Reframing Cinema Histories: ALPHAVILLE Issue 6

Header image from the symposium website for “Reframing Cinema Histories”

This issue of Alphaville originates in a one-day symposium, “Reframing Cinema Histories”, which was organised at University College Cork in March 2013. The aim of the event was to bring together a select group of scholars working on a range of historical projects and, through presentations of specific case studies and a round table discussion, highlight the variety of methodological approaches that may be adopted by the researcher studying and writing about cinema history [Reframing Cinema Histories: Editorial by Pierluigi Ercole and Gwenda Young, Alphaville, Issue 6, 2013]

And the new journal issues just keep on coming! Today, Film Studies For Free links to a very high quality issue of special interest to film historians and others working in film historiography: Alphaville's latest offering on Reframing Cinema Histories.

Utter brilliance from start to finish, IFSFFHO...


Alphaville, Issue 6, Winter 2013: Reframing Cinema Histories: 

• Editorial by Pierluigi Ercole and Gwenda Young (Issue 6 Editors) Articles:

• "A Taste in Pictures": The Second Birth of Cinema in Cork by Denis Condon, National University of Ireland Maynooth
• Understanding Dutch Film Culture: A Comparative Approach by Judith Thissen, Utrecht University
• "The Greatest Film of the Fascist Era": The Distribution of Camicia nera in Britain by Pierluigi Ercole, Oxford Brookes University
• Exploring Racial Politics, Personal History and Critical Reception: Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust (1949) by Gwenda Young, University College Cork
• An Advertiser's Dream: The Construction of the "Consumptionist" Cinematic Persona of Mercedes Gleitze by Ciara Chambers, University of Ulster
• The Politics of Independence: The China Syndrome (1979), Hollywood Liberals and Antinuclear Campaigning by Peter Krämer, University of East Anglia
• What is the Value of a Technological History of Cinema? by Lee Grieveson, University College London

Book Reviews:

1. A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove, by John Spong (2012) Reviewer: Matthew Carter, University of Essex
2. Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video, by Akira Mizuta Lippit (2012) Reviewer: Niall Flynn, Independent Scholar
3. Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema, by Debbie Ging (2013) Reviewer: Barry Monahan, University College Cork

[Book Reviews Editor: Ian Murphy]

Conference Reports:

1. World Cinema On-Demand: Film Distribution and Education in the Streaming Media Era
2. Queen's University Belfast, 15–16 June 2012; 26 June 2013; 19 September 2013 Reporter: Alexandra Kapka, Queen's University Belfast
3. Revisiting Star Studies, Culture Lab, Newcastle University, 12–14 June 2013 Reporter: Jennifer O'Meara, Trinity College Dublin
4. A Star is Born: Cinematic Reflections on Stardom and the "Stardom Film", King's College London, 13 September 2013 Reporter: Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg, King's College London

[Reports Editor: Yuanyuan Chen]

More about → Reframing Cinema Histories: ALPHAVILLE Issue 6

Just the Facts – A New Realist Cinema? New Issue of PHOTOGÉNIE

Frame grab from Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008). Read about this film in Tom Paulus's essay Historians of the Real? Che and Carlos as Political Cinema in the latest issue of Photogénie

[In the pages of De Filmkrant Adrian Martin] bemoans an ideological naiveté on both the filmmaker and the critic’s part when a return to realism is perceived as a way of breaking new ground, and genre conventions, by implication, are again seen as ideologically suspect. Jones replies that adherence to ‘meandering fact’ is, in these cases, purely functional, depending on the story at hand; as such, ‘realism’ must be seen as no more than a suitable response to ‘meditations on time’ like Fincher’s Zodiac (pictured above) or Assayas’s Carlos, films that are structured around “the lulls and disappointments and setbacks and frustrations instead of the peaks of an actual police investigation or an actual terrorist operation.” Still, Martin is not so far off the mark in identifying a trend (possibly kick-started by Zodiac’s critical reception), although the seeds of that trend lie with the films and culture Jameson was discussing, films like All the President’s Men, certainly an acknowledged influence on Fincher. In their strict adherence to historical fact movies like Zodiac, Carlos, Che – to name the most important disseminators of the trend – and more recently Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty or even Steven Spielberg’s ‘anecdotal’ Lincoln – seem to have been created as if to reprove Jameson’s dictum about docudrama that, “[n]ot even the most concrete visuality in detail and reconstruction, nor the historical accuracy and ‘truth’ of the re-enactment,” can remove these films from the realm of the imaginary. Although most of these films feature a ‘mediating consciousness’, a privileged witness character, who reshapes collective historical drama as personal psychological trauma, their dramaturgy is still largely constructed around the anecdotal, the ‘raw’ material of history. Martin notes that these movies are full of repetitious talk-sessions and ‘nothing-much-happening,’ a temps mort aesthetic that brings to mind both nouvelle vague and talky incarnations of slow cinema, the resemblance to the latter heightened by their lengthy running times.
    The aim of this issue is to look at these movies and the perceived return of realism from a variety of angles [...] [Tom Paulus introduces the new issue of Photogénie on realist cinema]

December is often one of the sweetest months for new issues of ejournals and this year is no exception. So Film Studies For Free is (slowly) catching up with some good ones. One of the very best sets of reading may be found in the new collection of work from Photogénie on realist cinema. FSFF particularly liked Adrian Martin's deconstruction of documentary purism and Tom Paulus on historians of the real, but each of the articles is excellent. The contents are linked to below.

You should subscribe to the wonderful Photogénie blog, too!

a. Just the Facts – A New Realist Cinema?: Edito TOM PAULUS

b. Sixteen Ways to Pronounce Potato, or: The Adventure of Materials /Fragment from 1987 ADRIAN MARTIN

c. Between Documentary, Fiction and Appropriation Art: A Case Report on the “Language-game” Public Hearing (2012) MICHAEL GUARNERI

d. Refusing to Lie Down: Truth, Fiction, and Ken Russell’s Early Television Documentaries CHRISTOPHER VAN EECKE

e. Historians of the Real? Che and Carlos as Political Cinema TOM PAULUS

f. The Unsilent Initial: Monuments, Swamps and Politics Before the Law in Steven Spielberg´s Lincoln DREHLI ROBNIK

g. Realistic, Like in a Movie: On Facts, Procedurals and Memories of Murders DAVID GUNZBURG

h. What Does It Mean to Be a Human Researcher?: Deleuze’s Character of the Forger in the Film L’humanité PIETER-JAN DECOSTER and NANCY VANSIELEGHEM

i. Scripting in the Dataverse STEFAAN DECOSTERE

List of Contributors

Photogénie Issues

1. - Just the Facts – A New Realist Cinema?

0. - Reviving Photogénie

More about → Just the Facts – A New Realist Cinema? New Issue of PHOTOGÉNIE

Studying Movie Magazines and Fan Culture! Online Research and Methodology Resources. And LANTERN!

 A Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine by Tamar Jeffers McDonald with Catherine Grant (on shaky cam!).
With her customary wit and aplomb, Jeffers McDonald shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. See below for further information about the video, as well as for a discussion about how Jeffers McDonald used resources, like the one showcased in the video, in research for her new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom.

Today, Film Studies For Free presents a bumper entry on movie magazines and fan culture research! The entry boasts three main content clusters: 

1. A guide to using Lantern, the new search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched.
2. A nine minute video Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine (also embedded above), presented by film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, and an audio interview in which she expands on the fan magazine research she carried out for her new book on Doris Day's stardom.
3. Links to written studies and other essential online resources on, or using, movie magazine and fan culture research methodologies.

 1. LANTERN

Pages from Radio and Television Mirror, Jan-June 1949 (archived by the Internet Archive), as discussed by Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, in her report, below, on using Lantern, Media History Digital Library's search and visualisation platform.

Many readers at Film Studies For Free will already know of, and indeed be using, Lantern, the new, essential, search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched. The MHDL has digitized over 800,000 pages of out-of-copyright media publications for open access. Many of the rare magazines in the collection came from the Library of Congress Packard Campus (you can see the full list of contributing individuals and sponsors on the credits webpage). The MHDL's searchable collections now include:

Business Screen (1938-1973); Educational Screen (1922-1962); The Film Daily (1918-1948); International Photographer (1929-1941); International Projectionist  (1933-1965); Transactions of SMPE and Journal of SMPE (1915-1954); Motion Picture Magazine (1914-1941); Motography (1909-1918); Movie Classic (1931-1937); Movie Makers (1926-1953); Moving Picture World (1907-1919); The New Movie Magazine (1929-1935); Photoplay (1914-1943); Radio Annual and Television Yearbook (1938-1964); Radio Digest (1923-1933); Radio Mirror (1934-1963); Radio Broadcast (1922-1930); Sponsor (1946-1964); Talking Machine World (1906-1928); Variety (1905-1926 - production on the next twenty years is underway)

The great news is that we can search and access items from the collection platform at MHDL's brilliant Lantern site http://lantern.mediahist.org, or simply type your query into the searchbox of the existing MHDL site: http://mediahistoryproject.org. The site was developed designed and produced by Eric Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts, UW-Madison and Co-Director (with David Pierce), Media History Digital Library.

FSFF asked film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, whose fabulous work in this area is expanded on in the next section of this entry, to test Lantern as a highly seasoned user of offline archives. Here is her glowing account:

For me Lantern's utility lies not only in its stock of periodicals, freely accessible, fully searchable, available for my own research purposes but also the possibilities it offers as a teaching tool, bringing film history alive.

     My recent research has been on Doris Day. Trips to the British Library, the Library of Congress and the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles netted me over 1500 articles to peruse, but not the first article turned up by Lantern when I put in "Doris Day" as the search term, "That Day Girl/That Hope Fellow" from Radio and Television Mirror, May 1949. This is an early piece in which the new star herself purports to write about Bob Hope, the veteran entertainer on whose radio show Day appeared as songstress and sidekick. The article attempts to preserve the double-act nature of the pair's relationship by getting each to write about the other. The columns notionally penned by 'Day' - and there is no way at this distance that we can either prove or disprove her actual authorship - testify to what a great guy Hope is; his sections do the same, maintaining his comic persona as a narcissist. This confirms the piece's early date - 1949 - Day was already beginning to be spoken of as a major star and fan magazines would not allow space dedicated to her to boost another performer for much longer. By 1952 coverage of Day was saturating the movie magazines: she appeared on or in all twelve monthly issues of Movie Stars Parade and was featured in seventy-five other periodicals that year too. Finding this piece through Lantern is a valuable corrective, then, to the belief that Day became a star effortlessly, consistently receiving lead billing and attention in the magazines. While Motion Picture did hail her as the next big thing in August 1948 [see images below**], other publications obviously took longer to be convinced.

     In addition to its value for researching for individual stars or films, Lantern is also useful for more general searches for social history. Since the whole text of the issues is scanned and searchable, the advertising sections of the magazines can be viewed also, and provide fascinating social history data about the presentation of a variety of products. Typing in "pink toothbrush" recovers the history of Ipana, a toothpaste which boasted it could do away with gum disease; "Zonite" claimed it was the "solution to a woman's most intimate problem". Enter any product name to see the variety of methods used to sell it in the different periodicals, and different periods, covered: a search for "Lustre Creme shampoo" will bring up gorgeous full colour portraits of Hollywood stars as well as more utilitarian black and white ads featuring a more anonymous 'the Lustre-Creme Girl'.

     Lantern truly illuminates both the importance of fan and trade periodicals as cinema paratexts, and itself as an invaluable source for finding and searching them.

     (Note: For the first search, I simply put in Doris Day as the term, without inverted commas, with no specified date range and without altering the default Sort mode for results, By Relevance. Changing this to 'Sort by date' is the best option to capture the changing methods of presentation for product advertising).

Further great accounts of Lantern may be found at the links below:

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

• Eric Hoyt, 'Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern', Antenna, August 14, 2013
• David Bordwell, 'Magic, this lantern', Observations on Film Art, August 12, 2013

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

2. A Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine 

In the video embedded at the top of the entry, Tamar Jeffers McDonald presents a guide to studying a movie magazine. With her customary wit and aplomb, she shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. The above, somewhat impromptu (shaky cam!) resource came out of an interview with Jeffers McDonald carried out at the National Theatre, London, in October 2013 by Film Studies For Free. An audio recording of the interview is embedded below and online here at FSFF's new podcast site.

The  main topic of conversation was about Jeffers McDonald's new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom (London: I B Tauris, 2013). This book poses as a central question, amongst others, “Why do we assume Doris Day always plays a virgin?” In previous work (her PhD thesis, the edited collection Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, (Wayne State University Press, 2010), and an article on Rock Hudson from 2007 - see details here) Jeffers McDonald has examined what ‘playing a virgin’ might mean and consist of; now she turns her attention to how this dominant idea has been circulated, through studying the film fan periodicals which advanced and then froze Day’s stardom, a methodology she explores in detail in this video, and in the (12 minutes long) audio interview embedded below. [** See the foot of FSFF's entry for images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, to which Jeffers McDonald refers in the interview].

3. Online Resources on Movie Magazines and Fan Culture Research Methodologies

• Participations: A Journal of Audience and Reception Studies
• Transformative Works and Cultures
• Fan Studies Network
• Fan Sites Network website
• Henry Jenkins' website
• Anne Helen Petersen's blog Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style | Proto-Scholastic Musings on Star Studies. Also see:
  Scandals of Classic Hollywood, The Hairpin; “The Rules of the Game: A Century of Hollywood Publicity,” Virginia Quarterly Review; “There Are Things Of Which I May Not Speak,” The Toast; “The Hollywood Canteen,” Laptham’s Quarterly; “Decoding the Beyonce Tumblr,” Gawker; “Me, You, and Star Trek: The Next Generation,” The Awl; Various fan magazine finds at Slate’s The Vault; The “Remembering Lilith Fair” series at The Hairpin.

• Nancy Baym's Online Fandom website
• Karen Hellekson's website
• On classic era Chinese movie magazines at The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History

• Daniël Biltereyst, Kathleen Lotze, Philippe Meers, 'Triangulation in historical audience research: Reflections and experiences from a multi-methodological research project on cinema audiences in Flanders', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• Liam Burke, '‘Superman in Green’: An audience study of comic book film adaptations Thorand Green Lantern', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• Brigid S. G. Cherry., The female horror film audience : viewing pleasures and fan practices, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 1999 
• Pam Cook, 'Labours of Love: In Praise of Fan Websites', Frames, 1.1, 2012   
• Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, 'Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One):', Confessions of an Aca Fan, August 23, 2007
• Mark Duffett, 'Boosting Elvis: A Content Analysis of Editorial Stories from one Fan Club Magazine', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• 'Fan Labor', Wikipedia entry
• Ellen Hijmans, 'Reading YES. Interpretive Repertoires and Identity Construction in Dutch Teenage Magazines', Participations,1.2, 2004
• Matt Hills, 'Fiske's 'textual productivity' and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction?', Participations, 10.1, 2010
• Laura Hubner, 'Introduction: Valuing Films', in Hubner (ed.), Valuing Films: Shifting Perceptions of Worth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
• Pietari Kääpä and Guan Wenbo, 'Santa Claus in China and Wu xia in Finland: Translocal reception of transnational cinema in Finnish and Chinese film cultures', Participations, 8.2, 2011 
•  Paul Thébergé, 'Everyday Fandom: Fan Clubs, Blogging, and the Quotidian Rhythms of theInternet', Canadian Journal of Communication, 30.4, 2005
• Ed Wiltse, 'Fans, Geeks and Nerds, and the Politics of Online Communities', Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association Fifth Annual Convention 5 (2004)

**Below are images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, reproduced by kind permission of Tamar Jeffers McDonald, to which she refers in her audio interview embedded above.

More about → Studying Movie Magazines and Fan Culture! Online Research and Methodology Resources. And LANTERN!

Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University

Website header and masthead at the incredible Women Film Pioneers Project website

This project began as a search for silent cinema “women film pioneers” who challenged the idea of established great male “pioneers of cinema.” Since researchers found more women than anyone expected to find, one principle came to organize the project: What we  assume never existed is what we invariably find. [About 'Women Film Pioneers Project']

Film Studies For Free is heading away from its computer for a few days but had to rush to publish the essential news of an incredible new website resource: the Women Film Pioneers Project.

WFPP is a new free online database published by Columbia University Libraries’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. The database includes more than 150 career profiles of women who worked during the silent film era as directors, co-directors, scenario writers, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, animal trainers, studio accountants, film company owners, and theatre managers.

A monumental, open access piece of important film historical research and publishing, this first phase of the project places together the Americas, the U.S. in the North and Latin America in the South. The next phases will open up the study of women in other national silent era cinemas: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary,  India, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey,  The United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Yugoslavia.

Clearly this is an archival resource that will also grow as more people know about it and can contribute missing information to it, but the editors have done a truly fantastic job in establishing this resource and populating it with such high quality and significant material already.

Congratulations and many thanks go to the WFPP team led by the brilliant film historian Jane Gaines, whose related book on early cinema, Fictioning Histories: Women Film Pioneers was published by University of Illinois Press in 2009. The project launch will take place at MoMA this Saturday, part of the film exhibition To Save and Project: The 11th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.

More about → Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University

Lives on Film: Auto/Biographical Fiction and Documentary Film Studies

Lizzie Thynne, filmmaker, writer and Senior Lecturer in Media and Film at the University of Sussex, discusses her theoretical and practice research into film biography with FSFF's author. In REFRAME’s interview, as well as her earlier films Child of Mine (Channel Four Television, 1996) and Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (2004), and her written research on biographical, subjective and feminist filmmaking, Thynne talks about her recent experimental documentary On the Border (UK, 2013, 56 minutes), a daughter’s exploration of her Finnish family’s history prompted by the letters, objects, and photographs left in her mother’s apartment. You can find more information about the above video here. Lizzie Thynne's film On the Border is screening today, Wednesday, October 9, at 7pm in The Finnish Church, 33 Albion St, London SE16 7JG – free entry courtesy of the Finnish Church in association with the Anglo-Finnish Society. The screening will be followed by a discussion with participants: Lizzie Thynne, Titus Hjelm (UCL, School of Slavonic Studies) and others.

Film Studies For Free brings you a list of links to open access scholarly and critical resources on the subject of biopics - life (hi)stories on film in a variety of fictional and documentary forms.

This entry is produced to coincide with the publication this week of the above embedded video on film biography, part of FSFF's sister project REFRAME Conversations, a new series of in-depth, open access explorations of media, film, music and cultural studies research, published and shareable on and offline in video/audio formats.

Because of this schedule, preparation of the below list precedes the publication of a great looking new edited collection on The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture by Tom Brown (a friend of this blog - see the entry on direct address here) and Belén Vidal. The two editors have completed a podcast on their project shortly to be uploaded to this website. That great link will be added here later.

• Zélie Asava, 'Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007)', Wide Screen, 1.2, 2010
• Michael Atkinson, 'We Hardly Knew Ye: Why do we watch biopics?', Moving Image Source, November 2012
• Giselle Bastin, 'Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family', a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2009, pp. 34-52 PDF 
• Donna Lee Brien, 'Disclosure in Biographically-Based Fiction: The Challenges of Writing Narratives Based on True Life Stories', M/C Journal, Vol. 12, No. 5 (2009) - 'disclose'
• Molly Brost, 'Walking the Line: Negotiating Celebrity in the Country Music Biopic', Scope, 18,  2011
• Molly Brost, 'Negotiating Authenticity: Coal Miner's Daughter, the Biopic, and Country Music', Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2008, Volume 7, Issue 2
• Rosalind Brunt, 'The Changing Face of Royalty', Marxism Today, 1984 
• David Bovey, “Sex doesn’t dominate my life at all, really. I think painting does” (David Hockney): the emergence of the queer artist biopic' PDF, NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012)
• Kieran Cashell, 'Charm and Strangeness: The Aesthetic and Epistemic Dimensions of Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein', Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
  
• Daniel Charchuk, '“Can’t Fucking Act”: Bronson and the Art of Performance', Offscreen, March 31, 2013 
• Christopher Glazek, 'Phoenixes [On I'm Not There]', N + 1, July 23, 2011
• Pam Cook, 'Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola', Sight and Sound 16 (11), November 2006, pp. 36-40
• Ryan Diduk, 'Of Race, Representation and Responsibility in Jenni Olson’s Afro Promo', Offscreen,10.2, 2006
• Thomas Doherty, 'All the Way to the FBI Tracing the Hollywood career of J. Edgar Hoover', Moving Image Source,  November 16, 2011
• Bilge Eburi, 'Visions of Ludwig: Cinema’s fascination with the mad king of Bavaria', Moving Image Source, June 4, 2009
• Carolyn Ellam, 'Depicting a Life Less Ordinary: Fantasy as Evidence for Deconstruction in the Contemporary Film Biopic' PDF, NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012)  
• Jane Feuer, 'Daughter Rite: Living with our pain, and love', Jump Cut, 23, October 1980
• Adam Gallimore, 'Digital Lives: Refiguring the recent and distant pasts in new biographical forms' PDF,  NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012) 
• Bree Hadley and Rebecca Caines, 'Negotiating Selves: Exploring Cultures of Disclosure', M/C Journal, Vol. 12, No. 5 (2009) - 'disclose'
• Stella Hockenhull, 'Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen', Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012) PDF
• Dianne Hunter, 'From Ethereal Confrontation to Child Abuse to Womanly Conflict: Ophelia in Three Late-Twentieth Century Films', PsyArt, December 2008
• Elisa Isabel Jiménez Aguilar, '"With tears and a journey”: Recreating Shakespeare’s life on screen', MA Thesis, Universidad de Granada, June 2013
• Derek Johnstone, 'Re-Envisioning the Artist Hero Through Two Cole Porter Biopics' PDF, NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012) 
• Julia Kinzler, 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011) pp. 49-65 
• Hanna Kylloen, 'Blurring Gender Boundaries – Masculine Confessional in Celebrity Auto/biographies' PDF, NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012)
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Follow the Leader: Revisiting the Oliver Stone biopics Nixon and Alexander', Moving Image Source, March 11, 2011
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Arsenic and Apple Pie Oliver Stone Pt. 1: Patriotism and propaganda in Born on the Fourth of July', Moving Image Source, October 14, 2008 
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Unreliable Narratives Oliver Stone Pt. 2: JFK and the power of counter-myth , Moving Image Source, October 15, 2008
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Fear and Self-Loathing Oliver Stone Pt. 3: Nixon and the unmaking of a president', Moving Image Source, October 16, 2008
  
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Empire of the Son Oliver Stone Pt. 4: War and civilization in Alexander, and an epilogue on W.', Moving Image Source, October 17, 2008
• Laura Mason, '"We' re just little people, Louis": Marie-Antoinette on Film', Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No.3 (1994): 211-222
• David Muldoon, 'The Postmodern Gender Divide in the Bob Dylan Biopic I'm Not There', Miscelánea, 46, 2012
• A. Mary Murphy, 'The Problem of the Literary BioPic', Kinema, 17, 2002 
• Donald Phelps, 'Ken Russell's Portraits of Elgar, Delius and Mahler', Rouge, 8, 2006
• Matthew Robinson, 'The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication: An Introduction' PDF,  NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012) 
• Keeley Saunders, 'Caravaggio’s cinematic painting: Fictionalising art and biography in the artist biopic', NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012) PDF
• Lizzie Thynne, 'Ethics, politics and representation in Child of Mine, a television documentary on lesbian parenting', Jump Cut, 23, 2011
• Andrew Tracy, 'Rare Bird: Gallant Journey and the limits of auteurism', Moving Image Source, Feburary 17, 2009

More about → Lives on Film: Auto/Biographical Fiction and Documentary Film Studies

On Documentary Film Styles: Historical and Sociological Perspectives

Frame grab from Человек с киноаппаратом / Chelovek s kinoapparatom/ Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), a film mentioned in Carsten Heinze's introduction to the Documentary Film Styles. Historical and Sociological Perspectives issue of InterDisciplines - Journal of History and Sociology (Vol 4, No 1 [2013])

One of Film Studies For Free's regular automated web searches discovered the following, just published volume of essays of great interest to documentary specialists: an issue of InterDisciplines - Journal of History and Sociology (Vol 4, No 1 [2013]) on Documentary Film Styles. Historical and Sociological Perspectives.

 

Each essay has much to recommend it, but FSFF particularly enjoyed Tanja Seider's discussion of the essay film in a postcolonial context, along with Bernt Schnettler's comprehensive study of visual research methods

 

The Table of Contents is pasted in below with all the links.

• Introduction: Historical and Sociological Aspects of Documental Pictures PDF  by Carsten Heinze

• Notes on the History and Development of Visual Research Methods PDF  by Bernt Schnettler

• The Factual Treatment of Actuality: The Emergence of Educational Film in the 1920s and its Relation to Documentary Film Proper PDF  by Laurel E. Ahnert

• Documentary Film in Media Transformation PDF  by Thomas Weber

• Postcolonial Historiography in the Essay Film: >De-Colonizing< Sound and Image PDF  by Tanja Seider

• Complete Issue PDF
• Cover Picture, Front Matter, Content PDF

More about → On Documentary Film Styles: Historical and Sociological Perspectives

“How Motion Pictures Became the Movies”: A Video Lecture by David Bordwell

Not the actual Vimeo embed! For that you MUST visit David Bordwell's website...

Today something new has been added [to the Observations on Film Art website]. I’ve decided to retire some of the lectures I take on the road, and I’ll put them up as video lectures. They’re sort of Net substitutes for my show-and-tells about aspects of film that interest me. The first is called “How Motion Pictures Became the Movies,” and it’s devoted to what is for me the crucial period 1908-1920. It quickly surveys what was going on in cinema over those years before zeroing in on the key stylistic developments we’ve often written about here: the emergence of continuity editing and the brief but brilliant exploration of tableau staging.
     The lecture isn’t a record of me pacing around talking. Rather, it’s a PowerPoint presentation that runs as a video, with my scratchy voice-over. I didn’t write a text, but rather talked it through as if I were presenting it live. It nakedly exposes my mannerisms and bad habits, but I hope they don’t get in the way of your enjoyment. [David Bordwell, ''What next? A video lecture, I suppose. Well, actually, yeah….", Observations on Film, January 12, 2013]

The above is, hopefully, self-explanatory. In other words you should head straight over to David Bordwell's website (also see here) to be reminded, if you really needed to be, of just what a valuable resource it is, and just what a global treasure he is (and, of course, Kristin Thompson, too!].

Film Studies For Free can't wait for more of these. Thank you, David!

More about → “How Motion Pictures Became the Movies”: A Video Lecture by David Bordwell

New Issue of MEDIASCAPE Online on "History and Technology"

Frame grab from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980), one of the subjects of Film Studies For Free's author's latest videographic film study in her new article 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', which you can find in the newly published issue of Mediascape.

The much awaited Winter 2013 issue of MEDIASCAPE, UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media, has just been published. There are two very fine articles on historical film archives by Christina Petersen and Bryan Sebok, as well as two excellent columns on related historiographical themes. Meanwhile, the META section boasts some very good, new video essay work by Matthias Stork, Alexandra Schroeder, and Clifford James Galiher and reflections on videographic and other digital film studies practices by great luminaries, such as Yuri Tsivian and Daria Khitrova, alongside those of much more ordinary mortals! There's also a highly informative interview with filmmaker Thom Andersen and some very interesting reviews to catch up with.

All contents are listed and linked to below. But, also, do check out MEDIASCAPE's occasional, but very high quality blog which publishes between journal issue releases. A good place to start is this entry: 'Mastering "The Master"' by Vincent Brook

MEDIASCAPE, Winter 2013

Editorial by Andy Myers and Andrew Young

Features

• The Crowd Mind: The Archival Legacy of the Payne Fund Studies’ Movies and Conduct (1933) by Christina Petersen
• Headline Hollywood: A discourse analysis of the Variety archive by Bryan Sebok

Columns

• Alex Haley’s Roots and Hyperreal Historiography by Randy Laist
• Transmission: Considering New Media and the Online Histories of HIV/AIDS by Christopher Garland

META

• What Happens When You Sleep? Multiple Layers of Voyeurism in the Paranormal Activity Trilogy by Alexandra Schroeder
• Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies by Catherine Grant
• The Three Fates of the Maltese Falcon: Hammet's Novel at Warner Bros. by Clifford James Galiher
• Photography and Fictionality by Jens Schröter
• Transmedia Synergies — Remediating Films and Video Games by Matthias Stork
• In Retrospect: 2012 Los Angeles Animation Festival by Kelly Lake
• “A Film is Alive During its Making” – An Interview with Filmmaker Thom Andersen by Matthias Stork
• On Cinemetrics, Video Essays, and Digital Scholarship – An Interview with Dr. Yuri Tsivian and Dr. Daria Khitrova by Matthias Stork

Reviews

• Total Archive: Picturing History from the Stereographic Library to the Digital Database by Brooke Belisle
• All The World’s A Video Wall: Technology, Humanity, and the Things in Between. Reviewing Chris Salter’s Entangled by Judith Kohlenberger and Samuel Zwaan
• Murder and Montage: Oliver Stone’s Hyperreal Period by Randy Laist
• Review of Useful Cinema by Andrew Myers
• Something Borrowed from the Past: Wedding Photography and Super 8mm by Paul Gansky

 

 

More about → New Issue of MEDIASCAPE Online on "History and Technology"

Real and Fictional Monarchies on Screen

The Paradox of the Monarchy by Catherine Grant

An archive video collage exploring some of the psychological and mediatized components of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy. It features excerpts from D.W. Winnicott's 1970 essay 'The Place of the Monarchy' (published in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, compiled and edited by Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis [London: Penguin, 1986]). Although it doesn't mention this, Winnicott's essay was published after the broadcast of the ground-breaking Royal Family documentary in 1969, which opened up new breaches in what the psychoanalyst was raising about the necessary distance and proximity of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy.

Public Domain Film Excerpts (from the Internet Archive Moving Image Collections)

• Pathe News Digest, 1937, No. 3 (Prelinger Archives)
• Visit of their Majesties, June 1939 (FDR Presidential Library [CC0 1.0 Universal])
• Today -- And Yesterday, Newsreel, 1911 (Prelinger Archives)
• A Welcome Guest in the House, ca. 1957 (Prelinger Archives)

Music Excerpt
“Self-Reflect” by Jared C. Balogh. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. Available for Download from from the Fee Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org/music/Balogh/A_Compilation_From_Compilations_Of_Compositions/SELF_REFLECT

Film Studies For Free was inspired by two events -- one offline and one online -- for today's entry.

The offline happening is an excellent looking conference on the British Monarchy on Screen taking place later this week, between November 23-24.

The conference is hosted by the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, and convened by the University of London Screen Studies Group, the Institute of English Studies, the department of Media Arts and the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research at Royal Holloway, University of London.

A somewhat ambivalent republican, but one indelibly marked by growing up immersed in the UK's mediatised monarchy, FSFF would have loved to attend. But its author is presenting instead at a conference in an actual Republic this weekend, instead. So this blog contributes the above monarchical-video-meditation in lieu of its presence - and there will be an accompanying essay about it for the Filmanalytical website very shortly.

Another series of events happening this week - also, sadly, to be missed by a gadabout FSFF -- will take place in Brighton. The Global Queer Cinema project is collaborating with the annual CineCity film festival on the topic of "Curating Queer Film Culture". Information about these really excellent and important events can be found here and here. 

The inspirational online event was another one FSFF missed... It was the competition which also inspired the above video, although the video took a somewhat different (topical) turn in its making: "The Past Re-Imagined as the Future" Remix Context, held by the brilliant Prelinger Archives and the Free Music Archive.

FSFF looks forward to hearing about the winners of that event but, in the meantime, had great fun as usual remixing material from both these amazing, public domain archives, and encourages its readers to have a go at doing the same. Any good film related results should be reported here forthwith.

Below, you can find a little (growing) list of links to online studies of monarchies on screen just to keep FSFF's hand in with this blog's day-job....

• Giselle Bastin, 'Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family', a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2009, pp. 34-52 PDF Rosalind Brunt, 'The Changing Face of Royalty', Marxism Today, 1984   
• Pam Cook, 'Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola', Sight and Sound 16 (11), November 2006, pp. 36-40
• Stella Hockenhull, 'Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen', Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012) PDF
• Dianne Hunter, 'From Ethereal Confrontation to Child Abuse to Womanly Conflict: Ophelia in Three Late-Twentieth Century Films', PsyArt, December 2008
• Julia Kinzler, 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011) pp. 49-65
• Laura Mason, '"We' re just little people, Louis": Marie-Antoinette on Film', Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No.3 (1994): 211-222 
• Anna Rogers, 'Sofia Coppola', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007

More about → Real and Fictional Monarchies on Screen

New SCREENING THE PAST on 'Untimely Cinema'

Framegrab from Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998). Please read Adrian Martin's new essay A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma

The question of whether cinema has run out of time, and the related question of whether it is also, therefore, out of ‘its’ time (cinema as ‘heritage’ media, a relic from another era) are questions that are often posed by, and to, those working in cinema studies today. For well over a decade, film theorists and film historians have evocatively, rigorously and at times relentlessly theorised and debated the question of whether cinema is dead, dying, living on borrowed time, or doing what it has so often done – refigure itself. In titling this essay, and this issue, “Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time” we consider this idea in two seemingly very different ways. [Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis, 'Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time', Screening the Past, ISsue 43, 2012 ]

A really wonderful new issue of Screening the Past, one of the best online and openly accessible film studies journals, has just been published, so Film Studies For Free rushes you the news. It's a timely special issue on Untimely Cinema guest edited by Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis.

The contents are incredibly rich and wide-ranging and are listed, and linked to, below.


Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time

• Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time by Jodi Brooks & Therese Davis
• Syrian Cinema: Out of Time? by Kay Dickinson
• The Restoration of The Exiles: The Untimeliness of Archival Cinema by Catherine Russell
• A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma by Adrian Martin
• Suspended Reading: Man on Wire, 9/11, and the Logic of the High-Wire by Adam Ross Rosenthal
• Kim Ki-duk’s Aporia: The Face and Hospitality (on 3-Iron) by Steve Choe
• Re-staging the Cinema: Psycho, Film Spectatorship and the Redundant New Remake by Megan Carrigy
• Parentheses in Time: L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) as Amorous Event by Alex Ling
• Missed Beats: Unseen Cinema and a Cinema of the Unseen (or Stella Dallas, Again) by Jodi Brooks
• Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary by Belinda Smaill
• Untimely Animations: Waltz with Bashir and the Incorporation of Historical Difference by Paul Atkinson and Simon Cooper

First Release

• Ten Fingers and Nine Toes: Embodied Representations of Pregnancy in Avant-Garde Cinema by Lauren Bliss
• Mapping the Cinematic Journey of Alexander Pearce, Cannibal Convict by Jane Stadler
• I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini)/The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) by Sam Rohdie
• The Great Uncredited: Sir Walter Scott and Cinema by Tim Dolin
• The Jazz Singer: Accounting for Female Agency and Reconsidering Scholarship by Karen Vered
• Encountering Elusive Cinema: Tati, Straub-Huillet and Antonioni by Edgar Jorge

Classics and Re-runs

• Directing the Avant-Garde: Raymond Durgnat interviews Stephen Dwoskin (1984) by Raymond Durgnat

Reviews

• Ford At Fox by Bill Routt
• To Wax Zizekian: On Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible by Adrian Martin
• Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-Assessment by Patricia Aufderheide
• The Shadowcatchers: a history of cinematography in Australia by Ina Bertrand
• Post – 9/11 Cinema: Through a Lens Darkly by Rod Bishop
• Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs by Dirk de Bruyn
• Deleuze and World Cinemas by Daniel Fairfax
• Celluloid Immigrant: Italian Australian Filmmaker Giorgio Mangiamele by Geoff Gardner
• Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts
• by Gabrielle Lowe
• World Film Locations: Paris by Sarinah Masukor
• The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era by Josh Nelson
• China on Video: Smaller-screen realities by Tom Salek
• Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film
• by Robert Sinnerbrink
• World Film Locations: Los Angeles & World Film Locations: London by Lynn Smailes
• Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era by Mike Walsh
• The Anatomy of Harpo Marx by Wheeler Winston Dixon
  

More about → New SCREENING THE PAST on 'Untimely Cinema'

The Great Ealing Film Challenge by Keith M. Johnston

A frame capture from Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick, 1952).
Read Keith M. Johnston's assessment of this film, and Pam Cook's

Today, a rather thrilled Film Studies For Free brings you news that Keith M. Johnston's truly 'Great Ealing Film Challenge' has reached its noble conclusion.

Johnston is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on the interplay of technology, aesthetics and industry in British film of the 1940s and 1950s, with particular interests in issues of colour, widescreen and 3-D.

He is the author of Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (McFarland 2009) and Science Fiction Fillm: A Critical Introduction (Berg 2011). He has also published on Ealing's colour aesthetic. You can follow him on Twitter and at the Huffington Post, as well as at his own website.

An ex-resident of Ealing, Keith has always been fascinated by Ealing Studios and its place in British cinema, both past and present. The 'Great Ealing Film Challenge' has been his attempt to better understand the films the studio produced, and what they can tell us about that period in British film history.

Just over a year ago, Keith wrote at his website about his (then) proposed experiment as follows:

[This blog has] decided to conduct its own obscure 80th anniversary celebration... and attempt to watch all of the Ealing Studios films.

Of course, there are some provisos - the list of 95 films I am working from comes from Charles Barr's Ealing Studios book, and is therefore focused entirely on the Michael Balcon years (1938-59). Given the difficulty of seeing much of the studio's output (either before 1938 or, in some cases, after), seeing all of those 95 is already something of a challenge (they're not all available on DVD ). [...]

The order in which I watch the films is largely going to be decided at whim [...] - the initial batch will include some of the well-known titles (commentary on Went the Day Well? and The Man in the White Suit will likely appear in the first week) and those lesser known titles that I realise I've never seen (the likes of The Love Lottery (1954), Nine Men (1943), The Feminine Touch (1954) and Train of Events (1950).

To celebrate the rather impressive achievement of blogging on all 95 films within a year, FSFF brings you not one, but two lists of links to Keith's highly informative and engaging entries! The first comes in the order in which Keith wrote them and the second has been organised alphabetically by year of release.

There will be much more forthcoming from Keith on Ealing Studios' films. He has also been working on co-editing Ealing Revisited with Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, and Melanie Williams. This major collection will be published by BFI-Palgrave later in 2012, tying in with the BFI's major retrospective of Ealing Studios in November/December 2012.

Oh, and don't forget FSFF's earlier post on Ealing comedy films here.

Well done and thank you, Keith! Surely there should be a wee dram as a reward? At any rate, FSFF hopes you enjoy your readers' gratitude galore!

Prologue: The Great Ealing Film Challenge


Went the Day Well? (1943); Train of Events (1949); A Run for your Money (1949); Fiddlers Three (1944); The Love Lottery (1954); The Cruel Sea (1953); The Long Arm (1956); Nine Men (1943); Nicholas Nickleby (1947); Trouble Brewing (1939); The Magnet (1950); The Ship That Died of Shame (1955); Against the Wind (1948); Another Shore (1948); The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942); The Ghost of St. Michael’s (1941); Dead of Night (1945); The Feminine Touch (1956); The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953); The Man in the White Suit (1951); The Gentle Gunman (1952); Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945); Saloon Bar (1940); The Next of Kin (1942); The Gaunt Stranger (1938); San Demetrio, London (1943); Where No Vultures Fly (1951); West of Zanzibar (1954); They Came to a City (1944); Return to Yesterday (1940); Lease of Life (1954); Johnny Frenchman (1945); Ships with Wings (1941); Davy (1957); Touch and Go (1955); Spare a Copper (1940); Turned Out Nice Again (1941); Come on George (1939); Whisky Galore! (1949); Let George Do It (1940); Dunkirk (1958); Who Done It? (1956); My Learned Friend (1943); The Captive Heart (1946); The Blue Lamp (1950); Sailor’s Three (1940); The Goose Steps Out (1942); The Halfway House (1944); The Square Ring (1953); The Foreman Went to France (1942); The Bells Went Down (1943); Champagne Charlie (1944); Bitter Springs (1950); The Overlanders (1946); Pool of London (1951); The Rainbow Jacket (1954); The Lavender Hill Mob (1951); The Shiralee (1957); For Those in Peril (1944); The Proud Valley (1940); The Ladykillers (1955); The Siege of Pinchgut (1959); Meet Mr Lucifer (1953); Secret People (1952); The Big Blockade (1942); Out of the Clouds (1955); Cheer Boys Cheer (1939); The Maggie (1953); Undercover (1943); The Four Just Men (1939); Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948); The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947); It Always Rains on Sunday (1947); Cage of Gold (1950); Frieda (1947); The Night My Number Came Up (1955); Hue [&] Cry (1947); Let’s Be Famous (1939); There Ain’t No Justice (1939); Eureka Stockade (1949); Painted Boats (1945); Barnacle Bill (1958); I Believe in You (1952); Dance Hall (1950); Convoy (1940); Scott of the Antarctic (1948); The Man in the Sky (1957); Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949; Young Man’s Fancy (1939); Mandy (1952); The Divided Heart (1954); His Excellency (1952); The Ware Case (1938); Nowhere to Go (1958); Passport to Pimlico (1949)

1938:
The Gaunt Stranger; The Ware Case

1939:
Cheer Boys Cheer; Come on George; Let’s Be Famous; The Four Just Men; There Ain’t No Justice ; Trouble Brewing; Young Man’s Fancy

1940:
Convoy; Let George Do It; Return to Yesterday ; Sailor’s Three ; Saloon Bar ; Spare a Copper; The Proud Valley

1941:
Ships with Wings; The Ghost of St. Michael’s; Turned Out Nice Again ;

1942:
The Big Blockade; The Black Sheep of Whitehall; The Foreman Went to France; The Goose Steps Out; The Next of Kin

1943:
My Learned Friend; Nine Men; San Demetrio, London; The Bells Went Down; Undercover; Went the Day Well? 

1944:
Champagne Charlie; Fiddlers Three; For Those in Peril; Fiddlers Three; The Halfway House; They Came to a City

1945:
Dead of Night; Johnny Frenchman; Painted Boats; Pink String and Sealing Wax 

1946:
The Captive Heart; The Overlanders

1947:
Frieda; Hue&Cry; It Always Rains on Sunday; Nicholas Nickleby; The Loves of Joanna Godden

1948:
Against the Wind; Another Shore; Saraband for Dead Lovers; Scott of the Antarctic

1949:
A Run for your Money; Eureka Stockade; Kind Hearts and Coronets; Passport to Pimlico; Train of Events; Whisky Galore!

1950:
Bitter Springs; Cage of Gold; Dance Hall; The Blue Lamp; The Magnet

1951:
Pool of London; The Lavender Hill Mob; The Man in the White Suit; Where No Vultures Fly

1952:
His Excellency; I Believe in You; Mandy; Secret People; The Gentle Gunman

1953:
Meet Mr Lucifer; The Cruel Sea; The Maggie; The Square Ring; The Titfield Thunderbolt

1954:
Lease of Life; The Divided Heart; The Love Lottery; The Rainbow Jacket; West of Zanzibar

1955:
Out of the Clouds; The Ladykillers; The Night My Number Came Up; The Ship That Died of Shame; Touch and Go

1956:
The Feminine Touch; The Long Arm; Who Done It?

1957:
Davy; The Man in the Sky; The Shiralee

1958:
Barnacle Bill; Dunkirk; Nowhere to Go

1959:
The Siege of Pinchgut

More about → The Great Ealing Film Challenge by Keith M. Johnston