MOVIE A Journal of Film Criticism

MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism is a refereed academic publication whose aim is to create a forum for the range of analysis, debate and discussion that only a journal devoted to a detailed film criticism can adequately provide. We are committed to publishing rigorous but accessible critical writing, at a variety of lengths, that is responsive to the detailed texture and artistry of film and television, old and new. We also welcome articles that illuminate concepts, analytical methods and questions in film aesthetics that are of significance to film criticism. The journal is published on a bi-annual basis.

Film Studies For Free is jumping for joy!  MOVIE, the legendary film magazine (1962-2000) published and designed by the late, and much lamented, Ian Cameron (1937-2010) and source of some of the most brilliant and influential writing on film ever, has inspired the beautiful birth of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, an online and openly accessible scholarly periodical, with a website hosted by the University of Warwick. 

Many of the same people central to MOVIEs earlier incarnation are involved this time around (Victor Perkins, Douglas Pye, Jim Hillier, Charles Barr, Deborah Thomas, Ed Gallafent, Michael Walker) together with a whole host of some of the best and brightest younger film writers (Andrew Klevan, James Macdowell, John Gibbs, Kathrina Glitre). 

FSFF hasnt read it yet, but wanted to rush you the news. So, as usual, the table of contents (with direct links to PDF files) is pasted in below. 

Wow, wow, wow...

Issue 1, 2010

• Editorial

• Ian Cameron: a Tribute V. F. Perkins

• Films, Directors and Critics Ian Cameron, reprinted from Movie 2

• Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Lucy Fife Donaldson

• Sleeping with Half Open Eyes: Dreams and Realities in The Cry of the Owl John Gibbs

• Fugitive Physicality and Female Performance in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss and Lola Kate Leadbetter

• Notes on Quirky James MacDowell

• At the Border: the Limits of Knowledge in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men Douglas Pye

• Limbo: Frustrated Narration Deborah Thomas

• Acting Ordinary in The Shop Around the Corner George Toles

• The Rhetoric of The Wire James Zborowski

• Review: Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, 3 – 10 October 2009 Michael Walker

• Robin Wood and Ian Cameron

This issue edited by Edward Gallafent and John Gibbs, with grateful acknowledgement of the contributions of Lucy Fife Donaldson and James MacDowell.

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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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Truly Doing Film Criticism Online Film Studies by Tag Gallagher

Tag Gallagher: A New Reality. Roberto Rossellinis Francesco, guillare di Dio, (US 2006)

[T]here is no formula for movie criticism. Cinema is not the same cinema in Ford and Rossellini, so you don’t use the same tools to look at it. Frame enlargements can show a lot of Ford’s art -- composition, camera angles rhyming from one shot to the next, lighting – but almost nothing of Rossellini’s art, because Rossellini turns everything into motion. All the feelings, the motivations, the characters’ sense of self, even morality and philosophy are turned into motion. So I published a thousand pages about Rossellini, but I really couldn’t deal with his cinema, until I made my video about his Francesco, giullare di Dio.  [Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher, kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009]

The first video I made about Roberto Rossellini was [on Francesco, giullare di Dio]. I made it for a company that turned it down because it did not like the quality of the recording of my voice. So I lost the opportunity to publish this essay in that country, and in some others. [...] So I showed my video on Francesco only at some museums and gave some copies to friends, but that was it.  [Excerpts from a January 2012 interview with Gallagher: Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico, Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]]

Today, Film Studies For Free is delighted to publish online, for the first time, film critic and historian extraordinaire Tag Gallaghers first video essay on a Roberto Rossellini film.

To celebrate and accompany this publication, for which FSFF and its readers have to thank the great Tag himself, below is a list of links to Gallaghers online film studies essays (written and audiovisual), interviews with him about his work, and studies of his work. If there is anything missing from the below lists, please leave a relevant link in the comments section. Many thanks!

Gallaghers Written Work Online:

• Tag Gallaghers website

• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007

• Tag Gallagher, Geometry of Force: Abel Ferrara and Simone Weil, Screening the Past, 10 (2000) 
• Tag Gallagher, Reading, culture, and auteur, Screening the Past, 12 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, Mizoguchi and Freedom, Screening the Past, 13 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, All lost in wonder: Edgar G.Ulmer, Screening the Past, 12 (2001)
• Tag Gallagher, Going My Way, Screening the Past, December 2001

• Tag Gallagher, Josef von Sternberg, Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, Raoul Walsh, Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, Max Ophuls: A New Art – But Who Notices?, Senses of Cinema, Issue 22, 2002
  
• Tag Gallagher, Hitchcock, Machines, and Us, Senses of Cinema, Issue 24, 3003 
• Tag Gallagher, Ford Rises from the Dead. Again, Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003
• Tag Gallagher, The Swine who Rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: Joseph L. Mankiewicz as Producer, Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, Ford Till 47, Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, Making Reality, Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, Renoir and the Scandal of “First Love” or The Perils of Catherine, Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk, Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, Lacrimae Rerum Materialized, Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, American Triptych: Vidor, Hawks and Ford, Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, Straub Anti-Straub, Senses of Cinema, Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, How to Share a Hill, Senses of Cinema,  Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, Chains of Dreams: Carl Th. Dreyer, Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009
• Tag Gallagher, Why Samuel Fuller?, Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009

• Tag Gallagher, Reply to Bleasdale, Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002

• Tag Gallagher, Letter to Helmut Färber, Lumen, 1, 2011

Gallaghers Video Essays Online:

• Dreaming of Jeanie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach  

Online Interviews with Gallagher:

• Toni DAngela, Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford, La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, and Michael Baute (et al.), Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher, kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009

Online Studies or Reviews of Gallaghers Work:

• Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico, Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]
• Adrian Martin, Always a window: Tag Gallaghers Rossellini, Screening the Past, March 2000 

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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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