¡Cine fantástico! In Memory of Jess Franco (1930-2013)

Frame grab image of Lina Romay in Jess Franco's Les possédées du diable/Exorcism (1974)

Serge Daney distinguishes between love of cinema and passion for cinema. The latter state concerns the expressive evolution and refinement of the art, typified by the work, one might suppose, of such singular giants as Godard, Dreyer and Garrel. Love of cinema, on the other hand, is fetishistic, stemming from contentment with the medium as it already is. In the acceptance speech [Jess] Franco made on receiving his honorary lifetime achievement Goya award this February [2009], he described himself as simply ‘a man in love with cinema'. Perhaps nowhere better than in Jess Franco's oeuvre is ‘love of cinema' embodied. Yet complacency is hardly the first quality one associates with Franco's often defiantly free, personal and gloriously extreme riffs on familiar B cinema patterns. The fevered mirror he holds up to cinema reveals not a static museum of ossified formulas but a rich arsenal of figurative possibilities. Jess Franco is cinema- cinema in all its crassness, vulgarity, brutality, puerility, vitality, invention, wonder, joy, eroticism, poetry, violence, bizarreness, obsessiveness, mystery. And, of course, addictiveness. [Maximilian Le Cain, Editorial, Experimental Conversations, Spring 2009]

Film Studies For Free was muy triste when it heard the news that Spanish horror cinema maestro Jess Franco has died today, following a stroke last week.

It will be gathering tributes and links in memory of Franco's amazing film career over the next days, starting with the ones below. So do please come back for more as the below lists get longer.

Tributes

• David Hudson, 'Jess Franco, 1930 – 2013', KeyFrame Daily at Fandor, April 2, 2013 
• Tim Lucas, 'Jesús "Jess" Franco (May 12, 1930 - April 2, 2013)', Tim Lucas Video Watch Blog, April 4, 2013

Good resources online

• Maximilian Le Cain, 'The Frontiers of Genre and Trance: Five Films by Jess Franco', Senses of Cinema, 27, 2003
• Maximilian Le Cain, Editorial, Experimental Conversations, Spring 2009
• John Exshaw, 'Jess Franco, or The Misfortunes of Virtue', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, issue 1, 2006 
• Lindsay Hallam, 'Whips and Bodies: The Sadean Cinematic Text', Senses of Cinema, 30, 2004 
• Joan Hawkins, 'Culture wars: some new trends in art horror', Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009
• Ira Konigsberg, 'How Many Draculas Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998
• Erich Kuersten, 'Time Travel for Amnesiacs: SUCCUBUS and the Moebius Love Strip', Acidemic: A Journal of Film and Media, Issue 4, 2008
• Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, 'Daring cycles: the Towers–Franco collaboration, 1968–70', New Review of Film and Television Studies, 11.1, 2013 
• John Marmysz, 'The Cutting Edge Between Trash Cinema and High Art', Film-Philosophy, 6.8, 2002
• Donato Totaro, 'The Case of Jesús Franco', Offscreen, 2011
  
• Glenn Ward, Journeys into perversion: vision, desire and economies of transgression in the films of Jess Franco, Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2011

More about → ¡Cine fantástico! In Memory of Jess Franco (1930-2013)

On Pictures of Moving: Articles from the International Journal of Screendance

Montage of sequences from Carmen (Carlos Saura, 1983). You can read more about this film (one of FSFF's absolute favourites!) in Marisa Zanotti's article 'When Dance is Imagined In Cinema: Disclosure in Dance Practice'. The article also examines Chantal Akerman’s documentary Un Jour Pina a Demandé (1983), about spending five weeks with Pina Bausch’s company.

Another lucky (unchoreographed) find by Film Studies For Free today. Looking for something else entirely, FSFF pirouetted (tripped) over the following, rather wonderful, online and openly accessible item: the first issue of the International Journal of Screendance. The superb contents of the issue are described in detail and linked to below.

A new issue of IJS is just about due out now, according to the website, so FSFF will let you know about that just as soon as it can.

This first issue of The International Journal of Screendance is dedicated to the proposal that screendance has not yet been invented. This is an appropriation of film theorist Andre Bazin’s suggestion, in The Myth of Total Cinema (1946), that the reality of cinema had not yet embodied the ideal of cinema. Bazin’s writing had been discussed in the first seminar of the International Screendance Network, together with Professor Ian Christie (Birkbeck College, University of London), who had given the 2006 Slade Lectures under the title “Cinema has Not Yet Been Invented.” The proposition that screendance has not yet been invented is intended as an incitement to the community to think about the art form in new ways, both critical and theoretical, and this journal aims to create a forum to sustain the debate.
     A number of themes emerge in this first issue. The presence of Maya Deren is felt in a number of articles, as are ideas about genre, criticality, authorship, disability, performance, and the phenomenology of screendance itself. Chirstinn Whyte looks at amateurism and idea of “professionalism” in “The Evolution of the ‘A’ word: Changing Notions of Professional Practice in Avant-Garde Film and Contemporary Screendance.” Gravity is explored from differing perspectives in two essays: Ann Cooper Albright rethinks the act of falling on screen as an instant in which new meaning can arise while Harmony Bench filters twentieth-century, modern and postmodern, dance techniques’ shared faith in gravity and weight through a digital and electronic lens. Sarah Whatley raises questions about the portrayal of dance and disability on screen, and Argentine critic Susanna Temperley (in Spanish with English translation) addresses the role of the critic in screendance in“Perplexed Writing”, while Kyra Norman explores ideas around the body, perception, and place in site- based screendance. Claudia Kappenberg reviews notions of originality and authorship in “The Logic of the Copy”, and Douglas Rosenberg proposes theories about genre and the diasporic nature of screendance.
     In addition to in-depth discussion and theorization of particular aspects of screen- dance practices, each issue will include interviews and reflective writing by practitioners in the field. In this issue, we publish a transcribed interview with BBC dance for television producer Bob Lockyer. In an effort to reacquaint readers with out of print or hard to find extant articles, we will be including such texts in forthcoming issues, and we begin by re-printing a paper by film theorist and philosopher Noël Carroll entitled “Toward a Definition of Moving Picture-Dance.” The paper was originally presented at the Dance for Camera Symposium in 2000 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In the paper and talk, Carroll, who has been writing about movement on screen since the 1970s, lays out an argument for a definition of the field in order to, as he states, “compare and contrast the various categorizations in play and to develop dialectically from them a comprehensive framework that makes sense of our practices and that resonates with our intuitions about its compass” (2, this issue).

International Journal of Screendance
Vol 1, No 1 (2010): Screendance Has Not Yet Been Invented

Table of Contents
Vol.1, Issue 1 [PDF of Full Issue]

Editorial comment

• Screendance: The Practice in Print by Douglas Rosenberg and Claudia Kappenberg

Articles

• The Evolution of the ‘A’ Word: Changing Notions of Professional Practice in Avant-garde Film and Contemporary Screendance by Chirstinn Whyte

• In and Out of Place: Site-based Screendance by Kyra Norman

• FALLING...on screen by Ann Cooper Albright

• The Logic of the Copy, from Appropriation to Choreography by Claudia Kappenberg

• The Spectacle of Difference: Dance and Disability on Screen by Sarah Whatley

• Anti-Gravitational Choreographies: Strategies of Mobility in Screendance by Harmony Bench

• Excavating Genres by Douglas Rosenberg 

• Perplexed Writing: Towards a Possible Encounter between Criticism and Videodance by Susana Temperley [also in Spanish]

• When Dance is Imagined In Cinema: Disclosure in Dance Practice by Marisa Zanotti

Interviews

• Bob Lockyer by Douglas Rosenberg

Reviews

• Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit By Karen Pearlman Review by Cari Ann Shim Sham*

Reprints
Toward a Definition of Moving-Picture Dance by Noël Carroll

Artists' Pages

Watching Simon Ellis Notes on Contributors

More about → On Pictures of Moving: Articles from the International Journal of Screendance

PhD Theses on Hal Hartley, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and Spanish cinema studies

Javier Bardem as Raúl and Penélope Cruz as Silvia in Jamón Jamón (Bigas Luna, 1992) as discussed in Rebecca Naughten's work Spain Made Flesh: Reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007

Film Studies For Free was delighted when Spanish cinema scholar Rebecca Naughten responded to its request for information about online PhD theses. Not only did Rebecca let FSFF know that her own really excellent thesis has recently been made available online, but she also did the hard work of trawling through the online repository at the University of Newcastle, where her work is stored, to find four other very good theses archived there. ¡Muchísimas gracias, Rebecca!

These works have just been added to FSFF's permanent list of Online Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Theses (see the link in the table of contents in the right-hand sidebar for future reference) which now makes more than 130 theses accessible to you at the click of your mouse.

Do please let FSFF know if your online PhD thesis, or others you know of, is not yet in this list.

• Deer, Lesley, The repetition of difference: Marginality and the films of Hal Hartley, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2000
• Durham, Christopher Louis, Masculinity in the post-war western: John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2005
• Hamilton, Jayne, Gender representation and textual strategies in the films of Pilar Miró, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 1997
• Mendez-Fiddian, Maria del Carmen, The representation of the family in Spanish cinema from 1950 to the present day, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 1989
• Naughten, Rebecca Claire, Spain Made Flesh: Reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2010

More about → PhD Theses on Hal Hartley, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and Spanish cinema studies

In darkened rooms: On Salvador Dalí and cinema (in memory of David Vilaseca)

Screen Test with Salvador Dalí (Andy Warhol, 1966-68) [Read Brian Dillon's article about Warhol's Screen Tests]

"Oh Salvador Dalí, of the olive-colored voice!

[...]

I sing your restless longing for the statue,

your fear of the feelings that await you in the street."

Excerpt from Federico García Lorca, 'Ode to Salvador Dalí'

(first published in Revista de Occidente, Madrid, April 1926)

"The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms."

André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)

"[Un chien andalou/] An Andalusian Dog, one of the most universally acclaimed films in cinema history, is frequently mentioned by critics as a privileged point of reference for the Surrealist rebellion. The film remains enigmatic to this day. Criticism has concentrated on the validity and effectiveness of its images to exemplify the avant-garde attack against social conventions and against the exclusive dominance of rationality in epistemology and social discourse. But this contextual approach does not take account of the script's fragmented narrative, which finds support in Freud's psychoanalytical theories and articulates a radical proposal for identity and culture. Largely neglected by critics, this narrative has been highly influential in the history of cinema. An Andalusian Dog is central to a long list of films that explore different aspects of the irrational, among them Jean Cocteau's Le sang du poète, Hunt Stromberg's The Strange Woman, Guy Debord's script Howling in Favor of the Marquis de Sade, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, [...] David Lynch's Blue Velvet [...].
    Conventionally An Andalusian Dog has been viewed as a film about sexuality; I suggest that sexuality appears in the film as the pretext for a discussion of the threat sexual desire poses for male identity. In this respect, the film develops ideas that begin to appear in paintings completed by Dalí after his initial contact with Freud's works in the mid-1920s. These paintings display male identity as a fragile form of subsistence unfolding between two alternate forces, desire and fear: the desire for sexual realization and the opposed fear that sexual intercourse will conclude in disease and ultimately in death. Given the scarcity of Buñuel's production prior to 1929, I suggest that Dalí's monumental production of paintings during these years served as a preliminary visual point of reference for the design of some of the images in An Andalusian Dog."  Ignacio Javier López, 'Film, Freud, and Paranoia Dalí and the Representation of Male Desire in An Andalusian Dog', Diacritics, 31.2 (2001) 35-48

"[David Vilaseca's] first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."
     Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate." Paul Julian Smith, 'David Vilaseca Obituary', The Guardian, March 11, 2010

Film Studies For Free chooses today -- the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia -- to bring you the second of its posts created in memory of David Vilaseca, the openly gay Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010, having fought against homophobia, in different ways, for much of his life. A recent obituary in the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia also brutally connected these two unassailable facts in its own powerful and poetic tribute to this remarkable scholar and hugely creative writer:

Deberíamos leer a Vilaseca, que supo esquivar la soledad y el desarraigo en un mundo homófobo hasta que este se disfrazó de camión y embistió su bicicleta.

We really should read the works of Vilaseca; he knew how to dodge loneliness and rootlessness in a homophobic world, at least until the latter disguised itself as a truck and rammed into his bicycle.

As Paul Julian Smith indicates in his obituary for his friend (cited above), Vilaseca's PhD thesis, which he turned into an outstanding first book, explored the highly complex question of the homophobia of artist, filmmaker, and fellow Catalan Salvador Dalí through the lens of queer cultural theories. 

Below is a list of direct links to numerous other resources (videos, podcasts, and further, openly-accessible, scholarly material), many of which touch on Dalí's much less well-explored cinematic work in the same contexts as those studied in Vilaseca's book; that is to say, the artist's avowed 'paranoiac-critical method' and the cultural expression of his sexuality. 

[Addendum: For two much less scholarly, but still highly (and, possibly, surprisingly) engaging, fictional examinations of the workings of paranoia and homophobia in the period of Dalí's life prior to the making of Un chien andalou, FSFF's author thoroughly recommends the films Little Ashes (Paul Morrison, 2009), starring Robert Pattinson as Dalí, and Carlos Saura's Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón. (If you need more convincing, please do read Pauline Bache's article on the former film).]

• Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, France, 1928 ) on Google Video
• L'Âge d'Or (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, France/Spain, 1930) on Google Video
• "An Addiction to Cinema: Salvador Dalí", LITERAL: Latin American Voices, Fall 2008
• Ian Christie, 'Lights, Camera, ... Metamorphosis', TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Neil Coombs , 'Introduction', Studying Surrealist and Fantasy Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
• 'Dalí, and the Media', Salvador Dalí Liquid Desire: Melbourne Winter Masterpieces,
• Christopher Jones and José Montes Baquer, 'The Great Collaborator', TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• 'Dalí and Disney's surreal collaboration', TateShots Video Podcast, June 20, 2007 (embedded below) 
• Roy Disney, 'Uncle Walk and Salvador', TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Eugene de Klerk, 'A Striptease in Pink Limelight: Removing the Veil between the Subjective and Objective', eSharp, Issue 5, Summer 2005
• James Magrini , 'Surrealism’s Revisionist Reading of Freudian Psychology: Surreal Film and the Dream', OTHERZINE, Issue 17, Fall 2009 
• Victoria L. McCard, 'Salvador Dalí or the Persistence of Memories --True and False', Ciberletras, Vol. 14, 2005
• Jonas Mekas, 'The Performance Years', TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Nanette Rißler-Pipka, 'A reflection on his mind: Bergson, perception and memory in Dalí’s writing', Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 21 (2008), 167–178
• Astrid Ruffa, 'Dalí’s surrealist activities and the model of scientific experimentation', Papers of Surrealism, Issue 4, Winter 2005
• 'Salvador Dalí Forgotten Horizon 1936', Modern Painters podcast
• 'Surrealism and Film: Study Day', Tate Modern Webcast - 7 videos 
• 'Un chien andalou, 50 years later', Tabacalera, 2008 
• Alexandre Werneck, 'The Apparitions of a Surrealist Eye: Dalí & Film', Studio International, December 17, 2007

Dreams designed by Dalí for Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Un Chien andalou

'Dalí and Disney's surreal collaboration', TateShots Video Podcast, June 20, 2007

More about → In darkened rooms: On Salvador Dalí and cinema (in memory of David Vilaseca)

Film-Historia: Index to English language articles

Image from Offret/The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986). See "Images of War in Andrei Tarkovski's The Sacrifice: Four levels of meaning", by Gabriel Giralt, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1999

Over the years, Film Studies For Free has noticed that there were some excellent English-language articles on lots of different aspects of film history to be found at the (very difficult to navigate) website of the excellent Universitat de Barcelona-based film journal Film-Historia. 

Until today, however, there was no easy way to access all of these articles, but ...  (drum roll) ... ta-da! Cast your eyes at the awesome list of direct links below, and, if you feel so inclined, thank your lucky stars that FSFF's author needed some distraction from her country's general election shenanigans this morning.

• "Walker: the dramatic film as historical truth" by Robert A. Rosenstone, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1992
• "The Image of Mexican Heroes in American Films" by Paul J. Vanderwood, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1992
• "Absolved by History: On the Aesthetics and Ideology on History in the Cuban Film Institute" by John Mraz, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1993
• "The Historical Film is a Real History", by Robert A. Rosenstone, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1995
• "Social Roles/Political Responsabilities: Jean Renoir's Search for Artistic Integrity, 1928-1939" by Charles Musser, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1994
• "Hollywood, U.S.- Mexican Relations, and the Devolution of the "Golden Age" of Mexican Cinema" by Seth Fein, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1994
• "'We're just little people, Louis': Marie-Antoniette on Film" by Laura Mason, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1994
• "Against the Ivory Tower: An Apologia for 'Popular' Historical Documentaries" by Dirk Eitzen, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1995
• "Filming the "Discovery" of America: How and Whose History Is Being Told" by Luisela Alvaray, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1995
• "Film as Historical Narrative", by Hannu Salmi, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1995
• "The Politics of the Trilogy Form: Lucia, the Oresteia, and The Godfather", by Peter W. Rose, Film-Historia, No. 2-3, 1993
• "Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988): Ethnicy and a Babble of Discourses", by Leslie Fishbein, Film-Historia, No. 2-3, 1995
• "Colonial History and Anglo-American tension in 1939: Allegheny Uprising and Drums along the Mohawk", by K. R. M. Short, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1996
• "Cinematic Contextual History of High Noon (1952, dir. Fred Zinnemann)", by J. M. Caparrós-Lera and Sergio Alegre, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1996
• "Spain in U.S.: cinematic relationship, 1939-1953", by Rafael de España, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1996
• "Mothering Daughters: Subjectivity and History in the Work of Helma Sanders Brahms's Germany Pale Mother" by Judith Keene, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1997
• "Paradise Found?: Ana/chronic Nostalgia in Belle Epoque", by Jose F. Colmeiro, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1997
• "Germany after Unification: Views from Abroad", by Roger Hillman, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1997
• "The Image of Ancient Rome in the Cinema", by Carl J. Mora, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1997
• "Coping Strategies: Three Decades of Vietnam War in Hollywood", by Eusebio V. Llácer and Esther Enjuto, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1998
• "The Royal Air Force: World War II Film Propaganda and The March of the Time", by K. R. M. Short, Film-Historia, No. 2-3, 1998
• "Oliver Stone's Nixon: Politics on the Edge of Darkness", by Ian Scott, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1999
• "Images of War in Andrei Tarkovski's. The Sacrifice: Four levels of meaning", by Gabriel Giralt, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1999
• "Playful Subversions: Hollywood Pirates Plunder Spanish America", by Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1999
• "The Revolution is History: Filming the Past in Mexico and Cuba", by John Mraz, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1999
• "El día que me quieras: History, Mith and Che Guevara", by John Hess, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1999
• "Cantinfladas of the PRI: (Mis) Representations of Mexican Society and Democracy in the Films of Mario Moreno", by Jeffrey Pilcher, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1999
• "Los Hermanos Mayo: Photographing Exile", by John Mraz, Film-Historia, No. 1-2, 2000 
• "Cut from Anglophilia to Anglophobia. Hollywood's Changing Perceptions of the British" by Carl J. Mora, Film-Historia, No. 1-2, 2001
• "In search of reality through dreams: Alejandro Amenabar's Abre los ojos", by Marina Martin, Film-Historia, No. 1-2, 2002
• "The ideological meaning behind Greta Garbo's star image", by Alan McLane, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2003
• "Poor Mexican cinema, So far from Cahiers du Cinema, so close to Latino U.S.A.: A Cantankerous Essay", by Carl J. Mora, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2003
• "The War, the Air Force and the Search for Realist Cinema in Britain, 1941-1942", by Michael Paris, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2003
• The Spanish Film Industry, New Technologies, New Opportunities", by Lauren Kogen, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2006
• "The Fatherless Society: Die Blechtrommel (Tin Drum)", by Xuejuen Guo, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2007

More about → Film-Historia: Index to English language articles

Paranormal cinematic activity: ghost film studies

Latest update: April 27, 2010

 Publicity still for The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). See an excerpt from this film in Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay 'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film', embedded towards the foot of this entry

Film Studies For Free has gone and spooked itself, today, with its own scary persistence in compiling a list of links to openly accessible, online, scholarly articles, chapters and theses on international ghost film studies. Oh, and there are two related video essays lurking at the bottom to scare the scholarly bejesus out of you for good measure, too (added April 27) .

Like all the best posts at this blog (IOHO), the list below owes its hefty materiality to its connections with FSFF's author's own (hauntological) research, some of which, hopefully, will be directly shared with her fearless readers very shortly. So do please be a revenant, won't you?

• Michael J. Anderson, 'Histoire de Marie et Julien: Jacques Rivette's Material Ghost Story', Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004

• Guy Austin, '"In Fear and Pain": Stardom and the Body in Two French Ghost Films', Scope, Issue 7, February 2007

• Sarah M. Ball, The Uncanny in Japanese and American Horror Film: Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s Ring, MA thesis, North Carolina State University, 2006  

• Colette Balmain, '“Vengeful Virgins in White”: Female Monstrosity in Asian Cinema', in Niall Scott (ed), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004) [scroll down through pdf to p. 123]

• Colette Balmain, 'Inside the Well of Loneliness: Towards a Definition of the Japanese Horror Film', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Papers, 2006

• Caetlin Benson-Allott , '“Before you die, you see The Ring”: notes on the immanent obsolescence of VHS, from Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007

• Lesley Brill, 'M. Night Shyamalan: A Preliminary Report', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008

• Ture Bural, 'Endland Umpire: A placement of David Lynch's Inland Empire', Perforations, 29, 2007

• Jodey Castricano, 'Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the Strange Question of Trans-Subjectivity', Jung: the e-Journal of the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies Volume 2, Number 3, April, 2006

• Brigid Cherry, 'Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror', Particip@tions, Vol. 5, Issue 1, 2008

• Leah A.Cheyne, 'The Sixth Sense: Humanizing Horror', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• David Church, 'Return of the Return of the Repressed: Notes on the American Horror Film (1991-2006)', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 10 (November 25, 2006)

• Michel Ciment, 'Kubrick and the Fantastic', (1982) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)

• Robyn Citizen, 'Review of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity by Linnie Blake', Senses of Cinema,Issue 51, 2009

• Ryan Cooke, 'Review of Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008', Screening the Past,Issue 23, 2008

• Lisa Coulthard, 'Uncanny Memories: Stan Douglas, Subjectivity and Cinema, Scope, 2000

• John Culbert, 'The Well and the Web: Phantoms of Community and the Mediatic Public Sphere', Postmodern Culture, 19.2, January 2009

• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Blackwell 2009)

• Carolyn Erler, 'The Obama Code: Ghosts and Monsters in the Visual Datasphere', CTheory.net, Resetting Theory Issue, December 2009
  

• Mark Fisher, 'Home is where the haunt is: The Shining's hauntology', k-punk, January 23, 2006

• Mark Fisher, 'You have always been the caretaker': the spectral spaces of the Overlook Hotel', Perforations, 29, 2007

• Brian Grady, '"We're Engaged to Be Engaged": The Paranormal Activity of Trauma and Relationship', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 67, February 2010

• Catherine Grant, 'Giving up Ghosts: Eliseo Subiela's Hombre mirando al sudeste and No te mueras sin decirme a dónde vas', Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds, ed. Rob Rix and Roberto Rodríguez-Saona (Leeds: Leeds Iberian Papers - Trinity and All Saints/University of Leeds, 1997), pp. 89-120  

• Coral Houtman, 'Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense', Scope, November 2004

• Wendy F. Hsu , 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, vol. 5 (2003)

• Annamarie Jagose, 'Hollywood Lesbians [Interview with Patricia White about Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability', Genders, 32, 2000

• Fredric Jameson, 'Historicism in The Shining', (1981) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)

• Brian Jarvis, 'Anamorphic allegory in The Ring, or, seven ways of looking at a horror video', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 3, 2007

• Bruce Kawin, 'Carnival of Souls', The Criterion Collection, Film Essays, 76

• Antonio Lázaro-Reboll , 'The Transnational Reception of El espinazo del diablo (Guillermo del Toro 2001)', Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2007, 39–51

• John Lewis, '"Mother Oh God Mother …": Analysing the 'Horror' of Single Mothers in Contemporary Hollywood Horror', Scope, Issue 2, 2005

• Owen Livermore, 'Gun and Other Play: Takashi Miike and Fantasia Festival 2004', Synoptique, December 2004

• Li Zeng, Horror returns to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and the space of horror ', from Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009

• Luo Hui, 'Chapter Four: Minor Discourses in New Peripheries', The Ghost of Liaozhai: Pu Songling's Ghostlore and its History of Reception, PhD Thesis,University of Toronto, 2009

• Nina K. Martin, 'Dread of mothering: plumbing the depths of Dark Water', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Ewa Mazierska, 'Between the Sacred and the Profane, the Sublime and the Trivial: The Magic Realism of Jan Jakub Kolski ', Scope, 2000

• Donna McRae, 'Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance', B for Bad Cinema, Colloquy, Issue 18, December 2009

• Thomas Mical, 'Introduction: Hauntology, or Spectral Space', Perforations, 29, 2007  

• Elizabeth Mullen, 'Synæsthetic Specters: Haunting Hill House on the Silver Screen', Image and Narrative, Vol. 10, Issue 1, 2009

• Lindsay Nelson, 'Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema', Cinemascope, Issue 13, July-December 2009

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

• Eimi Ozawa , 'Remaking Corporeality and Spatiality: U.S. Adaptations of Japanese Horror Films, 49th Parallel, Conference Special Edition, Autumn 2006

• N. Payasopon, 'The Cultural and Filmic Elements that contribute to the popularity of the Thai film Nang Nak', BU Review, Volume 2, No. 1, January-June 2003

• Jennifer Proctor, 'Différance, the Spectral, and the Work of Mourning in Aaron Valdez’s dissolve', 2004

• Laurence A. Rickels, 'Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time', Other Voices, v.2, n.2 (March 2002)

• Juneko J. Robinson , 'Review: Jay McRoy (2007) Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam: Rodopi', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010

• Caroline Ruddell, 'Breaking Boundaries The Representation of Split Identity in Anime', Animation Studies – Vol.2, 2007

• Steven Schneider, 'World Horror Cinema and the US: Bringing it all back home', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002

• Donato Totaro, 'Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 1: The Long Take., Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• Donato Totaro, Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 2: Mise en Scène', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• Donato Totaro, 'Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008', Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009

• Dennis Tredy, 'Shadows of Shadows - Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: J. Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), D. Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and A. Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999)', E-rea, 2.1, 2004

• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Leaving the cinema: metacinematic cruising in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Gang Gary Xu, 'Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005

• Young-joon Cho, 'Four Cinema Versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', Thannhouser Company Film Preservation, 2006

• Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Neda Hei-tung Ng, 'Magic, Medicine, Cannibalism: the China Demon in Hong Kong Horror', David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Working Paper Series, Paper Number: 74, April 2008 

Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay
'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film',

Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay
'Unreal Estate: The Scariest Movie Locations of All Time'

More about → Paranormal cinematic activity: ghost film studies

On fans and fantasy: Matt Hills online

Ana Torrent as Ángela in Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, Spain, 1996)

While Film Studies For Free was researching material for its last post - In-between-isms: Winnicottian film, media, and cultural studies - in which the work of media theorist Matt Hills figured strongly, it came across quite a few other freely-acessible, scholarly essays by and interviews with Hills, the links to which had not yet been collected in an online webliography.

So, below you can find a follow up links-list that does just that. Hopefully, it will be of use to those of us who appreciate Hills' unusual (these days) combination of film and media studies approaches in his work, which brilliantly draws both on psychoanalytic and sociological theories to explore audience or consumer attachments to popular media.

Online works by

• Matt Hills, ‘Gothic’ Body Parts in a ‘Postmodern’ Body of Work? The Hinchcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975-77)', Intensities Four, December 2007

• Matt Hills, 'Essential Tensions: Winnicottian Object-Relations In The Media Sociology of Roger Silverstone', International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), Feature 37-48

• Matt Hills, Whose "postmodern" horror? Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis (Thesis, 1996)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 5, 10 May 2003

• Matt Hills, 'Review of Lawrence Grossberg (2005) Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers)', Culture Machine, 2006

• Matt Hills 'Recognition in the eyes of the relevant beholder: Representing ‘subcultural celebrity’ and cult TV fan cultures', Mediactive, Issue 2, 2003 (scroll down to p. 59)

• Matt Hills, 'Review of Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy, Daniel Shaw, ed., (2001)', Aesthetics Online, 2002

Interviews with

• Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, 'Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One):', Confessions of an Aca Fan, August 23, 2007

• Henry Jenkins, 'Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills', Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 28, 2006

• Henry Jenkins, 'Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview With Matt Hills', Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 29, 2006

• Matt Hills, 'Intensities interviews Henry Jenkins @Console-ing Passions, University of Bristol, July 7th, 2001', Intensities Two,

More about → On fans and fantasy: Matt Hills online

Assorted articles and e-theses: costumes, sound, French and Spanish cinema, and more

Image from La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1993)

Another visit to a university research repository took Film Studies For Free to Exeter, home to some of the most original film-related research in the United Kingdom. Below are some openly accessible research items of note; four especially highly-recommended items are emboldened and marked with asterisks: ***

• Bridget Birchall, 'Patrick Dewaere and gender identity in Giscardian France (1974-1981)', e-PhD thesis, February 2009
• ***Jennie Cousins, 'Unstitching the 1950s film à costumes: Hidden Designers, Hidden Meanings.'', e-PhD thesis, October 2008
• Michael DeLashmutt, 'The sexualisation of popular culture: towards a Christian sexual aesthetic', Crucible, Summer 2006, pp. 42-56
• Michael DeLashmutt, 'The technological imaginary: bringing myth and imagination into dialogue with Bronislaw Szerszynski's "Nature, Technology and the Sacred"', Zygon, 41(4), pp.801-810
• Nikhilesh Dholakia and Jonathan Schroeder, 'Disney: delights and doubts', Journal of Research for Consumers, 2, 2001
• ***Sally Faulkner, 'A Cinema of Contradiction: Picazo's "La tía Tula" (1964) and the Nuevo Cine Español,' The Modern Language Review July 2004
• Stefan Jack Garel, 'QUEER BODIES AND SETTLEMENTS: the pertinence of queer theory in the fields of queer history and trans politics, disability and 'curative education', quantum physics and experimental art - an interdisciplinary and transnational account of three socio-cultural and filmic research projects.', e-PhD thesis, March 2009
• Anthony King, 'Serial killing and the postmodern self', History of the Human Sciences, 19(3), August 2006, pp. 109-125
• ***Amy McGill, 'The Contemporary Hollywood Film Soundtrack: Professional Practices and Sonic Styles Since the 1970s', e-PhD thesis, November 2008
• Jonathan Schroeder, 'Visual Consumption', Discussion papers in management. Final version published in The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology / edited by George Ritzer. Blackwell, 2007
• ***Thomas Wynn, 'Manon Through the Lens of Clouzot (1948): ‘images troublantes et précises’', French Cultural Studies, February 2006
  

More about → Assorted articles and e-theses: costumes, sound, French and Spanish cinema, and more