A Merry May Round Up of Joyous Film Links: Bergman, MAI, Jump Cut, OFFSCREEN, WIDESCREEN and lots more!

LESSON on Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata by Catherine Grant, one of a number of videos made to commemorate this year's centenary of the Swedish director's birth. Don't forget FSFF's earlier entry on Ingmar Bergman studies. 

Greetings -- it's been a while! Here's a speedy, northern-hemisphere, Spring round up from Film Studies For Free. See below for some especially choice and unmissable items!! More will be added to the below in the coming days.

Remember to follow @filmstudiesff on Twitter and on Facebook for your daily stream of great openly accessible items!

1. Jump Cut

Check out the HUGE new issue of JUMP CUT (58, 2018)
Tributes to Chuck Kleinhans. The future of Jump Cut. Special sections on experimental feature fiction, documentary strategies, international perspectives, U.S. slavery's legal and symbolic remains, radical activism, unruly women, porn again, and book reviews.

See also this excellent SCMS video tribute to Kleinhans here

2. MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture

Exciting launch issue of the new open access journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture: "A non-hierarchical journal open to multivalent feminist expression, research & critique of visual culture", featuring:

• MAI And Mai: A Reflection by Mariah Larsson
• On Brilliance: Making Light Of Women’s Creative Labour by Rebecca Harrison
• The Lessons We Have Learnt: How Sexism In American Politics Sparked Off The New Feminist Renaissance by Anna Misiak
• Let’s Hear It For The Girls! Representations Of Diverse Girlhoods, Feminism, Intersectionality And Activism In Contemporary Graphic Novels And Comics by Mel Gibson
• Abandoning Happiness For Life: Mourning And Futurity In Maja Borg’s Future My Love (2012) by Anna Backman Rogers
• Disappearing Into The Future Perfect: Spaces Of Self-Picturing In The Diaries Of Susan Sontag And Alix Cléo Roubaud by Lauren Elkin
• ‘My Body Isn’t My Own’: War, Monsters, And Matriarchy In Monstress (2015- ) by Rebecca Jones
• ‘Popular’ Feminism, Pharmacopornography And Media Strategies: Some Initial Thoughts by Tina Krekels
• How the Light Gets In: Notes on the Female Gaze and Selfie Culture by Mary McGill
• Neither The One Nor The Other: Photographic Errors—Subjectivity, Subversion And The In-Between by Tracy Piper-Wright
• Mai In Conversation With Hope Dickson Leach by Neil Fox
• Ladies Case Almanack by Mairead Case
• Exploring Self-Identification Through Verbal And Visual Dialogue by Patricia Prieto Blanco
• PERSONA NON GRATA SONATA - A Video Essay on Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Autumn Sonata by Catherine Grant and Amber Jacobs
• Bête Noir by Rebecca Louise Tiernan
• Oksana Kazmina’s The Wedding In Docu_Presence: A Project By Composer/Performer Solomiya Moroz by Oksana Kazmina
• Blood Rhythms – Jessica Tillings by Jessica Tillings
• Future Feminism by Sophia Kier-Byfield
• Futurist Paratexts Of The ‘Infamous Butter Scene’ by Jazmine Linklater
• Instant Triangle by Nia Davies
• The Funambulist – Paulette Jonguitud Responds To Iris Epstein’s ‘Pájaro Funámbulo’ by Paulette Jonguitud
• Woman/ Jeanne Dielman by Gloria Dawson
• Women With Erections by Amy McCauley
• Liberated Sex: Firestone On Love And Sexuality by Alva Gotby
• Intoxicated Feminisms And The Politics Of The Visible: Khairani Barokka’s Indigenous Species by Kate Lewis Hood
• Reading And Resistance: Re-Visiting The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, And The Image Of Common Sense In Politically Turbulent Times by Ana Maria Sapountzi
• Digital Violence: A Symposium by Hannah Hamad

Follow @MAI_journal on Twitter here

3. CFP for The Cine-Files Special issue on Animals in Cinema

The Cine-Files, Issue 14 (Fall 2018), Call for Papers  [Download as PDF] for a Special issue on Animals in Cinema. Submission Deadline:  July 30, 2018

The Cine-Files, an online journal of cinema scholarship, is now accepting submissions for its Fall 2018 special issue on animals in the cinema that will be edited by Catherine Grant and Tracy Cox-Stanton.  

We seek submissions for scholarly essays (4000-6000 words) that explore the significance of non-human animals in moving image studies.  These essays will comprise the peer-reviewed, “featured scholarship” portion of issue 14.

Since John Berger’s 1991 essay “Why Look at Animals?” studies of animals in visual culture have steadily advanced, culminating in the 2015 anthology Animal Life and the Moving Image (BFI, Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon, editors).  In this work, scholars employ a diversity of theoretical frameworks to extend many of the insights of animal studies into the terrain of film and media studies.  Issue 14 of The Cine-Files seeks to build on that work, inviting scholars to contemplate the significance of animals in a variety of audiovisual media.

Papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How do particular films or videos convey or complicate recent scholarly work about the sentience of non-human animals? 
• What can we learn from an analysis of films that feature animal performers? How does the non-human animal performer complicate our views of film performance?
• How might we understand the proliferation of online animal videos within the context of anthropogenic climate change and threats of “the sixth extinction”?
• What role did animals play in early cinema’s era of “attractions,” and how can an understanding of that era help us contextualize contemporary representations?
• How can we better understand and historicize “the colonialist trope of animalization” (identified in Unthinking Eurocentrism)—aligning non-human animals with human “others” including racial and/or ethnic minorities, as well as women, LGBTQI and others?
• How has CGI affected the cinematic figuration of animals? 
• How has the depiction of animals prompted particularly innovative uses of cinematic language?
• Is it possible to depict animals in a way that is not “anthropomorphic?” How have particular films challenged anthropomorphic representation?

Please email your essay as a MS Word doc to the editors, removing your identifying information from the essay.  On a separate page, include your name, essay title, brief biographical note, and email address. Consult the guidelines for submissions at http://www.thecine-files.com/submission-guidelines/

If you would like to submit a video essay for consideration, please contact the editors by email to discuss your idea in the first instance. July 30 will also be the date for submissions in this mode.

Catherine Grant, catherine.grant1@bbk.ac.uk and Tracy Cox-Stanton, editor@thecine-files.com

4. Some recent video essays!

At the new issue of OFFSCREEN on audiovisual essays (22.4, 2018)

At the latest issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Images (5.1, 2018)

• I Feel, Therefore I Can Be Free by Nzingha Kendall
• Berlin Moves by Evelyn Kreutzer
• Remixing Rose Hobart by Derek Long
• Cinders of La Invasion by Nike Nivar Ortiz
• The Follow Shot by Jordan Schonig

At Audiovisualcy:

• Cotton - The Fabric of Genocide by Cydnii Harris
• "Get Out" in the Overseas Marketplace by Cydnii Harris
• Women, Intimacy, and Sexual Violence in Hitchcock Films by Emma Hampsten
• Gunsmoke Rhythms - An Epigraphic Exploration by Katie Bird
• Actress Must Have No Mouth (on Marilyn Monroe) by Lara Mubaydeen 
• The Colors of GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES by Oswald Iten
• Beneath the Hollywood Style: Performance in the Cinema of John Cassavetes by Ian Garwood
• How Black Lives Matter in The Wire by Jason Mittell
• The Shipping Forecast: the audiovisual poetics of Ken Loach by Liz Greene
• Winter's Secret by Julia Kovalenko
• Elephant: A Matter of Pace by Tiago de Luca
• Skirt (on The Seven Year Itch) by Catherine Grant 
• The Thinking Machine 16: UP! by Cristina Alvarez López and Adrian Martin for Filmkrant 
• Sweet Country Video Essay by Tara Judah
• Before the Revolution: Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise by Jonathan Bygraves
• Mai Zetterling: Evolution of an Actress by Clara Podlesnigg

Also:

• A Video Essay Guide to Hitchcock's Vertigo at One Perfect Shot/Film School Rejects

5. Other stuff! (More to be added!)

• The website of the Fondation Chantal Akerman is online! 
• David Bordwell on Kiarostami's last film
• On reactions at the first film shows, here's film historian Prof Ian Christie’s survey from a Gresham College lecture.
• The latest issue of WIDE SCREEN journal is OUT NOW! This is a special issue on the production of cinematic space and has been edited Kathryn Hardy.

https://vimeo.com/257277668

THE CINE-FILES on Film Sound (Chion, Flinn, Beck) & FRAMES CINEMA JOURNAL on "Conflicting Images, Contested Realities"

Screenshot from Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). You can read Mack Hagood's article “The Tinnitus Trope: Acoustic Trauma in Narrative Film”, which refers to this film)

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to rapidly relay news to its readers of two new open access film journal issues: The Cine-Files (8, 2015) on Film Sound and Frames Cinema Journal, Conflicting Images,Contested Realities (7, 2015). Both volumes boast truly magnificent contents, but the Sound Dossier and Issue at The Cine-Files is something really special, with contributions from the likes of Michel Chion, Caryl Flinn, Jay Beck and Kate Lacey among many other luminaries.

FSFF's author also contributed to this excellent issue - on the emergent focus on film sound, music and listening in audiovisual essays.

The Cine-Files, Issue 8, 2015 (on Film Sound)

• Dossier:
• Introduction by Jacob Smith, “Listening to Film Sound”
• Jay Beck, “Submerged in Sound: Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénega“
• Michel Chion, “The Player (Robert Altman, 1992)”
• Caryl Flinn, “The Sound of Music: The Music Festival Scene”
• Mack Hagood, “The Tinnitus Trope: Acoustic Trauma in Narrative Film”
• Keir Keightley, “The Pantophonographic Patsy”
• Kate Lacey, “Listening In/To Germany, Pale Mother"
• Jean Ma, “Listening to Early Chinese Sound Film: Two Stars in the Milky Way"
• Mara Mills, “Listening to Images: Audio Description, the Translation Overlay, and Image Retrieval”
• Robert Spadoni, “New Worlds and Dark Traditions: Back Winding and Forward Propulsion in The Woman Who Came Back"
• Neil Verma, “The Huge Listening Contraption”
• Shane Vogel, “Projection without Representation: Screening Maya Angelou in Calypso Heat Wave"
• William Whittington, “A Conspiracy of Sound: Modes of Listening in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out"
• Girls And Old Men Talking: Gender, Power, And Sound In The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men And True Grit" by Laura L. Beading
• "Noise In Its Contexts At The Dawn Of Sound Cinema" by Matt Von Vogt
• "Turning Up The Volume? The Emergent Focus On Film Sound, Music And Listening In Audiovisual Essays" by Catherine Grant

Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 7, June 2015 on Conflicting Images,Contested Realities, (click here to access all the below contents)

Contents

• Conflicting Images, Contested Realities: An Introduction to Frames 7 by Eileen Rositzka and Amber Shields

Feature Articles

• "Goya on his Shoulders: Tim Hetherington, Genre Memory, and the Body at Risk" by Robert Burgoyne and Eileen Rositzka
• "New Ethical Questions and Social Media: Young People’s Construction of Holocaust Memory Online" by Victoria Grace Walden
• "The War Tapes and the Poetics of Affect of the Hollywood War Film Genre" by Cilli Pogodda and Danny Gronmaier
• "A Revolution for Memory: Reproductions of a Communist Utopia through Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain and Posters from the Cultural Revolution" by Nathan To
• "The Long Life of Belgian WWI Documentaries in the Interwar Period" by Natalia Stachura
• "'Choirs of Wailing Shells': Poetic and Musical Engagements in Derek Jarman’s War Requiem –between Documentary and Fiction" by Caroline Perret

Point of View

• "Matricídio, or Queerness Explained to My Mother" by Diego Costa
• "Bollywood Bodies: Turning the Gaze from Babes to Boys and Back Again in Farah Khan’s Happy New Year" by Amber Shields
• "Civil War Photography and the Contemporary War Film" by John Trafton
• "Argentine Documentaries on the Malvinas (Falklands) War: Between Testimony and Televisual Archive" by Mirta Varela
• "The British Docudramas of the Falklands War" by Georges Fournier

Book Reviews

• In Contrast: Croatian Film Today by Ana Grgić

[in]TRANSITION Issues! Rossellini, Marclay, Burnett, Snow, Emoticons, Time, Surveillance, Volumetric Cinema, Experimental Cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, Women in Prison Genre

THEORY OF RELATIVITY by Catherine Grant is an experimental video about digital intertextuality and cinephiliac relativity. It was inspired, in part, by (the non-open access article) "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," just published in the Spring 2015 issue of Cinema Journal (54.3) by film scholar Julie Levinson. You can read a little more about this video and the connections it makes here. It was also made as a reserve entry for the new issue of [in]Transition linked to below.

Film Studies For Free is truly thrilled to present an entry on the last two issues of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, of which FSFF's author is proud to be a co-editor. The journal and its editors and project managers recently won an 'Award of Distinction' for Innovative Scholarship thanks to the 2015 Anne Friedberg Award Committee and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Board of Directors, presented at the annual SCMS conference in Montreal. Woohoo! (Btw, look out for content related to this conference in FSFF's next entry, coming soonish!)

The first of the two issues FSFF is catching up with was published to coincide with the Montreal conference back in March. It was the first issue of [in]Transition devoted exclusively to peer-reviewed videographic work! Each video was accompanied by a curatorial statement from the maker, as well as the peer reviewer evaluations, all transparently published in the spirit of openness, to encourage scholarship as conversation, and to help our discipline establish a set of criteria for what constitutes valid scholarship in this emerging, audiovisual form. [in]Transition continues to accept submissions of videographic work for peer-reviewed publication in subsequent issues. Guidelines for submission are here.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.1, 2015

• Frames of Mind by Jordan Tynes and Maurizio Viano
• Emoticons by Patricia Pisters
• Volumetric Cinema by Kevin L. Ferguson
• Screening Surveillance by Steve Anderson
• Busting Out by Manohla Dargis, Dawn Fratini and Jen Moorman

And the second issue to be publicised here (commissioned and edited by FSFF's author) has just been published! It features content generated as part of an exciting collaboration with Cinema Journal, its partner publication. That journal's editor, Will Brooker, shared with [in]Transition's editors (some six months in advance of publication) four articles from the latest issue of this highly esteemed journal—54.3, Spring 2015—and asked if we would be interested in commissioning videographic responses to the work. We accepted this challenge, conceiving of it as an experiment to see how audiovisual essays (produced and published relatively quickly) could take up, adapt, or riff off debates and arguments posited by written scholarly texts (which, as is customary, had taken several years to produce and publish).

Five sets of audiovisual essayists accepted the unusual commission, and their creative, critical work forms the basis of the issue. Each video is accompanied by a written statement from the maker(s) discussing the matters at stake in composing such audiovisual responses. Further responses to the work from viewers and readers are invited in the comments threads to the entries.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.2, 2015

• Spaghettis in Translation by Austin Fisher. An audiovisual response to Michelle Cho, "Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema: Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird", Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
• Against the Real by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin - An audiovisual response to Sarah O'Brien, "Nous revenons à nos moutons: Regarding Animals in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep," Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
• So’s Nephew by Remes (thanx to Michael Snow) by Jorrie Penn Croft by Jennifer Proctor. An adaptation of Justin Remes, “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film”, Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
• The Definition of Film by Richard Misek. An audiovisual response to Justin Remes, “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film”, Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
• The Time Passing by Benjamin Sampson. An audiovisual response to Julie Levinson, "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015

[Note: The video at the top of this FSFF entry was made as a reserve video for the issue. You can read more about that one here.]

There is further open access content connected to the above articles from the latest issue of Cinema Journal with which [in]Transition 2.2 interacted, as follows:

Cinema Journal Afterthoughts and Postscripts, Spring 2015, 54.3

• Michelle Cho, Postscript to “Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema"
• Sarah O'Brien, Postscript to “Nous revenons à nos moutons: Regarding Animals in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep”
• Justin Remes, Movies That Don’t Move

On Desktop Documentary (or, Kevin B. Lee Goes Meta!)

Kevin B. Lee talks about Desktop Documentary at the University of Sussex, March 17, 2015

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to present an entry dedicated to some of the latest work of one of its absolute heroes: filmmaker, critic, and pioneer (and expert proponent) of the online video essay format, Kevin B. Lee.

On March 17th, 2015, Lee gave a Masterclass on his work at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex, UK.

Recently, he and others at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have developed a form of filmmaking they call Desktop Documentary, which uses screen capture technology to treat the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas. Desktop documentary seeks both to depict and question the ways we explore the world through the computer screen.

The Masterclass straddled a screening of Transformers: The Premake (2014, embedded below), Lee’s innovative essay film in this idiom. The ‘Premake’ produced and studied viral fan footage of the making of Michael Bay’s 2014 blockbuster Transformers 4: The Age Of Extinction and examined the ways in which this operated as an unofficial crowdsourced publicity vehicle for the film.

Below, you can find a complete audio recording of the Masterclass, an 'iPhone guerrilla video recording' of Kevin's five minute long introduction of the 'Premake,' and also a high quality video recording of the brilliant, first half hour of the Masterclass in which he discussed in detail the audiovisual antecedents of the innovative form his film took. There are also some links to further related online resources.

In FSFF's very humble view, this form of audiovisual presentation, with its incredibly skilful and brilliantly thought through use of screen capture, has the potential to revolutionise aspects of media studies teaching and learning - even as it's going to be pretty difficult to achieve the expressive and argumentational heights that Lee manages in his 'Premake'. Thanks Kevin!

Kevin B. Lee introduces his desktop documentary TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE

Kevin B. Lee discusses the inspirations behind his desktop documentary
TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE

The complete audio recording of Kevin B. Lee's talk on Desktop Documentary at the University of Sussex, March 17, 2015 (1:10:42)

• Rhizome on Nick Briz Author of "Apple Computers" - a Desktop Documentary avant la lettre
• Camille Henrot: Extracts from the video Grosse Fatigué (2013, video, color, sound)
• Jill Godmilow, What Farocki Taught (1998)

TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (Kevin B. Lee, 2014)

What Makes a Video Essay Great? by Kevin B. Lee (2014)

Kevin B. Lee, Interface 2.0, Frames Cinema Journal 1.1, July 2012

Also see Kevin B. Lee, The Audiovisual Essay, September 2014

Kevin B. Lee, 'Learning Farocki: A Live Desktop Response', Delivered as Live Response to Panelists of "What Farocki Taught," Harun Farocki Panel at the 2015 Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Montreal.

Labor Day Round Up! Jean Cocteau, Opera and Film, Film-Philosophy on Cavell and Rothman and much more!

Testament of Cocteau: Orphée on Film and in Opera

(A Conversation between James S. Williams and Ed Hughes)

by REFRAME Conversations

Film Studies For Free is slowly gearing up for the new academic year. Quite a few open access publications of its own (including the illustrated video conversation embedded above) are rolling off the presses at the moment - with plenty more to come in September, so please do expect further FSFF entries this month! [UPDATE! That didn't happen as a few life events got in the way, but this blog will be back very soon!].

Given all the pro bono work that goes into producing and distributing all openly accessible scholarly work, what better day to publish its latest round up than Labor Day! Thanks to all those who have published their work online in the list below and elsewhere.

• Just out! Film-Philosophy Vol 18 (2014)

Table of Contents: Special Section on Stanley Cavell

• Acknowledgment - No Knowledge Without It: Introduction to William Rothman and his Work by Alan Cholodenko PDF
• Keynote Article: On Stanley Cavell's Band Wagon by William Rothman PDF
• William Rothman's Vertigo by Rex Butler PDF
• Cavellian Meditations: How to do Things with Film and Philosophy by Robert Sinnerbrink 
• PDF
• Montage and Tableau in King Vidor's Stella Dallas by Richard Smith PDF
• What Goes Without Seeing: Marriage, Sex and the Ordinary in The Awful Truth by David Macarthur PDF
• Cavell and the Politics of Cinema: On Marie Antoinette by Richard Rushton 
• PDF
• Being on the Outside: Cinematic Automatism in Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed by Lisa Trahair PDF
• Vertigo and the Spectator of Film Analysis by Andrew Klevan PDF

• Tribute to the late, brilliant film scholar Jim Hillier by Doug Pye, Lib Taylor and Jonathan Bignell: http://fttreadingnews.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/jim-hillier-1941-2014/ Thanks to Lisa Purse for the link.

• New issue of PHOTOGENIE on The Everyday!! (link via Girish Shambu): http://www.photogenie.be/photogenie_blog/topic/2-everyday-once-more

• Find out about the upcoming Cary Grant Festival in the actor's home city of Bristol and a related filmmaking challenge! http://www.carycomeshome.co.uk/film-challenge.php Also see: https://www.facebook.com/carycomeshome

• A previously unpublished chapter of Adrian Martin's 2006 PhD: on Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS, at the great Danish journal 16:9.

• New audiovisual essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin on Fritz Lang's SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR at @NotebookMUBI : https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/felicity-conditions-seek-and-hide

• Also, see "Paratheatre: Plays Without Stages"by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin made for the 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival premiere of Jacques Rivette's 1971 magnum opus Out 1 - Noli me tangere: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/paratheatre-plays-without-stages. Plus Audiovisual essay here: Paratheatre - Plays Without Stages (From I to IV).

• A 1968 unaired BBC interview with John Ford (link via Mubi): http://youtu.be/2P2fY75Qlxs

• David Bordwell: "Must we find reflections of cultural needs in every aspect of a movie that might appeal to somebody?"http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/08/24/zip-zero-zeitgeist/

• New issue of CLÉO: A Journal of Film and Feminism on labour: http://cleojournal.com/category/vol-2-issue-2-labour/

• MEDIA FIELDS Issue 8 Playgrounds has some great film studies items!

• "Lost, found and refurbished, TOO MUCH JOHNSON reveals a young Orson Welles familiarizing himself with the techniques that would eventually turn Hollywood filmmaking upside down." http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/sowing-the-seeds-of-kane-orson-welles-too-much-johnson

• Twenty of the "best experimental films you can see online": http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/20-of-the-best-experimental-short-films-you-can-watch-online/http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/20-of-the-best-experimental-short-films-you-can-watch-online/

• Must-watch and read: Miriam Ross's excellent new work on vertical framing (the video contains some shocking documentary footage at the beginning, by the way)
• Link to her article: http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2014/08/06/ross/
• Link to her video essay: https://vimeo.com/99499627

• The rest of the new issue of REFRACTORY (on Intermediations: Disney, colour, Herzog, vertical framing, online videos and much more) is here: 

• A new video essay by film scholar extraordinaire Pam Cook in which Wong Kar-wai meets David Lean: "Corridors of Desire: Brief Encounter and In the Mood for Love" (2' 11").

• Brilliantly illustrated and informative essay by Rebecca Naughten on ROCÍO, an important Spanish documentary.

• Remembering Richard Attenborough, 1923 - 2014: essential links by David Hudson

• Check out the Cinema Film & Projection Heritage Network in order to share information, ideas and knowledge about this heritage: http://www.cfphn.org/

• Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted online the introductory chapter to his 1993 book PLACING MOVIES, with lots of useful links: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2014/08/placing-movies-part-1-the-critical-apparatus-introduduction-tk/

• Also see Jonathan Rosenbaum's The Voice and the Eye: A Commentary on the Heart of Darkness script

• Brilliant online documentary: Going Dark: The Final Days of Film Projection https://vimeo.com/101235645

• Jan-Christophe Horak on Exile Noir

• At In Media Res, Cinema Journal Presents InFocus: African American Media [August 25 - August 29, 2014]. Also read the related dossier: Cinema Journal 53:4 Summer 2014 - IN FOCUS (PDF)

• Links to all the other openly accessible online content associated with the latest issue of CINEMA JOURNAL (53.4, 2014): http://www.cmstudies.org/news/187135/Announcing-Cinema-Journal-53.4.htm

• Katherine Groo's great film archival news gathering for CJ/SCMS (fabulous links!): http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=CJ_Archival_News

• PALESTINEDOCS, created by Dina Iordanova and Eva Jørholt: a new web resource on films "chronicling the life of palestinians in and outside the middle east": http://www.palestinedocs.net/

• Tony Zhou's latest video essay - on texting and the internet in the cinema :http://vimeo.com/tonyzhou/internet

• Film genre studies: all you need to know?  http://wronghands1.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/anatomy-of-films/

• Great video essay by Tim Klobuchar: Souls at Hazard: The Coens & Their Cops in FARGO and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MENhttps://vimeo.com/101676796

• Fascinating interview about mental health and cinema at the monthly Minds on Film blog at the Royal College of Psychiatrists UK website, with Canadian filmmaker Shelagh Carter on her autobiographical film Passionflower. 

• EFFACE (1:29, below) the video essay made while the one embedded at the top of this week's entry was exporting - also on Cocteau's ORPHÉE.

EFFACE from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

Happy Holidays Round Up! Adrian Martin Interview, New Journal Issues, Videographic Film Studies and Much More!

UNCANNY FUSION by Catherine Grant: VIAGGIO IN ITALIA/JOURNEY TO ITALY meets…?

Read more about this video here and here

It's been a busy few months and a fair tuckered out Film Studies For Free is off on its annual screen-free holidays from tomorrow for just over a week. While it chills out on a sweltering beach somewhere, generous to a fault (so it says), it's leaving you with LOTS of links to fabulous open access reading, viewing and listening. Just check out the wondrousness below.

Back soonish.


New issue of [in]Transition: A Journal of Videographic Film Studies 1.2, 2014 
Edited by Christian Keathley, the new issue examines some of the formal parameters in emergent videographic film and moving studies. It contains the following entries:

• The ABCs of Forms and Genres by Christian Keathley
• Intersection by Girish Shambu
• On Video Tributes by Chiara Grizzaffi
• Compilation and Found-Footage Traditions by Corey K Creekmur

Adrian Martin Interview 
On the longest day of the year, June 21, 2014, Film Studies For Free's author interviewed film studies writer and thinker extraordinaire Adrian Martin. Our conversation took place in the quietest spot we could find in the historic center of Milan late on a World Cup match night. We were both visiting that city for the conference of the Network of European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), and had been part of a workshop panel that day on videographic film studies, or "audiovisual approaches to audiovisual subjects." We discussed Adrian's turn to audiovisual essays (many made with Cristina Álvarez López) as well as his work more generally, and talked about his new book Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, later in 2014). Adrian's latest De Filmkrant column 'Serve Yourself' offers an extract from the book as a preview of it: the column is on-line here: http://www.filmkrant.nl/world_wide_angle/10805. In the interview, Adrian talks in detail about a particular audiovisual essay -- Intimate Catastrophes -- which he co-edited with Cristina Álavarez López for the Transit: Cine y otros desvíos website.  Also see "[De Palma’s] Vision" by Martin and Álvarez López here: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/de-palmas-vision. The interview is available from Film Studies For Free's Podbean Site.

 
Two new cinephilia links from Photogénie!

• Photogénie has just updated its inaugural issue to include the following publication on cinephilia:
• Catherine Grant and Christian Keathley, 'The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations and videographic film studies', PHOTOGÉNIE 0, 2014
• Also, see Photogénie's new call for your personal accounts (in words or images) of your favorite cinephiliac moments here.

Great updates in Kracauer Lecture Video Recording Series at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (links via Vinzenz Hediger), including:

• Laura Mulvey's lecture 'Becoming History: Spectatorship, Technology and Feminist Film Theory': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/sommer-2014/laura-mulvey/ 
• Antonio Somaini's lecture on Eisenstein's 'Notes toward a General History of Cinema': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/sommer-2014/antonio-somaini
• Ginette Vincendeau's lecture 'From the Margins to the Centre: Ethnicity and the French Star-System': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/winter-2013-2014/ginette-vincendeau/
• Christa Blümlinger's lecture 'Memory and Projection': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/winter-2012-2013/christa-bluemlinger/

New issue of OFFSCREEN (Volume 18.4, 2014) on Television

• TV Horror: Covering the Televisual Horror Landscape By Donato Totaro
• TV Vampires: From Barnabas Collins to Bill Compton By Stacey Abbott
• Contextual Analysis of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: Robert Enrico vs. Rod Serling By Donato Totaro
• Revolution and Sex: The Evolution of TV By Tom Stempel
• Robert Towne’s Television Years By Elaine Lennon 

Preceding issue of OFFSCREEN (18.3, March 2014) on Memory, Cinema and Time

• Personal/Memory Time: Past and Present Merging on the Screen (Wild Strawberries, Spider, Solaris, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) By Elisa Pezzotta
• The Disappearance (1977, Stuart Cooper): Melancholy and Murder By Donato Totaro
• Out of Time: The Costumes of Bad Timing (1980) By Elaine Lennon
• Chronos Pulls the Strings: Roaming thoughts On Koji Yamamura’s Muybridge’s Strings (2011) By Ramin S. Khanjani
• “Japan Speaks Out!” at the 27th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato at Bologna, Italy, 29 June–6 July, 2013 By Peter Rist

SCOPE, Issue 26, February 2014

• No Country for Women and Children: Pastoral American and Meaningful Despair in Palindromes and Dancer in the Dark — Charles Burnetts
• The Fine Art of Commercial Freedom: British Music Videos and Film Culture — Emily Caston
• "Disappointingly Thin and Flaccid": Gender, Authorship and Authenticity in Shane Meadows' Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) — Martin Fradley and Emma Sutton
• “We Ain’t Thinking About Tomorrow”: Narrative Immediacy and the Digital Period Aesthetic in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies — Adam Gallimore
• Melodrama as Vernacular Modernism in China: The Case of D. W. Griffith — Qijun Han
• Postmillennial Cinema and the Avenging Fatale in Sin City, Hard Candy and Descent — Samantha Jane Lindop
• Labor Relations, 16mm Film and Euston Films — Max Sexton
• DOSSIER: Film Festival Pedagogy: Using the Film Festival in or as a Film Course — curated by Ger Zielinski 
• BOOK REVIEWS PDF
• FILM REVIEWS PDF
• CONFERENCE REPORTS 

See film scholars Ben Sampson and Drew Morton's fantastic VIDEO ESSAY DIPTYCH: Good Dads/Bad Dads: A Tribute to Cinematic Fathers. Morton has also posted all five drafts of his BAD DADS video essay to share his production process: http://vimeo.com/album/2915741. Also see Morton's ingenious video on Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: Day x Day x Day: https://vimeo.com/96852873

Michael Chanan has just uploaded his marvellous video tribute to the remarkable Brazilian documentarist Eduardo Coutinho. For further tributes to Coutinho see here. 

Ian Magor's great video tribute to the films of Bela Tarr: https://vimeo.com/97625110

Interesting audiovisual essay, on film music' relationship to the image track, by students Noémie Lachance and Jana Zander https://vimeo.com/95030117 

Kevin B Lee's TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (complete version)  

Computers Watching Movies (Inception) by Benjamin Grosser: https://vimeo.com/79080565

"Walden Connection: The Thoreauvian Agenda in UPSTREAM COLOR" Video by Anna Robertson  https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy/videos/92652144

Michael Heileman's monumental videographic STAR WARS study Kitbashed" http://vimeo.com/heilemann/kitbashed 

Great updates at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation website!

Excellent interview with film scholar Richard Misek, creator of the feature length essay film ROHMER IN PARIS: http://contrappassomag.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/contrappasso-extra-interview-with-richard-misek-rohmer-in-paris/. See his short video essay Mapping Rohmer here: http://framescinemajournal.com/article/mapping-rohmer-a-video-essay/. 

Souleymane Cissé on Henri Langlois (video 2:24): https://vimeo.com/99318945 (Link via Nicole Brenez)

The Österreichisches Filmmuseum has put Vertov's "Kinoweek" online, in digitized form, for free (link via Vinzenz Hediger)

Also at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum's site, video interviews with, among others, Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Benning, Anna Karina, Michel Ciment… Link via David Hudson: http://bit.ly/1m4MSAY

Remembering Eli Wallach, 1915 - 2014: http://fan.do/r/19i
 
David Hudson's tribute entry to Robert Gardner, 1925 – 2014, Anthropologist, filmmaker, author and advocate of the avant-garde: http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-robert-gardner-1925-2014.

Ehsan Khoshbakht talks to Dariush Mehrjui, Kamran Shirdel and Masoud Kimiai about the first golden age of Iranian cinema: http://fan.do/r/19h

kinderspiel, a project on children as media archaeologists, media makers and media players (link via Vinzenz Hediger)

Excellent talk by David Archibald:  "Should Scotland have an independent film industry?" http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-archibald/should-scotland-have-independent-film-industry

David Bordwell's first dispatch from Bologna #IlCinemaRitrovato (thanks to David Hudson for the link) 

Niamh Thornton on violence in Amat Escalante's 2013 film HELI.

Great article at Sight and Sound, on "The cinema of the Palestinian revolution" 

Call for Papers for the Global Humanitarianism and Media Culture conference in February 2015 

Transit's new video essay dedicated to deers in cinema!

New Issue of MEDIASCAPE Online on "History and Technology"

Frame grab from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980), one of the subjects of Film Studies For Free's author's latest videographic film study in her new article 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', which you can find in the newly published issue of Mediascape.

The much awaited Winter 2013 issue of MEDIASCAPE, UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media, has just been published. There are two very fine articles on historical film archives by Christina Petersen and Bryan Sebok, as well as two excellent columns on related historiographical themes. Meanwhile, the META section boasts some very good, new video essay work by Matthias Stork, Alexandra Schroeder, and Clifford James Galiher and reflections on videographic and other digital film studies practices by great luminaries, such as Yuri Tsivian and Daria Khitrova, alongside those of much more ordinary mortals! There's also a highly informative interview with filmmaker Thom Andersen and some very interesting reviews to catch up with.

All contents are listed and linked to below. But, also, do check out MEDIASCAPE's occasional, but very high quality blog which publishes between journal issue releases. A good place to start is this entry: 'Mastering "The Master"' by Vincent Brook

MEDIASCAPE, Winter 2013

Editorial by Andy Myers and Andrew Young

Features

• The Crowd Mind: The Archival Legacy of the Payne Fund Studies’ Movies and Conduct (1933) by Christina Petersen
• Headline Hollywood: A discourse analysis of the Variety archive by Bryan Sebok

Columns

• Alex Haley’s Roots and Hyperreal Historiography by Randy Laist
• Transmission: Considering New Media and the Online Histories of HIV/AIDS by Christopher Garland

META

• What Happens When You Sleep? Multiple Layers of Voyeurism in the Paranormal Activity Trilogy by Alexandra Schroeder
• Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies by Catherine Grant
• The Three Fates of the Maltese Falcon: Hammet's Novel at Warner Bros. by Clifford James Galiher
• Photography and Fictionality by Jens Schröter
• Transmedia Synergies — Remediating Films and Video Games by Matthias Stork
• In Retrospect: 2012 Los Angeles Animation Festival by Kelly Lake
• “A Film is Alive During its Making” – An Interview with Filmmaker Thom Andersen by Matthias Stork
• On Cinemetrics, Video Essays, and Digital Scholarship – An Interview with Dr. Yuri Tsivian and Dr. Daria Khitrova by Matthias Stork

Reviews

• Total Archive: Picturing History from the Stereographic Library to the Digital Database by Brooke Belisle
• All The World’s A Video Wall: Technology, Humanity, and the Things in Between. Reviewing Chris Salter’s Entangled by Judith Kohlenberger and Samuel Zwaan
• Murder and Montage: Oliver Stone’s Hyperreal Period by Randy Laist
• Review of Useful Cinema by Andrew Myers
• Something Borrowed from the Past: Wedding Photography and Super 8mm by Paul Gansky

 

 

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'! Video Studies of the Western

John Ford's Vision of the West by Matthias Stork

This new video essay examines the representation of the frontier in John Ford's Westerns. Ford's visual poetics illustrate Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." Ford's films, in this regard, allow us to explore seminal foundational concepts of America history and ideology. "John Ford's Vision of the West" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's written study of his video essay practice. Also see Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

The Western is one of the most iconographic of film genres and is thus particularly well suited to (audio)visual forms of analysis. So, today, Film Studies For Free has lassoed and corralled a whole herd of beefy video studies of film Westerns that abundantly testify to this advantage.

The group is led, above, by a new, wonderfully researched, video essay by the very talented Matthias Stork (author of the great, and widely circulated, Chaos Cinema video essays, along with others published here at FSFF). Thanks very much to him and all the other video essayists represented below for making their work publicly acessible. 

[It's Open Access week, so this here Open Access campaigning website particularly wants to show its warm appreciation to those of you who like to share the fruits of at least part of your film studies labour for free!]

And if you know of any other, freely accessible, video essays on Westerns that FSFF has missed please alert us to them by leaving a comment with the link below. Thanks!

 

Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel by Matthias Stork

An audiovisual study of Sergio Leone's distinctive duel aesthetic. The video essay was first published, along with an accompanying written essay, in the first issue of the online film journal FRAMES. "Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's reflections on the above video here. And read Film Studies For Free's entry on the Spaghetti Western

The Construction of Genre and Space in The Searchers by Austin Fisher

A video essay exploring the ways in which editing techniques and other cinematic processes aid the construction of genre in the opening of "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956).

Outlaw: Josey Wales by Matthew Cheney
A video essay looking at a few aspects of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 



McCabe and Mrs. Miller: A Video Essay by Steven Santos

A video essay on Robert Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See the original posting here

Critics' Picks: Rio Bravo from The New York Times
A. O. Scott basks in the pleasures of taking it easy with Howard Hawks's 1959 Western. (Related Link)



Beaver's Lodge: CAIN'S CUTTHROATS from Press Play Video Blog

This is the fifth installment of BEAVER'S LODGE, a series of video essays narrated by actor Jim Beaver which will offer critical takes on some of Beaver's favorite films 

'A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...': Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters

This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

      However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Frame By Frame - Director John Ford', UNL, August 26, 2010

Phil Peters and John Nelson, 'Studying in Western Filmmaker John Ford's Footsteps' 

Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

Once Upon a Time in the West - Jill Arrives at Flagstone from The Film League

 

Deconstructing the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

The Failure of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League