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Melonie Diaz, Jack Black, and Mos Def in Be Kind, Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008 - See FSFF's post on Gondry for some reading on this film)

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to be able to pass on news of the launch of MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL: Critical Explorations in Media and Space, a new graduate online journal based in the University of California, Santa Barbara's Department of Film and Media Studies.

The first issue (1.1, 2010) on VIDEO STORES, edited by Joshua Neves and Jeff Scheible, is now available at http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/.

Neves and Scheible introduce their special issue as follows:

This new online journal represents the latest development in a research initiative launched in UCSB’s Department of Film and Media Studies in 2007. The goal of Media Fields is to provide a forum focused on the critical study of media and space, where we can dynamically present and openly debate the latest work from established and emerging scholars and practitioners. Each issue will have a theme—whether it is a topic of contemporary relevance; an exploration of a particular concept, media form, genre, or practice; or, as in this issue, a specific media space: the video rental store.
We were compelled to focus on the space of the video store in this issue because it is a “media field” that at once allows for the kind of tangible, site-specific fieldwork that is at the heart of Media Fields and, at the same time, is a site where a range of important issues intersect: “new” media’s consequences for “old” media; uses, developments, and failures of media technologies; the cultivation of knowledge about cinema and television; global media distribution; piracy and the law; the circulation of pornography; configurations of cultural communities; relations between public and private space; and contemporary media reception. [read more]

The issue contents are linked to below. Also see the following great site mentioned by the special issue: Video Cultures.
Issue Contents:

Please also note that a call for submissions for an issue on DOCUMENTARY AND SPACE is now open and can be viewed here.

More about → Media Fields Journal on Video Stores

Who is Sally Potter?

Sally Potter is exceptional among directors in having made both successful commercial features and experimental films. Besides filmmaking, her career incorporates dance, choreography, music and performance art; these elements are interwoven in her films, all of which - while very different from each other - confront issues around performance, gender and genre and appeal to the significance of musicality and movement in a medium which is in essence non-verbal.
Annette Kuhn

On the surface a satire on fashion, Rage is an indictment of the very market logic that forces stars to parade themselves on the red carpet in Berlin’s inevitable snow. It’s a reclamation of beauty from the bankers, and central to its ravishing struggle is Jude Law as Minx, a Russian-American supermodel. Minx refers to herself in the third person as “she” but the film leaves open the question of how Minx understands this pronoun for herself.

While not as centrally queer as Orlando, Rage is deeply concerned with that queerest of themes: what we say of ourselves and what (secretly) we cannot say but long to. Its compassion is amplified by its stunningly simple visual style; shot in tiny photographers’ studios using greenscreen, the film is also a message to budding filmmakers who think their projects are unlikely to get funding. Potter, a friend of Derek Jarman’s, is one of the few filmmakers committed to his mission of: make things with what you have.
Sophie Mayer

In a brilliant article discussing the role that other media play within film ("The Film Stilled", Camera Obscura 24, September 1990), Raymond Bellour recently suggested that these singular moments of eruption or invasion can point in two quite contrary directions. On the one hand, there are moments of video in film that point backwards, regressively, to a lost, even archaic past. Here, video becomes a sad, deathly emblem of nostalgia in the lives of people who are finding it hard to get themselves together. This occurs in the current release Falling Down, where the relentless camera movement into Michael Douglas' family video in the final shot expresses the complete disintegration of his identity. But, in a completely different spirit, video moments can point forward to utopian, transcendent, sometimes mystical states and experiences. Bellour gives this trend in cinema the curious name of 'angelism' - and what's most curious about it is that he coined the word before seeing Sally Potter's Orlando, where, in its final vision, video texture fills the screen as a child's video camera [that of Orlando's daughter] discovers an angel hovering in the sky, singing.
Adrian Martin

On the day that Rage, Sally Potter's new film, embarks on its 'multiplatform, interactive' release-week (today begin the mobile phone episodes), Film Studies For Free (a big Potter fan of old) is delighted to premiere its own selection of choice, openly accessible, scholarly links to Potter resources:

More about → Angelism and rage: Sally Potter links

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Media Fields Journal on Video Stores

Angelism and rage: Sally Potter links

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