Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts

Thursday, 26 June 2014

Now ONLINE! Jacques Rancière's Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading



Jacques Rancière Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading, May 2, 2014

Private Q & A Session with Jacques Rancière, preceding his Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading, May 2, 2014

The above videos provide the sole focus for a fairly self-explanatory -- and wonderful -- entry at Film Studies For Free today: they present the recording of a lecture and discussion on cinema by the hugely eminent French philosopher Professor Jacques Rancière at the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, University of Reading, UK.

Rancière's abstract for his lecture, which took place on May 2, 2014, reads as follows:
Ars gratia artis, the three words written on the scroll surrounding the head of the roaring lion at the beginning of the MGM movies may sum up the singularity of cinema. Cinema has blurred in many ways the frontiers separating pure art from the activities of the everyday and the forms of popular performance and entertainment. By the same token, it may have questioned the very unity of what we call art. Through examples borrowed from the history of film and from the history of cinephilia I wish to examine some aspects of this subversion of the frontiers of art.
Jacques Rancière, born in Algiers (1940) is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris VIII, where he taught Philosophy from 1969 to 2000, and visiting professor in several American universities. His work deals with emancipatory politics, aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. His books translated into English include notably: The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), Disagreement (1998) , The Politics of Aesthetics ( 2006) , The Future of the Image ( 2007), The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Proletarian Nights (2012) and Aisthesis (2013). He has authored three books dedicated to cinema (Film Fables, 2006; Bela Tarr. The Time after, 2013; The Intervals of Cinema, forthcoming, 2014)

Thanks to Professor Lúcia Nagib and the other faculty at CFAC for making this event happen and, especially, for making the recording accesible online for everyone to watch it. Rancière's lecture begins about fifteen minutes into the first video.

Thanks to Hoi Lun Law for the tip-off that these recordings had gone online. FSFF can't wait to watch them!

Sunday, 17 March 2013

New SENSES OF CINEMA!

Frame grab from Sans Soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, 1983)
Oooh! Film Studies For Free's Sunday is complete: a new issue of Senses of Cinema is out. It has some eye-wateringly good items. Just skim, scan and click below.


Senses of Cinema, Issue 66 , March 2013
Editorial Introduction

Features

Great Director: Albie Thoms Dossier – Contents 
Adrian Danks's Introduction to the Dossier
  1. The Ubu Moment and Australian Experimental Film: Interviews with Albie Thoms by Danni Zuvela for OtherFilm 
  2. Albie – A Well-Directed Life by Tina Kaufman 
  3. Albie Thoms (dissimilis aliqua alia) by Peter Mudie 
  4. Why Albie Thoms? – A Singular Commitment and a Figure Displaced by Barrett Hodsdon 
  5. Days of Future Past: Albie Thoms’ Polemics by Jake Wilson 
  6. Memoir of Albie by John Flaus 
  7. Albie Thoms as an Historian by Graham Shirley 
  8. Albie Thoms Refractions by Danni Zuvela for OtherFilm
Cinémathèque Annotations on Film
Book Reviews Festival Reports

Monday, 7 January 2013

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

Columns


META


Reviews

 

 

Sunday, 7 October 2012

New JUMP CUT: gender, globalization, Third Cinema, history, political activism, racial representation, cinematic form, melodrama, genre, new media, and media institutions

Frame grab from La nación clandestina/The Hidden Nation (Jorge Sanjinés, 1989). Read a great selection of new and translated articles on this Bolivian filmmaker among the numerous essays just published in the latest issue of JUMP CUT
Film Studies For Free welcomes with wide open e-arms the fabulous new issue of JUMP CUT. Just look at all that high quality content, the links to which stretch out below, almost as far as the mouse can scroll.  

JUMP CUT truly goes from strength to strength with its focus on contemporary and international cinema, media, aesthetics, reception and politics. FSFF hasn't digested the entire issue yet, but so far particularly likes the dossier on Third Cinema filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés, Ian Murphy's article on two films by Claire Denis, and Diane Waldman's very thoughtful review of Vicki Callahan's important edited collection, Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History together with Suzanne Leonard's great study of Fatal Attraction.

Its brilliant and hardworking editors -- John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage -- deserve our admiration and sincere thanks for all the excellent, politically and ethically engaged research they help to bring into the public domain in our disciplines. Their stance and efforts are as crucial now as they have ever been.

Finally, in the week that brought the very sad news of the death of Octavio Getino, best known for co-founding, along with Fernando Solanas, the Grupo Cine Liberación as well as for elaborating with Solanas and others the notion of Third Cinema, and in memory of this great film theorist and practitioner, interested readers might like to be reminded of FSFF's earlier related entries (see below), which contain links to numerous, past JUMP CUT offerings, and also check out Michael Chanan's tribute to Getino and historian Eric Hobsbawm here.


THE FIRST WORD
ASIAN CINEMA AND TV DRAMA
  • “Family” in Li Yang’s Blind Shaft and Blind Mountain by Amanda Weiss. A look at globalization and the family in Li Yang's migrant films Blind Shaft (2003) and Blind Mountain (2007).
  • Migrant workers, women, and China’s modernization on screen 
by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau.
 Even though China's migrant workers constitute the biggest human migration in the world at this time the life circumstances of these workers receive little attention in Chinese cinema. This article explores how visual media, including installation arts, documentary films, and narrative films expose the often neglected issues of women migrants.
  • Defining the popular auteur, or what it means to be human within the machine 
by Caroline Guo.
 Review of Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film by Stephen Teo. 
Stephen Teo tackles Johnnie To’s multifaceted role in the Hong Kong film industry: this review picks up where his monograph leaves off to grapple with the filmmaker’s ongoing evolution and rethink the notion of the “popular auteur.”
  • Negotiating censorship: Narrow Dwelling as social critique
 by Wing Shan Ho.
 Housing crisis and extra-marital affair—this essay explores how the TV drama Narrow Dwelling skillfully critiques social inequalities under the censor’s eye.
  • Digital pleasure palaces: Bollywood seduces the global Indian at the multiplex 
by Manjunath Pendakur. 
Malls, multiplexes and digital cinemas are symbols of the fast-modernizing, neoliberal India of the 21st century and, in these turbulent conditions, Bollywood is expanding its audiences at home and abroad while the political-economic-technological changes have resulted in new conflicts and a reshaping of the film industry's internal structure and operation.
  • Chokher Bali: a historico-cultural translation of Tagore
 by Srimati Mukherjee
. Bengali director Rituparno Ghosh challenges the moribund aspects of cultural tradition and shows that mobilization in and out of the “fixed” space of the widow is possible.
LATIN AMERICAN MEDIA
Articles on Bolivian filmmaker, Jorge Sanjinés
  • Andean realism and the integral sequence shot 
by David M.J. Wood. 
Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés’ radical film theory and praxis: an Andean take on the critique of mainstream cinema and the redemptive power of realism.
  • The impossibility of mestizaje in The Hidden Nation: 
emblematic constructions in the cinema of Jorge Sanjinés
 by Alber Quispe Escobar, translated with explanatory notes by Keith John Richards.
  • The all-encompassing sequence shot
by Jorge Sanjinés, translated by Cecilia Cornejo and Dennis Hanlon.
Jorge Sanjinés' 1989 essay explains the development of the "Andean sequence shot" and why it is consonant with indigenous Andean concepts of community and time. A key piece of Third Cinema theory never before translated into English.
  • The “new” and the “old” in Bolivian cinema
 by Verónica Córdova S., translated by Amy L. Tibbitts. 
Verónica Córdova S. remarks on the motivations of the New Latin American Cinema movement of the 60s as contrasted with current trends and concerns of present-day Bolivian filmmakers. Using the films of Jorge Sanjinés as a model, Córdova explains how new technological advances in filmmaking are influencing Bolivian film production, while, hopefully, remaining in dialogue with the past generation of filmmakers.
  • A cinema of questions: a response to Verónica Córdova 
by Martín Boulocq, translated by Amy L. Tibbitts. 
Martín Boulocq responds to Verónica Córdova's comments regarding the motivation of past and present Bolivian filmmakers, offering an entirely unique perspective on what motivates filmmakers to make films.
  • Insurgentes: the slight return of Jorge Sanjinés 
by Keith John Richards.
 Jorge Sanjinés’ most recent film, Insurgentes, has aroused differences of opinion within Bolivia; this review examines the film in the context of recent developments in the country.
THEMES IN HOLLYWOOD AND OTHER CINEMAS
1. Race/ethnicity
2. The Mideast
3. History
4. Institutions: Law, Production, Exhibition
5. Queering the entertainment
DOCUMENTARY
EXPERIMENTAL and NEW MEDIA
CRITICAL ANALYSES
THE LAST WORD

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. 

Monday, 19 September 2011

Articles from the New Review of Film and Television Studies

Images from The Story of Adèle H. (François Truffaut, 1975) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) - two films referred to in Agustín Zarzosa's article 'Jane Campion's The Piano: melodrama as mode of exchange'
Film Studies For Free was very happy to hear that the excellent journal New Review of Film and Television Studies is now offering free access to a great selection of essays, including a recent offering by Thomas Elsaesser on Avatar, and translations from Christian Metz's book Impersonal Enunciation.

As well as the marvellous aforementioned items, FSFF also highly recommends the articles by Mette Kramer and Agustín Zarzosa.

All freely accessible material is linked to below. 

Thursday, 4 August 2011

New JUMP CUT: Hollywood, Reframing, International Cinema, Documentary, Economics and Politics, Porn, Independent/Art/Avant-garde, Horror


Back, nicely bronzed, from its holiday, Film Studies For Free has lots of catching up to do. Let it begin with rushing you, below, the table of contents from the latest, utterly brilliant issue of Jump Cut, No. 53, summer 2011. 

There is SO much great reading here, much of it deeply politically committed, as is characteristic of this important journal. But please don't miss its marvellous book reviews section, including a look at recent books on film sound by Michael Chanan (thanks for tipping FSFF off about this latest issue, Michael!).

Hollywood
Reframing
International cinema
Economics and cinema
Politics of media production and distribution
Porn
  • Clips, clicks and climax: notes on the relocation and remediation of pornography by Julian Hanich
    Moving-image pornography on the Internet has facilitated and intensified the masturbatory experience due to a double tendency toward privatization and individualization. This becomes particularly obvious when compared to the time when porn films were projected in theaters and consumed with other, mostly anonymous viewers.
  • The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich by Magnus Ullén
    Considering the relation between pornography and different media is important, yes; but it will be difficult to historicize pornography without first historicizing the mode of reading that gave rise to the concept of porn in the nineteenth century.
  • Back to the Golden Age by Thomas Waugh
    This brief intervention in the current conversation about porn contextualizes the debate within the history of porn studies and Jump Cut’s contribution since the 1970s to a materialist-feminist understanding of sexual representation.
  • Porn: it’s not just about sex anymore by Nina K. Martin
    Porn's shift to online and mobile device mediums has de-stigmatized the term to the point of banality, linking "porn" to non-sexualized notions of excess.
  • Beyond porno chic by Jose B. Capino
    Internet porn viewing and spectatorship at adult video arcades are more similar than we imagine.
  • Pornography, technology, and masturbation: response to Julian Hanich by Peter Lehman
    Society hysterically fears the dangers of pornography and masturbation while academia represses it, and that aspect of the historically complex interaction between media, technology and porn is lost in the process.
Independent/Art/Avant-garde
  • Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary  by Thomas Waugh
    Far from Vietnam, the collective French film of 1967, produced in solidarity with the Vietnamese people under U.S. attack, is explored in relation to its historical context on three continents, to its coalitional politics and the solidarity genre in general, and to the forum it provided to one contributor, veteran communist filmmaker Joris Ivens.
  • Re-conceiving Misconception: birth as a site of filmic experimentation by Roxanne Samer
    This cultural history of Marjorie Keller's birth film Misconception (1977) seeks to release the film from past dichotomizing interpretative binds with the hope of opening it up to further future interpretations, re-looking and better appreciation.
Horror
Books
  • Books on film sound review by Michael Chanan
    Two books about film sound come at their subject from completely different angles.
    • Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), Cinema in the Digital Sound Age
    • Andy Birtwistle, Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video
  • Iranian film opposing regimes of voyeurism review by Jyotika Virdi
    Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh
    Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is seen as a dynamic alternative to Hollywood's dominant voyeurism codes, while its narratives are displaced allegories that circumvent the state's modesty laws.
  • Darwin at the movies by David Andrews and Christine Andrews
    This review of Barbara Creed's book Darwin's Screens also examines the use of evolutionary ideas in the field of film studies.
  • Star Trek’s allegorical monomyth review by Elspeth kydd
    David Greven in Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films tackles complex issues within this large and elusive monomyth.
  • Nobody’s baby review by Kirsten Pike
    Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell
    The book examines girls’ domestic labor in the U.S. and also offers significant insight into the contradictory ways that girls are imagined, debated, and targeted by experts, advisors, and creators of popular culture.
  • Sexual innocence and film: a look at scholarship on virginity review by Susan Ericsson
    Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald
    How can virginity be depicted in fiction film and television beyond dialogue or narrative moments when the condition of virginity ends?
  • Documentary studies: news from the front line review by Russell Campbell
    Sociopolitical documentary comes under intensive scrutiny in a cluster of new books.
    Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation by John Ellis
    Recording Reality, Desiring the Real by Elizabeth Cowie
    The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
    Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
    The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film by Thomas Waugh
  • Documentary: intelligence and/or emotion? review by Chuck Kleinhans
    The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
    Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
The last word
  • Crisis politics On crises and drastic neoliberal economic makeovers by the editors