New WORLD PICTURE on Distance: André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Barbara Hammer, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Phil Solomon, Yorgos Lanthimos, and much more

Frame grab from Κυνόδοντας/Kynodontas/Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009). Read Eugene Brinkema's new essay on this film

Distance suggests a standing apart—a separation, an opening or difference, a gap in space. And mirroring broader swaps of categories of time for categories of space, “distance” can also stand for remoteness on the level of time: James Phillips, for example, neatly summarizes this shift as “Odysseus longs for home; Proust is in search of lost time.”6 But neither this sense of a spatial gap or a temporal remove is precisely the sense in which distance is taken seriously in Dogtooth. For that, we require an older sense of the word. [Eugenie Brinkema, 'e.g., Dogtooth', World Picture 7, 2012]

It's been busy, busy, busy round these parts, but today Film Studies For Free stirs itself from its travails to bring you the, as usual, wonderful news that World Picture, that most original of online humanities journals, has just published a new issue.

The keyword for WP 7 is Distance, and it has activated a wide range of brilliant cultural and philosophical readings on that topic. FSFF particularly loved filmmaker Barbara Hammer's contributions to this issue here and here (see this earlier FSFF entry on her marvellous work), as well as Eugenie Brinkema on Dogtooth, Sam Ishii-Gonzales on Bergson, and  Domietta Torlasco on The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

There is much more in WP of huge worth and interest, so please dip into the below contents.

Oh, and also, please come, if you can, to the upcoming annual World Picture conference, held this year at the University of Sussex, November 2-3, 2012. A terribly excited FSFF will be in attendance!


World Picture 7: Table of Contents

• Zach Barocas Givens
• Eugenie Brinkema e.g., Dogtooth
• Robert Cavanagh Contact Sport
• David L. Clark “Not ours, this death, to take into our bones”: The Postanimal after the Posthuman
• Lorenz Engell Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze
• Victor Fan Approaching Reality: Epistemic Distance, Political Crises and Temporal Imaginations
• in the Sino-French Dialogue on Cinema Ontology
• Alexander García Düttmann The Worst, or The Lesser of Two Evils
• Sam Ishii-Gonzales Suspended Meaning: On Bergson and Cinema Perception
• Barbara Hammer, in Correspondence with John David Rhodes
• Film is Thinking: A Conversation Across Distance
• Barbara Hammer Bent Time
• Sorin Radu Media on Target in the Global System: Military Strategy and Narrative Practice
• Alessandra Raengo Reification, Reanimation and the Money of the Real
• Phil Solomon While You Were Asleep
• Phil Solomon, in Conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland
• Mediating the American Idea
• Keston Sutherland The World and John Wieners
• Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece In the House, In the Picture: Distance and Proximity in the American Mid-Century Neutralized Theatre
• Matthew Tierney The Eclipse of the Eclipse of Distance: Talking Politics in a Global Village
• Domietta Torlasco The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini's New Erotics of Vision

More about → New WORLD PICTURE on Distance: André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Barbara Hammer, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Phil Solomon, Yorgos Lanthimos, and much more

"Between Past and Future": ROME, OPEN CITY Studies

Updated November 19, 2011

Frame grab from Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

Projected on the war torn landscape for a weary people, Rome Open City poetically serves the goals of unification and restoration. In many respects, this film both conforms to and promotes an ideal image of a courageous, Resistant and unified population – from communist intellectuals, to catholic priests, to working class women and their children. Open City maintains the comfortable melodramatic schema of Rossellini’s earlier Fascist-era films in which the forces of good (the Italian people) struggle triumphantly against the forces of evil embodied in the Nazi general Bergmann and his deviant cronies. The director’s fondness for his people culminates in an apologetic portrayal of Italian fascists as either wretched or unwilling collaborators. However, in the end, Open City’s epic scope effectively precludes the possibility of another film like it: all the “fathers” (Manfredi, Pina, Don Pietro) are dead and the child soldiers are abandoned to the city, suspended “between past and future”. The conclusion, the partisan priest’s execution, witnessed by the children of his parish, forewarns of the fragmentation, destitution, and moral poverty to come. With his last words, “non è difficile morire bene, è difficile vivere bene” (it’s not difficult to die well, it’s difficult to live well”), Don Pietro intimates the struggles ahead. [Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948', PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009  97-98] 

Another teaching week beckons, and Film Studies For Free's author looks forward to pondering, for the umpteenth, pedagogical time, that intensely strange film Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945).

There are some excellent resources on this film, and on related issues of (neo)realism, that are openly accessible online. So, andiamo felicemente with one of FSFF's regular studies of a single film.

• John Bleasdale, 'The Unrealistic Rossellini', Film Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 34, 2002 
• Gian Piero Brunetta, 'Introduction', The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
• Peter Brunette, 'Rossellini and Cinematic Realism', Cinema Journa1, 25, No. 1, Fall 1985
• Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, 'Open City, Rossellini and neorealism: Sixty years on', Screening the Past, 20, 2006 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to Bleasdale',  Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002
• Ora Gelley, 'Europa '51: The Face of the Star in Neorealism's Urban Landscape', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• Sidney Gottlieb, 'Introduction: Open City: Reappropriating the Old, Making Way for the New', in Gottlieb (ed.), Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 
• A. S. Hamrah, '[Interview with Tag Gallagher] From Italy to Iran', Hermenaut, October 20, 2000
• Marcia Landy, 'Introduction', Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 
• Adrian Martin, 'Always a window: Tag Gallagher's Rossellini', Screening the Past, March 2000
• Adrian Martin, 'What is Modern Cinema?', 16:9, September 2010
• Daniel Morgan, 'Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, 32 (2006) 
• Brent J. Piepergerdes, 'Re-envisioning the Nation: Film Neorealism and the Postwar Italian Condition', ACME, 2007
• Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948', PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009 
• Luca Prono, '[Review of] Rome Open City (Roma Città Aperta) By David Forgacs, London: BFI Publishing, 2000; Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, Edited by David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London: BFI Publishing, 2001', Scope, November 2002
• Luca Prono, '[Review of] Celluloide, Dir: Carlo Lizzani, 1996', Scope, 2000
• Hugo Salas, 'Roberto Rossellini', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Erica Sheen, 'Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete', Film Studies, Vol. 7, Winter 2005
• New Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon, 'The Film of Tomorrow will be an Act of War [on ROME OPEN CITY and its legacy]', Idiom Magazine, October 17, 2011 
• Martin Walsh, 'Rome, Open City, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV: Re-evaluating Rossellini', from Jump Cut, no. 15, 1977
• Jonathan David York, 'Open Spaces, Liminal Places: the Deployment of the Sacred in Open City', JCRT, 10.3, Summer 2010

Michael P. Rogin, 'Mourning, Melancholia, and the Popular Front: Roberto Rossellini's Beautiful Revolution', in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Jaimey Fisher, 'On the Ruins of Masculinity: The Figure of the Child in Italian Nerealism and the German Rubble Film', in Italian neorealism and global cinema, eds. Laura E. Ruberto, Kristi M. Wilson (Wayne State University Press, 2007)

More about → "Between Past and Future": ROME, OPEN CITY Studies

R.I.P. Peter Brunette and Teshome Gabriel: online tributes

Last updated June 24, 2010

Teshome Gabriel, 1939-2010

Peter Brunette, 1943-2010

Film Studies has lost two of its giants.

On Monday, Professor Teshome Gabriel of UCLA, a leading theorist and scholar of African, Third and Third World Cinema, and memory and cinema, passed away in Los Angeles.

And, just yesterday, Peter Brunette, Reynolds Professor of Film Studies at Wake Forest University, author of important books on film theory, Italian cinema and the work of individual film directors, and a very well-known and popular film critic, died while in attendance at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.

Film Studies For free will post full, individual, tributes of its own to each of these scholars very shortly, but in the meantime is gathering together, below, a list of links to some of the online tributes to both men. If you know of any you would like to see included, please email FSFF, or link to them in the comments section of this post.

The author of this blog would like to pass on her sincere condolences to the families and friends of both men.

Tributes to Teshome Gabriel

• UCLA obituary
•  Ethiopian Review obituary   
• Friend, Master Storyteller, Scholar, and Humanist Par Excellence: Reminiscences of Teshome H. Gabriel, June 16, 2010 by Vinay Lal 
• Teshome H. Gabriel dies at 70; UCLA professor and Third World cinema expert, by Dennis McLellan LA Times, June 17, 2010

Tributes to Peter Brunette

• Gerald Peary, 'Peter Brunette, In Memory', Indiewire.com, June 21, 2010
• Wake Forest University obituary
• The Hollywood Reporter report and obituary  
• Writer Peter Brunette Dies at Italian Festival by Eugene Hernandez, Indiewire, June 16, 2010
  
• Film Scholar Brunette Dies at Taormina by Anne Thompson, Thompson on Hollywood, June 16, 2010
• Peter Brunette by Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running, June 16, 2010
• R.I.P. Peter Brunette, by Joe Leydon, MovingPictureBlog, June 16, 2010
• RIP Peter Brunette, by Movie Cricket, Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2010
• Film critic Brunette dies by Rachel Abrams, Variety.com, June 16, 2010
• Nick James, 'Peter Brunette, 1944-2010', Sight and Sound, June 17, 2010 
• Issa Clubb, 'Remembering Peter Brunette', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2010
• Peter Keough, 'Peter Brunette 1944-2010', Outside the Frame, The Boston Phoenix, June 22, 2010

More about → R.I.P. Peter Brunette and Teshome Gabriel: online tributes

E-book Index: University of California Press Public Access Film Studies Books

Image of Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman) from Viaggio In Italia/Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
In honour of Peter Brunette's great book on Rossellini, now publicly acessible online via the University of California Press archives

Film Studies For Free regularly visits the brilliant online archive of the University of California Press to check out its range of public-access e-books. There are now more than thirty full-length, UC Press film-studies, or film and media-studies related, books openly accessible online now. So FSFF delightedly and painstakingly put together the list, below, of direct links to each and every last one of them. FSFF will keep you updated about future, film-related developments at the archive, too.

Thanks to UC Press and their book authors for their great attitude to publishing scholarly works online.

• Armbrust, Walter, editor. Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000 2000
• Bloch, R. Howard, and Frances Ferguson, editors Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989
• Brunette, Peter, Roberto Rossellini. University of California Press, c1996 1996
• Byg, Barton. Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Day, James. The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Flinn, Caryl. The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2004 2004
• Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Henderson, Brian, and Ann Martin, editors. Film Quarterly: Forty Years - A Selection. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999
• Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, c 1998 1998
• Iampolski, Mikhail. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Karlstrom, Paul J., editor On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996 1996
• Kenner, Hugh. Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings, Portraits of American Genius. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Matsumoto, Valerie J., and Blake Allmendinger, editors Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999
• McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991
• McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Murphy, Timothy S. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1997 1997
  
• Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Pearson, Roberta E. Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992
• Riskin, Robert. Six Screen Plays by Robert Riskin. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Smoodin, Eric, and Ann Martin, editors. Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945-1957. Berkeley: University of California, c2002 2002
• Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, editor. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001
• Toepfer, Karl. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
• Wees, William C. Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992
• Yeh, Wen-hsin, editor. Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000 2000
  
• Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999

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More about → E-book Index: University of California Press Public Access Film Studies Books