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Kamis, 10 April 2014

New Issue of MEDIASCAPE Online on History and Technology

Posted by Garber on 18.15 with No comments so far
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

Columns

META

Reviews

 

 

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Selasa, 08 April 2014

La Science de Michel Gondry online scholarship on his films videos

Posted by Garber on 16.30 with No comments so far
Last updated April 19, 2010
Electric Dreams? Above and below, images from Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008)
 


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.

 
 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)
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Senin, 07 April 2014

On ’Tangibility’ and Relocating Cinema NECSUS 2 Autumn 2012

Posted by Garber on 15.45 with No comments so far
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:
Special Section: Tangibility

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

Book Reviews:

Exhibition Reviews:
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Minggu, 06 April 2014

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

Posted by Garber on 15.45 with No comments so far
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.
See more of Emersons movie clips HERE.
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Selasa, 01 April 2014

On Railways and the Movies

Posted by Garber on 11.45 with No comments so far
The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970) was a film I ardently watched countless times on television as a child, and, I have to confess, I have seen and loved it countless times since. I had certainly seen it long before I saw  LArrivée dun Train en Gare de la Ciotat (Lumière Bros., 1895). I noticed the resemblance between the two films only when watching Jeffries film again recently. But when I explored this, I was struck by the extent of their resonance, and by the uncanniness of the later films pastiche of the earlier one: Bernard Cribbins Perks revivifies, down to his moustache, the La Ciotat station porter; an identical luggage trolley lurks in the background; the beshawled woman looks like she stepped off the earlier train, except that shes in Technicolor.
     I began to figure, to fantasize, that the uncanniness of The Railway Childrens penultimate sequence was not only set off by its graphic and musical evocation of the uncertainty of young Bobbie (Jenny Agutter) about quite why she was standing by the rail track, but also by its palpable haunting by the Lumières originary scene, with its powerful, ghostly, urtext of a, much more bustling, railway platform just after the arrival of cinema.
 For me, of course, it will also always be the other way round: that The Railway Children, and this films own afterwardsness, haunt LArrivée dun Train en Gare...
[From the introduction to "Uncanny Arrival at a Railway Station" by Catherine Grant] 

In the folklore’ of cinema history there is one anecdote which seems to be perennially fascinating to layman and historian alike. It might be summarised as follows: an audience in the early days of the cinema is seated in a hall when a film of an approaching train is projected on the screen. The spectators are anxious, fearful -    some of them even panic and run.
     This fearful or panicky reaction has been called the train effect’. It is such a common anecdote, cited by so many writers both at the time and later, that it has also been called `the founding myth of cinema’ or the cinema’s myth of origin. [Stephen Bottomore, The Panicking Audience?: early cinema and the "train effect’", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1999]

Rather than mistaking the image for reality, the spectator is astonished by its transformation through the new illusion of projected motion. Far from credulity, it is the incredible nature of the illusion that renders the viewer speechless. What is displayed before the audience is less the impending speed of the train than the force of the cinematic apparatus. [Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator [1989]’, in Linda Williams, ed. (1994) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. 114–133.]

Cinema as we know it, as an institution, as an entertainment based on the mass spectatorship of projected moving images, was born in 95, in the Golden Age of railway travel. As the prehistory and beginnings of cinema strongly suggest, film finds an apt metaphor in railroad. The train can be seen as providing the prototypical experience of looking at a framed, moving image, and as the mechanical double of the cinematic apparatus. Both are means of transporting a passenger to a totally different place, both are highly charged vehicles of narrative events, stories, intersections of strangers, both are based on a fundamental paradox: simultaneous motion and stillness. These are two great machines of vision that give rise to similar modes of perception, and are geared to shaping the leisure time of a mass society. [Lynne Kirby, Male Hysteria and Early Cinema, originally in Camera Obscura May 1988 6(2 17)]

Following on from Wolfgang Schivelbuschs now seminal account of the nineteenth-century railroad and the institution of "panoramic perception" as being emblematic of modernity, critics like Lynne Kirby and Mary Ann Doane have already explored the historic connections between film and the trains profound re-configuration of vision, with its mechanical separation of the viewers body from the actual physical space of a virtual perception. [Saige Walton, [Review of] Jeffrey Ruoff (ed), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006, Screening the Past, 20, 2006]

Above, Film Studies For Free gifts to you another of its authors experiments with real-time video comparison (also a further exploration of cinematic pastiche).

This tiny videographic donation accompanies the links, below, to Omar Ahmeds truly wonderful, much more comprehensive and informative video essay series on trains in Indian cinema.

And below those links are others to further, openly accessible online scholarship that touches on the topic of railways -- a very cinematic apparatus indeed -- in the movies.

Bon voyage!

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    Senin, 24 Maret 2014

    Mapping the Lost Highway New Perspectives on David Lynch TATE Modern Event

    Posted by Garber on 05.45 with No comments so far
    Image from Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

    Film Studies For Free has taken the trouble to gather together in one (hopefully) very easily navigable setting the twelve videos (embedded below) that recorded for posterity a really excellent symposium that took place last year on October 30 2009 at Londons Tate Modern. The symposium provided a space in which artists and film theorists insightfully discussed the work of filmmaker David Lynch in a range of theoretical and artistic contexts, including psychoanalysis, philosophy, prosthetics and photography.
    One of cinema’s most compelling and innovative directors, David Lynch remains a major influence on contemporary art, film and culture. In this landmark event, Tate Modern [brought] together leading artists, academics and writers from around the world to offer a series of new perspectives on Lynch’s films.
    [...] Speakers [included] the visual artists Gregory Crewdson, Daria Martin, and Jane and Louise Wilson, and there [were also] contributions from the writers and academics Parveen Adams, Sarah Churchwell, Simon Critchley, Roger Luckhurst, Tom McCarthy, and Jamieson Webster. A specially commissioned video interview with Lynch himself [was] screened, and an accompanying film programme [took] place at Tate Modern and the Birkbeck Cinema. 
    If you have difficulty playing the videos below, try visiting the Tate Websites gathering of them.


    PART 1: Marko Daniel: Welcome; Richard Martin: Introduction

    PART 2: The Body: Roger Luckhurst

    PART 3: The Body: Tom McCarthy

    PART 4: The Body: Q+A (chaired by Marko Daniel)

    PART 5: The Eye 1: Gregory Crewdson

    PART 6: The Eye 1: Q+A (chaired by Sarah Churchwell)

    PART 7: The Eye 2: Daria Martin

    PART 8: The Eye 2: Louise Wilson

    PART 9: The Eye 2: Q+A (chaired by Stuart Comer)

    PART 10: The Mind: Parveen Adams

    PART 11: The Mind: Q+A (chaired by Richard Martin)

    PART 12: The Ear: Chris Rodley responds to the days presentations in conversation with Sarah Churchwell. Followed by a Q+A with the symposiums speakers and the public
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    Minggu, 23 Maret 2014

    Seeing the join on film editing

    Posted by Garber on 04.45 with No comments so far
    In memoriam Dede Allen  
    (December 3, 1923 – April 17, 2010)
    The below entry was originally published the day before Dede Allen died. Allen was the highly innovative editor of such notable films as Bonnie and Clyde, The Hustler, Rachel, Rachel, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Night Moves, Slap Shot, Reds, The Breakfast Club and Henry and June. 

    Dissolve by Aaron Valdez (2003): "Found footage film constructed of hundreds of dissolves taken from old educational films and reassembled to create a meditation on our own impermanence". 

    Film Studies For Free presents a much requested links list today, one to openly accessible, high quality scholarly studies of film editing. Without further ado, lets jump cut straight to it:

    • The Art of Film Editing, Special Issue of P.O.V: A Danish Journal of Film Studies, edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998 - PDF containing:
      • Søren Kolstrup, The notion of editing   
      • Sidsel Mundal, Notes of an editing teacher  
      • Mark Le Fanu, On editing
      • Vinca Wiedemann, Film editing – a hidden art?
      • Edvin Kau, Separation or combination of fragments? Reflections on editing
      • Lars Bo Kimersgaard, Editing in the depth of the surface. Some basic principles of graphic editing
      • Martin Weinreich, The urban inferno. On the æsthetics of Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver
      • Scott MacKenzie, Closing arias: Operatic montage in the closing sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone
      • Claus Christensen, A vast edifice of memories: the cyclical cinema of Terence Davies,
      • Richard Raskin, Five explanations for the jump cuts in Godards Breathless







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      Kamis, 20 Maret 2014

      On Pleasure free Perkins in new Film Quarterly

      Posted by Garber on 02.30 with No comments so far

      Image from Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

      Thanks to The Auteurs Daily, Film Studies For Free heard about the new issue of Film Quarterly (Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall 2009) which comes with a wonderful, freely-accessible article by V.F.Perkins: Reconsideration: Le Plaisir: "The Mask" and "The Model". Its a fabulously illustrated study of Max Ophüls’s 1952 film Le Plaisir, an adaptation of three short stories by Guy de Maupassant: Le Masque, La Maison Tellier, and Le Modèle.

      Other freely-accessible items in this issue include: Rob White, Editors Notebook: Against Nature; Joshua Clover, Marx and Coca-Cola: The Future in Labor; Danny Birchall, Talking Point: The Avant-Garde Archive Online
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      Selasa, 18 Maret 2014

      Liquid Atmospherics On the cinema of Wong Kar wai

      Posted by Garber on 00.30 with No comments so far

      ENVOI (2011) from Elaine Castillo on Vimeo. The above video is a ficto-biographical essay-film taking two looped scenes from two Wong Kar-wai films (HAPPY TOGETHER and DAYS OF BEING WILD) as its point of departure, arrival (also: non-departure, non-arrival). On grief, migration, the romantic, hyper-specificity, sentimental time, queer space, Asian celebrity gossip, fantasies involving Maggie Cheung, covers and translations, the writing body, the filmmaking body, readability, speakability.
      Almost devoid of irony, Wong’s films, like classic rock and roll, take seriously all the crushes, the posturing, and the stubborn capriciousness of young angst. They rejoice in manic expenditures of energy. They celebrate the momentary heartbreak of glimpsing a stranger who might be interesting to love. The best comparison is surely not with Godard, whose romantic streak has a bitter edge. In Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong may have its Truffaut, the director who in Tirez sur le pianiste and Jules et Jim concentrated on not-quite-grown- up characters brooding on eternally missed chances. In any case, Wong stands out from his peers by abandoning the kinetics of comedies and action movies in favor of more liquid atmospherics. He dissolves crisp emotions into vaporous moods. For all his sophistication, his unembarrassed effort to capture powerful, pleasantly adolescent feelings confirms his commitment to the Hong Kong popular tradition.
      David Bordwell, Avant-Pop Cinema Romance on Your Menu: Chungking Express in Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Second edition: e-book; Wisconsin: Irvington Way Institute Press Madison, 2011), pp. 178-179

      Today, Film Studies For Free massively updates its existing entry on the cinema of Wong Kar-wai. 

      There are two compelling reasons for this: the first is there are lots more scholarly resources available, or discoverable, now on this filmmakers work that are worth listing, including some great items on video. 

      The second is that this is the first of two posts in celebration of the online publication, as a PDF, of a full colour, second edition of the peerless David Bordwells book Planet Hong Kong, an opus well worth its $15 pricetag, in FSFFs humble and, usually, frugal opinion.
       
      FSFF doesnt normally celebrate, or promote, pay-to-own resources. But, apart from the fact that this is a highly interesting development in online Film Studies publishing in its own right, no one has given so generously online, either of his already published work or of his ongoing scholarly work, as David Bordwell. 

      What is more, Bordwells PHK chapter entitled Avant-Pop Cinema, with its lyrical and beautifully illustrated section on Wongs work: Romance on Your Menu: Chungking Express, is worth the download price alone. If you need to save up to purchase Planet Hong Kong first, you can enjoy, in the meantime, several excellent posts at Observations on Film Art on Wongs work, including Ashes to Ashes (Redux) and Years of being obscure.

      Video material:
      Written material:
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