Film Festival Studies Online

As regular Film Studies For Free readers will know, this blog likes to flag up worthwhile examples of innovative online pedagogy in the film and media studies field (see previous related posts HERE, HERE, and HERE).

It was thrilled to hear, therefore, that internationally regarded film writer Adrian Martin, Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies in Monash University's Faculty of Arts, is teaching part of a World Film Festivals unit more or less entirely online.

Martin introduces this excellent venture as follows:

This Monash University 2009 Unit aims to give an understanding of the contemporary phenomenon of the International Film Festival as an event within global circuits of film culture. It is not a Unit devoted to film analysis per se; but rather to the socio-cultural institutions of the Festival circuit – taking in issues of audience, economics, promotion, programming and curation, cultural and ideological agendas, etc, and the relationship to other circuits of film culture such as mainstream exhibition/distribution, cinémathèques and museums, etc.

FSFF very much recommends that you visit the World Film Festivals blog (here) and read the work produced by the Unit's four festival reporters (Lesley Chow, Farah Azalea Mohamed Al Amin, Alida Tomaszewski, and Nienke Huitenga). They have been posting on a variety of topics, to date, as follows: What Tongue? (Chow); Interview with Amir Muhammad (Azalea and Chow); Albert Serra’s Birdsong (Chow); Amir Muhammad's Malaysian Gods (Azalea); The [Audi Festival of German Films] Festival as a Cultural Meeting Point (Huitenga); Interview with Amos Gitai (Chow and Azalea); Reconstructed Homelands [on the Gitai mini-retrospective at the Singapore International Film Festival] (Chow); Singapore Panorama (Azalea); and Sprechen Ze Deutsche? [on audience development at the German Film festival] (Tomaszewski).

Film Studies For Free's author very much approves of Martin's teaching practice on this unit. (She established an undergraduate course on Film Programming a couple of years ago, which is still running, albeit under new management these days.)

So here, to celebrate Martin's work, are a few excellent online (and, of course) Open Access film festival-studies resources (on festival programming, politics, business and other matters) from FSFF's dusty reading-list archive (last updated June 17, 2009):

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe' (from European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood [Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005])
• Lars Henrik Gass, 'Trade Market or Trade Mark? The Future of Film Festivals', Rouge 13, May 2009
  
• Frances Gateward, 'Introduction' to Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007)
• NEW Mike Hertenstein, 'Programming: Flickerings ‘09', Filmwell, May 5, 2009
  
• NEW Mike Hertenstein, 'Programming: Imaginarium ‘09', Filmwell, May 12, 2009
  
• Olivia Khoo, 'Slang Images: On the Foreignness of Contemporary Singaporean Films', Asia Research Institute Working Paper series, No. 40, May 2005
  
• Simone Kurtzke, 'Webfilm Theory', e-Thesis, Queen Margaret University, School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication, 12. Aug. 2007
• Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, 'Film Festivals / Film Festival Research: Thematic, Annotated Bibliography', Compiled for the Film Festival Research Network, December 2008
• Pauline Webber, 'The History of the Sydney Film Festival 1954-1983', e-Thesis, University of Sydney, 2005
• Cindy Wong, Producing Film Knowledge, Producing Films: Festivals in a New World' Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 21, 2008

Also, further essential reading can always be found at Professor Dina Iordanova's brilliant blog DinaView: Film Culture Technology Money (see all her postings on Film Festivals and Film Programming).

Professor Iordanova is one the lead team members of the Dynamics of World Cinema research project undertaken by the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust. (Full disclosure note: Adrian Martin and FSFF's own author are both members of the International Advisory Board of this project). The project describes itself thus:

This two-and-a- half-year-long study will examine the patterns and cycles of various distinctly active circuits of contemporary film distribution and exhibition, and the dynamic patterns of complex interaction between them.

[Project attention] attention focuses predominantly in four areas of the global circulation of non-Hollywood cinema: the international penetration of international blockbusters mainstream distribution, the film festival circuit, the film circulation via diasporic channels, as well as the various Internet-enabled forms of dissemination. The project's distinctiveness is in the endeavour to correlate these diverse strands and foreground their dynamic interactions.

For updated news, as it happens, the Dynamics of World Cinema Blog can be found here.

Note added: This blog brought news (on June 17th) of the following great online resources:

Film Festival Workshop - Video Clips

During the Film Festival Workshop held on 4 April 2009 in St Andrews, our discussants talked about some of the most pressing issues that were concerned with the development of Film Festival Studies.

Click on the links below to hear what they said:

Clip 1

Michael Gubbins, former Editor, Screen International, UK

Clip 2

Richard Porton, Editor, Cineaste Magazine, USA

Clip 3

Nick Roddick (aka Mr. Busy), film journalist and critic, Sight & Sound, UK

Clip 4

Nick Roddick (aka Mr. Busy), film journalist and critic, Sight & Sound, UK

Clip 5

Stuart Cunningham, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Clip 6

Irene Bignardi, Filmitalia and former Locarno Festival Director, Italy

Clip 7

Núria Triana Toribio, University of Manchester, UK

Clip 8

Dina Iordanova, Director, Centre for Film Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland

Also, please check out the Fipresci (international federation of film critics) website for an abundance of fascinating and useful material about film festivals.

More about → Film Festival Studies Online

Fruity film and television studies links!

Due to a devastating case of total PC meltdown (following painful months of on-and-off digital trouble and strife), Film Studies For Free brought you nothing new for over a week...

But now it's back.  Its mission is possible once again. And this time it's brought to you by a new, more reliable, and thoroughly inspirational computer host (think Scottish fruit). 

FSFF never wants to go away again (until vacation time at least). But it may struggle for a wee while, while its owner learns the cool new language of her wonderful new i-World.

Anyhoo, here are some choice links to celebrate its stylish return:

• One of FSFF's favourite film blogs -- Videoarcadia -- is back after a hiatus. Lots of things to read, but FSFF really liked the little post on Gus Van Sant's Milk.
• The new online issue of Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture is now available with Martin Roberts on Euro-American subcultural fascination with Japan; Michael Z. Newman on the ethical issues around P2P filesharing; Ben Aslinger on 'popular music and urban place'; Serra Tinic on the US Life on Mars and the cultural politics of imports and adaptations; Jeffrey Sconce on nineties comedy; Carly A. Kocurek on youth, video gaming and the law; Daren C. Brabham on 'Crowdsourced advertising'; and Priscilla Peña Ovalle on racialised bodies in Mexican Breakfast.
• A brilliant stream of posts over at Film For The Soul, thanks to its (now, spinoff) project 'Counting Down the Zeroes: The Noughties in all their glory'. There are twelve great guest posts on noughties films, so far (on Requiem for a Dream, X-Men, Pollock, You Can Count on Me, Traffic, Yi Yi/ A One and a Two, Werckmeister Harmonies,  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, InuYasha, High Fidelity, Boiler Room, and Battle Royale). If you'd like to contribute your own essay on a noughties film, please contact Ibetolis of Film for the Soul asap.
• If your bag is very heavyweight but brilliant philosophy with your film and literary studies (think Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Lacan, T.S.Eliot, plus David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci...), do venture a visit to the remarkable blogspot of Michael Grant, one of FSFF's owner's friends and former colleagues. For the as yet uninitiated, two good posts to try out first are: 'David Cronenberg: Style and Extremity' and  'Clint Eastwood: Avatar of the Undead'. 
• Other great blog posts from AP at the Movies ('Barbara Stanwyck, Cowboy Queen' and 'Waiting on a train [on The Train Robbers, 1972]''); Cinebeats (on Yusako Matsuda); Spectacular Attractions (on M. Night Shyamalan's underrated film Unbreakable); the peerless Tativille on Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees; and lots of wonderful recent posts at Shooting Down Pictures (FSFF loved the one on the 'best documentary of the decade').

More about → Fruity film and television studies links!

More Blog Magic

A quickie from Film Studies For Free today just to shout out about two of the best film studies blogs out there which, coincidentally, have very high-quality and worthwhile recent posts on films about duelling magicians:

• David Bordwell has posted Niceties: how classical filmmaking can be at once simple and precise on Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006). He examines, in minute frame-grabbed detail, the varied patternings in Nolan's film. '[S]tudying such microforms is enlightening, Bordwell writes:

It’s a way to understand films as wholes, dynamic constructions that shift their shapes across the time of their unfolding. Moreover, by examining things this closely, we can try to understand not only how this or that film works, but how this or that film relies on principles distinctive of a filmmaking tradition. Consider this another plug for poetics.

• University of Exeter film academic Dan North's blogpost The Last Trick (Jan Švankmajer, 1964) examines the Czech surrealist 's first film Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara as part of his latest research (a larger project on puppetry and cinema). North writes,

this short film is my starting point, and it reveals to me the challenges that lie ahead. Often we have to look carefully at films to come to terms with their idiosyncrasies, but Švankmajer’s work is particularly daunting in its concentration of allegory and allusion. [...] For eleven minutes [of this film], two magicians do battle, and their tricks require a montage of colliding images and a range of animation techniques: the two actors wear giant masks on their heads, probably papier-mâché, making them look like living, stringless marionettes, and Švankmajer manipulates them accordingly. The black backdrop allows a bunraku performance of sorts, with objects appearing to fly and float unaided through space; frame-by-frame animation moves the eyes of the masks; a shot of pixilation makes their bodies flit around the stage in a lightning fast chase. These are endlessly mutable bodies, but there is none of the joyous spectacle of Méliès’ filmed tricks here - the artifice is always signposted, never seamlessly suggestive, and the stolid expressions on the masked faces convey no fun, only procedure and routine. [links added by FSFF]

In addition to this (like Bordwell's) beautifully illustrated post, Dan's blog Spectacular Attractions has also taken up the challenge of Nicholas Rombes' 10 /40 / 70 film criticism exercise (see FSFF's post on this back on March 5). 10/40/70 is, according to Rombes:

[a]n experiment in writing about film: select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case the 10 minute, 40 minute, and 70 minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as the guide to writing about the film. No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. What if, instead of freely choosing what parts of the film to address, one let the film determine this? Constraint as a form of freedom.

In recent posts, North has souped up the engine of the original exercise,

using a random number generator to choose three points from which to take my grabs, and then I have a limited amount of time to write a little about each frame. It’s a quick workout for the critical faculties, and hopefully a way of snapping a jaded blogger out of the comfortable routines of selecting only the most appropriate or illustrative images for a piece of writing

The results are both insightful and highly entertaining, as always with North's blog. Film Studies For Free urges you to check them out, as follows:

• Jaws Randomised
• Frankenstein Randomised
• The Bride of Frankenstein Randomised
• This is Spinal Tap Randomised With Two Brains

One last thought, the following movies may not all be about duelling magicians, but does anyone want to write about The Magician (1926), a horror film directed by Rex Ingram, or The Magician (1958), directed by Ingmar Bergman, or The Illusionist (2006), directed by Neil Burger, and make the highly completist Film Studies For Free one very happy blog indeed? Oh and there's the parody Magicians (2007), directed by Andrew O'Connor too. Any takers?

More about → More Blog Magic

Dances with Blogs: Film Criticism Assignments Online

Thanks to David Hudson's Daily blog at IFC.com, Film Studies For Free was alerted to an interesting and worthwhile experiment in the use of blogs for obtaining 'real-world' feedback for undergraduate film studies assignments.

Nick Davis is an Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of the always good to read Nick's Flick Picks, which expertly does what it says on its blog-tin, and always conducts itself with great verve and wit.

From time to time Nick also generously shares notes on some of his academic research and his teaching projects on this site (see here and here). With regard to the latter, Nick's current seminar course at Northwestern, The Film Review as Genre, has led him to pose publicly the following great questions to his students:

What is a film review? How have reviews evolved as cinema has evolved? What do film reviewers want, and what criteria do they imply not only for the movies they critique but for the prose, the logic, and the details they enlist to convey that critique? Setting aside stars and thumbs and rotten tomatoes, we will engage with the literary, rhetorical, and stylistic aspects of film reviews as pieces of writing with their own history, considering the ways in which strong reviews require the same foundations as other expository essays (structure, argument, economy, evidence) but with specific and highly diverse relations to their readers, their venues, and their points of view. As an opportunity to bridge the "critical" and "creative" facets of literary study, participants in this course will study and write about film reviews by a host of crucial figures (including Rudolf Arnheim, Carl Sandburg, H.D., James Agee, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Andrew Sarris, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, and Stephanie Zacharek) and will also write and revise their own reviews in response to a wide range of required as well as self-appointed viewings. Neither the films nor the reviews will be taken lightly, and the course expects committed and ambitious students—but wit, style, and esteem for the "popular" are warmly welcomed.

But Nick also wanted his students to have more responses to their work than just his own, 'especially since they're working in a form that aspires to a large and diverse audience'. So on this occasion he has used his blog to solicit feedback from his numerous readers on well-chosen snippets from the work produced by the course students (including on Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves [1990]). The responses to his request easily reveal the usefulness of this exercise (36 generally serious comments, to date, in just a few days). Film Studies For Free salutes Nick Davis's experiment and very much recommends that other film studies teachers check it out.

Since FSFF has gone all digital-pedagogical today, it's a good time to flag up another rich and purposeful reflection on such matters by Kevin B Lee. Regular FSFF readers will remember that a while back (see here, here, and here) this blog leapt to the e-barricades in angry defence of Lee's YouTube channel which had been temporarily (and very precipitously) suspended because of a query about copyright.

Back in January, Kevin eloquently wrote in summary about his experiences with YouTube: Things I Learned from Losing - and Regaining - My YouTube Account. But, more recently, he has also posted an exploration of the potential of his video essays as educational resources, based on his discoveries about how they are actually being used as classroom and assignment tools (see Video Essays as a teaching tool: a testimonial).

If you are interested in learning more about innovative film studies teaching methods, Lee's reflections make important reading. Also, while you're visiting Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, do please watch his fabulous new video essays - La roue (1922, Abel Gance) and Variety (1925, E.A. Dupont) featuring commentary by Kristin Thompson.

More about → Dances with Blogs: Film Criticism Assignments Online