Diposting oleh
good reading on Selasa, 26 November 2013
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
THIRD CINEMA/INTERNATIONAL
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
EXPERIMENTAL/INDEPENDENT
LINCOLN & IDEOLOGY FORUM
HIV/AIDS ACTIVIST MEDIA
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!
Diposting oleh
good reading on Kamis, 04 Agustus 2011
Back, nicely bronzed, from its holiday,
Film Studies For Free has lots of catching up to do. Let it begin with rushing you, below, the table of contents from the latest, utterly brilliant issue of
Jump Cut, No. 53, summer 2011.
There is SO much great reading here, much of it deeply politically committed, as is characteristic of this important journal. But please don't miss its marvellous book reviews section, including a look at recent books on film sound by Michael Chanan (thanks for tipping FSFF off about this latest issue, Michael!).
Hollywood
Reframing
- Decay of the aura: modern art in classical cinema by Susan Felleman
A study of real works of art—including figural sculpture, “Entartete Kunst” (works of modern art deemed “degenerate by the Nazi regime), and abstract painting—as incorporated into three popular fiction films of the classic period (The Song of Songs, 1933; Venus vor Gericht, 1941; and The Trouble with Harry, 1955), reveals that when an art object becomes part of a fiction film, it enters a space of its own symbolic appropriation; aura is replaced by (unstable) signification. - Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”:
the myth of interdependence in oil drilling films by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
Louisiana Story (1948), Thunder Bay (1953), Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992), Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2009), and Crude (2009) draw on a mythology that suggests the oil and fishing industries can work interdependently once appropriate safety precautions are in place. - American Medusa: Bette Davis, Beyond the Forest, femininity, and Camp by David Greven
King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest allows us to consider the feminist and queer relevance of the theme of female transformation in Bette Davis films and to revisit and challenge the category of the Camp Classic. - Taken by Muslims: captivity narratives in
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Prisoner of the Mountains by Claudia Springer
A 1935 Hollywood film's vilification of Muslims is countered by a nuanced Russian film from 1996, with both revolving around the abduction of non-Muslims by Muslims. - A question of audience: revisiting Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come by Ulrick Casimir
A modern attempt to unpack Henzell's iconic film, analyzing the complex relations between British and U.S. conceptualizations of the Caribbean and the film itself.
International cinema
- At the global market: Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé
and the economics of women’s rights by Amy E. Borden
As both a tool used by contemporary activists, such as Tostan, and within its plot, Ousmane Sembène’s final film Moolaadé demonstrates how West African women may gain collective access to juridical and political power by using local cultural customs to resist the practice of female genital cutting. - Serbian cutting: assemblage and the archival impulse
in the films of Dušan Makavejev by Greg DeCuir, Jr.
"If Serbs are fond of slaughtering people, there must be a method of film cutting that corresponds." - Global capital’s false choices in the films of Laurent Cantet by Jessica Livingston
By looking at the four major films of French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, we receive a valuable window through which to view the false choices offered by the contemporary neoliberal economy. - Narrating topography: Still Life and the cinema of Jia Zhangke by Eric Dalle
Jia Zhangke’s environmental fiction film, Still Life, explores the effects of the Three Gorges Dam on the emotional lives of individuals from different social strata. - Redeeming the woman from Maoist China in China Cry: A True Story by Jing Yang
This 1990 filmic narrative of the Christian redemption of a Chinese woman from Maoist political frenzy exemplifies residual U.S. Cold War thinking that serves to contain the ideological other. - Let’s get lost: unmapping history and Reformasi in the Indonesian film Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya by Dag Yngvesson
Riri Riza's deceptively lazy 2007 Javanese Road Movie attempts to disorient itself from the pervasive sociopolitical apathy of contemporary Indonesian youth by slowly eviscerating the ubiquitous formal, narrative and cultural structures that have imbued the problems of recent history and resulting status quo with a nostalgic, translucent sheen. - The Nakba and the construction of identity in Palestinian film by Inez Hedges
Performative memory serves as the counterweight to dispossession from the land.
Economics and cinema
Politics of media production and distribution
- Woman with the movie camera redux: revisiting the position of women in the production classroom by Jennifer Proctor, River E. Branch, Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson
A call and template for a responsive pedagogy addressing the pervasive violent representations of women in student films and the continuing under-representation of women the culture of production — a critical echo of and expansion upon Michelle Citron’s and Ellen Seiter’s call in 1981. - Digital distribution, participatory culture, and the transmedia documentary by Chuck Tryon
Explores the role of digital media reshaping the distribution, exhibition, and reception of documentary films. - Claims to be heard: young self-expressivity, social change, and the Educational Video Center by Stephen Michael Charbonneau
A historical and critical overview of New York-based Educational Video Center, a leading youth media organization, and its auto-ethnographic work with disadvantaged communities. - Ethics, politics and representation in Child of Mine, a television documentary on lesbian parenting by Lizzie Thynne
Re-interviewing her main character from a documentary on lesbian custody she made for UK Channel 4, Lizzie Thynne explores the ethics and politics of filming one's own community for broadcast.
Porn
- Clips, clicks and climax: notes on the relocation and remediation of pornography by Julian Hanich
Moving-image pornography on the Internet has facilitated and intensified the masturbatory experience due to a double tendency toward privatization and individualization. This becomes particularly obvious when compared to the time when porn films were projected in theaters and consumed with other, mostly anonymous viewers. - The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich by Magnus Ullén
Considering the relation between pornography and different media is important, yes; but it will be difficult to historicize pornography without first historicizing the mode of reading that gave rise to the concept of porn in the nineteenth century. - Back to the Golden Age by Thomas Waugh
This brief intervention in the current conversation about porn contextualizes the debate within the history of porn studies and Jump Cut’s contribution since the 1970s to a materialist-feminist understanding of sexual representation. - Porn: it’s not just about sex anymore by Nina K. Martin
Porn's shift to online and mobile device mediums has de-stigmatized the term to the point of banality, linking "porn" to non-sexualized notions of excess. - Beyond porno chic by Jose B. Capino
Internet porn viewing and spectatorship at adult video arcades are more similar than we imagine. - Pornography, technology, and masturbation: response to Julian Hanich by Peter Lehman
Society hysterically fears the dangers of pornography and masturbation while academia represses it, and that aspect of the historically complex interaction between media, technology and porn is lost in the process.
Independent/Art/Avant-garde
- Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary by Thomas Waugh
Far from Vietnam, the collective French film of 1967, produced in solidarity with the Vietnamese people under U.S. attack, is explored in relation to its historical context on three continents, to its coalitional politics and the solidarity genre in general, and to the forum it provided to one contributor, veteran communist filmmaker Joris Ivens. - Re-conceiving Misconception: birth as a site of filmic experimentation by Roxanne Samer
This cultural history of Marjorie Keller's birth film Misconception (1977) seeks to release the film from past dichotomizing interpretative binds with the hope of opening it up to further future interpretations, re-looking and better appreciation.
Horror
Books
- Books on film sound review by Michael Chanan
Two books about film sound come at their subject from completely different angles.
• Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), Cinema in the Digital Sound Age
• Andy Birtwistle, Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video - Iranian film opposing regimes of voyeurism review by Jyotika Virdi
Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh
Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is seen as a dynamic alternative to Hollywood's dominant voyeurism codes, while its narratives are displaced allegories that circumvent the state's modesty laws. - Darwin at the movies by David Andrews and Christine Andrews
This review of Barbara Creed's book Darwin's Screens also examines the use of evolutionary ideas in the field of film studies. - Star Trek’s allegorical monomyth review by Elspeth kydd
David Greven in Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films tackles complex issues within this large and elusive monomyth. - Nobody’s baby review by Kirsten Pike
Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell
The book examines girls’ domestic labor in the U.S. and also offers significant insight into the contradictory ways that girls are imagined, debated, and targeted by experts, advisors, and creators of popular culture. - Sexual innocence and film: a look at scholarship on virginity review by Susan Ericsson
Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald
How can virginity be depicted in fiction film and television beyond dialogue or narrative moments when the condition of virginity ends? - Documentary studies: news from the front line review by Russell Campbell
Sociopolitical documentary comes under intensive scrutiny in a cluster of new books.
• Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation by John Ellis
• Recording Reality, Desiring the Real by Elizabeth Cowie
• The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
• Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
• The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film by Thomas Waugh - Documentary: intelligence and/or emotion? review by Chuck Kleinhans
• The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
• Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
The last word
- Crisis politics On crises and drastic neoliberal economic makeovers by the editors
Diposting oleh
good reading on Jumat, 19 Juni 2009
Film Studies For Free brings you a little Friday round up of just-out-now scholarly links.
Imagining torture by Chuck Kleinhans; Torture documentaries by Julia Lesage; A Simple Case for Torture, redux by Martha Rosler; The Wire and the world: narrative and metanarrative by Helena Sheehan and Sheamus Sweeney; “Don’t Just Watch It, Live It:” technology, corporate partnerships, and The Hills by Elizabeth Affuso; Postmodern marketing, Generation Y and the multiplatform viewing experience of MTV’s The Hills by Amanda Klein; The past isn't what it used to be: the troubled homes of Mad Men by Mark Taylor; Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica reviewed by David Greven; Global formats, gender and identity: the search for The Perfect Bride on Italian television by Michela Ardizzoni; A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away by Ayumi Suzuki; The curious cases of Salma, Siti, and Ming:representations of Indonesia’s polygamous life in Love for Share by Ekky Imanjaya; Gender and class in the Singaporean film 881 by Brenda Chan; Cinenumerology: interview with Royston Tan, one of Singapore’s most versatile filmmakers by Anne Ciecko; Visible “waves”: notes on Koreanness, pan-Asianness, and some recent Southeast Asian art films by Anne Ciecko and Hunju Lee; Asia’s beloved sassy girl: Jun Ji-Hyun’s star image and her transnational stardom by JaeYoon Park; Pornography and its critical reception: toward a theory of masturbation by Magnus Ullén; Real sex: the aesthetics and economics of art-house porn by Jon Lewis; Documentary and the anamnesis of queer space: The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman by Nicholas de Villiers; Documentary investigations and the female porn star by Belinda Smaill; The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene reviewed by Catherine Clepper; Documenting and denial: discourses of sexual self-exploitation by Leigh Goldstein; Children of Men and I Am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood by Kirk Boyle; The exceptional darkness of The Dark Knight by Todd McGowan; The Dark Knight of American empire by Randolph Lewis; Post-Iraq cinema: the veteran hero in The Jacket and Harsh Times by Justin Vicari; WALL-E: from environmental adaptation to sentimental nostalgia by Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann; Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino: the death of America’s hero by Robert Alpert; Interpreting revolution: Che: Part I and Part II by Victor Wallis; The cold world behind the window: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Romanian cinema’s return to real-existing communism by Constantin Parvulescu; Retrieving Emir Kusturica’s Underground as a critique of ethnic nationalism by Sean Homer; Dimensions of exile in the videos of Silvia Malagrino by Ilene S. Goldman; No parking between signs: on Sadie Benning's Flat is Beautiful and early works by Burlin Barr; Sex versus the small screen: home video censorship and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también by Caetlin Benson-Allott; Torture, maternity, and truth in Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica: Land of My Dreams by Caroline Koebel; Culture wars: some new trends in art horror by Joan Hawkins; Misogyny as radical commentary: Rashomon retold in Takashi Miike’s Masters of Horror: Imprint by William Leung; The dangers of biosecurity: The Host and the geopolitics of outbreak by Hsuan L. Hsu; The return of horror to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and space of horror by Li Zeng; Cross cultural disgust: some problems in the analysis of contemporary horror cinema by Chuck Kleinhans; Media salad by Chuck Kleinhans; Racing into the Obama era by the editors; Remembrance against manufactured amnesia: on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident by David Leiwei Li. Plus several book reviews.
'Gypsy Stars in the New Europe' by Aniko Imre; 'When Satellites Fall: On the Trails of Cosmos 954 and USA 193' by Lisa Parks; 'Towards a Typology of Dance TV Contestants' by Christine Quail; 'No Rerun Nation: Canadian Television and Cultural Amnesia' by Serra Tinic; 'And the winner of Britain's Got Talent is . . .' by Lisa W. Kelly.
Rob White, 'Editor's Notebook: Heaven Knows We're Digital Now' ; Joshua Clover, 'Marx and Coca-Cola: Cinema for a New Grand Game'; Laura Mulvey, 'Reconsideration: The Earrings of Madame de . . . ; Michael Colvino, 'Ecosystem: La malavita: Gomorrah and Naples'. As it is celebrating its 50th anniversary, it is also still offering free access to 'Da Capo,' a history of FQ written by founding editor Ernest Callenbach.
[According to its press release,] it’s a timely and stimulating report, confirming that film has been one of the most powerful cultural and social agents of the last 100 years. Taking 200 iconic films from the past six decades, it traces how British cinema has upheld some traditional British values – and mocked, challenged and undermined others. It shows how important film has been in sustaining and developing the identity of the UK’s nations and regions, and in reflecting the changing face of Britain’s different communities. And it charts the extraordinary power British film can wield at home and abroad – even more so with the massive economic and technological evolution film has experienced in recent years. This study highlights the cultural impact of British film. It calls on us to acknowledge and appreciate the strength, the diversity and the rude health of our film heritage and to acknowledge its increasingly vital role in contemporary culture.
