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SCREENING THE PAST 37 and LA FURIA UMANA 17

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 21 Oktober 2013




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 D'Angela 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
D'UNE 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
L'occhio che uccide
Flaming creatures
The new world
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Cinemagogic Echoes? Len Lye's FREE RADICALS (1958) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's HOUR OF THE FURNACES (1968)

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 18 Februari 2013


A real-time comparison, for scholarly purposes, of Len Lye's 1958 experimental animation FREE RADICALS and the opening minutes of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 1968 Grupo Cine Liberación activist film  LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS/HOUR OF THE FURNACES

[Len] Lye's Free Radicals (1958) […] is a black and white scratch animation short, cut to the insistent rhythmic accompaniment of an African drum solo.* It immediately calls to mind the unforgettable opening scenes of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas' Third Cinema classic La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968).** While equally exciting and radical, these strikingly similar films hint at the extent to which the world and the political landscape had changed in the decade between their respective release dates, and between then and now. We have no way of knowing if Getino and Solanas knew of Len Lye's film. We know, however, that films exchange ideas, talking to one another across time, and that the conversation between radical aesthetics and radical politics is ongoing, with both daring to 'make it new' and set the world on its feet, by turning it upside down. [Jerry Whyte, 'Free Radicals', CineOutsider.com, December 11, 2011. Online at: http://www.cineoutsider.com/articles/stories/f/free_radicals_1.html]
A demonstration and a lesson, The Hour of the Furnaces imports into cinema the affirmative aesthetics of the written political treatise. A collective ideal informs the whole film. It anticipates a liberated time. It’s not the product of a single voice but of a chorus of poems (Marti, Césaire), manifestos (Fanon, Guevara, Castro, Juan José Hernández Arregui) and films (by Fernando Birri, Joris Ivens, Nemesio Juárez). It conjoins the powers of didacticism, poetry and agogy (the agogic qualities of a work concern its rhythmic, sensible, physical properties – a notion suggested by the French aesthetician Etienne Souriau). Stylistically, the film uses all possible audiovisual techniques, from flicker to contemplative sequence shots (for instance, the final three-minute shot that reproduces a picture of the dead Che Guevara’s face with his eyes wide open), from collage to direct cinema, from blank screen to animated effects, from the rigours of the blackboard to the hallucinogenic properties of the fish-eye, from classical music to anglophone pop hits. Cinema is an arsenal and here all its weapons are unsheathed. [Nicole Brenez, 'Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces', Sight and Sound Magazine, 8 March 2012. Online at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaceshttp://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaces]
'Agogics' is a musical term that designates the use of agogic accents, that is accents consisting in a lengthening of the time-value of the note. The philosopher Étienne Souriau extended the use of the term to include all the arts existing in time. He defined 'agogics' as \what characterizes an artwork that takes place in time, through movement, and specifically through the creation of a fast or slow pace, or the use of different rhythms.' For musicians, the notion is related to gesture, to physical movements, to a bodily interaction with their instrument, to a sense of speed, an energy, a precise handling of a piece. [Christian Jacquemin et al, 'Emergence of New Institutions for Art-Science Collaboration...' [date unknown], Online at: seadnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/jacquemin_final1.pdf. Hyperlinks added by FSFF] 
Souriau developed his idea of the agogic as an explicit reaction to the ‘rather banal description [of] arts of space in contrast to the phonetic and cinematic arts’. [Of] interest is Popper’s use of the term to describe the quality of temporal pattern that he identifies in a range of works. At one extreme [..].] is the velocity and dramatic choreography of a Len Lye installation. The term agogic conflates speed, acceleration and duration and would appear to be a significant aspect of kinetic form. [Jules Moloney, Designing Kinetics for Architectural Facades: State Change (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011), p. 64.]
Film Studies For Free's author has been a tad busy elsewhere lately - and there will be lots to catch up with at this blog in due course.

But today FSFF is thrilled to present its (by distance) contribution to a teach-in which took place earlier today. This video was produced in a few hours this morning, using readily available materials for quotation (see above and below), in solidarity with a campus occupation that you can choose to read more about here.

Staff and students of media and cultural studies, working in a deeply personal, activist capacity, gave short presentations on their research and thinking about ideas of resistance, occupation and neoliberalism in the context of the university and beyond, in order to consider how research in their fields might offer new and diverse perspectives on activism and resistance.

FSFF has always liked its politics, like its film studies, to have rhythm and timing, so its research project today foregrounds those elements. You can find its author's scholarly discussion of this kind of "real-time" videographic comparison here: 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', MEDIASCAPE: Journal of Cinema and Media, Winter 2013.

FSFF has devoted a number of previous entries to online and openly accessible resources on Third Cinema and revolutionary aesthetics in the past. See especially this bumper post and this more recent one. 

And you can find the two films quoted from above, in low-res online video versions, as per the details and links below.

More about → Cinemagogic Echoes? Len Lye's FREE RADICALS (1958) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's HOUR OF THE FURNACES (1968)
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Holy LOLA! Issue 3 on MASKS Online

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 07 Januari 2013

FSFF's montage of frame grabs from Les yeux sans visage / Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960) and Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012). Read Part One of LOLA's collective hailing of the latter film

Film Studies For Free is delighted to bring you the always lovely news that not only has a new issue of Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu's LOLA been published -- on Masks -- it has already been extended, as per the new rolling publication style of this wonderful online film journal.

There is one final roll-out for this issue coming soon. This will include texts on Jerry Lewis, Rivette and Carpenter compared, Sitges Film Festival, and the conclusion of 'Hail Holy Motors'. FSFF will add links to the below list of contents once these are online.

LOLA, Issue 3 (December 2012): Masks
Notes on Contributors
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Adrian Martin's new book, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez

Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 25 Oktober 2012

Cover of Adrian Martin's new book, Last day Every Day (Punctum Books, 2012)
Where is film analysis at today? What is cinema theory up to, behind our backs? The field, as professionally defined (at least in the Anglo-American academic world), is presently divided between contextual historians who turn to broad formations of modernity, and stylistic connoisseurs who call for a return to old-fashioned things like authorial vision, tone, and mise en scène. But there are other, vital, inventive currents happening — in criticism, on the Internet, in small magazines, and renegade conferences everywhere — which we are not hearing much about in any official way. Last Day Every Day shines a light on one of these exciting new avenues.
      Is there a way to bring together, in a refreshed manner, textual logic, hermeneutic interpretation, theoretical speculation, and socio-political history? A way to break the deadlock between classical approaches that sought organic coherence in film works, and poststructuralist approaches that exposed the heterogeneity of all texts and scattered the pieces to the four winds? A way to attend to the minute materiality of cinema, while grasping and contesting the histories imbricated in every image and sound?
Film Studies For Free urges its readers to go and check out the free download of Adrian Martin's important new book as described above. It is published by (the very wonderful) Punctum Books. Please support them by purchasing an incredibly reasonably priced paper copy as a lovely gift for the film scholars you love, or at the very least by ordering copies for your libraries.

That is all. Thank you! And a very big thank you to Adrian and Punctum.

This wonderful tome has also been added to FSFF's permanent listing of free Film Studies ebooks.
More about → Adrian Martin's new book, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez
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New online film journal LOLA launches with an issue on "Histories" !!

Diposting oleh good reading on Rabu, 17 Agustus 2011




Framegrab from Ohayo/Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959), an image of the 'in-between' as analysed by Andrew Klevan in the inaugural issue of LOLA.
A big day! Film Studies For Free is delighted to relay the news that Girish Shambu has just published at his blog: LOLA, a new online film journal edited by Adrian Martin and Shambu, has just launched.

Below, FSFF also reproduces the wonderful table of contents which include some very hotly anticipated items, among many other must-read essays... So that's what FSFF is heading off to do now: it must read them!

For once, the links below don't take you straight to the item, but, instead, to the entry at girish's where you can find the full links as well as a brief summary of each article.

Congratulations, and many thanks, Adrian and Girish. Let all film scholars and cinephiles bless the birth of LOLA and all who sail in her!

More about → New online film journal LOLA launches with an issue on "Histories" !!
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On Figural Analysis in Film Studies

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 23 Mei 2011


Video essay about У самого синего моря/U samogo sinyego morya/By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, 1936). Featuring commentary by Nicole Brenez, author of Abel Ferrara (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and De la figure en général et du corps en particulier (De Boeck, 1998), professor of cinema studies at Université Paris I and programmer at the Cinémathèque Française. Video essay produced by Kevin B. Lee.
At the very least, I believe this is a good, poetic way of grasping part of the art of cinema: as an art of constantly shifting figuration. Not just on the level of bringing bodies and people into being, but also animals, objects, imaginary apparitions - in fact an entire material and virtual world. […]
     For [Nicole] Brenez as for [Gilles] Deleuze, a critical and theoretical approach of this sort marks a significant departure from classical mise en scène analysis. The venerable tool of découpage - shot-by-shot breakdown - depends upon the theatrical and dramatic unity of the filmic scene, which in turn rests upon the most cherished principle of mise en scène analysis: "bodies in space", the pro-filmic reality of bodies dwelling and moving within a space defined by a set or a landscape. Deleuze asserts, to the contrary, that "the cinema is not a theatre", and that its bodies are composed "from granules, which are granules of time". This is, in a sense, analysis in two dimensions rather than the usual three; and if there is still "depth" to a movie, it will need to be a new, differently defined kind of depth.
     Figural analysis, thus, is granular or atomic, a true "frame by frame" analysis which takes its model and inspiration from the fine-grain materiality and action of experimental cinema; it is less concerned with lenses and depth of field than with the mobile arrangment, displacement and pulsation of screen particles. Shot divisions, even scenes or sequences are less pertinent for this work than analytic "ensembles", slices of text and texture that demonstrate the economy and logic of a film's ceaseless transformation of its elements. And everything to do with character, performance and actorly presence in cinema will have to be rethought from the vantage point of this ghostly, mobile flickering of the celluloid grain as it helps to form and deform the figure of the human being on screen. [Adrian Martin, 'The body has no head: corporeal figuration in Aldrich', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000]
As Bill Routt reminds us in his admirable article on the figural in film, figural analysis is a form of hermeneutics involving the historical relation between signs and events, between the text's present condition of meaning and its capacity to draw on and summon forth the past through the power of signs. The figural opens up the historicity of the film text so that the event's past is also its 'coming to presence'. Reading the figural is to read the past in the present; to read with the 'pastness' of the text as a prefiguring of something beyond what the text says in its normative, denotative mode of signification. All texts have figures, since all texts have a past, or at least point to a past as the very materiality of their signification.
     The task of figural analysis is not limited to describing figures in film texts. Rather, it concerns the mapping of an abstract machine: a machine for writing in images, composed of various historically defined elements drawn synthetically into particular arrangements and assemblages that make film happen in the way that it does. Here I am not referring to 'context', but to a genealogical tracing of the lineages and interconnectivities between older and more recent image technologies, and their hybrid formations through time. Any given film or media text will exhibit interconnections with pre-existing modes (even if those modes have been pronounced obsolete), which define and control the potential that the film undertakes to make happen. In silent film we might trace the transformation from a theatrical to a film mode of appearance, where the former is prefigured in the latter and vice versa, for instance in the coincidence of stage and film gestures in Lillian Gish's performance in Way Down East. Here we see the emergence of a new kind of film sense vibrating in the uneasy conjunction of different techniques.
     At stake here is the proliferation of a technological apparatus for the production of images, and the power arrangements that make them appear historically. The technological apparatus is not all of a piece, but is constantly riven with the effects of an outside that produces transformational change. The image machine lives on, not because of any over-riding structure that it possesses, but through the contingent interconnections that are activated in particular image-productions. This is why it is necessary to attend carefully to films themselves, to the detailing of their mode of appearance and its relation to ideational content as a particular moment in the image machine's transformational history. [Warwick Mules, 'The Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media: D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7, December 2003 Hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Today, Film Studies For Free presents a luscious list of links to online explorations or examples of figural analysis deployed in the service of film studies. It is an eclectic, but almost certainly not yet an exhaustive list. So, if you know of further good items, please leave a comment below.

It particularly figures, if you will forgive FSFF's characteristically lame pun, the online work of French film scholar and cinephile activist Nicole Brenez, alongside that of Adrian Martin, the latter an anglophone champion of Brenez's many, increasingly influential, contributions to our international field. But there are lots of other inflections of the figural represented below, too, as per FSFF's usual pluralist linkage-leanings.
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Adrian Martin Podcast

Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 02 Juli 2009

Adrian Martin at the Provisional Insight colloquium

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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