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New FILM-PHILOSOPHY!!

Diposting oleh good reading on Jumat, 20 Desember 2013

Frame grab from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Read Ben Tyrer's article on film noir and this film in the latest issue of Film-Philosophy

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013): the second to last of the brilliant new film studies e journal issues out in December with which Film Studies For Free will present you in 2013. And the daddy of them all.

There will be two more FSFF posts to appear before the holidays, that is, if you can tear yourself away from reading the below articles and reviews.

    Articles
      Book Reviews
      • Hsiu-Chuang Deppman (2010) Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film (Iris Chui Ping Kam) PDF
      • Alain Badiou (2013) Cinema and Alex Ling (2010) Badiou and Cinema (David H. Fleming) PDF
      • Timothy Corrigan, ed. (2012) Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. 2nd Edition (Shawn Loht) PDF
      • Michael Charlesworth (2011) Derek Jarman (Justin Remes) PDF
      • Sharon Lin Tay (2009) Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (Sheryl Tuttle Ross) PDF
      • Todd Berliner (2010) Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (John Anthony Bleasdale) PDF
      •  M. Keith Booker (2011) Historical Dictionary of American Cinema (Glen Melanson) PDF  
      • Shawn C. Bean (2008) The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking (Carrie Giunta) PDF
      • Julian Petley (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Zach Saltz) PDF
      • Suzanne Buchan (2011) The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Micki Nyman) PDF
      • Khatereh Sheibani (2011) The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics and Modernity After the Revolution (Paul Elliott) PDF
      More about → New FILM-PHILOSOPHY!!
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      LOLA: Issue 4 on "Walks"; Tourneur, Hitchcock, De Palma, Pacino and much more

      Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 16 September 2013

      Screen shot from Carlito's Way (Brian De Palma, 1993). Read Adrian Martin's essay on this film in the new issue of LOLA .
      Film Studies For Free is thrilled to hear that a new rolling issue of LOLA has launched. Issue 4 treats the very cinematic topic of 'Walks' and contains some items (Victor Bruno on lighting effects in Out of the Past, a fine translation of an Alain Bergala essay on Vertigo and Obsession, and several further excellent pieces on De Palma) that will very much repay a speedy stroll over there to check them out.

      Over the coming weeks, LOLA will go on to present further articles on Kira Muratova, Frank Tashlin, the Cinema of Compassion, CinemaScope, The Grandmaster, and much more! Those enticing contents will slowly be added to the already delightful ones linked to below.
      More about → LOLA: Issue 4 on "Walks"; Tourneur, Hitchcock, De Palma, Pacino and much more
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      Film and Media Studies Podcasts Galore! Cinema Journal's Aca-Media, New Books in Film Studies and NoirCasts

      Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 19 Agustus 2013

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      More about → Film and Media Studies Podcasts Galore! Cinema Journal's Aca-Media, New Books in Film Studies and NoirCasts
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      Hard-Boiled! Studies of Raymond Chandler's Work on Screen

      Diposting oleh good reading on Minggu, 14 Oktober 2012

      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.


      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.


      Wootten 2 poster frame

      More about → Hard-Boiled! Studies of Raymond Chandler's Work on Screen
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      A Place for Film Noir with Will Scheibel

      Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 05 Juni 2012

         


      Production at Film Studies For Free Towers will slow up, for a month or so, due to the sheer weight of responsibilities elsewhere, FSFF is afraid.

      Some of those responsibilities are significant authorial and, especially, editorial ones which will bear truly glorious, open access, film scholarly fruit very soon!

      But this site will continue to post some occasional gems in the meantime. And this brings us to the above, excellent excerpt from one of the great Indiana University Cinema Podcasts.

      Regular hosts Andy Hunsucker and Jason Thompson invited Film Studies grad student at Indiana University (and former notable blogger) Will Scheibel to talk about Film Noir, particularly in relation to preparing a class on this fundamental film studies topic. The discussion is extremely engaging and very well informed

      Check out the full audio podcast episode at here. Lins to previous episodes are here. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. The IU podcast is also on Twitter and Facebook.

      Two earlier FSFF entries on film noir are given below:  
        And for further, film studies, podcast fun and frolics please don't forget the wonderful Film Versus Film crew series with Dustin Morrow, Chris Cagle, David Cooper Moore and Matt Prigge. Their beautiful Tumblr is here.
        More about → A Place for Film Noir with Will Scheibel
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        "Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies

        Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 08 Maret 2012

        The above is a short video primer by Catherine Grant. It offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of gender, sexuality and movement in relation to Rita Hayworth's performance as Gilda in Charles Vidor's 1946 film.
        The femme fatale is a product of the male imaginary, which emerges in literature and the visual arts under contingent socio-political conditions as a challenge to coherent and stable identities. [...]
             The emergence of the femme fatale motif in literature, art and cinema generally coincides with periods of social or political instability and is not specific to a culture, society or era, but exhibits countless masks as she may manifest herself in diverse historical or geo-political contexts, and through a variety of artistic and literary forms. She embodies traces of a myriad of powerful, as well as menacing, historical, biblical and mythical female figures, such as Cleopatra, Salome, or the Sirens; yet this wicked and barren creature is always imbued with an alluring beauty and rapacious sexuality that is potentially deadly to man. The femme fatale figure is a recurrent patriarchal construct, a projection of all that exists beyond that which is normal, familiar, or safe. As Rebecca Stott observes, she is a multiple sign, or ‘the Other around whom the qualities of all Other collect in the male imagination’ (1992: 39). As such, her appearances are always symptomatic of a society in crisis.         [Eva Bru-Domínguez, 'The Body as a Conflation of Discourses: The femme fatale in Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat' (1974)', Journal of Catalan Studies 2009]
        [I]s it possible that the tangled webs of violence, sexuality, pathology, and intrigue at the core of certain film noir offer moments of reversal and exception which challenge women's role as eternal victim? How is an anti-feminist backlash or male anxiety around women's power projected into these paranoid film scenarios? To what extent can such disruptions be contained through conventional "happy family" closure - or through the violent death of the (anti-)heroine whose glittering image lingers as the credits rolls? Working against the inescapable grain of the "repressive rule" of female victimhood, I choose here to seize on the exceptional figure of the "fatale femme." While the exception may help define the rule, she also keeps alive the possibility, the inevitability, of transformation in gendered relations of power. [Julianne Pidduck, The "fatal femme" in contemporary Hollywood film noir: reframing gender, violence, and power, Masters Thesis, Concordia University, 1993: 6-7]
        Rather than promoting images of women that emphasize their spirit and unknowable power, and rather than promoting images of women that rely on their bodies, finally, we need to illustrate the contexts that inform women’s experience. I want to suggest some of the reasons why we’ve grown accustomed to identifying film noir’s “femme fatale” without examining these contexts that inform her presence in film noir, by doing just that: examining the settings—social, psychological, political, physical, and geographical—that define her experience, which is, I want strongly to suggest, a far better thing to define than “woman” herself.
             This study seeks to modify the tone of feminist discussions about film noir’s women by reorienting our attention to the narrative, social contexts, and mise-en-scene that show the relationship between women’s powers and the limits placed on them by social rules. Both the view of the “femme fatale” as misogynist projection and the view of the “femme fatale” as opaque yet transgressive female force emphasize her status as object or symbol (as object of scorn or as the mysterious and opaque “other” that threatens to destroy the male subject). My aim is to adjust our focus on film noir and gender so that we illuminate these women’s narratives rather than mystifying women as objects or images.         [Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009): 5. Book info.]
        Film Studies For Free wishes its reader a very happy International Women's Day with a varied curatorial selection of online scholarly work touching on possibly the most studied 'object' in all of feminist film theory: the 'dangerous' woman, sometimes fatal, sometimes a fatality...

        If you are a film goer you know her kind. She is attractive, alluring, enigmatic, enticing, teasing, siren-like. Totally tautological. You might come across her dancing in a cinematic cabaret or show, smoking in a private detective's office, gracing a film noir alleyway, or haunting a difficult to decipher flashback. Or turning up like a beautiful but bad penny, provoking your scopophilia (and/or your epistemophilia), just about anywhere in almost every period of international film history.

        Just what is it about these cinematic women? There certainly isn't one answer to that question, but the studies linked to below might very well help you to begin to tackle it.

        If there are any important online resources that FSFF has missed, please do list them in the comments thread.
        More about → "Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies
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        Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?

        Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 17 Januari 2012

        Last updated January 20, 2012

        A psychosexually obsessed man wanders the streets of 1950s San Francisco; he spies [on] seemingly unavailable blonde women; he makes a woman fall from a height; she drops into water; the scene is filled with circle imagery, especially circles within circles.....  [See the original sequence]
        As Film Studies For Free's readers may have heard, Kim Novak, co-star of Vertigo, took out an ad in trade magazine Variety to protest about the recent use of an excerpt from Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film in Michel Hazanavicius’s 2011 modern silent film The Artist. "I want to report a rape," went the headline. "I feel as if my body - or at least my body of work -- has been violated by the movie, The Artist," Novak wrote. She went on to criticise the “use and abuse [of] famous pieces of work to gain attention and applause for other than what they were intended.”

        There was quite a strong international reaction to Novak's intervention. Some were dismayed by her recourse to the lexicon of rape; others were more sympathetic to her stance and background as someone very much not from the digital age of remix and creative appropriation; still others remind us that, in 'Scene d'Amour', the musical Vertigo theme in question, Herrmann was, of course, inspirationally reworking some of Richard Wagner's motifs from his Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Good artists copy; great artists steal?

        Enter the story the PRESS PLAY blog which launched a contest inviting readers to re-use Herrmann's "Scene d'Amour" music in their own mash-up, inspired by the idea that "Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score is so passionate and powerful that it can elevate an already good scene -- and a familiar one at that -- to a higher plane of expression."

        Film Studies For Free's author was only too happy to have a go, joining the legions of those who, like Hazanavicius, have used Herrmann's music in their work, in large or very small ways. Her choice of film sequence? One borrowed from The Sniper, Edward Dmytryk's 1952 film noir, with its own, obsessed, wandering male protagonist and San Francisco setting.

        The Sniper was one of the films that probably directly inspired Vertigo, as well as Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho -- see critic Dave Kehr's thoughts on this. The above mash-up chooses, then, to marry Herrmann's lush Wagnerian romance with the key 'amusement park' sequence from Dmytryk's brilliant film, with its astonishing performance of overt misogyny by Arthur Franz as Edward "Eddie" Miller -- perhaps the perfect, filmic, mirror-image of James Stewart's unforgettable, unconsciously misogynist, John "Scottie" Ferguson.

        FSFF's author was excited to experience at first-hand the scholarly possibilities of remixing film clips in this way (the contest rules state that the original film sequence cannot be re-edited in any way -- except, if you choose to, by removing its sound -- in order not to cheat with the creative re-juxtaposition process).

        Remixing is an astonishingly good (and amazingly easy) way of really -- almost literally -- getting inside a film sequence. It is thus a truly great exercise for all students of film with access to the right digital tools. Analysing just how the mash-up adapts the meaning of the original music and original sequence is rather educational and fun, too!

        If you get your skates on with the Vertigo score exercise, there are still three days left for Press Play's contest entries. Click here to watch the (over 60) entries at present.

        FSFF's favorite entry to the contest, so far, is a mash-up which, rather like its own, plays on the conscious or unconscious connections between an earlier film and Vertigo. It's Matthew Cheney's wonderful work with Mädchen in Uniform (the brilliant 1931 film by Leontine Sagan). But there are loads of other imaginative and highly satisfying remixes that you will enjoy checking out. UPDATE: the videographic legend that is Steven Boone just added a late Vertigoed entry which is FSFF's new favourite: a scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

        If you want to see even more brilliant, Vertigo mash-up work -- actually, a work of remix in a completely different, utterly sublime class -- you simply must check out The Vertigo Variations by remarkable critic-filmmaker B. Kite.

        And, for more vertiginous sublimity, don't forget FSFF's very own Study of a Single Film: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo entry.



        The mash up video at the top of the post was made according to principles of Fair Use/Fair Dealing, with non-commercial scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License in January 2012. 
        More about → Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?
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        Studies of Film Noirishness, with Love

        Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 21 Februari 2011

        50+ new links added on February 27, 2011
        The above is a short video primer by Catherine Grant. It offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of gender, sexuality and movement in relation to Rita Hayworth's performance as Gilda in Charles Vidor's 1946 film.



        Film Studies For Free is delighted to present its own contribution to the remarkable fundraising effort for the Film Noir Foundation that has been taking place in the last week, namely the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blog-a-thon, organised by film critics Farran Smith Nehme (Self-Styled Siren) and Marilyn Ferdinand (of Ferdy on Film).

        Awed by the contributions so far, FSFF proffers (above) a little video-primer on its favourite noir - Gilda - together with a reposting of Matt Zoller Seitz's fabulous audiovisual essay on The Prowler (also above), and a whole host of direct links (below) to openly accessible scholarly reading and viewing on Film Noir, and on all varieties of Neo-Noir, too - taken altogether, some of the most essential of film studies topics.

        The Film Noir Foundation works to preserve and restore movies in its chosen mode from many eras and from many countries. The film nominated to be restored with monies raised this year is a fine and important noir called The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me) directed by Cy Endfield (1914–1995).

        One of the resources FSFF links to is an excellent interview with Endfield, conducted in 1989 by Brian Neve, in which he discusses that film in the context of his career as a whole and the historical events which formed the background to his work. Here's what Endfield concludes about The Sound of Fury.
        I consider that my talent for making pictures was best expressed in two pictures, Zulu and The Sound of Fury. I think the one big talent I have is to make big pictures. There is a sense of structure about something of dimension that I have found lacking even in pictures that were supposed to be big. [...] The Sound of Fury was made mostly from my blood circulation and nervous system. 
        FSFF knows that feeling only too well! It can't wait to see the restored film. So, please, if you love Film Noir, join this blog's author in donating some of your hard-earned dough (or even some of your ill-begotten gains...) on this occasion. Just click here. Thank you!
                          Note: The first video essay (by Catherine Grant) embedded at the top of this post was made according to principles of Fair Use/Fair Dealing, primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License in February 2011. If you found this video or FSFF's Film Noir entry useful or enjoyable, please consider supporting with a donation the valuable work of the Film Noir Foundation. Thank you.
                            More about → Studies of Film Noirishness, with Love
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