Two x FRAMES: 'The Political Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers' and 'Promotional Materials'

Film scholar Tim Bergfelder giving a talk which is embedded at the latest issue of Frames

Today, Film Studies For Free rounds up two, very fine, 2013 issues of the e journal Frames. Feast your eyes on all the links below.

The latest issue on the political western is just out. The earlier issue, on film and television promotional materials, will form part of a long in preparation bumper FSFF collection on paratextuality that will now appear in the new year, along with other (very long in preparation) posts: on the magnificence of Caboose, a film studies publisher with a marvellous attitude to freely available content; on découpage; and on many other topics.... 2013 has proved to be just too short a year to cram all this in.

There's still one more FSFF entry to go before the holidays, though, so please look out for that on Monday. In the meantime, happy solstice!


Frames, Issue 4, December 2013: Commies and Indians: The Political Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers 

 

Editorial

Letter from the Editor By Heath Iverson

Feature articles

• Csikós, Puszta, Goulash: Hungarian Frontier Imaginaries in ‘The Wind Blows under Your Feet’ and ‘Brady’s Escape’ By Sonja Simonyi
• Appropriating the “Other” for the Cold War Struggle: DEFA’s Depiction of Native Americans in its Indianerfilme By Jennifer Michaels
• Partisan ‘Realism’: Representations of Wartime Past and State-Building Future in the Cinema of Socialist Yugoslavia By Greg de Cuir, Jr.
• A Third Western(?): Genre and the Popular/Political in Latin America By Chelsea Wessels
• The Birth of the Romanian Western By Marian Tutui
• The Balkan Westerns of the Sixties By Sergey Lavrentiev
• The DEFA Indianerfilm as Artifact of Resistance By Evan Torner

Video Supplement

• Commies and Indians Symposium: Jonathan Owen on Czech Westerns
• Commies and Indians Symposium: Tim Bergfelder on the Euro-Western and on Collaborations across the Iron Curtain

P.O.V.

• Yugoslav (Hi)stories: a country which no longer exists, except on film By Ana Grgic and Raluca Iacob

Frames, Issue 3, May 2013: Promotional Materials 

 

Editorial

• Letter from the Editors By Kathleen Scott and Sarah Soliman
• Introduction: Still Coming Soon? Studying Promotional Materials By Keith M. Johnston 

Feature articles

• Working in the World of Propaganda: Early Trailers & Modern Discourses of Social Control By Frederick Greene
• The Advertising Director as Coming Attraction: Television Advertising as Hollywood Business Card in the Age of Digital Distribution By Leon Gurevitch
• ‘Action… Suspense… Emotion!’: The Trailer as Cinematic Performance By Daniel Hesford
• Imaging a Female Filmmaker: The Director Personas of Nishikawa Miwa and Ogigami Naoko By Colleen Laird
• Aspirational paratexts: the case of “quality openers” in TV promotion By Enrica Picarelli
• ‘Glamorous Bait for an Amorous killer!’: How post-war audiences were Lured by Lucille and the working-girl investigator By Ellen Wright
• DVD Special Features and Stage Greetings: Whose Promotional Material Is It Anyway? By Jonathan Wroot

Interviews

• Interview with Shaun Farrington By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Frederick L. Greene By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Esther Harris By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Paul N. Lazarus By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Bill Seymour By Keith M. Johnston
• Interview with Anthony Sloman By Keith M. Johnston

More about → Two x FRAMES: 'The Political Western Beyond Cold War Frontiers' and 'Promotional Materials'

Dreaming of Westerns... More video essays including Tag Gallagher's classic on STAGECOACH

Dreaming of Jeanie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach by Tag Gallagher

When Film Studies For Free published its popular entry on video studies of the Western a few weeks back, it asked its readers if they knew of any further essays.

Thankfully, the veritable 'Daddy' of the online video essay format, Kevin B. Lee got in touch to flag up some more, including one of the best such essays ever made, Tag Gallagher's 'Dreaming of Jeanie' (above).

Many thanks for the additions, Kevin!

If you would like to see more of the brilliant Gallagher's fantastic work online, please leave a comment and maybe we can convince him (we did! see here!)! Also, please let FSFF know if you know of even further great video essays as yet unlisted....

A two-parter by Kevin B/ Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz  on Raoul Walsh's THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON: Part 1

 

 Part 2

 Below, Kevin B. Lee analyzed a scene in Sam Peckinpah's PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID, both at normal and at half speed: Part 1: Normal 

Below, Part 2: Half speed
 

Below, another video essay on the same scene, by Derek Dehart

More about → Dreaming of Westerns... More video essays including Tag Gallagher's classic on STAGECOACH

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'! Video Studies of the Western

John Ford's Vision of the West by Matthias Stork

This new video essay examines the representation of the frontier in John Ford's Westerns. Ford's visual poetics illustrate Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." Ford's films, in this regard, allow us to explore seminal foundational concepts of America history and ideology. "John Ford's Vision of the West" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's written study of his video essay practice. Also see Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

The Western is one of the most iconographic of film genres and is thus particularly well suited to (audio)visual forms of analysis. So, today, Film Studies For Free has lassoed and corralled a whole herd of beefy video studies of film Westerns that abundantly testify to this advantage.

The group is led, above, by a new, wonderfully researched, video essay by the very talented Matthias Stork (author of the great, and widely circulated, Chaos Cinema video essays, along with others published here at FSFF). Thanks very much to him and all the other video essayists represented below for making their work publicly acessible. 

[It's Open Access week, so this here Open Access campaigning website particularly wants to show its warm appreciation to those of you who like to share the fruits of at least part of your film studies labour for free!]

And if you know of any other, freely accessible, video essays on Westerns that FSFF has missed please alert us to them by leaving a comment with the link below. Thanks!

 

Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel by Matthias Stork

An audiovisual study of Sergio Leone's distinctive duel aesthetic. The video essay was first published, along with an accompanying written essay, in the first issue of the online film journal FRAMES. "Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's reflections on the above video here. And read Film Studies For Free's entry on the Spaghetti Western

The Construction of Genre and Space in The Searchers by Austin Fisher

A video essay exploring the ways in which editing techniques and other cinematic processes aid the construction of genre in the opening of "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956).

Outlaw: Josey Wales by Matthew Cheney
A video essay looking at a few aspects of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 



McCabe and Mrs. Miller: A Video Essay by Steven Santos

A video essay on Robert Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See the original posting here

Critics' Picks: Rio Bravo from The New York Times
A. O. Scott basks in the pleasures of taking it easy with Howard Hawks's 1959 Western. (Related Link)



Beaver's Lodge: CAIN'S CUTTHROATS from Press Play Video Blog

This is the fifth installment of BEAVER'S LODGE, a series of video essays narrated by actor Jim Beaver which will offer critical takes on some of Beaver's favorite films 

'A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...': Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters

This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

      However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Frame By Frame - Director John Ford', UNL, August 26, 2010

Phil Peters and John Nelson, 'Studying in Western Filmmaker John Ford's Footsteps' 

Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

Once Upon a Time in the West - Jill Arrives at Flagstone from The Film League

 

Deconstructing the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

The Failure of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

More about → Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'! Video Studies of the Western

A Fistful of "Spaghetti Western" Studies

BFI Researcher's Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns 
(Frayling is author of Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans From Karl May to Sergio Leone [London: I.B.Tauris, 1981, 1998]; Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death [London: Faber and Faber, 2000]; and
Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy [London: Thames and Hudson, 2005]).

It was the spaghetti Westerns… that first eliminated the morality-play dimension and turned the Western into pure violent reverie [...] What made these [...] popular was that they stripped the Western form of its cultural burden of morality. They discarded its civility along with its hypocrisy. In a sense, they liberated the form: what the Western hero stood for was left out, and what he embodied (strength and gun power) was retained. Abroad, that was probably what he had represented all along.

Pauline Kael, Killing Time, in Karl French (ed.), Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1974), pp. 171-178: 172.

Today, to accompany its list of links to openly accessible scholarly studies of the Spaghetti (or Italian, or Euro) Western, and related topics, the normally garrulous Film Studies For Free was going to treat its readers to an improbable, digital impersonation of  Clint Eastwood's performance as the Man With No Name in what is often called "The Dollars Trilogy" directed by Sergio Leone.

Sadly, no dice: while it looks good in a poncho, not only does FSFF fall short in performing moral ambiguity, but it's also fairly hopeless when it comes to capturing taciturnity. 

Dammit. 

Do please enjoy the links, anyway. Grazie.

• Spaghetti Western Database

• Jenna Bond, 'Homosexuality and the Italian Spaghetti Western', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 11, November 2007

• Mark Brownrigg, 'Chapter 4: Music and the Western', Film Music and Film Genre, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 2003

• Timothy Campbell, 'The Corrupting Sea, Technology and Devalued Life in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns', California Italian Studies Journal 1.1, 2010

• Rolando Caputo, 'Aldrich, Leone and Vera Cruz: style and substance over the border', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000

• Paul Coughlin, '[Review of] Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: something to do with death. London: Faber and Faber., 2000', Screening the Past, November 1, 2000

• Vera Dika, 'An East German Indianerfilm: the bear in sheep's clothing', Jump Cut, No. 50, Spring 2008

• Chris Durham, 'Absent Heroism: Reconsidering Clint Eastwood's Star Persona', Scope, Issue 7, 2007

• Robert J. Edmonstone, 'Beyond “Brutality”: Understanding the Italian Filone’s Violent Excesses', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008

• Daniel Edwards, 'Sergio Leone', Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Austin Fisher, 'A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier', Scope,  Issue 15, November 2009

• Brad D. Foster, 'Constructing Heroic Identities: Masculinity and the Western Film', Masters Thesis, Oregon State University, July 2007

• Luis M. García Mainar, 'Authorship and Identity in the Cinema of Clint Eastwood', ATLANTIS 29.2 (December 2007)

• Howard Hughes, Excerpts from Aim from the Heart: The Films of Clint Eastwood (London: IB Tauris, 2009)

• Emily Anne Kausalik, A Fistful of Drama: Musical Form in the Dollars Trilogy, Masters Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2008

• Kyle Keough, 'Cowboys and Shoguns: The American Western, Japanese Jidaigeki, and Cross-Cultural Exchange', DigitalCommons@University of Rhode Island, 2008

• Evert Jan van Leeuven, 'Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a Hollywood Myth',  BRight Lights Film Journal, Issue 60, May 2008

• Scott MacKenzie, 'Closing arias: Operatic montage in the closing sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone', P.O.V. 'The Art of Film Editing', edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998 - (scroll down in large PDF)

• John Nudge, 'Wild East Productions: Spaghetti Westerns', first published in Imagesjournal.com, 1998

• Walter Przybylowski, 'The European Western', Dialogues, Vol. 5, Fall 2006

• Richard Raskin, 'Jack Elam and the Fly in Once Upon a Time in the West', P.O.V. No.24 - The Western, December 2007

• Alireza Vahdani, 'European Western vs. American Western', Offscreen Journal,  January 31, 2010

• Jeannette Vaught, 'Deserting the Desert, Salvaging the Southland: The Re-Location of the American Hero and Cultural Identity in 1970s Outlaw Movies', TPP VII (2009): 9-28

• Tony Williams, 'A Fistful of Dollars', Senses of Cinema , Issue 28, 2003

More about → A Fistful of "Spaghetti Western" Studies

BFI Researchers' Tales: Mulvey, Dyer, Kubrick, Frayling

 Image of Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

For some time now, Film Studies For Free has been enjoying the videos that the British Film Institute has been posting at BFI Live, its online video channel exploring film and TV culture. There are lots of videos worth seeing at the site but, below, FSFF has singled out and directly linked to some which are especially deserving of the attention of film scholars.

Laura Mulvey on the Blonde

8 Mar 2010: The world-renowned film theorist presents her thoughts on the Hitchcock Blonde.

Researchers' Tales: Richard Dyer

8 Mar 2010: The writer and academic discusses his instrumental role in the creation of the BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious celebrations of queer cinema.

Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? (Part 1)

13 Jan 2010: An illustrated lecture on Stanley Kubrick’s most ambitious yet unrealised project.

Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? (Part 2)

11 Jan 2010: An onstage discussion of the finer points of Stanley Kubrick’s failed production.

Researchers' Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns

14 Dec 2009: Eminent academic and writer Sir Christopher Frayling discusses the Spaghetti Western genre as part of the BFI National Library’s Researcher’s Tales strand.

Researchers' Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Film Research

14 Dec 2009: Eminent educationalist and writer Sir Christopher Frayling discusses the practice of researching film.

More about → BFI Researchers' Tales: Mulvey, Dyer, Kubrick, Frayling