New WORLD PICTURE on 'Left': PT Anderson, Hollis Frampton, Vincente Minnelli and much more

Screenshot from The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli, 1955). Read Agustín Zarzosa's article on this film in the new issue of World Picture

It's that wonderful time of year when a new issue from one of Film Studies For Free's favourite journals World Picture hits the open access e-stands. The brilliant contents in issue 8 on 'Left' are listed in full and linked to below.

FSFF particularly enjoyed the essay on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights by the legendary film scholar Tanya Modleski as well as Alexander García Düttmann on Hollis Frampton's 1971 film (nostalgia) (a version of which may be viewed online here) and Agustín Zarzosa on The Cobweb and the Politics of Decoration.

If you're in (or could be in) the environs of Toronto on November 7-8, 2013, you may be interested in attending the very convivial, annual World Picture conference. This year it treats the keyword 'willing' and boasts the participation of very fine keynote speakers: Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago) and Davide Panagia (Trent University).

Table of Contents

• Argos Euclid

• Rey Chow Remains’ Regime Change?

• Alexander García Düttmann Why Burn a Photograph? A Film by Hollis Frampton

• Sam Ladkin The Patient Poetry and Poetics of Rob Halpern

• Erica Levin Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows

• Tania Modleski Historical Omission and Psychic Repression in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights

• Jonathan Mullins What Remains of the Italian Left of the 1970s?

• Evan Calder Williams Pseudo-Cinema

• Agustín Zarzosa The Cobweb and the Politics of Decoration

More about → New WORLD PICTURE on 'Left': PT Anderson, Hollis Frampton, Vincente Minnelli and much more

New WORLD PICTURE on 'Wrong'

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" Original from ppow_gallery on Vimeo

A Fire in My Belly is an awkward work that at first glance can appear to be both hyperbolic or overreaching and inconsistent or contradictory. This short film resembles a travel log, an illustrated lecture, or an educational slide show that mixes the unpitying gaze of a mondo cane film (unwrapped mummies with gaping mouths, unusually disabled bodies performing daily tasks, animals forced into fighting by their human captors) with the deliriously overwrought expressionism of 1980s music videos (spinning eyeballs aflame, strobed flashes of milk splashes). The film also recalls major moments in the visual avant-garde of the twentieth century by invoking 1920s surrealist iconography, aping Eisenstein’s clunkier intellectual montages, and echoing the idolatry of Kenneth Anger’s films which themselves borrow from the formal idioms [of] religious and exploitation films. A Fire in My Belly overtly conflates symbolic registers and gains momentum by joining documentary footage of workers performing precarious tasks or snakes devouring their prey to staged studio shots of symbolic transactions involving leaking blood, throwing money, spinning globes, or torched marionettes.  [from Karl Schoonover's essay 'David Wojnarowicz's Graven Image: Cinema, Censorship, and Queers'; hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Following its much appreciated seasonal break, a rather bleary-eyed but well-rested Film Studies For Free wishes its readers a very happy new year.

Its first few posts of 2012 will be devoted to catching up with some new issues of online film and moving image studies related journals, starting with a listing of links to a new collection of work from one of the most original of such journals: World Picture on the concept of 'wrong'.

FSFF particularly liked Schoonover on Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly, (as above), Schwartz's riff on Pasolini, Malsky on dystopian sound, and Manon and Temkin on glitch art.

WORLD PICTURE 6, 2011: Table of Contents

• Mark Andrejevic: Estrangement 2.0
• Bishnupriya Ghosh: Governing by Wrong
• Seb Franklin: Is Attention Really Immaterial? Visual Culture after Post-Fordism
• Danny Hayward: The Essential Standpoint of Man: An Autopsy, In Three Parts
• Sam Lipsyte in conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland: Acategorical Imperatives
• Matt Malsky: Being Heard: Listening In–Sound and Our Dystopian Present
• Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin: Notes on Glitch
• Daniel Temkin—gl1tchw0rks gall3ry
• Davide Panagia: The Notion of Pantry: A Speculative Defense of Unuse
• Brian Price: A Theory of Regret
• Lucy Raven: Tech City
• Scott C. Richmond: “Dude, That's Just Wrong”: Mimesis, Identification, Jackass
• Karl Schoonover: David Wojnarowicz's Graven Image: Cinema, Censorship, and Queers
• Louis-Georges Schwartz: A Futher Explanation of My Last Error By Pier Paolo Pasolini
• A. L. Steiner: WELCOME TO MY RECTANGLE

More about → New WORLD PICTURE on 'Wrong'

New World Picture 5: Varda, Solomon, Citron, Jacobs, Schneeman, Wisconsin Death Trip,

Image from Innocence and Despair (Phil Solomon, 2001). Experience Solomon's video at World Picture Journal 5: Sustainability

Film Studies For Free is a longstanding and ardent supporter of the online journal World Picture. Today, FSFF is thrilled to bring you news of the latest issue (no. 5) on Sustainability which has just gone online. There are plenty of wonderful film-related items, as usual, as well as some timely and important essays and interviews on sustainability from a number of other key perspectives for the Arts and Humanities.

Great work, WP!

Below, you can find the issue's  table of contents, and below that you can find the call for papers for the next World Picture conference, this time in Toronto, so do please scroll down for those.

Table of Contents

• Eugenie Brinkema Burn. Object. If.

• Tina di Carlo  Excess Sustainability, Sustainable Excess: A Dossier of Statements on Architecture and Sustainability Statements by Stefano Harney, Geoffrey West, Rem Koolhaas, Jeffrey Inaba, Bjarke Ingels, and Tomas Saraceno

• Michelle Citron in conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland The Ambiguous Archive

• Alexander García Düttmann The Life and Death of the University

• Ken Jacobs 3D is Intoxicating and Three 3D Poems: Lulu in Hollywood, Routine, The Story of a Devoted Couple

• Jennifer Johung Sustainably Dependent: Bio-Architectural Living Spaces

• Maebh Long The Hedgehog and Lord Browne: The “To Come” of the Humanities

• Ian MacKaye in conversation with Brian Price Records

• Timothy Morton Unsustaining

• Karen Pinkus and Cameron Tonkinwise Want Not: A Dialogue on Sustainability with Images

• Rebekah Rutkoff The Splatter Technique: An Interior Dialogue Between the Narrator and Carolee Schneeman

• Phil Solomon Innocence and Despair (2001): A Decade Later

• Allan Stoekl Agnès Varda and the Limits of Gleaning

CALL FOR PAPERS: 2011 World Picture Conference 
October 21-22 University of Toronto 
Lorenz Engell, Bauhaus University, Weimar Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University

The annual World Picture Conference gathers scholars from a range of different disciplines to address the relation between critical theory, philosophy, and aesthetics. For this year’s meeting we welcome papers on questions of distance. Such considerations might include (but are in no sense limited to):  

• Distance and mediation (technological and otherwise) 
• Distance as abstraction (or alienation, estrangement) 
• Travel Simultaneity
• Spatial allegories of distance
• Vision (as the prime sense organ of distance)
• Modes of translation
• Geopolitics (of distance)
• Distance and/as interval (distance as time, not just space) 
• Distance and unknowing/ignorance 
• Critique of proximity/propinquity 
• Ecology and distance (global footprints, carbon calculations, etc.) 
• Scale Emotion Critical distance/objectivity

Please submit proposals (250 words, plus brief bio) by June 17 to: brian.price@utoronto.ca

More about → New World Picture 5: Varda, Solomon, Citron, Jacobs, Schneeman, Wisconsin Death Trip,

Happy Saturday Reading: New 'World Picture Journal'

Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge, directed by Cui Wei and Chen Huai’ai, 1959)

Film Studies For Free is delighted to report that the new Summer 2009 issue of World Picture Journal (number 3) has just been posted at its website. The issue is on 'Happiness'

Below are direct links to its three film-related articles. The issue also includes other wonderful essays on Adorno and John Stuart Mill, and a fabulous interview with Adam Phillips:

• Sara Ahmed, Happiness and Queer Politics (includes reference to the Canadian lesbian film, Lost and Delirious [Léa Pool, 2001])


• Jason McGrath, Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People's Republic of China


• Brian Price, On Compromises (on film theory and political philosophy)

More about → Happy Saturday Reading: New 'World Picture Journal'