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KOSMORAMA! Great online resources from the Danish Film Institute

March 31, 2015, 3:29 am
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Short films from a small nation - marketing postwar Denmark (13 Nov 2014)
Fifty years before Borgen hit British TV screens, Danish directors were making films for British audiences. Driven by the need to market Danish produce and culture abroad after World War II, the government funded hundreds of short films in many languages, encompassing topics from pensions to bacon to handicrafts.

As the Spring break in the UK beckons, Film Studies For Free sparks back into life with some shorter entries.

The first of these results from some correspondence with Claire Thomson of University College London (who features in the excellent videoed talk, embedded above). Dr Thomson very kindly wrote to FSFF to point it in the direction of the following two online resources from the Danish Film Institute. 
The Danish film journal Kosmorama was established in 1954, and since 2011 has been publishing 4-5 issues a year in online open access format, from its base at the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen. Most of Kosmorama’s articles are peer-reviewed, but space is also reserved for writing accessible to a wide audience of cinephiles. 
The journal also tries to strike a balance between publishing in English for a global audience, and catering for Scandinavian readers, with articles in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. A clever feature of Kosmorama is its use of embedded film clips, images and documentation to illustrate arguments and analyses. The site also hosts a research blog, which is a place to share news on recent publications and upcoming workshops, lectures, conferences and call for papers, and readers can sign up to a newsletter so as not to miss a single issue. 
Recent content in English includes articles on media in Wim Wenders’Paris, Texas, metafiction in House of Cards, state-sponsored short films, Mormonism in early Danish cinema, and a theme issue on Body Language in the Moving Image. Article submissions of around 5000 words on any aspect of cinema and television are welcome, and information for potential contributors can be found via Kosmorama’s English homepage: http://www.kosmorama.org/ServiceMenu/05-English.aspx  
The Danish Film Institute is also home to an extensive web resource on the auteur Carl Th. Dreyer.  Carl Th. Dreyer: The Man and His Work combines a growing collection of essays on Dreyer’s life, work and style with an extensively annotated filmography, film clips, stills, posters, and a searchable database of the Dreyer Archive. Whether you want to read about aspects of Dreyer’s style or filmmaking practice, research his correspondence, watch his short films, or find out what  Lars von Trier inherited from Dreyer (answer: some stylistic tricks, and a tailor-made tuxedo), do visit the site here: http://english.carlthdreyer.dk/
Thanks very much to Dr Thomson for these. FSFF readers will be able to find lots of articles online at Kosmorama, but the ones in the latest issue have been listed and are linked to below.

ARTICLES / KOSMORAMA #258 – BODY LANGUAGE IN THE MOVING IMAGE


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On Desktop Documentary (or, Kevin B. Lee Goes Meta!)

April 6, 2015, 5:39 am
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Kevin B. Lee talks about Desktop Documentary at the University of Sussex, March 17, 2015

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to present an entry dedicated to some of the latest work of one of its absolute heroes: filmmaker, critic, and pioneer (and expert proponent) of the online video essay format, Kevin B. Lee.

On March 17th, 2015, Lee gave a Masterclass on his work at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex, UK.

Recently, he and others at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have developed a form of filmmaking they call Desktop Documentary, which uses screen capture technology to treat the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas. Desktop documentary seeks both to depict and question the ways we explore the world through the computer screen.

The Masterclass straddled a screening of Transformers: The Premake (2014, embedded below), Lee’s innovative essay film in this idiom. The ‘Premake’ produced and studied viral fan footage of the making of Michael Bay’s 2014 blockbuster Transformers 4: The Age Of Extinction and examined the ways in which this operated as an unofficial crowdsourced publicity vehicle for the film.

Below, you can find a complete audio recording of the Masterclass, an 'iPhone guerrilla video recording' of Kevin's five minute long introduction of the 'Premake,' and also a high quality video recording of the brilliant, first half hour of the Masterclass in which he discussed in detail the audiovisual antecedents of the innovative form his film took. There are also some links to further related online resources.

In FSFF's very humble view, this form of audiovisual presentation, with its incredibly skilful and brilliantly thought through use of screen capture, has the potential to revolutionise aspects of media studies teaching and learning - even as it's going to be pretty difficult to achieve the expressive and argumentational heights that Lee manages in his 'Premake'. Thanks Kevin!






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The Passion(s) of Sam Rohdie (1939-2015)

April 14, 2015, 8:08 am
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'In Vertigo, James Stewart's look is as important as the figure [...] whom he regards and who he transforms by his desires [...] It is important that the sight seen has in it something out of place, out of true and the normal, which engages the look of the character and lures him or her into an imaginary.'
Sam Rohdie, Montage (Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 63-64 (Also see here)

The sad news has arrived of the sudden death, on April 3 in Florida, of film scholar Sam Rohdie, a hugely important, if at times also a divisive figure in our discipline.

In the last years, Rohdie held the position of Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Film at the University of Central Florida. He had previously held the Chair in Film Studies at The Queens University of Belfast and before that was Professor of Film Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He also held academic posts in universities in England, Ghana, Italy and the United States and was an original member of the Cinema Studies Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He published widely on film in academic journals and books (see below). Rohdie was the editor of Screen in the United Kingdom from 1971 to 1974.

FSFF's author never met Rohdie, but was an avid reader of his work. He not only made a huge contribution to film studies as a discipline, he was also an important author and supporter of online and open access film scholarship, particularly at the pioneering Australian open access journal Screening the Past (including co-editing a special issue of the journal with Des O-'Rawe on ‘Cinema/Photography'), which is one of the reasons why his contribution is especially dear to FSFF.

Below, you can find invited tributes to Rohdie's work, beginning with Adrian Martin's memories of Rohdie - more will follow on a rolling basis in the next days. 

Below the tributes is FSFF's characteristic gathering of links to online scholarly works - ones by or about Rohdie, as well as a list of his major books.

If you have any resources you would like to be added, please email FSFF. Thanks.


Sam Rohdie 
By Adrian Martin
It was 1978. I was a student in the Media course at Melbourne State College (a training institution for secondary school teachers) in Australia, and that semester we had (thanks to his friend Tom Ryan) an illustrious guest lecturer: Sam Rohdie. At that time, Sam was completing his PhD, a minute analysis – written somewhat in the manner of Barthes or Derrida – of a segment from Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. We worked through this same segment in class, week after week, with a 16mm print and projector (those were the days!).
Sam’s goal was to show, intensively, that what history had taken for ‘realism’ (or even neo-realism) was entirely fabricated, shot for shot, cut for cut. That what happened apparently ‘incidentally’ in the scene was connected, by numerous narrative and semantic chains, to every other moment in the film. There was the thrill – de rigueur at the time – of the micro-analytic exposure of common sense and transparency, an almost paranoiac ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ as it came to be called. But there was also a sensual joy in this analysis, and that quickly came to mean more for Sam, in all the work that followed this doctoral culmination of what we might think of as his ‘Screen years’ – i.e., his time as editor, contributor, instigator and agitator at that (now august) cinema studies journal.
Almost at the second the ink was dry on that thesis, Sam got into the habit of downplaying the Screen legacy in his life – and he was still doing so when Deane Williams interviewed him in 2010 for a history of film theory in Australia. He had developed a marked aversion to the ‘dry taxonomies’ of Metz, as he told me, and indeed with the entire dream of structuralist-semiotic film analysis. He was through with the pretension to scientific rigour and certainty. He was heading somewhere else, and now in a more post-structuralist spirit, but without all the lengthy citations and footnotes of the then-recent academic past: into paradox, into pleasure, and above all into writing as a creative as well as critical art.
In 1978, Sam had given me the draft of his PhD to read – and he curtly dismissed me from his presence on the day I handed it back without any particularly searing critical comment to offer on it. That’s how he was: like Godard, Sam was always in search of an interlocutor, and so rarely found one who he deemed worthy. It was his personal style, and it infused his singularly disconcerting teaching method. Sam was aggressive and provocative in the classroom; he was impatient with having to be ‘the teacher’. This seems to have remained his teaching mode, more or less, to the end of his life (he was about to retire from the game in May). In 1978, at least, he was in the habit of identifying the ‘gifted’ students – this was to be my role, alas – and, when he got bored, giving the signal for that chosen delegate to keep the class going by yapping on without missing the beat, as he looked off and thought of more pleasant things, such as what he would cook that evening (Sam was a true foodie). 
Rossellini: Sam came to love him, not to expose him – as his essay on Indiaeventually showed. I came to see, by the mid 1990s, when he launched his personal book-writing crusade with the brilliant Antonioni– and after articles he had written in various Australian magazines like Cinema Papers and Filmviews– that Sam now grasped every film he liked (in deep-dish Derrida style) as a conceptual paradox: a statement or position always undoing itself, implying its opposite term. This idea tracks through all of his writing on the great auteurs of Italian cinema. Fellini, for instance, may make films that, on the surface decry a world of artifice and superficiality – but, in their very being, they celebrate this artifice, and invite us to (as he once wrote) “join the party”. Rocco and His Brothers may seem to be groping toward a stern moral statement about the “conflicting claims of passion and duty, art and reason”, but Visconti is forever fascinated by the decadence that he dramatises. Sam was no longer out to expose or correct these wayward, paradoxical expressions. On the contrary, he took them for constitutiveparadoxes, generating the most agonised, soulful and beautiful of films. 
I don’t pretend to have really known Sam, or to know now what ever made him tick. I have the impression that he was someone who constantly reinvented himself and his life, in terms of the places he lived (and taught), the languages he learnt, the books he read and the films he saw (and re-saw). In Australia in the 1970s and ‘80s, he hurled himself into the public works of film culture: he appeared on radio (very memorably), chaired feisty public discussions at the National Film Theatre, and contributed to curriculum committees for screen education at tertiary and secondary levels. The most remarkable sign of this intense desire to ‘assimilate’ was in his finding and championing of Australian avant-garde work – work that has rarely been approached with such theoretical zest ever since. 
But I think that, in later times and places – in Hong Kong or Belfast or Florida, by which time I had totally lost touch with him – he no longer longed to fuse himself with local scenes in the same way. Rather, he preferred to look backward (and yet forward) into history, histories of film and culture; and it was writing that sustained his interest and his passion, as we see in his final essay collections, Montage and Intersections, and no doubt the posthumous Film Modernism appearing later this year. I spotted him at the Godard conference at the Tate in 2001 – a rather lonely, sullen figure, he seemed to me, and unaccountably silent at each session’s question time, where once he would have been so vociferous – and again in 2006 on the streets of Paris, once more on a rendez-vous with Godard, this time the astonishing Pompidou exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie. And it is Godard and his Histoire(s) du cinéma that, judging from the essays he would regularly send the editors of Screening the Past in his last years, form the spine of Film Modernism. 
I am back in that classroom of 1978. Sam gives me ‘the sign’ to speak – I am utterly terrified, but kind-of used to this sadomasochistic ritual by now – and he looks away from the sea of students, indifferent to either their delight or their dismay. I remember one day, when he did this, just about everyone present could forgive his perennial tactic, because he was concentrated by something that formed a quite lovely spectacle: his very young daughter had fallen asleep in his lap at the front of the classroom, and he caressed her very gently and tenderly, soothing her dreams. This is the image of Sam Rohdie I choose to remember today.
© Adrian Martin, 14 April 2015


Works by Sam Rohdie online

Online works about Sam Rohdie's work:

Sam Rohdie's Books
  • Montage, Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2006
  • Fellini Lexicon, London : BFI Publishing, 2002
  • Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism; London : British Film Institute, 2001
  • The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, London : British Film Institute / Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1996
  • Rocco and His Brothers, London : BFI Publishing, 1993
  • Antonioni, London : BFI Publishing, 1990
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STUDY OF A SINGLE FILM: On Godard's ALPHAVILLE - Dystopia 50 Years On!

May 5, 2015, 6:12 am
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Frame grab from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)



"One never understands anything...then suddenly, one evening...you end up dying of it."
Lemmy Caution, Alphaville

In 1965, Jean-Luc Godard—the quintessential European auteur, the first cinephile director, the man who took it upon himself to reinvent the cinema and then to declare its death—directed a black-and-white science-fiction film noir: Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Mixing genres, combining a distant future and the recent past, pop and high art, total alienness and twentieth century Paris, dystopian scenarios and modernist architecture, the celebration of familiar tropes and the annihilation of stereotypes, Godard made a highly hybrid and visionary film that was many things at once, but also irreducibly singular. With international funding, an expatriate American lead actor (famous in France and Germany for his roles as British pulp character Lemmy Caution), foregrounding Paris simultaneously as the heart of European modernism and as the standardised, international metropolis of the future, Alphaville nodded to the tropes of an Americanised global culture while being utterly European—and the product of the post-New Wave coproduction practices of continental art cinema. Alphaville was a film that both exploited and exploded the tropes, conventions and expectations that constituted “European cinema” as a commercial product, as a critical concept and as an aesthetic category. Laura Rascaroli, Alphaville editorial

Fifty years ago today Jean-Luc Godard's dystopian science fiction film Alphaville was released in France. It remains one of the most compelling fictional studies of 'technological totalitarianism', as Andrew Sarris put it, ever produced for the cinema. To commemorate this important anniversary Film Studies For Free publishes its usual list of related scholarly links and wonderful embedded videos (including a brand new tribute video on the film by renowned film scholar Patricia Pisters) on the subject of this redoubtable film.

In an era in which many aspects of the dystopia so brilliantly and originally portrayed in Godard's film seem only too real, FSFF additionally celebrates the French director's 'strange adventure', and much of the politically committed writing about it, by declaring its solidarity with ongoing struggles to defend progressive and free education around the world, including the Amsterdam New University movement (see also here), and other valuable challenges to the logic of "Market-Driven Education" in the UK (including at the LSE) and elsewhere, including the defence of Film Studies in Hungary (see the petition here).

Finally, FSFF would also like to flag up a CFP for the wonderful journal named after Godard's film - Alphaville is planning a special issue on Women and Screen Media in the Twenty-First Century.
See the details here: http://alphavillejournal.com/Submissions.html#CFP

Coming very soon: FSFF's roundup of online resources resulting from this year's annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montréal!




In honor of the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard's film Alphaville (1965).
Watching Alphaville fifty years after its making in 2015, most striking is the enduring presence of wounds of the Second World War. The ruins, scars and the horror of the war can be felt in every image of this film, even if it is set in the future. But what is even more striking is that so much of the film's traumas related to the past, and related to the cold logic of modernity, still resonate with today’s reality. Just replace ‘Alphaville’ with ‘NSA’ and think of Lemmy Caution as Edward Snowden, and the future that Godard captured in Paris of the 1960s represented by the totalitarianism of the Alpha 60 machine has transformed into the more invisible algorithms of the billions of metadata patterns that trace, predict and control our steps in today’s global digital networks. 
The allegory I mention in this video-essay not only concerns [...] the past and an imaginary future, but [...] the actual present of our control societies that have taken the snake-like intricateness and hard to grasp modulations announced by Gilles Deleuze about twenty-five years ago. Patricia Pisters 

Henrike Lindenberger, 'On Alphaville: The Crystal Maze', The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, September 2014. Online at: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/reflections/intransition-1-3/henrike-lindenberger/ Also fCurated at [in]Transition, 1.3, 2014 by Cristina Alvarez López

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Study of a Single Film: IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

March 17, 2014, 2:00 am
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INTERSECTION, a videographic film study of In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000) 
By Catherine Grant, Chiara Grizaffi and Denise Liege

The above video explores the notion (and some of the motifs) of 'Intersection' in Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film In the Mood for Love. It works through a synchronous compilation of the images and soundtracks from the montage sequences in the film that use the same orchestration of a waltz originally composed by Shigeru Umebayashi for the film Yumeji (Suzuki Seijun, 1991). Watch the video, then read these linked to, intersecting quotations from written texts about Wong's film. Then repeat.


Film Studies For Free proudly presents its latest "Study of a Single Film" entry which, this time, showcases open access scholarly work on the subject of Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film In the Mood for Love.

It's a film that FSFF's author has been fortunate to have been teaching this semester, on a course which devotes its entire attention just to this one movie. As with the corresponding course last year (which treated Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados), this period of intense study has resulted in a videographic study of In the Mood for Love on the film - embedded above - this year, one co-produced as part of a research collaboration with two graduate students Chiara Grizzaffi and Denise Liege.

Speaking of videographic film studies... is exactly what FSFF's author will be doing at a workshop at the upcoming Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Seattle, USA (download PDF of the program here). At this workshop an important announcement will be made: notably, the precise online location of a brand new open access journal to which the below official press release refers:

Announcing[in]Transition

Cinema Journal and MediaCommons will soon announce the launch of the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. The journal, [in]Transition, will unveil its inaugural issue at next week's annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, Washington. The journal will be formally launched and discussed (amongst other topics) at the “Visualizing Media Studies: The Expansion of Scholarly Publishing into Video Essays” workshop on Thursday, March 20th (Session E14).

[in]Transition will provide a forum for a range of digital scholarship (which includes such formats as the video essay and the visual essay) and will also create a context for understanding and evaluating videographic work as a new mode of scholarly writing for the disciplines of cinema and media studies and related fields. This goal will be achieved through editorial curating of exemplary videographic works, through critical analysis and appreciation, pre-publication peer review and Open Peer Commentary.

[in]Transition will be co-edited by Catherine Grant (University of Sussex), Christian Keathley (Middlebury College), and Drew Morton (Texas A and M University-Texarkana) and managed by Christine Becker (Cinema Journal) and Jason Mittell (MediaCommons).

FSFF will also bring you that news as hot off the press as it can, probably just after the conference. So do please stay tuned! It hopes to see some of you at the workshop, too, as well as at its author's other conferencepanel appearance (on "Transnational Film Remakes" with Iain Robert Smith and Michael Lawrence).

But, in the meantime, please enjoy perusing the below links to scholarly material about Wong's wonderful film.
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[in]TRANSITION Issues! Rossellini, Marclay, Burnett, Snow, Emoticons, Time, Surveillance, Volumetric Cinema, Experimental Cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, Women in Prison Genre

May 25, 2015, 4:03 am
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THEORY OF RELATIVITY by Catherine Grant is an experimental video about digital intertextuality and cinephiliac relativity. It was inspired, in part, by (the non-open access article) "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," just published in the Spring 2015 issue of Cinema Journal (54.3) by film scholar Julie Levinson. You can read a little more about this video and the connections it makes here. It was also made as a reserve entry for the new issue of [in]Transition linked to below.

Film Studies For Free is truly thrilled to present an entry on the last two issues of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, of which FSFF's author is proud to be a co-editor. The journal and its editors and project managers recently won an 'Award of Distinction' for Innovative Scholarship thanks to the 2015 Anne Friedberg Award Committee and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Board of Directors, presented at the annual SCMS conference in Montreal. Woohoo! (Btw, look out for content related to this conference in FSFF's next entry, coming soonish!)

The first of the two issues FSFF is catching up with was published to coincide with the Montreal conference back in March. It was the first issue of [in]Transitiondevoted exclusively to peer-reviewed videographic work! Each video was accompanied by a curatorial statement from the maker, as well as the peer reviewer evaluations, all transparently published in the spirit of openness, to encourage scholarship as conversation, and to help our discipline establish a set of criteria for what constitutes valid scholarship in this emerging, audiovisual form. [in]Transition continues to accept submissions of videographic work for peer-reviewed publication in subsequent issues. Guidelines for submission are here.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.1, 2015
And the second issue to be publicised here (commissioned and edited by FSFF's author) has just been published! It features content generated as part of an exciting collaboration with Cinema Journal, its partner publication. That journal's editor, Will Brooker, shared with [in]Transition's editors (some six months in advance of publication) four articles from the latest issue of this highly esteemed journal—54.3, Spring 2015—and asked if we would be interested in commissioning videographic responses to the work. We accepted this challenge, conceiving of it as an experiment to see how audiovisual essays (produced and published relatively quickly) could take up, adapt, or riff off debates and arguments posited by written scholarly texts (which, as is customary, had taken several years to produce and publish).

Five sets of audiovisual essayists accepted the unusual commission, and their creative, critical work forms the basis of the issue. Each video is accompanied by a written statement from the maker(s) discussing the matters at stake in composing such audiovisual responses. Further responses to the work from viewers and readers are invited in the comments threads to the entries.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.2, 2015
[Note: The video at the top of this FSFF entry was made as a reserve video for the issue. You can read more about that one here.]

There is further open access content connected to the above articles from the latest issue of Cinema Journal with which [in]Transition 2.2 interacted, as follows:

Cinema Journal Afterthoughts and Postscripts, Spring 2015, 54.3
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THE CINE-FILES on Film Sound (Chion, Flinn, Beck) & FRAMES CINEMA JOURNAL on "Conflicting Images, Contested Realities"

June 1, 2015, 6:02 am
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Screenshot from Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). You can read Mack Hagood's article “The Tinnitus Trope: Acoustic Trauma in Narrative Film”, which refers to this film)

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to rapidly relay news to its readers of two new open access film journal issues: The Cine-Files (8, 2015) on Film Sound and Frames Cinema Journal, Conflicting Images,Contested Realities (7, 2015). Both volumes boast truly magnificent contents, but the Sound Dossier and Issue at The Cine-Files is something really special, with contributions from the likes of Michel Chion, Caryl Flinn, Jay Beck and Kate Lacey among many other luminaries.

FSFF's author also contributed to this excellent issue - on the emergent focus on film sound, music and listening in audiovisual essays.




Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 7, June 2015 on Conflicting Images,Contested Realities, (click here to access all the below contents)

Contents
  • Conflicting Images, Contested Realities: An Introduction to Frames 7 by Eileen Rositzka and Amber Shields
Feature Articles
  • "Goya on his Shoulders: Tim Hetherington, Genre Memory, and the Body at Risk" by Robert Burgoyne and Eileen Rositzka
  • "New Ethical Questions and Social Media: Young People’s Construction of Holocaust Memory Online" by Victoria Grace Walden
  • "The War Tapes and the Poetics of Affect of the Hollywood War Film Genre" by Cilli Pogodda and Danny Gronmaier
  • "A Revolution for Memory: Reproductions of a Communist Utopia through Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain and Posters from the Cultural Revolution" by Nathan To
  • "The Long Life of Belgian WWI Documentaries in the Interwar Period" by Natalia Stachura
  • "'Choirs of Wailing Shells': Poetic and Musical Engagements in Derek Jarman’s War Requiem–between Documentary and Fiction" by Caroline Perret
Point of View
  • "Matricídio, or Queerness Explained to My Mother" by Diego Costa
  • "Bollywood Bodies: Turning the Gaze from Babes to Boys and Back Again in Farah Khan’s Happy New Year" by Amber Shields
  • "Civil War Photography and the Contemporary War Film" by John Trafton
  • "Argentine Documentaries on the Malvinas (Falklands) War: Between Testimony and Televisual Archive" by Mirta Varela
  • "The British Docudramas of the Falklands War" by Georges Fournier
Book Reviews
  • In Contrast: Croatian Film Today by Ana Grgić
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The Other Western: great new issue of TRANSFORMATIONS

May 22, 2014, 9:49 am
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Frame grab from Bend of the River (Anthony Mann, 1952). Read an article on this film by Helen Miller and Warwick Mules

Thanks to the always alert and brilliant Adrian Martin, Film Studies For Free got wind of a fantastic new issue of Transformations Journal on The Other Western (meaning [as the editors set out]: unusual Westerns as well as the "global and contemporary Western", which means that the issue provides a great accompaniment for Frames Cinema Journal's own recent take on the Cold War or political Western; and also to FSFF's podcast interview with Austin Fisher on his research on the spaghetti western).

FSFF has only just begun to dig into this issue of Transformations, but what it's read so far is really excellent. All the links are below.

And thank ye kindly, AM!

Transformations, Issue No. 24   2014— The Other Western

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New Issues of NECSUS on 'Animals', Godard, Sobchack, Mulvey, Musicals, Documentary, Feminisms, and PARTICIPATIONS on film festivals, internet, television, Twitter, film and theatre audiences

June 11, 2015, 3:33 am
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A concise video primer by Catherine Grant on phenomenological film theory as well as a tribute to the works of René Clément, Henri Decae, Vivian Sobchack, Steven Shaviro and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Published in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring, 2015, where you can also read an accompanying text: "Film studies in the groove? Rhythmising perception in Carnal Locomotive."

Today, Film Studies For Free brings very glad tidings of two newly published, open access journal issues, from NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (still rolling out, and which, alongside its regular features and sections, offers a special dossier on 'animals') and PARTICIPATIONS: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. All the contents are listed and linked to below.

If you're attending the annual gathering of the Network of European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) in Łódź, Poland, have fun! It's a great conference. This year, FSFF's author is presenting instead at the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities-funded workshop on Scholarship in Sound and Image, taking place from next week at Middleburg College in Vermont, U.S.A. from which some wonderful (and certainly open access) things will soon come.


NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2015

All the below contents are linked to here: http://www.necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2015_animals/ 


Features:
Editorial Necsus

Audiovisual essays:

Special section: Animals (rolling out shortly)
  • Animals, anthropocentrism, media by Barbara Creed and Maarten Reesink
  • Why not look at animals? by Anat Pick
  • When Lulu met the Centaur: Photographic traces of creaturely love by Dominic Pettman
  • Tasmanian tigers and polar bears: The documentary moving image and (species) loss by Belinda Smaill
  • Cinematic slowness, political paralysis?: Animal life in ‘Bovines’, with Deleuze and Guattari by Laura McMahon
  • Horseplay: Equine performance and creaturely acts in cinema by Stella Hockenhull
  • Cows, clicks, ciphers, and satire by Tom Tyler

Book reviews:

(edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier [NECS Publication Committee])

  • Television studies reloaded: From history to text review by Massimo Scaglioni
  • The documentary film book review by Malin Wahlberg 
  • Storytelling in the media convergence age: Exploring screen narratives review by Emre Caglayan
  • Education in the school of dreams: Travelogues and non-fiction films review by Adam Freeman

Festival reviews:

(edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist [Film Festival Research Network])
  • Dossier: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015 edited by Marijke de Valck
  • Dispatches from the dark: A conversation with Neil Young at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015 by Daniel Steinhart
  • Hollywood legacies and Russian laughter: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto / Pordenone Silent Film Festival 2014 review by Gert Jan Harkema
  • We can haz film fest!: Internet Cat Video Festival goes viral review by Diane Burgess

Exhibition reviews:

(edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg [NECS Publication Committee])
  • Too much world: A Hito Steyerl retrospective review by Paula Albuquerque
  • McMansion of media excess: Ryan Trecartin’s and Lizzie Fitch’s SITE VISIT review by Lisa Åkervall
  • Reaching out!: Activating space in the art of Olafur Eliasson review by Olivia Eriksson
  • David Reeb: Traces of Things to Come review by Leshu Torchin


PARTICIPATIONS 12. 1, May 2015

All the below contents are linked to here: http://www.participations.org/Volume%2012/Issue%201/contents.htm


Editorial: Barker, Martin (Editor): 'Thinking differently about "censorship"''


Articles

Themed Section 1: 'Theatre Audiences' (Guest editors: Matthew Reason and Kirsty Sedgman)

Themed Section 2: 'Tweeting the Olympics: International broadcasting soft power and social media'(Guest editors: Marie Gillespie and Ben O'Loughlin)


Themed Section 3: 'EIFAC 2014' (Guest editors: Lesley-Ann Dickson)


Reviews

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NECSUS Issue 5 on Traces: Kracauer, Carax, Farocki, Elsaesser, mobile interfaces, film sound and much more

June 28, 2014, 1:53 am
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Frame grab from Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2013). Read Saige Walton's article on this film "The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in Holy Motors" in the Spring 2014 issue of NECSUS. Pt 1 of the LOLA
dossier of the film is here; pt 2 here.

Film Studies For Free had such a great time at the conference of the Network for European Cinema and Media Studies conference in Milan last week that it is a little delayed in bringing its readers news of the publication of the latest issue of this organisation's wonderful Open Access journal NECSUS. The great table of contents is given below.

More will be forthcoming from FSFF about the Milan conference in a few days (including the recording of a wonderful interview gathered there...). But one of the hottest news items from the conference is that video essayists Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López will develop and edit a new video essay section for NECSUS, to debut in the Autumn 2014 issue. More details about this very welcome development are given here.


Features:
Special section: Traces
Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier - NECS Publication Committee)
Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist - Film Festival Research Network)
Exhibition reviews:
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Toute la mémoire du monde: In Memoriam, Alain Resnais (June 3, 1922 - March 1, 2014)

March 2, 2014, 3:54 am
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Screenshot from Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais/Chris Marker, 1953)
 "I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living
and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film." - Alain Resnais

News has just come in of the death of Alain Resnais at the age of 91. The below tribute will evolve and expand over the next days and weeks. But Film Studies For Free has begun it with a sense of shock and huge sadness. David Hudson is also collecting tributes and links at Keyframe Daily.
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Study of a Single Film: IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

March 17, 2014, 2:00 am
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INTERSECTION, a videographic film study of In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000) 
By Catherine Grant, Chiara Grizaffi and Denise Liege

The above video explores the notion (and some of the motifs) of 'Intersection' in Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film In the Mood for Love. It works through a synchronous compilation of the images and soundtracks from the montage sequences in the film that use the same orchestration of a waltz originally composed by Shigeru Umebayashi for the film Yumeji (Suzuki Seijun, 1991). Watch the video, then read these linked to, intersecting quotations from written texts about Wong's film. Then repeat.


Film Studies For Free proudly presents its latest "Study of a Single Film" entry which, this time, showcases open access scholarly work on the subject of Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film In the Mood for Love.

It's a film that FSFF's author has been fortunate to have been teaching this semester, on a course which devotes its entire attention just to this one movie. As with the corresponding course last year (which treated Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados), this period of intense study has resulted in a videographic study of In the Mood for Love on the film - embedded above - this year, one co-produced as part of a research collaboration with two graduate students Chiara Grizzaffi and Denise Liege.

Speaking of videographic film studies... is exactly what FSFF's author will be doing at a workshop at the upcoming Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Seattle, USA (download PDF of the program here). At this workshop an important announcement will be made: notably, the precise online location of a brand new open access journal to which the below official press release refers:

Announcing[in]Transition

Cinema Journal and MediaCommons will soon announce the launch of the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. The journal, [in]Transition, will unveil its inaugural issue at next week's annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, Washington. The journal will be formally launched and discussed (amongst other topics) at the “Visualizing Media Studies: The Expansion of Scholarly Publishing into Video Essays” workshop on Thursday, March 20th (Session E14).

[in]Transition will provide a forum for a range of digital scholarship (which includes such formats as the video essay and the visual essay) and will also create a context for understanding and evaluating videographic work as a new mode of scholarly writing for the disciplines of cinema and media studies and related fields. This goal will be achieved through editorial curating of exemplary videographic works, through critical analysis and appreciation, pre-publication peer review and Open Peer Commentary.

[in]Transition will be co-edited by Catherine Grant (University of Sussex), Christian Keathley (Middlebury College), and Drew Morton (Texas A and M University-Texarkana) and managed by Christine Becker (Cinema Journal) and Jason Mittell (MediaCommons).

FSFF will also bring you that news as hot off the press as it can, probably just after the conference. So do please stay tuned! It hopes to see some of you at the workshop, too, as well as at its author's other conferencepanel appearance (on "Transnational Film Remakes" with Iain Robert Smith and Michael Lawrence).

But, in the meantime, please enjoy perusing the below links to scholarly material about Wong's wonderful film.
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On Cinematic Découpage

March 27, 2014, 10:35 am
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Opening paragraph from Timothy Barnard's new book Découpage (Montreal: caboose, 2014)
découpage
French term, untranslatable into English, for an EDITING “plan” of a (sometimes finished) film which is like a visual version of a “screenplay,” but not necessarily a “storyboard” or “shooting script” because these can’t include a precise conception of movement within and between shots. Most notably used by film theorist Noël Burch and director Robert Bresson. 


Film Studies For Free is thrilled to present an entry on the concept of cinematic découpage to celebrate the online publication of the first half of the forthcoming volume on that topic in the Kino-Agora series (edited by Christian Keathley, author of some of the other works on découpage linked to below) published by the Canadian publisher caboose and written by Timothy Barnard. The full book will be published in Fall 2014. While you're visiting the caboose website, it's really worth having a good look around: this is one of the most generous of film publishers in offering free excerpts from its wonderful books.

FSFF will be back on Monday with a round up entry of open access goodies from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference on Seattle, at which [in]Transition, the new journal of videographic film and moving image studies was launched! So, if you have any items you'd like to share, please email them. Thanks!



The recording of a Film Studies research seminar given by Christian Keathley at the Centre for Visual Fields, University of Sussex, on December 4, 2013. For information about this video (and for an audio file version) please see here.

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of CINEPHILIA AND HISTORY, OR THE WIND IN THE TREES (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently working on a second book, THE MYSTERY OF OTTO PREMINGER (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multimedia format, including video essays (see his Vimeo account here). Keathley is editor of caboose's kino-agora book series.

For links to numerous examples of Keathley's scholarly work online, including items he mentions in this talk, please see this earlier Film Studies For Free entry.

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Society for Cinema and Media Studies Post-Conference Round Up: [IN]TRANSITION,Transnational Cinemas, MOVIE eBooks, and much more!

March 30, 2014, 11:56 pm
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Homepage of [in]Transition, 1.1, 2014

Film Studies For Free is just back from attending the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. This year it took place in the distinctly cinematic, and especially fun, city of Seattle in Washington State, USA.

The big event, from this blog's point of view, was the launch of [in]Transition, a new open access periodical, co-edited by FSFF's author with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. [in]Transition– a collaboration between MediaCommons and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ official publication Cinema Journal– is the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. [in]Transition has ahighly distinguished editorial board and is more than ably project managed for MediaCommons by Jason Mittell and for Cinema Journal by Chris Becker, CJ's online editor (big thanks also go to the very visionary Will Brooker [CJ editor], Avi Santo, Monica McCormick and the rest of the heroic MediaCommons team). 

You can read more about the project here, and about videographic film studies and its lineage more generally in the Resources page here. Please visit the website and be very encouraged to comment on the curated videos (on Marilyn Monroe, neorealism, F for Fake and the films of Ingmar Bergman) published in issue 1. One of the main goals of this journal is to generate debate and understanding about audiovisual moving image studies, and we would love to be able to count on the insights and questions of our viewers/readers in this project. So please visit the journal website and see whether you'd like to contribute to the Open Peer Commentary.

You can also watch video recordings (linked to below) of the historic SCMS conference workshop on Visualizing Media Studies, on March 20th, which launched [in]Transition, with contributions by Chris Becker, Drew Morton, Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley, Matthias Stork, Benjamin Sampson, Jason Mittell, and a very lively and interested audience. This session was livestreamed and then archived for online viewing among a series of other SCMS panels and workshops. These are all linked to below, along with lots of other items of interest and news from the conference.
 
SCMS Workshop Livestreaming:
Transnational Cinemas Links:
On March 24, 2014, Film Studies For Free interviewed Dr Austin Fisher, Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema and editor of the forthcoming volume Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), among other publications. 
     The interview took place in Seattle, USA, after the close of the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, where Austin was contributing to a number of workshops and panels as co-chair (with Iain Robert Smith) of the SCMS Scholarly Interest Group in Transnational Cinemas. Austin talks about this topic in the interview and connects it to his longstanding interest in Italian cinema and the spaghetti western. He was also in the US as an invited speaker (with Sir Christopher Frayling) at an event at Texas Tech, in Lubbock, Texas, to celebrate 50 years since the release of A Fistful of Dollars.
     Austin is also author of a video essay on The Searchers, and in the interview he talks about the experience of making this work, a topic of particular interest at the SCMS conference where [in]Transition was launched.

MOVIE eBooks!!
  • At a wonderful SCMS workshop on 'Film Scholarship and the Online Journal' (proposed by V.F. Perkins and chaired by Girish Shambu), John Gibbs announced the launch of a range of open access eBooks by MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism. The first three volumes (in EPUB and Mobi formats) are as follows:
    • Movies and Tone by Douglas Pye
    • The Police Series by Jonathan Bignell 
    • Reading Buffy by Deborah Thomas 
Discussions of/Reflections on SCMS:
Other material presented or referred to at SCMS (please let FSFF know of more to add to this list):
    Other news and links: 

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    Announcing the launch of MEDIA INDUSTRIES! A new international Open Access Journal

    May 21, 2014, 2:48 pm
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    After a hiatus due to some rather pressing research deadlines (and a little holiday), Film Studies For Free pokes its head fleetingly above the e-parapet to announce the exciting launch of a wonderful new open access journal: Media Industries online at http://mediaindustriesjournal.org.

    Media Industries is a new peer-reviewed, multi-media, open-access online journal that supports critical studies of media industries and institutions worldwide. The first issue is now online and the journal is also now accepting submissions for future issues.

    Issue 1 is the first in a series of three issues to be published over the summer that features essays authored by the journal's highly esteemed editorial board. Each of the board essays discusses the state of the field of media industries studies.


    FSFF wishes Media Industries all the very best for a highly industrious open access future.

    1.1 Table of Contents (visit the journal for live links)

    • “Welcome to Media Industries” - written by the Editorial Collective: Amelia Arsenault, Stuart Cunningham, Michael Curtin, Terry Flew, Anthony Fung, Jennifer Holt, Paul McDonald, Brian McNair, Alisa Perren, and Kevin Sanson.
    • “Dirt Research For Media Industries” - Charles R. Acland
    • “Media Policy Research and the Media Industries” - Des Freedman
    • “The Value of Ethnography” - Tejaswini Ganti
    • “The Menace of Instrumentalism in Media Industries Research and Education” – David Hesmondhalgh
    • “Placing International Media Production” - Aphra Kerr
    • “On Automation in Media Industries: Integrating Algorithmic Media Production Into Media Industries Scholarship” - Philip Napoli
    • “Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Industry Studies” - Thomas Schatz
    • “Selling Television: Addressing Transformations in the International Distribution of Television Content” - Jeanette Steemers
    • “There Is No Music Industry” – Jonathan Sterne
    • “Globalization Through the Eyes of Runners: Student Interns as Ethnographers on Runaway Productions in Prague” – Petr Szczepanik
    • “The Case for Studying In-Store Media” - Joseph Turow
    • “Industry Proximity” – Patrick Vonderau

    Call for Papers
    Media Industries invites contributions that range across the full spectrum of media industries, including film, television, internet, radio, music, publishing, electronic games, advertising, and mobile communications. Submissions may explore these industries individually or examine inter-medial relations between industrial sectors. We encourage both contemporary and historical studies, and are especially interested in contributions that draw attention to global and international perspectives, and use innovative methodologies, imaginative theoretical approaches, and new research directions.

    More About Media Industries
    The journal is maintained by a managing Editorial Collective and Editorial Board comprised of an international group of media industries scholars. For additional information about the Board and Collective, as well as a list of forthcoming essays from Board members, please visit:
    Media Industries

    Website: http://mediaindustriesjournal.org
    Email: mediaindjournal@gmail.com
    Facebook: http://facebook.com/mediaindustriesjournal
    Twitter: http://twitter.com/mediaindjournal
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    Search

    The Other Western: great new issue of TRANSFORMATIONS

    May 22, 2014, 9:49 am
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    Frame grab from Bend of the River (Anthony Mann, 1952). Read an article on this film by Helen Miller and Warwick Mules

    Thanks to the always alert and brilliant Adrian Martin, Film Studies For Free got wind of a fantastic new issue of Transformations Journal on The Other Western (meaning [as the editors set out]: unusual Westerns as well as the "global and contemporary Western", which means that the issue provides a great accompaniment for Frames Cinema Journal's own recent take on the Cold War or political Western; and also to FSFF's podcast interview with Austin Fisher on his research on the spaghetti western).

    FSFF has only just begun to dig into this issue of Transformations, but what it's read so far is really excellent. All the links are below.

    And thank ye kindly, AM!

    Transformations, Issue No. 24   2014— The Other Western

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    Indian Cinema and its Centenary at SYNOPTIQUE

    June 25, 2014, 7:26 am
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    Synoptique cover by Malory Beazley based on an image by flickr user lecercle.

    It's about time for some link action at Film Studies For Free. Indeed, there will be a little flurry of long overdue entries here over the next days too as there are lots of new issues of great online journals to flag up, as well as other important resources to publicise.
    First up, today, news from SYNOPTIQUE about the launch of its latest issue devoted to the Centenary of Indian Cinema, guest edited by Catherine Bernier. The table of contents is given below, or follow the link to access the journal.
    SYNOPTIQUE - An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, Vol 3, No 1, 2014
    Table of Contents

    Articles
    • Size Zero Begums and Dirty Pictures: The Contemporary Female Star in Bollywood (1-29) by Tupur Chatterjee
    • Recycle Industry: The Visual Economy of Remakes in Contemporary Bombay Film Culture (30-66) by Ramna Walia
    • Visual Perception and Cultural Memory: Typecast and Typecast(e)ing in Malayalam Cinema (67-98) by Sujith Kumar Parayil

    Interviews
    • Death Becomes Her: Bombay Cinema, Nation and Kashmir (Kaushik Bhaumik in Conversation with Desire Machine Collective, Guwahati) (99-116) by Kaushik Bhaumik
    • Questions for Kumar Shahani- Interview (117-126) by Aparna Frank
    • Critical Review: Kumar Shahani's Maya Darpan (1972) (127-150) by Aparna Frank

    Translations
    • "The Writer in the Film World: Amritlal Nagar’s Seven Years of Film Experience" Translation and Introduction by Suzanne L. Schulz (151-159)

    Book Reviews
    • Politics as Performance: An Ambitious Exploration of Cine-Politics in Andhra Pradesh (160-166) by Parichay Patra

    Miscellaneous - Festival Reports
    • Is It Dead Yet?: The 42nd Festival du nouveau cinéma (167-169) by Bradley Warren
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    Now ONLINE! Jacques Rancière's Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading

    June 26, 2014, 6:16 am
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    Jacques Rancière Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading, May 2, 2014

    Private Q & A Session with Jacques Rancière, preceding his Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading, May 2, 2014

    The above videos provide the sole focus for a fairly self-explanatory -- and wonderful -- entry at Film Studies For Free today: they present the recording of a lecture and discussion on cinema by the hugely eminent French philosopher Professor Jacques Rancière at the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, University of Reading, UK.

    Rancière's abstract for his lecture, which took place on May 2, 2014, reads as follows:
    Ars gratia artis, the three words written on the scroll surrounding the head of the roaring lion at the beginning of the MGM movies may sum up the singularity of cinema. Cinema has blurred in many ways the frontiers separating pure art from the activities of the everyday and the forms of popular performance and entertainment. By the same token, it may have questioned the very unity of what we call art. Through examples borrowed from the history of film and from the history of cinephilia I wish to examine some aspects of this subversion of the frontiers of art.
    Jacques Rancière, born in Algiers (1940) is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris VIII, where he taught Philosophy from 1969 to 2000, and visiting professor in several American universities. His work deals with emancipatory politics, aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. His books translated into English include notably: The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), Disagreement (1998) , The Politics of Aesthetics ( 2006) , The Future of the Image ( 2007), The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Proletarian Nights (2012) and Aisthesis (2013). He has authored three books dedicated to cinema (Film Fables, 2006; Bela Tarr. The Time after, 2013; The Intervals of Cinema, forthcoming, 2014)

    Thanks to Professor Lúcia Nagib and the other faculty at CFAC for making this event happen and, especially, for making the recording accesible online for everyone to watch it. Rancière's lecture begins about fifteen minutes into the first video.

    Thanks to Hoi Lun Law for the tip-off that these recordings had gone online. FSFF can't wait to watch them!
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    On happy and other endings! Kelly Reichardt, Andrew Klevan and James MacDowell on Video (not all together!)

    June 27, 2014, 7:33 am
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    The filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Humanitas Visiting Professor in Film and Television, "In Conversation" with Dr Andrew Klevan at the University of Oxford on May 23, 2014. Click here to access the video (1:18:30)


    Film Studies For Free brings you tidings of some more wonderful film studies related videos. Both of them, like yesterday's Rancière videos, came from top notch tip offs by Hoi Lun Law (thanks HL!).

    In the above video (online here), Andrew Klevan enters into an incredibly thought-provoking and insightful conversation with the great American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her work. Reichardt's five feature films are River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Night Moves (2013); and she has also made the short narrative Ode (1999). Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, and author of, inter alia, a recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013), which he discussed in a number of formats  with Film Studies For Free. He is also a member of the editorial board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism.

    Below, you can find the embedded recording of a great talk by Klevan's fellow Movie editorial board member James MacDowell, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick and a film scholar who has shared far more high quality work online for free than many academics produce in a lifetime (see here, here, here, here and here [PDF], for instance).

    MacDowell discusses the romantic ‘happy ending’ in Hollywood cinema - its motifs, meanings and potential mutability - in a brilliantly illustrated and entertaining talk for an event for the Zabludowicz Collection which took place on December 6, 2013. MacDowell is the founder of great film critical website Alternate Takes, author of the book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliché, Convention and the Final Couple (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and he is currently writing a monograph on irony in film for Palgrave MacMillan (forthcoming 2016).

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    NEW [in]Transition, IN MEDIA RES, VIEW, DELETION, Free FILM QUARTERLY, INDIANCINE.MA

    September 14, 2015, 5:43 am
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    A new score for Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902). Written for The New Music Players and Orchestra of Sound and Light for concerts in London and Sussex, UK, with funding support from the RVW Trust and Arts Council England. (Music © University of York Music Press, 2015). More information here.

    Hello there! It's been a rather busy few months, so Film Studies For Free had to take a little break from its long-form advocacy activities at this website, although its bountiful open-access recommendations continued to issue forth as usual on Twitter and Facebook. But the extended version of FSFF returns now with news of a number of fabulous online publications for your autumnal (Northern Hemisphere) or Spring (Southern Hemisphere) viewing and reading pleasure. Do scroll down for all the contents listed in the title. Oh and one more thing: don't miss Sight and Sound's ongoing "Women on Film" coverage.


    [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.3, 2015
    P.S. Please note [in]Transition's call for submissions for a special issue on Latin American cinema at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/call-special-issue


    Some Recent Theme weeks:

    • Monday, August 24, 2015 - Shohini Chaudhuri (University of Essex) presents: Gaza and the Trope of Encirclement
    • Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - Sara Saljoughi (University of Toronto) presents: Nostalgic Returns
    • Wednesday, August 26, 2015 - Michelle Baroody (University of Minnesota) presents: "A River Runs Through It": Visualizing Fluency
    • Thursday, August 27, 2015 - Aisha Jamal (Sheridan College) presents: The ‘Afghan girl" Sherbat Gula’s popularity with Afghans
    • Friday, August 28, 2015 -Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University) presents: A revolutionary meme
    ROCK DOCS
    • Monday, August 10, 2015 - Shani Heckman (College of Marin) presents: Celebrity Skinned: Patty Schemel Lesbian Hero featured in film Hit So Hard
    • Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - Landon Palmer (Indiana University) presents: Rocking the Transmission: Vulgar Spontaneity in Live Television Music
    • Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - Jesse Scholtterbeck (Denison University) presents: Performance and the Pursuit of Stardom in Anvil: The Story of Anvil
    • Thursday, August 13, 2015 - Michael Bass (Georgia State University) presents: Filth, Fury, and Fiction: Creating a Mythology in The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle
    • Friday, August 14, 2015 - Laura Mayne (University of York) presents: Seeking the variety of live performance in The Rolling Stones’ Rock n Roll Circus (1968)
    FOUND FOOTAGE ART
    • Monday, August 17, 2015 - Shane Denson (Duke University) presents: VHS Found Footage and the Material Horrors of Post-Cinematic Images
    • Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - Laura Wilson (University of Manchester) presents: Affective Horror of the Found Footage Anthology
    • Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - Anthony C. Bleach (Kutztown University) presents: Video Aesthetics and Nostalgia Deployed in Better Call Saul
    • Thursday, August 20, 2015 - Rebecca Jackson (Johnston Community College) presents: JOLT! And The Glitch Aesthetic
    • Friday, August 21, 2015 - Leo Goldsmith (New York University) presents: The All-Consuming: Scratch Video’s Ambivalent Bodies
    • Monday, June 29, 2015 - Maria San Filippo (University of the Arts Philadelphia) presents: Captive Viewers: Learning In/humanity through Film in ‘Dogtooth’ and ‘The Wolfpack’
    • Tuesday, June 30, 2015 - Emily Carman (Chapman University) presents: Illicit Achive: Sony Hack as Access for Media Industry Studies
    • Wednesday, July 1, 2015 - Catherine Grant (University of Sussex) presents: Scholarly Striptease. Or, The Unintended Consequences of Film Studies For Free
    • Thursday, July 2, 2015 - Zoe Shacklock (University of Warwick) presents: Kathryn Alexandre and the Performance of the Body
    • Friday, July 3, 2015 - Kevin L. Ferguson (Queen’s College) presents: Pee-Wee’s Daddy

    VIEW 4.7, 2015: Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and -Realities
    Table of Contents
    Discoveries
    Explorations


    DELETION The Open Access Forum in Science Fiction Studies
    Episode 10: The Science Fiction Blockbuster
    Previous Episodes


    FILM QUARTERLY Vol. 68 No. 4, Summer 2015 for free until September 30th, 2015: http://fq.ucpress.edu/content/68/4

    Table of Contents

    FROM THE EDITOR
    FEATURES
    • Black Media Matters: Remembering The Bombing of Osage Avenue by Karen Beckman
    • China Unraveled: Violence, Sin, and Art in Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin by Jiwei Xiao
    • Mickey Horror: Escape from Tomorrow and the Gothic Attack on Disney by Aviva Briefel
    • Attention Duras by William Caroline
    • Maximum Emotions, Minimum Words: Interview with Eugène Green by Megan Ratner
    COLUMNS
    • Crónica de castas (Chronicle of Castes) and Sangre bárbara (Barbarous Blood) by Paul Julian Smith
    • The Vulnerable Spectator: On the Contagion of Vulnerability by Amelie Hastie
    FESTIVAL REPORTS
    • Marking Time: The Long form Documentary at IDFA 2014 by Deirdre Boyle
    • Sundance 2015, The Crystal Ball by B. Ruby Rich
    IN MEMORIAM
    • Remembering Resnais: An Encounter on the First Anniversary (Approximately) of His Death by Paul Thomas
    PAGE VIEWS
    • Bernie Cook Reflects on Katrina Media at the Ten-Year Mark in FLOOD OF IMAGES: Media, Memory, and Hurricane Katrina by Regina Longo
    BOOK REVIEWS
    • Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics by Julie A. Turnock DANA POLAN
    • Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter by Richard Barrios CARRIE RICKEY
    • Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military by Alice Lovejoy TANYA GOLDMAN
    • L.A. Plays Itself / Boys in the Sand (Queer Film Classics series) by Cindy Patton GREG YOUMANS
    • Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywoodby Kaveh Askari
    • VITO ADRIAENSENS
    • Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance by Lea Jacobs MASHA SHPOLBERG



    Indiancine.ma is an annotated online archive of Indian film. It is intended to serve as a shared resource for film scholars and enthusiasts in India and beyond.

    Indiancine.ma has been initiated by Pad.ma, and is operated in collaboration with a number of organisations and film studies institutions. These include:

    The initial set of films and metadata is based on Ashish Rajadhyaksha's and Paul Willemen's Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, and the Indiancine.ma Wiki. The website was built with pan.do/ra, and launched in February 2013 at Jaaga in Bangalore, with support from the Bohen Foundation, The Foundation for Arts Initiatives, and the Goethe Institute.

    At present, Indiancine.ma is being utilized as a backbone structure for several research projects on Indian film, including a project for an 'Annotated Repository on the Art Cinemas of India" being conducted by the University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a project on the Left and the early Malayalam cinema being overseen by Prof. Satish Poduval of the English & Foreign University, a repository for precious historical print holdings on the history of Tamil and Telugu cinemas being assembled by Samyuktha P.C. (Chennai) and Dr. S.V. Srinivas (Bangalore), and a project on early Bengali films at the Media Lab, Jadavpur. A general focus at the moment is on out-of-copyright films, currently pre-1954.

    Books:
    Texts:
    • Three Bombay Talkies Films from the 1930s Debashree Mukherjee, as a part of a Pad.ma film histories fellowship, selected and annotated a trio of major Franz Osten Bombay Talkies films. Debashree writes about her selection and annotation strategy and presents an interview with Peter Dietze, grandson of Himanshu Rai with rare images from his Melbourne collection.
    • A Filmi Twist of Fate: An Interview with Peter Dietze, Grandson of Himansu Rai Debashree Mukherjee's interview with Peter Dietze, grandson of Himanshu Rai with rare images from his from his Melbourne collection. In her own words, 'the only extant and accessible collection of studio papers from any Indian talkie studio of this time'.
    • A Second Bibliography Around John Abraham Jenson Joseph is researching Malayalam cinema around the key figure of filmmaker John Abraham. This is part of the Annotated Repositories of the Art Cinemas of India project supported by the University of Chicago's Delhi Centre. This is a first Visual Bibliography of his researches, and includes previously inaccessible material around the Odessa Film Collective and other material on and by Abraham.
    • A Second Select Bibliography on the Cinema of Mrinal Sen This is the first set of materials assembled as a part of the Annotated Repository of the Art Cinemas of India project supported by the University of Chicago Delhi Centre. It includes key texts around the work of Mrinal Sen, and includes publicity materials around Sen's films, the reception of the films when they were first released, on the making of the films, and reviews.
    • A Second Select Bibliography on the Cinema of Jahnu Barua This is the first set of materials assembled as a part of the Annotated Repository of the Art Cinemas of India project supported by the University of Chicago Delhi Centre. It includes reviews and writings on the cinema of Jahnu Barua.
    • Signifying Nativity: ‘Documentary reels’ in early South Indian films By Jenson Joseph
    • The Complete ICC Reports Five complete volumes of the Indian Cinematograph Committee evidence (1927-28).
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