Showing posts with label more. Show all posts
Showing posts with label more. Show all posts

Once more with paranoia conspiracy film studies

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Ewan McGregor in The Ghost Writer [aka The Ghost] (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Not only has Film Studies For Frees author been catching up with a slew of contemporary conspiracy films (The Ghost [Writer]; State of Play; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among others); she has also been transfixed, like many of her (otherwise politically divided) country-people, by the real-life conspiratorial, and other, dramas of a national, post-electoral, political process.

Tired of biting her nails and shouting at the telly, she took to comfort blogging. Here, then, is an FSFF entry appropriately prepared, given its subject, under duress and on tenterhooks: a list of links to openly accessible and predominantly scholarly studies of the conspiracy film.
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Wide Screen Journal on film analysis film and history Scorsese Altman Panahi and much more

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

An image of Lily Tomlin as Linnea Reese in Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975).

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the second issue of the online and Open-Access film studies journal Wide Screen has been published, with a characteristically broad spread of good quality essays.  FSFF particularly enjoyed Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yates very original Winnicottian study of DVD Culture, and Zélie Asavas essay on Todd Hayness film I’m Not There (2007).

Below is a list of direct links to each of the main articles. And FSFF has pasted in their abstracts, too, because theres absolutely nothing that this blog likes to do more than to encourage and inform online film-studies reading, even on sunny Saturdays like the one currently tempting its author away from her computer screen...
  • On Not Being a Fan: Masculine Identity, DVD Culture and the Accidental Collector - Caroline Bainbridge, Candida Yates 
    • Abstract: Recent work on DVD and home cinema technologies, audience and the context of reception has tended to focus on fandom, privileging the fanaticism that underpins the etymology of that term. This article is premised on focus group work that suggests, in counterpoint, that many contemporary collectors of DVDs do not see themselves as ‘fans’. What does this mean for the discourses that are developing around the consumption of new media technologies and their role in everyday life? Drawing on interview material, this article discusses the relationship between Western masculinity and the phenomenon of DVD collection. It considers the pleasures of this activity alongside the spaces of resistance it produces and we argue that commentary that interprets such phenomena in terms of fetishism does not account fully enough for what is at stake. Drawing on object relations psychoanalysis, we suggest that the material object of the DVD works in tandem with its psychical equivalent to produce new spaces of exploration and creativity for men. Against the backdrop of the commonplace assumption that masculinity is in ‘crisis’, we suggest that men make use of technologies to forge new spaces of interaction with one another, arguing that this creates new formations through which to think about the cultural structuration of homosociality and its creative potential.
  • Aura, Auteurism and the Key to Reserva - Kartik Nair 
    • Abstract: This essay revisits some of the most significant and enduring debates over the status of cinema as a popular form. The first debate is over the ‘aura’ and film. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), Walter Benjamin celebrated the democratic moment when technical reproducibility— culminating with film—abolished the centuries-old ‘aura’ of art. Conversely, in “The Culture Industry” (1944), Theodor Adorno lamented the anti-enlightenment standardization wrought by the assembly line under monopoly capitalism, and the movies were for him a primary example of this mindlessness. Arguably, auteurism emerged in the crossfire of the legacies of Benjamin and Adorno. Since it sought to cordon films off from the undistinguished mass of studio ‘product’ by elevating certain film-makers into the rarefied air of individual expression, ‘auteur theory’ may be said to have conferred a plenitude on its chosen few, a plenitude akin to aura. The second debate that I revisit is therefore that between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, a debate surrounding the Americanization of the auteur.
          Finally, the essay concludes with a brief focus on the short film The Key to Reserva (2007), directed by Martin Scorsese. It is a playful 9-minute experiment – part mockumentary, part homage – in which Scorsese attempts to ‘preserve’ a script Hitchcock developed but left unfilmed. I shall attempt to stage The Key To Reserva as an exciting flashpoint for discussions not only of the status of Hitchcock and Scorsese in Hollywood viz. auteur theory, but also as a flashpoint for discussions of mass reproduction and cinema; the commodity form and advertising; standardization and style; anonymity, authorship, and aura.
  • Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There - Zélie Asava 
    • Abstract: ‘Passing’ narratives question fixed social categorisations and prove the possibility of self-determination, which is why they are such a popular literary and cinematic trope. This article explores ‘passing’ as a performance of identity, following Judith Butler’s (1993) idea of all identity as a performance language. The performance of multiple roles in I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007) draws our attention not only to ‘passing’, ‘morphing’ and cultural hybridity, but also to the nature of acting as inhabiting multiple identities.
      I’m Not There is a biopic of the musician Bob Dylan. It is a fictional account of a real man who, through his ability to plausibly ‘pass’ for a range of personae, has achieved legendary status. It uses four actors, an actress and a black child actor to perform this enigma.
          The performance of multiple identities in this film explores the ‘moral heteroglossia’, that is, the variety and ‘many-languagedness’ (as Mikhael Bakhtin put it) of identity, through its use of multiply raced and gendered actors. But the film’s use of representational strategies is problematic. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) note that mixed-race and black representations are often distorted by a Eurocentric perspective. And, as Aisha D. Bastiaans notes, representation is a process which operates ‘in the absence or displaced presence, of racial and gendered subjects’ (2008: 232). This article argues that I’m Not There, like Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991) video, exploits racial and gendered difference through ‘passing’ and ‘morphing’ narratives, to reinforce the white-centrism of American visual culture.
  • Urban Imagination and the Cinema of Jafar Panahi - Sarah Niazi 
    • Abstract: The city in Iranian cinema acquires a character of its own. This paper through the exploration of the fabric of Jafar Panahi’s films attempts to evaluate the claims of this statement and deduce in his cinema an ‘aesthetic of veiling’1 as a narrative and enunciative coordinate that defines the post- revolutionary cinema in Iran. Working through a Benjaminian analysis of the urban experience located in the flaneur; the essay will attempt to understand the cinematic flanerie of Panahi’s camera, the perceptual prowess of his children in The White Balloon (1995) and The Mirror (1997) and the adventures of his flaneuse in The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006) as a desire to map the experiential realm of Tehran that is located within the marvellously mundane and the monumental everyday.
  • Visual Story Telling and History As A Great Toy in The Lives of Others - Gerry Coulter 
    • Abstract: The Lives of Others is an important film for two reasons: 1) it is a striking example of how cinema tells a story by visual means as much as the script (which in this case is much weaker); and 2) the film raises extremely important questions for history in our virtual era, a time when the reach and influence of film makers far extends that of the historian.
  • Film Analysis: A Comparison among Criticism, Interpretation, Analysis and Close Analysis - Elisa Pezzotta 
    • Abstract: The first aim of this article is to summarize and discuss the definitions of film analysis reported in some of the more well known texts about this subject which were and/or are published in France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States and which are directed to undergraduate and graduate students. Because film analysis is a broad field, firstly, I will distinguish between analysis and criticism and among interpretation, analysis and close analysis. Then, I will underline what are the relationships between analysis and close analysis, what are the main instruments of close analysis, the assumptions of analysis and the goals of both close analysis and analysis.
          This discussion is not exhaustive, but it furnishes a guide to an essential bibliography of film analysis and can aid students to undertake their own analyses with more awareness of their tasks. Finally, I strongly wish to have raised some important questions about the future of film analysis.
  • “Bhagat Singh Topless, Waving In Jeans”: Melancholia Through Mimesis In Rang De Basanti - Kshama Kumar 
    • Abstract: How is history mapped on the topography of twenty first century India? It seems apt to study the idea through modern India’s largest popular culture industry: Bollywood. This paper will examine the interaction between history and modern India in Rang de Basanti/Paint it Yellow (2006). The film employs history to understand the present. This paper, therefore, seeks to understand the different processes by which the film accomplishes this goal.It will involve a detailed study of the melancholia within the film which allows history and the present to co-exist. Temporal and spatial fluidity is afforded in the film through the mimetic process of the meta-drama, which will also then be studied to better understand the melancholic condition. The melancholic and the mimetic in the film, allow for an examination of the socio-political condition that the film seeks to represent. The film, this paper will argue also employs a critique of modern day governance. The paper will thus come full circle and examine modern day politics as a system of political history in action: pre-colonial politics in a postcolonial world.
  • Loss and Mourning: Cinemas Language of Trauma in Waltz with Bashir - Natasha Jane Mansfield 
    • Abstract: This paper seeks to analyse Ari Folman’s 2008 animated film Waltz with Bashir from the perspective of psychoanalysis. The aim with any form of story telling is to meaningfully convey a narrative to an intended audience. This paper seeks to address the ways in which the audio/visual characteristics of film allow it to present narrative in terms that are unavailable to the written word. In this case, the form and style specific to animation, provides further avenues for exploration with regard to the narration of trauma. The focus of this paper is the representation of traumatic memory, from the perspective of middle aged men, recalling their teenage experiences of war: in this case the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. The organising framework of Waltz with Bashir is the exploration of memory. It reconstructs experiences of war from a distance of approximately twenty years, using multiple perspectives in order to regain a sense of history. As a result, there are many strategies the film employs to try to weave together the various different narratives into an impression of events coherent enough to engage the audience and lead to some clarification of memory, and yet disparate enough to retain the idea of history as shifting and personal. The analysis also questions the difference in perception between the distance created by an artistic representation of reality through the talents of animators, and the distance created through the lens of a camera.
  • “We must be doing something right to last two hundred years”: Nashville, or the American bicentennial as viewed by Robert Altman - Chris Louis Durham 
    • Abstract: In this paper, I will discuss Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) in the context of its relationship to bicentennial-era American socio-political culture, contemporary American filmmaking, and other films by Altman. In particular, I will argue that Nashville is typical in its problematic representation of “America,” echoing similarly problematic representations of contemporary America found in a number of films of the period. American society in 1975 anticipated the upcoming bicentennial and presidential election in 1976, but a sense of positive American renewal was complicated by very recent memories of the withdrawal from Vietnam (a matter of weeks before Nashville’s release), Watergate, and the pervasive ideological polarization of the late 1960s onward. Nashville is characterized by both the dystopic narrative structure and the fragmentary visual style common to Altman’s films and numerous “New Hollywood” films of the 1960s and 1970s, and which was symptomatic of a period which for many American filmmakers underlined the inapposite nature of utopian fantasies and the desirability of rejecting the traditionally more ordered, invisible and “objective” style of filmmaking that defined much of the American cinematic past. Nashville’s conscious representation of contemporary America – an America defined in terms of polarized communities, a bankrupt political culture, and the threat of random violence - ensures the film’s resonance as a cultural document, and as such one that merits considered analysis.
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Forty more film and moving image studies theses online

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Frame grab from Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951), a film discussed in Andrew Klevans PhD thesis Disclosure of the Everyday

Film Studies For Free brings you its latest roundup of links to online and openly accessible film and moving image studies theses. These links (all of them to theses stored in European research repositories) will very shortly be added to FSFFs permanent listing of already more than 150 theses (the vast majority of them at PhD level, though one or two high quality MPhils are also included).

Particular highlights in this roundup, in FSFFs view, are the recent online publication of Andrew Klevans 1996 thesis Disclosure of the everyday, Catherine Fowlers The films of Chantal Akerman (1995), Martin Stollerys 1994 Alternative empires on Soviet montage cinema, the British documentary movement and colonialism, Ximena Triquells 2000 socio-semiotic approach to cinematic representations of the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983),  and David Martin-Jones 2002 Becoming-other in time: the Deleuzian subject in cinema.

If any of FSFFs esteemed readers know that their own thesis is available online but not yet added to these listings, please email this blog with a link.
    1. Aaltonen, Minna-Ella, Touch, taste and devour: phenomenology of film and the film experiencer in the cinema of sensations, MPhil Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011
    2. Archibald, David, The Spanish Civil War in cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2004
    3. Baker, Rosemari Elizabeth, Shklovsky in the Cinema, 1926-1932, PhD Thesis, Durham University, 2010
    4. Berridge, Susan, Serialised sexual violence in teen television drama series, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010
    5. Bissell, Laura, The female body, technology and performance: performing a feminist praxis. PhD thesis University of Glasgow, 2011
    6. Bourkiba Larbi, Abdelrhaffar, Parody and ideology: The case of Othello, PhD Thesis, Universitat de València, 2005
    7. Carrasco, Rocio, Of men and cyborgs: the construction of masculinity in contemporary U.S. science fiction cinema, PhD Thesis, Universidad de Huelva, 2010
    8. Chalkou, Maria, Towards the creation of quality Greek national cinema in the 1960s, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
    9. Copsey, Dickon, Race, gender and nation : the cultural construction of identity within 1990s German cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2004 
    10. Dymek, Mikolaj, Industrial Phantasmagoria : Subcultural Interactive Cinema Meets Mass-Cultural Media of Simulation, PhD Thesis, KTH, Sweden, 2010
    11. Ferguson, Laura E., Kicking the Vietnam syndrome? Collective memory of the Vietnam War in fictional American cinema following the 1991 Gulf War, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011 
    12. Fowler, Catherine, The films of Chantal Akerman: a cinema of displacements, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995
    13. Goode, Ian, Voices of inheritance: aspects of British film and television in the 1980s and 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000
    14. Heeren, Catherine Quirine van, Contemporary Indonesian film : spirits of reform and ghosts from the past, PhD Thesis, Leiden University, 2009
    15. Hibberd, Lynne A., Creative industries policy and practice. a study of BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009
    16. Hinchliffe, Alexander, Contamination and containment: representing the pathologised other in 1950s American cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2010
    17. Johnston, Cristina, The use of the spoken word in contemporary French minority cinema, with specific reference to banlieue and gay cinema (1990-2000), PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005
    18. Joo, Chang-Yun, The interpretative positions of the audience and the invitations of television drama, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 1997 
    19. King, Martin S., "Running like big daft girls." A multi-method study of representations of and reflections on men and masculinities through "The Beatles", PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield 2009
    20. Kiss, Robert James, The Doppelganger in Wilhelmine cinema (1895-1914) : modernity, audiences and identity in turn-of-the-century Germany, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000 
    21. Klevan, Andrew, Disclosure of the everyday : the undramatic achievements in narrative film, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1996
    22. Lehin, Barbara, Cinema and society: Thatchers Britain and Mitterands France, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003 
    23. Martin-Jones, David, Becoming-other in time: the Deleuzian subject in cinema, PhD Thesis,  University of Glasgow, 2002 
    24. Morris, Julia, An investigation into subtitling in French and Spanish heritage cinema, PhD Thesis,  University of Birmingham, 2010
    25. Natzén, Christopher, The Coming of Sound Film in Sweden 1928-1932 : New and Old Technologies, PhD Thesis, Stockholm University, 2010 
    26. Newsinger, Jack, From the grassroots: regional film policy and practice in England, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2010
    27. Pescetelli, M., The art of not forgetting: towards a practical hermeneutics of film restoration, PhD Thesis, University College London, 2011 
    28. Pigott, Michael, Time and film style, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009
    29. Ragazzi, Rossella, Walking on uneven paths : the transcultural experience of migrant children in France and Ireland, PhD Thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, 2005
    30. Robinson, Rebecca Grace, Scottish television comedy audiences, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2002
    31. Shand, Ryan John, Amateur cinema: history, theory and genre (1930-80), PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007  
    32. Shields, Ryan John, Amateur cinema: history, theory and genre (1930-80), PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007
    33. Smit, Alexia Jayne, Broadcasting the body: affect, embodiment and bodily excess on contemporary television, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010
    34. Smith, Sarah, A complicitous critique: parodic transformations of cinema in moving image art,  PhD thesis, University of Glasgow 2007
    35. Sorrentino, Giuseppe, The Disappearance of the Real - Mass Media in Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, PhD Thesis, Università degli studi Roma, 2008
    36. Stollery, Martin, Alternative empires : Soviet montage cinema, the British documentary movement and colonialism, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick 1994
    37. Thomas, Sarah, Face-maker : the negotiation between screen performance, extra-filmic persona and conditions of employment within the career of Peter Lorre, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008
    38. Triquell, Ximena, Projecting history: a socio-semiotic approach to the representations of the military dictatorship (1976-1983) in the cinematic discourses of Argentine democracy, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2000
    39. Walsh, John, A Space and Time Machine: Actuality Cinema in New York City, 1890s to c. 1905, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2005
    40. Yam, Chi-Keung, Study of popular Hong Kong cinema from 2001 to 2004 as resource for a contextual approach to expressions of christian faith in the public realm after the reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2008
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    New Film Philosophy Haneke Rivette Cassavetes Deleuze Badiou Leigh Bacon Jarman Bu�uel and more

    Saturday, December 27, 2014

    Frame capture from Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008). Read Basileios Kroustalliss take on this film as a thought-experiment

    Film Studies For Free is delighted to relay the excellent news that another high-quality  issue of Film-Philosophy has just been published. Edited by David Sorfa, Graham Matthews, Matthew Holtmeier and Ben Tyrer, the issue boasts no fewer than thirteen great articles as well as dozens of book reviews. The former are listed in full and linked to below.

    The next annual Film-Philosophy conference will take place in London in September 2012, and the full schedule has recently been published. You can find it here.

    Film-Philosophy also has its very own Facebook page and Twitter account.


    Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012)

    Articles

    1. Interpreting Disturbed Minds: Donald Davidson and The White Ribbon PDF by James J Pearson
    2. Haptic Aurality: Resonance, Listening and Michael Haneke PDF by Lisa Coulthard
    3. To Describe a Labyrinth: Dialectics in Jacques Rivette’s Film Theory and Film Practice PDF by Douglas Morrey
    4. The Subject Trapped in Gomorrah: Undecidability and Choice in Network Cinema PDF by Maria Poulaki
    5. Film as Thought Experiment: A Happy-Go-Lucky Case? PDF by Basileios Kroustallis
    6. Losing Face: Francis Bacons 25th Hour PDF by Arne De Boever
    7. Charm and Strangeness: The Aesthetic and Epistemic Dimensions of Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein PDF by Kieran Anthony Cashell
    8. Why He Really Doesn’t Get Her: Deleuze’s Whatever-Space and the Crisis of the Male Quest PDF by Niels Niessen
    9. Groundhog Day and the Good Life PDF by Diana Abad
    10. Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen PDF by Stella Hockenhull
    11. Contrapuntal Close-up: The Cinema of John Cassavetes and the Agitation of Sense PDF by Daniele Rugo
    12. Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman, or, the Horror of Sex PDF by Lorenzo Chiesa
    13. Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buñuel’s Late Films PDF by Chad Trevitte
    Book reviews
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    Chronicle of an Auteur More Antonioni Goodness!

    Thursday, December 25, 2014

    Frame grab from Cronaca di un amore / Story of a Love Affair (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950)

    Film Studies For Free presents the second of its celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Below are embedded the video recordings of a number of unmissable talks at Antonioni and the Arts, an event held at Royal Holloway, University of London, in October to mark the anniversary. 

    Thanks to Royal Holloways School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures for hosting the talks, as well as taking the trouble to record them and make them freely available online.

    This latest entry coincides with Cronaca di un autor: Convegno dedicato a Michelangelo Antonioni nel centenario della nascita, a marvellous conference, with an amazing array of speakers, taking place between December 11-13, 2012, merely the latest in a series of brilliant, celebratory events in Ferrara, Antonionis birthplace.

    Who knows? Maybe therell be some more videos to embed here at FSFF! Hope so! In any case, You can see the first FSFF Antonioni anniversary celebration here: Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth.



    Dr. Laura Rascarolis lecture and discussion. In conversation with Dr. Giuliana Pieri.

    A study day devoted to the late Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) took place on Friday, 26 October, in Egham, co-sponsored by HARC, SMLLC, Media Arts, and the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni.

    The centenary of the birth of this master of European modernist cinema was a chance to bring together a number of scholars and curators who have a particular interest in the interdisciplinary aspects of Antonioni’s oeuvre. Dr Laura Rascaroli (U. of Cork) and Dr John David Rhodes (U. of Sussex), who edited the 2011 volume, Antonioni: Centenary Essays, offered a novel perspective on the work of the Italian film-maker by focusing on the influence of art and architecture respectively. The two talks were preceded by a screening of two rare Antonioni documentaries: Gente del Po (1943-7) and Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo (2004). Documentaries are a very important but often less studied aspect of Antonioni’s production. They also ideally frame his career since Antonioni began as a documentary film maker and ended his cinematic career with his tribute to the master of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti, in a short film of extreme beauty which helped the audience to reflect upon art and tradition. The general discussion that followed covered a number of fascinating topics relating to Antonioni’s practice, including his consistently ‘open’, physical engagement with the human figure, as compared, for example, with that of Jean-Luc Godard.
    Dr. John David Rhodess lecture, discussion and round table with Dr. Laura Rascaroli, Dr. Giuliana Pieri and Prof. James Williams.

    Prof. Dominique Païnis presentation of the retrospective Antonioni And The Arts. The Gaze of Michelangelo and lecture. Introduction by Prof. Williams James.

    The second part of the study day was a lecture by film scholar and curator, Professor Dominique Païni (École du Louvre, Paris), who presented with slides his plans for the forthcoming centenary exhibition on Antonioni in his home-town of Ferrara. Prof. Païni revealed that the physical challenge of the exhibition space, the Renaissance Palazzo dei Diamanti, created the opportunity to present Antonioni’s work as a series of contrasts arising from the idea that cinema is, after all, narrative sculpture in movement, and that shapes are born out of the most basic contrast, that of light and dark. Both the lecture and ensuing discussion brought into focus a series of important characteristics of the work of Antonioni: the identification of women and the nation, ideal masculinity and Italian art and tradition, the critique of humanism and the classical heritage, and the ambiguous relationship between Antonioni and Italy’s post-war tradition of social and political engagement (impegno) which characterised the work of many of his contemporaries working in film and literature.
    A few reflections with Professor Dominique Païni. Translation in English by Alix Agret.
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