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Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 01 Oktober 2013

A fascinating and informative excerpt from the audio commentary track on the British Film Institute's brand new Dual Format Edition of RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977). You can find more information about this new video version of the film here and read a new interview with Mulvey about its making here.

Riddles of the Sphinx was made in 1976-7. The film used the Sphinx as an emblem with which to hang a question mark over the Oedipus complex, to illustrate the extent to which it represents a riddle for women committed to Freudian theory but still determined to think about psychoanalysis radically or, as I have said before, with poetic license. Riddles of the Sphinx and Penthesilea, our previous film, used ancient Greece to invoke a mythic point of origin for Western civilization, that had been critically re-affirmed by high culture throughout our history. [... S]ome primitive attraction to the fantasy of origins, a Gordian knot that would suddenly unravel, persisted for me in the Oedipus story, and its special status: belonging to very ancient mythology and to the literature of high Greek civilization, chosen by Freud to name his perception of the founding moment of the human psyche. My interest then concentrated on breaking down the binarism of the before/after opposition, by considering the story as a passage through time, a journey that could metaphorically open out or stretch the Oedipal trajectory through significant details and through its formal, narrational, properties. [Laura Mulvey, 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989, FSFF's emphasis]

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry in honour of one the most important, most brilliant, most influential and hardest-working film and moving image scholars of all time: Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and recently, co-founder of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. Mulvey is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989; second edition, 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996; 2nd ed. 2013), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series, 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006). And she has made six films in collaboration with fellow film theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI, 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980) and with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994)

FSFF's author has a pretty good record in celebrating Mulvey's influence on film studies already, having been lucky enough to take part, earlier this year, in a day devoted to this activity at Birkbeck's Institute of Humanities - an event recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting. The happy occasion for today's eFestschrift, however, is the British Film Institute's release of a new DVD/BluRay disk of Riddles of the Sphinx, the hugely significant and original feminist film Mulvey co-directed and produced in 1976/77 with her partner Wollen (the disk also contains their first film together: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons [1974]).

To accompany this entry FSFF was honoured to be able to produce a short, exclusive extract of a sequence of its choice from the DVD audio commentary accompanied version (as embedded above). FSFF warmly thanks Laura Mulvey herself, as well as Hannah Maloco and the BFI, whose Production Board thankfully funded Riddles of the Sphinx, for kindly allowing this blog to create such a memorable and instrumental item of openly accessible film studies.

Beneath the BFI's own Riddles of the Sphinx clip (embedded below) -- a commentary free version of substantially the same sequence -- you can find a wonderful listing of links to openly accessible online scholarly work by and about Laura Mulvey. It provides ample testimony, were it needed, as to why she has been, is, and always will be, one of the true greats of our subject - as Michel Foucault probably would have put, a veritable 'founder of discursivity' for our discipline...

Online written work by Laura Mulvey:

Online written work by Peter Wollen about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work:

Online video/audio work by or featuring Laura Mulvey:

Online writing about Laura Mulvey's work:

More about → Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License

Expanded Cinema Studies? Free eBook on Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art

Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 04 Juli 2013

Whether it involves remaking an old Hollywood movie, projecting a quiet 16mm film, or constructing a bombastic multi-screen environment, cinema now takes place not just in the movie theatre and the home, but also in the art gallery and the museum. The author of this engaging study takes stock of this development, offering an in-depth inquiry into its genesis, its defining features, and the ramifications it has for art and cinema alike. Through the lens of contemporary art history, she examines cinema studies’ great disciplinary obsession – namely, what cinema was, is, and will become in a digital future. (blurb for Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013])

Thanks to the legend that is Girish Shambu, Film Studies For Free heard of the latest, wonderful, freely accessible book from Amsterdam University Press: Erika Balsom's Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. The table of contents is below. It's a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of Expanded Cinema Studies. Read it for free but please order it for your libraries! It has been added to FSFF's permanent and regularly updated listing of online Open Access Film Studies e-Books

Another related resource: six video recordings have been uploaded online of all the sessions from the recent Mediamorphosis Symposium and Exhibition at the University of Sussex at which researchers, practitioners, artists (including filmmakers), designers, scientists were invited to submit, discuss, exchange and engage with analogue and digital practices as mediamorphosis. You can find links to the videos here.

It's been so quiet around here that FSFF's readers probably won't even notice that it is going on holiday for two weeks (it will be taking Erika's book!). It promises to return refreshed, reinvigorated and possibly even sun-tanned after that, with LOTS of new Open Access items to link to. But, in the meantime, please check out this little video on a different kind of "expanded cinema studies" - it has one or two useful resources that you may find interesting.

Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013)

Table of Contents
Introduction – The Othered Cinema

Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition
The Passages of Cinema Projection and Patrimony Black Box/White Cube The New Blockbusters The Myth of Activity Media at MoMA

Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins
Post-medium Post-mortem Indexing the Past A Little History of 35mm Ruinophilia Analogue Aura

Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives Ambivalent Appropriations The Four Operations Precursors The False Promises of the “Utopia of Use” Remaking Fandom “Room-for-Play” VCR Memories

Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction Anti-anti-illusionism Hybrid Forms Rehabilitating Narrative A Return of the Real Two Images of Death
Conclusion – “Cinema and...”

More about → Expanded Cinema Studies? Free eBook on Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art

Knowing that/knowing how? On audiovisual film studies, part 1: practice-led film research

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 06 Maret 2012

Research in progress by Joanna Callaghan for the fourth long format film in the series 'Ontological Narratives' which will take Jacques Derrida's epistolary novel The Post Card as starting point.
In this research film, the possibility of a deconstructive film is discussed with world leading experts on Derrida using a range of clips as counterpoints.
Ontological Narratives is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by Callaghan in collaboration with Martin McQuillan. [Also see 'The Post Card - Adaptation'; for more on this project see here and here]. See also Callaghan and McQuillan's important film on the current convulsive state of UK Higher Education, "I melt the glass with my forehead".

We can therefore turn this [film theory/film practice divide] debate into an explicitly philosophical issue, by not presupposing that knowing that and knowing how simply overlap; they are two different types of knowledge whose relationship needs to be thought through. It is the theorization of the link/overlap between the two types of knowledge that seems to be missing. [Warren Buckland, Film-Philosophy Discussion List, January 31, 2012]

[The debate about film theory and practice] has a history which, in the UK at least, goes back to the 1970s, when the art colleges taught experimental film making, and the then polytechnics and a few new universities began to include film-making in their undergraduate film courses. Film theory as such was still taking shape, and video was in its earliest stages. In an atmosphere charged with radical intellectual fervour, the theoretical input led to much experimentation in colleges of creative practice—the watchword of the time was deconstruction. The paradigm for the infusion of theory into practice could be found in the work, for example, of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who established themselves on screen and on page, together and separately, as leading denizens of both. Some of the people emerging from this habitus made the break and went on to successful careers in the mainstream, but independent film-making informed by theoretical critique remained in the margins. [Michael Chanan, 'Revisiting the Theory/Practice Debate', Putney Debater, February 15, 2012 (hyperlinks added)]

Audiovisual works, it may be argued – films, videos or some other form – are already discursively articulated, they not only incorporate language (as dialogue, voice-over, intertitle, and so on) but are quasi-linguistic in their very form. The analogy between language and cinema, for example, has been explored with particular rigour in structuralist film theory, not least in the work of Christian Metz. It might be argued that if audiovisual forms are inherently discursive, then an intellectual argument can equally well be presented in the form of a film or video as in a more conventional written form. [Victor Burgin, 'Thoughts on 'research' degrees in visual arts departments', Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2006] (hyperlink added)]

The misgivings about the legitimacy of practice-based research degrees in the creative and performing arts arise mainly because people have trouble taking research seriously which is designed, articulated and documented with both discursive and artistic means. The difficulty lurks in the presumed impossibility of arriving at a more or less objective assessment of the quality of the research – as if a specialised art forum did not already exist alongside the academic one, and as if academic or scientific objectivity itself were an unproblematic notion. In a certain sense, a discussion is repeating itself here that has already taken place (and still continues) with respect to the emancipation of the social sciences: the prerogative of the old guard that thinks it holds the standard of quality against the rights of the newcomers who, by introducing their own field of research, actually alter the current understanding of what scholarship and objectivity are. [Henk Borgdorff, 'The debate on research in the arts', The Sensuous Knowledge Project, 2006]

And so begins a mini-series of posts here at Film Studies For Free on the practical possibilities for, and the critical debates about, audiovisual film studies research and 'publication'.

Below, in this first instalment, FSFF links to freely-accessible, online resources relating to the notion of film practice as a form of film/video theorising, in other words, as a reflexive and/or affective meditation on the ontological qualities of film or video (a 'felt framing', in Julian Klein's great phrase to describe artistic research). It's certainly a good excuse to showcase some of the burgeoning, open access work (and open access publications, or free publishers' samples) in the very healthy field of Moving Image Practice as Research (aka 'Research by Practice' or 'Practice-Led research).

Some studies of Practice-Led Research

Two Open Access journals for AV/media practice work:

The Journal of Media practice: SCREENWORKS (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 [on AVPhD practice work])
The Journal for Artistic Research

Two free publishers journal samples:

Journal of Media Practice 11.1, 2010, Free Sample Issue

MIRAJ 1:1, 2012 (the journal of the Artists' Moving Image Research Network) – Free Inaugural issue

Editorial:

Catherine Elwes

Articles:

Features:

Reviews:

More about → Knowing that/knowing how? On audiovisual film studies, part 1: practice-led film research

Conversations from the REMIX CINEMA Workshop

Diposting oleh good reading on Minggu, 29 Januari 2012

In conversation with Richard Misek at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

Film Studies For Free took a little break to meet a few deadlines in the last two weeks. Normal service resumes this week, thankfully.

In the next days, there will be an entry of links in memory of Theo Angelopoulos who sadly died last week. So, do please come back for that.

Today, though, FSFF posts links to some recently uploaded audio files which very valuably record great interviews with the contributors to an important workshop conference that took place last March at Oxford University.

The event explored the topic of Remix Cinema: the collaborative making, deconstruction and distribution of digital artefacts, and was part of a wider project exploring the role of audio-visual remix practices in contemporary digital culture.

Thanks to everyone taking part for making these excellent resources available to everyone working in the field.

More about → Conversations from the REMIX CINEMA Workshop

Media Fields Journal on Video Stores

Diposting oleh good reading on Rabu, 08 Desember 2010

Melonie Diaz, Jack Black, and Mos Def in Be Kind, Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008 - See FSFF's post on Gondry for some reading on this film)

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to be able to pass on news of the launch of MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL: Critical Explorations in Media and Space, a new graduate online journal based in the University of California, Santa Barbara's Department of Film and Media Studies.

The first issue (1.1, 2010) on VIDEO STORES, edited by Joshua Neves and Jeff Scheible, is now available at http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/.

Neves and Scheible introduce their special issue as follows:

This new online journal represents the latest development in a research initiative launched in UCSB’s Department of Film and Media Studies in 2007. The goal of Media Fields is to provide a forum focused on the critical study of media and space, where we can dynamically present and openly debate the latest work from established and emerging scholars and practitioners. Each issue will have a theme—whether it is a topic of contemporary relevance; an exploration of a particular concept, media form, genre, or practice; or, as in this issue, a specific media space: the video rental store.
We were compelled to focus on the space of the video store in this issue because it is a “media field” that at once allows for the kind of tangible, site-specific fieldwork that is at the heart of Media Fields and, at the same time, is a site where a range of important issues intersect: “new” media’s consequences for “old” media; uses, developments, and failures of media technologies; the cultivation of knowledge about cinema and television; global media distribution; piracy and the law; the circulation of pornography; configurations of cultural communities; relations between public and private space; and contemporary media reception. [read more]

The issue contents are linked to below. Also see the following great site mentioned by the special issue: Video Cultures.
Issue Contents:

Please also note that a call for submissions for an issue on DOCUMENTARY AND SPACE is now open and can be viewed here.

More about → Media Fields Journal on Video Stores

Michael Snow videos and links

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 12 Oktober 2009

My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor ... sometimes they all work together. (Michael Snow)

[N]o other artist has done so much to destabilise our approximation of the visible than Michael Snow. By threatening the very tools we rely on to process what we perceive, the artist creates unnerving yet frequently poetic works. His avant-garde film-making is less about a way of understanding the camera as a device for recording than as an instrument whose structural, material properties can form the main focus of the work. (Tim Clarke)

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you another video gem from the Tate Channel in which the highly distinguished Canadian artist Michael Snow, one of the most influential experimental filmmakers (including of such masterworks as Wavelength [1967)], La Région Centrale [1971], and *Corpus Callosum [2002]) discusses his work. Snow, who will reach the grand old age of 80 this December, gave this illustrated talk at the Tate Modern in London on October 26, 2001, on the occasion of a major retrospective of his work that year at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. The talk, a very detailed and insightful revisiting of the entirety of his work to that point, lasts just under two hours.

Here also, as is FSFF's wont, are links to further wonderful, freely accessible, online, scholarly Michael Snow resources. Below the list are two other embedded videos: the first, a ten minute overview of Snow's work; the second, a video version of Snow's 1967 experimental film Wavelength (please read the comments on this post for a discussion of the ethics of reproducing this very poor copy of the film):