New WORLD PICTURE on 'Left': PT Anderson, Hollis Frampton, Vincente Minnelli and much more

Screenshot from The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli, 1955). Read Agustín Zarzosa's article on this film in the new issue of World Picture

It's that wonderful time of year when a new issue from one of Film Studies For Free's favourite journals World Picture hits the open access e-stands. The brilliant contents in issue 8 on 'Left' are listed in full and linked to below.

FSFF particularly enjoyed the essay on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights by the legendary film scholar Tanya Modleski as well as Alexander García Düttmann on Hollis Frampton's 1971 film (nostalgia) (a version of which may be viewed online here) and Agustín Zarzosa on The Cobweb and the Politics of Decoration.

If you're in (or could be in) the environs of Toronto on November 7-8, 2013, you may be interested in attending the very convivial, annual World Picture conference. This year it treats the keyword 'willing' and boasts the participation of very fine keynote speakers: Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago) and Davide Panagia (Trent University).

Table of Contents

• Argos Euclid

• Rey Chow Remains’ Regime Change?

• Alexander García Düttmann Why Burn a Photograph? A Film by Hollis Frampton

• Sam Ladkin The Patient Poetry and Poetics of Rob Halpern

• Erica Levin Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows

• Tania Modleski Historical Omission and Psychic Repression in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights

• Jonathan Mullins What Remains of the Italian Left of the 1970s?

• Evan Calder Williams Pseudo-Cinema

• Agustín Zarzosa The Cobweb and the Politics of Decoration

A new MOVIE: Fritz Lang, Robin Wood, Vincente Minnelli, Susan Hayward and More

Image from The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933). Read Michael Walker's article on this film here.

A great way to start the week, Film Studies For Free thinks. The second issue of the new Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism has just been posted online, with a wonderful looking Lang dossier, a fine tribute to the late Robin Wood, which takes the form of seven of his rarest pieces from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. And there's more besides on Susan Hayward and Vincente Minnelli. Direct links to all items are given below.

Now, to read it!

Issue 2

• Fritz Lang Dossier, Part 1
  

• Notes on Metropolis Michael Walker
• M: Leading the Blind Douglas Pye & Iris Luppa
• Das Testament des Dr Mabuse Michael Walker

• Susan Hayward in the 50s Edward Gallafent

• Madame Bovary, C’est Moi – Signed, Vincente Minnelli Mark Rappaport

• Robin Wood: A Tribute
  

• Psychoanalyse de Psycho / Psychoanalysis of Psycho Robin Wood

• Attitudes in Advise and Consent Robin Wood

• In Memoriam Michael Reeves Robin Wood

• Sense of Dislocation Robin Wood

• Moments of Release Robin Wood

• Call Me Ishmael Robin Wood

Standing Out: R.I.P. Lena Horne

Groundbreaking actress and singer Lena Horne, who died yesterday in her nineties. In the sequence above, from the movie Stormy Weather (dir. Andrew Stone, US, 1943), she sings the track for which she will always be remembered.

For more on this film, do read 'All cullud musical daily double: Stormy Weather', by Odienator at Big Media Vandalism, February 21, 2008. It is also discussed at length in a great, hour-long interview on Horne's career with Gail Buckley, the star's daughter (some other great links and video at this site).

Below are extracts from and links to a few, excellent scholarly studies of Horne's work and persona. David Hudson's round up of tributes to the actress is now online at The Auteurs Notebook

While the subject of Shane Vogel’s article “Lena Horne’s Impersona” could herself be described as a spectacular mulata musical performer, Vogel makes the case that Horne’s (in)famous “aloof” performing style has been “misunderstood . . . as a reflection of the demanding and narcissistic personality of the prima donna.” Instead, Vogel finds that, far from cultivating a Garboesque diva mask, Horne’s distant and distancing style “is a withholding of any persona at all”; its “negative affect” a “strategic mode of black [female] performance” that allowed Horne — and a number of other women—“to survive the psychic damage and physical danger of segregated cabaret performance.”
Alexander Doty, 'Introduction: The Good, the Bad, and the Fabulous; or, The Diva Issue Strikes Back', Camera Obscura 67, Volume 23, Number 1, 2008

[Lena Horne's] restraint on the cabaret stage found its cinematic counterpart in [her] film career. She appeared in more than a dozen Hollywood musicals, but primarily as what was sardonically termed a “pillar singer.” In films like Panama Hattie (dir. Norman Z. McLeod, US, 1942), I Dood It (dir. Vincente Minnelli, US, 1943), Thousands Cheer (dir. George Sidney, US, 1943), and Boogie-Woogie Dream (dir. Hans Burger, US, 1944), Horne was featured, usually propped against a marble column, in a musical number that was supplemental to the narrative of the film. This isolation from the story allowed her number to be easily deleted before distribution to southern theaters. “I looked good and I stood up against a wall and sang and sang. But I had no relationship with anybody else,” Horne recalled in 1957. “Mississippi wanted its movies without me. It was an accepted fact that any scene I did was going to be cut when the movie played the South. So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut. I had no communication with anybody.” This filmic isolation contributed to Horne’s reputation for affective distance. Even in the three films in which she had starring roles—The Duke Is Tops (dir. William L. Nolte, US, 1938), Stormy Weather (dir. Andrew Stone, US, 1943), and Cabin in the Sky (dir. Vincente Minnelli, US, 1943) — her reserve and her refusal to inhabit the images available to her seemed to render her detached from the narrative. As James Haskins notes about her performance as the seductive vixen Georgia Brown in Cabin in the Sky, “Undoubtedly she infused the role with as much dignity as she could muster and managed to be the most aloof ‘bad girl’ ever seen in a film to date. She was not believable as a slut, and as such she was an enigmatic character who invited puzzled contemplation as much as sexual desire in the male members of the audience.”

Shane Vogel, 'Lena Horne’s Impersona', Camera Obscura 67, Volume 23, Number 1

• TaKeshia Brooks, 'Boogie Woogie Dreams: Early African-American Representations in Musical Short Films', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, 2009-05-25
• Stacy Holman Jones, 'Conversations with Scholars of American Popular Culture', Americana, Fall 2008

Thursday Links (Renoir's Toni, Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, McElhaney's Minnelli)

Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
(Chantal Akerman, 1975)

And on it goes... That is to say, some more, assorted, quality links to online, openly-accessible, film studies material of note, today, from the relatively indefatigible Film Studies For Free.

This blog is preparing for a legendary links post on Monday, its first birthday, so please come back for that. Until then, do enjoy the below gems:

• Matthew Flanagan's blog Landscape Suicide (named for James Benning's 1986 film) goes from strength to strength with an astonishingly beautiful post on Jean Renoir's hugely influential 1934 film Toni: 'Toni & Boating, or: Realism(s) #1'. Here's looking forward to '#2'!
• There's another good essay on Toni by Michael Campi for Senses of Cinema (2006). And you must read Charles Musser's brillant article 'Social Roles / Political Responsibilities: Jean Renoir's Search for Artistic Integrity, 1928-1939 'Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No. 1 (1994): 3-30.

• Over at The Auteurs, you can find a good, short essay by Ivone Margulies (author of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday ): 'A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'. A little taster:
  

Despite their apparent simplicity, Akerman’s assured framing and narrative, built out of blocks of real time intercut by radical ellipses, are not easily replicated. Rather, the film’s impact is indirectly evident in the emergence of a new phenomenological sensibility and approach to observation and the weight of time in the work of contemporary filmmakers as diverse as Abbas Kiarostami, Gus van Sant, Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Todd Haynes, Jia Zhangke, and Tsai Ming-liang.

• You can read another excellent Akerman essay online by Margulies: 'La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator' at Rouge 10, 2006.
  
• See a great essay by Maria Fosheim Lund, 'Deja-Vu Melodrama: An Iconographical and Iconological Analysis of "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles"' at Out 1 Film Journal (January 27, 2009).
• And you can read Ed Henderson's thoughtful review of 'Jeanne Dielman' for Slant Magazine, June 8, 2003.
  

• Joe McElhaney's fantastic edited collection on director Vincente Minnelli (Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009) has been deservedly garnering a lot of online attention (see Girish Shambu here; Jonathan Rosenbaum here; and some other review snippets here) and it certainly looks like an excellent book to own. Film Studies For Free wanted you to know, however, that some of McElhaney's hugely important work on this Hollywood director has already very generously been made available online for free: see his overview essay 'Vincente Minnelli' at Senses of Cinema. Also see The Band Wagon by Joe McElhaney, Cabin in the Sky by Rick Thompson, Putting on a Show, or The Ghostliness of Gesture by Lesley Stern (Includes discussion of performance in The Band Wagon); and Some Came Running by Dana Polan at the same journal.
  
• And you can also read McElhaney's brilliant article 'Medium Shot Gestures: Vincente Minnelli and Some Came Running' at 16:9, June 2003 (as well as his 2006 essay for the same journal on Fritz Lang HERE).