New FILM-PHILOSOPHY!!

Frame grab from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Read Ben Tyrer's article on film noir and this film in the latest issue of Film-Philosophy

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013): the second to last of the brilliant new film studies e journal issues out in December with which Film Studies For Free will present you in 2013. And the daddy of them all.

There will be two more FSFF posts to appear before the holidays, that is, if you can tear yourself away from reading the below articles and reviews.

Articles

• The Facts Before Our Eyes: Wittgenstein and the Film Noir Investigator Keith Dromm PDF
• 'How Can It Not Know What It Is?': Self and Other in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner  Andrew Norris PDF
• Ghost in the Shell 2, Technicity and the Subject  Daniel Hourigan PDF
• Throne of Blood and the Metaphysics of Tragedy  Henry Somers-Hall PDF
• 'That Man Behind the Curtain': Atheism and Belief in The Wizard of Oz  Justin Remes PDF
• Film Noir as Point de Capiton: Double Indemnity, Structure and Temporality Ben Tyrer PDF
• Shooting for Dead Time in Gus Van Sant's Elephant William Little  PDF
• Bad Memories: Haneke with Locke on Personal Identity and Post-Colonial Guilt Justine McGill PDF
• 'Misfortune's Image': The Cinematic Representation of Trauma in Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967)  Mark Cresswell, Zulfia Karimova PDF
• The Ister: Cinema's Interruption Linda Daley PDF
• Otherness and the Renewal of Freedom in Jarmusch's Down by Law: A Levinasian and Arendtian Reading Mark Cauchi  PDF
• Mimesis Reconsidered: Adorno and Tarkovsky contra Habermas  Simon Mussell PDF
• Nietzsche and Bad Conscience on Mosquito Coast James Edward Gough, Sue Matheson PDF
• The Closure of the 'Gold Window': From 'Camera-Eye' to 'Brain-Screen' Morgan M Adamson  PDF
• A New/Old Ontology of Film Rafe McGregor  PDF
• Internal Needs, Endoxa and the Truth: An Aristotelian Approach to the Popular Screenplay Daniel McInerny PDF
• Extreme Makeover: Art and Morality in The Shape of Things Joseph H. Kupfer  PDF
• 'Even the Ghost was more than one person': Hauntology and Authenticity in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There Carolyn D'Cruz, Glenn D'Cruz PDF
• I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Subjective Dissolution, Schizoanalysis and Post-Structuralist Ethics in the Films of Todd Haynes  Helen Darby PDF
• Truth, Autobiography and Documentary: Perspectivism in Nietzsche and Herzog Katrina Mitcheson  PDF
• Left-over Spaces: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers  Benoit Dillet, Tara Puri PDF
• Homeopathic Repetition and Memories of Underdevelopment: The Dialectic of Subjective Experience and Objective Historical Forces  Trevor James Cunnington PDF
• Charcoal Matter with Memory: Images of Movement, Time and Duration in the animated films of William Kentridge  David H. Fleming PDF
• The Philosophical Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes: The Silent Films of Stan Brakhage   James Michael Magrini PDF
• 'The Epidermis of Reality': Artaud, the Material Body and Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc Ros Murray PDF

Book Reviews

• Hsiu-Chuang Deppman (2010) Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film (Iris Chui Ping Kam) PDF
• Alain Badiou (2013) Cinema and Alex Ling (2010) Badiou and Cinema (David H. Fleming) PDF
• Timothy Corrigan, ed. (2012) Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. 2nd Edition (Shawn Loht) PDF
• Michael Charlesworth (2011) Derek Jarman (Justin Remes) PDF
• Sharon Lin Tay (2009) Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (Sheryl Tuttle Ross) PDF
• Todd Berliner (2010) Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (John Anthony Bleasdale) PDF
•  M. Keith Booker (2011) Historical Dictionary of American Cinema (Glen Melanson) PDF  
• Shawn C. Bean (2008) The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking (Carrie Giunta) PDF
• Julian Petley (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Zach Saltz) PDF
• Suzanne Buchan (2011) The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Micki Nyman) PDF
• Khatereh Sheibani (2011) The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics and Modernity After the Revolution (Paul Elliott) PDF

More about → New FILM-PHILOSOPHY!!

Study of a Single Film: Todd Haynes' [SAFE] (1995)

Video Essay on Todd Haynes's [SAFE] (1995) by Amber Jacobs and Catherine Grant. You can read more about this work in 'Un[Contained]? On Todd Haynes's [SAFE]', Filmanalytical, June 17, 2013

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular 'studies of a single film' entries. This one is dedicated to gathering direct links to freely accessible, high-quality studies of Todd Haynes's remarkable film [SAFE] (1995).

The resources are headed (above) by a new video by FSFF's author which was completely inspired by Amber Jacobs's magnificent commentary. This audiovisual essay foregrounds the film's treatment of mothering.

FSFF is also truly delighted and grateful to offer free access (below) to a wonderful, related excerpt from Rob White's recently published book on the cinema of Todd Haynes.

Below the embedded excerpt, readers can find FSFF's customary listing of open access resources on the featured film, and, below that, further offline, bibliographies related to this film.

Rob White on Todd Haynes' SAFE

Embedded excerpts from Rob White, ' The Misery the World Is Made Of: The Cinema of Todd Haynes', TODD HAYNES (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Reproduced here at Film Studies For Free by kind permission of the author and University of Illinois Press. FSFF's thanks go to the author and publisher, and also to Steven Fast.

Notes on Contributors:

• Amber Jacobs works on feminist  theories and philosophies, film and visual culture, ancient Greek myth, tragedy and philosophy and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theories. Her Book On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother came out in 2008 with Columbia University Press. She currently works as a lecturer in the department of psychosocial studies, Birkbeck, University of London.
• Rob White spent ten years as commissioning editor of BFI Publishing (and series editor of the Classics volumes) before becoming, in 2006, editor of Film Quarterly (until 2013). He has been a columnist for Sight and Sound and is author of The Third Man (BFI Film Classics, 2003) and Freud’s Memory: Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body (Palgrave, 2008). His book on Todd Haynes has been published in the University of Illinois Press series, Contemporary Film Directors.

Open Access Resources on [SAFE]

• Andrew Burke, '"Do You Smell Fumes?": Health, Hygiene, and Suburban Life', ESC: English Studies in Canada, 32.4, December 2006
• Rachel Carroll, 'Toxic shock: Gendered environments and embodied knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]', Transformations, Issue 14, March 2007 
• Çakirlar, Cüneyt, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes’ Cinema of Queer Pastiche', Kult 1.1 (2011): 162–200
• Anthony Enns], '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• John Gill, excerpt from Far From Heaven (London: Palgrave/BFI Film Classics: 2011)
• Ruth Goldberg, 'Every Breath You Take: Re-Evaluating Time, Place and Cultural Metaphor in Safe', Screen Memories of the Mad Monstrous '80s: Trauma and Political Allegory in Horror Films that Look Back at the Reagan Years, PhD Thesis, Union Institute and University Cincinatti, Ohio, October 2010 
• Catherine Grant, 'Un[Contained]? On Todd Haynes's [SAFE]', Filmanalytical, June 17, 2013
• Julie Grossman, 'The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling', Other Voices 2.3 January 2005
• Amber Jacobs and Rob White, 'Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce: A Discussion', Film Quarterly, Feburary 2012
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love,' originally published in The Cinema of Todd Haynes, ed. James Morrison (London:Wallflower Press, 2007) 
• Jeremy Justus, "What you are seeing outside is a reflection of what you are feeling within" space, ideology and biopolitics in Safe', AmericanPopularCulture.com, October 2007
• Rose Ellen Lessy, 'Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes’s Safe', Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4):291–308, 2006 
• Jed Mayer, 'Raised in Fear: The Self-Help Horror of Todd Haynes’ SAFE', PressPlay, Indiewire, April 16, 2013 
• Joan Faber McAlister, 'Unsafe Houses: The Narrative Inversion of Suburban Morality in Popular Film', Liminalities, 4.1, 2008
• Alison McLean, 'Todd Haynes', BOMB 52/Summer 1995
• Martha Elisabeth Polk, 'What is Wrong With Carol? Narrative, Genre, Feminism, and Language in Todd Haynes’ Safe', MA dissertation, Emory University, 2013
• Susan Potter, 'Dangerous Spaces: SAFE', Camera Obscura, 57 (Volume 19, Number 3), 2004, pp. 124-154
• Anat Pick, '"No Callous Shell": The Fate of Selfhood from Walt Whitman to Todd Haynes', in James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Jason Qualls, 'Genuine Artifice, Serious Camp: The Women's Films of Todd Haynes', The McNair Scholarly Review, 2008 (scroll to p. 119)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Stranded in the Jungle [on SAFE], Interzones, October 1995
• Chuck Stephens, 'Gentlemen Prefer Haynes', Film Comment, Vol. 31, No. 4, July/August 1995 
• Nick Stevenson, 'What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk', Sociological Research Online, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005
• Amy Taubin, 'Nowhere to Hide', Sight and Sound 6:5 (May 1996) p. 32-34
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002 
• Rob White, 'Todd Haynes’s Poison Reconsidered', Film Quarterly Fall 2011, Vol. 65, No. 1

Film Studies For Free entries on Todd Haynes

• On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day! July 4, 2010
• New Todd Haynes' Masterclass November 27, 2011
• Longtime Companion? HIV/AIDS in thirty years of cinema, media and culture December 1, 2011
• All That Film Pastiche Allows: Fifty+ Online Studies April 15, 2012

Other Resources Mentioned in the Video Essay Bibliography

• Danielle Bouchard and Jigna Desai, '"There's Nothing More Debilitating than Travel“: Locating US Empire in Todd Haynes' Safe', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22(4), 2005: 359–370
• Laura Christian, 'Of Housewives and Saints: Abjection, Transgression, and Impossible Mourning in Poison and Safe', Camera Obscura (2004) 19(3 57): 93-123
• Glyn Davis], 'Health and Safety in the Home: Todd Haynes's clinical white world', in David Alderson and Linda R. Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
• Mary Ann Doane, 'Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes', Camera Obscura (2004) 19(3 57): 1-21
• Roy Grundmann, 'How Clean Was My Valley? Todd Haynes' Safe', Cineaste 21:4, 1995: 22-5
• Lisa Lynch, 'The Epidemiology of "Regrettable Kinship": Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes' [Safe] and Richard Powers' Gain', Journal of Medical Humanities vol. 23, nos. 3-4 (Winter, 2002): 203-19
• José Esteban Muñoz, 'Notes on the Whiteness of New Queer Cinema: Safe', GLQ (1998) 4:1: 126-37
• Gaye Naismith, 'Tales from the Crypt: Contamination and Quarantine in Todd Haynes's [Safe],' In P. Treichler, L. Cartwright, & C. Penley (eds), The Visible Woman: Imagine Technologies, Gender and Science (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
• Roddey Reid, 'Un[Safe] at Any Distance: Todd Haynes's Visual Culture of Health and Risk', Film Quarterly (Spring, 1998): 32-44
• John David Rhodes, 'Allegory, mise-en-scène, AIDS: interpreting Safe', in James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Rob White, Todd Haynes (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013) online excerpt

Further Offline Resources

• Andrew Burke, '"Do you smell fumes?": Health, Hygiene, and Suburban Life', English Studies in Canada, Winter 2006, Vol. 32 Issue 4, pp. 147-168
• Matthew Gandy, 'Allergy and Allegory in Todd Haynes' [Safe]', In: Screening the city edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London and New York: Verso, 2003)
• Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore and Christine Vachon, '"...and all is well in our world" - making Safe', In: Film-makers on film-making edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)
• Susan Kollin, 'Toxic Subjectivity: Gender and the Ecologies of Whiteness in Todd Haynes's Safe', Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 121-39, Winter 2002
• Christopher McQuain, 'Safe Man: Are Todd Haynes' Films Gay Enough?', Film Journal, vol. 1, no. 3, 2002
• Arij Ouweneel, 'Carol's Predicament" The Body in [Safe] (1995) and Jennifer's Body (2009)', Freudian Fadeout: The Failings of Psychoanalysis in Film Criticism (London: McFarland, 2012)
• Dorian Stuber, 'Patient Zero? Illness and Vulnerability in Todd Haynes's [Safe]." Parallax Volume 11, Number 2 / April-June 2005  

  

Front cover of Rob White, Todd Haynes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

 

More about → Study of a Single Film: Todd Haynes' [SAFE] (1995)

Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013 Conference Papers and Contributions Online

            Film Studies and Videographic Assemblage A Video Presentation by Catherine Grant for the S23 Workshop "Writing with Video: Beyond the Illustrated Text", Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Chicago, March 6-10, 2013.

[Catherine Grant's introduction to the above video:] My presentation to this workshop has a somewhat strange take on the notion of the capacity of "video-writing" to move beyond the "illustrated text". The video it presents (embedded above) not only uses a good deal of text, but was also originally inspired by the idea of audiovisually amplifying, or supplementing, a long pre-existing written study of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope.
    What making it demonstrated to me is that, in scholarly settings, even the simplest videographic act of presenting an assemblage of compiled film sequences involves medium-specific forms of argumentation, for example, the selection and presentation of audiovisual evidence, montage and mise en scene, titling, sound editing and other creative effects, all aiming to draw from "a broader notion of pathos, logos, and ethos than that which has been reified in the age of print literacy", as Virginia Kuhn has put it.* The result is not only the creation of an audiovisual argument, therefore, but also, importantly, of an active viewing space for live co-research - a framed experience of participant observation which, particularly through its online distribution, dialogically invites responses (including rebuttals!) through forms of remix. [Also see
Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins) and Déjà-Viewing?Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies]
    *Kuhn, Virginia. 2012. "The Rhetoric of Remix." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. Online at dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0358.

S23 Workshop chaired by Virginia Kuhn (University of Southern California), with presentations by Vicki Callahan, Catherine Grant, Michael Lachney, Virginia Kuhn and Cheryl Ball. The workshop was sponsored by the Media Literacy and Pedagogical Outreach Scholarly Interest Group. The full 2013 SCMS Conference Program PDF is here.

Film Studies For Free is happy to present links to some resources pertaining to papers or presentations at the (recently concluded) annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.

FSFF's author's own contribution to the conference, embedded and pasted in above, was part of a workshop panel on "Writing with Video" (see all of the assets from this workshop gathered by Virginia Kuhn here). In the end, this year -- for the same reasons it's been so quiet at this blog (major, unexpected construction work taking place at home at the same time as a very busy semester!) -- she was unable to travel to the US to attend this final session of the conference in person. But, thanks to the wonders of modern technology her work was kindly presented in absentia by her fellow panelists. Among these, Vicki Callahan and Michael Lachney presented on their pedagogical practices around teaching video argumentation as part of multimedia literacy programmes. In particular, Callahan discussed her classroom use of online video collaborative authoring tools including WeVideo. Cheryl Ball discussed her experience as editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (see Ball's fabulous essay for Kairos on digital scholarship here). And workshop chair Virginia Kuhn presented on her highly innovative large scale video analysis project, a wonderful example of the potential for humanities supercomputing (also see here).

Below are links to a whole host of further conference contributions, mostly collected via Twitter. Thanks very much to those who supplied the links. If you have posted your own SCMS paper online, or know of others not gathered below, please leave the link in a comment. Thank you!

SCMS Digital Humanities J23 Workshop 5_8_13 from scms at livestream.com. Featuring Miriam Posner, Jason Mittell (see below for his paper), Hannah Goodwin, Jasmijn Van Gorp, Jason Rhody and Eric Faden

• Tyler Bickford, '“The Best of Both Worlds”: Hannah Montana, “having it all,” and postfeminist tween domesticity' (Thanks to Anthony C Bleach for the link)
• Shane Denson, 'Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect'
• Theresa Geller, '"The Hardest, The Most Difficult Film:" Todd Haynes’ Safe as Feminist Film Praxis' (Thanks for the link to Julia Leyda)
• Richard Grusin, 'Post-Cinematic Atavism'
• Justin Horton, 'Disembodiment and Ecstatic Perception in The Tree of Life' 
• Amanda Ann Klein, '“To Dance Again!”: Affect, Genre, and the HARRY POTTER Franchise'
• Julia Leyda, 'Playing with Dolls: Girls and Fans in Velvet Goldmine'
• James MacDowell, 'Value, Intention, and the Aesthetics of "So Bad It's Good"'
• Jason Mittell, 'Mapping a Pluralistic Field: What Does Television Studies Really Look Like?' 
• Munib Rezaie, 'The New Chinese Mainstream? Dayyan Eng and Ning Hao’s Appeal for Young Urban Moviegoers in the People’s Republic of China' (Thanks to Justin Horton for the link)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Response to panel on “primordigital cinema,” with talks by Jonathan Freedman, Richard Grusin, and Selmin Kara'
• Chuck Tryon, 'Families are Complicated: Netflix Kids, Personalization, and Digital Delivery'
• María A. Vélez-Serna, 'Film distribution in Scotland in the 1910s: A case study in artificial scarcity as institutional strategy'
• Neil Verma, 'Sound Studies at SCMS 2013'

Also see:

• SCMS YouTube Channel with lots of videos from the conference
• SCMS Annual Conference Live: Chicago 2013 Blogs (by Alexander Cho, Alexandra Juhasz, Chuck Kleinhans, Raquel Gates and Tim Havens)
• Suzanne Scott, 'Distanced Learning: SCMS as MOOC (massively open online conference)'

More about → Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013 Conference Papers and Contributions Online

Four Issues of IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE: Antonioni, Malick, Nolan, Keaton, Russell, Haynes, Neo-Baroque, and more

Screen grab from Salome's Last Dance (Ken Russell, 1988). Read Christophe Van Eecke's study of this film as "Baroque Performance". And also read Film Studies For Free's memorial listing of links to other studies of Russell's work

 

A more systematic way of understanding Russell’s work as baroque could be to simply read it as a contemporary reprise of a form of theatrical performativity associated specifically with seventeenth century baroque theatre. For literary critics one of the key innovations of the baroque stage was its self-reflexivity, its uncanny ability to point at itself in performance and say: look at me, I’m a play! Two important ways of generating this effect were the play-within-the- play and the so-called mise-en-abîme. These two procedures are related yet distinct. The play- within-the-play is a structural feature of baroque theatre, a conceit whereby several characters in a play become spectators of a play performed within the framing narrative, echoing the relationship between the original, framing play and the actual spectators in the theatre. The mise-en-abîme is a thematic trope and is quite literally a mirroring effect (Forestier 13). It refers to the potentially infinite self-reflection that emerges when a play starts mirroring its own action or begins to comment on it. The self-reflexive effect of baroque theatre is most overwhelming when the structural and the thematic self-reflexivity coincide. This happens when a play-within-the- play is used to reveal something about the characters or plot in the original framing story. This is the way the performance of the Mousetrap is used Hamlet. Russell has used the play-within-the- play as a revelatory mise-en-abîme in his film Salome’s Last Dance (1988), which is a play-within-the-film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1893). In this film Russell uses these tropes to reflect, through the play-within-the-film, on his own position as an artist. Therefore it would seem to be a very good place to start an investigation of whether and how Russell is ‘baroque’. The film is also one of the director’s most neglected efforts, which makes a critical discussion all the more timely. [Christophe Van Eecke, 'Moonstruck Follies. Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance (1988) as Baroque Performance', Image and Narrative, 13.2, 2012: pp. 6-7]

Film Studies For Free presents a little catch up entry today: links to all the contents of the latest four issues of the very good, Belgium-based, online journal Image [&] Narrative which treats "visual narratology and word and image studies in the broadest sense".

There are some excellent film studies articles, especially in the latest issue, on the "Neo-Baroque", which begins the below list. FSFF particularly liked the article on Russell's 1988 film, and also Peter Verstraten's article on Antonioni and Malick's "Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose".

Image [&] Narrative, Vol 13, No 2 (2012): Neo-baroque Today 1

Thematic Cluster

• 'Introduction' by Ralph Dekoninck, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, et al Abstract PDF
• 'Moonstruck Follies. Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance (1988) as Baroque Performance' by Christophe Van Eecke Abstract PDF
• 'The Ambiguity of Weeping. Baroque and Mannerist Discourses in Haynes’ Far from Heaven and Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows' by Jack Post Abstract PDF
• 'Cinematic Neo-Mannerism or Neo-Baroque? Deleuze and Daney' by Sjoerd van Tuinen Abstract PDF  
• 'Re-visioning the Spanish Baroque: The Ekphrastic Dimension of Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins by Carlos Fuentes' by Reindert Dhondt Abstract PDF
• 'A Neo-Baroque Tale of Jesuits in Space: Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996)' by Daniel J. Worden Abstract PDF

Various Articles

• 'A Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose: On Antonioni and Malick' by Peter Verstraten Abstract PDF
• 'Metaphors in Buster Keaton’s Short Films' by Maarten Coëgnarts, Peter Kravanja Abstract PDF

Review Articles

• 'Charles Hatfield, Hand of Fire. The Comics of Jack Kirby' by Jan Baetens Abstract PDF

Image [&] Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012): Hauntings II: Uncanny, Figures and Twilight Zones

Thematic Cluster

• 'Introduction' by Fabio Camilletti Abstract PDF
• 'Staging the Uncanny: Phantasmagoria in Post-Unification Italy' by Morena Corradi Abstract PDF  
• 'Freud and Hoffmann, once again' by Tan Wälchli Abstract PDF  
• 'Phantasmagoria: A Profane Phenomenon as a Critical Alternative to the Fetish' by Christine Blaettler Abstract PDF  
• 'Engführung as a Case Study of Paul Celan’s Poetics of the Uncanny' by Vita Zilburg Abstract PDF
• 'Impassively true to life' by Claudia Peppel Abstract PDF
• 'Medial Techniques of the Uncanny and Anxiety' by Michaela Wünsch Abstract PDF 

Various Articles

• 'From Thought to Modality: A Theoretical Framework for Analysing Structural-Conceptual Metaphors and Image Metaphors in Film' by Maarten Coëgnarts, Peter Kravanja Abstract PDF

Review Articles

• 'Inception and Philosophy: Ideas To Die For' by Martin Rosenstock Abstract PDF
• 'Curious Visions of Modernity. Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred' by Jan Baetens Abstract PDF

Image [&] Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011): Introduction to The Story of Things: reading narrative in the visual (part 2)

Thematic Cluster

• 'Introduction' by Jonathan Carson, Rosie Miller Abstract PDF 
• 'Rephrased, Relocated, Repainted: visual anachronism as a narrative device' by Gyöngyvér Horváth Abstract PDF
• 'Lost Children, the Moors & Evil Monsters: the photographic story of the Moors murders' by Helen Pleasance Abstract PDF
• 'Read You Like A Book: Time and Relative Dimensions in Storytelling' by Mike Nicholson Abstract PDF
• 'The Pre-Narrative Monstrosity of Images: how images demand narrative' by William Brown Abstract PDF
• 'Towards Ephemeral Narrative' by Gavin Parry, Jacqueline Butler Abstract PDF

Various Articles

• 'Portrait of the Opportunist as Circus Acrobat: Félicien Champsaur's Entrée de clowns' by Jennifer Forrest Abstract PDF
• 'Depardon, le DATAR et le paysage' by Raphaële Bertho Abstract PDF
• 'Historicising achronism. Some notes on the idea of art without history in David Carrier's The Aesthetics of Comics' by Jan Baetens Abstract PDF

Review Articles

• 'Compte rendu de Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, Littérature et ritualité. Enjeux du rite dans la littérature française contemporaine' by Laurence van Nuijs Abstract PDF

 Image [&] Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011): The Story of Things: reading narrative in the visual

Thematic Cluster

• 'Introduction' by Jonathan Carson, Rosie Miller Abstract PDF
• 'Relating the Story of Things' by Patricia Allmer Abstract PDF
• 'Scrapbook (a visual essay)' by Jonathan Carson, Rosie Miller Abstract PDF
• 'Seeing the Past/Reading the Past' by Karen Bassi Abstract PDF
• 'Ephemeral Art: Telling Stories to the Dead' by Mary O’Neill Abstract PDF
• 'European Locations Dreamed with a Limited Imagination' by Samantha Donnelly Abstract PDF

Various Articles

• 'Belgian Photography: Towards a Minor Photography' by Jan Baetens, Hilde Van Gelder, Mieke Bleyen Abstract PDF
• 'The surrealist book as a cross-border space: The experimentations of Lise Deharme and Gisèle Prassinos' by Andrea Oberhuber Abstract PDF
• 'The Power of Tableaux Vivants in Zola: The Underside of the Image' by Arnaud Rykner Abstract PDF
• 'Spitting Image and Pre-Televisual Political Satire: Graphics and Puppets to Screens' by Kiene Brillenburg Abstract PDF

Review Articles

• 'Sarah Sepulchre, dir. Décoder les séries télévisées' by Jan Baetens Abstract PDF

More about → Four Issues of IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE: Antonioni, Malick, Nolan, Keaton, Russell, Haynes, Neo-Baroque, and more

All That Film Pastiche Allows: Fifty+ Online Studies

All That Pastiche Allows by Catherine Grant

"[Pastiche] can, at its best, allow us to feel our connection to the affective frameworks, the structures of feeling, past and present, that we inherit and pass on. That is to say, it can enable us to know ourselves affectively as historical beings."
Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)

Film Studies For Free today presents a whole host of links to studies of cinematic pastiche. It begins with the above video -- the latest in FSFF's experiments in videographic comparison -- which is designed to afford its viewers a space for real-time co-contemplation of the opening titles sequences of All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) and its 'pastiche' Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002).

• Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven', in The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 (scroll to p. 194)
• Deborah Allison, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006
• Lee Barron, 'Droogs, electro-voodoo and kyborgs: pastiche, postmodernism and Kylie Minogue live', Nebula, 2009  
• Tilman Baumgärtel, 'Imitation, Indigenization, Assimilation? No, Globalization!: The Cinema of Bobby Suarez', Asia Culture Forum, 2006
• Katherine Biber, 'The Threshold Moment: Masculinity at Home and on the Road in Australian Cinema', Limina, Vol. 7, 2001
• Norman Bryson, 'Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema', Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999
• Cüneyt Çakirlar, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes's Cinema of Queer Pastiche', KÜLT: A Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1, April 2011
• Brigid Cherry, 'From Cult to Subculture: Re­imaginings of Cult Films in Alternative Music Video' Scope, 15, 2010
• Simon Chia-rong Wu, 'Gender Pastiche: Thai Queerness in Beautiful Boxer', Cultural Studies Monthly, 78, 2008
•  E. Anna Claydon, 'British South Asian Cinema and Identity II:'When did Mr Collins become the 'Ugly American'? Representing America in the films of Gurinder Chadha'', South Asian Cultural Studies, 2009, 2 (2)
• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven,' Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, No. 5
• Cynthia Duncan, 'Reading Angeles Mastretta's Arráncame la vida through the Lens of Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema', Rocky Mountain Review, 63.2, 1997
  
• Richard Dyer, 'Tales of Plagiarism And Pastiche', Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2010)  (27 free pages) Book info. 
• Darren Elliott, 'Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Horror Icon in Charles Lum's Indelible', Scope, 15, 2010
• Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood(Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
• Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam University Press, 1996)
• Laura E. Felschow, Todd Haynes: the Public, the Private, and the Performative, PhD Thesis, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, February 1, 2009 
• T Ferrero-Regis, 'Cinema On Cinema: Self-reflexive Memories in Recent Italian History Films', transformationsjournal.org, Issue 3, 2002 
• Lucy Fischer, 'Modernity and Postmaternity: High Heels and Imitation of Life', in Horton, Andrew Horton (ed.), Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)  
• Caryl Flynn,The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
• Catherine Grant, 'In authenticity: Douglas Sirk and the Sirkian Melodrama', Film Studies For Free, September 21, 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day!', Film Studies For Free, July 4, 2010 
• Catherine Grant, New Todd Haynes' Masterclass', Film Studies For Free, November 27, 2011
• Catherine Grant, 'Storytelling sans frontières? On Adaptation, Remaking, Intertextuality, and Transmediality', Film Studies For Free, November 21, 2009
• Val Hill, 'Postmodernism and cinema', in S. Sim (ed.), The Routledge companion to postmodernism (Lndon: Routledge, 2000)
• Dom Holdaway, 'Da fatti realmente accaduti: Performing History in Contemporary Italian Cinema', New Readings 11 (2011)
• Marlie Centawer Huisman, ' Representations of Swinging London in 1960s British Cinema: Blowup (1966), Smashing Time (1967) and Performance (1970)', MA Thesis, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, May 2011
• Kate Ince, 'Francois Ozon's cinema of desire', in Ince (ed.), Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon (Manchester University Press, 2008)
• Shen Jiang, Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1993-2008): A Reflection of China's Socio-Cultural Postmodernity, PhD Thesis, University of Canterbury, 2010
• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003
• Jordan Lavender-Smith, 'Irony Inc.: Parodic-Doc Horror and The Blair Witch Project', Scope, 15, 2010
• James MacDowell, 'Beneath the Surface of Things: Interpretation and Far From Heaven', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 5 (May 31, 2006)
• Norimasa Morita, 'Avant-garde, Pastiche, and Media Crossing: Films of Terayama Shūji', Waseda Global Forum No. 3, 2006
• Chi Hyun Park, Orientalism in U. S. Cyberpunk Cinema from Blade Runner to The Matrix, PhD Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, May 2004
• Jack Post, 'The Ambiguity of Weeping. Baroque and Mannerist Discourses in Haynes’ Far from Heaven and Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows', Image and Narrative, 13.2, 2012 
• James Ricci, Attractions and Negotiations of Film Noir in American Cinema and Culture, PhD Thesis, University of South Florida, April, 2008
• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006
• Timothy Robinson, 'Cultural Value in Historical Pastiche: Reclaiming the Past as Modern ‘Parody’ and Postmodern ‘Pastiche’ in The Hours and Marie Antoinette', Honors Thesis, The College of William and Mary, 2008
• Richard Rushton, 'Douglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation', Screening the Past, Issue 21, 2007
• Rebecca Scherr, '(Not) queering “white vision” in Far from Heaven and Transamerica', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 
• Robert Stam, 'Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage: the Case of Brazilian Cinema', E.I.A.L. ESTUDIOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE, Vol. 9, No. 1, enero-junio 1998 (Cultura visual en América Latina, Editor invitado: John Mraz)
• Sunny Stalter, 'Down With Love/Far From Heaven', Scope, May 2004  
• Will Straw, 'Mannerism in Recent Cinema', Cultural Studies, 1987
• Margaret M. Toscano, 'Homer Meets the Coen Brothers: Memory as Artistic Pastiche in O Brother, Where Art Thou?', Film and History, Volume 39.2, Fall 2009
• Michael Töteberg, 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: All That Fassbinder Allows', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2003
• Mary Traester, 'Hysteria and Ruin: Feminine Immobility And the Problem of Representation in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven', COLT Symposium, April 15, 2008 
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Tony Veale, and M. T. Keane (1997). A Computational Treatment of Metaphoric Blends with Special Regard to Cinematic "Borrowing", in the proceedings of Mind II: Computational Models of Creative Cognition, Dublin, Ireland, 1997
• Sharon Willis, 'Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003 
• Chris Wisniewski, 'Far from Heaven', Reverse Shot, - Proposition 24: Defining a New Queer Cinema', 2009
• Jonathan Wright, '[Review of] Re-remembering History in Contemporary Film: Pam Cook (2005) Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema', Film-Philosophy, 10.1, 2006
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema. PhD thesis, University of Sussex, 2010
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Scope, 15, 2010
• Rie Yamasaki, 'The films of Mitani Kōki: Intertextuality and comedy in contemporary Japanese cinema', New Voices, Volume 4, January 2011

More about → All That Film Pastiche Allows: Fifty+ Online Studies

New Todd Haynes' Masterclass

Todd Haynes' masterclass given on November 12, 2011, on the occasion of a retrospective of his films at the XIIth Queer Film Festival MEZIPATRA in Prague. Coproduced by MEZIPATRA, MIDPOINT and FAMU. Todd Haynes speaks about all his films with the Variety critic Boyd Van Hoeij.

Film Studies For Free heard about the above, enjoyable and hugely insightful video thanks to San Francisco based film critic Michael Guillén.

FSFF has a longstanding soft spot for Haynes, a great filmmaker whose work has a compelling relationship with film theory, as well as with Film Studies as a discipline, as the above video indicates time and again.

Interested readers can find earlier FSFF entries on Haynes (with links to lots of online studies of his works) here and here, and also on queer film theory here.

More about → New Todd Haynes' Masterclass

New Issue of Scope! Gollum/LOTR, Egyptian cinema, Fight Club, Snuff-Fiction

Read Mike Miley's review of Glyn Davis's study of  Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987). Read Film Studies For Free's related entry dedicated to Todd Haynes and its entry on the Sirkian melodrama. 

As usual, Film Studies For Free is delighted to bring you news of the latest issue of Scope; an Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. The full table of contents is given below. 

In addition to an excellent selection of main articles, there is an astonishing array of book and film reviews and conference reports, the latter sections in particular flagging up the enormous, but highly worthwhile, collective editorial effort that goes into producing a very good quality Open Access journal.

Thank you, Scope!

Scope, Issue 19, February 2011

Articles

• Playing with Gollum: Uncovering the Cultural Life and Transnational Travels of a Complex Character - Part One Martin Barker

• Playing with Gollum: Uncovering the Cultural Life and Transnational Travels of a Complex Character - Part Two Martin Barker

• Dying to be Seen: Snuff-Fiction's Problematic Fantasies of "Reality" Steve Jones

• Screening Egypt: Reconciling Egyptian Film's Place in "World Cinema" Omar Kholeif

• A Copy, of a Copy, of a Copy? Exploring Masculinity Under Transformation in Fight Club Simon Lindgren

• [ALL ARTICLES ON ONE PAGE]

Book Reviews

• Carmen on Film: A Cultural History by Phil Powrie, Bruce Babington, Ann Davies and Chris Perriam  100 Hundred Years of Spanish Cinema By Tatjana Pavlovi, Inmaculada Alvarez, Rosana Blanco-Cano, Anitra Grisales, Alejandra Osorio and Alejandra Sánchez Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 By Steven Ricci Reviewer: Noelia Saenz

• Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies by Terry Bolas  Beginning Film Studies By Andrew Dix Reviewer: Juli Pitzer

• Isuma: Inuit Video Art by Michael Robert Evans Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples in Canadian Dramatic Television Series By Mary Jane Miller  Reviewer: Heather Macdougall

• The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks by Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.)  Stardom in Postwar France Edited by John Gaffney and Diana Holmes Reviewer: John Berra

• Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson (eds.) Reviewer: Evan Elkins

• Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy by Paola Marrati. Translated by Alisa Hartz  Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film By Irving Singer Reviewer: Alexander Thimons

• Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema by Warren Buckland (ed.) Reviewer: Chris Pallant

• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story by Glyn Davis Reviewer: Mike Miley

• The Hitchcock Annual Anthology: Selected Essays from Volumes 10-15 by Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen (eds.) Reviewer: Christina M. Parker

• Film and Memory in East Germany by Anke Pinkert  Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema By Inga Scharf Reviewer: David Embree

• Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language by Hester Baer Reviewer: Paul Cooke

• Understanding Indian Cinema: Culture, Cognition and Cinematic Imagination by Patrick Colm Hogan  Mourning The Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition By Bhaskar Sarkar Reviewer: Scott Jordan Harris

• Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Movies by Dave Saunders Reviewer: Joseph Arton

• Jean-Pierre Jeunet by Elizabeth Ezra  The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience By Jennifer M. Barker Reviewer: Alison Frank

• Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson  The Films of Hal Ashby By Christopher Beach Reviewer: Aaron Hunter

• Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book by Dean A. Kowalski (ed.)  Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film and Philosophy By Colin Davis Reviewer: Chelsea Wessels

• The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity  by Catherine Russell   Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary By Abé Mark Nornes  Reviewer: Stephen Potter

• Anatomy of Film. Sixth Edition by Bernhard F. Dick Reviewer: Monika Raesch

• Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin by David Church (ed.)  The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers, Volume 1. Edited by George Melnyk Reviewer: Rachel Walls

• TV China by Ying Zhu and Chris Berry (eds.)  Transnational Television in Europe: Reconfiguring Global Communications Networks By Jean K. Chalaby Reviewer: Bärbel Göbel

• [ALL BOOK REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Film Reviews

• The Godfather Reviewer: Mark Chapman

• Red Hill Reviewer: Kate Harper

• The Eclipse Reviewer: Andrea Grunert

• Life on Mars Reviewer: Mary Irwin

• Kaminey Reviewer: Sagnik Banerjee

• [ALL FILM REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Conference Reports

• British Film 2000-2010: Crossing Borders, Transferring Cultures, Germersheim School of Translation, Interpreting, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Mainz, 18 – 21 February 2010 Reporter: Ron Walker

• NERFS (North-East Regional Film Seminar), Northumbria University, Newcastle, 15 July 2010 Reporter: Louise Anderson and Erin Hill-Parks

• Investigating Torchwood: Text, Context, Audiences, Cardiff School of Creative Arts, University of Glamorgan, 18 June 2010 Reporter: Ross P. Garner

• NECS 2010 Annual Conference, Communication Faculty, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, 24 – 27 June 2010 Reporter: Ozgur Cicek

• MeCCSA-PGN 2010: Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association Postgraduate Network Conference, University of Glasgow, 31 June – 1 July 2010 Reporter: Douglas McNaughton

• Screen Studies Conference: Screen Performance, University of Glasgow, 2 – 4 July 2010 Reporter: Melanie Hoyes

• [ALL CONFERENCE REPORTS ON ONE PAGE]

More about → New Issue of Scope! Gollum/LOTR, Egyptian cinema, Fight Club, Snuff-Fiction

In authenticity: Douglas Sirk and the Sirkian Melodrama

Image from Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

I first saw Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life in 1959 at The Yeadon, a neighbourhood movie house in a white working-class suburb of Philadelphia. I was 16. Imitation of Life was about four women, two of them black. When we came out afterward, most of us were crying. The theatre owner's wife was standing in the lobby with a box of Kleenex. Many people gratefully took a tissue to dry their eyes. This is what Sirk wanted, I believe. [Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005]

[W]ith the reconsideration of directors like Douglas Sirk and the application of (gasp) irony, “melodrama” isn’t the dirty word it once was. Initially, film studies criticism used the term pejoratively to connote unrealistic, pathos-filled, campy tales of romance or domestic situations with cliché-ridden characters intended to appeal to female audiences. Understandably, these were considered to be lesser films, sentimental pap churned out by the Hollywood tear-jerk machine. And if one couldn’t look beyond these tropes – if the viewer were unable to see through them – they might find themself (like many critics of the 1950s) unjustly unwilling to give credit where credit is due.

     Sirk, for example, a contract director working mostly at Universal, was known for turning out dizzy romantic fiascos; glossy and kitsch, excessive and (sometimes) silly, these dependable studio projects were routinely panned by critics and “sophisticated” audiences. What these viewers missed was the subversive strain running through Sirk’s art. He wasn’t just making a melodrama, he was using it. Even the critic James Harvey admits to “missing” Sirk the first time around, remembering his biggest hits, Written on the Wind (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959), to be “unredeemably bad”. But twenty years after its release, Harvey returned to Imitation of Life and found himself overwhelmed.

     My awareness of even a possible ironic intention seemed to transform the movie for me. As it had, it seemed, for the audience around me, who were responding to it in a way no imaginable 1950s audience could have: being alert and to and amused by every hollow ring in Lana Turner’s multi-costumed, leading-lady performance, for example, just as I was being. We had become an audience for the “Sirkian subtext”, as it was called. And we were no longer (as we had been years before) jeering alone. This time even the director was on our side.

     And so there is the Melodrama and there is the melodramatic. The trick is to figure out which is which. [Sam Wasson, Bigger Than Life: The Picture, The Production, The Press', Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006]

The most important ironies in Sirk are those of so much film melodrama of the 1950s, namely the ironies of the failure of dominant ideology, the vast distance between how social institutions, gender roles, and other fundamental values are supposed to function and how they actually do function. Much of this “ironic” social critique of Sirk’s films is overt and uncomplicated (the country-club values in All That Heaven Allows or Lana Turner’s kitsch glamour in Imitation of Life [USA, 1959]). What the “irony in Sirk” debate is mostly directed to, instead, is the fact that the films often take up an attitude critical of ideological norms without overtly acknowledging that they are conducting such a cri- tique, and that they present characters in the grip of dominant values (therefore “good” characters) whose ideological conformity is objectively destructive but who are never overtly labelled by the film as hollow or destructive (the Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall characters in Written on the Wind are a clear example). The melodrama of Sirk and his contemporaries is quite different in this respect from most earlier forms of cinematic melodrama (Griffith for example), where all the values inherent in the films are plainly depicted as what the films think they are. But although the hollowness of some of Sirk’s “good” characters does indeed interfere with the overt ideological work of the narrative, it hardly disables the melodrama of these characters’ sufferings, or the pathos of their entrapment in ideology. Indeed, the reverse is the case: they are rendered more pathetic by their impossibility, and the film’s distance from their “false consciousness” then functions much like dramatic irony, and not at all like any kind of scornful detachment. [William Beard, 'Maddin and Melodrama', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 14:2, Autumn 2005, fn 6, pp.15-16]

[T]o understand what Imitation of Life is trying to do audiences have to trust in its distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, between its evocations of real life and its manifestations of life’s imitations. The evocations of real life rely on emotional manipulation – the emotion of motion pictures. It is only by way of these moments of intense emotional involvement that the moments of authenticity in the film can be distinguished from those of pretence. And it is the moments of pretence, of escaping into falsifying theatres of one form or another, that Sirk is holding up for criticism. Finally, that is what is produced by Sirkian ‘ironic distanciation’: an acknowledgment of the inauthentic imitation of life.[Richard Rushton, 'Douglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation', Screening the Past, Issue 21, 2007]

Film Studies For Free today celebrates studies of the work of Douglas Sirk with an almost melodramatically long list of links to online scholarly items on this director's films and some of the films they have influenced. The list builds on Kevin B. Lee's very valuable, existing webliographical work.
 
FSFF knows, of course, that offering up such easy access to these resources means that there won't be a dry eye in the house. But if your tears are due to FSFF having missed a good Sirkian link, do please let us know by commenting below...

• Jeanine Basinger, “The Lure of the Gilded Cage: All I Desire and There's Always Tomorrow”, Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• William Beard, 'Maddin and Melodrama', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 14:2, Autumn 2005, fn 6, pp.15-16

• Jean-Loup Bourget, 'Sirk and the Critics', Translated by Eithne Bourget,  Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Jean-Loup Bourget, 'God Is Dead, or, Through a Glass Darkly', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Jeremy B. Butler, 'Imitation of Life (John Stahl, 1934. Douglas Sirk, 1959): Style and the domestic melodrama', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 25-28

• Fred Camper, 'The Films of Douglas Sirk: The Epistemologist of Despair', Chicago Reader, April 14, 2006

• Susan Courtney, ‘Picturizing race: Hollywood’s censorship of miscegenation and production of racial visibility through Imitation of Life’, Genders, vol. 27, 1998 (mostly on the Stahl film)

• Adrian Danks, “The Far Side of Paradise”: Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005

• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven,' Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, No. 5

• Sybil DelGaudio, 'The mammy in Hollywood film: I'd walk a million miles — for one of her smiles', from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 23-25

• Lucy Fischer, 'Modernity and Postmaternity: High Heels and Imitation of Life', in Horton, Andrew Horton (ed.), Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

• Freda Freiberg, Review of Fannie Hurst, Imitation of life. Edited and introduced by Daniel Itzkovitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)', Screening the Past, 20, 2006

• Chris Fujiwara, 'Tears Without Laughter Deciphering audience responses to Douglas Sirk, in the U.S. and Japan', Moving Image Source, August 18, 2008 

• Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005

• Stephen Handzo, 'Intimations of Lifelessness: Sirk's Ironic Tearjerker', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Sara Hayat, Dream Houses Gone Wrong: Small Town, Suburbia, and Architectural Narrative in Four Films by Douglas Sirk, Masters Thesis, University of Miami, 2010

• Richard Henke, 'Imitation of Life: Imitation world of vaudeville', from Jump Cut, no. 39, June 1994, pp. 31-39

• Victoria Jaschob, 'Fear of Heaven', Film International, 2007

• Tamar Jeffers McDonald, '“Very Little Wrist Movement”: Rock Hudson Acts Out Sexual Heterodoxy', Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 31 (2006) 843-858

• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003

• Kevin B. Lee, 'Douglas Sirk: An Annotated Webliography', Shooting Down Pictures, December 2009

• André de Alencar Lyon, 'The Afterlife of Melodrama: Roger Michell's Changing Lanes', SURJ., Spring 2004

• James MacDowell, 'Beneath the Surface of Things: Interpretation and Far From Heaven', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 5 (May 31, 2006)

• Geoff Mayer, 'Review of Ben Singer. Melodrama and modernity. Early sensational cinema and its contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001', Screening the Past, 16, 2004

• Marsha McCreadie, 'Petra’s Place', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• Gary Morris, 'Introduction to the Douglas Sirk Issue', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Gary Morris, 'Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind", Images, Issue 10, February 2004 

• Laura Mulvey, 'All That Heaven Allows', Criterion Collection, June 18, 2001

• Laura Mulvey, 'Written on the Wind', The Criterion Collection, June 18, 2001

• Geoffrey O’Brien, 'Magnificent Obsessions', The Criterion Collection, January 19, 2009

• Ryan Powell, 'Putting on the Red Dress: Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,' Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007

• Mark Rappaport, 'The Sirk-Hudson Connection', The Criterion Collection, January 21, 2009

• Mark Rappaport, 'The Secret Life of Objects', Rouge, 13, 2009

• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006

• Vadim Rizov, 'Stahl vs. Sirk', The Daily Notebook, January 31, 2009

• Monique Rooney, 'What passes in Imitation of Life (1959)?', Humanities Research Vol. XVI. No. 1. 2010: Passing, Imitations, Crossings,edited by Monique Rooney and Carolyn Strange (PDF) 

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Rediscovering Ali: Fear Eats the Soul', JonathanRosenbaum.com, September 5, 2008

• Richard Rushton, 'Douglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation', Screening the Past, Issue 21, 2007

• Tom Ryan, 'Douglas Sirk/Detlef Sierck', Senses of Cinema, November 2003

• Dave Sanjek, 'Summer Storm', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005

• Andrew Sarris, 'Sarris on Sirk', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Christopher Sharrett, 'Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow', Cineaste, Vol.XXXV No. 4 2010

• Robert E. Smith, 'Love Affairs That Always Fade', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Jane Stern and Michael Stern, “Two Weeks in Another Town: Interview with Douglas Sirk”, Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Antonio João Teixeira, '“A False Creation" - Stains in the Glossy World of Imitation of Life', Revista Letras, Curitaba, N. 66, P. 193-206, Maio/Ago. 2005

• Michael Töteberg, 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: All That Fassbinder Allows', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2003

• Suzanna Danuta Walters, Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

• Sharon Willis, 'Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk', orignally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003

• Agustin Zarzosa, 'Signifying Objects, Embodied Ideas, and Melodrama', Scope, Issue 7, february 2007

• George Zuckerman and Albert Zugsmith, 'Zuckerman and Zugsmith on Sirk', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

More about → In authenticity: Douglas Sirk and the Sirkian Melodrama