On happy and other endings! Kelly Reichardt, Andrew Klevan and James MacDowell on Video (not all together!)

The filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Humanitas Visiting Professor in Film and Television, "In Conversation" with Dr Andrew Klevan at the University of Oxford on May 23, 2014. Click here to access the video (1:18:30)

Film Studies For Free brings you tidings of some more wonderful film studies related videos. Both of them, like yesterday's Rancière videos, came from top notch tip offs by Hoi Lun Law (thanks HL!).

In the above video (online here), Andrew Klevan enters into an incredibly thought-provoking and insightful conversation with the great American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her work. Reichardt's five feature films are River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Night Moves (2013); and she has also made the short narrative Ode (1999). Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, and author of, inter alia, a recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013), which he discussed in a number of formats  with Film Studies For Free. He is also a member of the editorial board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism.

Below, you can find the embedded recording of a great talk by Klevan's fellow Movie editorial board member James MacDowell, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick and a film scholar who has shared far more high quality work online for free than many academics produce in a lifetime (see here, here, here, here and here [PDF], for instance).

MacDowell discusses the romantic ‘happy ending’ in Hollywood cinema - its motifs, meanings and potential mutability - in a brilliantly illustrated and entertaining talk for an event for the Zabludowicz Collection which took place on December 6, 2013. MacDowell is the founder of great film critical website Alternate Takes, author of the book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliché, Convention and the Final Couple (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and he is currently writing a monograph on irony in film for Palgrave MacMillan (forthcoming 2016).

Embracing the Happy Ending: Cliché and Closure in Hollywood Cinema - a talk by Dr. James MacDowell from Zabludowicz Collection on Vimeo.

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

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

New MOVIE! VERTIGO, Hal Ashby, Luis Buñuel, Charles Chaplin, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Altman, Robin Wood, Andrew Sarris, George Toles, Charles Barr, Andrew Klevan, Hoagy Carmichael

Frame grab of Robert Mitchum in The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959). Read Pete Falconer's study of this film in the great new issue of MOVIE

Woohoo! The wonderful issue 4 of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism has hit the e-stands!

Edited by Andrew Klevan and Victor Perkins, this one is sure to be a classic. Highlights, for FSFF, include Andrew Sarris (on Buñuel's Viridiana [1960]) and Robin Wood tribute archives, as well as the new 'Opening Shots' feature with great contributions by Charles Barr and Pete Falconer. But there are some truly remarkable feature articles in this issue, too, including Adam O'Brien on Hal Ashby's film The Last Detail and George Toles on cinematic images of luxury.

Thanks for the film critical luxury and largesse, MOVIE people!

MOVIE, Issue 4, 2013

• Regional Horizons in The Last Detail Adam O'Brien
• Luxury and Largesse in Film George Toles
• Talking Space in Vertigo Murray Pomerance
• Play It Again, Butch, Cricket, Chick, Smoke, Happy...: The Performances of Hoagy Carmichael as a Hollywood Bar-room Pianist Ian Garwood
• Rereading A Countess from Hong Kong: Action, Speech, and Style in Charlie Chaplin's Final Feature Donna Kornhaber

• Opening Shots
• Only Yesterday Charles Barr
• The Wonderful Country Pete Falconer

• Andrew Sarris: A Tribute

• The Devil and the Nun Andrew Sarris

• A Robin Wood Archive (2)

• Mashed Marlowe Robin Wood
• Controlling the Situation Robin Wood
• Poet of the Cinema Robin Wood
• Mad Smile of a Hollow Civilisation Robin Wood
• A Matter of Life and Death Robin Wood

This issue was designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.

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

On the myth of the frontier in cinema and culture

'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.

The inspiration for today's Film Studies For Free entry -- on the (transnational) myth of the frontier in cinema and related culture -- was Richard Langley's excellent, highly persuasive, short documentary embedded above. That video also has a vivid, post hoc connection to this blog's popular list of "Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies" posted but a few short weeks ago.

Like cinematic apocalypses, filmic frontier mythology turned out to be an incredibly rich vein of web scholarship. So, many thanks to Richard and all the below named scholars for making sure their very valuable work was openly accessible online.

Open Access is, after all, the real 'final [e-]frontier'.

And hopefully it won't turn out to be a myth...

• Catherine Lynn Adams, 'Africanizing the Territory: The History, Memory and Contemporary Imagination of Black Frontier Settlements in the Oklahoma Territory', PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2010
• Tyler Lorey Adams, 'The Geography of Frontier', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
  
• Jon Baldwin, 'Other Bother: The Alien in Science Fiction Cinema; Sardar and Cubitt's Aliens R Us' , Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 20, August 2003
• Ann Barrow, 'The Cutting Garden: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and ReceptionTheories of Audiences or Fans', Cultural Studies Conference Proceedings, 2004
• Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis (eds), Dislocating the Frontier: essaying the mystique of the outback (ANU E-Press, 2006)
• Maria Beatrice Bittarello, 'Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination', Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol. 1. No. 1, July 2008
• Henrik Bødker, 'The Mercy Seat as Inescapable Heat - The Proposition and Ideas of Justice in the Australian Outback', P.O.V. No.24 - The Western, December 2007
• Barbara Buchenau, 'Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography', CLCWeb Volume 3, Issue 2, June 2001 
• Angus Cameron, 'The Metaverse Frontier', PSA 2008
• Cynthia-Lou Coleman, 'Framing Cinematic Indians within the Social Construction of Place', American Studies, 46:3/4 (Fall-Winter 2005): 275-293 Indigenous Studies Today, 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006)
• Felicity Collins, 'History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema', Trames, 2008, 12(62/57), 3, 276–286
• Chris Cowan, 'Reflections on The Blair Witch Project', 49th Parallel, Issue 11, Autumn 2003
• Melissa Daniels, '"History Is a Funny Thing": African Americans in the West, American Studies, and the Screen', Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2010, Volume 9, Issue 2, Fall 2010
• Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, 'Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum', Western Journal of Communication Vol. 69, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 85–108
• Klaus Dodds, 'Hollywood and the Popular Geopolitics of the War on Terror', Third World Quarterly 2008
• Dan Edwards, 'Australian Western: Fear on the frontier [on The Proposition]', RealTime Arts Magazine, 70, December-January 2005
• Rainer Eisfeld, 'Myths and Realities of Frontier Violence: A Look at the Gunfighter Saga', Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 3(5) (1995) 106-122
• Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, Alexander Horwath (eds), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
• Thomas S. Engeman, 'Why The American "Frontier" Will Always Be Populated By Democratic, Christian Knights', The Claremont Institute, September 2002
• Theo Finigan, '"To the Stables, Robin!": Regenerating the Frontier in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns', Image Text, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010 
• Austin Fisher, 'A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier', Scope, 'Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation' e-book, 2009
• Austin Fisher, 'Out West, down south: Gazing at America in reverse shot through Damiano Damiani’s "Quien sabe?"', The Italianist, 30:2, 2010
• Peter Flynn, 'The Silent Western as Mythmaker', Images Journal, Issue 6, February 2004 
• Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos,' Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction', in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (SUNY, 2001)
• Martin Fradley, '“Why Doesn’t Your Compass Work?”: Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantasy Blockbusters and Contemporary Queer Theory', originally published in Karen Ross (ed.), "The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media" (Blackwell, 2011), pp.294-312
• Martin Fradley, '[Review of] Gary Needham, "Brokeback Mountain" (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 19:2 (Fall 2010), pp.143-146 
• Christiane Gerblinger, ‘"Fiery the Angels Fell": America, Regeneration and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner', Australasian Journal of American Studies, 21.1, July 2002
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Genre Films and Cultural Myth', Film International, April 20, 2011 
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Introduction: Spokes in the Wheels', John Ford's Stagecoach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• Michael Grimshaw, 'Preacher, or the Death of God in Pictures', JCRT 3.2
• David Gunkel and Ann Hetzel Gunkel, 'Terra Nova 2.0—The New Worlds of MMORPGs', Critical Studies in Media Communication 26(2), June 2009, pp. 104-127 
• Alia Haddad, 'An American Take on Mythic Mexico and its Revolution in The Wild Bunch', Volume VII, Number 2, Fall 2011
• Rowena Harper, 'Frontier Mythology in the American Teen Film', PhD Thesis, University of Adelaide December 2008
• Christina Judith Hein, 'Battleground Masculinity: Gendertroublers and Gatekeepers in Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986)', COPAS, Issue 8, 2007
• Kurt Hemmer, 'Political Outlaws: Beat Cowboys', American Studies Journal, No. 50, 2007
• David Ingram, ‘"Go to the forest and move": 1960s American Rock Music as Electronic Pastoral', 49th Parallel, Vol. 20, Winter 2006-2007
• Nicholas Jelley, The Potential for Rewriting Myth: Finding 'Kindness' on the Frontier, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2005
• Kathleen Kennedy, 'Bodily Pain and Nation Making: Catholics and Indians in the Protestant Historical Imagination', Queen: A Journal of Rhetoric and Power, September 2003
• Geoff King, 'Spectacular Narratives: Twister, Independence Day, and frontier mythology in contemporary Hollywood', originally published in SPECTACULAR NARRATIVESHollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: IB Tauris, 2000)
• Katherine Kinney, 'Cold Wars: Black Soldiers in Liberal Hollywood', WLA Spring/Summer 2000
• Stephen Koetzing, 'The Trespassing Cyborg: Technology, Nature, and the Nation in Wild Wild West', AS Peers 4, 2011
• Marie Claire Kolbenschlag, 'Film and the American experience', from Jump Cut, no. 6, 1975, pp. 16-21 
• Sam Kula, 'National Image, National Dream',  Cinema Canada, February 1976
• Emma Lambert, '[De]Constructing John F. Kennedy?: Herschensohn's Years of Lightning, Days of Drums', 49th Parallel, Issue 4, Winter 2000
• Richard Langley, 'American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters',Vimeo, November 17, 2011 (originally screened at the American Frontiers conference, University of Birmingham, 12 November 2011)
• Helen Laville, 'What kind of Man are you? - Masculinity in Oliver Stone JFK', 49th Parallel, Issue 5, Spring 2000
• Christopher Le Coney and Zoe Trodd, 'John Wayne and the Queer Frontier: Deconstructions of the Classic Cowboy Narrative during the Vietnam War, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2005 
• Julia Leyda, 'Black-Audience Westerns and the Politics of Cultural Identification In the 1930s', Cinema Journal, 42, No. 1, Fall 2002
• Julia Leyda, 'Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility In John Ford's The Searchers', The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13, 2002 [click on PDF]
• Stephen McVeigh, '[Review of] The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory, By Will Wright (London: Sage Publications, 2001)', Scope, November 2003
• Mark Mordue, 'Dead Men Walking', Frieze Magazine, Issue 114, April 2008
• Gabrielle Murray, 'Fact and Fiction: The Iraq War Film in Absence', Screening the Past, 29, 2010
  
• Robin Murray and Joe Heumann, 'Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”: the myth of interdependence in oil drilling film', Jump Cut, No. 53, summer 2011
• Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont, 'Daughter of Earth: Judith Merril and the Intersections of Gender, Science Fiction, and Frontier Mythology', Science Fiction Studies, 107, Volume 36, Part 1, March 2009
• Gregory H. Nobles, 'Beyond Myth and Master Narrative: Toward a New History of the American Frontier', Quaderno, 6, 2004
• Allison Perlman, 'The Brief Ride of the Biker Movie', International Journal of Motorcycle Studies, March 2007
• Lauren Rabinovitz, 'More Than Meets the Eye: Movies in American Studies', MAASA Presidential Symposium 2005
• Rod Romesburg, 'Regeneration through Vampirism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s New Frontier', Slayage 5.3 [19], February 2006
• Christina Rowley, ‘The Disappearance and Re-emergence of the Western in Vietnam War Films’, PSA 2010 
• Christian Seidl, '"Regeneration through Creativity" – The Frontier in Paul Auster's Moon Palace', PhiN 31, 2005
• Ron Smith, 'Mistaken Images in Serge: Cecil B. DeMille’s Northwest Mounted Police (1940)', 49th Parallel, Vol. 24, 2010
• Saralyn Smith, '"Come see a fat old man sometime!" Masculinity and Aging in True Grit (1969) and Unforgiven', MA Thesis, Claremont Graduate University, December 2010 
• Barry Stephenson, 'Swaggering Savagery and the New Frontier', Journal of Religion and Popula Culture, Vol. 16, Summer 2007
• John Streamas, '"Patriotic Drunk": To be Yellow, Brave, and Disappeared in Bad Day at Black Rock',  New Voices Conference, American Studies, 44:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 99-119
• András Tarnóc, 'Narratives of Confinement: Revisiting the Founding Myths of American Culture', Americana, Volume VII, Number 1, Spring 2011
• Nann Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam University Press, 2006 [on the emergence of the  Western]) 
• Edvin Vestergaard Kau, 'The Western Experience: Reflections on the Phenomenology of the Western', P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007
• Geoffrey Walker, 'Deconstructing an American Myth: Hollywood and The Last of the Mohicans', 10th Cooper Seminar, James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, July, 1995
• Jerry White, 'POSSUM, film noir, and the past/future of New Zealand', P:O.V. No.7, March 1999
• Gioia Woods, 'Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Lori Piestewa, and the Great American Makeover', Studies in Popular Culture, 29.1 October 2006
• Ray Bourgeois Zimmerman, 'Gruntspeak: Masculinity, Monstrosity and Discourse in Hasford's The Short-Timers', American Studies, 40:1 (Spring 1999): 65-93 

Brokeback Mountain Studies: Through the Queer Longing Glass

Through the Queer Longing Glass of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN from Catherine Grant.

Films accumulate meaning through, at times, very subtle moves. From one colour to another. From one shape to another. The latter is the case with Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005).

While much of the film's affective meaning is conjured through quite obvious (but no less moving for that) figurations of absence and presence, such as Ennis's discovery of the (now 'empty') bloodied shirts in Jack's closet, and their (still 'empty') reappearance in Ennis's own closet at the end of the film, there is also some mourning and memory-work carried out through considerably less conspicuous, visual shape-shifting and graphic matching.

This very short video essay traces the long journey from Jack's desirous looking at Ennis through round glass (as he shaves his later-to-be-bruised cheek) in the early and middle parts of the film, to Ennis's touching association with squarer, straighter vistas, at the end of the film, an un/looking through 'longing glass' in which Jack can only be figured invisibly, metaphorically, through his absence.  [Catherine Grant, 'Through the Queer Longing Glass of Brokeback Mountain']

Film Studies For Free's author was doing a little bit of teaching on Brokeback Mountain last week. It was windy up there, but this pedagogical outing inspired the above little video essay as well as the below list of links to online, and openly accessible studies of Ang Lee's 2005 film and Annie Proulx's short story as well as of the 'gay cowboy film' more generally. Yee ha!

• Harry M. Benshoff, 'Brokering Brokeback Mountain — a local reception study', Jump Cut, Issue 50, Spring 2008
• Michael Bronski, 'From The Celluloid Closet to Brokeback Mountain: The Changing Nature of Queer Film Criticism', Cineaste, 2008
• Matt Connolly, 'Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and the Queer Prestige Film', Reverse Shot, Issue 24, 2009
• Daniel Garrett, 'You Don’t Know What Love Is', Film International, January 2011
  
• William Glass, ''"Americans Don't Want Cowboys to Be Gay:" "Brokeback Mountain" and the Oscars', Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies, 2, 2007
• Le Han and Lushan Shi, 'The "Brokeback Mountain"of Chinese Media: A Case Study of Chinese Media Construction of Nationalism on Reporting of 78th Academy Award[s]', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 93rd Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, Nov 15, 2007 
• William R. Handley, 'Introduction: The Pasts and Futures of a Story and a Film', in William R. Handley (ed.), The Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon (Lincoln :University of Nebraska Press, 2011)
• Andrew Holleran, 'The Magic Mountain', The Gay and Lesbian review, Volume 13, Issue 2: History Questions, 2006
• Mark John Isola, 'Disciplining Desire: the Fluid Textuality of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain', Nordic Journal of English Studies, 7.1, 2008  
• James R. Keller and Anne Goodwyn Jones, 'Brokeback Mountain: Masculinity and Manhood', Studies in Popular Culture, 30.2 Spring 2008 
• Barbara Koziak, 'Shepherding Romance: Reviving the Politics of Romantic Love in Brokeback Mountain', Genders Online, Issue 50, 2009
• Christian Lassen, '"In the dark camp," Or: Straight with a (Pastoral) Twist. American Western Masculinity in Brokeback Mountain', Gender Forum, Issue 16, 2006 
• Christopher Le Coney and Zoe Trodd, 'John Wayne and the Queer Frontier: Deconstructions of the Classic Cowboy Narrative during the Vietnam War', Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 5.1, Spring 2006
• Scott McKinnon, 'Taking the Word ‘Out’ West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces', Participations, Volume 7, Issue 2, November 2010 
• George Raitt, 'Hidden Differences: New meanings in adaptations of literature to the screen', Double Dialogues, Issue 12, Winter 2010: Interior Worlds: Hidden Stories
• Christopher Sharrett, 'Death of the Strong, Silent Type: The Achievement of Brokeback Mountain', Film International, 7.1, 2009
• Craig Snyder, 'Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain', Jump Cut, Issue 53, Summer 2011 
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Ang Lee’s Cowboys', Offscreen Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2, February 28, 2007
• Ian Scott Todd, 'Outside/In: Abjection, Space, and Landscape in Brokeback Mountain', Scope13, February 2009 
• Michael Stewart, 'Transience and Imperfect Tense: Brokeback Mountain as Melodrama', Scope, Issue 12, October 2008
• Steven Stowell, 'A Gay Love Story?', The Oxonian Review of Books, 5.2, Spring 2006
• Tommy TSE Ho-lun, Narcissism in Male Sexuality: Lan Yu, Crystal Boys and Brokeback Mountain, MPhil Thesis, University of Hong Kong, 2006

On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

Even if John Ford had not made his ten best movies (whichever they are), he'd still be the greatest. [Tag Gallagher]

In Young Mr. Lincoln, John Ford achieves the perfection of his art. Never were his matter and his method more aptly fitted, and never were his tendencies toward sprawl and overemphasis more rigorously controlled. It is a masterpiece of concision in which every element in every shot, every ratio, every movement, every shift of viewpoint seems dense with significance, yet it breathes an air of casual improvisation. While its surfaces paint, with relaxed humor and effortless nostalgic charm, an imaginary antebellum America, it sustains an underlying note of somber apprehension, all the more powerful for being held in check.

Ford finds a mood that avoids the clutter and ponderousness of most Hollywood history movies, a mood more of parable than of textbook chronicle. That preoccupation with history and its contradictions—the variance between actual human experience and the official version that will be constructed after the fact—that suffuses films as different as They Were Expendable (1945), Fort Apache (1948), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) resonates troublingly at the heart of this film, for all its apparent serenity. Nothing here is as uncomplicated as it seems designed to appear, which may be why the editors of Cahiers du cinéma, in a celebrated, if by now scarcely readable, special issue of 1970, brought the full force of their post-’68 Althusserian-Lacanian rhetoric to bear on the film in a scene-by-scene analysis, as if here the secret mechanisms of the American ideology itself might be decoded and exposed. In trying to pin down the meanings of Ford’s art, however, Cahiers du cinéma missed his mercurial—and, admittedly, sometimes infuriating––ability to be in two places at once. If Ford’s Lincoln exhibits at once a radiant sincerity and the devious subtlety of a trickster, he is to that extent the director’s mirror image. [Geoffrey O'Brien, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: Here in Waiting', The Criterion Collection, February 13, 2006]

Cahiers du cinéma’s 1969 analysis of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), reprinted in Screenin 1972 in its first English translation, introduced symptomatic reading to British feminist film critics such as Pam Cook and Claire Johnston. Louis Althusser (1968, trans. 1970: 28-9) coined the term “symptomatic reading,” an interpretive strategy that searches not only for the structural dominants in a text but most importantly, for absences and omissions that are an indication of what the dominant ideology seeks to repress, contain or marginalize. Reading against the grain operates under the assumption that the text comprises a hierarchy of discourses in which one discourse – patriarchal ideology – asserts its dominance over others. Nevertheless, tensions between the dominant ideology and subordinate discourses produce ideological contradictions that the popular film cannot mask nor reconcile, try as it might. [Aspasia Kotsopoulos, 'Reading against the grain revisited', from Jump Cut, Issue 44, 2001]

While it is difficult to ascertain exactly how an ‘oblique’ analysis of film would proceed, the editors of Cahiers [du cinéma’s] essay on John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939) is a significant example of this type of criticism and stands as exemplary of the many important analyses of mainstream Hollywood films that were carried out in the pages of Cahiers and elsewhere. The analysis of Young Mr Lincoln is a close reading of this film, which belongs to the category that is in many ways the most difficult to endorse: films that remain within bourgeois ideology, but reveal its ambiguities and fissures (when subjected to a highly specialised mode of reading).The reading by the Editors of Cahiers uses principles of Marxism, semiology and credits Marxist and Freudian discourses, and includes fleeting references to Jean-Pierre Oudart, Althusser, Roland Barthes and Serge Daney, and Lacan. However, there is no sustained explanation as to precisely which principles drawn from these discourses they will deploy. While Peter Wollen, in his Afterword to the translation of the analysis of Young Mr Lincoln in Screen, declares that the text “owes its concepts to Jacques Lacan” [...], this text would seem to be exemplary of Žižek’s contention that a sustained and explicit consideration of Lacan was in fact missing from 60s and 70s film theory.
     At first glance, therefore, the Young Mr Lincoln article might seem to exemplify a move towards Lacanian psychoanalysis. Furthermore, upon first glance, it appears to be a step towards a consideration of narrative content. As such, it might seem to undermine a contention of this thesis: that the content of popular film was systematically precluded by considerations of film and ideology during the 60s and 70s. In this article, the Editorial Collective treat the text of the film in many ways like a work of literature, analysing it sequence by sequence, with scarcely a mention of its materiality. It could be argued that here is an example of textual analysis that confounds the assertion that subject matter was neglected in favour of form and materiality in analyses of film and ideology. While an extensive examination of the content of Young Mr Lincoln, or signifié, to use the Editors’ turn of phrase, appears to consume the bulk of this article, it must be noted that it is the film’s form which is ostensibly the impetus for the discussion of its content. [Kate Greenwood, Confronting the limits: Renditions of the Real in the Edge of the Construct Film, PhD Thesis, The University of Adelaide, December 2006: 63-64]

It's been a slightly quieter week than usual here at Film Studies For Free, as its voracious readers may have noticed.

A good reason for that is that this blog's author has merrily begun a new university year, teaching ... (drum roll) ... Film Theory!

This shiny, new, non-virtual, pedagogical order will continue to slow up FSFF's production a little, it's true, but it will also inspire the direction that some of its entries will take in the coming weeks and months.

For example, as next week's teaching focus is John Ford's 1939 film Young Mr, Lincoln, and the ideological film readings that it inspired, or provoked, here's a little list of online and openly accessible scholarly books, articles and videos on the inspirational and/or provocative work of that very director.

• Charles Barr, 'About the John Ford Archive', Paper at Archives and Auteurs Conference, University of Stirling, September 2-4, 2009'
• Charles Barr, 'Irish Brother Feeney: Francis Ford in John Ford’s films', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010
• David Bordwell, 'John Ford, silent man', Observations on Film Art, June 28, 2010 
• Seán Crosson, "‘They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever pa, ‘cause we're the people' - Misrepresenting death in Jim Sheridan's In America (2003)", Estudios Irlandeses: Journal of Irish Studies, Issue 3, (2008)
• Seán Crosson, 'Vanishing Point: An examination of some consequences of globalization for contemporary Irish film', E-Keltoi, Vol. 2, 2003
• Toni D'Angela, 'Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of the Hollywood Professionals', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009
• Ruurd Dykstra, 'The Search for Spectators: VistaVision and Technicolor in The Searchers', Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, 1.1, 2010 
• Arthur M. Eckstein, 'Darkening Ethan: John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Screen', originally published in Cinema Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 3-24
• Martin Flanagan, 'Re-Making Time: Chronotopes of the West in Lone Star (1996) and The Searchers (1956', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• Richard Franklin, 'John Ford', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Till '47', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Rises from the Dead. Again', Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Going My Way', Screening the Past, December 2001
• Ross Gibson, 'The Searchers - Dismantled', Rouge, Issue 7, 2004 
• Shigehiko Hasumi, 'John Ford, or The Eloquence of Gesture', Rouge, 2005
• James Hawko, 'John Ford's The Horse Soldiers', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Arlene Hui, 'The Racial Frontier in John Ford’s The Searchers', Revista Complutense de Historia de América, 2004, vol. 30, 187-207 
• Peter Lehman, '"Tonight Your Director Is John Ford":The Strange Journey of Stagecoach from Screen to Radio', Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes', Edited by Andrew J. Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
• Julia Leyda, 'Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers', The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)
• Miguel Marías, 'Ford's Depth', Rouge, Issue 7, 2004
• Cornelis Martin Renes, 'The Quiet Man and Angela’s Ashes: Hollywood Representations of Irish Emigration as Male Quest Narrative', Estudios Irlandeses , Number 2, 2007, pp. 93-106
• Gary Morris, 'The Searcher: On Ethan Edwards and John Ford's Masterpiece', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 58, 2007
• John T. Nelson, 'The Berkhofer Duality Revealed in the Western Films of John Ford and John Wayne', Madison Historical Review, Vol. 4, November 2007
• Geoffrey O'Brien, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: Here in Waiting', The Criterion Collection, February 13, 2006
• Timothy P. O'Neill, 'Two Concepts of Liberty Valance: John Ford, Isaiah Berlin, and Tragic Choice on the Frontier', Creighton Law Review, Vol. 37, 2004
• Jeffrey C. Prater, John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy: Myth or Reality?, Masters Thesis, Faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, June 1989
• Art Redding, 'Built Ford Tough: John Ford and the Persistence of the American Western', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Sam Rohdie, 'Four essays [on Painlevé, Jennings, Vigo, and Ford], Screening the Past, 25, 2009
• Norman Rosenberg, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: The Lawyer as Super-Hero', Legal Studies Forum, Volume 15, Number 3 (1991)
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘"The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause":John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright', Rouge, No. 7, 2004
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part One', Screening the Past, 23, 2008 
  
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (a)', Screening the Past, 24, 2008
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (b)', Screening the Past, 25, 2009
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (c)', Screening the Past, 27, 2010
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Three (a)', Screening the Past, 28, 2010 
• Sean Ryder, 'Representing Ireland: Literary Adaptation and Irish Cinema', Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 9, 1998, 119-130
• Thomas Schatz, 'Stagecoach and Hollywood's A-Western Renaissance', in John Ford's Stagecoach, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [long extract] 
• Tom Schneller, '[Review of] Kathryn Kalinak. How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford', The Journal of film music, Volume 2, numbers 2-4, Winter 2009, 279-82
• Nicoleta Stanca, 'Hollywood Gender Representations of Irish America in the 20th Century: Maureen O’Hara and Pierce Brosnan', The Annals of Ovidius University Constanta - Philology (20/2009)
• Temenuga Trifonova, 'John Ford’s Funeral Oration: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Phil Wagner, 'John Ford Made … Monsters? The Grotesque Tradition in Ford’s Work', Senses of Cinema, Issue 48, 2008 
• Saige Walton, '[Review of] Jim Kitses,'Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood', Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006

Video Essay by Kevin B. Lee on The Sun Shines Bright (1956, John Ford) and Gertrud (1964, Carl T. Dreyer) with commentary by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Part One of Two. Part of the Shooting Down Pictures project

Video essay by Kevin B. Lee on Tobacco Road (1941, dir. John Ford), #905 (46) in the Shooting Down Pictures project.

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'