On the Cinema of Sharon Lockhart videos and essays

Image from Teatro Amazonas (Sharon Lockhart, 1999)

Film Studies For Free was rather inspired by a characteristically excellent blog essay by Srikanth Srinivasan on the films of Sharon Lockhart (thanks to David Hudson for the tip off). So heres a quick cluster of links to some wonderful Lockhart resources -- videos and essays -- available online in openly accessible forms. If anyone knows of any other high quality online material about this artist, please let FSFF know. 

Sharon Lockhart interview, Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International

Blending rigorous aesthetic concerns with an anthropologists sensibility to community engagement and observation, Sharon Lockhart uses film and photography to create poignant, beautiful, and intimate portraits. She carefully manipulates formal elements as she explores certain concepts with regularity: portraiture, the relationship between photography and film, and the combination of fictive or choreographed performances with unscripted, intimate moments. The film Pine Flat and the accompanying color photographs Pine Flat Portrait Studio (both from 2005) present a spare, meditative series of filmic and photographic portraits of a group of children the artist came to know during her nearly four-year stay in Pine Flat, California. Pine Flat is a two-part film focusing on children and adolescents interacting in the sublime landscape surrounding this small rural community. Its determinedly languid pace engages the viewer in a self-conscious reflection on the process of looking and offers a meditation on the subjective experience of time, particularly as an aspect of childrens lives.

 Sharon Lockhart and James Benning: Walker Art Gallery 109 mins 
(discussion begins after 8 mins)

Although a generation apart, filmmakers Sharon Lockhart and James Benning have cited each others work as an important influence on their own practice. Join them for a conversation about the process of creating a picture of America and California in particular—that focuses on Lockharts Pine Flat (2005) and films from Bennings California Trilogy (20002001). Pine Flat is Lockharts first project to examine American culture. Bennings 30-year filmmaking career includes more than 36 films. He teaches film/video at the California Institute of the Arts. / Moderated by Walker director Kathy Halbreich. / Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat.

• Girish Shambu, Experiments In Fact And Fiction: The Films Of Sharon Lockhart, Senses of Cinema, 17, 2001
• Sharon Lockhart: Teatro Amazonas, Absolute Arts, 2000
• Sharon Lockarts Teatro Amazonas (1999) and Lunch Break (2009) online at UbuWeb
• Srikanth Srinivasan, The Films of Sharon Lockhart, The Seventh Art, September 4, 2010

I sat through all 99 minutes of Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide, shown in a special “Focus” on “40 years of Berlin’s Forum. I knew in advance that there were only two shots in Lockhart’s HD work, so, naturally, I was apprehensive. Remarkably, most of the 100 or so spectators who attended the 10:00 am public screening were also there at the end. Only one human character appears in Double Tide, Jen Casad, a clam digger, and a very few birds. The first shot occurs early morning, and the second late afternoon, and at each low tide, we see Ms Casad enter the static frame with her floating clam basket, ready to search beneath the shallow water. The sound would appear to be direct, it is certainly natural, and, although the camera never moves, the frame is never static. We begin to appreciate all of the effort the clam digger puts into her work, while the fog in the background lifts then reappears, finally to lift again revealing a number of seabirds doing their own search for food. The second shot reveals that we are not looking out to sea at all, but at a forested inlet, and, with the sun setting off-frame left, we can appreciate the changing of the light, and again marvel at the sounds as well as sights of nature. [Peter Rist, ...BAFICI..., Offscreen, Vol. 14, Issue 3, 2010]

I would like here to invoke Sharon Lockharts film Kahlil Haper-Bowers (1993), because it seems to me a brilliant analysis of this visual panic, this disruption of the visual field that lies at the foundation of heteronormative visuality.* In Lockharts film, the body of a young boy, who faces the camera directly, gradually begins to display what at first seem slight discolorations or abrasions of the skin. The film, which gives the impression of being a medical, diagnostic record of a series of clinical visits over time, hovers intently at the point of indistinctness: what are these dark shadows on the skin? Bruises? Lesions? Are they real, genuine dermatological symptoms–or just stage make-up? And, of what condition are these the symptoms: AIDS–or not? As the marks begin to multiply, Lockhart skillfully intensifies the pressure of the visual field around the deviant body, to the point where the spectator is able to experience the stigmatizing gaze in itself. The film brings all of that gazes contradictory elements into play: the quasi-medical, quasi-legalistic imperative to explore the body intimately and diagnostically; where the diagnostic gaze is at the same time a sadistic, invasive procedure that seeks to brand the body it explores; where at the point or punctum of branding the whole visual field suddenly buckles and bends around;** where instead of the stigma acting as a seal, a cauterizing process, a protection against disease, something seeps through the stigma from its other side, something sickening, like a secretion, the secretion of the secret, something that dissolves the membrane separating us from them, a point of merger where the two sides commingle, a point of infection or contagion; a point that is experienced throughout this process entirely at the level of Galtonesque hallucination, of not being sure what it is, of not being able to apply the normalizing categories for the precise reason that at the very point of the stigma the categories hang suspended, leaving the subject floundering, unable to impose the distinction that was the goal of its activity, losing the distinction, losing it all round, becoming for a moment a subject unable to apply the dividing line that is the founding axiom of the heteronormative order, for the duration of the panic unable to successfully abject what is to be abjected in order for the subject to be, and is instead invaded and attacked, in the ricochet of the brand-become-infection that typifies homophobic panic as a visual field. [Norman Bryson, Todd Hayness Poison and Queer Cinema, Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999]

Read More..

With a twist on puzzle films mind games unreliable narrators spoilers

Latest update May 10, 2010

Image from The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)

Film Studies For Free is a sucker for films and television dramas with a twist, and also a big fan of reading about audiovisual narrative complexity and narrational unreliability. Never one to keep its enthusiasms to itself, heres a little list of some excellent, and openly accessible, online reading of the scholarly kind on those very tricksy topics, and a lovely little short film that FSFF came across on its e-travels, too...

• Gary Bettinson, Effects of the dominant in Secret Window, New Review of Film and Television Studies 6:2 (August 2008)
• Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky and Contemporary Art: Medium and Mediation, Tate Papers, Autumn 2008
  
• Lesley Brill, M. Night Shyamalan: A Preliminary Report, Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008
• Ture Bural, Endland Umpire: A placement of David Lynchs Inland Empire, Perforations, 29, 2007
• Leah A.Cheyne, The Sixth Sense: Humanizing Horror, Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Michel Ciment, Kubrick and the Fantastic, (1982) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)
• T.J. Demos, Moving Images of Globalization, Grey Room 37, Fall 2009, pp. 6–29 
• Jonathan Eig, A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity, from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003
• Thomas Elsaesser, The Mind-Game Film in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)
• Thomas Elsaesser, "Performative Self-Contradictions Michael Hanekes Mind Games," in Roy Grundmann (ed), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
• Jim Emerson, Head Trips: Movies Inside the Skull, RogerEbert.com, January 1, 2005 
• Jim Emerson, Donnie Darko in his minds eye (One little boy, one little man), RogerEbert.com, November 2, 2004
  
• Jim Emerson, Birth of a Buñuelian Notion, Scanners, June 15, 2006
• Jim Emerson, Fight Club: Punching in the Dark, RogerEbert.com, October 25, 1999
• Jim Emerson, Fight Club: I Am Jacks Manic-Depression, Scanners, July 22, 2008
• Domènec Font, In the fabric of time, Formats, No. 5, 2009 
• Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, “Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption and Rethinking Textuality” Particip@tions Volume 4, Issue 1 (May 2007)
• Coral Houtman, Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense, Scope, November 2004
• New Kathryn Muriel Kang, Patch and reboot in Memento, in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)
• Jung-In Kwon, Memory Simulated, Journal of Moving Image Studies, Fall 2003 
• Erlend Lavik , "Changing Narratives: Five Essays on Hollywood History", PhD Thesis, University of Bergen, 2007
• Kia Lindroos, Non-Linear Narrative As a Form of Political Action: Viewing Chris Marker’s Film Sans Soleil, ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Mannheim Workshop: THE POLITICAL USES OF NARRATIVE With Maureen Whitebrook and Fabrice Larat (date unknown)
• Todd McGowan, "The Violence of Creation in The Prestige", Žižek and Cinema - IJŽS Vol 1.3, 2007
• Jason Mittell, Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television", The Velvet Light Trap #58, Fall 2006 
• Laura Rascaroli, Scopic Drive, Time Travel and Film Spectatorship in Gilliams Twelve Monkeys and Bigelows Strange Days, Kinema, 15 (Spring 2001)
• Laurence A. Rickels, Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time, Other Voices, v.2, n.2 (March 2002)
• Laura Schuster, “What does a scanner see?” Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film", Conference paper: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberpunk and Science Fiction, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, July 1-3, 2008
• Laura Schuster , "The Trouble with Memory: Reco(r)ding the Mind in Code 46", Conference paper: Digital Memories, Salzburg, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, March 17-19, 2009
• Aaron Smuts, Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002
• New Aaron Smuts, Sympathetic spectators: Roman Polanskis Le Locataire (The Tenant, 1976),  Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 3, 2002
• Donato Totaro, Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 1: The Long Take., Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Donato Totaro, Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 2: Mise en Scène, Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Donato Totaro, Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008, Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009
• Dennis Tredy, Shadows of Shadows - Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: J. Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), D. Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and A. Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999), E-rea, 2.1, 2004
• Andrew V. Uroskie, La Jetée en Spirale: Robert Smithson’s Stratigraphic Cinema, Grey Room 19, Spring 2005, pp. 54–79

Quiet Work by Sean Martin, 2007 (also see here)

"A short film about gardens and gardening, as narrated by my Mother (an unreliable narrator!). Inspired a little by the home movie sequence in Tarkovskys Solaris, and also the Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait. Its in stereo. The title is from the poem by Matthew Arnold".

 

Read More..

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

Read More..

10th Anniversary Issue of PARTICIPATIONS on Fan Studies and Audience Interaction and Participation

Screenshot extract from Ten years old - and ready to try new things, an editorial by Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull in the the tenth anniversary issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception  Studies

Film Studies For Free today wishes a very happy 10th year in online existence to the remarkable open access venture that is Participations. What a great achievement! The journal is stronger and more impressive than ever, as the below, very high quality (and enormous), latest issue -- on fan studies, and audience interaction and participation -- testifies

FSFF somewhat cheekily embeds the above screenshot from the opening part of this issues editorial, for its readers, as in it joint editors Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull raise some important matters concerning the long term viability and success of a journal like this. The editors are choosing to respond to these by recasting the journal in a number of interesting ways - you can read about these at greater length here.

If you are working in this area, now would be a really good time to consider what you would want from Participations in the years ahead. Feel free to post comments here, or contact the editors here.

Heres to the next ten years, Participations! And thank you.


Participations, Volume 10, Issue 1, (May 2013)

• Editorial by Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull (Joint Editors): Ten years old - and ready to try new things

Articles

• Bradby, Barbara: Our affair with Mila Kunis: A group ethnography of cinema-going and the male gaze’ Haslop, Craig: "I certainly wouldnt want to be portrayed as a boring straight person": Torchwood, meaning-making and the performance of gender and sexual identities

Special Section: The Fan Studies Network - new connections, new research

• Bennett, Lucy & Tom Phillips: An introduction: The Fan Studies Network - new connections, new research
• Booth, Paul & Peter Kelly: The changing faces of Doctor Who fandom: New fans, new technologies, old practices?
• Busse, Kristina: Geek hierarchies, boundary policing, and the gendering of the good fan
• Chin, Bertha & Lori Hitchcock Morimoto: Towards a theory of transcultural fandom
• Ellison, Hannah: Submissives, Nekos and Futanaris: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Glee Kink Meme
• Hills, Matt: Fiskes textual productivity and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction?
• Lamerichs, Nicolle: The cultural dynamic of doujinshi and cosplay: Local anime fandom in Japan, USA and Europe
• Pett, Emma: "Hey! Hey! Ive seen this one, Ive seen this one. Its a classic!": Nostalgia, repeat viewing and cult performance in Back to the Future
• Proctor, William: "Holy crap, more Star Wars! More Star Wars? What if theyre crap?": Disney, Lucasfilm and Star Wars online fandom in the 21st century
• Sandvoss, Cornel: Toward an understanding of political enthusiasm as media fandom: Blogging, fan productivity and affect in American politics
• Whiteman, Natasha, Joanne Metivier: From post-object to "Zombie" fandoms: The "deaths" of online fan communities and what they say about us

FSN Forum Discussion

• Bury, Rhiannon, Ruth Deller, Adam Greenwood & Bethan Jones: From Usenet to Tumblr: The changing role of social media
• McCulloch, Richard, Virginia Crisp, Jon Hickman & Stephanie Janes: Of proprietors and poachers: Fandom as negotiated brand ownership
• Freund, Katharina & Dianna Fielding: Research ethics in fan studies
• Jones, Bethan & Lucy Bennett: Blurring boundaries, crossing divides: An interview with Will Brooker
• Lozano Delmar, Javier, Victor Hernández-Santaolalla & Marina Ramos: Fandom generated content: An approach to the concept of fanadvertising
• Sturm, Damion & Andrew McKinney: Affective hyper-consumption and immaterial labors of love: Theorizing sport fandom in the age of new media

Special Section: COST - audience interaction & participation

• Damásio, Manuel José, Mélanie Bourdaa, Bozena I. Mierzejewska, Ana Milojević, José Manuel Noguera, Birgit Stark, Lucia Vesnić-Alujević & Igor Vobič: Editors introduction: Stakeholder essays on audience interaction and participation
• Stark, Birgit & Andy Kaltenbrunner: There is no such thing as a convergence continuum aiming towards the perfect solution
• Stark, Birgit & Ina von Holly: Social media is not a threat but a reward for companies!
• Haas, Josefa: New tools and scenes for the media play
• Nyirő, Nóra & Agnes Urban: Effects of audience participation in CSO communication
• Marmino, Michele, Mario Petitto & Andrea Pinchera: CSOs communication strategies and audience participation
• Joye, Stijn & Philippe Henon: Activating the audience in times of compassion fatigue
• Vozab, Dina, Eugen Jakovčić & Saša Šegrt: Croatian civil society and media from the perspective of two civil society organisations
• Harrison, Teresa: The "audience" as participative, idea generating, decision making citizens: will they transform government?
• Dahlgren, Peter: From public to civic intellectuals via online cultures
• Harrington, Stephen, Tim Highfield & Axel Bruns: More than a backchannel: Twitter and television
• García de Torres, Elvira: Audience territory
• Scolari, Carlos: Lost in the borderlines between user-generated content and the cultural industry
• Zamora, Rocío & Wayne Wanta: The influence of a mediating source – my friend – is now spreading the influence to others who may not have seen the news reports
• Vobič, Igor: Rethinking social life of radio news: Slovenian public radio journalists perceptions of audience interactivity
• Krstić, Aleksandra: When the audience changes a journalist
• Torres da Silva, Marisa: Professional views on letters-to-the-editor as a means of audience participation
• Vesnić-Alujević, Lucia: Online strategies of members of the European parliament
• Hänska-Ahy, Maximillian, Claire Wardle & Malachy Browne: Social media & journalism: Reporting the world through user generated content
• Milojević, Ana, Jelena Kleut & James Ball: Conversational style of journalism
• Milojević, Ana & Steve Herrmannl: Journalism taking up a curatorial role
• Maretić, Meri & Ante Babić: New political communication
• Buchanan, Margot & Fiona Hyslop: Transforming audiences, transforming audience expectations?
• Gallego, Manuel Javier Callejo & Convadonga Fernández: Producing information, producing and monitoring communication

Reviews

• Benwell, Bethan, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (eds.): Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception’ (Reviewed by Pinar Sadar)
• Jacobs, Katrien: Peoples Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet’ (Reviewed by Giovanna Maina)
• Lang, Anouk (ed.): From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the turn of the twenty-first century’ (Reviewed by Julian McDougall)
• Rudolph, Jennifer Domino: Embodying Latino Masculinities: Producing Masculatinidad’ (Reviewed by Victoria Kearley)

Read More..

On Todd Haynes Happy Independence Day!

Film Studies For Free is off on its annual holiday. 
Back in two weeks. Hasta entonces, lectores queridos

Director Todd Haynes discusses his film Far From Heaven following a screening in the Walker Cinema (November 19, 2005)

Double Indemnity: Todd Haynes/Edward Hopper  

Richard Dyer, Professor of Film Studies at University of Warwick and author of White and The Matter of Images will join Todd Haynes to discuss issues raised by his work and the Hopper film programme at the Tate Modern, London, June 4, 2004.

In the first of a two-part interview, Reel Report speaks to maverick American director Todd Haynes about his latest movie Im Not There, an unconventional rock biopic about the life of music legend Bob Dylan. Haynes talks about the challenges of telling Dylans story, casting the six very different actors who play Dylan, and how he plans to take on the Bush administration with his next project (December 7, 2007).

In the second part of Reel Reports two-part interview with Todd Haynes, director of Im Not There, the rock biopic about the life of Bob Dylan, we talk more generally about aspects of his filmmaking. In particular we ask him about his unique way of story-telling, his approach to the concept of film genres and whether his sexuality has an effect on his ability to interpret characters (December 18, 2007).

On this very appropriate day, Film Studies For Free honours Todd Haynes, a true and truly wonderful American independent filmmaker, with links, above and below, to great videos and many freely accessible and high quality online studies of his work.

Haynes is a big favourite at this blog, and why wouldnt he be as one of the most "cinema-studies literate" filmmakers working today. Heres looking forward to his forthcoming reworking of that Film Studies classic Mildred Pierce...

• Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven, in The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 (scroll to p. 194)
• Zélie Asava, Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There, Widescreen Journal, No. 2, 2010
• Norman Bryson, Todd Hayness Poison and Queer Cinema, Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999
• Rachel Carroll, Toxic shock: Gendered environments and embodied knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe], Transformations, Issue 14, March 2007
• Donald L. Carveth and Jean Hantman Carveth, Fugitives From Guilt: Postmodern De-Moralization and the New Hysterias, March 2007
• Adrian Danks,“… I’m Gone”; or Seven Characters in Search of an Exit: Some Reflections on Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008
• Amelia DeFalco, A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (2004)
• Anthony Enns, "A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes Safe, Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• Laura E. Felschow, Todd Haynes: the Public, the Private, and the Performative, PhD Thesis, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, February 1, 2009
• Julie Grossman, “The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling [On Todd Haynes Safe], Other Voices 2.3 January 2005
• Todd Hayness film: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) 
  
• Lynne Joyrich, Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven, Camera Obscura, 57, Volume 19, Number 3, 2004
• Alexandra Juhasz, From the Scenes to Queens: Genre, AIDS, and Queer Love, 2007 
• Rose Ellen Lessy, Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes’s Safe, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4):291–308, 2006
• Niall Richardson, Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Hayness Far From Heaven, Scope, Issue 6, October 2006
• Rebecca Scherr, (Not) queering “white vision” in Far from Heaven and Transamerica, Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 
• David L. Smith, True, Valid Death Off a Movie Screen: Todd Haynes Im Not There, Journal of Religion and Film,  Vol. 12, No. 2, 2008
• Sunny Stalter, Down With Love/Far From Heaven, Scope, May 2004
• Nick Stevenson, What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk, Sociological Research Online, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005
• Mary Traester, Hysteria and Ruin: Feminine Immobility And the Problem of Representation in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, COLT Symposium, April 15, 2008
• Keith Uhlich, Todd Haynes, Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Nicholas de Villiers, Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 57, August 2007
• Sharon Willis, Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk, Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003

 Cornell Cinema events May 6, 2008

Read More..

Links on videographical film criticism editing intensified continuity chaos cinema hapticity and post cinematic affect

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT?

A FILMANALYTICAL video collage, made by Catherine Grant

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? offers a brief audiovisual exploration of issues of sensuous proximity, contiguity or contact in experiencing or studying films - what theorist Laura U. Marks called hapticity. It quotes from Marks essay Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes [in FRAMEWORK: the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004, pp. 79-82], as well as from Ingmar Bergmans 1966 film PERSONA (cinematography by Sven Nykvist). The music is excerpted from Robert Lippok and Beatrice Martinis BRANCHES, available at the Free Music Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can read an accompanying written essay about this video and videographic film studies here.

A ragbag of links, today, at Film Studies For Free. But this blog wanted to flag up some recently published, and curiously related, audiovisual items of possible interest, together with some associated written resources.

First up, is the video above, the latest of FSFFs videographic film studies experiments. Compared with FSFFs other videos, this film-theoretical one turned out to be a close kin of two earlier video primers (on Gilda, film noir, gender and performance and on Elizabeth Taylor, framing and child stardom/performance). As befits primers, rather than

aiming to generate completely new insights, [these rich text objects attempt], within the time-space of the average YouTube fan clip, to assemble and combine quotations from existing film scholarship on [their topics] with sequences from the film in question in order to provide a meaningful, scholarly and affective, immersive experience. [FSFF, April 7, 2011]

If you are beginning to be invested in, or just mildly curious about, the possibilities of videographic film criticism and film theory, then do read Touching the Film Object? Notes on the Haptic in Videographical Film Studies by Catherine Grant at FSFFs sister blog Filmanalytical, and also check out further links and thoughts here.

Next up, a pointer to an exciting, film-theory related, theme week at the great website In Media Res on Steven Shaviros Post-Cinematic Affect, running between August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011.

There are a couple of interesting entries up already, with very lively comments streams. Further links will be added below as the posts go live. In the meantime, you can read a lengthy excerpt from Shaviros book on Post-Cinematic Affect here. And do visit his blog where you will find lots more material from this work.

• Cinemas Exhaustion and the Vitality ... by Elena del Rio
• Post-Cinematic Effects by Paul Bowman
• A hair of the dog that bit us by Adrian Ivakhiv
• Fragments of unconscious by Patricia MacCormack
• Steven Shaviro Presents: A response to the week

Finally, FSFF wanted to make sure that its own readers were alerted to a very lively debate on intensified continuity and chaos cinema in relation to the action film (broadly defined) that has sprung up online as a result of the publication of a two part video essay on those topics at the wonderful new (video-essay-rich) website PressPlay, curated by film critic and video essayist extraordinaire Matt Zoller Seitz. The Chaos Cinema essay, embedded below, is by a young film scholar Matthias Stork and is well worth a look.

Below the videos, FSFF has linked to related online, scholarly and journalistic items treating substantially similar issues as Chaos Cinema, published before his essay, as well as to ones produced directly in response to Storks work.

Enjoy! 

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork.

The video essay Chaos Cinema, administered by Indiewires journalistic blog PRESS PLAY, examines the extreme aesthetic principles of 21st century action films. These films operate on techniques that, while derived from classical cinema, threaten to shatter the established continuity formula. Chaos reigns in image and sound. Part 1 contrasts traditional action films with chaotic ones and takes a close look at the "sound" track, especially its use in car chases.

Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork.

Part 2 takes a look at the chaotic style in dialogue scenes, musicals, "shaky-cam" extravaganzas and mourns the rich history of early cinema.

• David Bordwell, Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film, originally in Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 16-28
• David Bordwell, Intensified Continuity Revisited, Observations of Film Art, May 2007
• David Bordwell, Unsteadicam Chronicles, Observations on Film Art, August 17, 2007
• David Bordwell, Bond vs. Chan: Jackie shows how it’s done, Observations on Film Art, September 15, 2010
  
• Steven Boone, Blind Fury: Notes on Chaos Cinema, PressPlay, August 27, 2011
• Chris Cagle, More on (Post-)Classicism, Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 18, 2007
• Jim Emerson, Agents of Chaos, Scanners, August 23, 2011
• Jim Emerson, The Architecture of Gravity, Scanners, January 20, 2009
• Jim Emerson, Bye, Sally -- Sally Menke, 1953 - 2010, Scanners, September 28, 2010
• Catherine Grant, Seeing the join: on film editing, Film Studies For Free, April 16, 2010
• Ian Grey, The Art of Chaos Cinema, PressPlay, August 26, 2011
• Ambrose Heron, Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the AVID, Film Detail, August 23, 2011
• Kevin Howley, Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction, Scope May 2004
• Neal King, Secret Agency in Mainstream Postmodern Cinema, Postmodern Culture, 18.3, 2008 
• Jakob Isak Nielsen, Structural completeness in The War Is Over, Short Film Studies, 1.1, 2010
• Catherine ORawe, More more Moro: Music and montage in Romanzo criminale, the italianist 29 · 2009 · 214-226
• Steven Shaviro, Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films, The Pinocchio Theory, May 12, 2010
• Matthias Stork, Chaos Cinema: The decline and fall of action filmmaking, PressPlay, August 22, 2011
• James Udden, Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuaron’s Film Aesthetics in the Shadow of Globalization, Style, Volume 43, No. 1, Spring 2009
• Matt Zoller Seitz, Why are so many modern action movies terrible?, PressPlay, August 25, 2011

Read More..

New JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE on Alternative cinemas in India

Cover of JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE 10, 2012 (Alternative cinemas in India)

A new issue of Journal of the Moving Image Online, a great, online, open access publication, has hit the e-stands!

Film Studies For Free heard the news via film scholar and JMI editor Moinak Biswas, who has contributed a number of very fine pieces to Volume 10. There are also excellent articles on Mani Kaul (see also FSFFs memorial entry on this fine filmmaker), and on the brilliant MediaLab, a fantastic initiative by Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University (also the publishers of JMI), by Anustup Bastu.

All the contents are linked to below. Great work!

• Editorial by Moinak Biswas
• The Persistence of Rajasthan in Indian Cinema : One Region, So Many Views by Kaushik Bhaumik (Deputy Director, Osians Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, New Delhi)
• John Abraham : Cinema and the Idea of the Collective by Rajan Kurai Krishnan (Senior Research Fellow, IDCR, Loyola College, Chennai)
• Alternative Cinema : Response of Indian Film Studies by Manas Ghosh (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• The Story of Arri : Imagined Landscapes, Emergent Technologies and Bengali Cinema by Madhuja Mukherjee (Associate Professor and Head, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Spectres of the New Wave : The State of the Work of Mourning, and the New Cinema Aesthetic in a Regional Industry by Parichay Patra (Student, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Authoring Space, Gender and the Past : A Film Called Shubho Mahurat by Sumit Dey (Student, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Mani Kaul : DU : KH ke Prakar by Amrit Gangar
• Incomplete Testimonies : Tapan Sinha by Moinak Biswas (Associate Professor, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• A Memorialization Without Destinying : A Revisitation of JU Media Labs National Instruments Project Archive by Anustup Basu (Associate Professor of English, Cinema and Media, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Read More..

Spectators of our Lives Alexander Kluge Studies on his 80th Birthday

Alexander Kluge discusses the role of montage (excerpt from Schnitte in Raum und Zeit)

If I feel myself as the producer of my life, then I am unhappy. So I would rather be a spectator of my life. I would rather change my life this way since I cannot change it in society. So at night I see films that are different from my experiences during the day. Thus there is a strict separation between experience and the cinema. That is the obstacle for our films. For we are people of the 60s, and we do not believe in the opposition between experience and fiction. –- Alexander Kluge, 1988  [cited by Jonathan Rosenbaum]

Its Alexander Kluges 80th birthday and Film Studies For Free is delighted to celebrate his astonishing and hugely important career with its own little e-festschrift of scholarly links - see below.

If you love and value Kluges films as much as FSFF does, youll want to read the fine post that David Hudson has composed in the German filmmakers honour at the MUBI Notebook full of fascinating online reading, including news of Kluges latest book out, Das fünfte Buch - Neue Lebensläufe. 402 Geschichten.

FSFFs own assembly, from the great video above to the list of written studies below, contains links to the contents of a fabulous new openly accessible book on Kluges work -- one of the best edited (by Tara Forrest) collections FSFF has ever had the pleasure of reading -- which has just been published by the fantastic scholars at Amsterdam University Press.

• Nicole Brenez, T. W. Adorno: cinema in spite of itself—but cinema all the same, Cultural Studies Review, 13.1 March 2007
• Caryl Flynn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)
• Tara Forrest, Alexander Kluge : Raw Materials for the Imagination (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)
• Introduction
• Editor’s Introduction
• The Stubborn Persistence of Alexander Kluge by Thomas Elsaesser
• On Film and the Public Sphere by Alexander Kluge
• Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to GERMANY IN AUTUMN by Miriam Hansen 
• ‘"What is Different is Good": Women and Femininity in the Films of Alexander Kluge by Heide Schlüpmann
• In Search of Germany: Alexander Kluge’s THE PATRIOT by Anton Kaes
• Alexander Kluge and German History: "The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8.4.1945"’ by David Roberts
• The Air Raid on Halberstadt, 8 April 1945 (extract) by Alexander Kluge
• Construction Site Film: Kluge’s Idea of Realism and His Short Films by Eike Friedrich Wenzel
• The Sharpest Ideology: That Reality Appeals to its Realistic Character by Alexander Kluge
• Debate on the Documentary Film: Conversation with Klaus Eder, 1980 by Alexander Kluge and Klaus Eder
• Undoing Act 5: History, Bodies and Operatic Remains in THE POWER OF EMOTION by Caryl Flinn
• ‘Feelings Can Move Mountains ...’: An Interview with Alexander Kluge on the Film THE POWER OF EMOTION by Florian Hopf
• Alexander Kluge’s Phantom of the Opera by Gertrud Koch
• An Analytic Storyteller in the Course of Time by Andreas Huyssen
• The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings by Alexander Kluge
• At the 2003 International Security Conference by Alexander Kluge
• Raw Materials for the Imagination: Kluge’s Work for Television by Tara Forrest
• Television and Obstinacy by Christian Schulte
• Reframing Islam in Television: Alexander Kluge’s Interviews on Islam and Terrorism since 9/11 by Tim Grünewald
• In the Real Time of Feelings: Interview with Alexander Kluge by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Giaco Schiesser
• Character Armour and Mobile Warfare by Alexander Kluge and Heiner Müller
• Jeff Mills: Godfather of Techno by Alexander Kluge and Jeff Mills
• Tsunami of Emotion: On Puccini’s Tosca by Alexander Kluge and Joseph Vogl
• Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema by Miriam Hansen
• ‘All Things Are Enchanted Human Beings’: Remarks on Alexander Kluge’s NEWS FROM IDEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY by Christian Schulte
• Terri Ginsberg, Bordering on Disaster: Toward an Epistemology of Divided Cinematic Space, Spectator 29.1 (Spring 2009): 30-36 
• Angelos Koutsourakis, Brecht Today: Interview with Alexander Kluge, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2011
• Kevin B Lee, Abschied von gestern – (Anita G.) / Yesterday Girl (1966, dir. Alexander Kluge), Shooting Down Pictures, January 18, 2010
• Lisa McDonald, Baroque Inclinations, Cultural Studies Review, 14, September 2008
• Christopher Pavsek, The Stubborn Utopian: The Films of Alexander Kluge, Cinema Scope, 32, 2011 
• Julia Vassilieva, Capital and Co.: Kluge/Eisenstein/Marx, Screening the Past, 8, 2011

Read More..

On Kazuo Hara and Japanese Documentary Film

Kazuo Hara and Japanese Film Studies
Videoed symposium (held on May 3, 2009) featuring three of the top film studies scholars from around the US discussing Kazuo Haras body of work (including The Emperors Naked Army Marches On (1987) and Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974) and the future of Japanese film studies at universities worldwide, followed by comments by Kazuo Hara. This event was a part of the UC Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies 50th Anniversary program of events. Co-sponsored by: Center for Japanese Studies and Pacific Film Archive. With Markus Nornes, Aaron Gerow, Akira Mizuta Lippit, and Miryam Sas

Western documentary film theory focuses on the relationship of signified and signifier raked by the subjectivities of producer and spectators. Because these two groups approach the referent only through the signification system, the theory closes off discussion of the profilmic world. ... Japanese theoretical and popular discourses do not suffer from this linguistic confusion between subject and object. In post-1960 film theory and filmmaking, it is precisely the relationship between subject and referent that produces the sign. Where the American filmmaker creates a sign from a referent in the world, the Japanese filmmaker’s intimate interaction with the referent leaves a signifying trace we call a documentary film. It is a subtle but decisive difference one would have difficulty articulating with the critical tools of contemporary documentary theory outside of Japan. [Abé Mark Nornes, Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, cited by Charles Fairbanks, 2003, p. 11]

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

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

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

• The Kazuo Hara production diary (archived version) (Link via Yusef Sayed ‏[@InsaneHorizon]) 

• Abé Mark Nornes, X-Treme Private Documentary: Michael Moore and Kazuo Hara, Film (University of Michigan), 2007
• Jeffrey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff, The Memory of War: Hara Kazuos "The Emperors Naked Army Marches On"(London: Flicks Books, 1998)
• Kenneth Ruoff, Filming at the Margins: The Documentaries of Hara Kazuo, Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound no. 16 (Spring 1993), 115-126
• Kenneth Ruoff, "Japans Outlaw Filmmaker: An Interview with Hara Kazuo," with Kenneth Ruoff, Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound, no. 16 (Spring 1993), 103-113

Also see:

• Film of the Month entry on Kazuo Haras The Emperors Naked Army Marches On (thanks to Girish Shambu)
• Dan Edwards, Breaking the doco mould, Realtime 63, 2004
  
• Catherine Grant, On Japanese Cinema, Film Studies For Free, July 27, 2010
• Tetsuaki Matsue, Extremes of Independence, Vertigo, 3.4, 2007
• Midnight Eyes Kazuo Hara resources

Read More..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", Free e-Text at Project Gutenberg, 1995

• David Auerbach, Occurrences at Owl Creek Bridge, Waggish, June 16, 2007
• David Auerbach, Occurrences at Owl Creek Bridge: Beyond the Zeroes, Waggish, August 12, 2007
• Aviva Briefel, What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film, Narrative, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2009, pp. 95-108
• Jonathan Eig, A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity, from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003
• Don A. Habibi, The Magic Moment: the Liminal, Distended Time Flashforward of Ambrose Bierce,  The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005
• Don Asher Habibi, The experience of a lifetime: philosophical reflections on a narrative device of Ambrose Bierce, Studies in the Humanities; 12/1/2002
• Richard J. Hand, Reanimating Peyton Farquhar: the adaptations of Ambrose Bierces An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in American Radio and Television, The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005
• Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, Lost Finale and the Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Parallel, Wordsushi, May 25, 2010
• Justine Smith, Robert Enrico’s Civil War Trilogy based on stories by Ambrose Bierce, House of Mirth and Movies, May 11, 2010
• Alanna Thain, Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynchs Lost Highway, Invisible Culture, Issue 8, 2004
• Peter Wilshire, Dead in the Water? Dream and Reality in Carnival of Souls: the Eternal Circle of Life and Death, Offscreen Journal, April 30, 2007

Read More..