[in]TRANSITION Issues! Rossellini, Marclay, Burnett, Snow, Emoticons, Time, Surveillance, Volumetric Cinema, Experimental Cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, Women in Prison Genre

THEORY OF RELATIVITY by Catherine Grant is an experimental video about digital intertextuality and cinephiliac relativity. It was inspired, in part, by (the non-open access article) "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," just published in the Spring 2015 issue of Cinema Journal (54.3) by film scholar Julie Levinson. You can read a little more about this video and the connections it makes here. It was also made as a reserve entry for the new issue of [in]Transition linked to below.

Film Studies For Free is truly thrilled to present an entry on the last two issues of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, of which FSFF's author is proud to be a co-editor. The journal and its editors and project managers recently won an 'Award of Distinction' for Innovative Scholarship thanks to the 2015 Anne Friedberg Award Committee and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Board of Directors, presented at the annual SCMS conference in Montreal. Woohoo! (Btw, look out for content related to this conference in FSFF's next entry, coming soonish!)

The first of the two issues FSFF is catching up with was published to coincide with the Montreal conference back in March. It was the first issue of [in]Transition devoted exclusively to peer-reviewed videographic work! Each video was accompanied by a curatorial statement from the maker, as well as the peer reviewer evaluations, all transparently published in the spirit of openness, to encourage scholarship as conversation, and to help our discipline establish a set of criteria for what constitutes valid scholarship in this emerging, audiovisual form. [in]Transition continues to accept submissions of videographic work for peer-reviewed publication in subsequent issues. Guidelines for submission are here.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.1, 2015

• Frames of Mind by Jordan Tynes and Maurizio Viano
• Emoticons by Patricia Pisters
• Volumetric Cinema by Kevin L. Ferguson
• Screening Surveillance by Steve Anderson
• Busting Out by Manohla Dargis, Dawn Fratini and Jen Moorman

And the second issue to be publicised here (commissioned and edited by FSFF's author) has just been published! It features content generated as part of an exciting collaboration with Cinema Journal, its partner publication. That journal's editor, Will Brooker, shared with [in]Transition's editors (some six months in advance of publication) four articles from the latest issue of this highly esteemed journal—54.3, Spring 2015—and asked if we would be interested in commissioning videographic responses to the work. We accepted this challenge, conceiving of it as an experiment to see how audiovisual essays (produced and published relatively quickly) could take up, adapt, or riff off debates and arguments posited by written scholarly texts (which, as is customary, had taken several years to produce and publish).

Five sets of audiovisual essayists accepted the unusual commission, and their creative, critical work forms the basis of the issue. Each video is accompanied by a written statement from the maker(s) discussing the matters at stake in composing such audiovisual responses. Further responses to the work from viewers and readers are invited in the comments threads to the entries.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.2, 2015

• Spaghettis in Translation by Austin Fisher. An audiovisual response to Michelle Cho, "Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema: Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird", Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
• Against the Real by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin - An audiovisual response to Sarah O'Brien, "Nous revenons à nos moutons: Regarding Animals in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep," Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
• So’s Nephew by Remes (thanx to Michael Snow) by Jorrie Penn Croft by Jennifer Proctor. An adaptation of Justin Remes, “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film”, Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
• The Definition of Film by Richard Misek. An audiovisual response to Justin Remes, “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film”, Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
• The Time Passing by Benjamin Sampson. An audiovisual response to Julie Levinson, "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015

[Note: The video at the top of this FSFF entry was made as a reserve video for the issue. You can read more about that one here.]

There is further open access content connected to the above articles from the latest issue of Cinema Journal with which [in]Transition 2.2 interacted, as follows:

Cinema Journal Afterthoughts and Postscripts, Spring 2015, 54.3

• Michelle Cho, Postscript to “Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema"
• Sarah O'Brien, Postscript to “Nous revenons à nos moutons: Regarding Animals in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep”
• Justin Remes, Movies That Don’t Move

The Other Western: great new issue of TRANSFORMATIONS

Frame grab from Bend of the River (Anthony Mann, 1952). Read an article on this film by Helen Miller and Warwick Mules

Thanks to the always alert and brilliant Adrian Martin, Film Studies For Free got wind of a fantastic new issue of Transformations Journal on The Other Western (meaning [as the editors set out]: unusual Westerns as well as the "global and contemporary Western", which means that the issue provides a great accompaniment for Frames Cinema Journal's own recent take on the Cold War or political Western; and also to FSFF's podcast interview with Austin Fisher on his research on the spaghetti western).

FSFF has only just begun to dig into this issue of Transformations, but what it's read so far is really excellent. All the links are below.

And thank ye kindly, AM!

Transformations, Issue No. 24   2014 — The Other Western

• editorial  
• abstracts 
•  “Do I look Mexican?”: Translating the Western Beyond National Borders  Chelsea Wessels 
• The Singing Cowboys: Sholay and the Significance of (Indian) Curry Westerns within Post-Colonial Narratives  Madhuja Mukherjee 
• Whither the Australian Western? Performing Genre and the Archive in Outback and Beyond Grayson Cooke
• Hollywood Westerns and the Pacific: John Kneubuhl and The Wild Wild West Sarina Pearson
• “I Knew Killing a Man Would Kill You”: Lucky Luke Shaped by Myth and History Annick Pellegrin
• The Night-Time Town as an Alternative Space in the Western Genre Pete Falconer
• Anthony Mann’s Film Westerns: Mise-en-scène and the Total Image in Bend of the River Helen Miller and Warwick Mules
• Mann and Woman: the Function of the Feminine in the “Noir Westerns” of Anthony Mann David Baker and Danielle Zuvela 
• Hybridity, Agency and the Distribution of Whiteness in The Searchers Birgitta Frello

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Post-Conference Round Up: [IN]TRANSITION,Transnational Cinemas, MOVIE eBooks, and much more!

Homepage of [in]Transition, 1.1, 2014

Film Studies For Free is just back from attending the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. This year it took place in the distinctly cinematic, and especially fun, city of Seattle in Washington State, USA.

The big event, from this blog's point of view, was the launch of [in]Transition, a new open access periodical, co-edited by FSFF's author with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. [in]Transition – a collaboration between MediaCommons and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ official publication Cinema Journal – is the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. [in]Transition has a highly distinguished editorial board and is more than ably project managed for MediaCommons by Jason Mittell and for Cinema Journal by Chris Becker, CJ's online editor (big thanks also go to the very visionary Will Brooker [CJ editor], Avi Santo, Monica McCormick and the rest of the heroic MediaCommons team). 

You can read more about the project here, and about videographic film studies and its lineage more generally in the Resources page here. Please visit the website and be very encouraged to comment on the curated videos (on Marilyn Monroe, neorealism, F for Fake and the films of Ingmar Bergman) published in issue 1. One of the main goals of this journal is to generate debate and understanding about audiovisual moving image studies, and we would love to be able to count on the insights and questions of our viewers/readers in this project. So please visit the journal website and see whether you'd like to contribute to the Open Peer Commentary.

You can also watch video recordings (linked to below) of the historic SCMS conference workshop on Visualizing Media Studies, on March 20th, which launched [in]Transition, with contributions by Chris Becker, Drew Morton, Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley, Matthias Stork, Benjamin Sampson, Jason Mittell, and a very lively and interested audience. This session was livestreamed and then archived for online viewing among a series of other SCMS panels and workshops. These are all linked to below, along with lots of other items of interest and news from the conference.
 
SCMS Workshop Livestreaming:

• SCMS Workshop -Visualizing Media Studies Part 1 (0:14:00 - scroll to 5:58 for Chris Becker's introduction and then to 8:40 for the first part of Drew Morton's presentation)
• SCMS Workshop -Visualizing Media Studies Part 2 (1:35:49 - DM's presentation continues then scroll to 4:20 for Catherine Grant; to 20:50 for Christian Keathley; to 28:14 for Matthias Stork; to 40:00 for Ben Sampson; to 54:30 for Jason Mittell; and to 58:15 for the Q&A session)
• SCMS Workshop on Exploring Transnational Television Histories (1:45:35)
• SCMS Workshop on Media Activism and the Cultural Industries (1:58:10)

Transnational Cinemas Links:

• FSFF's New Podcast Interview with Austin Fisher at SCMS14:

On March 24, 2014, Film Studies For Free interviewed Dr Austin Fisher, Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema and editor of the forthcoming volume Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), among other publications. 
     The interview took place in Seattle, USA, after the close of the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, where Austin was contributing to a number of workshops and panels as co-chair (with Iain Robert Smith) of the SCMS Scholarly Interest Group in Transnational Cinemas. Austin talks about this topic in the interview and connects it to his longstanding interest in Italian cinema and the spaghetti western. He was also in the US as an invited speaker (with Sir Christopher Frayling) at an event at Texas Tech, in Lubbock, Texas, to celebrate 50 years since the release of A Fistful of Dollars.
     Austin is also author of a video essay on The Searchers, and in the interview he talks about the experience of making this work, a topic of particular interest at the SCMS conference where [in]Transition was launched.

• Catherine Grant, 'Single Take Horror Film [Transnational] Mutations: Remaking La casa muda in Silent House [video essay plus text for SCMS Transnational Film Remakes Panel, March 2014]', Mediático. March 31, 2014
• Dolores Tierney, 'The Link Between Funding and Text: Transnational Aesthetics in Lucrecia Martel’s Films, Mediático, March 23, 2014
• James Wicks' blog Transnational / Cinema / Reflections

MOVIE eBooks!!

• At a wonderful SCMS workshop on 'Film Scholarship and the Online Journal' (proposed by V.F. Perkins and chaired by Girish Shambu), John Gibbs announced the launch of a range of open access eBooks by MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism. The first three volumes (in EPUB and Mobi formats) are as follows:
• Movies and Tone by Douglas Pye
• The Police Series by Jonathan Bignell 
• Reading Buffy by Deborah Thomas 

Discussions of/Reflections on SCMS:

• Archived live tweets from @cinemajournal reporters about the conference: @CJ at SCMS Cinema and @ CJ at SCMS Media/TV
• Great Aca-Media podcasts (also on Twitter)
• Photos from SCMS14!!
• Check out Chris Cagle's SCMS14 commentary (at his wonderful blog Category D) here and here, and his interview with Jaimie Baron whose great new book The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (read Baron's related essay on Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception here) launched just prior to the conference. 
• James Wicks has some good posts on the transnational cinema panels at his great website:
• SCMS Conference Notes, Fri./Sat. (3/21-22), Post 3
• SCMS Conference Notes, Thursday (3/20), Post 2
• SCMS Conference Notes, Thursday (3/20), Post 1

Other material presented or referred to at SCMS (please let FSFF know of more to add to this list):

• Just added Steen Christiansen, 'Things Gone Wild: The Movie Camera in the Drone Age', Dissemination, March 19, 2014
• Justin Horton, 'Vibration, Resonance, Deformation: Deleuze's Soundfulness', Academica.edu, March 2014
• Transmedia Database (Tmdb!): 'a research hub for transmedia content in its widest sense' run by Vicki Callahan, Sarah Atkinson, Jeff Aldrich and Robert Foster.

Other news and links: 

• Save Film Studies at University of West of England!!
• New issue of SCOPE, 26, 2014!!
• New issue of Senses of Cinema, 70, 2014!!
• New issue of Wide Screen, Vol 5, No 1 (2014), Special Issue: An Unseen Century: Indian Cinema 1913-2013!!
• Remembering Stuart Hall by E. Ann Kaplan
• Remembering Scott Nygren by David Desser
• Remembering Harold Ramis by Kristen Thompson
• Remembering Věra Chytilová (DAISIES), 1929 – 2014 by David Hudson 
• Two great early German cinema links: by Enes Lukac; and by Jan-Christopher Horak
• Kevin B Lee on Chris Marker
• David Bordwell on The Grand Budapest Hotel
• VIDEO (2:23): James Mooney's brilliant video essay on Bertolucci's use of Plato's cave Imagery in THE CONFORMIST (narrated by Orson Welles...). Also see Mooney's discussion here: http://filmandphilosophy.com/.../platos-cave-and-the-cinema/
• Roberto Ortiz's essay on Latina star of the 1940s Maria Montez, and Warhol superstar and drag pioneer Mario Montez 
• Below, a short video tribute to Shirley Temple (made the day after she died) by Catherine Grant. This was screened at the SCMS panel on 'First-person Singular: Cinephilia and Writing with the “I” in Cinema and Media Studies' (proposed and chaired by David Johnson) in Christian Keathley's presentation 'Video Essays and the First-person Singular'. The video was originally published, with a short explanatory text, by Film Ireland, February 12, 2014. It will also be presented in a talk called 'Losing/finding/creating the (child) star: on online mourning and videographic objects' at the 'Film and the Psycho-Cultural: Objects, relatedness, process' symposium on Saturday 31st May at the Freud Museum in London, organised by Media and the Inner World, Psychosocial Studies at UEL and the Centre for Research in Film and Audio-Visual Cultures at Roehampton.

Mechanised Flights: Memories of Shirley Temple in HEIDI (Allan Dwan, 1937) from Catherine Grant.

Read more about this video here

              Single Take Horror Film Mutations from Catherine Grant on Vimeo. Also see
'Single Take Horror Film [Transnational] Mutations: Remaking La casa muda in Silent House [video essay plus text for SCMS Transnational Film Remakes Panel, March 2014]', Mediático. March 31, 2014

Two x FRAMES: 'The Political Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers' and 'Promotional Materials'

Film scholar Tim Bergfelder giving a talk which is embedded at the latest issue of Frames

Today, Film Studies For Free rounds up two, very fine, 2013 issues of the e journal Frames. Feast your eyes on all the links below.

The latest issue on the political western is just out. The earlier issue, on film and television promotional materials, will form part of a long in preparation bumper FSFF collection on paratextuality that will now appear in the new year, along with other (very long in preparation) posts: on the magnificence of Caboose, a film studies publisher with a marvellous attitude to freely available content; on découpage; and on many other topics.... 2013 has proved to be just too short a year to cram all this in.

There's still one more FSFF entry to go before the holidays, though, so please look out for that on Monday. In the meantime, happy solstice!


Frames, Issue 4, December 2013: Commies and Indians: The Political Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers 

 

Editorial

Letter from the Editor By Heath Iverson

Feature articles

• Csikós, Puszta, Goulash: Hungarian Frontier Imaginaries in ‘The Wind Blows under Your Feet’ and ‘Brady’s Escape’ By Sonja Simonyi
• Appropriating the “Other” for the Cold War Struggle: DEFA’s Depiction of Native Americans in its Indianerfilme By Jennifer Michaels
• Partisan ‘Realism’: Representations of Wartime Past and State-Building Future in the Cinema of Socialist Yugoslavia By Greg de Cuir, Jr.
• A Third Western(?): Genre and the Popular/Political in Latin America By Chelsea Wessels
• The Birth of the Romanian Western By Marian Tutui
• The Balkan Westerns of the Sixties By Sergey Lavrentiev
• The DEFA Indianerfilm as Artifact of Resistance By Evan Torner

Video Supplement

• Commies and Indians Symposium: Jonathan Owen on Czech Westerns
• Commies and Indians Symposium: Tim Bergfelder on the Euro-Western and on Collaborations across the Iron Curtain

P.O.V.

• Yugoslav (Hi)stories: a country which no longer exists, except on film By Ana Grgic and Raluca Iacob

Frames, Issue 3, May 2013: Promotional Materials 

 

Editorial

• Letter from the Editors By Kathleen Scott and Sarah Soliman
• Introduction: Still Coming Soon? Studying Promotional Materials By Keith M. Johnston 

Feature articles

• Working in the World of Propaganda: Early Trailers & Modern Discourses of Social Control By Frederick Greene
• The Advertising Director as Coming Attraction: Television Advertising as Hollywood Business Card in the Age of Digital Distribution By Leon Gurevitch
• ‘Action… Suspense… Emotion!’: The Trailer as Cinematic Performance By Daniel Hesford
• Imaging a Female Filmmaker: The Director Personas of Nishikawa Miwa and Ogigami Naoko By Colleen Laird
• Aspirational paratexts: the case of “quality openers” in TV promotion By Enrica Picarelli
• ‘Glamorous Bait for an Amorous killer!’: How post-war audiences were Lured by Lucille and the working-girl investigator By Ellen Wright
• DVD Special Features and Stage Greetings: Whose Promotional Material Is It Anyway? By Jonathan Wroot

Interviews

• Interview with Shaun Farrington By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Frederick L. Greene By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Esther Harris By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Paul N. Lazarus By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Bill Seymour By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Anthony Sloman By Keith M. Johnston

Dreaming of Westerns... More video essays including Tag Gallagher's classic on STAGECOACH

Dreaming of Jeanie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach by Tag Gallagher

When Film Studies For Free published its popular entry on video studies of the Western a few weeks back, it asked its readers if they knew of any further essays.

Thankfully, the veritable 'Daddy' of the online video essay format, Kevin B. Lee got in touch to flag up some more, including one of the best such essays ever made, Tag Gallagher's 'Dreaming of Jeanie' (above).

Many thanks for the additions, Kevin!

If you would like to see more of the brilliant Gallagher's fantastic work online, please leave a comment and maybe we can convince him (we did! see here!)! Also, please let FSFF know if you know of even further great video essays as yet unlisted....

A two-parter by Kevin B/ Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz  on Raoul Walsh's THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON: Part 1

 

 Part 2

 Below, Kevin B. Lee analyzed a scene in Sam Peckinpah's PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID, both at normal and at half speed: Part 1: Normal  

Below, Part 2: Half speed
 

Below, another video essay on the same scene, by Derek Dehart

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'! Video Studies of the Western

John Ford's Vision of the West by Matthias Stork

This new video essay examines the representation of the frontier in John Ford's Westerns. Ford's visual poetics illustrate Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." Ford's films, in this regard, allow us to explore seminal foundational concepts of America history and ideology. "John Ford's Vision of the West" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's written study of his video essay practice. Also see Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

The Western is one of the most iconographic of film genres and is thus particularly well suited to (audio)visual forms of analysis. So, today, Film Studies For Free has lassoed and corralled a whole herd of beefy video studies of film Westerns that abundantly testify to this advantage.

The group is led, above, by a new, wonderfully researched, video essay by the very talented Matthias Stork (author of the great, and widely circulated, Chaos Cinema video essays, along with others published here at FSFF). Thanks very much to him and all the other video essayists represented below for making their work publicly acessible. 

[It's Open Access week, so this here Open Access campaigning website particularly wants to show its warm appreciation to those of you who like to share the fruits of at least part of your film studies labour for free!]

And if you know of any other, freely accessible, video essays on Westerns that FSFF has missed please alert us to them by leaving a comment with the link below. Thanks!

 

Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel by Matthias Stork

An audiovisual study of Sergio Leone's distinctive duel aesthetic. The video essay was first published, along with an accompanying written essay, in the first issue of the online film journal FRAMES. "Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's reflections on the above video here. And read Film Studies For Free's entry on the Spaghetti Western

The Construction of Genre and Space in The Searchers by Austin Fisher

A video essay exploring the ways in which editing techniques and other cinematic processes aid the construction of genre in the opening of "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956).

Outlaw: Josey Wales by Matthew Cheney
A video essay looking at a few aspects of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 



McCabe and Mrs. Miller: A Video Essay by Steven Santos

A video essay on Robert Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See the original posting here

Critics' Picks: Rio Bravo from The New York Times
A. O. Scott basks in the pleasures of taking it easy with Howard Hawks's 1959 Western. (Related Link)



Beaver's Lodge: CAIN'S CUTTHROATS from Press Play Video Blog

This is the fifth installment of BEAVER'S LODGE, a series of video essays narrated by actor Jim Beaver which will offer critical takes on some of Beaver's favorite films 

'A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...': Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters

This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

      However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Frame By Frame - Director John Ford', UNL, August 26, 2010

Phil Peters and John Nelson, 'Studying in Western Filmmaker John Ford's Footsteps' 

Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

Once Upon a Time in the West - Jill Arrives at Flagstone from The Film League

 

Deconstructing the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

The Failure of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

A Fistful of "Spaghetti Western" Studies

BFI Researcher's Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns 
(Frayling is author of Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans From Karl May to Sergio Leone [London: I.B.Tauris, 1981, 1998]; Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death [London: Faber and Faber, 2000]; and
Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy [London: Thames and Hudson, 2005]).

It was the spaghetti Westerns… that first eliminated the morality-play dimension and turned the Western into pure violent reverie [...] What made these [...] popular was that they stripped the Western form of its cultural burden of morality. They discarded its civility along with its hypocrisy. In a sense, they liberated the form: what the Western hero stood for was left out, and what he embodied (strength and gun power) was retained. Abroad, that was probably what he had represented all along.

Pauline Kael, Killing Time, in Karl French (ed.), Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1974), pp. 171-178: 172.

Today, to accompany its list of links to openly accessible scholarly studies of the Spaghetti (or Italian, or Euro) Western, and related topics, the normally garrulous Film Studies For Free was going to treat its readers to an improbable, digital impersonation of  Clint Eastwood's performance as the Man With No Name in what is often called "The Dollars Trilogy" directed by Sergio Leone.

Sadly, no dice: while it looks good in a poncho, not only does FSFF fall short in performing moral ambiguity, but it's also fairly hopeless when it comes to capturing taciturnity. 

Dammit. 

Do please enjoy the links, anyway. Grazie.

• Spaghetti Western Database

• Jenna Bond, 'Homosexuality and the Italian Spaghetti Western', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 11, November 2007

• Mark Brownrigg, 'Chapter 4: Music and the Western', Film Music and Film Genre, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 2003

• Timothy Campbell, 'The Corrupting Sea, Technology and Devalued Life in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns', California Italian Studies Journal 1.1, 2010

• Rolando Caputo, 'Aldrich, Leone and Vera Cruz: style and substance over the border', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000

• Paul Coughlin, '[Review of] Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: something to do with death. London: Faber and Faber., 2000', Screening the Past, November 1, 2000

• Vera Dika, 'An East German Indianerfilm: the bear in sheep's clothing', Jump Cut, No. 50, Spring 2008

• Chris Durham, 'Absent Heroism: Reconsidering Clint Eastwood's Star Persona', Scope, Issue 7, 2007

• Robert J. Edmonstone, 'Beyond “Brutality”: Understanding the Italian Filone’s Violent Excesses', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008

• Daniel Edwards, 'Sergio Leone', Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Austin Fisher, 'A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier', Scope,  Issue 15, November 2009

• Brad D. Foster, 'Constructing Heroic Identities: Masculinity and the Western Film', Masters Thesis, Oregon State University, July 2007

• Luis M. García Mainar, 'Authorship and Identity in the Cinema of Clint Eastwood', ATLANTIS 29.2 (December 2007)

• Howard Hughes, Excerpts from Aim from the Heart: The Films of Clint Eastwood (London: IB Tauris, 2009)

• Emily Anne Kausalik, A Fistful of Drama: Musical Form in the Dollars Trilogy, Masters Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2008

• Kyle Keough, 'Cowboys and Shoguns: The American Western, Japanese Jidaigeki, and Cross-Cultural Exchange', DigitalCommons@University of Rhode Island, 2008

• Evert Jan van Leeuven, 'Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a Hollywood Myth',  BRight Lights Film Journal, Issue 60, May 2008

• Scott MacKenzie, 'Closing arias: Operatic montage in the closing sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone', P.O.V. 'The Art of Film Editing', edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998 - (scroll down in large PDF)

• John Nudge, 'Wild East Productions: Spaghetti Westerns', first published in Imagesjournal.com, 1998

• Walter Przybylowski, 'The European Western', Dialogues, Vol. 5, Fall 2006

• Richard Raskin, 'Jack Elam and the Fly in Once Upon a Time in the West', P.O.V. No.24 - The Western, December 2007

• Alireza Vahdani, 'European Western vs. American Western', Offscreen Journal,  January 31, 2010

• Jeannette Vaught, 'Deserting the Desert, Salvaging the Southland: The Re-Location of the American Hero and Cultural Identity in 1970s Outlaw Movies', TPP VII (2009): 9-28

• Tony Williams, 'A Fistful of Dollars', Senses of Cinema , Issue 28, 2003

BFI Researchers' Tales: Mulvey, Dyer, Kubrick, Frayling

 Image of Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

For some time now, Film Studies For Free has been enjoying the videos that the British Film Institute has been posting at BFI Live, its online video channel exploring film and TV culture. There are lots of videos worth seeing at the site but, below, FSFF has singled out and directly linked to some which are especially deserving of the attention of film scholars.

Laura Mulvey on the Blonde

8 Mar 2010: The world-renowned film theorist presents her thoughts on the Hitchcock Blonde.

Researchers' Tales: Richard Dyer

8 Mar 2010: The writer and academic discusses his instrumental role in the creation of the BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious celebrations of queer cinema.

Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? (Part 1)

13 Jan 2010: An illustrated lecture on Stanley Kubrick’s most ambitious yet unrealised project.

Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? (Part 2)

11 Jan 2010: An onstage discussion of the finer points of Stanley Kubrick’s failed production.

Researchers' Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns

14 Dec 2009: Eminent academic and writer Sir Christopher Frayling discusses the Spaghetti Western genre as part of the BFI National Library’s Researcher’s Tales strand.

Researchers' Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Film Research

14 Dec 2009: Eminent educationalist and writer Sir Christopher Frayling discusses the practice of researching film.