Showing posts with label bodies on film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bodies on film. Show all posts

Monday, 6 June 2016

The Persistence of Vision: Videos on the Work of Film Theorists and Scholars




A New Video Tribute to the Work of Film Scholar Elizabeth Cowie.

Film Studies For Free's author has just published her latest video tribute to a film theorist! The above, quite heartfelt work (with key contributions from Andrew Klevan, Christine Evans, Coral Houtman and Sarah Wood) celebrates the writing of Professor Emeritus Elizabeth Cowie, a pioneer in psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to cinema studies and author of two important books in our field (Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, 1997, and Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, 2011). She has also published the below, wonderful essays online:
The publication of the above video prompted FSFF to assemble and embed its now numerous celebratory video works on the writings (and films) of individual (to date, mostly anglophone) film theorists and scholars. So, below, you can watch video works on writings by:
Pam Cook; Elizabeth Cowie; Alexander Doty; Richard Dyer; Amber Jacobs; Andrew Klevan; Annette Kuhn; Mathieu Macherey; Laura Marks; D.A. Miller; Laura Mulvey; Vivian Sobchack; Lesley Stern; Gaylyn Studlar; Dai Vaughan; and Patricia White. 
Enjoy!
Pam Cook

Alexander Doty
Richard Dyer (and Elizabeth Cowie and Adrienne McLean)




 Richard Dyer and Pam Cook




 Amber Jacobs 


Read more about this video essay here.


Andrew Klevan


Read more about this video here.
Annette Kuhn




Mathieu Macherey
Mechanised Flights: Memories of HEIDI from Catherine Grant
Read more about this video here.


Laura Marks




Also see here.


D.A. Miller


Also see here.
Laura Mulvey



Vivian Sobchack


Published in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring, 2015. Online at: necsus-ejms.org/film-studies-in-the-groove-rhythmising-perception-in-carnal-locomotive/, where you can also read the accompanying text: "Film studies in the groove? Rhythmising perception in Carnal Locomotive."


Lesley Stern


"A GESTURE EXPANDS INTO GYMNASTICS,
RAGE IS EXPRESSED THROUGH A SOMERSAULT" 
[Eisenstein]

An experimental response to (or adaptive working through of) the following written essay:


This video by CATHERINE GRANT was presented at THE AUDIOVISUAL ESSAY Conference, Deutsches Filminstitut/Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, November 23-4, 2013


Gaylyn Studlar



Dai Vaughan



Patricia White



"In the earlier film version of Stella Dallas [Henry King, 1925], the overwrought Stella takes refuge in the ladies’ waiting room at the train station directly after her visit to Helen [the woman to whom she has just entrusted her daughter]. She’s watched very closely by a woman whose flashy dress indicates her similarity to Stella in class status, if not in her dubious profession. The stranger offers the apparently inconsolable Stella a cigarette, and Stella puts it in her mouth and lights it end to end with the cigarette in the other woman’s mouth. A fade to black gives the gesture—which resembles a kiss—an elliptical significance, though nothing else is made of this scene. The shot echoes with Stella’s connection to Helen in the previous scene. But the silent version of Stella Dallas  suggests that such sympathy, and women’s motives, need not be reduced to shared maternal feeling. The washroom “pick-up” scene doesn’t occur in the [original 1922 source novel Stella Dallas  by Olive Higgins Prouty].
QUOTATION: Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 107-8.
Patricia White (and Tania Modleski)



Also see: See "The Remix That Knew Too Much? On REBECCA, Retrospectatorship and the Making Of RITES OF PASSAGE", THE CINE-FILES, 7, Fall 2014.


Various theorists (Stanley Cavell, Linda Williams, William Rothman, and Christian Viviani)



Read the related multimedia essay "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014.  (this essay has been translated into Spanish by Cristina Álvarez López and published here)

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Monday, 28 July 2014

End of July Round Up! Grusin and Kara on the post-cinematic, new ALPHAVILLE, WORLD PICTURE and ANIKI, Keathley, Bellour, Mittell, and Wasko videos, and lots more!

               Do you ever get confused about movies, television, life? You are not alone...
SFR (Swiss Family Robinson [Ken Annakin, 1960]) by Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Film Studies For Free is delighted to present its latest handy round up of links to great online, open access items of film and media scholarly interest! 

New SEQUENCE One essays:
SEQUENCE is delighted to announce the publication of two further individual responses -- by Richard Grusin and Selmin Kara -- to Steven Shaviro’s magisterial article “MELANCHOLIA, Or The Romantic Anti-Sublime”, SEQUENCE 1.1 (2012), the launch essay for PLANET MELANCHOLIA, the inaugural issue of SEQUENCE, REFRAME‘s experimental, peer-reviewed, media, film and music studies serial publication.
    Following Rupert Read’s engagement with Shaviro in SEQUENCE 1.2, which offered a personal, affective (and deeply philosophical) account of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, in their very fine, equally philosophically-informed, contributions Grusin and Kara turn their detailed attention to the questions of "post-cinematic atavism" and "primordigitality" raised by the hybrid analog/digital technical and aesthetic contexts of a number of recent films, including Melancholia as well as Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (2011), Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011), Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) .
    SEQUENCES continues to invite further responses to Shaviro’s article as well as to those which have followed it in the SEQUENCE One thread, as well as to the second issue of SEQUENCE: ‘We Need to Talk about the Maternal Melodrama'.

Video essay on the documentaries of late Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho by Michael Chanan

Video essay on Editing Space and Time in Satoshi Kon's films by Tony Zhou

Network of European Cinema and Media Studies 2014 conference videos and audio:

New issue of ALHAVILLE, Issue 7, 2014, on Corporeal Cinema

New issue of WORLD PICTURE, 9, 2014, on 'Serious'

Great new issue of the Portuguese film studies journal ANIKI (1.2, 2014) w/ LOTS of research published in English, including a dossier on art and cinema, an interview with Jia Zhang-ke and Marshall Deutelbaum's article on Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon.

Updates at David Bordwell and Kristin Thomspon's Observations on Film Art website:

 Girish Shambu's latest blog entry 'On Video Essays, Cinephilia and Affect', which includes lots of great suggestions for further reading and an excellent comments thread

Check out all the updates to Wikipedia as a result of the #SheMustBeWiki, feminist film studies wiki writing event at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, July 25, 2014:

Excellent video on Brian De Palma's cinematic art of looks and looking by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin:

Barbara Flueckiger's important update about her wonderful open access project on Film Colors

Desistfilm Issue 6, 2014
  • Online here: http://desistfilm.com/category/issue-006/
  • PETER WHITEHEAD: REVOLUTION, REVELATION – PINK FLOYD LONDON 1966-1967 By Lu Juejing
  • EMBRACING BY NAOMI KAWASE By Adrian Martin
  • SHAKING TRACKS: THE DOCUMENTARY WAYS IN THE WORK OF KORE-EDA HIROKAZU By Claudia Siefen
  • ON Hi-8/DIGITAL AND THE INTIMATE: THE FILM DIARIES OF ALAIN CAVALIER By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • DAY IS DONE DE THOMAS IMBACH Por Mónica Delgado
  • A REAL DEAD RINGER FOR LOVE. VIDEO FOOL FOR LOVE By Adrian Martin
  • DIALOGUE WITH A WOMAN DEPARTED BY LEO HURWITZ By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • ROUTE ONE/USA DE ROBERT KRAMER Por Nicolás Carrasco
  • VARIACIONES DEL “FILMADOR” EN ALGUNAS PELÍCULAS INDEPENDIENTES Y EXPERIMENTALES DE AMÉRICA LATINA Por Mónica Delgado
  • FEATURED FILMMAKER: JENNIFER REEDER By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • EL DIARIO FÍLMICO EN ESPAÑA, HOY Por Ricardo Adalia Martin
  • NEARSIGHT BY SAUL LEVINE By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Check out this fantastic resource on the work of Chris Marker, including IMMEMORY, Guillaume sightings worldwide, and other gems (link via Via Genevieve Yue and Nico Baumbach):

Innovative, Canada-based, film studies publisher caboose has launched the collaborative on-line project Planetary Projection, introducing some of the world’s remarkable film projectionists. We invite you to help us find a few more, in every corner of the globe, so that they might tell us their stories

Online extract from Madelon Sprenthnether's remarkable book Crying at the Movies:

Great video in which director John Akomfrah talks to Baroness Lola Young about The Stuart Hall Project, which paints a sensitive and emotionally charged portrait of the celebrated cultural theorist.  

For a few more days, enjoy temporary free online access to many articles from Routledge Film and Cinema Studies journals

'I Have to Trust My Intuition': A 40-Minute Chat Between Ingmar Bergman & AFI Film Students at NoFilmSchool:
The "Motherhood Archives" - Irene Lustzig's epic multimedia essay on institutionalization of birth and motherhood:
New ADA: A JOURNAL OF GENDER, NEW MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY issue on Queer Feminist Media Praxis:
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Saturday, 5 January 2013

On Embodiment and the Body: New Issue of CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image




Above, a recording of composer Simon Fisher Turner and sound artist Black Sifichi's live performance of SFT's score for Derek Jarman's 1994 film Blue at Glasgow's Tramway Theatre in 2008.  Below, a brief excerpt from Vivian Sobchack's article 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Today, most graduate students are in such a hurry to “professionalize” and “talk the talk” of their disciplines that they often forget to attend to their own experience of “seeing” and “listening” — or they devalue it. Instead, they rush to quote others, and describe their objects of study through a range of “floating signifiers” that tend to overdetermine and foreclose their objects and their descriptions before the latter have even really begun. Hermeneutically sophisticated yet overly dependent upon “received knowledge,” these students are also secretly insecure and worried that everyone else ‘knows’ more than they do — and intellectually aware of “the death of the subject,” they are highly suspicious of their own “subjective” experience. They ignore, mistrust, and devalue it as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevantly singular — this last, a false, indeed arrogant, humility that unwittingly rejects intersubjectivity, sociality, and culture. Thus, ignoring the apodicticity (or initial certainty) and presence of their own lived-bodies engaged in being-in-the-world (and in the cinema), their thought about the world (and cinema) has no existential ground of its own from which to empirically proceed. Phenomenological inquiry affords redress to this contemporary situation: it insists we dwell on the ground of experience before moving on to more abstract or theoretical concerns, that we experience and reflect upon our own sight before we (dare I pun?) cite others. [From Vivian Sobchack, 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Happy new year to all of Film Studies For Free's readers! FSFF has unfortunately been slowed up in its efforts to bring you its list of Best Online Film Studies Resources in 2012. That should now be published around the end of next week.

But, in the meantime, there are a few new journal-issues to catch up with, including a strong contender for the category of Best Single Issue of an Online Film Studies Journal in 2012: the below, latest offering from CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image on Embodiment and the Body. And, in this blog's humble opinion, Vivian Sobchack's article, from which FSFF has cited above, would be a shoo-in for Best and certainly most important 2012 Article...


CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF

EMBODIMENT AND THE BODY edited by Patrícia Silveirinha Castello Branco
  • EDITORIAL: CINEMA, THE BODY AND EMBODIMENT, 1-9 PDF 
  • ABSTRACTS, 10-18 PDF
Articles
  • FLESHING OUT THE IMAGE: PHENOMENOLOGY, PEDAGOGY, AND DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE, 19-38 PDF  by Vivian Sobchack
  • SEDUCTION INCARNATE: PRE-PRODUCTION CODE HOLLYWOOD AND POSSESSIVE SPECTATORSHIP, 39-61 PDF by Ana Salzberg 
  • A PHENOMENOLOGY OF RECIPROCAL SENSATION IN THE MOVING BODY EXPERIENCE OF MOBILE PHONE FILMS, 62-83 PDF by Gavin Wilson
  • CINEMA OF THE BODY: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMATIVITY IN LARS VON TRIER’S DOGVILLE AND YORGOS LANTHIMO’S DOGTOOTH, 84-108 PDF by Angelos Koutsourakis
  • THE BODY OF IL DUCE: THE MYTH OF THE POLITICAL PHYSICALITY OF MUSSOLINI IN MARCO BELLOCCHIO’S VINCERE, 109-123 PDF by Marco Luceri
  • EIJA-LIISA AHTILA: THE PALPABLE EVENT, 124-154 PDF byAndrew Conio
  • UPSIDE-DOWN CINEMA: (DIS)SIMULATION OF THE BODY IN THE FILM EXPERIENCE, 155-182 PDF by Adriano D’Aloia 
  • EMBODYING MOVIES: EMBODIED SIMULATION AND FILM STUDIES, 183-210 PDF by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra 
  • EXISTENTIAL FEELINGS: HOW CINEMA MAKES US FEEL ALIVE, 211-228 PDF by Dina Mendonça 
  • THE BODY AS INTERFACE: AMBIVALENT TACTILITY IN EXPANDED RUBE CINEMA, 229-253 PDF by Seung-hoon Jeong
Interview
  • A PROPOS D’IMAGES (A SUIVRE): ENTRETIEN AVEC MARIE-JOSE MONDZAIN [FR.], 254-271 PDF Conducted by Vanessa Brito
Conference Reports
  • CONFERENCE ROUND-UP SUMMER 2012: POWERS OF THE FALSE (INSTITUT FRANÇAIS, LONDON, 18-19 MAY), SCSMI CONFERENCE (SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE/NYU, NEW YORK, 13-16 JUN.), FILM-GAME-EMOTION-BRAIN (UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM, 14-21 JUL.), AND FILM-PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE (QUEEN MARY – UNIVERSITY OF LONDON/ KING’S COLLEGE LONDON/KINGSTON UNIVERSITY, 12-14 SEPT.), 272-283 PDF by William Brown

Special Section
  • CÍRCULOS E POÉTICAS EM FILMES LITERÁRIOS DE FERNANDO LOPES, 284-300 PDF by Eduardo Paz Barroso
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Thursday, 13 January 2011

Double-Strength: Videos and Links in Celebration of Barbara Hammer



"I have chosen images rather than words for the act of naming myself an artist and a lesbian because the level of meanings possible for images and image conjunctions seemed richer and held more ramifications" Barbara Hammer
Film Studies For Free today presents a tribute to the remarkable American, experimental filmmaker and activist Barbara Hammer. The tribute takes the form of a listing of online videos and scholarly links to studies of Hammer's work, as well as of related queer film and politics.

Hammer is seventy-one years old, still making films and still protesting against injustice and censorship. In 2010, she published her wonderful autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, which addressed her personal history and philosophies on art (see a review here).

FSFF says, "Thank you, but... keep it up, please, Barbara! Your work and activism is needed now more than ever." (This blog can be a rather greedy and merciless task-mistress at times...)








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    Sunday, 2 January 2011

    On Digital Cinema, Visual Effects, and CGI Studies


    Faking it? Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

    Happy New Year, dear readers! A truly chilled out Film Studies For Free is back from vacation, and raring to go with a pretty impressive (if it says so itself) entry of direct links to openly accessible scholarly work on digital cinema and computer generated imagery studies.

    The post was inspired by news of the availability as a free download of 'Digital Bodies' - a chapter, translated into English, from esteemed scholar Barbara Flueckiger's 2008 German-language book Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer.

    Flueckiger, Associate Professor at the University of Zurich's Institute of Cinema Studies, has also just published her great database on the history of CGI, VFX, and computer animation online.  

    Vielen Dank, Barbara! Thanks also to all the scholars listed below for choosing to publish their work in freely accessible venues online! 

    Finally, in case you hadn't yet heard of the best website for regular, informed discussions of special and visual effects in the cinema, do check out film scholar Dan North's awe-inspiring blog Spectacular Attractions!
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