On David Lean: the Centenary Lectures from Queen Mary, University of London

Section from a frame grab from A Passage to India (David Lean, 1985)

Film Studies For Free only just bumped into the below videoed lectures which have been archived online for some time, possibly even since 2008 when they were recorded. They all treat the topic of David Lean, British film director, editor, producer and screenwriter.

What a truly wonderful resource they are, brought to you by the rather fantastic Film Studies department at Queen Mary, University of London. Two upcoming FSFF blogposts will bring you yet more fabulous resources from the brilliant staff in that department, but in the meantime it hopes that you will enjoy the resources linked to below.

David Lean, 100th Anniversary Conference 

At Queen Mary, University of London,
24th - 25th July 2008

"David Lean is one of the outstanding figures of British film history. A much sought-after film editor during the 1930s, he made his début as a director with In Which We Serve in 1942. He went on to direct such acclaimed films as Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1985). This centenary conference offered an opportunity both to celebrate his career and to evaluate the nature of his achievement."

Click on the images below to launch QuickTime video files of the lectures:

Mark Glancy, Queen Mary, University of London

David Lean and Noel Coward: Authorship and In Which We Serve

Anthony Reeves, trustee of the David Lean Foundation

Anthony Reeves gives a brief introduction to the work of the David Lean Foundation

Linda Kaye, Senior Researcher, British Universities Film & Video Council

David Lean and the Newsreels (1930-1931)

Jeremy Hicks, Queen Mary, University of London

In Which We Serve... The Story of a Ship...Those Who Serve at Sea: The International Reception of David Lean's Directorial Début.

Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth

International Conference: ANTONIONI 1912-2012 (Part 1 of 2)

This event on March 30, 2012, was part of: Homage to Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) held at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, to mark the centenary year of the Italian director’s birth organized jointly by the Department of Italian Studies and the Department of Cinema Studies, NYU.

Above: PANEL 1: Richard Allen (NYU), ‘Hitchcock, Antonioni, and the Wandering Woman’ and Karen Pinkus (Cornell), ‘Automation, Autonomia, Anomie’; PANEL 2: John David Rhodes (Sussex), ‘Antonioni and Geopolitical Abstraction’ and Karl Schoonover (Warwick), ‘Antonioni's Toxicology’

International Conference: ANTONIONI 1912-2012 (Part 2 of 2)

Above: PANEL 3 Screening of N.U. (11’, 1948) and discussion with David Forgacs and Ara Merjian (NYU) Matilde Nardelli (UCL) 'Antonioni and the Cultures of Photography’ PANEL 4 Michael Siegel (Brown), ‘From Identificazione to Investigazione: Looking at Looking in Late Antonioni’ Francesco Casetti (Yale), ‘The Remains of the Modern’ PANEL 5 Eugenia Paulicelli (CUNY), David Forgacs (NYU), John David Rhodes (Sussex)

Approaching the figure and work of Michelangelo Antonioni a century after his birth, one is confronted with a number of persistent critical tropes about his oeuvre, with a substantial, if in great part dated, body of critical work and, perhaps, also with the sense that all has already been said and written on the director of the malady of feelings, of filmic slowness and temps mort, of the crisis of the postwar bourgeoisie, of epistemological uncertainties, of modernist difficulty and even boredom, of aestheticism and the hypertrophy of style, of narrative opacity. And yet, Antonioni today powerfully escapes the reach of old categorisations that have attempted to congeal his figure once and for all into an inert monument of modern cinema. His continued influence on world film-makers and the new pressing questions that his films raise today for contemporary audiences call for a renewed critical effort. [Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)]

Despite Antonioni’s deep concerns about scientific logic and any objective representation of reality, in purely formal terms his work is always defined by a clear tension between what I would call on the one hand a documentary impulse, and on the other a drive towards fiction pushed at times to the level of melodrama.

[... H]owever hollowed-out and experimental Antonioni’s works become, they always constitute fictions since they present characters in artificial situations. As Antonioni himself put it, his primary interest lies in the moment when the context or environment suddenly takes on “relief.” Which is to say, his hybrid narratives marked by temporal disjunction, disorientation, black holes, ellipses, and a lack of resolution serve to provide just enough justification for human figuration, however “unnaturally” heightened and stylized, to take hold. This recourse to melodrama, broadly defined, offered Antonioni a means of shortcircuiting and sculpting the Real in slowed-down, distended form in order to capture it as a series of tableaux vivants. [...]

Alert to the tensions in the spatiotemporal relations between people, objects, and events, the director must, according to Antonioni, engage with a “special reality” and be “committed morally in some way.” What this means in practice is dedramatizing the narrative event in order to focus attention on the physical context that both makes it possible but also eludes it. Antonioni propels his protagonists into new or alien environments, and we follow them almost ethnographically as they develop new perceptual powers in order to negotiate their changed conditions'. [James S. Williams, 'The Rhythms of Life: An Appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni, Extreme Aesthete of the Real', Film Quarterly (Fall Issue 2008, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 46-57), pp. 50-52 - my emphasis]

Today, Film Studies For Free gleefully celebrates the publication online of just under seven hours of videoed content from an excellent, recent conference in New York City that its author had really wished she'd been able to attend. Now -- virtually -- she (and you) can! 

The conference took a timely new look at the work of FSFF's favourite Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni one hundred years on from the year of his birth. It followed on from the recent publication of an excellent, similarly inspired, BFI/Palgrave collection of work on Antonioni edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes. 

Rhodes, a highly esteemed (and much loved!) colleague of FSFF's humble scribe, appears in the video frame still at the top of this post, and throughout both embedded videos. He was one of the organisers of, and main contributors to, the NYU conference. A very generous sample excerpt from his and Rascaroli's book may be found here.

To accompany the truly excellent videos, FSFF has assembled a rather fabulous list of links to other online and openly accessible studies of Antonioni's work. If you know of any significant resources missing below, please leave a link in the comments. Grazie!

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Antonioni's birthplace of Ferrara between September 30, 2012 and January 6, 2013, you'll be able to catch an excellent exhibition about his work, which opens following a public celebration of the filmmaker on the day of his birth itself (September 29). You can find more information here. Thanks to Antonioni scholar Ted Perry for his tip off about this event. Do look out for his new book on him which should be out next year.

• Paolo Bartoloni, 'Blanchot and Ambiguity, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.4 (2010)
• Michael Bloom, 'Fragile Images and Concrete Things: Indirect Subjectivity and the Externalization of The Soul in Michelangelo Antonioni's Tetralogy', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• David Brancaleone, 'Part 2 of 'The Thin Line Between Documentary and Fiction'', Experimental Conversations, Issue 8, 2011
• James Brown, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', Senses of Cinema, 20, 2002
• James Brown, 'Il Grido: Modernising the Po', Senses of Cinema, 26, 2003
• Peter Brunette, 'Introduction [excerpt]', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Peter Brunette, 'Blow-up', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Ken Burke and Héctor Mario Cavallari, 'Julio Cortázar and Michelangelo Antonioni: Words, Images, and the Limits of Verbal and Visual Representation', Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism, 05/20/10
• Bert Cardullo, 'Introduction', in Cardullo (ed.), After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films; Essays and Interviews (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009)
• James Cisneros, 'How to Watch the Story of Film Adaptation. Cortázar, Antonioni, Blow-Up', Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, n° 2, 2003
• Jonathan Dawson, The Passenger', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
• Laurie N. Ede, '[Review of Murray Pomerance's] Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011]', Screening the Past, 33, 2011
• R. Bruce Elder, 'Antonioni's Tragic Vision: Style, Fonn and Idea in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, with Especial Emphasis on His Masterpiece, Il deserto rosso', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 1.2, 1991
• Hamish Ford, 'Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Deleuze’s Time-Image', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, Sept-Oct 2003
• Matthew Gandy, 'Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert', originally in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (2) (2003)
• Peter Goldman, 'Blowup, Film Theory, and the Logic of Realism', Anthropoetics 14, no. 1 (Summer 2008)
• Absjørn Grønstad, 'Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up', Film Journal, 9, 2004
• Mike Grost on Antonioni
• Christine Henderson, 'The Trials of Individuation in Late Modernity: Exploring Subject Formation in Antonioni's Red Desert' PDF, Film-Philosophy, 15.1, 2011
• Penelope Houston, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', originally in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980
• Ian Johnston, 'We’re Not Happy and We Never Will Be: On Cronaca di un amore', Bright Lights Film Journal, 53, 2006
• Robert Philip Kolker The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (passim.), originally published 1982
• Little Rabbit's Antonioni Archive (thanks to Mike Grost for the link)
• Gaetana Marrone, 'A Cinematic Grand Tour of Sicily: Irony, Memory and Metamorphic Desire from Goethe to Tornatore', California Italian Studies, 1(1), 2010
• 'David Martin-Jones, '[Review of Brunette's book on Antonioni', Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 50, December 1999
• David Alan Mellor, '‘Fragments of an Unknowable Whole’: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incorporation of Contemporary Visualities in London, 1966', Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, 8 (2): 2007, pp. 45-61
• Zach Melzer, 'Michelangelo Antonioni and the “Reality” of the Modern', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Gary Morris, 'Chabrol, Losey, Antonioni: Three Classic Eurofilms: Les Bonnes Femmes, Eva, Il Grido', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 31, 2010
• Gavriel Moses, 'As We [They] See [Hear] Them [Us]: Cain/Antonioni//Antonioni/Coppola', Voices in Italian Americana, 1991
• John Orr, 'Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs. Antonioni's The Passenger', Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007
• Murray Pomerance, 'Significant Cinema: The Scene of the Crime', Senses of Cinema, 61, 2011
• Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)
• Julie Ravary, 'La Femme “Antonionienne”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Elena del Río, “Antonioni’s Blowup: Freeing the Imaginary from Metaphysical Ground”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 32, June, 2005
• Christopher Sharrett, 'L’eclisse', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
• Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara, 'Reporting on The Passenger', Undercurrent, 3, 2006
• Gregory Solman, 'L'Avventura', Senses of Cinema, 31, 2004
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Realism and Reality in Antonioni’s Profession: Reporter as dramatizing the Nietzschean notion of the “power of the false”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Frank P. Tomasulo, 'The bourgeoisie is also a class: class as character in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura', Jump Cut, 49, 2007
• Donato Totaro, ' Zabriskie Point (1970, Antonioni): A Scene by Scene Analysis of a Troubled Masterpiece', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Donato Totaro, 'Alida Valli: May 31, 1921-April 22, 2006', Offscreen Journal, 10.5, 2006
• Donato Totaro, 'May 1968 and After: Cinema in France and Beyond', Offscreen Journal, 1998
• Jack Turner, 'Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text', Other Voices 1.3 (January 1999)
• Peter Verstraten, 'A Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose: On Antonioni and Malick', Image [and] Narrative, 13.2, 2012
• Fiona A.Villella, 'Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing In Antonioni's Zabriskie Point', Senses of Cinema, 4, 2000
• Elisabeth Weis, 'Tati, Hitchcock, Antonioni: Three Approaches to Sonic Creativity', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, 2007
• Matthew M. Wylie, 'Avoiding the Masculine "Gaze": Frustrated Homosexual Desire and the Eroticized Role of the Camera In Hitchcock's Rear Window and Antonioni's Blow Up', Cinetext, February 2003

On Bill Douglas, Scottish Cinema and Magical Film Archives

Bill Douglas 'My Childhood' Masterclass with Mamoun Hassan (video by Sherief Hassan)

Film Studies For Free today presents an entry about Bill Douglas, one of the most interesting Scottish filmmakers ever, and a highly likely influence on anyone interesting working in that field today -- in FSFF's undoubtedly Sassenach view, that would include, inter alia, fine film folk like Lynne Ramsay, Peter Mullan, David MacKenzie, and Gillies MacKinnon (plus, perhaps, the otherwise English Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows).

Douglas was known especially for his amazing Trilogy (My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), and My Way Home (1978)), as well as for the wonderful 1987 film Comrades. But his lifelong collection of cinema artifacts and memorabilia also went on to form the basis of one of the most significant cinema archives in the world, named after him, at the University of Exeter. The Bill Douglas Centre also looks after one of the most important online and openly accessible cinematic archives, too: Everyone's Virtual Exhibition (EVE). If you are so inclined, you may very much like to interact with the BDC at Facebook. 

The particular occasion for this entry is an upcoming symposium on Douglas's work at the University of Exeter taking place this week on Friday September 23. There are papers from eminent scholars Karen Lury, Andrew Noble, Brian Hoyle, Jonny Murray and Paul Newland and from filmmaker Sean Martin and the BDC's principal donor, Peter Jewell, on all aspects of Douglas's work; the Trilogy, Comrades, his unmade scripts, and his collection. There will also be the first ever screening of Charlie Chaplin Lived Here, Bill and Peter's 8mm film made in 1966. The event is free but please register in advance by email. The full programme of papers is available here.

FSFF has assembled some great, freely accessible resources below, including links to work on Scottish cinema and also on film archiving. The goodies include a highly informative and clip-filled 2006 documentary "Intent on Getting the Image" about Bill Douglas's life and career, edited by Stuart Eade and produced and directed by Andy Kimpton-Nye.

At the very foot of the post is a video about the incredibly valuable work of the Bill Douglas Centre. FSFF salutes you!

On Bill Douglas's Films, and related Scottish cinema:

• Bill Douglas entry at BFI Screenonline 
• Bill Douglas: A Brief Biography', Bill Douglas Centre website

• Michael Atkinson, 'Mr. Vengeance: Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas's autobiographical trilogy', Moving Image Source, September 22, 2008
• Neil Blain, 'The Scottish Dimension in Film and Television', Scottish Life and Society: Transport and Communications, A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology, Volume 8, pp. 768 - 792
• Simon Brown, '“Anywhere but Scotland?” Transnationalism and New Scottish Cinema', International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 2011
• Yannick Deplaedt, 'Bill Douglas, ou la mémoire au cinéma' [in French], Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, journal of School of Foreign Languages, 2010 (39), 91-117, 2010-08
• Ian Goode, 'Different Trajectories: Europe and Scotland in Recent Scottish Cinema', PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, July 2007
• Rhys Graham, 'The Glimpse Given Life: An Elegy for Bill Douglas'Senses of Cinema, Issue 10, 2000
• Lynne A. Hibberd, Creative industries policy and practice. a study of BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009
• Michael McCracken, 'Lowest of the Low: Scenes of Shame and Self-Depreciation in Contemporary Scottish Cinema', MA Thesis, University of North Texas, May 2008
• Christopher Meir, Underwriting national sovereignty?: policy, the market and Scottish cinema, 1982- present, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007
• Catherine M. Munroe, From Highlander to Hard Man: Representations of Scottish Masculinity in 1990s Cinema, Masters Thesis, York University, Ontario, 2000
• Sarah Neely, Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture: fiction to film. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003
• Beatriz Oria Gómez, 'Imagining Scotland: Local Hero (1983) and Kailyardism', Bells: Barcelona English language and literature studies; Vol.: 17, 2008
• Takato Seino, Realism and Representations of the Working Class in Contemporary British Cinema, MPhil Thesis, DeMontfort University, 2010
• Linda Wood, British Films (London: BFI, 1983)

On Archive and Online Repository Matters, etc.:

• Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello, 'Introduction: Verbal and Visual Interactions in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 5 (2007)
• Fergus Cooke, 'Questions of Authorship and Audience: A Study of Artefacts Related to the Film Rebecca (1940)', Bill Douglas Centre, [date unknown] 
• Jessica Gardner, Michelle Allen, Dominic Prosser, and Helen Hanson, 'E-learning at the University of Exeter Library', SCONUL FOCUS, 2005 (RTF)
• Catherine Owen, Tony Pearson, Stephen Arnold, 'Meeting the Challenge of Film Research in the Electronic Age', D-Lib Magazine, Volume 6 Number 3, March 2000
• Duncan Petrie, 'The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture: A Report for Screen', 1999
• John Plunkett, 'DIGITISATION AND MATERIALITY FORUM From Optical to Digital (and back again)', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 6 (2008) 
• Lisa Stead, Audiences from the Film Archive: Women's Writing and Silent Cinema', Scope, Issue 17, June 2010

Christine Sprengler, 'Memory and Exile in the Bill Douglas Trilogy' in Cultures of exile: images of displacement By Wendy Ellen Everett, Peter Wagstaff (Oxford: Bergahn Books, 2004)

Graham Smith, 'The Travelling Lanternist and the Uncommercial Traveller; An Experiment in Correspondences', in Literature and the visual media by David Seed (London: DS Brewer, 2005)

Below, in eight short parts, "Intent on Getting the Image",
a documentary about the life and work of Bill Douglas

Below, a video introducing the work of the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter

Latest five volumes of REFRACTORY: A Journal of Entertainment Media

Frame grab from Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002). Read Samatha Lindop's 2011 article on this film here. For another interesting, psychiatrically-informed account of Cronenberg's film, see here

Thanks to Adrian Martin (whose video version of his Ritwik Ghatak talk is now online, by the way), Film Studies For Free heard about the latest issue of the online Australian journal Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. And thanks to that, FSFF realised it hadn't really mentioned an issue of Refractory since Volume 14, 2009 in its entry on "Split Screens". So, below are direct links to all of the contents of this great journal since that issue. And FSFF promises not to be quite so pommily slow next time this journal publishes one of its characteristically excellent collections of film and media studies...

Refractory, Volume 19, 2011

1. Blockbusters for the YouTube Generation: A new product of convergence culture – Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller
2. ‘Out wiv the old ay plumma?’ The Uncanny Marginalized Wastelands of Memory and Matter in David Cronenberg’s Spider – Samantha Lindop
3. A Moving Image Experience: Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, June-July, 2010 – Wendy Haslem
4. “A series of emotional remembrances”: Echoes of Bernard Herrmann -Daniel Golding
5. Don Draper On The Couch: Mad Men and the Stranger to Paradise – Mark Nicholls

Refractory, Volume 18, 2011

1. Editorial: Transitions in Popular Culture – Matthew Sini and Angie Knaggs  
2. “Never my soul”: Adaptations, Re-makes and Re-imaginings of Yeşilçam Cinema – Can Yalcinkaya  
3. Looking Past Seeing: Imaginative Space and Empathetic Engagement in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and There Will Be Blood – Elliott Logan
4. Struggling to find their place: Indigenous youth, identity, and storytelling in Beneath Clouds and Samson and Delilah – Samantha Fordham
5. Transgeneric Tendencies in New Queer Cinema – Matthew Sini
6. Before Priscilla: Male-to-Female Transgender in Australian Cinema until the 1990s – Joanna McIntyre
7. From Night and Day to De-Lovely: Cinematic Representations of Cole Porter – Penny Spirou
8. (Em)Placing Prison Break: Heterotopic Televisual Space and Place – Angie Knaggs
9. “Think Smart”: multiple casting, critical engagement and the contemporary film spectator – Nicole Choolun

Refractory, Volume 17, 2010

1. From Cult Texts to Authored Languages: Fan Discourse and the Performances of Authorship – Karolina Agata Kazimierczak
2. The Pinball Problem – Daniel Reynolds
3. The Invisible Medium: Comics Studies in Australia – Kevin Patrick
4. Acculturation of the ‘Pure’ Economy: Sci Fi, IT and the National Lampoon – Rock Chugg
5. Subversive Frames: Vermeer And Lucio Fulci’s SETTE NOTE IN NERO – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
6. Ringu/ The Ring: Tracing the Analog Spirit in a Digital Era – Michael Fisch
7. Keaton and the Lion: A Critical Re-evaluation of The Cameraman, Free and Easy and Speak Easily – Anna Gardner
8. Rosy-Fingered Dawn: The Natural Sublime in the work of Terrence Malick – Dimitrios Latsis

Refractory, Volume 16, 2009

1. Editorial ‘All Your Base Are Belong to Us’: Videogames and Play in the Information Age : Tom Apperley and Justin Clemens
2. A Critique of Play – Sean Cubitt
3. ‘The code which governs war and play’: Computer games, sport and modern combat – Jeff Sparrow
4. Being Played: Games Culture and Asian American Dis/identifications – Dean Chan
5. “I’m OK”: How young people articulate ‘violence’ in videogames – Gareth Schott
6. How to Do Things With Images – Darshana Jayemanne
7. Myths of Neoconservatism and Privatization in World of Warcraft – Kyle Kontour
8. Babelswarm -Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash

Refractory, Volume 15, 2009

Double Issue: General Issue and Television Issue, Editors: Angela Ndalianis and Lucian Chaffey

1. Reality is in the performance’: Issues of Digital Technology, Simulation and Artificial Acting in S1mOne – Anna Notaro
2. The Neo-baroque in Lucha Libre - Kat Austin
3. Ryan Is Being Beaten: Incest, Fanfiction, and The OC – Jes Battis
4. Mobile Content Market: an Exploratory Analysis of Problems and Drivers in the U.S. – Giuseppe Bonometti, Raffaello Balocco, Peter Chu, Shiv Prabhu, Rajit Gadh
5. Televisual control: The resistance of the mockumentary – Wendy Davis
6. The Classic Hollywood Town at the Dawn of Suburbia - Stephen Rowley
7. Digital Intervention: Remixes, Mash Ups and Pixel Pirates – Amanda Trevisanut
8. The Bill 1984 – 2009: Genre, Production, Redefinition - Margaret Rogers
9. Guiding Stars – Carly Nugent

Christopher Nolan Studies

An image from Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Film Studies For Free knows only too well that there's a time and a place for everything. Given that Christopher Nolan's Inception has just premiered to mostly great online acclaim, it is probably the right time and place for a bumper FSFF "Christopher Nolan Studies" entry (despite the fact that FSFF's author won't actually see his new film till the weekend... No spoilers, people!).

Much more than all you need to know about the online discussion of Nolan's latest film is linked to with customary wit and brevity by David Hudson. The below links, then, restrict themselves to online, openly accessible, and (pure-dead-brilliant) scholarly takes on Nolan's film work, and related matters, to date.

• Robert Avery, 'Violence as (Masculinist) Epistemic Rhetoric: the case of Memento', Masters Thesis, University of Maine, August 2004

• Christopher Bodnar, 'The Database, Logic, and Suffering: Memento and Random-Access Information Aesthetics', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 10, May 2003

• Holly Lynn Baumgartner, 'Visualizing Levinas: Existence and Existents through Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Vanilla Sky', PhD Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, May 2005

• Jay David Bolter, 'Transference and Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema', Intermédialités, n 6 automne 2005

• David Bordwell, 'Niceties: how classical filmmaking can be at once simple and precise', Observations on Film Art, March 22, 2009

• Matthew Campora, ''Review of Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema, by Allan Cameron, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2008', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• Melissa Clark, 'The Space-Time Image: the Case of Bergson, Deleuze, and Memento', The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2002

• Michael Duffy, 'Batman Begins', Scope, Issue 3, November 2005

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)  

• Raoul Eshelman, 'Performatism in the Movies (1997-2003)', Anthropoetics 8, no. 2 (Fall 2002 / Winter 2003)

• Mark Fisher, 'Gothic Oedipus: subjectivity and capitalism in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins', ImageTexT, Vol. 2.2, 2006

• Domènec Font, 'In the Fabric of Time', Formats, No. 5, 2009

• Juan González Etxeberria, "Metamorphosing Words in the Cinema of the Fantastic", Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008)

• Adrian Gargett, 'Nolan's Memento, Memory, and Recognition', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.3 (2002)

• Matt George, 'On Forgetting Memento', h2so4, 16, 2001

• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, Vol. 0, No 51 (2006)

• Davin Heckman, 'Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman', CTHeory.net, 2008

• Ann Heilmann, 'Doing It With Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist', Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2 (Winter 2009/2010) pp. 18-42

• John Ip, 'The Dark Knight's War on Terrorism', Social Science Research Network, May 2010Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Forthcoming) 

• Kathryn Muriel Kang, 'Patch and reboot in Memento', in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)

• Vicki Karaminas, 'Ubermen: Masculinity, Costume, and Meaning in Comic Book Superheroes' in Peter McNeil and Vicki Karaminas (eds), The Men's Fashion Reader, Berg, Oxford and New York, pp. 179-186 

• Vicki Karaminas, “No Capes!” Über Fashion and How “Luck Favours the Prepared”: Constructing Contemporary Superhero Identities in American Popular Culture', International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA), vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 478-508

• Zelda G Knight, 'Monsters and Monstrous Acts: Exploring the Shadow Archetype in Batman: The Dark Knight', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 7th Global Conference, Oxford 2009

• Lutz Koepnick , 'Photographs and Memories', South Central Review 21.1 (Spring 2004): 94–129

• Jung-In Kwon, 'Memory Simulated', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 3, 2004

• Randolph Lewis, 'The Dark Knight of American Empire', Jump Cut, No. 51, 2009

• Patrick McEntaggart, 'Once Upon a Paradigm Shift: Interactive Storytelling in a New Media Context', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 5th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 14, 2010

• Todd McGowan, 'The Exceptional darkness of The Dark Knight', Jump Cut, 51, 2009

• Todd McGowan, 'The Violence of Creation in The Prestige', International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol 1, No 3 (2007)

• Walter Benn Michaels, 'The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Christopher Nolan's Idea of Form', Electronic Book Review, October 2007

• John S. Nelson, 'Realism as a Political Style: Noir Insights', Poroi, 5, 2, November, 2008

• Stanley Orr, 'Connected Guys: The Reconstructed Subject of 1990s Film Noir', in Darkly perfect world : colonial adventure, postmodernism, and American noir (Ohio State University, 2010) scroll down in PDF to p. 198 

• Kimberly Ann Owczarski, 'Batman, Time Warner, and Franchise Filmmaking in the Conglomerate Era', PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2008

• Chris Pallant , 'Review: Mark T. Conrad, ed. (2007) The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010

• Brock Poulin, 'Dark time (s): non-linear narratives in the postmodern film noir', Masters Thesis, University of British Columbia, April 2005 

• Karen Renner, 'Repeat Viewings Revisited: Emotions, Memory, and Memento', Film Studies, Issue 8, Summer 2006

• Thomas Riegler, 'The “Mastermind”: Personifications of Evil in the Cinema', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 10th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 2009

• Torben Schmidt, 'Christopher Nolan’s Memento – Analysis of the narrative structure of a noirish revenge film', Seminar: “Decadence and Modernism in Late 20th Century American Cinema, 2003

• Ilana Shiloh, 'Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento', M/C Journal, Vol. 10, Issue 2, May 2007

• Giovanni Tiso, 'Impossible Recollections: the Troubled Imaginary of Mediated Memory', PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2006

• Gary Westfahl, 'Magnificent Obsessions: A Review of The Dark Knight', Locus Online, July 28, 2008

• Gary Westfahl, 'Nolan’s Labyrinth: A Review of Inception', Locus Online, July 18, 2010

R.I.P. Peter Brunette and Teshome Gabriel: online tributes

Last updated June 24, 2010

Teshome Gabriel, 1939-2010

Peter Brunette, 1943-2010

Film Studies has lost two of its giants.

On Monday, Professor Teshome Gabriel of UCLA, a leading theorist and scholar of African, Third and Third World Cinema, and memory and cinema, passed away in Los Angeles.

And, just yesterday, Peter Brunette, Reynolds Professor of Film Studies at Wake Forest University, author of important books on film theory, Italian cinema and the work of individual film directors, and a very well-known and popular film critic, died while in attendance at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.

Film Studies For free will post full, individual, tributes of its own to each of these scholars very shortly, but in the meantime is gathering together, below, a list of links to some of the online tributes to both men. If you know of any you would like to see included, please email FSFF, or link to them in the comments section of this post.

The author of this blog would like to pass on her sincere condolences to the families and friends of both men.

Tributes to Teshome Gabriel

• UCLA obituary
•  Ethiopian Review obituary   
• Friend, Master Storyteller, Scholar, and Humanist Par Excellence: Reminiscences of Teshome H. Gabriel, June 16, 2010 by Vinay Lal 
• Teshome H. Gabriel dies at 70; UCLA professor and Third World cinema expert, by Dennis McLellan LA Times, June 17, 2010

Tributes to Peter Brunette

• Gerald Peary, 'Peter Brunette, In Memory', Indiewire.com, June 21, 2010
• Wake Forest University obituary
• The Hollywood Reporter report and obituary  
• Writer Peter Brunette Dies at Italian Festival by Eugene Hernandez, Indiewire, June 16, 2010
  
• Film Scholar Brunette Dies at Taormina by Anne Thompson, Thompson on Hollywood, June 16, 2010
• Peter Brunette by Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running, June 16, 2010
• R.I.P. Peter Brunette, by Joe Leydon, MovingPictureBlog, June 16, 2010
• RIP Peter Brunette, by Movie Cricket, Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2010
• Film critic Brunette dies by Rachel Abrams, Variety.com, June 16, 2010
• Nick James, 'Peter Brunette, 1944-2010', Sight and Sound, June 17, 2010 
• Issa Clubb, 'Remembering Peter Brunette', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2010
• Peter Keough, 'Peter Brunette 1944-2010', Outside the Frame, The Boston Phoenix, June 22, 2010

More Film Authorship Studies: Romero, Welles, Portillo, Mamet, and the studio system

George A. Romero, Daddy of the Dead (a Wired.com video)

Film Studies For Free brings you some more great essays on film authorship (a favourite topic at this here blog), following the serendipitous discovery that a special issue on that subject by the (normally) subscription only periodical The Velvet Light Trap was chosen to be that journal's free online sample.


Do also check out FSFF's earlier related posts if this is a topic of particular interest: On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theories, film authorship Orson Welles. 

The Velvet Light Trap Number 57, Spring 2006 Special Issue: Authorship

• Introduction
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]

• Joe Kember, The Cinema of Affections: The Transformation of Authorship in British Cinema before 1907
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  

• Jerome Christensen, Studio Authorship, Warner Bros., and The Fountainhead
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  

• Brooke Rollins, "Some Kind of a Man": Orson Welles as Touch of Evil's Masculine Auteur
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]

• Matt Becker, A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  

• Yannis Tzioumakis, Marketing David Mamet: Institutionally Assigned Film Authorship in Contemporary American Cinema
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]

• Mónica F. Torres, Exorcizing/Exercising Treachery: Robust Subjectivity in Lourdes Portillo's The Devil Never Sleeps [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]

• Anna Notaro, Technology in Search of an Artist: Questions of Auteurism/Authorship and the Contemporary Cinematic Experience
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  

On the Issue of Collaboration in Film Production Education

Image from La Nuit américaine/Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1974)

Film Studies For Free was thrilled to find not only that the internationally renowned scholarly Journal of Film and Video had published a recent, excellent special collection of articles on the often thorny issue of teaching collaboration in film production collaboratively, but also that this collection was freely available online.

The full table of contents is given below.

Now, please get into groups and read the articles...

Journal of Film and Video
Volume 61, Number 1, Spring 2009

Guest Editor: Rob Sabal

• Introduction by Rob Sabal

Excerpt: The impulse for this special issue on teaching about and through collaboration comes from a shared search for answers to the question, "how might production students work more productively and more harmoniously with others—peers, professionals, and members of the community?" The search is spurred by the recognition that, as a field, we are not doing much to address this facet of production education. Drawn together by a mutual concern for providing a rich and lasting education for our students, the authors included in this issue, along with fellow members of the University Film and Video Association, formed an informal collaboration interest group and have, for several years, been sharing stories, ideas, information, and resources about teaching collaboration and conflict resolution.
      The implicit question running through this special issue is, "what is the purpose of a film production education?" This seems to be a particularly important question to ask of undergraduate production programs because the traditional value of a liberal arts education is its breadth and its focus on inquiry and methods, which gives it its enduring value over a person's lifetime. What do we teach in a traditional production class that is of abiding value? Certainly nothing related to physical production, where technology, process, storytelling structures, exhibition, and distribution outlets continue to change rapidly. The enduring value of production classes has to be that as each student develops his or her artistic identity, he or she also comes to a clear and truthful understanding of him- or herself, develops an ability to see and appreciate the talents of others, learns to constructively negotiate conflict, and extends this ability to work positively with others into their institution and their community.

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (45k)

• The Individual in Collaborative Media Production by Rob Sabal

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (174k)

• Film Collaboration and Creative Conflict by Carroll Hodge

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (174k

• Notes on Collaboration: Assessing Student Behaviors by Ted Hardin

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (2239k)

• Intercollegiate and Community Collaboration: Film Productions for Students and Community Volunteers by Emily Edwards

• HTML Version 

• PDF Version (442k)

• Documentary and Collaboration: Placing the Camera in the Community by Elizabeth Coffman

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (1795k)

"Mix-Tape Cinema": studies of Wes Anderson's films

Links added May 27, 2010

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Wes Anderson at the New York Public Library (Fora.tv)

On the occasion of today's publication by Fora.tv of the above entertaining and informative video, Film Studies For Free presents a (rather) small but (almost) perfectly formed compendium of links to freely accessible studies of the joyous/poignant/whimsical/arch/'scavenger' films of US writer/director Wes Anderson. As usual, if readers know of any other good online material to add to the below list, do please get in touch.

The Substance of Style, Pt 1Wes Anderson and his pantheon of heroes (Schulz, Welles, Truffaut) by Matt Zoller Seitz  posted March 30, 2009 

The above video is the first in a five-part series of video essays analyzing the key influences on Wes Anderson’s style. Part 2 covers Martin Scorsese, Richard Lester, and Mike Nichols. Part 3 covers Hal Ashby. Part 4 covers J.D. Salinger. Part 5 is an annotated version of the prologue to The Royal Tenenbaums.

'The Films of Wes Anderson' (great clip 'mix-tape'/montage) by Paul Proulx

"A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I watched a film called Bottle Rocket. I knew nothing about it, and the movie really took me by surprise. Here was a picture without a trace of cynicism, that obviously grew out of its director's affection for his characters in particular and for people in general. A rarity. And the central idea of the film is so delicate, so human: A group of young guys think that their lives have to be filled with risk and danger in order to be real. They don't know that it's okay simply to be who they are." Martin Scorsese, 'Wes Anderson', Esquire, March 1, 2000

"Whenever I am getting ready to make a movie I look at other movies I love in order to answer the same recurring question: How is this done, again? I can never seem to remember, and I don’t mean that to be glib. I also hope people don’t throw it back in my face. Making a movie is very complicated, and it seems like kind of a miracle when it actually works out. Hal Ashby made five or six great movies in a row, and that seems to be practically unheard of." 'Wes Anderson on [Hal Ashby's] The Last Detail' in 'The Director's Director', by Jennifer Wachtel, GOOD, June 18, 2008

"In narrative, whimsy emphasizes the unexpected links that connect disparate ideas or events, but the connections must be meaningful. Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) is not whimsical because it never proposes that the links between its scenes are anything more than incidental. It embraces insignificance and ponders the possibility of elevating apathy into anarchy. Wes Anderson’s films are whimsical because their unexpected juxtapositions are imbued with sentimental significance. As a visual mode, whimsy favours busy frames and compositions that distract viewers from the centre. It rewards those willing to explore the edges with jokes buried in marginalia or Dalmatian mice sniffing around in the corner of an elaborately composed shot. In all cases whimsy values the ability to appreciate the aesthetic harmony possible among myriad incongruent objects. It draws attention to the act of perception and the sensibility of the perceiver." Charlotte Taylor, 'The Importance of Being Earnest', Frieze Magazine, Issue 92, June-August 2005

'...[S]tuff like Wes Anderson mix-tape cinema...', Michael Sicinski, 'Songs Sung Blue: The Films of Michael Robinson', Cinema-scope, 33 

• Joseph Aisenberg, 'Wes's World:Riding Wes Anderson's Vision Limited', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 59, February 2008
• Nandana Bose, 'The Darjeeling Limited: Critiquing Orientalism on the Train to Nowhere', Mediascape, Spring 2008
• Kirk Boyle, 'Reading the Dialectical Ontology of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Against the Ontological Monism of Adaptation', Film-Philosophy, Volume 11.1, June 2007
• Elena Gorfinkel, 'The Future of Anachronism: Todd Haynes and the Magnificent Andersons', Cinephilia Movies, Love and Memory, Edited by Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005 - large PDF: scroll to p. 153)
  
• Brannon M. Hancock, 'A Community of Characters: the Narrative Self in the Films of Wes Anderson', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 9, No.2, October 2005
• Steven Hyden, Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, and Scott Tobias, '16 Films Without Which Wes Anderson Couldn't Have Happened', AV Club, October 8, 2007 
• Deanna K Kreisel, 'What Maxie Knew: The Gift and Oedipus in What Maisie Knew and Rushmore', Mosaic (Winnipeg), 38/2, June 2005
• Christian Lorentzen, 'Captain Neato: Wes Anderson and the Problem with Hipsters; Or, What Happens When a Generation Refuses to Grow Up', N+1, April 23, 2010 
• James MacDowell, 'The "Quirky" New Wave', Alternate Takes, July 21, 2005
• Suzy Mackenzie, 'Into the Deep', The Guardian, February 12, 2005
• Emily J. May, 'The Darjeeling Limited and The New American Traveller', Senses of Cinema, Issue 49, 2008
• Volker Pantenburg, 'Essay 1: Notes on Matt Zoller Seitz’ ”Wes Anderson: The Substance Of Style”', trans. Kevin B Lee, Shooting Down Pictures, April 23, 2009 
• Carole Lyn Piechota, 'Give Me a Second Grace: Music as Absolution in The Royal Tenenbaums', Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006
• Lee Weston Sabo, 'Inimitable Charm: Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 67, February 2010
• Herbert Schwaarb, 'Buddies that Matter. Philosophical Reflections on the Genre of the New Buddy Film', International Conference on Gender, Laughter, Media: Comic Genres and Strategies“ at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, August 2005