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

Monday, 21 October 2013

SCREENING THE PAST 37 and LA FURIA UMANA 17




Film Studies For Free is under the cosh of a few deadlines right now (there are some great things to come at this here open access campaigning website in the next weeks!).

But it has temporarily cast off its work shackles to rush you tidings of two new ejournal issues: the latest Screening the Past, co-edited by Adrian Martin and Anna Dzenis, and replete with Part One of a brilliant dossier on Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema and a marvellous essay by Nicole Brenez, among other treasures (Hediger, Martin and Tofts, Phelps); and the very welcome return online of the multilingual La furia umana (whose website, and fabulous archive [soon to return fully], were devastated by a malware attack), edited by Toni D'Angela and replete with dossiers on Joseph Losey and Bertrand Bonello, and a marvelous essay by Nicole Brenez, among other treasures (Ramani, Calder Williams, Small, to cite just some anglophone ones)!

Scroll down for all the wonderful contents. FSFF will be back properly soon!


SCREENING THE PAST 37, 2013

Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema (Part 1)
First Release
Reviews
 Classics and Re-runs

LA FURIA UMANA 17, 2013

Editorial: T.D. / La critique comme concaténation

Confidential report
D'UNE CRITIQUE DE CINÉMA DIGNE DE SON NOM (EN FRANCE)
NICOLE BRENEZ / La Critique comme concept, exigence et praxis

JOSEPH LOSEY
BERTRAND BONELLO
Prima linea
Histoires du cinéma
L'occhio che uccide
Flaming creatures
The new world
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Monday, 5 November 2012

Belén Vidal's book, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic

Belén Vidal, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Vidal is lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, co-editor (with Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones) of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Heritage Film: Nation Genre and Representation (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

This definitive work offers a new approach to the period film at the turn of the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which contemporary cinema recreates the historical past. This book explores the relation between visual motifs and cultural representation in a range of key films by James Ivory, Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion, among others. Looking at the mannerist taste for citation, detail and stylisation, the author argues for an aesthetic of fragments and figures central to the period film as an international genre. Three key figures - the house, the tableau and the letter - structure a critical journey through a selection of detailed case studies, in relation to changing notions of visual style, melodrama, and gender. This seeks to place this popular but often undervalued genre in a new light and to rethink its significance in the context of key debates in film studies.

Film Studies For Free had a very pleasant surprise, today, when it discovered that Belén Vidal's remarkable book is the latest Amsterdam University Press publication to be distributed as an Open Access ebook. The table of contents is given below.

This truly excellent volume has been added to FSFF's permanent listing of free Film Studies ebooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!

Introduction – Period Film and the Mannerist Moment - Fragments and Figures - An International Genre - Mannerism: The Possibilities of a Conservative Aesthetic

Chapter 1 – A Poetics of Figuration - The Belated Moment of Mannerism - Pastiche and the Reality Effect - From the Figurative to the Figural - Classical/Post-classical: Adaptation, Film Writing and the Technological Narrative - Credits Roll: The Figure as Threshold

Chapter 2 – Present in the Past: The House - Nostalgia Interrupted: The House and its Ghosts - Home and (Dis)Inheritance: Howards End -The Collector and the House-Museum: The Golden Bowl and End of Period - Melodrama and the Descriptive Mode: The Age of Innocence -Fidelity to the Past and the Melancholic Imagination: Woman as Ghost - The House of Mirth or, Time and Woman

Chapter 3 – Time and the Image: The Tableau - Still Images/Moving Narratives: The Tableau Effect - The Shot-Tableau: From Pregnant Moment to Hieroglyph -The Portrait as Fetish - Portraits and Tableaux in the Feminist Imagination - Deframings: The Portrait of a Lady - Double-Framing the Mythologies of the Female Artist: Artemisia - Vision, Blindness and the Displacement of Trauma - The Governess or, the Woman in Camera

Chapter 4 – The Scene of Writing: The Letter - Textual Erotics: Reading the Letter as Object and Figure - The Letter that Arrives Too Late: Figuration and Melodramatic Temporality - Letters and Spatial Displacement - The Love Letter and the Queer Encounter: Onegin - Imaginary Landscapes of Loss: To Those Who Love - Truncated Narratives, Textual Possibilities: Atonement and the Interrupted Histories of the European Period Film.

Conclusion – Second Sight: Reviewing the Past, Figuring the Present - Notes - Bibliography - Index of Film Titles - Index of Names and Subjects
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Tuesday, 21 August 2012

On 'Acid Aesthetics' and Contemporary Cinematic Stylistic 'Excess' - In Memory of Tony Scott (1944-2012)

Last updated August 30, 2012
A video tribute to Tony Scott, "[A] vigorous and energetic filmmaker extraordinaire"
 
Filmmaking is like painting…Every stroke or every color impacts another and you build film on the canvas and you get ideas from the last stroke.
 [Tony Scott, audio commentary, Domino DVD]
[T]he minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning. Style is the use of repeated techniques which become characteristic of the work; these techniques are foregrounded so that the spectator will notice them and create connections between their individual uses. Excess does not equal style, but the two are closely linked because they both involve the material aspects of the film. Excess forms no specific patterns which we could say are characteristic of the work. But the formal organization provided by style does not exhaust the material of the filmic techniques, and a spectator's attention to style might well lead to a noticing of excess as well. [...] Probably no one ever watches only these non-diegetic aspects [...] through an entire film. Nevertheless, they are constantly present, a whole "film" existing in some sense alongside the narrative film we tend to think of ourselves as watching. [Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess', Ciné-Tracts, 1.2, Summer 1977, pp. 55-56]
Hollywood action scenes became ‘impressionistic,’ rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it. [David Bordwell, 'A Glance at Blows', Observations on Film Art, September 28, 2008]
In classical continuity styles, space is a fixed and rigid container, which remains the same no matter what goes on in the narrative; and time flows linearly, and at a uniform rate, even when the film’s chronology is scrambled by flashbacks. But in post-continuity films, this is not necessarily the case. We enter into the spacetime of modern physics; or better, into the “space of flows”, and the time of microintervals and speed-of-light transformations, that are characteristic of globalized, high-tech financial capital.  [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]
The essential characteristic of the acid aesthetic is the employment of early twentieth century hand-crank cameras. Loaded with high-speed reversal film, they are manually cranked forwards and backwards during the shooting, and afterwards cross-processed in an inappropriate developer. The results are quite extreme and fairly unpredictable: multiple exposures within one or more images, high contrasts and de-saturated colors, abrupt visual jolts of overexposed lighting, increased grain activity and discernible smears, cracks and trails on the frame, which add an air of physical authenticity. Film becomes tangible in this aesthetic equation. The analogue form, generally masked in the classical continuity style, is revealed, indeed placed in the foreground. Footage from digital cameras further provides an occasional visual counterpoint to the stylized primitivism of the hand-crank aesthetic, presenting crisp, overly saturated images, which seem, by contrast, manufactured and purely synthetic. The result is a dialectic of control and chaos, with the latter as the defining crux. [...] What becomes clear here is that Scott’s acid aesthetics put on display the cinematic apparatus itself, the process of constructing moving images, both in analogue and digital form. The resulting casualty is the concept of filmic realism. The gained impression is not the order of continuity but the chaos of stylistic transparency, an illustration of the formal potentialities of film, unrestrained by storytelling conventions.
[...] A blend of analogue and digital filmmaking lays bare the inner mechanics of cinema, its texture, emphasizing the process of manipulating and creating moving images. Film, in this regard, can be conceptualized as an enormous canvas, to be filled with color. It is not a coincidence that Tony Scott was trained as a visual artist and generally views himself as such, a cinematic painter. Thus, he constructs rather than documents images, both in the camera and on a post-production computer setup. In Scott’s hands, cinema rediscovers its ability for overt stylization, not eroding, but at least de-privileging what Christian Metz calls the realistic cinema-effect, in favor of a display of cinematic technique. In the words of Lev Manovich, cinema is then “no longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush”. And indeed Scott’s filmmaking transcends the mere realm of visual representation. Wielding the camera like a brush, and similar to Alexandre Astruc’s pen, the caméra-stylo, he sprays, splashes and splatters paint onto the canvas, producing an expressionistic chaos, reminiscent of paintings by Jackson Pollock. Notwithstanding the overt experimentalism, all this activity is framed by the generic conventions of Hollywood story material. The margins of Scott’s canvas are defined by the tenets of traditional and, with regard to Man on Fire and Domino, arguably quite clichéd narrative. In this regard, Scott’s cinematic paintings become more than just a display of style, namely an unrestrained sensory assault of visual abstraction that, in a postmodern twist of meta-textual discourse, exposes the process of moving image construction, and thereby reconfigures the traditional notion of what mainstream cinema should look like. [Excerpts from Matthias Stork, 'Acid Aesthetics: Tony Scott's Cinema of Chaos', SWTX Popular and American Culture Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2012]
I have cautiously championed Tony Scott’s recent work because at least he’s willing to go all the way, however misguided the direction. From Spy Games on, he has stuck to the credo that too much is never enough. His technique is swaggering and undisciplined, mannered to the nth degree. Yet I find his fevered visuals more genuinely arresting than the safe noodlings of most of today’s mainstream cinema. Man on Fire and Déja Vu reheat their genre leftovers into something spicy, if not nourishing, while Domino, the cinematic equivalent of hophead graffiti, wraps its sleazy characters in a visual design apparently inspired by the glowing interior of a peepshow booth.  [David Bordwell, '50 Days of Summer Movies Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009, hyperlink added by FSFF]
Tony Scott’s need to push the boundaries of the postclassical into the classical-plus and the hyperclassical with Man on Fire and Domino suggests a growing impatience with intensified continuity and the postmodern condition. In Top Gun and even True Romance the audience can easily float with the surface structure and identify with the fantasy of transcending both physical space and cultural time. But in Man on Fire and Domino the audience cannot ignore the deaths of Denzel Washington, Edgar Ramirez, and Mickey Rourke, the irrevocable loss of continuity, and the status of the image not as synergistic decoration or digital simulacrum, but as a symptom and agent of cultural flux and despair. Even in Deja Vu, which retreats somewhat from the volatile aesthetic of Man on Fire and Domino, Scott makes postclassical narrative hyperclassical by allowing Denzel Washington to inhabit the past and present simultaneously. Deja Vu, with its post-Katrina New Orleans, opening terrorist attack, and urgent desire to traverse time and prevent the death of Paula Patton, suggests a shell-shocked United States unable to understand the past or ponder the future — Denzel, in a Butterfly Effect-like matrix of temporal frequency and repetition, dies in one narrative thread even as he emerges unscathed in another. Scott pushes the boundaries of narrative time and space so far he doesn’t need the vomit comet or Domino-Vision to achieve the same measure of indeterminacy. Man on Fire, Domino, and Deja Vu suggest that the only sin Tony Scott has committed is not to anticipate the hyperclassical and the classical-plus sooner. [Larry Knapp, 'Tony Scott and Domino — Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical', Jump Cut, 50, 2008]

Film Studies for Free was shocked, like everyone else, by the news of Tony Scott's death yesterday. Following the news, much of the day was spent reading online assessments of his important filmmaking career.

These frequently centered, of course, on the role of 'excessive style' in his work, and its (some would say, concomitant) lack of narrative motivation. The ground was thus laid for today's tribute list of more than fifty links to academic studies centering on the debates about cinematic 'excess', as well as on issues of intensified (or 'post'-, or 'Chaos') continuity in contemporary film aesthetics.

Rather incredibly, at the weekend, Matthias Stork, talented author of the video essay series on Chaos Cinema, had sent FSFF a link to a draft version of a new video essay featuring Tony Scott's work, which explored some related issues regarding contemporary film aesthetics. Following yesterday's awful news, Stork worked around the clock to develop that essay to provide an important tribute to Scott's work. You can see the video at the top of this entry, and also at Stork's Vimeo page Cine-Essais.

For more tributes to Scott, an essential round up is given at David Hudson's post devoted to 'Tony Scott, 1944 – 2012' at Fandor's Keyframe Daily website.

A very big Danke schön goes to Matthias Stork for all his essential contributions to this entry. 
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Thursday, 26 May 2011

30+ articles from the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture

Frame grab from The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928). Read Bo Florin's article on this film
[Traditionally, aesthetics] has been based on national perspectives and contexts, as well as contained within the limits of specific disciplines. However, the changing society has made this focus all too narrow. Due to globalization, media and territories merge and move in new ways, where regional, national, international, and global perspectives increasingly integrate. New contexts and new aesthetic strategies are also created, and traditional boundaries and hierarchies become transgressed, for example, between high brow and popular culture, or between art and technology. Aesthetics as well as culture thus need to be discussed and interpreted across the disciplines, through different media, over territorial borders. Finally, this is also a strong argument for Open Access publishing: to constitute a global platform and an interface for interdisciplinary discourse—free for anybody to read. [from first JAC Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson and John Sundholm]
Film Studies For Free had been meaning to post something about the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture for quite a while. It's an online open access journal, hence one very much after this blog's's heart, with a high percentage of very good quality film-studies related articles that FSFF has frequently linked to on Twitter.

Today, JAC published an excellent dossier on Transnational Cultural Memory, an event which provided a wonderful prompt to gather together, in one place, links to everything that JAC has published to date. And below, that is just what you will find.

FSFF has also added JAC to its permanent listing of excellent, Open Access film and moving image studies journals. 

Vol. 1 (2009)
Vol. 2 (2010)

Vol 3 (2011)

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Tuesday, 21 December 2010

Film Studies and Aesthetics video and audio resources from the University of Kent

Image of a domestic interior in A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954). Listen to John David Rhodes's talk on the encounter between cinema and modernist American domestic architecture, in relation to this film and others.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you glad tidings of the very high quality, audio and video, Film Studies research resources that have been generously shared through the University of Kent website.  

As FSFF's author well knows, having been fortunate enough to work there for a decade, Kent is one of the largest and best university centres in Europe dedicated to Film Studies. Film research there, in both theory and practice (faculty include the world-leading scholars Murray Smith and Elizabeth Cowie, as well as the award-winning film-makers Clio Barnard and  Sarah Turner), is currently centred in four broad areas: national cinemas – form and history: North American, European, Latin American, Asian; the digital in film; the  documentary film; and, especially, film aesthetics, the latter often in collaboration with the interdisciplinary ‘Aesthetics Research Group’.

Some of these interests, and plenty more besides, are beautifully reflected in the amazing wealth of recordings of conferences, symposia and seminars directly linked to below. Just feast your eyes and ears on them.

Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image

Audio Resources

  • "The Art of Not Playing to Pictures’ in British Cinemas, 1908-1914" Dr Jon Burrows (University of Warwick) Recent scholarship on musical practices in the silent era argues that by the end of the 1900s and throughout the 1910s the typical cinema musician was a lone pianist who occupied a subordinate position in relation to the projected image and provided forms of accompaniment which ignored traditional musical logic and obediently responded instead to the dictates of narrative logic. Using a variety of evidential sources available in the UK (cinema licensing records, police inspection files, trade paper debates) my paper will argue the contrary: that miniature orchestras were extremely common in British cinemas before the First World War, and that, well into the feature film era, careful synchronisation of music and image was probably the exception rather than the rule. Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "Theory and Practice in British Film Schools" Prof Duncan Petrie (University of York) Film and media education in the UK has long been characterised by a fundamental polarisation between theory and practice. This is most clearly manifest in the widespread separation between academic study and hands-on production training within University and College departments and programmes...Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "Easy Living: The Modernist House and Cinematic Space“ Dr John David Rhodes (University of Sussex) In this paper I will look at a series of encounters—both real and imaginary—between cinema and modernist American domestic architecture. The paper moves from the sets of A Star is Born (Cukor, 1954), to the short experimental film House (1954)...Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism" Prof Lucia Nagib (University of Leeds) This paper will address world cinema through an unusual theoretical model, based on an ethics of realism. The juxtaposition of the terms ‘world cinema’, ‘ethics’ and ‘realism’ creates a tension intended to offer a productive alternative to traditional oppositional binaries such as popular vs art cinemas, fiction vs documentary films, Hollywood vs world cinema... Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
University of Kent Aesthetics Research Group
Audio and video resources:
Kendall Walton and The Aesthetics of Photography and Film (2007)
Jerrold Levinson: Key Concepts in Aesthetics (2008-09)
Research Seminars (ongoing)
Art, Aesthetics and the Sexual (2009)
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Tuesday, 18 May 2010

Bazinian, Neo-Bazinian, and Post-Bazinian Film Studies


Film Studies For Free decided to round up some classy links today to studies either by the hugely influential film critic André Bazin (1918-1958), co-founder of the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, or by those who use or comment upon his work in their own contributions to film studies. As the below, openly accessible works more than amply show, even in this the digital film age, Bazin is an earlier generation film theorist who keeps on giving to the discipline that he, as much as anyone else, helped to found.

Online Baziniana: 
 Post/Neo-Baziniana:
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