Undead Links to George A Romero Studies

Zombies intruding on the free flow of commerce? Frame grab from Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978)

In [George Romeros films], antagonism and horror are not pushed out of society (to the monster) but are rather located within society (qua the monster). The issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the “heroes”—the police, the army, good old boys with their guns and male bonding fantasies. If they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future. Romero also implements this critique structurally. As Steven Shaviro observes, the cultural discomfort is not only located in the films’ graphic cannibalism and zombie genocide: the low-budget aesthetics makes us see “the violent fragmentation of the cinematic process itself." The zombie in such a representation may be uncanny and repulsive, but the imperfect uncleanness of the zombie’s face—the bad make-up, the failure to hide the actor behind the monster’s mask—is what breaks the screen of the spectacle. [Lars Bang Larsen, Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death, E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010] 

About a month ago, Film Studies For Frees author was delighted to take part in the first of a series of screenings and roundtables on the fascinating and complex subject of Intrusion and its specific relation to the visual on the different but interrelated registers of the psychic, sexual, social and political. 

This inventive and highly productive series was organised by Amber Jacobs, Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and creator and presenter of the wonderful Daily Subversions weekly radio show on ResonanceFM (available everywhere online). FSFF will post a video essay contribution on the first film in the Intrusion series just as soon as the more mundane intrusions of research deadlines and the hectic grading season have subsided.

An excellent podcast of the final roundtable of the series, discussing George A. Romeros 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, has just gone online. The discussion features Dr Jacobs, along with Mark Fisher (Cultural Studies and Music Culture, Goldsmiths), Gordon Hon (Artist and Lecturer in Visual Culture, Winchester School of Art), Paul Myerscough (Senior Editor at the London Review of Books), and some great contributions from the audience. The podcast lasts just under an hour. 

To accompany this new online resource, FSFF has assembled and updated a scarily good list of links to further, openly accessible studies or scholarly discussions of Romeros work. Also see previous related entries "Any Zombies Out There?" Undead Film Studies and Zombie Week at In Media Res. And also be aware that you can watch Romeros 1968 film Night of the Living Dead in its entirety at the Internet Archive.

• Birkbeck College Roundtable Discussion on ‘Dawn of the Dead’, May 26, 2011 (with Amber Jacobs, Paul Myerscough, Gordon Hon and Mark Fisher) 
• Michael Bloom, Reanimating the Living Dead: Uncovering the Zombie Archetype in the Works of George A. Romero, Offscreen, April 30, 2009
• Matt Cardin, Spirituality in Romero’s Living Dead Films, TheoFantastique, December 3, 2009
• John Cussans, Tracking the Zombie Diaspora: From Subhuman Haiti to Posthuman Tucson, First published in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil edited by Paul Yoder and Peter Mario Kreuter, May 2004
• Erin Burns Davis, To Say Death’s Name: The Ever-changing Definition of the Zombie in Popular Culture, Academia.edu, 2006 
• Jennifer Whitney Dotson, Considering Blackness in George A. Romeros Night of the Living Dead: An Historical Exploration, MA Thesis, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2006
• Stephen Harper, "They’re Us": Representations of Women in George Romero’s ‘Living Dead’ Series, Intensities, 2003
• Stephen Harper, Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romeros Dawn of the Dead, Americana, 1.2, Fall 2002
• Stephen Harper,  “Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic”, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 50, November 2005 
• Philip Horne, I shopped with a zombie, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4, Winter 1992, 97-110
• Lars Bang Larsen, Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death, E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010
• John Marmysz, From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead, First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996
• Marco Maurizi, “Just in Case Society Crumbles”: George A. Romero and Marxism, Historical Materialism Conference, 2006
• Kim Paffenroth, Religious Themes of George Romero’s Zombie Movies, Golem: Journal of Religion and Monsters, Spring 2006 
• Kim Paffenroth (Iona College), Dawn of the Dead (1978): Zombies and Human Nature, In Media Res, Wednesday, September 30, 2009
• Pinewood Dialogue with George A. Romero
• Steven Shaviro, Survival of the Dead, The Pinocchio Theory, September 25, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, Diary of the Dead, The Pinocchio Theory, April 26, 2008
• Jasie Stokes, Ghouls, Hell and Transcendence: the Zombie in Popular Culture from Night of the Living Dead to Shaun of the Dead, MA Thesis, Brigham Young University, April 2010
• Jesse Stommel, "Pity Poor Flesh": Terrible Bodies in the Films of Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Romero, Bright Lights Film Journal, No. 56, May 2007
• Margaret Twohy, From Voodoo to Viruses: The Evolution of the Zombie in Twentieth Century Popular Culture, MPhil Thesis, Trinity College Dublin, October 2008

George A. Romero, Daddy of the Dead (a Wired.com video)

Romeros Zombies

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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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Michael Snow videos and links

My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor ... sometimes they all work together. (Michael Snow)

[N]o other artist has done so much to destabilise our approximation of the visible than Michael Snow. By threatening the very tools we rely on to process what we perceive, the artist creates unnerving yet frequently poetic works. His avant-garde film-making is less about a way of understanding the camera as a device for recording than as an instrument whose structural, material properties can form the main focus of the work. (Tim Clarke)

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you another video gem from the Tate Channel in which the highly distinguished Canadian artist Michael Snow, one of the most influential experimental filmmakers (including of such masterworks as Wavelength [1967)], La Région Centrale [1971], and *Corpus Callosum [2002]) discusses his work. Snow, who will reach the grand old age of 80 this December, gave this illustrated talk at the Tate Modern in London on October 26, 2001, on the occasion of a major retrospective of his work that year at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. The talk, a very detailed and insightful revisiting of the entirety of his work to that point, lasts just under two hours.

Here also, as is FSFFs wont, are links to further wonderful, freely accessible, online, scholarly Michael Snow resources. Below the list are two other embedded videos: the first, a ten minute overview of Snows work; the second, a video version of Snows 1967 experimental film Wavelength (please read the comments on this post for a discussion of the ethics of reproducing this very poor copy of the film):

• The Michael Snow Dossier, Offscreen Journal, November 2002 (Michael Snow: A Brief Introduction by Peter Rist;La Région Centrale by Peter Rist; Wavelength Revisitedby Donato Totaro; Master Lessons With Michael Snowby Louis Goyette;Weathering the Creative Storm: An Interview With Michael Snow by Donato Totaro and André Habib;Transcending the Fragmentation of Experience: The acousmêtre on the air in the films of Michael Snow by Randolph Jordan)

• Cleo Cacoulides, "Too Busy Making Work":Michael Snow, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 44, 2004

• Bruce Elder, On Michael Snow, Ciné-Tracts 9; Vol.3, No. 1, (Winter, 1980) scroll down in pdf

• Alex Farquharson, Michael Snow, Frieze, Issue 64, January-February 2002

• Adèle Flannery and Maia Lussier-Seguin, Snow at Concordia: An Interview with Michael Snow, Offcreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 3, March 2009

• Maximilian Le Cain, Snow Drift: The 2007 Lucca Film Festival 28 September – 6 October 2007, Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008

• Brett Kashmere, Underground Film, Into the Light: Two Sides of the Projected Image in American Art, 1945-1975, Synoptique 8, March 2005

• Tila Landon Kellman, Figuring redemption: resighting my self in the art of Michael Snow - (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002 -Google Books)

• Jane Simon, Reading in the Dark, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, January 12, 2004

• Michael Snow, with Louise Dompierre, The collected writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University press, 1994 - Google Books)


• Michael Snow and Bruce Elder, In conversation, Ciné-Tracts 5, No. 1, (17), Summer/Fall, 1982) scroll down in pdf


• Michael Snow and Jesse Stewart, In Conversation: Toronto, November 2005, Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 3, No 1 (2007)
  

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Werner Herzogs Cave videos and links

One of the most distinctive filmmakers of our time, Werner Herzog has been called the "romantic visionary" of the New German Cinema movement. His edgy, larger-than-life films fuse the epic with the intimate, redefining the scale and scope of filmmaking to include more than 60 works shot on every continent. He appeared in conversation with acclaimed author and essayist, Pico Iyer at UC Santa Barbara on October 25, 2010. (download the video here)

A 10 minute fragment from a masterclass with Werner Herzog. For 7 Planete Doc Review, with Pamela Cohn with Michałem Chacińskim, 2010. Also see this video.

Film Studies For Free hopes its Werner Herzog-obsessive readers will have a few hours to spare. Theyll need them to watch the above embedded (and linked to) videos, some of the more recent, and most worthwhile of freely accessible online encounters with LAs most interesting resident filmmaker.

These videos, and the critical and scholarly reading below, will help time pass before the Spring 2011 premiere of Herzogs latest (3D) film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (trailer, related video,  second related video). Dont say that FSFF isnt looking out for you, Herzog-ites!

Scholarly online writing about Herzog:

• Jesse Amato-Grill, Trappings, Mercer Street, 2007

• Matthias Wilhelm Benfey, Religious cinema as virtual religious experience : a theory of religious cinema applied to Werner Herzogs Herz aus Glas, PhD Thesis, McGill University, 1986 

• Adam Bingham, Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzogs La Soufrière, Senses of Cinema, September 2006

• Tom Bissell, The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the Images of Werner Herzog, Harpers Magazine, December 2006

• Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, Of Gods and Grizzlies: The Non-Aesthetic of Nature and the new Kinship of Werner Herzog and Caspar David Friedrich, Senior Thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 2006 

• Buffalo Film Seminars - selected writings about Herzog (and, especially, Aguirre: Wrath of God)

• Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, An Adaptation With Fangs: Herzogs Nosferatu, Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 20, December 2002

• Alkan Chipperfield, Murmurs from a Shadowless Land: Fragmentary Reflections on the Cinema of Werner Herzog, Senses of Cinema, June 2001

• David Church, Werner Herzog, Senses of Cinema, June 2006

• David Church, Examining the Role of Disability in Herzogs Even Dwarves Started Small, Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol 25, No 4 (2005)

• Roger Dawkins, Thoughts of Deleuze, Spinoza and the Cinema (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), Contretemps, 3 July 2002

• Eric Dewberry, Conceiving Grizzly Man through the "Powers of the False", Scope, Issue 11, June 2008

• Thomas Elsaesser, The Cinema of Irony, Monogram no. 5, 1973

• Thomas Elsaesser, Hyper-, Retro- or Counter-European Cinema as Third Cinema between Hollywood and Art Cinema, in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood(Amsterdam University Press, 2005)

• Caryl Flynn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2004 2004

• Andrew W. Hurley, Re-imagining Milirrpum v Nabalco in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream, Paper delivered at PASSAGES: law, aesthetics, politics 13–14 July 2006 Melbourne Australia

• David T Johnson, "You Must Never Listen to This": Lessons on Sound, Cinema, and Mortality from Herzogs Grizzly Man, Film Criticism; Spring 2008, 32: 3

• Michael Koller, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• Joe Muszynski, A Legacy of Quality: Werner Herzogs Nosferatu and the New German Cinema

• Benjamin Noys, Antiphusis: Werner Herzogs Grizzly Man, Film-Philosophy, 11.3, November 2006

• Ingo Petzke, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• Cynthia Rockwell, Werner Herzog and the Documentary Film, e-Thesis, Boston University 1994

• Antonia Shanahan, My Best Fiend, Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• John W. White, On Werner Herzog’s Documentary Grizzly Man: Psychoanalysis, Nature, and Meaning, Fast capitalism, 4.1, 2008

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Werner Herzog Links inc YouTube Fest

Film Studies For Free wanted to let academic fans of Werner Herzog know that (certainly in the UK, but most probably elsewhere, too, if no geoblocking) they can currently watch eight of his films on YouTube in their glorious entirety. This is thanks to the video distributor Starzmedia, one of the companies participating in YouTubes growing efforts to stream full-length films with the support of the movie companies who own the rights. Below, FSFF has embedded the trailers of seven of the Herzog films that are currently available. Click on the titles to visit the YouTube pages for the full-length films, which can be watched freely online in relatively good quality versions (Even YouTube Screens Started Small...). (Click HERE for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser added later. The Starzmedia channel for Herzog is HERE).

And, if that werent enough excitement for one FSFF day, beneath the video-trailers, at the foot of this post, are some other choice links to freely available Herzog material online.

Aguirre The Wrath Of God

My Best Fiend

Even Dwarfs Started Small

Fitzcarraldo

Lessons Of Darkness

Woyzeck

Little Dieter Needs To Fly

Scholarly online writing about Herzog:

• Adam Bingham, Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzogs La Soufrière, Senses of Cinema, September 2006
• Tom Bissell, The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the Images of Werner Herzog, Harpers Magazine, December 2006
• Buffalo Film Seminars - selected writings about Herzog (and, especially, Aguirre: Wrath of God)
• Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, An Adaptation With Fangs: Herzogs Nosferatu, Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 20, December 2002
• Alkan Chipperfield, Murmurs from a Shadowless Land: Fragmentary Reflections on the Cinema of Werner Herzog, Senses of Cinema, June 2001
• David Church, Werner Herzog, Senses of Cinema, June 2006
• Roger Dawkins, Thoughts of Deleuze, Spinoza and the Cinema (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), Contretemps, 3 July 200
• Michael Koller, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Senses of Cinema, February 2002
• Joe Muszynski, A Legacy of Quality: Werner Herzogs Nosferatu and the New German Cinema
• Benjamin Noys, Antiphusis: Werner Herzogs Grizzly Man, Film-Philosophy, 11.3, November 2006
• Ingo Petzke, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Senses of Cinema, February 2002
• Cynthia Rockwell, Werner Herzog and the Documentary Film, e-Thesis, Boston University 1994
• Antonia Shanahan, My Best Fiend, Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• Herzogs Official Website is HERE
• Ray Pride gathered a load of great Herzog paraphernalia/paratextuality a couple of years back at Movie City Pride (videos/articles/interviews) and you can access it HERE (link courtesy of GreenCine Daily, April 4 2007). Link added April 21
  
• And you can listen to a great interview with Herzog HERE, by Jonathan Demme, courtesy of Pinewood Dialogues
  

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Double Strength Videos and Links in Celebration of Barbara Hammer

Clip from Maya Derens Sink by Barbara Hammer (via UndergroundFilm at Vimeo)


Clip from NITRATE KISSES by Barbara Hammer



Clip from SANCTUS and other films from the 1980s by Barbara Hammer
(You can see Sanctus @ubuweb)

HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life Book Performance, Barbara Hammer at British Film Institute, March 2010

"I have chosen images rather than words for the act of naming myself an artist and a lesbian because the level of meanings possible for images and image conjunctions seemed richer and held more ramifications" Barbara Hammer

Film Studies For Free today presents a tribute to the remarkable American, experimental filmmaker and activist Barbara Hammer. The tribute takes the form of a listing of online videos and scholarly links to studies of Hammers work, as well as of related queer film and politics.

Hammer is seventy-one years old, still making films and still protesting against injustice and censorship. In 2010, she published her wonderful autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, which addressed her personal history and philosophies on art (see a review here).

FSFF says, "Thank you, but... keep it up, please, Barbara! Your work and activism is needed now more than ever." (This blog can be a rather greedy and merciless task-mistress at times...)

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on her career and Feminist film

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on Maya Deren

• Barbara Hammer Faculty page at European Graduate School 

• Barbara Hammer. Resisting Paradise. Video Lecture Documentary 2005 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4

• Barbara Hammers Video Channel at Vimeo (16 videos so far archived) 

• Barbara Hammers website

• Barbara Hammer interviewed in February 2010 about her research on medical science film No bones about it!

• Edith Becker, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, B. Ruby Rich, Lesbians and film, p. 2, from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Sarah Boslaugh, Getting Past the Stereotypes: Woman and Motorcycles in recent Lesbian Novels, IJMS, March 2006

•  Martin P. Botha, The New African Queer Aesthetics: the Portrayal of Homosexuality in International Cinema, Kinema,

• Joan Braderman, Feminism and Video: A View from the Village, Camera Obscura, Volume 22, Number 1, 2007

• Julia Erhart, Performing memory: compensation and redress in contemporary feminist first-person documentary, Screening the Past, December 1, 2001

• Claudia Gorbman, Barbara Hammers recent work: Body displaced, body discovered, from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987

• John Hess, Notes on U.S. radical film, 1967-8, from Jump Cut, no. 21, Nov. 1979 

• Tricia Jenkins, ‘‘Potential Lesbians at Two O’Clock’’: The Heterosexualization of Lesbianism in the Recent Teen Film, The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2005 

• Chuck Kleinhans, Teaching sexual images: some pragmatics, from Jump Cut, no. 40, March 1996 

• Laura U. Marks, Loving a Disappearing Image, Cinémas : revue détudes cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 8, n° 1-2, 1997

• Susan E. McKenna, Seeing lesbian queerly: visibility, community, and audience in 1980s Northampton, Massachusetts, PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts, September 2009

• Fiontán Moran, Anatomies of Desire, Afterall, May 2010

• Gary Morris, Tender Fictions: Barbara Hammers Truth Club, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 17, 1996

• Ricardo Peach, Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema on South Africa and Australia, PhD Thesis,University of Technology, Sydney, March 2005

• John Ramirez and Larry Horne, UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference, from Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984 

• Jennifer Beth Simmons, Visions of Feminist (Pom(o)nanism): Masturbating Female Postmodern Subjectivity in American Television and Film, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2004

• Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage. PhD Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2006 

• William C. Wees, Carrying On: Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Abigail Child and American Avant-Garde Film of the Eighties, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2001

• Andrea Weiss, Women I Love. Double Strength : Lesbian Cinema and Romantic Love , from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Jacquelyn Zita, The films of Barbara Hammer: Counter-currencies of a lesbian iconography, from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

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A Star Was Born Links in Barbra Streisands Honour on her 70th Birthday!

Frame grab from A Star Is Born ( Frank Pierson, 1976)

Each version of A Star Is Born may detail the rise of an unknown, but does so through extremely well-known performers, albeit ones at different stages of their careers. [...] Barbra Streisand [...] was at the height of her career in 1976. Her domination of A Star Is Born (she contributed to the writing and even, as Kris Kristofferson, her co-star, saw it, the directing [(Burke, Tom. "Kris Kristofferson Sings the Good-Life Blues." Esquire 86 (December 1976): 126–28ff), 208-9]) was another manifestation of a desire to play out aspects of her own life. The credited director has recounted at length how, during preproduction, Streisand debated the degree to which her autobiography should be reflected in Esther Hoffman ([Pierson, Frank. "My Battles with Barbra and Jon." New York 9 (November 15, 1976): 49–60], 50). If James Masons character in the 1954 film becomes through role reversal the "fictional counterpart of the neurotic, self-destructive person that Garland [had] become" ([Jennings, Wade. "Nova: Garland in A Star Is Born." Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 3 (summer 1979): 321–37], 333), then Streisands Esther Hoffman directly fulfills everything that Streisand herself has become by 1976. Richard Dyer even suggests that among the "number of cases on which the totality of a film can be laid at the door of the star" the case can be made "most persuasively" for Streisands A Star Is Born (Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979], 175) [Jerome Delamater, "Once More, from the Top": Musicals the Second Time Around, in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 84]

Film Studies For Free wishes a very happy 70th birthday to Barbra Streisand, actor, singer, songwriter, film director, producer, and queer feminist icon extraordinaire.

Below, you can find a tiny little celebration in related scholarly links - the only gift that (rather besotted Barbra fan) FSFF knows how to give.

If anyone knows of any other good items (and it is far too short and unworthy a list so far...), please leave a comment and FSFF will add them to the list.

• Zohar Altman Ravid, The star as a Creation and the Star as a creator: The Case of Barbra Streisand in History of Stardom Reconsidered, edited by Kari Kallioniemi, Kimi Kärki, Janne Mäkelä and Hannu Salmi. Turku: International Institute for Popular Culture, 2007
• Henry Bial, How Jews Became Sexy, 1968–1983, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (University of Michigan, 2005)
• Jerome Delamater, "Once More, from the Top": Musicals the Second Time Around, in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, c 1998 1998
• Brett Farmer, Stage Door Jennies: Interview with Stacy Wolf about her New Book, A Problem Like Maria Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, Genders.org, Issue 38, 2003
• Rachel Garfield, Towards a Re-Articulation of Cultural Identity: Problematising the Jewish Subject in Art, originally in Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 1, January, 2006, 99–108
• Stephen Godfry, The Way We Were, Pro Tem, November 29, 1973 (scroll down in PDF to p. 8)
• Elisa Klapheck, Toby Axelrod, My Journey Toward Regina Jonas, Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas: The Story of the First Woman Rabbi (Wiley, 2004)
• Evyatar Marienberg, Jews Have the Best Sex: The Hollywood Adventures of a Peculiar Medieval Jewish Text on Sexuality, Journal of Religion and Film, 14.2, 2010
• Arthur Laurents, Emotional Reality: Interview by Pat McGilligan, in McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)
• Joel Rosenberg, Jewish Experience on Film: An American Overview, American Jewish Yearbook, 1996
• Jérôme Segal and Monika Kaczek, Molly Picon and the Cinematic Archetype of a Jewish Woman, CinemaScope, 14, Jan-Jul. 2010
  
• Greg M. Smith, Streisand Shops the Museum Store: Consuming Art on Television, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 30.1 (Spring 2002) 63-68
• Jon Stratton, Introduction, Jews, Race and Popular Music (Ashgate, 2009)
• Stacy Wolf, Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body, SandF Online, Double Issue: 3.3 & 4.1
• Stacy Ellen Wolf, Introduction, A Problem Like Maria:Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002)

Sequence from Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968)

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