Showing posts with label film comedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film comedy. Show all posts

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

New Issue of LA FURIA UMANA on Jerry Lewis and much more...

Frame grab image of Jerry Lewis as 'Warren Nefron' in Smorgasbord aka Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983). Read Steven Shaviro's new article on this film

Smorgasbord (retitled Cracking Up by the distributor) is Jerry Lewis's last self-directed feature film. It first opened in France in 1983; it never received a proper American release. (In the US, it was immediately relegated to cable television -- which is where I saw it for the first time). And Smorgasbord still isn't very well known today -- even among Lewis aficionados. (It is, for instance, the only one of Lewis's self-directed films not to appear in the index to Enfant Terrible, an academic essay collection edited by Murray Pomerance in 2002, which otherwise covers Lewis' film career quite comprehensively). Yet I think that Smorgasbord is one of Jerry Lewis's greatest films; in what follows, I will try to explain why. [Steven Shaviro, 'Smorgasbord', La Furia Umana, 12, 2012; hyperlinks added by FSFF]
Film Studies For Free just heard about the latest issue of the pentalingual film journal La Furia Umana. There are lots of brilliant articles in English, and other marvellous work, too, in other languages that will be entertainingly translated by Google, if you so require.

The particular highlight, this time, is a truly brilliant and wide-ranging dossier on the work of Jerry Lewis, a human fury of an actor if ever there was one... But FSFF also had plenty of thoughts usefully and skilfully provoked by Kim Nicolini writing on the Post-Feminist Possibilities in Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. 

And there's a lot more to explore and learn from besides the above. Just feast your polyglot eyes on the below...

nota editoriale

rapporto confidenziale
prima linea
histoire(s) du cinéma
l'occhio che uccide
flaming creatures
the whole town's talking
western fragmenta
the new world
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Friday, 25 November 2011

International cinema, comedy, and online film and media practices: audience research at PARTICIPATIONS

Frame grab from A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971). You can read about audience responses to this film in Peter Krämer's excellent article '‘Movies that make people sick’: Audience Responses to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971/72'

Film Studies For Free takes to the blogwaves today to shout out about a truly excellent issue of the Open Access, and openly refereed, international audience research journal Participations.

It's a bumper issue with 27 articles - an advantage of an online journal format over its offline, paper-bound relatives, as editor Martin Barker outlines in his interesting introduction to this issue.

FSFF particularly appreciated the section on international film audiences, and also especially enjoyed Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore's study 'Reviewing Romcom: (100) IMDb Users and (500) Days of Summer' and also Anne Collins Smith and Owen M. Smith's article on 'Pragmatism and Meaning: Assessing the Message of Star Trek: The Original Series'.

Special Edition Contents

Editorial
Articles
Special Section: Comedy Audiences
Special Section: International Film Audiences Conference
Special Section: Approaching the Online Audience: New Practices, New Thinking
Reviews
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Thursday, 29 September 2011

¡Viva Raúl Ruiz!


Video essay-tribute by Catherine Grant
The above is a very short study of a sequence from Diálogos de exiliados/Dialogues of Exiles (France, 1974/5), an extremely low-budget film written and directed in Paris by the late and much lamented Raúl Ruiz. Diálogos was the first film to be made by that filmmaker in exile from Chile, with many of his countrymen and women, after Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état against the legally elected Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende. Controversially, at the time, it wasn't exactly the most conventional, or, despite its satire, the most crowd-pleasing 'exile' or 'solidarity' film that could have been made in those circumstances. And yet, as Zuzana Pick wrote of it, "[Diálogos] can fulfill the function that Ruiz intended for it by provoking dialogue. With its clear and evocative title, this first work of Chile’s cinema of resistance inserts itself into the struggle against fascism."
A few weeks back, Film Studies For Free published a sincerely felt tribute to the recently deceased Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. The tribute took the customary, if somewhat impersonal, form for this blog: a long list of links to openly-accessible scholarly and critical writing on Ruiz's work.

Shortly after that list appeared, though, FSFF's author was asked for a more personal response to the work of one of her favourite film artists: to contribute some thoughts on a beloved moment in Ruiz's films to a wonderful collection of such thoughts -- by critics, academics, and people who knew the Chilean filmmaker -- currently being published in serial form at the MUBI Notebook.

This was how the above, little video tribute came into being. The links to all the contributions are being added below as they, also, appear online.

Many thanks to David Phelps for his wonderful work of commissioning and curation. It was a real pleasure, albeit quite a poignant one, to take part, and an honour to have one's work published in such excellent, international company.

COMING SOON

  • The Golden Boat (1990) by C. Mason Wells
  • Poetics of Cinema (1994/2005) by Matthew Flanagan
  • Shattered Image (1998) by Zach Campbell
  • “Los dos caminos” / “The Two Paths” by Cristián Sánchez Garfias
  • Time Regained (Le temps retrouvé, 1999) by David Pendleton
  • Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody (2002) by Quintín
  • Klimt (2006) by Adrian Martin
  • A Closed Book (2010) by David Phelps
  • Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) by Carlos Losilla
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    Wednesday, 24 August 2011

    University of Sussex Film and Moving Image Studies Research Online

    A (bordering on) recursive Film Studies For Free screengrab

    It is Film Studies For Free's 3rd birthday today. So, time for a little self-indulgent reflection and celebration...

    A lot has changed in the last year, most notably that this blog has had to vie with a Film Studies For Pay job for its author's attention... Entries have indeed slowed a little. But, despite this, FSFF's readership has continued to grow rather astonishingly, with 'unique visits' exceeding 300,000, and 'page views' just about to reach half a million. Thank you, dear readers!

    While there will be big developments at this blog in the coming year -- some of those linked to an exciting new, MA in Film Studies course its author will teach on Curating Film Culture next Spring -- its essential mission and qualities won't change: viva Open Access!

    Onwards and upwards, but please remember you can follow FSFF in its various incarnations at Twitter, at Facebook, and at Vimeo, and you can keep up with its videographic film studies curations at Audiovisualcy (also on Twitter and Facebook).

    Film Studies at the University of Sussex has been such a welcoming, fruitful and stimulating workplace for this blog's author. So, today's entry gratefully gathers links to openly accessible, online, film and moving image studies research and scholarship produced by the very wonderful staff and doctoral students/graduates at that rather venerable (50 years old, itself, next month) and pretty cool institution (as well as by FSFF's own scrivener).






















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    Thursday, 18 August 2011

    Laughing at Austerity Britain? Ealing Comedy Studies

    The year 1949 was a pretty miserable time in Britain. Postwar austerity was at its height. Many city centres were still largely bomb sites. The cold war was getting chillier. The British film industry was in crisis after the Labour government had imposed a punitive tax on American films, which led to Hollywood studios withholding their product. Then suddenly, in the early summer, three pictures opened on consecutive weeks that together defined what we now know as "the Ealing comedy". The films got darker and Ealing Studios' reputation greater as the month wore on. [Philip French, 'Whisky Galore - Review', The Observer, July 31, 2011]
    [Michael] Powell after A Matter of Life and Death gives us three intriguing variations on the trauma picture, in which, intertwined are the central landmarks of British life after 1945: the end of war, the end of empire and the birth of a new consumer age.
           Before that, however, we should note that Ealing comedy of the period inverts the trauma film completely.
           If Ealing Studios produced the keynote Dead of Night, it also produced a triple antithesis in the post-war years: anti-trauma comedy in the form of [Robert] Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Alexander Mackendrick’s scintillating double act, Whisky Galore (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955). Indeed, the best of Ealing comedy is premised very precisely on this inversion, where what might well be traumatic turns out to be the exact opposite.
           Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets is biting social satire, in which the serial killer, Louis (Dennis Price), as outcast of the family and excluded by the vacuous rich, is more sympathetic than any of his eccentric aristo victims (all played by Alec Guinness). As they fall like ninepins one after the other, we can all have a good laugh and applaud Louis’ elegant cunning. A perfect picture, you could argue, for a new social democracy.
           The wartime Whisky Galore, set on the remote island of Todday (toddy?), also plays on inversion: this time on the fear of occupation – an anti-The Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson, 1942) or Went the Day Well? In Mackendrick’s film, the fear of invasion is now past but the Scottish island is ‘occupied’ by an English Home Army captain, Waggert (Basil Radford), who has marshalled customs officials to try and prevent the looting of a wrecked cargo ship carrying whisky. It is a comic version of Anglo-Scots antagonism, with its famous montage sequence of the looted alcohol being hidden by the islanders in rain-butts, water tanks, hot-water bottles and under a baby’s cot before bemused officials arrive to discover absolutely nothing. The gradual social exclusion of Waggert from the island has an edge and a cruel streak that prevents any lapse into sentimentality.
           Sentimentality is equally absent from The Ladykillers, where Mackendrick completely inverts the trauma-effects of Gothic expressionism. A motley gang of train robbers posing as a musical ensemble takes lodgings near Kings Cross station to prepare the next heist. At the landlady’s door, the figure of Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) casts a dark shadow – shades of the opening to The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927) – but thereafter the threat becomes internal as the eccentric old landlady ([Katie Johnson]), in her parody of a haunted house, has the gang tearing their hair out in annoyance and frustration at her blithe eccentricities. In Gothic melodrama, we expect villains to terrify, but here they are traumatised to the extent that, when found out, they are prepared to kill off each other rather than kill the ‘harmless’ old landlady. She who should be terrified is oblivious to the threat; those who should terrify show a collective failure of nerve and eliminate each other instead. Gothic melodrama morphs into dark comedy. And Ealing comedy runs happily on in a parallel world to David Lean and Michael Powell. [John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 ]

    Ealing Studios, the oldest continuously working film studio in the world, is marking its 80th anniversary, according to a couple of enjoyable videos at the Channel 4 and BBC websites. A remarkable achievement, indeed, thinks Film Studies For Free, one of the finest in the history of British cinema.

    Founded in economically austere and politically troubled times, the studios escaped relatively unscathed from the recent riots in London (Ealing was a particularly tragically affected area). They seem set to continue to produce their distinctly transnational brand of cinematic goods for the UK film industry well into the future. 

    The current anniversary of the establishment of the sound stages at Ealing, and a number of other connected anniversaries coming up (e.g. 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the Scottish-American director Alexander Mackendrick’s birth, one of Britain’s greatest, and most undervalued, filmmakers) have felicitously 'coincided' with the latest cinematic and DVD release of three of the greatest products of those studios: the Ealing comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), and Whisky Galore (Mackendrick, 1949).

    FSFF loves a mildly subversive chuckle from time to time, and is particularly partial, thus, to a good Ealing comedy. So, in fond celebration of that wonderful cycle of movies, below is its little list of links to online studies of those films, as well as to other items of related, scholarly interest.
    vvv

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    Tuesday, 24 August 2010

    Immaturity Abides! On Teen, "Gross Out" and Dumbass Comedy

    Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

    Film Studies For Free is two years old today. You go, blog!

    In honour of its tentative entry into digital post-toddlerdom (and hopefully not the terrible twos), it wanted to celebrate online and openly accessible studies of what FSFF likes to think of (in its über-scholarly way) as those liminal film genres and cycles of comic immaturity, awkwardness, stupidity, and tastelessness -- that is to say, all varieties of the teen (or arrested development) comedy (including the "teen sex comedy", the "gross-out" comedy, comic "dude flicks" and "bromances"), as well as studies of related issues.

    Today's scattershot links list is partly an offshoot of FSFF's recent entry on the romantic comedy, and partly its first experiment in "crowdsourcing" via its blossoming Facebook page. Thanks so much to those who suggested items there.

    If anyone else has any bright ideas for further additions, do please 'fess up. FSFF earnestly promises that you won't be ritually humiliated, or mercilessly laughed at, at all  :o)




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                          Saturday, 29 May 2010

                          Love builds bridges: on the romantic comedy in transnational cinema

                          Last updated June 1, 2010
                          Image of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn on the set of Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938). See Kartina Richardson's short video essay on this film at her new audio commentary website Mirror.

                          Film Studies For Free's author sensibly decided, on balance, that it was probably better to stay at home and draft the below list of links to good quality, openly accessible, and disciplinarily-diverse, scholarly studies of the transnational, transhistorical, romantic comedy film mode, than to haul herself out (in the rain) to the cinema to see Sex and the City 2.

                          Enough said, probably, but if you think she has made the wrong choice, please do leave a comment below... (More links should be added in the next few days - if you have any to suggest, please get in touch).
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