To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathley's Film Studies Online

A free-to-attend University of London Screen Studies Group series event. Full details are given here: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/events/view/13234.

A free-to-attend University of Sussex Centre for Visual Fields event. Further details are given here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cvf/newsandevents/events?id=16509.

Film Studies For Free is almost unspeakably thrilled that its author is helping to host a visit to her shores by the wonderful film scholar Christian Keathley. So thrilled, in fact, that a collected edition of links to his generously-shared, online, film scholarship is given below. 

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently completing a second book, The Mystery of Otto Preminger (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multi-media format, including video essays.

In addition to the two UK events detailed above, Keathley will also give a keynote lecture on his work as part of the lineup for a two-day symposium in Antwerp, Belgium, entitled "FROM PHOTOGÉNIE TO CINEPHILIA 2.0, a seminar on cinephilia then and now". The event takes place between December 7-8. Unlike the two events above, it isn't free-to-attend, but it is incredibly good value. 

This superb looking symposium is hosted by the Flemish Service for Film Culture, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (UGent) and Research Group Visual Studies and Media Culture (University of Antwerp) organised in collaboration with Research Center for Visual Poetics (University of Antwerp) and CINEMATEK, with two other internationally recognised keynotes Malte Hagener and Sarah Keller. You can find further details of the symposium here.

There should be some open access resources emerging from the above events, and if that happens, FSFF will be among the first to let you know about them.

Online Written Texts by Christian Keathley:

• Christian Keathley, 'Teaching the Scholarly Video Essay', Frames, Issue 1, July 2012

• Christian Keathley,  'Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of Découpage', MOVIE, 3, 2011

• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008

• Christian Keathley, 'A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool]', In Media Res, May 14 , 200

• Christian Keathley et al, 'The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age', MIT6 Stone Papyrus Storage and Transmission Conference, April 24-26, 2009

• Christian Keathley, 'The Cinephiliac Moment', Framework, 42, Summer 2000

Online Video Essays by Christian Keathley:

Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.
Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley

Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

50 Years On from Christian Keathley
Revision of a video made for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies' 50th anniversary conference.


Does Your Dog Bite? from Christian Keathley
A video essay by Christian Keathley on a canine moment in Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951).

About Christian Keathley's work:

• Jason Sperb, 'Review of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees by Christian Keathley (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006)', Scope: an online journal of film & TV studies, Issue 12, October 2008

More about → To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathley's Film Studies Online

Real and Fictional Monarchies on Screen

The Paradox of the Monarchy by Catherine Grant

An archive video collage exploring some of the psychological and mediatized components of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy. It features excerpts from D.W. Winnicott's 1970 essay 'The Place of the Monarchy' (published in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, compiled and edited by Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis [London: Penguin, 1986]). Although it doesn't mention this, Winnicott's essay was published after the broadcast of the ground-breaking Royal Family documentary in 1969, which opened up new breaches in what the psychoanalyst was raising about the necessary distance and proximity of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy.

Public Domain Film Excerpts (from the Internet Archive Moving Image Collections)

• Pathe News Digest, 1937, No. 3 (Prelinger Archives)
• Visit of their Majesties, June 1939 (FDR Presidential Library [CC0 1.0 Universal])
• Today -- And Yesterday, Newsreel, 1911 (Prelinger Archives)
• A Welcome Guest in the House, ca. 1957 (Prelinger Archives)

Music Excerpt
“Self-Reflect” by Jared C. Balogh. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. Available for Download from from the Fee Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org/music/Balogh/A_Compilation_From_Compilations_Of_Compositions/SELF_REFLECT

Film Studies For Free was inspired by two events -- one offline and one online -- for today's entry.

The offline happening is an excellent looking conference on the British Monarchy on Screen taking place later this week, between November 23-24.

The conference is hosted by the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, and convened by the University of London Screen Studies Group, the Institute of English Studies, the department of Media Arts and the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research at Royal Holloway, University of London.

A somewhat ambivalent republican, but one indelibly marked by growing up immersed in the UK's mediatised monarchy, FSFF would have loved to attend. But its author is presenting instead at a conference in an actual Republic this weekend, instead. So this blog contributes the above monarchical-video-meditation in lieu of its presence - and there will be an accompanying essay about it for the Filmanalytical website very shortly.

Another series of events happening this week - also, sadly, to be missed by a gadabout FSFF -- will take place in Brighton. The Global Queer Cinema project is collaborating with the annual CineCity film festival on the topic of "Curating Queer Film Culture". Information about these really excellent and important events can be found here and here. 

The inspirational online event was another one FSFF missed... It was the competition which also inspired the above video, although the video took a somewhat different (topical) turn in its making: "The Past Re-Imagined as the Future" Remix Context, held by the brilliant Prelinger Archives and the Free Music Archive.

FSFF looks forward to hearing about the winners of that event but, in the meantime, had great fun as usual remixing material from both these amazing, public domain archives, and encourages its readers to have a go at doing the same. Any good film related results should be reported here forthwith.

Below, you can find a little (growing) list of links to online studies of monarchies on screen just to keep FSFF's hand in with this blog's day-job....

• Giselle Bastin, 'Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family', a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2009, pp. 34-52 PDF Rosalind Brunt, 'The Changing Face of Royalty', Marxism Today, 1984   
• Pam Cook, 'Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola', Sight and Sound 16 (11), November 2006, pp. 36-40
• Stella Hockenhull, 'Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen', Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012) PDF
• Dianne Hunter, 'From Ethereal Confrontation to Child Abuse to Womanly Conflict: Ophelia in Three Late-Twentieth Century Films', PsyArt, December 2008
• Julia Kinzler, 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011) pp. 49-65
• Laura Mason, '"We' re just little people, Louis": Marie-Antoinette on Film', Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No.3 (1994): 211-222 
• Anna Rogers, 'Sofia Coppola', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007

More about → Real and Fictional Monarchies on Screen

On fans and fantasy: Matt Hills online

Ana Torrent as Ángela in Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, Spain, 1996)

While Film Studies For Free was researching material for its last post - In-between-isms: Winnicottian film, media, and cultural studies - in which the work of media theorist Matt Hills figured strongly, it came across quite a few other freely-acessible, scholarly essays by and interviews with Hills, the links to which had not yet been collected in an online webliography.

So, below you can find a follow up links-list that does just that. Hopefully, it will be of use to those of us who appreciate Hills' unusual (these days) combination of film and media studies approaches in his work, which brilliantly draws both on psychoanalytic and sociological theories to explore audience or consumer attachments to popular media.

Online works by

• Matt Hills, ‘Gothic’ Body Parts in a ‘Postmodern’ Body of Work? The Hinchcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975-77)', Intensities Four, December 2007

• Matt Hills, 'Essential Tensions: Winnicottian Object-Relations In The Media Sociology of Roger Silverstone', International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), Feature 37-48

• Matt Hills, Whose "postmodern" horror? Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis (Thesis, 1996)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 5, 10 May 2003

• Matt Hills, 'Review of Lawrence Grossberg (2005) Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers)', Culture Machine, 2006

• Matt Hills 'Recognition in the eyes of the relevant beholder: Representing ‘subcultural celebrity’ and cult TV fan cultures', Mediactive, Issue 2, 2003 (scroll down to p. 59)

• Matt Hills, 'Review of Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy, Daniel Shaw, ed., (2001)', Aesthetics Online, 2002

Interviews with

• Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, 'Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One):', Confessions of an Aca Fan, August 23, 2007

• Henry Jenkins, 'Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills', Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 28, 2006

• Henry Jenkins, 'Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview With Matt Hills', Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 29, 2006

• Matt Hills, 'Intensities interviews Henry Jenkins @Console-ing Passions, University of Bristol, July 7th, 2001', Intensities Two,

More about → On fans and fantasy: Matt Hills online