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Sabtu, 05 April 2014

Horror Studies Issue 1 for free!

Posted by Garber on 15.00 with No comments so far

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
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Jumat, 04 April 2014

C is for Cinephilia Studies plus some telephilia too

Posted by Garber on 14.00 with No comments so far

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)

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.
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Kamis, 03 April 2014

Between Past and Future ROME OPEN CITY Studies

Posted by Garber on 12.45 with No comments so far
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.





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Rabu, 02 April 2014

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

Posted by Garber on 12.45 with No comments so far
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.

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Rabu, 26 Maret 2014

Unstable Platforms Film Moving Image Studies Papers from MIT7 Media in Transition

Posted by Garber on 07.30 with No comments so far
Teaser image, courtesy of Warner Brothers, from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 out on July 15  (David Yates, 2011). Read Debora Luis paper on Harry Potter: The Exhibition.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you links to film and moving image related papers from the conference proceedings of the seventh annual Media in Transition conference, which will take place next week, May 13-15, 2011, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Heres the conferences mission statement:
Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence. How are we coping with the instability of platforms? 
FSFF particularly liked "“Make Any Room Your TV Room:” Media Mobility, Digital Delivery, and Family Harmony" by film and media studies scholar and blogger extraordinaire Chuck Tryon, film and television scholar and media studies blogger extraordinaire Michael Z. Newmans paper The Television Image and the Image of the Television", and "Who Told You You Were Special Edition? The Commercialization of the Aura" by Justin Mack.

There are other great papers online connected to the conference theme of unstable platforms and the experience of mediatic transitions that dont treat moving image topics and you can access those here.

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Sabtu, 22 Maret 2014

Making the meaning affective Peter Brunettes film studies

Posted by Garber on 04.30 with No comments so far
Still image from the final shot of LAvventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

 Luxuriating in the view over the Sicilian coast, the Mt. Etna volcano, and the Mediterranean sea here at the Taormina Film Festival. Oh yeah, and seeing some good films too!
Peter Brunette,  June 15, 2010

Rather than viewing the narrative content of Antonionis films as symbolic, as representations of an absent meaning, [Peter] Brunette calls for an appreciation of the visual in and for itself, as meaning is made affective, through line, shape, and form (60). Meaning emerges from the image, it is made affective. Searching for authorial intent behind seemingly obvious symbols -- Brunette shows through the discrepancy between Antonionis own suggestions and the contrasting critical reception of his films -- will inevitably say more about the critical frame employed, than the film itself. What Brunette is claiming is the loss of referent for the sign, the loss of signification. This links nicely to his deconstructive concern, which is itself indicative of the flaws in the existentialist debate. The absences that characteristically mark Antonionis films (witness the vanishing Anna (Massari) in Lavventura) points not to a transcendental absence, but rather indicates the way out of the Platonic illusion of the coexisting Ideal and (vs) real. David Martin-Jones, [Review of Brunettes book on Antonioni, Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 50, December 1999
Katherines exclamation [in Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini, 1954] is also emblematic of the death theme that permeates the film, and that culminates in the sequence so aptly described by Brunette in the following passage: "The parts begin to form themselves into a man and a woman; death has caught them making love, or at least wrapped tightly in each others arms. Suddenly, the museum, the catacombs, and the Cumaean Sybil all come together in one startling image: the physicality and rawness of the ancient world, the ubiquity of death in life, and love, however inadequate and flawed, as the only possible solution". Asbjørn Grønstad, "The Gaze of Tiresias: Joyce, Rossellini and the Iconology of "The Dead"", Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2002, citing Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 1996)
In Peter Brunette and David Willss much under-valued Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory [Princeton University Press, 1989] they discuss the form that a deconstructive mode of analysis might take. They write: From a deconstructive stand-point, analysis would no longer seek the supposed center of meaning but instead turn its attentions to the margins, where the supports of meaning are disclosed, to reading in and out of the text, examining the other texts onto which it opens itself out or from which it closes itself off. [...] [I]t strikes me that a serious discussion of Brunette and Willss book would be essential to any work purporting to discuss cinema and deconstructive politics.[...]  David Sorfa, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 23, 1998
A number of the tributes to film critic and scholar Peter Brunette, who died last week at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy,  conveyed very movingly their opinion that he left this world while doing what he loved.

Those of us who followed Peters activities and travels, at least from the vantage point of his social media network, certainly loved his updates on them, like his final Facebook posting above. His death was a huge shock, and a great loss, notably to the two spheres -- film scholarship and theory, and film criticism -- that he managed to join up, much more successfully than most, through his own prolific practice (he gave an account of some of the issues at stake in this choice in an interview here, and Gerald Pearys obituary beautifully refers to his unusual trajectory, for an academic, here).

FSFFs authors acquaintance with Peter Brunette began with his director books (listed with his other work in his CV here), and in particular with his marvellous study of the films of Roberto Rossellini, now one of the best freely accessible e-books online, thanks to Peter and his publishers. Peter was a fan and an important supporter of freely accessible culture and ideas on the Web, as this article he wrote in 2000 testifies.

Fortunately, a very good selection of other articles and chapters (and a substantial podcast) by him may be experienced at the click of a mouse, quite aside from the virtual reams of online movie criticism under his byline. That means that the following list of links to the former work - to Peter Brunettes formal film studies - is, then, the most fitting tribute that FSFF can give to a scholar who gave so much and influenced so many in his too short (or just long enough) life.





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Jumat, 14 Maret 2014

Dangerous Cinematic Women Studies

Posted by Garber on 20.45 with No comments so far
The above is a short video primer by Catherine Grant. It offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of gender, sexuality and movement in relation to Rita Hayworths performance as Gilda in Charles Vidors 1946 film.
The femme fatale is a product of the male imaginary, which emerges in literature and the visual arts under contingent socio-political conditions as a challenge to coherent and stable identities. [...]
     The emergence of the femme fatale motif in literature, art and cinema generally coincides with periods of social or political instability and is not specific to a culture, society or era, but exhibits countless masks as she may manifest herself in diverse historical or geo-political contexts, and through a variety of artistic and literary forms. She embodies traces of a myriad of powerful, as well as menacing, historical, biblical and mythical female figures, such as Cleopatra, Salome, or the Sirens; yet this wicked and barren creature is always imbued with an alluring beauty and rapacious sexuality that is potentially deadly to man. The femme fatale figure is a recurrent patriarchal construct, a projection of all that exists beyond that which is normal, familiar, or safe. As Rebecca Stott observes, she is a multiple sign, or ‘the Other around whom the qualities of all Other collect in the male imagination’ (1992: 39). As such, her appearances are always symptomatic of a society in crisis. [Eva Bru-Domínguez, The Body as a Conflation of Discourses: The femme fatale in Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat (1974), Journal of Catalan Studies 2009]
[I]s it possible that the tangled webs of violence, sexuality, pathology, and intrigue at the core of certain film noir offer moments of reversal and exception which challenge womens role as eternal victim? How is an anti-feminist backlash or male anxiety around womens power projected into these paranoid film scenarios? To what extent can such disruptions be contained through conventional "happy family" closure - or through the violent death of the (anti-)heroine whose glittering image lingers as the credits rolls? Working against the inescapable grain of the "repressive rule" of female victimhood, I choose here to seize on the exceptional figure of the "fatale femme." While the exception may help define the rule, she also keeps alive the possibility, the inevitability, of transformation in gendered relations of power. [Julianne Pidduck, The "fatal femme" in contemporary Hollywood film noir: reframing gender, violence, and power, Masters Thesis, Concordia University, 1993: 6-7]
Rather than promoting images of women that emphasize their spirit and unknowable power, and rather than promoting images of women that rely on their bodies, finally, we need to illustrate the contexts that inform women’s experience. I want to suggest some of the reasons why we’ve grown accustomed to identifying film noir’s “femme fatale” without examining these contexts that inform her presence in film noir, by doing just that: examining the settings—social, psychological, political, physical, and geographical—that define her experience, which is, I want strongly to suggest, a far better thing to define than “woman” herself.
     This study seeks to modify the tone of feminist discussions about film noir’s women by reorienting our attention to the narrative, social contexts, and mise-en-scene that show the relationship between women’s powers and the limits placed on them by social rules. Both the view of the “femme fatale” as misogynist projection and the view of the “femme fatale” as opaque yet transgressive female force emphasize her status as object or symbol (as object of scorn or as the mysterious and opaque “other” that threatens to destroy the male subject). My aim is to adjust our focus on film noir and gender so that we illuminate these women’s narratives rather than mystifying women as objects or images. [Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009): 5. Book info.]
Film Studies For Free wishes its reader a very happy International Womens Day with a varied curatorial selection of online scholarly work touching on possibly the most studied object in all of feminist film theory: the dangerous woman, sometimes fatal, sometimes a fatality...

If you are a film goer you know her kind. She is attractive, alluring, enigmatic, enticing, teasing, siren-like. Totally tautological. You might come across her dancing in a cinematic cabaret or show, smoking in a private detectives office, gracing a film noir alleyway, or haunting a difficult to decipher flashback. Or turning up like a beautiful but bad penny, provoking your scopophilia (and/or your epistemophilia), just about anywhere in almost every period of international film history.

Just what is it about these cinematic women? There certainly isnt one answer to that question, but the studies linked to below might very well help you to begin to tackle it.

If there are any important online resources that FSFF has missed, please do list them in the comments thread.
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Kamis, 13 Maret 2014

Imaginary and Fantastic Hayao Miyazaki Studies

Posted by Garber on 20.45 with No comments so far



As Film Studies For Frees merry band of followers on Twitter already know, this morning brought the wonderful discovery of an openly-accessible special issue on the work of Hayao Miyazaki from the Journal of the Imaginary and Fantastic (Vol.1 No.2). As usual, direct links to all items are given below. Click here to check out all of FSFFs earlier posts on animation studies.

Vol. 1.  No. 2.  :  The Films of Hayao Miyazaki
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Jumat, 07 Maret 2014

Journal of the Moving Image Indian and South Asian cinema and media studies

Posted by Garber on 15.30 with No comments so far
Image from Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Anil Sharma, 2001). 

Film Studies For Free just came across a really good e-journal that it hadnt bumped into before: Journal of the Moving Image, an annual publication of the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. 

It was launched in print format in 1999, but its print and online versions now co-exist. As its mission statement puts it,
JMI seeks to represent critical work on the state of contemporary screen cultures. There are many regions in the world with large viewing populations, often with vast production infrastructures for film and television; but corresponding institutions or forums for critical engagement with such audio-visual regimes are still highly inadequate. JMI seeks to address a broad set of issues ranging from formal properties of the moving image to the social foundation of its production, transmission and reception. There will be a special focus on India and South Asia, and on issues of transnational media transactions, but we would like to offer a wider range of discussion on film and television from various parts of the world made from different perspectives.
FSFF wanted to share its contents with you promptly, so direct links to all items so far online are pasted in below, with the most recent issue first. The first three issues of JMI are also being prepared for online publication. 

There are some excellent items here (you might try out Ravi Vasudevans The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ just for starters). So FSFF heartily recommends that you subscribe to JMI ready for its next issue in December. 

(Also, please check out, if you havent yet, FSFFs own related entry: "Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies)

JMI, Number 7, December, 2008
JMI, Number 5, December, 2006
JMI, Number 4, November, 2005
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