Showing posts with label David Bordwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Bordwell. 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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Thursday, 27 November 2014

Thanksgiving Round Up! On the Audiovisual Essay, Bordwellian Beneficence, FROZEN, Fincher, SNOWPIERCER, Jodorowsky, Charles Barr interview, Horror Grrls, Fan Studies, Media Industries, Animation, and SO MUCH MORE!!



An audiovisual essay by Adrian Martin. Read Martin's accompanying text at [in]Transition 1.3, 2014, where you can see the other entries in this latest issue of the new journal of videographic film and moving image studies. Also, check out the latest issue of LOLA (co-edited by Martin and Girish Shambu), which features great new essays by Joe McElhaney (on German cinema) and Lesley Stern (on the ghostliness of gesture in film), among others.



Life, travel and lots happening at the good old salaried job rather got in the way, in the last three months, of Film Studies For Free's foolish claim that it would be "right back" after its last entry. This miscalculation heralded the longest hiatus in this blog's six and half year long existence! But FSFF is BACK and (even more foolishly) claiming that December should see some further new entries! Don't believe a word of it, people, till you see them with your own eyes!

Just be thankful, then, if you're so inclined, for all the openly accessible film and moving image studies that have appeared or been located online since the last entry. Links to many of these are lovingly gathered below for your reading and viewing pleasure and for your film and media studies edification.

Two further items of interest: first, you still have time to apply to attend a free two-week long workshop on making videographic criticism at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA, in June 2015, run by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, with Eric Faden and Catherine Grant as guest presenters! In case you think that, while free, this will still be an expensive venture, through a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, participants will receive a small stipend as well as having all travel, housing, and food expenses covered. The application deadline is Monday December 1, 2014.... So go to it! Full details here: http://sites.middlebury.edu/videoworkshop/.

Finally, do be sure to tune in to In Media Res from Monday (December 1) for a weeklong discussion of Open Source Academia: "Featuring communications and media scholars from various avenues and alleyways, this multimedia discussion will take place at the In Media Res website as well as at Facebook, Twitter and beyond! Curators for this week include Catherine Grant, of Film Studies for Free, writing on "Scholarly Striptease," and Suzanne Scott, drawing on the troublesome canard of the "Fake Geek Girl" to address the possibility of the 'Fake Geek Academic.' Open Source Academia week is a collaboration between In Media Res and the students of IML 501, Seminar in Contemporary Digital Media in the Media Arts and Practices Division in The University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Follow Open Source Academia on Facebook and Twitter to enjoy custom curated web content to enrich the conversation as it unfolds."

P.S. It's not open access, sadly, but USC film and media scholar Holly Willis published a great profile of Film Studies For Free in the Fall 2014 issue of FILMMAKER Magazine. If you're a subscriber you can find it here: "Film Studies in the 21st Century": http://filmmakermagazine.com/87920-film-studies-for-the-21st-century/.

  • NEW ISSUE! Media Industries Journal 1.2 is now out with twelve think pieces from its editorial board: http://www.mediaindustriesjournal.org/index.php/mij/issue/view/2
  • More podcast brilliance: the Aca Media team have published two episodes since FSFF's last entry:
    • Episode 18 (aka The Halloween episode) has lots of laughs and frights! Also: Forrest Gump and the SCMS-U conference. http://www.aca-media.org/episode18
    • Episode 17 features Courtney Brannon Donoghue discussing Sony's film production in Brazil. an introduction to an exciting new outlet for video essays, [in]Transition, and a discussion of baseball players who don't have a clue and a couple of British detectives who do: http://www.aca-media.org/episode17
  • VIEWING! From the OPEN HERE conference and festival on social, technological & cultural issues re. the digital commons: https://vimeo.com/user33775574
  • ALSO! 1000 Frames of Hitchcock: See Each of Hitchcock’s 52 Films Reduced to 1,000 Artistic Frames: http://goo.gl/Wa8ulI 
  • ALSO! Darren Tofts and Mark Amerika, joined new media philosophy journal Ctrl-Z editor Niall Lucy and film director Ken Miller to "discuss the flows and eruptions of remix culture, to reflect on its technological and intellectual pre-histories, and to consider its implications for cultural practice": http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/press/media/ (link via Adrian Martin)
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Monday, 1 September 2014

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


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
  • A previously unpublished chapter of Adrian Martin's 2006 PhD: on Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS, at the great Danish journal 16:9.
  • MEDIA FIELDS Issue 8 Playgrounds has some great film studies items!
  • 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").
  • Check out the Cinema Film & Projection Heritage Network in order to share information, ideas and knowledge about this heritage: http://www.cfphn.org/
  • 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/
  • 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.
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Saturday, 12 January 2013

“How Motion Pictures Became the Movies”: A Video Lecture by David Bordwell

Not the actual Vimeo embed! For that you MUST visit David Bordwell's website...
Today something new has been added [to the Observations on Film Art website]. I’ve decided to retire some of the lectures I take on the road, and I’ll put them up as video lectures. They’re sort of Net substitutes for my show-and-tells about aspects of film that interest me. The first is called “How Motion Pictures Became the Movies,” and it’s devoted to what is for me the crucial period 1908-1920. It quickly surveys what was going on in cinema over those years before zeroing in on the key stylistic developments we’ve often written about here: the emergence of continuity editing and the brief but brilliant exploration of tableau staging.
     The lecture isn’t a record of me pacing around talking. Rather, it’s a PowerPoint presentation that runs as a video, with my scratchy voice-over. I didn’t write a text, but rather talked it through as if I were presenting it live. It nakedly exposes my mannerisms and bad habits, but I hope they don’t get in the way of your enjoyment. [David Bordwell, ''What next? A video lecture, I suppose. Well, actually, yeah….", Observations on Film, January 12, 2013]

The above is, hopefully, self-explanatory. In other words you should head straight over to David Bordwell's website (also see here) to be reminded, if you really needed to be, of just what a valuable resource it is, and just what a global treasure he is (and, of course, Kristin Thompson, too!].

Film Studies For Free can't wait for more of these. Thank you, David!
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Tuesday, 21 August 2012

On 'Acid Aesthetics' and Contemporary Cinematic Stylistic 'Excess' - In Memory of Tony Scott (1944-2012)

Last updated August 30, 2012
A video tribute to Tony Scott, "[A] vigorous and energetic filmmaker extraordinaire"
 
Filmmaking is like painting…Every stroke or every color impacts another and you build film on the canvas and you get ideas from the last stroke.
 [Tony Scott, audio commentary, Domino DVD]
[T]he minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning. Style is the use of repeated techniques which become characteristic of the work; these techniques are foregrounded so that the spectator will notice them and create connections between their individual uses. Excess does not equal style, but the two are closely linked because they both involve the material aspects of the film. Excess forms no specific patterns which we could say are characteristic of the work. But the formal organization provided by style does not exhaust the material of the filmic techniques, and a spectator's attention to style might well lead to a noticing of excess as well. [...] Probably no one ever watches only these non-diegetic aspects [...] through an entire film. Nevertheless, they are constantly present, a whole "film" existing in some sense alongside the narrative film we tend to think of ourselves as watching. [Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess', Ciné-Tracts, 1.2, Summer 1977, pp. 55-56]
Hollywood action scenes became ‘impressionistic,’ rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it. [David Bordwell, 'A Glance at Blows', Observations on Film Art, September 28, 2008]
In classical continuity styles, space is a fixed and rigid container, which remains the same no matter what goes on in the narrative; and time flows linearly, and at a uniform rate, even when the film’s chronology is scrambled by flashbacks. But in post-continuity films, this is not necessarily the case. We enter into the spacetime of modern physics; or better, into the “space of flows”, and the time of microintervals and speed-of-light transformations, that are characteristic of globalized, high-tech financial capital.  [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]
The essential characteristic of the acid aesthetic is the employment of early twentieth century hand-crank cameras. Loaded with high-speed reversal film, they are manually cranked forwards and backwards during the shooting, and afterwards cross-processed in an inappropriate developer. The results are quite extreme and fairly unpredictable: multiple exposures within one or more images, high contrasts and de-saturated colors, abrupt visual jolts of overexposed lighting, increased grain activity and discernible smears, cracks and trails on the frame, which add an air of physical authenticity. Film becomes tangible in this aesthetic equation. The analogue form, generally masked in the classical continuity style, is revealed, indeed placed in the foreground. Footage from digital cameras further provides an occasional visual counterpoint to the stylized primitivism of the hand-crank aesthetic, presenting crisp, overly saturated images, which seem, by contrast, manufactured and purely synthetic. The result is a dialectic of control and chaos, with the latter as the defining crux. [...] What becomes clear here is that Scott’s acid aesthetics put on display the cinematic apparatus itself, the process of constructing moving images, both in analogue and digital form. The resulting casualty is the concept of filmic realism. The gained impression is not the order of continuity but the chaos of stylistic transparency, an illustration of the formal potentialities of film, unrestrained by storytelling conventions.
[...] A blend of analogue and digital filmmaking lays bare the inner mechanics of cinema, its texture, emphasizing the process of manipulating and creating moving images. Film, in this regard, can be conceptualized as an enormous canvas, to be filled with color. It is not a coincidence that Tony Scott was trained as a visual artist and generally views himself as such, a cinematic painter. Thus, he constructs rather than documents images, both in the camera and on a post-production computer setup. In Scott’s hands, cinema rediscovers its ability for overt stylization, not eroding, but at least de-privileging what Christian Metz calls the realistic cinema-effect, in favor of a display of cinematic technique. In the words of Lev Manovich, cinema is then “no longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush”. And indeed Scott’s filmmaking transcends the mere realm of visual representation. Wielding the camera like a brush, and similar to Alexandre Astruc’s pen, the caméra-stylo, he sprays, splashes and splatters paint onto the canvas, producing an expressionistic chaos, reminiscent of paintings by Jackson Pollock. Notwithstanding the overt experimentalism, all this activity is framed by the generic conventions of Hollywood story material. The margins of Scott’s canvas are defined by the tenets of traditional and, with regard to Man on Fire and Domino, arguably quite clichéd narrative. In this regard, Scott’s cinematic paintings become more than just a display of style, namely an unrestrained sensory assault of visual abstraction that, in a postmodern twist of meta-textual discourse, exposes the process of moving image construction, and thereby reconfigures the traditional notion of what mainstream cinema should look like. [Excerpts from Matthias Stork, 'Acid Aesthetics: Tony Scott's Cinema of Chaos', SWTX Popular and American Culture Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2012]
I have cautiously championed Tony Scott’s recent work because at least he’s willing to go all the way, however misguided the direction. From Spy Games on, he has stuck to the credo that too much is never enough. His technique is swaggering and undisciplined, mannered to the nth degree. Yet I find his fevered visuals more genuinely arresting than the safe noodlings of most of today’s mainstream cinema. Man on Fire and Déja Vu reheat their genre leftovers into something spicy, if not nourishing, while Domino, the cinematic equivalent of hophead graffiti, wraps its sleazy characters in a visual design apparently inspired by the glowing interior of a peepshow booth.  [David Bordwell, '50 Days of Summer Movies Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009, hyperlink added by FSFF]
Tony Scott’s need to push the boundaries of the postclassical into the classical-plus and the hyperclassical with Man on Fire and Domino suggests a growing impatience with intensified continuity and the postmodern condition. In Top Gun and even True Romance the audience can easily float with the surface structure and identify with the fantasy of transcending both physical space and cultural time. But in Man on Fire and Domino the audience cannot ignore the deaths of Denzel Washington, Edgar Ramirez, and Mickey Rourke, the irrevocable loss of continuity, and the status of the image not as synergistic decoration or digital simulacrum, but as a symptom and agent of cultural flux and despair. Even in Deja Vu, which retreats somewhat from the volatile aesthetic of Man on Fire and Domino, Scott makes postclassical narrative hyperclassical by allowing Denzel Washington to inhabit the past and present simultaneously. Deja Vu, with its post-Katrina New Orleans, opening terrorist attack, and urgent desire to traverse time and prevent the death of Paula Patton, suggests a shell-shocked United States unable to understand the past or ponder the future — Denzel, in a Butterfly Effect-like matrix of temporal frequency and repetition, dies in one narrative thread even as he emerges unscathed in another. Scott pushes the boundaries of narrative time and space so far he doesn’t need the vomit comet or Domino-Vision to achieve the same measure of indeterminacy. Man on Fire, Domino, and Deja Vu suggest that the only sin Tony Scott has committed is not to anticipate the hyperclassical and the classical-plus sooner. [Larry Knapp, 'Tony Scott and Domino — Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical', Jump Cut, 50, 2008]

Film Studies for Free was shocked, like everyone else, by the news of Tony Scott's death yesterday. Following the news, much of the day was spent reading online assessments of his important filmmaking career.

These frequently centered, of course, on the role of 'excessive style' in his work, and its (some would say, concomitant) lack of narrative motivation. The ground was thus laid for today's tribute list of more than fifty links to academic studies centering on the debates about cinematic 'excess', as well as on issues of intensified (or 'post'-, or 'Chaos') continuity in contemporary film aesthetics.

Rather incredibly, at the weekend, Matthias Stork, talented author of the video essay series on Chaos Cinema, had sent FSFF a link to a draft version of a new video essay featuring Tony Scott's work, which explored some related issues regarding contemporary film aesthetics. Following yesterday's awful news, Stork worked around the clock to develop that essay to provide an important tribute to Scott's work. You can see the video at the top of this entry, and also at Stork's Vimeo page Cine-Essais.

For more tributes to Scott, an essential round up is given at David Hudson's post devoted to 'Tony Scott, 1944 – 2012' at Fandor's Keyframe Daily website.

A very big Danke schön goes to Matthias Stork for all his essential contributions to this entry. 
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