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

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

New JUMP CUT, MOVIE, CINEMA on Deleuze, L'ATALANTE on acting and cinephile directors, CINEMA COMPAR/ATIVE CINEMA on Manny Farber and MUCH MORE


Happy 2015 from Film Studies For Free! Quite a few major online journal launches of Fall 2014 issues didn't make it into FSFF's end of year round up (which did announce new issues of The Cine Files, Mediascape, [in]Transition, NECSUS, Frames and other great items). So links and contents are gathered below for convenience.

As the brilliant Jump Cut issue 56 has just been published, FSFF wanted to rush that news to you, but will also add further links of note to the foot of the entry in the coming days. So do come back to take a look at those.

CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 6 (2014): GILLES DELEUZE AND MOVING IMAGES
    • Edited by Susana Viegas PDF
    • Editorial: Gilles Deleuze and Moving Images, 1-7 PDF by Susana Viegas
    • Abstracts, 8-15 PDF
ARTICLES
    • Cinema: The “Counter-Realization” of Philosophical Problems, by Mirjam Schaub PDF
    • Visual Effects and Phenomenology of Perceptual Control, by Jay Lampert PDF
    • Double-Deleuze: “Intelligent Materialism” Goes to the Movies, by Bernd Herzogenrath PDF
    • Bringing the Past into the Present: West of the Tracks as a Deleuzian Time-Image, by William Brown PDF
    • Thought-Images and the New as a Rarity: A Reevaluation of the Philosophical Implications of Deleuze’s Cinema Books, by Jakob Nilsson PDF
    • Visions of the Intolerable: Deleuze on Ethical Images, by Joseph Barker PDF
    • Artaud Versus Kant: Annihilation of the Imagination in the Deleuze’s Philosophy of Cinema, 
    • Jurate Baranova PDF
    • Para Além da Imagem-Cristal: Contributos para a Identificação de uma Terceira Síntese do Tempo nos Cinemas de Gilles Deleuze, by Nuno Carvalho PDF
BOOK REVIEWS
    • Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, by Niall Flynn PDF
    • Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema, Adam Cottrel PDF

CINEMA COMPAR/ATIVE CINEMA, No. 4, Fall 2014 (English language version)
CINEMA SCOPE Issue 61, 2014, online feature and interview content
JUMP CUT No. 56, fall 2014 (all items below are available here: http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/index.html)

HOLLYWOOD, MAINSTREAM
    • Saving Mr. Banks and building Mr. Brand: the Walt Disney Company in the era of corporate personhood by Mike Budd 
    • The horrors of slavery and modes of representation in 12 Years a Slave and Amistad by by Douglas Kellner
    • Django Unchained—thirteen ways of looking at a black film by Heather Ashley Hayes and Gilbert Rodman 
    • The artificial intelligence of Her By Robert Alpert 
    • Attack the Block: monsters, race, and rewriting South London’s outer spaces by Lorrie Palmer 
    • Class warfare in the Robocop films by Milo Sweedler
    • Pirates without piracy: criminality, rebellion, and anarcho-libertarianism in the pirate film by Michael D. High 
    • Demon debt: 
Paranormal Activity as recessional post-cinematic allegory By Julia Leyda 
    • Wolfen: they might be gods by Tyler Sage
    • As beautiful as a butterfly? Monstrous cockroach nature and the horror film by Robin Murray and Joseph Heuman 
    • U.S. ambivalence about torture: an analysis of post-9/11 films by Jean Rahbar 

TECH AND BUSINESS
    • Hugo. The Artist—specters of film new nostalgia movies and Hollywood’s digital transition
    • by Jason Sperb 
    • The tail wags: Hollywood’s crumbling infrastructure by Jonathan Eig
    • The white flag of surrender? NBC, The Jay Leno Show, and failure on contemporary broadcast television by Kimberly Owczarski 

INTERNATIONAL
    • Inhabiting post-communist spaces in Nimród Antal’s Kontroll by György Kalmár
    • A 'Failed Brotherhood': Polish-Jewish relations and the films of Andrzej Wajda by Tim Kennedy 
    • "Made in Bollywood”: Indian popular culture in Brazil's Caminho das Indias by Swapnil Rai 
    • Of radio, remix, and Rang de Basanti: rethinking film history through film sound by Pavitra Sundar 
    • Cinema and neoliberalism: network form and the politics of connection in Icíar Bollaín’s Even the Rain by Shakti Jaising 
    • The revolution must (not) be advertised: The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos, the discourse of advertising, and the limits of political modernism by Greg Cohen 
    • The film as essay: Jafar Panahi’s search for self in This is Not a Film by Bebe Nodjomi 

BOOKS AND FESTIVALS
    • Buffoon queers by Andrew J. Douglas [Review of Scott Balcerzak, Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013]).
    • Montgomery Clift: or, the ambiguities
    • by David Greven (Review of Elisabetta Girelli, Montgomery Clift, Queer Star [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014])
    • ‘Factory of new film expressions’: Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade festival review by Kamila Kuc 
CLASSICS FROM THE PAST
    • Broken Blossoms—artful racism, artful rape by Julia Lesage
SPECIAL SECTION
ACTIVIST COUNTER-CINEMA
    • Part one: Jump Cut 40th anniversary
      • Introduction by Chuck Kleinhans
      • Marxism and film criticism: the current situation (1977) by Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage
      • Introduction to 
Jump Cut: Hollywood and Counter Cinema (1985) by Peter Steven
      • The Sons and Daughters of Los: culture and community in Los Angeles by David E. James
    • Part two: the current scene, recurring issues
      • Perpetual subversion by Julia Lesage
      • Flying under the radar: notes on a decade of media agitation by Ernest Larson
      • Subversive media: when, why, and where by Chuck Kleinhans
      • Activist street tapes and protest pornography: participatory media culture in the age of digital reproduction by Angela Aguayo
      • Anarchist aesthetics and U.S. video activism by Chris Robé 
    • THE LAST WORD
      • John Hess, award for activism
        • Looking back, deliciously

L'ATALANTE. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS CINEMATOGRÁFICOS N°19You'll need to create a user account for free at this journal but once you have you'll be able to access lots of wonderful articles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial
Pablo Hernández Miñano, Violeta Martín Núñez


Notebook

Dialogue

(Dis)agreements

Vanishing Points
Notebook: Cinephile directors in modern times. When the Cinema Interrogates Itself
Table of Contents
Issue Masthead
2

Editorial
Rebeca Romero Escrivá 5

Notebook

Dialogue

(Dis)agreements

Vanishing Points

MOVIE: A JOURNAL OF FILM CRITICISM Issue 5, 2014 (Edited by Alex Clayton and Kathrina Glitre)
Jim Hillier: 1941 – 2014 - A Tribute
Other Online Items of Note (MANY MORE TO BE ADDED IN THE NEXT DAYS):

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Monday, 11 November 2013

Magnifying Mirror: On Barbara Stanwyck and Film Performance Studies


Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry on the wonderful work of American actress Barbara Stanwyck as well as on film performance studies more generally. Stanwyck's illustrious career began in the 1920s and spanned sixty years. During that period she starred in major films of many genres and worked with some of the most distinguished Hollywood directors. Writing on her work may provide, therefore, an excellent, indeed exemplary case for reflection on film critical methodologies in performance studies.

As well as the usual links to online scholarly work on these topics (scroll down for those), the entry presents, below, an interview with Andrew Klevan, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford. Klevan discusses the rationale behind his recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013). He also talks about some of the issues that arise when film performance is the object of study, around intention and attribution of agency and value.

During the interview, which took place in October this year, Klevan read aloud an excerpt from his book, a reading which inspired, and formed the narration of, the above FSFF video on Stanwyck, MAGNIFYING MIRROR. Klevan also wrote a short statement about the video and about his collaboration with FSFF more generally, which you can also find below.


A Note by Andrew Klevan
I am grateful to Film Studies For Free for highlighting my work, and I hope the expression of some nervousness will not be taken as ungracious. The problem of enlarging on rationale and method as I do in the interview is that, aside from risking accusations of self-importance and self-promotion, by simply stating matters which should, perhaps, remain implicit, one overstates the case, and raises expectations, especially with regard to, what we affectionately call, little books. My answers, drawing out many of the things I tried to do, may create the incorrect impression that the Barbara Stanwyck study is comprehensive and voluminous. (Even the use of expressions such as ‘moment-by-moment’ or ‘movement of meaning’ might suggest an exhaustive sequential tracking.) In fact, one of the compositional aims was to try, using the short form of the little book, to achieve a balance between elaboration and concentration, extraction and distillation. This partly reflects a similar balance achieved in the films and performances, and Catherine Grant’s fascinating video riff, ‘Magnifying Mirror’, which matches the film to my pre-existing text, captures some of this by looping a sequence and in doing so emphasises the moment’s compactness by way of repetition.

I am conscious that [fellow film scholar] E.A. Kaplan is a casualty, and it appears as if her comment on Stella Dallas is singled out where actually quite a few accounts are tested in the course of the study and the isolation is a consequence of uprooting. It is true that I take issue with her assessment, but this is a difference over an interpretation, not a charge against her work more generally, or the value of it. I feel that her account reduces, and overlooks an achievement of the film, but this is something that we are all prone to do. Indeed, much nervousness on my part again as the film returns, insistently, to probe my own description and interpretation – alas too late to make adjustments – but also some satisfaction as film and criticism are reunited. This image/speech track relationship struck me as quite different to a DVD commentary (which is limited by the real time of the film) and the narration of audio-visual criticism (which is conceived in relation to the handling of images). I got the sense of a new form of criticism, using audio-visual material, happily meeting an old form of criticism, using words, and not simply exemplifying the ‘close reading’, but enhancing and interrogating, and more generally revivifying (and magnifying). The iteration in Catherine’s video productively interacts with the distension of written representation. The collaboration with FSFF has illuminated for me the stimulating relationship between commentaries in different forms so that the book gets commented upon in an audio interview and in a video film which in turn gets commented upon in this web statement, allowing the different media to differently elucidate.
Andrew Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. He is author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film and Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. He is the co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism, and is on the editorial boards of MOVIE - A Journal of Film Criticism and Film-Philosophy Journal]

On Barbara Stanwyck

On film performance


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Friday, 7 June 2013

The Cine-Files' special issue on mise-en-scene: Laura Mulvey, Kristin Thompson, V.F. Perkins, Lesley Stern, Adrian Martin, Christian Keathley, Jean Ma, Girish Shambu, John Gibbs and Jesse Green

Scene from the Iranian film Zir-e poost-e shahr/Under the Skin of the City (Rakhshan Bani-E'temad, 2001). Read a study of this film by Laura Mulvey in the new issue of The Cine-Files. Professor Mulvey has recently launched the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) which organises London-based film studies events, many of them with free entry and recorded for global online access. Upcoming BIMI events include some excellent ones on 3D. 

Film Studies For Free was thrilled to learn of the publication of Issue 4 of The Cine-Files. It, in turn, is delighted to feature ten guest scholars (ranging from the top notch to the legendary!) who offer either analysis of a cinematic “moment” or responses to questions about mise-en-scène and the significance of “close reading.” There are two further excellent articles in the issue by Warwick Mules and Mark Balderston. Thank you to The Cine-Files!

Guest contributions: 
Features:

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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, 12 August 2011

New SCREENING THE PAST

Image from After the Rainbow (2009), a two screen video installation by Soda_Jerk, the Australian artist sisters Dom and Dan Angeloro, as discussed in 'The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime' by Andrew Frost
[C]inema is surely a paradoxical object: its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity. That is where its true materiality-effect, today, is situated: in the palpable aura of a mise en scène that is always less than itself and more than itself, not only itself but also its contrary, ever vanishing and yet ever renewed across a thousand and one screens, platforms and dispositifs. [Adrian Martin, 'Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif ', Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011]

Below, Film Studies For Free presents the table of contents to the latest online issue of Screening the Past.

It's a special issue on the 'intermediality' of cinema, guest-edited by the brilliant and influential Australian film critic and scholar Adrian Martin. It begins with a marvellous contribution by him to the topic. There's also an unmissable 'rerun' of Nicole Brenez's remarkable essay 'Incomparable Bodies'.

Admirers of Martin's work should also be more than excited by the news that the first issue of LOLA, a new film journal edited by him and the film writer and blogger extraordinaire Girish Shambu, is "coming soon"...


Screening the Past, Issue 31 - Cinema Between Media 
(Incorporating U-matic to YouTube, a selection of papers from a National Symposium celebrating three decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking edited by Therese Davis).

First Release

Dossier: U-Matic to YouTube

Classics and Re-runs

Reviews

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Thursday, 7 April 2011

Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE (1944)

"In a world of flickering images,
Elizabeth Taylor was a constant star."


This video offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of film performance, cinematic staging, and gender in relation to Elizabeth Taylor's brief, uncredited role as doomed-child character Helen Burns in the 1944 film Jane Eyre, directed by Robert Stevenson, and adapted from Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel of the same name.

Film Studies For Free was far from home, just over two weeks ago, when the remarkable film actor and person Elizabeth Taylor passed away. It was very sorry not to be able to respond to this event as soon as it might have liked. Taylor was FSFF's author's favourite Hollywood star by some distance.

David Hudson has worked hard to gather links to an astonishing range of online tributes to Taylor. FSFF wanted to add to these, but not simply with its own customary list of links to any related (in this case, rather scant) online scholarly resources.

It decided upon the creation of a relatively self-contained audiovisual memorial in the form of the above contemplation, Framing Incandescence - the second in FSFF's new, video primer series.

As befits a 'Primer', rather than aiming to generate completely new insights, this 'rich text object' attempts, within the time-space of the average YouTube fan clip, to assemble and combine quotations from existing film scholarship on its topic with sequences from the film in question in order to provide a meaningful, scholarly and affective, immersive experience. Making fair use of the possibilities for moving image studies offered by online accessibility, video primers might well profit from feeling a little like fan videos and introductory film studies all at once.

Framing Incandescence certainly comments on the fetishism and fetishisation of the star image of Elizabeth Taylor at the same time as it willingly deploys that fetishism in its own rhetoric and, indeed, it practices tactical forms of 'possessive spectatorship', such as those Laura Mulvey points to, in her recent work, as characteristic of film viewing in the digital age.

For the quotations in this particular study, FSFF is especially indebted to the work of film scholar Gaylyn Studlar in her brilliant essay on Taylor's performances as a child actor in her three 1944 films (Jane Eyre, The White Cliffs of Dover and National Velvet). This essay appears in Tamar Jeffers McDonald's fascinating 2010 collection Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film (Wayne State University Press). Other sources and related texts of interest are listed below.

The makers of Jane Eyre cast two further, wonderful, child stars from the 1940s in more central roles than that of Taylor: Peggy Ann Garner (featured extensively in the video primer) and Margaret O'Brien. If you are interested in the concept, practices and history of the child actor/child star, and issues of juvenile performance more generally, you may well want to know about an upcoming conference precisely on this topic. Please scroll down further in this entry to find out more. 


Further related reading and texts cited by the 'Framing Incandescence' video primer:
  • David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)
  • Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic  (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1992)
  • Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) [Dyer's reference to tuberculosis as 'White Death' is on p. 209)
  • Delphine Letort,' Diverging Interpretations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847): Franco Zeffirelli’s and Robert Stevenson’s Screen Adaptations', Revue LISA/LISA e-journal online here
  • Susan McLeland, ''Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood's Last Glamour Girl', in Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett (eds), Swinging single: representing sexuality in the 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
  • Jane O'Connor, Cultural Significance of the Child Star (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)
  • Jane O'Connor, 'Beyond Social Constructionism: A Structural Analysis of the Cultural Significance of the Child Star', Children and Society, Vol. 23 (2009), pp. 214-225
  • Momin Rahman, '[Review] Jane O'Connor, The Cultural Significance of the Child Star...', Canadian Journal of Sociology 33(3) 2008, pp. 752-754: online here
  • Diana Serra Cary, Hollywood's Children (Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1978, 1997)
  • Gaylyn Studlar, 'Velvet's Cherry: Elizabeth Taylor and Virginal English Girlhood' in Tamar Jeffers McDonald (ed.), Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010)
  • Emma Wilson, Cinema's Missing Children (London: Wallflower Press, 2003)
FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS 



Child Actors/Child Stars: Juvenile Performance on Screen
A conference co-hosted by the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, and the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex. 
To be held at the David Puttnam Media Centre, University of Sunderland
8-9 September, 2011
 This conference seeks to build on recent scholarly interest in screen performance by focusing on the contribution of child actors to the history of international film and television. From the popular child stars of Hollywood to the child actors working in popular television and the non-professional children ubiquitous throughout ‘world cinema,’ the child performer is a prominent figure across a diverse range of media. However, the child actor is rarely considered in discussions of screen performance or of the representation of childhood: this conference will be the first of its kind to be focused exclusively on the work of children in and for film and television. We welcome papers that discuss particular child stars and performers and/or particular performances by children, as well as papers that consider more general historical and theoretical questions related to the child actor’s presence on the screen and their position in film and television cultures and industries. 
Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Dr. Karen Lury (University of Glasgow), author of The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales (2010).
Confirmed Special Guest: Jon Whiteley, the former child actor, will talk about his film career and his experiences making Hunted (Charles Crichton, 1952), The Little Kidnappers (Philip Leacock, 1953), Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955) and The Spanish Gardener (Philip Leacock, 1956).
(Further Speakers/Special Guests to be announced)
The conference will comprise both traditional panels (consisting of papers of 20-25 minutes) and workshops (consisting of 10 minute long position papers that outline a key idea/theme/ argument or offer close analysis of a moment of child performance in film). Please clearly mark your submission ‘panel’ or ‘workshop’. We hope the conference will both represent existing scholarship and inspire and encourage further work, and so we welcome contributions that are speculative and experimental.  We are interested in papers on the following topics but would also welcome proposals on other areas as well:
the training and schooling of child actors; the craft and labour of the child actor; notions of agency and control; different traditions of child acting and how child acting operates within different national/historical/cultural contexts and on the small (tv) as opposed to big screen (cinema); the critical reception of children’s performances/the child as actor; the relationship between child acting and child stardom (e.g. the contribution that performance makes to the formation/articulation of child star identity; the notion of the child star as performer); the child actor’s transition to child star; the transition from child to adolescent (or adult) performer; adolescent performances in film and/or television; how child performance operates within the context of genre; the child’s voice as an aspect of performance; voice/body relations in child performance; the dynamics involved when children perform with adult actors/stars; the work of the child actor in children’s vs. non-children’s cinema/television;  children performing with animals; ensemble child acting;  the performative spaces in which children find scope to act; child acting during the silent vs. sound era;  the notion of the child as performer in the animated film;  collaborations between child actors and particular directors or stars;   professional vs. non-professional child acting.
 It is hoped that selected papers from the conference will be published in the form of an edited book collection. Please send abstracts (no more than 250 words) to our conference email address by 15 April 2011. Pre-constituted panels of 3 speakers are welcome. Acceptance notices will be issued by 6 May 2011. Our conference website is available at http://childacting.wordpress.com/ and will be updated with registration and other details in the coming weeks. 
Any general enquiries should be addressed to the conference co-organisers: Susan Smith and Michael Lawrence.
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