Showing posts with label Podcasts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Podcasts. Show all posts

Tuesday, 27 August 2013

BFI Pasolini Study Day - Talks Online!

Screenshot from Porcile/Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969). Listen to Filippo Trentin's talk on this film from the BFI Pasolini Study Day, April 20, 2012.

Thanks to Dan North, following its recent film studies podcasts entry, Film Studies For Free learned that all the talks from the British Film Institute's Pasolini Study Day, held on Saturday April 20, 2012, are freely available to listen to and download from iTunes U. Evviva!

All details and links to this fabulous resource are given below. Thanks to the BFI, as well as to FSFF's lovely colleagues at the University of Sussex -- especially to renowned Pasolini scholar and World Picture co-editor John David Rhodes -- for organising the day.

View More from the BFI on iTunes U

Resource Description

Stimulating and engaging programme of talks, discussions and screenings (hosted in collaboration with the University of Sussex’s Centre for Visual Fields and School of English) exploring the work and thought of Pasolini, one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation and a fiercely original – and controversial – public figure. A prestigious line-up of speakers includes Adam Chodzko, Rosalind Galt, Robert Gordon, Matilde Nardelli, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Tony Rayns, John David Rhodes, Filippo Trentin and his favourite actor: Ninetto Davoli. 


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Monday, 19 August 2013

Film and Media Studies Podcasts Galore! Cinema Journal's Aca-Media, New Books in Film Studies and NoirCasts

Accompanying illustration for Episode 7: Aca-Media Podcast


As its regular readers will know, Film Studies For Free is always delighted to promote non-open access film studies items if their authors and publishers make substantial related resources freely available online. So the below entry lists three different publicly accessible sets of brilliant podcast resources related, in general, to offline or subscription only journals and books: Cinema Journal's Aca-Media; Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir; and New Books in Film Studies.

If you know of any further academic film studies podcasts that FSFF should link to, please let everyone know about those in the credits.


1. Aca-Media
Aca-Media is a monthly podcast that presents an academic perspective on media. Hosts Christine Becker and Michael Kackman explore current scholarship, issues in the media industries, questions in pedagogy and professional development, and events in the world of media studies. Aca-Media is sponsored by Cinema Journal, the official journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and has been funded in part by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. You can contact the show at info@aca-media.org, join its Facebook group, and follow it on Twitter at @aca_media.

In this inaugural episode of Aca-Media, we interview incoming editor of Cinema Journal and Batman scholar Will Brooker, discuss the recent Flow Conference in Austin, TX (featuring a screening of the new Fox drama The Following), and report on the tribute to the late Alexander Doty held last fall in Bloomington, IN. 
In this episode of Aca-Media, we premiere a new feature: one-minute media reviews called "Aca-Media Bites." If you would like to contribute one, email us for more information. Also on this episode: an interview with Yvonne Tasker about television crime drama and homeland security, a report on a Media Industries Conference in Atlanta, and our listeners' advice for the upcoming SCMS conference.
This episode features an interview with Justin Horton on Bazin, Deleuze, and neorealism; a tour of the recent SCMS conference through the eyes of a first-timer and an old pro; and an interview with the incoming and outgoing presidents of SCMS, Barbara Klinger and Chris Holmlund. Plus an Aca-Media Bites segment proving that Ira Glass is a devil.
This episode features an interview with David Scott Diffrient about his recent Cinema Journal article on the controversial 1970 sex comedy Myra Breckinridge. We also bring you a report on the recent SCMS Undergraduate Conference held at Notre Dame, a "Vox Scholari" segment on the texts that got us interested in studying media, and an Aca-Media Bites in praise of administrative assistants.
This month, we introduce a new segment, "Cinema Journal Classics," in which we look back at an especially important or influential article (or just one of our favorites) from the CJ archives. In this installment, we return to the Autumn, 2005 "In Focus" feature on "The Place of Television Studies" and talk with one of those authors, Horace Newcomb, about television studies and his career in general. Then we bring you an interview with Aviva Dove-Viebahn about the SCMS website and the challenges the organization faces as it moves deeper into the online world. Finally, we invite you to contribute to an upcoming "Vox Scholari" segment: Tell us about a moment when you were surprised in the classroom. You can record your response and email it to info@aca-media.org.
This episode features an interview with Paula Amad about her Cinema Journal article "Visual Riposte: Reconsidering the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory’s Gift to Film Studies." We also bring you a pedagogy roundtable on teaching with social media, as well as a new segment, "What We're Watching." Finally, we're still looking for contributors to our next Vox Scholari segment: What was a time when you were surprised in the classroom? Email us at info@aca-media.org for more info on how to send us your story.
This is a great one, folks! We discuss the question of "industrial authorship" with Josh Heuman, who wrote a recent article in Cinema Journal on the topic. Then we bring you a roundtable discussion about the Trayvon Martin case, getting insights from Bambi Haggins, Miriam Petty, and Kristen Warner on what a Media Studies perspective can bring to the issue and how we might make sense of it as scholars, teachers, parents, and citizens. Plus Chris and Michael tell us about what the media they are consuming this month. Be sure to click through to the show notes for a "web extra"--a segment from the roundtable about the role of social media in the Zimmerman/Martin case that was too long to include in the podcast version.

2. Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir
Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir was the first analytical film podcast available on the Web, created by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards in July 2005 and running up to 2012. Each episode of Out of the Past investigates a single film in relation to the body of film noir. There are 53 episodes in total. In 2011, Clute and Edwards published their related book, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism (Dartmouth College Press).
While many scholars have focused on noir as a dark visual style, or a worldview marked by the anxieties and stark realities of modernity, few have addressed noir's high degree of self-consciousness or its profoundly quirky humor. In their 2011 book, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism (Dartmouth College Press), Shannon Clute and Richey Edwards focus on these underappreciated characteristics of noir to demonstrate how films noir frame their "intertextual" borrowings from on another and create visual puns, and how these gestures function to generate both compelling narratives and critical reflections upon those narratives. Drawing on the on the concept of "constraint" articulated by the Oulipo (a French acronym for "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle," or "Workshop of Potential Literature"), Clute and Edwards demonstrate that noir was the most constrained of film styles, and the constraints noir embraced gave rise to its infinite variability and unprecedented self-reflexivity--the very characteristics that have often forced scholars to bracket off noir, framing it as an exception to the otherwise tidy world of studio-era American cinema. [Publisher's blurb]
In a related video essay, Clute and Edwards used the "simple constraint of run time percentage to recombine iconic moments from 31 films noir and neo-noir, and in the process create[d] a short film that is at once a noir narrative and an investigation into the narrative constraints embraced by noir".

Thanks a lot to Josh Cluderay for getting in touch and reminding this blog about Shannon and Richey's wonderful and hugely valuable labour of noir love).

3. New Books in Film Studies

New Books in Film Studies regularly provides substantial interview recordings with authors of recently published books in Film Studies are a component part of the New Books Network. The below list links to all those disseminated to date.

You can follow this site on Facebook and via its website/RSS feed here.

Thanks to this blog's dear friend James Williams, participant in the first listed of the interviews linked to below for alerting FSFF to this marvellous and growing resource.
In his new book, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2013), James S. Williams engages the work of five contemporary filmmakers who are complex creators and interrogators of cinematic space in all its forms: screen, landscape, narrative, soundscape, and the space of spectatorship itself. Grappling simultaneously with film theory, the varieties of cinematic technique, and the social and political fields in which films are made and viewed, the book explores the spaces and places of films by Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. The book’s seven chapters take the reader from the “provincial” films of Dumont, to Guédiguian’s versions of Marseilles, to Cantet’s space of the classroom, Kechiche’s filmic métissage, and Denis’ cinema of diaspora.
A theoretically sophisticated study that includes close readings of key films, the book is throughout concerned with the ways that cinema is a crucial site of representations of, and challenges to, French culture and tradition. Contemporary France and some of its most significant auteurs/directors here offer readers opportunities to think through critical concepts, practices, and experiences of and in the cinema. At the same time, the cinema and its spaces are sites of deep feeling, expression, and politics framing, de-framing, and re-framing the investments and fault lines of the wild, urban, exclusionary, multicultural, and postcolonial Republic.
[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] In addition to being full of wonderful anecdotes about the film and television industries, David Kirby’s Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011) is also a very enlightening exploration of the role of science consultants on television and in film, and the negotiations of expertise involved in relationships between scientists and the cinema. Scholars of STS will recognize some of the major themes that Kirby raises in the course of a fascinating look behind the scenes of the cinematic production of “science”: negotiated definitions of accuracy and plausibility, technologies of virtual witnessing, the social construction of knowledge. Many of the chapters will change the way you see representations of scientists and their work in the movies and on TV, and Kirby’s description of the filmic use of “diegetic prototypes,” or cinematic depictions of future technologies, is a stand-alone contribution in itself. This is a must-read for anyone interested in popular representations of science. Kirby describes the ways that visual media interpret, naturalize, and engage with scientific theories (be they well-accepted, controversial, or fantastical), and how some scientists in turn manipulate cinematic depictions for their own ends.
Check out David’s recent discussion of the film Prometheus!
[Cross-posted from New Books in Religion] As each frame of a film goes by we witness a new world that is situated in space and time. This process of worldmaking happens through the cinematic lens but also through the myths and rituals of religious traditions. Or so argues S. Brent Plate, Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, in his book Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Wallflower Press, 2008). In this short work Plate sets out to create a “critical religious film theory” and demonstrates how understanding religion and film can help us comprehend the other in more nuanced ways. Through a close examination of mise-en-scène, editing, and cinematics we discover the interrelationship of the world we live and the one on the screen. Plate reveals that film serves many of the same functions myth and ritual do in defining space and time. Both Hollywood blockbusters and avante-garde films present a way of understanding the world and reveal a new visual ethics for understanding reality. Plate also tells us what happens when film leaves the movie theatre and re-ritualizes contemporary experience. In our conversation we discuss film techniques, Star Wars, Blue Velvet, The Matrix, Chocolat, Rocky Horror Picture Show, sensual aspects of religion, the altar and the screen, ethics, aesthetics, myth, ritual, and Plates role in developing new features in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Did you see one of Eisenstein’s masterpieces “The Battleship Potemkin” and “Alexander Nevsky” in a Russian or Soviet history class? Were you captivated by Tarkovsky’s brooding long shots in movies such as “Solaris” and “Stalker“? Did you seek out Pichul’s “Little Vera” in the theater to get a glimpse of the new openness ushered in by Glasnost? If you did, or even more if you did not, Louis Menashe’s Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies (New Academia, 2011) offers a valuable entry into Soviet and Russian film, especially during the Gorbachev years.
Menashe has long used Soviet film as a medium for discussing Russian and Soviet society in the classroom, thus the essays in this book will be of use to teachers. But beyond being a handy pedagogical resource, the book is a valuable history of Soviet cinema in the “Era of Stagnation,” Glasnost, and the Post-Soviet period. He argues that many very high quality films were made in the “Era of Stagnation,” though some were not shown. During Glasnost, these “lost” films made it into the theater to wide acclaim. Things were looking up. Yet, Monashe says, just as Gorbachev failed to create the foundation for an enduring open society, his Post-Soviet successors have failed to nurture a new generation of filmmakers to rival the creativity of the great Soviet directors.
[Crossposted from New Books in History] This week we interviewed Laura Wittern-Keller about her new book, Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to Film Censorship 1915-1981. Both well written and extremely well researched, Freedom of the Screen takes the reader case by case through the history of film censorship in the United States. Dr. Wittern-Keller is a visiting assistant professor of history and public policy at the University at Albany (SUNY) and is also the recipient of the New York State Archives Award for Excellence in Research. Francis G. Couvares, author of Movie Censorship and American Culture, claims that “[Dr. Wittern-Keller's] research is prodigious and fills a significant gap in the field. All who are engaged in this field will have to incorporate her findings into their stories of movie censorship.”
[Crossposted from New Books in History] Did you ever wonder how we got from a moment in which almost everything on film could be censored (the Progressive Era) to the moment in which nothing on film could be censored (today)? From the Nickelodeon to Deep Throat? The answer is provided by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski in their wonderful new book The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (University of Kansas Press, 2008). You’ve probably never heard of “The Miracle” or the case it launched in 1949. It’s a short film by Roberto Rossellini about a deranged women who, having slept with a man she believes is St. Joseph, gives birth to a child in a deserted mountain church. Fellini has a bit part (as “Joseph”). Critics generally liked it; Catholics in New York generally didn’t. The Church mounted a campaign against the film and the authorities relented: “The Miracle” was banned on the grounds that it was  “sacrilegious.” In 1949, those were fine grounds. Not for long. The film’s distributor–the feisty Joseph Burstyn–fought for the right to exhibit it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1952. And he won. Between 1952 and 1965, the states got out of the film-censorship business and we entered a new era of free-speech absolutism when it comes to film. One wonders if that’s a good thing.

  • Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr., "Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood" [podcast length: 36:28]

    Much ink has been spilled in telling the story of the making of Gone With the Wind- be it the book, the movie, or the subsequent musicals and merchandise. So it’s not only refreshing but downright commendable that in their biography, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011), Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr. managed to stumble upon a story that has been almost entirely ignored until now. Rather than focusing the biography on an individual involved with Gone With the Wind, the authors explore the life of the novel itself, from its inception through to its future.
    What emerges from their narrative is a fascinating perspective on the life of a tremendously successful book– a story that’s equal parts legal thriller and manners drama, and peopled by a cast of colorful characters. We’ve flapper Peggy Mitchell, her stern husband, and her lawyer brother, whose Southern affability is put to the test by the slew of glitzy publishing people they encounter in New York, all of whom seem to bungle the novel’s publication in one way or another.
    Thanks to that bungling, the case of Gone With the Wind provides a crash course in the history of United States copyright law and that may be the enduring legacy of Brown and Wiley’s book. It leaves one with a renewed appreciation for the grit and determination of Miss. Mitchell- an oftimes undervalued literary figure, who fought viciously to retain her authorial rights around the world, during war-time and in an age long before email.
Dana Andrews was one of the major films stars of the 1940s, and yet he was never nominated for an Academy Award. The posterboy for the ‘male mask’ archetype that typified the decade, Andrews portrayed the ‘masculine ideal of steely impassivity’  in such classics as Laura and Fallen Angel. In Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) biographer Carl Rollyson cracks the mask, providing intimate insight into Andrews’s extraordinary talent and his life.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rollyson’s account is that, in the end, Andrews appears to have been beloved by everyone. Often, biographies- particularly biographies of Hollywood stars- batter one’s affection for their subjects, illuminating horrible personality traits or an atrocious work ethic or a cruelty towards children, animals, and/or wives. Hollywood Enigma does no such thing. Rather, it tells the story of a man who, in Rollyson’s words, ‘always showed up for work on time, always knew his lines, and was never less than a gentleman.’
That Hollywood Enigma is about a nice man doesn’t make it any less interesting. Origin stories in biographies are notoriously tedious- long lists of grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, like something out of Genesis- but Rollyson lays out Andrews’s story at a brisk and engaging pace. Born in rural Mississippi (a town with such an exquisite sense of humor that it christened itself ‘Don’t’ solely so that its postal abbreviation might be ‘Don’t, Miss.’), he grew up in Texas then moved to California, where he worked as an accountant, a gas station attendant, and at various other odd jobs before an employer helped finance his lessons in opera. That, in turn, led to a gig at the community theater and, nine years after setting foot in L.A., Andrews appeared onscreen.
Andrews would a remain a popular star through the 1940s, only to drift into B-movies in the 1950s and 1960s. But he would resurface in the 1970s,  hitting upon something of a second act when he began publicly discussing his struggle with alcoholism. Andrews helped de-stigmatize alcoholism- a disease that was still taboo- while also reframing the way people thought about alcoholics.
Hollywood Enigma is, ultimately, the story of a man who, in an industry known for its frivolity and excesses, stood out as an enigma precisely because he knew who he was.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

A Place for Film Noir with Will Scheibel

   


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

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

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

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

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

Two earlier FSFF entries on film noir are given below:  
And for further, film studies, podcast fun and frolics please don't forget the wonderful Film Versus Film crew series with Dustin Morrow, Chris Cagle, David Cooper Moore and Matt Prigge. Their beautiful Tumblr is here.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Friday, 17 October 2008

David Lynch on creativity and Ed’s Co-ed from The Bioscope


I just had a transcendentally enjoyable afternoon watching two videos: the first one I'll discuss (actually the one I viewed second) was an (at times) insightful, and always highly engaging, free online recording of David Lynch's beatific guest lecture at the University of Oregon on November 8th, 2005, which I can thoroughly recommend to Film Studies For Free's (small but growing) 'bliss-seeking' readership. The link is HERE; there are various viewing options but I found the RealPlayer one to be the most straightforward on this occasion (and it also allows you to record the video, if you want). There's also a podcast version HERE.

Following a lovely introduction by Associate Professor Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, the video shows Lynch amiably and very capably addressing a large gathering of fans and sceptics on the subject of “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain,” with shorter speaking turns taken for part of the (nearly) two-hour long session by his fellow promoters of Transcendental Meditation, Drs. John Hagelin and Fred Travis.

Much of what Lynch has to say, of course, treats the topic of TM. Lynch is also widely-known now (as well as for his films) for his eponymous Foundation which promotes this practice in the declared interests of 'world peace'. But there is plenty in the Lecture about his films and filmmaking practice more generally, too, thankfully, hence FSFF's recommendation. If you want to skip the 'science', Lynch answers great questions from the audience for the first fifty minutes and then returns for some more questions one hour and thirty-two minutes in.

A particular highlight for me was Lynch's response to a question (about 28 minutes in) about Mulholland Dr. (USA, 2001): 'What the hell is the box and the key?'. Lynch continues with an anecdote about the turning of the TV pilot version of his script into the full-length movie version. This, in turn, is immediately followed by a nice story I hadn't heard before about Lynch meeting Federico Fellini just before the latter's death in 1993.

It turns out, though, that Lynch has done this same gig numerous times, including at other universities. So, if you are a true believer, or you just really want an overload of “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain,” or if, like me, (for a [meagre] living) you study what directors repeatedly say about their work, you could try out the Google Video of the talk as given on the day after the UOregon lecture at UC Berkeley, click HERE. Or, there's a Google search page HERE giving a list of all the other, online and free video versions of this talk out there in cyberspace.

I came across the Lynch video at the University of Oregon Scholars' Bank link because of a recommendation to check out another film stored in that online archive by Luke McKernan over at The Bioscope (see my earlier post about this fabulous blog HERE). The Bioscope is currently posting reports from the 27th Annual Pordenone Silent Film Festival/Giornate del Cinema Muto. In the report from Day 4, McKernan discussed, inter alia, a silent film made at the University of Oregon in 1929: Ed’s Co-ed. He warmly recommends it thus:
There is not a trace of amateurism about Ed’s Co-ed. The story is that of every college movie you ever saw - country boy Ed comes to college, is picked on by other students, he falls for the girl but is rejected by all after he admits to a crime to cover up for someone else who actually committed it, his talents are recognised (he plays the violin, he’s top in all his grades), he wins through at last. It’s so like every college film made that you could be fooled by its ordinariness, but this is a college film that actually came from a college, and it is a treasure trove of period attitudes, codes, fashions and language.
McKernan gives the great link to the streamed and downloadable versions of the film in the UOregon website. I thoroughly enjoyed this film (before Film Studies For Free's Lynch marathon) though would have loved to have seen it at Pordenone with the live accompaniment from Neil Brand (piano) and Günter Buchwald (violin).
Posted by at 4 comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Friday, 10 October 2008

Assorted recommendations

Thanks for some very nice email responses to Film Studies For Free's last posting. Today, FSFF brings you a round up of links to some great online resources.

  • First of all, a very good, film-related, online, Open Access journal that I didn't have in my earlier list: Limina, a refereed academic journal of historical and cultural studies based in the Discipline of History at the University of Western Australia. For a good sample article, please try Tama Leaver's 'Rationality, Representation and the Holocaust in Life is Beautiful'.
  • Next, please check out a great website run by the International Documentary Association (IDA) which has lots of items of academic Film-Studies interest: documentary.org. The best features (from FSFF's point of view) are lots of freely accessible, online video clips, and a very good selection of magazine articles drawn from the IDA's print publication Documentary (link to latest issue on documentaries related to elections HERE, and to the magazine archive HERE).
  • Via ConvergenceCulture.org, a great link to audio and video recordings of the 2006 and 2007 Futures of Entertainment (1 & 2) conferences at MIT, including papers given by Henry Jenkins (see also HERE), Jason Mittell (see also HERE), and Danah Boyd ( see also HERE). I do hope that lots of other conference organisers will note just how great it is to be able to access international conference papers in this way, from anywhere in the world, albeit only with the right technology, of course. See the Convergence Cultures Consortium weblog for updates about Futures of Entertainment 3.
  • Somewhat tardily, I just discovered that you can subscribe to a truly excellent weblog by Moving Image Source (now added to Film Studies For Free's blogroll). FSFF has previously commented on the parent site's great resources (including wonderful podcasts). The weblog has very high quality material, indeed: for example, see this great posting 'This Way, Myth' by Jonathan Rosenbaum (also see HERE).
  • Finally, for today, my recommendation of two of the most useful weblogs (for Film Studies academics, at any rate) that I've yet come across with a focus on film industry research.
    • The first is Bigger Picture Research - a 'A no-nonsense look at film biz research from around the world' - which is expertly run by Jim Barratt (also author of a soon to be published study of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste (1987) by Wallflower Press). Bigger Picture Research has fantastic links, is frequently updated, and is beautifully (and most unfussily) set out. It does what it says on its tin, and more: in other words, it has an admirably global focus and reach. There is no better website that critically and concisely examines the commercial and industrial discourses of film. Please do subscribe (get the feed HERE)and support this blog!
    • The second is a link I've only just thought of adding to FSFF's lengthy blogroll, which is r a t h e r strange; as a researcher into contemporary cinema and the impact of new technologies on old film practices and discourses (like auteurism), it's the blog I've been following the longest (since its inception in May 2005). The aforehinted-at website is CinemaTech, a blog that focuses precisely on 'how new technologies are changing cinema - the way movies get made, discovered, marketed, distributed, shown, and seen'. It's run by Scott Kirsner, a prolific film journalist and digital film commentator. It's not as 'links-oriented' as Bigger Picture Research, but (like that blog) does give good opinion, as well as accurate news coverage, in very rapid response to film-industry developments. FSFF apologises profusely for waiting until now to link to CinemaTech. Please help to assuage its guilt by (co-)adopting this wonderful blog (get the feed HERE). Thank you.

Now, back to the global financial crisis... Have a good weekend, won't you.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Monday, 22 September 2008

More on artists' film and video: an e-book, and 'vodcast' links

From Ecology, directed by Sarah Turner, 2007. Photo: Matthew Walter/Sarah Turner

A few more links have been added to Film Studies For Free's list of film-scholarly podcasts and videocasts, most notably one to a page on the LUXONLINE site, a brilliant web resource for exploring British based artists’ film and video in-depth (offering critical writing, stills, streaming video clips, and other contextual resources).

The link I've just added is to LUXONLINE's offering of 'vodcasts' of interviews with leading British film artists and curators (link HERE, please note, though, that you need to be registered first with iTunes in order to access almost all of the vodcasts). There are video interviews with Andrew Kötting, Angela Kingston (independent curator), Tina Keane, Ruth Novaczek, Chris Welsby, Alia Syed, Stephen Dwoskin, and Harold Offeh. The latest vodcast is with Sarah Pucill (there's currently no need for an iTunes account for this one: there's a direct link HERE)

The LUXONLINE site also has a lot of original artists' films, or clips from artists' films, available for viewing in streaming video, so it is well worth taking the time to explore the site properly. You can start your searches for resources by particular artists HERE and for particular streamed films/clips HERE.

There's another organisation which has even more user-friendly listings to assist with tracking down British-based artists' film available for viewing more generally on the web (links HERE and HERE). The British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection is a research project led by David Curtis and Steven Ball and based at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London. It focuses in particular on the history of artists' film and video in Britain.

Like LUXONLINE, the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection also provides a good collection of freely accessible research papers on artists' film or by film artists (link HERE), including ones by Malcolm Le Grice and Michael Mazière. There's also a paper by my friend and former colleague in Film Studies at the University of Kent, Sarah Turner, which sets out some of the conceptual background to her 2007 film Ecology (read a BBC interview HERE), which premiered at last year's Cambridge Film Festival.

Finally, there's also a link now in Film Studies For Free's 'Film Open Access e-books' listing to Gene Youngblood's hugely influential and prescient Expanded Cinema, a 444 page book, originally published in 1970 (downloadable in a single .pdf via Ubu.com; and also accessible HERE in separate sections via http://www.vasulka.org/). Expanded Cinema, as the very useful Wikipedia article on it argues, was
the first book to consider video as an art form, [and] was influential in establishing the field of media arts. In the book [Youngblood] argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Saturday, 20 September 2008

Some Bordwellian inspiration (in blogpost and podcast)

The latest blog post by David Bordwell ('They’re looking for us', 19 September 2008) treats the important issue of the reaction shot, a film technique which provides 'one of the most enjoyable and arousing dimensions of cinematic storytelling'.

Bordwell's post is, as usual, a remarkable, and beautifully illustrated, piece of digital scholarship which takes us, very entertainingly, from a contemporary example of a reaction shot (drawn from the 2007 film Music and Lyrics, directed by Marc Lawrence), and working thus in the context of what Bordwell considers intensified continuity editing; through Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), and Carol Reed's The Third Man, ending up with Road Warrior (1981, aka Mad Max II, directed by George Miller).

Bordwell's impressive tour of this technique explores the many ways in which the reaction shot instructs us 'in how to respond to the fictional world as a whole', as well as cognitive, or neuroscientific, theories of how 'Reaction shots may gain their strength from not merely our ability to understand facial expressions but the power of facial expressions to trigger in us an echo of the emotion displayed.'

Bordwell concludes his highly informative and enlightening post with characteristic modesty: 'There’s much more to say about the reaction shot'. He's right, of course: we might 'want as well to talk about films that withhold information about characters’ reactions—by using enigmatic or ambiguous reaction shots, or by eliminating reaction shots altogether'. ' But it is really difficult to imagine saying anything more, or saying anything in a more illuminating way, in under 2,750 words. With their blog Observations on film art and Film Art, Bordwell, and Kristin Thompson, his partner and frequent co-writer, have very much perfected the art of concise and scholarly digital communication.

We must be very thankful, thus, that both of them came to be inspired by the possibilities for the creation and dissemination of new film scholarship which are offered by the internet, in general, and by weblogging, in particular. There's a great podcast in which Bordwell talks about this very topic (recorded in January 2007), which is very much worth checking out. It's accessible HERE at Zoom in Online (be warned that you have to endure a short advert, and not-the-best audio quality, though).

[Note added on September 8, 2008: Check out a fascinating, subsequent post on reaction shots - 'Non-Reaction Shots' on the great blog IScreen Studies, by Ben Goldsmith, who reacts very productively indeed to Bordwell's thoughts]

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, 17 September 2008

More great Film Studies podcasts: Pinewood Dialogues

I just came across another great, free source of podcasts of film scholarly note, via the wonderful Museum of the Moving Image's  Moving Image Source website, where I was checking out a girish recommendation for the publication of September articles.

The podcasts are accessible via a Moving Image Source page called Pinewood Dialogues ('Selected Conversations with Innovative and Influential Creative Figures in Film, TV, and Digital Media'). There are some 73 podcasts currently posted, of interviews with, and dialogues between, filmmakers and other creative folk, including the likes of Werner Herzog and Jonathan Demme, Stan Brakhage, Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell, Patricia Rozema, George A. Romero, Fernando Meirelles and Rachel Weisz,  and François Ozon, among many others.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 4 September 2008

Free podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) of film-scholarly note

Film Studies For Free now has a listing of links to free podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) of film-scholarly note. It is currently headed by a link to the podcast page of the website feminism 3.0 (also accessible via the blog New Research in Feminist Media Art/Theory/History) run by my friend Vicki Callahan of the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee). The podcast currently posted is of an interview with the media artist Cecelia Condit in which she discusses her work. Some of Condit's video work is posted to her website. A nice Afterimage article about Condit's work, by Kelly Mink (Jan-Feb., 1998), is available HERE.

I've also posted a link to the hugely rich Tate Galleries listing of podcasts. Film-scholarly related highlights on this enormous listing include a podcast of the Tate Modern event 25-11-2007 Film Synergies which discussed the practice of Latin-American film co-production with Europe, which became widespread in the 1990s. The event included the screening of the 46-minute documentary Latin America in Co-production (Libia Villazana, UK/Peru 2007), which explores the mechanisms of this practice.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 22-07-2007 Patrick Keiller in which Keiller presents and discusses material from Londres, Bombay (2006), his multi-screen video reconstruction of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) in Mumbai.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 16-06-2007 Surrealism and Film: Study Day, held on the occasion of that gallery's major exhibition 'Dalí & Film', which explored the work of Salvador Dalí in relation to the wider links between surrealism and film.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 24-02-2007 Robert Beavers, about the season dedicated to this American film artist's work.

And there's a whole host of great podcasts on animation (beginning with this one) drawing on the three-day international conference at the Tate Modern 02-03-2007 Pervasive Animation which united speakers from a wide range of research agendas and creative practices, and thus facilitated 'much-needed dialogue centred on the ubiquitous and interdisciplinary nature of animation, its potentially radical future development, and its ethical responsibilities for spatial politics in moving image culture.'

Any suggestions of further links to good film-related podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) from FSFF's readers would be most welcome.
Posted by at 5 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)