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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On 'Affect' and 'Emotion' in Film and Media Studies

Image from Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992), a film explored by Tim Groves in 'Cinema/Affect/Writing'

Emotion is a phenomenon that, according to [Sergei] Eisenstein, "is completely identical with the primary phenomenon of cinema. [In cinema] movement is created out of two motionless cells. Here, a movement of the soul, i.e. emotion (from the Latin root motio = movement), is created out of the performance of a series of incidents." ([Towards a Theory of Montage] 145, emphasis in original). Properly structured as a series of uncompleted incidents, montage calls on us to finish the actions mentally, and for Eisenstein this internal movement of filling in the gaps is emotion, a movement of the soul. [Greg M. Smith, Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein's Writings', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.4 (October-November 2004) 303-315 citing Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage. Trans. Michael Glenny. Ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor. London: BFI Publishing, 1991; hyperlinks added]

[H]ow to write about specific, personal affective experiences of the cinema? [...]

It is difficult for me to articulate, but I was affected [in Unforgiven] by the conjunction of lighting, costuming, and the melancholy, homicidal figure of [Clint] Eastwood in the final shootout in Greely’s. The mise en scène of this confrontation repeats that of the night of Will’s beating at the hands of Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). The lack of contrast in lighting and the orange and brown colours of both the characters’ costumes and saloon setting cause the characters to merge into their surroundings. It is literally difficult to see what is happening. While William Munny and the Eastwood persona are constructed as unforgiven in this scene, somewhere in the gloom I found a metaphor for the ambivalence of their forgiveness across the entire film. As a result, I declined to judge this “notoriously vicious and intemperate” figure, as he is labelled in [the film]. Instead I forgave him. I saw his thinning hair and the wounds engraved on his face, and reached out to tend to them. Forgiveness was the punctum which I found in Unforgiven and which is already there in the text, if ambiguously. [...]

But I cannot write your cinema/sadness . . . [Tim Groves, 'Cinema/Affect/Writing', Senses of Cinema, February 2003 hyperlinks added]

Film Structure and the Emotion System is concerned with this emotion system's structure, rather than with particular emotions themselves. This is not a book about sadness or joy; instead it deals with the foundational structures that make such emotions possible. Culturally nuanced work on particular emotions certainly needs to be done, but we should make sure that we first understand the basic principles of how the emotion system is constructed. [Greg M. Smith, 'An Invitation to Feel', Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) hyperlinks added]

The elicitation of affect in the audience stands firmly at the core of the film-going experience, figuring into the poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and ideology of film viewing. If our goal is to understand how mainstream viewers experience films, if we want to explore the cultural role of movies, if we wish to expand our conception of the poetics of the cinema, then we cannot ignore the place of emotion elicitation and affective experience within film viewing. [Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006 hyperlinks added]

In their work, [Torben] Grodal, [Greg M.] Smith, and [Carl] Plantinga all rely on a “downstream flow” of perception, cognition, emotional processing in narrative film. It is a uni-directional flow; the viewers see, they comprehend, they experience emotion. However, underlying all of their work are Silvan Tomkins’s foundational studies of affect from the 1960s. Tomkins’s analyses make possible a more complicated multi-directional understanding of affect [...]. Tomkins explored affect as located in the voice, skin, autonomic nervous system, hand, body, and most extensively, the face. Rather than perceive affect and emotion as developing outward from the inner organs as Henri Bergson, William James, or Carl Lange had suggested, Tomkins and his colleagues Carrol Izard and Paul Ekman focused mostly on the face as “an organ for the maximal transmission of information, to the self and to others” and concluded that “the information it transmits is largely concerned with affects.” This is the point on which narrative film studies has focused. [Randall Halle, 'Toward a Phenomenology of Emotion in Film: Michael Brynntrup and The Face of Gay Shame', MLN, Vol. 124, No. 3, April 2009 (German Issue), pp. 683-707; hyperlinks added]

AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body …  [Brian Massumi, 'Introduction' to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, xvi, cited by Eric Shouse, 'Feeling, Emotion, Affect', M/C Journal, 8.6, 2005]

Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalising upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation and distribution. They generate subjectivity and they play a crucial role in the valorisation of capital. Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance. [...]
     What does it mean to describe such processes in terms of affect? Here I follow Brian Massumi ([Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press] 2002, 23-45) in differentiating between affect and emotion. For Massumi, affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified and meaningful, a ‘content’ that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions. [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]

There is not one ‘affect’, nor even one economy, ecosystem or ecology of affect(s); just as there is not one reading of one text. Post-cinematic effects, yes; Shaviro makes an important observation. But affects? I’m not so sure why or how they would be different from everything that postmodern theorists have long been saying about postmodernity. The ultimate question, to me, is whether approaching the world in terms of affect offers anything specific for cultural theory and the understanding of culture and politics. [Paul Bowman, 'Post-Cinematic Effects', In Media Res Theme Week on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect (August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011)]

It is almost too easy to speak of affect—as if, by using this term, one had cleansed all the embarrassment and messiness from the experience. To use “affect” in the sense defined by Deleuze and Guattari, that is, as non-conscious and non-linguistic experience of intensity, appears not to be useful if one wants to explore the overlap of rationality and emotionality, as well as insist on the textual and self-reflexive—that is, self-augmenting and self-attenuating—character of emotionality. [Katrin Pahl, 'Emotionality: A Brief Introduction', Modern Language Notes, Volume 124, Number 3, April 2009 (German Issue)]

Today, Film Studies For Free makes one of its regular, little, curatorial contributions to a particular Film Studies theoretical debate. This time, it's the turn of an exploration of some much-fought-over keywords pertaining to film and media theories of feelings and related bodily and psychological experiences and behaviours - most notably, the terms 'Affect' and 'Emotion'.

The 'Affective Turn' is a rich, if at times rather complex or befuddling, vein of film studies thinking, with an array of approaches ranging from the historical-political (e.g. von Moltke's article), to the cognitivist (for example, see Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith) through the psychoanalytic (for example, see Groves' essay) and the (post-)Deleuzo-Guattarian (for a good, clear introduction, read Anna Powell's article).

As always, in the below list of links to openly accessible online studies, the ever pluralist FSFF doesn't come down on any one theoretical side. But this collection does go out especially to all those who have been curious about, or confused and dumbfounded by, the undoubted buzzword quality, particularly, of 'affect' in Film and Media Studies in the last ten to fifteen years.

• Marco Abel, 'Intensifying Affect', Electronic Book Review, October 2008

• Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs, ' Media, Affect and the Face: Biomediation and the Political Scene', Southern Review 38.2 (2006)

• Philip Bell, 'Cultural Studies as Neo-Psychology: Comments on B. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (2002)', Porceedings of Hawaian International Conference on Social Sciences, 2003

• Jamie Skye Bianco, 'Affective | Reading | Affect', draft for Cross Media Movements [date unknown]

• Lisa Blackman and John Cromby, 'Affect and feeling', International Journal of Critical Psychology, 21, 5-22 (2007)

• Paul Bowman, 'Post-Cinematic Effects', Jacques Rancière, July 26, 2011

• Will Brooker, 'Brief Tears I: Gin Talking' in Michele Byers and David Lavery (eds), On the Verge of Tears: Why the Movies, Television, Music, Art, Popular Culture, Literature, and the Real World Make Us Cry (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010)

• Giuliana Bruno, 'Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Archictecture and Film', Talk at Institut de la Ville en Mouvement, 2001(?)

• Giuliana Bruno, 'Motion and Emotion: Film and Haptic Space', 13.2, 2010

• Sarah Cefai, 'Unhappy Families [Review of Sara Ahmed, The 
Promise
 of 
Happiness
, 2010]', Cultural Studies Review, 17.1, March 2011

• Hsiao-hung Chang, 'Transnational Affect: Cold Anger, Hot Tears, and Lust, Caution', Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.1 March 2009: 31-50

• Eu Jin Chua, '[Review of] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.', BMRCL, 6.2, Fall 2007

• Annabel Cohen, 'Music as a Source of Emotion in Film',  in J. Sloboda and (Eds.). Music and emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 245-268

• Amy Coplan, 'Catching Characters' Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

• Eric Crosby, 'An Aesthetic of Wonderment: IMAX and Affect',  Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 6, 2007

• Gilles Deleuze, 'The Affection-image: Face and Close-up', Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986 (Google Books Limited Preview)

• Jens Eder, 'Ways of Being Close to characters', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

• Kathrin Fahlenbrach, 'The Emotional Design of Music Videos. Approaches to Audiovisual Metaphors', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 4, 2005

• Jonathan Frome , 'Representation, Reality, and Emotions Across Media', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

• Patrick W. Galbraith, 'Moe: Exploring Virtual Potential in Post-Millennial Japan', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, October 31, 2009

• Wendy Gan, "0.01cm: Affectivity and Urban Space in Chungking Express." Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, November 2003

• Gary Genosko, 'A Tale of Two Virtuals', TOPIA 10, Fall 2003

• Anna Gibbs, 'Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect', Australian Humanities Review, December 2001

• Jeremy Gilbert, 'Signifying Nothing: "Culture", "Discourse" and the Sociality of Affect', Culture Machine, Vol. 6, 2004

• Alessandro Giovannelli, Artistic and Ethical Values in the Experience of Narratives, PhD Thesis, University of Maryland, 2004

• Rebecca Gordon, 'Remakes, Genre, and Affect: The Thriller-Chiller-Comedy as Case Study' Paper at MLA Conference, 2007

• Sneja Gunew, 'Subaltern Empathy: Beyond European Categories in Affect Theory', Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.1 March 2009: 11-30

• Torben Grodal , 'The PECMA Flow: A General Model of Visual Aesthetics', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

• James J. Gross and Robert W. Levenson, 'Emotion elicitation using films', Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 9, No. 1. (1995), 87-108

• Tim Groves, 'Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006

• Tim Groves, 'Cinema/Affect/Writing', Senses of Cinema, February 2003

• Gay Hawkins, 'Documentary Affect: Filming Rubbish', Australian Humanities Review, September 2002

• William Hope, Excerpt from Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion, Cognition, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006)

• In Media Res Theme Week on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect [August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011]
• 'Cinema's Exhaustion and the Vitality ...' by Elena del Rio
• 'Post-Cinematic Effects' by Paul Bowman
• 'A hair of the dog that bit us' by Adrian Ivakhiv
• 'Fragments of unconscious' by Patricia MacCormack
• A response to the week by Steven Shaviro

• Barbara M. Kennedy, 'Choreographies of the Screen', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2002

• Anu Koivunen & Susanna Paasonen (eds), Conference proceedings for Affective Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment in Feminist Media Studies (Media Studies, Turku 2000)

[Contents: Anu Koivunen, Preface: The Affective Turn?; Sara Ahmed, Communities that feel: Intensity, Difference and Attachment; Ana Paula Baltazar, Architecture as Interface: Forming and Informing Spaces and Subjects; Jennifer Lyon Bell, Character and Cognition in Modern Pornography; Rosemary Betterton, Spaces of Memory: Photographic Practices of Home and Exile; Joanna Bouldin, The Body, Animation and The Real: Race, Reality and the Rotoscope in Betty Boop; Hannu Eerikäinen, Love Your Prosthesis Like Yourself: ‘Sex’, Text and the Body in Cyber Discourse; Taru Elfving, The Girl in Space-time Encounters with and within Eija-liisa Ahtila’s Video Installations; Amy Herzog, Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory; Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas, Inventing “African Solutions”, HIV Prevention and Medical Media; Sanna Karkulehto, Effects and Affects of Queer as Folk; Martta Kaukonen, ”I Must Reveal a Shocking Secret” Transvestites in American Talk Shows; Jane Kilby, Tracking Shock: Some Thoughts on TV, Trauma, Testimony; Emmy Kurjenpuu, Women’s Magazines Meet Feminist Philosophy; Minna Lahti, “I Thought I Would Become a Millionaire” – Desire and Disillusionment in Silicon Valley, California; Mari-Elina Laukkanen, Ladies for Sale. The Finnish Press as a Profiteer; Ilmari Leppihalme, Do Muscles Have a Gender? A Female Subject Building her Body in the Film Pumping Iron II: The Women; Justine Lloyd and Lesley Johnson, The Three Faces of Eve:the Post-war Housewife, Melodrama and Home; Tapio Mäkelä, Re-reading Digitality through Scientific Discourses of Cybernetics: Fantasies of Disembodied Users and Embodied Computers; Norie Neumark, E/motional Machines: Esprit de Corps; Kaarina Nikunen, Dangerous Emotions? Finnish Television Fans and Sensibilities of Fandom; Sanna Ojajärvi, Visual Acts - Choreography of Touches, Glances and Movements between Hosts and Assistants on Television; Susanna Paasonen, Best Wives are Artefacts? Popular Cybernetics and Robot Women in the 1970s; Megan D. Pincus, Must They Be Famous Vaginas? The Effect and Affect of Celebrity on The Vagina Monologues and V-Day 2001; Liina Puustinen, Gender for Sale, Advertising Design as Technologies of Gender; Leena-Maija Rossi, Why Do I Love and Hate the Sugarfolks in Syruptown? Studying the Visual Production of Heteronormativity in Television Commercials; Christine Ross, Depression and Video Art at the Turn of the Millennium: The Work Of Diana Thater; Janne Rovio, The Vintage Van Damme Look; Moira Sullivan, Lesbographic Pornography; Rebecca Sullivan, Biotechnological Embodiment: Gender and Scientific Anxiety in Horror Films; Heidi Tikka, Missing the Point - Situated User Experience and the Materiality of Interaction; Julia Turnock, A Cataclysm of Carnage, Nausea, and Death: Saving Private Ryan and Bodily Engagement; Pasi Väliaho, An Audiovisual Brain: Towards a Digital Image of Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma; Hans Wessels, The Positioning of Lou Reed from a Profeminist Perspective; Jennifer Willet, Imagining the Self]

• Tarja Laine, 'Chapter 1: Intersubjectivity in Film Studies', in Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (Peter Lang Publishing, 2007)

• Marcia Landy, 'Traveling in Film Theory: Giuliana Bruno's Atlas of Emotion', Film-Philosophy, vol. 7 no. 44, November 2003

• Marcia Landy, 'Melodrama: Short Reflections on a Long Subject', Kinocultura, 17, 2007

• 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)

• Amparo Lasén, 'Mobile Media and Affectivity: Some Thoughts about the notion of Affective Bandwidth', in Höflich, Joachim R. / Kircher, Georg F. / Linke, Christine / Schlote, Isabel (eds.) Mobile Media and the Change of Everyday Life (New York: Peter Lang, 2010)

• David Lavery, 'The Crying Game', in Michele Byers and David Lavery (eds), On the Verge of Tears: Why the Movies, Television, Music, Art, Popular Culture, Literature, and the Real World Make Us Cry (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010)

• Scott D. Lipscomb and D. E. Tolchinsky, 'The role of music communication in cinema', in D. Miell, R. MacDonald,  and D. Hargreaves' (Eds.), Musical Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 [pre-publication draft]

• Patricia MacCormack, 'A Cinema of Desire: Cinesexuality and Guattari’s Asignifying Cinema', Women: A Cultural Review, 2005

• Brian Massumi, 'REALER THAN REAL: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari', Originally published in Copyright no.1, 1987

• Brian Massumi, 'EVERYWHERE YOU WANT TO BE: Introduction to Fear', in The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)

• Kevin McHugh, 'Celestal Fire', Aether Vol. 1, 34–38, October 2007 

• Benjamin Meade, 'Emotional Response to Computer Generated Special Effects: Realism Revisited', Journal of Moving Studies, Vol. 1, 2002

• David S. Miall, 'Feeling from the Perspective of the Empirical Study of Literature', JLT 1: 2 (2007), 377–393

• Johannes von Moltke, 'Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion - A Feeling for History', New German Critique 102, Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 2007

• Christopher M. Moreno, 'Affecting and Affective Social/Media Fields', Aether Vol. 1, 39–44, October 2007

• Angela Ndalianis, '[Review of] PARABLES FOR THE VIRTUAL: Movement, affect, sensation by Brian Massumi. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002', Leonardo Digital Reviews, February 2003

• 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

• Katrin Pahl, 'Emotionality: A Brief Introduction', Modern Language Notes, Volume 124, Number 3, April 2009 (German Issue)

• Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, 'Biology's Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect', Body and Society, 2010, 16: 29

• Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, 'Introduction' in Plantinga and Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Chicago: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

• Carl Plantinga and Ed Tan, 'Running head: Interest and unity in the emotional response to film', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 5, 2006 

• Carl Plantinga, 'Emotional Response Model', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 5, 2006

• Carl Plantinga, 'Film Theory and Aesthetics: Notes on a Schism', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53.1, Summer 1993

• Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006 

• Carl Plantinga and Ed Tan, 'Is an overarching theory of affect in film viewing possible?', Journal of Moving Image Studies 4 (2007)

• Anna Powell, 'Ripper’s Bodies–without–Organs: Affect and Psychogeography under the scalpel in From Hell', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 7, December 2009

• John Protevi, '[Review of] Melissa Greeg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)', Culture Machine, July 2011

• Effie Rassos, 'Everyday Narratives: Reconsidering Filmic Temporality and Spectatorial Affect Through the Quotidian,' PhD, University of New South Wales, 2005

• Gopalan Ravindran, 'The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory',Bright Lights Film Journal, 63, February 2009

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

• Elena del Río, 'Foreword: What a Scene Can Do', Cinephile, Vol. 5, Issue 2, 2009

• Elena del Río, 'Ararat and the Event of the Mother', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 17.2, Fall 2008

• 'Roundtable Discussion: The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 (with Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham)', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011

• Anne Rutherford, 'Cinema and Embodied Affect', Senses of Cinema, Issue 25, 2003

• Shelley Day Sclater, Candida Yates, Heather Price and David W. Jones, 'Introducing PsychosocialStudies of Emotion', in Sclater, Yates, Price and Jones (eds), Emotion: New Psychosocial Perspectives(London: Palgrave, 2009)

• Steven Shaviro, 'The Cinematic Body Redux', parallax 14:1 (February 2008): 48-54

• Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
   
• Steven Shaviro, 'Excerpt from Post-Cinematic Affect (I): Gamer', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011
   
• Steven Shaviro, 'Excerpt from Post-Cinematic Affect (II): Coda', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011
   
• Steven Shaviro, 'Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film', Projections, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2007: 63-82

• Eric Shouse, 'Feeling, Emotion, Affect', M/C Journal, 8.6, 2005

• Robert Sinnerbrink, 'Time, Affect, and the Brain: Deleuze’s Cinematic Aesthetics', Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008

• Greg M. Smith, 'An Invitation to Feel', Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

• Greg M. Smith, Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein's Writings', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.4 (October-November 2004) 303-315

• Greg M. Smith, 'Reflecting on the Image: Sartrean Emotions in the Writings of André Bazin', Film and Philosophy, 10 (2006)

• Greg M. Smith, 'Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure' in Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Chicago: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

• Murray Smith, 'The Sound of Sentiment: Popular Music, Film, and Emotion', 16:9, 11, 2006

• Murray Smith, 'Empathy and the Extended Mind', University of Kent, Aesthetic Research Group Seminar Series 2006-7 Research Papers

• Monica Swindle, 'Feeling Girl, Girling Feeling: An Examination of "Girl" as "Affect"', Rhizomes, 22 2011

• John D. Teasdale et al, 'Functional MRI Study of the Cognitive Generation of Affect', American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, February 1999

• Imogen Tyler, 'Methodological Fatigue and the Politics of the Affective Turn', Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2008

• Cam Nhung Vu, Regarding Vietnam: Affects in Vietnamese and Vietnament Disasporic Literature and Film, PhD Thesis, University of Southern California, May 2010

• Imanol Zumalde-Arregi , 'The filmic emotion. A comparative analysis of film theories', Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 66, 2011, 326-349

Articles from the New Review of Film and Television Studies

Images from The Story of Adèle H. (François Truffaut, 1975) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) - two films referred to in Agustín Zarzosa's article 'Jane Campion's The Piano: melodrama as mode of exchange'

Film Studies For Free was very happy to hear that the excellent journal New Review of Film and Television Studies is now offering free access to a great selection of essays, including a recent offering by Thomas Elsaesser on Avatar, and translations from Christian Metz's book Impersonal Enunciation.

As well as the marvellous aforementioned items, FSFF also highly recommends the articles by Mette Kramer and Agustín Zarzosa.

All freely accessible material is linked to below. 

• Cinema and the two cultures: Robert Lepage's La face cachée de la lune by Sylvie Bissonnette

• Introduction to Christian Metz's Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film by Cormac Deane

• James Cameron's Avatar: access for all by Thomas Elsaesser

• The embrace of Mother Nature: appraisal processes and the regulation of affect in attachment genres by Mette Kramer

• Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts) by Christian Metz and Translated by Cormac Deane

• A lightning-image of the kaleidoscope: a review of Päsi Valiaho's Mapping the Moving Image by Imola Mikó

• The narrative structuring and interactive narrative logic of televised professional wrestling by Aaron J. Petten

• Review of Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style by Barry Salt

• Jane Campion's The Piano: melodrama as mode of exchange by Agustin Zarzosa

Black Narcissus: the Colours of Desire

Updated October 28, 2010

Image from Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

[Black Narcissus]’s trauma-tale is inseparable from the doomed project [of Imperialism]: it is predicated on the vertiginous nature of culture shock. The lofty palace-convent perched on the edge of a mountain precipice [...] seems a visual metonym. Sister Clodagh may want to heal and enlighten “a primitive people”, but, when she looks up and then looks down from the bell tower, she is completely lost. Powell and Pressburger have transposed the ‘edge of the world’ from Foula at the tip of the Shetlands in Powell’s 1937 Scottish picture (The Edge of the World) to India’s border with the high Himalayas; from the edge of the Roman Empire to the edge of the British Empire. The former, of course, was long gone; the latter was about to expire. The end of empire is literally vertiginous, its trauma doubly embedded, or embodied, in the figures of Clodagh and sickly Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron). Ruth cannot hack the chasm of culture that confronts her and wants out; Clodagh, disillusioned after a romance in Ireland has ended when her boyfriend leaves for America without her, seeks solace in the Order. Flashback shows us the rural idyll of Irish sweethearts fishing and riding amidst fields and hills of emerald Technicolor, the flame-haired Clodagh slim, free-spirited and ravishing, like a figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The long auburn hair now concealed under the all-embracing convent habit is never to reappear. As the fragile Order starts to crumble after the unfortunate death of a local child, the febrile Sister Ruth sheds her habit to reappear in scarlet lipstick and a lush crimson dress; for the shocked Clodagh, perhaps a melodramatic return of the repressed – the erotic red of the painted lips matched by the sensual velvet that highlights the shape of the female figure rather than burying it under a mountain of white cloth. [John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009]

Filled with the joys of Open Access Week 2010, Film Studies For Free brings you a small but perfectly formed 'study of a single film' resource: a little list of openly accessible online articles on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1947 film Black Narcissus.

• Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Janice Miller, 'If Looks Could Kill: Making Up the Face of Evil', The Wicked Heart: Studies in the Phenomenology of Evil, eds Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and William Andrew Myers (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2006), scroll to p. 235
• Mary Bowen, 'Blue Nun/Red Desire: The Palette of Piety, Passion, and Monstrosity in Black Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org, 2004
• Peter Coyne, 'Black Narcissus', Scope, Issue 11, June 2008
• Robert Cross, 'Black Narcissus: A Post-colonial Empire Film?', Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture, 9(4), 2007: 593 – 611
• Kelly Davidson and John Hill, '‘Under control’?: Black Narcissus and the Imagining of India', Film Studies, Issue 6, Summer 2005
• Raymond Durgnat, 'Retrospective: Black Narcissus', Monthly Film Bulletin, 1947
• Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000, 157-171
• Anh Hua, 'Primitive Spectacle in Black Narcissus', j_spot, 1.2, 2000
• Kent Jones, 'Empire of the Senses', Criterion Collection, July 20, 2010
• Dave Kehr, 'Black Narcissus', Criterion Collection, January 29, 2001
• Karli Lukas, 'Black Narcissus', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009
• Alton Jerome McFarland, 'Madness through Music: An Analysis of Sound in Black Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org (date unknown)
• Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus', Images Journal, Issue 10
• Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, July 2001
• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009
• Michael Walker, 'Black Narcissus', From Framework 9, Winter 1978/79

On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day!

Film Studies For Free is off on its annual holiday. 
Back in two weeks. Hasta entonces, lectores queridos

Director Todd Haynes discusses his film Far From Heaven following a screening in the Walker Cinema (November 19, 2005)

Double Indemnity: Todd Haynes/Edward Hopper  

Richard Dyer, Professor of Film Studies at University of Warwick and author of White and The Matter of Images will join Todd Haynes to discuss issues raised by his work and the Hopper film programme at the Tate Modern, London, June 4, 2004.

In the first of a two-part interview, Reel Report speaks to maverick American director Todd Haynes about his latest movie I'm Not There, an unconventional rock biopic about the life of music legend Bob Dylan. Haynes talks about the challenges of telling Dylan's story, casting the six very different actors who play Dylan, and how he plans to take on the Bush administration with his next project (December 7, 2007).

In the second part of Reel Report's two-part interview with Todd Haynes, director of I'm Not There, the rock biopic about the life of Bob Dylan, we talk more generally about aspects of his filmmaking. In particular we ask him about his unique way of story-telling, his approach to the concept of film genres and whether his sexuality has an effect on his ability to interpret characters (December 18, 2007).

On this very appropriate day, Film Studies For Free honours Todd Haynes, a true and truly wonderful American independent filmmaker, with links, above and below, to great videos and many freely accessible and high quality online studies of his work.

Haynes is a big favourite at this blog, and why wouldn't he be as one of the most "cinema-studies literate" filmmakers working today. Here's looking forward to his forthcoming reworking of that Film Studies classic Mildred Pierce...

• Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven', in The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 (scroll to p. 194)
• Zélie Asava, 'Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There', Widescreen Journal, No. 2, 2010
• Norman Bryson, 'Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema', Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999
• Rachel Carroll, 'Toxic shock: Gendered environments and embodied knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]', Transformations, Issue 14, March 2007
• Donald L. Carveth and Jean Hantman Carveth, 'Fugitives From Guilt: Postmodern De-Moralization and the New Hysterias', March 2007
• Adrian Danks,“… I’m Gone”; or Seven Characters in Search of an Exit: Some Reflections on Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008
• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (2004)
• Anthony Enns, '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• Laura E. Felschow, Todd Haynes: the Public, the Private, and the Performative, PhD Thesis, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, February 1, 2009
• Julie Grossman, “The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling [On Todd Haynes' Safe]', Other Voices 2.3 January 2005
• Todd Haynes's film: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) 
  
• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', Camera Obscura, 57, Volume 19, Number 3, 2004
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes to Queens: Genre, AIDS, and Queer Love', 2007 
• Rose Ellen Lessy, 'Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes’s Safe', Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4):291–308, 2006
• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006
• Rebecca Scherr, '(Not) queering “white vision” in Far from Heaven and Transamerica', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 
• David L. Smith, 'True, Valid Death Off a Movie Screen: Todd Haynes' I'm Not There', Journal of Religion and Film,  Vol. 12, No. 2, 2008
• Sunny Stalter, 'Down With Love/Far From Heaven', Scope, May 2004
• Nick Stevenson, 'What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk', Sociological Research Online, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005
• Mary Traester, 'Hysteria and Ruin: Feminine Immobility And the Problem of Representation in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven', COLT Symposium, April 15, 2008
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 57, August 2007
• Sharon Willis, 'Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk', Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003

 Cornell Cinema events May 6, 2008