Tenth Anniversary SCOPE !! On Cultural Borrowings Appropriation Reworking Transformation

Sissy Spacek as Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976). See Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Horror Icon in Charles Lums Indelible by Darren Elliott in the new Scope issue

Hooray! Its OUT. Film Studies For Free has been checking almost every day for a couple of months now because it knew that an amazing issue of Scope: an online journal of film and tv studies -- its TENTH anniversary issue -- was just about to be published. Its here now *Scope* # 15: an issue and  an e-book -- see the contents links below -- and contains some fantastic items of film and media studies. 

Congratulations to the whole editorial team at Scope, who do a fabulous job. These have been ten great years of remarkably high quality and FREELY ACCESSIBLE scholarly works. Thank you.


Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation
Edited by Iain Robert Smith

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements Iain Robert Smith

Foreword: Scopes Tenth Anniversary  Mark Gallagher and Julian Stringer

Introduction Iain Robert Smith

Part I: Hollywood Cinema and Artistic Imitation

Exploitation as Adaptation I. Q. Hunter

The Character-Oriented Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of Pre-Sold Characters in American Film, 1913-1950 Jason Scott

Novelty through Repetition: Exploring the Success of Artistic Imitation in the Contemporary Film Industry, 1983-2007 Stijn Joye

Part II: Found Footage and Remix Culture

A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet Eli Horwatt

Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives Emma Cocker

Music Videos and Reused Footage Sérgio Dias Branco

Part III: Modes of Parody and Pastiche

From Cult to Subculture: Re­imaginings of Cult Films in Alternative Music Video Brigid Cherry

Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Horror Icon in Charles Lums Indelible Darren Elliott

Irony Inc.: Parodic-Doc Horror and The Blair Witch Project Jordan Lavender-Smith

Part IV: Transnational Screen Culture

A Marxists Gotta Do What a Marxists Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier Austin Fisher

"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake Neelam Sidhar Wright

"La Television des Professeurs?": Charles Dickens, French Public Service Television and Olivier Twist Pamela Atzori

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New MOVIE! VERTIGO Hal Ashby Luis Bu�uel Charles Chaplin Kenji Mizoguchi Robert Altman Robin Wood Andrew Sarris George Toles Charles Barr Andrew Klevan Hoagy Carmichael

Frame grab of Robert Mitchum in The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959). Read Pete Falconers study of this film in the great new issue of MOVIE

Woohoo! The wonderful issue 4 of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism has hit the e-stands!

Edited by Andrew Klevan and Victor Perkins, this one is sure to be a classic. Highlights, for FSFF, include Andrew Sarris (on Buñuels Viridiana [1960]) and Robin Wood tribute archives, as well as the new Opening Shots feature with great contributions by Charles Barr and Pete Falconer. But there are some truly remarkable feature articles in this issue, too, including Adam OBrien on Hal Ashbys film The Last Detail and George Toles on cinematic images of luxury.

Thanks for the film critical luxury and largesse, MOVIE people!

MOVIE, Issue 4, 2013

• Regional Horizons in The Last Detail Adam OBrien
• Luxury and Largesse in Film George Toles
• Talking Space in Vertigo Murray Pomerance
• Play It Again, Butch, Cricket, Chick, Smoke, Happy...: The Performances of Hoagy Carmichael as a Hollywood Bar-room Pianist Ian Garwood
• Rereading A Countess from Hong Kong: Action, Speech, and Style in Charlie Chaplins Final Feature Donna Kornhaber

• Opening Shots
• Only Yesterday Charles Barr
• The Wonderful Country Pete Falconer

• Andrew Sarris: A Tribute

• The Devil and the Nun Andrew Sarris

• A Robin Wood Archive (2)

• Mashed Marlowe Robin Wood
• Controlling the Situation Robin Wood
• Poet of the Cinema Robin Wood
• Mad Smile of a Hollow Civilisation Robin Wood
• A Matter of Life and Death Robin Wood

This issue was designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.

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On the art and ideology of John Fords films

Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

Even if John Ford had not made his ten best movies (whichever they are), hed still be the greatest. [Tag Gallagher]

In Young Mr. Lincoln, John Ford achieves the perfection of his art. Never were his matter and his method more aptly fitted, and never were his tendencies toward sprawl and overemphasis more rigorously controlled. It is a masterpiece of concision in which every element in every shot, every ratio, every movement, every shift of viewpoint seems dense with significance, yet it breathes an air of casual improvisation. While its surfaces paint, with relaxed humor and effortless nostalgic charm, an imaginary antebellum America, it sustains an underlying note of somber apprehension, all the more powerful for being held in check.

Ford finds a mood that avoids the clutter and ponderousness of most Hollywood history movies, a mood more of parable than of textbook chronicle. That preoccupation with history and its contradictions—the variance between actual human experience and the official version that will be constructed after the fact—that suffuses films as different as They Were Expendable (1945), Fort Apache (1948), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) resonates troublingly at the heart of this film, for all its apparent serenity. Nothing here is as uncomplicated as it seems designed to appear, which may be why the editors of Cahiers du cinéma, in a celebrated, if by now scarcely readable, special issue of 1970, brought the full force of their post-’68 Althusserian-Lacanian rhetoric to bear on the film in a scene-by-scene analysis, as if here the secret mechanisms of the American ideology itself might be decoded and exposed. In trying to pin down the meanings of Ford’s art, however, Cahiers du cinéma missed his mercurial—and, admittedly, sometimes infuriating––ability to be in two places at once. If Ford’s Lincoln exhibits at once a radiant sincerity and the devious subtlety of a trickster, he is to that extent the director’s mirror image. [Geoffrey OBrien, Young Mr. Lincoln: Here in Waiting, The Criterion Collection, February 13, 2006]

Cahiers du cinéma’s 1969 analysis of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), reprinted in Screenin 1972 in its first English translation, introduced symptomatic reading to British feminist film critics such as Pam Cook and Claire Johnston. Louis Althusser (1968, trans. 1970: 28-9) coined the term “symptomatic reading,” an interpretive strategy that searches not only for the structural dominants in a text but most importantly, for absences and omissions that are an indication of what the dominant ideology seeks to repress, contain or marginalize. Reading against the grain operates under the assumption that the text comprises a hierarchy of discourses in which one discourse – patriarchal ideology – asserts its dominance over others. Nevertheless, tensions between the dominant ideology and subordinate discourses produce ideological contradictions that the popular film cannot mask nor reconcile, try as it might. [Aspasia Kotsopoulos, Reading against the grain revisited, from Jump Cut, Issue 44, 2001]

While it is difficult to ascertain exactly how an ‘oblique’ analysis of film would proceed, the editors of Cahiers [du cinéma’s] essay on John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939) is a significant example of this type of criticism and stands as exemplary of the many important analyses of mainstream Hollywood films that were carried out in the pages of Cahiers and elsewhere. The analysis of Young Mr Lincoln is a close reading of this film, which belongs to the category that is in many ways the most difficult to endorse: films that remain within bourgeois ideology, but reveal its ambiguities and fissures (when subjected to a highly specialised mode of reading).The reading by the Editors of Cahiers uses principles of Marxism, semiology and credits Marxist and Freudian discourses, and includes fleeting references to Jean-Pierre Oudart, Althusser, Roland Barthes and Serge Daney, and Lacan. However, there is no sustained explanation as to precisely which principles drawn from these discourses they will deploy. While Peter Wollen, in his Afterword to the translation of the analysis of Young Mr Lincoln in Screen, declares that the text “owes its concepts to Jacques Lacan” [...], this text would seem to be exemplary of Žižek’s contention that a sustained and explicit consideration of Lacan was in fact missing from 60s and 70s film theory.
     At first glance, therefore, the Young Mr Lincoln article might seem to exemplify a move towards Lacanian psychoanalysis. Furthermore, upon first glance, it appears to be a step towards a consideration of narrative content. As such, it might seem to undermine a contention of this thesis: that the content of popular film was systematically precluded by considerations of film and ideology during the 60s and 70s. In this article, the Editorial Collective treat the text of the film in many ways like a work of literature, analysing it sequence by sequence, with scarcely a mention of its materiality. It could be argued that here is an example of textual analysis that confounds the assertion that subject matter was neglected in favour of form and materiality in analyses of film and ideology. While an extensive examination of the content of Young Mr Lincoln, or signifié, to use the Editors’ turn of phrase, appears to consume the bulk of this article, it must be noted that it is the film’s form which is ostensibly the impetus for the discussion of its content. [Kate Greenwood, Confronting the limits: Renditions of the Real in the Edge of the Construct Film, PhD Thesis, The University of Adelaide, December 2006: 63-64]

Its been a slightly quieter week than usual here at Film Studies For Free, as its voracious readers may have noticed.

A good reason for that is that this blogs author has merrily begun a new university year, teaching ... (drum roll) ... Film Theory!

This shiny, new, non-virtual, pedagogical order will continue to slow up FSFFs production a little, its true, but it will also inspire the direction that some of its entries will take in the coming weeks and months.

For example, as next weeks teaching focus is John Fords 1939 film Young Mr, Lincoln, and the ideological film readings that it inspired, or provoked, heres a little list of online and openly accessible scholarly books, articles and videos on the inspirational and/or provocative work of that very director.

• Charles Barr, About the John Ford Archive, Paper at Archives and Auteurs Conference, University of Stirling, September 2-4, 2009
• Charles Barr, Irish Brother Feeney: Francis Ford in John Ford’s films, Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010
• David Bordwell, John Ford, silent man, Observations on Film Art, June 28, 2010 
• Seán Crosson, "‘They cant wipe us out, they cant lick us. Well go on forever pa, ‘cause were the people - Misrepresenting death in Jim Sheridans In America (2003)", Estudios Irlandeses: Journal of Irish Studies, Issue 3, (2008)
• Seán Crosson, Vanishing Point: An examination of some consequences of globalization for contemporary Irish film, E-Keltoi, Vol. 2, 2003
• Toni DAngela, Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford, La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Wheeler Winston Dixon, Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of the Hollywood Professionals, Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009
• Ruurd Dykstra, The Search for Spectators: VistaVision and Technicolor in The Searchers, Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, 1.1, 2010 
• Arthur M. Eckstein, Darkening Ethan: John Fords "The Searchers" (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Screen, originally published in Cinema Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 3-24
• Martin Flanagan, Re-Making Time: Chronotopes of the West in Lone Star (1996) and The Searchers (1956, Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• Richard Franklin, John Ford, Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009 
• Tag Gallagher, Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, Ford Till 47, Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, Ford Rises from the Dead. Again, Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, Going My Way, Screening the Past, December 2001
• Ross Gibson, The Searchers - Dismantled, Rouge, Issue 7, 2004 
• Shigehiko Hasumi, John Ford, or The Eloquence of Gesture, Rouge, 2005
• James Hawko, John Fords The Horse Soldiers, Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Arlene Hui, The Racial Frontier in John Ford’s The Searchers, Revista Complutense de Historia de América, 2004, vol. 30, 187-207 
• Peter Lehman, "Tonight Your Director Is John Ford":The Strange Journey of Stagecoach from Screen to Radio, Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, Edited by Andrew J. Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
• Julia Leyda, Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers, The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)
• Miguel Marías, Fords Depth, Rouge, Issue 7, 2004
• Cornelis Martin Renes, The Quiet Man and Angela’s Ashes: Hollywood Representations of Irish Emigration as Male Quest Narrative, Estudios Irlandeses , Number 2, 2007, pp. 93-106
• Gary Morris, The Searcher: On Ethan Edwards and John Fords Masterpiece, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 58, 2007
• John T. Nelson, The Berkhofer Duality Revealed in the Western Films of John Ford and John Wayne, Madison Historical Review, Vol. 4, November 2007
• Geoffrey OBrien, Young Mr. Lincoln: Here in Waiting, The Criterion Collection, February 13, 2006
• Timothy P. ONeill, Two Concepts of Liberty Valance: John Ford, Isaiah Berlin, and Tragic Choice on the Frontier, Creighton Law Review, Vol. 37, 2004
• Jeffrey C. Prater, John Fords Cavalry Trilogy: Myth or Reality?, Masters Thesis, Faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, June 1989
• Art Redding, Built Ford Tough: John Ford and the Persistence of the American Western, La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Sam Rohdie, Four essays [on Painlevé, Jennings, Vigo, and Ford], Screening the Past, 25, 2009
• Norman Rosenberg, Young Mr. Lincoln: The Lawyer as Super-Hero, Legal Studies Forum, Volume 15, Number 3 (1991)
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘"The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause":John Fords The Sun Shines Bright, Rouge, No. 7, 2004
• Bill Routt, Ford At Fox: Part One, Screening the Past, 23, 2008 
  
• Bill Routt, Ford At Fox: Part Two (a), Screening the Past, 24, 2008
• Bill Routt, Ford At Fox: Part Two (b), Screening the Past, 25, 2009
• Bill Routt, Ford At Fox: Part Two (c), Screening the Past, 27, 2010
• Bill Routt, Ford At Fox: Part Three (a), Screening the Past, 28, 2010 
• Sean Ryder, Representing Ireland: Literary Adaptation and Irish Cinema, Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 9, 1998, 119-130
• Thomas Schatz, Stagecoach and Hollywoods A-Western Renaissance, in John Fords Stagecoach, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [long extract] 
• Tom Schneller, [Review of] Kathryn Kalinak. How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford, The Journal of film music, Volume 2, numbers 2-4, Winter 2009, 279-82
• Nicoleta Stanca, Hollywood Gender Representations of Irish America in the 20th Century: Maureen O’Hara and Pierce Brosnan, The Annals of Ovidius University Constanta - Philology (20/2009)
• Temenuga Trifonova, John Ford’s Funeral Oration: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Phil Wagner, John Ford Made … Monsters? The Grotesque Tradition in Ford’s Work, Senses of Cinema, Issue 48, 2008 
• Saige Walton, [Review of] Jim Kitses,Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood, Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006

Video Essay by Kevin B. Lee on The Sun Shines Bright (1956, John Ford) and Gertrud (1964, Carl T. Dreyer) with commentary by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Part One of Two. Part of the Shooting Down Pictures project

Video essay by Kevin B. Lee on Tobacco Road (1941, dir. John Ford), #905 (46) in the Shooting Down Pictures project.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Frame By Frame - Director John Ford, UNL, August 26, 2010

Phil Peters and John Nelson, Studying in Western Filmmaker John Fords Footsteps

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Film Television and Media Studies articles in STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

Framegrab of Rooney Mara as final girl Nancy Holbrook in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010). Read Kyle Christensens article on this films source text (The Final Girl versus Wes Cravens A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema), and also check out Film Studies For Frees entry of links to Final Girl Studies

Below, Film Studies For Free links to the entire online contents, to date, of the excellent Open Access journal Studies in Popular Culture: a list of more than 60 great articles on film, television and media studies. 

The journal of the US Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in the South, SPC dates back, in its offline, print version, to 1977, making it one of the oldest, continuously published academic journals to treat audiovisual media.  

SPC has been online since 2006 and is a wonderful example of how an online presence indicates no necessary lowering of the quality bar for a properly peer-reviewed journal. 


29.1 October 2006 [Go here for an online table of contents)

• "Reinventing the Hero: Gardners Grendel and the Shifting Face of Beowulf in Popular Culture" -- Michael Livingston and John William Sutton 
• "Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Loria Pestewa, and the Great American Makeover." -- Gioia Woods
• "Artistic Schizophrenia: How Fight Clubs Message is Subverted by its Own Nature" -- Kyle Bishop
• "Michael, Are You Okay? Youve Been Hit By a Smooth Criminal: Racism, Contraversy, and Parody in the Video Clips "Smooth Criminal" and "You Rock My World." -- Elenda Oliete
• "Sigmund Freud, Analyze This: How Madonna Situates "Die Another Day" Beyond the Pleasure Principle" -- David Sigler 

30.2 Spring 2008 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• Little America: R.E.M., Howard Finster, and the Southern "Outsider Art" Aesthetic -- Matthew Sutton
• Brokeback Mountain: Masculinity and Manhood -- James R. Keller and Anne Goodwyn Jones
• Race, Crime, and Motherhood in George Pelecanoss Soul Circus -- Alexander Pitofsky
• The Politics of Talk: The Oprah Interview as Narrative -- Sarah Henstra
• Survival of the Stereotypical: A Study of Personal Characteristics and Order of Elimination on Reality Television -- Bryan E. Denham and Richelle N. Jones
• A Car of Her Own: Volvos "Your Concept Car" as a Vehicle for Feminism? -- Roy Schwartzman and Merci Decker
• Trainspotting, High Fidelity, and the Diction of Addiction -- Scott Stalcup 

31.1 Fall 2008 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Culture of the Past 
• From Apicius to Gastroporn: Form, Function, and Ideology in the History of Cookery Books -- Abigail Dennis
• Queer Investigations: Foxy Ladies and Dandy Detectives in American Dime Novels -- Pamela Bedore
• Literary Art in an Age of Formula Fiction and Mass Consumption: Double Coding in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle” -- Nils Clausson 
• Lost Girl: Diminishing Dorothy of Oz -- SydneyDuncan
• The Protean Character of Jello, Icon of Food and Identity -- Susan Grove Hall
• Gazing on Fu-Manchu: Obscurity and Imperial Crisis in the Work of Sax Rohmer -- Rebecca Wingfield
• “To Renew the Old World”: Record Collecting as Cultural Production -- Kevin Moist 

31.2 Spring 2009 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Cultures "Material and Conceptual Conditions 
• Fast Food Frontiers: Ive Got a Feeling Were Not in Kansas Anymore -- Minjoo Oh
• Sexed Appeals: Network Marketing and Adult Home Novelty Parties -- Dawn Heinecken 
• Popularizing HIgh Culture: Zemeckiss Beowulf -- Kathleen Forni
• Fear and Loathing in Knoxvegas: Representations of the "Other" in the Official Press Before and During the 1982 Knoxville Worlds Fair -- Stephen Bales and Charlie Gee
• Paul Reveres of Early Radio: The Boy Scouts and the Origin of Broadcasting -- Noah Arceneaux 
• The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive on the Political Left in Literature, Song, and Film -- Ron BrileyTamenicia or Tammy; James or Jim Bob; Bessie or Heather: Patterns and Significance of Choosing Names for American Babies -- Claude J. Smith, Jr. 

32.1 Fall 2009 [Go here to find a PDF of the Entire Issue]

• From the Editor: Moral Choices in the Art of Popular Culture
• "Spiritual Warfare" and Intolerance in Popular Culture: The Left Behind Franchise, the Commodification of Belief, and the Consequences for Imagination -- Marnie Jones
• The Narcissism of Bipartisanship: Accessing Ann Coulter on the Internet -- Lindsey Ives
• "Not Like Other Men"?: The Vampire Body in Joss Whedons Angel -- Lorna Jowett
• "...long before the stars were torn down ...": Sam Shepard and Bob Dylans "Brownsville Girl" -- Katherine Weiss 
• Death and Magic in Clive Barkers Lord of Illusions: A Terror Management Perspective -- Jonathan Bassett
• Disneyfying Dickens: Oliver and Company and The Muppet Christmas Carol as Dickensian Musicals -- Marc Napolitano 
• Even a Tramp Can Dream: An Examination of the Clash Between "High Art" and "Low Art" in the Films of Charlie Chaplin -- Richard Ward 

32.2 Spring 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: No Monoliths Here
• Striking Back Without Missing a Beat: Radical Responses to Domestic Violence in Country Music’s The Dixie Chicks and Salsa’s Celia Cruz -- Delia Poey
• “But This Is the South”: Ambivalent Regionalism in Jan Karon’s Mitford Novels -- Eleanor Hersey Nickel
• Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation -- Karolina Kazimierczak
• The Jesus Fish: Evolution of a Cultural Icon -- Todd Edmondson
• The Politics of the "Open" Self: America in the Cinemas of King Vidor and Robert Altman -- Margaret Hrezo and William E. Hrezo
• Like a “Whopper Virgin”: Anthropological Reflections on Burger King’s Controversial Ad Campaign -- Ty Matejowsky 
• The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television: A Replication of the Mastro and Greenberg Study a Decade Later -- Elizabeth Monk-Turner, Mary Heiserman, Crystle Johnson, Vanity Cotton, and Manny Jackson 

33.1 Fall 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Theory and Practice
• Whats Entertainment? Notes Toward a Definition -- Stephen Bates and Anthony J. Ferri 
• Popular Fiction Studies: The Advantages of a New Field -- Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
• Interpretive Methodology from Literary Criticism: Carnivalesque Analysis of Popular Culture: Jackass, South Park, and ‘Everyday’ Life -- Gulnara Karimova
• The Cinematic and Historic Weight of Stone of Destiny -- Lynnette Porter
• Ken Follett and the Scribblers Trade: A Midnight Train to Somewhere -- Carlos Ramet
• The “Aquatic Zionist” in The Yiddish Policemens Union -- Bennett Kravitz
• “Tons of Useful Stuff”: Defining Wellness in Popular Magazines -- Carol-Ann Farkas 

33.2 Spring 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Cultural Fragments, Cultural Flowers
• My Vampire Boyfriend: Postfeminism, “Perfect” Masculinity, and the Contemporary Appeal of Paranormal Romance -- Ananya Mukherjea
• “Thou Shalt Not Crave Thy Neighbor” : True Blood, Abjection, and Otherness -- Sabrina Boyer
• Mad Mens Color Schemes: A Changing Palette of Working Women -- Katherine Gantz
• The Revolution Will Be Soooo Cute: YouTube “Hauls” and the Voice of Young Female Consumers -- Laura Jeffries
• Outsider Nostalgia in Dazed and Confused and Detroit Rock City -- Carey L. Martin
• The Beatles and the Art of the Tambourine -- Steven Hamelman
• Outsourced: Crime Stories, New World Horrors, and Genre -- Jonathan L. Crane 

34.1 Fall 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Art for Someone Elses Sake
• Protecting a City’s Image: The Death of Las Vegas Beat, 1961 -- Larry Dale Gragg
• The Final Girl versus Wes Cravens A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema -- Kyle Christensen
• “And I Started Wondering . . .”: Voiceover and Conversation in Sex and the City -- Ashli Dykes
• Refrigerator Design and Masculinity in Postwar Media, 1946-1960 -- Paul Gansky
• Pop Culture, Politics, and Americas Favorite Animated Family: Partisan Bias in The Simpsons? -- Kenneth Michael White and Mirya Holman
• Evaluating the Presence of Social Strain in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV -- Patrick Osborne

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A Star Was Born Links in Barbra Streisands Honour on her 70th Birthday!

Frame grab from A Star Is Born ( Frank Pierson, 1976)

Each version of A Star Is Born may detail the rise of an unknown, but does so through extremely well-known performers, albeit ones at different stages of their careers. [...] Barbra Streisand [...] was at the height of her career in 1976. Her domination of A Star Is Born (she contributed to the writing and even, as Kris Kristofferson, her co-star, saw it, the directing [(Burke, Tom. "Kris Kristofferson Sings the Good-Life Blues." Esquire 86 (December 1976): 126–28ff), 208-9]) was another manifestation of a desire to play out aspects of her own life. The credited director has recounted at length how, during preproduction, Streisand debated the degree to which her autobiography should be reflected in Esther Hoffman ([Pierson, Frank. "My Battles with Barbra and Jon." New York 9 (November 15, 1976): 49–60], 50). If James Masons character in the 1954 film becomes through role reversal the "fictional counterpart of the neurotic, self-destructive person that Garland [had] become" ([Jennings, Wade. "Nova: Garland in A Star Is Born." Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 3 (summer 1979): 321–37], 333), then Streisands Esther Hoffman directly fulfills everything that Streisand herself has become by 1976. Richard Dyer even suggests that among the "number of cases on which the totality of a film can be laid at the door of the star" the case can be made "most persuasively" for Streisands A Star Is Born (Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979], 175) [Jerome Delamater, "Once More, from the Top": Musicals the Second Time Around, in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 84]

Film Studies For Free wishes a very happy 70th birthday to Barbra Streisand, actor, singer, songwriter, film director, producer, and queer feminist icon extraordinaire.

Below, you can find a tiny little celebration in related scholarly links - the only gift that (rather besotted Barbra fan) FSFF knows how to give.

If anyone knows of any other good items (and it is far too short and unworthy a list so far...), please leave a comment and FSFF will add them to the list.

• Zohar Altman Ravid, The star as a Creation and the Star as a creator: The Case of Barbra Streisand in History of Stardom Reconsidered, edited by Kari Kallioniemi, Kimi Kärki, Janne Mäkelä and Hannu Salmi. Turku: International Institute for Popular Culture, 2007
• Henry Bial, How Jews Became Sexy, 1968–1983, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (University of Michigan, 2005)
• Jerome Delamater, "Once More, from the Top": Musicals the Second Time Around, in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, c 1998 1998
• Brett Farmer, Stage Door Jennies: Interview with Stacy Wolf about her New Book, A Problem Like Maria Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, Genders.org, Issue 38, 2003
• Rachel Garfield, Towards a Re-Articulation of Cultural Identity: Problematising the Jewish Subject in Art, originally in Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 1, January, 2006, 99–108
• Stephen Godfry, The Way We Were, Pro Tem, November 29, 1973 (scroll down in PDF to p. 8)
• Elisa Klapheck, Toby Axelrod, My Journey Toward Regina Jonas, Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas: The Story of the First Woman Rabbi (Wiley, 2004)
• Evyatar Marienberg, Jews Have the Best Sex: The Hollywood Adventures of a Peculiar Medieval Jewish Text on Sexuality, Journal of Religion and Film, 14.2, 2010
• Arthur Laurents, Emotional Reality: Interview by Pat McGilligan, in McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)
• Joel Rosenberg, Jewish Experience on Film: An American Overview, American Jewish Yearbook, 1996
• Jérôme Segal and Monika Kaczek, Molly Picon and the Cinematic Archetype of a Jewish Woman, CinemaScope, 14, Jan-Jul. 2010
  
• Greg M. Smith, Streisand Shops the Museum Store: Consuming Art on Television, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 30.1 (Spring 2002) 63-68
• Jon Stratton, Introduction, Jews, Race and Popular Music (Ashgate, 2009)
• Stacy Wolf, Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body, SandF Online, Double Issue: 3.3 & 4.1
• Stacy Ellen Wolf, Introduction, A Problem Like Maria:Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002)

Sequence from Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968)

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Up up and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

May the Fourth Be With You published on May 4, 2012 by thehpalliance.

Read Henry Jenkins and Ashley Hincks articles about the Harry Potter Alliance.

Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts. Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement. [Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism [1.9], Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)]

Film Studies For Free is a very big fan of the open access journal of Transformative Works and Cultures, so it is delighted that theres a new issue out.

Its a themed collection of studies of transformative works and fan activism, edited by media studies superheroes Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. Links to abstracts of the articles (and from there to the articles themselves) are given below.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012): Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California. 

Editorial

• Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova

Theory

• Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and political participation  by Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova
• "Cultural acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance by Henry Jenkins
• Experiencing fan activism: Understanding the power of fan activist organizations through members narratives by Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, Chris Tokuhama
• Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandoms integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance by Ashley Hinck
• The German federal election of 2009: The challenge of participatory cultures in political campaigns by Andreas Jungherr
• Wonder Woman for a day: Affect, agency, and Amazons by Matt Yockey

Praxis

• Fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms in K-pop fandom by Sun Jung
• Being of service: "X-Files" fans and social engagement by Bethan Jones
• Fan action and political participation on "The Colbert Report" by Marcus Schulzke
• Even a monkey can understand fan activism: Political speech, artistic expression, and a public of the Japanese dôjin community by Alex Leavitt, Andrea Horbinski
• "Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses by Tanya R. Cochran
• Nerdfighters, "Paper Towns," and heterotopia by Lili Wilkinson
• The absence of fan activism in the queer fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong by Cheuk Yin Li
• Too fat to fly: A case study of unsuccessful fan mobilization by Tom Phillips

Symposium

• Of snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish play at the Wisconsin protests by Jonathan Gray
• On the ordinariness of participatory culture by Aswin Punathambekar
• Imagining No-place by Stephen Duncombe
• Fan activism for social mobilization: A critical review of the literature by Lucy Bennett
• Flash activism: How a Bollywood film catalyzed civic justice toward a murder trial by Ritesh Mehta

Review

• "Fan fiction and copyright: Outside works and intellectual property protection," by Aaron Schwabach: Review by Stacey Marie Lantagne

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Goodbye Cinema Hello Cinephilia Masterclasses in Film Criticism by Adrian Martin Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jacques Ranci�re

Adrian Martin - Sint Lukas Brussels - 20/10/11 from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

Jonathan Rosenbaum RITS-cinema Brussels 27/10/11 from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

Jonathan Rosenbaum KASK cinema Gent 28/10/11 from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

Jacques Rancière - Bozar studios Brussels - 18/11/11 from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

“For me, film criticism is not a way of explaining or classifying things, it’s a way of prolonging them, making them resonate differently”

- Jacques Rancière

Today, Film Studies For Free presents some videos its been meaning to link to here for an age: a series of very extensive, and very wonderful, masterclasses given by Adrian Martin, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jacques Rancière in Brussels in 2011.

Their talks, part of the "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia" project, explore the status and possibility of cinephilia and film critical thinking. These astonishingly good events took their title from the wonderful 2010 book by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Below are a few related links, including one to FSFFs mammoth collection of online writing on cinephilia.

• Catherine Grant, C is for Cinephilia Studies (plus some telephilia, too), Film Studies For Free, May 28, 2009
• Adrian Martin, That Summer Feeling, Fipresci, 2005
• Adrian Martins monthly Filmkrant columns, July 2010-present 
• Jacques Rancière, The Thwarted Fable, Rouge, 8, 2006
• Jacques Rancière , Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art,  Art and Research, 2.1, 2008
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, JonathanRosenbaum.com, June 24, 2004
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Missing Image - From Cinephilia to the World - The Trajectory of Serge Daney, originally published in The New Left Review, 34, July-August 2005
• Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, Preface to Movie Mutations: The changing face of world cinephilia, Fipresci Documents, 2004
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Love: Film-history tidbits in a monument to French cinephilia, Moving Image Source, March 5, 2009
• Jason Sperb, Be Kind...Rewind, Jamais Vu, May 13, 2012

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On CINEMATIC DIRECT ADDRESS Part One Mapping the Field

CINEMATIC DIRECT ADDRESS Part One: Mapping the Field - Video by Catherine Grant

This entry has been superseded by the following, later FSFF entry so why dont you head over there straightaway?

On Friday March 1, 2013, Film Studies For Frees author had the very great pleasure of interviewing Tom Brown, Lecturer in Film Studies at Kings College, London, on the subject of direct address in the cinema, a topic he knows a huge amount about as author of the only book completely dedicated to it: Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) [Its up already - you can find it here].  You can read the preface to Toms book online here (PDF), check out another article he uploaded about it here, and visit his wonderfully illustrated Tumblr on the topic here.

The recorded interview will be presented in two parts here at FSFF: part one is above and part two -- "YOU LOOKING AT ME? On Buñuels LOS OLVIDADOS" -- will follow soon in a separate entry accompanied, as is this blogs wont, by a full compendium of links to further online scholarly studies of this (of course not exclusively) cinematic phenomenon.

In the period of time between recording this interview and completing the editing of it for this blog, Leigh Singers great video supercut on breaking the fourth wall (see below) was published, to merited acclaim, at PressPlay. Singers essay -- which uses examples from a number of the same films as FSFFs video, is a hugely witty, skillful, and highly thought-provoking accompaniment to it. If you know of any further videographic studies of cinematic direct address, or indeed any other good resources, please let FSFF know about them via the comments.

Thanks! Yes! You there!

Breaking the 4th Wall Movie Supercut by Leigh Singer

A compilation of scenes and moments from films that all "break the fourth wall" - that is, acknowledge (usually directly to the camera, and therefore the audience) that theyre part of a movie. The term comes from the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.

The montage includes 54 different films (some used more than once) from perhaps the very first example of breaking the fourth wall right up to today. There were so many other great examples I couldnt find room for (sadly, The Dude and The Big Lebowskis narrator dont abide here), Id love to hear which 4th wall breakers youd also include. Email me on leigh@singer-leisinger.com, or @Leigh_Singer on Twitter. Look forward to hearing your comments!

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�How Motion Pictures Became the Movies� A Video Lecture by David Bordwell

Not the actual Vimeo embed! For that you MUST visit David Bordwells website...

Today something new has been added [to the Observations on Film Art website]. I’ve decided to retire some of the lectures I take on the road, and I’ll put them up as video lectures. They’re sort of Net substitutes for my show-and-tells about aspects of film that interest me. The first is called “How Motion Pictures Became the Movies,” and it’s devoted to what is for me the crucial period 1908-1920. It quickly surveys what was going on in cinema over those years before zeroing in on the key stylistic developments we’ve often written about here: the emergence of continuity editing and the brief but brilliant exploration of tableau staging.
     The lecture isn’t a record of me pacing around talking. Rather, it’s a PowerPoint presentation that runs as a video, with my scratchy voice-over. I didn’t write a text, but rather talked it through as if I were presenting it live. It nakedly exposes my mannerisms and bad habits, but I hope they don’t get in the way of your enjoyment. [David Bordwell, What next? A video lecture, I suppose. Well, actually, yeah….", Observations on Film, January 12, 2013]

The above is, hopefully, self-explanatory. In other words you should head straight over to David Bordwells website (also see here) to be reminded, if you really needed to be, of just what a valuable resource it is, and just what a global treasure he is (and, of course, Kristin Thompson, too!].

Film Studies For Free cant wait for more of these. Thank you, David!

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On Spectatorship Reception Studies Fandom and Fan Studies In Media Res and Flow

Picture from Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla via Flickr, used and altered under Creative Commons License permission.

Film Studies For Free wanted you to know you have to go with the new issue of Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture on Fandom and Fan Studies.  Oh, and then you can join the party already started at In Media Res on issues of spectatorship. The great contents of these worthy e-journals are directly linked to below:


In Media Res December 13-17, 2010 (Theme week organized by Ian Peters [Georgia State University])

• Sarah Sinwell (Northeastern University) presents: The Art of Seduction: Film Spectatorship in the Age of the Cell Phone

• Ross Melnick (Emory University) presents: BIG News from India: BIG Cinemas and Diasporic Indian Moviegoing in the United States

• Sarah Hamblin (Michigan State University) presents: Puzzling Spectatorship

• Daniel C. Faltesek (University of Iowa) presents: The 3D Machine: An Experiment With Aura, Television, and Installation

• Jesse Schlotterbeck (University of Iowa) presents: DVDs Like LPs: The Official Websites of Musical Biopics and the Contemporary Film Collector

Flow: A Critical Forumon Television and Media Culture

• "Fandom In/As the Academy" by Paul Booth A look at the specific pedagogical value of fandom as an activity and how it can be appropriated in a variety of educational contexts.

• "We Have Met the Fans, and They Are Us: In Defense of Aca-Fans and Scholars" by Catherine Coker and Candace Benefiel  Fans hold their objects of study to a higher standard. How can the critical study of any text succeed without the passionate and knowledgeable participation of the scholar?

• "The Gathering of the Juggalos and the Peculiar Sanctity of Fandom" by Michael Dwyer The Gathering of the Juggalos is the scene of questionable fan practices contrary to the noble portrait of fandom elaborated by several scholars.

• "We are all together: Fan Studies and Performance" by Jen Gunnels and M. Flourish Klink Gunnels and Klink argue that fan studies parallels performance studies in discerning tensions between researcher and subject.

• "Stop Being an Elitist, and Start Being an Elitist" by David Jenemann Given how Aca-fandom has created its own canon and looks down its nose at certain cultural forms like sports broadcasting, we could use a little of Adornos elitism in the discipline today.

• "Telling Tastes: (Re)producing Distinction in Popular Media Studies" by Eve Ng What we study and how we learn to talk about it is productive of our identities along mostly covert dimensions of power. How do scholars distinguish themselves from the mainstream critics?

• "Embracing the Overly Confessional: Scholar-Fandom and Approaches to Personal Research" by Tom Phillips A scholar argues that embracing an "overly confessional" approach to his academic writing is integral to the fidelity of his research.

• "Revisiting Fandom in Africa" by Olivier J. Tchouaffe The application of fandom and its resources is not the same in all cultures, and African fans might not be recognized as legitimate fans. The point of this piece is to demonstrate that there is a unifying figure of American domination of mass culture.

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