New FILM-PHILOSOPHY!!

Frame grab from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Read Ben Tyrer's article on film noir and this film in the latest issue of Film-Philosophy

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013): the second to last of the brilliant new film studies e journal issues out in December with which Film Studies For Free will present you in 2013. And the daddy of them all.

There will be two more FSFF posts to appear before the holidays, that is, if you can tear yourself away from reading the below articles and reviews.

Articles

• The Facts Before Our Eyes: Wittgenstein and the Film Noir Investigator Keith Dromm PDF
• 'How Can It Not Know What It Is?': Self and Other in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner  Andrew Norris PDF
• Ghost in the Shell 2, Technicity and the Subject  Daniel Hourigan PDF
• Throne of Blood and the Metaphysics of Tragedy  Henry Somers-Hall PDF
• 'That Man Behind the Curtain': Atheism and Belief in The Wizard of Oz  Justin Remes PDF
• Film Noir as Point de Capiton: Double Indemnity, Structure and Temporality Ben Tyrer PDF
• Shooting for Dead Time in Gus Van Sant's Elephant William Little  PDF
• Bad Memories: Haneke with Locke on Personal Identity and Post-Colonial Guilt Justine McGill PDF
• 'Misfortune's Image': The Cinematic Representation of Trauma in Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967)  Mark Cresswell, Zulfia Karimova PDF
• The Ister: Cinema's Interruption Linda Daley PDF
• Otherness and the Renewal of Freedom in Jarmusch's Down by Law: A Levinasian and Arendtian Reading Mark Cauchi  PDF
• Mimesis Reconsidered: Adorno and Tarkovsky contra Habermas  Simon Mussell PDF
• Nietzsche and Bad Conscience on Mosquito Coast James Edward Gough, Sue Matheson PDF
• The Closure of the 'Gold Window': From 'Camera-Eye' to 'Brain-Screen' Morgan M Adamson  PDF
• A New/Old Ontology of Film Rafe McGregor  PDF
• Internal Needs, Endoxa and the Truth: An Aristotelian Approach to the Popular Screenplay Daniel McInerny PDF
• Extreme Makeover: Art and Morality in The Shape of Things Joseph H. Kupfer  PDF
• 'Even the Ghost was more than one person': Hauntology and Authenticity in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There Carolyn D'Cruz, Glenn D'Cruz PDF
• I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Subjective Dissolution, Schizoanalysis and Post-Structuralist Ethics in the Films of Todd Haynes  Helen Darby PDF
• Truth, Autobiography and Documentary: Perspectivism in Nietzsche and Herzog Katrina Mitcheson  PDF
• Left-over Spaces: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers  Benoit Dillet, Tara Puri PDF
• Homeopathic Repetition and Memories of Underdevelopment: The Dialectic of Subjective Experience and Objective Historical Forces  Trevor James Cunnington PDF
• Charcoal Matter with Memory: Images of Movement, Time and Duration in the animated films of William Kentridge  David H. Fleming PDF
• The Philosophical Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes: The Silent Films of Stan Brakhage   James Michael Magrini PDF
• 'The Epidermis of Reality': Artaud, the Material Body and Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc Ros Murray PDF

Book Reviews

• Hsiu-Chuang Deppman (2010) Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film (Iris Chui Ping Kam) PDF
• Alain Badiou (2013) Cinema and Alex Ling (2010) Badiou and Cinema (David H. Fleming) PDF
• Timothy Corrigan, ed. (2012) Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. 2nd Edition (Shawn Loht) PDF
• Michael Charlesworth (2011) Derek Jarman (Justin Remes) PDF
• Sharon Lin Tay (2009) Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (Sheryl Tuttle Ross) PDF
• Todd Berliner (2010) Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (John Anthony Bleasdale) PDF
•  M. Keith Booker (2011) Historical Dictionary of American Cinema (Glen Melanson) PDF  
• Shawn C. Bean (2008) The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking (Carrie Giunta) PDF
• Julian Petley (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Zach Saltz) PDF
• Suzanne Buchan (2011) The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Micki Nyman) PDF
• Khatereh Sheibani (2011) The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics and Modernity After the Revolution (Paul Elliott) PDF

Werner Herzog's Cave: videos and links

One of the most distinctive filmmakers of our time, Werner Herzog has been called the "romantic visionary" of the New German Cinema movement. His edgy, larger-than-life films fuse the epic with the intimate, redefining the scale and scope of filmmaking to include more than 60 works shot on every continent. He appeared in conversation with acclaimed author and essayist, Pico Iyer at UC Santa Barbara on October 25, 2010. (download the video here)

A 10 minute fragment from a 'masterclass' with Werner Herzog. For 7 Planete Doc Review, with Pamela Cohn with Michałem Chacińskim, 2010. Also see this video.

Film Studies For Free hopes its Werner Herzog-obsessive readers will have a few hours to spare. They'll need them to watch the above embedded (and linked to) videos, some of the more recent, and most worthwhile of freely accessible online encounters with LA's most interesting resident filmmaker.

These videos, and the critical and scholarly reading below, will help time pass before the Spring 2011 premiere of Herzog's latest (3D) film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (trailer, related video,  second related video). Don't say that FSFF isn't looking out for you, Herzog-ites!

Scholarly online writing about Herzog:

• Jesse Amato-Grill, 'Trappings', Mercer Street, 2007

• Matthias Wilhelm Benfey, Religious cinema as virtual religious experience : a theory of religious cinema applied to Werner Herzog's Herz aus Glas, PhD Thesis, McGill University, 1986 

• Adam Bingham, 'Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzog's La Soufrière', Senses of Cinema, September 2006

• Tom Bissell, 'The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the Images of Werner Herzog', Harpers Magazine, December 2006

• Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, 'Of Gods and Grizzlies: The Non-Aesthetic of Nature and the new Kinship of Werner Herzog and Caspar David Friedrich', Senior Thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 2006 

• Buffalo Film Seminars - selected writings about Herzog (and, especially, Aguirre: Wrath of God)

• Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, 'An Adaptation With Fangs: Herzog's Nosferatu,' Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 20, December 2002

• Alkan Chipperfield, 'Murmurs from a Shadowless Land: Fragmentary Reflections on the Cinema of Werner Herzog', Senses of Cinema, June 2001

• David Church, 'Werner Herzog', Senses of Cinema, June 2006

• David Church, 'Examining the Role of Disability in Herzog's Even Dwarves Started Small', Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol 25, No 4 (2005)

• Roger Dawkins, 'Thoughts of Deleuze, Spinoza and the Cinema (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)', Contretemps, 3 July 2002

• Eric Dewberry, 'Conceiving Grizzly Man through the "Powers of the False"', Scope, Issue 11, June 2008

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Cinema of Irony', Monogram no. 5, 1973

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Hyper-, Retro- or Counter-European Cinema as Third Cinema between Hollywood and Art Cinema', in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood(Amsterdam University Press, 2005)

• Caryl Flynn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2004 2004

• Andrew W. Hurley, 'Re-imagining Milirrpum v Nabalco in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream', Paper delivered at PASSAGES: law, aesthetics, politics 13–14 July 2006 Melbourne Australia

• David T Johnson, '"You Must Never Listen to This": Lessons on Sound, Cinema, and Mortality from Herzog's Grizzly Man', Film Criticism; Spring 2008, 32: 3

• Michael Koller, 'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• Joe Muszynski, 'A Legacy of Quality: Werner Herzog's Nosferatu and the New German Cinema'

• Benjamin Noys, 'Antiphusis: Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man', Film-Philosophy, 11.3, November 2006

• Ingo Petzke, 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• Cynthia Rockwell, 'Werner Herzog and the Documentary Film', e-Thesis, Boston University 1994

• Antonia Shanahan, 'My Best Fiend', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• John W. White, 'On Werner Herzog’s Documentary Grizzly Man: Psychoanalysis, Nature, and Meaning', Fast capitalism, 4.1, 2008

On the Cinema of Sharon Lockhart: videos and essays

Image from Teatro Amazonas (Sharon Lockhart, 1999)

Film Studies For Free was rather inspired by a characteristically excellent blog essay by Srikanth Srinivasan on the films of Sharon Lockhart (thanks to David Hudson for the tip off). So here's a quick cluster of links to some wonderful Lockhart resources -- videos and essays -- available online in openly accessible forms. If anyone knows of any other high quality online material about this artist, please let FSFF know. 

Sharon Lockhart interview, Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International

Blending rigorous aesthetic concerns with an anthropologist's sensibility to community engagement and observation, Sharon Lockhart uses film and photography to create poignant, beautiful, and intimate portraits. She carefully manipulates formal elements as she explores certain concepts with regularity: portraiture, the relationship between photography and film, and the combination of fictive or choreographed performances with unscripted, intimate moments. The film Pine Flat and the accompanying color photographs Pine Flat Portrait Studio (both from 2005) present a spare, meditative series of filmic and photographic portraits of a group of children the artist came to know during her nearly four-year stay in Pine Flat, California. Pine Flat is a two-part film focusing on children and adolescents interacting in the sublime landscape surrounding this small rural community. Its determinedly languid pace engages the viewer in a self-conscious reflection on the process of looking and offers a meditation on the subjective experience of time, particularly as an aspect of children's lives.

 Sharon Lockhart and James Benning: Walker Art Gallery 109 mins 
(discussion begins after 8 mins)

Although a generation apart, filmmakers Sharon Lockhart and James Benning have cited each others work as an important influence on their own practice. Join them for a conversation about the process of creating a picture of America and California in particular—that focuses on Lockhart's Pine Flat (2005) and films from Bennings California Trilogy (20002001). Pine Flat is Lockhart's first project to examine American culture. Benning's 30-year filmmaking career includes more than 36 films. He teaches film/video at the California Institute of the Arts. / Moderated by Walker director Kathy Halbreich. / Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat.

• Girish Shambu, 'Experiments In Fact And Fiction: The Films Of Sharon Lockhart', Senses of Cinema, 17, 2001
• 'Sharon Lockhart: Teatro Amazonas', Absolute Arts, 2000
• Sharon Lockart's Teatro Amazonas (1999) and Lunch Break (2009) online at UbuWeb
• Srikanth Srinivasan, 'The Films of Sharon Lockhart', The Seventh Art, September 4, 2010

I sat through all 99 minutes of Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide, shown in a special “Focus” on “40 years of Berlin’s Forum. I knew in advance that there were only two shots in Lockhart’s HD work, so, naturally, I was apprehensive. Remarkably, most of the 100 or so spectators who attended the 10:00 am public screening were also there at the end. Only one human character appears in Double Tide, Jen Casad, a clam digger, and a very few birds. The first shot occurs early morning, and the second late afternoon, and at each low tide, we see Ms Casad enter the static frame with her floating clam basket, ready to search beneath the shallow water. The sound would appear to be direct, it is certainly natural, and, although the camera never moves, the frame is never static. We begin to appreciate all of the effort the clam digger puts into her work, while the fog in the background lifts then reappears, finally to lift again revealing a number of seabirds doing their own search for food. The second shot reveals that we are not looking out to sea at all, but at a forested inlet, and, with the sun setting off-frame left, we can appreciate the changing of the light, and again marvel at the sounds as well as sights of nature. [Peter Rist, '...BAFICI...', Offscreen, Vol. 14, Issue 3, 2010]

I would like here to invoke Sharon Lockhart's film Kahlil Haper-Bowers (1993), because it seems to me a brilliant analysis of this visual panic, this disruption of the visual field that lies at the foundation of heteronormative visuality.* In Lockhart's film, the body of a young boy, who faces the camera directly, gradually begins to display what at first seem slight discolorations or abrasions of the skin. The film, which gives the impression of being a medical, diagnostic record of a series of clinical visits over time, hovers intently at the point of indistinctness: what are these dark shadows on the skin? Bruises? Lesions? Are they real, genuine dermatological symptoms–or just stage make-up? And, of what condition are these the symptoms: AIDS–or not? As the marks begin to multiply, Lockhart skillfully intensifies the pressure of the visual field around the deviant body, to the point where the spectator is able to experience the stigmatizing gaze in itself. The film brings all of that gaze's contradictory elements into play: the quasi-medical, quasi-legalistic imperative to explore the body intimately and diagnostically; where the diagnostic gaze is at the same time a sadistic, invasive procedure that seeks to brand the body it explores; where at the point or punctum of branding the whole visual field suddenly buckles and bends around;** where instead of the stigma acting as a seal, a cauterizing process, a protection against disease, something seeps through the stigma from its other side, something sickening, like a secretion, the secretion of the secret, something that dissolves the membrane separating us from them, a point of merger where the two sides commingle, a point of infection or contagion; a point that is experienced throughout this process entirely at the level of Galtonesque hallucination, of not being sure what it is, of not being able to apply the normalizing categories for the precise reason that at the very point of the stigma the categories hang suspended, leaving the subject floundering, unable to impose the distinction that was the goal of its activity, losing the distinction, losing it all round, becoming for a moment a subject unable to apply the dividing line that is the founding axiom of the heteronormative order, for the duration of the panic unable to successfully abject what is to be abjected in order for the subject to be, and is instead invaded and attacked, in the ricochet of the brand-become-infection that typifies homophobic panic as a visual field. [Norman Bryson, 'Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema', Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999]

Werner Herzog Links inc YouTube Fest

Film Studies For Free wanted to let academic fans of Werner Herzog know that (certainly in the UK, but most probably elsewhere, too, if no geoblocking) they can currently watch eight of his films on YouTube in their glorious entirety. This is thanks to the video distributor Starzmedia, one of the companies participating in YouTube's growing efforts to stream full-length films with the support of the movie companies who own the rights. Below, FSFF has embedded the trailers of seven of the Herzog films that are currently available. Click on the titles to visit the YouTube pages for the full-length films, which can be watched freely online in relatively good quality versions (Even YouTube Screens Started Small...). (Click HERE for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser added later. The Starzmedia channel for Herzog is HERE).

And, if that weren't enough excitement for one FSFF day, beneath the video-trailers, at the foot of this post, are some other choice links to freely available Herzog material online.

Aguirre The Wrath Of God

My Best Fiend

Even Dwarfs Started Small

Fitzcarraldo

Lessons Of Darkness

Woyzeck

Little Dieter Needs To Fly

Scholarly online writing about Herzog:

• Adam Bingham, 'Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzog's La Soufrière', Senses of Cinema, September 2006
• Tom Bissell, 'The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the Images of Werner Herzog', Harpers Magazine, December 2006
• Buffalo Film Seminars - selected writings about Herzog (and, especially, Aguirre: Wrath of God)
• Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, 'An Adaptation With Fangs: Herzog's Nosferatu,' Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 20, December 2002
• Alkan Chipperfield, 'Murmurs from a Shadowless Land: Fragmentary Reflections on the Cinema of Werner Herzog', Senses of Cinema, June 2001
• David Church, 'Werner Herzog', Senses of Cinema, June 2006
• Roger Dawkins, 'Thoughts of Deleuze, Spinoza and the Cinema (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)', Contretemps, 3 July 200
• Michael Koller, 'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner', Senses of Cinema, February 2002
• Joe Muszynski, 'A Legacy of Quality: Werner Herzog's Nosferatu and the New German Cinema'
• Benjamin Noys, 'Antiphusis: Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man', Film-Philosophy, 11.3, November 2006
• Ingo Petzke, 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God', Senses of Cinema, February 2002
• Cynthia Rockwell, 'Werner Herzog and the Documentary Film', e-Thesis, Boston University 1994
• Antonia Shanahan, 'My Best Fiend', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• Herzog's Official Website is HERE
• Ray Pride gathered a load of great Herzog paraphernalia/paratextuality a couple of years back at Movie City Pride (videos/articles/interviews) and you can access it HERE (link courtesy of GreenCine Daily, April 4 2007). Link added April 21
  
• And you can listen to a great interview with Herzog HERE, by Jonathan Demme, courtesy of Pinewood Dialogues
  

Please go in two by two! Sally Potter's Fabulous Ark

Film Studies For Free has recently set up a small, but growing, new links list to 'Filmmakers' Websites Of Note' (just scroll down on the right-hand side of the site). The list currently contains links to the following sites: Alejandro Jodorowsky; Fernando Trueba; Gonzalo Suárez; Carlos Saura; Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea; Isabel Coixet; Bigas Luna; Alejandro Amenábar; Pedro Almodóvar's blog; Aardman Animations; Álex de la Iglesia; Atom Egoyan; Bill Melendez; The Coppola Family; The Makhmalbaf Filmhouse; and Werner Herzog (please 'excuse' the abundance of Spanish and Latin filmmakers, but that was the cohort within which FSFF began its search). Any suggestions for additions to the listing are very gratefully received indeed. And, if auteur(ist)-resources are your bag, please keep an eye on it as FSFF is sure it will rapidly expand.

A new link to by far the most innovative and promising of any filmmakers' websites ever surfed by this blogger has just been added to the list: Sally Potter's Archive SP-ARK! (Potter also has an occasional blog; and a more conventional company website, too). Potter is, as FSFF readers will know, director of radically innovative films such as Thriller, The Gold Diggers, Orlando (the principal 'object' of the SP-ARK archive), The Man Who Cried, The Tango Lesson, and more recently, Yes.

SP-ARK is currently in prototype (beta-test) form; it describes its amazing project as follows:

SP-ARK is a web-based open source educational project based on the multi-media archive of film-maker Sally Potter. SP-ARK is designed as a unique educational resource, tailored to the radically new learning preferences of students everywhere, which can be used as a model for innovative teaching and research in all disciplines and at every level. At this stage only a tiny fraction of the materials available in the Sally Potter archive has been uploaded to the site's database. During the next phase the complete ORLANDO archive will be made available, followed by materials relating to all of Potter's films and her work in dance, music and theatre. You are welcome to browse through the sample materials already available on the site, currently over 600 items. If you would like to access SP-ARK 's unique interactive features and become a trial user participating in the testing and future development of this prototype then please email us at beta [at] sp-ark.org with some information about yourself and your interest in SP-ARK. We will send you a username and password.

(Please note that you don't have to email or register in order to browse - just visit!)

Film Studies For Free l o v e s the ethos of SP-ARK, and greatly appreciates what's up and running on the site already; it very much looks forward to following its development. It also hopes that other living filmmakers (or the heirs of filmmakers from earlier generations) are inspired to build on Sally Potter's generous example.

As for the educational implications of projects like these, the 'Cloud's' the limit, if you know what FSFF means. As Chris Berry, Professor of Film and Television Studies at London's Goldsmiths College, brilliantly puts it in his endorsement of this archive:

The SP-ARK vision of social learning gives us a glimmer of the future today. Instead of locking archive materials away and restricting availability, it promises ready access to SP-ARK to anybody anywhere with a computer and the internet. Furthermore, the solitary archive user is transformed into a producer and a member of a community by the ability to build pathways of connections and commentary through the material. In the process, the cinema is extended from a fixed object to be viewed into a dynamic, interactive, and growing network of digital debate and active learning.

Some other, good, Sally Potter, online links follow:

• Who is Sally Potter? video on YouTube


• A Senses of Cinema Overview by Kristi McKim


• A ScreenOnline Overview by Annette Kuhn with links to some film clips (if accessing from an educational institution)


• Carmen out swinging: Sally Potter takes on opera's femme fatale ... (about Potter's latest project)


• Sally Potter on directing Carmen for English National Opera ...


• The Sally Potter Carmen Project on YouTube


• BBC - Films - interview - Sally Potter


• Sally Potter's Notes on the Adaptation of the Book Orlando


• The Contemporary Auteur: An Interview with Sally Potter (BFI)


• Seven Questions with Sally Potter of The Tango Lesson (The Director's Chair Interviews, by Augusta Palmer)


• The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter's Inspiration)


• Guernica Magazine Interview with Potter


• BBC summary of Potter's Carmen

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.