Get the Picture! A Community-Based Film Study Programme Using THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY

Interview with filmmaker and educator Mark Cousins about his film series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which forms the basis of the Get the Picture community film study project described below

Quite often Film Studies For Free gets asked about free film study. Not so surprising, you might think, given the name on its own tin. But what people are often asking about is free "real world", or offline, film study - and sadly not too much of that comes for free these days.

So imagine how delighted FSFF was when it was contacted by a group of generous and talented individuals who have formed an educational partnership called Get the Picture 'that aims to provide free support materials and a framework to help people to come together in their local community, to form study groups and learn about film'.

FSFF is, therefore, delighted to create a space, in today's entry, for a concise and enticing introduction to the work of this partnership, in the hope that some of its readers will go on to take up the specific invitation set out here, and that yet others will go on to concoct their own community film study projects inspired by this one. If the latter happens, do please let FSFF know.

In the meantime, thank you so much to Get the Picture!  You can follow the project on Twitter --  @GtPfilm -- and, of course, at its website.

Get the Picture: Film study groups in the community

There's a certain added frisson of pleasure in writing this post, because of its context: what I'm about to describe is a programme of informal adult film study that is free to users. The only necessary additional costs involved are the purchase of the DVD box set of Mark Cousins's The Story of Film, an Odyssey.

'Us' refers to Get the Picture, which is the collective name for three activists in the community cinema movement, John Salisbury, Julia Vickers and Jim Barratt. The programme of study we've developed and made available is a response to the rapid attrition of informal film study in the 2000s, in the UK, at least, resulting from the decision of the last government to withdraw from supporting lifelong learning. After the impact of that withdrawal of funding became evident, we set about looking for an approach to filling the gap which would, like community cinemas themselves, work in local communities everywhere in the UK. We saw the possibilities opened up by the release of The Story of Film, and our programme is the result. Incidentally, we ran the idea past Mark Cousins early on: he liked it then, and has strongly and warmly endorsed the result.

What was needed?

As we saw it, the requirement was for a programme which was

• free to participants
• self-organised and self-paced
• informal, not assessed
• of benefit whatever the starting point of the participant.

We saw there was a need for someone (a group member) to manage the group experience and chair discussions (a role we termed 'enabler'), but that shouldering this responsibility would require additional support from us. We decided to base the whole programme on advice notes (e.g. Programme Guide, How to be a Participant) and study notes (each relating to a specific study/discussion session based on an individual episode of The Story of Film). We decided that since the only distribution system for study materials which would work universally was sending pdf documents over the internet, we would embrace the internet, giving strong guidance on its use as a resource for individual study. Finally, we decided that basing a programme on all 15 chapters of The Story of Film might well seem a dauntingly large commitment for a study group, so we offered the programme in three segments of five chapters/study sessions each.

What's in the programme?

For each segment, a participant receives a document set which contains common advice notes and the study notes relevant to the sessions in that segment. The advice notes consist of the Programme Guide, How to be a Participant, How to be an Enabler, and the Key Films list. You can find more detail on this (and examples) on the Get the Picture website at getthepicture.org.uk. There is also an advice note on Enhancements and Digressions, because we recognise that some groups may wish to add to the programme we've laid out, or digress from it: nothing is set in stone.

The normal experience for a participant in each segment is that after an introductory organizing session convened by the enabler, they attend five discussion sessions in which they discuss prepared questions chosen from those found in each set of Study Notes. In between discussion sessions, participants are asked to do four things: they watch the relevant chapter of The Story of Film, they prepare for the planned discussion questions, they undertake individual study based on suggested internet resources (from Wikipedia, YouTube and specified websites), and they watch the specified key films. This means that scheduling the discussions must leave time for these individual activities, and enablers receive suitable guidance about this. To give a more comprehensive flavour, embedded below is the Programme Guide pdf document which all participants receive. If you want to view it more comfortably, or offline, you can download it from this website: http://getthepicture.org.uk.

The Key Films list is significant: for each session, we select two of the films Mark Cousins cites as notable within the episode of The Story of Film, and suggest all group members watch these films as part of their preparation, to provide a common basis for discussion. From quite early on, some of the discussion questions focus on individual key films.

Trialling the programme

We have been fortunate in that groups from a small number of film societies agreed to trial the materials for Segment One. The result has been very positive and a clear endorsement of the basic approach. We have streamlined the study materials as a result of trials feedback, and worked hard to clarify the discussion questions. As we expected, specific problems arose around the role of the enabler, especially when inexperienced enablers had to deal with obstinate group members, but these problems were by no means dealbreakers. We encountered unexpected problems (for example, the disruptive potential of refreshments) and have had to mention these in the advice notes. But in general, the trials indicated to us that it was well worth continuing with the programme and making it generally available.

Who will benefit?

The short answer is anyone, anywhere. We have set the entry threshold low by shaping each set of discussion questions so that they are readily approachable, but permit quite deep insights. We have largely refrained from the theoretical but touched on it where appropriate, and we have taken the intellectual frame as that bounded by Mark Cousins's treatment, which relates filmmaking technique to viewing experience in some complex and interesting ways.  We have shaped the individual study possibilities by introducing a wide range of resources, simply as a way of illustrating what is possible, and we have used guided Wikipedia and YouTube research as the spine for individual inquiry.  This approach offers anyone who wants to go further all that the internet allows, but gives a solid and satisfactory experience to the novice.

What we want from you.

Do you know anyone who might like to know about the Get the Picture programme? They might be in a film society, or involved in a community cinema, or they might just be into film. The benefits of making what is normally solitary - watching film, reading and thinking about it - communal and social are hard to quantify, but they do include a clear development in the individual's ability to talk and think about film. We find that, for the many generations of Britons who have received no education in film at school or since, this development is immensely liberating, so we have no hesitation in asking you to spread the word. Send them a link to this post. Get the Pictureis open for (free) business.

[The above text is by John Salisbury of Get the Picture]

Note about location: The materials were trialled with groups in the UK, but there is no reason why groups from anywhere in the English-speaking world should not take advantage of them. You only need to be sure you can access The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Study groups from anywhere in the world are welcome and invited to register with Get the Picture.

More about → Get the Picture! A Community-Based Film Study Programme Using THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY

Magnifying Mirror: On Barbara Stanwyck and Film Performance Studies

 
"[F]ilm and criticism re-united"? MAGNIFYING MIRROR 
Video by Catherine Grant, based on text and narration by Andrew Klevan

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry on the wonderful work of American actress Barbara Stanwyck as well as on film performance studies more generally. Stanwyck's illustrious career began in the 1920s and spanned sixty years. During that period she starred in major films of many genres and worked with some of the most distinguished Hollywood directors. Writing on her work may provide, therefore, an excellent, indeed exemplary case for reflection on film critical methodologies in performance studies.

As well as the usual links to online scholarly work on these topics (scroll down for those), the entry presents, below, an interview with Andrew Klevan, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford. Klevan discusses the rationale behind his recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013). He also talks about some of the issues that arise when film performance is the object of study, around intention and attribution of agency and value.

During the interview, which took place in October this year, Klevan read aloud an excerpt from his book, a reading which inspired, and formed the narration of, the above FSFF video on Stanwyck, MAGNIFYING MIRROR. Klevan also wrote a short statement about the video and about his collaboration with FSFF more generally, which you can also find below.

FSFF Interview: Andrew Klevan on writing about Barbara Stanwyck and film performance 

A Note by Andrew Klevan
I am grateful to Film Studies For Free for highlighting my work, and I hope the expression of some nervousness will not be taken as ungracious. The problem of enlarging on rationale and method as I do in the interview is that, aside from risking accusations of self-importance and self-promotion, by simply stating matters which should, perhaps, remain implicit, one overstates the case, and raises expectations, especially with regard to, what we affectionately call, little books. My answers, drawing out many of the things I tried to do, may create the incorrect impression that the Barbara Stanwyck study is comprehensive and voluminous. (Even the use of expressions such as ‘moment-by-moment’ or ‘movement of meaning’ might suggest an exhaustive sequential tracking.) In fact, one of the compositional aims was to try, using the short form of the little book, to achieve a balance between elaboration and concentration, extraction and distillation. This partly reflects a similar balance achieved in the films and performances, and Catherine Grant’s fascinating video riff, ‘Magnifying Mirror’, which matches the film to my pre-existing text, captures some of this by looping a sequence and in doing so emphasises the moment’s compactness by way of repetition.

I am conscious that [fellow film scholar] E.A. Kaplan is a casualty, and it appears as if her comment on Stella Dallas is singled out where actually quite a few accounts are tested in the course of the study and the isolation is a consequence of uprooting. It is true that I take issue with her assessment, but this is a difference over an interpretation, not a charge against her work more generally, or the value of it. I feel that her account reduces, and overlooks an achievement of the film, but this is something that we are all prone to do. Indeed, much nervousness on my part again as the film returns, insistently, to probe my own description and interpretation – alas too late to make adjustments – but also some satisfaction as film and criticism are reunited. This image/speech track relationship struck me as quite different to a DVD commentary (which is limited by the real time of the film) and the narration of audio-visual criticism (which is conceived in relation to the handling of images). I got the sense of a new form of criticism, using audio-visual material, happily meeting an old form of criticism, using words, and not simply exemplifying the ‘close reading’, but enhancing and interrogating, and more generally revivifying (and magnifying). The iteration in Catherine’s video productively interacts with the distension of written representation. The collaboration with FSFF has illuminated for me the stimulating relationship between commentaries in different forms so that the book gets commented upon in an audio interview and in a video film which in turn gets commented upon in this web statement, allowing the different media to differently elucidate.

Andrew Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. He is author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film and Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. He is the co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism, and is on the editorial boards of MOVIE - A Journal of Film Criticism and Film-Philosophy Journal]

On Barbara Stanwyck

• Linda Berkvens, No Crinoline-Covered Lady: Stardom, Agency, and the Career of Barbara Stanwyck, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex, 2011
• Linda Berkvens, 'From Below to Above the Title: The Construction of the Star Image of Barbara Stanwyck, 1930-1935', Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, Vol 2, No 1 (2009) 
• Maria DiBattista, 'Fast-Talking Dames, New York Times: Books, 2001
• Gary Johnson, 'Barbara Stanwyck, With her Hands on her Hips', Images Journal, Issue 1 
• Glenn Kenny, 'A Woman's Equipment: Barbara Stanwyck's Anklet in DOUBLE INDEMNITY', Balder and Dash, October 14, 2013
• Andrew Klevan, sample chapters from Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013) 
• Andrew Klevan, 'A Reply to Adrian Martin', Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
• Michelle Orange, 'Review of  A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940 by Victoria Wilson. Simon & Schuster', Slate, November 8, 2013
• V.F. Perkins, 'Acting on Objects', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• Catherine Russell, 'Frank Capra: The Early Collection', Cineaste, 38.3, 2013
  
• Christopher Sharrett, 'Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow', Cineaste, 35.4, 2010
• Imogen Sara Smith, 'Passing the Test: On Repetition, Performance, and the Greatness of Howard Hawks', Moving Image Source, September 4, 2013
• Suzanna Danuta Walters, 'My Heart Belongs to Mama: Stella Dallas and the Politics of Class', in Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  1992
• Victoria Wilson, author of Barbara Stanwyck Steel-True 1907-1940 interviewed by Warner Archive Podcast, November 7th, 2013 
• 'An Interview with Victoria Wilson, Author of A LIFE OF BARBARA STANWYCK: STEEL-TRUE (1907-1940)', Backlots, October 24, 2013

On film performance

• Nicole Brenez, 'Incomparable Bodies', Screening the Past, 31, 2011
• Dan Callahan, 'Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame." Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 61, August 2008  
• Charles Chaplin Conference Proceedings, BFI, July 2005
• Anna Dzenis, 'On Film Performance', Screening the Past, 20, 2006
• Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009) Book info. 
• Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, 'Introduction', Film and Television Stardom, ed by K-P R Hart (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)
• Susan Hayward, 'Stardom: Beyond Desire?' in History of Stardom Reconsidered, edited by Kari Kallioniemi, Kimi Kärki, Janne Mäkelä and Hannu Salmi. Turku: International Institute for Popular Culture, 2007 
• Tamar Jeffers, "Should I surrender?": performing and interrogating female virginity in Hollywood films 1957-64', PhD thesis, University of Warwick 
• 'Jerry Lewis Dossier' in La Furia Umana, Issue 12 - currently offline but will be back soon
• Christian Keathley, 'The Man in the Back Seat', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013 
• Andrew Klevan, 'A Reply to Adrian Martin', Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
• Andrew Klevan, 'Expressing the In-Between', LOLA, Issue 1, 2011
• Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the everyday : the undramatic achievements in narrative film, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1996
• Victoria Lowe, 'Performing Hitchcock': Robert Donat, Film Acting and The 39 Steps (1935)', Scope, Issue 14, June 2009  
• Jean Ma, 'Close Reading: The Mise-en-scène of Song Performance', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• Adrian Martin, 'Secret Agents [Review of Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation], Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
• Adrian Martin, 'Hands Across the Table', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• Adrian Martin, 'At Table: The Social Mise en scène of How Green Was My Valley', Undercurrent, no. 5, 2009
• Steve Masters, 'Review of Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation by Andrew Klevan', Scope, Issue 9, October 2007
• Daniel Morgan, 'Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity: On the Aesthetics and Ethics of Camera Movement, Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2011 
• Warwick Mules, ''Mise-en-scène and the Figural: A Reading of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life'', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• Rebecca Claire Naughten, Spain Made Flesh: Reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2010 
• V.F. Perkins, 'Acting on Objects', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• V.F. Perkins, 'Moments of Choice', Rouge, no. 9, 2006
• V.F. Perkins, 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52), 16:9, September 2003
• VI Pudovkin, Film Technique And Film Acting, Grove Press Inc, 1958 
• Laura Sava, 'Théâtre du Soleil Meets the Cinema: Acting and Mask Work in Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière', Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011
• Imogen Sara Smith, 'Passing the Test: On Repetition, Performance, and the Greatness of Howard Hawks', Moving Image Source, September 4, 2013
• Joerg Sternagel, 'From Inside Us: Experiencing the Film Actor in Michael Haneke's Caché', Film International #39, vol. 7, no. 3
• Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995
• Sarah Thomas, Face-maker : the negotiation between screen performance, extra-filmic persona and conditions of employment within the career of Peter Lorre, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008
• Dolores Tierney, 'Latino Acting on Screen: Pedro Armendariz Performs Mexicanness in Three John Ford Movies', Revista Candiense de Estudios Hispanicos 37.1, 2012

 
Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE by Catherine Grant

 
Refashioning the Femme Fatale? Gilda in Motion by Catherine Grant

More about → Magnifying Mirror: On Barbara Stanwyck and Film Performance Studies

Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013 Conference Papers and Contributions Online

            Film Studies and Videographic Assemblage A Video Presentation by Catherine Grant for the S23 Workshop "Writing with Video: Beyond the Illustrated Text", Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Chicago, March 6-10, 2013.

[Catherine Grant's introduction to the above video:] My presentation to this workshop has a somewhat strange take on the notion of the capacity of "video-writing" to move beyond the "illustrated text". The video it presents (embedded above) not only uses a good deal of text, but was also originally inspired by the idea of audiovisually amplifying, or supplementing, a long pre-existing written study of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope.
    What making it demonstrated to me is that, in scholarly settings, even the simplest videographic act of presenting an assemblage of compiled film sequences involves medium-specific forms of argumentation, for example, the selection and presentation of audiovisual evidence, montage and mise en scene, titling, sound editing and other creative effects, all aiming to draw from "a broader notion of pathos, logos, and ethos than that which has been reified in the age of print literacy", as Virginia Kuhn has put it.* The result is not only the creation of an audiovisual argument, therefore, but also, importantly, of an active viewing space for live co-research - a framed experience of participant observation which, particularly through its online distribution, dialogically invites responses (including rebuttals!) through forms of remix. [Also see
Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins) and Déjà-Viewing?Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies]
    *Kuhn, Virginia. 2012. "The Rhetoric of Remix." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. Online at dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0358.

S23 Workshop chaired by Virginia Kuhn (University of Southern California), with presentations by Vicki Callahan, Catherine Grant, Michael Lachney, Virginia Kuhn and Cheryl Ball. The workshop was sponsored by the Media Literacy and Pedagogical Outreach Scholarly Interest Group. The full 2013 SCMS Conference Program PDF is here.

Film Studies For Free is happy to present links to some resources pertaining to papers or presentations at the (recently concluded) annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.

FSFF's author's own contribution to the conference, embedded and pasted in above, was part of a workshop panel on "Writing with Video" (see all of the assets from this workshop gathered by Virginia Kuhn here). In the end, this year -- for the same reasons it's been so quiet at this blog (major, unexpected construction work taking place at home at the same time as a very busy semester!) -- she was unable to travel to the US to attend this final session of the conference in person. But, thanks to the wonders of modern technology her work was kindly presented in absentia by her fellow panelists. Among these, Vicki Callahan and Michael Lachney presented on their pedagogical practices around teaching video argumentation as part of multimedia literacy programmes. In particular, Callahan discussed her classroom use of online video collaborative authoring tools including WeVideo. Cheryl Ball discussed her experience as editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (see Ball's fabulous essay for Kairos on digital scholarship here). And workshop chair Virginia Kuhn presented on her highly innovative large scale video analysis project, a wonderful example of the potential for humanities supercomputing (also see here).

Below are links to a whole host of further conference contributions, mostly collected via Twitter. Thanks very much to those who supplied the links. If you have posted your own SCMS paper online, or know of others not gathered below, please leave the link in a comment. Thank you!

SCMS Digital Humanities J23 Workshop 5_8_13 from scms at livestream.com. Featuring Miriam Posner, Jason Mittell (see below for his paper), Hannah Goodwin, Jasmijn Van Gorp, Jason Rhody and Eric Faden

• Tyler Bickford, '“The Best of Both Worlds”: Hannah Montana, “having it all,” and postfeminist tween domesticity' (Thanks to Anthony C Bleach for the link)
• Shane Denson, 'Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect'
• Theresa Geller, '"The Hardest, The Most Difficult Film:" Todd Haynes’ Safe as Feminist Film Praxis' (Thanks for the link to Julia Leyda)
• Richard Grusin, 'Post-Cinematic Atavism'
• Justin Horton, 'Disembodiment and Ecstatic Perception in The Tree of Life' 
• Amanda Ann Klein, '“To Dance Again!”: Affect, Genre, and the HARRY POTTER Franchise'
• Julia Leyda, 'Playing with Dolls: Girls and Fans in Velvet Goldmine'
• James MacDowell, 'Value, Intention, and the Aesthetics of "So Bad It's Good"'
• Jason Mittell, 'Mapping a Pluralistic Field: What Does Television Studies Really Look Like?' 
• Munib Rezaie, 'The New Chinese Mainstream? Dayyan Eng and Ning Hao’s Appeal for Young Urban Moviegoers in the People’s Republic of China' (Thanks to Justin Horton for the link)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Response to panel on “primordigital cinema,” with talks by Jonathan Freedman, Richard Grusin, and Selmin Kara'
• Chuck Tryon, 'Families are Complicated: Netflix Kids, Personalization, and Digital Delivery'
• María A. Vélez-Serna, 'Film distribution in Scotland in the 1910s: A case study in artificial scarcity as institutional strategy'
• Neil Verma, 'Sound Studies at SCMS 2013'

Also see:

• SCMS YouTube Channel with lots of videos from the conference
• SCMS Annual Conference Live: Chicago 2013 Blogs (by Alexander Cho, Alexandra Juhasz, Chuck Kleinhans, Raquel Gates and Tim Havens)
• Suzanne Scott, 'Distanced Learning: SCMS as MOOC (massively open online conference)'

More about → Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013 Conference Papers and Contributions Online

BLADE RUNNER, ALIEN, INCEPTION, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and Spielberg: Five Video Essays by Steven Benedict

Updated on August 9 to include video analyses of Spielberg's films and Ridley Scott's Alien

The Techniques and Themes of Steven Spielberg by Steven Benedict


Analysis of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) by Steven Benedict
 

Analysis of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) by Steven Benedict

Analysis of Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) by Steven Benedict

Analysis of The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) by Steven Benedict

Film Studies For Free just watched the above, very new, film analytical video essays, spotted on one of its regular trawls of the great video hosting site Vimeo. They are made for educational and critical purposes, using fair use/fair dealing procedures, by the Irish filmmaker, broadcaster, and lecturer Steven Benedict.

They are well edited, wide-ranging, insightful, and great for classroom discussion, to boot. FSFF hopes we'll be seeing more videographic film analyses made by Benedict and that these essays will inspire others, including film students, to explore this rising pedagogical and critical format, too.

There will be a post coming up shortly on the theory and practice of making film/TV educational video essays, so do please look out for that. And check out FSFF's earlier collection of links on Christopher Nolan's films.

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A Place for Film Noir with Will Scheibel

   

This is an excerpt from Episode 87 of A Place For Film - The IU Cinema Podcast

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:  

• Studies of Film Noirishness, with Love 
• "Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies 

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.

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Video Essays and Scholarly Remix: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Forms - Audiovisual Film Studies, Pt 2

           A tiny transfusion of fleeting, Swedish, film sequences, revealing -- conjuring, arguing for -- an intertextual relationship using digital video montage

Catherine Grant will discuss the above companion piece to her video essay Touching the Film Object? at a workshop on "Video Essays: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Form" at the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, 5pm on March 22, 2012 in Boston.
     Her fellow workshop participants will include Christian Keathley (Middlebury College), Girish Shambu (Canisius College), Benjamin Sampson (UCLA), Richard Misek (University of Kent), Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida) and Matthias Stork (UCLA).  

In her book Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey considered how the intersection of cinema with various digital technologies has changed film studies in recent decades.  Most obviously, DVDs allow film scholars unprecedented access to high-quality copies of our objects of study, and the internet has supplemented this with a wealth of online critical and archival material.  As a result, these various digital tools have significantly enhanced film scholars’ research and teaching.  But this intersection of cinema and digital technologies has brought not just accessibility, but the potential for dramatic transformation in the study of film.  Mulvey wrote, “New ways of consuming old movies on electronic and digital technologies,” she wrote, “should bring about a ‘reinvention’ of textual analysis and a new wave of cinephilia."

One place where this ‘reinvention’ of analysis and revived cinephilia can be seen is in the emergence recently of a new scholarly form -- the video essay.  Practitioners of this form are exploring the ways in which digital technologies afford a new way of conducting and presenting film research -- for the full range of digital technologies enables film scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their object of study: moving images and sounds.  Examples of this video essay work can be readily viewed online, especially at the Moving Image Source website, and at the vimeo site Audiovisualcy .  But most of the work in this new form is being produced by scholars outside academia (with some key exceptions), in part because the strictures of written academic discourse pose a challenge for this nascent form of multi-media scholarship.

This workshop -- which will include presentations by film scholars who are also video essay producers -- will consider the challenges faced in legitimizing the video essay as a valid form of academic scholarship.  The participants will address such issues as: How does the use of images and sounds in the presentation of scholarship demand a rethinking of the rhetorical strategies employed by the film scholar?  How does aesthetics play a role in an academic discourse that aims to produce knowledge and emotional response?  How would teaching courses on video essays help legitimize the form, and how might such instruction be undertaken?  How might emerging scholars situate themselves as leaders of this emerging academic mode? [SCMS workshop proposal drafted by Christian Keathley, author of the must-read essay 'La caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia', in Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011]

*****

[H]apticity -- a grasp of what can be sensed of an object in close contact with it -- seems to me now to be very helpful in conceiving what can take place in the process of creating videographic film studies. It can also help us more fully to understand videographic studies as objects to be experienced themselves.

In the old days, the only people who really got to touch films were those who worked on them, particularly film editors. As Annette Michelson (1990) and others have argued, the democratization of the 'heady delights' of editing (Michelson, 1990: 22) was brought about by the introduction of video technology in the 1970s and 80s. Now, with the relatively wide availability of digital technology, we can even more easily share 'the euphoria one feels at the editing table [...] a sharpening cognitive focus and [...] a ludic sovereignty, grounded in that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence " [Michelson, 1990: 23].

But, are there other ways in which 'touching film' is just a fantasy? In videographic film studies, do videographers actually touch or handle the real matter of the film? Or are we only ever able to touch upon the film experience? Our film experiences? Do video essays only make objects of, or objectify, our film experiences, our insuperable memories of them, our own cinematic projections?

These questions may not flag up significantly new limitations. Film critical video essays do seem to work, it seems to me, in the same 'intersubjective' zone as that of written film criticism. As Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton argue of this zone, 'we are immersed in the film as the critic sees it, hence brought to share a deeply involved perspective' (2011: 9).

Yet, in videographical criticism, is there not a different intersubjective relation, a more transitional one, to the physicality or materiality of the objective elements of films that the video essays reproduce? Like written essays, video essays may well '"stir our recall"' (Klevan and Clayton, 2011: 9) of a film moment or sequence, but they usually do this by confronting us with a replay of the actual sequence, too. How might this difference count?

If nothing else, this confrontation with, or, to put it more gently, this inevitable re-immersion in the film experience, ought to make videographic critics pursue humility in their analytical observations with an even greater focus, make them especially 'willing to alter [their analyses] according to what [they come into] contact with [...] give up ideas when they stop touching the other’s surface' (Marks, 2004: 80).

A further, built-in, random element in non-linear digital video editing -- the fact that this process frequently confronts the editor with graphic matter from the film (e.g. thumbnails) that s/he may not specifically have chosen to dwell on -- may also encourage a particularly humble, usefully (at times) non-instrumental form of looking that Swalwell (2002) detects in Marks' notion of hapticity.

As Marks writes, 'Whether criticism is haptic, in touch with its object, is a matter of the point at which the words lift off' (2004: 80). Haptic criticism must be what happens, then, when the words don't lift off the surface of the film object, if they (or any of the other film-analytical elements conveyed through montage or other non-linear editing techniques and tools) remain on the surface of the film object, as they often do in videographic film studies. In addition to this, video essays on films may often be an especially 'superficial' form of criticism, frequently using slow motion or zoom-in effects to allow those experiencing them to close in on the grain or detail of the film image.

With so many words, or other filmanalytical strategies, simultaneously available to be sensed on the surface of the image and, in terms of sound strategies (such as voiceovers or other added elements), seeming to emanate from it, videographical film studies may be curiously haptic objects, then. It is useful to remember that the art historical concept of haptic visuality emerged from the scholarly and artistic traditions of formalism, which made procedures such as defamiliarization central to their practice. Defamiliarization -- the uncanny distancing effect of an altered perspective on (such as a hyper-proximity to) an otherwise familiar object -- may be one of the greatest benefits of the particular hapticity of videographical film criticism. [Catherine Grant, 'Touching the Film Object', Filmanalytical, August 29, 2011: citing Laura U. Marks, 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes', Framework" the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004 (large pdf - scroll down to p. 79); Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton, 'Introduction', in Clayton and Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011; and Michelson,  Annette, 'The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning: Prolegomena for the Analysis of a Textual System,' October 52 (Spring 1990)]

*****

One of the elements that Film Studies For Free appreciates most about online audiovisual film studies (film studies in digital video forms) are the phenomenological possibilities they offer viewers for the experiencing of moving image and sound juxtapositions in real time. We can synchronously feel, as well as know about, the comparisons they make. In other words, unlike written texts, they don't have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us. [Catherine Grant, 'Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison', Film Studies For Free, March 12, 2012]

*****

What interests me most in academic study is the exploration of what Gérard Genette called "transtextuality", that is to say, "everything that brings the text into relation (manifest or hidden) with other texts" (Genette, Palimpsestes, 1992: 81). Sometimes this interest alights on matters of cultural influence and film authorship (see here, for example), but often it focuses itself on the issue of the recognition of cinematic interconnectedness.

Now, in an age of digital and multimedia scholarship, how better to explore filmic connections of different kinds than to use the format of the video mashup? [This video essay on Peeping Tom and Code Unknown] is, then, the first in a series of "scholarly mashups" [...] examining the obvious and obscure connections between particular films in ways that are both striking and, hopefully, more precisely illuminating with regard to their form as films, than comparisons performed purely in non-audiovisual formats might be. [Catherine Grant, 'True likeness: Peeping Tom and Code inconnu/Code Unknown', Filmanalytical, June 26, 2010]

Here is the second entry in a mini-series of posts here at Film Studies For Free on the practical possibilities for, and the critical debates about, audiovisual film studies research and 'publication'.

Today the focus is on two of film scholarship's emergent forms, much loved by FSFF: video essays on, or scholarly remixes about, film. The above quotations draw attention to the range of issues these forms  raise for film studies: from the changes they involve in the processes of film studies research to the questions they pose about its publication forms and knowledge effects, as well as the possible roles for creativity and affect in our discipline.

The occasion for this latest meditation is an upcoming workshop discussion at the annual conference of the U.S. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. But  there are also a whole raft of online developments in, and other important, recent, publications on, this genre that FSFF wanted to flag up. Those are listed below.

Beneath all the links you will find embedded versions of some of the online video essays by FSFF's very talented, fellow workshop panellists and respondents in Boston. (You can find all of FSFF's audiovisual essays here).

If you are able to come to the workshop, hurray! Do please say hello to us all at the end! If you can't come but would like us to discuss any questions you have about video essays, do post those in the comments below. Thanks.

FSFF will take a little blogging break during and after the SCMS conference, but will tirelessly tweet during the conference, reporting on panels attended and other events. So do please follow @filmstudiesff if you'd like those updates.

Otherwise, see you back here sometime in early April.

• Latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures about remixes, vidding, and video essays (Vol 9 (2012) (thanks to Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell for the link). The issue was guest edited by Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College, and Julie Levin Russo, Brown University.
  • Editorial: Fan/remix video (a remix) by Julie Levin Russo, Francesca Coppa
  • Theory
  • Mashup as temporal amalgam: Time, taste, and textuality HTML by Paul J. Booth
  • Toward an ecology of vidding HTML by Tisha Turk, Joshua Johnson
  • The rhetoric of remix HTML by Virginia Kuhn
  • Remix video and the crisis of the humanities HTML by Kim Middleton
  • Praxis
  • Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in "Closer" and "On the Prowl" HTML by Sarah Fiona Winters
  • Spreading the cult body on YouTube: A case study of "Telephone" derivative videos HTML by Agnese Vellar
  • Fake and fan film trailers as incarnations of audience anticipation and desire HTML by Kathleen Amy Williams
  • Symposium
  • The two-source illusion: How vidding practices changed Jonathan McIntosh’s political remix videos  by Martin Leduc
  • Abridged series and fandom remix culture by Zephra Doerr
  • The Star Wars franchise, fan edits, and Lucasfilm by Forrest Phillips
  • Interview
  • Documenting the vidders: A conversation with Bradcpu  
  • Counteragent
  • Interview with Eric Faden and Nina Paley by Brett Boessen
  • Desiree D'Alessandro and Diran Lyons bear arms: Weapons of mass transformation by Desiree D'Alessandro, Diran Lyons
  • Multimedia
  • Fred rant by Alexandra Juhasz
  • Queer video remix and LGBTQ online communities by Elisa Kreisinger
  • Genesis of the digital anime music video scene, 1990–2001 by Ian Roberts
  • A history of subversive remix video before YouTube: Thirty political video mashups made between World War II and 2005 by Jonathan McIntosh
  • Review
  • "Television and new media: Must-click TV," by Jennifer Gillan by Lindsay Giggey

• Nora Fiore, 'TheEssay: Remixed for Video', New England Review, February 29, 2012
• Catherine Grant, 'AUDIOVISUALCY: A New Press Play Column', Press Play at Indiewire, March 15, 2012 A new bimonthly column in which Grant, Kevin Lee and guests discuss what they like and value about particular examples of online video essays about films.
• Catherine Grant, 'Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison', Film Studies For Free, March 12, 2012
• Kevin B. Lee and Volker Pantenberg, 'Film Studies in Motion – A Web Series in 7 Episodes', Kurzfilmtage, March 2012 Lee and Pantenberg present a weekly selection of analytical video essays on the web published on Fridays 
• Marshall Poe, 'Every Monograph a Movie', Chronicle.com, March 12, 2012 (thanks to Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell for the link) 
• Girish Shambu, 'Video Essays', Girish, February 27, 2012
• Kristin Thompson, 'FILM ART: AN INTRODUCTION reaches a milestone, with help from the Criterion Collection', March 15, 2012 ): Bordwell and Thompson add digital video essays to their Film Art text book materials. Watch the sample video essay: "Elliptical Editing in Vagabond (1985)”

Christian Keathley, Pass the Salt

Christian Keathley, '50 Years On'

 

Girish Shambu and Kevin B. Lee, 'Shooting Down Pictures #906 (47): The Woman in the Window'

Ben Sampson on Spielberg's AI, Pt 1 

Sampson on AI, Pt. 2 

Ben Sampson on Welles' F For Fake, Pt 1

Ben Sampson on Welles' F For Fake, Pt 2

Matthias Stork on Chaos Cinema 2   

Also see 'VIDEO ESSAY: CHAOS CINEMA, PART 3; Matthias Stork addresses his critics'

More about → Video Essays and Scholarly Remix: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Forms - Audiovisual Film Studies, Pt 2

Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison

Garden of Forking Paths?
A real-time space for comparison of a sequence in the sound and silent versions of Hitchcock's BLACKMAIL

(Video edited by Catherine Grant)

 

Having begun production as a silent film, the studio, British International Pictures, decided to convert [Blackmail (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)] to sound during shooting. A silent version was released [probably only in Britain] for theaters not equipped for sound (at 6740 feet), with the sound version (7136 feet) released at the same time.[*] The silent version still exists in the British Film Institute collection.[**] [Blackmail Wikipedia entry, last accessed March 12, 2012]

Critic and historian Charles Barr, in his 1976 article "Blackmail: Silent and Sound", in which he closely compares the two versions, notes that the silent version shows Hitchcock striving to escape a 'theatrical' style in which the action is generally viewed face on, with the camera occupying the position of the 'fourth wall'. In a theatre, this represents the position of the proscenium arch, which marks the boundary between a conventional stage and the audience.

     In the silent version, Hitchcock experimented with changing the position of the camera within a scene, and tried to avoid 'face-on' set-ups, that is, where the camera is placed at ninety degrees to the action. Because of the limitations of sound at this early stage - for example the need to position the microphone where it can pick up all of the actors in the scene but cannot be seen - Hitchcock was obliged to adopt a less experimental approach in the framing of the sound version. [Mark Duguid, 'Hitchcock's Style', BFI Screenonline]

Although 1929 was rather late for a "first" sound film, the delay enabled Hitchcock to produce an advanced meditation on the possible uses of sound. The text incorporates silent footage (lifted whole from the original silent version, made immediately prior to the sound version), which allows for a series of comparisons/contrasts between sound and silents/silence. The conceit of this early sound film is an attempt to keep a man silent (paying off a blackmailer). The heroine spends over a third of the film virtually speechless. When she finally speaks, her boyfriend urges her to keep quiet. The dialogue is laughably banal, yet the right word can cut like a knife. The opening scene, an exciting silent chase, is immediately contrasted with a poorly dubbed, confusingly cut dialogue scene that seems as if it will never end. But before we glibly assume silents were "better" movies, sound becomes a moral force, while silence is linked with corruption and moral lassitude.

     The text's position on "sound plus image" versus "image alone" is carefully paralleled with the depiction of Alice. Thematically, she veers from one extreme to the other. She is introduced as a chatterbox. After a violent assault, she becomes almost catatonic. Finally, she accepts speech as a moral imperative, achieving maturity and the audience's respect before slipping back under patriarchal control and enforced silence. Alice White becomes Hitchcock's personification of the course the sound film must take. [Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 119]

Hitchcock first makes us aware that he is distorting the sound track subjectively when he exaggerates the loudness of bird chirpings to stress Alice's agitation on the morning after the murder. When the mother enters Alice's bedroom to wake her, she uncovers the cage of Alice's canary. Once the mother leaves the room, the bird's chirping is loudly insistent while the girl takes off the clothes she wore the night before and puts on fresh ones. The chirps are loudest, unnaturally so, when she is looking at herself in the mirror, the most "interior" action she performs while dressing. The sound reminds us of the tiny, birdlike jerkings that the girl made immediately after stabbing the artist. Just after the knife sequence there is another subjective distortion of sound, when a customer rings a bell as he enters the store. We are in the breakfast parlor, and yet the bell resonates much more loudly than it does elsewhere in the film. The camera is on a close-up of Alice's face to indicate that it is her point of view, once again, from which we hear.
     In a sense the use of bird noises in the bedroom scene should be distinguished from the other techniques mentioned here. Whereas aural restriction and distortion of loudness are related to character point of view, the choice specifically of bird sounds has a particular meaning for Hitchcock independent of the film. This sequence marks the beginning of an ongoing association of murder and bird noises in Hitchcock's mind that accrues meaning from film to film, from Blackmail and Murder through Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and Psycho, and culminates in The Birds. [Elizabeth Weiss, 'Chapter 2: First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder' in The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcock's Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982) p. 46]

One of the elements that Film Studies For Free appreciates most about online audiovisual film studies (film studies in digital video forms) are the phenomenological possibilities they offer viewers for the experiencing of moving image and sound juxtapositions in real time. We can synchronously feel, as well as know about, the comparisons they make. In other words, unlike written texts, they don't have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us.

Embedded above is FSFF's homemade example of this kind of simple, more or less medium-specific, eloquence: a real-time video juxtaposition, made for the purposes of scholarly comparison, of corresponding sequences from the silent and sound versions of Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929). It is a work intended to supplement the contribution of an earlier blog entry here, entitled Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema in which the two sequences were separately embedded.

But it is also intended to publicise FSFF's support, as ever, for the very relevant For the Love of Film Preservation Blogathon which will take place this year between May 13-18, 2012 . The blogathon has a Hitchcock theme and will support an important film preservation and dissemination project focusing on an early 'Hitchcock film': The White Shadow (1923).

You can read more about the blogathon below, and much more about it at the linked-to websites. But suffice to say this may not be the last Hitchcockian video study here at Film Studies For Free this Spring!

It's time to reveal our fundraising project for 2012: Online streaming and recording of the new score for THE WHITE SHADOW, directed by Graham Cutts and everything else done by Alfred Hitchcock. It's all about access this year, folks. [For the Love of Film Preservation Blogathon Facebook page, February 1, 2012]

The good people at National Film Preservation Foundation are committed to making many of the films they have rescued available for cost-free viewing by streaming them on their website. But online hosting ain’t cheap. NFPF estimates that it will cost $15,000 to stream The White Shadow for four months and record the score. It is the mission of this year’s For the Love of Film Blogathon to raise that money so that anyone with access to a computer can watch this amazing early film that offered Hitchcock a chance to learn his craft, with a score that does it justice. [Marilyn Ferdinand introducing the cause supported by this year's For the Love of Film [Hitchcock] Blogathon at her website Ferdy on Films]

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More about → Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison