Showing posts with label American Cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Cinema. Show all posts

Monday, 22 December 2014

End of December Round Up: THE CINE-FILES, FRAMES, [in]TRANSITION, LOLA, MEDIASCAPE, NECSUS and Much More!

The Marriages of LAUREL DALLAS by Catherine Grant
The above video is published as an integral part of a multimedia essay on two Hollywood adaptations of STELLA DALLAS "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall2014_MarriagesMelodrama.html


Another year of open access scholarly bulletins and links draws to a close at Film Studies For Free. Despite readership well exceeding 2,000,000 page views since late 2009 (thanks for coming back all of you!), it has been a fairly quiet year at this blog,* if not at its Twitter feed and Facebook page, both of which generally boast fast-flowing, usually daily content. But let's round the year off, nonetheless, with a characteristically large collection of links to lots of just (in the nick of time) published Fall 2014 issues of some brilliant online and open access film and moving image studies journals, as well as a bunch of other online delights. Just feast your festive eyes on all the below riches!

And also check out the videographic jewel at the top of this entry too - FSFF's latest audiovisual essay on the tear-jerking ending(s) of Stella Dallas. 2014 has been a golden year for the scholarly video, for sure. A clear highlight in that emergent film studies idiom has been the creation and successful launch of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Images Studies, which FSFF's author co-founded and co-edits with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. Four issues have been published, with the most recent one appearing last week - linked to below - and there's lots more great peer reviewed content lining itself up for 2015. And the audiovisual essay also now boasts its own section at NECSUS Journal, too - edited by the brilliant essayist duo Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. It's EVERYWHERE!!

If you're interested in learning more about this audiovisual film scholarly form in a classroom or presentation setting, FSFF's author will be holding video essay workshops and masterclasses at the January conference of MeCCSA in Newcastle, UK, at BIMI: Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, in London in March (that's a free to attend session!), at an event at the University of East Anglia in May, with  Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin (details soon), as well as at a National Endowment for the Humanities funded event at Middlebury College, Vermont. And those are just the events scheduled in the first half of next year!

So 2015 may be a quiet year at this blog, too........ But FSFF will try to maintain regular entries to publish alongside all its usual microblogging on open access film studies.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! WISHING EVERYONE A WONDERFUL NEW YEAR!

*One of the reasons it's been so quiet is that FSFF's author has not just been linking but also contributing rather a lot to these and other journals and online projects this year. See the long list of publications right at the foot of what follows.


FEATURE ARTICLES
P.O.V.
[in]TRANSITION 1.4, 2014 (Issue commissioned and edited by Drew Morton)
LOLA Issue 5 has continued to roll out with the entries below published to date and others still to come:

MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014 on ADAPTATION (in films, television, anime, computer animation, games!)

NECSUS Journal, Autumn 2014: War

Features
Audiovisual essays: edited by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
Special section: War
Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier [NECS Publication Committee])
Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist [Film Festival Research Network])
Exhibition reviews (edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg [NECS Publication Committee])

 Assorted further open access linkage!

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Friday, 27 June 2014

On happy and other endings! Kelly Reichardt, Andrew Klevan and James MacDowell on Video (not all together!)

The filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Humanitas Visiting Professor in Film and Television, "In Conversation" with Dr Andrew Klevan at the University of Oxford on May 23, 2014. Click here to access the video (1:18:30)


Film Studies For Free brings you tidings of some more wonderful film studies related videos. Both of them, like yesterday's Rancière videos, came from top notch tip offs by Hoi Lun Law (thanks HL!).

In the above video (online here), Andrew Klevan enters into an incredibly thought-provoking and insightful conversation with the great American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her work. Reichardt's five feature films are River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Night Moves (2013); and she has also made the short narrative Ode (1999). Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, and author of, inter alia, a recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013), which he discussed in a number of formats  with Film Studies For Free. He is also a member of the editorial board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism.

Below, you can find the embedded recording of a great talk by Klevan's fellow Movie editorial board member James MacDowell, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick and a film scholar who has shared far more high quality work online for free than many academics produce in a lifetime (see here, here, here, here and here [PDF], for instance).

MacDowell discusses the romantic ‘happy ending’ in Hollywood cinema - its motifs, meanings and potential mutability - in a brilliantly illustrated and entertaining talk for an event for the Zabludowicz Collection which took place on December 6, 2013. MacDowell is the founder of great film critical website Alternate Takes, author of the book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliché, Convention and the Final Couple (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and he is currently writing a monograph on irony in film for Palgrave MacMillan (forthcoming 2016).

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Thursday, 21 June 2012

Pantheon Level Author: In Memory of Andrew Sarris

UNL Film Studies professor Wheeler Winston Dixon describes the auteur theory of filmmaking, 
including the contribution to this theory by Andrew Sarris.You can read Professor Dixon's obituary of Sarris here.
The art of cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scene. Auteur criticism is a reaction against sociological criticism that enthroned the what against the how. However, it would be equally fallacious to enthrone the how against the what. The whole point of meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement. [Andrew Sarris]

Film Studies For Free was really saddened to hear of the death of Andrew Sarris, one of the most influential of all film critics on the academic study of the cinema.

In memory of his huge contribution to film studies, FSFF has begun to gather links to online works by Sarris as well as to studies of his writings and related items. The collection process will continue in the next days.

Meanwhile, David Hudson is very valuably collecting links to online tributes to Sarris at Fandor's Keyframe Daily site. And see the great PressPlay at Indiewire tributes, including a great video essay featuring probably the last recording of Sarris's voice, here.

Keep coming back for updates.
 
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Tuesday, 5 June 2012

A Place for Film Noir with Will Scheibel

   


Production at Film Studies For Free Towers will slow up, for a month or so, due to the sheer weight of responsibilities elsewhere, FSFF is afraid.

Some of those responsibilities are significant authorial and, especially, editorial ones which will bear truly glorious, open access, film scholarly fruit very soon!

But this site will continue to post some occasional gems in the meantime. And this brings us to the above, excellent excerpt from one of the great Indiana University Cinema Podcasts.

Regular hosts Andy Hunsucker and Jason Thompson invited Film Studies grad student at Indiana University (and former notable blogger) Will Scheibel to talk about Film Noir, particularly in relation to preparing a class on this fundamental film studies topic. The discussion is extremely engaging and very well informed

Check out the full audio podcast episode at here. Lins to previous episodes are here. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. The IU podcast is also on Twitter and Facebook.

Two earlier FSFF entries on film noir are given below:  
And for further, film studies, podcast fun and frolics please don't forget the wonderful Film Versus Film crew series with Dustin Morrow, Chris Cagle, David Cooper Moore and Matt Prigge. Their beautiful Tumblr is here.
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Monday, 14 May 2012

Audiovisual Alfred Hitchcock Studies - For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon 2012


'Does Your Dog Bite?' 
A video essay by Christian Keathley on a canine moment in Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951).


Skipping Rope (Through Hitchcock's Joins) 
A videographic assemblage by Catherine Grant of all the edits in Rope (Hitchcock, 1948), together with adjacent dialogue.
You can read more about Rope and about the context of this video here.

Film Studies For Free proudly presents, above and below, its annual contribution in support of the wonderful "For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon", May 13-18, 2012. Two video essays (above) -- one newly published online for this occasion by Christian Keathley, the other newly made for it by FSFF's author -- plus (below) links to/embeds of lots more, fascinating and openly accessible, audiovisual studies of Hitchcock's films.

This year, this Blogathon will raise funds to finance the online streaming of, and recording of a new score for, The White Shadow (1923), directed by Graham Cutts and with everything else done by Hitchcock:
The film was long thought to have be a lost film. In August 2011, the National Film Preservation Foundation announced that the first three reels of the six-reel picture had been found in the garden shed of Jack Murtagh in Hastings, New Zealand in 1989 and donated to the NFPF. The film cans were mislabled Two Sisters and Unidentified American Film and only later identified. The film was restored by Park Road Studios and is now in the New Zealand Film Archive [The White Shadow Wikipedia entry] 
Please consider supporting this cause by making a donation-- however small or large -- at this link. Thank you! 

And a huge thanks, also, to Farran Nehme (read her great post on Farley Grainger who features in both of the new video essays), Marilyn Ferdinand and Rod Heath for devoting their marvellous websites and energies to assembling a team of well over one hundred bloggers from around the world to respond to this cause -- the third, great, year in a row.

If you know of any further Alfred Hitchcock video essays of interest online, which aren't listed above or below, please leave a link in the comments.

  1. Vertigo Variations, Pt 1 A few ways of seeing Alfred Hitchcock's impossible object by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo
  2. Vertigo Variations, Pt 2 by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo
  3. Vertigo Variations, Pt 3 by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo


(except for: Easy Virtue (1927); Blackmail (1929); Foreign Correspondent (1940); Suspicion (1941); Spellbound (1945); The Paradine Case (1947); Under Capricorn (1949))
 
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Tuesday, 24 April 2012

A Star Was Born... : Links in Barbra Streisand's Honour on her 70th Birthday!

Frame grab from A Star Is Born ( Frank Pierson, 1976)
Each version of A Star Is Born may detail the rise of an unknown, but does so through extremely well-known performers, albeit ones at different stages of their careers. [...] Barbra Streisand [...] was at the height of her career in 1976. Her domination of A Star Is Born (she contributed to the writing and even, as Kris Kristofferson, her co-star, saw it, the directing [(Burke, Tom. "Kris Kristofferson Sings the Good-Life Blues." Esquire 86 (December 1976): 126–28ff), 208-9]) was another manifestation of a desire to play out aspects of her own life. The credited director has recounted at length how, during preproduction, Streisand debated the degree to which her autobiography should be reflected in Esther Hoffman ([Pierson, Frank. "My Battles with Barbra and Jon." New York 9 (November 15, 1976): 49–60], 50). If James Mason's character in the 1954 film becomes through role reversal the "fictional counterpart of the neurotic, self-destructive person that Garland [had] become" ([Jennings, Wade. "Nova: Garland in 'A Star Is Born.'" Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 3 (summer 1979): 321–37], 333), then Streisand's Esther Hoffman directly fulfills everything that Streisand herself has become by 1976. Richard Dyer even suggests that among the "number of cases on which the totality of a film can be laid at the door of the star" the case can be made "most persuasively" for Streisand's A Star Is Born (Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979], 175) [Jerome Delamater, '"Once More, from the Top": Musicals the Second Time Around', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 84]
Film Studies For Free wishes a very happy 70th birthday to Barbra Streisand, actor, singer, songwriter, film director, producer, and queer feminist icon extraordinaire.

Below, you can find a tiny little celebration in related scholarly links - the only gift that (rather besotted Barbra fan) FSFF knows how to give.

If anyone knows of any other good items (and it is far too short and unworthy a list so far...), please leave a comment and FSFF will add them to the list.

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Tuesday, 3 April 2012

New Issue of LA FURIA UMANA on Jerry Lewis and much more...

Frame grab image of Jerry Lewis as 'Warren Nefron' in Smorgasbord aka Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983). Read Steven Shaviro's new article on this film

Smorgasbord (retitled Cracking Up by the distributor) is Jerry Lewis's last self-directed feature film. It first opened in France in 1983; it never received a proper American release. (In the US, it was immediately relegated to cable television -- which is where I saw it for the first time). And Smorgasbord still isn't very well known today -- even among Lewis aficionados. (It is, for instance, the only one of Lewis's self-directed films not to appear in the index to Enfant Terrible, an academic essay collection edited by Murray Pomerance in 2002, which otherwise covers Lewis' film career quite comprehensively). Yet I think that Smorgasbord is one of Jerry Lewis's greatest films; in what follows, I will try to explain why. [Steven Shaviro, 'Smorgasbord', La Furia Umana, 12, 2012; hyperlinks added by FSFF]
Film Studies For Free just heard about the latest issue of the pentalingual film journal La Furia Umana. There are lots of brilliant articles in English, and other marvellous work, too, in other languages that will be entertainingly translated by Google, if you so require.

The particular highlight, this time, is a truly brilliant and wide-ranging dossier on the work of Jerry Lewis, a human fury of an actor if ever there was one... But FSFF also had plenty of thoughts usefully and skilfully provoked by Kim Nicolini writing on the Post-Feminist Possibilities in Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. 

And there's a lot more to explore and learn from besides the above. Just feast your polyglot eyes on the below...

nota editoriale

rapporto confidenziale
prima linea
histoire(s) du cinéma
l'occhio che uccide
flaming creatures
the whole town's talking
western fragmenta
the new world
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Monday, 21 November 2011

On the myth of the frontier in cinema and culture

'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.
The inspiration for today's Film Studies For Free entry -- on the (transnational) myth of the frontier in cinema and related culture -- was Richard Langley's excellent, highly persuasive, short documentary embedded above. That video also has a vivid, post hoc connection to this blog's popular list of "Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies" posted but a few short weeks ago.

Like cinematic apocalypses, filmic frontier mythology turned out to be an incredibly rich vein of web scholarship. So, many thanks to Richard and all the below named scholars for making sure their very valuable work was openly accessible online.

Open Access is, after all, the real 'final [e-]frontier'.

And hopefully it won't turn out to be a myth...
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