To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathley's Film Studies Online

A free-to-attend University of London Screen Studies Group series event. Full details are given here: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/events/view/13234.

A free-to-attend University of Sussex Centre for Visual Fields event. Further details are given here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cvf/newsandevents/events?id=16509.

Film Studies For Free is almost unspeakably thrilled that its author is helping to host a visit to her shores by the wonderful film scholar Christian Keathley. So thrilled, in fact, that a collected edition of links to his generously-shared, online, film scholarship is given below. 

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently completing a second book, The Mystery of Otto Preminger (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multi-media format, including video essays.

In addition to the two UK events detailed above, Keathley will also give a keynote lecture on his work as part of the lineup for a two-day symposium in Antwerp, Belgium, entitled "FROM PHOTOGÉNIE TO CINEPHILIA 2.0, a seminar on cinephilia then and now". The event takes place between December 7-8. Unlike the two events above, it isn't free-to-attend, but it is incredibly good value. 

This superb looking symposium is hosted by the Flemish Service for Film Culture, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (UGent) and Research Group Visual Studies and Media Culture (University of Antwerp) organised in collaboration with Research Center for Visual Poetics (University of Antwerp) and CINEMATEK, with two other internationally recognised keynotes Malte Hagener and Sarah Keller. You can find further details of the symposium here.

There should be some open access resources emerging from the above events, and if that happens, FSFF will be among the first to let you know about them.

Online Written Texts by Christian Keathley:

• Christian Keathley, 'Teaching the Scholarly Video Essay', Frames, Issue 1, July 2012

• Christian Keathley,  'Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of Découpage', MOVIE, 3, 2011

• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008

• Christian Keathley, 'A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool]', In Media Res, May 14 , 200

• Christian Keathley et al, 'The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age', MIT6 Stone Papyrus Storage and Transmission Conference, April 24-26, 2009

• Christian Keathley, 'The Cinephiliac Moment', Framework, 42, Summer 2000

Online Video Essays by Christian Keathley:

Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.
Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley

Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

50 Years On from Christian Keathley
Revision of a video made for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies' 50th anniversary conference.


Does Your Dog Bite? from Christian Keathley
A video essay by Christian Keathley on a canine moment in Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951).

About Christian Keathley's work:

• Jason Sperb, 'Review of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees by Christian Keathley (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006)', Scope: an online journal of film & TV studies, Issue 12, October 2008

More about → To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathley's Film Studies Online

New Issue of MOVIE: Lang, Preminger, découpage, PSYCHO and its remake, and filmmakers' choices

Frame grab from Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958). See Christian Keathley's article on découpage in this film here

Film Studies For Free was thrilled that a new issue of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism -- the best yet of this relaunched journal -- has recently hit the online newstands.

Issue 3 contains part 2 of the marvellous Fritz Lang Dossier, with contributions by, among others, V. F. Perkins, Adrian Martin, Peter Evans, Stella Bruzzi, Ed Gallafent, and Deborah Thomas.

There are also excellent articles on Preminger's film art, Psycho and its remake, and filmmakers' choices by Christian Keathley, Alex Clayton and John Gibbs.

Links to all items are set out for you below.

• The Fritz Lang Dossier, Part 2
  

• Rush to Judgement: Imperfect Justice in Fury (1936)
  Stella Bruzzi
• You Only Live Once (1937)
  V. F. Perkins
• Going Straight: The Past and the Future in The Return of Frank James (1940)
  Edward Gallafent
• The Woman in the Window (1944)
  Mark Rappaport
• Guess-Work: Scarlet Street (1945)
  Adrian Martin
• The Big Heat: Acts of Violence (1953)
  Peter William Evans
• Human Desire (1954)
  Deborah Thomas
• Lang With Lacan: The Power of the Gaze in Moonfleet (1955)
  Peter Benson

• Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of Découpage
  Christian Keathley
• The Texture of Performance in Psycho and its Remake
  Alex Clayton
• The Cry of the Owl: Investigating Decision-Making in a Contemporary Feature Film
  John Gibbs

This issue edited by Douglas Pye and Michael Walker. Designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.

More about → New Issue of MOVIE: Lang, Preminger, découpage, PSYCHO and its remake, and filmmakers' choices

The Obscurity of the Obvious: On the Films of Otto Preminger

Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. (Also see Keathley's 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008)

 Richard Brody on Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1967)

Auteurism got film studies into the academy, but it was 1970s “semiotic” theory (with its amalgam of structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism) that secured film studies a position as a discrete discipline. With this critical shift, however, the obvious became obscure: for in effect, the semiotic approach rendered in need of interpretation many films that appeared transparent. But while films by directors like Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli seemed tailor-made for this method—with their implicit interrogation of the social relations of post-war life in America (bourgeois, patriarchal, heterosexual, capitalist)—Preminger’s films aren’t, due to their both narrative and stylistic approach. While Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli mounted their critique of American capitalist society indirectly, through their carefully designed mise-en-scène that communicated visually things that couldn’t then be addressed directly, Preminger took the opposite approach: addressing controversial social issues (sexual affairs, drug abuse, homosexuality) head- on, so that any “symptomatic” interpretation was rendered superfluous. The social issues under interrogation in Preminger’s films were not subtextual—they were the manifest content. Indeed, to point out that there is a subtext of incest in Anatomy of a Murder, Bonjour Tristesse, and Bunny Lake Is Missing is merely to state the obvious. As a result, since the early 1970s, Preminger has been a severely under-examined filmmaker.  [Excerpt from Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008]

Film Studies For Free was so inspired by Christian Keathley's video essay on Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, part of an impressive body of scholarship on this director's films by this US based academic, that it immediately set to work on assembling an accompanying collection of direct links to other high quality and openly accessible studies of this filmmaker's oeuvre, as well as to one or two other interesting discussions of other directors' work which mention Preminger's films.

And below you have it. That is all. 

• Deborah Allinson, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006

• David Bordwell, 'Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism', The Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985

• Michael Buchler, '“Laura” and the essential ninth: were they only a dream?', Em Pauta, Porto Alegre, v. 17, n. 29, julho a dezembro, 2006

• Mary Ann Doane, 'Scale and the Negotiation of “Real” and “Unreal” Space in the Cinema',NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 1, Number 20 (December 2008), 1-38

• Chris Fujiwara, 'Otto Preminger', Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Noah Isenberg, 'Script Doktor', Bookforum, Jan/Feb 2008

• Oscar Jubis, 'From Suspicion to Trust: Biegler and Manion in Anatomy of a Murder', FilmLeaf, June 2009

• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008

• Christian Keathley, 'A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool]', In Media Res, May 14 , 2007

• Pat McGilligan/Arthur Laurents, 'Arthur Laurents: Emotional Reality', Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 

• Ronny Loewy, 'Pure Flight or Exodus: Otto Preminger's film about Israel', First published in: Filmgeschichte. Newsletter der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Nr. 13, Juni 1999

• Miguel Marías, 'The Head and Eyes of Otto Preminger, or The Thinking Gaze', Undercurrent, Issue 3, 2006

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'Camera Movement Revisited', 16:9, 2, 2009

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'The Shape of a Western- Visual Design in Winchester '73 and The Man from Laramie', P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007 

• Martha P. Nochimson, 'Betty Grable Finally Dances... (That Lady in Ermine, Otto Preminger, 1948), Senses of Cinema, 5, 2000

• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• David Ray Papke, 'From Flat to Round: Changing Portrayals of the Judge in American Popular Culture',  Journal of the Legal Profession, Vol. 31, 2006-2007

• Luca Prono, 'Whatever Happened to Nelson Algren ?: Otto Preminger’s Adaptation Of The Man with the Golden Arm', Links and Letters 6, 1999

• Dahlia Schweitzer, 'Who is missing in Bunny Lake?', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Valerie Stulman, 'Femme/s, Film/s, Noir/e: Revisions', Thinking Gender Papers, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UC Los Angeles, January 2007 

• Boris Trbic, 'Where the Sidewalk Ends', Senses of Cinema, 8, 2000

More about → The Obscurity of the Obvious: On the Films of Otto Preminger

"A fusion of life and dream": In memory of John Orr

Image from Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003). This  film topped John Orr's list of favourite films in 2003 (here are his 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2009 lists)

What is trauma if not, as in the original Greek, a kind of wound? In cinema, though, it is something more: a wound that seldom heals, a deep wounding of body and soul from which, often, the subject does not recover. Hence, the critical formula for the outcome of the trauma picture: at the least, significant damage; at the most, violent death.

If film horror often sources the supernatural, film trauma focuses on the fears of the natural world. What is out there as waking nightmare in a dangerous world is often a mirror of what is hidden in here, in the human heart. The monsters that horror films project onto the screen are often the monsters of our dream worlds. The wounding events of the trauma film are by contrast a fusion of life and dream.

In film, there is no absolute borderline between these opposites – human trauma and supernatural horror  but the question of emphasis, one way or the other, is crucial: the threat of aliens, mutants, werewolves, monsters, robots, slasher killers, vampires et alia, or the threat of evil that is here and now, that is contingent and recurrent in the life-world, yet also seems onscreen to inhabit the world of dream. Horror is, thus, the popular genre of superhuman evil, trauma its human and dreamlike subset. [John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009]

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear, via Dina Iordanova's website, of the death of influential film theorist and scholar John Orr.

Appointed as a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh in 1967, Orr began teaching film and cultural studies in that department in 1984. A few years later, he founded, with John Ellis, the joint honours film course for Sociology and English Literature. From 1998 onwards, he taught on the MSc in Film Studies, based in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.

Best known for his pioneering work on the sociology of film and art, Orr was author of Cinema and Modernity, Contemporary Cinema, The Art and Politics of Film and Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema. He also co-edited important works on Andzrej Wajda and Roman Polanski and had written recent essays on Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, and Dogme 95. His most recent book was Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He had recently retired from his post as Professor Emeritus in Social and Political Studies at Edinburgh, but was still very active in his research and publishing on cinema.

Orr was both prolific and very generous with his work. In recent years, he published a number of significant essays online, many of which set out in depth his brilliant thinking on trauma, fright, and paranoia in the cinema. Below, in tribute to and with gratitude for his work, both on and offline, FSFF has gathered links to those essays.

• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 

• John Orr, 'A Cinema of Parallel Worlds Lynch and Kieślowśki + Inland Empire', Film International, Volume: 7 | Issue: 1 February 2009

• John Orr, 'Pinter and the paranoid style in English theatre', cyc, Volume 12 n°1, 2008

• John Orr, 'Hitchcock and Hume Revisited: Fear, Confusion and Stage Fright', Film-Philosophy, 11.1, June 2007

• John Orr, 'Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs. Antonioni's The Passenger', Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007

• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• John Orr, 'Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet', Senses of Cinema, No. 37, 2005

• John Orr, 'Right Direction, Wrong Turning: On Zizek's The Fright of Real Tears', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 30, September 2003

• John Orr, 'Hidden Agenda: Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton', Edinburgh Working Papers in Sociology, No. 14 (1999)
  

More about → "A fusion of life and dream": In memory of John Orr