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New Issue of JUMP CUT!

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 26 November 2013


Frame grab from The Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). See the Jump Cut dossier on Ford's film, Spielberg's version of the Lincoln story, and the classic Cahiers du Cinéma debate on the earlier film. Also see  Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Film Studies For Free has been away, gadding about and gabbling at a wonderful conference in Frankfurt on The Audiovisual Essay (organised by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, with Vinzenz Hediger, for Deutsches Filminstitut and Goethe University), about which you will hear a great deal in the coming weeks and months.

Next, tomorrow, it departs for yet another exciting public event - a panel discussion on 'The Future of Film Criticism" at King's College, London, speaking alongside Jean-Michel Frodon (Editor of Cahiers du Cinéma and film critic for Le Monde) and Nick James (Editor of Sight & Sound).

In between these two magnificent events, it had to bring you news of a huge new issue of the online journal Jump Cut, which is absolutely full of incredibly interesting looking contents - FSFF particularly liked the dossier on Lincoln and ideology, but there's so much more to enjoy here. Thank you, Jump Cut!

Back soon.


Current issue, No. 55, fall 2013: INSTITUTIONS, TECHNOLOGIES, and LABOR

THIRD CINEMA/INTERNATIONAL

GENDER

IN AND AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM

EXPERIMENTAL/INDEPENDENT
LINCOLN & IDEOLOGY FORUM
HIV/AIDS ACTIVIST MEDIA

CLASSICS FROM THE PAST
S/Z and Rules of the Game by Julia Lesage
 
THE LAST WORD The war on/in higher education by the Editors
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New issue of SCOPE: Nicole Holofcener, Realism, Self-Transformation Narratives, Károly Makk, the Feature Film as "Short Story" and More

Diposting oleh good reading on Jumat, 30 November 2012


Framegrab from Lovely and Amazing (Nicole Holofcener, 2001). You can read Rachel Lister's article about Holofcener's films here

Life is good, thinks Film Studies For Free: a new issue of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies has just been published. There's a small but well-edited selection of great articles, and an enormous number of hugely useful book reviews and conference reports. FSFF particularly liked Rachel Lister on Nicole Holofcener's "short story" films and Miklós Kiss on Károly Makk's Szerelem/Love.

All contents are listed and linked to below.

Scope: Issue 24 October 2012

Articles

Book Reviews

Film and Television Reviews

Conference Reports
More aboutNew issue of SCOPE: Nicole Holofcener, Realism, Self-Transformation Narratives, Károly Makk, the Feature Film as "Short Story" and More

New JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE on Alternative cinemas in India

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 18 September 2012

Cover of JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE 10, 2012 (Alternative cinemas in India)

A new issue of Journal of the Moving Image Online, a great, online, open access publication, has hit the e-stands!

Film Studies For Free heard the news via film scholar and JMI editor Moinak Biswas, who has contributed a number of very fine pieces to Volume 10. There are also excellent articles on Mani Kaul (see also FSFF's memorial entry on this fine filmmaker), and on the brilliant MediaLab, a fantastic initiative by Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University (also the publishers of JMI), by Anustup Bastu.

All the contents are linked to below. Great work!
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Our Beautiful Wickedness: On Reading Films Queerly. In Memory of Alexander Doty

Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 13 Agustus 2012

An audiovisual collage made by Catherine Grant in memory of Alexander Doty, 
brilliant author of numerous key texts in LGBT and queer film and cultural studies, 
including the one quoted from in this video: Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon 
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

[C]lassic [film] texts and personalities actually can be more queer-suggestive than “openly” gay, lesbian, or bisexual texts. That is, the coding of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts and personalities can often yield a wider range of non-straight readings because certain sexual things could not be stated baldly—and still cannot or will not in most mainstream products—thus often making it more difficult to categorize the erotics of a film or a star. Of course, if you aren’t careful, this line of thought can begin to sound like an argument valorizing the closet, for understanding queerness as always something “connotated” or suggested (and never really there “denotatively”), for “subtexting,” and for “subcultural” readings. But since I don’t see queer readings as any less there, or any less real, than straight readings of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts, I don’t think that what I do in this book is colluding with dominant representational or interpretive regimes that seek to make queerness “alternative” or “sub” straight. [Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics, pp. 1-2]
In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my “queer reception” love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses–largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add. [Alexander Doty,  in Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011]

Film Studies For Free was shocked and very saddened at the news, just over a week ago, of the untimely death of Alexander Doty, a truly trailblazing film and media scholar.

Doty, Indiana University Professor of Gender Studies and Communication and Culture (and chair of the latter department) was the author of two classic and highly enjoyable books in queer audiovisual cultural studies: Making Things Perfectly Queer (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000). He also co-edited, with Corey Creekmur, the hugely important collection Out in Culture: Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Continuum, 1995) and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas.

While Doty didn't claim to have invented queer cultural reading as a scholarly practice, he wowed us with the brilliance, daring and sincerity of his interpretations, ones often deeply rooted in his personal, affective experiences of the cultural forms he was studying. In so doing, he succeeded in showing countless other students of film and media texts why it is so vital to engage in these critical practices in public, why it is essential to be good at them, as well as what is seriously at stake in many identity or, indeed, existence-based scholar-fandoms, like those often engaged in by LGBT subjects.

If, as the Wizard of Oz tells us, 'A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others', the many tributes to Doty that have appeared in the last week prove, beyond any doubt, that he had an excellent heart. He certainly had a very courageous one. He, his unique voice, and the work he would have gone on to produce, had his life not been so cruelly cut short, will be hugely missed.

As well as putting together the video collage at the top of this entry, which introduces Doty's compelling justification for queer reading, if not the (possibly even more compelling) details of his actual queer reading of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), FSFF has also assembled a list of links in Doty's memory to online studies which perform queer readings of films and moving image culture, as well as openly accessible studies of some films that perform their own queer readings. Two further FSFF video essays are embedded--on Elizabeth Taylor and on "queer Hitchcock", both of which intersect with, and were partly inspired by Doty's own work on these and other themes.

That long list is preceded by a growing collection of links to the online tributes to Doty that have appeared since his death (this will be kept updated), as well as to his own, openly accessible, scholarly work online. FSFF's author very gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Anthony Bleach and the Facebook group Friends of Alexander Doty in assembling the first two of these three lists. Although she only knew Doty through his published work, she would like to convey her condolences for his loss to all those whose lives were graced, as so many evidently were, by knowing him personally.

Finally, at the very foot of today's entry is a call for contributions to a new website for the Global Queer Cinema project (to be launched in September). It will seek to live up to the high standards that Doty's work set for queer cultural critique as it aims to provide a new, openly accessible, internationalist resource for queer film and cultural studies. FSFF will update its readers about this exciting project in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, FSFF is sad that one of those who have most inspired LGBT film studies scholarship will not be around to witness his influence on this project.

Rest in queer peace, Alexander Doty.


Online tributes to Alexander Doty
Online work by Alexander Doty 
Online studies, or performances, of queer reading

    Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE by Catherine Grant


    Skipping ROPE (with audio commentary) by Catherine Grant. First published in Frames, 1, 2012. Transcript available.



    Call For Queer Reading/Writing Contributions 
    to the new Global Queer Cinema website


    Contributions are invited to the Global Queer Cinema website, hosted by the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, UK. The site will be launched in early September 2012. 
    The website forms part of the Global Queer Cinema project, an international academic research network project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Sussex. The project is led by Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (University of Warwick). The network held its first event in May of this year.
    The project website will be run in conjunction with Catherine Grant (University of Sussex and Film Studies For Free) and Laura Ellen Joyce, GQC Project Co-ordinator, and will continue beyond the length of the project, acting in part as an open access archive and news filter for project-generated material, and related queer film studies resources. 
    We welcome contributions from researchers interested in queer (and queering) cinema, cultural studies, media, global studies, gender and sexuality, filmmakers, artists, writers and interdisciplinary scholars, or those with an interest in the practice, exploration and dissemination of film. The below list of topics and frameworks. 
    • Queer frames
    • Queer uncanny
    • Queer sounds and music
    • Queer illusions
    • Queer film festivals
    • Queer decades
    • Queer directors
    • Queer avant garde and DIY
    • New Queer Cinema
    • New releases
    • Classic films
    • Androgyny and pandrogyny
    • Queer cosmetics and prosthetics
    • In-depth essays on single films
    • Short essays on single images

    We therefore invite short takes of 250 - 300 words, or longer essays (MLA style) of around 1500-2000 words for more in-depth analysis. Multimedia work (non-copyright infringing - using fair use/fair dealing principles) is very welcome. The above list of topics is not exhaustive, and we invite contributions on any topic or theme which you feel would may (queerly) fit our general ethos. Please correspond with us about any proposals for content by email at GQCproject[at]gmail[dot]com, on Twitter at @g_q_c, and do please 'like' us on Facebook. Thank you.
    More aboutOur Beautiful Wickedness: On Reading Films Queerly. In Memory of Alexander Doty

    Up, up, and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

    Diposting oleh good reading on Sabtu, 16 Juni 2012

    May the Fourth Be With You published on May 4, 2012 by
    Read Henry Jenkins' and Ashley Hinck's articles about the Harry Potter Alliance.
    Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts. Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement. [Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, 'Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism' [1.9], Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)]
    Film Studies For Free is a very big fan of the open access journal of Transformative Works and Cultures, so it is delighted that there's a new issue out.

    It's a themed collection of studies of transformative works and fan activism, edited by media studies superheroes Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. Links to abstracts of the articles (and from there to the articles themselves) are given below.

    Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012): Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California. 
    More aboutUp, up, and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

    "Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies

    Diposting oleh good reading on Kamis, 08 Maret 2012

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

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

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

    If there are any important online resources that FSFF has missed, please do list them in the comments thread.
    More about"Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies

    Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?

    Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 17 Januari 2012

    Last updated January 20, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

    Journal articles on masculinity in popular cinema, and much more

    Diposting oleh good reading on Rabu, 05 Oktober 2011

    Image of John Travolta as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). You can read Stelios Cristodoulou's great article on this film here

    Today, Film Studies For Free brings you more excellent contents from Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, the periodical brought to you by the postgraduate network of the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association.

    The links below channel the latest two issues of the journal, including a great selection of articles on masculinity and popular culture, with some very worthwhile studies of popular cinema.

    And if you like these very worthy items, you might also like to check out a previous FSFF post listing some further, great articles from this journal.

    Networking Knowledge, Vol 4, No 1 (2011) on Masculinity and Popular Culture  
    Articles
    • ‘"A straight heterosexual film": Masculinity, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Saturday Night Fever' by Stelios Christodoulou Abstract PDF 
    • 'Tough Guy in Drag? How the external, critical discourses surrounding Kathryn Bigelow demonstrate the wider problems of the gender question' by Rona Murray Abstract PDF
    • Interrogating Masculinity through the Child Figure in Bombay Cinema' by Siddarth Pandey Abstract PDF 
    • Deviating from the Deviant: The Masculinity of Brando in Julius Caesar (1953)' by Rachael Kelly Abstract PDF
    • '“Please Baby, take me Back”: Homo-social Bonds in the Contemporary British Biopic' by Matthew Robinson Abstract PDF
    • '"Tell me all about your new man": (Re)Constructing Masculinity in Contemporary Chick Texts' by Amy Burns Abstract PDF
    • 'Mohamed “el-Limby” Saad and the Popularization of a Masculine Code' by Koen Van Eynde Abstract PDF
    • 'Metal, Machismo and Musical Mode: How the ‘Feminine’ Phrygian Second has been Appropriated and Transformed' by Sarha Moore Abstract PDF
    • 'The Role of Lucha Libre in the Construction of Mexican Male Identity' by Javier Pereda, Patricia Murrieta-Flores Abstract PDF
    • 'Masculinity and Institutional Identity in South Cyprus - the case of I do not forget' by Stratis Andreas Efthymiou Abstract PDF

    Networking Knowledge, Vol 3, No 2 (2010)  MeCCSA-PGN Conference Edition
    Articles
    • 'Screen Acting and Performance Choices' by Trevor Rawlins Abstract PDF
    • 'Family Photography as a phatic construction' by Patricia Prieto Blanco Abstract PDF
    • 'UTV, The Network relationship and Reporting the "Troubles"’ by Orla Lafferty Abstract PDF
    • 'Representations of the Irish in American Vaudeville and Early Film' by Jennifer Mooney Abstract PDF
    Short Papers
    • 'Public Service Broadcasting and the Public Sphere: Normative Arguments from Habermasian Theory' by Phil Ramsey Abstract PDF
    • 'Postdramatic Musicality in The Black Rider' by Markee Rambo-Hood Abstract PDF
    More aboutJournal articles on masculinity in popular cinema, and much more

    New SCOPE: Chris Marker, Cult cinema, Dance on Film, 1970s Film Theory

    Diposting oleh good reading on Senin, 27 Juni 2011

    Image from The Company (Robert Altman, 2003)

    Today, Film Studies For Free is thrilled to point you in the tremendous direction of the latest contents of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies. There's lots to recommend in this issue but FSFF particularly enjoyed Katharina Lindner's article on the female dancer on film, along with numerous, wonderful book reviews and conference reports, all part of the fabulous and openly accessible service that Scope provides to the international film studies community.

    Scope, Issue 20, June 211

    Articles

    Book Reviews

    Film Reviews

    Conference Reports

    More aboutNew SCOPE: Chris Marker, Cult cinema, Dance on Film, 1970s Film Theory