New Issue of JUMP CUT!

Frame grab from The Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). See the Jump Cut dossier on Ford's film, Spielberg's version of the Lincoln story, and the classic Cahiers du Cinéma debate on the earlier film. Also see  Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Film Studies For Free has been away, gadding about and gabbling at a wonderful conference in Frankfurt on The Audiovisual Essay (organised by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, with Vinzenz Hediger, for Deutsches Filminstitut and Goethe University), about which you will hear a great deal in the coming weeks and months.

Next, tomorrow, it departs for yet another exciting public event - a panel discussion on 'The Future of Film Criticism" at King's College, London, speaking alongside Jean-Michel Frodon (Editor of Cahiers du Cinéma and film critic for Le Monde) and Nick James (Editor of Sight & Sound).

In between these two magnificent events, it had to bring you news of a huge new issue of the online journal Jump Cut, which is absolutely full of incredibly interesting looking contents - FSFF particularly liked the dossier on Lincoln and ideology, but there's so much more to enjoy here. Thank you, Jump Cut!

Back soon.


Current issue, No. 55, fall 2013: INSTITUTIONS, TECHNOLOGIES, and LABOR

• Digital dreams in a material world: the rise of Netflix and its impact on changing distribution and exhibition patterns by Kevin P. McDonald
• “From, by, for”: Nairobi’s Slum Film Festival, film festival studies, and the practices of development by Lindiwe Dovey, Joshua McNamara, and Federico Olivier
• The normativity of 3D: cinematic journeys, “imperial visuality” and unchained cameras by Bruce Bennett
• Native images: the otherness and affectivity of the digital body by Adam Davis
• Sounds of Hong Kong cinema: Johnnie To, Milkyway Image, and the sound track by Gary Bettinson
• To work or not to work: the dilemma of Hong Kong film labor in the age of mainlandization by Mirana M. Szeto and Yun-chung Chen

THIRD CINEMA/INTERNATIONAL

• Jai Bhim Comrade: tales of oppression and songs of resistance by Catherine Bernier
• “The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition” by Brian Winston (a review of Joshua Malitsky, Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations)
• Thauk gya paw hee thwi deh thwi /Blood’s Oath to Beautiful Flower —Blood’s Oath, drama of insurgency in a Burmese Pwo Karen Film by Violet Cho
• Amnesiac memory: Hiroshima/Nagasaki in Japanese film by Inez Hedges
• Body memories, body cinema: the politics of multi-sensual counter-memory in György Pálfi’s Hukkle by György Kalmár
• We lost our way: the time and space of alienation in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together by Caroline Guo
• Hong Kong’s liminal spaces: unveiling nature and identity in Tsang Tsui-shan’s Big Blue Lake by Winnie L. M. Yee
• Capitalist childhood in film: modes of critique by Susan Ferguson
• National identity, cultural institutions, and filmmaking in “Paradise” —the Puerto Rican successes of Talento de barrio and Broche de oro by Naida García-Crespo
• “Behind her laughter…is fear!” Domestic abuse and transnational feminism in Bollywood remakes by Gohar Siddiqui

GENDER

• New queer cinema by Roxanne Samer
• Feminist porn by Erica Rand (a review of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young)
• The gay-for-pay gaze in gay male pornography by Kevin John Bozelka
• Dire straights: the indeterminacy of sexual identity in gay-for-pay pornography by John Paul Stadler
• Sartorial signifiers, masculinity, and the global recession in HBO's Hung by Chris Vanderwees
• The multivalent feminism of The Notorious Bettie Page by Steven S. Kapica
• Descent: “Everything’s okay now”—race, vengeance, and watching the modern rape-revenge narrative by Jenny Lapekas
• Bringing out Baby Jane —camp, sympathy, and the horror-woman’s film of the 1960s by David Greven
• Doing his homework by David Greven (a review of David Halperin’s How to be Gay)

IN AND AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM

• Skyfall: a mother and her twin boys by Robert Alpert
• “Propane is for pussies” —Bellflower’s bromance of retro technology and hip masculinity by David Church
• Take Shelter; Meek’s Cutoff; The Turin Horse — the end of everything by Timothy Kreider
• Workers' confessions and the reality TV series Undercover Boss by Lyell Davies
• From Hoover to Bush Jr. — home and crisis scripts in U.S. social cinema by Antonio Sánchez-Escalonilla
• Ecocinema by Joe Heumann and Robin Murray (a review of Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt
• The earth bites back: vampires and the ecological roots of home by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
• Broomhilda Unchained: Tarantino’s Wagner by Adrian Daub and Elisabeth Bronfen

EXPERIMENTAL/INDEPENDENT

• Movies in miniature by Midi Onodera
• Amateurization of the entire media universe by Patricia R. Zimmermann (a review of Amateur Media: Social, Cultural and Legal Perspectives, ed. Dan Hunter, Ramon Lobato, Megan Richardson and Julian Thomas)
• Varient cinematic artistic expression by Greg DeCuir (a review of Pavle Levi, Cinema by other means)

LINCOLN & IDEOLOGY FORUM

• Introduction by Chuck Kleinhans
• Young Mr. Lincoln and ideological analysis: a reconsideration (with many asides) by Chuck Kleinhans
• Lincoln in contemporary U.S. culture and politics by Douglas Kellner
• Equality before the law in Spielberg’s Lincoln by Gary Bettinson and Richard Rushton
• Symptomatic reading in Althusser, Cahiers du cinéma, and Zizek by Warren Buckland
• Lincoln: shared myths in a revisionist age by Frederick Wasser
• The hysteric, the mother, the natural gal:
• male fantasies and male theories in films about Lincoln by Deborah Tudor
• The significance of Steven Spielberg's Old Mr. Lincoln:
• political emotions and intertextual knowledge by Janet Staiger
• Mr. Spielberg's Mr. Lincoln by Chuck Kleinhans

HIV/AIDS ACTIVIST MEDIA

• Introduction: Ghost stories by David Oscar Harvey, Marty Fink, Alexandra Juhasz, Bishnu Gosh
• Ghosts caught in our throat —
• of the lack of contemporary representations of gay/bisexual men and HIV by David Oscar Harvey
• Two ghost stories: disability activism and HIV/AIDS by Marty Fink
• Acts of signification-survival by Alexandra Juhasz
• What time is it here? by Bishnupriya Ghosh

CLASSICS FROM THE PAST
S/Z and Rules of the Game by Julia Lesage
 
THE LAST WORD The war on/in higher education by the Editors

More about → New Issue of JUMP CUT!

Truly Doing Film Criticism: Online Film Studies by Tag Gallagher

Tag Gallagher: A New Reality. Roberto Rossellini's Francesco, guillare di Dio, (US 2006)

[T]here is no formula for movie criticism. Cinema is not the same cinema in Ford and Rossellini, so you don’t use the same tools to look at it. Frame enlargements can show a lot of Ford’s art -- composition, camera angles rhyming from one shot to the next, lighting – but almost nothing of Rossellini’s art, because Rossellini turns everything into motion. All the feelings, the motivations, the characters’ sense of self, even morality and philosophy are turned into motion. So I published a thousand pages about Rossellini, but I really couldn’t deal with his cinema, until I made my video about his Francesco, giullare di Dio.  ['Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher', kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009]

The first video I made about Roberto Rossellini was [on Francesco, giullare di Dio]. I made it for a company that turned it down because it did not like the quality of the recording of my voice. So I lost the opportunity to publish this essay in that country, and in some others. [...] So I showed my video on Francesco only at some museums and gave some copies to friends, but that was it.  [Excerpts from a January 2012 interview with Gallagher: Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, 'Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico', Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]]

Today, Film Studies For Free is delighted to publish online, for the first time, film critic and historian extraordinaire Tag Gallagher's first video essay on a Roberto Rossellini film.

To celebrate and accompany this publication, for which FSFF and its readers have to thank the great Tag himself, below is a list of links to Gallagher's online film studies essays (written and audiovisual), interviews with him about his work, and studies of his work. If there is anything missing from the below lists, please leave a relevant link in the comments section. Many thanks!

Gallagher's Written Work Online:

• Tag Gallagher's website

• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007

• Tag Gallagher, 'Geometry of Force: Abel Ferrara and Simone Weil', Screening the Past, 10 (2000) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reading, culture, and auteur', Screening the Past, 12 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Mizoguchi and Freedom', Screening the Past, 13 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'All lost in wonder: Edgar G.Ulmer', Screening the Past, 12 (2001)
• Tag Gallagher, 'Going My Way', Screening the Past, December 2001

• Tag Gallagher, 'Josef von Sternberg', Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, 'Raoul Walsh', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, 'Max Ophuls: A New Art – But Who Notices?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 22, 2002
  
• Tag Gallagher, 'Hitchcock, Machines, and Us', Senses of Cinema, Issue 24, 3003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Rises from the Dead. Again', Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003
• Tag Gallagher, 'The Swine who Rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: Joseph L. Mankiewicz as Producer', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Till '47', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Making Reality', Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Renoir and the Scandal of “First Love” or The Perils of Catherine', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'Lacrimae Rerum Materialized', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, 'American Triptych: Vidor, Hawks and Ford', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Straub Anti-Straub', Senses of Cinema, Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, How to Share a Hill', Senses of Cinema,  Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Chains of Dreams: Carl Th. Dreyer', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009
• Tag Gallagher, 'Why Samuel Fuller?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009

• Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to Bleasdale', Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002

• Tag Gallagher, 'Letter to Helmut Färber', Lumen, 1, 2011

Gallagher's Video Essays Online:

• Dreaming of Jeanie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach  

Online Interviews with Gallagher:

• Toni D'Angela, 'Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, and Michael Baute (et al.), 'Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher', kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009

Online Studies or Reviews of Gallagher's Work:

• Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, 'Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico', Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]
• Adrian Martin, 'Always a window: Tag Gallagher's Rossellini', Screening the Past, March 2000 

More about → Truly Doing Film Criticism: Online Film Studies by Tag Gallagher

On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

Even if John Ford had not made his ten best movies (whichever they are), he'd still be the greatest. [Tag Gallagher]

In Young Mr. Lincoln, John Ford achieves the perfection of his art. Never were his matter and his method more aptly fitted, and never were his tendencies toward sprawl and overemphasis more rigorously controlled. It is a masterpiece of concision in which every element in every shot, every ratio, every movement, every shift of viewpoint seems dense with significance, yet it breathes an air of casual improvisation. While its surfaces paint, with relaxed humor and effortless nostalgic charm, an imaginary antebellum America, it sustains an underlying note of somber apprehension, all the more powerful for being held in check.

Ford finds a mood that avoids the clutter and ponderousness of most Hollywood history movies, a mood more of parable than of textbook chronicle. That preoccupation with history and its contradictions—the variance between actual human experience and the official version that will be constructed after the fact—that suffuses films as different as They Were Expendable (1945), Fort Apache (1948), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) resonates troublingly at the heart of this film, for all its apparent serenity. Nothing here is as uncomplicated as it seems designed to appear, which may be why the editors of Cahiers du cinéma, in a celebrated, if by now scarcely readable, special issue of 1970, brought the full force of their post-’68 Althusserian-Lacanian rhetoric to bear on the film in a scene-by-scene analysis, as if here the secret mechanisms of the American ideology itself might be decoded and exposed. In trying to pin down the meanings of Ford’s art, however, Cahiers du cinéma missed his mercurial—and, admittedly, sometimes infuriating––ability to be in two places at once. If Ford’s Lincoln exhibits at once a radiant sincerity and the devious subtlety of a trickster, he is to that extent the director’s mirror image. [Geoffrey O'Brien, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: Here in Waiting', The Criterion Collection, February 13, 2006]

Cahiers du cinéma’s 1969 analysis of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), reprinted in Screenin 1972 in its first English translation, introduced symptomatic reading to British feminist film critics such as Pam Cook and Claire Johnston. Louis Althusser (1968, trans. 1970: 28-9) coined the term “symptomatic reading,” an interpretive strategy that searches not only for the structural dominants in a text but most importantly, for absences and omissions that are an indication of what the dominant ideology seeks to repress, contain or marginalize. Reading against the grain operates under the assumption that the text comprises a hierarchy of discourses in which one discourse – patriarchal ideology – asserts its dominance over others. Nevertheless, tensions between the dominant ideology and subordinate discourses produce ideological contradictions that the popular film cannot mask nor reconcile, try as it might. [Aspasia Kotsopoulos, 'Reading against the grain revisited', from Jump Cut, Issue 44, 2001]

While it is difficult to ascertain exactly how an ‘oblique’ analysis of film would proceed, the editors of Cahiers [du cinéma’s] essay on John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939) is a significant example of this type of criticism and stands as exemplary of the many important analyses of mainstream Hollywood films that were carried out in the pages of Cahiers and elsewhere. The analysis of Young Mr Lincoln is a close reading of this film, which belongs to the category that is in many ways the most difficult to endorse: films that remain within bourgeois ideology, but reveal its ambiguities and fissures (when subjected to a highly specialised mode of reading).The reading by the Editors of Cahiers uses principles of Marxism, semiology and credits Marxist and Freudian discourses, and includes fleeting references to Jean-Pierre Oudart, Althusser, Roland Barthes and Serge Daney, and Lacan. However, there is no sustained explanation as to precisely which principles drawn from these discourses they will deploy. While Peter Wollen, in his Afterword to the translation of the analysis of Young Mr Lincoln in Screen, declares that the text “owes its concepts to Jacques Lacan” [...], this text would seem to be exemplary of Žižek’s contention that a sustained and explicit consideration of Lacan was in fact missing from 60s and 70s film theory.
     At first glance, therefore, the Young Mr Lincoln article might seem to exemplify a move towards Lacanian psychoanalysis. Furthermore, upon first glance, it appears to be a step towards a consideration of narrative content. As such, it might seem to undermine a contention of this thesis: that the content of popular film was systematically precluded by considerations of film and ideology during the 60s and 70s. In this article, the Editorial Collective treat the text of the film in many ways like a work of literature, analysing it sequence by sequence, with scarcely a mention of its materiality. It could be argued that here is an example of textual analysis that confounds the assertion that subject matter was neglected in favour of form and materiality in analyses of film and ideology. While an extensive examination of the content of Young Mr Lincoln, or signifié, to use the Editors’ turn of phrase, appears to consume the bulk of this article, it must be noted that it is the film’s form which is ostensibly the impetus for the discussion of its content. [Kate Greenwood, Confronting the limits: Renditions of the Real in the Edge of the Construct Film, PhD Thesis, The University of Adelaide, December 2006: 63-64]

It's been a slightly quieter week than usual here at Film Studies For Free, as its voracious readers may have noticed.

A good reason for that is that this blog's author has merrily begun a new university year, teaching ... (drum roll) ... Film Theory!

This shiny, new, non-virtual, pedagogical order will continue to slow up FSFF's production a little, it's true, but it will also inspire the direction that some of its entries will take in the coming weeks and months.

For example, as next week's teaching focus is John Ford's 1939 film Young Mr, Lincoln, and the ideological film readings that it inspired, or provoked, here's a little list of online and openly accessible scholarly books, articles and videos on the inspirational and/or provocative work of that very director.

• Charles Barr, 'About the John Ford Archive', Paper at Archives and Auteurs Conference, University of Stirling, September 2-4, 2009'
• Charles Barr, 'Irish Brother Feeney: Francis Ford in John Ford’s films', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010
• David Bordwell, 'John Ford, silent man', Observations on Film Art, June 28, 2010 
• Seán Crosson, "‘They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever pa, ‘cause we're the people' - Misrepresenting death in Jim Sheridan's In America (2003)", Estudios Irlandeses: Journal of Irish Studies, Issue 3, (2008)
• Seán Crosson, 'Vanishing Point: An examination of some consequences of globalization for contemporary Irish film', E-Keltoi, Vol. 2, 2003
• Toni D'Angela, 'Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of the Hollywood Professionals', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009
• Ruurd Dykstra, 'The Search for Spectators: VistaVision and Technicolor in The Searchers', Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, 1.1, 2010 
• Arthur M. Eckstein, 'Darkening Ethan: John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Screen', originally published in Cinema Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 3-24
• Martin Flanagan, 'Re-Making Time: Chronotopes of the West in Lone Star (1996) and The Searchers (1956', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• Richard Franklin, 'John Ford', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Till '47', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Rises from the Dead. Again', Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Going My Way', Screening the Past, December 2001
• Ross Gibson, 'The Searchers - Dismantled', Rouge, Issue 7, 2004 
• Shigehiko Hasumi, 'John Ford, or The Eloquence of Gesture', Rouge, 2005
• James Hawko, 'John Ford's The Horse Soldiers', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Arlene Hui, 'The Racial Frontier in John Ford’s The Searchers', Revista Complutense de Historia de América, 2004, vol. 30, 187-207 
• Peter Lehman, '"Tonight Your Director Is John Ford":The Strange Journey of Stagecoach from Screen to Radio', Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes', Edited by Andrew J. Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
• Julia Leyda, 'Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers', The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)
• Miguel Marías, 'Ford's Depth', Rouge, Issue 7, 2004
• Cornelis Martin Renes, 'The Quiet Man and Angela’s Ashes: Hollywood Representations of Irish Emigration as Male Quest Narrative', Estudios Irlandeses , Number 2, 2007, pp. 93-106
• Gary Morris, 'The Searcher: On Ethan Edwards and John Ford's Masterpiece', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 58, 2007
• John T. Nelson, 'The Berkhofer Duality Revealed in the Western Films of John Ford and John Wayne', Madison Historical Review, Vol. 4, November 2007
• Geoffrey O'Brien, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: Here in Waiting', The Criterion Collection, February 13, 2006
• Timothy P. O'Neill, 'Two Concepts of Liberty Valance: John Ford, Isaiah Berlin, and Tragic Choice on the Frontier', Creighton Law Review, Vol. 37, 2004
• Jeffrey C. Prater, John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy: Myth or Reality?, Masters Thesis, Faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, June 1989
• Art Redding, 'Built Ford Tough: John Ford and the Persistence of the American Western', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Sam Rohdie, 'Four essays [on Painlevé, Jennings, Vigo, and Ford], Screening the Past, 25, 2009
• Norman Rosenberg, 'Young Mr. Lincoln: The Lawyer as Super-Hero', Legal Studies Forum, Volume 15, Number 3 (1991)
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘"The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause":John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright', Rouge, No. 7, 2004
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part One', Screening the Past, 23, 2008 
  
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (a)', Screening the Past, 24, 2008
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (b)', Screening the Past, 25, 2009
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Two (c)', Screening the Past, 27, 2010
• Bill Routt, 'Ford At Fox: Part Three (a)', Screening the Past, 28, 2010 
• Sean Ryder, 'Representing Ireland: Literary Adaptation and Irish Cinema', Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 9, 1998, 119-130
• Thomas Schatz, 'Stagecoach and Hollywood's A-Western Renaissance', in John Ford's Stagecoach, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [long extract] 
• Tom Schneller, '[Review of] Kathryn Kalinak. How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford', The Journal of film music, Volume 2, numbers 2-4, Winter 2009, 279-82
• Nicoleta Stanca, 'Hollywood Gender Representations of Irish America in the 20th Century: Maureen O’Hara and Pierce Brosnan', The Annals of Ovidius University Constanta - Philology (20/2009)
• Temenuga Trifonova, 'John Ford’s Funeral Oration: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Phil Wagner, 'John Ford Made … Monsters? The Grotesque Tradition in Ford’s Work', Senses of Cinema, Issue 48, 2008 
• Saige Walton, '[Review of] Jim Kitses,'Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood', Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006

Video Essay by Kevin B. Lee on The Sun Shines Bright (1956, John Ford) and Gertrud (1964, Carl T. Dreyer) with commentary by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Part One of Two. Part of the Shooting Down Pictures project

Video essay by Kevin B. Lee on Tobacco Road (1941, dir. John Ford), #905 (46) in the Shooting Down Pictures project.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Frame By Frame - Director John Ford', UNL, August 26, 2010

Phil Peters and John Nelson, 'Studying in Western Filmmaker John Ford's Footsteps'

More about → On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Archives and Auteurs: conference papers online

Lindsay Anderson meeting the "Queen' ( on the set of Britannia Hospital, 1982)

As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project on 'The Cinema Authorship of Lindsay Anderson' (see detailed project outline), a conference on Archives and Auteurs was held at the University of Stirling from 2nd - 4th September 2009. The conference brought archivists, academics, curators and researchers together to discuss the ways in which the study of the archives of filmmakers and the film industry can provide new perspectives and insights into the history of cinema.

Film Studies For Free was delighted to see that the excellent papers from the conference are now freely accessible online at the Stirling University website.

Direct links to open pdf files are given below. In addition, check out Kathryn Mackenzie's wonderful blog -- Archives and Auteurs -- devoted to this project. A selection of Anderson's photograph albums from 1940s and 1950s have been made available on the University of Stirling Archives flickr pages. These albums provide a rich visual record of Anderson's early years as a filmmaker, documenting the early industrial films he made in Wakefield, his trips to the Cannes Film Festival and his contribution to Free Cinema. Those interested should also read this related article by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, 'Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If.... (1968)', Journal of Screenwriting, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010. And finally, Moving Image Source published a great article on Anderson (August 14, 2008) by Steve Erickson, entitled 'Anarchy in the U.K': 

• Charles Barr, 'About the John Ford Archive'

• Steve Chibnall, 'A Family Film Business: Researching the Adelphi Archive'

• Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, 'The Fairy-Tale Theatre: Reception and Authorship at the Margins of the Ingmar Bergman Archive'

• Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, 'Some Kind of Dialectic: Lindsay Anderson's Artistic Process'  Pt.1

• Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, 'Some Kind of Dialectic: Lindsay Anderson's Artistic Process' Pt.2

• Aaron Hunter, 'Down to the Last Detail: Archival Reconstruction of Hal Ashby's Place in Hollywood Cinema'

• John Izod, 'A bumpy ride on The White Bus'

• Kathryn Mackenzie, 'Britannia Hospital: searching the archives for an audience'   

• Karl Magee, 'O Lucky Man? Investigating the Lindsay Anderson Archive'  

• Brian Neve, 'Archives, process and discourse: Elia Kazan, Baby Doll and 'independent' American filmmaking, 1955-63'

• Andrew Spicer, 'The Creative Producer: The Michael Klinger Papers'

• Sarah  Street, '"Designing for Moving Pictures": Production Designers and/in the Archives'

• Karyn Stuckey, 'Lolita: a journey with Nabokov and Kubrick from the page to the screen'

• Marc Vernet, 'The Ince 'Method' and Film on the West Coast between 1913 and 1917'

More about → Archives and Auteurs: conference papers online