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".

 

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Film Studies with added awesomeness

He knows his stuff...

Hey readers.... A really quick link today, one specially for the end of a long and tiring teaching term. Film Studies For Free loves this Tumblr by girldetective and hopes that you will find it stimulating, too.

It’s all part of the Hey Girl/Ryan Gosling Tumblr meme (the origins of which can be found here). In a nutshell, following the success of Danielle Henderson’s blog, Feminist Ryan Gosling (which, in turn, was a derivative of the blog F[***] Yeah Ryan Gosling), many other bloggers rehashed the format using references to different fields of study, including Typography, International Development and Rhetoric. Being the nerdy cinephile that I am, I kept hoping that somebody would create a Film Studies version of the meme, but when that didn’t happen, I decided to just make one myself. [girldetectives mission statement]

Also, must read: Anne Helen Petersen of Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style on the Gosling meme.

Hat tip to Nelson D. (aka @nelly061) for passing the link onto FSFF.

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Once more with paranoia conspiracy film studies

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.

• Brenda Austin-Smith, The Conversation, Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001
• Emilia Bakola, The Paranoiacs Who Knew Too Much: Postmodern Knowledge and Hollywood Cinema, PhD Thesis, Stony Brook University, 2007
• Emily Bakola, How to Do Conspiracy Theory with Fetishism: The Myth of the “Slain King”, Gramma, 2008
• Karyn Ball, Hitchcocks "Material Whirl", Culture Machine Reviews, 2006
• Matthew David Barber, Shooting the President: The Depiction of the American Presidency on Film and Television from John F. Kennedy to Josiah Bartlet, PhD Thesis, University of Exeter, 2009
• Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism, New Political Science, Volume 28, Number 3, September 2006
• Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, Postmodern Cinema and Hollywood Culture in an Age of Corporate Colonization, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2001
• David Bordwell, Watching a movie, page by page [on The Ghost Writer and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo], Observations of Film Art, May 10, 2010
• Pat Brereton , Hollywood Representations of Irish Journalism: A Case Study of Veronica Guerin, Dublin Institute of Technology School of Media Articles, 2009
• James Amos Burton, Film, History and Cultural Memory: Cinematic Representations of Vietnam-Era America during the Culture Wars, 1987-1995, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2007
• Stephanie Chieh-Ying Chong, The Anthropomorphization of Law: Fictional Judges and Lawyers in Contemporary North American and European Settings, PhD Thesis, University of Toronto, 2009 
• William Clark , The Academy Awards [review of The New American Cinema, by John Lewis, ed.], Variant, 2.10, 2000
• Graham Coulter-Smith and Maurice Owen, Introduction, Art in the Age of Terrorism (Paul Holberton publishing/University of Washington Press, 2005)
• David Crawford, Realism vs. Reality TV in the War on Terror: Artworks as Models of Interpretation, Geometer, January 19, 2009
• Brenda Cromb, War Films Without War: The Gulf War at the Movies, Cinephile, vol. 3, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2007
• Adam Curtis, Panel Discussion onTherapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age in association with Routledge and Kings College London, and sponsored by the Body and Soul section of The Times, An Institute of Ideas symposium at King’s College London, 22 November 2003
• Christian Devine, Visionary Paranoia, Bad Subjects, Issue #34, October 1997
• Scott Forsyth , Hollywoods War on the World: the New World Order as Movie, Socialist Register, 1992
• Vincent M. Gaine, ‘"We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM": Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral,Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, Vol 2, No 1 (2009)
• David Greven, Misfortune and Mens Eyes: Voyeurism, Sorrow, and the Homosocial in Three Early Brian De Palma Films, Genders, Issue 49, 2009
• Oscar Guardiola Rivera, Terrorism and the Global Public Sphere, International Law: Revista columbiana de derecho internacional, December 2004
• Steffen Hantke, Germanys secret history: Stefan Ruzowitzkys Anatomie (Anatomy, 2000), Kinoeye, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2001
• John Harkness, The Word, the Flesh, and the Films of David Cronenberg, Cinema Canada, June 1983
• Nicholas Holm, Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: Considering Modalities of Paranoia and Conspiracy in Surveillance Studies, Surveillance & Society 7(1): 36-48, 2009
• Adrian Ivakhiv, Green Film Criticism and Its Futures, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15.2 (Summer 2008)  
• Tom Jennings, The Ill-Health of the State, Variant, 36, Winter 2009
• Tom Jennings, Parcels of Rogues, Variant 35, Summer 2009
• Tom Jennings , Craven New World, Variant, 32, Summer 2008
• Tom Jennings, Rose Coloured Spectacles, Variant, 27, Winter 2006 
• Laura Jones , A Geopolitical Mapping of the Post-9/11 World: Exploring Conspiratorial Knowledge Through Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Manchurian Candidate, Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, Vol. III, 37–57, June 2008
• Orit Kamir, Michael Clayton, Hollywood’s Contemporary Hero-Lawyer: Beyond Outsider Within and Insider Without, Suffolk University Law Review, Vol. XLII: 829, 2009
• Dietmar Kammerer, Video Surveillance in Hollywood Movies, Surveillance and Society - CCTV Special (eds. Norris, McCahill and Wood) 2(2/3): 464-473
• Kathryn Muriel Kang, "Ch. 7: Picture This [scroll to p. 161]", in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)
• 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) 
• Fredric Jameson, Totality as Conspiracy, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (London : British Film Institute, 1992)
• Peter Knight, Conspiracy Theories about 9/11, Centre for International Politics Working Paper Series, No. 34, August 2007
• Robert Koehler, Neo-Fantasies and Ancient Myths: Adam Curtis on The Power of Nightmares, Cinema Scope Issue 23, 2005
• Li Zeng, Horror returns to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and the space of horror , from Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009
• Thomas Y. Levin, Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”, In CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Fronhe and Peter Weibel, 578-93. Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002
• Virginia Luzón Aguado , Film Genre and its Vicissitures: the Case of the Psychothriller, Atlantis, Vol. XXIV Núm. 2 (Junio 2002): 163-72
• Adrian Martin. Driven, Mesh, 18, 2005
• Kyle Ross McDaniel, Reviewing the Image of the Photojournalist in Film [...] from1954 to 2006, MA Thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007
• John S. Nelson, Political Rhetorics for Film: Argument through Experience in War Movies, Poroi, Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2005
• John S. Nelson, Four Forms of Terrorism: Horror, Dystopia, Thriller, and Noir, Poroi, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2003  
• Catherine O’Rawe, More more Moro: Music and montage in Romanzo criminale, The Italianist 29 · 2009 · 214-226 
• Tarla R. Petersen, “National security, and all that it implies…”: Communication and (post-) Cold War culture, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 86, No. 4, 2000
• Katie Ryan, The Circling, Shades and Shadows of Polanskis Chinatown, Cross-sections, The Bruce Hall Academic Journal - Volume II, 2006 
  
• Ian S. Scott, ‘"Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water": Politics, Perceptions and the Pursuit of History in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, European journal of American studies, 2, 2007
• Aaron Smuts, Sympathetic spectators: Roman Polanskis Le Locataire (The Tenant, 1976),  Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 3, 2002
• Matthew Stoddard, Contested Utopias: Ghost in the Shell, Cognitive Mapping, and the Desire for Communism, ImageTexT, Volume 5, Issue 2 (2010)
• Benjamin Strong, All the Presidents Men: Follow the Paper Trai, the L Magazine, May 10, 2010
• Sharon Lin Tay, (2008), long excerpt from ʻUndisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital convergenceʼ, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 79–98
• Henry M. Taylor, The Capgras Syndrome in Film: Don Siegels “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and its Legacy, Vol. 2, May-August 2005
• Bo Kampmann Walther, The art of staying tuned in real-time: remediation in 24, Revista de Comunicação e Cultura, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2003
• John Walton, Film as Urban history: the Case of Chinatown, in Shiel and Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) 
• Jerry White, Hidden Agenda. JFK: Conspiracy thrillers, from Jump Cut, no. 38, June 1993, pp. 14-18
• Mary M. Wiles, Mapping the Contours of Cyborg Space in the Conspiracy Film: The Feminine Ecology of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, Post-Identity, Fall 1997

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