Labor Day Round Up! Jean Cocteau, Opera and Film, Film-Philosophy on Cavell and Rothman and much more!

Testament of Cocteau: Orphée on Film and in Opera

(A Conversation between James S. Williams and Ed Hughes)

by REFRAME Conversations

Film Studies For Free is slowly gearing up for the new academic year. Quite a few open access publications of its own (including the illustrated video conversation embedded above) are rolling off the presses at the moment - with plenty more to come in September, so please do expect further FSFF entries this month! [UPDATE! That didn't happen as a few life events got in the way, but this blog will be back very soon!].

Given all the pro bono work that goes into producing and distributing all openly accessible scholarly work, what better day to publish its latest round up than Labor Day! Thanks to all those who have published their work online in the list below and elsewhere.

• Just out! Film-Philosophy Vol 18 (2014)

Table of Contents: Special Section on Stanley Cavell

• Acknowledgment - No Knowledge Without It: Introduction to William Rothman and his Work by Alan Cholodenko PDF
• Keynote Article: On Stanley Cavell's Band Wagon by William Rothman PDF
• William Rothman's Vertigo by Rex Butler PDF
• Cavellian Meditations: How to do Things with Film and Philosophy by Robert Sinnerbrink 
• PDF
• Montage and Tableau in King Vidor's Stella Dallas by Richard Smith PDF
• What Goes Without Seeing: Marriage, Sex and the Ordinary in The Awful Truth by David Macarthur PDF
• Cavell and the Politics of Cinema: On Marie Antoinette by Richard Rushton 
• PDF
• Being on the Outside: Cinematic Automatism in Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed by Lisa Trahair PDF
• Vertigo and the Spectator of Film Analysis by Andrew Klevan PDF

• Tribute to the late, brilliant film scholar Jim Hillier by Doug Pye, Lib Taylor and Jonathan Bignell: http://fttreadingnews.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/jim-hillier-1941-2014/ Thanks to Lisa Purse for the link.

• New issue of PHOTOGENIE on The Everyday!! (link via Girish Shambu): http://www.photogenie.be/photogenie_blog/topic/2-everyday-once-more

• Find out about the upcoming Cary Grant Festival in the actor's home city of Bristol and a related filmmaking challenge! http://www.carycomeshome.co.uk/film-challenge.php Also see: https://www.facebook.com/carycomeshome

• A previously unpublished chapter of Adrian Martin's 2006 PhD: on Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS, at the great Danish journal 16:9.

• New audiovisual essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin on Fritz Lang's SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR at @NotebookMUBI : https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/felicity-conditions-seek-and-hide

• Also, see "Paratheatre: Plays Without Stages"by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin made for the 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival premiere of Jacques Rivette's 1971 magnum opus Out 1 - Noli me tangere: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/paratheatre-plays-without-stages. Plus Audiovisual essay here: Paratheatre - Plays Without Stages (From I to IV).

• A 1968 unaired BBC interview with John Ford (link via Mubi): http://youtu.be/2P2fY75Qlxs

• David Bordwell: "Must we find reflections of cultural needs in every aspect of a movie that might appeal to somebody?"http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/08/24/zip-zero-zeitgeist/

• New issue of CLÉO: A Journal of Film and Feminism on labour: http://cleojournal.com/category/vol-2-issue-2-labour/

• MEDIA FIELDS Issue 8 Playgrounds has some great film studies items!

• "Lost, found and refurbished, TOO MUCH JOHNSON reveals a young Orson Welles familiarizing himself with the techniques that would eventually turn Hollywood filmmaking upside down." http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/sowing-the-seeds-of-kane-orson-welles-too-much-johnson

• Twenty of the "best experimental films you can see online": http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/20-of-the-best-experimental-short-films-you-can-watch-online/http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/20-of-the-best-experimental-short-films-you-can-watch-online/

• Must-watch and read: Miriam Ross's excellent new work on vertical framing (the video contains some shocking documentary footage at the beginning, by the way)
• Link to her article: http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2014/08/06/ross/
• Link to her video essay: https://vimeo.com/99499627

• The rest of the new issue of REFRACTORY (on Intermediations: Disney, colour, Herzog, vertical framing, online videos and much more) is here: 

• A new video essay by film scholar extraordinaire Pam Cook in which Wong Kar-wai meets David Lean: "Corridors of Desire: Brief Encounter and In the Mood for Love" (2' 11").

• Brilliantly illustrated and informative essay by Rebecca Naughten on ROCÍO, an important Spanish documentary.

• Remembering Richard Attenborough, 1923 - 2014: essential links by David Hudson

• Check out the Cinema Film & Projection Heritage Network in order to share information, ideas and knowledge about this heritage: http://www.cfphn.org/

• Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted online the introductory chapter to his 1993 book PLACING MOVIES, with lots of useful links: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2014/08/placing-movies-part-1-the-critical-apparatus-introduduction-tk/

• Also see Jonathan Rosenbaum's The Voice and the Eye: A Commentary on the Heart of Darkness script

• Brilliant online documentary: Going Dark: The Final Days of Film Projection https://vimeo.com/101235645

• Jan-Christophe Horak on Exile Noir

• At In Media Res, Cinema Journal Presents InFocus: African American Media [August 25 - August 29, 2014]. Also read the related dossier: Cinema Journal 53:4 Summer 2014 - IN FOCUS (PDF)

• Links to all the other openly accessible online content associated with the latest issue of CINEMA JOURNAL (53.4, 2014): http://www.cmstudies.org/news/187135/Announcing-Cinema-Journal-53.4.htm

• Katherine Groo's great film archival news gathering for CJ/SCMS (fabulous links!): http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=CJ_Archival_News

• PALESTINEDOCS, created by Dina Iordanova and Eva Jørholt: a new web resource on films "chronicling the life of palestinians in and outside the middle east": http://www.palestinedocs.net/

• Tony Zhou's latest video essay - on texting and the internet in the cinema :http://vimeo.com/tonyzhou/internet

• Film genre studies: all you need to know?  http://wronghands1.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/anatomy-of-films/

• Great video essay by Tim Klobuchar: Souls at Hazard: The Coens & Their Cops in FARGO and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MENhttps://vimeo.com/101676796

• Fascinating interview about mental health and cinema at the monthly Minds on Film blog at the Royal College of Psychiatrists UK website, with Canadian filmmaker Shelagh Carter on her autobiographical film Passionflower. 

• EFFACE (1:29, below) the video essay made while the one embedded at the top of this week's entry was exporting - also on Cocteau's ORPHÉE.

EFFACE from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

Stanley Cavell by Mulhall and Rothman: Online Colloquium

"The Melodramatic Reality of Film and Literature: Cavell and Diamond, Coetzee and Hughes" by Stephen Mulhall

"The Double Existence of Cavell’s Philosophical Prose" by William Rothman

Thanks to HarryTuttle at Screenville, Film Studies For Free was  absolutely bouleversé to discover online the exceptionally excellent talks, embedded above, on the work of (film) philosopher Stanley Cavell, a frequent topic of conversation at this blog (see FSFF's large links list “Why is this as it is?”: The Question of Cavellian Film Studies for further information, as well as the entry Film 'Conversations With History': Stanley Cavell, Oliver Stone, Robert Wise, and others).

Tuttle links to many more, brilliant, French language videos from this colloquium -- Hommage à Stanley Cavell - l'écran de nos pensées : Philosophie et cinéma -- held at l'École normale supérieure de Lyon, May 4-7, 2010.  It's a real treasure trove for film scholars.


Merci Harry!

“Why is this as it is?”: The Question of Cavellian Film Studies

Image from the 'incessant[ly] questioning' film (Adrian Martin) The Thin Red Line (directed by Terrence Malick [former student of Stanley Cavell], 1998)

Today, Film Studies For Free casts its penetrating gaze at the freely accessible, online manifestations of the film-studies influence of Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell.

Cavell's work has frequently informed and, at times, inspired film studies by anglophone scholars as varied as William Rothman, George Toles, George M. Wilson, Stephen Mulhall, Gilberto Perez, V.F. Perkins, Lesley Stern, Michael Grant, Steven Jay Schneider, Thomas Wartenberg, Edward Gallafent, Adrian Martin, Christian Keathley, Daniel Frampton, Douglas Pye, John Gibbs, Jacob Leigh, and Andrew Klevan.

Klevan, who was responsible for one of the most enlightening of published interviews with Cavell, very eloquently sets out some of the discipular attractions, for him (and, by FSFF's extension, for other film scholars, although not for all of those listed above, or below), of Cavell's philosophical criticism as follows:

One aspect of Cavell’s method is that it does not presume there is a self-evident way to approach a text or assume what a revelatory instance in a text might look like. Cavell is especially alive to moments, possibly ordinary or straightforward, which he reveals to be quietly mysterious.

This approach is particularly telling with regard to film where the ordinary lucidity of film dramatisation means significance may be readily available but not immediately easy to see. For Cavell, a single dramatic action, a posture, a gesture, or a seemingly perfunctory line of dialogue triggers an open-ended investigation, and is unexpectedly fecund. Cavell writes, ‘The work of such criticism is to reveal its object as having yet to achieve its due effect. Something there, despite being fully open to the senses, has been missed’ [Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 11]. One turns to the moment, initially perhaps with only the vaguest intuition of its worth, and returns, repeatedly testing its components and one’s own experience of it.

Through an intricate, and intimate, investigation of how the elements of a moment, a scene or a sequence work, one endeavours not simply to reveal meaning but to trace the movement of meaning. Secondly, there is the very act of writing, especially description, which is a means of revelation. Because film has a special capacity to embody the metaphorical in the literal, in the physical and in the real, we may describe the actual in such a way that discloses the symbolic. Thirdly, there is the question of how the moment relates to the film as a film: observing how the style of this film works is also a way of reflecting on how this film uses the medium, how it reflects on the medium; indeed our modes of reflection, quite appropriately, reflect each other.

There is also, finally, and crucially, a critical dimension, or more accurately an appreciative one to philosophical criticism. Cavell writes about, ‘a particular form of criticism…after the fact of pleasure, articulate[s] the grounds of this experience in particular objects’ [ibid.] This appreciative dimension is often missing from academic film analysis, philosophically minded or otherwise. As Adrian Martin writes, ‘appreciation is what the spectator must rise to and what she or he can create…in an interplay of description, evocation and analysis’ [Martin, 'Secret Agents', Fipresci, Issue 4 , 2007].

Andrew Klevan, Online Abstract for the 'Philosophy and Film / Film and Philosophy' Conference, July 2008 – Arnolfini Arts Centre & UWE Bristol. [Hyperlinked references added by FSFF]

Below are FSFF's weblinks to openly-accessible, film-related works by or about Cavell, as well as to other, notable, online film studies or discussions inspired or informed by his work:

• Nathan Andersen, 'Is Film the Alien Other to Philosophy?: Philosophy *as* Film in Mulhall's On Film', Film-Philosophy. 7.23, August 2003
• Julian Baggini, 'Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall's On Film', Film-Philosophy, vol. 7 no. 24, August 2003
• Daniel Barnett, 'If a Film Did Philosophy We Wouldn’t Understand It', Film-Philosophy, 11.3, December 2007
• Michael William Boyce, 'Re-imagining the War in British Film, 1945-155', PhD Thesis, University of Manitoba, April 2007
• Rex Butler, 'An "Exchange" with Stanley Cavell', Senses of Cinema, February-April 2001
• Stanley Cavell, 'The Uncanniness of the Ordinary', The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Delivered at Stanford University April 3 and 8, 1986
• Stanley Cavell, 'A Capra Moment', Humanities, Vol. 6, No. 4 (August 1985), pp. 3-7
• Stanley Cavell, 'Reply to Grant', Film-Philosophy, 9.50, December 2005
• Stanley Cavell, "A Philosopher Goes to the Movies," 2/7/02 video link here (Cavell joined UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler to talk about his life as a philosopher and his passion for movies as part of Kreisler's Conversations with History series)
• Richard Eldridge, 'Introduction: Between Acknowledgement and Avoidance", in Stanley Cavell, ed. by Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• Richard Eldridge, 'Review of Russell Goodman (ed.), Contending with Stanley Cavell, Oxford University Press, 2005', Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2008
• Thomas Elsaesser. 'Presentation: Stanley Cavell and Cinema', in Eloe Kingma et al (eds.), ASCA Yearbook (Amsterdam: ASCA 1999) 107-115
• Michael Fischer, 'Using Stanley Cavell', Philosophy and literature, 2008, 32: 198–20
• Dan Flory, 'Introduction: Philosophy and the Blackness of Film Noir', Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir, Penn State University Press, 2008
• Alexander R. Galloway, 'The Anti-Language of New Media', forthcoming in Discourse, currently at cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/
• Daniel Garrett, 'Seeing, Thinking, and Writing: Daniel Shaw’s book Film and Philosophy: Taking Movies Seriously', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 7, 2009
  
• Richard A. Gilmour, 'John Ford’s The Searchers as an Allegory of the Philosophical Search', Doing Philosophy at the Movies (State University of New York Press, 2005)
• Michael Grant, 'Cities of Words, Cities of Cinema: Stanley Cavell's City of Words', Film-Philosophy, 9.49, December 2005
• Michael Grant, 'Fulci’s Waste Land: Cinema, Horror and the Abominations of Hell', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• Michal Grover-Friedlander, 'Introduction', Vocal Apparitions (Princeton University Press, 2005)
• Matthew Guy, 'Review of Russell Goodman, ed., Contending with Stanley Cavell. New York, USA, Oxford University Press 2005', Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, Volume 6, Number 3, December 2005
  
• Michael Jarrett, 'Walden + Railroad + Sound', Rhizomes, Issue 18, Winter 2008
• Kent Jones, 'Can Movies Think?', Rouge, 12, October 2008
• David Large, 'Unknown Men and Unknown Women: Reading Cavell', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1997
  
• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008
• Andrew Klevan, 'A Reply to Adrian Martin', Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
• Andrew Klevan, 'Expressing the In-Between', Rouge, forthcoming 2009/2010
• Gary MacLennan, 'Rothman and the Challenge of Critical Realism', Film-Philosophy, vol. 1 no. 10, October 1997
  
• Carla Marcantonio, 'Letter from an Unknown Woman', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, March 2006
• Jacob Leigh, ‘The Caprices of Rosine or the Follies of a Fortnight: Parallel Intrigues in Eric Rohmer’s Conte d’automne’, Undercurrent Issue 2, July 2006
• Adrian Martin, 'Secret Agents [Review of Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation], Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
• Adrian Martin, 'Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick', Rouge, 10, December 2006
• Steve Masters, 'Review of Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation by Andrew Klevan', Scope, Issue 9, October 2007
• Linda Mizejewski, 'Chapter 1: Rules and Unruliness: Romantic Comedy' in It Happened One Night (Wiley, forthcoming December 2009)
• Daniel Morgan, ‘No Trickery with Montage’: On Reading a Sequence in Godard’s Pierrot le fou', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• James F. Moyer, 'Film and the Public Memory: The Phenomena of Nonfiction Film Fragments', Contemporary Aesthetics, May 24, 2007
• Stephen Mulhall, 'Ways of Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 25, August 2003
• John Mullarkey, 'Introduction: Nobody Knows Anything!', in Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
• Steven Peacock, 'Holding onto Moments in The Age of Innocence', Film Studies, Issue 9, Winter 2006
• V.F. Perkins, 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52), 16:9, September 2003
• Michael Peters, 'Stanley Cavell and Philosophy of Education', Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education, June 1999
  
• Douglas Pye, 'In and Around The Paradine Case: Control, Confession and the Claims of Marriage', Rouge, 4, 2004
  
• Daniel Ross, 'Review of Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the day after tomorrow. Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005', Screening the Past, Issue 19, 2006
• Rupert Read, 'What theory of film do Wittgenstein and Cavell have? (Introduction II)', DRAFT eventually published in Film as philosophy: essays on cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (edited book, jointly edited with Jerry Goodenough; London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005)
• William Rothman, 'Response to Tepper', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 13, June 2002
  
• Philipp Schmerheim, 'Film, not Sliced up into Pieces, or: How Film Made Me Feel Thinking (Review: Daniel Frampton [2006], Filmosophy London: Wallflower), Film-Philosophy, 12.2, September 2008
  
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'Review of On Film', Aesthetics Online, 2002
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'Introduction: Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film', Horror Film and Psychoanalysis - Freud’s Worst Nightmare - Edited by Steven Jay Schneider (Cambridge University Press, 2004
• Joshua Shaw, 'A Second Look at On Film', Film-Philosophy, 13.1, April 2009
• Robert Sinnerbrink, 'A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line', Film-Philosophy, 10.3, December 2006
• Wim Staat, 'Unlikely Candidates for Paradigmatic Cases of Intercultural Communication, reply to Van Brakel', R&R 2006 / 3
• Lesley Stern, 'Excerpt from Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things', Critical Inquiry, Fall 2001, Volume 28, Number 1
• Craig Tepper, 'The Cavell Cavil [review of William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell's The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2000)], Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 12, June 2002
• David Tkach, 'Book Review: Contemporary Philosophers in Focus: Stanley Cavell, edited by Richard Eldridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003', Gnosis, Volume VIII, Number 1
• Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey, 'Introduction', in Beyond the philosopher's fear: a Cavellian reading of gender, origin and religion in modern skepticism, by Ludger H. Viefhues-Baile (London: Ashgate, 2007)
• Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, 'Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell', Gender Forum, Gender and Language 20 (2008)
• Charles Warren, 'Cavell, Altman, Cassavetes', Film International, Vol. 4, No. 4, (Issue 22), 2006
• Thomas E. Wartenberg, 'Film, Philosophy, and the Ordinary: A Response to Butler', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 5 No. 23, July 2001
• Greg Watkins, 'Seeing and Being Seen: Distinctively Filmic and Religious Elements in Film', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 3, No. 2 October 1999
• Stephen J. Whitfield, 'Cinéma Verité [on Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. By Stanley Cavell]', Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1983
• Cary Wolfe, 'When You Can't Believe Your Eyes: Voice, Vision, and the Prosthetic Subject in Dancer in the Dark', Electronic Book Review, September 1, 2001
• Christopher S. Yates, 'A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic 'Worlds'', Contemporary Aesthetics, October 22, 2006

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Film 'Conversations With History': Stanley Cavell, Oliver Stone, Robert Wise, and others

Stanley Cavell, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard University, joins UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler to talk about his life as a philosopher and his passion for movies as part of Kreisler's Conversations with History series.

Thanks a lot for your nice comments about Film Studies For Free's A-Z of Favourite Scholarly blogs post. If it had its fun time compiling the list all over again, the rather absent-minded FSFF would add the following two favourite items: f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g and Latest Articles on Moving Image Source (indeed they, and one or two others, will be added when the list joins the right-hand menus of this blog).

Today, Film Studies For Free is thrilled to bring you links to the great videos and transcripts of interviews with filmmakers and filmthinkers that form part of UC Berkeley's Conversations with History series. All the videos last roughly an hour, so these are rich resources indeed. The full film-related index is HERE.

• Stanley Cavell; Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus; Harvard: "A Philosopher Goes to the Movies," 2/7/02 video link here
  
• Shima Iwashita, actress: "The Movie Experience," 2/27/99
  
• Ken Jacobs, Film Artist: "Film and the Creation of Mind," 10/14/99 video link here
  
• Nathaniel Rich, Associate Editor, Paris Review: "San Francisco in Film Noir," 6/23/05 video link here
  
• Donald Richie, writer and film critic: "Writing, Film, and Japan: An Expatriate's View," 9/21/01
  
• Masahiro Shinoda, film director: "The Movie Experience," 2/27/99
  
• Oliver Stone, Filmmaker: "History and the Movies," 4/17/97 and 6/27/97 video link here
  
• Robert Wise, Filmmaker: "The Wise Touch," 2/28/98

See also Harry Kreisler's Conversations with History Blog for further updates about this series.