On CINEMATIC DIRECT ADDRESS - Part One: Mapping the Field

CINEMATIC DIRECT ADDRESS Part One: Mapping the Field - Video by Catherine Grant

This entry has been superseded by the following, later FSFF entry so why don't you head over there straightaway?

On Friday March 1, 2013, Film Studies For Free's author had the very great pleasure of interviewing Tom Brown, Lecturer in Film Studies at Kings College, London, on the subject of direct address in the cinema, a topic he knows a huge amount about as author of the only book completely dedicated to it: Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) [It's up already - you can find it here].  You can read the preface to Tom's book online here (PDF), check out another article he uploaded about it here, and visit his wonderfully illustrated Tumblr on the topic here.

The recorded interview will be presented in two parts here at FSFF: part one is above and part two -- "YOU LOOKING AT ME? On Buñuel's LOS OLVIDADOS" -- will follow soon in a separate entry accompanied, as is this blog's wont, by a full compendium of links to further online scholarly studies of this (of course not exclusively) cinematic phenomenon.

In the period of time between recording this interview and completing the editing of it for this blog, Leigh Singer's great video 'supercut' on breaking the fourth wall (see below) was published, to merited acclaim, at PressPlay. Singer's essay -- which uses examples from a number of the same films as FSFF's video, is a hugely witty, skillful, and highly thought-provoking accompaniment to it. If you know of any further videographic studies of cinematic direct address, or indeed any other good resources, please let FSFF know about them via the comments.

Thanks! Yes! You there!

Breaking the 4th Wall Movie Supercut by Leigh Singer

A compilation of scenes and moments from films that all "break the fourth wall" - that is, acknowledge (usually directly to the camera, and therefore the audience) that they're part of a movie. The term comes from the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.

The montage includes 54 different films (some used more than once) from perhaps the very first example of breaking the fourth wall right up to today. There were so many other great examples I couldn't find room for (sadly, The Dude and The Big Lebowski's narrator don't abide here), I'd love to hear which 4th wall breakers you'd also include. Email me on leigh@singer-leisinger.com, or @Leigh_Singer on Twitter. Look forward to hearing your comments!

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ALPHAVILLE Issue 3: Sound, Voice and Music

Framegrab from Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978)

In his discussion of the work of Hal Ashby ['When is the Now in the Here and There?'], Aaron Hunter contributes to the emerging body of scholarship on the technique of “trans-diegesis”. Taking Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) as a case study, Hunter shows how Ashby’s use of trans-diegetic music—music that crosses narrative layers—forms part of a consistently playful approach to cinematic form and functions on several levels: as a tool that allows for a merger between moments in time, as a device to create a transition between incongruent events within the diegesis, or as mechanism to create a temporal confluence between apparently sequential events. [Alphaville, 3, 2012 Editorial by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine]

 
Once again, Film Studies For Free salutes the online journal Alphaville. Its latest issue, just out, treats the important topic of sound, voice and music in film and television and boasts some excellent contributions.

FSFF enjoyed them all, but particularly liked Michael Dwyer's The Same Old Songs in Reagan-Era Teen Film and Michael Charlton's Performing Gender in the Studio and Postmodern Musical, along with the discussion of Hal Ashby's film by Aaron Hunter. There are also some great book reviews and rewarding conference reports, too, perhaps most notably James MacDowell's detailed discussion of  The End Of…? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures.

All the contents are linked to below.


Alphaville, Issue 3, Summer 2012
Sound, Voice, Music Edited by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine

Editorial by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine

• The Same Old Songs in Reagan-Era Teen Film by Michael D. Dwyer, Arcadia University
• Performing Gender in the Studio and Postmodern Musical by Michael Charlton, Missouri Western State University
• When is the Now in the Here and There? Trans-diegetic Music in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home by Aaron Hunter, Queen’s University Belfast
• Beneath Sci-fi Sound: Primer, Science Fiction Sound Design, and American Independent Cinema by Nessa Johnston, University of Glasgow
• Cultural Innovation and Narrative Synergy in R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet by Ioana Literat, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
• Emotion Capture: Vocal Performances by Children in the Computer-animated Film by Christopher Holliday, King’s College London

Book Reviews Edited by Jill Murphy

• Media and Memory, by Joanne Garde-Hansen (2011) Reviewer: Elena Caoduro, University of Southampton
• Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen, by Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong (2011) Reviewer: Fiona Lee, City University of New York – The Graduate Center
• Music Video and the Politics of Representation, by Diane Railton and Paul Watson (2011) Reviewer: Antonio Sanna, Università degli Studi di Cagliari (Italy)
• Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview, by Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty and Jochen Eisentraut (eds.) (2009) Reviewer: Penny Spirou, Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia)
• Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores, by Peter Franklin (2011) Reviewer: K. A. Wisniewski, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA)
• Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir, by Robert Miklitsch (2011) Reviewer: James A. Wren, San José State University

Reports Edited by Ian Murphy

• Dysfunctionalities. Annual Conference of the German Society for Media Science (GfM) Postdam, Germany, 5-8 October 2011 Reporter: Patricia Prieto Blanco, Huston School of Film and Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway
• The Impact of Technological Innovations on the Historiography and Theory of Cinema Montreal, Canada, 1-6 November 2011 Reporter: Daniel Fitzpatrick, DAH, National University of Ireland, Galway
• The End Of…? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures University of Kent, Canterbury, 21-22 January 2012 Reporter: James MacDowell, University of Warwick

More about → ALPHAVILLE Issue 3: Sound, Voice and Music

Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies

Updated November 21, 2011

Image from Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998)

Aside from the current stirrings of challenge to the disastrous, real-world, global order, Film Studies For Free was inspired to produce the below, awesome entry of links to studies of apocalypse and planetary disaster in film and moving image culture by three earth-shatteringly exciting things:

1. A very impressive digital-cinema screening of Lars von Trier's latest film Melancholia (Is cinema dead? FSFF thinks it may still have a few years of life left... Some good thoughts on this film are linked to here); 
2. A thrilling call for papers for an upcoming conference on The End, in relation to motion pictures (scroll to the foot of the post);
3. The just-in-the-nick-of-time appearance of a great, film-related, free-to-read-online book published by the wonderful people at OpenBook Publishers: Maria Manuela Lisboa's The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011). OBP have also produced a new, free-to read online version of Robert Philip Kolker's long freely available, classic book The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema.

Now, if you don't mind, the all-too-easily scared FSFF will anti-climactically head for the hills (or, perhaps, for the sofa) to remove itself from all this eschatological excitement.

• Karin Badt. 'Apocalypse Too Soon: Wheeler Winston Dixon's Visions of the Apocalypse', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 27, May 2005 
• Lior Barshack, 'Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini', Cardozo Law Review, 31.4, 2010
• Brent Bellamy, 'We are Apocalyptic! [on Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books, 2011)]', Reviews in Cultural Theory Vol. 2, Issue 2, 2011
• Adam Bingham, 'Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzog's La Soufrière', Senses of Cinema, September 2006
• Kurt Bullock, 'Vertical Apocalypse: Altered Noir Cityscape within Blade Runner’s Dystopia', SBCC.edu
• L.T. Copier, Preposterous revelations: visions of apocalypse and martyrdom in Hollywood cinema 1980 – 2000, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• Sérgio Dias Branco, 'Being Her/She in ‘Who Are You?’”. It’s the End of the World. Again?!?: Why Buffy Still Matters, Conference at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, March 16, 2007
• H. Bruce Franklin, 'Don't Look Where We're Going: Visions of the Future in Science-Fiction Films, 1970-82 ("Ne cherche pas à savoir où on va": les Visions de l'avenir dans le cinéma de SF de 1970 à 1982), Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), pp. 70-80 
• Asbjørn Grønstad, 'Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered', Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005
• Mark Harris, 'The New Scene Canon - Chopping Choppers Unforgettably: The "Nowhere to Go but Down" Scene in Apocalypse Now', Cinephile, 6.1, 2011
• Despina Kakoudaki, 'Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film', Camera Obscura 50, Volume 17, Number 2, 2002
• Kate S. Kelly, 'Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Century Thompson, Kirsten Moana. Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007', Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 22.1, 2010 
• New Richard Langley, 'American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters',Vimeo, November 17, 2011 (originally screened at the American Frontiers conference, University of Birmingham, 12 November 2011)
• Bruno Lessard, ‘"It’s the End of the World!": The Paradox of Event and Body in Hitchcock’s The Birds', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
• Jeff Lewis and Kirsty Best, 'Pure Filth: Apocalyptic Hedonism and the Postmodern Surfer', Scope, Issue 2, June 2005
• Maria Manuel Lisboa, The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011) [Apocalypse Now and Again; The World Gone M A D ; Is the End Ever; Falling Out with Hal and Hester; Utopia at the End of this; Libera Me Domine De Vita Æterna]
• Ewa Mazierska, 'Polish Cinematic Dystopias: Metaphos of Life Under Communism - and Beyond', Kinema. 2004
• Walter Metz, 'Atomic Animals: Toward the Re-Invention of Natural History and Science Filmmaking', IM: Interactive Media. 2. [2006]. 1-12
• Angela Ndalianis, 'Buffy, Angel and the Palimpsest Apocalypse', Slayage Online, 2003
• Conrad Ostwalt, 'Visions of the End: Secular Apocalypse in Recent Hollywood Film', Journal of Religion and Film, 2.1, 1998
• Conrad Ostwalt, 'Armageddon at the Millennial Dawn', Journal of Religion and Film, 4.1, 2000
• Iván Pintor, 'Melancholay and Sacrifice in Contemporary Science Fiction' FORMATS, No. 5, 2009
• Gyan Prakash, 'Imaging the Modern City, Darkly', in Gyan Prakash (ed.) Noir Urbanism: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton University Press, 2010)
• Justin Remes, 'Apocalyptic Premediations', Journal of Religion and Popular CultureVolume 22(2): Summer 2010
• Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, 'Visions of Apocalypse: A Rhetorical Analysis of The Day After', Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (34th, San Francisco, CA, May 24-28, 1984
• D. Bruno Starrs, 'Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer's Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)', Forum, 5, 2007
• Kevin Stewart, 'The Zombie Aesthetics and the Post-Apocalyptic Franchise', Kinema, 2007 
• Kirsten Moana Thompson, 'Apocalyptic Dread, Kierkegaard, and the Cultural Landscape of the Millennium', Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium (New York: SUNY Press, 2007)
• Robert Torry, 'Apocalypse Then: Benefits of the Bomb in Fifties Science Fiction Films', Cinema Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991) 
• Roslyn Weaver, '"The Four Horsemen of the Greenhouse Apocalypse": Apocalypse in the Science Fiction Novels of George Turner', Forum, 5, 2007

The End of ...? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures - University of Kent, UK, January 21, 2011

This one-day conference is for postgraduate students and early career researchers whose work incorporates the study of motion pictures and aims to explore the interdisciplinary conception and representation of “The End.”
     As the conspiracy theories for the end of the world in 2012 culminate in the mainstream disaster movie and the relevant literature, our concern and anxiety with closures remain within the margins of academic attention. In addition to the ubiquitous representations of “The End”, phrases such as “the end of cinema” and “death of celluloid” are recurrent in scholarly circles, calling forth a new era of engagement with film and other media. “The End” in the latter case evokes a new beginning that requires close examination: perhaps an analogy that could be extended to Film Studies as a discipline, outlining (or criticizing) its potential methodological changes in the future as well as in the past. The aesthetics of “The End”, however, is clearly evident in our direct engagement with time-based cultural artefacts. In other words, the study of various methods of narrative closure in film, music, literature and theatre can inform one of our fundamental obsessions: a good ending.
     We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations from candidates across arts and humanities, welcoming individual papers as well as group panels that investigate “The End” as a broad phenomenon that can be approached through a variety of methods. Possible research subjects include, but not limited to: End of cinema: changing patterns of distribution and exhibition; End of Theory: the methodological shifts in film studies as a discipline; End of story: the aesthetics and strategies of narrative closure, open endings, narrative inconclusiveness in relation to film and other arts; End of the world: recent preoccupation with the disaster film genres; End of cinephilia: alternative channels for watching and discussing movies; End of film: the death of celluloid, the rise of digital technologies and issues of medium specificity; Case studies of films or other media that address any of the aforementioned issues; Representation and/or conception of “The End” within the history and philosophy of art.
     The conference will conclude with a film screening and an introduction by the keynote speaker in the Gulbenkian Cinema, an independent cinema located within the university campus at Canterbury.
Please send abstracts (300 words) and a short biographical note to thendof2012@gmail.com. Deadline for applications is 15 November 2011. Should you have any queries, please do not
hesitate to contact us at the same e-mail address. Website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/film/filmcentre/the_end_of.html
Conference Organization Committee: Emre Caglayan, Frances Kamm, Pete Sillett

Tina Pippin (ed.), Apocalyptic Bodies: the biblical end of the world in text and image (London: Routledge, 1999)

More about → Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies

'Final Girl' Studies

Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, the final girl of Halloween

Film Studies For Free loves plucky female film protagonists (and false protagonists, for that matter) still fighting on in there at "The End".

It also loves Carol J. Clover’s 1987 essay 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,' (Representations [Number 20: Fall 1987, pp. 187-228] - later included by Clover in her hugely influential book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1992]), which was the first work to coin the resonant phrase 'Final Girl' to name climactic female survivors of slasher/horror/fantasy-sci-fi-horror films.

Clover's essay asked the following, rather fascinating, question: why, in these films which are supposedly principally aimed at male spectators, are the surviving heroes so often women characters?

It's a question that has been frequently addressed, since, in film, television, and now videogame studies, many of them freely available online. So here's Film Studies For Free's not-so-weak-and-feeble list of terribly-brave-and-resilient links to open-access "Final Girl" Studies, beginning with Clover's key essay, and then proceeding in an orderly alphabetical direction, by author surname:

• Carol J. Clover, 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film', in Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, e-Book, Edited and with a New Introduction by R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 continues here and here
• Holly G. Barbaccia, 'Buffy in the “Terrible House”', Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy Studies, 1.4, December 2001
  
• Arial Yuan-Jie Chou , 'On Horror Films: A Psychoanalytic Approach On A Nightmare On Elm Street Series' E-Thesis Providence University July 2006
• Celestino Deleyto Alcala, 'Masochism and Representation in Modern Horror: The Case of Alien 3' , Atlantis VVIII (1-2) 1996
• Sérgio Dias Branco, 'Being Her/She in ‘Who Are You?’”. It’s the End of the World. Again?!?: Why Buffy Still Matters, Conference at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, March 16, 2007
• Elizabeth Ezra, 'Resurrecting the Alien Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Hollywood', Stirling Online Research Repository, originally published in New Cinemas volume 1, no. 1 (2002): 54-60
• Robert Genter, 'Imagining murderous mothers: male spectatorship and the American slasher film', Studies in the Humanities, June 1, 2006
• Sara M. Grimes, '"You Shoot Like A Girl!”: The Female Protagonist in Action-Adventure Video Games', Digital Games Research Association - Level Up Conference Proceedings, November 2003
• Andrew Grossman, 'Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part One)', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 47, February 2005
• Andrew Grossman, 'Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part Two)', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 50, November 2005
• Tamiko Southcott Hayter, 'Perverse Pleasures: Spectatorship, The Blair Witch Project,' E-Thesis, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2005
• Lacy Hodges, '"Scully, what are you wearing?": the problem of feminism, subversion, and heteronormativity in The X Files', e-Thesis University of Florida, 2005
• Irene Karras, 'The Third Wave's Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer', Thirdspace, Vol. 1, Issue 2, March 2002
• Mikel J. Koven, 'The Terror Tale: Urban Legends and the Slasher Film', Scope, May 2003
• Jenni Lada, 'Feminizing the Final Girl', Cerize Magazine, October 2007
• Colin Le Sueur, 'Misogynism and the Macabre: An Analysis of the Representation of Women in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses', Film Fortress, June 9, 2006
• Uel McMahan, 'The Alienation of Ripley and the Maturation of the Final Girl', Wiggledog's Song, June 21, 2008
• 'Mittens', 'Feminist Horror Film Theory', Everything2, [date unknown]
• Victoria Newsom, 'Young Females as Super Heroes: Superheroines in the Animated Sailor Moon', Femspec, ('Girl Power' Issue) 5.2
• Marc Ouellette, '"When a Killer Body Isn't Enough": Cross-Gender Identification in Action-Adventure Video Games', Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)
• Iva Radat, 'Haute Tension: Lesbian Audience and the Slasher Film', Transgressing Gender Conference, Zagreb, Croatia, 2005 (scroll down to page 20/262)
• David Robinson, 'The unattainable narrative: identity, consumerism and the slasher film in Mary Harron's American Psycho', CineAction, January 1, 2006
• Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, 'Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: "I'm Not My Mother", Genders Online Journal Issue 38 2003
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'Introduction - Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film', Senses of Cinema, July 2001
• Shweta Sharma, 'The Killer Father and the Final Mother: Womb-Envy in The Cell' Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, Vol 1, No 2 (2007)
• Elizabeth J. Silas, Abstract Themes of Awakening in Mainstream Films: Female Subjects and the Lacanian Symbolic, E-Thesis, Miami University, 2005
• Anneke Smelik, 'Feminist Film Theory', from Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink, (eds), The Cinema Book, second edition. London: British Film Institute, 1999, pp 353-365
• Ashley Lorrain Smith, 'Girl Power, feminism, girlculture and the popular media', E-Thesis, University of North Texas, August 1999
• Donato Totaro, 'The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror', Offscreen Journal, January 31, 2002

FSFF also highly recommends that you visit Slayage: International Journal of Buffy Studies for lots of other relevant studies.

More about → 'Final Girl' Studies