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New issue of SCOPE: Nicole Holofcener, Realism, Self-Transformation Narratives, Károly Makk, the Feature Film as "Short Story" and More

Diposting oleh good reading on Jumat, 30 November 2012


Framegrab from Lovely and Amazing (Nicole Holofcener, 2001). You can read Rachel Lister's article about Holofcener's films here

Life is good, thinks Film Studies For Free: a new issue of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies has just been published. There's a small but well-edited selection of great articles, and an enormous number of hugely useful book reviews and conference reports. FSFF particularly liked Rachel Lister on Nicole Holofcener's "short story" films and Miklós Kiss on Károly Makk's Szerelem/Love.

All contents are listed and linked to below.

Scope: Issue 24 October 2012

Articles

Book Reviews

Film and Television Reviews

Conference Reports
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FSFF's Favourite Online Film Studies Resources in 2011

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 20 Desember 2011

Insightful interview (in English) with filmmaker and academic Clio Barnard about her experimental documentary The Arbor on the life and work of Andrea Dunbar, British writer of the 1986 film Rita, Sue and Bob, too. The Arbor was one of Film Studies For Free's author's favourite films seen in 2011 (interview December 5, 2011)

Not since its December 2008 blog entry A-Z of Favourite Scholarly Film and Moving Image Blogs has the otherwise intrepid Film Studies For Free ventured into the rather crowded, online territory of end-of-year lists.

But, as it signs off on its seasonal break until the first few days of 2012, FSFF thought the time was right for a listing of links to its favourite, openly accessible, online Film Studies resources in 2011.

Thanks so much to all who worked hard to bring you these openly accessible treasures in the first place. And thanks also, dear readers, for being there to appreciate them.

FSFF very much looks forward to seeing you again in the New Year.
  1. Top seven film and moving image studies history resources online in 2011: 
    1. The Colonial Film Project archive plus two freely accessible chapters by those involved in the project: Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film (BFI/Palgrave, 2011) and 32 sample pages; and Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (BFI/Palgrave, 2011) and 25 sample pages
    2. Media History Digital Library
    3. The Turconi Project
    4. EU Screen
    5. European Film Gateway
    6. The Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories
    7. The Kracauer Lectures website
  2. Top five, most consistently brilliant Film Studies bloggers:
    1. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson for Observations on Film Art
    2. Luke McKernan for The Bioscope (also see McKernan's two new ScoopIt! projects: The Bioscope and Screen Research)
    3. Roland-François Lack for The Cine-Tourist, The Daily Map and The BlowUp Moment (also see The Autopsies Group website) and also on Twitter
    4. Dan North for Spectacular Attractions (also see The Cinema of Puppetry) and also on Twitter
    5. Tie between Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad for Tativille and Ten Best Films; and  Omar Ahmed for Ellipsis
  3. Best new Film Studies blog: Katherine Groo's Half/Films
  4. Best 'media studies approaches to film and moving image studies' blog - tie between:
    1. Just TV by Jason Mittell (also on Twitter)
    2. Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style by Anne Helen Petersen (also on Twitter)
    3. The Chutry Experiment by Chuck Tryon (also on Twitter)
    4. The Negarponti Files by Negar Mottahedeh (also on Twitter and Facebook)
  5. Most consistently original, Film and Moving Image Studies writer active online - a tie between: 
    1. Adrian Martin (e.g. see all the links here)
    2. Nicholas Rombes (e.g. see here and here)
    3. Amanda Ann Klein (also see here)
    4. David Bordwell
    5. Kristin Thompson (also see here and here)
    6. Jeffrey Sconce (also see here)
  6. Best Film Studies informed, commercial film criticism website: Alternate Takes
  7. Best new online film journal in 2011 - a tie between:
    1. LOLA edited by Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu
    2. ALPHAVILLE edited by Laura Rascaroli and others at the University of Cork
    3. JOAN'S DIGEST edited by Miriam Bale
  8. Best recently established online academic Film Studies journal: MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism
  9. Top twelve established, online, (mostly) English language, Film Studies journals:
    1. Screening the Past
    2. Film-Philosophy
    3. SCOPE
    4. Jump Cut
    5. Senses of Cinema
    6. MEDIASCAPE
    7. Participations
    8. Bright Lights Film Journal
    9. CINEPHILE
    10. Offscreen
    11. La Furia Umana 
    12. World Picture Journal
    13. For links to one hundred more journals (including some brilliant, primarily non-English language journals, like Transit: Cine..., see here)
  10. Most generous, Open Access Film Studies author: Thomas Elsaesser for the below freely accessible e-books and for the hundreds of further resources linked to from his website:
    1. Elsaesser, Thomas (ed), A Second Life : German Cinema's First Decades (Amsterdam University Press, 1996)
    2. Elsaesser, Thomas (ed), Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
    3. Elsaesser, Thomas,  Jan Simons, Lucette Bronk (eds), Writing for the Medium: Television in transition (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
    4. Elsaesser, Thomas, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
    5. Elsaesser, Thomas, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam University Press, 1996)
    6. Elsaesser, Thomas, Noel King, Alexander Horwath (eds), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
  11. Best online cinephile news and criticism site: MUBI Notebook (thanks so much to David Hudson and Daniel Kasman for their brilliant work)
  12. Best cinephile salon site - a tie between:
    1. Dave Kehr's place
    2. Girish Shambu's place
  13. Best seven multimedia/multiplatform/multichannel-style film and moving image studies websites:
    1. FlowTV
    2. In Media Res 
    3. Moving Image Source 
    4. Screen Machine 
    5. Screen Culture
    6. Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture 
    7. Critical Studies in Television
  14. Most impactful online Film Studies work in 2011 - a tie between:
    1. Tim Smith's work on how movie viewers watch, showcased here as well as on his blog Continuity Boy and his research site.
    2. Matthias Stork's video essays on Chaos Cinema (see FSFF's original post on this)
    3. Aitor Gametxo's video essay: Variation: THE SUNBEAM, David W. Griffith, 1912
    4. Steven Shaviro's work on Post-Cinematic Affect: see here for lots of links
  15. FSFF's favourite Film Studies academic links on Twitter: @filmdrblog (also see the Film Doctor's actual blog)
  16. FSFF's favourite non-academic, film studies-informed, online film critics - a tie between:
    1. Srikanth Srinivasan (also on Twitter)
    2. Matt Zoller Seitz (also on Twitter
    3. Kevin B Lee (also on Twitter here and here)
    4. Jim Emerson (also on Twitter)
    5. Jonathan Rosenbaum (also on Twitter)
    6. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (also on Twitter)
    7. Farran Smith Nehme (also on Twitter)
    8. Marilyn Ferdinand and Roderick Heath (also on Twitter here and here) and see Rod's blog
    9. Anne Billson (also writing for the Guardian and on Twitter)
    10. David Cairns (also on Twitter)
  17. FSFF's ten favourite FSFF blogposts (and blogpost clusters) in 2011: 
    1. On 'Affect' and 'Emotion' in Film and Media Studies
    2. Double Vision: Links in Memory of Raúl Ruiz, a Filmmaking Legend and ¡Viva Raúl Ruiz!
    3. V.F. Perkins on FILM AS FILM and More Victor Perkins Video Interviews Online from Saarbruecken 
    4. The Future of Cinema: Discussion with David Bordwell, Simon Field, Andréa Picard and Alan Franey 
    5. The Tree of Links: Terrence Malick Studies 
    6. Ingmar Bergman Studies 
    7. Viewing Modes and Mise en Scene: 50 YEARS ON by Christian Keathley and The Obscurity of the Obvious: On the Films of Otto Preminger 
    8. On Figural Analysis in Film Studies 
    9. Liquid Atmospherics: On the cinema of Wong Kar-wai 
    10. Its own video essay posts: Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE (1944); Studies of Film Noirishness, with Love; Links on videographical film criticism, editing, 'intensified continuity', 'chaos cinema', 'hapticity' and (post) cinematic affect; and Audiovisualcy: Videographic Film Studies 
  18. FSFF's most read post in 2011 by some distance was "An incarnation of the modern": In Memory of Miriam Bratu Hansen, 1949-2011
  19. Most popular resource at FSFF: Open Access Film E-books List
  20. Best search engine for Open Access Film Studies (and other Arts and Humanities resources): JURN (thanks, as ever, to the indefatigable David Haden)
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On 'Affect' and 'Emotion' in Film and Media Studies

Diposting oleh good reading on Jumat, 04 November 2011

Image from Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992), a film explored by Tim Groves in 'Cinema/Affect/Writing'
Emotion is a phenomenon that, according to [Sergei] Eisenstein, "is completely identical with the primary phenomenon of cinema. [In cinema] movement is created out of two motionless cells. Here, a movement of the soul, i.e. emotion (from the Latin root motio = movement), is created out of the performance of a series of incidents." ([Towards a Theory of Montage] 145, emphasis in original). Properly structured as a series of uncompleted incidents, montage calls on us to finish the actions mentally, and for Eisenstein this internal movement of filling in the gaps is emotion, a movement of the soul. [Greg M. Smith, Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein's Writings', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.4 (October-November 2004) 303-315 citing Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage. Trans. Michael Glenny. Ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor. London: BFI Publishing, 1991; hyperlinks added]
[H]ow to write about specific, personal affective experiences of the cinema? [...]

It is difficult for me to articulate, but I was affected [in Unforgiven] by the conjunction of lighting, costuming, and the melancholy, homicidal figure of [Clint] Eastwood in the final shootout in Greely’s. The mise en scène of this confrontation repeats that of the night of Will’s beating at the hands of Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). The lack of contrast in lighting and the orange and brown colours of both the characters’ costumes and saloon setting cause the characters to merge into their surroundings. It is literally difficult to see what is happening. While William Munny and the Eastwood persona are constructed as unforgiven in this scene, somewhere in the gloom I found a metaphor for the ambivalence of their forgiveness across the entire film. As a result, I declined to judge this “notoriously vicious and intemperate” figure, as he is labelled in [the film]. Instead I forgave him. I saw his thinning hair and the wounds engraved on his face, and reached out to tend to them. Forgiveness was the punctum which I found in Unforgiven and which is already there in the text, if ambiguously. [...]

But I cannot write your cinema/sadness . . . [Tim Groves, 'Cinema/Affect/Writing', Senses of Cinema, February 2003 hyperlinks added]
Film Structure and the Emotion System is concerned with this emotion system's structure, rather than with particular emotions themselves. This is not a book about sadness or joy; instead it deals with the foundational structures that make such emotions possible. Culturally nuanced work on particular emotions certainly needs to be done, but we should make sure that we first understand the basic principles of how the emotion system is constructed. [Greg M. Smith, 'An Invitation to Feel', Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) hyperlinks added]
The elicitation of affect in the audience stands firmly at the core of the film-going experience, figuring into the poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and ideology of film viewing. If our goal is to understand how mainstream viewers experience films, if we want to explore the cultural role of movies, if we wish to expand our conception of the poetics of the cinema, then we cannot ignore the place of emotion elicitation and affective experience within film viewing. [Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006 hyperlinks added]
In their work, [Torben] Grodal, [Greg M.] Smith, and [Carl] Plantinga all rely on a “downstream flow” of perception, cognition, emotional processing in narrative film. It is a uni-directional flow; the viewers see, they comprehend, they experience emotion. However, underlying all of their work are Silvan Tomkins’s foundational studies of affect from the 1960s. Tomkins’s analyses make possible a more complicated multi-directional understanding of affect [...]. Tomkins explored affect as located in the voice, skin, autonomic nervous system, hand, body, and most extensively, the face. Rather than perceive affect and emotion as developing outward from the inner organs as Henri Bergson, William James, or Carl Lange had suggested, Tomkins and his colleagues Carrol Izard and Paul Ekman focused mostly on the face as “an organ for the maximal transmission of information, to the self and to others” and concluded that “the information it transmits is largely concerned with affects.” This is the point on which narrative film studies has focused. [Randall Halle, 'Toward a Phenomenology of Emotion in Film: Michael Brynntrup and The Face of Gay Shame', MLN, Vol. 124, No. 3, April 2009 (German Issue), pp. 683-707; hyperlinks added]
AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body …  [Brian Massumi, 'Introduction' to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, xvi, cited by Eric Shouse, 'Feeling, Emotion, Affect', M/C Journal, 8.6, 2005]
Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalising upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation and distribution. They generate subjectivity and they play a crucial role in the valorisation of capital. Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance. [...]
     What does it mean to describe such processes in terms of affect? Here I follow Brian Massumi ([Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press] 2002, 23-45) in differentiating between affect and emotion. For Massumi, affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified and meaningful, a ‘content’ that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions. [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]
There is not one ‘affect’, nor even one economy, ecosystem or ecology of affect(s); just as there is not one reading of one text. Post-cinematic effects, yes; Shaviro makes an important observation. But affects? I’m not so sure why or how they would be different from everything that postmodern theorists have long been saying about postmodernity. The ultimate question, to me, is whether approaching the world in terms of affect offers anything specific for cultural theory and the understanding of culture and politics. [Paul Bowman, 'Post-Cinematic Effects', In Media Res Theme Week on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect (August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011)]
It is almost too easy to speak of affect—as if, by using this term, one had cleansed all the embarrassment and messiness from the experience. To use “affect” in the sense defined by Deleuze and Guattari, that is, as non-conscious and non-linguistic experience of intensity, appears not to be useful if one wants to explore the overlap of rationality and emotionality, as well as insist on the textual and self-reflexive—that is, self-augmenting and self-attenuating—character of emotionality. [Katrin Pahl, 'Emotionality: A Brief Introduction', Modern Language Notes, Volume 124, Number 3, April 2009 (German Issue)]
Today, Film Studies For Free makes one of its regular, little, curatorial contributions to a particular Film Studies theoretical debate. This time, it's the turn of an exploration of some much-fought-over keywords pertaining to film and media theories of feelings and related bodily and psychological experiences and behaviours - most notably, the terms 'Affect' and 'Emotion'.

The 'Affective Turn' is a rich, if at times rather complex or befuddling, vein of film studies thinking, with an array of approaches ranging from the historical-political (e.g. von Moltke's article), to the cognitivist (for example, see Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith) through the psychoanalytic (for example, see Groves' essay) and the (post-)Deleuzo-Guattarian (for a good, clear introduction, read Anna Powell's article).

As always, in the below list of links to openly accessible online studies, the ever pluralist FSFF doesn't come down on any one theoretical side. But this collection does go out especially to all those who have been curious about, or confused and dumbfounded by, the undoubted buzzword quality, particularly, of 'affect' in Film and Media Studies in the last ten to fifteen years.
        [Contents: Anu Koivunen, Preface: The Affective Turn?; Sara Ahmed, Communities that feel: Intensity, Difference and Attachment; Ana Paula Baltazar, Architecture as Interface: Forming and Informing Spaces and Subjects; Jennifer Lyon Bell, Character and Cognition in Modern Pornography; Rosemary Betterton, Spaces of Memory: Photographic Practices of Home and Exile; Joanna Bouldin, The Body, Animation and The Real: Race, Reality and the Rotoscope in Betty Boop; Hannu Eerikäinen, Love Your Prosthesis Like Yourself: ‘Sex’, Text and the Body in Cyber Discourse; Taru Elfving, The Girl in Space-time Encounters with and within Eija-liisa Ahtila’s Video Installations; Amy Herzog, Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory; Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas, Inventing “African Solutions”, HIV Prevention and Medical Media; Sanna Karkulehto, Effects and Affects of Queer as Folk; Martta Kaukonen, ”I Must Reveal a Shocking Secret” Transvestites in American Talk Shows; Jane Kilby, Tracking Shock: Some Thoughts on TV, Trauma, Testimony; Emmy Kurjenpuu, Women’s Magazines Meet Feminist Philosophy; Minna Lahti, “I Thought I Would Become a Millionaire” – Desire and Disillusionment in Silicon Valley, California; Mari-Elina Laukkanen, Ladies for Sale. The Finnish Press as a Profiteer; Ilmari Leppihalme, Do Muscles Have a Gender? A Female Subject Building her Body in the Film Pumping Iron II: The Women; Justine Lloyd and Lesley Johnson, The Three Faces of Eve:the Post-war Housewife, Melodrama and Home; Tapio Mäkelä, Re-reading Digitality through Scientific Discourses of Cybernetics: Fantasies of Disembodied Users and Embodied Computers; Norie Neumark, E/motional Machines: Esprit de Corps; Kaarina Nikunen, Dangerous Emotions? Finnish Television Fans and Sensibilities of Fandom; Sanna Ojajärvi, Visual Acts - Choreography of Touches, Glances and Movements between Hosts and Assistants on Television; Susanna Paasonen, Best Wives are Artefacts? Popular Cybernetics and Robot Women in the 1970s; Megan D. Pincus, Must They Be Famous Vaginas? The Effect and Affect of Celebrity on The Vagina Monologues and V-Day 2001; Liina Puustinen, Gender for Sale, Advertising Design as Technologies of Gender; Leena-Maija Rossi, Why Do I Love and Hate the Sugarfolks in Syruptown? Studying the Visual Production of Heteronormativity in Television Commercials; Christine Ross, Depression and Video Art at the Turn of the Millennium: The Work Of Diana Thater; Janne Rovio, The Vintage Van Damme Look; Moira Sullivan, Lesbographic Pornography; Rebecca Sullivan, Biotechnological Embodiment: Gender and Scientific Anxiety in Horror Films; Heidi Tikka, Missing the Point - Situated User Experience and the Materiality of Interaction; Julia Turnock, A Cataclysm of Carnage, Nausea, and Death: Saving Private Ryan and Bodily Engagement; Pasi Väliaho, An Audiovisual Brain: Towards a Digital Image of Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma; Hans Wessels, The Positioning of Lou Reed from a Profeminist Perspective; Jennifer Willet, Imagining the Self]
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                          Cognitive Film Studies

                          Diposting oleh good reading on Minggu, 24 Oktober 2010

                          An empirical approach? Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby in Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
                          Scholars often resist the cognitive approach to art because they're reluctant to mount causal or functional explanations. Instead of asking how films work or how spectators understand films, many scholars prefer to offer interpretive commentary on films. Even what's called film theory is largely a mixture of received doctrines, highly selective evidence, and more or less free association. Which is to say that many humanists treat doing film theory as a sort of abstract version of doing film criticism. They don't embrace the practices of rational inquiry, which includes assessing a wide body of evidence, seeking out counterexamples, and showing how a line of argument is more adequate than its rivals.  [David Bordwell, introducing a free download of his article 'A Case for Cognitivism: Further Reflections', Iris no. 11 (Summer 1990): 107–112.]
                          Film Studies For Free has previously only touched on the burgeoning field of cognitivist film studies in passing. Today, however, it has decided to gather together links to some excellent online resources, above all from two journals -- Film Studies and The Journal of Moving Image Studies -- in order to provide a good introduction to this field, as well as to the related field of analytic (film) philosophy, two increasingly influential sets of approaches to our discipline.

                          As one of the most eloquent and persuasive champions of cognitivism is film scholar extraordinaire David Bordwell, one of the very best places to begin such an introduction is with a selection of openly accessible writings on this topic by that author. For instance, here, Bordwell summarises the history of cognitive film studies and discusses some recent work as a prelude to the second annual meeting of The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (note: link now updated).  Scroll down for lots more great work...

                          (Note: David Bordwell is probably the most generous of scholars in relation to making his invaluable work freely available online. As always, FSFF thanks him very sincerely for helping to make online film studies such a rewarding focus. This entry is dedicated to his work).

                          Introductions to Cognitivist Film Studies:
                          Film Studies
                          Volume 8, Summer 2006


                          The Journal of Moving Image Studies -
                          Note: Apologies but there's currently a problem with the links set out below, which FSFF will fix as soon as it can. But in the meantime, all the below articles can be accessed via this page.

                          Vol. 1, 2002
                          Vol. 2, 203

                          Vol. 3, 2004

                          Vol. 4, 2005

                          Vol. 5, 2006


                          Vol. 6, 2007
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                          Narratology and Narration in Film and Transmedia Storytelling

                          Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 07 September 2010

                          Image from Storytelling (Todd Solondz, 2001)

                          Narration in the Fiction Film

                          [David] Bordwell bases his theory of cinematic narration on the work of the Russian Formalists. It is a theory that assumes a distinction between ‘the story that is represented and the actual representation of it’ (1985: 49); a distinction between the narrative as it is constructed by the spectator (the fabula) and the formal systems of representation employed in a film (syuzhet and style). Bordwell describes the spectator’s activity in constructing a narrative in the following terms:
                          Presented with two narrative events, we look for causal or spatial or temporal links. The imaginary construct we create, progressively and retrospectively, was termed by the Formalists the fabula (sometimes translated as ‘story’). More specifically, the fabula embodies the action as a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and spatial field. … The fabula is thus a pattern which perceivers of narratives create through assumptions and inferences. It is the developing result of picking up narrative cues, applying schema, framing and testing hypotheses. … It would be an error to take the fabula, or story, as the profilmic event. A film’s fabula is never materially present on the screen or soundtrack. … What is given? … The syuzhet (usually translated as ‘plot’) is the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film. It is not in the text in toto. It is a more abstract construct, the patterning of a story as a blow-by-blow recounting of the film could render it (Bordwell 1985: 49-50. Original emphasis). [Nick Redfern, 'Film as Text: Radical Constructivism and the Problem of Narrative in Cinema', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 2, Autumn 2005]
                          Unreliable narration in film and literature

                          As discussed by Volker Ferenz (Ferenz 2005) in an article on the status of the concept of the unreliable narrator in film studies, the present scope has been wide and highly diverse. Seymour Chatman - one of the few who deals with film and literature equally well - uses it to describe a character who appears to be our source of the shown (i.e. in control of the image) and who turns out to be unreliable (i.e. the picture has not been true), and to describe voice-over narrators whose telling is undermined by the image-track. (Chatman 1978: 235ff, Chatman 1990: 131 ff.) These two uses are pretty much in agreement with what literary studies have been doing. But others, like David Bordwell, George M. Wilson and Gregory Currie, have applied the concept to films with non-personalised narrators where important omissions of information lead the spectator to draw his or her own or false conclusions as the film progresses (Bordwell 1985; Wilson 1986; Currie 1997), and yet others have applied it to films where the normal causal-logic of reality is suspended - either in favour of metafictional manoeuvres, as seen in Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961), or as in ghost stories like Alejandro Amenábar's The Others (2001) or M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999)[2], both partly constructed around the axis of what Tzvetan Torodov labelled the fantastic-marvellous (Todorov 1980). Ferenz shows that Tamar Yacobi's five strategies for the naturalization of textual ambiguities and inconsistencies (Yacobi 1981) is an excellent tool for sorting out some of these (mis)understandings. In Yacobi's taxonomy it is the 'perspectival principle', by which the reader brings discordant elements into a pattern by attributing them to the peculiarities of the speaker or observer through whom the world is mediated, that are congruent with what literary studies label as an unreliable narrator, and Ferenz shows that many of the films described as unreliably narrated are better understood in accordance with Yacobi's other principles - i.e. as a matter of generic or functional principles. [Per Krogh Hansen, 'Unreliable Narration in Cinema: Facing the Cognitive Challenge Arising from Literary Studies', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 5, Autumn 2008-Autumn 2009]

                          Film Studies For Free presents one of its regular bumper links lists to openly accessible scholarly materials. Today's category of choice is an essential one for our discipline: the study of narratology in film and transmedia storytelling.

                          As it's such a long list, FSFF will start off proceedings by singling out two particularly useful resources with which those new to this topic might like to begin:
                          1. Manfred Jahn, 'A Guide to Narratological Film Analysis'. Poems, Plays, and Prose: A Guide to the Theory of Literary Genres. English Department, University of Cologne, 1.7. August 2, 2003 
                          2. Dino Felluga, 'General Introduction to Narratology', Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, Purdue University, 2003
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