Showing posts with label queer reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label queer reading. Show all posts

Monday, 28 July 2014

End of July Round Up! Grusin and Kara on the post-cinematic, new ALPHAVILLE, WORLD PICTURE and ANIKI, Keathley, Bellour, Mittell, and Wasko videos, and lots more!

               Do you ever get confused about movies, television, life? You are not alone...
SFR (Swiss Family Robinson [Ken Annakin, 1960]) by Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Film Studies For Free is delighted to present its latest handy round up of links to great online, open access items of film and media scholarly interest! 

New SEQUENCE One essays:
SEQUENCE is delighted to announce the publication of two further individual responses -- by Richard Grusin and Selmin Kara -- to Steven Shaviro’s magisterial article “MELANCHOLIA, Or The Romantic Anti-Sublime”, SEQUENCE 1.1 (2012), the launch essay for PLANET MELANCHOLIA, the inaugural issue of SEQUENCE, REFRAME‘s experimental, peer-reviewed, media, film and music studies serial publication.
    Following Rupert Read’s engagement with Shaviro in SEQUENCE 1.2, which offered a personal, affective (and deeply philosophical) account of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, in their very fine, equally philosophically-informed, contributions Grusin and Kara turn their detailed attention to the questions of "post-cinematic atavism" and "primordigitality" raised by the hybrid analog/digital technical and aesthetic contexts of a number of recent films, including Melancholia as well as Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (2011), Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011), Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) .
    SEQUENCES continues to invite further responses to Shaviro’s article as well as to those which have followed it in the SEQUENCE One thread, as well as to the second issue of SEQUENCE: ‘We Need to Talk about the Maternal Melodrama'.

Video essay on the documentaries of late Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho by Michael Chanan

Video essay on Editing Space and Time in Satoshi Kon's films by Tony Zhou

Network of European Cinema and Media Studies 2014 conference videos and audio:

New issue of ALHAVILLE, Issue 7, 2014, on Corporeal Cinema

New issue of WORLD PICTURE, 9, 2014, on 'Serious'

Great new issue of the Portuguese film studies journal ANIKI (1.2, 2014) w/ LOTS of research published in English, including a dossier on art and cinema, an interview with Jia Zhang-ke and Marshall Deutelbaum's article on Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon.

Updates at David Bordwell and Kristin Thomspon's Observations on Film Art website:

 Girish Shambu's latest blog entry 'On Video Essays, Cinephilia and Affect', which includes lots of great suggestions for further reading and an excellent comments thread

Check out all the updates to Wikipedia as a result of the #SheMustBeWiki, feminist film studies wiki writing event at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, July 25, 2014:

Excellent video on Brian De Palma's cinematic art of looks and looking by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin:

Barbara Flueckiger's important update about her wonderful open access project on Film Colors

Desistfilm Issue 6, 2014
  • Online here: http://desistfilm.com/category/issue-006/
  • PETER WHITEHEAD: REVOLUTION, REVELATION – PINK FLOYD LONDON 1966-1967 By Lu Juejing
  • EMBRACING BY NAOMI KAWASE By Adrian Martin
  • SHAKING TRACKS: THE DOCUMENTARY WAYS IN THE WORK OF KORE-EDA HIROKAZU By Claudia Siefen
  • ON Hi-8/DIGITAL AND THE INTIMATE: THE FILM DIARIES OF ALAIN CAVALIER By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • DAY IS DONE DE THOMAS IMBACH Por Mónica Delgado
  • A REAL DEAD RINGER FOR LOVE. VIDEO FOOL FOR LOVE By Adrian Martin
  • DIALOGUE WITH A WOMAN DEPARTED BY LEO HURWITZ By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • ROUTE ONE/USA DE ROBERT KRAMER Por Nicolás Carrasco
  • VARIACIONES DEL “FILMADOR” EN ALGUNAS PELÍCULAS INDEPENDIENTES Y EXPERIMENTALES DE AMÉRICA LATINA Por Mónica Delgado
  • FEATURED FILMMAKER: JENNIFER REEDER By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • EL DIARIO FÍLMICO EN ESPAÑA, HOY Por Ricardo Adalia Martin
  • NEARSIGHT BY SAUL LEVINE By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Check out this fantastic resource on the work of Chris Marker, including IMMEMORY, Guillaume sightings worldwide, and other gems (link via Via Genevieve Yue and Nico Baumbach):

Innovative, Canada-based, film studies publisher caboose has launched the collaborative on-line project Planetary Projection, introducing some of the world’s remarkable film projectionists. We invite you to help us find a few more, in every corner of the globe, so that they might tell us their stories

Online extract from Madelon Sprenthnether's remarkable book Crying at the Movies:

Great video in which director John Akomfrah talks to Baroness Lola Young about The Stuart Hall Project, which paints a sensitive and emotionally charged portrait of the celebrated cultural theorist.  

For a few more days, enjoy temporary free online access to many articles from Routledge Film and Cinema Studies journals

'I Have to Trust My Intuition': A 40-Minute Chat Between Ingmar Bergman & AFI Film Students at NoFilmSchool:
The "Motherhood Archives" - Irene Lustzig's epic multimedia essay on institutionalization of birth and motherhood:
New ADA: A JOURNAL OF GENDER, NEW MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY issue on Queer Feminist Media Praxis:
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Monday, 13 August 2012

Our Beautiful Wickedness: On Reading Films Queerly. In Memory of Alexander Doty

An audiovisual collage made by Catherine Grant in memory of Alexander Doty, 
brilliant author of numerous key texts in LGBT and queer film and cultural studies, 
including the one quoted from in this video: Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon 
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

[C]lassic [film] texts and personalities actually can be more queer-suggestive than “openly” gay, lesbian, or bisexual texts. That is, the coding of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts and personalities can often yield a wider range of non-straight readings because certain sexual things could not be stated baldly—and still cannot or will not in most mainstream products—thus often making it more difficult to categorize the erotics of a film or a star. Of course, if you aren’t careful, this line of thought can begin to sound like an argument valorizing the closet, for understanding queerness as always something “connotated” or suggested (and never really there “denotatively”), for “subtexting,” and for “subcultural” readings. But since I don’t see queer readings as any less there, or any less real, than straight readings of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts, I don’t think that what I do in this book is colluding with dominant representational or interpretive regimes that seek to make queerness “alternative” or “sub” straight. [Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics, pp. 1-2]
In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my “queer reception” love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses–largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add. [Alexander Doty,  in Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011]

Film Studies For Free was shocked and very saddened at the news, just over a week ago, of the untimely death of Alexander Doty, a truly trailblazing film and media scholar.

Doty, Indiana University Professor of Gender Studies and Communication and Culture (and chair of the latter department) was the author of two classic and highly enjoyable books in queer audiovisual cultural studies: Making Things Perfectly Queer (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000). He also co-edited, with Corey Creekmur, the hugely important collection Out in Culture: Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Continuum, 1995) and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas.

While Doty didn't claim to have invented queer cultural reading as a scholarly practice, he wowed us with the brilliance, daring and sincerity of his interpretations, ones often deeply rooted in his personal, affective experiences of the cultural forms he was studying. In so doing, he succeeded in showing countless other students of film and media texts why it is so vital to engage in these critical practices in public, why it is essential to be good at them, as well as what is seriously at stake in many identity or, indeed, existence-based scholar-fandoms, like those often engaged in by LGBT subjects.

If, as the Wizard of Oz tells us, 'A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others', the many tributes to Doty that have appeared in the last week prove, beyond any doubt, that he had an excellent heart. He certainly had a very courageous one. He, his unique voice, and the work he would have gone on to produce, had his life not been so cruelly cut short, will be hugely missed.

As well as putting together the video collage at the top of this entry, which introduces Doty's compelling justification for queer reading, if not the (possibly even more compelling) details of his actual queer reading of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), FSFF has also assembled a list of links in Doty's memory to online studies which perform queer readings of films and moving image culture, as well as openly accessible studies of some films that perform their own queer readings. Two further FSFF video essays are embedded--on Elizabeth Taylor and on "queer Hitchcock", both of which intersect with, and were partly inspired by Doty's own work on these and other themes.

That long list is preceded by a growing collection of links to the online tributes to Doty that have appeared since his death (this will be kept updated), as well as to his own, openly accessible, scholarly work online. FSFF's author very gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Anthony Bleach and the Facebook group Friends of Alexander Doty in assembling the first two of these three lists. Although she only knew Doty through his published work, she would like to convey her condolences for his loss to all those whose lives were graced, as so many evidently were, by knowing him personally.

Finally, at the very foot of today's entry is a call for contributions to a new website for the Global Queer Cinema project (to be launched in September). It will seek to live up to the high standards that Doty's work set for queer cultural critique as it aims to provide a new, openly accessible, internationalist resource for queer film and cultural studies. FSFF will update its readers about this exciting project in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, FSFF is sad that one of those who have most inspired LGBT film studies scholarship will not be around to witness his influence on this project.

Rest in queer peace, Alexander Doty.


Online tributes to Alexander Doty
Online work by Alexander Doty 
Online studies, or performances, of queer reading

Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE by Catherine Grant


Skipping ROPE (with audio commentary) by Catherine Grant. First published in Frames, 1, 2012. Transcript available.



Call For Queer Reading/Writing Contributions 
to the new Global Queer Cinema website


Contributions are invited to the Global Queer Cinema website, hosted by the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, UK. The site will be launched in early September 2012. 
The website forms part of the Global Queer Cinema project, an international academic research network project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Sussex. The project is led by Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (University of Warwick). The network held its first event in May of this year.
The project website will be run in conjunction with Catherine Grant (University of Sussex and Film Studies For Free) and Laura Ellen Joyce, GQC Project Co-ordinator, and will continue beyond the length of the project, acting in part as an open access archive and news filter for project-generated material, and related queer film studies resources. 
We welcome contributions from researchers interested in queer (and queering) cinema, cultural studies, media, global studies, gender and sexuality, filmmakers, artists, writers and interdisciplinary scholars, or those with an interest in the practice, exploration and dissemination of film. The below list of topics and frameworks. 
  • Queer frames
  • Queer uncanny
  • Queer sounds and music
  • Queer illusions
  • Queer film festivals
  • Queer decades
  • Queer directors
  • Queer avant garde and DIY
  • New Queer Cinema
  • New releases
  • Classic films
  • Androgyny and pandrogyny
  • Queer cosmetics and prosthetics
  • In-depth essays on single films
  • Short essays on single images

We therefore invite short takes of 250 - 300 words, or longer essays (MLA style) of around 1500-2000 words for more in-depth analysis. Multimedia work (non-copyright infringing - using fair use/fair dealing principles) is very welcome. The above list of topics is not exhaustive, and we invite contributions on any topic or theme which you feel would may (queerly) fit our general ethos. Please correspond with us about any proposals for content by email at GQCproject[at]gmail[dot]com, on Twitter at @g_q_c, and do please 'like' us on Facebook. Thank you.
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