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

Friday, 22 July 2016

For all to see, and to see the sense of: In Memory of V. F. Perkins (1936-2016)

Last updated on December 31, 2016



[S]election by the camera [...] asserts significance. The image is displayed not only to relay information but to claim that it matters and to guide us towards the ways in which it matters...

[A] film’s form and method are incomprehensible outside of a recognition that its story takes place, and its images are both made and found, in a world...

Movies always take us into the middle of things because the film and its story begin, but the world does not...

V. F. Perkins, ‘Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction’
in Gibbs and Pye (eds.), Style and Meaning... (MUP, 2005); 22-25. 


I suggest that a prime task of interpretation is to articulate in the medium of prose some aspects of what artists have made perfectly and precisely clear in the medium of film. The meanings I have discussed in the Caught fragment are neither stated nor in any special sense implied. They are filmed. Whatever else that means (which it is a purpose of criticism and theory to explore) it means that they are not hidden in or behind the movie, and that my interpretation is not an attempt to clarify what the picture has obscured. I have written about things that I believe to be in the film for all to see, and to see the sense of.

V.F. Perkins, 'Must We Say What We Mean?', Movie 34/35, Winter 1990



It is with very great sadness that Film Studies For Free brings you its latest entry: a commemoration of the life, film criticism, theory and scholarship of Victor Perkins who died a week ago today.

V. F. Perkins was a founding editor of the hugely influential film critical publication MOVIE. He was also the author of Film as Film (Penguin, 1972), one of the most inspiring of the foundational texts in film studies, and of two thrilling monographs on individual films for the BFI Film Classics series: The Magnificent Ambersons (1999); and La Règle du jeu (2012). After beginning to teach on cinema in a number of institutional settings from the 1960s (including at Bulmershe College of Education), he lectured on that subject at Warwick University (in the remarkable department he co-founded) from 1978 and was Honorary Professor in Film Studies.

Although Victor had been ill for several years, his passing was quite sudden and thus shocking to his family, friends and colleagues. He is, without doubt, someone who will be greatly missed by all those blessed by his personal and professional acquaintance (by all accounts, he was a truly wonderful colleague, teacher and research supervisor), as well as by the many, many thousands of people around the world who have loved and learned from his writing on the cinema.

FSFF's author had the very great pleasure of knowing Victor a little, and spent some very enjoyable (and inspiring) times with him over the last two decades. He was an enthusiastic supporter of this website and its ethos from FSFF's earliest days back in 2008, and was a most welcome correspondent on the topic of online film resources. He was a passionate advocate for, and practical supporter of, open-access publishing and multimedia film studies, as his key role in the relaunch as an online journal of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism testifies. Victor always wondered if he'd go on to make video essays, a form in which he had a very keen interest. FSFF had always fervently hoped that he would....

There will undoubtedly be many tributes to his work from those who are much better qualified to write these than FSFF's author. So the aim of what follows is confined mostly to the significant task of updating existing entries at this website on Perkins' online work, and in collecting together links to online interviews with him, and writings about him.

But FSFF also offers up, below, four videos about Victor's work - three of these newly commissioned and produced in memoriam since Victor's death - by Christian Keathley, Hoi Lun Law and Catherine Grant (the fourth is by film scholar Patrick Keating). Update: Alex Clayton's tribute "Spin the Wheel" was added on July 27 and Ian Garwood's "Choice Moments" on July 30.

 Furthermore, it warmly invites its readers to produce and submit their own online tribute videos and texts (please send links to these via the comments function below, or by email, and also please send on links to any relevant work or resources not yet listed below. Thank you). 

In the meantime, FSFF's author offers her deepest condolences to Victor's family (especially his daughter and son), and to his close friends and colleagues at this very sad time.


Tributes #forvictor #vfperkins






'A video tribute about delicate moments of (decorous) choice that reworks a much loved paragraph from the truly remarkable writing of film critic and scholar V.F. Perkins (1936-July 15, 2016). Warm thanks go to my friend Andrew Klevan who introduced me to Victor's reading of this sequence from Renoir's La Règle du jeu back in 1998'



Online writing by V.F. Perkins


The below embedded videos are the twelve constituent parts of a truly fascinating interview with V.F. Perkins which took place at the Kino 8 1/2 in Saarbrücken, Germany, and was filmed by Media Art and Design Studiengang. In the interview, Perkins engagingly discusses his approach to film studies and, in particular, talks about the trajectory of his foundational 1972 book Film as Film, and about his research on Jean Renoir's1939 film Le Régle du jeu about which he had written a 2012 book for the BFI Film Classics series (excerpt here).













Octave


Death


Casting


Max Ophüls


Classicism


Orson Welles


Online writing about V.F. Perkins
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Tuesday, 14 April 2015

The Passion(s) of Sam Rohdie (1939-2015)

UPDATED on November 19, 2015 with link to Sam Rohdie's Passions(s): A Coda [four new tributes]
'In Vertigo, James Stewart's look is as important as the figure [...] whom he regards and who he transforms by his desires [...] It is important that the sight seen has in it something out of place, out of true and the normal, which engages the look of the character and lures him or her into an imaginary.'
Sam Rohdie, Montage (Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 63-64 (Also see here)

The sad news has arrived of the sudden death, on April 3 in Florida, of film scholar Sam Rohdie, a hugely important, if at times also a divisive figure in our discipline.

In the last years, Rohdie held the position of Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Film at the University of Central Florida. He had previously held the Chair in Film Studies at The Queens University of Belfast and before that was Professor of Film Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He also held academic posts in universities in England, Ghana, Italy and the United States and was an original member of the Cinema Studies Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He published widely on film in academic journals and books (see below). Rohdie was the editor of Screen in the United Kingdom from 1971 to 1974.

FSFF's author never met Rohdie, but was an avid reader of his work. He not only made a huge contribution to film studies as a discipline, he was also an important author and supporter of online and open access film scholarship, particularly at the pioneering Australian open access journal Screening the Past (including co-editing two dossiers for the journal with Des O-'Rawe - on ‘Cinema/Photography: Beyond Representation [Screening the Past, Issue 29]' and 'Cinema/Theatre: Beyond Adaptation [Screening the Past, Issue 21]'; see the journal's own Facebook page for its tributes to Rohdie). The latter is one of the reasons why his contribution is especially dear to FSFF.

Below, you can find invited tributes to Rohdie's work, beginning with Adrian Martin's memories of Rohdie - more will follow on a rolling basis in the next days. 

Below the tributes is FSFF's characteristic gathering of links to online scholarly works - ones by or about Rohdie, as well as a list of his major books.



Sam Rohdie 
By Adrian Martin
It was 1978. I was a student in the Media course at Melbourne State College (a training institution for secondary school teachers) in Australia, and that semester we had (thanks to his friend Tom Ryan) an illustrious guest lecturer: Sam Rohdie. At that time, Sam was completing his PhD, a minute analysis – written somewhat in the manner of Barthes or Derrida – of a segment from Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. We worked through this same segment in class, week after week, with a 16mm print and projector (those were the days!).
Sam’s goal was to show, intensively, that what history had taken for ‘realism’ (or even neo-realism) was entirely fabricated, shot for shot, cut for cut. That what happened apparently ‘incidentally’ in the scene was connected, by numerous narrative and semantic chains, to every other moment in the film. There was the thrill – de rigueur at the time – of the micro-analytic exposure of common sense and transparency, an almost paranoiac ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ as it came to be called. But there was also a sensual joy in this analysis, and that quickly came to mean more for Sam, in all the work that followed this doctoral culmination of what we might think of as his ‘Screen years’ – i.e., his time as editor, contributor, instigator and agitator at that (now august) cinema studies journal.
Almost at the second the ink was dry on that thesis, Sam got into the habit of downplaying the Screen legacy in his life – and he was still doing so when Deane Williams interviewed him in 2010 for a history of film theory in Australia. He had developed a marked aversion to the ‘dry taxonomies’ of Metz, as he told me, and indeed with the entire dream of structuralist-semiotic film analysis. He was through with the pretension to scientific rigour and certainty. He was heading somewhere else, and now in a more post-structuralist spirit, but without all the lengthy citations and footnotes of the then-recent academic past: into paradox, into pleasure, and above all into writing as a creative as well as critical art.
In 1978, Sam had given me the draft of his PhD to read – and he curtly dismissed me from his presence on the day I handed it back without any particularly searing critical comment to offer on it. That’s how he was: like Godard, Sam was always in search of an interlocutor, and so rarely found one who he deemed worthy. It was his personal style, and it infused his singularly disconcerting teaching method. Sam was aggressive and provocative in the classroom; he was impatient with having to be ‘the teacher’. This seems to have remained his teaching mode, more or less, to the end of his life (he was about to retire from the game in May). In 1978, at least, he was in the habit of identifying the ‘gifted’ students – this was to be my role, alas – and, when he got bored, giving the signal for that chosen delegate to keep the class going by yapping on without missing the beat, as he looked off and thought of more pleasant things, such as what he would cook that evening (Sam was a true foodie). 
Rossellini: Sam came to love him, not to expose him – as his essay on India eventually showed. I came to see, by the mid 1990s, when he launched his personal book-writing crusade with the brilliant Antonioni – and after articles he had written in various Australian magazines like Cinema Papers and Filmviews – that Sam now grasped every film he liked (in deep-dish Derrida style) as a conceptual paradox: a statement or position always undoing itself, implying its opposite term. This idea tracks through all of his writing on the great auteurs of Italian cinema. Fellini, for instance, may make films that, on the surface decry a world of artifice and superficiality – but, in their very being, they celebrate this artifice, and invite us to (as he once wrote) “join the party”. Rocco and His Brothers may seem to be groping toward a stern moral statement about the “conflicting claims of passion and duty, art and reason”, but Visconti is forever fascinated by the decadence that he dramatises. Sam was no longer out to expose or correct these wayward, paradoxical expressions. On the contrary, he took them for constitutive paradoxes, generating the most agonised, soulful and beautiful of films. 
I don’t pretend to have really known Sam, or to know now what ever made him tick. I have the impression that he was someone who constantly reinvented himself and his life, in terms of the places he lived (and taught), the languages he learnt, the books he read and the films he saw (and re-saw). In Australia in the 1970s and ‘80s, he hurled himself into the public works of film culture: he appeared on radio (very memorably), chaired feisty public discussions at the National Film Theatre, and contributed to curriculum committees for screen education at tertiary and secondary levels. The most remarkable sign of this intense desire to ‘assimilate’ was in his finding and championing of Australian avant-garde work – work that has rarely been approached with such theoretical zest ever since. 
But I think that, in later times and places – in Hong Kong or Belfast or Florida, by which time I had totally lost touch with him – he no longer longed to fuse himself with local scenes in the same way. Rather, he preferred to look backward (and yet forward) into history, histories of film and culture; and it was writing that sustained his interest and his passion, as we see in his final essay collections, Montage and Intersections, and no doubt the posthumous Film Modernism appearing later this year. I spotted him at the Godard conference at the Tate in 2001 – a rather lonely, sullen figure, he seemed to me, and unaccountably silent at each session’s question time, where once he would have been so vociferous – and again in 2006 on the streets of Paris, once more on a rendez-vous with Godard, this time the astonishing Pompidou exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie. And it is Godard and his Histoire(s) du cinéma that, judging from the essays he would regularly send the editors of Screening the Past in his last years, form the spine of Film Modernism. 
I am back in that classroom of 1978. Sam gives me ‘the sign’ to speak – I am utterly terrified, but kind-of used to this sadomasochistic ritual by now – and he looks away from the sea of students, indifferent to either their delight or their dismay. I remember one day, when he did this, just about everyone present could forgive his perennial tactic, because he was concentrated by something that formed a quite lovely spectacle: his very young daughter had fallen asleep in his lap at the front of the classroom, and he caressed her very gently and tenderly, soothing her dreams. This is the image of Sam Rohdie I choose to remember today.
© Adrian Martin, 14 April 2015


Sam Rohdie: Three Times 
By Deane Williams 
(1)
In 1989, after many years away from the University, I enrolled in an Honours year at the then legendary La Trobe University Cinema Studies department, home to Bill Routt, Rick Thompson, Barbara Creed, Lorraine Mortimer, and, of course, Sam Rohdie. I wanted to write a dissertation on Chris Marker’s Sunless and was assigned Sam as a supervisor. Sam told me he didn’t, at that time, like the film much, wasn’t a very good supervisor, suggested I might be interested in Italian neo-realism and that I couldn’t write. He also suggested that I read Proust and Jean Rouch on the “cine-trance” in the essay in Mick Eaton’s collection Anthropology, Reality, Cinema. It turned out to be not much of a dissertation. No matter. 
What Sam did was introduce me to was what I think of as intellectual film studies, what Sam, in an interview I did with him in 2009, called “serious film studies”, a term he used over and over in that interview, as distinct from a theoretical approach to film studies; an approach taken by everyone at La Trobe in this period. He continued:
I think the more correct word is seriousness and that engaging with a film or a group of films was risky and exciting and you needed to do it seriously and whatever would help you in that seriousness you should employ and so it was very… anything, anything would do but there certainly wasn’t a ‘film theory’ that I had any particular loyalty towards. You used ideas when they seemed appropriate and you went to things when they seemed appropriate and if certain structures of ideas helped you to see things, you employed them but they were kind of instruments.
In this way Sam was a kind of deep intellectual, with a formidable knowledge across, film and art history, literature, critical theory et al., matched by an equally fearsome confidence in both his own criticism of any presumed knowledge as well as his own manner in pursuing his own ideas. Sam was forthright, difficult and a hell of a writer. 
(2) 
In my PhD dissertation completed in 2000, I tried to mimic Sam’s writing on Italian neo-realism in my own discussion of Rossellini’s Stromboli in relation to R Maslyn Williams Mike and Stefani. A few years later I read and reviewed Sam’s essayistic Promised Lands: Cinema. Geography, Modernism for Framework. It is my favourite book of Sam’s, even though his Antonioni floored me at the time. I wrote then that,

Promised Lands is a book that is formally like the cinema that Rohdie revels in. Like Rohdie’s beloved neo-realism the book is invested with the present but only as it relates to what Rohdie and Bazin understood to be “the unforeseen”. In adopting this approach Rohdie divests himself of intention, of arguing a point, of calling on reliable witnesses to nail the reading of any situation, photograph or film. The book is open ended, free flowing marked by gaps, fissures and repetitions masking an intricacy at its heart.
I wrote that Promised Lands was a kind of ideal film studies book, eccentric to the pressures many of us submit to in academic life, a book that worked away at Albert Kahn’s The Archives of the Planet, in an imaginative, indirect and marvellous work of writing about cinema. 
(3) 
In 2009 I travelled to Orlando Florida to spend the day with Sam, eating at a Vietnamese restaurant, interviewing, talking about Sam’s latest interests and writing endeavours: Chris Marker, Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma and Johan van der Keuken.  Sam was incredibly generous with his time and his remembrances, able to understand his enormous contribution to film studies in a measured and engaging way. Sam had obviously thought a lot about his various roles, in Ghana, in London at Screen, New York, Australia, Hong Kong, Belfast, Florida with each move understood in amongst the significant cultural shifts occurring around him. I think the interview captured the intellectual spirit of a truly eccentric character. Rest in Peace Sam Deane Williams 
“Journeying” Rev of Promised Lands: Cinema. Geography, Modernism – Sam Rohdie”,Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media. 45: 2 (Fall 2004): 118-120.
 “Some Things You Never Learn” – Sam Rohdie Interviewed by Deane Williams. in Noel King and Deane Williams. Australian Film Theory and Criticism. Vol. II: Interviews. Bristol and Chicago, Intellect, 2014. 157-168.  
© Deane Williams, 15 April 2015


In Memoriam: Sam Rohdie 
By Lesley Stern 

The film is beautiful. The Chinese authorities wanted a film which glorified the Revolution, a film full of certainties. Antonioni gave them instead a film of immense affection, care, and attention, but one as a result at odds with the official, the sure, the conventional, and the false. In doing so, the film suggested a politics of art based on openness, on looking, on wondering, on respect for the specific, the particular, the individual. It was a journey in search of what was hidden and interior in China, not its political public face, but its human one.[i]
Sam, here, is writing about Antonioni’s 1972 film, Chung Kuo Cina. But it seems to me this could also be read as an account of his own journey through cinema, and about the relationship between writing about films and films themselves. Sam’s later books and writing hover between a careful attention to the films he discusses, as entities existing independent of the individual gaze, and as worlds that bring into being the consciousness of the writer, that elicit and shape a mode of writing and reflection that is acutely personal. 
Sam and I worked together, along with others, in the Cinema Studies Program at la Trobe University in Melbourne for about six years, from 1977-1982. During that time we maintained a strong collegial relationship and a kind-of-friendship. A couple of years later he cut me out of his life as he was wont to do. And we had no further contact. 
I learnt more, teaching with Sam, than from any other single person. He might have been cavalier with students (Adrian describes his mode very well and also captures the way in which Sam, despite his unorthodox pedagogic mode, had a tremendous impact on those students who endured) but he never condescended and always (usually correctly) assumed that people were capable of grasping much more complex ideas than commonsense dictated. As a colleague, though, the thrill was in the preparation, in the discussion about the curriculum and courses, in the space opened up in these discussions and debates to really interrogate why the cinema mattered (interrogate? oh where did this word come from? It just torpedoed right out of the 1970s, exploding into this so much more subdued bit of writing). We had a lot of fun devising and imagining courses, like an introductory unit that would begin with All that Heaven Allows and end with River of No Return. 
Sam was a formidable presence. He could be charming, seductive, engaged -- or cruel, malicious, capricious, indifferent. And sometimes it varied from one moment to the next. I learnt early on that if you could get a toe hold in an argument with Sam the important thing was to hang on, even if you had to swing from the chandeliers or more often from decidedly less glittering perches. We argued a lot during those years. Some of those arguments were predictable but you could also be blind-sided. One day, seemingly out of the blue, he lit into me with particular fury about Jeanne Dielmann. He chose his moment well: a party, when there was a hush in the room. He denounced the film (and me) as retrograde, as exhibiting all the worst tendencies of neo-realism, as a huge black mark against feminist film and any claims made on its behalf for experimentation. Indeed, in general he considered my feminism as proof of an impoverished imaginative grasp of cinema. Robbe Grillet is another figure about whom we disagreed. For Sam all relations in film could be plotted, figures positioned and transposed, the game enjoyed. 
This is the story I now tell; his story would no doubt be different. He would be the first to say that we all tell stories, and indeed he reveled in performativity. He picked up and dropped people just like he did ideas. He would include people in his will and excise them, often publicly. If you were able to grasp the performative aspect of his vitriol you might survive, and even on occasion enjoy the drama, but a lot of people didn’t survive. 
Let me qualify or reconsider what I have just said. Sam did not treat people and ideas in quite the same way. I think he had a lot more respect, on the whole, for ideas; he was a tenacious and passionate intellectual, he never floated ideas whimsically, always his arguments were based in extensive and deep reading, viewing, thinking through. In the interview he did with Deane Williams he reconsiders his position of the Screen days, and talks about how he has no canon, no fixed allegiances, how he likes to probe and find out what curiosity yields, what ideas are useful, or new—generated by a text. I think this is true in his criticism, but I would also say that he has remained remarkably true to certain film makers and writers: to Italian cinema of the postwar period, to Godard, to Proust and Barthes. 
Take A Lover’s Discourse. Sam and I were in agreement in loving that Barthes. Though at the time its influence did not actually register in much film writing. But it does register in later Rohdie, reading a book like Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism is also to reread the Barthes of A Lover’s Discourse. 
Ideas/people: are they so distinguishable, or so interchangeable? Surely not, but it is not always so easy to tell how, in what circuitous and often unexpected ways they are connected. 
After living for some years in Melbourne Sam bought a place on the outskirts of the city where he (I think) remodeled the existing house and terraced the hillside to landscape a vegetable garden. He was a marvelous cook, his touch was light and deft. I remember a particular lunch he conjured: raw crunchy fresh vegetables and a rich yellow mayonnaise, and then a stir fry with snow peas from the garden. But most of all I remember how he showed with great pride his pantry. It was cool and spacious, shelves lined with jars of fruit and jam and chutneys he had bottled. 
I often recall that day, a poignant pleasure, not long before we became no-longer friends. Often when I am feeling sorry for myself, when I start cataloguing all the things that are missing from my life, top of the list is usually a pantry. I always think, then, with considerable envy, of Sam’s pantry. But as I walk in and start browsing the shelves ideas start bubbling. The Rohdie pantry is also a library, an archive, a film museum, a curiosity cabinet. 
Looking forward to meeting Sam again in his forthcoming Film Modernism.
[i] http://www.littlerabbit.com/antonioni/masamrohdie.html
© Lesley Stern, 18 April 2015


Cut 
By William Routt 


Perhaps I should begin by pointing out that what you read here was not written by Bill Routt. It is being written by William D. Routt, an identity with which Bill should be intimately acquainted but who is by no means me. 
And what I am writing or have written emphasises a specific and crucial element of my (and your) relation to Sam Rohdie: Sam as a distorted reflection. In 1989 I, the one who writes this, dedicated an essay about cinema and architecture to “Sam – miroir insolite,” a pretty up itself way of telling him (if he ever read it or understood the secret message) that I was writing about this topic because he had been teaching and thinking and occasionally talking about Antonioni and architecture, and that I was also conscious of having taken other cues from what he had done. Of course, as it turned out, my dedication was much more than that. 
I had taken a lot of pleasure in the disturbance Sam caused when he initially arrived in the same batch of media faculty as I and another, at La Trobe's School of Education. There had been a raucous, pointed exchange with other members of the School on matters of history in which Sam was the Big Dog and I was the Small Dog. Even when he scared me, I thought it probably did me some good – because he could not shut up, because he had to say what he thought (or, rather, felt), because he was a bully, because he liked to embarrass and destroy. And because I also thought that there was no particular, no specific malice in what he did and said. There was a malice towards all, not malice towards one. He wanted no part of anyone (he wanted us all, all of us). Don't you wish you were like that? I did. 
So Sam was my bizarre mirror, an inversion of vision as printing is an inversion of what has been written, in which I identified myself distorted, no good, and truly. Saw the Big Dog without ever being the big dog. My reflection, projection, identification. The triumph of the finite me in the Absolutely Other. I hope he was that for at least some of you as well because, I think, it may have been something of what he intended, if he ever intended, if we ever really intend. 
Almost to the measure that his later, post-La Trobe, work was not within a mainstream that he, as editor of Screen in the early seventies, did so much to establish, that work is a benchmark of the best that a passionate, loving, and ambitious curiosity about  the cinema can produce. What interests me most about Sam's writing after Promised Lands, however, is its form. Fellini Lexicon, Montage, Intersections, and the forthcoming Film Modernism are all what I will call quilts, made of pieces that “stand alone”, related by colour and shape set in a certain relation to one another, a relation that might be another relation in another context, a relation that perhaps only seems to suggest a bounded whole – each a small model of community that does nowork. In this sense, what he wrote in that period takes us back to the  dissertation on just 43 shots of Rossellini's that he wrote, and I read, during his first years at La Trobe University. 
Fourteen years ago (almost to the day that I heard about Sam's death), he sent me an email asking what I knew about Primers. The wonderful, perfectly elementary Fellini Lexicon was about to come out and he was working on a short book about Godard along similar lines. Diane, who makes the actual quilts and to whom my writing is always (sometimes also) dedicated, collects childrens' books and she and I began to talk about such books. I picked through what she said and I said and wrote back to Sam. Some time after that he told me that he might quote/use what I had sent him in his Godard book. 
Two intriguing things happened since then. 
The first is that "the Godard book" no longer exists. Instead there is Film Modernism, which apparently is/will be something of a Primer on the topic of its title and on Godard and on Godard's Histoires, which Sam loved and lured me to love in a certain "round and round we go, down and down we go, into that old black magic" fashion. I do not know what may be in that book beyond love and black magic. 
The second intriguing thing is that in sorting through my computerised files a couple of year ago, I came across a couple of pages about Primers which I thought must have been written by Sam - for what would I have to say on such a topic? Since they had been placed, clearly by mistake, among the files of my own writing, I conscientiously deleted them in order to avoid inadvertent plagiarism. Now I remember that I was keeping them because they belonged with my notes about The Fairy Spectator, a very interesting book about mirrors and morals - thus, like Lois Weber's Hypocrites and other texts, about the cinema (only The Fairy Spectator was written in 1784). But now those pages are lost utterly because I was not able to distinguish myself from Sam. Or so it may be. There was no mirror left, no inversion. In writing, to my mind and for a couple of paragraphs, we were one. 
* 
I am thinking just now, intermittently, of Sergei Eisenstein's glass house in which no one notices anymore that the walls are glass, that someone can see and be seen through them. Instead all behave as though they are invisible to others. And this is the cinema: we watch, we judge. In the end our judgement is delivered; the glass house is smashed, and with it everything else is destroyed. One reason I am thinking about this is that I was first drawn to Eisenstein's glass house project while I was writing the essay I dedicated to Sam. 
"I wrote a story about living in the city, you know, after the end of the world thing. Just glass, everywhere glass" (an Author). 
For every image is  a sememe, that is, an assertion, a speech act. Every image demands interpretation, that is, judgement. Every image in this way reflects its viewer; every image is a figure. Every figure cuts itself off from other figures, every figure foresees its own destruction and everyone knows the exploding dice are loaded. 
Or at least this is what happens when one sees the thing in the mirror - a figure, a singularity, always already a monster. But this is also what happens when one stops looking, stops being distracted by the refractions of the light, the unending proliferation of sense. All that glass is, of course, already in the city before world's end, but invisible. All those reflections refracting reflections. We have but to look (again). 
There are more than a Viewer, or Viewers, and a Figure, or Figures, here. There is an Author. There are Authors. Histories, Memories, Texts, Secrets, Erasures, Lies, the Unnameable, the Unintended. And Futures, of course.  There is a community there and here, an unworking or nowork community, lured by curiosity, and awakened by a touch.  
The Big Dog - is it ambition? And the Little Dog - curiosity? What does ambition want - is it love?  Surely curiosity wants only understanding? They lie there together in the hall, waiting for me (and others) to take them for a walk. 
(But I would say that, about understanding and love, wouldn't I?).  As though one had to make a dichotomy here, as though this writing has been an act of separation instead of conjuncture. I am not writing about Sam. I cannot write about Sam, for there are no words of mine to replace his words which I make my own whenever I read them. I can write only about me, about the part of me that I sense as Sam. This is what I would write about you also. You know that. 
And you would make of me. 
*
© William D. Routt, 19 April 2015



 Works by Sam Rohdie online

Online works about Sam Rohdie's work:

Sam Rohdie's Books
  • Film Modernism, New York : Manchester University Press, October 2015 (see below for blurb)
  •  Intersections: Writings on Cinema,  New York : Manchester University Press, 2012
  • Montage, Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2006
  • Fellini Lexicon, London : BFI Publishing, 2002
  • Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism; London : British Film Institute, 2001
  • The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, London : British Film Institute / Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1996
  • Rocco and His Brothers, London : BFI Publishing, 1993
  • Antonioni, London : BFI Publishing, 1990
Film Modernism publisher's summary
This book is at once a detailed study of a range of individual filmmakers and an exploration of the modernism in which they are situated. It consists of fifty categories arranged in alphabetical order, among which are Allegory, Bricolage, Classicism, Contradiction, Desire, Destructuring and Writing. Each category, though autonomous, interacts, intersects and juxtaposes with the others, entering into a dialogue with them and in so doing creates connections, illuminations, associations and rhymes which may not have arisen in a more conventional framework. The apparent arbitrary order and openness of the book, based as it is on the alphabet, is indebted to Jean-Luc Godard's interrogation of history and of film history in all his work, especially in his Histoire(s) du cinema and its associative reach.
     The author refers to particular films and directors that raise questions related to modernism, and, inevitably, thereby to classicism, and often offers more in the way of questions and speculations than answers and conclusions. Jean-Luc Godard's work is at the centre of the book, though it spreads out, evokes and echoes other filmmakers and their work, including the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, João César Monteiro, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Orson Welles. This innovative and eloquently written text book will be an essential resource for all film students.

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Wednesday, 18 December 2013

New Fall 2013 Issue of MEDIASCAPE on "Urban Centers, Media Centers"

Frame grab from The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012). Read José Gallegos' article about this film in the new issue of Mediascape
This issue of Mediascape then is designed to raise pointed questions about the role of the city as a center of both media and cultural production, especially in relation to our experience of mediated reality. The ultimate goal is to ground this larger discourse in a more specific discussion of cinematic space and its transformation in the ever-expanding era of digital media. How do films represent the city in a time of technological change and aesthetic evolution? How has the wholesale implementation of digital technologies impacted the use of space in cinema? And how does the digital era affect the relationship between the off-screen and on-screen spatial environment? Looking at the distinctive aesthetics of urban space, it is our belief, allows for an examination of how we perceive and engage with the iconography of our world. Our intent is to problematize what we understand as the urban, and how strongly it relates to our relationship with contemporary media.
[Matthias Stork and Andrew Young, Mediascape Co-Editors-in-Chief, Introduction to the Fall 2013 issue]
Film Studies For Free would like its readers to head straight on over to the new issue of Mediascape which considers matters of space and mediation. 

FSFF would particularly recommend Matthias Stork's marvellous (and marvellously illustrated) study of the 'Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games', James Gilmore's fascinating essay on The Dark Knight Rises, urban space and the cultural experience of terrorism as mediation, as well as José Gallegos' essay on the Tsunami disaster film The Impossible. The issue also boasts unmissable items in the area of game studies.

Readers may also be interested to know that the excellent Mediascape blog is seeking new contributors on a wide variety of topics. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, or if you would like more information about the blog, please write to Editor-in-Chief Matthias Stork at mstork[at]ucla[dot]edu.
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Monday, 16 December 2013

Get the Picture! A Community-Based Film Study Programme Using THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY


Interview with filmmaker and educator Mark Cousins about his film series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which forms the basis of the Get the Picture community film study project described below

Quite often Film Studies For Free gets asked about free film study. Not so surprising, you might think, given the name on its own tin. But what people are often asking about is free "real world", or offline, film study - and sadly not too much of that comes for free these days.

So imagine how delighted FSFF was when it was contacted by a group of generous and talented individuals who have formed an educational partnership called Get the Picture 'that aims to provide free support materials and a framework to help people to come together in their local community, to form study groups and learn about film'.

FSFF is, therefore, delighted to create a space, in today's entry, for a concise and enticing introduction to the work of this partnership, in the hope that some of its readers will go on to take up the specific invitation set out here, and that yet others will go on to concoct their own community film study projects inspired by this one. If the latter happens, do please let FSFF know.

In the meantime, thank you so much to Get the Picture!  You can follow the project on Twitter --  @GtPfilm -- and, of course, at its website.


Get the Picture: Film study groups in the community

There's a certain added frisson of pleasure in writing this post, because of its context: what I'm about to describe is a programme of informal adult film study that is free to users. The only necessary additional costs involved are the purchase of the DVD box set of Mark Cousins's The Story of Film, an Odyssey.

'Us' refers to Get the Picture, which is the collective name for three activists in the community cinema movement, John Salisbury, Julia Vickers and Jim Barratt. The programme of study we've developed and made available is a response to the rapid attrition of informal film study in the 2000s, in the UK, at least, resulting from the decision of the last government to withdraw from supporting lifelong learning. After the impact of that withdrawal of funding became evident, we set about looking for an approach to filling the gap which would, like community cinemas themselves, work in local communities everywhere in the UK. We saw the possibilities opened up by the release of The Story of Film, and our programme is the result. Incidentally, we ran the idea past Mark Cousins early on: he liked it then, and has strongly and warmly endorsed the result.

What was needed?

As we saw it, the requirement was for a programme which was
  • free to participants
  • self-organised and self-paced
  • informal, not assessed
  • of benefit whatever the starting point of the participant.
We saw there was a need for someone (a group member) to manage the group experience and chair discussions (a role we termed 'enabler'), but that shouldering this responsibility would require additional support from us. We decided to base the whole programme on advice notes (e.g. Programme Guide, How to be a Participant) and study notes (each relating to a specific study/discussion session based on an individual episode of The Story of Film). We decided that since the only distribution system for study materials which would work universally was sending pdf documents over the internet, we would embrace the internet, giving strong guidance on its use as a resource for individual study. Finally, we decided that basing a programme on all 15 chapters of The Story of Film might well seem a dauntingly large commitment for a study group, so we offered the programme in three segments of five chapters/study sessions each.

What's in the programme?

For each segment, a participant receives a document set which contains common advice notes and the study notes relevant to the sessions in that segment. The advice notes consist of the Programme Guide, How to be a Participant, How to be an Enabler, and the Key Films list. You can find more detail on this (and examples) on the Get the Picture website at getthepicture.org.uk. There is also an advice note on Enhancements and Digressions, because we recognise that some groups may wish to add to the programme we've laid out, or digress from it: nothing is set in stone.

The normal experience for a participant in each segment is that after an introductory organizing session convened by the enabler, they attend five discussion sessions in which they discuss prepared questions chosen from those found in each set of Study Notes. In between discussion sessions, participants are asked to do four things: they watch the relevant chapter of The Story of Film, they prepare for the planned discussion questions, they undertake individual study based on suggested internet resources (from Wikipedia, YouTube and specified websites), and they watch the specified key films. This means that scheduling the discussions must leave time for these individual activities, and enablers receive suitable guidance about this. To give a more comprehensive flavour, embedded below is the Programme Guide pdf document which all participants receive. If you want to view it more comfortably, or offline, you can download it from this website: http://getthepicture.org.uk.


The Key Films list is significant: for each session, we select two of the films Mark Cousins cites as notable within the episode of The Story of Film, and suggest all group members watch these films as part of their preparation, to provide a common basis for discussion. From quite early on, some of the discussion questions focus on individual key films.

Trialling the programme

We have been fortunate in that groups from a small number of film societies agreed to trial the materials for Segment One. The result has been very positive and a clear endorsement of the basic approach. We have streamlined the study materials as a result of trials feedback, and worked hard to clarify the discussion questions. As we expected, specific problems arose around the role of the enabler, especially when inexperienced enablers had to deal with obstinate group members, but these problems were by no means dealbreakers. We encountered unexpected problems (for example, the disruptive potential of refreshments) and have had to mention these in the advice notes. But in general, the trials indicated to us that it was well worth continuing with the programme and making it generally available.

Who will benefit?

The short answer is anyone, anywhere. We have set the entry threshold low by shaping each set of discussion questions so that they are readily approachable, but permit quite deep insights. We have largely refrained from the theoretical but touched on it where appropriate, and we have taken the intellectual frame as that bounded by Mark Cousins's treatment, which relates filmmaking technique to viewing experience in some complex and interesting ways.  We have shaped the individual study possibilities by introducing a wide range of resources, simply as a way of illustrating what is possible, and we have used guided Wikipedia and YouTube research as the spine for individual inquiry.  This approach offers anyone who wants to go further all that the internet allows, but gives a solid and satisfactory experience to the novice.

What we want from you.

Do you know anyone who might like to know about the Get the Picture programme? They might be in a film society, or involved in a community cinema, or they might just be into film. The benefits of making what is normally solitary - watching film, reading and thinking about it - communal and social are hard to quantify, but they do include a clear development in the individual's ability to talk and think about film. We find that, for the many generations of Britons who have received no education in film at school or since, this development is immensely liberating, so we have no hesitation in asking you to spread the word. Send them a link to this post. Get the Picture is open for (free) business.
[The above text is by John Salisbury of Get the Picture]

Note about location: The materials were trialled with groups in the UK, but there is no reason why groups from anywhere in the English-speaking world should not take advantage of them. You only need to be sure you can access The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Study groups from anywhere in the world are welcome and invited to register with Get the Picture.
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