Two new eBooks: On Stillness and Motion Film, and on Contemporary Indonesian Film

Screenshot of a freeze frame from the opening credit sequence of Die Ehe der Maria Braun/The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)

Even before the credits, the opening of the film brings us the scene of a newly married couple and a registry official leaving a German registry office during an air raid. We watch as the excited couple throw themselves to the ground, imploring the official to sign the marriage certificate right there. A sheet of paper floats upward, borne on the gust of wind caused by exploding bombs, and then, in the middle of the visual field, there is a sudden standstill in the form of a freeze-frame, while the soundtrack continues to herald the horror of the approaching artillery. This is followed by the film title in red letters that fill the entire visual field, word after word, as if it were a page in a book. At the end, Fassbinder’s name appears alone on a white backdrop.
    With this standstill, the floating sheet of paper is simultaneously captured and displaced by the film. Due to the non-sync between image and sound, of visual interruption and auditive flow, we are confronted from the very start with two various temporal modi: the time of the film narrative (the postwar years) and the time of the making of the film (the 1970s). At issue here is Fassbinder’s time-place: when the author tells stories and histories, they are always primarily in the present tense. [Christa Blümlinger, writing on the sequence in which the above freeze frame appears, in 'The Figure of Visual Standstill in R.W. Fassbinder’s Films', in Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011)

There's nothing Film Studies For Free likes more than a good open access ebook. So you can imagine how delighted it is to bring its readers news of not one but two such English language, digital artifacts, from different Dutch publishers to boot!

• Katinka van Heeren, Contemporary Indonesian Film; Spirits of Reform and ghosts from the past (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012)
• Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011) 

The contents are listed below, and both books have been added to FSFF's permanent, and continuously updated listing of more than 100 free ebooks in film and moving image studies.

Dank u wel, the Netherlands (and the below authors, editors and publishers!): FSFF salutes you for your pioneering, open access ebook achievements!

Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011)

Contents

The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction - Eivind Røssaak

Philosophies of Motion
The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century “Philosophical Toys” and Their Discourse - Tom Gunning

Digital Technics Beyond the “Last Machine”: Thinking Digital
Media with Hollis Frampton - Mark B.N. Hansen

The Use of Freeze and Slide Motion
The Figure of Visual Standstill in R.W. Fassbinder’s Films - Christa Blümlinger
The Temporalities of the Narrative Slide Motion Film - Liv Hausken

The Cinematic Turn in the Arts
Stop/Motion - Thomas Elsaesser
After “Photography’s Expanded Field” - George Baker
On On Otto: Moving Images and the New Collectivity - Ina Blom

The Algorithmic Turn
Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video:
An Aesthetic of Post-Production - Arild Fetveit
Algorithmic Culture: Beyond the Photo/Film Divide  - Eivind Røssaak

Archives in Between
“The Archives of the Planet” and Montage: The Movement of the Crowd and “the Rhythm of Life” - Trond Lundemo

Katinka van Heeren, Contemporary Indonesian Film; Spirits of Reform and ghosts from the past (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012)

Contents
Preface
Introduction
part 1 film mediation practices
1 new order and surface

Production: The attempt to produce Provokator the New Order way 26 Distribution and exhibition: Trade and charade in cinemas and film formats
Exhibition and consumption: Film festivals as forums for national imaginations and representations
Conclusion

2 reformasi and underground

Reformation in film production: Kuldesak and film independen
Distribution and exhibition of new media formats: ‘Local’ Beth versus ‘transnational’ Jelangkung
Alternative sites of film consumption: Additional identifications and modes of resistance Conclusion

part 2 discourse practices
3 histories, heroes, and monumental frameworks

Film history: New Order patronage of film perjuangan and film pembangunan
Film and historiography: Promotion and representations of New Order history
‘Film in the framework of’: G30S/PKI and Hapsak
Conclusion

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

New Issue of SCOPE: CIA, Resnais, German cinema and Dead Cities in the Cinema

Framegrab from I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007). Read Elena Woolley's article on "lone-survivor-in-the-dead-city" films

A quick post from Film Studies For Free today, simply to deliver the, as ever, excellent news that Scope, the online journal of film and tv studies, has published a new issue. Some very good articles and a marvellous array of book and film reviews, and conference reports, await you when you click on all the links below. 

Scope Issue 23, June 2012

Articles

• Intelligence Activity in Hollywood: Remembering the 'Agency' in CIA Tricia Jenkins and Matthew Alford
• Toujours sous la neige: Snow, Stasis and Immobility in Alain Resnais' L'Amour mort and Coeurs Jenny Munro
• The Dead City: The Decay of the Urban Oganisation Elena Woolley
• Constructing Consensus: teamWorx's Event Movies and the Cinema of Consensus Andrew Wormald

Book Reviews

• All Book Reviews  [PDF]
• Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms By James Walters; The Fantasy Film By Katherine A. Fowkes A review by Alexander Sergeant
• Global Art Cinema Edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover; Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties By Andrew L. Owen; Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema By Janina Falkowska A review by Billy Budd Vermillion
• Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema By Alistair Fox; The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era By Thomas Schatz A review by Deborah Mellamphy
• Possessed Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema By Stefan Andriopoulos; A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan By Aaron Gerow A review by Irena Hayter
• Ostrannenie Edited by Annie van den Oever; Optical Media By Friedrich Kittler A review by Katerina Loukopoulou
• The Language of Film By Robert Edgar-Hunt, John Marland Steven Rawie;Valuing Films: Shifting Perceptions of Worth Edited by Laura Hubner; Fifty Key American Films Edited by John White and Sabine Haenni A review by Meraj Ahmed Mubarki
• Humphrey Jennings By Keith Beattie; Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain Edited by Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor; From Pinewood to Hollywood: British Filmmakers in American Cinema 1910- 1969 By Ian Scott A review by Paul Elliot
• Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema By Derek Nystrom; He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western By Roderick McGillis A review by Gavin Harper
• The Cinema of India Edited by Lalitha Gopalan; Film in the Middle East and North Africa Edited by Josef Gugler; Bengali Cinema "An Other Nation? By Sharmistha Gooptu A review by Rohit K. Dasgupta 
• Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000 Edited by Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid; Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas By Alison Macor A review by Yusef Sayed

Film and Television Reviews

• All Film and Television Reviews [PDF]
• Jane Eyre  Catherine Paula Han
• J. Edgar Serena Daalmans
• Andy Hardy, Collection 1 Judy Beth Morris
• The Avengers Brady Hammond
• A Dangerous Method Charles Andrews
• The Shore Andrew Grunert

Conference Reports

• All Conference Reports [PDF]
• East Winds: East Asian Cinema and Cultural Crossovers Symposium A report by Pierce Conran
• SCMS 2012: Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference A report by Joan Doagle
• Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Symposium A report by Joanna Kellond
• Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject A report by Ian Pettigrew

All That Film Pastiche Allows: Fifty+ Online Studies

All That Pastiche Allows by Catherine Grant

"[Pastiche] can, at its best, allow us to feel our connection to the affective frameworks, the structures of feeling, past and present, that we inherit and pass on. That is to say, it can enable us to know ourselves affectively as historical beings."
Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)

Film Studies For Free today presents a whole host of links to studies of cinematic pastiche. It begins with the above video -- the latest in FSFF's experiments in videographic comparison -- which is designed to afford its viewers a space for real-time co-contemplation of the opening titles sequences of All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) and its 'pastiche' Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002).

• Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven', in The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 (scroll to p. 194)
• Deborah Allison, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006
• Lee Barron, 'Droogs, electro-voodoo and kyborgs: pastiche, postmodernism and Kylie Minogue live', Nebula, 2009  
• Tilman Baumgärtel, 'Imitation, Indigenization, Assimilation? No, Globalization!: The Cinema of Bobby Suarez', Asia Culture Forum, 2006
• Katherine Biber, 'The Threshold Moment: Masculinity at Home and on the Road in Australian Cinema', Limina, Vol. 7, 2001
• Norman Bryson, 'Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema', Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999
• Cüneyt Çakirlar, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes's Cinema of Queer Pastiche', KÜLT: A Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1, April 2011
• Brigid Cherry, 'From Cult to Subculture: Re­imaginings of Cult Films in Alternative Music Video' Scope, 15, 2010
• Simon Chia-rong Wu, 'Gender Pastiche: Thai Queerness in Beautiful Boxer', Cultural Studies Monthly, 78, 2008
•  E. Anna Claydon, 'British South Asian Cinema and Identity II:'When did Mr Collins become the 'Ugly American'? Representing America in the films of Gurinder Chadha'', South Asian Cultural Studies, 2009, 2 (2)
• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven,' Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, No. 5
• Cynthia Duncan, 'Reading Angeles Mastretta's Arráncame la vida through the Lens of Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema', Rocky Mountain Review, 63.2, 1997
  
• Richard Dyer, 'Tales of Plagiarism And Pastiche', Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2010)  (27 free pages) Book info. 
• Darren Elliott, 'Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Horror Icon in Charles Lum's Indelible', Scope, 15, 2010
• Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood(Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
• Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam University Press, 1996)
• Laura E. Felschow, Todd Haynes: the Public, the Private, and the Performative, PhD Thesis, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, February 1, 2009 
• T Ferrero-Regis, 'Cinema On Cinema: Self-reflexive Memories in Recent Italian History Films', transformationsjournal.org, Issue 3, 2002 
• Lucy Fischer, 'Modernity and Postmaternity: High Heels and Imitation of Life', in Horton, Andrew Horton (ed.), Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)  
• Caryl Flynn,The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
• Catherine Grant, 'In authenticity: Douglas Sirk and the Sirkian Melodrama', Film Studies For Free, September 21, 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day!', Film Studies For Free, July 4, 2010 
• Catherine Grant, New Todd Haynes' Masterclass', Film Studies For Free, November 27, 2011
• Catherine Grant, 'Storytelling sans frontières? On Adaptation, Remaking, Intertextuality, and Transmediality', Film Studies For Free, November 21, 2009
• Val Hill, 'Postmodernism and cinema', in S. Sim (ed.), The Routledge companion to postmodernism (Lndon: Routledge, 2000)
• Dom Holdaway, 'Da fatti realmente accaduti: Performing History in Contemporary Italian Cinema', New Readings 11 (2011)
• Marlie Centawer Huisman, ' Representations of Swinging London in 1960s British Cinema: Blowup (1966), Smashing Time (1967) and Performance (1970)', MA Thesis, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, May 2011
• Kate Ince, 'Francois Ozon's cinema of desire', in Ince (ed.), Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon (Manchester University Press, 2008)
• Shen Jiang, Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1993-2008): A Reflection of China's Socio-Cultural Postmodernity, PhD Thesis, University of Canterbury, 2010
• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003
• Jordan Lavender-Smith, 'Irony Inc.: Parodic-Doc Horror and The Blair Witch Project', Scope, 15, 2010
• James MacDowell, 'Beneath the Surface of Things: Interpretation and Far From Heaven', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 5 (May 31, 2006)
• Norimasa Morita, 'Avant-garde, Pastiche, and Media Crossing: Films of Terayama Shūji', Waseda Global Forum No. 3, 2006
• Chi Hyun Park, Orientalism in U. S. Cyberpunk Cinema from Blade Runner to The Matrix, PhD Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, May 2004
• Jack Post, 'The Ambiguity of Weeping. Baroque and Mannerist Discourses in Haynes’ Far from Heaven and Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows', Image and Narrative, 13.2, 2012 
• James Ricci, Attractions and Negotiations of Film Noir in American Cinema and Culture, PhD Thesis, University of South Florida, April, 2008
• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006
• Timothy Robinson, 'Cultural Value in Historical Pastiche: Reclaiming the Past as Modern ‘Parody’ and Postmodern ‘Pastiche’ in The Hours and Marie Antoinette', Honors Thesis, The College of William and Mary, 2008
• Richard Rushton, 'Douglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation', Screening the Past, Issue 21, 2007
• Rebecca Scherr, '(Not) queering “white vision” in Far from Heaven and Transamerica', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 
• Robert Stam, 'Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage: the Case of Brazilian Cinema', E.I.A.L. ESTUDIOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE, Vol. 9, No. 1, enero-junio 1998 (Cultura visual en América Latina, Editor invitado: John Mraz)
• Sunny Stalter, 'Down With Love/Far From Heaven', Scope, May 2004  
• Will Straw, 'Mannerism in Recent Cinema', Cultural Studies, 1987
• Margaret M. Toscano, 'Homer Meets the Coen Brothers: Memory as Artistic Pastiche in O Brother, Where Art Thou?', Film and History, Volume 39.2, Fall 2009
• Michael Töteberg, 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: All That Fassbinder Allows', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2003
• Mary Traester, 'Hysteria and Ruin: Feminine Immobility And the Problem of Representation in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven', COLT Symposium, April 15, 2008 
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Tony Veale, and M. T. Keane (1997). A Computational Treatment of Metaphoric Blends with Special Regard to Cinematic "Borrowing", in the proceedings of Mind II: Computational Models of Creative Cognition, Dublin, Ireland, 1997
• Sharon Willis, 'Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003 
• Chris Wisniewski, 'Far from Heaven', Reverse Shot, - Proposition 24: Defining a New Queer Cinema', 2009
• Jonathan Wright, '[Review of] Re-remembering History in Contemporary Film: Pam Cook (2005) Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema', Film-Philosophy, 10.1, 2006
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema. PhD thesis, University of Sussex, 2010
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Scope, 15, 2010
• Rie Yamasaki, 'The films of Mitani Kōki: Intertextuality and comedy in contemporary Japanese cinema', New Voices, Volume 4, January 2011

Voyage to Cinema: Studies of the Work of Theo Angelopoulos

Framegrabs from Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα/Voyage to Cythera ( Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1984)

The world needs cinema now more than ever. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Andrew Horton]

Realism? Me? I’ve not a damn thing to do with it. The religious attitude to reality has never concerned me. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Raymond Durgnat in “The Long Take in Voyage to Cythera: Brecht and Marx vs. Bazin and God.” Film Comment 26.6 (November/December, 1990): 43-46]

[Some] complain that Angelopoulos’ films are long, slow and boring, but that is exactly what they are not. They are too short (for the subject matters they cover [...]), quite fast (within the image or sound or the narrative, there is always something occurring) and always fascinating (in the multi-layered way they mix the personal with the political, the aesthetic surface with the deeper meaning, etc.). [Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000]

What is important, what has meaning, is the journey... [and] journeys are through history as well as through a landscape. [Theo Angelopoulos, quoted in Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, 1997: 98]

Today, Film Studies For Free solemnly pays tribute to the monumental cinematic career of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who very sadly died last week while near the set of his film The Other Sea.

David Hudson has collected a wonderful series of links to items of interest to anyone who has been touched by or is studying Angelopoulos's films. Below, as is its memorialising wont, FSFF points its readers in the online direction of a whole host of high quality academic studies of his work, including a number of freely-accessible, book-length items.

• Acquarello, 'Theodoros Angelopoulos', Senses of Cinema, Issue 27, 2003
• Maria Chalkou, Towards the creation of 'quality' Greek national cinema in the 1960s, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
• Hsin-Ning Chang, Viewing the Long Take in Post-World War II Films: A Cognitive Approach, MA Thesis,  Ohio University, 2008 
• Burcu Fikretoglu, 'Gazing at Decay in the Narratives of Theo Angelopoulos and W.G. Sebald', Academia.edu [date unknown]
• Andrew Horton, 'The Greek and Balkan Spirit of Comedy During the Journeys with the Films of Theo Angelopoulos', GreeceTravel.com, [date unknown]
• Smaro Kamboureli, 'Memory under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze', Paper at Performing Identity/Crossing Borders: The Cyprus Symposium: Cicac, 2007
• Angelos Koutsourakis, 'The Desire for History in Lars von Trier’s Europa and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork' , Kinema, Spring 2010
• Antonis Liakos, 'Historical Time and National Space in Modern Greece', Slavic Euroasian Studies, Hokkaido University “Regions in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Present”, Sapporo, Japan, December 14-16, 2005
• Vangelis Makriyannakis, 'Angelopoulos’ Ulysses' Gaze: Where the Old meets the New', Forum, Issue 1 - Origins and Originality, Autumn 2005
• Evangelos Makrygiannakis, Films of Theo Angelopoulos: a voyage in time, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009
• Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000
• Arthur J. Pomeroy, 'The sense of epiphany in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze', Classical Receptions Journal Vol 3. Iss. 2 (2011) pp. 213–226
• Anne Rutherford, 'Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mise en scène and the Senses in Angelopoulos’ Balkans Epic', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Irini Stathi, Eleftherios Tsouris, Nikos Soulakellis, 'Geography as Utopia. From the Rigas Pheraios Map to the Division and Establishment of Borders in the Balkans: An Intercultural Itinerary through the Geography of Ulysses's Gaze', Earth Conference, University of the Aegean, 2008
• Gonda A.H. van Steen, 'Playing by the Censors' Rules? Classical Drama Revived under the Greek Junta (1967-1974)', Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 27.1-2 (2001)
• Lasse Thomassen, 'Heterogeneity, Representation and Justice: Borders and Communities in Angelopoulos’s Balkan Trilogy', originally in D. Morgan and G. Banham (eds), Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 191-210 
• Paris Tsekouras, 'Narrative and historical accuracy in The Travelling Players', Academia.edu [date unknown]
• Katerina Zacharia, '"Reel" Hellenisms: Perceptions of Greece In Greek Cinema, in K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Cutlure, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Ashgate 2008) 

Longtime Companion? HIV/AIDS in thirty years of cinema, media and culture

Images from two 'AIDS film dramas': above, Longtime Companion (Norman René, 1989), a film which, as Emmanuel Levy puts it, carried "the burden of being the first [widely distributed] theatrical movie to deal directly with AIDS"; below, a frame grab from Yesterday (Darrell Roodt, 2004), about a Zulu woman living with AIDS. Read Jean Stuart's and Olaia Cores Calvo's articles on this film.

It was [30] years ago, in the summer of 1981, when society as a whole[, including] the scientific community[,] was faced with an unknown disease that came later to be known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Several films [...] reflected the initial fears and uncertainty, the responses of the different social groups, the fight against ignorance, the [demand for] access to treatment and the suffering of the infected individuals and their families [...] due to this disease. Taking into account that these movies were filmed when these epidemics took place they can actually be considered as [...] historical documents that deserve [to be] analysed by the generations to come. Films such as And The Band Played On; Longtime Companion; Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; Les Nuits Fauves; Angels in America; Yesterday and My Brother... Nikhil have marked [30] years of AIDS history that should not be forgotten by the world. [Adapted from António Pais de Lacerda, 'Cinema as an Historical Document: AIDS in 25 years of Cinema', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 102-113; hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Film Studies For Free today commemorates the twenty-third World AIDS Day in the thirtieth year since the identification of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. The Human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], the lentivirus which causes the syndrome, was identified two years later, in 1983.

FSFF marks this anniversary year with the below entry of links to scholarly resources on the figuration of AIDS/HIV in cinema and culture.

Today's posting was also inspired by a series of film screenings and discussions on 'AIDS and its Melodramas' that have been taking place at the University of Sussex, UK, organised by Michael Lawrence and John David Rhodes. These academic events will continue next term with screenings of Fatal Love (1991), And the Band Played On (1993), Philadelphia (1993) and, one of FSFF's favourites,  Boys on the Side (1995). Please email FSFF if you'd like more details.

• ACT UP NY Webcasts
• Elana D. Anderson, 'Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow: Socio-Cultural Evolution In African Literature and Film', Mosaic African Studies, 2010 
• Carole Blair and Neil Michel, 'The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration', Rhetoric and Public Affairs Vol. 10, No. 4, 2007, pp. 595–626
• Martin P. Botha, 'Post-Apartheid Cinema: A Thematic and Aesthetic Explorations of Selected Short and Feature Films', Ilha do Desterro, Florianópolis, nº 61 p. 225- 267 jul/dez 2011
• Cüneyt Çakirlar, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes's Cinema of Queer Pastiche', KÜLT: A Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1, April 2011
• Jean Carlomusto and Jane Rosett, 'AIDS: A LIVING ARCHIVE™', SandF Online, 2.1, Summer 2003
• Olaia Cores Calvo, 'Yesterday (2004)', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 5.4 (2009):125-130
• David Campbell, The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS: A report for the AIDS, Security and Conflict Initiative, May 2008 
• Brendan Curran, Singin’ in the Scourge: Two AIDS Musicals, Two Political and Cultural Contexts, MA Thesis, Concordia University, April 2011
• Juan Luis Cuesta Jiménez, 'The Constant Gardener or the development of new Therapies', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2.3 (2006): 96-101 
• Ann Cvetkovich, 'AIDS Activism and the Oral History Archive', SandF Online, Summer 2.1, Summer 2003
• Anthony Enns, '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction,7.3, 2007
• Kyle Frackman, 'Out of Time: "Allotemporality" in Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss’ Zurück auf los', queere (t)ex(t)perimente. Eds. Franziska Bergmann, Jennifer Moos, and Claudia Münzing. Freiburg: fwpf-Verlag, 2008
• J.E. García Sánchez, E. García Sánchez and M.L. Merino Marcos, 'Antiviral, antifungal and antiprotozoal agents in the cinema', Revista Española de Quimioterapia, Marzo 2007; Vol. 20 (No 1): 106-111
• Silvia Grassi, 'Like a Carsic River: Gay Independent Cinema from Underground Films to New Queer Cinema and Beyond', Altre modernità/ Otras modernidades/ Autres modernités/ Other Modernities, N. 2 – 10/2009
• Oliver Gruner, Public Politics/Personal Authenticity: A Tale of Two Sixties in Hollywood Cinema, 1986-1994, PhD Thesis, University of East Anglia, August, 2010
• Roger Hallas, 'The Witness in the Archive', SandF Online, 2.1, Summer 2003
• Lucas Hilderbrand, 'Retroactivism', glq, 12.2, 2006
• Jim Hubbard, 'A Report on the Archiving of Film and Video Work by Makers with AIDS', DIVA TV, [date unknown]
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'AIDS Video: To Dream and Dance with the Censor', Jump Cut, No. 52, summer 2010
• Alexandra Juhasz in exchange with Antoinette Burton, 'Feminist history making and Video Remains', Jump Cut, No. 48, winter 2006
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'Alternative AIDS Videos', Cineaste, vol.XXI, nos. 1-2, 1994/5
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'Interview with Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman: ACT UP Oral History Project', CORPUS, Spring 2006
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love,' originally published in The Cinema of Todd Haynes, ed. James Morrison (London:Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Dion Kagan, '[Review of] Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Duke University Press, 2009', Screening the Past, 28, 2010
• Tim Lawrence, ‘AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plurality in Derek Jarman's Blue’ Social Text, 52/53 (Autumn - Winter 1997): 241-264
• Timothy F. Murphy, 'Part One: The Meaning of AIDS', Ethics in an Epidemic: AIDS, Morality, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
• Christo Oberholzer, An Investigation Into Nationalism and National Allegory within South African Post-Apartheid Film, MA Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2006
• António Pais de Lacerda, 'Cinema as an Historical Document: AIDS in 25 years of Cinema', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 102-113
• Georgios Pappas, Savvas Seitaridis, Nikolaos Akritidis, and Epaminondas Tsianos, 'Infectious Diseases in Cinema: Virus Hunters and Killer Microbes', Clinical Infectious Diseases,
• Volume 37, Issue 7, 2003: 939-942
• Monica B. Pearl, 'The City of Brotherly Love: Sex, Race and AIDS in Philadelphia', EnterText 2.3, Summer 2003
• Monica B. Pearl, 'American Grief: The AIDS Quilt and Texts of Witness', Gramma, 08
• Lucia Pérez Ochoa López, 'Philadelphia (1993): View of AIDS when it began to be a treatable disease', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 21-28
• Jean Stuart, 'Yesterday, today … and tomorrow: The future of girlhood in the age of AIDS', AGENDA 79 2009
• Marita Sturken, 'The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions', in Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov, 1996
• Nicoletta Vallorani, 'Path(o)s of Mourning. Memory, Death and the Invisible Body in Derek Jarman’s Blue', Altre modernità/ Otras modernidades/ Autres modernités/ Other Modernities, N. 4 – 10/2010

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