Studies of the Remediation of Films, Comics and Video Games

Transmedia Synergies - Remediating Films and Video Games from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.
See Matthias Stork's Mediascape, Winter 2013 essay 'Transmedia Synergies – Remediating Films and Video Games', which incorporates this video

                   The Video Game Film from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

This mash-up is a playful offshoot of [Matthias Stork's] research project on the aesthetic intermediality of films and video games [e.g. see above]. Edgar Wright’s seminal film SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (2010, Universal Pictures) effectively illustrates the audiovisual parallels and differences between the two media. It organically integrates the distinctive stylistic flourishes of video game play into the dominant cinematic texture, to the point that the film, particularly in its action sequences, evolves into a subjectively rendered (and relatable) gameplay experience. It thus represents a genuine video game film. This video essay seeks to foreground this affective dimension by heightening the aesthetic strategies of the film. And it is further intended as an homage to the director’s exceptional work.

"The Video Game Film" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

             From the Panel to the Frame: Style and Scott Pilgrim from Drew Morton on Vimeo. Originally published at PressPlay with a great introduction by Matt Zoller Seitz

Film Studies For Free today presents an entry which has long been in preparation. It was originally conceived of especially as a showcase for the above, hugely innovative and informative video essay studies by Matthias Stork and Drew Morton. But it has grown into a veritable font of wonderful links to online and open access studies of the connections between films, comics and video games.

FSFF hopes you enjoy the below list, and if you'd like to add any, as yet missing open access studies to it, please just let this blog know about those in the comments. Thank you! [Please note: FSFF can't publish one submitted suggestion for a non-open access book in the field, one which has no free excerpts. Sorry about that. But, hopefully, that commercial publisher has an advertising budget to compensate for this little blog's interest in other forms of publishing. Thanks anyway.]

Game on!

• Charles R. Acland, 'Avatar as Technological Tentpole', Flow, January 2012
• Maaheen Ahmed and Martin Lund, 'Apocalypse Why? The Neutralisation of the Antichrist Motif in Three Comics Adaptations', SCAN, 9.1, 2012 
• Matthew Bolton, 'Fidelity and Period Aesthetics in Comics Adaptation', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 6.1 (2011)
• Will Brooker, 'Maps of many worlds: Remembering computer game fandom in the 1980s', Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 2 (2009)
• Liam Burke, ''Special Effect: Have film adaptations changed mainstream comics?'', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Rebecca Carlsen, 'Games as Transformative Works', Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 2, 2009
• Josep Catala, 'A Drawing of the World: Documentary and Comic Book', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Stacey Church, 'Remediation and Video Games: Bookwork in Dragon Age: Origins', Emergence: A Journal of Undergraduate Literary Criticism and Creative Research, Vol. 2, 2011
• Damian Duffy, 'Remasters of American Comics: Sequential art as new media in the transformative museum context', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)  
• Markku Eskelinen, 'The Gaming Situation', Game Studies, 1.1, 2001
• Jim Fleury, 'Revenge of the (Angry Video Game) Nerd: James Rolfe and Web 2.0 Fandom', Mediascape, Winter 2012
• Michael Fuchs, '“My name is Alan Wake. I’m a writer.”: Crafting Narrative Complexity in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling', Academia.edu, January 2012
• Robert Furze, 'Virtual Bliss, Analog Horrors: Reading the Imperfect Digital Image in Film and the Video Game', MiT7: Unstable Platforms: the Promise and Peril of Transition, 13-15 May 2011
• Lynn Gelfand, 'Moon Prism Power, Make-Up!': Sailor Moon and the Transformation of the Multiform Story in Modern Media', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Harrison Gish, 'Media Boundaries and Bullet Time: A Hard Boiled Fan Plays Stranglehold', Mediascape, Winter 2012
• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro, No. 51, 2006
• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010
• Christopher Hayton, 'Charlton Comics' Monster Movie Adaptations', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Matthew Hepburn, 'The Technoludic Film: Remediation in Videograme to Film Adaptations', University of Warwick, Unpublished dissertation, January 2012 also see here
• Henry Jenkins, 'Game Design As Narrative Architecture',  in P. Harrington and N. Frup- Waldrop (Eds.), First Person. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002 and also at CMS / MIT, 2004
• Henry Jenkins, 'Transmedia Synergies: Remediating Films and Video Games', Confessions of an Aca-Fan, January 9, 2013
• Jesper Juul, 'Games Telling Stories? - A brief note on games and narratives', Game Studies, 1,1 2001
• Petri Lankoski, 'Goals, Affects, and Empathy in Games', Paper at the Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games, Modena reggio Emilia, Italy, January 25-27, 2007 
• Petri Lankoski, Character-Driven Game Design (Aalto University, 2010)
• Simon Locke, 'Considering comics as medium, art, and culture - the case of From Hell', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Vyshali Manivannan, 'Interplay Amidst the Strangeness and the Charm: Under-language and the Attenuation of Meaning in the Film Adaptation of Watchmen', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.4 (2011)
• Lev Manovich, 'What is Digital Cinema?', Manovich.net, 1995
• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema and Digital Media', in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (eds), Perspectives of Media Art (1996)
• Lev Manovich, 'Moving Image Culture after Computerisation: an outline', 2003
• Patrick McEntaggart, 'Once Upon a Paradigm Shift: Interactive Storytelling in a New Media Context', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 5th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 14, 2010
• Jane McGonigal, ʻ”This Is Not a Game”: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play [on The Beast/ the A.I game]', MelbourneDAC2003
• Tom Miller, 'Struggling With Godzilla: Unraveling the Symbolism in Toho’s Sci/Fi Films', Kaiju-Fan 10 (Winter), 1999
• Drew Morton, 'Sketching Under the Influence? Winsor McCay and the Question of Aesthetic Convergence Between Comic Strips and Film', Animation, 2010 
• Drew Morton, 'Comics to Film (And Halfway Back Again): A DVD Essay', FLOW, April 5, 2007
• Drew Morton, 'Godard’s Comic Strip Mise-en-Scène', Senses of Cinema, 53, 2009
• Drew Morton, David O’Grady and Jennifer Porst, 'Towards a New Genre of Video Game Play', Mediascape, Fall 2009
• Graham J. Murphy, 'Gotham (K)Nights: Utopianism, American Mythology, and Frank Miller's Bat(-topia)', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 4.2 (2008)
• Janet H. Murray, 'The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies', DiGRA 2005, Vancouver, Canada, June 17, 2005
• Lizzie Nixon, 'I Focalize, You Focalize, We All Focalize Together: Audience Participation in Persepolis', Image and Narrative, 11.2, 2010
• Brian L. Ott, 'The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema', eventually published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Volume 27 Issue 1, March 2010
• Ágnes Petho, 'Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies', Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2 (2010) 39–72 
• Paul Petrovic, 'The Culturally Constituted Gaze: Fetishizing the Feminine from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen to Zack Snyder's Watchmen', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.4 (2011)
• Michael J. Prince, ''HOWL: A Novel Graphic: Authenticity and Irony in Eric Drooker's Adaptations of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"' ', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• William Proctor, ''Beginning Again: The Reboot Phenomenon in Comic Books and Film'', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Charlotte Pylyser, 'Rogue Paratexts: Epo's Graphic Classic Adaptations and the Jupien Effect', SCAN, 9.1, 2012  
• J.R. Roberto, 'Godzilla and the Second World War: A Study of the Allegorical Meaning in Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again' in Kaiju-Fan 5 (Spring), 1997
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media', Game Studies, Volume 1, issue 1, 2001
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'On Defining Narrative Media', Image and Narrative, 3.2, 2003
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Computer Games as Narrative: The Ludology versus Narrativism Controversy', Avatars of Story, at www.dichtung-digital.org/2006
• Kevin Schut, 'Technology tells a tale: digital games and narrative', Proceedings of Digra, 2003
• Jan Simons, 'Narrative, Games, and Theory', Game Studies, 7.1, 2007
• Matthew Stoddard, 'Ghost in the Shell, Cognitive Mapping, and the Desire for Communism', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.2 (2010)
• Matthias Stork, 'In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema', Frames, 1, 2012
• Matthias Stork, 'Transmedia Synergies – Remediating Films and Video Games', Mediascape, Winter 2013 
• Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• David Surman, 'Remediation and Cineliteracy: An Approach to Recent Popular Film', Academia.edu, [date unknown] also see here
• Jan-Noël Thon, 'Computer Games, Fictional Worlds, and Transmedia Storytelling: A Narratological Perspective', The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Oslo 2009
• Justine Toh, 'The tools and toys of (the) War (on Terror): Consumer desire, military fetish and regime change in Batman Begins', SCAN, 6.1, 2009

• Kevin Veale, '"Interactive Cinema" Is an Oxymoron, but May Not Always Be', Game Studies, Volume 12, issue 1, 2012

• Video Games: The State of the Field - A Discussion with Steve Mamber, Peter Lunenfeld, and Eddo Stern (March 28, 2011). Moderated by David O’Grady, Mediascape, Winter 2012 
• Mark Rowell Wallin, 'Myths, Monsters and Markets: Ethos, Identification, and the Video Game Adaptations of The Lord of the Rings', Game Studies, Volume 7, issue 1, 2007

More about → Studies of the Remediation of Films, Comics and Video Games

Belén Vidal's book, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic

Belén Vidal, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Vidal is lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, co-editor (with Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones) of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Heritage Film: Nation Genre and Representation (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

This definitive work offers a new approach to the period film at the turn of the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which contemporary cinema recreates the historical past. This book explores the relation between visual motifs and cultural representation in a range of key films by James Ivory, Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion, among others. Looking at the mannerist taste for citation, detail and stylisation, the author argues for an aesthetic of fragments and figures central to the period film as an international genre. Three key figures - the house, the tableau and the letter - structure a critical journey through a selection of detailed case studies, in relation to changing notions of visual style, melodrama, and gender. This seeks to place this popular but often undervalued genre in a new light and to rethink its significance in the context of key debates in film studies.

Film Studies For Free had a very pleasant surprise, today, when it discovered that Belén Vidal's remarkable book is the latest Amsterdam University Press publication to be distributed as an Open Access ebook. The table of contents is given below.

This truly excellent volume has been added to FSFF's permanent listing of free Film Studies ebooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!

Introduction – Period Film and the Mannerist Moment - Fragments and Figures - An International Genre - Mannerism: The Possibilities of a Conservative Aesthetic

Chapter 1 – A Poetics of Figuration - The Belated Moment of Mannerism - Pastiche and the Reality Effect - From the Figurative to the Figural - Classical/Post-classical: Adaptation, Film Writing and the Technological Narrative - Credits Roll: The Figure as Threshold

Chapter 2 – Present in the Past: The House - Nostalgia Interrupted: The House and its Ghosts - Home and (Dis)Inheritance: Howards End -The Collector and the House-Museum: The Golden Bowl and End of Period - Melodrama and the Descriptive Mode: The Age of Innocence -Fidelity to the Past and the Melancholic Imagination: Woman as Ghost - The House of Mirth or, Time and Woman

Chapter 3 – Time and the Image: The Tableau - Still Images/Moving Narratives: The Tableau Effect - The Shot-Tableau: From Pregnant Moment to Hieroglyph -The Portrait as Fetish - Portraits and Tableaux in the Feminist Imagination - Deframings: The Portrait of a Lady - Double-Framing the Mythologies of the Female Artist: Artemisia - Vision, Blindness and the Displacement of Trauma - The Governess or, the Woman in Camera

Chapter 4 – The Scene of Writing: The Letter - Textual Erotics: Reading the Letter as Object and Figure - The Letter that Arrives Too Late: Figuration and Melodramatic Temporality - Letters and Spatial Displacement - The Love Letter and the Queer Encounter: Onegin - Imaginary Landscapes of Loss: To Those Who Love - Truncated Narratives, Textual Possibilities: Atonement and the Interrupted Histories of the European Period Film.

Conclusion – Second Sight: Reviewing the Past, Figuring the Present - Notes - Bibliography - Index of Film Titles - Index of Names and Subjects

More about → Belén Vidal's book, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic

Hard-Boiled! Studies of Raymond Chandler's Work on Screen

Frame grab from The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). Read Jonathan  Rosenbaum's essay on this film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you the second of three posts devoted to online resources provided by the staff of the fantastic Film Studies department at Queen Mary, University of London. On this occasion, the resource is a two part video of an excellent, illustrated lecture by Adrian Wootton on the screen adaptations of Chandler's work, including ones the writer scripted himself.

This time, FSFF adds value to the videos with its own presentation of a terribly hard-boiled list of links to online scholarly studies of Raymond Chandler's work and its screen adaptations.

Raymond Chandler on Screen

On December 3rd 2009, Adrian Wootton, then Chief Executive of the BFI (now CEO of Film London), visited Queen Mary, University of London, to give a talk on Raymond Chandler on screen.

Click on the links below to access QuickTime video files of the event.

Part 1

Part 2

• Paul Bird, 'Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction as a Vehicle of Social Commentary in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Walter Mosley's Devil In A Blue Dress', Journal of the Faculty of Economics, KGU, Vol.21, No.1, September 2011
• John J. Blaser and Stephanie L.M. Blaser, Film Noir Studies (dozens of essays and clips), 2008 
• 'Leigh Brackett: Journeyman Plumber', Interview by Steve Swires, in Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Edited and with an Introduction by Pat McGilligan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
• Clara Calvo, 'Telephone Conversation in the Fiction of Raymond Chandler: Opening up Openings and Closings', Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 3, 1995 
• Patrick Cattrysse,'Adaptation and Screenwriting Studies: Methodological Reflections', Paper was presented at the Fourth International Screenwriting Research Conference in Brussels (8-9-10 September 2011)
• Patrick Cattrysse, 'Descriptive and normative norms in film adaptation: the Hays Office and the American film noir', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 6, n° 2-3, 1996
• John G. Cawelti, 'The gunfighter and the hard-boiled dick some ruminations on american fantasies of heroism', American Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2: Fall 1975
• Christine Coit, 'Philip Marlowe: American Detective', Explorations: An Undergraduate Research Journal, 2003
• David M. Fine, 'James M. Cain and the Los Angeles novel', American Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1: Spring 1979 
  Philippa Gates, 'A Brief History of the Detective Film', Crime Culture, 2004
• James A Goring, 'The Fictive Sense of Place: Los Angeles in Word and Image', Places, Vol. 5.2, 1988
• Catherine Grant, 'Studies of Film Noirishness, with Love', Film Studies For Free, February 21, 2011
• Kevin Jack Hagopian, 'The Big Sleep', Images, 2 [date unknown]
• Kevin Jack Hagopian, 'Double Indemnity', Images, 2 [date unknown]
• Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller [sample chapter], (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) Book info. here
• Lee Horsley, 'Hard-boiled investigators' [sample chapter], The Noir Thriller (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)
• Lee Horsley, 'American Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction, 1920s-1940s', Crime Culture, 2002
• Susanne Jansson, 'Style as Experience', Nordiskestetisktidskrift, 12, 22, 2000
• Jennifer E. Langdon, Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood (New York: Columbia Univrsity Press, 2008)
• S Knight, 'Re-Formations of the Thriller: Raymond Chandler and John Le Carre', Sydney Studies in English, 2008 
• Daniel Linder, 'The Censorship of Sex: A Study of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep in Franco’s Spain', TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, Volume 17, numéro 1, 1er semestre 2004, p. 155-182
• Daniel Linder, 'Translating Slang in Detective Fiction', Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, Vol 8.4, 2000 
• Fran Mason, Hollywood Detectives: Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir (Sample chapter - London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) book info
• Harold Orel, 'Raymond Chandler's Last Novel: Some Observations on the Private Eye Tradition', Journal of the Central Mississippi Valley American Studies, 1961 
• Bryan D. Palmer, 'Night in the Capitalist, Cold War City: Noir and the Cultural Politics of Darkness', Left History, 5.2, 1997
• Kriss Ravetto, 'Shaking Down L.A. Cool: Hopping Up Neo-Noir', Emergences, 9.2, 1999
• Paul Skenazy, 'The New Wild West: The Urban Mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler', Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1982 
• 'Billy Wilder, The Art of Screenwriting No. 1', Interviewed by James Linville, The Paris Review, 138, Spring 1996
• 'Billy Wilder: About Film Noir '-- an interview by Robert Porfirio, Images, 10 [date unknown]

More about → Hard-Boiled! Studies of Raymond Chandler's Work on Screen

"Pity we aren't madder": Ken Russell links in his magnificent memory

"I think we've all gone mad" [Jennie Linden as Ursula Brangwen]

"Pity we aren't madder" [Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin] 

 Scene from Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969)

An extract from one of Ken Russell's very first films, Amelia and the Angel (1958) 

Film Studies For Free was saddened to hear of the death yesterday of the magnificent filmmaker Ken Russell. A monumental passing. But what a cinematic life he lived!

Russell's weirdly, viscerally, brilliant Altered States (1980) was one of the first films genuinely to whet FSFF's author's off-beat cinematic appetite, and his adaptation of Women in Love (excerpted above) and his portraits of Elgar (1962), Delius (1968) and Mahler (1974) are several of her favourite British films.

Below, FSFF has gathered some links to online scholarly studies of Russell's work, and to related  resources. Readers should also check out David Hudson's essential collection of tributes to, and other material about, the British filmmaker for the Mubi Notebook here.

• Ken Russell at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Savage Messiah – a Ken Russell site by Iain Fisher 

• Complete Filmography and bibliography: Tarek Krohn and Hans J. Wulff (eds), Medienwissenschaft / Hamburg: Berichte und Papiere 110 / 2010: Ken Russell (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2010
  

• German language book on music in Ken Russell's films: Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, 7, 2011: Musik bei Ken Russell // 3- edited by Frédéric Döhl, Albrecht Riethmüller and Hans Jürgen Wulff

• Michael Adams, 'Ken Russell: Musical Mythmaker', Notes, 66 (September 2009): 143-163
• E. Anna Claydon, 'Masculinity and deviance in British cinema of the 1970s: Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n'Roll in The Wicker Man, Tommy and The Rocky Horror Picture Show', in Newland, P. (ed) Don't Look Now? British Cinema in the 1970s, (Intellect Ltd 2010) pp. 131-142
• Adrian Garvey, 'The Boy Friend', The 1970s Project Conference, 2008
• Sergio Lopez Figueroa, 'The anachronism in film music: a brief introduction on the music for “The Devils” (1971)', 1995
• Barry Keith Grant, 'A British Picture: Portrait of an Enfant Terrible, UK, 1989: Ken Russell', in Grant and Jim Hillier, 100 Documentary Films (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2009) 
• Chris Martin, 'Music in British Films in the 1970s: New Directions', The 1970s Project Conference, 2008 
• John Kenneth Muir, 'On Ken Russell, and Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist', JKM, October 10, 2009 
• Donald Phelps, 'Ken Russell's Portraits of Elgar, Delius and Mahler', Rouge, 8, 2006
• David Pomeroy, 'Films: Experiencing Tommy', Theology Today, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1975
• John A. Riley, '[Review of] Kevin M. Flanagan (ed.), Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England's Last Mannerist (London, Toronto and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2009)', Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 7, April 2010
• Donato Totaro and Peter Rist, 'An Interview With Ken Russell and Lisi Tribble~ Rock n' Roller at Heart', Offscreen Journal, April 30, 2011
• Linda Ruth Williams, 'Ken Russell: Sweet Swell Of Excess', Sight and Sound, July 2007
  

Barry Keith Grant, 'The Body Politic: Ken Russell in the 1980s', in Lester D. Friedman (ed.) Fires were started: British cinema and Thatcherism (London: Wallflower Press, 2006)

Kevin M. Flanagan (ed.), Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England's last mannerist (London: Scarecrow Press, 2009)

More about → "Pity we aren't madder": Ken Russell links in his magnificent memory

Brokeback Mountain Studies: Through the Queer Longing Glass

Films accumulate meaning through, at times, very subtle moves. From one colour to another. From one shape to another. The latter is the case with Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005).

While much of the film's affective meaning is conjured through quite obvious (but no less moving for that) figurations of absence and presence, such as Ennis's discovery of the (now 'empty') bloodied shirts in Jack's closet, and their (still 'empty') reappearance in Ennis's own closet at the end of the film, there is also some mourning and memory-work carried out through considerably less conspicuous, visual shape-shifting and graphic matching.

This very short video essay traces the long journey from Jack's desirous looking at Ennis through round glass (as he shaves his later-to-be-bruised cheek) in the early and middle parts of the film, to Ennis's touching association with squarer, straighter vistas, at the end of the film, an un/looking through 'longing glass' in which Jack can only be figured invisibly, metaphorically, through his absence.  [Catherine Grant, 'Through the Queer Longing Glass of Brokeback Mountain']

Film Studies For Free's author was doing a little bit of teaching on Brokeback Mountain last week. It was windy up there, but this pedagogical outing inspired the above little video essay as well as the below list of links to online, and openly accessible studies of Ang Lee's 2005 film and Annie Proulx's short story as well as of the 'gay cowboy film' more generally. Yee ha!

• Harry M. Benshoff, 'Brokering Brokeback Mountain — a local reception study', Jump Cut, Issue 50, Spring 2008
• Michael Bronski, 'From The Celluloid Closet to Brokeback Mountain: The Changing Nature of Queer Film Criticism', Cineaste, 2008
• Matt Connolly, 'Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and the Queer Prestige Film', Reverse Shot, Issue 24, 2009
• Daniel Garrett, 'You Don’t Know What Love Is', Film International, January 2011
  
• William Glass, ''"Americans Don't Want Cowboys to Be Gay:" "Brokeback Mountain" and the Oscars', Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies, 2, 2007
• Le Han and Lushan Shi, 'The "Brokeback Mountain"of Chinese Media: A Case Study of Chinese Media Construction of Nationalism on Reporting of 78th Academy Award[s]', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 93rd Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, Nov 15, 2007 
• William R. Handley, 'Introduction: The Pasts and Futures of a Story and a Film', in William R. Handley (ed.), The Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon (Lincoln :University of Nebraska Press, 2011)
• Andrew Holleran, 'The Magic Mountain', The Gay and Lesbian review, Volume 13, Issue 2: History Questions, 2006
• Mark John Isola, 'Disciplining Desire: the Fluid Textuality of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain', Nordic Journal of English Studies, 7.1, 2008  
• James R. Keller and Anne Goodwyn Jones, 'Brokeback Mountain: Masculinity and Manhood', Studies in Popular Culture, 30.2 Spring 2008 
• Barbara Koziak, 'Shepherding Romance: Reviving the Politics of Romantic Love in Brokeback Mountain', Genders Online, Issue 50, 2009
• Christian Lassen, '"In the dark camp," Or: Straight with a (Pastoral) Twist. American Western Masculinity in Brokeback Mountain', Gender Forum, Issue 16, 2006 
• Christopher Le Coney and Zoe Trodd, 'John Wayne and the Queer Frontier: Deconstructions of the Classic Cowboy Narrative during the Vietnam War', Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 5.1, Spring 2006
• Scott McKinnon, 'Taking the Word ‘Out’ West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces', Participations, Volume 7, Issue 2, November 2010 
• George Raitt, 'Hidden Differences: New meanings in adaptations of literature to the screen', Double Dialogues, Issue 12, Winter 2010: Interior Worlds: Hidden Stories
• Christopher Sharrett, 'Death of the Strong, Silent Type: The Achievement of Brokeback Mountain', Film International, 7.1, 2009
• Craig Snyder, 'Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain', Jump Cut, Issue 53, Summer 2011 
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Ang Lee’s Cowboys', Offscreen Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2, February 28, 2007
• Ian Scott Todd, 'Outside/In: Abjection, Space, and Landscape in Brokeback Mountain', Scope13, February 2009 
• Michael Stewart, 'Transience and Imperfect Tense: Brokeback Mountain as Melodrama', Scope, Issue 12, October 2008
• Steven Stowell, 'A Gay Love Story?', The Oxonian Review of Books, 5.2, Spring 2006
• Tommy TSE Ho-lun, Narcissism in Male Sexuality: Lan Yu, Crystal Boys and Brokeback Mountain, MPhil Thesis, University of Hong Kong, 2006

More about → Brokeback Mountain Studies: Through the Queer Longing Glass

New Issue of Scope!

Image from Good Bye, Lenin! ( Wolfgang Becker, 2003). Read Kevin L. Ferguson's fascinating article on the film: Home Movies: Historical Space and the Mother's Memory

Good Bye Lenin!, a film commonly read as a political fable of East German nostalgia, is rather for me a successful example of autobiographical narrative that balances maternal loss and a boy's coming to manhood, framing this transition in and through home movies. As such, it provides a much-needed positive model for cinema's use of mothers and memory. [Kevin L. Ferguson]

Film Studies For Free has been far too quiet lately, but that's about to change, people! Let us kick off the burst of activity with FSFF's usual update about one of its very favourite openly accessible, film-scholarly journals, SCOPE: And Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, run by those wonderful people at the Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham. The full Table of Contents is reproduced below for your convenient reading pleasure.

Scope, Issue 18, 2010

Articles

Art Cinema as Institution, Redux: Art Houses, Film Festivals, and Film Studies
David Andrews
The Pinnacle of Popular Taste?: The Importance of Confessions of a Window Cleaner
Sian Barber
Walking the Line: Negotiating Celebrity in the Country Music Biopic
Molly Brost
Home Movies: Historical Space and the Mother's Memory
Kevin L. Ferguson
An Aristocratic Plod, Erstwhile Commandos and Ladies who Craved Excitement: Hammer Films' Post-War BBC Crime Series and Serial Adaptations
David Mann

[ALL ARTICLES ON ONE PAGE]

Book Reviews

"May Contain Graphic Material": Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Film By M. Keith Booker
Reviewer: David Simmons
Investigating Firefly and Serenity By Rhonda Wilcox and Tanya Cochran (eds.) & Special Issue on Firefly and Serenity
Reviewer: Ronald Helfrich
Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film By Adilifu Nama & Mixed Race Hollywood
Reviewer: Augusto Ciuffo de Oliveira
Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright By Lucas Hilderbrand & From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video
Reviewer: Daniel Herbert
Stanley Cavell's American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies By Lawrence F. Rhu
Reviewer: Áine Kelly
Scorsese By Roger Ebert
Reviewer: John Berra
Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror By James Leggott & Roman Polanski
Reviewer: Paul Newland
Cities In Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis By Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (eds.) & Cinematic Countrysides (Inside Popular Film)
Reviewer: Peter C. Pugsley
Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World By S. Brent Plate & Crowd Scenes: Movies and Mass Politics
Reviewer: Douglas C. MacLeod, Jr.
Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City By Mark Shiel
Reviewer: Tom Whittaker
Independent Cinema (includes DVD of Paul Cronin's Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16) By D.K. Holm & Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production
Reviewer: Carl Wilson
Seventies British Cinema By Robert Shail (ed.)
Reviewer: Lawrence Webb
Photography and Cinema (Exposures) By David Campany  & Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography
Reviewer: Tom Slevin
Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood's Russians: Biography of an Image By Harlow Robinson & How the Soviet Man was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin
Reviewer: Brian Faucette
A Companion to Spanish Cinema By Bernard P.E. Bentley & Gender and Spanish Cinema
Reviewer: Abigail Keating
The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II By David Welky & The Hidden Art of Hollywood: In Defense of the Studio Era Film
Reviewer: Hannah Durkin
Neil Jordan By Maria Pramaggiore & The Cinema of Neil Jordan: Dark Carnival
Reviewer: Steve Masters
Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory By Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi
Reviewer: Omar Kholeif
The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy (Directors' Cuts) By Peter Hames & Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex
Reviewer: Jonathan Owen
Movie Greats: A Critical Study of Classic Cinema By Philip Gillett  & Inventing Film Studies
Reviewer: Steven Rybin

[ALL BOOK REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Film Reviews

Generation Kill
Reviewer: Sheamus Sweeney
Diary of the Dead
Reviewer: Sigmund Shen
Rich and Strange & Stage Fright
Reviewer: Judy Beth Morris
Blood: The Last Vampire
Reviewer: Kia-Choong Teo
Coraline
Reviewer: Alice Mills
Before and After
Reviewer: Clodagh M. Weldon

[ALL FILM REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Conference Reports

Bloodlines: British Horror Past and Present, An International Conference and Film Festival at De Montfort University and Phoenix Square, Leicester, 4 - 5 March 2010
Reporter: Michael Ahmed
IMAGEing Reality, University of Navarra, Spain, 22– 24 October 2009
Reporter: Stefano Odorico
The Moving Image: Reconfiguring Spaces of Loss and Mourning in the 21st Century, Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cambridge, 26-27 February 2010
Reporter: Jenny Chamarette
NECS 2009 3rd Annual Conference: Locating Media, Lund, Sweden, 25 - 28 June, 2009
Reporter: Andrea Virginás
New Waves: XII International Film and Media Conference, Transylvania, Romania, 22 - 23 October 2009
Reporter: Hajnal Kiraly
Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, April 16 - 17 2010
Reporter: Darren Elliott-Smith
Re-Living Disaster, Birbkeck College, London, 29-30 April 2010
Reporter: Ozlem Koksal
SCMS @ 50/LA (Society for Cinema and Media Studies): Archiving the Future, Mobilizing the Past, Los Angleles, California, US, March 10-14, 2010
Reporter: Jason Kelly Roberts
SCMS @ 50/LA (Society for Cinema and Media Studies), Los Angeles, California, March 10-14, 2010
Reporter: Martin L. Johnson
Straight Outta Uttoxeter: Studying Shane Meadows, University of East Anglia, 15 - 16 April 2010
Reporter: Emma Sutton

[ALL CONFERENCE REPORTS ON ONE PAGE]

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