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..

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..

More V F Perkins Online

Image from You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937)

Film Studies For Free is extremely fond of the work of V. F. Perkins, world-renowned author of Film as Film (London: Penguin Books, 1972 - see an recent interesting review HERE).

FSFF has previously drawn attention to two pieces of Perkins hugely influential work which are freely available online:

• Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman (originally published in CineAction! no. 52) republished online by Danish film studies journal 16:9 (September 2003) and accessible HERE.
• Moments of Choice [on film directing] (originally published in The Movie, ch. 58, reprinted in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Movie Book of the Fifties, Orbis, 1982) republished online by the Australian journal Rouge (issue 9, 2006) and accessible HERE.

Today, it is delighted to bring to its readers attention a further Open Access essay by Perkins which is currently stored at WRAP: the Warwick Research Archive Project.

The piece is an as yet undated and otherwise unpublished article entitled You Only Live Once that brilliantly treats this magisterial 1937 film directed by Fritz Lang.

Heres an excerpt from the essay with relevant hyperlinks added by FSFF:

Anyone who wants to write usefully about You Only Live Once has to build on the work of George M Wilson. A chapter in [Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)] makes a systematic presentation of the movie’s narrative strategies, and a detailed reading of key images. Wilson shows how Lang’s picture is designed to educate its viewers in the manipulability of the image, and to demonstrate the power of the film sequence to deceive us by obscuring key points in its story and by soliciting preferred readings that the content of the images may not in fact guarantee. The achievement that Wilson uncovers is the more remarkable in that it occurs not in an illustrated lecture but in a fiction movie, one that works to powerful effect within its genre of social protest melodrama.

Wilson’s essay opened my eyes to You Only Live Once, a movie that I had previously found opaque because, apart from its evident social project, I had not seen a purpose in its meticulous design beyond that of giving power and plausibility to a noticeably contrived tale. In what follows I take for granted the main lines of Wilson’s argument in order to develop some remarks on Lang’s mise-en-scène in two representative sequences.

Read More..