Reframing Cinema Histories: ALPHAVILLE Issue 6

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

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

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

Utter brilliance from start to finish, IFSFFHO...


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

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

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

Book Reviews:

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

[Book Reviews Editor: Ian Murphy]

Conference Reports:

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

[Reports Editor: Yuanyuan Chen]

More about → Reframing Cinema Histories: ALPHAVILLE Issue 6

"Timeline of Historical Film Colors" now online

Frame grab from Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)

More than ever we need access to solid knowledge about historical film color processes in order to save our beautiful filmic heritage. [Barbara Flueckiger]

Film Studies For Free urges its readers to go and check out University of Zurich Institute of Cinema Studies professor Barbara Flueckiger's Database of Historical Film Colors and its amazing timeline of historical color processes.

Professor Flueckiger is certainly no stranger to making her important work freely accessible online for scholars all around the world to access. FSFF has previously covered some of her phenomenal sharing in its On Digital Cinema, Visual Effects, and CGI Studies entry, in which links were given both to a free download of 'Digital Bodies' (a chapter, translated into English, from Flueckiger's 2008 German-language book Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer), as well as to her great online database on the history of CGI, VFX, and computer animation.

As of April 2012, the latest of the resources she is making available, the Historical Film Colors database consists of 290 entries. It comes in the form of a timeline that connects historical and bibliographical information with primary resources from several hundred original papers and more than 400 scanned frames provided by archives and scholars from all over the world.

In this current form the database is a nucleus for a much more advanced project which will be elaborated in the forthcoming months. It is Flueckiger's plan to develop a digital platform which allows experts and researchers to collaborate on a global scale.

To date, Professor Flueckiger has been solely responsible not only for gathering and analyzing all of the data, which derives from her studies of several hundred original papers and secondary sources at Harvard University in the fall term of 2011, but also for programming most of the database and organizing all the images and copyright clearances. Only to a very limited extent has she received financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation in the framework of her research project "Film History Re-mastered". She has therefore financed a major part of this project herself.

She has thus set up a crowd-funding campaign to invite you (or your institution) to support the further development of the project, either by sharing it or by contributing financially. The goal is to raise at least $10,000 in the upcoming 90 days. There are several contribution levels, starting at $25 for buying the rights for one image and extending to $5,000 for possible co-chairs of this project.

She will be very grateful for any kind of support and will be more than willing to give proper credit for conceptual or financial contributions. Many renowned scholars and institutions have contributed already.

Film Studies For Free hopes that its readers will support this project, either by contributing themselves, or by spreading the word.

More about → "Timeline of Historical Film Colors" now online

The Future of Cinema: Discussion with David Bordwell, Simon Field, Andréa Picard and Alan Franey

Future of Cinema - Looking Forward After 30 Years

A very quick post at Film Studies For Free today to bring you a fascinating futurological film and film studies resource: the video of a very well informed panel discussion on where cinema is going.

It features, among others, film scholar extraordinaire David Bordwell, who, as a phenomenal researcher of (practically) the entirety of cinema's past and present, is definitely one of the best qualified people in the world to comment on cinema's future.

The video is a must see if you're interested in the future of film technologies of production and especially of distribution and exhibition. It is part of the 2011 Vancouver International Film Festival collection at Vimeo.

Future of Cinema - Looking Forward After 30 Years
Event description:

The first few chapter headings in a film we did not program at this year's [Vancouver International Film Festival] VIFF are: “Technology Is Great”, “The Industry Is Dead”, “Artists Have the Power”, and “The Craft Is Gone.” To which celluloid-loving film festival organizers might ask: Is it? Do they? Where on earth are we headed? And why?

VIFF has come a long way in its 30 years and never has the future of cinema--and VIFF's future--been more uncertain. Will it be bright and splendid and fair or will it move so quickly that a great deal of what is valuable will be lost before we know it? There are now dramatically more “film festivals” and “films” being made than ever, yet some fear that the industry may be dead. Filmmakers are acutely worried for funding, yet need to operate on a growing number of fronts. Given that the numbers of hours in a day and the numbers of days in a life remain fixed, what limits should we council for our own appetites? Why might we miss the Hollywood Theatre and Videomatica? Given that cultural agencies seemingly have shrinking resources but more new media and film festival applicants every year, will the centres hold or is babble ascendant? Will VIFF's function as an annual international universalist festival be superseded by myriad niche events?

Technology is indeed great in that it has put the means of creative motion picture production in almost everyone's hands, but will the best artists be the ones to be recognized? The entrepreneurial spirit tends to favour change in hopes that it may profit from it, but will artists have the power? When entrepreneurs benefit, will consumers benefit? Will cultural institutions that have taken years to build remain viable? Will cinema, metrics of quality and craftsmanship and, ultimately, quality of life be improved or even be sustainable? What do you personally care about for the future of cinema to offer? What should VIFF 2020 aim to be?

Here to wrestle with these sorts of questions—and yours—will be a distinguished group of panellists including: David Bordwell, film critic, academic and author of numerous books on cinema; Simon Field, film producer and former Director, International Film Festival Rotterdam; Andréa Picard, film critic and programmer, formerly of the Toronto International Film Festival and the Cinémathèque Ontario; Tom Charity, film critic and Vancity Theatre program coordinator; and Alan Franey, director, Vancouver International Film Festival.

More about → The Future of Cinema: Discussion with David Bordwell, Simon Field, Andréa Picard and Alan Franey

Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema

Blackmail, silent version (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Blackmail, sound version

Hitchcock's use of sound in Blackmail and Murder is important in three respects. As historical documents the two films overturn some accepted notions of what was technically possible in filming with immobilized cameras and uneditable sound systems. As personal documents they represent Hitchcock's first major experiments in combining sound and image in ways that would not subordinate pictures to dialogue. As films that extend Hitchcock's expressionistic interests into the sound era, they reveal Hitchcock's earliest efforts to use aural techniques to convey a character's feelings. In addition, Blackmail already establishes Hitchcock's predilection for integrating music and sound effects with plot and theme, and it introduces most of his favorite aural motifs. Both films are interesting historically, but Blackmail is the more successful work of art because its aural techniques and motifs are an integral part of a stylistic whole. [Elisabeth Weis, Chapter 2: "First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder", in The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcocks Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 28]

A new academic year is upon us and Film Studies For Free's author is very happily gearing up to teach, inter alia, Alfred Hitchcock's film Blackmail for the umpteenth time.

It's a truly great teaching topic, one which usually takes off from the fact that Hitchcock converted his silent film to sound during its production. And it has very fruitfully inspired today's entry on scholarship about sound in Hitchcock's cinema.

There are some excellent, openly accessible resources linked to below, most notably Elisabeth Weis's wonderful book on this topic, now added to FSFF's permanent listing of online and freely accessible Film Studies e-books.

• Richard Allen, 'Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense Theory and Practice' in Allen, Richard, Malcolm Turvey (eds), Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004)

• Alan Andres, 'Telescope: A Talk with Hitchcock (1964)', The Bernard Herrmann Society, February 2000

• Giorgio Biancorosso, 'Beginning Credits and Beyond: Music and the Cinematic Imagination', Echo, Volume 3 Issue 1 (Spring 2001)

• David Butler, 'The Days Do Not End: Film Music, Time and Bernard Herrmann', Film Studies, Volume 9 (Winter 2006)

• Stephen Deutsch, 'Psycho and The Orchestration of Anxiety', The Soundtrack, 2010

• Nathan Fink, 'The Sound of Suspense: an analysis of music in Alfred Hitchcock films', 9th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, University of Bologna, 2006

• Kurt George Gjerde, 'Bernard Herrmann A Celebration of His Life and Music', The Bernard Herrmann Society, April 1999

• Catherine Grant, 'Framing Fascination: Studies of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window', Film Studies For Free, February 16, 2011

• Catherine Grant, 'Study of a Single Film: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo', Film Studies For Free, November 22, 2010

• Stephen Husarik, 'Transformation of “The Psycho Theme” in Bernard’s Herrmann’s Music for Psycho', Interdisciplinary Humanities, 2009

• Amy Lawrence, 'Blackmail (1929)', in Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

• Richard Littlefield, '[Review of] Steven C. Smith. A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann', The Journal of Film Music, 1.2/3, 2003 

• Gary McCarron, 'Undecided Stories: Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and The Problem of Moral Agency', Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (2008) 65-80

• Stuart Y. McDougal, 'The Director Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock Remakes Himself', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998

• David George Menard, 'Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 1'' and 'Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 2', Offcreen Journal, Vol. 12, 2008

• Ellen J. Nasto, 'Bernard Herrmann: An Annotated Index of Materials', The Bernard Herrmann Society, 1999

• Stephen Rebello, 'Sound in Psycho', excerpt from Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (London: St Martins Press (Trade); 1999)

• Nick Redfern, 'Hitchcock and shot scales', Research Into Film, November 18, 2010

• William H. Rosar, 'Bernard Herrmann: The Beethoven of Film Music?', The Journal of Film Music, 1.2/3, 2003 

• Tom Schneller, 'Unconscious Anchors: Bernard Herrmann's Music for Marnie', Popular Music History Vol.5, Number 1, (2010), pages 55-104 

• Tom Schneller, 'Death and Love: Bernard Herrmann's Score for Vertigo', Cuadernos de musica, artes visuales y artes escenicas, Vol. 1, Number 2 (April-September 2005), pages 189-200

• Tom Schneller, '[Review of ] Jack Sullivan: Hitchcock’s Music', The Journal of Film Music, 2.1, 2007

• Tom Schneller, '[Review of] David Cooper. Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbookand David Cooper. Bernard Herrmann’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir', The Journal of Film Music, 2.1, 2007

• Jack Sullivan, 'Overture', Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006) 

• Constantine Verevis, 'Remaking Film', Film Studies, Vol. 4, Summer 2004 (pp 87-103)

• Steve Vertlieb, 'Herrmann and Hitchcock: The Torn Curtain', The Bernard Herrmann Society, 2002

• Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)

• Elisabeth Weis, 'The Sound of One wing Flapping', Filmsound.org, [date unknown]

• Elisabeth Weis, 'Tati, Hitchcock, Antonioni: Three Approaches to Sonic Creativity', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, 2007

• Elisabeth Weis, The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcock's Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982)

• 1. Introduction (p 13)
• 2. First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder (p 28)
• 3. Expressionism at Its Height: Secret Agent (p 63)
• 4. Consolidation of a Classical Style: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) (p 77)
• 5. Music and Murder (p 87)
• 6. The Subjective Film: Rear Window (p 107)
• 7. Aural Intrusion and the Single-Set Films (p 125)
• 8. Beyond Subjectivity: The Birds (p 136)
• 9. Silence and Screams (p 148) Appendix filmography

• Brian Wise, 'Bernard Herrmann: Remembering an Original who Changed Film Music',WQXR, June 30, 2011

• Bill Wrobel, 'The Nature of Bernard Herrmann's Music', The Bernard Herrmann Society, 2008

• Slavoj Zizek, 'Why Hitchcock is still our contemporary?', Alternative Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2, 94-105, October 2010

More about → Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema

On Film Music and Digital Media

Film Music and Digital Media 
(Moderator: Martin Marks with Paul Seiko Chihara and Dan Carlin) MIT, April 2, 2009 (Running Time: 1:55:26)

Film Studies For Free really enjoyed the above highly insightful and well-illustrated video and it very much hopes you will, too. The discussion covers, with wit and great intelligence, many of the practical considerations that are part and parcel of contemporary film scoring. As it is quite long, the below text will let you know a little of what you can expect.

For more on film music studies, check out FSFF's entry "Music to the Eyes: Film Music Essays and Resources Online", as well as its other references to film music here.

About the Lecture

In a panel that at times resembles a late-night ramble and conversation, three film music professionals discuss changes in their industry, with some no-holds-barred dishing and kvetching.

Martin Marks sets the scene historically, starting with the revolutionary introduction of sound to film. He plays a clip from the original 1933 film King Kong, which he describd it hopes es as both a technological and aesthetic landmark of soundtrack production. Paul Chihara continues the story, explaining that the score’s creator, Max Steiner, was part of the first wave of film composers, classically trained musicians, fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Steiner drew on the music he knew best, the kind performed by the Vienna Staatsoper, for his King Kong score, so we get a movie that’s “wall to wall music, filled with leitmotifs,” played by a giant orchestra.

Cut to 2005, and the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong. In what he describes as “an electro-acoustic seminar on how digitally sound is enhanced,” Chihara plays several clips of the same scene that demonstrate the evolutionary leap in soundtrack scoring since 1933. The process involves the demo track, a score with digital sampling and no acoustic instruments intended to help the filmmaker imagine how music will work with the film; next an acoustic score; and the final dub version, where acoustic and digital music sources combine, and the rest of the sound elements are added in post production (dialogue and sound effects).

The new scoring process can prove dangerous to composers, as Dan Carlin reveals. “We have a term called ‘demo love,’ describing how the director gets attached to the very first track offered by the composer.” This is a digitally sampled score often drawn from other composers’ work. The editor and director become accustomed to it, and test audiences watch films with demo tracks. “So the composer comes in with a new approach, and often gets fired at this point.” This has led to composers fearful of originality. Carlin says starting in the ‘90s, generic romantic and action scores began to emerge: “Everything starts to sound alike.” He also describes how composer Georges Delerue went to see Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, and heard one of his own themes, which had started as a temporary music cue but then was essentially plagiarized. This led to a very lucrative law suit. Marks notes that “one of America’s film music geniuses,” Elmer Bernstein, essentially dropped out of the business because of the insistence on demo tracks over original music.

Panelists also bemoan the demise of orchestral recording sessions at production studios, as digital audio tools put the composer’s work in the hands of directors and editors, who play with increasingly authentic sounding software-based instruments. Companies are buying up the rights to the sounds of famous symphony orchestras, down to the staccato and legato notes of strings and horns in different keys and pitches. The craft involved in composing music, then conducting an orchestra through a movie scene, has become obsolete. Chihara concludes sadly, “It’s an unnecessary art.”

More about → On Film Music and Digital Media

A Cinematic World? On Jean Baudrillard and Film Studies

Image from Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce, 2008). Read Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace, 'Terminal Indifference: The Hollywood War Film Post-September 11', which treats this and other contemporary war films.

We are no longer the actors of the real but the double agents of the virtual.

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III (New York: Verso, 1997):125

On the occasion of an excellent new issue of online journal Film-Philosophy on "Baudrillard and Film-Philosophy" (Vol 14, No 2, 2010), Film Studies For Free is proud to present a long list of links to openly accessible Baudrillardian film studies. These are set out below the embedded video of the late Baudrillard in action himself. This list incorporates links to the FP articles.

It's so nice to have things in a simulacrum of one tidy place, FSFF thinks. And it hopes you will agree.

Jean Baudrillard thinking and talking about the violence of the image, the violence to the image, aggression, oppression, transgression, regression, effects and causes of violence, violence of the virtual, 3d, virtual reality, transparency, psychological and imaginary. Open Lecture given by Jean Baudrillard after his seminar for the students at the European Graduate School, EGS Media and Communication Program Studies Department, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, in 2004

By Jean Baudrillard

• Jean Baudrillard, 'Virtuality and Events: The Hell of Power', [Translated by Chris Turner], International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 3, Number 2 (July 2006)

• Jean Baudrillard, 'Violence of the Virtual and Integral Reality', [Translated by Dr. Marilyn Lambert-Drache], International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 2 (July 2005)

• Jean Baudrillard, 'The Matrix Decoded:  Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard', [Translated by: Dr. Gary Genosko and Adam Bryx], International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004) 

• Jean Baudrillard video lectures at EGS 

Engaging with Baudrillard's work:

• Stuart C. Aitken and Deborah P. Dixon, 'Imagining Geographies of Film', Erdkunde, Band 60/2006

• Chiara Armentano, '"The Image-Interface": New Forms of Narrative Visualization, Space and Time in Postmodern Cinema', Reconstruction, 8.3 (2008)

• Jon Baldwin, 'Introduction - White Magic: Baudrillard and Cinema', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)

• Melanie Chan, 'Virtually Real and Really Virtual: Baudrillard’s Procession of Simulacrum and The Matrix', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)

• Alan Cholodenko, The ‘ABCs’ of B, Or: To Be and Not to Be B', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)

• Alan Cholodenko, 'The Nutty Universe of Animation, The “Discipline” of All “Disciplines”, And That’s Not All, Folks!', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 3, Number 1 (January 2006)

• Alan Cholodenko, '“OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”: The Virtual Reality of Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2005) 

• Alan Cholodenko, '“The Borders of Our Lives”: Frederick Wiseman, Jean Baudrillard, And The Question of The Documentary', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004) 

• Alan Cholodenko, '(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix - Part II: A Difficulty in the Path of Animation Studies', Animation Studies – Vol.2, 2007

• Alan Cholodenko, 'The Spectre in the Screen', Animation Studies – Vol.3, 2008

• David B. Clarke, Dreams Rise in Darkness: The White Magic of Cinema', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)

• Gerry Coulter, 'Jean Baudrillard and Cinema: The Problems of Technology, Realism and History', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)

• Anton Escher, 'The Geography of Cinema - A Cinematic World', Erdkunde, Band 60/2006

• Scott Forsyth, 'Marxist Film Theory: From the Barricades to Postmodernism' , The Socialist Register, 1997

• Anne Friedberg, 'Urban mobility and cinematic visuality: the screens of Los Angeles – endless cinema or private telematics', Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 1(2), 2002: 183-204

• John Frow, 'Australian Cultural Studies: Theory Story, History', Australian Humanities Review, Issue 37, December 2005

• Michael Hemmingson, 'Auto/Ethnography and Tinsel Town: Nathaniel Kohn's Pursuing Hollywood and How it Relates to My Own Experiences Chasing the Dream of Creating Culture Through Cinema', Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research,  Vol 9, No 3 (2008)

• Mark Hobart, 'Just Talk? Anthropological Reflections on the Object of Media Studies in Indonesia', A.J.S.S. 34:3 (492–519)

• Mark Hobart, 'The Subject of the Subject: Philosophical background to a critical reconsideration of the problems in studying non-Western media', Position Paper to the Workshop on The Subject of the Subject in Media Studies, Media Research Group SOAS, 2nd. December 1997

• Russell J.A. Kilbourn, 'Re-Writing "Reality": Reading The Matrix', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 9.2, Fall 2000, pp 43-54

• Marc J. LaFountain, 'Obscene Ethics: A Baudrillardian View of Spurlock’s Super Size Me', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008) 

• Jon Lindblom, 'Toward an Ontology of the Image: Deleuze and the Aura of Simulation', Movement Editions, 2010

• Scott A. Lukas, 'Fragments of The World Thinking Me, Or How The Digital Facilitates Human Separation', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 3, Number 2 (July 2006)

• Chris Lukinbeal, 'The map that precedes the territory: An introduction to essays in cinematic geography', GeoJournal 59: 247–251, 2004

• Christopher Macallister, 'The Changing British Sensibility Towards War and the Reimagining of World War Two in the Cinema', War, Virtual War and the Challenges to Communities Oxford 16th – 18th July 2002

• Russell Manning, 'Taking Baudrillard to the Movies (To Talk About Death)', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 7, Number 1 (January, 2010)

• Erik Marshall, 'Fatal Strategies and Film Studies', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 44, November 2002

• William Merrin, 'Speculating to the Death: Machinic Integration and Transformation Within A Virtualized Reality', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 2 (July, 2007)

• William Merrin, 'Total Screen: 9/11 and the Gulf War Reloaded',International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,  Volume 2, Number 2 (July 2005)

• Paula Murphy, 'The Simulacra of Global Conflict', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)

• Pamela Nilan, 'Applying Semiotic Analysis to Social Data in Media Studies', Jurnal Komunikasi Massa Vol. 1, No. 1, Juli 2007, 60-74

• Benjamin Noys, 'Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 1 (January, 2008) 

• William Pawlett and Meena Dhanda, 'The Shared Destiny of the Radically Other: A Reading of  The Wizard of Oz', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)

• Richard Pope, 'Baudrillard’s Simulacrum:  Of War, Terror, and Obituaries', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 3 (October, 2007)

• James Rovira, 'Subverting the Mechanisms of Control: Baudrillard, The Matrix Trilogy, and the Future of Religion', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 2 (July 2005)

• Kenneth Rufo, 'Obscenity with a View: Baudrillard's  Revenge of the Crystal and Film Studies', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 43, November 2002

• Marita Ryan, 'Answering the Question: “What is Intermission?” – An Exploration of Intermission as a Postmodern Film', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 1 (January, 2008) 

• Alan N. Shapiro, 'Baudrillard and Trek-nology (Or Everything I Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek and Reading Jean Baudrillard)', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 2 (July 2005) 

• Mark Shiel, 'Cinema and the City in History and Theory', Cinema and the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)

• Jonathan Smith, Jean Baudrillard’s Philosophy of Magic', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 2 (July, 2007)

• Richard G. Smith, 'Lights, Camera, Action: Baudrillard and the Performance of Representations', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2005)

• Paul Taylor, 'Baudrillard's Resistance To the Ob-Scene As the Mis-en-scene (Or, Refusing to Think Like a Lap-Dancer’s Client)', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)

• Paul A. Taylor, 'The Pornographic Barbarism of the Self-Reflecting Sign', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 1 (January 2007)

• Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace, 'Terminal Indifference: The Hollywood War Film Post-September 11', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)

• Hunter Vaughan, 'The Paradox of Film: An Industry of Sex, a Form of Seduction (Notes on JeanBaudrillard’s  Seduction  and the Cinema)', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)

More about → A Cinematic World? On Jean Baudrillard and Film Studies

Amsterdam fine links!

Image from Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), based on Stanisław Lem's 1961 novel. Read BC Biermann's film-philosophical PhD Thesis chapter on this film adaptation

A little window of opportunity for Film Studies For Free's author to bring you one of this site's regular features today: a report (or, more accurately, a labour-intensive links-harvest) from a University research repository, one of those online archives in which, on occasion, academics choose not only to store references to their published film studies work, but also to provide Open Access to that work.

The repository in question today is that of the University of Amsterdam/Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA), home to one of the best Film and Media Studies departments in the world. Below is a list of links to an amazing spread of very high quality film research accessible there, most of it in the form of full-length PhD theses.

• Mieke Bal, 'Exhibition as film', in: (Re)visualizing national history: museums and national identities in Europe in the new millennium, ed. R. Ostow (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), p. 15-43 
• M. Behlil , Home away from home: global directors of new Hollywood, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2007
• B.C. Biermann, Travelling philosophy: from literature to film [on A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Solaris], PhD Thesis, UvA, 2006 
• C.J. Birdsall, Between Noise and Silence: Sound, Technology and Urban Space during Nazi Germany, PhD Thesis, UvA (2010)
• L.T. Copier, Preposterous revelations: visions of apocalypse and martyrdom in Hollywood cinema 1980 – 2000, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• S Dasgupta, 'Art is going elsewhere: and politics has to catch it : an interview with Jacques Rancière', Krisis, 9.1, 2008
• K. van Driel, Psychology of entertainment, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2003
• JJ Ebbers, Organizational dynamics in social networks : contracts and reputations in the film industry, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Constructive Instability, or The Life of Things as the Cinema's Afterlife', Video Vortex: Responses to Youtube, eds. G. Lovink, S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2008)
• C.J. Forceville, 'The source-path-goal schema in the autobiographical journey documentary: McElwee, Van der Keuken, Cole', The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 4 (2006), p. 241-261 
• Malte Hagener, Avant-garde culture and media strategies: the networks and discourses of the European film avant-garde, 1919-39, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005
• EM Kedem, The kibbutz and Israeli cinema : deterritorializing representation and ideology, PhD Thesis, UvA 2007
• J de Kloet, 'Cosmopatriot contamination', Cosmopatriots: on distant belongings and close encounters, eds E. Jurriëns, J. de Kloet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007)
• S. Loist, M. de Valck, 'Film festivals/Film festival research: thematic, annotated bibliography', 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, Institut für Germanistik II, 2010)
• J. Noordegraaf, "'Facing Forward' with found footage: displacing colonial footage in 'Mother Dao' and the work of Fiona Tan", in: Technologies of memory in the arts (2009), eds Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik , p. 172-187 (author's original manuscript)  
• F Paalman, 'The Cheetah of Cinema', Mind the screen: media concepts according to Thomas Elsaesser, eds. J. Kooijman, P. Pisters, W. Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008)
• F. Paalman, 'Harbor, architecture, film: Rotterdam 1925-1935', in: Films that work: industrial film and the productivity of media, eds V. Hediger, P. Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 391-404 
• MJ Punt, Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2000
• Laura Schuster, “What does a scanner see?” Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film", Conference paper: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberpunk and Science Fiction, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, July 1-3, 2008
• D.W. Russell, A multifaceted multi-methodological examination of the global movie industry, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2006
• E Thanouli, Post-classical narration: a new paradigm in contemporary world cinema, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005
• S Vojkovic, Subjectivity in the New Hollywood Cinema: Fathers, Sons and Other Ghosts, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2001

More about → Amsterdam fine links!

Coming at you! 3-D Studies

Stereo Wiggle by Kieff

Film Studies For Free brings you a very rounded links list today on the terribly topical subject of 3-D cinema and other media.

It's a big subject area, encompassing debates on and research about film realism, media industry history, film technology (practice and theory), film spectatorship and reception, and human/media interactivity. If you want a good place to begin before you start dipping into the list below, check out the following, excellent, Wikipedia entries on 3-D film, stereoscopy and 3D audio effect.

• Jay David Bolter, 'Digital Media and Cinematic Point of View',Telepolis (14.02.1997)

• David Bordwell, 'Coraline, cornered', Observations on Film Art, February 23, 2009

• David Cairns, ''Excelsior! [on Up]', Shadowplay, October 19, 2009

• Tobey Crockett, 'Building a Bridge to the Aesthetic Experience: Artistic Virtual Environments and Other Interactive Digital Art', Intelligent Agent, 5.1., 2005
  

• Glorianna Davenport and Brian Bradley, 'Everyone's Cinema: Towards the Future of Cinematics', Oberhausen Film Festival - April 28, 1997
  

• Roger Ebert, 'D-Minus for 3-D', Chicago Sun-TImes, August 16, 2008

• Dana Goodyear, 'Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron', The New Yorker, October 2009

• John Hayes, '“You see them WITH glasses!”… A Short History of 3D Movies', Wide Screen Movies Magazine, Part One: The 1800s to the 1950s, February 1, 2009

• Jan Holmberg, 'Ideals of Immersion in Early Cinema, Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 14, n° 1, 2003, p. 129- 147
  

• Mike Jones, 'Composing Space: Cinema and Computer Gaming - The Macro-Mise en Scene and Spatial Composition', Imaginary Worlds: Image and Space International Symposium, Sydney, 14 October 2005

• Pete Kozachik, '2 Worlds in 3 Dimensions [on Coraline]', The American Cinematographer, February 2009
  

• Harold A. Layer, 'Stereoscopy: Where Did It Come From? Where Will It Lead?', updated version published originally in: EXPOSURE: 17:3 Fall 1979
  

• Lenny Lipton, 'The Last Great Innovation: The Stereoscopic Cinema', SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, November/December 2007

• María Lorenzo Hernández, 'The Double Sense of Animated Images. A View on the Paradoxes of Animation as a Visual Language', Animation Studies, January 27, 2008
  

• Lev Manovich, 'Global Algorithm 1.3: The Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds: Report From Los Angeles', CTheory.net, May 1996

• Lev Manovich, 'Assembling Reality: Myths of Computer Graphics', manovich.net, 1992

• Lev Manovich, 'Synthetic Realism and its Discontents', manovich.net, 1992, revised 1999

• Mekado Murphy, ''Buzz and Woody add a dimension', The New York Times, October 4, 2009 (plus related audio interview with Toy Story director Jon Lasseter here)

• Angela Ndalianis, 'Architectures of Vision: Neo-Baroque Optical Regimes and Contemporary Entertainment Media', MIT Communications Forum, December 19, 1999
  

• Michael Nitsche, 'Games, Montage, and the First Person Point of View', Digital Games Research Association, 2007

• Dan North, 'Toy Story 3D', Spectacular Attractions, October 9, 2009

• Dan North, 'Magnificent Bodyguards: Jackie Chan in 3D, 1978', Spectacular Attractions, July 20, 2009

• Per Persson, 'Chapter 1: Understanding and Dispositions', Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery (Cambridge University Press, 2003

• Seth Porges, 'Are 3D Movies Finally Ready for Their High-Tech Close-up?', Popular Mechanics, July 21, 2008

• Bob Rehak, 'Titles on the Fringe', Graphic Engine, September 12, 2008

• Paolo Teobaldelli, 'Cinema and Special Effects Seen From a Non- Dual Based Approach to Communication', Applied Semiotics, No. 14, 2004
  

• Kristin Thompson, 'Has 3-D already failed?', Observations on Film Art, September 17, 2009

• HarryTuttle, ‘You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This on Television!’ CNN’s Election Night Hologram', Rouge, 13, April 2007
  

• Todd VanDerWeff, 'A Pixar Week Compendium', The House Next Door, October 11, 2009

• Gary De Wan, '3D', originally published Motion Picture Projectionist, February 1954, republished Wide Screen Movies Magazine, October 7, 2007
  

• Ke Colin Zheng et al, 'Parallax Photography: Creating 3D Cinematic Effects from Stills', Graphics Interface 2009
  

• Ray Zone's The 3-D Zone website

• Ray Zone, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952 (University Press of Kentucky, 2007: Google Books - Limited Preview)

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Science of Watchmen, War Films, plus Mira Nair, from YouTube EDU

Film Studies For Free is grateful to Peter Suber of Open Access News for the tip-off that YouTube has launched a new channel to facilitate access to video material submitted by universities and colleges: YouTube EDU.

The new channel makes it much easier than before to search for and access high-quality scholarly material related to film and media studies, FSFF has found. As Wired Campus also reports, 'The new section makes it possible to find out which college-produced video is most popular'.

The winner in the popularity stakes so far just happens to be an interview [embedded above] with a University of Minnesota [physics] professor discussing the science behind the new movie Watchmen.' In the video, Professor James Kakalios discusses how he was asked to add a physics perspective to the upcoming Warner Brothers movie, Watchmen. Kakalios explores how quantum mechanics can explain Dr. Manhattan's super human powers in the film, and how he came to become an expert on the topic of the physics of superheroes (click here to read an excerpt from Kakalios's book on this topic).

Film Studies For Free has browsed further Film Studies highlights from YouTube EDU and embedded two more of its top quality educational videos below:

1. University of California Television Presents 'My Dinner with Alain: War Cinema' (56 mins 41 secs):

Alain J. J. Cohen is a Professor of Comparative Literature at UCSD who specializes in film history. In this program presented at the UCSD Faculty Club, Cohen examines the challenges of war films as a genre. Clips from various films about World Wars I & II, Vietnam, space wars, etc., illustrate how the filmmakers battle with issues of world history, order and chaos, studio budgets, editing techniques and conflicts of interpretation to realize their vision of combat.

2. University of California Television Presents 'Cinema Diaspora: Discussion with Mira Nair' (57 mins 35 secs):

Mira Nair's films, Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake, illuminate the ambiguities of the immigrant experience and highlight the conflicts between modern and traditional cultures. She is joined for a discussion of modern cinema by Gayatri Gopinath and Juli Wyman, both of UC Davis.

More about → Science of Watchmen, War Films, plus Mira Nair, from YouTube EDU