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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction - Eivind Røssaak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 reformasi and underground

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

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

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

Study of a Single Film: On Robert Enrico's La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 1 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 2 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 3 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

Film Studies For Free presents one of its regular features today - a little study of a (favourite) single film: La rivière du hibou, an adaptation of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", a short story by Ambrose Bierce. This short film version of Bierce's tale was directed by Robert Enrico, produced by Marcel Ichac with Paul de Roubaix, and was released in 1963. It won the award for best short subject at the 1962 Cannes film festival and 1963 Academy Awards.

In 1964 La rivière du hibou aired on U.S. television as an episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone (hence the framing, and opening and closing narrations in the slightly shortened version -- widely available online -- embedded above).

Partly because of its brilliance and partly because its adaptation of Bierce's classic story was so widely seen, Enrico's film has been cited as an important influence on many other cinematic experiments with subjective storytelling and "twist endings",  including recent ones by U.S. based directors such as Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and David Lynch.

FSFF loves the sheer cinematographic inventiveness of this film and sincerely believes that all students of audiovisual storytelling could learn a lot from studying precisely how it works. To assist with this task (always best achieved by closely watching the film and analysing its techniques first), it has concocted a small but reasonably well-formed list of links to online and openly accessible studies of La rivière du hibou and related moving image texts.

• Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", Free e-Text at Project Gutenberg, 1995

• David Auerbach, 'Occurrences at Owl Creek Bridge', Waggish, June 16, 2007
• David Auerbach, 'Occurrences at Owl Creek Bridge: Beyond the Zeroes', Waggish, August 12, 2007
• Aviva Briefel, 'What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film', Narrative, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2009, pp. 95-108
• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003
• Don A. Habibi, 'The Magic Moment: the Liminal, Distended Time Flashforward of Ambrose Bierce',  The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005
• Don Asher Habibi, 'The experience of a lifetime: philosophical reflections on a narrative device of Ambrose Bierce', Studies in the Humanities; 12/1/2002
• Richard J. Hand, 'Reanimating Peyton Farquhar: the adaptations of Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in American Radio and Television', The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005
• Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, 'Lost Finale and the Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Parallel', Wordsushi, May 25, 2010
• Justine Smith, 'Robert Enrico’s Civil War Trilogy based on stories by Ambrose Bierce', House of Mirth and Movies, May 11, 2010
• Alanna Thain, 'Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch's Lost Highway', Invisible Culture, Issue 8, 2004
• Peter Wilshire, 'Dead in the Water? Dream and Reality in Carnival of Souls: the Eternal Circle of Life and Death', Offscreen Journal, April 30, 2007

Paranormal cinematic activity: ghost film studies

Latest update: April 27, 2010

 Publicity still for The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). See an excerpt from this film in Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay 'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film', embedded towards the foot of this entry

Film Studies For Free has gone and spooked itself, today, with its own scary persistence in compiling a list of links to openly accessible, online, scholarly articles, chapters and theses on international ghost film studies. Oh, and there are two related video essays lurking at the bottom to scare the scholarly bejesus out of you for good measure, too (added April 27) .

Like all the best posts at this blog (IOHO), the list below owes its hefty materiality to its connections with FSFF's author's own (hauntological) research, some of which, hopefully, will be directly shared with her fearless readers very shortly. So do please be a revenant, won't you?

• Michael J. Anderson, 'Histoire de Marie et Julien: Jacques Rivette's Material Ghost Story', Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004

• Guy Austin, '"In Fear and Pain": Stardom and the Body in Two French Ghost Films', Scope, Issue 7, February 2007

• Sarah M. Ball, The Uncanny in Japanese and American Horror Film: Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s Ring, MA thesis, North Carolina State University, 2006  

• Colette Balmain, '“Vengeful Virgins in White”: Female Monstrosity in Asian Cinema', in Niall Scott (ed), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004) [scroll down through pdf to p. 123]

• Colette Balmain, 'Inside the Well of Loneliness: Towards a Definition of the Japanese Horror Film', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Papers, 2006

• Caetlin Benson-Allott , '“Before you die, you see The Ring”: notes on the immanent obsolescence of VHS, from Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007

• Lesley Brill, 'M. Night Shyamalan: A Preliminary Report', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008

• Ture Bural, 'Endland Umpire: A placement of David Lynch's Inland Empire', Perforations, 29, 2007

• Jodey Castricano, 'Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the Strange Question of Trans-Subjectivity', Jung: the e-Journal of the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies Volume 2, Number 3, April, 2006

• Brigid Cherry, 'Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror', Particip@tions, Vol. 5, Issue 1, 2008

• Leah A.Cheyne, 'The Sixth Sense: Humanizing Horror', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• David Church, 'Return of the Return of the Repressed: Notes on the American Horror Film (1991-2006)', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 10 (November 25, 2006)

• Michel Ciment, 'Kubrick and the Fantastic', (1982) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)

• Robyn Citizen, 'Review of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity by Linnie Blake', Senses of Cinema,Issue 51, 2009

• Ryan Cooke, 'Review of Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008', Screening the Past,Issue 23, 2008

• Lisa Coulthard, 'Uncanny Memories: Stan Douglas, Subjectivity and Cinema, Scope, 2000

• John Culbert, 'The Well and the Web: Phantoms of Community and the Mediatic Public Sphere', Postmodern Culture, 19.2, January 2009

• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003

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

• Carolyn Erler, 'The Obama Code: Ghosts and Monsters in the Visual Datasphere', CTheory.net, Resetting Theory Issue, December 2009
  

• Mark Fisher, 'Home is where the haunt is: The Shining's hauntology', k-punk, January 23, 2006

• Mark Fisher, 'You have always been the caretaker': the spectral spaces of the Overlook Hotel', Perforations, 29, 2007

• Brian Grady, '"We're Engaged to Be Engaged": The Paranormal Activity of Trauma and Relationship', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 67, February 2010

• Catherine Grant, 'Giving up Ghosts: Eliseo Subiela's Hombre mirando al sudeste and No te mueras sin decirme a dónde vas', Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds, ed. Rob Rix and Roberto Rodríguez-Saona (Leeds: Leeds Iberian Papers - Trinity and All Saints/University of Leeds, 1997), pp. 89-120  

• Coral Houtman, 'Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense', Scope, November 2004

• Wendy F. Hsu , 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, vol. 5 (2003)

• Annamarie Jagose, 'Hollywood Lesbians [Interview with Patricia White about Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability', Genders, 32, 2000

• Fredric Jameson, 'Historicism in The Shining', (1981) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)

• Brian Jarvis, 'Anamorphic allegory in The Ring, or, seven ways of looking at a horror video', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 3, 2007

• Bruce Kawin, 'Carnival of Souls', The Criterion Collection, Film Essays, 76

• Antonio Lázaro-Reboll , 'The Transnational Reception of El espinazo del diablo (Guillermo del Toro 2001)', Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2007, 39–51

• John Lewis, '"Mother Oh God Mother …": Analysing the 'Horror' of Single Mothers in Contemporary Hollywood Horror', Scope, Issue 2, 2005

• Owen Livermore, 'Gun and Other Play: Takashi Miike and Fantasia Festival 2004', Synoptique, December 2004

• Li Zeng, Horror returns to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and the space of horror ', from Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009

• Luo Hui, 'Chapter Four: Minor Discourses in New Peripheries', The Ghost of Liaozhai: Pu Songling's Ghostlore and its History of Reception, PhD Thesis,University of Toronto, 2009

• Nina K. Martin, 'Dread of mothering: plumbing the depths of Dark Water', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Ewa Mazierska, 'Between the Sacred and the Profane, the Sublime and the Trivial: The Magic Realism of Jan Jakub Kolski ', Scope, 2000

• Donna McRae, 'Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance', B for Bad Cinema, Colloquy, Issue 18, December 2009

• Thomas Mical, 'Introduction: Hauntology, or Spectral Space', Perforations, 29, 2007  

• Elizabeth Mullen, 'Synæsthetic Specters: Haunting Hill House on the Silver Screen', Image and Narrative, Vol. 10, Issue 1, 2009

• Lindsay Nelson, 'Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema', Cinemascope, Issue 13, July-December 2009

• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009

• Eimi Ozawa , 'Remaking Corporeality and Spatiality: U.S. Adaptations of Japanese Horror Films, 49th Parallel, Conference Special Edition, Autumn 2006

• N. Payasopon, 'The Cultural and Filmic Elements that contribute to the popularity of the Thai film Nang Nak', BU Review, Volume 2, No. 1, January-June 2003

• Jennifer Proctor, 'Différance, the Spectral, and the Work of Mourning in Aaron Valdez’s dissolve', 2004

• Laurence A. Rickels, 'Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time', Other Voices, v.2, n.2 (March 2002)

• Juneko J. Robinson , 'Review: Jay McRoy (2007) Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam: Rodopi', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010

• Caroline Ruddell, 'Breaking Boundaries The Representation of Split Identity in Anime', Animation Studies – Vol.2, 2007

• Steven Schneider, 'World Horror Cinema and the US: Bringing it all back home', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002

• Donato Totaro, 'Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 1: The Long Take., Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• Donato Totaro, Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 2: Mise en Scène', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• Donato Totaro, 'Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008', Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009

• Dennis Tredy, 'Shadows of Shadows - Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: J. Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), D. Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and A. Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999)', E-rea, 2.1, 2004

• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Leaving the cinema: metacinematic cruising in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Gang Gary Xu, 'Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005

• Young-joon Cho, 'Four Cinema Versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', Thannhouser Company Film Preservation, 2006

• Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Neda Hei-tung Ng, 'Magic, Medicine, Cannibalism: the China Demon in Hong Kong Horror', David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Working Paper Series, Paper Number: 74, April 2008 

Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay
'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film',

Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay
'Unreal Estate: The Scariest Movie Locations of All Time'