Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

30 articles from the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture

Monday, January 12, 2015

Frame grab from The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928). Read Bo Florins article on this film
[Traditionally, aesthetics] has been based on national perspectives and contexts, as well as contained within the limits of specific disciplines. However, the changing society has made this focus all too narrow. Due to globalization, media and territories merge and move in new ways, where regional, national, international, and global perspectives increasingly integrate. New contexts and new aesthetic strategies are also created, and traditional boundaries and hierarchies become transgressed, for example, between high brow and popular culture, or between art and technology. Aesthetics as well as culture thus need to be discussed and interpreted across the disciplines, through different media, over territorial borders. Finally, this is also a strong argument for Open Access publishing: to constitute a global platform and an interface for interdisciplinary discourse—free for anybody to read. [from first JAC Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson and John Sundholm]
Film Studies For Free had been meaning to post something about the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture for quite a while. Its an online open access journal, hence one very much after this blogss heart, with a high percentage of very good quality film-studies related articles that FSFF has frequently linked to on Twitter.

Today, JAC published an excellent dossier on Transnational Cultural Memory, an event which provided a wonderful prompt to gather together, in one place, links to everything that JAC has published to date. And below, that is just what you will find.

FSFF has also added JAC to its permanent listing of excellent, Open Access film and moving image studies journals

Vol. 1 (2009)
Vol. 2 (2010)

Vol 3 (2011)

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On the myth of the frontier in cinema and culture

Saturday, January 10, 2015

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...
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    Longtime Companion HIV AIDS in thirty years of cinema media and culture

    Thursday, January 8, 2015


    Images from two AIDS film dramas: above, Longtime Companion (Norman René, 1989), a film which, as Emmanuel Levy puts it, carried "the burden of being the first [widely distributed] theatrical movie to deal directly with AIDS"; below, a frame grab from Yesterday (Darrell Roodt, 2004), about a Zulu woman living with AIDS. Read Jean Stuarts and Olaia Cores Calvos articles on this film.
    It was [30] years ago, in the summer of 1981, when society as a whole[, including] the scientific community[,] was faced with an unknown disease that came later to be known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Several films [...] reflected the initial fears and uncertainty, the responses of the different social groups, the fight against ignorance, the [demand for] access to treatment and the suffering of the infected individuals and their families [...] due to this disease. Taking into account that these movies were filmed when these epidemics took place they can actually be considered as [...] historical documents that deserve [to be] analysed by the generations to come. Films such as And The Band Played On; Longtime Companion; Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; Les Nuits Fauves; Angels in America; Yesterday and My Brother... Nikhil have marked [30] years of AIDS history that should not be forgotten by the world. [Adapted from António Pais de Lacerda, Cinema as an Historical Document: AIDS in 25 years of Cinema, Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 102-113; hyperlinks added by FSFF]
    Film Studies For Free today commemorates the twenty-third World AIDS Day in the thirtieth year since the identification of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. The Human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], the lentivirus which causes the syndrome, was identified two years later, in 1983.

    FSFF marks this anniversary year with the below entry of links to scholarly resources on the figuration of AIDS/HIV in cinema and culture.

    Todays posting was also inspired by a series of film screenings and discussions on AIDS and its Melodramas that have been taking place at the University of Sussex, UK, organised by Michael Lawrence and John David Rhodes. These academic events will continue next term with screenings of Fatal Love (1991), And the Band Played On (1993), Philadelphia (1993) and, one of FSFFs favourites,  Boys on the Side (1995). Please email FSFF if youd like more details.
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        Film Television and Media Studies articles in STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

        Wednesday, December 31, 2014

        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)
        30.2 Spring 2008 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]
        31.1 Fall 2008 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]
        31.2 Spring 2009 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]
        32.1 Fall 2009 [Go here to find a PDF of the Entire Issue]
        32.2 Spring 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]
        33.1 Fall 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]
        33.2 Spring 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]
        34.1 Fall 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]
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