On the Cinema of Sharon Lockhart videos and essays

Image from Teatro Amazonas (Sharon Lockhart, 1999)

Film Studies For Free was rather inspired by a characteristically excellent blog essay by Srikanth Srinivasan on the films of Sharon Lockhart (thanks to David Hudson for the tip off). So heres a quick cluster of links to some wonderful Lockhart resources -- videos and essays -- available online in openly accessible forms. If anyone knows of any other high quality online material about this artist, please let FSFF know. 

Sharon Lockhart interview, Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International

Blending rigorous aesthetic concerns with an anthropologists sensibility to community engagement and observation, Sharon Lockhart uses film and photography to create poignant, beautiful, and intimate portraits. She carefully manipulates formal elements as she explores certain concepts with regularity: portraiture, the relationship between photography and film, and the combination of fictive or choreographed performances with unscripted, intimate moments. The film Pine Flat and the accompanying color photographs Pine Flat Portrait Studio (both from 2005) present a spare, meditative series of filmic and photographic portraits of a group of children the artist came to know during her nearly four-year stay in Pine Flat, California. Pine Flat is a two-part film focusing on children and adolescents interacting in the sublime landscape surrounding this small rural community. Its determinedly languid pace engages the viewer in a self-conscious reflection on the process of looking and offers a meditation on the subjective experience of time, particularly as an aspect of childrens lives.

 Sharon Lockhart and James Benning: Walker Art Gallery 109 mins 
(discussion begins after 8 mins)

Although a generation apart, filmmakers Sharon Lockhart and James Benning have cited each others work as an important influence on their own practice. Join them for a conversation about the process of creating a picture of America and California in particular—that focuses on Lockharts Pine Flat (2005) and films from Bennings California Trilogy (20002001). Pine Flat is Lockharts first project to examine American culture. Bennings 30-year filmmaking career includes more than 36 films. He teaches film/video at the California Institute of the Arts. / Moderated by Walker director Kathy Halbreich. / Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat.

• Girish Shambu, Experiments In Fact And Fiction: The Films Of Sharon Lockhart, Senses of Cinema, 17, 2001
• Sharon Lockhart: Teatro Amazonas, Absolute Arts, 2000
• Sharon Lockarts Teatro Amazonas (1999) and Lunch Break (2009) online at UbuWeb
• Srikanth Srinivasan, The Films of Sharon Lockhart, The Seventh Art, September 4, 2010

I sat through all 99 minutes of Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide, shown in a special “Focus” on “40 years of Berlin’s Forum. I knew in advance that there were only two shots in Lockhart’s HD work, so, naturally, I was apprehensive. Remarkably, most of the 100 or so spectators who attended the 10:00 am public screening were also there at the end. Only one human character appears in Double Tide, Jen Casad, a clam digger, and a very few birds. The first shot occurs early morning, and the second late afternoon, and at each low tide, we see Ms Casad enter the static frame with her floating clam basket, ready to search beneath the shallow water. The sound would appear to be direct, it is certainly natural, and, although the camera never moves, the frame is never static. We begin to appreciate all of the effort the clam digger puts into her work, while the fog in the background lifts then reappears, finally to lift again revealing a number of seabirds doing their own search for food. The second shot reveals that we are not looking out to sea at all, but at a forested inlet, and, with the sun setting off-frame left, we can appreciate the changing of the light, and again marvel at the sounds as well as sights of nature. [Peter Rist, ...BAFICI..., Offscreen, Vol. 14, Issue 3, 2010]

I would like here to invoke Sharon Lockharts film Kahlil Haper-Bowers (1993), because it seems to me a brilliant analysis of this visual panic, this disruption of the visual field that lies at the foundation of heteronormative visuality.* In Lockharts film, the body of a young boy, who faces the camera directly, gradually begins to display what at first seem slight discolorations or abrasions of the skin. The film, which gives the impression of being a medical, diagnostic record of a series of clinical visits over time, hovers intently at the point of indistinctness: what are these dark shadows on the skin? Bruises? Lesions? Are they real, genuine dermatological symptoms–or just stage make-up? And, of what condition are these the symptoms: AIDS–or not? As the marks begin to multiply, Lockhart skillfully intensifies the pressure of the visual field around the deviant body, to the point where the spectator is able to experience the stigmatizing gaze in itself. The film brings all of that gazes contradictory elements into play: the quasi-medical, quasi-legalistic imperative to explore the body intimately and diagnostically; where the diagnostic gaze is at the same time a sadistic, invasive procedure that seeks to brand the body it explores; where at the point or punctum of branding the whole visual field suddenly buckles and bends around;** where instead of the stigma acting as a seal, a cauterizing process, a protection against disease, something seeps through the stigma from its other side, something sickening, like a secretion, the secretion of the secret, something that dissolves the membrane separating us from them, a point of merger where the two sides commingle, a point of infection or contagion; a point that is experienced throughout this process entirely at the level of Galtonesque hallucination, of not being sure what it is, of not being able to apply the normalizing categories for the precise reason that at the very point of the stigma the categories hang suspended, leaving the subject floundering, unable to impose the distinction that was the goal of its activity, losing the distinction, losing it all round, becoming for a moment a subject unable to apply the dividing line that is the founding axiom of the heteronormative order, for the duration of the panic unable to successfully abject what is to be abjected in order for the subject to be, and is instead invaded and attacked, in the ricochet of the brand-become-infection that typifies homophobic panic as a visual field. [Norman Bryson, Todd Hayness Poison and Queer Cinema, Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999]

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Senses of Cinema The Post Dreaming Issue

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

An Interview with Arnaud Desplechin by Marko Bauer

An Interview with Marie-Christine Questerbert by Sally Shafto

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

Iván Zulueta’s Cinephilia of Ecstasy and Experiment by Matt Losada

Rico Ilarde as filmmaker by Noel Vera

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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Sensing cinema phenomenological film and media studies

Image from Tam e guilass/Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1997)

Film Studies For Free is using all of its searching senses today to bring you lots of links to perceptive film and media studies of the phenomenological kind, or to studies which at least touch meaningfully on issues of phenomenology, perception, and haptics.

Those especially interested in these topics might also like to experience the fascinating Cinesensory website once theyve dipped into some of the wonderful, openly-accessible, scholarly resources below:

• Henry Bacon, Synthesizing Approaches in Film Theory, The Journal of Moving Image Studies, Volume 4, 2005
  

• Jennifer M Barker, Chapter 1: Skin, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)

• Melinda Barlow, Review of TOUCH: SENSUOUS THEORY AND MULTISENSORY MEDIA Laura U. Marks Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003
  

• Tammy L. Bennington and Geri Gay, Mediated Perceptions: Contributions of Phenomenological Film Theory to Understanding the Interactive Video Experience, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 5 (4) June 2000
  

• Martha Blassnigg, Review of Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology by Malin Wahlberg [University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008], Leonardo on-line, July 2008
  

• Jay David Bolter, Digital Media and Cinematic Point of View,Telepolis (14.02.1997)

• Havi Carel, A phenomenology of tragedy: illness and body betrayal in The Fly, SCAN, vol. 4, number 2 august 2007
  

• Josh Cohen, Phenomenology, History and the Image: A Reply to Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Film-Philosophy, vol. 3 no. 11, March 1999
  

• Sarah Cooper, Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2007

• Glorianna Davenport and Brian Bradley, Everyones Cinema: Towards the Future of Cinematics, Oberhausen Film Festival - April 28, 199
  

• Trevor G. Elkington, Between Order and Chaos: On Peter Greenaways Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema, Film-Philosophy, vol. 8 no. 2, January 2004
  

• Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Images of/and the Postmodern, Film-Philosophy, vol. 3 no. 8, February 1999
  

• Daniel Frampton, The Way that Movements Speak [on Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies by Bela Tarr, and Last Resort by Pawel Pawlikowski], Film-Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 10, 2001

• Alex Gerbaz, Direct Address, Ethical Imagination, and Errol Morris’s Interrotron, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 2, December 2008

• Sam B. Girgus, Beyond Ontology: Levinas and the Ethical Frame in Film, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 2, August 2007
  

• Julien Guillemet, Painting/Cinema: A Study on Saturated Phenomena, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 2, September 2008
  

• Jan Holmberg, Ideals of Immersion in Early Cinema, Cinémas : revue détudes cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 14, n° 1, 2003, p. 129- 147
  

• Robert Hopkins, Pictures and Film; Philosophy and the Empirical Disciplines: A Reply to Dean, Film-Philosophy, vol. 3 no. 27, June 1999
  

• Mike Jones, Composing Space: Cinema and Computer Gaming - The Macro-Mise en Scene and Spatial Composition, Imaginary Worlds: Image and Space International Symposium, Sydney, 14 October 2005
  

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

• Abigail Loxham, Veo, veo; Leo, Leo?: A re(-)viewing of haptic and visual discourse in Bigas Luna’s Bilbao (1978), Studies in European Cinema, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2007

• Laura U. Marks, Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes, Framework" the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004

• Laura U. Marks, Information, secrets, and enigmas: an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics for cinema, 2009

• Laura U. Marks, Multisensory Culture, 2008

• Laura U. Marks, Mohamed Soueids Cinema of Immanence, Jump Cut, 49, 2007

• Laura U. Marks, Asphalt Nomadism, 2006

• Laura U. Marks, Enfolding and Unfolding: An Aesthetics for the Information Age,
  
  An interactive essay produced in collaboration with designer Raegan Kelly in Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, 2006.
  
  
  

• Douglas Morrey, Bodies that Matter - Review: Vivian Sobchack (2004) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2006

• Douglas Morrey, Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2008

• Edward R. ONeill, Apprehending Deleuze Apprehending Cinema [on Der Film bei Deleuze/Le cinema selon Deleuze, edited by Fahle & Engell], Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2, January 1998
  

• Per Persson, Chapter 1: Understanding and Dispositions, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery (Cambridge University Press, 2003
  

• Dominic Michael Rainsford, Tarkovsky and Levinas: Cuts, Mirrors, Triangulations, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2007

• Elena del Río, “Antonioni’s Blowup: Freeing the Imaginary from Metaphysical Ground”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 32, June, 2005
  

• Jason Kelly Roberts, Review of The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick [London: Harvard University Press, 2007], Scope, Issue 13, February 2009

• Anne Rutherford, Cinema and Embodied Affect, Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Anne Rutherford, Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mice en Scene, and the Senses in Angelopoulos Balkan Epic, Senses of Cinema 2004
  

• Philipp Schmerheim, ‘Film, not Sliced up into Pieces, or: How Film Made me Feel Thinking: Review of Filmosophy’, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008

• Vivian Sobchack, Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime, Millennium Film Journal No. 34 (Fall 1999): The Digital

• A. Soltani, Cinesensory: A Filmic Design for Mapping Haptic Space, International Design and Cinema Conference, Istanbul, November 2009

• David Sterritt, Taste of Kiarostami, Senses of the Cinema, Issue no. 9, Sept-Oct. 2000

• David Sullivan, Noemata or No Matter?: Forcing Phenomenology into Film Theory, Film-Philosophy, vol. 1 no. 3, July 1997

• Melanie Swalwell, The Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema [on Laura U. Markss The Skin of the Film], Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 32, 2002

• Donato Totaro, Deleuzian film Analysis: The Skin of the Film, Offscreen Journal, June 30, 2002
  

• Saige Walton, “Cinema as I see-I hear-I feel”: Review of The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film by Brigitte Peucker, Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007

• Robert E. Wood, Toward an Ontology of Film: A Phenomenological Approach, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 24, 2001

• Benjamin Wurgaft, How Heavy Light Can Be, Film-Philosophy, vol. 6 no. 9, May 2002
  

• Kevin Wynter, Of depth and surfaces; notes on Watchmen and other reflections on phenomenological film experience, CineAction, Summer, 2009
  

• Daniel Yacavone, ‘Towards a Theory of Film Worlds’, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008

• Christopher S. Yates, A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic "Worlds", Contemporary Aesthetics, Oct 22, 2006
  

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Links on videographical film criticism editing intensified continuity chaos cinema hapticity and post cinematic affect

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT?

A FILMANALYTICAL video collage, made by Catherine Grant

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? offers a brief audiovisual exploration of issues of sensuous proximity, contiguity or contact in experiencing or studying films - what theorist Laura U. Marks called hapticity. It quotes from Marks essay Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes [in FRAMEWORK: the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004, pp. 79-82], as well as from Ingmar Bergmans 1966 film PERSONA (cinematography by Sven Nykvist). The music is excerpted from Robert Lippok and Beatrice Martinis BRANCHES, available at the Free Music Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can read an accompanying written essay about this video and videographic film studies here.

A ragbag of links, today, at Film Studies For Free. But this blog wanted to flag up some recently published, and curiously related, audiovisual items of possible interest, together with some associated written resources.

First up, is the video above, the latest of FSFFs videographic film studies experiments. Compared with FSFFs other videos, this film-theoretical one turned out to be a close kin of two earlier video primers (on Gilda, film noir, gender and performance and on Elizabeth Taylor, framing and child stardom/performance). As befits primers, rather than

aiming to generate completely new insights, [these rich text objects attempt], within the time-space of the average YouTube fan clip, to assemble and combine quotations from existing film scholarship on [their topics] with sequences from the film in question in order to provide a meaningful, scholarly and affective, immersive experience. [FSFF, April 7, 2011]

If you are beginning to be invested in, or just mildly curious about, the possibilities of videographic film criticism and film theory, then do read Touching the Film Object? Notes on the Haptic in Videographical Film Studies by Catherine Grant at FSFFs sister blog Filmanalytical, and also check out further links and thoughts here.

Next up, a pointer to an exciting, film-theory related, theme week at the great website In Media Res on Steven Shaviros Post-Cinematic Affect, running between August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011.

There are a couple of interesting entries up already, with very lively comments streams. Further links will be added below as the posts go live. In the meantime, you can read a lengthy excerpt from Shaviros book on Post-Cinematic Affect here. And do visit his blog where you will find lots more material from this work.

• Cinemas 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
• Steven Shaviro Presents: A response to the week

Finally, FSFF wanted to make sure that its own readers were alerted to a very lively debate on intensified continuity and chaos cinema in relation to the action film (broadly defined) that has sprung up online as a result of the publication of a two part video essay on those topics at the wonderful new (video-essay-rich) website PressPlay, curated by film critic and video essayist extraordinaire Matt Zoller Seitz. The Chaos Cinema essay, embedded below, is by a young film scholar Matthias Stork and is well worth a look.

Below the videos, FSFF has linked to related online, scholarly and journalistic items treating substantially similar issues as Chaos Cinema, published before his essay, as well as to ones produced directly in response to Storks work.

Enjoy! 

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork.

The video essay Chaos Cinema, administered by Indiewires journalistic blog PRESS PLAY, examines the extreme aesthetic principles of 21st century action films. These films operate on techniques that, while derived from classical cinema, threaten to shatter the established continuity formula. Chaos reigns in image and sound. Part 1 contrasts traditional action films with chaotic ones and takes a close look at the "sound" track, especially its use in car chases.

Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork.

Part 2 takes a look at the chaotic style in dialogue scenes, musicals, "shaky-cam" extravaganzas and mourns the rich history of early cinema.

• David Bordwell, Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film, originally in Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 16-28
• David Bordwell, Intensified Continuity Revisited, Observations of Film Art, May 2007
• David Bordwell, Unsteadicam Chronicles, Observations on Film Art, August 17, 2007
• David Bordwell, Bond vs. Chan: Jackie shows how it’s done, Observations on Film Art, September 15, 2010
  
• Steven Boone, Blind Fury: Notes on Chaos Cinema, PressPlay, August 27, 2011
• Chris Cagle, More on (Post-)Classicism, Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 18, 2007
• Jim Emerson, Agents of Chaos, Scanners, August 23, 2011
• Jim Emerson, The Architecture of Gravity, Scanners, January 20, 2009
• Jim Emerson, Bye, Sally -- Sally Menke, 1953 - 2010, Scanners, September 28, 2010
• Catherine Grant, Seeing the join: on film editing, Film Studies For Free, April 16, 2010
• Ian Grey, The Art of Chaos Cinema, PressPlay, August 26, 2011
• Ambrose Heron, Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the AVID, Film Detail, August 23, 2011
• Kevin Howley, Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction, Scope May 2004
• Neal King, Secret Agency in Mainstream Postmodern Cinema, Postmodern Culture, 18.3, 2008 
• Jakob Isak Nielsen, Structural completeness in The War Is Over, Short Film Studies, 1.1, 2010
• Catherine ORawe, More more Moro: Music and montage in Romanzo criminale, the italianist 29 · 2009 · 214-226
• Steven Shaviro, Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films, The Pinocchio Theory, May 12, 2010
• Matthias Stork, Chaos Cinema: The decline and fall of action filmmaking, PressPlay, August 22, 2011
• James Udden, Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuaron’s Film Aesthetics in the Shadow of Globalization, Style, Volume 43, No. 1, Spring 2009
• Matt Zoller Seitz, Why are so many modern action movies terrible?, PressPlay, August 25, 2011

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Direct Cinema Innovative Documentary Studies Online

Image from Subdivided (Dean Terry, US 2007)

Film Studies For Free is keepin it real today with a choice selection of links to mostly very recent, definitely innovative, and freely-accessible online documentary studies (last updated April 10, 2009):

• On the Rocumentary: Keith Beatty, Its Not Only Rock and Roll: Rockumentary, Direct Cinema, and Performative Display, Australasian Journal of American Studies. December 2005
• On Animation and Documentary: David Bordwell, Showing What Cant Be Filmed, Observations on Film Art and Film Art, March 24, 2009


• On Spectacle and Documentary: Elizabeth Cowie, The Spectacle of Reality and Documentary Film, Documentary Box, #10 (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival) (1997) (Also see HERE; and do visit the main site Documentary Box Online Journal for many other great articles on documentary)


• On Music and Documentary: Leonardo DAmico, People and sounds”: Filming African music between visual anthropology and television documentary, Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review, #11 (2007)
• On Direct Address and Documentary: Alex Gerbaz, Direct Address, Ethical Imagination, and Errol Morris’s Interrotron, Film-Philosophy, 12.2, September 2008


• On Activism and Documentary: John Haynes, Documentary as Social Justice Activism: The Textual and Political Strategies of Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films, 49th Parallel, Vol.21 (Autumn 2007)


• On the Personal in Japanese Documentary: Nada Hisashi, Self-Documentary: Its Origins and Present State, Documentary Box, #26 (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival), 2005


• On Adaptation and Documentary: David T. Johnson, Playgrounds of Unlimited Potential: Adaptation, Documentary, and Dogtown and Z-Boys, Adaptation Vol. 2 , No. 1 , pp. 1 – 16 (2009) (a free sample article from this new Oxford Journals periodical)


• On Performativity and Science Documentary: John Arthur Little, The Power and Potential of Performative Documentary Film, e-thesis April 2007, Montana State University
• On New Approaches to Documentary: B. Ruby Rich, Documentary Disciplines: An Introduction
  
• On New Media and Documentary: Bjørn Sørenssen, Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized?, Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 2, no. 1 (March 2008): 47-59 (see abstract; temporarily free online. Thanks a lot to Watching YouTube for the link)


• On Stylization, Abstraction and Documentary: Billy Budd Vermillion, The "Wondrous Truth" of Microcosmos, 16:9 - April 2007 - 5. årgang - nummer 21

Also see the great articles for the New worlds of documentary Special Section of Jump Cut, issue no. 48, winter 2006, edited by Julia Lesage:

Introduction: new worlds of documentary by Julia Lesage; Emergency analysis, Terri Schiavo: introduction The cutting edge: emergencies in visual culture by Janet Staiger; Schiavo videos context and reception: timely triage by Diane Waldman; Emergency analysis: the academic traffic in images by Catherine L. Preston; The videographic persistence of Terri Schiavo by Janet Walker Walker; A walk on the wild side: the changing face of TV wildlife documentary by Richard Kilborn; Strange Justice: sounding out the Right: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and constructing spin in the name of justice by Steve Lipkin; Giving voice: performance and authenticity in the documentary musical by Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe; Video Vigilantes and the work of shame by Gareth Palmer; Audio documentary: a polemical introduction for the visual studies crowd by Chuck Kleinhans; TV news titles: picturing the planet by Sean Cubitt; Les Archives de la Planète: a cinematographic atlas by Teresa Castro; Cinephilia and the travel film: Gambling, Gods and LSD by Catherine Russell; Dark Days: a narrative of environmental adaptation by Joseph Heumann and Robin L. Murray; Feminist history making and Video Remains by Alexandra Juhasz.

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B for Bad Cinema Colloquy from Monash

Image from Snakes on a Plane (David R. Ellis, 2006); Read Kirsten Stevenss article Snakes on a Plane and the prefabricated cult film (pdf) from the new issue of Colloquy

Its going to continue to be a little quiet around here at Film Studies For Free as its author busies herself with finishing off a couple of video essays that will be posted here very shortly.

The essays will also form the basis of two talks to be given in the next few weeks: on March 8 at Liverpool John Moores University; and on March 17 at the University of Sussex (details to follow).

The title of both talks, as per the following abstract, is:

Quote/Unquote? The "Unattainable [Film] Text" in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Following the lead of scholars Christian Keathley, Eric Faden, Jason Mittell, Andrew Miller and Craig Cieslikowski in the summary of their conference panel on The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age (MIT6, Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, April 24-26, 2009), in this talk Catherine Grant will revisit Raymond Bellours essay on The Unattainable Text (Screen, Vol 16, No 3, 1975: 19-27), as well as Laura Mulveys more recent considerations of film possession, and pensiveness in the digital age (Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2006). Then she will examine the issue of film quotation in audiovisual work, as well as, more generally, the possibilities offered to film studies by the rising generation of online digital-video essays about films and film theory.

To sustain FSFFs terribly loyal readers until then, heres news (via David Hudson @theauteursdaily) of a wonderful e-journal special issue entitled B for Bad Cinema. All the film-related contents are linked to below. Enjoy! It has some particularly choice items on horror cinema, as well as on David Lynch and Lars von Trier.

This usually indefatigable blog will be back properly soon. In the meantime you can continue to follow its much more succinct recommendations on Twitter courtesy of @filmstudiesff.

All articles are in pdf format. To download the whole issue as one file, click Issue 18.
Front
Contents
Editorial

B for Bad Cinema from Colloquy (Monash University), Issue 18, December 2009

• Introduction: B for Bad Cinema Julia Vassilieva and Claire Perkins

• Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception: Configuring a Scatological Gaze in Trash Filmmaking Zoe Gross

• “They don’t call ’em exploitation movies for nothing!”: Joe Bob Briggs and the Critical Commentary on I Spit on Your Grave Tristan Fidler

• Erasing the B out of Bad Cinema: Remaking Identity in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Craig Frost

• “Fucking Americans”: Postmodern Nationalisms in the Contemporary Splatter Film Phoebe Fletcher

• Their Time Has Come: Bad Cinema Nerds as Late-Capitalist Paradigm Mark Steven

• Snakes on a Plane and the prefabricated cult film Kirsten Stevens

• “Bad Form”: Contemporary Cinema’s Turn to the Perverse. David Lynch: Lost Highway (1997) Lars von Trier: Breaking the Waves (1996) Hester Joyce and Scott Wilson

• The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films Ekky Imanjaya

• Doing It for the Kids: Rebels and Prom Queens in the Cold War Classroom Film Anika Ervin-Ward

• Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance Donna McRae

• B for Bad, B for Bogus and B for Bold: Rupert Kathner, The Glenrowan Affair and Ned Kelly Stephen Gaunson

• Horror-Ritual: Horror Movie Villains as Collective Representations, Uncanny Metaphors and Ritual Transgressors Mario Rodriguez

• From Kracauer to Clover: Some Reflections on Genre and Gender in 70s/80s Slasher Films Tyson Namow

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On the myth of the frontier in cinema and culture

A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...: Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters

This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

      However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.

The inspiration for todays Film Studies For Free entry -- on the (transnational) myth of the frontier in cinema and related culture -- was Richard Langleys excellent, highly persuasive, short documentary embedded above. That video also has a vivid, post hoc connection to this blogs popular list of "Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies" posted but a few short weeks ago.

Like cinematic apocalypses, filmic frontier mythology turned out to be an incredibly rich vein of web scholarship. So, many thanks to Richard and all the below named scholars for making sure their very valuable work was openly accessible online.

Open Access is, after all, the real final [e-]frontier.

And hopefully it wont turn out to be a myth...

• Catherine Lynn Adams, Africanizing the Territory: The History, Memory and Contemporary Imagination of Black Frontier Settlements in the Oklahoma Territory, PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2010
• Tyler Lorey Adams, The Geography of Frontier, Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
  
• Jon Baldwin, Other Bother: The Alien in Science Fiction Cinema; Sardar and Cubitts Aliens R Us , Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 20, August 2003
• Ann Barrow, The Cutting Garden: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and ReceptionTheories of Audiences or Fans, Cultural Studies Conference Proceedings, 2004
• Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis (eds), Dislocating the Frontier: essaying the mystique of the outback (ANU E-Press, 2006)
• Maria Beatrice Bittarello, Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol. 1. No. 1, July 2008
• Henrik Bødker, The Mercy Seat as Inescapable Heat - The Proposition and Ideas of Justice in the Australian Outback, P.O.V. No.24 - The Western, December 2007
• Barbara Buchenau, Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography, CLCWeb Volume 3, Issue 2, June 2001 
• Angus Cameron, The Metaverse Frontier, PSA 2008
• Cynthia-Lou Coleman, Framing Cinematic Indians within the Social Construction of Place, American Studies, 46:3/4 (Fall-Winter 2005): 275-293 Indigenous Studies Today, 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006)
• Felicity Collins, History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema, Trames, 2008, 12(62/57), 3, 276–286
• Chris Cowan, Reflections on The Blair Witch Project, 49th Parallel, Issue 11, Autumn 2003
• Melissa Daniels, "History Is a Funny Thing": African Americans in the West, American Studies, and the Screen, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2010, Volume 9, Issue 2, Fall 2010
• Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum, Western Journal of Communication Vol. 69, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 85–108
• Klaus Dodds, Hollywood and the Popular Geopolitics of the War on Terror, Third World Quarterly 2008
• Dan Edwards, Australian Western: Fear on the frontier [on The Proposition], RealTime Arts Magazine, 70, December-January 2005
• Rainer Eisfeld, Myths and Realities of Frontier Violence: A Look at the Gunfighter Saga, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 3(5) (1995) 106-122
• Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, Alexander Horwath (eds), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
• Thomas S. Engeman, Why The American "Frontier" Will Always Be Populated By Democratic, Christian Knights, The Claremont Institute, September 2002
• Theo Finigan, "To the Stables, Robin!": Regenerating the Frontier in Frank Millers Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Image Text, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010 
• Austin Fisher, A Marxists Gotta Do What a Marxists Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier, Scope, Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation e-book, 2009
• Austin Fisher, Out West, down south: Gazing at America in reverse shot through Damiano Damiani’s "Quien sabe?", The Italianist, 30:2, 2010
• Peter Flynn, The Silent Western as Mythmaker, Images Journal, Issue 6, February 2004 
• Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction, in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (SUNY, 2001)
• Martin Fradley, “Why Doesn’t Your Compass Work?”: Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantasy Blockbusters and Contemporary Queer Theory, originally published in Karen Ross (ed.), "The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media" (Blackwell, 2011), pp.294-312
• Martin Fradley, [Review of] Gary Needham, "Brokeback Mountain" (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 19:2 (Fall 2010), pp.143-146 
• Christiane Gerblinger, ‘"Fiery the Angels Fell": America, Regeneration and Ridley Scotts Blade Runner, Australasian Journal of American Studies, 21.1, July 2002
• Barry Keith Grant, Genre Films and Cultural Myth, Film International, April 20, 2011 
• Barry Keith Grant, Introduction: Spokes in the Wheels, John Fords Stagecoach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• Michael Grimshaw, Preacher, or the Death of God in Pictures, JCRT 3.2
• David Gunkel and Ann Hetzel Gunkel, Terra Nova 2.0—The New Worlds of MMORPGs, Critical Studies in Media Communication 26(2), June 2009, pp. 104-127 
• Alia Haddad, An American Take on Mythic Mexico and its Revolution in The Wild Bunch, Volume VII, Number 2, Fall 2011
• Rowena Harper, Frontier Mythology in the American Teen Film, PhD Thesis, University of Adelaide December 2008
• Christina Judith Hein, Battleground Masculinity: Gendertroublers and Gatekeepers in Oliver Stones Platoon (1986), COPAS, Issue 8, 2007
• Kurt Hemmer, Political Outlaws: Beat Cowboys, American Studies Journal, No. 50, 2007
• David Ingram, ‘"Go to the forest and move": 1960s American Rock Music as Electronic Pastoral, 49th Parallel, Vol. 20, Winter 2006-2007
• Nicholas Jelley, The Potential for Rewriting Myth: Finding Kindness on the Frontier, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2005
• Kathleen Kennedy, Bodily Pain and Nation Making: Catholics and Indians in the Protestant Historical Imagination, Queen: A Journal of Rhetoric and Power, September 2003
• Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Twister, Independence Day, and frontier mythology in contemporary Hollywood, originally published in SPECTACULAR NARRATIVESHollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: IB Tauris, 2000)
• Katherine Kinney, Cold Wars: Black Soldiers in Liberal Hollywood, WLA Spring/Summer 2000
• Stephen Koetzing, The Trespassing Cyborg: Technology, Nature, and the Nation in Wild Wild West, AS Peers 4, 2011
• Marie Claire Kolbenschlag, Film and the American experience, from Jump Cut, no. 6, 1975, pp. 16-21 
• Sam Kula, National Image, National Dream,  Cinema Canada, February 1976
• Emma Lambert, [De]Constructing John F. Kennedy?: Herschensohns Years of Lightning, Days of Drums, 49th Parallel, Issue 4, Winter 2000
• Richard Langley, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters,Vimeo, November 17, 2011 (originally screened at the American Frontiers conference, University of Birmingham, 12 November 2011)
• Helen Laville, What kind of Man are you? - Masculinity in Oliver Stone JFK, 49th Parallel, Issue 5, Spring 2000
• Christopher Le Coney and Zoe Trodd, John Wayne and the Queer Frontier: Deconstructions of the Classic Cowboy Narrative during the Vietnam War, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2005 
• Julia Leyda, Black-Audience Westerns and the Politics of Cultural Identification In the 1930s, Cinema Journal, 42, No. 1, Fall 2002
• Julia Leyda, Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility In John Fords The Searchers, The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13, 2002 [click on PDF]
• Stephen McVeigh, [Review of] The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory, By Will Wright (London: Sage Publications, 2001), Scope, November 2003
• Mark Mordue, Dead Men Walking, Frieze Magazine, Issue 114, April 2008
• Gabrielle Murray, Fact and Fiction: The Iraq War Film in Absence, Screening the Past, 29, 2010
  
• Robin Murray and Joe Heumann, Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”: the myth of interdependence in oil drilling film, Jump Cut, No. 53, summer 2011
• Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont, Daughter of Earth: Judith Merril and the Intersections of Gender, Science Fiction, and Frontier Mythology, Science Fiction Studies, 107, Volume 36, Part 1, March 2009
• Gregory H. Nobles, Beyond Myth and Master Narrative: Toward a New History of the American Frontier, Quaderno, 6, 2004
• Allison Perlman, The Brief Ride of the Biker Movie, International Journal of Motorcycle Studies, March 2007
• Lauren Rabinovitz, More Than Meets the Eye: Movies in American Studies, MAASA Presidential Symposium 2005
• Rod Romesburg, Regeneration through Vampirism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s New Frontier, Slayage 5.3 [19], February 2006
• Christina Rowley, ‘The Disappearance and Re-emergence of the Western in Vietnam War Films’, PSA 2010 
• Christian Seidl, "Regeneration through Creativity" – The Frontier in Paul Austers Moon Palace, PhiN 31, 2005
• Ron Smith, Mistaken Images in Serge: Cecil B. DeMille’s Northwest Mounted Police (1940), 49th Parallel, Vol. 24, 2010
• Saralyn Smith, "Come see a fat old man sometime!" Masculinity and Aging in True Grit (1969) and Unforgiven, MA Thesis, Claremont Graduate University, December 2010 
• Barry Stephenson, Swaggering Savagery and the New Frontier, Journal of Religion and Popula Culture, Vol. 16, Summer 2007
• John Streamas, "Patriotic Drunk": To be Yellow, Brave, and Disappeared in Bad Day at Black Rock,  New Voices Conference, American Studies, 44:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 99-119
• András Tarnóc, Narratives of Confinement: Revisiting the Founding Myths of American Culture, Americana, Volume VII, Number 1, Spring 2011
• Nann Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam University Press, 2006 [on the emergence of the  Western]) 
• Edvin Vestergaard Kau, The Western Experience: Reflections on the Phenomenology of the Western, P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007
• Geoffrey Walker, Deconstructing an American Myth: Hollywood and The Last of the Mohicans, 10th Cooper Seminar, James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, July, 1995
• Jerry White, POSSUM, film noir, and the past/future of New Zealand, P:O.V. No.7, March 1999
• Gioia Woods, Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Lori Piestewa, and the Great American Makeover, Studies in Popular Culture, 29.1 October 2006
• Ray Bourgeois Zimmerman, Gruntspeak: Masculinity, Monstrosity and Discourse in Hasfords The Short-Timers, American Studies, 40:1 (Spring 1999): 65-93 

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