Ten Festive Treats from Film Studies For Free!

1. FATED TO BE MATED: An Architectural Promenade from Catherine Grant on Vimeo. As discussed in "Screen studies as device?: Working through the video essay" and at Filmanalytical

Sawing Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in half.

A queer experiment in cinephilic re-spatialisation

Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays from Film Studies For Free! Let's celebrate with a new video essay (above) and nine sets of treats (below) representing some of FSFF's favourite online film and moving image studies items from 2018.


2. MEDIÁTICO - Special Dossier on Alfonso Cuarón's Roma (2018) by nine world-leading scholars on Latin American Cinema

• INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL DOSSIER ON ROMA (ALFONSO CUARON) by Dolores Tierney
• WATCHING ROMA IN MEXICO CITY by Paul Julian Smith
• BROKEN MEMORY, VOICE AND VISUAL STORYTELLING by Pedro Ángel Palou
• ALFONSO CUARÓN’S LOVE LETTER TO HIS NANA by Deborah Shaw
• CLASS TROUBLE by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
• MEMORIES OF C/LEO – ON AUTEURISM AND ROMA by Jeffrey Middents
• FEMINISM AND INTIMATE/EMOTIONAL LABOR by Olivia Consentino
• THE PARADOXES OF CINEPHILIA IN THE AGE OF NETFLIX by Belén Vidal
• RECUERDA, NOTES ON ALFONSO CUARÓN’S ROMA by Robert Carlos Ortiz

3. Twenty of FSFF's favourite video essays from 2018

Cotton - The Fabric of Genocide from Cydnii Harris on Vimeo.

What's Walt Thinking? Mind Reading & Serialized Memory in Breaking Bad from Jason Mittell on Vimeo.


Dorothy, Isabella, Dorothy from Liz Greene on Vimeo.

The Signature Effect - trailer from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Bush Mama Epigraph from Neepa Majumdar on Vimeo.

Women, Intimacy, and Sexual Violence in Hitchcock Films from Emma Hampsten on Vimeo.

The Follow Shot: A Tale of Two Elephants from Jordan Schonig on Vimeo.

Berlin Moves from Evelyn Kreutzer on Vimeo.

I Feel, Therefore I Can Be Free from Nzingha Kendall on Vimeo.

Melodramatic Railway Sounds - Video Essay from Oswald Iten on Vimeo.

David Verdeure's 'The Apartment' at MUBI

Flânerie 2.0 [ENG SUBS] from Chloé Galibert-Laîné on Vimeo.

The Thinking Machine 24: When You Read This Letter by Cristina Alvarez López and Adrian Martin from De Filmkrant

Cinders of La Invasión: Reenactment as Index in Abner Benaim's Invasión from Nike Nivar Ortiz on Vimeo.

Remixing Rose Hobart from Derek Long on Vimeo.

America is (not) Cool from Jenny OK on Vimeo.

Sound in Hanna-Barbera from Patrick Sullivan on Vimeo.

Some People Like Hearing Sad Things: A Meditation on "Transparent" from Nicole Morse on Vimeo.

Cruising Différance in 3 Scenes from Marc Francis on Vimeo.

#65 - Childhood by Hirokazu Kore-eda // Enfants rois from TROISCOULEURS on Vimeo.

4. NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. Autumn 2018 Issue on Mapping

• Editorial NECSUS

• Early cinema, Sergei Eisenstein, and film culture today: An interview with Ian Christie on new directions in film history by Annie van den Oever and Malte Hagener

• The playfulness of Ingmar Bergman: Screenwriting from notebooks to screenplays by Anna Sofia Rossholm

• Handmade films and artist-run labs: The chemical sites of film’s counterculture by Rossella Catanese and Jussi Parikka

• Border crossings: Serial figures and the evolution of media by Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer

Special section: #Mappingedited by Giorgio Avezzù, Teresa Castro, and Giuseppe Fidotta

• The exact shape of the world: Mapping and the media by Giorgio Avezzù, Teresa Castro, and Giuseppe Fidotta

• The mapping of ‘500 Days of Summer’: A processual approach to cinematic cartography by Chris Lukinbeal

• Earth networks: ‘The Human Surge’ and cognitive mapping by Tiago de Luca 

• Digital maps and fan discourse: Moving between heuristics and interpretation by Marta Boni

• Embodied cartographies of the unscene: A feminist approach to (geo)visualising film and television production by Laura Sharp

• Making the map speak: Indigenous animated cartographies as contrapuntal spatial representations by Lola Remy 

• Plus ultra: Coloniality and the mapping of American natureculture in the empire of Philip II by Adam Wickberg

• Media mapping and oil extraction: A Louisiana story by Janet Walker

Festival reviews:edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist

• A brief study of film festivals in Mexico: Consumption and historical evolution 2010-2016 by Jacob Bañuelos and Juan Olmedo

• The Dutch film festival landscape: A walk-through by Harry van Vliet 

• Evidentiary aesthetics: Landscapes of violence at RIDM 2017 by Patrick Smith

Exhibition reviews:edited by Miriam de Rosa and Leo Goldsmith

• Codes of conflux: Collaborations between human and computer in MoMa’s ‘Thinking Machines’ by Leo Goldsmith

• Nothing stable under heaven at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by Justin Ross Muchnick

• Racial phantasmagoria: The demonisation of the other in Richard Mosse’s ‘Incoming’ by Diego Ramirez

Book reviews:edited by Lavinia Brydon and Victoria Pastor-González

• (Re)imagining African independence by Vicente Sanchez-Biosca 

• Form and feeling: Kinaesthetic Knowing / Artificial Darkness by Seth Barry Watter

Audiovisual essays:edited by Miklós Kiss

• Videographic scene analyses, part 2 by Miklós Kiss 

• Witnessing the western by Luís Azevedo 

• Marxism in ‘Metropolis’ by Greta Calaciura and Shant Bayramian 

• The l/song take in ‘Before Sunrise’ by Ian Garwood

• Agent of chaos: Discontinuous editing in ‘The Dark Knight’ by Drew Morton

5. Erika Balsom's brilliant essay on Jean-Lun Godard's latest film Le livre d'image The Image Book

6. Latest round up of profiles at the amazing Women's Film Pioneers Project

• Travelogue filmmaker and anthropologist Kathleen Romoli(Colombia) by Isabel Arredondo
• Director, producer, and screenwriter Louise Kolm-Fleck(Austria, Germany, China) by Claudia Walkensteiner-Preschl
• Director, actress, producer, and screenwriter Francesca Bertini (Italy) by Monica Dall’Asta
• Chief accountant, office manager, and production secretary Aili Kari (Finland) by Hannu Salmi
• Producer, screenwriter, and editor Virgínia de Castro e Almeida (Portugal, France) by Tiago Baptista
• Director, producer, screenwriter, actress, and camerawoman Angela Murray Gibson (United States) by Charles “Buckey” Grimm
• Set designers and location scouts Frances Baker Farrell and Lettice Ramsey & actress/editor Máirín Hayes (Ireland) by Donna Casella
• Publicist, trade journal editor and writer, and business owner Mabel Condon (United States) by Carolyn Jacobs
• Director, actress, and film company founder Cleo de Verberena (Brazil) by Marcella Grecco de Araujo

7. The fabulous research project and resource Timeline of Historical Film Colors is now on Instagram as @timeline_filmcolors!

8. The Shadowcast: A remarkable new film podcast from film critic genius David Cairns

9.  Allison Wilmore's 'Orientalism is Alive and Well in American Cinema' (link via Girish Shambu)

10. "Breaking your reservation: the rise of indigenous cinema" by So Mayer

We'll Tak' a Cup o' Kindness Yet: Awesome Open Access Film Studies Links to See Out 2016!

 A major open access eBook: Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film
Edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016).

In this end of year post, Film Studies For Free reflects on and links to some of its very favourite 2016 open access resources selected from the ones that this blog's author had a hand in producing, contributing to, or publishing. 

It has been a (deadly) funny old year, to be sure, one that began with tributes aplenty to David Bowie and has concluded with ones to Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (see also here, here and here). David Hudson rounds up some of the cinematic losses here. And some of FSFF's own tributes are linked to below, alongside blog entries, amazing free ebooks, and wonderful journal issue contents.

FSFF wishes all its readers and supporters a happy, healthy 2017. And it looks forward to producing and purveying plenty more open access film studies resources in the year ahead.

• Film Studies For Free 2016 entries x 10:

• The Film-Play's the Thing: RIP Jacques Rivette 1928-2016 
• New FILM CRITICISM, FILM-PHILOSOPHY, 12 new film and media open access eBooks, Mulvey and Dyer interviews, and lots of other links!,
• For the Starman Who Fell to Earth - In Memory of David Bowie 
• New LOLA, [in]TRANSITION, MOVIE, Film-Philosophy, MOVIE, Film-Philosophy, Senses of Cinema plus a video essay on Todd Haynes' CAROL, and more!
• The Persistence of Vision: Videos on the Work of Film Theorists and Scholars
• For all to see, and to see the sense of: In Memory of V. F. Perkins (1936-2016)
• Almodovar Studies For Free
• My Year’s Work in Audiovisual Essays and Videographic Film Studies
• We'll Tak' a Cup o' Kindness Yet: Awesome Open Access Film Studies Links to See Out 2016!

• Film Studies For Free Videographic Tributes Bookending the Year x 3

SIMULACRUM (For Carrie Fisher) by Catherine Grant

MOVIE MOTHER (For Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher) by Catherine Grant

LOS OLVIDADOS / LAZARUS (Bowie meets Buñuel) by Catherine Grant

• The Best Video Essays of 2016 - Fandor's End of Year Poll

As last year, Kevin B. Lee polled "esteemed video essay creators, scholars, programmers, and devoted followers of the form to highlight the best video essays of the year. Each year it becomes more necessary to crowdsource this task, for in the words of notable video essayist David Verdeure / Filmscalpel, 'It has become impossible to keep up with all video essays that are made, with the form proliferating in both academic and film fan circles.' These poll results might offer some help in sorting out the standouts of the genre. Videos mentioned most frequently in this poll are embedded below, along with the individual lists."

• Open Access Film Studies eBooks x 2!

• POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21ST-CENTURY FILM

A major scholarly collection edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, and published by REFRAME’s open access ebook imprint. 

If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, Denson and Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” Contributors explore key experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime and articulate both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries.

Download: PDF 13mb and PDF 9mb

CONTENTS AND LINKS TO WEB CHAPTERS

Perspectives on Post-Cinema: An Introduction – Shane Denson and Julia Leyda

1. Parameters for Post-Cinema 1.1  What is Digital Cinema? – Lev Manovich 1.2  Post-Continuity: An Introduction – Steven Shaviro 1.3  DVDs, Video Games, and the Cinema of Interactions – Richard Grusin

2. Experiences of Post-Cinema 2.1  The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence” – Vivian Sobchack 2.2  Post-Cinematic Affect – Steven Shaviro 2.3  Flash-Forward: The Future is Now – Patricia Pisters 2.4  Towards a Non-Time Image: Notes on Deleuze in the Digital Era – Sergi Sánchez 2.5  Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect – Shane Denson 2.6  The Error-Image: On the Technics of Memory – David Rambo

3. Techniques and Technologies of Post-Cinema 3.1  Cinema Designed: Visual Effects Software and the Emergence of the Engineered Spectacle – Leon Gurevitch 3.2  Bullet Time and the Mediation of Post-Cinematic Temporality – Andreas Sudmann 3.3  The Chora Line: RealD Incorporated – Caetlin Benson-Allott 3.4  Splitting the Atom: Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision – Steven Shaviro

4. Politics of Post-Cinema 4.1  Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory – Julia Leyda 4.2  On the Political Economy of the Contemporary (Superhero) Blockbuster Series – Felix Brinker 4.3  Reality Effects: The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso Cuarón – Bruce Isaacs 4.4  Metamorphosis and Modulation: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan – Steen Christiansen 4.5  Biopolitical Violence and Affective Force: Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown – Elena del Río

5. Archaeologies of Post-Cinema 5.1  The Relocation of Cinema – Francesco Casetti 5.2  Early/Post-Cinema: The Short Form, 1900/2000 – Ruth Mayer 5.3  Post-Cinematic Atavism – Richard Grusin 5.4  Ride into the Danger Zone: Top Gun (1986) and the Emergence of the Post-Cinematic – Michael Loren Siegel 5.5  Life in Those Shadows! Kara Walker’s Post-Cinematic Silhouettes – Alessandra Raengo

 6. Ecologies of Post-Cinema 6.1  The Art of Morphogenesis: Cinema in and beyond the Capitalocene – Adrian Ivakhiv 6.2  Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions – Selmin Kara 6.3  Algorithmic Sensibility: Reflections on the Post-Perceptual Image – Mark B. N. Hansen 6.4  The Post-Cinematic Venue: Towards an Infrastructuralist Poetics – Billy Stevenson

7. Dialogues on Post-Cinema 7.1  The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 – Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, and Steven Shaviro 7.2  Post-Cinematic Affect: A Conversation in Five Parts – Paul Bowman, Kristopher L. Cannon, Elena del Río, Shane Denson, Adrian Ivakhiv, Patricia MacCormack, Michael O’Rourke, Karin Sellberg, and Steven Shaviro 7.3  Post-Continuity, the Irrational Camera, Thoughts on 3D – Shane Denson, Therese Grisham, and Julia Leyda 7.4  Post-Cinema, Digitality, Politics – Julia Leyda, Rosalind Galt, and Kylie Jarrett

• The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities
In June 2016, REFRAME Books published The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities, edited by Charles R. Acland and Eric Hoyt – a cutting edge collection of work both surveying what media historians are doing with digital tools and charting a course for how the field of media history might move forward in an ongoing dialogue with the digital humanities. Online at: http://projectarclight.org/book/

CONTENTS:

“A Guide to the Arclight Guidebook” by Eric Hoyt, Kit Hughes, and Charles R. Acland

PART I: Searching and Mapping 1) “The Quick Search and Slow Scholarship: Researching Film Formats” by Haidee Wasson; 2) “Search and Re-search: Digital Print Archives and the History of Multi-sited Cinema” by Gregory A. Waller; 3) “Using Digital Maps to Investigate Cinema History” by Laura Horak; 4) “Field Sketches with Arclight: Mapping the Industrial Film Sector” by Kit Hughes

PART II: Approaching the Database 5) “Low-Tech Digital” by Charles R. Acland; 6) “Excavating Film History with Metadata Analysis: Building and Searching the ECHO Early Cinema Credits Database” by Derek Long; 7) “Show Me the History! Big Data Goes to the Movies” by Deb Verhoeven; 8) “How Is a Digital Project Like a Film?” by Miriam Posner

PART III: Analyzing Images, Sounds, Words 9) “Coding and Visualizing the Beauty in Hating Michelle Phan: Exploratory Experiments with YouTube, Images, and Discussion Boards” by Tony Tran; 10) “Looking for Bachelors in American Silent Film: Experiments with Digital Methods” by Lisa Spiro; 11) “Terminological Traffic in the Movie Business” by Charles R. Acland & Fenwick McKelvey; 12) “Digital Tools for Film Analysis: Small Data” by Lea Jacobs & Kaitlin Fyfe; 13) “The Slices of Cinema: Digital Surrealism as Research Strategy” by Kevin L. Ferguson

PART IV: Process, Product, and Publics 14) “Digital Tools for Television Historiography: Researching and Writing the History of US Daytime Soap Opera” by Elana H. Levine; 15) “When Worlds Collide: Sharing Historical Advertising Research on Tumblr” by Cynthia B. Meyers; 16) “Networking Moving Image History: Archives, Scholars, and the Media Ecology Project” by Mark Williams; 17) “Curating, Coding, Writing: Expanded Forms of Scholarly Production” by Eric Hoyt; “Keywords and Online Resources” by Robert Hunt and Tony Tran

• Open Access Film and Media Studies Journal Issues x 4: 

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2016_#Home

• Editorial Necsus

• Features: 
• Even today there are people who think these harmless little books are dangerous: An interview with David Bordwell by Malte Hagener 
• From single male guest worker to Muslim: An archaeology of iterating archival footage on Dutch television by Andrea Meuzelaar 
• The politics of spatiality in experimental nonfiction cinema: Jonathan Perel’s ‘Toponimia’ by Patrick Brian Smith 
• For here there is no place that does not see you: ‘Minority Report’ and art as de/legitimisation by Josef Früchtl 

• Special section: #Home 
• The Calais Jungle: Mediations of home by Mireille Rosello 
• From the bedroom to LA: Revisiting the settings of early video blogs on YouTube by Rainer Hillrichs 
• The filmic representation of home in transnational families: The case of ‘I for India’ by Efrén Cuevas 
• The home screen as an anchor point for mobile media use: Technologies, practices, identities by Stefan Werning 
• Songs of home (and away): Ethnically-coded diegetic music and multidirectional nostalgia in fiction films about Polish migrants by Kris Van Heuckelom and Iwona Guść 

• Festival reviews: edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist (Film Festival Research Network) 
• How do film festivals work?: A conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer by Greg de Cuir Jr 
• Virtual futures and cinematic pasts at the 65th Melbourne International Film Festival by Kirsten Stevens 
• Films from Asia, attention around the world: 18th Far East Film Festival, Udine by Jinuo Diao 

• Exhibition reviews: edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg (NECS Publication Committee) 
• Pierdom by Simon Roberts by Lavinia Brydon and Olu Jenzen 
• A place between desire and experience: Afterthoughts on Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting by Carlos Kong 

• Book reviews: edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier (NECS Publication Committee) 
• Dreaming of Cinema / Slow Cinema by James Newton 
• A geography of resistance: Locating US underground film and TV cultures by Andrea Mariani 

• Audiovisual essays: guest edited by Catherine Grant 
• The audiovisual essay as performative research by Catherine Grant 
• House Arrest by Domietta Torlasco 
• The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism by Ian Garwood 
• Being Bowie by Will Brooker and Rebecca Hughes

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2016_’Small data’

• Editorial Necsus 

• Features
• A philosophy of weaving the web: An interview with media theorist Sebastian Giessmann by Geert Lovink
• Remake: Chantal Akerman’s and John Smith’s plays on reality by Clara Miranda Scherffig
• Videographic film studies and the analysis of camera movement by Volker Pantenburg
• Photobiographies: The Derrida documentaries as film-philosophy by Robert Sinnerbrink
• ‘The Right Stuff’: From Western to melodrama and comedy by Wim Staat
• Pleasure | Obvious | Queer: A conversation with Richard Dyer by Catherine Grant and Jaap Kooijman 

• Special section: Small data
• Forms of binding: On data and not ‘fitting in’ by Anirban Gupta-Nigam
• Compact cinematics by Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki
• From Saul Bass to participatory culture: Opening title sequences in contemporary television series by Valentina Re
• Database aesthetics, modular storytelling, and the intimate small worlds of Korsakow documentaries by Anna Wiehl
• Towards a minor data manifesto by Jacek Smolicki and Alberto Frigo 

• Exhibition reviews: edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg (NECS Publication Committee)
• Ryoji Ikeda at ZKM by Joo Yun Lee
• Re-enacting pre-existing image collections in Akram Zaatari’s ‘Unfolding’ by Olivia Eriksson
• The milieu of poetry: Yuri An’s ‘The Unharvested Sea’ and ‘Sailing Words’ by Adeena Mey
• Festival reviews: edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist (Film Festival Research Network)
• Of calendars and industries: IDFA and CPH:DOX by Aida Vallejo
• Human rights, film, and social change: Screening Rights Film Festival, Birmingham Centre for Film Studies by Sonia Tascón
• Rediscovering Frantz Fanon at Scotland’s Africa in Motion film festival by Prince Bubacarr Aminata Sankanu 

• Book reviews: edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier (NECS Publication Committee)
• Complex series and struggling cable guys by Anne Gre Wabeke
• New media configurations and socio-cultural dynamics in Asia and the Arab world by Najmeh Moradiyan Rizi 

• Audiovisual essays: guest edited by Dana Linssen
• Whose Cinema: The video-essay on the big screen of the International Film Festival Rotterdam by Dana Linssen
• Live Streaming US by Paula Albuquerque
• re_making by Juan Daniel Molero
• Warped Reflections: The Cinematic Identity of Helmut Berger by Hugo Emmerzael

• SEQUENCE (4.1 [2016]) — ‘THINKING WITH DIGITS: Cinema and the Digital-Analogue Opposition’ by Paul Atkinson

• SEQUENCE (5.1 [2016]) — 'Silence' by Liz Greene

• New website:

• AHRC-funded CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL STUDIES NETWORK edited by Chris Berry and Luke Robinson. This research network brings together scholars in the UK, China, other parts of Asia, Europe and the USA who are working on film festivals in Chinese-language territories and cultures (including the People’s Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere): http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/chinesefilmfeststudies/

The website collects materials relevant to Chinese Film Festival Studies, including reports on network events, bibliographies, lists of and reports on film festivals, and much more.

• Other Open Access Resources 

• TALKS@MFM – REFRAME continues with its series of video and audio recordings of research presentations and masterclasses held at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex: 

• Professor Laura Rascaroli on “Framing: The Essay Film as Theoretical Practice”

• Dr Rarchel Moseley on "Child’s Play? Stop-Frame Television Animation for Children in the Sixties and Seventies”

• Jerry Rothwell on "HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD (2015): Production, Engagement and Distribution in Documentary”

New Issues of NECSUS on 'Animals', Godard, Sobchack, Mulvey, Musicals, Documentary, Feminisms, and PARTICIPATIONS on film festivals, internet, television, Twitter, film and theatre audiences

A concise video primer by Catherine Grant on phenomenological film theory as well as a tribute to the works of René Clément, Henri Decae, Vivian Sobchack, Steven Shaviro and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Published in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring, 2015, where you can also read an accompanying text: "Film studies in the groove? Rhythmising perception in Carnal Locomotive."

Today, Film Studies For Free brings very glad tidings of two newly published, open access journal issues, from NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (still rolling out, and which, alongside its regular features and sections, offers a special dossier on 'animals') and PARTICIPATIONS: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. All the contents are listed and linked to below.

If you're attending the annual gathering of the Network of European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) in Łódź, Poland, have fun! It's a great conference. This year, FSFF's author is presenting instead at the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities-funded workshop on Scholarship in Sound and Image, taking place from next week at Middleburg College in Vermont, U.S.A. from which some wonderful (and certainly open access) things will soon come.

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2015

All the below contents are linked to here: http://www.necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2015_animals/ 


Features:
Editorial Necsus

• In search of ‘Sauve la vie (qui peut)’ by Michael Witt
• Oppositional banality: Watching ordinary Muslims in ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’ by Jenifer Chao
• Dancing in the sun: The musical as touristic hook in ‘Honeymoon’ by Lidia Merás and Sarah Wright
• Feminist film studies 40 years after ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a triologue by Laura Mulvey, Anna Backman Rogers, and Annie van den Oever

Audiovisual essays:

• The audiovisual essay as art practice: An introduction by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
• Carnal Locomotive by Catherine Grant
• Club Video by Philip Brophy

Special section: Animals (rolling out shortly)

• Animals, anthropocentrism, media by Barbara Creed and Maarten Reesink
• Why not look at animals? by Anat Pick
• When Lulu met the Centaur: Photographic traces of creaturely love by Dominic Pettman
• Tasmanian tigers and polar bears: The documentary moving image and (species) loss by Belinda Smaill
• Cinematic slowness, political paralysis?: Animal life in ‘Bovines’, with Deleuze and Guattari by Laura McMahon
• Horseplay: Equine performance and creaturely acts in cinema by Stella Hockenhull
• Cows, clicks, ciphers, and satire by Tom Tyler

Book reviews:

(edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier [NECS Publication Committee])

• Television studies reloaded: From history to text review by Massimo Scaglioni
• The documentary film book review by Malin Wahlberg 
• Storytelling in the media convergence age: Exploring screen narratives review by Emre Caglayan
• Education in the school of dreams: Travelogues and non-fiction films review by Adam Freeman

Festival reviews:

(edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist [Film Festival Research Network])

• Dossier: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015 edited by Marijke de Valck
• Dispatches from the dark: A conversation with Neil Young at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015 by Daniel Steinhart
• Hollywood legacies and Russian laughter: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto / Pordenone Silent Film Festival 2014 review by Gert Jan Harkema
• We can haz film fest!: Internet Cat Video Festival goes viral review by Diane Burgess

Exhibition reviews:

(edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg [NECS Publication Committee])

• Too much world: A Hito Steyerl retrospective review by Paula Albuquerque
• McMansion of media excess: Ryan Trecartin’s and Lizzie Fitch’s SITE VISIT review by Lisa Åkervall
• Reaching out!: Activating space in the art of Olafur Eliasson review by Olivia Eriksson
• David Reeb: Traces of Things to Come review by Leshu Torchin

PARTICIPATIONS 12. 1, May 2015

All the below contents are linked to here: http://www.participations.org/Volume%2012/Issue%201/contents.htm


Editorial: Barker, Martin (Editor): 'Thinking differently about "censorship"''


Articles

• Bergström, Annika: ‘The contexts of internet use: From innovators to late majority’
• Knight, Victoria: ‘Television, emotion and prison life: Achieving personal control’ 
• Matikainen, Janne: ‘Motivations for content generation in social media’ 
• Reinhard, CarrieLynn D. and Kevin Miller: ‘Men watching Sex and the City, My Little Pony, and Oklahoma: The interpretation of gender appropriateness in the reception of cross-gendered media products’
• Wroot, Jonathan: ‘Reviewing distinctive DVD experiences: NEO Magazine and the critical reception of Asian media distributors’
• Chambers, Amy C. and R. Lyle Skains: ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the multimodal mash-up: Film as participatory narrative’

Themed Section 1: 'Theatre Audiences' (Guest editors: Matthew Reason and Kirsty Sedgman)

• Reason, Matthew and Kirsty Sedgman: ‘Editors’ general introduction: Themed Section on theatre audiences’
• Sedgman, Kirsty: Introduction to Part 1: ‘Be reasonable! On institutions, values, voices’
• Wilkinson, Julie: ‘Dissatisfied ghosts: Theatre spectatorship and the production of cultural value’
• Hadley, Bree: ‘Participation, politics and provocations: People with disabilities as non-conciliatory audiences’
• Schuitema, Karian: ‘A provocation: Researching the diverse child audience in the UK’
• Richardson, John M.: ‘Live theatre in the age of digital technology: “Digital habitus” and the youth live theatre audience’
• Pasquier, Dominique: ‘“The Cacophony of Failure”: Being an audience in a traditional theatre’
• Lindelof, Anja Mølle and Louise Ejgod Hansen: ’Talking about theatre: Audience development through dialogue’ 
• Johanson, Katya and Hilary Glow: ‘A virtuous circle: The positive evaluation phenomenon in arts audience research’
• Reason, Matthew: Introduction to Part 2: ‘Participations on Participation: Researching the “active” theatre audience’ 
• Gomme, Rachel: 
• ‘Not-so-close encounters: Searching for intimacy in one-to-one performance’
• Biggin, Rose: ‘Reading fan mail: Communicating immersive experience in Punchdrunk’s Faust and The Masque of the Red Death’ 
• Wozniak, Jan: ‘The value of being together? Audiences in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man’
• Wilson, Anna: ‘“Playing the Game”: Authenticity and invitation in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience’ 
• Gröschel, Uwe: ‘Researching audiences through Walking Fieldwork’
• Breel, Astrid: ‘Audience agency in participatory performance: A methodology for examining aesthetic experience’

Themed Section 2: 'Tweeting the Olympics: International broadcasting soft power and social media' (Guest editors: Marie Gillespie and Ben O'Loughlin)

• Gillespie, Marie and Ben O’Loughlin: ‘Editorial Introduction: International news, social media and soft power: The London and Sochi Olympics as global media events’
• Burchell, Kenzie and Ben O’Loughlin, Marie Gillespie and Eva Nieto McAvoy: ‘Soft power and its audiences: Tweeting the Olympics from London 2012 to Sochi 2014’ 
• Dennis, James, Marie Gillespie and Ben O’Loughlin: ‘Tweeting the Olympics: Towards a methodological framework for Big Data analysis of audience engagement during global media events’
• Procter, Rob, Alex Voss and Ilia Lvov: ‘Audience research and social media data: Opportunities and challenges’
• Willis, Alistair, Ali Fisher and Ilia Lvov: ‘Mapping networks of influence: Tracking Twitter conversations through time and space’
• Shreim, Nour: ‘Tweeting the Olympics: Transcending national, religious and gender identities on BBC Arabic’
• Voss, Alex and Marzieh Asgari-Targhi: ‘The inescapable history and politics of Anglo-Iranian relations: Audience engagement with BBC Persian on social media during the London 2012 Olympics’
• Aslan, Billur, James Dennis and Ben O’Loughlin: ‘Balding goes trolling? Cross-media amplification of controversy at the 2012 Olympics’ 
• Aslanyan, Anna and Marie Gillespie: ‘The Russian-language Twittersphere, the BBC World Service and the London Olympics’
• Hutchings, Stephen Marie Gillespie, Ilya Yablokov, Ilia Lvov and Alexander Voss: ‘Staging the Sochi Winter Olympics 2014 on Russia Today and BBC World News: From soft power to geopolitical crisis’ 
• Burchell, Kenzie: ‘Infiltrating the space, hijacking the platform: Pussy Riot, Sochi protests, and media events’

Themed Section 3: 'EIFAC 2014' (Guest editors: Lesley-Ann Dickson)

• Dickson, Lesley-Ann: ‘Section Introduction: Edinburgh International Film Audiences Conference, 2014’
• Ateşman, Özge Özdüzen: ‘The Politicisation and “Occupy”sation of the Istanbul Film Festival Audience’
• Dickson, Lesley-Ann: ‘“Ah! Other Bodies!”: Embodied spaces, pleasures and practices at Glasgow Film Festival’
• Martinez, Josu, Miriam Frances, Katixa Agirre and Miren Manias-Muñoz: ‘Zinegin Basque film festival: A non-existent audience revealed’
• Ralph, Sarah and Martin Barker: ‘What a performance! Exploring audiences’ responses to film acting’
• Saryusz-Wolska, Magdalena: ‘Watching films in the ruins: Cinema-going in early post-war Berlin’

Reviews

• Burland, Karen and Stephanie Pitts (eds.): Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience (reviewed by Rose Biggin)
• Radbourne, Jennifer, Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson (eds.): The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts (reviewed by Kirsty Sedgman)

NECSUS #3 The GREEN Issue

Frame grab from Shrek 2 (Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon, 2004). Read Brady Hammond's article in the new issue of NECSUS, which explores 'green skin' in contemporary Hollywood cinema

Things have been a little busy in Film Studies For Free's offline universe and so rather quiet in its online one. But it's back with an ecologically sound bang, in the form of some updates about excellent, recent, open access journal issues.

First up is Issue 3 of NECSUS, the European Journal of Media Studies. Its last issue touched on 'Tangibility’. This time round its focus is on ‘"Greenness" in a broader pallet of media-related issues, from sustainable media production to the use of the colour green in a variety of films.'


NECSUS #3_Spring 2013_’Green’

• Editorial Necsus

Articles:

• Anecdotal evidence by Sean Cubitt
• Still TV: On the resilience on an old medium by Alexander Dhoest and Nele Simons
• Nenette: Film theory, animals, and boredom by Barbara Creed
• Advertisarial relations and aesthetics of survival: Advertising –> advertisign by Jonathan Beller

Special Section: Green

• Greening media studies: An interview with Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller by Jaap Kooijman
• ‘Global warming is not a crisis!’: Studying climate change skepticism on the web by Sabine Niederer
• Painting the town green: From urban teleology to urban ecology in New York cinema, 1960-present by Brady Fletcher and Cortland Rankin
• A filmic exploration by means of botanical imagery: Notes on Rose Lowder by Enrico Camporesi
• Dialectical modes of nature in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line by Tyson Wils
• Her green materials: Mourning, Melancholia, and not-so-vital materialisms by Catherine Lord
• Disharmonious designs: Colour contrast and curiosity in Jane Campion’s In the Cut by Liz Watkins
• Greenface: Exploring green skin in contemporary Hollywood cinema by Brady Hammond
• Scalar entanglement in digital media ecologies by Sy Taffel

Book Reviews:

edited by the NECS Publication Committee

• Subjectivity and ostrannenie: Key debates in European film studies review by Pietro Bianchi
• Screen dynamics: Mapping the borders of cinema review by Lavinia Brydon
• Branding television review by Alison Payne

Festival Reviews:

edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network

• Go east by southeast: 13th Festival of Central and Eastern European Film Wiesbaden review by Greg de Cuir, Jr
• From Chernobyl to Fukushima: The Uranium Film Festival review by Courtney Sheehan
• Indigenous film festival as eco-testimonial encounter: The 2011 Native Film + Video Festival review by Salma Monani

Exhibition + Website + Conference Reviews:

• Discovering repetition review by Francesco Pitassio
• Playing with digital byproduct data: An indictive example review by David Beer
• Screen industries in East-Central Europe: Cultural policies and political culture review by Olof Hedling

On ’Tangibility’ and Relocating Cinema: NECSUS #2, Autumn 2012

To celebrate the new issue of NECSUS on tangibility, above is a reposting of TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? by Catherine Grant. Also see version with audio commentary

[A] media, singular, is not just its medium – it is not only a support or a device. A media is also and foremost a cultural form; it is defined by the way in which it puts us in relation with the world and with others, and therefore by the type of experience that it activates. By experience, I mean both a confrontation with reality (to gain experience) and the capacity to manage this relation and to give it meaning (to have experience). From its very beginnings, cinema has been based on the fact that it offers us moving images through which we may reconfigure the reality around us and our own position within it. Cinema has always been a way of seeing and a way of living – a form of sensibility and a form of understanding. [Francesco Casetti, 'The relocation of cinema', NECSUS, Issue 2, Autumn 2012]

A great second issue of NECSUS, the brilliant journal of NECS, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies has been published. It boasts some superlative articles including Francesco Casetti's must-read article from which Film Studies For Free has excerpted above.

For those interested in hapticity, and our experience of the material properties of film, there's a very special section on that topic.

All in all (and all the contents are directly linked to below), some truly wonderful work. Well done and thank you NECSUS!

Editorial Necsus

Articles:

• The relocation of cinema by Francesco Casetti
• MP3s, rebundled debt, and performative economics: Deferral, derivatives, and digital commodity fetishism in Lady Gaga’s spectacle of excess by Anne Kustritz
• Can you see yourself living here?: Structures of desire in recent British lifestyle television by James Zborowski
• Investigatory art: Real-time systems and network culture by Edward Shanken
• Beyond cognitive estrangement: The future of science fiction cinema by Stephen Zepke
• The care for opacity: On Tsai Ming-Liang’s conservative filmic gesture by Erik Bordeleau

Special Section: Tangibility

• Material properties of historical film in the digital age by Barbara Flueckiger
• Early cinema’s touch(able) screens: From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou by Wanda Strauven
• Aporias of the touchscreen: On the promises and failures of a ubiquitous technology by Timo Kaerlein
• Questions of embodied difference: Film and queer phenomenology by Katharina Lindner
• The intangible ground: A neurophenomenology of the film experience by Adriano D’Aloia
• From subject-effect to presence-effect: A deictic approach to the cinematic by Pepita Hesselberth
• ‘The last ray of the dying sun’: Tacita Dean’s commitment to analog media as demonstrated through FLOH and FILM by Caylin Smith

Festival Reviews:
Edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network

• The Angels’ Share at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival review by David Archibald
• The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival: Seeking the social in the virtual review by Sarah Dillard
• Alternative Film/Video Belgrade 2011 review by Maja Krajnc

Book Reviews:

• The good, the beautiful and the sublime review by Bavand Behpoor
• A multiplied medium: Reviewing recent publications on television’s transitions review by Markus Stauff
• European nightmares: Horror cinema in Europe since 1945 review by Francesco Di Chiara
• Cinema and experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno review by Malte Hagener

Exhibition Reviews:

• The Abramović Method, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (March-June 2012) review by Elena Biserna
• Non Non Non – Visiting the exhibition with Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi review by Miriam De Rosa