Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts

Queer Film Festival Studies

Friday, January 16, 2015

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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MOVIE A Journal of Film Criticism

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

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

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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Sensing cinema phenomenological film and media studies



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:

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Film Studies with added awesomeness

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

He knows his stuff...
Hey readers.... A really quick link today, one specially for the end of a long and tiring teaching term. Film Studies For Free loves this Tumblr by girldetective and hopes that you will find it stimulating, too.
It’s all part of the Hey Girl/Ryan Gosling Tumblr meme (the origins of which can be found here). In a nutshell, following the success of Danielle Henderson’s blog, Feminist Ryan Gosling (which, in turn, was a derivative of the blog F[***] Yeah Ryan Gosling), many other bloggers rehashed the format using references to different fields of study, including Typography, International Development and Rhetoric. Being the nerdy cinephile that I am, I kept hoping that somebody would create a Film Studies version of the meme, but when that didn’t happen, I decided to just make one myself. [girldetectives mission statement]
Also, must read: Anne Helen Petersen of Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style on the Gosling meme.

Hat tip to Nelson D. (aka @nelly061) for passing the link onto FSFF.
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Links on videographical film criticism editing intensified continuity chaos cinema hapticity and post cinematic affect

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.
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! 


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.
Part 2 takes a look at the chaotic style in dialogue scenes, musicals, "shaky-cam" extravaganzas and mourns the rich history of early cinema.
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To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathleys Film Studies Online

Sunday, January 11, 2015

A free-to-attend University of London Screen Studies Group series event. Full details are given here: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/events/view/13234.

A free-to-attend University of Sussex Centre for Visual Fields event. Further details are given here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cvf/newsandevents/events?id=16509.

Film Studies For Free is almost unspeakably thrilled that its author is helping to host a visit to her shores by the wonderful film scholar Christian Keathley. So thrilled, in fact, that a collected edition of links to his generously-shared, online, film scholarship is given below. 

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently completing a second book, The Mystery of Otto Preminger (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multi-media format, including video essays.

In addition to the two UK events detailed above, Keathley will also give a keynote lecture on his work as part of the lineup for a two-day symposium in Antwerp, Belgium, entitled "FROM PHOTOGÉNIE TO CINEPHILIA 2.0, a seminar on cinephilia then and now". The event takes place between December 7-8. Unlike the two events above, it isnt free-to-attend, but it is incredibly good value. 

This superb looking symposium is hosted by the Flemish Service for Film Culture, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (UGent) and Research Group Visual Studies and Media Culture (University of Antwerp) organised in collaboration with Research Center for Visual Poetics (University of Antwerp) and CINEMATEK, with two other internationally recognised keynotes Malte Hagener and Sarah Keller. You can find further details of the symposium here.

There should be some open access resources emerging from the above events, and if that happens, FSFF will be among the first to let you know about them.

Online Written Texts by Christian Keathley:
Online Video Essays by Christian Keathley:
Video essay on a scene from Otto Premingers Anatomy of a Murder.

50 Years On from Christian Keathley
Revision of a video made for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies 50th anniversary conference.


Does Your Dog Bite? from Christian Keathley
A video essay by Christian Keathley on a canine moment in Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951).

About Christian Keathleys work:
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Study of a Single Film Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo

 
Roundtable discussion at the Philoctetes Center, New York, on November 6, 2010, with Richard Allen, John Belton, Joe McElhaney, Edward Neresessian, and Brigitte Peucker

Vertigo (1958) is the Hitchcock film in which the confusion of ontological registers—of reality with illusion—takes center stage. Indeed, it’s a case study of someone for whom this confusion is nearly pathological. The James Stewart character, Scottie, is duped by a performance with criminal intent, as he falls for a woman he believes to be Madeleine, but who in reality is a woman named Judy (played by Kim Novak) perpetrating a masquerade. Around this “false” Madeleine, a narrative is created thats designed to ensnare Scottie. The film concerns a mysterious case of “possession”—a staged fascination with death—played out in a series of silent tableaux, each of which aestheticizes and eroticizes the Madeleine figure. The films narrative structure is circular and repetitive; its been suggested that the film itself represents a distinct form of madness. "Vertigo is just a movie," writes Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed, "but no other movie I know so purely conveys the sealing of a mind within a scorching fantasy." What is the role of psychoanalysis in Hitchcocks work? Is psychoanalysis merely one "surface feature" of Hitchcocks work, as Richard Allen has suggested, subject to irony like all the others? What draws psychoanalytic critics to Hitchcocks work, and how, if at all, is this phenomenon related to its modernism? [Philoctetes Center]
Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular link-fests pertaining to the study of a single film: today, its the turn of Alfred Hitchcocks truly magical thriller Vertigo (1958)

The below list of openly-accessible resources was very much inspired by the recent posting of a hugely entertaining, and vertiginously brilliant, discussion on this film between some of the most able Film Studies academics and writers of their generation (see above). The discussion was hosted by the wonderful people at the Philoctetes Center in New York City. Thanks so much to them for making this video available for all to watch and learn from.

 
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On Kazuo Hara and Japanese Documentary Film


Kazuo Hara and Japanese Film Studies
Videoed symposium (held on May 3, 2009) featuring three of the top film studies scholars from around the US discussing Kazuo Haras body of work (including The Emperors Naked Army Marches On (1987) and Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974) and the future of Japanese film studies at universities worldwide, followed by comments by Kazuo Hara. This event was a part of the UC Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies 50th Anniversary program of events. Co-sponsored by: Center for Japanese Studies and Pacific Film Archive. With Markus Nornes, Aaron Gerow, Akira Mizuta Lippit, and Miryam Sas
Western documentary film theory focuses on the relationship of signified and signifier raked by the subjectivities of producer and spectators. Because these two groups approach the referent only through the signification system, the theory closes off discussion of the profilmic world. ... Japanese theoretical and popular discourses do not suffer from this linguistic confusion between subject and object. In post-1960 film theory and filmmaking, it is precisely the relationship between subject and referent that produces the sign. Where the American filmmaker creates a sign from a referent in the world, the Japanese filmmaker’s intimate interaction with the referent leaves a signifying trace we call a documentary film. It is a subtle but decisive difference one would have difficulty articulating with the critical tools of contemporary documentary theory outside of Japan. [Abé Mark Nornes, Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, cited by Charles Fairbanks, 2003, p. 11]

Film Studies For Free was so inspired by its discovery of the above video (with its wonderful sequences from Haras films) that it concocted a short but high quality, accompanying list of links to some wonderful online resources about the Japanese documentarists work, as well as related issues of Japanese cinema.

Please note, especially, the excellent monograph on Hara by Jeffrey and Kenneth Ruoff (one of the wonderful books by the now sadly defunct publishers Flicks Books), which has been added to FSFFs permanent listing of openly accessible ebooks.

That books co-author Jeffrey Ruoff has an incredibly generous collection of some of his other film studies work online here. And Aaron Gerow, one of the speakers in the above symposium has an amazing collection of his own online work, much of it on Japanese cinema here.

Also see:
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Study of a Single Film On Robert Enricos La rivi�re du hibou An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge 1962

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 1 (Robert Enrico, 1962)
La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 2 (Robert Enrico, 1962)
La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 3 (Robert Enrico, 1962)


Film Studies For Free presents one of its regular features today - a little study of a (favourite) single film: La rivière du hibou, an adaptation of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", a short story by Ambrose Bierce. This short film version of Bierces tale was directed by Robert Enrico, produced by Marcel Ichac with Paul de Roubaix, and was released in 1963. It won the award for best short subject at the 1962 Cannes film festival and 1963 Academy Awards.

In 1964 La rivière du hibou aired on U.S. television as an episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone (hence the framing, and opening and closing narrations in the slightly shortened version -- widely available online -- embedded above).

Partly because of its brilliance and partly because its adaptation of Bierces classic story was so widely seen, Enricos film has been cited as an important influence on many other cinematic experiments with subjective storytelling and "twist endings",  including recent ones by U.S. based directors such as Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and David Lynch.

FSFF loves the sheer cinematographic inventiveness of this film and sincerely believes that all students of audiovisual storytelling could learn a lot from studying precisely how it works. To assist with this task (always best achieved by closely watching the film and analysing its techniques first), it has concocted a small but reasonably well-formed list of links to online and openly accessible studies of La rivière du hibou and related moving image texts.
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Film Studies and Aesthetics video and audio resources from the University of Kent

Friday, January 9, 2015

Image of a domestic interior in A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954). Listen to John David Rhodess talk on the encounter between cinema and modernist American domestic architecture, in relation to this film and others.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you glad tidings of the very high quality, audio and video, Film Studies research resources that have been generously shared through the University of Kent website.  

As FSFFs author well knows, having been fortunate enough to work there for a decade, Kent is one of the largest and best university centres in Europe dedicated to Film Studies. Film research there, in both theory and practice (faculty include the world-leading scholars Murray Smith and Elizabeth Cowie, as well as the award-winning film-makers Clio Barnard and  Sarah Turner), is currently centred in four broad areas: national cinemas – form and history: North American, European, Latin American, Asian; the digital in film; the  documentary film; and, especially, film aesthetics, the latter often in collaboration with the interdisciplinary ‘Aesthetics Research Group’.

Some of these interests, and plenty more besides, are beautifully reflected in the amazing wealth of recordings of conferences, symposia and seminars directly linked to below. Just feast your eyes and ears on them.

Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image

Audio Resources

  • "The Art of Not Playing to Pictures’ in British Cinemas, 1908-1914" Dr Jon Burrows (University of Warwick) Recent scholarship on musical practices in the silent era argues that by the end of the 1900s and throughout the 1910s the typical cinema musician was a lone pianist who occupied a subordinate position in relation to the projected image and provided forms of accompaniment which ignored traditional musical logic and obediently responded instead to the dictates of narrative logic. Using a variety of evidential sources available in the UK (cinema licensing records, police inspection files, trade paper debates) my paper will argue the contrary: that miniature orchestras were extremely common in British cinemas before the First World War, and that, well into the feature film era, careful synchronisation of music and image was probably the exception rather than the rule. Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "Theory and Practice in British Film Schools" Prof Duncan Petrie (University of York) Film and media education in the UK has long been characterised by a fundamental polarisation between theory and practice. This is most clearly manifest in the widespread separation between academic study and hands-on production training within University and College departments and programmes...Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "Easy Living: The Modernist House and Cinematic Space“ Dr John David Rhodes (University of Sussex) In this paper I will look at a series of encounters—both real and imaginary—between cinema and modernist American domestic architecture. The paper moves from the sets of A Star is Born (Cukor, 1954), to the short experimental film House (1954)...Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism" Prof Lucia Nagib (University of Leeds) This paper will address world cinema through an unusual theoretical model, based on an ethics of realism. The juxtaposition of the terms ‘world cinema’, ‘ethics’ and ‘realism’ creates a tension intended to offer a productive alternative to traditional oppositional binaries such as popular vs art cinemas, fiction vs documentary films, Hollywood vs world cinema... Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
University of Kent Aesthetics Research Group
Audio and video resources:
Kendall Walton and The Aesthetics of Photography and Film (2007)
Jerrold Levinson: Key Concepts in Aesthetics (2008-09)
Research Seminars (ongoing)
Art, Aesthetics and the Sexual (2009)
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