Studies of the Remediation of Films, Comics and Video Games

Transmedia Synergies - Remediating Films and Video Games from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.
See Matthias Stork's Mediascape, Winter 2013 essay 'Transmedia Synergies – Remediating Films and Video Games', which incorporates this video

                   The Video Game Film from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

This mash-up is a playful offshoot of [Matthias Stork's] research project on the aesthetic intermediality of films and video games [e.g. see above]. Edgar Wright’s seminal film SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (2010, Universal Pictures) effectively illustrates the audiovisual parallels and differences between the two media. It organically integrates the distinctive stylistic flourishes of video game play into the dominant cinematic texture, to the point that the film, particularly in its action sequences, evolves into a subjectively rendered (and relatable) gameplay experience. It thus represents a genuine video game film. This video essay seeks to foreground this affective dimension by heightening the aesthetic strategies of the film. And it is further intended as an homage to the director’s exceptional work.

"The Video Game Film" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

             From the Panel to the Frame: Style and Scott Pilgrim from Drew Morton on Vimeo. Originally published at PressPlay with a great introduction by Matt Zoller Seitz

Film Studies For Free today presents an entry which has long been in preparation. It was originally conceived of especially as a showcase for the above, hugely innovative and informative video essay studies by Matthias Stork and Drew Morton. But it has grown into a veritable font of wonderful links to online and open access studies of the connections between films, comics and video games.

FSFF hopes you enjoy the below list, and if you'd like to add any, as yet missing open access studies to it, please just let this blog know about those in the comments. Thank you! [Please note: FSFF can't publish one submitted suggestion for a non-open access book in the field, one which has no free excerpts. Sorry about that. But, hopefully, that commercial publisher has an advertising budget to compensate for this little blog's interest in other forms of publishing. Thanks anyway.]

Game on!

• Charles R. Acland, 'Avatar as Technological Tentpole', Flow, January 2012
• Maaheen Ahmed and Martin Lund, 'Apocalypse Why? The Neutralisation of the Antichrist Motif in Three Comics Adaptations', SCAN, 9.1, 2012 
• Matthew Bolton, 'Fidelity and Period Aesthetics in Comics Adaptation', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 6.1 (2011)
• Will Brooker, 'Maps of many worlds: Remembering computer game fandom in the 1980s', Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 2 (2009)
• Liam Burke, ''Special Effect: Have film adaptations changed mainstream comics?'', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Rebecca Carlsen, 'Games as Transformative Works', Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 2, 2009
• Josep Catala, 'A Drawing of the World: Documentary and Comic Book', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Stacey Church, 'Remediation and Video Games: Bookwork in Dragon Age: Origins', Emergence: A Journal of Undergraduate Literary Criticism and Creative Research, Vol. 2, 2011
• Damian Duffy, 'Remasters of American Comics: Sequential art as new media in the transformative museum context', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)  
• Markku Eskelinen, 'The Gaming Situation', Game Studies, 1.1, 2001
• Jim Fleury, 'Revenge of the (Angry Video Game) Nerd: James Rolfe and Web 2.0 Fandom', Mediascape, Winter 2012
• Michael Fuchs, '“My name is Alan Wake. I’m a writer.”: Crafting Narrative Complexity in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling', Academia.edu, January 2012
• Robert Furze, 'Virtual Bliss, Analog Horrors: Reading the Imperfect Digital Image in Film and the Video Game', MiT7: Unstable Platforms: the Promise and Peril of Transition, 13-15 May 2011
• Lynn Gelfand, 'Moon Prism Power, Make-Up!': Sailor Moon and the Transformation of the Multiform Story in Modern Media', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Harrison Gish, 'Media Boundaries and Bullet Time: A Hard Boiled Fan Plays Stranglehold', Mediascape, Winter 2012
• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro, No. 51, 2006
• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010
• Christopher Hayton, 'Charlton Comics' Monster Movie Adaptations', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Matthew Hepburn, 'The Technoludic Film: Remediation in Videograme to Film Adaptations', University of Warwick, Unpublished dissertation, January 2012 also see here
• Henry Jenkins, 'Game Design As Narrative Architecture',  in P. Harrington and N. Frup- Waldrop (Eds.), First Person. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002 and also at CMS / MIT, 2004
• Henry Jenkins, 'Transmedia Synergies: Remediating Films and Video Games', Confessions of an Aca-Fan, January 9, 2013
• Jesper Juul, 'Games Telling Stories? - A brief note on games and narratives', Game Studies, 1,1 2001
• Petri Lankoski, 'Goals, Affects, and Empathy in Games', Paper at the Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games, Modena reggio Emilia, Italy, January 25-27, 2007 
• Petri Lankoski, Character-Driven Game Design (Aalto University, 2010)
• Simon Locke, 'Considering comics as medium, art, and culture - the case of From Hell', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Vyshali Manivannan, 'Interplay Amidst the Strangeness and the Charm: Under-language and the Attenuation of Meaning in the Film Adaptation of Watchmen', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.4 (2011)
• Lev Manovich, 'What is Digital Cinema?', Manovich.net, 1995
• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema and Digital Media', in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (eds), Perspectives of Media Art (1996)
• Lev Manovich, 'Moving Image Culture after Computerisation: an outline', 2003
• Patrick McEntaggart, 'Once Upon a Paradigm Shift: Interactive Storytelling in a New Media Context', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 5th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 14, 2010
• Jane McGonigal, ʻ”This Is Not a Game”: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play [on The Beast/ the A.I game]', MelbourneDAC2003
• Tom Miller, 'Struggling With Godzilla: Unraveling the Symbolism in Toho’s Sci/Fi Films', Kaiju-Fan 10 (Winter), 1999
• Drew Morton, 'Sketching Under the Influence? Winsor McCay and the Question of Aesthetic Convergence Between Comic Strips and Film', Animation, 2010 
• Drew Morton, 'Comics to Film (And Halfway Back Again): A DVD Essay', FLOW, April 5, 2007
• Drew Morton, 'Godard’s Comic Strip Mise-en-Scène', Senses of Cinema, 53, 2009
• Drew Morton, David O’Grady and Jennifer Porst, 'Towards a New Genre of Video Game Play', Mediascape, Fall 2009
• Graham J. Murphy, 'Gotham (K)Nights: Utopianism, American Mythology, and Frank Miller's Bat(-topia)', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 4.2 (2008)
• Janet H. Murray, 'The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies', DiGRA 2005, Vancouver, Canada, June 17, 2005
• Lizzie Nixon, 'I Focalize, You Focalize, We All Focalize Together: Audience Participation in Persepolis', Image and Narrative, 11.2, 2010
• Brian L. Ott, 'The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema', eventually published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Volume 27 Issue 1, March 2010
• Ágnes Petho, 'Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies', Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2 (2010) 39–72 
• Paul Petrovic, 'The Culturally Constituted Gaze: Fetishizing the Feminine from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen to Zack Snyder's Watchmen', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.4 (2011)
• Michael J. Prince, ''HOWL: A Novel Graphic: Authenticity and Irony in Eric Drooker's Adaptations of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"' ', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• William Proctor, ''Beginning Again: The Reboot Phenomenon in Comic Books and Film'', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Charlotte Pylyser, 'Rogue Paratexts: Epo's Graphic Classic Adaptations and the Jupien Effect', SCAN, 9.1, 2012  
• J.R. Roberto, 'Godzilla and the Second World War: A Study of the Allegorical Meaning in Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again' in Kaiju-Fan 5 (Spring), 1997
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media', Game Studies, Volume 1, issue 1, 2001
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'On Defining Narrative Media', Image and Narrative, 3.2, 2003
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Computer Games as Narrative: The Ludology versus Narrativism Controversy', Avatars of Story, at www.dichtung-digital.org/2006
• Kevin Schut, 'Technology tells a tale: digital games and narrative', Proceedings of Digra, 2003
• Jan Simons, 'Narrative, Games, and Theory', Game Studies, 7.1, 2007
• Matthew Stoddard, 'Ghost in the Shell, Cognitive Mapping, and the Desire for Communism', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.2 (2010)
• Matthias Stork, 'In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema', Frames, 1, 2012
• Matthias Stork, 'Transmedia Synergies – Remediating Films and Video Games', Mediascape, Winter 2013 
• Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• David Surman, 'Remediation and Cineliteracy: An Approach to Recent Popular Film', Academia.edu, [date unknown] also see here
• Jan-Noël Thon, 'Computer Games, Fictional Worlds, and Transmedia Storytelling: A Narratological Perspective', The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Oslo 2009
• Justine Toh, 'The tools and toys of (the) War (on Terror): Consumer desire, military fetish and regime change in Batman Begins', SCAN, 6.1, 2009

• Kevin Veale, '"Interactive Cinema" Is an Oxymoron, but May Not Always Be', Game Studies, Volume 12, issue 1, 2012

• Video Games: The State of the Field - A Discussion with Steve Mamber, Peter Lunenfeld, and Eddo Stern (March 28, 2011). Moderated by David O’Grady, Mediascape, Winter 2012 
• Mark Rowell Wallin, 'Myths, Monsters and Markets: Ethos, Identification, and the Video Game Adaptations of The Lord of the Rings', Game Studies, Volume 7, issue 1, 2007

New SCREENING THE PAST

Image from After the Rainbow (2009), a two screen video installation by Soda_Jerk, the Australian artist sisters Dom and Dan Angeloro, as discussed in 'The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime' by Andrew Frost

[C]inema is surely a paradoxical object: its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity. That is where its true materiality-effect, today, is situated: in the palpable aura of a mise en scène that is always less than itself and more than itself, not only itself but also its contrary, ever vanishing and yet ever renewed across a thousand and one screens, platforms and dispositifs. [Adrian Martin, 'Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif ', Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011]

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

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

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


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

First Release

• Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif by Adrian Martin
• Cinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch’s Inland Empire by Jodi Brooks
• The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime by Andrew Frost
• Théâtre du Soleil Meets the Cinema: Acting and Mask Work in Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière by Laura Sava
• Capital and Co.: Kluge/Eisenstein/Marx by Julia Vassilieva

Dossier: U-Matic to YouTube

• “Working in Communities, Connecting with Culture”: Reflecting on U-matic to YouTube A National Symposium Celebrating Three Decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking by Therese Davis and Romaine Moreton
• “These Are The Choices We Make”: Animating Saltwater Country by John Bradley Graham Friday Amanda Kearney and Leonard Norman
• Two Laws: A Filmmaking Journey by Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan
• Was Two Laws Experimental? by Stephen Muecke
• Story, Film Style and Cross-cultural Collaboration in Aeroplane Dance (1994) by Trevor Graham
• Aeroplane Dance: Whose Story? by Maryrose Casey and John Bradley
• Models of Collaboration in the Making of Ten Canoes (2006) by Nancy E. Wright
• Darlene Johnson on Making Films in Arnhem Land by Therese Davis
• Victorian Indigenous Communities and Digital Storytelling by Jason Eades Helen Simondson and Kimba Thompson
• The Farm (2009) and Indigenous Remembrance by Romaine Moreton

Classics and Re-runs

• Incomparable Bodies by Nicole Brenez

Reviews

• Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, Bernard Stiegler by Daniel Ross
• Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Peter Limbrick by Deane Williams
• Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing, Susan L. Carruthers by Gabrielle Murray
• Diasporas of Australian cinema, Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert (eds) by Ina Bertrand
• The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller by Michael Grant
• Dancing Ledge / Kicking the Pricks, Derek Jarman by Niall Richardson
• Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood by Regina Longo
• Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Ella Shohat by Seyda Aylin Gurses
• The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Suzanne Buchan by Mihaela Mihailova
• Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, Karen Beckman by Thomas Salek

In-Sight from Excursions: action movies, neuroscience, dreamscapes, intermediality and spectatorship

Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)

The image seems to be a way of marking such a potential separation between exterior and interior while belonging to both. Moreover, that condition of holding ‘in sight’, as a means of externalisation as belonging to the image, is realised in the easy conceptual slippage from ‘in sight’ to ‘insight’- originally ‘internal sight’ or seeing with the eyes of the mind, that later becomes a seeing into a thing or subject. To bring an object within sight is to affect the ‘inner eye’, to re-formulate the relationship of the visible to the invisible, presence to absence.  Lindsay Smith, 'Foreword: In-Sight', Excursions, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (June 2010), i-ii

Thanks to the regular updates to Jurn, the excellent search-engine that Film Studies For Free uses in its every waking hour (and then dreams of every night), FSFF found its way to a newish e-journal -- Excursions -- with a first issue replete with interesting and, yes, insightful items on film.

Its Mission Statement reads as follows:

Excursions is an invitation to journey into the unfamiliar, a space in which to reflect upon the travels of concepts, beyond the boundaries of one’s discipline. An on-line peer-reviewed journal, Excursions is designed to showcase high-quality, innovative and inventive postgraduate research. Run by postgraduates in the School of English at the University of Sussex, we aim to encourage work that plays with the permeable nature of academic disciplines. As such, our interest lies in the interdisciplinary. Each issue of the journal has a theme which contributors can interpret as they see fit. We welcome critical papers or creative pieces and seek to place cultural, political, artistic and scientific discourses together in surprising combinations and illuminating moments of collision.

And here is the table of contents:

Articles

• Foreword Lindsay Smith

• The Eye, the Brain, the Screen – What Neuroscience Can Teach Film Theory Paul Elliott

• Hard bodies and sidelong looks: Spectacle and fetish in 1980s action cinema Nicky Falkof

• Through the Arendtian Lens: Developing Statelessness through Gregor Schneider's 'Weisse Folter' Suzy K. Freake

• Waking Life: The Destiny of Cinema’s Dreamscape; or the Question of Old and New Mediations Markos Hadjioannou

• The Embodied Spectator and the Uncomfortable Experience of Watching Romance and The Piano Teacher Sara Elisabeth Sellevold Orning

• Invoking The Spectral Body: A Study of Potential Corporealities in the Work of Marina Abramovic and Francesca Woodman  Prema Purigali Prabhakar

• The Problem of Film Theatre Intermediality in Jesus of Montreal Laura Sava

• Writing the world: photographing the text of the landscape Gina Wall