New Fall 2013 Issue of MEDIASCAPE on Urban Centers Media Centers

Frame grab from The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012). Read José Gallegos article about this film in the new issue of Mediascape

This issue of Mediascape then is designed to raise pointed questions about the role of the city as a center of both media and cultural production, especially in relation to our experience of mediated reality. The ultimate goal is to ground this larger discourse in a more specific discussion of cinematic space and its transformation in the ever-expanding era of digital media. How do films represent the city in a time of technological change and aesthetic evolution? How has the wholesale implementation of digital technologies impacted the use of space in cinema? And how does the digital era affect the relationship between the off-screen and on-screen spatial environment? Looking at the distinctive aesthetics of urban space, it is our belief, allows for an examination of how we perceive and engage with the iconography of our world. Our intent is to problematize what we understand as the urban, and how strongly it relates to our relationship with contemporary media.

[Matthias Stork and Andrew Young, Mediascape Co-Editors-in-Chief, Introduction to the Fall 2013 issue]

Film Studies For Free would like its readers to head straight on over to the new issue of Mediascape which considers matters of space and mediation. 

FSFF would particularly recommend Matthias Storks marvellous (and marvellously illustrated) study of the Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games, James Gilmores fascinating essay on The Dark Knight Rises, urban space and the cultural experience of terrorism as mediation, as well as José Gallegos essay on the Tsunami disaster film The Impossible. The issue also boasts unmissable items in the area of game studies.

Readers may also be interested to know that the excellent Mediascape blog is seeking new contributors on a wide variety of topics. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, or if you would like more information about the blog, please write to Editor-in-Chief Matthias Stork at mstork[at]ucla[dot]edu.

• Moving Through Videogame Cities Bobby Schweizer
• The Impossible – Or How I Learned Thailand Was Filled with European Tourists Jose Gallegos
• Absolute Anxiety Test: Urban Wreckage in The Dark Knight Rises James Gilmore
• Dimensions of the Digital City Oscar Moralde
• Space-Wars: Mapping the Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games Matthias Stork
• Negotiating Transitional Spaces in Classic Games Harrison Gish
• Invisible Walls: Narrativizing Spatial Limitation in Ico and Assassin’s Creed II Bryan Wuest
• Perpetual Game Space in Crime City: Game Design in the Age of Social Network Gaming Andrew Young

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Sensing cinema phenomenological film and media studies

Image from Tam e guilass/Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1997)

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:

• Henry Bacon, Synthesizing Approaches in Film Theory, The Journal of Moving Image Studies, Volume 4, 2005
  

• Jennifer M Barker, Chapter 1: Skin, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)

• Melinda Barlow, Review of TOUCH: SENSUOUS THEORY AND MULTISENSORY MEDIA Laura U. Marks Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003
  

• Tammy L. Bennington and Geri Gay, Mediated Perceptions: Contributions of Phenomenological Film Theory to Understanding the Interactive Video Experience, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 5 (4) June 2000
  

• Martha Blassnigg, Review of Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology by Malin Wahlberg [University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008], Leonardo on-line, July 2008
  

• Jay David Bolter, Digital Media and Cinematic Point of View,Telepolis (14.02.1997)

• Havi Carel, A phenomenology of tragedy: illness and body betrayal in The Fly, SCAN, vol. 4, number 2 august 2007
  

• Josh Cohen, Phenomenology, History and the Image: A Reply to Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Film-Philosophy, vol. 3 no. 11, March 1999
  

• Sarah Cooper, Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2007

• Glorianna Davenport and Brian Bradley, Everyones Cinema: Towards the Future of Cinematics, Oberhausen Film Festival - April 28, 199
  

• Trevor G. Elkington, Between Order and Chaos: On Peter Greenaways Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema, Film-Philosophy, vol. 8 no. 2, January 2004
  

• Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Images of/and the Postmodern, Film-Philosophy, vol. 3 no. 8, February 1999
  

• Daniel Frampton, The Way that Movements Speak [on Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies by Bela Tarr, and Last Resort by Pawel Pawlikowski], Film-Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 10, 2001

• Alex Gerbaz, Direct Address, Ethical Imagination, and Errol Morris’s Interrotron, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 2, December 2008

• Sam B. Girgus, Beyond Ontology: Levinas and the Ethical Frame in Film, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 2, August 2007
  

• Julien Guillemet, Painting/Cinema: A Study on Saturated Phenomena, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 2, September 2008
  

• Jan Holmberg, Ideals of Immersion in Early Cinema, Cinémas : revue détudes cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 14, n° 1, 2003, p. 129- 147
  

• Robert Hopkins, Pictures and Film; Philosophy and the Empirical Disciplines: A Reply to Dean, Film-Philosophy, vol. 3 no. 27, June 1999
  

• Mike Jones, Composing Space: Cinema and Computer Gaming - The Macro-Mise en Scene and Spatial Composition, Imaginary Worlds: Image and Space International Symposium, Sydney, 14 October 2005
  

• Marcia Landy, Traveling in Film Theory: Giuliana Brunos Atlas of Emotion, Film-Philosophy, vol. 7 no. 44, November 2003

• Abigail Loxham, Veo, veo; Leo, Leo?: A re(-)viewing of haptic and visual discourse in Bigas Luna’s Bilbao (1978), Studies in European Cinema, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2007

• Laura U. Marks, Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes, Framework" the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004

• Laura U. Marks, Information, secrets, and enigmas: an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics for cinema, 2009

• Laura U. Marks, Multisensory Culture, 2008

• Laura U. Marks, Mohamed Soueids Cinema of Immanence, Jump Cut, 49, 2007

• Laura U. Marks, Asphalt Nomadism, 2006

• Laura U. Marks, Enfolding and Unfolding: An Aesthetics for the Information Age,
  
  An interactive essay produced in collaboration with designer Raegan Kelly in Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, 2006.
  
  
  

• Douglas Morrey, Bodies that Matter - Review: Vivian Sobchack (2004) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2006

• Douglas Morrey, Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2008

• Edward R. ONeill, Apprehending Deleuze Apprehending Cinema [on Der Film bei Deleuze/Le cinema selon Deleuze, edited by Fahle & Engell], Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2, January 1998
  

• Per Persson, Chapter 1: Understanding and Dispositions, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery (Cambridge University Press, 2003
  

• Dominic Michael Rainsford, Tarkovsky and Levinas: Cuts, Mirrors, Triangulations, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2007

• Elena del Río, “Antonioni’s Blowup: Freeing the Imaginary from Metaphysical Ground”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 32, June, 2005
  

• Jason Kelly Roberts, Review of The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick [London: Harvard University Press, 2007], Scope, Issue 13, February 2009

• Anne Rutherford, Cinema and Embodied Affect, Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Anne Rutherford, Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mice en Scene, and the Senses in Angelopoulos Balkan Epic, Senses of Cinema 2004
  

• Philipp Schmerheim, ‘Film, not Sliced up into Pieces, or: How Film Made me Feel Thinking: Review of Filmosophy’, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008

• Vivian Sobchack, Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime, Millennium Film Journal No. 34 (Fall 1999): The Digital

• A. Soltani, Cinesensory: A Filmic Design for Mapping Haptic Space, International Design and Cinema Conference, Istanbul, November 2009

• David Sterritt, Taste of Kiarostami, Senses of the Cinema, Issue no. 9, Sept-Oct. 2000

• David Sullivan, Noemata or No Matter?: Forcing Phenomenology into Film Theory, Film-Philosophy, vol. 1 no. 3, July 1997

• Melanie Swalwell, The Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema [on Laura U. Markss The Skin of the Film], Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 32, 2002

• Donato Totaro, Deleuzian film Analysis: The Skin of the Film, Offscreen Journal, June 30, 2002
  

• Saige Walton, “Cinema as I see-I hear-I feel”: Review of The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film by Brigitte Peucker, Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007

• Robert E. Wood, Toward an Ontology of Film: A Phenomenological Approach, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 24, 2001

• Benjamin Wurgaft, How Heavy Light Can Be, Film-Philosophy, vol. 6 no. 9, May 2002
  

• Kevin Wynter, Of depth and surfaces; notes on Watchmen and other reflections on phenomenological film experience, CineAction, Summer, 2009
  

• Daniel Yacavone, ‘Towards a Theory of Film Worlds’, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008

• Christopher S. Yates, A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic "Worlds", Contemporary Aesthetics, Oct 22, 2006
  

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Documentary and Space New issue of MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL

Framegrab from El Valley Centro (James Benning, 2000). Read Elizabeth Cowies article on Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape which discusses Bennings film, among others. Cowie is author of the new book Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

Film Studies For Free brings you openly accessible brilliance from the latest issue of Media Fields Journal. Its a really excellent issue on documentary and space - a must-read. And however hyperbolically positive (the always hyperbolically positive) FSFF is, it doesnt always say that. So, do yourselves a big favour and click on the below links without further ado.

• Ryan Bowles and Rahul Mukherjee, Documentary and Space: Introduction, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Alexandra Juhasz, A Place in the Online Feminist Documentary Cyber-closet, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Jason Alley, Spaces of Reticence, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Laura Rascaroli, Sonic Interstices: Essayistic Voiceover and Spectatorial Space in Robert Cambrinus’s Commentary (2009), Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Elizabeth Cowie, Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• André Jansson and Erik Gandini, Gitmo Space: A Dialogue about Mediatized Warfare, Documentary Filmmaking and Heterotopic Truth, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Nonny de la Peña, Physical World News In Virtual Spaces: Representation and Embodiment in Immersive Nonfiction, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Brett Lashua, Popular Music Memoryscapes of Liverpool 8, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Erica Stein, The Road to Heaven Twists: The City, Urban Planning, and Experiential Space, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Christina Corfield, Flexible by Nature: Video and the Cultural Production of Concrete Fact, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Dan Fleming, The Staging of Affect and the “Elsewhens” of Documentary Space, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Sukanya Sen, Encountering Space: Documenting the Topography of the Migrant Home, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Maggie Hennefeld, The Geopolitics of Narrative Parody in Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Mapping Documentary: Roundtable with Filmmaker Ido Haar and Film and Media Studies Scholar Janet Walker in Conversation with David Gray and Jade Petermon, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Renée Rhodes, Moving Makes a Map, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Bernadette Flynn, Spatial Praxis in the Staging of Material Evidence, Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

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

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.

• ACT UP NY Webcasts
• Elana D. Anderson, Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow: Socio-Cultural Evolution In African Literature and Film, Mosaic African Studies, 2010 
• Carole Blair and Neil Michel, The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration, Rhetoric and Public Affairs Vol. 10, No. 4, 2007, pp. 595–626
• Martin P. Botha, Post-Apartheid Cinema: A Thematic and Aesthetic Explorations of Selected Short and Feature Films, Ilha do Desterro, Florianópolis, nº 61 p. 225- 267 jul/dez 2011
• Cüneyt Çakirlar, Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Hayness Cinema of Queer Pastiche, KÜLT: A Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1, April 2011
• Jean Carlomusto and Jane Rosett, AIDS: A LIVING ARCHIVE™, SandF Online, 2.1, Summer 2003
• Olaia Cores Calvo, Yesterday (2004), Journal of Medicine and Movies, 5.4 (2009):125-130
• David Campbell, The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS: A report for the AIDS, Security and Conflict Initiative, May 2008 
• Brendan Curran, Singin’ in the Scourge: Two AIDS Musicals, Two Political and Cultural Contexts, MA Thesis, Concordia University, April 2011
• Juan Luis Cuesta Jiménez, The Constant Gardener or the development of new Therapies, Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2.3 (2006): 96-101 
• Ann Cvetkovich, AIDS Activism and the Oral History Archive, SandF Online, Summer 2.1, Summer 2003
• Anthony Enns, "A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes Safe, Reconstruction,7.3, 2007
• Kyle Frackman, Out of Time: "Allotemporality" in Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss’ Zurück auf los, queere (t)ex(t)perimente. Eds. Franziska Bergmann, Jennifer Moos, and Claudia Münzing. Freiburg: fwpf-Verlag, 2008
• J.E. García Sánchez, E. García Sánchez and M.L. Merino Marcos, Antiviral, antifungal and antiprotozoal agents in the cinema, Revista Española de Quimioterapia, Marzo 2007; Vol. 20 (No 1): 106-111
• Silvia Grassi, Like a Carsic River: Gay Independent Cinema from Underground Films to New Queer Cinema and Beyond, Altre modernità/ Otras modernidades/ Autres modernités/ Other Modernities, N. 2 – 10/2009
• Oliver Gruner, Public Politics/Personal Authenticity: A Tale of Two Sixties in Hollywood Cinema, 1986-1994, PhD Thesis, University of East Anglia, August, 2010
• Roger Hallas, The Witness in the Archive, SandF Online, 2.1, Summer 2003
• Lucas Hilderbrand, Retroactivism, glq, 12.2, 2006
• Jim Hubbard, A Report on the Archiving of Film and Video Work by Makers with AIDS, DIVA TV, [date unknown]
• Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS Video: To Dream and Dance with the Censor, Jump Cut, No. 52, summer 2010
• Alexandra Juhasz in exchange with Antoinette Burton, Feminist history making and Video Remains, Jump Cut, No. 48, winter 2006
• Alexandra Juhasz, Alternative AIDS Videos, Cineaste, vol.XXI, nos. 1-2, 1994/5
• Alexandra Juhasz, Interview with Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman: ACT UP Oral History Project, CORPUS, Spring 2006
• Alexandra Juhasz, From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love, originally published in The Cinema of Todd Haynes, ed. James Morrison (London:Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Dion Kagan, [Review of] Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Duke University Press, 2009, Screening the Past, 28, 2010
• Tim Lawrence, ‘AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plurality in Derek Jarmans Blue’ Social Text, 52/53 (Autumn - Winter 1997): 241-264
• Timothy F. Murphy, Part One: The Meaning of AIDS, Ethics in an Epidemic: AIDS, Morality, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
• Christo Oberholzer, An Investigation Into Nationalism and National Allegory within South African Post-Apartheid Film, MA Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2006
• António Pais de Lacerda, Cinema as an Historical Document: AIDS in 25 years of Cinema, Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 102-113
• Georgios Pappas, Savvas Seitaridis, Nikolaos Akritidis, and Epaminondas Tsianos, Infectious Diseases in Cinema: Virus Hunters and Killer Microbes, Clinical Infectious Diseases,
• Volume 37, Issue 7, 2003: 939-942
• Monica B. Pearl, The City of Brotherly Love: Sex, Race and AIDS in Philadelphia, EnterText 2.3, Summer 2003
• Monica B. Pearl, American Grief: The AIDS Quilt and Texts of Witness, Gramma, 08
• Lucia Pérez Ochoa López, Philadelphia (1993): View of AIDS when it began to be a treatable disease, Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 21-28
• Jean Stuart, Yesterday, today … and tomorrow: The future of girlhood in the age of AIDS, AGENDA 79 2009
• Marita Sturken, The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions, in Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov, 1996
• Nicoletta Vallorani, Path(o)s of Mourning. Memory, Death and the Invisible Body in Derek Jarman’s Blue, Altre modernità/ Otras modernidades/ Autres modernités/ Other Modernities, N. 4 – 10/2010

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New Issue of MEDIASCAPE on Film and Media Space

Image montage from Lou Romanos wonderful Cinemosaic website of frame grabs from The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Read Bryan Wuests article on space in this film.

The theme of our newest issue is “space,” which has spawned a range of approaches in cinema and media studies. “Space” is a nebulous concept, but the very difficulty in pinning down how a spatial discussion of media should proceed is why Mediascape thought this would be an appropriate discussion to tease out in our non-traditional format.[Introduction by Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Katy Ralko, Co-Editors-in-Chief, Mediascape, Winter 2012 Issue]

Film Studies For Free is back from its trip to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston. You can watch videos of some of the conference highlights here. And you can read the live tweets and other reports from the conference from the conference via this page. 

FSFF had a truly wonderful time meeting old friends and new, including a whole bunch of talented people who are responsible for the new issue of one of its favourite online journals, the UCLA-produced Mediascape. And a great issue it is, too. Links to all contents may be found below.

Features:

• Watching the River: Mise en Scène and Safe Space in The Night of the Hunter By Bryan Wuest
• Disneyomatics: Media, Branding, and Urban Space in Post-Katrina New Orleans By Helen Morgan Parmett
• War Games at Home, Home Games at War: Geography and Military First-Person Shooting Games By Diana M. Pozo

Reviews:

• "Between Heaven and Here": Inner-City Apartheid and Socio-Spatial Marginalization in By Ioana Literat
• The Driving Forces and Scope of The Mapping of Taiwan By Jerome F. Keating

Columns:

• Christopher Nolan’s Inception: The Oneiric Intruder and the Architecturalism of Space By Andrew Young
• Negotiating Utopia and Dystopia: Space and Architecture in Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) By Annie Dell’Aria
• "Is Space Political?": Oppositional Strategies in Treme By Katie Moylan

META:

• Media Boundaries and Bullet Time: A Hard Boiled Fan Plays Stranglehold By Harrison Gish
• Urban Metaphysics: Creating Game Layers on Top of the World By Nettrice R. Gaskins
• Revenge of the (Angry Video Game) Nerd: James Rolfe and Web 2.0 Fandom By Jim Fleury
• Video Games: The State of the Field - A Discussion with Steve Mamber, Peter Lunenfeld, and Eddo Stern (March 28, 2011). Moderated by David O’Grady

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Audiovisual Thinking Online Video Journal about Audiovisuality Communication Media

Screen caps from What is Academic Video by Inge Ejbye Sørensen  
for Audiovisual Thinking 

Film Studies For Free predicted at the beginning of this year that 2010 would be the year of the video essay. And thus it has come to pass... Woohoo!

Audiovisual Thinking -- an online video journal about "audiovisuality, communication and media" -- has just launched and it looks to FSFF to be a very worthwhile venture indeed. All relevant information has been pasted in below to tempt you to the excellent AT website. There are lots of introductory videos embedded there which will inform you audiovisually about the Audiovisual Thinking ethos.

Audiovisual Thinking has issued its first call for videos for its first proper issue which will explore the "legacy and merit of the use of audiovisual material in academic thinking, research and teaching, in the past, present and in the future" (deadline: June 15, 2010; do note: according to the submission form (as of April 22) the videos should be no longer than seven minutes and a maximum of [an as yet quite tiny] 10 Mb [Update: The editors reported to FSFF that they are working on achieving a larger, automated, upload volume. If you have larger submissions, these can be uploaded manually, so just get in touch with the editors via the websites contact page].

If you dont yet completely understand why FSFF is so pleased with this development, you should check out the following propaganda piece that it published last July: Video Essays on Films: A Multiprotagonist Manifesto. Also, do have a peruse of all the video essays embedded at FSFF, including this little one we prepared earlier (sadly, its just a little longer than seven minutes and larger than 10Mb or 100Mb...).

About Audiovisual Thinking

Audiovisual Thinking is a pioneering forum where academics and educators can articulate, conceptualize and disseminate their research about audiovisuality and audiovisual culture through the medium of video.

     International in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, the purpose of Audiovisual Thinking is to develop and promote academic thinking in and about all aspects of audiovisuality and audiovisual culture.

    Advised by a board of leading academics and thinkers in the fields of audiovisuality, communication and the media, the journal seeks to set the standard for academic audiovisual essays now and in the future.

    Video submissions are welcome from all fields of study and, as one would expect, the main criteria for submissions are that the discussion and thinking are conveyed through audiovisual means.

Audiovisual Thinking Issues

Each issue of Audiovisual Thinking will call for and then showcase academic videos around a specific theme within audiovisual culture and the media. The journal also accepts ‘opinion’ or ‘reflective’ audiovisual pieces on any area of audiovisual research or pedagogy. 

    Submissions are welcome from the areas of the Arts, Journalism, Media and Communication studies, as well as Education and the Social Sciences where audiovisual material is routinely used, or is gaining ground, as an academic research tool or teaching method.
     This first issue will explore the legacy of audiovisual content in contemporary academic research and thinking. Submit your video here.

• About
  
• Issues
  
• Advisory Board
  
• Editorial Board
  
• Partners
  
• Feedback  
• Contact

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Wide Screen Call For Papers on Contemporary European Film and Media Production

Still and Trailer for the latest film from the current master of European film production and multimedia marketing -Pedro Almodóvars Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces (Spain, 2009)

Film Studies For Free is always happy to post Open-Access related, Film and Media Studies calls for papers. Below is one such call for an OA journal that FSFF has profiled and linked to before: Wide Screen, a peer-reviewed open access academic journal of screen studies that encompasses a multi-disciplinary approach and is devoted to the critical study of cinema and television from historical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic perspectives.

Call For Paper - Special Issue of Wide Screen

European Producers and Production: Contemporary practices in film, television and multimedia environments

Edited by Professor Graham Roberts (Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University) and Dr Dorota Ostrowska (School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck, University of London)

About the Special Issue

This issue of Wide Screen is interested in the ways in which the contemporary media environment has changed the role and function of a producer. We would like to understand new models of production emerging as a result of new media environments (multimedia, game industry, internet). Does the multimedia environment lead to a greater specialisation on the part of particular producers in relation to the content they deliver, or does it result in producers extending their activity into a wider range of media and content? How do the profession, work, role and function of a producer differ depending on the national context in which they function? What is the impact of EU-wide policies on production practices in Europe?

Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Wide Screen invites articles on individual producers focusing on one of the following themes: co-productions, festival circuits (film, television and computer games markets), EU funding programmes and policies, education and training, freelancers vs in-house producers, networking, contracts, creativity, risk-taking, types of producers (creative, executive, line-producers), contracts, relationship with talent (directors, writers, actors), DVD releases (in particular special collectors editions)/DVD companies; production companies; awards and prizes; relationship with distribution and exhibition sector; producers of shorts, documentaries, fiction; sourcing content (book fairs, theatre productions); content ownership; piracy; private funding, sponsorship, equity versus public funding;

Deadline

Deadline for submission of full papers: 10 November, 2009

Guidelines and submission information

Articles should be between 4000 and 6000 words can be submitted using the online submission system: http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/submissions

Wide Screen adheres to a strict double blind review, which is defined here: http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess

Any questions/enquiries should be sent to Dorota Ostrowska (D.Ostrowska@bbk.ac.uk) and Graham Roberts (G.Roberts@ljmu.ac.uk)

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Film Television and Media Studies articles in STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

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)

• "Reinventing the Hero: Gardners Grendel and the Shifting Face of Beowulf in Popular Culture" -- Michael Livingston and John William Sutton 
• "Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Loria Pestewa, and the Great American Makeover." -- Gioia Woods
• "Artistic Schizophrenia: How Fight Clubs Message is Subverted by its Own Nature" -- Kyle Bishop
• "Michael, Are You Okay? Youve Been Hit By a Smooth Criminal: Racism, Contraversy, and Parody in the Video Clips "Smooth Criminal" and "You Rock My World." -- Elenda Oliete
• "Sigmund Freud, Analyze This: How Madonna Situates "Die Another Day" Beyond the Pleasure Principle" -- David Sigler 

30.2 Spring 2008 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• Little America: R.E.M., Howard Finster, and the Southern "Outsider Art" Aesthetic -- Matthew Sutton
• Brokeback Mountain: Masculinity and Manhood -- James R. Keller and Anne Goodwyn Jones
• Race, Crime, and Motherhood in George Pelecanoss Soul Circus -- Alexander Pitofsky
• The Politics of Talk: The Oprah Interview as Narrative -- Sarah Henstra
• Survival of the Stereotypical: A Study of Personal Characteristics and Order of Elimination on Reality Television -- Bryan E. Denham and Richelle N. Jones
• A Car of Her Own: Volvos "Your Concept Car" as a Vehicle for Feminism? -- Roy Schwartzman and Merci Decker
• Trainspotting, High Fidelity, and the Diction of Addiction -- Scott Stalcup 

31.1 Fall 2008 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Culture of the Past 
• From Apicius to Gastroporn: Form, Function, and Ideology in the History of Cookery Books -- Abigail Dennis
• Queer Investigations: Foxy Ladies and Dandy Detectives in American Dime Novels -- Pamela Bedore
• Literary Art in an Age of Formula Fiction and Mass Consumption: Double Coding in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle” -- Nils Clausson 
• Lost Girl: Diminishing Dorothy of Oz -- SydneyDuncan
• The Protean Character of Jello, Icon of Food and Identity -- Susan Grove Hall
• Gazing on Fu-Manchu: Obscurity and Imperial Crisis in the Work of Sax Rohmer -- Rebecca Wingfield
• “To Renew the Old World”: Record Collecting as Cultural Production -- Kevin Moist 

31.2 Spring 2009 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Cultures "Material and Conceptual Conditions 
• Fast Food Frontiers: Ive Got a Feeling Were Not in Kansas Anymore -- Minjoo Oh
• Sexed Appeals: Network Marketing and Adult Home Novelty Parties -- Dawn Heinecken 
• Popularizing HIgh Culture: Zemeckiss Beowulf -- Kathleen Forni
• Fear and Loathing in Knoxvegas: Representations of the "Other" in the Official Press Before and During the 1982 Knoxville Worlds Fair -- Stephen Bales and Charlie Gee
• Paul Reveres of Early Radio: The Boy Scouts and the Origin of Broadcasting -- Noah Arceneaux 
• The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive on the Political Left in Literature, Song, and Film -- Ron BrileyTamenicia or Tammy; James or Jim Bob; Bessie or Heather: Patterns and Significance of Choosing Names for American Babies -- Claude J. Smith, Jr. 

32.1 Fall 2009 [Go here to find a PDF of the Entire Issue]

• From the Editor: Moral Choices in the Art of Popular Culture
• "Spiritual Warfare" and Intolerance in Popular Culture: The Left Behind Franchise, the Commodification of Belief, and the Consequences for Imagination -- Marnie Jones
• The Narcissism of Bipartisanship: Accessing Ann Coulter on the Internet -- Lindsey Ives
• "Not Like Other Men"?: The Vampire Body in Joss Whedons Angel -- Lorna Jowett
• "...long before the stars were torn down ...": Sam Shepard and Bob Dylans "Brownsville Girl" -- Katherine Weiss 
• Death and Magic in Clive Barkers Lord of Illusions: A Terror Management Perspective -- Jonathan Bassett
• Disneyfying Dickens: Oliver and Company and The Muppet Christmas Carol as Dickensian Musicals -- Marc Napolitano 
• Even a Tramp Can Dream: An Examination of the Clash Between "High Art" and "Low Art" in the Films of Charlie Chaplin -- Richard Ward 

32.2 Spring 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: No Monoliths Here
• Striking Back Without Missing a Beat: Radical Responses to Domestic Violence in Country Music’s The Dixie Chicks and Salsa’s Celia Cruz -- Delia Poey
• “But This Is the South”: Ambivalent Regionalism in Jan Karon’s Mitford Novels -- Eleanor Hersey Nickel
• Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation -- Karolina Kazimierczak
• The Jesus Fish: Evolution of a Cultural Icon -- Todd Edmondson
• The Politics of the "Open" Self: America in the Cinemas of King Vidor and Robert Altman -- Margaret Hrezo and William E. Hrezo
• Like a “Whopper Virgin”: Anthropological Reflections on Burger King’s Controversial Ad Campaign -- Ty Matejowsky 
• The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television: A Replication of the Mastro and Greenberg Study a Decade Later -- Elizabeth Monk-Turner, Mary Heiserman, Crystle Johnson, Vanity Cotton, and Manny Jackson 

33.1 Fall 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Theory and Practice
• Whats Entertainment? Notes Toward a Definition -- Stephen Bates and Anthony J. Ferri 
• Popular Fiction Studies: The Advantages of a New Field -- Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
• Interpretive Methodology from Literary Criticism: Carnivalesque Analysis of Popular Culture: Jackass, South Park, and ‘Everyday’ Life -- Gulnara Karimova
• The Cinematic and Historic Weight of Stone of Destiny -- Lynnette Porter
• Ken Follett and the Scribblers Trade: A Midnight Train to Somewhere -- Carlos Ramet
• The “Aquatic Zionist” in The Yiddish Policemens Union -- Bennett Kravitz
• “Tons of Useful Stuff”: Defining Wellness in Popular Magazines -- Carol-Ann Farkas 

33.2 Spring 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Cultural Fragments, Cultural Flowers
• My Vampire Boyfriend: Postfeminism, “Perfect” Masculinity, and the Contemporary Appeal of Paranormal Romance -- Ananya Mukherjea
• “Thou Shalt Not Crave Thy Neighbor” : True Blood, Abjection, and Otherness -- Sabrina Boyer
• Mad Mens Color Schemes: A Changing Palette of Working Women -- Katherine Gantz
• The Revolution Will Be Soooo Cute: YouTube “Hauls” and the Voice of Young Female Consumers -- Laura Jeffries
• Outsider Nostalgia in Dazed and Confused and Detroit Rock City -- Carey L. Martin
• The Beatles and the Art of the Tambourine -- Steven Hamelman
• Outsourced: Crime Stories, New World Horrors, and Genre -- Jonathan L. Crane 

34.1 Fall 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Art for Someone Elses Sake
• Protecting a City’s Image: The Death of Las Vegas Beat, 1961 -- Larry Dale Gragg
• The Final Girl versus Wes Cravens A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema -- Kyle Christensen
• “And I Started Wondering . . .”: Voiceover and Conversation in Sex and the City -- Ashli Dykes
• Refrigerator Design and Masculinity in Postwar Media, 1946-1960 -- Paul Gansky
• Pop Culture, Politics, and Americas Favorite Animated Family: Partisan Bias in The Simpsons? -- Kenneth Michael White and Mirya Holman
• Evaluating the Presence of Social Strain in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV -- Patrick Osborne

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On Spectatorship Reception Studies Fandom and Fan Studies In Media Res and Flow

Picture from Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla via Flickr, used and altered under Creative Commons License permission.

Film Studies For Free wanted you to know you have to go with the new issue of Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture on Fandom and Fan Studies.  Oh, and then you can join the party already started at In Media Res on issues of spectatorship. The great contents of these worthy e-journals are directly linked to below:


In Media Res December 13-17, 2010 (Theme week organized by Ian Peters [Georgia State University])

• Sarah Sinwell (Northeastern University) presents: The Art of Seduction: Film Spectatorship in the Age of the Cell Phone

• Ross Melnick (Emory University) presents: BIG News from India: BIG Cinemas and Diasporic Indian Moviegoing in the United States

• Sarah Hamblin (Michigan State University) presents: Puzzling Spectatorship

• Daniel C. Faltesek (University of Iowa) presents: The 3D Machine: An Experiment With Aura, Television, and Installation

• Jesse Schlotterbeck (University of Iowa) presents: DVDs Like LPs: The Official Websites of Musical Biopics and the Contemporary Film Collector

Flow: A Critical Forumon Television and Media Culture

• "Fandom In/As the Academy" by Paul Booth A look at the specific pedagogical value of fandom as an activity and how it can be appropriated in a variety of educational contexts.

• "We Have Met the Fans, and They Are Us: In Defense of Aca-Fans and Scholars" by Catherine Coker and Candace Benefiel  Fans hold their objects of study to a higher standard. How can the critical study of any text succeed without the passionate and knowledgeable participation of the scholar?

• "The Gathering of the Juggalos and the Peculiar Sanctity of Fandom" by Michael Dwyer The Gathering of the Juggalos is the scene of questionable fan practices contrary to the noble portrait of fandom elaborated by several scholars.

• "We are all together: Fan Studies and Performance" by Jen Gunnels and M. Flourish Klink Gunnels and Klink argue that fan studies parallels performance studies in discerning tensions between researcher and subject.

• "Stop Being an Elitist, and Start Being an Elitist" by David Jenemann Given how Aca-fandom has created its own canon and looks down its nose at certain cultural forms like sports broadcasting, we could use a little of Adornos elitism in the discipline today.

• "Telling Tastes: (Re)producing Distinction in Popular Media Studies" by Eve Ng What we study and how we learn to talk about it is productive of our identities along mostly covert dimensions of power. How do scholars distinguish themselves from the mainstream critics?

• "Embracing the Overly Confessional: Scholar-Fandom and Approaches to Personal Research" by Tom Phillips A scholar argues that embracing an "overly confessional" approach to his academic writing is integral to the fidelity of his research.

• "Revisiting Fandom in Africa" by Olivier J. Tchouaffe The application of fandom and its resources is not the same in all cultures, and African fans might not be recognized as legitimate fans. The point of this piece is to demonstrate that there is a unifying figure of American domination of mass culture.

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ALPHAVILLE a new journal of film and screen media

A poster of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

Alphaville is the first fully peer-reviewed online film journal in Ireland. It is edited by staff and PhD students in Film Studies at University College Cork. It will be published twice a year, in Summer and Winter, with both open and themed issues that will aim to provoke debate in the most topical issues in film and screen studies. [More about Alphaville]

There is no better title [...] for a new journal that proposes to explore the constitutive hybridity of the moving image—analog and digital, commercial and avant-garde, mainstream and independent, popular and elitist—without forgetting how its roots spread in artistic and productive practices that have always been far more composite and multilayered than our critical categories seemed to wish to account for. Calling for the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries, media fields and critical categories, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media aspires to be a laboratory for new interpretative ideas on the moving image of yesterday, of today and of tomorrow. This inaugural issue, in particular, foregrounds cultural, spatial, productive and aesthetic issues that aim to set in motion our thinking about European cinema within multilayered critical, cultural and geopolitical models, and in light of the complexity of the flow of images that characterises our media landscape. The transnationality, transculturality and transmediality of contemporary European cinemas are undoubtedly going to shape and occupy the research agenda for some time to come.  [Laura Rascaroli, Back to the Future: The European Film Studies Agenda Today]

Theres a new open access film journal on the block, everybody! Great news in Film Studies For Frees humble opinion. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media has just published its first issue, along with calls for papers for two further issues, to boot.

The first issue is themed, and heres what its editors say about their choice of organising topic:

Alphaville Issue 1, European Cinema: Transnational, Transcultural, Transmedial stems thematically from an international graduate film studies conference that we co-organised in May 2010 at University College Cork. The conference addressed the permeability of European spaces—geopolitical, sociocultural, productive and aesthetic—within a post-1989 cinematic context. This Issue, however, moves the focus beyond such a specific—albeit multilayered—epoch, encompassing research on both past and contemporary filmmaking, in a bid to showcase the “movement” that was and still is at the heart of European cinema with regard to its interrelationships of geography, culture and form. Inspired by the many seminal works on European cinema that have gone before it, we seek to contribute to the debate a collection that is at once original, in its theoretical and thematic scope, and fresh, in its demonstration of inspiring new work by early career scholars (an attribute that affords us the knowledge that this thriving area in our field will continue to be so).

FSFF thinks its a great issue packed with items of interest for film scholars, beginning with Natalia Pinázzas brilliant article on Sandra Kogut’s multinational coproduction documentary Un passeport hongrois/The Hungarian Passport (2001).

Tu es très bienvenu Alphaville!

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media Issue 1 (Summer 2011)

Editorial:

• Back to the Future: The European Film Studies Agenda Today by Laura Rascaroli
• Issue Editors’ Note by Abigail Keating, Jill Murphy and Aidan Power

Articles:

• Transnationality and Transitionality: Sandra Kogut’s The Hungarian Passport by Natalia Pinázza
• Paris, Borders and the Concept of Europe in Paris, je t’aime and Code Unknown by Vivien Silvey
• Lindsay Anderson: Britishness and National Cinemas by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard
• The Fictive Archive: Kurdish Filmmaking in Turkey by Özgür Çiçek
• Ideas of Sex: Discourses on Sexuality in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Cesare Canevari’s The Gestapo’s Last Orgy by Nick Impey
• Cinema/History: Philippe Garrel, Bernardo Bertolucci and May 1968 by Michael Leonard
• Face to Face with the Muslim “Other”: European Cinematic Responses to Al-Qaeda by Elena Caoduro

Book Reviews and Festival and Conference Reports:

[Compiled by Jill Moriarty, Deborah Mellamphy and Stefano Odorico, University College Cork]

• Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, by Yosefa Loshitzky (2010)  Reviewer: Aidan Power
• Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representations of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema, by Russel J.A. Kilbourn (2010)  Reviewer: Colm Ryan

• The “Biographical Narrative in Film and Television” Postgraduate Seminar Series University of Southampton, May and June 2010  Reporter: Victoria Kearley
• The Society of Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference 2011: Media Citizenship New Orleans, USA, March 10-13, 2011  Reporter: Deborah Mellamphy

• The Corona Fastnet Short Film Festival Schull, County Cork, 26-29 May 2011  Reporter: Barry Monahan
• Film 4 Frightfest, 2010 London, 26-30 August 2010  Reporter: Deborah Mellamphy

email: alphavillejournal@gmail.com

Issue 2, Winter 2011, Space and Time in Film.

Issue 3, Summer 2012, Sound, Voice, Music.

cfp: http://www.alphavillejournal.com/CallforPapers.html

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