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 

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Adrian Martin Podcast

Film Studies For Free is delighted to inform its readers, today, about a really worthwhile podcast by Adrian Martin - a recording of a great talk he gave in the Provisional Insight Colloquium series at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, on July 18 2008, entitled 'Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and some others'.

The abstract for the talk is given below. The podcast (just over an hour long) can be accessed (with or without a slideshow) from the Monash University Arts website HERE.

For further great podcasts from the same series (by Ian Aitken; Andrew Benjamin; Graeme Gilloch; Helen Grace; Deane Williams; and the wonderful Lesley Stern) click HERE.

Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and Some Others

Adrian Martin

In “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud”, Paul Ricoeur (drawing upon Hegel) remarks: “The appropriation of a meaning constituted prior to me presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead of itself by a succession of ‘figures’, each of which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it.” The notion of the figural has recently become popular in European film theory and analysis, especially due to the work of Nicole Brenez – in which the figure stands for “the force … of everything that remains to be constituted” in a character, object, social relation or idea. Her use of the term refers back to magisterial work of German literary philologist Erich Auerbach (Mimesis), who decoded the religious interpretive system wherein all persons and events are grasped as significant only insofar as they prefigure their fulfilment on the ‘last day’ of divine judgement. Auerbach’s 1920s work on figuration in Dante was an important influence on his friend Walter Benjamin; and it was this ‘theological’ aspect of Benjamin’s thought that caught Kracauer’s attention, leading to the problematic of the redemption of worldly things. In this lecture I will trace the notion of figural thinking from Weimar then to Paris (and beyond) today, taking in writings by William Routt and Giorgio Agamben, as well as two filmmakers also touched by figural thinking: Josef von Sternberg and Douglas Sirk.

Adrian Martin is Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). His books include What is Modern Cinema? (Uqbar 2008), Raul Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions (Altamira 2004), The Mad Max Movies (Screensound/Currency 2003), Once Upon a Time in America (BFI 1998) and Phantasms (Penguin 1994), and he has regular columns in Film Quarterly (US), De Filmkrant (Holland) and Cahiers du cinéma España (Spain). He is the Co-editor of Movie Mutations (BFI 2003) and the Internet film magazine Rouge.

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