Horror in Homeopathic Doses Franjus Eyes Without a Face

Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju,  France/Italy, 1959)

More than any other image, an erased human face remains horribly eloquent. In fact, a face cannot be made to vanish completely: it stays sufficiently human to horrify by its exact lack of humanity. Hence the unnerving effect of Georges Franjus film Eyes Without a Face (1959), in which a young woman, disfigured in a car crash, is subjected to her fathers insane and murderous plan to give her a new face. We never see the daughters ravaged face, but the featureless white mask she wears for most of the film is enough to suggest her uncanny oscillation between human and inhuman.
Brian Dillon, The Revelation of Erasure, Tate Etc., Issue 8, Autumn 2006

Being a horror buff of the rather squeamish and easily frightened kind, Film Studies For Free usually likes its scary, gory movies to be Lyrical... Poetic... Beautiful. That way, it finds, it doesnt have to avert its eyes from the screen too much. 

Thus, FSFF is a particular fan of the truly horrific but extraordinarily beautiful film Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face. Georges Franjus classic delivers its horror in homeopathic doses, as Franju himself so aptly put it. 

So, its the film FSFF just had to choose for its little homage in scholarly links this Halloween. (P.S. If you are based in the USA or Canada, you can also currently watch it for free online as part of October Halloween Festival of free films at The Auteurs website).

• Curtis Bowman, A film without politics: Georges Franjus Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959), Kinoeye, Vol 2,  Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Elizabeth Cowie,  Anxiety, ethics and horror: Georges Franjus Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959), Kinoeye, Vol 2,  Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Paul Cronly, Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 5, December 2008
  
• Lee Hill, Skin Deep, Vertigo Magazine, No. 17, May 2008
  
• Reynold Humphries, Dr Franjus "House of Pain" and the political cutting edge of horror, Kinoeye, Vol 2, Issue 13, Sept 2002 
• Kate Ince, Reply to Michael du Plessis, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Gary Johnson, "Georges Franjus Eyes Without a Face, Images Journal, 2004 
• Katerina Loukopoulou, Review of Georges Franju by Kate Ince [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005], Scope, Issue 9, October 2007
• Michael du Plessis, Fantasies of the Institution: The Films of Georges Franju and Kate Ince’s Georges Franju, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007  
• Donato Totaro, Martyrs: Evoking Frances Cinematic and Historical Past, Offscreen, Vol. 13, Issue 5, 2009
  
• Donato Totaro, Salute Alida, Offscreen, Vol. 10, Issue 5, May 31, 2006 
• Catherine Wheatley, Les Yeux sans visage, Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, 2007
  

Read More..

Zombie Week at In Media Res

Image from Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978)

Film Studies For Free today recommends an event at one of its favourite, and one of the most original, film and media studies websites -- In Media Res -- which is just concluding a special theme week devoted to Zombies! Below are the direct links to all the fun stuff, and below those you can find more information about the ethos and practicalities of the marvellous In Media Res site.

• Eric Hamako (University of Massachusetts) presents: “The Yellow Peril rises from the grave…to get your White women!" Orientalist themes in zombie stories, Monday, September 28, 2009

• Cathy Schlund-Vials (Univ. of Connecticut), Racism, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonial Zombies: Resident Evil 5, Tuesday, September 29, 2009

• Kim Paffenroth (Iona College), Dawn of the Dead (1978): Zombies and Human Nature, Wednesday, September 30, 2009

• Elizabeth McAlister (Wesleyan Univ.), “Obama, Zombies, and Black Male Secular Messiahs", Thursday, October 1, 2009

ABOUT IN MEDIA RES

In Media Res is dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.

Each day, a different scholar will curate a 30-second to 3-minute video clip/visual image slideshow accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response.

We use the title "curator" because, like a curator in a museum, you are repurposing a media object that already exists and providing context through your commentary, which frames the object in a particular way.

The clip/comment combination are intended to both introduce the curators work to the larger community of scholars (as well as non-academics who frequent the site) and, hopefully, encourage feedback/discussion from that community.

Theme weeks are designed to generate a networked conversation between curators. All the posts for that week will thematically overlap and the participating curators each agree to comment on one anothers work.

Our goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst scholars and the public about contemporary approaches to studying media.

In Media Res provides a forum for more immediate critical engagement with media at a pace closer to how we typically experience media

In Media Res is a publication of MediaCommons. MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of "fair use." If such quotation is necessary to a scholars argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholars original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text -- but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it -- we must defend the scholars right to quote from the media texts under study.

For more information, please contact In Media Res’ coordinating editor, Avi Santo at asanto@odu.edu

Read More..

New Issue of MEDIASCAPE Online on History and Technology

Frame grab from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980), one of the subjects of Film Studies For Frees authors latest videographic film study in her new article Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies, which you can find in the newly published issue of Mediascape.

The much awaited Winter 2013 issue of MEDIASCAPE, UCLAs Journal of Cinema and Media, has just been published. There are two very fine articles on historical film archives by Christina Petersen and Bryan Sebok, as well as two excellent columns on related historiographical themes. Meanwhile, the META section boasts some very good, new video essay work by Matthias Stork, Alexandra Schroeder, and Clifford James Galiher and reflections on videographic and other digital film studies practices by great luminaries, such as Yuri Tsivian and Daria Khitrova, alongside those of much more ordinary mortals! Theres also a highly informative interview with filmmaker Thom Andersen and some very interesting reviews to catch up with.

All contents are listed and linked to below. But, also, do check out MEDIASCAPEs occasional, but very high quality blog which publishes between journal issue releases. A good place to start is this entry: Mastering "The Master" by Vincent Brook

MEDIASCAPE, Winter 2013

Editorial by Andy Myers and Andrew Young

Features

• The Crowd Mind: The Archival Legacy of the Payne Fund Studies’ Movies and Conduct (1933) by Christina Petersen
• Headline Hollywood: A discourse analysis of the Variety archive by Bryan Sebok

Columns

• Alex Haley’s Roots and Hyperreal Historiography by Randy Laist
• Transmission: Considering New Media and the Online Histories of HIV/AIDS by Christopher Garland

META

• What Happens When You Sleep? Multiple Layers of Voyeurism in the Paranormal Activity Trilogy by Alexandra Schroeder
• Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies by Catherine Grant
• The Three Fates of the Maltese Falcon: Hammets Novel at Warner Bros. by Clifford James Galiher
• Photography and Fictionality by Jens Schröter
• Transmedia Synergies — Remediating Films and Video Games by Matthias Stork
• In Retrospect: 2012 Los Angeles Animation Festival by Kelly Lake
• “A Film is Alive During its Making” – An Interview with Filmmaker Thom Andersen by Matthias Stork
• On Cinemetrics, Video Essays, and Digital Scholarship – An Interview with Dr. Yuri Tsivian and Dr. Daria Khitrova by Matthias Stork

Reviews

• Total Archive: Picturing History from the Stereographic Library to the Digital Database by Brooke Belisle
• All The World’s A Video Wall: Technology, Humanity, and the Things in Between. Reviewing Chris Salter’s Entangled by Judith Kohlenberger and Samuel Zwaan
• Murder and Montage: Oliver Stone’s Hyperreal Period by Randy Laist
• Review of Useful Cinema by Andrew Myers
• Something Borrowed from the Past: Wedding Photography and Super 8mm by Paul Gansky

 

 

Read More..

The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos An Appeal by a Cinephile

Image from Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg Indio Nacional/A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, Or, The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos (Raya Martin, 2005)

Martin’s Maicling Pelicula is an intensely personal film projecting the young director’s emotional impressions of the era bygone into actualities of the beginnings of the uprising, the stirrings of Philippine nationalism. [...] Maicling Pelicula throws down the gauntlet—and with rude authority—for the heights of sophistication and beauty that the Filipino aesthetic may reach.
Alexis Tioseco, November 11, 2006

Film Studies For Frees author imagines that its readers have been as shocked and upset as she has been to see the news footage of the recent Philippines floods caused when Tropical Storm Ketsana/now Typhoon Ondoy hit on Saturday. Independent filmmakers from the Philippines, like Raya Martin, are producing among the most compelling cinematic work in the world at the moment. Their communications about the floods on Twitter and Facebook have very powerfully expressed the awful scale of the countrys current emergency.

FSFF urges you, if you are able, to investigate how to donate to any of the charitable organisations currently mobilising their resources to provide emergency support. One such organisation (based in the UK) is the Disasters Emergency Committee (also, a good point of call for those responding to the Southern Pacific tsunamis and the Indonesian earthquake [added Oct 1]); Google links for Help for Typhoon Ondoy Victims in the Philippines are here; the Philippine Red Cross is linked to here; other links, for those based in the Philippines, are listed here. If readers want to supply other links to, or information about, any further ways of donating, or helping, you are warmly encouraged to use the comments section of this blog for that purpose. Thank you.

Below is a small selection of key links to online resources on the subject of the cinema of the Philippines (including, at the very foot of the post, a wonderful Cahiers du cinéma video interview in English with Raya Martin) to remind us just how worthy of critical and other support that cinema is. Very sadly, as regular readers of FSFF will know, some of the best entries in the list come from a now silenced voice, that of one of the most eloquent champions of Philippine cinema: Alexis Tioseco, murdered in Quezon City, Philippines, along with partner and fellow critic Nika Bohinc, several weeks ago. They are much missed.

• Cinema of the Philippines wikipedia entry

• Phillipines page of the late Alexis Tiosecos Criticine website on Southeast Asian cinema

• Noel Veras blog on Philippines cinema, Critic After Dark

• Richard Bolisays blog on Philippines Cinema, Lilok Pelicula/Sculpting Cinema

• Francis Cruzs blog on Philippines and other cinemas, Lessons From the School of Inattention - Oggs Movie Thoughts

• Francis Joseph Cruz, Philippine Cinema on the Verge of Redemption, Lessons From the School of Inattention - Oggs Movie Thoughts, August 8, 2007

• Khavn de la Cruz, Filipino digital filmmaker: his website; his YouTube channel
  

• HarryTuttle, Raya Martin Links, Unspoken Cinema, August 6, 2009

• Raya Martin by Alexis Tioseco, Cinema Scope, 39

• Alexis Tioseco, Introduction to a Programme of Philippine Experimental Film/Video Art (Untitled)

• A short interview with Raya Martin by Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope, 27

• Emmanuel Burdeau, October 7: The Filipino Angle, Cahiers du cinéma, October 2007

• Francis Cruz, Maicling Pelicula Nañg Ysañg Indio Nacional (O Ang Mahabang Kalungkutan ng Katagalugan) (2005), Lessons From the School of Inattention - Oggs Movie Thoughts, July 26, 2006

• Roger Garcia, Interview with Raya Martin, DMC Review Online, December 2005
  

• HarryTuttle, Raya Martin in Cannes 2008, Unspoken Cinema, June 6, 2008

• Noel Vera, Indio Nacional: A Short Film about being Filipino, Critic After Dark, July 24, 2007

Rencontre avec Raya Martin 1/3 by Webcahiers

Rencontre avec Raya Martin 2/3 by Webcahiers

Read More..

La Science de Michel Gondry online scholarship on his films videos

Last updated April 19, 2010

Electric Dreams? Above and below, images from Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008)

 

Michel Gondry and Robert Stickgold discuss dreams, filmmaking and the scientific method (SeedMagazine.com, 2007).

Film Studies For Free presents un petit hommage -- en images, hypertexte, et vidéos --to one of its favourite filmmakers, Michel Gondry, French maestro of the music-video form, and also responsible, as director, for the audiovisual brilliance of the following films: Human Nature (2001); Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); La Science des rêves/The Science of Sleep (2006); Be Kind Rewind (2008); and The Green Hornet (2010).

There are some truly wonderful scholarly resources linked to below: merci bien, as ever, to their authors, editors and publishers for making them freely accessible online.

• Dwayne Avery, The Future is behind you: the Reclamation of Place in Be Kind Rewind, Movement 1.1: the futures of cinema, 2009 
• Jim Batcho, Overlapping Levels of the Diegesis in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007
• New Julia Driver, Memory, Desire, and Value in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in Christopher Grau (ed), Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Routledge, 2009)
• New Michel Gondry, Foreword, in Christopher Grau (ed), Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Routledge, 2009)
• New Christopher Grau, Introduction to Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Routledge, 2009)
• New Christopher Grau, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the morality of memory,  Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (1), Winter 2006
• Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Narrative and Mediatized Memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Scope, Issue 8, June 2007
• Brandon M. Hancock, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 9, No. 1 April 2005
• Erin Hill-Parks, From Film to Life: The Construction of Identity in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I “Heart” Huckabees, From Camera Lens To Critical Lens A Collection Of Best Essays On Film Adaptation, edited by Rebecca Housel (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006) 
• Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - screenplay, 2003
• John Finlay Kerr, ‘Rereading’ Be Kind Rewind (USA 2008): How film history can be remapped through the social memories of popular culture, Screening the Past, Issue 24, 2009
• Mike Lim, Review of Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, Screening the Past, Issue 23, 2008
• Colm OShea, Out of His Head: Metaphysical Escape Attempts in the Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman , Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 63, February 2009 
• Heidi Peeters , The semiotics of music videos: it must be written in the stars, Image [and] Narrative, Issue 8, May 2004
• A Raz, and M Paasivirta, The Science and Fiction of Memory Removal, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol 50(42), 2005
• Richard Rushton, Cinema After Deleuze After 9/11, Postmodern Culture, Volume 19, No. 2, 2009 
• Fredericka Shulman, The Objects of Memory: Collecting Eternal Sunshine, Philament, Issue 5, 2005
• Jason Sperb, Be Kind Rewind / or, an incomplete essay on Off-Modern American Cinephilia, Jamais Vu, December 13, 2009
• Gunnar Strøm, The Two Golden Ages  of Animated Music Video, Animation Studies, Vol.2, 2007
• Dayton Taylor and Hector Macleod, Digital Air Techniques (2008)
• Scott Thrill, "How My Brain Works": An Interview with Michel Gondry, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 53, August 2006
• José van Dijck, Memory Matters in the Digital Age, Configurations, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2004
• Thomas E. Wartenberg, Film as Argument, Film Studies, Issue 8, Summer 2006

Matt Zoller Seitz shares his thoughts with fellow filmmaker critic Kevin B Lee while rewatching Michel Gondrys 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, May 2009

 

 The original music video of Gary Jules and Michael Andrews cover version of Tears for Fears song Mad World, directed by Michel Gondry. This song features in the soundtrack of Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)

Read More..

On ’Tangibility’ and Relocating Cinema NECSUS 2 Autumn 2012

To celebrate the new issue of NECSUS on tangibility, above is a reposting of TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? by Catherine Grant. Also see version with audio commentary

[A] media, singular, is not just its medium – it is not only a support or a device. A media is also and foremost a cultural form; it is defined by the way in which it puts us in relation with the world and with others, and therefore by the type of experience that it activates. By experience, I mean both a confrontation with reality (to gain experience) and the capacity to manage this relation and to give it meaning (to have experience). From its very beginnings, cinema has been based on the fact that it offers us moving images through which we may reconfigure the reality around us and our own position within it. Cinema has always been a way of seeing and a way of living – a form of sensibility and a form of understanding. [Francesco Casetti, The relocation of cinema, NECSUS, Issue 2, Autumn 2012]

A great second issue of NECSUS, the brilliant journal of NECS, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies has been published. It boasts some superlative articles including Francesco Casettis must-read article from which Film Studies For Free has excerpted above.

For those interested in hapticity, and our experience of the material properties of film, theres a very special section on that topic.

All in all (and all the contents are directly linked to below), some truly wonderful work. Well done and thank you NECSUS!

Editorial Necsus

Articles:

• The relocation of cinema by Francesco Casetti
• MP3s, rebundled debt, and performative economics: Deferral, derivatives, and digital commodity fetishism in Lady Gaga’s spectacle of excess by Anne Kustritz
• Can you see yourself living here?: Structures of desire in recent British lifestyle television by James Zborowski
• Investigatory art: Real-time systems and network culture by Edward Shanken
• Beyond cognitive estrangement: The future of science fiction cinema by Stephen Zepke
• The care for opacity: On Tsai Ming-Liang’s conservative filmic gesture by Erik Bordeleau

Special Section: Tangibility

• Material properties of historical film in the digital age by Barbara Flueckiger
• Early cinema’s touch(able) screens: From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou by Wanda Strauven
• Aporias of the touchscreen: On the promises and failures of a ubiquitous technology by Timo Kaerlein
• Questions of embodied difference: Film and queer phenomenology by Katharina Lindner
• The intangible ground: A neurophenomenology of the film experience by Adriano D’Aloia
• From subject-effect to presence-effect: A deictic approach to the cinematic by Pepita Hesselberth
• ‘The last ray of the dying sun’: Tacita Dean’s commitment to analog media as demonstrated through FLOH and FILM by Caylin Smith

Festival Reviews:
Edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network

• The Angels’ Share at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival review by David Archibald
• The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival: Seeking the social in the virtual review by Sarah Dillard
• Alternative Film/Video Belgrade 2011 review by Maja Krajnc

Book Reviews:

• The good, the beautiful and the sublime review by Bavand Behpoor
• A multiplied medium: Reviewing recent publications on television’s transitions review by Markus Stauff
• European nightmares: Horror cinema in Europe since 1945 review by Francesco Di Chiara
• Cinema and experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno review by Malte Hagener

Exhibition Reviews:

• The Abramović Method, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (March-June 2012) review by Elena Biserna
• Non Non Non – Visiting the exhibition with Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi review by Miriam De Rosa

Read More..

More on the video essay Jim Emersons Close Up the movie essay dream

Janet Leighs eye from Jim Emerson, Close Up: The movie/essay/dream, Scanners, October 17, 2007

Lots of correspondence after yesterdays post on the video essays of Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin B Lee has prompted Film Studies For Free to research the online work of a number of other film artists/academics. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts about this shortly.

FSFF would also love to hear from any of its readers who can point in the direction of further examples of good-quality, freely-accessible, scholarly online video essays to check out.

But, in the meantime, here are some great links to the online video essay work of a highly notable film critic who has very successfully experimented with this form: Jim Emerson, film critic and creator of Scanners (a movie blog and home of the Opening Shots Project) and founding editor of/contributor to RogerEbert.com, Roger Ebert`s web site.

• Jim Emerson, Close-Ups: A free-association dream sequence, Scanners, October 14, 2007
• Jim Emerson, Close Up: The movie/essay/dream, Scanners, October 17, 2007
• Jim Emerson, Written in the flesh: a crash course in David Cronenberg, November 2, 2007
  
• Jim Emerson, Your Users Guide to Movie Violence, Scanners, March 12, 2008

See more of Emersons movie clips HERE.

Read More..

Horror Studies Issue 1 for free!

Image from The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

There are [...] two significant [subliminal cuts] in The Exorcist [...] --- firstly during [Father Damien] Karras [(Jason Miller))] dream of his mother, the screen is filled for two frames with a white-painted image of Jason Millers leering face, appearing as a death mask; and during the exorcism itself, Linda Blairs tossing head is replaced momentarily with Millers similarly deathly visage.  Mark Kermode, Devilish Deceptions (From Fear Magazine, Issue 24 December 1990)

Only Father Karras, in a final, desperate act of self-sacrifice – of somatic and spiritual simpatico with the demon – comes to reconcile and transcend these extremes, thus restoring Regan to her former state of being. Larrie Dudenhoeffer , ‘"Evil against Evil": The Parabolic Structure and Thematics of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Horror Studies, 1.1, 2010, p. 11 (pdf)

Film Studies For Free is trembling with delicious terror at the news of yet another freely accessible issue of a new journal from Intellect Press - theres just too much to read already... Aaaarrggghhhh...

But seriously, Horror Studies is a peer-reviewed, biannual, academic journal devoted to the study of the aesthetics of horror in all of its cultural and historical forms, from film and literature, music and dance, to fine art, photography and beyond: "With a strong commitment to interdisciplinarity, Horror Studies seeks to foster fruitful dialogue on horror between a wide range of different critical and scholarly traditions."

The first issue contains a good number of excellent film-related articles: on The Exorcist; abjection and masculinity in Todd Solondz’s Happiness; Werewolf of London (Walker, 1935); Dracula in early cinema; the submarine myth and its relation to the shark myth, as it has been propagated in film since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975); and a Deleuzian study of Michael Almereydas horror films.

As usual, here at FSFF, links to all contents are given below.

Horror Studies 1.1, 2010

• Contents/Editorial/Authors: View Header/Abstract   View PDF

• Karen E. Macfarlane , Mummy Knows Best: Knowledge and the Unknowable in Turn of the Century Mummy Fiction View Header/Abstract   View PDF

• Gary D Rhodes, Drakula halála (1921): The Cinema’s First Dracula, View Header/AbstractView PDF
  

• Robert Spadoni, Strange Botany in Werewolf of London View Header/Abstract   View PDF

• Larrie Dudenhoeffer , ‘"Evil against Evil": The Parabolic Structure and Thematics of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist View Header/Abstract   View PDF

• Linda Maria Koldau, Of Submarines and Sharks: Musical Settings of a Silent Menace View Header/Abstract   View PDF

• Tom O’Connor, ‘Uncontrollably Herself’: Deleuze’s Becoming-woman in the Horror Films of Michael Almereyda, View Header/Abstract   View PDF

• Adam Wadenius, The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz’s Happiness,  View Header/Abstract   View PDF

• Catherine Spooner  Dark Looks: An Interview With Valerie Steele View Header/Abstract   View PDF

Read More..

C is for Cinephilia Studies plus some telephilia too

Still from Jean-Luc Godards Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma, 2004

A veritable labour of love, today, from Film Studies For Free: a list of links to freely available online resources devoted to the study of cinephilia, telephilia and videophilia - the putatively excessive love for whatever is projected (or broadcast or played) on screens large and small. Truth be told: FSFF cant really see whats excessive about that... (Updated June 1, 2009)

• Scott Balcerzak, Pleasures of Analysis/Pleasures of Film/Pleasures of Teaching, Dr Mabuses Kaleido-scope, September 7, 2007
• David Bordwell, Games Cinephiles Play, Observations on film art and Film Art, August 3, 2008
• Peter Bosma, Cinephilia and the Institutional View on Film Culture, Some General Notes on Film Studies, Spring 2008, from p. 12 (23) - E-view, Vol 2009, No 1 (2009)
• Jodi Brooks, The Lure of the breach: invisibility and the dissolution of cinematic vision, Screening the Past, December 2007
• NEW Zach Campbell, Cinephile Business: Key Texts, Elusive Lucidity, December 18, 2005
  
• NEW Zach Campbell, The Tribalism of Cinephilia, Elusive Lucidity, June 23, 2007
  
• Paul Coughlin, Sublime Moments, Senses of Cinema, December 2000
• Dennis Cozzalio, Pleasures Worthy of Guilt: A Cinephiles Confession (2005), with Postscript (2009), The House Next Door Online, January 12, 2009
• Serge Daney (interview with Bill Krohn), Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968-1977, The Thousand Eyes, 1977, republished by Steve Erickson
• Serge Daney, The tracking Shot in Kapo, Originally published in Trafic, No. 4, Fall 1992
• Manohla Dargis, The 21st Century Cinephile, New York Times, November 14, 2004 (and continues here)
• Steve Erickson, et al. "Permanent Ghosts: Cinephilia in the Age of the Internet and Video." Senses of Cinema 4 (2000) and 5 (2000) (Essay 1 by Steve Erickson | Essay 2 by Theo Panayides | Essay 3 by David Sterritt | Essay 4 by Jeff Lambert | Essay 5 by Bryant Frazier)
• Bill Flavell, Cinephilia and/or Cinematic Specificity, Senses of Cinema, July 2000
• Mas Generis , Review of Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds), Cinephilia: movies, love and memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), Screening the Past, 2006
• NEW Asbjørn Grønstad, No one goes to the movies anymore:Cinema and Visual Studies in the Digital Era Blue, Kinema, Fall 2008
• Tim Groves, CInema/Affect/Writing, Senses of Cinema, February 2003
• Tim Groves, Night Surfing: On Telefilia, Senses of Cinema, January 2004
• Benjamin Halligan, Against Cinephiliphobia: Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, Senses of Cinema, May 2004
• Christian Haye, Steve McQueen, Frieze Magazine, Issue 28, May 1996
• Anthony Kaufman, The Vanishing: The demise of VHS, and the movies disappearing along with it, Moving Image Source, February 26, 2009
• Christian Keathley, A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool], In Media Res, May 14 , 2007
• Christian Keathley, The Cinephiliac Moment, Framework, 42, Summer 2000
• Christian Keathley, Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema, World Picture Journal 2, Autumn 2008
• Christian Keathley, The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age, MIT6 Stone Papyrus Storage and Transmission Conference, April 24-26, 2009
• Noel King, Manny Farber, Framework 40, Spring 1999
• Tony McKibbin, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT: High Mimetics in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, Experimental Conversations, Issue 3, Spring 2009
• Justus Nieland, Archives of Modernist Cinephilia [Review Essay on Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894–1941], Modernism/modernity 2007
• NEW Quintín, An Anorexic’s Case Against Uchida Tomo, Cinema Scope, No. 22,
  
• Nitesh Rohit, Cinephilia in India: a search for love and identity, Indian Auteur, February 1, 2009
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Missing Image - From Cinephilia to the World - The Trajectory of Serge Daney, originally published in The New Left Review, 34, July-August 2005
• Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, Preface to Movie Mutations: The changing face of world cinephilia, Fipresci Documents, 2004
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Love: Film-history tidbits in a monument to French cinephilia, Moving Image Source, March 5, 2009
• Catherine Russell, Cinephilia: The future of cinephilia, Filmreference.com, [date unknown]
• Matthew Salomon, Soft Cinema and the Soft Cinephiliac, golempoem, June 14, 2007
• Girish Shambu, The Cinephiliac Moment, girish, June 19, 2006
• Girish Shambu, Cinephile Accounting: Old vs. New , girish, March 23, 2008
• Girish Shambu, An Alphabet of Cinema , girish, May 4, 2008
• Ryan Shand, Review of Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory By Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005, SCope: an online journal of film & TV studies, Issue 10, Fenruary 2008
• Steven Shaviro, Ingmar Bergman, The Pinocchio Theory, July 31, 2007
• So-young Kim, "Cine-Mania" or Cinephilia, Film Festival and Identity Question, originally published in Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer, eds. New Korean Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005
• Susan Sontag, The Decay of Cinema, New York Times, February 25, 1996
• Jason Sperb, Sensing an Intellectual Nemesis, Film Criticism 32.1 (Fall 2007): 49-71
• Jason Sperb, Review of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees by Christian Keathley (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), Scope: an online journal of film & TV studies, Issue 12, October 2008
• Jason Sperb, The Politics of Cinephilia, Dr Mabuses Kaleido-scope, August 24, 2006
• Jason Sperb, Still a Cinephilia of Anticipation, Dr Mabuses Kaleido-scope, November 15, 2006
• Jason Sperb, Bond [. . .] Interrupted, Dr Mabuses Kaleido-scope, December 28, 2006
• Jason Sperb, The cinephiliac practice of everyday life, Jamais Vu, August 12, 2007
• Jason Sperb, Scholars cannot write as cinephiles (but academics can), Dr Mabuses Kaleido-scope, March 23, 2007
• Jason Sperb, While its simply not that simple, Dr Mabuses Kaleido-scope, March 28, 2007
• Jason Sperb, Metz and Cinephilia, Dr Mabuses Kaleido-scope, April 15, 2007
• Jason Sperb, Cinephilia and Disappointment (review of Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory. Eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005. 11-43), Dr Mabuses Kaleido-scope, May 22, 2007
• Jason Sperb, Practising a cinephiliac practice, Jamais Vu, November 27, 2007
• Jason Sperb, Punch-Drunk Love, Jamais Vu, May 23, 2008
• Rick Swintice, The cinephilia of Le Mépris, Netribution Film Network, January 28th, 2000
• Harry Tuttle, Nomad Cinephilia (Adrian Martin), Screenville, October 17, 2008
• Rashna Wadia Richards, Re-Viewing Cinephilia: The Movement and the Moment, Politics and Culture 1, 2006
• Gijs van Wiechen, Who Framed F.W. Murnau’s Faust? Intertextuality, Discourse & the Historical Film on DVD, Masters e-Thesis, RMA Media Studies, University Utrecht, August 31, 2008
• Paul Willemen, An Introduction to Framework, Framework 42, 1999
• Prakash Younger, What is Cinephilosophy? A Bazinian Paradigm, Part 1 & 2, Offscreen Journal, Volume 13, Issue 2 (Bazin Renewed), February 2009

To conclude, the normally parsimonious (Open Access championing) Film Studies For Free blog doesnt usually plug books that you have to pay for (even though its owner both writes and, of course, reads such papercentric objects) but it absolutely must flag up the fact that it is very much looking forward to Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperbs forthcoming Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, vol. 1, due to be published by Wallflower Press in June 2009.

This first volume in a twin-anthology project includes contributions by Robert Burgoyne, Zach Campbell, Tobey Crockett, Brian Darr, Kevin Fisher, Andy Horbal, Christian Keathley, Adrian Martin, Jenna Ng, Lisa Purse, Dan Sallitt and Girish Shambu, as well as by Sperb and Balcerzak.

As todays links list so amply testifies, so many of these authors have already tirelessly shared their work on this topic for free online. FSFF thinks this is very much a book worth having.

Read More..

Between Past and Future ROME OPEN CITY Studies

Updated November 19, 2011

Frame grab from Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

Projected on the war torn landscape for a weary people, Rome Open City poetically serves the goals of unification and restoration. In many respects, this film both conforms to and promotes an ideal image of a courageous, Resistant and unified population – from communist intellectuals, to catholic priests, to working class women and their children. Open City maintains the comfortable melodramatic schema of Rossellini’s earlier Fascist-era films in which the forces of good (the Italian people) struggle triumphantly against the forces of evil embodied in the Nazi general Bergmann and his deviant cronies. The director’s fondness for his people culminates in an apologetic portrayal of Italian fascists as either wretched or unwilling collaborators. However, in the end, Open City’s epic scope effectively precludes the possibility of another film like it: all the “fathers” (Manfredi, Pina, Don Pietro) are dead and the child soldiers are abandoned to the city, suspended “between past and future”. The conclusion, the partisan priest’s execution, witnessed by the children of his parish, forewarns of the fragmentation, destitution, and moral poverty to come. With his last words, “non è difficile morire bene, è difficile vivere bene” (it’s not difficult to die well, it’s difficult to live well”), Don Pietro intimates the struggles ahead. [Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948, PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009  97-98] 

Another teaching week beckons, and Film Studies For Frees author looks forward to pondering, for the umpteenth, pedagogical time, that intensely strange film Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945).

There are some excellent resources on this film, and on related issues of (neo)realism, that are openly accessible online. So, andiamo felicemente with one of FSFFs regular studies of a single film.

• John Bleasdale, The Unrealistic Rossellini, Film Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 34, 2002 
• Gian Piero Brunetta, Introduction, The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
• Peter Brunette, Rossellini and Cinematic Realism, Cinema Journa1, 25, No. 1, Fall 1985
• Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, Open City, Rossellini and neorealism: Sixty years on, Screening the Past, 20, 2006 
• Tag Gallagher, Reply to Bleasdale,  Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002
• Ora Gelley, Europa 51: The Face of the Star in Neorealisms Urban Landscape, Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• Sidney Gottlieb, Introduction: Open City: Reappropriating the Old, Making Way for the New, in Gottlieb (ed.), Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 
• A. S. Hamrah, [Interview with Tag Gallagher] From Italy to Iran, Hermenaut, October 20, 2000
• Marcia Landy, Introduction, Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 
• Adrian Martin, Always a window: Tag Gallaghers Rossellini, Screening the Past, March 2000
• Adrian Martin, What is Modern Cinema?, 16:9, September 2010
• Daniel Morgan, Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics, Critical Inquiry, 32 (2006) 
• Brent J. Piepergerdes, Re-envisioning the Nation: Film Neorealism and the Postwar Italian Condition, ACME, 2007
• Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948, PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009 
• Luca Prono, [Review of] Rome Open City (Roma Città Aperta) By David Forgacs, London: BFI Publishing, 2000; Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, Edited by David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London: BFI Publishing, 2001, Scope, November 2002
• Luca Prono, [Review of] Celluloide, Dir: Carlo Lizzani, 1996, Scope, 2000
• Hugo Salas, Roberto Rossellini, Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Erica Sheen, Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete, Film Studies, Vol. 7, Winter 2005
• New Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon, The Film of Tomorrow will be an Act of War [on ROME OPEN CITY and its legacy], Idiom Magazine, October 17, 2011 
• Martin Walsh, Rome, Open City, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV: Re-evaluating Rossellini, from Jump Cut, no. 15, 1977
• Jonathan David York, Open Spaces, Liminal Places: the Deployment of the Sacred in Open City, JCRT, 10.3, Summer 2010

Michael P. Rogin, Mourning, Melancholia, and the Popular Front: Roberto Rossellinis Beautiful Revolution, in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Roberto Rossellinis Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Jaimey Fisher, On the Ruins of Masculinity: The Figure of the Child in Italian Nerealism and the German Rubble Film, in Italian neorealism and global cinema, eds. Laura E. Ruberto, Kristi M. Wilson (Wayne State University Press, 2007)

Read More..

Lots more links to film studies journals to celebrate Open Access Week!

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fourth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.  

Its International Open Access Week this week, and while every week is Open Access Week at Film Studies For Free, this website decided to celebrate this special week of events by flagging up the work of an individual who can rightfully claim to be one of the most hard-working supporters of this important cause: Jan Szczepanski.

FSFF was recently contacted by Jan, a librarian from Sweden who has been a collector of freely accessible scholarly e-journals since the end of the 1990s. He has been responsible for gathering the longest ever lists of links to (multilingual) Open Access scholarly journals titles, mostly in humanities and the social sciences, many of which you can access through the embedded document below (also see here).

FSFF hasnt yet fully cross-checked Jans list with its own list of English-language online Film and Media Studies Journals (permanently accessible from the table of contents in the right-hand sidebar), but will do so as soon as possible in order to add notable items it hasnt yet come across.

FSFF has set up the document below so that you can immediately scroll down through the Film titles, from page 107. But you can also perform a search for Masskommunikation to scroll automatically to page 491 for lots of Media Studies titles.

Thanks so much to Jan for getting in touch and especially for all his hard work in assembling this monumental list.

8.999 Open Access Journals. New, expanded list, December 2009

Read More..