Billy Liar Studies in Memory of Keith Waterhouse

Film Studies For Free was saddened to hear that novelist, journalist, and screenwriter Keith Waterhouse has died, albeit after a long and rich life. He was author of the novel Billy Liar and wrote the critically acclaimed screenplay for John Schlesingers brilliant 1963 film of the same name, one of FSFFs favourites from the British New Wave. He also worked on other great screenplays, including Whistle Down the Wind (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962) and Alfred Hitchcocks Torn Curtain (1966, uncredited).

Below, in memory of Keith Waterhouses great British cinematic imagination, are some links to online and openly accessible Billy Liar and British New Wave cinema resources:

• Tony Aldgate, British New Wave Cinema, Open2.net, November 2002
  
• Billy Liar, Monthly Film Bulletin Review, Volume 30, No.356, September 1963
• Michael Brooke, The British Hero: Heroic Failures, BFI Screenonline
• Directors Guild of Great Britain, Lifetime Achievement Award to John Schlesinger, Booklet 2002
• Mark Duguid, British Film in the 1960s, BFI Screenonline
  
• Bruce Goldstein, Billy Liar, The Criterion Collection, Essays, July 9, 2001
• Roderick Heath, Look Back: Influences and Major Figures of the British Free Cinema, Ferdy on Films, etc, February 20, 2002
• Justin Hindmarsh, British Cinema Style and Context: An Examination of British "New Wave" Films, Leicester Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, 1997
• Gavin Lambert, New Wave, Old Problem, The Guardian Online, October 3, 2002
  
• A.O. Scott, Billy Liar, The Criterion Collection, Essays, July 9, 2001
• B. F. Taylor, Major Themes and Minor Movements: Composition and Repetition in John Schlesingers Billy Liar, in British New Wave: A Certain Tendency (Manchester University Press, 2006) (full disclosure note: work based on a thesis supervised by Catherine Grant)
  
• Phil Wickham, Billy Liar (1963), BFI Screenonline
  

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A fusion of life and dream In memory of John Orr

Image from Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003). This  film topped John Orrs list of favourite films in 2003 (here are his 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2009 lists)

What is trauma if not, as in the original Greek, a kind of wound? In cinema, though, it is something more: a wound that seldom heals, a deep wounding of body and soul from which, often, the subject does not recover. Hence, the critical formula for the outcome of the trauma picture: at the least, significant damage; at the most, violent death.

If film horror often sources the supernatural, film trauma focuses on the fears of the natural world. What is out there as waking nightmare in a dangerous world is often a mirror of what is hidden in here, in the human heart. The monsters that horror films project onto the screen are often the monsters of our dream worlds. The wounding events of the trauma film are by contrast a fusion of life and dream.

In film, there is no absolute borderline between these opposites – human trauma and supernatural horror  but the question of emphasis, one way or the other, is crucial: the threat of aliens, mutants, werewolves, monsters, robots, slasher killers, vampires et alia, or the threat of evil that is here and now, that is contingent and recurrent in the life-world, yet also seems onscreen to inhabit the world of dream. Horror is, thus, the popular genre of superhuman evil, trauma its human and dreamlike subset. [John Orr, The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960, Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009]

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear, via Dina Iordanovas website, of the death of influential film theorist and scholar John Orr.

Appointed as a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh in 1967, Orr began teaching film and cultural studies in that department in 1984. A few years later, he founded, with John Ellis, the joint honours film course for Sociology and English Literature. From 1998 onwards, he taught on the MSc in Film Studies, based in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.

Best known for his pioneering work on the sociology of film and art, Orr was author of Cinema and Modernity, Contemporary Cinema, The Art and Politics of Film and Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema. He also co-edited important works on Andzrej Wajda and Roman Polanski and had written recent essays on Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, and Dogme 95. His most recent book was Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He had recently retired from his post as Professor Emeritus in Social and Political Studies at Edinburgh, but was still very active in his research and publishing on cinema.

Orr was both prolific and very generous with his work. In recent years, he published a number of significant essays online, many of which set out in depth his brilliant thinking on trauma, fright, and paranoia in the cinema. Below, in tribute to and with gratitude for his work, both on and offline, FSFF has gathered links to those essays.

• John Orr, The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960, Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 

• John Orr, A Cinema of Parallel Worlds Lynch and Kieślowśki + Inland Empire, Film International, Volume: 7 | Issue: 1 February 2009

• John Orr, Pinter and the paranoid style in English theatre, cyc, Volume 12 n°1, 2008

• John Orr, Hitchcock and Hume Revisited: Fear, Confusion and Stage Fright, Film-Philosophy, 11.1, June 2007

• John Orr, Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergmans The Silence vs. Antonionis The Passenger, Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007

• John Orr, Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• John Orr, Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet, Senses of Cinema, No. 37, 2005

• John Orr, Right Direction, Wrong Turning: On Zizeks The Fright of Real Tears, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 30, September 2003

• John Orr, Hidden Agenda: Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, Edinburgh Working Papers in Sociology, No. 14 (1999)
  

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Study of a Single Film Forbidden Planet in memory of Leslie Nielsen

Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis star in Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)

Film Studies For Free was sad to hear that the king of deadpan movie humour, actor Leslie Nielsen, has died at the age of 84. Of all the films he starred in, the one that has most often been the subject of scholarly studies was the hugely influential science fiction movie Forbidden Planet, a film in which Nielsen played a sincerely serious role.

In (metonymic) memory of Nielsens wonderful career (the straight part standing for the mostly comic whole), FSFF has assembled a list of links to openly accessible academic studies of this 1956 film. With its groundbreaking electronic music score by Louis and Bebe Barron, its highly personable robot character, its loose adaptation of a high culture text (Shakespeares The Tempest), and its well elaborated allusions to classical (and post-classical) mythology, as well as to Freud (the Id monster), Forbidden Planet will probably keep film academics in business for quite some time. But, FSFF hopes some will also turn their attention to Nielsens comic performances, before too long.

Shirley, they merit that, at the very least.

• Martin Stig Andersen, Audiovisual Correspondences, CEC: eContact! 12.4 — Perspectives on the Electroacoustic Work / Perspectives sur lœuvre électroacoustique (August 2010)
• Simone Caroti, "Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest"    page 2 of 12 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004)
• David Cooper, [Review of] James Wierzbicki: Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet: A Film Score Guide, The Journal of Film Music, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2007
• Ted Friedman, Jung and Lost, FlowTV, May 1, 2009
• Robert M. Geraci, Robots and the Sacred in Science and Science Fiction: Theological Implications of Artificial Intelligence, Zygon, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2007)
• Miguel Angel González Campos, Shakespeare in Outer Space: Forbidden Planet as Adaptation of The Tempest, Sederi 9 (1998)
• Greg Grewell, Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions Then, Now, and in the (Imagined) Future, Rocky Mountain Review, Fall 2001
• Laurie Johnson, Felix and Gilless tempestuous, monstrous machine, M/C Journal: Journal of Media and Culture, 2 (6) 1999 
• David A. Kirby, The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films, Literature and Medicine 26, no. 1 (Spring 2007)
• T.J. Matheson, Marcuse, Ellul, and the Science-Fiction Film: Negative Responses to Technology, Science Fiction Studies, #58, Volume 19, Part 3, November 1992
• Anthony Miller, "In this last tempest": Modernising Shakespeare’s Tempest on Film, Sydney Studies in English, Vol 23 (1997)
• Roy Schwartzman, “Engenderneered Machines in Science Fiction Film.” Studies in Popular Culture 22.1 (October 1999): 75-87
• Rachel Weissbrod, Inter-Semiotic Translation: Shakespeare on Screen, Journal of Specialised Translation, Issue 5, January 2006

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Memory Screens New Issue of IMAGE AND NARRATIVE

Frame grab from 1975 (Shaun Wilson, version 1 (2005), DV as single channel DVD, colour, sound, 5mins). Visit Shaun Wilsons website here and read his article about home movies here

The concept of memory screens is an overarching term exploring the relationship between forms of media, viewers, practitioners and memory. The notion of memory screens alludes to the ways in which memories become remembered, layered, forgotten and transformed. The range of articles in this volume reflects the relationship between memory and history, both public and personal. [Thematic Cluster: Introduction by Teresa Forde]

Film Studies For Free continues to be impressed by the excellence of the online journal Image and Narrative which has recently published a special issue entitled Memory Screens.

FSFF particularly appreciated film and video artist Shaun Wilsons essay on the art of vintage home movies, Jenny Chamarettes study of the dynamics of the ‘spectre’ or ‘spectral body’ of the auteurist figure of Agnès Varda, Peter Kravanjas exploration of narrative contingencies in Rohmer and Akerman and Teresa Forde and Erin Bells discussions of memory and British television. But this is a very high quality issue throughout and, as always at I and N, particularly characterised by the thoughtful integration of close analysis and film and moving image theory.

Image and Narrative, Vol 12, No 2 (2011): Memory Screens

Table of Contents

• Thematic Cluster: Introduction by Teresa Forde ABSTRACT PDF
• Remixing Memory through Home Movies by Shaun Wilson ABSTRACT PDF
• Video Installation, Memory and Storytelling: the viewer as narrator by Diane Charleson ABSTRACT PDF
• Spectral bodies, temporalised spaces: Agnès Vardas motile gestures of mourning and memorial by Jenny Chamarette ABSTRACT PDF
• Television and memory: history programming and contemporary identities by Erin Bell ABSTRACTPDF
• Television Dramas as Memory Screens by Teresa Forde ABSTRACT PDF
• The Lives of Others: re-remembering the German Democratic Republic  by Margaret Montgomerie and Anne- Kathrin Reck ABSTRACT PDF
• Nostalgic [re]remembering: film fan cultures and the affective reiteration of popular film histories by Nathan Hunt ABSTRACT PDF

Various Articles

• Cinema, Contingencies, Metaphysics by Peter Kravanja ABSTRACT PDF

Review Articles

• Hillary Chutes Ambivalent Idiom of Witness by Charlotte Pylyser  ABSTRACT PDF
• Naissances de la bande dessinée de William Hogarth à Winsor McCay by Pascal Lefèvre ABSTRACT PDF

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In darkened rooms On Salvador Dal� and cinema in memory of David Vilaseca

Screen Test with Salvador Dalí (Andy Warhol, 1966-68) [Read Brian Dillons article about Warhols Screen Tests]

"Oh Salvador Dalí, of the olive-colored voice!

[...]

I sing your restless longing for the statue,

your fear of the feelings that await you in the street."

Excerpt from Federico García Lorca, Ode to Salvador Dalí

(first published in Revista de Occidente, Madrid, April 1926)

"The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms."

André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)

"[Un chien andalou/] An Andalusian Dog, one of the most universally acclaimed films in cinema history, is frequently mentioned by critics as a privileged point of reference for the Surrealist rebellion. The film remains enigmatic to this day. Criticism has concentrated on the validity and effectiveness of its images to exemplify the avant-garde attack against social conventions and against the exclusive dominance of rationality in epistemology and social discourse. But this contextual approach does not take account of the scripts fragmented narrative, which finds support in Freuds psychoanalytical theories and articulates a radical proposal for identity and culture. Largely neglected by critics, this narrative has been highly influential in the history of cinema. An Andalusian Dog is central to a long list of films that explore different aspects of the irrational, among them Jean Cocteaus Le sang du poète, Hunt Strombergs The Strange Woman, Guy Debords script Howling in Favor of the Marquis de Sade, Alfred Hitchcocks Spellbound, [...] David Lynchs Blue Velvet [...].
    Conventionally An Andalusian Dog has been viewed as a film about sexuality; I suggest that sexuality appears in the film as the pretext for a discussion of the threat sexual desire poses for male identity. In this respect, the film develops ideas that begin to appear in paintings completed by Dalí after his initial contact with Freuds works in the mid-1920s. These paintings display male identity as a fragile form of subsistence unfolding between two alternate forces, desire and fear: the desire for sexual realization and the opposed fear that sexual intercourse will conclude in disease and ultimately in death. Given the scarcity of Buñuels production prior to 1929, I suggest that Dalís monumental production of paintings during these years served as a preliminary visual point of reference for the design of some of the images in An Andalusian Dog."  Ignacio Javier López, Film, Freud, and Paranoia Dalí and the Representation of Male Desire in An Andalusian Dog, Diacritics, 31.2 (2001) 35-48

"[David Vilasecas] first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalís Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalís vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."
     Bizarre episodes in Dalís autobiography suddenly made sense in Davids subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate." Paul Julian Smith, David Vilaseca Obituary, The Guardian, March 11, 2010

Film Studies For Free chooses today -- the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia -- to bring you the second of its posts created in memory of David Vilaseca, the openly gay Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010, having fought against homophobia, in different ways, for much of his life. A recent obituary in the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia also brutally connected these two unassailable facts in its own powerful and poetic tribute to this remarkable scholar and hugely creative writer:

Deberíamos leer a Vilaseca, que supo esquivar la soledad y el desarraigo en un mundo homófobo hasta que este se disfrazó de camión y embistió su bicicleta.

We really should read the works of Vilaseca; he knew how to dodge loneliness and rootlessness in a homophobic world, at least until the latter disguised itself as a truck and rammed into his bicycle.

As Paul Julian Smith indicates in his obituary for his friend (cited above), Vilasecas PhD thesis, which he turned into an outstanding first book, explored the highly complex question of the homophobia of artist, filmmaker, and fellow Catalan Salvador Dalí through the lens of queer cultural theories. 

Below is a list of direct links to numerous other resources (videos, podcasts, and further, openly-accessible, scholarly material), many of which touch on Dalís much less well-explored cinematic work in the same contexts as those studied in Vilasecas book; that is to say, the artists avowed paranoiac-critical method and the cultural expression of his sexuality. 

[Addendum: For two much less scholarly, but still highly (and, possibly, surprisingly) engaging, fictional examinations of the workings of paranoia and homophobia in the period of Dalís life prior to the making of Un chien andalou, FSFFs author thoroughly recommends the films Little Ashes (Paul Morrison, 2009), starring Robert Pattinson as Dalí, and Carlos Sauras Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón. (If you need more convincing, please do read Pauline Baches article on the former film).]

• Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, France, 1928 ) on Google Video
• LÂge dOr (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, France/Spain, 1930) on Google Video
• "An Addiction to Cinema: Salvador Dalí", LITERAL: Latin American Voices, Fall 2008
• Ian Christie, Lights, Camera, ... Metamorphosis, TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Neil Coombs , Introduction, Studying Surrealist and Fantasy Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
• Dalí, and the Media, Salvador Dalí Liquid Desire: Melbourne Winter Masterpieces,
• Christopher Jones and José Montes Baquer, The Great Collaborator, TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Dalí and Disneys surreal collaboration, TateShots Video Podcast, June 20, 2007 (embedded below) 
• Roy Disney, Uncle Walk and Salvador, TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Eugene de Klerk, A Striptease in Pink Limelight: Removing the Veil between the Subjective and Objective, eSharp, Issue 5, Summer 2005
• James Magrini , Surrealism’s Revisionist Reading of Freudian Psychology: Surreal Film and the Dream, OTHERZINE, Issue 17, Fall 2009 
• Victoria L. McCard, Salvador Dalí or the Persistence of Memories --True and False, Ciberletras, Vol. 14, 2005
• Jonas Mekas, The Performance Years, TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Nanette Rißler-Pipka, A reflection on his mind: Bergson, perception and memory in Dalí’s writing, Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 21 (2008), 167–178
• Astrid Ruffa, Dalí’s surrealist activities and the model of scientific experimentation, Papers of Surrealism, Issue 4, Winter 2005
• Salvador Dalí Forgotten Horizon 1936, Modern Painters podcast
• Surrealism and Film: Study Day, Tate Modern Webcast - 7 videos 
• Un chien andalou, 50 years later, Tabacalera, 2008 
• Alexandre Werneck, The Apparitions of a Surrealist Eye: Dalí & Film, Studio International, December 17, 2007

Dreams designed by Dalí for Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Un Chien andalou

Dalí and Disneys surreal collaboration, TateShots Video Podcast, June 20, 2007

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Obstinate Battles for Documentary Memory Patricio Guzm�n Resources Online

Regular readers will know, hopefully, that Film Studies For Free issues forth only on the topics that take its fancy. It receives no commercial or other patronage, and it does not respond to prompts for its hypertextual-utterances: nor does it want any! It loves and supports free online culture, and it prefers to make its own reading, viewing and blogging choices. Sometimes, though, it does get independently inspired by commercially-available film releases or new offline publications of a very worthwhile kind, as was the case today. And the result is a little bit of unsolicited free advertising...

FSFF was so HAPPY to hear that Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmáns films The Battle of Chile (1975-1978), The Pinochet Case (2001) and a particular personal favourite, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997 - see the opening sequences above) have been released on a new DVD by a great and longstanding supporter of Latin American film culture -- Icarus Films -- that it decided to mark this very auspicious occasion with a related scholarly links-list in honour, and warm appreciation, of Guzmáns hugely important films.

• Articles on Guzmáns website:

• MOVIES THAT MARKED ME FOREVER
• When I was about eight or nine years old (I really don’t remember exactly)...
• THE DOCUMENTARY EXPLOSION
• THE LOST IMAGES
• PIECES OF LIFE
• STAINS ON THE NEGATIVE
• OBLIVION AS A CENTRAL THEME
• THE CHILEAN DOCUMENTARY, A PANORAMIC LOOK

• Pat Aufderheide, Interview with Patricio Guzmán, Center for Social Media, Oct. 25, 2002

• Pamela Biénzobas, Patricio Guzmáns Salvador Allende: The Personal Painting of a Universal Myth, Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, January 2005

• Katherine Bliss, Review of Chile, Obstinate Memory/Battle of Chile, The Public Historian, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 1999

• Judy Branfman, Poking in the wound or reclaiming history? Documentary Films as Gendered Historical Memory in Post-Dictatorship Chile and Spain, CSW Update, October 2007
  

• Michael Chanan, The Changing Geography of Third Cinema, originally published in Screen Special Latin American Issue (edited by Catherine Grant and Jackie Stacey), Volume 38 number 4 Winter 1997

• Michael Chanan, The economic condition of cinema in Latin America , Third World Affairs 1985, London: Third World Foundation, pp.379-389

• Michael Chanan, Latin American Cinema in the 90s. Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema, E.I.A.L. ESTUDIOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE, Vol. 9, No. 1, enero-junio 1998 (Cultura visual en América Latina, Editor invitado: John Mraz)

• Michael Chanan, New Cinemas in Latin America (1960-1995), from The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, OUP, 1996

• Hugo Chaparro Valderrama, Patricio Guzmán according to Jorge Ruffinelli, El ojo que piensa, 2002
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-1978), CHILE, OBSTINATE MEMORY (1997), THE PINOCHET CASE (2001), Films by Patricio Guzmán
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for SALVADOR ALLENDE (2004), Film by Patricio Guzmán

• Jim Hillier, The Battle of Chile/La batalla de Chile, Patricio Guzmán, 1975–9, 100 Documentary Films (London: BFI/Palgrave, BFI Film Guides, 2009 (scroll down to Ch. 14))
  

• Sarah Kessler, An Imperfect Cinema, The Brooklyn Rail, September 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, Third Cinema Today, Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 6, 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, The Art of Hunger: re-defining Third Cinema, 16:9, November 2009 - 7. årgang - nummer 34

• Zuzana M. Pick, Chilean cinema: ten years of exile (1973-83), from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 66-70
  

• Margaret Power, Chile, Obstinate Memory, H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. September, 1998
  

• Margaret Power, The Battle of Chile, H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. August, 1998
  

• Juan Carlos Rodríguez, The Postdictatorial Documentaries of Patricio Guzmán: Chile, Obstinate Memory, The Pinochet Case, and Island of Robinson Crusoe, PhD Thesis, Duke University 2007
  

• Antonio Traverso, Unsettled Screens: The Cinema of Latin America, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 12, March 2005
  

• And a very special bonus for French or Spanish speakers: … à Valparaiso (1963 France/Chile 29 mins, directed by Joris Ivens, with a script by Chris Marker and assistance from Patricio Guzmán). See Adrian Danks Senses of Cinema article on this film here.

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