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BFI Pasolini Study Day - Talks Online!

August 27, 2013, 4:06 am
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Screenshot from Porcile/Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969). Listen to Filippo Trentin's talk on this film from the BFI Pasolini Study Day, April 20, 2012. Thanks to Dan North, following its recent film studies podcasts entry, Film Studies For Free learned that all the talks from the British Film Institute's Pasolini Study Day, held on Saturday April 20, 2012, are freely available to listen
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Cult Controversies! New CINE-EXCESS eJournal launches

September 2, 2013, 4:03 am
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Screenshot from The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009). Read Claire Henry's article about this remake of Wes Craven's 1972 film here. Film Studies For Free is scandalously excited to announce the publication of the new peer-reviewed eJournal Cine-Excess. Like the long-running conference and festival, directed by cult film scholar Xavier Mendik, to which it is related, the
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LOLA: Issue 4 on "Walks"; Tourneur, Hitchcock, De Palma, Pacino and much more

September 16, 2013, 4:18 am
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Screen shot from Carlito's Way (Brian De Palma, 1993). Read Adrian Martin's essay on this film in the new issue of LOLA . Film Studies For Free is thrilled to hear that a new rolling issue of LOLA has launched. Issue 4 treats the very cinematic topic of 'Walks' and contains some items (Victor Bruno on lighting effects in Out of the Past, a fine translation of an Alain Bergala essay on Vertigo
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FILMICON: The New Journal That Will Launch a Thousand (Plus) Greek Film Studies

September 16, 2013, 5:12 am
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Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce the launch of Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies. A peer-reviewed, open access and cross-cultural project, its mission (excerpted from, below) is a refreshing, important and timely one, indeed. The lively and original contents of its first issue are also linked to below. FSSF would particularly like to flag up Olga Kourelou's brilliantly
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New CINEPHILE 8.2 on Contemporary Extremism

September 24, 2013, 1:59 am
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Screenshot from 올드보이/Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) What happens to the specificity of the films of the new European extremism and their self-conscious address to the spectator when the category of extremism is opened up, and takes on global dimensions? To what extent is it useful or important to retain this label of a “new extremism” in cinema across these disparate contexts? And how do we
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Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License

October 1, 2013, 7:53 am
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A fascinating and informative excerpt from the audio commentary track on the British Film Institute's brand new Dual Format Edition of RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977). You can find more information about this new video version of the film here and read a new interview with Mulvey about its making here.
Riddles of the Sphinx was made in 1976-7. The film used the Sphinx as an emblem with which to hang a question mark over the Oedipus complex, to illustrate the extent to which it represents a riddle for women committed to Freudian theory but still determined to think about psychoanalysis radically or, as I have said before, with poetic license. Riddles of the Sphinx and Penthesilea, our previous film, used ancient Greece to invoke a mythic point of origin for Western civilization, that had been critically re-affirmed by high culture throughout our history. [... S]ome primitive attraction to the fantasy of origins, a Gordian knot that would suddenly unravel, persisted for me in the Oedipus story, and its special status: belonging to very ancient mythology and to the literature of high Greek civilization, chosen by Freud to name his perception of the founding moment of the human psyche. My interest then concentrated on breaking down the binarism of the before/after opposition, by considering the story as a passage through time, a journey that could metaphorically open out or stretch the Oedipal trajectory through significant details and through its formal, narrational, properties. [Laura Mulvey, 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989, FSFF's emphasis]

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry in honour of one the most important, most brilliant, most influential and hardest-working film and moving image scholars of all time: Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and recently, co-founder of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. Mulvey is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989; second edition, 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996; 2nd ed. 2013), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series, 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006). And she has made six films in collaboration with fellow film theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI, 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980) and with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994)

FSFF's author has a pretty good record in celebrating Mulvey's influence on film studies already, having been lucky enough to take part, earlier this year, in a day devoted to this activity at Birkbeck's Institute of Humanities - an event recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting. The happy occasion for today's eFestschrift, however, is the British Film Institute's release of a new DVD/BluRay disk of Riddles of the Sphinx, the hugely significant and original feminist film Mulvey co-directed and produced in 1976/77 with her partner Wollen (the disk also contains their first film together:Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons [1974]).

To accompany this entryFSFF was honoured to be able to produce a short, exclusive extract of a sequence of its choice from the DVD audio commentary accompanied version (as embedded above). FSFF warmly thanks Laura Mulvey herself, as well as Hannah Maloco and the BFI, whose Production Board thankfully funded Riddles of the Sphinx, for kindly allowing this blog to create such a memorable and instrumental item of openly accessible film studies.

Beneath the BFI's own Riddles of the Sphinx clip (embedded below) -- a commentary free version of substantially the same sequence -- you can find a wonderful listing of links to openly accessible online scholarly work by and about Laura Mulvey. It provides ample testimony, were it needed, as to why she has been, is, and always will be, one of the true greats of our subject - as Michel Foucault probably would have put, a veritable 'founder of discursivity' for our discipline... 




Online written work by Laura Mulvey: 

Online written work by Peter Wollen about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work: 

Online video/audio work by or featuring Laura Mulvey:

Online writing about Laura Mulvey's work:
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Lives on Film: Auto/Biographical Fiction and Documentary Film Studies

October 9, 2013, 4:07 am
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Lizzie Thynne, filmmaker, writer and Senior Lecturer in Media and Film at the University of Sussex, discusses her theoretical and practice research into film biography with FSFF's author. InREFRAME’s interview, as well as her earlier films Child of Mine (Channel Four Television, 1996) and Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (2004), and her written research on biographical, subjective and feminist filmmaking, Thynne talks about her recent experimental documentary On the Border (UK, 2013, 56 minutes), a daughter’s exploration of her Finnish family’s history prompted by the letters, objects, and photographs left in her mother’s apartment. You can find more information about the above video here. Lizzie Thynne's film On the Border is screening today, Wednesday, October 9, at 7pm in The Finnish Church, 33 Albion St, London SE16 7JG – free entry courtesy of the Finnish Church in association with the Anglo-Finnish Society. The screening will be followed by a discussion with participants: Lizzie Thynne, Titus Hjelm (UCL, School of Slavonic Studies) and others.


Film Studies For Free brings you a list of links to open access scholarly and critical resources on the subject of biopics - life (hi)stories on film in a variety of fictional and documentary forms.

This entry is produced to coincide with the publication this week of the above embedded video on film biography, part of FSFF's sister project REFRAME Conversations, a new series of in-depth, open access explorations of media, film, music and cultural studies research, published and shareable on and offline in video/audio formats.

Because of this schedule, preparation of the below list precedes the publication of a great looking new edited collection on The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture by Tom Brown (a friend of this blog - see the entry on direct address here) and Belén Vidal. The two editors have completed a podcast on their project shortly to be uploaded to this website. That great link will be added here later.

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Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University

October 10, 2013, 6:44 am
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Website header and masthead at the incredible Women Film Pioneers Project website

This project began as a search for silent cinema “women film pioneers” who challenged the idea of established great male “pioneers of cinema.” Since researchers found more women than anyone expected to find, one principle came to organize the project: What we  assume never existed is what we invariably find. [About 'Women Film Pioneers Project']
Film Studies For Free is heading away from its computer for a few days but had to rush to publish the essential news of an incredible new website resource: the Women Film Pioneers Project.

WFPP is a new free online database published by Columbia University Libraries’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. The database includes more than 150 career profiles of women who worked during the silent film era as directors, co-directors, scenario writers, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, animal trainers, studio accountants, film company owners, and theatre managers.

A monumental, open access piece of important film historical research and publishing, this first phase of the project places together the Americas, the U.S. in the North and Latin America in the South. The next phases will open up the study of women in other national silent era cinemas: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary,  India, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey,  The United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Yugoslavia.

Clearly this is an archival resource that will also grow as more people know about it and can contribute missing information to it, but the editors have done a truly fantastic job in establishing this resource and populating it with such high quality and significant material already.

Congratulations and many thanks go to the WFPP team led by the brilliant film historian Jane Gaines, whose related book on early cinema, Fictioning Histories: Women Film Pioneers was published by University of Illinois Press in 2009. The project launch will take place at MoMA this Saturday, part of the film exhibition To Save and Project: The 11th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.
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SCREENING THE PAST 37 and LA FURIA UMANA 17

October 21, 2013, 12:43 am
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Film Studies For Free is under the cosh of a few deadlines right now (there are some great things to come at this here open access campaigning website in the next weeks!).

But it has temporarily cast off its work shackles to rush you tidings of two new ejournal issues: the latest Screening the Past, co-edited by Adrian Martin and Anna Dzenis, and replete with Part One of a brilliant dossier on Aesthetic Issues in World Cinemaand a marvellous essay by Nicole Brenez, among other treasures (Hediger, Martin and Tofts, Phelps); and the very welcome return online of the multilingual La furia umana (whose website, and fabulous archive [soon to return fully], were devastated by a malware attack), edited by Toni D'Angela and replete with dossiers on Joseph Losey and Bertrand Bonello, and a marvelous essay by Nicole Brenez, among other treasures (Ramani, Calder Williams, Small, to cite just some anglophone ones)!

Scroll down for all the wonderful contents. FSFF will be back properly soon!


SCREENING THE PAST 37, 2013

Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema (Part 1)
First Release
Reviews
 Classics and Re-runs

LA FURIA UMANA 17, 2013

Editorial:T.D. / La critique comme concaténation

Confidential report
D'UNE CRITIQUE DE CINÉMA DIGNE DE SON NOM (EN FRANCE)
NICOLE BRENEZ / La Critique comme concept, exigence et praxis

JOSEPH LOSEY
BERTRAND BONELLO
Prima linea
Histoires du cinéma
L'occhio che uccide
Flaming creatures
The new world
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Studying Movie Magazines and Fan Culture! Online Research and Methodology Resources. And LANTERN!

October 28, 2013, 6:08 am
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 A Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine by Tamar Jeffers McDonald with Catherine Grant (on shaky cam!).
With her customary wit and aplomb, Jeffers McDonald shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. See below for further information about the video, as well as for a discussion about how Jeffers McDonald used resources, like the one showcased in the video, in research for her new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom.

Today, Film Studies For Free presents a bumper entry on movie magazines and fan culture research! The entry boasts three main content clusters: 
  1. A guide to using Lantern, the new search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched.
  2. A nine minute video Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine (also embedded above), presented by film scholarTamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, and an audio interview in which she expands on the fan magazine research she carried out for her new book on Doris Day's stardom.
  3. Links to written studies and other essential online resources on, or using, movie magazine and fan culture research methodologies.

 1. LANTERN



Pages from Radio and Television Mirror, Jan-June 1949 (archived by the Internet Archive), as discussed by Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, in her report, below, on using Lantern, Media History Digital Library's search and visualisation platform.

Many readers at Film Studies For Free will already know of, and indeed be using, Lantern, the new, essential, search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched. The MHDL has digitized over 800,000 pages of out-of-copyright media publications for open access. Many of the rare magazines in the collection came from the Library of Congress Packard Campus (you can see the full list of contributing individuals and sponsors on the credits webpage). The MHDL's searchable collections now include:
Business Screen (1938-1973); Educational Screen (1922-1962); The Film Daily (1918-1948); International Photographer (1929-1941); International Projectionist (1933-1965); Transactions of SMPE and Journal of SMPE (1915-1954); Motion Picture Magazine (1914-1941); Motography (1909-1918); Movie Classic (1931-1937); Movie Makers (1926-1953); Moving Picture World (1907-1919); The New Movie Magazine (1929-1935); Photoplay (1914-1943); Radio Annual and Television Yearbook (1938-1964); Radio Digest (1923-1933); Radio Mirror (1934-1963); Radio Broadcast (1922-1930); Sponsor (1946-1964); Talking Machine World (1906-1928); Variety (1905-1926 - production on the next twenty years is underway)
The great news is that we can search and access items from the collection platform at MHDL's brilliant Lantern site http://lantern.mediahist.org, or simply type your query into the searchbox of the existing MHDL site: http://mediahistoryproject.org. The site was developed designed and produced by Eric Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts, UW-Madison and Co-Director (with David Pierce), Media History Digital Library.

FSFF asked film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, whose fabulous work in this area is expanded on in the next section of this entry, to test Lantern as a highly seasoned user of offline archives. Here is her glowing account:
For me Lantern's utility lies not only in its stock of periodicals, freely accessible, fully searchable, available for my own research purposes but also the possibilities it offers as a teaching tool, bringing film history alive.
     My recent research has been on Doris Day. Trips to the British Library, the Library of Congress and the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles netted me over 1500 articles to peruse, but not the first article turned up by Lantern when I put in "Doris Day" as the search term, "That Day Girl/That Hope Fellow" from Radio and Television Mirror, May 1949. This is an early piece in which the new star herself purports to write about Bob Hope, the veteran entertainer on whose radio show Day appeared as songstress and sidekick. The article attempts to preserve the double-act nature of the pair's relationship by getting each to write about the other. The columns notionally penned by 'Day' - and there is no way at this distance that we can either prove or disprove her actual authorship - testify to what a great guy Hope is; his sections do the same, maintaining his comic persona as a narcissist. This confirms the piece's early date - 1949 - Day was already beginning to be spoken of as a major star and fan magazines would not allow space dedicated to her to boost another performer for much longer. By 1952 coverage of Day was saturating the movie magazines: she appeared on or in all twelve monthly issues of Movie Stars Parade and was featured in seventy-five other periodicals that year too. Finding this piece through Lantern is a valuable corrective, then, to the belief that Day became a star effortlessly, consistently receiving lead billing and attention in the magazines. While Motion Picture did hail her as the next big thing in August 1948 [see images below**], other publications obviously took longer to be convinced.
     In addition to its value for researching for individual stars or films, Lantern is also useful for more general searches for social history. Since the whole text of the issues is scanned and searchable, the advertising sections of the magazines can be viewed also, and provide fascinating social history data about the presentation of a variety of products. Typing in "pink toothbrush" recovers the history of Ipana, a toothpaste which boasted it could do away with gum disease; "Zonite" claimed it was the "solution to a woman's most intimate problem". Enter any product name to see the variety of methods used to sell it in the different periodicals, and different periods, covered: a search for "Lustre Creme shampoo"will bring up gorgeous full colour portraits of Hollywood stars as well as more utilitarian black and white ads featuring a more anonymous 'the Lustre-Creme Girl'.
     Lantern truly illuminates both the importance of fan and trade periodicals as cinema paratexts, and itself as an invaluable source for finding and searching them.
     (Note: For the first search, I simply put in Doris Day as the term, without inverted commas, with no specified date range and without altering the default Sort mode for results, By Relevance. Changing this to 'Sort by date' is the best option to capture the changing methods of presentation for product advertising).
Further great accounts of Lantern may be found at the links below:
Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf
Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf
In the video embedded at the top of the entry, Tamar Jeffers McDonald presents a guide to studying a movie magazine. With her customary wit and aplomb, she shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. The above, somewhat impromptu (shaky cam!) resource came out of an interview with Jeffers McDonald carried out at the National Theatre, London, in October 2013 by Film Studies For Free. An audio recording of the interview is embedded below and online here at FSFF's new podcast site.

The  main topic of conversation was about Jeffers McDonald's new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom (London: I B Tauris, 2013). This book poses as a central question, amongst others, “Why do we assume Doris Day always plays a virgin?” In previous work (her PhD thesis, the edited collection Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, (Wayne State University Press, 2010), and an article on Rock Hudson from 2007 - see details here) Jeffers McDonald has examined what ‘playing a virgin’ might mean and consist of; now she turns her attention to how this dominant idea has been circulated, through studying the film fan periodicals which advanced and then froze Day’s stardom, a methodology she explores in detail in this video, and in the (12 minutes long) audio interview embedded below. [** See the foot of FSFF's entry for images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, to which Jeffers McDonald refers in the interview].


3. Online Resources on Movie Magazines and Fan Culture Research Methodologies

**Below are images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, reproduced by kind permission of Tamar Jeffers McDonald, to which she refers in her audio interview embedded above.














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    Magnifying Mirror: On Barbara Stanwyck and Film Performance Studies

    November 11, 2013, 4:03 am
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    Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry on the wonderful work of American actress Barbara Stanwyck as well as on film performance studies more generally. Stanwyck's illustrious career began in the 1920s and spanned sixty years. During that period she starred in major films of many genres and worked with some of the most distinguished Hollywood directors. Writing on her work may provide, therefore, an excellent, indeedexemplary case for reflection on film critical methodologies in performance studies.

    As well as the usual links to online scholarly work on these topics (scroll down for those), the entry presents, below, an interview with Andrew Klevan, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford. Klevan discusses the rationale behind his recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013). He also talks about some of the issues that arise when film performance is the object of study, around intention and attribution of agency and value.

    During the interview, which took place in October this year, Klevan read aloud an excerpt from his book, a reading which inspired, and formed the narration of, the above FSFFvideo on Stanwyck, MAGNIFYING MIRROR. Klevan also wrote a short statement about the video and about his collaboration with FSFF more generally, which you can also find below.

    A Note by Andrew Klevan
    I am grateful to     Film Studies For Free for highlighting my work, and I hope the expression of some nervousness will not be taken as ungracious. The problem of enlarging on rationale and method as I do in the interview is that, aside from risking accusations of self-importance and self-promotion, by simply stating matters which should, perhaps, remain implicit, one overstates the case, and raises expectations, especially with regard to, what we affectionately call, little books. My answers, drawing out many of the things I tried to do, may create the incorrect impression that the Barbara Stanwyck study is comprehensive and voluminous. (Even the use of expressions such as ‘moment-by-moment’ or ‘movement of meaning’ might suggest an exhaustive sequential tracking.) In fact, one of the compositional aims was to try, using the short form of the little book, to achieve a balance between elaboration and concentration, extraction and distillation. This partly reflects a similar balance achieved in the films and performances, and Catherine Grant’s fascinating video riff, ‘Magnifying Mirror’, which matches the film to my pre-existing text, captures some of this by looping a sequence and in doing so emphasises the moment’s compactness by way of repetition.

    I am conscious that [fellow film scholar] E.A. Kaplan is a casualty, and it appears as if her comment on Stella Dallas is singled out where actually quite a few accounts are tested in the course of the study and the isolation is a consequence of uprooting. It is true that I take issue with her assessment, but this is a difference over an interpretation, not a charge against her work more generally, or the value of it. I feel that her account reduces, and overlooks an achievement of the film, but this is something that we are all prone to do. Indeed, much nervousness on my part again as the film returns, insistently, to probe my own description and interpretation – alas too late to make adjustments – but also some satisfaction as film and criticism are reunited. This image/speech track relationship struck me as quite different to a DVD commentary (which is limited by the real time of the film) and the narration of audio-visual criticism (which is conceived in relation to the handling of images). I got the sense of a new form of criticism, using audio-visual material, happily meeting an old form of criticism, using words, and not simply exemplifying the ‘close reading’, but enhancing and interrogating, and more generally revivifying (and magnifying). The iteration in Catherine’s video productively interacts with the distension of written representation. The collaboration with FSFF has illuminated for me the stimulating relationship between commentaries in different forms so that the book gets commented upon in an audio interview and in a video film which in turn gets commented upon in this web statement, allowing the different media to differently elucidate.
    Andrew Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. He is author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film and Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. He is the co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism, and is on the editorial boards of MOVIE - A Journal of Film Criticism and Film-Philosophy Journal]

    On Barbara Stanwyck
      On film performance


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          New Issue of JUMP CUT!

          November 26, 2013, 8:11 am
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          Frame grab from The Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). See the Jump Cut dossier on Ford's film, Spielberg's version of the Lincoln story, and the classic Cahiers du Cinéma debate on the earlier film. Also see  Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

          Film Studies For Free has been away, gadding about and gabbling at a wonderful conference in Frankfurt on The Audiovisual Essay (organised by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, with Vinzenz Hediger, for Deutsches Filminstitut and Goethe University), about which you will hear a great deal in the coming weeks and months.

          Next, tomorrow, it departs for yet another exciting public event - a panel discussion on 'The Future of Film Criticism" at King's College, London, speaking alongside Jean-Michel Frodon (Editor of Cahiers du Cinéma and film critic for Le Monde) and Nick James (Editor of Sight & Sound).

          In between these two magnificent events, it had to bring you news of a huge new issue of the online journal Jump Cut, which is absolutely full of incredibly interesting looking contents - FSFF particularly liked the dossier on Lincoln and ideology, but there's so much more to enjoy here. Thank you, Jump Cut!

          Back soon.


          Current issue, No. 55, fall 2013: INSTITUTIONS, TECHNOLOGIES, and LABOR

          THIRD CINEMA/INTERNATIONAL

          GENDER

          IN AND AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM

          EXPERIMENTAL/INDEPENDENT
          LINCOLN & IDEOLOGY FORUM
          HIV/AIDS ACTIVIST MEDIA

          CLASSICS FROM THE PAST
          S/Z and Rules of the Game by Julia Lesage
           
          THE LAST WORD The war on/in higher education by the Editors
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          Just the Facts – A New Realist Cinema? New Issue of PHOTOGÉNIE

          December 5, 2013, 8:35 am
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          Frame grab from Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008). Read about this film in Tom Paulus's essay Historians of the Real? Che and Carlos as Political Cinema in the latest issue of Photogénie
          [In the pages of De Filmkrant Adrian Martin] bemoans an ideological naiveté on both the filmmaker and the critic’s part when a return to realism is perceived as a way of breaking new ground, and genre conventions, by implication, are again seen as ideologically suspect. Jones replies that adherence to ‘meandering fact’ is, in these cases, purely functional, depending on the story at hand; as such, ‘realism’ must be seen as no more than a suitable response to ‘meditations on time’ like Fincher’s Zodiac (pictured above) or Assayas’s Carlos, films that are structured around “the lulls and disappointments and setbacks and frustrations instead of the peaks of an actual police investigation or an actual terrorist operation.” Still, Martin is not so far off the mark in identifying a trend (possibly kick-started by Zodiac’s critical reception), although the seeds of that trend lie with the films and culture Jameson was discussing, films like All the President’s Men, certainly an acknowledged influence on Fincher. In their strict adherence to historical fact movies like Zodiac, Carlos, Che– to name the most important disseminators of the trend – and more recently Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty or even Steven Spielberg’s ‘anecdotal’ Lincoln – seem to have been created as if to reprove Jameson’s dictum about docudrama that, “[n]ot even the most concrete visuality in detail and reconstruction, nor the historical accuracy and ‘truth’ of the re-enactment,” can remove these films from the realm of the imaginary. Although most of these films feature a ‘mediating consciousness’, a privileged witness character, who reshapes collective historical drama as personal psychological trauma, their dramaturgy is still largely constructed around the anecdotal, the ‘raw’ material of history. Martin notes that these movies are full of repetitious talk-sessions and ‘nothing-much-happening,’ a temps mort aesthetic that brings to mind both nouvelle vague and talky incarnations of slow cinema, the resemblance to the latter heightened by their lengthy running times.
              The aim of this issue is to look at these movies and the perceived return of realism from a variety of angles [...] [Tom Paulus introduces the new issue of Photogénie on realist cinema]
          December is often one of the sweetest months for new issues of ejournals and this year is no exception. So Film Studies For Free is (slowly) catching up with some good ones. One of the very best sets of reading may be found in the new collection of work fromPhotogénie on realist cinema. FSFF particularly liked Adrian Martin's deconstruction of documentary purism and Tom Paulus on historians of the real, but each of the articles is excellent. The contents are linked to below.

          You should subscribe to the wonderful Photogénie blog, too!

          a. Just the Facts – A New Realist Cinema?: Edito TOM PAULUS
          b. Sixteen Ways to Pronounce Potato, or: The Adventure of Materials /Fragment from 1987 ADRIAN MARTIN
          c. Between Documentary, Fiction and Appropriation Art: A Case Report on the “Language-game” Public Hearing (2012) MICHAEL GUARNERI
          d. Refusing to Lie Down: Truth, Fiction, and Ken Russell’s Early Television Documentaries CHRISTOPHER VAN EECKE
          e. Historians of the Real? Che and Carlos as Political Cinema TOM PAULUS
          f. The Unsilent Initial: Monuments, Swamps and Politics Before the Law in Steven Spielberg´s LincolnDREHLI ROBNIK
          g. Realistic, Like in a Movie: On Facts, Procedurals and Memories of Murders DAVID GUNZBURG
          h. What Does It Mean to Be a Human Researcher?: Deleuze’s Character of the Forger in the Film L’humanité PIETER-JAN DECOSTER and NANCY VANSIELEGHEM
          i. Scripting in the Dataverse STEFAAN DECOSTERE
          List of Contributors
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          Get the Picture! A Community-Based Film Study Programme Using THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY

          December 16, 2013, 1:34 am
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          Interview with filmmaker and educator Mark Cousins about his film series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which forms the basis of the Get the Picture community film study project described below

          Quite often Film Studies For Free gets asked about free film study. Not so surprising, you might think, given the name on its own tin. But what people are often asking about is free "real world", or offline, film study - and sadly not too much of that comes for free these days.

          So imagine how delighted FSFF was when it was contacted by a group of generous and talented individuals who have formed an educational partnership called Get the Picture'that aims to provide free support materials and a framework to help people to come together in their local community, to form study groups and learn about film'.

          FSFF is, therefore, delighted to create a space, in today's entry, for a concise and enticing introduction to the work of this partnership, in the hope that some of its readers will go on to take up the specific invitation set out here, and that yet others will go on to concoct their own community film study projects inspired by this one. If the latter happens, do please let FSFF know.

          In the meantime, thank you so much to Get the Picture!  You can follow the project on Twitter --  @GtPfilm -- and, of course, at its website.


          Get the Picture: Film study groups in the community

          There's a certain added frisson of pleasure in writing this post, because of its context: what I'm about to describe is a programme of informal adult film study that is free to users. The only necessary additional costs involved are the purchase of the DVD box set of Mark Cousins's The Story of Film, an Odyssey.

          'Us' refers toGet the Picture, which is the collective name for three activists in the community cinema movement, John Salisbury, Julia Vickers and Jim Barratt. The programme of study we've developed and made available is a response to the rapid attrition of informal film study in the 2000s, in the UK, at least, resulting from the decision of the last government to withdraw from supporting lifelong learning. After the impact of that withdrawal of funding became evident, we set about looking for an approach to filling the gap which would, like community cinemas themselves, work in local communities everywhere in the UK. We saw the possibilities opened up by the release of The Story of Film, and our programme is the result. Incidentally, we ran the idea past Mark Cousins early on: he liked it then, and has strongly and warmly endorsed the result.

          What was needed?

          As we saw it, the requirement was for a programme which was
          • free to participants
          • self-organised and self-paced
          • informal, not assessed
          • of benefit whatever the starting point of the participant.
          We saw there was a need for someone (a group member) to manage the group experience and chair discussions (a role we termed 'enabler'), but that shouldering this responsibility would require additional support from us. We decided to base the whole programme on advice notes (e.g. Programme Guide, How to be a Participant) and study notes (each relating to a specific study/discussion session based on an individual episode of The Story of Film). We decided that since the only distribution system for study materials which would work universally was sending pdf documents over the internet, we would embrace the internet, giving strong guidance on its use as a resource for individual study. Finally, we decided that basing a programme on all 15 chapters of The Story of Film might well seem a dauntingly large commitment for a study group, so we offered the programme in three segments of five chapters/study sessions each.

          What's in the programme?

          For each segment, a participant receives a document set which contains common advice notes and the study notes relevant to the sessions in that segment. The advice notes consist of the Programme Guide, How to be a Participant, How to be an Enabler, and the Key Films list. You can find more detail on this (and examples) on the Get the Picture website at getthepicture.org.uk. There is also an advice note on Enhancements and Digressions, because we recognise that some groups may wish to add to the programme we've laid out, or digress from it: nothing is set in stone.

          The normal experience for a participant in each segment is that after an introductory organizing session convened by the enabler, they attend five discussion sessions in which they discuss prepared questions chosen from those found in each set of Study Notes. In between discussion sessions, participants are asked to do four things: they watch the relevant chapter of The Story of Film, they prepare for the planned discussion questions, they undertake individual study based on suggested internet resources (from Wikipedia, YouTube and specified websites), and they watch the specified key films. This means that scheduling the discussions must leave time for these individual activities, and enablers receive suitable guidance about this. To give a more comprehensive flavour, embedded below is the Programme Guide pdf document which all participants receive. If you want to view it more comfortably, or offline, you can download it from this website: http://getthepicture.org.uk.


          The Key Films list is significant: for each session, we select two of the films Mark Cousins cites as notable within the episode of The Story of Film, and suggest all group members watch these films as part of their preparation, to provide a common basis for discussion. From quite early on, some of the discussion questions focus on individual key films.

          Trialling the programme

          We have been fortunate in that groups from a small number of film societies agreed to trial the materials for Segment One. The result has been very positive and a clear endorsement of the basic approach. We have streamlined the study materials as a result of trials feedback, and worked hard to clarify the discussion questions. As we expected, specific problems arose around the role of the enabler, especially when inexperienced enablers had to deal with obstinate group members, but these problems were by no means dealbreakers. We encountered unexpected problems (for example, the disruptive potential of refreshments) and have had to mention these in the advice notes. But in general, the trials indicated to us that it was well worth continuing with the programme and making it generally available.

          Who will benefit?

          The short answer is anyone, anywhere. We have set the entry threshold low by shaping each set of discussion questions so that they are readily approachable, but permit quite deep insights. We have largely refrained from the theoretical but touched on it where appropriate, and we have taken the intellectual frame as that bounded by Mark Cousins's treatment, which relates filmmaking technique to viewing experience in some complex and interesting ways.  We have shaped the individual study possibilities by introducing a wide range of resources, simply as a way of illustrating what is possible, and we have used guided Wikipedia and YouTube research as the spine for individual inquiry.  This approach offers anyone who wants to go further all that the internet allows, but gives a solid and satisfactory experience to the novice.

          What we want from you.

          Do you know anyone who might like to know about the Get the Picture programme? They might be in a film society, or involved in a community cinema, or they might just be into film. The benefits of making what is normally solitary - watching film, reading and thinking about it - communal and social are hard to quantify, but they do include a clear development in the individual's ability to talk and think about film. We find that, for the many generations of Britons who have received no education in film at school or since, this development is immensely liberating, so we have no hesitation in asking you to spread the word. Send them a link to this post. Get the Pictureis open for (free) business.
          [The above text is by John Salisbury of Get the Picture]

          Note about location: The materials were trialled with groups in the UK, but there is no reason why groups from anywhere in the English-speaking world should not take advantage of them. You only need to be sure you can access The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Study groups from anywhere in the world are welcome and invited to register with Get the Picture.
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          New Fall 2013 Issue of MEDIASCAPE on "Urban Centers, Media Centers"

          December 18, 2013, 6:54 am
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          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 Mediascapethen 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 Stork's marvellous (and marvellously illustrated) study of the 'Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games', James Gilmore's 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.
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            Reframing Cinema Histories: ALPHAVILLE Issue 6

            December 19, 2013, 5:46 am
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            Header image from the symposium website for “Reframing Cinema Histories”
            This issue of Alphaville originates in a one-day symposium,“Reframing Cinema Histories”, which was organised at University College Cork in March 2013. The aim of the event was to bring together a select group of scholars working on a range of historical projects and, through presentations of specific case studies and a round table discussion, highlight the variety of methodological approaches that may be adopted by the researcher studying and writing about cinema history [Reframing Cinema Histories: Editorial by Pierluigi Ercole and Gwenda Young, Alphaville, Issue 6, 2013]
            And the new journal issues just keep on coming! Today, Film Studies For Free links to a very high quality issue of special interest to film historians and others working in film historiography: Alphaville's latest offering on Reframing Cinema Histories.

            Utter brilliance from start to finish, IFSFFHO...


            Alphaville, Issue 6, Winter 2013: Reframing Cinema Histories: 
            Book Reviews:
            1. A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove, by John Spong (2012) Reviewer: Matthew Carter, University of Essex
            2. Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video, by Akira Mizuta Lippit (2012) Reviewer: Niall Flynn, Independent Scholar
            3. Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema, by Debbie Ging (2013) Reviewer: Barry Monahan, University College Cork
            [Book Reviews Editor: Ian Murphy]

            Conference Reports:
            1. World Cinema On-Demand: Film Distribution and Education in the Streaming Media Era
            2. Queen's University Belfast, 15–16 June 2012; 26 June 2013; 19 September 2013 Reporter: Alexandra Kapka, Queen's University Belfast
            3. Revisiting Star Studies, Culture Lab, Newcastle University, 12–14 June 2013 Reporter: Jennifer O'Meara, Trinity College Dublin
            4. A Star is Born: Cinematic Reflections on Stardom and the "Stardom Film", King's College London, 13 September 2013 Reporter: Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg, King's College London
            [Reports Editor: Yuanyuan Chen]
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            New FILM-PHILOSOPHY!!

            December 20, 2013, 5:06 am
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            Frame grab from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Read Ben Tyrer's article on film noir and this film in the latest issue of Film-Philosophy

            Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013): the second to last of the brilliant new film studies e journal issues out in December with which Film Studies For Free will present you in 2013. And the daddy of them all.

            There will be two more FSFF posts to appear before the holidays, that is, if you can tear yourself away from reading the below articles and reviews.

              Articles
                Book Reviews
                • Hsiu-Chuang Deppman (2010) Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film (Iris Chui Ping Kam) PDF
                • Alain Badiou (2013) Cinema and Alex Ling (2010) Badiou and Cinema (David H. Fleming) PDF
                • Timothy Corrigan, ed. (2012) Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. 2nd Edition (Shawn Loht) PDF
                • Michael Charlesworth (2011) Derek Jarman (Justin Remes) PDF
                • Sharon Lin Tay (2009) Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (Sheryl Tuttle Ross) PDF
                • Todd Berliner (2010) Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (John Anthony Bleasdale) PDF
                •  M. Keith Booker (2011) Historical Dictionary of American Cinema (Glen Melanson) PDF 
                • Shawn C. Bean (2008) The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking (Carrie Giunta) PDF
                • Julian Petley (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Zach Saltz) PDF
                • Suzanne Buchan (2011) The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Micki Nyman) PDF
                • Khatereh Sheibani (2011) The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics and Modernity After the Revolution (Paul Elliott) PDF
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                Two x FRAMES: 'The Political Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers' and 'Promotional Materials'

                December 21, 2013, 1:46 am
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                Film scholar Tim Bergfelder giving a talk which is embedded at the latest issue of Frames

                Today, Film Studies For Free rounds up two, very fine, 2013 issues of the e journal Frames. Feast your eyes on all the links below.

                The latest issue on the political western is just out. The earlier issue, on film and television promotional materials, will form part of a long in preparation bumper FSFF collection on paratextuality that will now appear in the new year, along with other (very long in preparation) posts: on the magnificence of Caboose, a film studies publisher with a marvellous attitude to freely available content; on découpage; and on many other topics.... 2013 has proved to be just too short a year to cram all this in.

                There's still one more FSFF entry to go before the holidays, though, so please look out for that on Monday. In the meantime, happy solstice!


                Frames, Issue 4, December 2013: Commies and Indians: The Political Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers 

                 

                Editorial
                Letter from the Editor By Heath Iverson

                Feature articles
                Video Supplement
                P.O.V.

                Frames, Issue 3, May 2013: Promotional Materials 
                 

                Editorial
                Feature articles
                Interviews
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                Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine

                December 23, 2013, 4:48 am
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                A video essay, completed in memory of Joan Fontaine, studying the liminal moments of her character inRebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). This low resolution, educational compilation also samples and remixes music originally composed for the film by Franz Waxman.

                Film Studies For Free presents its last entry of the year on the gothic film melodrama. Sadly, this entry appears just a short time after the death of one of the most notable stars of Hollywood's female Gothic tradition -- Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 − 15 December 2013) -- and is dedicated to her memory. Other tributes have been comprehensively collected by David Hudson at his Keyframe/Fandor site, including a particularly fine one by Josephine Botting for the British Film Institute

                FSFF's own collection of resources begins with an item that also doubles as a tribute: its own videographic study of Fontaine's masterly physical performance of "voluptuous masochism" (to borrow the brilliant words of Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape [p. 191]) in the context of Alfred Hitchcock's mise-en-scene for Rebecca (1940), together with Franz Waxman's lushly uncanny musical score for this film.

                The resources continue at length below in a customary -- for FSFF -- list of links to online scholarly resources on the cinematic gothic more generally. You can also find further, closely related studies in FSFF's earlier entry on Final Girl Studies.

                FSFF warmly wishes its readers very happy holidays if they're having them! It will be back with lots more open access film studies in the new year.

                 
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                The Flâneur on Film: On films by Richard Linklater and others by Rob Stone

                February 10, 2014, 12:37 am
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                Links added on February 25, 2014
                A short film that searches for Jesse and Celine in Vienna on Bloomsday, 16 June 2013. As their absence reveals the city, so this pilgrimage to places they have been becomes lost in time, and an homage to three films of flânerie: Before Sunrise, Sans soleil and En la ciudad de Sylvia.

                It's been a rather slow start to the year here at Film Studies For Free, with lots of other (exciting) projects diverting attention from this little URL to date (more about those soon).

                But FSFF is back with a wonderful (and generous) guest entry by Rob Stone, Professor of Film, Chair of European Film and Director of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. Rob is the author of Spanish Cinema (Longman, 2001), The Wounded Throat: Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (Edwin Mellen, 2004), Julio Medem (Manchester University Press, 2007), Walk, Don't Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (Wallflower/ Columbia University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (IB Tauris, 2015). He also co-edited The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Wallflower, 2007), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2012) and A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

                The entry begins (at the top) with Rob's fascinating video homage to Linklater's Before Sunrise (and Sans soleil/Sunless and En la ciudad de Sylvia), it continues, below, with his thoughtful and informative written text about cinematic wanderings (including his own), and it ends (at the foot of the post) with FSFF's characteristic list of links to related online items connected to the films of Richard Linklater and flânerie on film.

                BETWEEN SUNRISE AND SUNLESS
                By Rob Stone

                'Between Sunrise and Sunless' came out of my recently published book, The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run (Columbia University Press, 2013), which explores several key themes across that American director's films, including those associated with the figure of theflâneur: the sense of a single ongoing present moment, and the pursuit of elusive, meaningful connections, of closing the spaces in between people. It also came from an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project entitled Screening European Heritage, run in collaboration with Professor Paul Cooke of the University of Leeds, UK, in which the notions of film tourism and the cinematic pilgrimage became an emergent theme.
                     Pilgrimage, which is targetted, might be expected to oppose the wanderings of flânerie, but this brief homage to the films directed by Linklater, which tend to feature a great deal of walking and talking, provides a combination of both. The flâneur was celebrated by the poet Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth century as a pedestrian whose wanderings enabled novel understandings of the evolving metropolis. The daytime flâneur rejected quantitative measurements of functional space and sought instead to realise new meanings for the streets. In this the flâneur had much in common with the Surrealists led by André Breton, who had sought dreamlike encounters in the streets at night, as well as the activists of the Situationist International, whose philosophy of psychogeography made the dérive or drift into a symbolic trespassing on official spaces, a pointed trampling of any prohibitive demarcations and a freeform remapping of the city for revolutionary pursuits.

                     In his essay on the redemption of physical reality, Siegfried Kracauer asserts that
                the street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself. Again one will have to think mainly of the city street with its ever-moving crowds. The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out, thereby preventing the onlooker from following up any of the innumerable suggestions they offer. What appeals to him are not so much sharp-contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable pursuit as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures. Each has a story, yet the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow casts its spell over the flâneur  or even creates him. The flâneur is intoxicated with life in the street – life eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form. [1960: 72]
                Kracauer clearly defers here to the Bergsonian notion of time as something that is a durational state of mind and this idea of a moment that is unique and eternal supports the commitment and fuels the ebullient intuition of the flâneur, for whom times and places are not static or immutable but ever-becoming, incomplete and evolving. This eternal renewal can be confusing. The pursuit of the wandering Madeleine (Kim Novak) by Scottie (James Stewart) around San Francisco in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) results in him getting lost in time, memory and myth. Moreover, the idea that ‘the flâneur is a multilayered palimpsest’ (Jenks 1995: 148) is confirmed in En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia, José Luis Guerín, 2007), in which the Dreamer (Xavier Lafitte) pursues a young woman around Strasbourg in a vain quest to shore up the self-serving myth of an ideal woman whose perfection might reflect his own narcissism. Baudelaire describes the flâneur as ‘distilling the eternal from the transitory’ (1972) in his traversal of the city, but the contrast between the crumbling egos of Scottie and the Dreamer and their concrete environments is debilitating, with both films subverting the chauvinist notion of the figure as ‘a utopian representation of a carefree (male) individual in the midst of the urban maelstrom’ (Tester 1994: 67).
                     The flâneur on film is rarely as carefree as his literary counterpart. Rather, films such as Vertigo and En la ciudad de Sylvia follow neurotic males in their attempts to relocate their psyches at the centre of an order of things that is so defiantly of their own making that their flânerie corresponds to a kind of ‘time-space psychosis’ (Tester, 1994: 77). The labyrinth of streets they traverse is also, of course, an apt metaphor for how the mind stores memories and retrieves them by the association of ideas, which is represented by the movement of the flâneur, for whom bridges, tunnels, alleyways and squares reveal new and unending synaptic connections. The flâneur should be Baudelaire’s ‘perfect idler [and] passionate observer’ (1972); however, the cinematic sense of time and place he or she creates can become so distorted that it provokes the disintegration of coherent experience. No-one is as confounded as Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) in La Notte (The Night, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), the unloved wife who wanders Milan during the day ‘observing the harsh, uncoordinated fragments of life’ (Thomson, 1998: 529). Her aimlessness results from the erasure of her own identity in marriage, which is ultimately revealed as an open wound of searing pain rather than indifference. Moreau strains against the architectural rigidity of the film, in which characters freeze in doorways and dissolve in their reflections. Baudelaire supposes that the flâneur sets ‘up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite’ (1972), while Walter Benjamin declares that the flâneur‘derives pleasure from his location within the crowd, but simultaneously regards it with contempt’ (1983: 35). Neither realise that to be without a crowd entirely leaves a flâneur like Lidia annulled.
                     Despite or because of the dangers of losing oneself in place, time, morbid introspection and memory, flânerie goes global in Sans soleil (Sunless, Chris Marker, 1983), wherein the elusive auteur admits ‘to have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.’ This is a peripatetic quest for understanding that searches through time in old footage as much as it explores the world that turns around the itinerant filmmaker. In Japan, Paris, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and San Francisco, where the filmmaker attempts a pilgrimage to the flânerie of Vertigo, Sans soleil presents itself as evidence that ‘new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa’ (Lefebvre 1991: 59). Repeatedly reterritorialising urban spaces as arenas of new and even revolutionary thought, Marker pauses on his travels through time and space only briefly to express affinity with the drunken Korean flâneur who ‘takes his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads.’
                     Flânerie has informed many films about those who transcend the potential banality of their existence via the affinities they find in ephemeral associations. It can serve as an assertion of subjectivity, often opposing the hegemonic idea of a city with a view of it from the perspective of an Other. The female flâneur is a potent figure in Weimar culture, for example, while Frances (Greta Gerwig) dancing through Chinatown in Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013) offers a refreshing replacement for the myth of the Manhattanite hipster male. Flânerie can resemble a political stance too, when characters such as those encountered in the west Austin of Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991), for example, get to embody its interwoven enactment and philosophy, professing resistance to all kinds of social, political, generic and narrative imperatives by simply hanging out. Flânerie and psychogeography are similarly explored in The London Perambulator (John Rogers, 2009), London (Patrick Keiller, 1994)  and the Portsmouth of Flaneurs (Alex Sergeant, 2012). Flânerie is also behind the morally ambivalent and seemingly indifferent wanderers of the post-war West German state in Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, Wim Wenders, 1974).
                     The flâneur’s accumulation of experiences and influences often results in an indistinct outcast figure, one who walks to a different rhythm, defined and maintained by an absence of clear origins and a lack of explicit direction. Consequently, the flâneur can be disruptive where a sense of rootlessness and rejection of settlement renders the figure as threatening Other. This outsiderness can inspire empathy, which Walter Benjamin describes in his essay on Baudelaire as ‘the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd’ (2006: 85); but the flâneur mostly drifts in a kind of pilgrimage to aimlessness, which is parodied in the frustrated efforts of the faithful to reach their illusory, sacred yet profaned objective in La Voie lactée (The Milky Way, Luis Buñuel, 1969). The association of urban drift and psychogeography with idleness in Slacker and other films directed by Linklater has also been dismissed as laziness, yet the oppositional movement of the slackers who also feature in Dazed and Confused (1993), SubUrbia (1996), The Newton Boys (1998), Waking Life(2001), and The School of Rock (2003) is quietly revolutionary. Refusing to follow rules or lines in Republican America leads them to formulate a structural and dialogic strategy that favours intertextuality as much as criss-crossing cities and even oceans, ending up in Vienna, for example, in Before Sunrise (1995), Paris in Before Sunset (2004) and Messinia in Before Midnight(2013).
                     The short film Between Sunrise and Sunless is an attempt to combine elements of flânerie with an interest in film tourism, even pilgrimage. It was shot in Vienna on 16 June 2013, which is James Joyce’s Bloomsday, the most ordinary day of the year, and exactly eighteen years on from the events of Before Sunrise. The book on Linklater had just been published and it was time to put some of its ideas into practice in the manner of several film scholars in the UK, such as Catherine Grant and William Brown, who are breaking ground by producing and integrating short and even full-length films, video essays and online media into their teaching and research. The original idea was to record a cinematic pilgrimage, to understand how a film affects a place and investigate how that place is affected by the film. This kind of film tourism is a world apart from the Universal Tour in Los Angeles or the Harry Potter Experience in London, where everything is practiced, limited and laid on. Neither is it the same as taking the official, organised and guided ‘Vertigo Tour’ in San Francisco, ‘The Godfather Tour’ in Sicily, ‘The Da Vinci Code Tour’ from Edinburgh, ‘The Sopranos Tour’ in New York or ‘The Lord of the Rings Tour’ in Wellington, although each hold significant pleasures. Instead, there is much to be said for the uniquely personal, certainly metaphysical and even occasionally transcendental experiences of chasing down replicants in Los Angeles a few shrinking years before Blade Runner(Ridley Scott, 1981) will actually take place or visiting the towers, canals and alcoves actually in Bruges of In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008). There was also an element of affective criticism that followed (and was perhaps validated by) Robin Wood, who wrote in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 1998) that he felt compelled to preface his analysis of Before Sunrise with the admission that ‘here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration but love’ (1998: 318). Was it possible to follow the example of Wood, who not only shared his passion but made it an essential component of his craft?
                     Between Sunrise and Sunless was shot on a Canon Legria HF M52 and edited with Final Cut Pro on a MacBook Pro. The music is taken (following donation) from a website offering royalty-free music called Incompetech run by Kevin MacLeod, who composes all of it himself.  Simply mapping Vienna was a curious endeavour aided by websites containing information from other fans of the film on its locations. At times, the flânerie of Before Sunrise was revealed as a cheat: the cemetery of the nameless, for example, is a long way out of town, requiring a bus and taxi for which there was no time. In addition, the actual route taken by Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) through the city, if followed chronologically, is absurdly haphazard. So the filming trajectory was plotted for practical purposes, which resulted in a mostly circular route and one essential excursion across the river by metro to the fairground. Still, Vienna was filmed as found on a gloriously warm day in ten hours that concluded with a viewing of Before Midnight in the Votivkino cinema, which also appears in the short film.
                     The accumulated footage and photographs were initially going to be used to simply juxtapose images of the city now with those of the film then; but memories of Sans soleil graciously presented themselves at the editing stage as the ideal model for the investigation of time and place elaborated in the voiceover, while threaded glimpses of a woman in white refer to the pursuit of the muse in En la ciudad de Sylvia. This short film’s quest is elusive, even deluded, but ultimately and eternally redirected by optimism. It looks for real places and ends up searching for unreal times. Nevertheless, it continues. Between Sunrise and Sunless also provided a lesson in how the Internet functions and how important and necessary can be websites and blogs like Film Studies for Free and Mediático. It was picked up by Colombia University Press for its blog and website, then praised by a CNN film critic who had presumably seen it there. It has since popped up on several websites and was recently recommended on the Twitter feed of Sight and Sound. However, by far the best and most surprising result has been the ensuing correspondence from many fans of Before Sunrise and its sequels, who saw it and got in touch, thereby suggesting that this whole idea of closing the spaces in between people was not impossible after all.

                Rob Stone

                With thanks to Catherine Grant [who provided the hyperlinks above], Paul Cooke, James Clifford Kent and Jeff Stollenwerck


                References

                Baudelaire, Charles (1972) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Selected Writings on Art and
                Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet, London: Viking, 395–422.
                Online: http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/pm/baudelaire-painter.htm [accessed 10 October 2010].

                Benjamin, Walter  (1983) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
                trans. Harry Zohn, London: Verso.

                Benjamin, Walter (2006) The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press.

                Jenks, Chris (1995) ‘Watching your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur’, in
                Visual Culture, New York: Routledge, 142–60.

                Kracauer, Siegfried (1960) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Oxford:
                Oxford University Press.

                Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, London: Blackwell.

                Stone, R. (2012) ‘En la ciudad de Sylvia and the durée of a derivé’ in Delgado, M. and R. Fiddian (eds), Spanish Cinema 1973-2010: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory, Manchester: Manchester University Press. In press.

                Stone, Rob (2013) Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater, New York: Columbia University Press.

                Stone, R. and P. Cooke (2013) ‘Transatlantic Drift: Hobos, Slackers, Flâneurs, Idiots and Edukators’ in Nagib, L. and A. Jersley (eds), Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, London/New York: I.B. Tauris.

                Tester, Keith (1994), The Flâneur, New York: Routledge.

                Thomson, David (1998) A Biographical Dictionary of Film, London: André Deutsch. 
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