New Fall 2013 Issue of MEDIASCAPE on "Urban Centers, Media Centers"

Frame grab from The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012). Read José Gallegos' article about this film in the new issue of Mediascape

This issue of Mediascape then is designed to raise pointed questions about the role of the city as a center of both media and cultural production, especially in relation to our experience of mediated reality. The ultimate goal is to ground this larger discourse in a more specific discussion of cinematic space and its transformation in the ever-expanding era of digital media. How do films represent the city in a time of technological change and aesthetic evolution? How has the wholesale implementation of digital technologies impacted the use of space in cinema? And how does the digital era affect the relationship between the off-screen and on-screen spatial environment? Looking at the distinctive aesthetics of urban space, it is our belief, allows for an examination of how we perceive and engage with the iconography of our world. Our intent is to problematize what we understand as the urban, and how strongly it relates to our relationship with contemporary media.

[Matthias Stork and Andrew Young, Mediascape Co-Editors-in-Chief, Introduction to the Fall 2013 issue]

Film Studies For Free would like its readers to head straight on over to the new issue of Mediascape which considers matters of space and mediation. 

FSFF would particularly recommend Matthias Stork's marvellous (and marvellously illustrated) study of the 'Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games', James Gilmore's fascinating essay on The Dark Knight Rises, urban space and the cultural experience of terrorism as mediation, as well as José Gallegos' essay on the Tsunami disaster film The Impossible. The issue also boasts unmissable items in the area of game studies.

Readers may also be interested to know that the excellent Mediascape blog is seeking new contributors on a wide variety of topics. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, or if you would like more information about the blog, please write to Editor-in-Chief Matthias Stork at mstork[at]ucla[dot]edu.

• Moving Through Videogame Cities Bobby Schweizer
• The Impossible – Or How I Learned Thailand Was Filled with European Tourists Jose Gallegos
• Absolute Anxiety Test: Urban Wreckage in The Dark Knight Rises James Gilmore
• Dimensions of the Digital City Oscar Moralde
• Space-Wars: Mapping the Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games Matthias Stork
• Negotiating Transitional Spaces in Classic Games Harrison Gish
• Invisible Walls: Narrativizing Spatial Limitation in Ico and Assassin’s Creed II Bryan Wuest
• Perpetual Game Space in Crime City: Game Design in the Age of Social Network Gaming Andrew Young

More about → New Fall 2013 Issue of MEDIASCAPE on "Urban Centers, Media Centers"

Links on videographical film criticism, editing, 'intensified continuity', 'chaos cinema', 'hapticity' and (post) cinematic affect

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT?

A FILMANALYTICAL video collage, made by Catherine Grant

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? offers a brief audiovisual exploration of issues of sensuous proximity, contiguity or contact in experiencing or studying films - what theorist Laura U. Marks called 'hapticity'. It quotes from Marks' essay 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes' [in FRAMEWORK: the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004, pp. 79-82], as well as from Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film PERSONA (cinematography by Sven Nykvist). The music is excerpted from Robert Lippok and Beatrice Martini's BRANCHES, available at the Free Music Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can read an accompanying written essay about this video and videographic film studies here.

A ragbag of links, today, at Film Studies For Free. But this blog wanted to flag up some recently published, and curiously related, audiovisual items of possible interest, together with some associated written resources.

First up, is the video above, the latest of FSFF's videographic film studies experiments. Compared with FSFF's other videos, this film-theoretical one turned out to be a close kin of two earlier video 'primers' (on Gilda, film noir, gender and performance and on Elizabeth Taylor, framing and child stardom/performance). As befits primers, rather than

aiming to generate completely new insights, [these 'rich text objects' attempt], within the time-space of the average YouTube fan clip, to assemble and combine quotations from existing film scholarship on [their topics] with sequences from the film in question in order to provide a meaningful, scholarly and affective, immersive experience. [FSFF, April 7, 2011]

If you are beginning to be invested in, or just mildly curious about, the possibilities of videographic film criticism and film theory, then do read 'Touching the Film Object? Notes on the 'Haptic' in Videographical Film Studies' by Catherine Grant at FSFF's sister blog Filmanalytical, and also check out further links and thoughts here.

Next up, a pointer to an exciting, film-theory related, theme week at the great website In Media Res on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect, running between August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011.

There are a couple of interesting entries up already, with very lively comments streams. Further links will be added below as the posts go live. In the meantime, you can read a lengthy excerpt from Shaviro's book on Post-Cinematic Affect here. And do visit his blog where you will find lots more material from this work.

• 'Cinema's Exhaustion and the Vitality ...' by Elena del Rio
• 'Post-Cinematic Effects' by Paul Bowman
• 'A hair of the dog that bit us' by Adrian Ivakhiv
• 'Fragments of unconscious' by Patricia MacCormack
• 'Steven Shaviro Presents': A response to the week

Finally, FSFF wanted to make sure that its own readers were alerted to a very lively debate on 'intensified continuity' and 'chaos cinema' in relation to the action film (broadly defined) that has sprung up online as a result of the publication of a two part video essay on those topics at the wonderful new (video-essay-rich) website PressPlay, curated by film critic and video essayist extraordinaire Matt Zoller Seitz. The 'Chaos Cinema' essay, embedded below, is by a young film scholar Matthias Stork and is well worth a look.

Below the videos, FSFF has linked to related online, scholarly and journalistic items treating substantially similar issues as 'Chaos Cinema', published before his essay, as well as to ones produced directly in response to Stork's work.

Enjoy! 

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork.

The video essay Chaos Cinema, administered by Indiewire's journalistic blog PRESS PLAY, examines the extreme aesthetic principles of 21st century action films. These films operate on techniques that, while derived from classical cinema, threaten to shatter the established continuity formula. Chaos reigns in image and sound. Part 1 contrasts traditional action films with chaotic ones and takes a close look at the "sound" track, especially its use in car chases.

Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork.

Part 2 takes a look at the chaotic style in dialogue scenes, musicals, "shaky-cam" extravaganzas and mourns the rich history of early cinema.

• David Bordwell, 'Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film', originally in Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 16-28
• David Bordwell, 'Intensified Continuity Revisited', Observations of Film Art, May 2007
• David Bordwell, 'Unsteadicam Chronicles', Observations on Film Art, August 17, 2007
• David Bordwell, 'Bond vs. Chan: Jackie shows how it’s done', Observations on Film Art, September 15, 2010
  
• Steven Boone, 'Blind Fury: Notes on Chaos Cinema', PressPlay, August 27, 2011
• Chris Cagle, 'More on (Post-)Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 18, 2007
• Jim Emerson, 'Agents of Chaos', Scanners, August 23, 2011
• Jim Emerson, 'The Architecture of Gravity', Scanners, January 20, 2009
• Jim Emerson, 'Bye, Sally -- Sally Menke, 1953 - 2010', Scanners, September 28, 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'Seeing the join: on film editing', Film Studies For Free, April 16, 2010
• Ian Grey, 'The Art of Chaos Cinema', PressPlay, August 26, 2011
• Ambrose Heron, 'Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the AVID', Film Detail, August 23, 2011
• Kevin Howley, 'Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction', Scope May 2004
• Neal King, 'Secret Agency in Mainstream Postmodern Cinema', Postmodern Culture, 18.3, 2008 
• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'Structural completeness in The War Is Over', Short Film Studies, 1.1, 2010
• Catherine O'Rawe, 'More more Moro: Music and montage in Romanzo criminale', the italianist 29 · 2009 · 214-226
• Steven Shaviro, 'Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films', The Pinocchio Theory, May 12, 2010
• Matthias Stork, 'Chaos Cinema: The decline and fall of action filmmaking', PressPlay, August 22, 2011
• James Udden, 'Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuaron’s Film Aesthetics in the Shadow of Globalization', Style, Volume 43, No. 1, Spring 2009
• Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Why are so many modern action movies terrible?', PressPlay, August 25, 2011

More about → Links on videographical film criticism, editing, 'intensified continuity', 'chaos cinema', 'hapticity' and (post) cinematic affect

In-Sight from Excursions: action movies, neuroscience, dreamscapes, intermediality and spectatorship

Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)

The image seems to be a way of marking such a potential separation between exterior and interior while belonging to both. Moreover, that condition of holding ‘in sight’, as a means of externalisation as belonging to the image, is realised in the easy conceptual slippage from ‘in sight’ to ‘insight’- originally ‘internal sight’ or seeing with the eyes of the mind, that later becomes a seeing into a thing or subject. To bring an object within sight is to affect the ‘inner eye’, to re-formulate the relationship of the visible to the invisible, presence to absence.  Lindsay Smith, 'Foreword: In-Sight', Excursions, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (June 2010), i-ii

Thanks to the regular updates to Jurn, the excellent search-engine that Film Studies For Free uses in its every waking hour (and then dreams of every night), FSFF found its way to a newish e-journal -- Excursions -- with a first issue replete with interesting and, yes, insightful items on film.

Its Mission Statement reads as follows:

Excursions is an invitation to journey into the unfamiliar, a space in which to reflect upon the travels of concepts, beyond the boundaries of one’s discipline. An on-line peer-reviewed journal, Excursions is designed to showcase high-quality, innovative and inventive postgraduate research. Run by postgraduates in the School of English at the University of Sussex, we aim to encourage work that plays with the permeable nature of academic disciplines. As such, our interest lies in the interdisciplinary. Each issue of the journal has a theme which contributors can interpret as they see fit. We welcome critical papers or creative pieces and seek to place cultural, political, artistic and scientific discourses together in surprising combinations and illuminating moments of collision.

And here is the table of contents:

Articles

• Foreword Lindsay Smith

• The Eye, the Brain, the Screen – What Neuroscience Can Teach Film Theory Paul Elliott

• Hard bodies and sidelong looks: Spectacle and fetish in 1980s action cinema Nicky Falkof

• Through the Arendtian Lens: Developing Statelessness through Gregor Schneider's 'Weisse Folter' Suzy K. Freake

• Waking Life: The Destiny of Cinema’s Dreamscape; or the Question of Old and New Mediations Markos Hadjioannou

• The Embodied Spectator and the Uncomfortable Experience of Watching Romance and The Piano Teacher Sara Elisabeth Sellevold Orning

• Invoking The Spectral Body: A Study of Potential Corporealities in the Work of Marina Abramovic and Francesca Woodman  Prema Purigali Prabhakar

• The Problem of Film Theatre Intermediality in Jesus of Montreal Laura Sava

• Writing the world: photographing the text of the landscape Gina Wall

More about → In-Sight from Excursions: action movies, neuroscience, dreamscapes, intermediality and spectatorship