Tampilkan postingan dengan label Southeast Asian cinema. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Southeast Asian cinema. Tampilkan semua postingan

Two new eBooks: On Stillness and Motion Film, and on Contemporary Indonesian Film

Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 31 Januari 2013

Screenshot of a freeze frame from the opening credit sequence of Die Ehe der Maria Braun/The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)
Even before the credits, the opening of the film brings us the scene of a newly married couple and a registry official leaving a German registry office during an air raid. We watch as the excited couple throw themselves to the ground, imploring the official to sign the marriage certificate right there. A sheet of paper floats upward, borne on the gust of wind caused by exploding bombs, and then, in the middle of the visual field, there is a sudden standstill in the form of a freeze-frame, while the soundtrack continues to herald the horror of the approaching artillery. This is followed by the film title in red letters that fill the entire visual field, word after word, as if it were a page in a book. At the end, Fassbinder’s name appears alone on a white backdrop.
    With this standstill, the floating sheet of paper is simultaneously captured and displaced by the film. Due to the non-sync between image and sound, of visual interruption and auditive flow, we are confronted from the very start with two various temporal modi: the time of the film narrative (the postwar years) and the time of the making of the film (the 1970s). At issue here is Fassbinder’s time-place: when the author tells stories and histories, they are always primarily in the present tense. [Christa Blümlinger, writing on the sequence in which the above freeze frame appears, in 'The Figure of Visual Standstill in R.W. Fassbinder’s Films', in Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011)
There's nothing Film Studies For Free likes more than a good open access ebook. So you can imagine how delighted it is to bring its readers news of not one but two such English language, digital artifacts, from different Dutch publishers to boot!
The contents are listed below, and both books have been added to FSFF's permanent, and continuously updated listing of more than 100 free ebooks in film and moving image studies.

Dank u wel, the Netherlands (and the below authors, editors and publishers!): FSFF salutes you for your pioneering, open access ebook achievements!

Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011)

Contents
The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction - Eivind Røssaak

Philosophies of Motion
The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century “Philosophical Toys” and Their Discourse - Tom Gunning
Digital Technics Beyond the “Last Machine”: Thinking Digital
Media with Hollis Frampton - Mark B.N. Hansen

The Use of Freeze and Slide Motion
The Figure of Visual Standstill in R.W. Fassbinder’s Films - Christa Blümlinger
The Temporalities of the Narrative Slide Motion Film - Liv Hausken

The Cinematic Turn in the Arts
Stop/Motion - Thomas Elsaesser
After “Photography’s Expanded Field” - George Baker
On On Otto: Moving Images and the New Collectivity - Ina Blom

The Algorithmic Turn
Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video:
An Aesthetic of Post-Production - Arild Fetveit
Algorithmic Culture: Beyond the Photo/Film Divide  - Eivind Røssaak

Archives in Between
“The Archives of the Planet” and Montage: The Movement of the Crowd and “the Rhythm of Life” - Trond Lundemo

Katinka van Heeren, Contemporary Indonesian Film; Spirits of Reform and ghosts from the past (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012)
Contents
Preface
Introduction
part 1 film mediation practices
1 new order and surface

Production: The attempt to produce Provokator the New Order way 26 Distribution and exhibition: Trade and charade in cinemas and film formats
Exhibition and consumption: Film festivals as forums for national imaginations and representations
Conclusion
2 reformasi and underground
Reformation in film production: Kuldesak and film independen
Distribution and exhibition of new media formats: ‘Local’ Beth versus ‘transnational’ Jelangkung
Alternative sites of film consumption: Additional identifications and modes of resistance Conclusion
part 2 discourse practices
3 histories, heroes, and monumental frameworks

Film history: New Order patronage of film perjuangan and film pembangunan
Film and historiography: Promotion and representations of New Order history
‘Film in the framework of’: G30S/PKI and Hapsak
Conclusion
More about → Two new eBooks: On Stillness and Motion Film, and on Contemporary Indonesian Film

Journal of the Moving Image: Indian and South Asian cinema and media studies

Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 09 September 2010

Image from Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Anil Sharma, 2001). 

Film Studies For Free just came across a really good e-journal that it hadn't bumped into before: Journal of the Moving Image, an annual publication of the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. 

It was launched in print format in 1999, but its print and online versions now co-exist. As its mission statement puts it,
JMI seeks to represent critical work on the state of contemporary screen cultures. There are many regions in the world with large viewing populations, often with vast production infrastructures for film and television; but corresponding institutions or forums for critical engagement with such audio-visual regimes are still highly inadequate. JMI seeks to address a broad set of issues ranging from formal properties of the moving image to the social foundation of its production, transmission and reception. There will be a special focus on India and South Asia, and on issues of transnational media transactions, but we would like to offer a wider range of discussion on film and television from various parts of the world made from different perspectives.
FSFF wanted to share its contents with you promptly, so direct links to all items so far online are pasted in below, with the most recent issue first. The first three issues of JMI are also being prepared for online publication. 

There are some excellent items here (you might try out Ravi Vasudevan's The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ just for starters). So FSFF heartily recommends that you subscribe to JMI ready for its next issue in December. 

(Also, please check out, if you haven't yet, FSFF's own related entry: "Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies)

More about → Journal of the Moving Image: Indian and South Asian cinema and media studies

The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos: An Appeal by a Cinephile

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 29 September 2009


Image from Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg Indio Nacional/A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, Or, The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos (Raya Martin, 2005)
Martin’s Maicling Pelicula is an intensely personal film projecting the young director’s emotional impressions of the era bygone into actualities of the beginnings of the uprising, the stirrings of Philippine nationalism. [...] Maicling Pelicula throws down the gauntlet—and with rude authority—for the heights of sophistication and beauty that the Filipino aesthetic may reach.
Alexis Tioseco, November 11, 2006

Film Studies For Free's author imagines that its readers have been as shocked and upset as she has been to see the news footage of the recent Philippines floods caused when Tropical Storm Ketsana/now Typhoon Ondoy hit on Saturday. Independent filmmakers from the Philippines, like Raya Martin, are producing among the most compelling cinematic work in the world at the moment. Their communications about the floods on Twitter and Facebook have very powerfully expressed the awful scale of the country's current emergency.

FSFF urges you, if you are able, to investigate how to donate to any of the charitable organisations currently mobilising their resources to provide emergency support. One such organisation (based in the UK) is the Disasters Emergency Committee (also, a good point of call for those responding to the Southern Pacific tsunamis and the Indonesian earthquake [added Oct 1]); Google links for Help for Typhoon Ondoy Victims in the Philippines are here; the Philippine Red Cross is linked to here; other links, for those based in the Philippines, are listed here. If readers want to supply other links to, or information about, any further ways of donating, or helping, you are warmly encouraged to use the comments section of this blog for that purpose. Thank you.

Below is a small selection of key links to online resources on the subject of the cinema of the Philippines (including, at the very foot of the post, a wonderful Cahiers du cinéma video interview in English with Raya Martin) to remind us just how worthy of critical and other support that cinema is. Very sadly, as regular readers of FSFF will know, some of the best entries in the list come from a now silenced voice, that of one of the most eloquent champions of Philippine cinema: Alexis Tioseco, murdered in Quezon City, Philippines, along with partner and fellow critic Nika Bohinc, several weeks ago. They are much missed.






More about → The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos: An Appeal by a Cinephile