Showing posts with label Peter Wollen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Wollen. Show all posts

Tuesday, 31 December 2019

Afore Ye Go, 2019: Essential Tributes (Elsaesser, Wollen, Lindner) Plus Favourite-of-the-Year Open Access Resources

A comparative videographic study by Catherine Grant showcasing the repetitions and variations across two sets of corresponding sequences from the three direct film adaptations of Christa Winsloe's MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM (aka RITTER NÉRESTAN and GESTERN UND HEUTE, 1930-32). Video first published at MEDIÁTICO in December 2019, alongside a great text on the Mexican adaptation by Roberto Carlos Ortiz.

Better late than never, so they say. But it is especially late for this to be the very first, as well as the very last, blog entry of 2019 at Film Studies For Free...

What else can this blog's author say, but sorry / not sorry for being distracted by an incredibly busy year spent in hot pursuit of other excellent open-access screen studies initiatives - all listed immediately beneath this introduction.

It has also been a year of tremendous loss for many, especially, it seems, in the realm of film and moving image studies. So this end of year/end of decade FSFF post has a somewhat sombre tone and distinctly commemorative content. It offers warm tributes in links to the work and lives of the two foundational film scholars-filmmakers who sadly died late in 2019: Thomas Elsaesser and Peter Wollen. We owe them so much. It also offers a further deeply-heart-felt tribute to a brilliant young film scholar who, in February of this year, died way too soon: Katharina "Kat" Lindner.

FSFF's author had the great fortune, honour and pleasure of meeting all three of these wonderful contributors to our discipline. She sends much love and sincere condolences to their partners, families and close friends. As further online tributes to these scholars appear, the entries below will be updated.

Other huge film studies losses, in this cruel year, have included Edward Branigan and Eileen Bowser.

Below FSFF's tributes, this end of year entry continues with this blog's customary lists of links to some of its favourite open-access film and moving image studies resources from 2019.

Film Studies For Free wishes all of its readers and viewers a happy and healthy 2020! It hopes to see a lot more of you in the next decade!



Film Studies For Free's Author's OA Activities in 2019

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In Memoriam Thomas Elsaesser
(1943–2019)

Personal tribute by Catherine Grant 
I still can’t believe Thomas Elsaesser has died. A foundational and inspirational figure in our field - and for me personally, especially given his utter dedication to open access publishing, both by his own example, sharing so many of his publications at his website, as well as as a hugely important figure at Amsterdam University Press.
I met Thomas in 2001 at the Forever Godard conference and remained in touch. In the last years, especially, I got to spend time with him in person quite a lot as our paths crossed on many conference trips and he visited the institutions I have worked in numerous times, including to screen his lovely film The Sun Island. From his work on melodrama, authorship (his Fassbinder book, linked to below was a huge influence on my work), media history and archaeology, through to, latterly, research by film and video practice, he was always leading the way. He was hugely supportive of Film Studies For Free over the years, and of the scholarly endeavour of videographic  approaches to our discipline, in which he was also a pioneer (see below).

Where will we go now, Thomas?

Online Tributes and Festschrifts

 Open Access Books

 Websites

 Thomas Elsaesser - Including a list of Publications (many downloadable as PDFs)

Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses


Online Interviews (more to be added)

 Essay Film Festival 2018: Thomas Elsaesser in Discussion with Erica Carter
about his 2018 film The Sun Island


Videos and Video Essays

Thomas Elsaesser's Vimeo Account

BERGMAN SENSES (Thomas Elsaesser, Anne Bachmann and Jonas Moberg)


Film Studies For Free Tribute videos



Installations and Compilations: Elsaesser Senses - Commentary version


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In Memoriam Peter Wollen
(1938-2019)


Personal tribute by Catherine Grant

I only met Peter Wollen once in real life - also at the 2001 Forever Godard where I met Thomas Elsaesser and other foundational film scholars. But I encountered him in my head many many times, and will continue to do so. His work - particularly his  brilliant filmmaking explorations with Laura Mulvey, and the second edition of his book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, with its groundbreaking arguments about film authorship and 'patterns of energy cathexis' - were of huge importance to my own writing, teaching, and also filmmaking. His 2001 account of cinephilia in "An Alphabet of Cinema" (NEW LEFT REVIEW, 12) is even more of an influence on what I and others are doing now in our video essays and works of creative criticism. I am very much looking forward to the cinematic re-release of Friendship's Death, his 1987 solo-directed essay film, in 2020, and feel sure that Wollen's work, with its timely prescience, will endure in many ways that we cannot yet predict.

Online Tributes



S.T.R.O.B.E. by Peter Wollen




Work about Wollen's Research and Filmmaking

Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Theory and Practice, Aesthetics and Politics, 1963-1983, PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2018

European Cinema : Face to Face with Hollywood, by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 2005) - this collection includes Elsaesser's essay on Peter Wollen's first solo-directed film Friendship's Death (1987), and numerous other references to his work.

Lux Online Entry on 'Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen'


Wollen epigraph by Christian Keathley



 Film Studies For Free Tribute video



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In Memoriam Katharina Lindner
(1979-2019)

Personal tribute by Catherine Grant
Kat Lindner is missed so acutely by so many in her twin worlds of football and film studies. I met her only once in person, a few years ago, though we corresponded about our work over the years. She came to an event in Glasgow at which I was talking, as usual, about video essays. She was a razor sharp, deeply original thinker, with a truly glowing presence. Afterwards we talked for a long time - me trying to convince her, and almost succeeding, I think, that her fabulous work on queer cinematic phenomenology would translate brilliantly to this audiovisual format if only she would take it up. It was an exhilarating conversation and I wish it hadn't had to end. Even before that memorable encounter, I loved her work (especially her path-breaking 2017 book Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema), and used it in my own research directly and indirectly. One day I would like to make a video essay about her writing - but I haven't been able to yet.

Online Tributes

'Towards a Queer Feminist Vernacular: Dr Katharina Lindner’s Film Bodies'

'Katharina Lindner, 1979-2019: Tributes paid to footballer turned queer theorist', by Matthew Reitz, THE, 28 February 2019
 'Obituary: Kat Lindner, academic and footballer for Glasgow City', The Herald, 14 February 2019

'Screening Expectation' in Screen Bodies, by Brian Bergen-Aurand
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/screen.2018.030201 [PDF]



 Online Film Studies Writing by Lindner

'Questions of embodied difference: Film and queer phenomenology',
NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2012

‘Situated bodies, cinematic orientations: Film and (queer) phenomenology’, in Saer Ba and William Higbee (eds), De-Westernizing Film. London: Routledge, 2012, [pre-print]

'Spectacular (Dis-) Embodiments: The Female Dancer on Film', Scope, 20, June 2011 PDF

 ‘‘There is a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one of them without a fella...’: The ‘lesbian’ potential of Bend it Like Beckham’. New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 9, No.2, 2011, pp. 204-223 [pre-print]

‘Bodies ‘in action’: Female athleticism on the cinema screen’. Feminist Media Studies, Vol.11, No.3, 2011, pp. 321-345 [pre-print]

‘Fighting for subjectivity: Articulations of physicality in Girlfight’. In Journal of International Women’s Studies, 2009, Vol.10, No.3, pp.4-17. [pre-print]

(Other online publications and pre-prints on media studies topics by Lindner are accessible here)
Writing about Lindner's Research

 Davina Quinlivan, 'Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema, by Katharina Lindner' Times Higher Educational Supplement, January 18, 2018

Jules O'Dwyer, Katharina Lindner (2017) Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema, Film-Philosophy, 22.3

Kat's Inspirational Hartford Hawks Hall of Fame Acceptance Speech, Class of '03

 Video link


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FSFF's Favourite Online Film and Moving Image Studies 2019


Favourite Contributions to Online Film Scholarly Culture by a Single Scholar

Jennifer Proctor for 'Am I Pretty? and a “Sonic Gaze”', [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2019,  plus her article 'Teaching avant-garde practice as videographic research', in Screen, 60.3, Autumn 2019; and especially for her inspirational continuing work on the inclusive teaching initiative, EDIT Media (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Teaching Media), http://www.editmedia.org


Favourite Open Access Journal Article

'“Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier”: Pola Negri, Wartime and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial', by Elisabetta Girelli, in Film-Philosophy's special issue on Stardom and Film-Philosophy (23.2, 2019), edited by Lucy Bolton


Favourite New Open Access Journal Issue

Issue 16, Winter 2019, edited by Ana Maria Sapountzi & Peize Li  


Favourite New Open Access Journal

Media+Environment, edited by Alenda Chang, Adrian Ivakhiv and Janet Walker


Most Missed Online Journal That Stopped Publishing in 2019

(Read about its demise here. But, thanks to the generosity of filmmaker Barry Jenkins, you can purchase a compendium of the best writing in its six year run).



Favourite Film Studies Blog (as Ever)

 Observations on Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson


 Favourite New Film and Moving Image Studies Related Podcast

Will DiGravio's The Video Essay Podcast


Favourite Online Videographic Approach to Screen Studies

Poor Jesse by Jason Mittell,
Part of "The Chemistry of Character in BREAKING BAD: An Audiovisual Book"


Favourite Collection of Online Video Essays (Not Published by FSFF)

In an excellent new issue of NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2019, devoted to treatments of gesture, came this collection of three excellent video essays in a section edited by Tracy Cox-Stanton: (scroll down)‬


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14 of Film Studies For Free Video Essays Published in 2019


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Tuesday, 1 October 2013

Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License



 
A fascinating and informative excerpt from the audio commentary track on the British Film Institute's brand new Dual Format Edition of RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977). You can find more information about this new video version of the film here and read a new interview with Mulvey about its making here.
Riddles of the Sphinx was made in 1976-7. The film used the Sphinx as an emblem with which to hang a question mark over the Oedipus complex, to illustrate the extent to which it represents a riddle for women committed to Freudian theory but still determined to think about psychoanalysis radically or, as I have said before, with poetic license. Riddles of the Sphinx and Penthesilea, our previous film, used ancient Greece to invoke a mythic point of origin for Western civilization, that had been critically re-affirmed by high culture throughout our history. [... S]ome primitive attraction to the fantasy of origins, a Gordian knot that would suddenly unravel, persisted for me in the Oedipus story, and its special status: belonging to very ancient mythology and to the literature of high Greek civilization, chosen by Freud to name his perception of the founding moment of the human psyche. My interest then concentrated on breaking down the binarism of the before/after opposition, by considering the story as a passage through time, a journey that could metaphorically open out or stretch the Oedipal trajectory through significant details and through its formal, narrational, properties. [Laura Mulvey, 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989, FSFF's emphasis]

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry in honour of one the most important, most brilliant, most influential and hardest-working film and moving image scholars of all time: Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and recently, co-founder of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. Mulvey is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989; second edition, 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996; 2nd ed. 2013), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series, 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006). And she has made six films in collaboration with fellow film theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI, 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980) and with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994)

FSFF's author has a pretty good record in celebrating Mulvey's influence on film studies already, having been lucky enough to take part, earlier this year, in a day devoted to this activity at Birkbeck's Institute of Humanities - an event recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting. The happy occasion for today's eFestschrift, however, is the British Film Institute's release of a new DVD/BluRay disk of Riddles of the Sphinx, the hugely significant and original feminist film Mulvey co-directed and produced in 1976/77 with her partner Wollen (the disk also contains their first film together: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons [1974]).

To accompany this entry FSFF was honoured to be able to produce a short, exclusive extract of a sequence of its choice from the DVD audio commentary accompanied version (as embedded above). FSFF warmly thanks Laura Mulvey herself, as well as Hannah Maloco and the BFI, whose Production Board thankfully funded Riddles of the Sphinx, for kindly allowing this blog to create such a memorable and instrumental item of openly accessible film studies.

Beneath the BFI's own Riddles of the Sphinx clip (embedded below) -- a commentary free version of substantially the same sequence -- you can find a wonderful listing of links to openly accessible online scholarly work by and about Laura Mulvey. It provides ample testimony, were it needed, as to why she has been, is, and always will be, one of the true greats of our subject - as Michel Foucault probably would have put, a veritable 'founder of discursivity' for our discipline... 




Online written work by Laura Mulvey: 

Online written work by Peter Wollen about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work: 

Online video/audio work by or featuring Laura Mulvey:

Online writing about Laura Mulvey's work:
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