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Rabu, 09 April 2014

The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos An Appeal by a Cinephile

Posted by Garber on 17.45 with No comments so far

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.






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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, 31 Maret 2014

    SCREENING THE PAST 37 and LA FURIA UMANA 17

    Posted by Garber on 09.46 with No comments so far



    Film Studies For Free is under the cosh of a few deadlines right now (there are some great things to come at this here open access campaigning website in the next weeks!).

    But it has temporarily cast off its work shackles to rush you tidings of two new ejournal issues: the latest Screening the Past, co-edited by Adrian Martin and Anna Dzenis, and replete with Part One of a brilliant dossier on Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema and a marvellous essay by Nicole Brenez, among other treasures (Hediger, Martin and Tofts, Phelps); and the very welcome return online of the multilingual La furia umana (whose website, and fabulous archive [soon to return fully], were devastated by a malware attack), edited by Toni DAngela and replete with dossiers on Joseph Losey and Bertrand Bonello, and a marvelous essay by Nicole Brenez, among other treasures (Ramani, Calder Williams, Small, to cite just some anglophone ones)!

    Scroll down for all the wonderful contents. FSFF will be back properly soon!


    SCREENING THE PAST 37, 2013

    Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema (Part 1)
    First Release
    Reviews
     Classics and Re-runs

    LA FURIA UMANA 17, 2013

    Editorial: T.D. / La critique comme concaténation

    Confidential report
    DUNE CRITIQUE DE CINÉMA DIGNE DE SON NOM (EN FRANCE)
    NICOLE BRENEZ / La Critique comme concept, exigence et praxis

    JOSEPH LOSEY
    BERTRAND BONELLO
    Prima linea
    Histoires du cinéma
    Locchio che uccide
    Flaming creatures
    The new world
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    Minggu, 30 Maret 2014

    Cinema in the Interstices Issue 5 of ALPHAVILLE

    Posted by Garber on 09.45 with No comments so far
    Frame grab from Mon oncle dAmérique/My American Uncle (Alain Resnais, 1980). Read Angela Dalle Vacches article which treats this film in the latest issue of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
    The interstice: something empty, something minute—a crevice, a chink, a narrow gap—yet, in spite of this definition of something apparently slight and inconsequential, one perhaps may make the claim that the interstice serves as a foundational element of film. The “intervening space”, as the OED defines it, in its celluloid form provided the connection between multiple images, allowing them to run together to form the illusion of movement. While this interstitial black strip that imperceptibly framed the moving image is no longer a constituent part of cinema in its current digital format, interstices continue to proliferate in screen media, perhaps to a greater extent than ever. Indeed, just as cinema originated in the interstices between theatre, painting, literature and photography, this intermediality takes on a redefined role in the digital era, with the lines between cinema, television, art, video and new media becoming increasingly difficult to define. [from Cinema in the Interstices: Editorial, Alphaville, 5, 2013, by Abigail Keating, Deborah Mellamphy and Jill Murphy (Issue Editors)]
    Film Studies For Free is thrilled to announce to its readers that Issue 5 of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, a special themed issue on Cinema in the Interstices, is now available. The full table of contents, with links to all the excellent items, is given below.

    FSFF particularly enjoyed Angela Dalle Vacches essay, Laura Lee on the (digital) layering of media forms in Japanese cinema, Patrick Tarrant on Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Onde Jaz o Teu Sorriso, 2001), Pauline Marsh on the Australian coming-of-age film and complex issues of relations between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians, Veronika Schweigl on Henri-François Imbert’s essay film, No pasarán, album souvenir (2003) about the fate of Spanish Civil War refugees in France, Roy Daly on Jim Jarmusch, and Delphine Letort on Treme. Last but definitely not least, FSFF really appreciated Raymond Bellours lecture on "the increasingly irreversible position of cinema within multiple image and sound dispositifs" through the prism of art installations by filmmakers and artists, including Marker, Akerman, Mekas, Kiarostami, Egoyan, Farocki, Svankmajer, Rist, Oursler, Beloff, Cardiff, Birnbaum, Viola and Castorf.

    That is to say, FSFF particularly enjoyed everything in this issue.
    Book Reviews (Editor: Ian Murphy)
    Reports (Editor: Yuanyuan Chen)
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    Jumat, 28 Maret 2014

    The eloquence of cinematic space Eric Rohmer 1920 2010

    Posted by Garber on 09.30 with No comments so far

    Image from La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
    "What Rohmer does, in essence, is precisely to give space to this elusive life of the heart, expanding the arena for those subtle and important personal choices which most of the time, for most of us, are squeezed below the surface made up of work and more conscious or pressing demands", Judith Williamson [Deadline at Dawn: Film Criticism 1980-1990, Marion Boyars, London, 1993, p. 180]
    “After all I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject.” Eric Rohmer ["Letter to a Critic Concerning my Contes moraux"]
    "Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet [his] work was warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his elegant, orderly films" 
    Dave Kehr [The New York Times, January 11, 2010]


    A shocked Film Studies For Free mourns the passing of Eric Rohmer, one of the key directors of the French New Wave and one of the most eloquent founders, audiovisually and verbally, of the discourse of modern cinema.

    David Hudson of The Auteurs is busily gathering links to a fantastic range of eulogies to, and other worthwhile material about, this filmmaker. Below, FSFF offers up its own (customary) tribute in the form of a list of links to online, freely accessible, and notable scholarly resources which explore Rohmers magnificent body of cinematic work:


                  • YouTube videos (part 1 and part 2): excerpts of Claire Deniss film of Serge Daney interviewing Jacques Rivette on his early interest in filmmaking, his days with Cahiers du cinéma, and his first meetings with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer (from 3 mins 30 secs). A must watch for those who havent yet seen Deniss Jacque Rivette, The Watchman.
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                  Selasa, 25 Maret 2014

                  New SCREENING THE PAST

                  Posted by Garber on 06.30 with No comments so far



                  Image from After the Rainbow (2009), a two screen video installation by Soda_Jerk, the Australian artist sisters Dom and Dan Angeloro, as discussed in The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime by Andrew Frost
                  [C]inema is surely a paradoxical object: its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity. That is where its true materiality-effect, today, is situated: in the palpable aura of a mise en scène that is always less than itself and more than itself, not only itself but also its contrary, ever vanishing and yet ever renewed across a thousand and one screens, platforms and dispositifs. [Adrian Martin, Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif , Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011]

                  Below, Film Studies For Free presents the table of contents to the latest online issue of Screening the Past.

                  Its a special issue on the intermediality of cinema, guest-edited by the brilliant and influential Australian film critic and scholar Adrian Martin. It begins with a marvellous contribution by him to the topic. Theres also an unmissable rerun of Nicole Brenezs remarkable essay Incomparable Bodies.

                  Admirers of Martins work should also be more than excited by the news that the first issue of LOLA, a new film journal edited by him and the film writer and blogger extraordinaire Girish Shambu, is "coming soon"...


                  Screening the Past, Issue 31 - Cinema Between Media 
                  (Incorporating U-matic to YouTube, a selection of papers from a National Symposium celebrating three decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking edited by Therese Davis).

                  First Release

                  Dossier: U-Matic to YouTube

                  Classics and Re-runs

                  Reviews

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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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