The Legions of the Lost: Michael Klinger and the role of the film producer in the British film industry 1960-1980

Framegrab from Repulsion (directed by Roman Polanski and executive produced by Michael Klinger [uncredited], 1965)

During the 1970s, a period of economic decline, admissions to cinemas were down, there was a lack of public investment in the film industry and the Hollywood studios had pulled out of investing in British films. Despite this, Michael Klinger made 13 successful films [including ] Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966)] - he was the only consistently profitable indigenous producer in this decade - yet very little critical acclaim has been given to him. Film studies tends to focus on the director as having the main creative role, yet in the case of Michael Klinger, he was involved in all aspects of film-making, including casting, the writing of the screenplay and editing. [Andrew Spicer] 

Although Michael Klinger was the most successful independent producer in the 1970s, he has become one of the legions of the lost in British cinema. This occlusion, is symptomatic of the neglect of the producer's role within British cinema studies (and within Film Studies in general [...]), which, in Alexander Walker's deft formulation, 'has to be resisted if films are to make sense as an industry that can sometimes create art' [Walker, Alexander, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Harrap, 1986 [1974]] p. 17). [Andrew Spicer, 'The Creative Producer – The Michael Klinger Papers', Paper Given at the University of Stirling Conference, Archives and Auteurs - Filmmakers and their Archives, 2 - 4 September 2009].

Film Studies For Free rushes you news of the announcement that the website for the research project on Michael Klinger and the role of the film producer in the British film industry 1960-1980 is now live. It contains a comprehensive catalogue of the Klinger papers housed at the University of the West of England as well as details about the project, images, selected documents, interviews, events and some excellent, openly accessible publications.
 
You can read a great overview of Klinger's life and career here and an informative press release about the initial research project may be found here.

Andrew Spicer, Reader in Cultural History at UWE and the project's Principal Investigator, and research associate Anthony McKenna would be very pleased to receive any feedback about the site and suggestions as to how it might be developed. They hope it will prove useful and informative and be the spur to other studies of producers. 

FSFF is absolutely certain that this project will be generative of further valuable work on film producers and it hopes its readers will join it in congratulating Spicer and McKenna on such a successful and, just as importantly, successfully shared project.

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New Issue of MOVIE: Lang, Preminger, découpage, PSYCHO and its remake, and filmmakers' choices

Frame grab from Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958). See Christian Keathley's article on découpage in this film here

Film Studies For Free was thrilled that a new issue of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism -- the best yet of this relaunched journal -- has recently hit the online newstands.

Issue 3 contains part 2 of the marvellous Fritz Lang Dossier, with contributions by, among others, V. F. Perkins, Adrian Martin, Peter Evans, Stella Bruzzi, Ed Gallafent, and Deborah Thomas.

There are also excellent articles on Preminger's film art, Psycho and its remake, and filmmakers' choices by Christian Keathley, Alex Clayton and John Gibbs.

Links to all items are set out for you below.

• The Fritz Lang Dossier, Part 2
  

• Rush to Judgement: Imperfect Justice in Fury (1936)
  Stella Bruzzi
• You Only Live Once (1937)
  V. F. Perkins
• Going Straight: The Past and the Future in The Return of Frank James (1940)
  Edward Gallafent
• The Woman in the Window (1944)
  Mark Rappaport
• Guess-Work: Scarlet Street (1945)
  Adrian Martin
• The Big Heat: Acts of Violence (1953)
  Peter William Evans
• Human Desire (1954)
  Deborah Thomas
• Lang With Lacan: The Power of the Gaze in Moonfleet (1955)
  Peter Benson

• Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of Découpage
  Christian Keathley
• The Texture of Performance in Psycho and its Remake
  Alex Clayton
• The Cry of the Owl: Investigating Decision-Making in a Contemporary Feature Film
  John Gibbs

This issue edited by Douglas Pye and Michael Walker. Designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.

More about → New Issue of MOVIE: Lang, Preminger, découpage, PSYCHO and its remake, and filmmakers' choices

New JUMP CUT: Hollywood, Reframing, International Cinema, Documentary, Economics and Politics, Porn, Independent/Art/Avant-garde, Horror

"Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation",  Tom Paxton's song contribution to Loin du Vietnam/Far From Vietnam (Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, 1967). See Thomas Waugh's great visual essay on the film 'Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary'

Back, nicely bronzed, from its holiday, Film Studies For Free has lots of catching up to do. Let it begin with rushing you, below, the table of contents from the latest, utterly brilliant issue of Jump Cut, No. 53, summer 2011. 

There is SO much great reading here, much of it deeply politically committed, as is characteristic of this important journal. But please don't miss its marvellous book reviews section, including a look at recent books on film sound by Michael Chanan (thanks for tipping FSFF off about this latest issue, Michael!).

Hollywood

• The tracks of Sully’s tears: disability in James Cameron’s Avatar by Dana Fore
  Examining disability issues in Cameron's futuristic fairy tale reveals more complex and potentially sinister ideas at work.
• The Social Network: the contemporary pursuit of
  happiness through social connections by Robert Alpert
  The Social Network reenacts the U.S success myth and places it in the contemporary context of virtual realities in which connections are monetized and each person is emotionally detached from the next. 
• Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: when excess isn’t parody  by Stephen Papson
  Parody, excess and mythology intermix, producing contradictory readings of Luhrmann’s Australia.
• Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain by Craig Snyder
  A gay love story for the ages? Let's hope not. A textual analysis of how homosexual desire is disciplined within Brokeback Mountain.
• There's a sucker born every minute. Audiences blog about Sucker Punch. by Chuck Kleinhans
  A search for the film Sucker Punch on the microblog Tumblr provides a rich data collection to study commonplace audience discourse about a commercial entertainment film and New Media as an example of phatic communication.

Reframing

• Decay of the aura: modern art in classical cinema by Susan Felleman
  A study of real works of art—including figural sculpture, “Entartete Kunst” (works of modern art deemed “degenerate by the Nazi regime), and abstract painting—as incorporated into three popular fiction films of the classic period (The Song of Songs, 1933; Venus vor Gericht, 1941; and The Trouble with Harry, 1955), reveals that when an art object becomes part of a fiction film, it enters a space of its own symbolic appropriation; aura is replaced by (unstable) signification.
• Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”:
  the myth of interdependence in oil drilling films by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
  Louisiana Story (1948), Thunder Bay (1953), Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992), Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2009), and Crude (2009) draw on a mythology that suggests the oil and fishing industries can work interdependently once appropriate safety precautions are in place.
• American Medusa: Bette Davis, Beyond the Forest, femininity, and Camp  by David Greven
  King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest allows us to consider the feminist and queer relevance of the theme of female transformation in Bette Davis films and to revisit and challenge the category of the Camp Classic.
• Taken by Muslims: captivity narratives in
  The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Prisoner of the Mountains by Claudia Springer
  A 1935 Hollywood film's vilification of Muslims is countered by a nuanced Russian film from 1996, with both revolving around the abduction of non-Muslims by Muslims.
• A question of audience: revisiting Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come by Ulrick Casimir
  A modern attempt to unpack Henzell's iconic film, analyzing the complex relations between British and U.S. conceptualizations of the Caribbean and the film itself.

International cinema

• At the global market: Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé
  and the economics of women’s rights by Amy E. Borden
  As both a tool used by contemporary activists, such as Tostan, and within its plot, Ousmane Sembène’s final film Moolaadé demonstrates how West African women may gain collective access to juridical and political power by using local cultural customs to resist the practice of female genital cutting.
• Serbian cutting: assemblage and the archival impulse
  in the films of Dušan Makavejev by Greg DeCuir, Jr.
  "If Serbs are fond of slaughtering people, there must be a method of film cutting that corresponds."
• Global capital’s false choices in the films of Laurent Cantet by Jessica Livingston
  By looking at the four major films of French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, we receive a valuable window through which to view the false choices offered by the contemporary neoliberal economy.
• Narrating topography: Still Life and the cinema of Jia Zhangke by Eric Dalle
  Jia Zhangke’s environmental fiction film, Still Life, explores the effects of the Three Gorges Dam on the emotional lives of individuals from different social strata.
• Redeeming the woman from Maoist China in China Cry: A True Story by Jing Yang
  This 1990 filmic narrative of the Christian redemption of a Chinese woman from Maoist political frenzy exemplifies residual U.S. Cold War thinking that serves to contain the ideological other.
• Let’s get lost: unmapping history and Reformasi in the Indonesian film Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya by Dag Yngvesson
  Riri Riza's deceptively lazy 2007 Javanese Road Movie attempts to disorient itself from the pervasive sociopolitical apathy of contemporary Indonesian youth by slowly eviscerating the ubiquitous formal, narrative and cultural structures that have imbued the problems of recent history and resulting status quo with a nostalgic, translucent sheen.
• The Nakba and the construction of identity in Palestinian film by Inez Hedges
  Performative memory serves as the counterweight to dispossession from the land.

Economics and cinema

• Capital limits on creativity: Neoliberalism and its uses of art by Jyotsna Kapur:
  Why the “creative economy” is a capitalistic invention, hostile to art and ultimately to human creativity.
• “Creative Industries,” neoliberal fantasies, and the cold, hard facts
  of global recession: some basic lessons by Chuck Kleinhans
  The international financial crisis provides the ultimate stress test for myths about today’s media culture.
• Media art and economics: resources Annotated bibliography by Chuck Kleinhans
  

Politics of media production and distribution

• Woman with the movie camera redux: revisiting the position of women in the production classroom by Jennifer Proctor, River E. Branch, Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson
  A call and template for a responsive pedagogy addressing the pervasive violent representations of women in student films and the continuing under-representation of women the culture of production — a critical echo of and expansion upon Michelle Citron’s and Ellen Seiter’s call in 1981.
• Digital distribution, participatory culture, and the transmedia documentary by Chuck Tryon
  Explores the role of digital media reshaping the distribution, exhibition, and reception of documentary films.
• Claims to be heard: young self-expressivity, social change, and the Educational Video Center by Stephen Michael Charbonneau
  A historical and critical overview of New York-based Educational Video Center, a leading youth media organization, and its auto-ethnographic work with disadvantaged communities.
• Ethics, politics and representation in Child of Mine, a television documentary on lesbian parenting by Lizzie Thynne
  Re-interviewing her main character from a documentary on lesbian custody she made for UK Channel 4, Lizzie Thynne explores the ethics and politics of filming one's own community for broadcast.

Porn

• Clips, clicks and climax: notes on the relocation and remediation of pornography by Julian Hanich
  Moving-image pornography on the Internet has facilitated and intensified the masturbatory experience due to a double tendency toward privatization and individualization. This becomes particularly obvious when compared to the time when porn films were projected in theaters and consumed with other, mostly anonymous viewers.
• The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich by Magnus Ullén
  Considering the relation between pornography and different media is important, yes; but it will be difficult to historicize pornography without first historicizing the mode of reading that gave rise to the concept of porn in the nineteenth century.
• Back to the Golden Age by Thomas Waugh
  This brief intervention in the current conversation about porn contextualizes the debate within the history of porn studies and Jump Cut’s contribution since the 1970s to a materialist-feminist understanding of sexual representation.
• Porn: it’s not just about sex anymore by Nina K. Martin
  Porn's shift to online and mobile device mediums has de-stigmatized the term to the point of banality, linking "porn" to non-sexualized notions of excess.
• Beyond porno chic by Jose B. Capino
  Internet porn viewing and spectatorship at adult video arcades are more similar than we imagine.
• Pornography, technology, and masturbation: response to Julian Hanich by Peter Lehman
  Society hysterically fears the dangers of pornography and masturbation while academia represses it, and that aspect of the historically complex interaction between media, technology and porn is lost in the process.

Independent/Art/Avant-garde

• Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary  by Thomas Waugh
  Far from Vietnam, the collective French film of 1967, produced in solidarity with the Vietnamese people under U.S. attack, is explored in relation to its historical context on three continents, to its coalitional politics and the solidarity genre in general, and to the forum it provided to one contributor, veteran communist filmmaker Joris Ivens.
• Re-conceiving Misconception: birth as a site of filmic experimentation by Roxanne Samer
  This cultural history of Marjorie Keller's birth film Misconception (1977) seeks to release the film from past dichotomizing interpretative binds with the hope of opening it up to further future interpretations, re-looking and better appreciation.

Horror

• Archaeology of flesh: history and body-memory in Taxidermia by Laszlo Strausz
  As a grotesque body film with comic corporeal exaggerations, Taxidermia outlines a complex argument about 20th-century Hungarian history and historical memory.
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning: a cultural critique of the Bush-Cheney Administration by Rod Buxton
  Through a dark poetics of brutality and mayhem, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning explores the militarism and economic fallout that resulted from the political policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration.
• It takes a child to raze a village: demonizing youth rebellion by Andrew Scahill
  When children attack! The child collective horror film presents a nightmare scenario of childhood in revolt — a revolution against systems of surveillance, control, and heterosexual kinship.

Books

• Books on film sound review by Michael Chanan
  Two books about film sound come at their subject from completely different angles.
  • Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), Cinema in the Digital Sound Age
  • Andy Birtwistle, Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video
• Iranian film opposing regimes of voyeurism review by Jyotika Virdi
  Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh
  Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is seen as a dynamic alternative to Hollywood's dominant voyeurism codes, while its narratives are displaced allegories that circumvent the state's modesty laws.
• Darwin at the movies by David Andrews and Christine Andrews
  This review of Barbara Creed's book Darwin's Screens also examines the use of evolutionary ideas in the field of film studies.
• Star Trek’s allegorical monomyth review by Elspeth kydd
  David Greven in Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films tackles complex issues within this large and elusive monomyth.
• Nobody’s baby review by Kirsten Pike
  Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell
  The book examines girls’ domestic labor in the U.S. and also offers significant insight into the contradictory ways that girls are imagined, debated, and targeted by experts, advisors, and creators of popular culture.
• Sexual innocence and film: a look at scholarship on virginity review by Susan Ericsson
  Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald
  How can virginity be depicted in fiction film and television beyond dialogue or narrative moments when the condition of virginity ends?
• Documentary studies: news from the front line review by Russell Campbell
  Sociopolitical documentary comes under intensive scrutiny in a cluster of new books.
  • Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation by John Ellis
  • Recording Reality, Desiring the Real by Elizabeth Cowie
  • The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
  • Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
  • The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film by Thomas Waugh
• Documentary: intelligence and/or emotion? review by Chuck Kleinhans
  • The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
  • Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana

The last word

• Crisis politics On crises and drastic neoliberal economic makeovers by the editors

More about → New JUMP CUT: Hollywood, Reframing, International Cinema, Documentary, Economics and Politics, Porn, Independent/Art/Avant-garde, Horror

Wide Screen Journal on Film Production Studies

Javier Casanova in Vainilla Chip (Erik Knudsen, 2009) Watch this film here (or here) and read Knudsen's article on his work

Set in the small Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños, just outside Havana, Vainilla Chip tells the story of an ordinary day for an elderly ice cream maker, Javier Rodriguez Casanova. An ordinary day which, like all the other ordinary days, has become painfully pierced by an acute sense of longing for his deceased wife.
     This film is an intimate portrait of a hard working man in a contemporary Cuba far removed from clichés of The Revolution and romanticised memories of Cuban music. Vainilla Chip brings the musicality of one ordinary man’s life to the fore to reveal a universal struggle affecting many people across cultural and political divides. [Erik Knudsen]

We often hear that the power of films lays in their emotional impact. In recent years, some corners of film studies have been preoccupied with the investigation of the senses and the body, which could be related to the view of films in terms of emotions and affect. Much of the filmmaking process rests on creating and communicating this emotional power of the films. Instead of thinking, like Powdermaker did, that the film workers are collectively involved in story-telling, or like Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger, that they are preoccupied with the generation of a particular style of filmmaking, we would like to argue that films are collectively involved in generating, assembling and crafting the emotion of the film. [Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska]

Film Studies For Free is very happy to pass on news that a special issue of the online, Open Access film journal Wide Screen has just been published on "Production Studies". The issue was edited by Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska. The Table of Contents is given below.


Essays

• 'Magic, Emotions And Film Producers: Unlocking The “Black-Box” Of Film Production' by Dorota Ostrowska Abstract PDF HTML

• 'The Film Producer as a Creative Force' by Alejandro Pardo Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Housekeeper of Hong Kong cinema: The role of producer in the system of Hong Kong film industry' by Cindy Chan Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Close Encounters?: Contemporary Turkish Television And Cinema' by Melis Behlil Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Anthology Film. The Future Is Now: Film Producer As Creative Director' by Shekhar Deshpande Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Cinema Of Poverty: Independence And Simplicity In An Age Of Abundance And Complexity' by Erik Knudsen Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Understanding Orlova: Youtube producers, Hot for Words, and some pitfalls of production studies' by Patrick Vonderau Abstract PDF HTML

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On the Issue of Collaboration in Film Production Education

Image from La Nuit américaine/Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1974)

Film Studies For Free was thrilled to find not only that the internationally renowned scholarly Journal of Film and Video had published a recent, excellent special collection of articles on the often thorny issue of teaching collaboration in film production collaboratively, but also that this collection was freely available online.

The full table of contents is given below.

Now, please get into groups and read the articles...

Journal of Film and Video
Volume 61, Number 1, Spring 2009

Guest Editor: Rob Sabal

• Introduction by Rob Sabal

Excerpt: The impulse for this special issue on teaching about and through collaboration comes from a shared search for answers to the question, "how might production students work more productively and more harmoniously with others—peers, professionals, and members of the community?" The search is spurred by the recognition that, as a field, we are not doing much to address this facet of production education. Drawn together by a mutual concern for providing a rich and lasting education for our students, the authors included in this issue, along with fellow members of the University Film and Video Association, formed an informal collaboration interest group and have, for several years, been sharing stories, ideas, information, and resources about teaching collaboration and conflict resolution.
      The implicit question running through this special issue is, "what is the purpose of a film production education?" This seems to be a particularly important question to ask of undergraduate production programs because the traditional value of a liberal arts education is its breadth and its focus on inquiry and methods, which gives it its enduring value over a person's lifetime. What do we teach in a traditional production class that is of abiding value? Certainly nothing related to physical production, where technology, process, storytelling structures, exhibition, and distribution outlets continue to change rapidly. The enduring value of production classes has to be that as each student develops his or her artistic identity, he or she also comes to a clear and truthful understanding of him- or herself, develops an ability to see and appreciate the talents of others, learns to constructively negotiate conflict, and extends this ability to work positively with others into their institution and their community.

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (45k)

• The Individual in Collaborative Media Production by Rob Sabal

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (174k)

• Film Collaboration and Creative Conflict by Carroll Hodge

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (174k

• Notes on Collaboration: Assessing Student Behaviors by Ted Hardin

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (2239k)

• Intercollegiate and Community Collaboration: Film Productions for Students and Community Volunteers by Emily Edwards

• HTML Version 

• PDF Version (442k)

• Documentary and Collaboration: Placing the Camera in the Community by Elizabeth Coffman

• HTML Version

• PDF Version (1795k)

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