Billy Liar Studies in Memory of Keith Waterhouse

Saturday, January 17, 2015


Film Studies For Free was saddened to hear that novelist, journalist, and screenwriter Keith Waterhouse has died, albeit after a long and rich life. He was author of the novel Billy Liar and wrote the critically acclaimed screenplay for John Schlesingers brilliant 1963 film of the same name, one of FSFFs favourites from the British New Wave. He also worked on other great screenplays, including Whistle Down the Wind (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962) and Alfred Hitchcocks Torn Curtain (1966, uncredited).

Below, in memory of Keith Waterhouses great British cinematic imagination, are some links to online and openly accessible Billy Liar and British New Wave cinema resources:
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Senses of Cinema The Post Dreaming Issue

Friday, January 16, 2015

Image from Nothing Personal (Urszula Antoniak, 2009) premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010 - Read the late John Orrs festival report.

Were dreams the “virtual worlds” of a previous era? Or at least as Freud understood them to be, as wish fulfilments? In this day and age of  “virtual reality” sites such as Second Life, are not all wish fulfilments at our disposal, made manifest instantly? We continue to dream, of course, but dreaming may be just the archaic [remnant] of a by-gone activity. Old habits die hard. If the post-modern age is post-Freudian, then it also post-dreaming. [Welcome to Issue 56 of our journal (Senses of Cinema) by the editors]
Hot off the digital press: a new issue of online journal Senses of Cinema, with a distinct focus on dreams and virtuality. Film Studies For Free brings you the tantalising table of contents below.

FSFF also notes that this issue carries the final Senses of Cinema contributions (and here) by the late film scholar John Orr. You can read FSFFs tribute to him here.

Issue 56 Contents 

Editorial

Feature Articles

Feed Me Grapes by Murray Pomerance
Inception by Ian Alan Paul
World on a Wire by the Celluloid Liberation Front
The Illusionist by David Bellos
The Skladanowsky Brothers by Stephen Barber
Watching the World Cup Final by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Cocksucker Blues by Stephen Gaunson
Jake Wilson interviews Leo Berkeley
Mary M. Wiles interviews Gaylene Preston

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill Dossier

Dossier Introduction by Adrian Danks
Jake Wilson on Films by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill
OtherFilm on Cantrills Expanded Cinema
Michael Koller on Waterfall
Freda Freiberg on In This Life’s Body

Steven Ball on Cantrills Filmnotes

Great Directors

John R. Hamilton on Paul Schrader

Festival Reports

Paul Breschuk on Media City
Damien Spiccia on Revelation
David Sanjek on Il Cinema Ritrovato
Ivana Novak on Dokufest
Bill Mousoulis on Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Darragh O’Donoghue on Killruddery
John Orr on Edinburgh International Film Festival
Jake Wilson on MIFF

Book Reviews

John Orr on Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence and Jerzy Skolimowski
David Melville on Latin American Melodrama and All About Almodóvar
David Sanjek on Richard Lester
Geoff Mayer on Screen The British "B" Film
Gozde Kilic on Conversations with Directors

Cteq Annotations

Tony Williams on Centre Stage
John Fidler on Irma Vep
Carla Marcantonio on In the Mood for Love
Audrey Yue on Song of the Exile
Michael Da Silva on The 10th District Court: Moments of Trials
Adrian Danks on The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg
Wheeler Winston Dixon on One Hour With You
Shari Kizirian on Madame Dubarry
Michael Koller on Kohlhiesels Töchter and Schuhpalast Pinkus
Pasquale Iannone on Broken Lullaby
Louise Sheedy on Beginnings
Louise Sheedy on Arts Vietnam
Darragh O’Donoghue on The Phantom Carriage
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Queer Film Festival Studies

Click here to visit the full interactive version of the above map.

As identity-based festivals, queer film festivals have a specific relationship to the audience to which they cater. More specifically, most of these festivals have had a strong connection to the political and social movement behind the lesbian and gay/queer agenda and try to maintain this relationship between cultural event and political framework [...]. Because of this history, queer film festivals have a strong tradition of a nuanced critical inquiry into the interconnections of cultural event management, community politics, nation state politics, funding and marketing strategies, and organizational structures [...]. [From Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, LGBT / Queer Film Festivals, Film Festival Research Network, last updated November 2012]
Festivals are the primary markets for international queer film, but they do not simply acquire and screen the films they show; they actually create the economic conditions that enable their production. This is not to imply that queer internationalism is merely inauthentic or commercial and thus without any kind of political viability. Rather, what it indicates is that scholars, activists, and festival directors must begin to look at the economy of queer cultural production as an essential element of queer collectivities and the institutions they form. Conceiving of an international queer community through cultural circulation and consumption begs significant questions about how U.S. audiences understand the role of the festival in defining a gay and lesbian class identity within this global economy. [From Ragan Rhyne, The Global Economy of Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 4, 2006]
As the above two scholarly excerpts indicate, the subject of film festivals is one which raises numerous issues of central importance to cultural studies more generally. For this reason, as well as to celebrate the work of scholars who have shared their findings in particular corner of this field online, Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the latest set of links to open access queer film studies that it has created for its sibling Global Queer Cinema website is devoted to the topic of Queer Film Festival Studies. You can visit numerous earlier FSFF entries on film festival studies by clicking here.

This most recent collection in the GQC Resources section includes a link to the full, interactive, version of the map at the top of this entry, created by pioneering film festival scholar Skadi Loist (co-founder, with Marijke de Valck,  of the Film Festival Studies Network), which shows 256 LGBT/queer film festivals existing globally since 1977.

For live-link access to all the below resources, please visit this webpage.

  • Chris Berry, My Queer Korea: Identity, Space, and the 1998 Seoul Queer Film & Video festival, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 2, May 1999
  • Noa Ben-Asher, Screening Historical Sexualities: A Roundtable on Sodomy, South Africa, and Proteus,Pace Law Faculty Publications, 2005. Paper 589
  • Kaucyila Brooke, Dividers and Doorways [on the locational politics of Los Angeless Gay and Lesbian film festival], Jump Cut, no. 42, December 1998, pp. 50-57
  • Phillip B. Cook, Gay Sundance 2013: The Year Ahead in Independent Queer Cinema, The Blog, Huff Post Gay Voices, January 17, 2013
  • Michael Guillén, The Evening Class blog, 2006-present
  • Mel Hogan, 21 years of image & nation: legitimizing the gaze, Nouvelles «vues» sur le cinéma québécois, no. 10, Hiver 2008-2009
  • Jamie June, Is it Queer Enough?: An Analysis of the Criteria and Selection Process for Programming Films within Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Film Festivals in the United States, MA Thesis, University of Oregon, August 2003
  • Alice Kuzniar, Schwul-lesbisches Kino aus Deutschland, in: Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg, ed. by Dorothée von Diepenbroick and Skadi Loist (Hamburg: Maennerschwarm Verlag, 2009)
  • Hui-Ling Lin, Bodies in Motion: The Films of Transmigrant Queer Chinese Women Filmmakers in Canada, PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2011
  • Skadi Loist, Precarious cultural work: about the organization of (queer) film festivals, Screen, 52.2, 2011
  • Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck (2010). “Film Festivals / Film Festival Research: Thematic, Annotated Bibliography: Second Edition.” Medienwissenschaft / Hamburg: Berichte und Papiere 91 (2010). (19. May. 2010 (sections1. Film Festivals: The Long View2. Festival Time: Awards, Juries and Critics3. Festival Space: Cities, Tourism and Publics4. On the Red Carpet: Spectacle, Stars and Glamour ; 5. Business Matters: Industries, Distribution and Markets6. Trans/National Cinemas7. Programming8. Reception: Audiences, Communities and Cinephiles9. Specialized Film Festivals10. Publications Dedicated to Individual Film Festivals11. Online ResourcesContact / Bio), 2008
  • Skadi Loist, Queer Film and the Film Festival Circuit, In Media Res, September 14, 2010
  • Skadi Loist, Das Queer Cinema und die Bedeutung lesbisch-schwuler Filmfestivals: Monika Treut im Interview mit Skadi Loistn: Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg. Eds. Dorothée von Diepenbroick, and Skadi Loist. Hamburg: Männerschwarm, 2009. pp. 12–20
  • Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, Film Festival Studies: An Overview of a Burgeoning Field, in: Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit. Eds. Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2009. pp. 179–215
  • Scott McKinnon, Taking the Word ‘Out’ West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces, Participations, Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010) 
  • Kelly McWilliam, Were Here All Week: Public Formation and the Brisbane Queer Film Festival. Queensland Review 14(2), 2007:pp. 79-91
  • Jenni Olson, Film Festivals, GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. 2002. 24 February 2007
  • Ricardo Peach, Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema in South Africa and Australia, PhD Thesis, University of Technology, Sydney 2005
  • Renee Penney, Desperately Seeking Redundancy? Queer Romantic Comedy and the Festival Audience, PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010
  • Mel Pritchard, the big queer film festival list, QueerFilmFestivals.org
  • Marc Siegel, Spilling Out onto Castro Street, Jump Cut No. 41 (May), 1997
  • Amy Watson, Being Inappropriate: Queer Activism in Context, MA Thesis, Central European University 2009
  • Gerald J. Z. Zielinski, Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence and Cultural Politics of Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals, PhD Thesis, McGill University, August 2008
  • Ger Zielinski, On the production of heterotopia, and other spaces, in and around lesbian and gay film festivals, Jump Cut, No 54, Fall 2012
  • Ger Zielinski, "Queer Film Festivals." LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia. Eds. John C. Hawley, and Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. pp. 980–984
  • Ger Zielinski in Conversation with Stephen Kent Jusick, Executive Director of MIX Festival of Queer Experimental Film and Video, FUSE Art Culture Politics (summer issue, 2010), pp. 16-23 

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BFI Pasolini Study Day Talks Online!

Screenshot from Porcile/Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969). Listen to Filippo Trentins talk on this film from the BFI Pasolini Study Day, April 20, 2012.

Thanks to Dan North, following its recent film studies podcasts entry, Film Studies For Free learned that all the talks from the British Film Institutes Pasolini Study Day, held on Saturday April 20, 2012, are freely available to listen to and download from iTunes U. Evviva!

All details and links to this fabulous resource are given below. Thanks to the BFI, as well as to FSFFs lovely colleagues at the University of Sussex -- especially to renowned Pasolini scholar and World Picture co-editor John David Rhodes -- for organising the day.

View More from the BFI on iTunes U

Resource Description

Stimulating and engaging programme of talks, discussions and screenings (hosted in collaboration with the University of Sussex’s Centre for Visual Fields and School of English) exploring the work and thought of Pasolini, one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation and a fiercely original – and controversial – public figure. A prestigious line-up of speakers includes Adam Chodzko, Rosalind Galt, Robert Gordon, Matilde Nardelli, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Tony Rayns, John David Rhodes, Filippo Trentin and his favourite actor: Ninetto Davoli. 


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Ingmar Bergman Studies

Updated September 19, 2011



Film Studies For Free brings you, below, a very long list indeed of links to online and openly accessible studies of the work of Ingmar Bergman. The list was especially inspired by hearing of the first of the three video studies above, via Adrian Martin, Corey Creekmur and Christa Fuller. This news led to the subsequent discovery of the rest of this amazing videographic trilogy on Bergmans films by Jonas Moberg. Update: FSFF has learned that these videos were devised by Thomas Elsaesser, during his year as Ingmar Bergman Professor at Stockholm University in 2007 in conjunction with the project "Ingmar Bergman in the Museum" (a summary of which is linked to below). Initially, seven of these videos were planned, to go with each of the chapters in the book Film Theory - An Introduction through the Senses. The research for all seven Bergman Senses Videos was carried out by Elsaesser, together with Anne Bachmann, a PhD student at Stockholm University, and Jonas Moberg then edited three of them. Sadly, time ran out on the project and the remaining four planned videos werent completed.

Bergman scholars and fans should also know about Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face, the beautiful website of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, which showcases and links to numerous further resources. Sight and Sound has also just featured a fascinating essay by Lena Bergman on her fathers viewing habits in his unique private cinema, a converted barn on Fårö, the Baltic island where he lived until his death in 2007. This year’s Bergman Week festival takes place in the cinema on Fårö from 28 June to 3 July. Television viewers in the UK might, in addition, like to hear that Film4 will show 16 Ingmar Bergman films in a series beginning next week. Yay!

If FSFF says so itself, the below list is probably one of its best ever (do scroll right down for all the videos). It was certainly one of the most rewarding to compile... It hopes you will find it in equal parts enjoyable and useful.



    Liv Ullmann at the Bergman Week 2010, speaking about the filming of Face To Face with Ingmar Bergman. She talks about the relationship between a director and his actors, and specifically the scene when her character commits suicide in the film.

    Wim Wenders talks about Ingmar Bergman

    Agnes Varda talks about Bergman.

    David Stratton talks about Ingmar Bergman.

    Bergman Center interviews American director John Landis about Ingmar Bergman at Venice International Film Festival.

    Bergman Center interviews French actor Jean-Marc Barr about Ingmar Bergman at Venice International Film Festival.
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    Sad News



    "The first impulse of any good film critic, and [with] this I think you would agree, must be of love. To be moved enough to want to share their affection for a particular work or to relate their experience so that others may be curious. This is why criticism, teaching, and curating or programming, in an ideal sense, must all go hand in hand."
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    With a twist on puzzle films mind games unreliable narrators spoilers

    Thursday, January 15, 2015

    Latest update May 10, 2010

    Film Studies For Free is a sucker for films and television dramas with a twist, and also a big fan of reading about audiovisual narrative complexity and narrational unreliability. Never one to keep its enthusiasms to itself, heres a little list of some excellent, and openly accessible, online reading of the scholarly kind on those very tricksy topics, and a lovely little short film that FSFF came across on its e-travels, too...

    Quiet Work by Sean Martin, 2007 (also see here)
    "A short film about gardens and gardening, as narrated by my Mother (an unreliable narrator!). Inspired a little by the home movie sequence in Tarkovskys Solaris, and also the Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait. Its in stereo. The title is from the poem by Matthew Arnold".
     
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    AUDIENCES a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press and a bumper new issue of PARTICIPATIONS!

    Frame grab from Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902). Read Dan Norths great blog entry about the audience-oriented attractionist aesthetic of this film, and Frank Kesslers chapter on this film in the collection Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception
    This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the effects of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioral world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional box office studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms. [Publishers blurb for Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)]

    Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass on news of the publication of an open access version of a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press. Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception is an extremely high quality collection edited by Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History, at Birkbeck, University of London. This great tome has, of course, been added to FSFFs permanent listing of Open Access eBooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!


    Since were on the subject of audiences, it seems a brilliant moment to reproduce, below, links to the incredibly rich contents of the latest, just published, issue of PARTICIPATIONS, the excellent online journal of audience research. Not all items are directly film studies related, but they should be of interest to all researching issues of reception in film and media culture.



    CONTENTS
    • Editorial; Acknowledgments
    • Introduction: In Search of Audiences Ian Christie
    PART I: Reassessing Historic Audiences
    • “At the Picture Palace”: The British Cinema Audience, 1895-1920 25 by Nicholas Hiley
    • The Gentleman in the Stalls: Georges Méliès and Spectatorship in Early Cinema by Frank Kessler
    • Beyond the Nickelodeon: Cinemagoing, Everyday Life and Identity Politics by Judith Thissen
    • Cinema in the Colonial City: Early Film Audiences in Calcutta by Ranita Chatterjee
    • Locating Early Non-Theatrical Audiences by Gregory A. Waller
    • Understanding Audience Behavior Through Statistical Evidence: London and Amsterdam in the Mid-1930s byJohn Sedgwick and Clara Pafort-Overduin
    PART II: New Frontiers in Audience Research
    • The Aesthetics and Viewing Regimes of Cinema and Television, and Their Dialectics by Annie van den Oever
    • Tapping into Our Tribal Heritage: The Lord of the Rings and Brain Evolution by Torben Grodal
    • Cinephilia in the Digital Age by Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto
    • Spectator, Film and the Mobile Phone by Roger Odin
    • Exploring Inner Worlds: Where Cognitive Psychology May Take Us by A dialogue between Tim J. Smith and Ian Christie
    PART III: Once and Future Audiences
    • Crossing Out the Audience by Martin Barker
    • The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory by Raymond Bellour
    • Operatic Cinematics: A New View from the Stalls by Kay Armatage
    • What Do We Really Know About Film Audiences? by Ian Christie
    • Notes; General Bibliography; Notes on Contributors; Index of Names; Index of Film Titles; Index of Subjects

    PARTICIPATIONS, 9.2, 2012
    Contents
    Articles
    Special Section: Comic-Book Audiences
    Special Section: Music Audiences
    Special Section: Audience Involvement and New Production Paradigms [COST Action]
    Special Section: Multi-Method Audience Research [COST Action]
    Reviews
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