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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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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