Issue 35 of SCREENING THE PAST: Martin, Ruiz, Godard, Marker, Malick, Ophuls, and RIP Vikki Riley

Corrected edition! [Thanks AM!]

Screen cap from Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968). Read Adrian Danks's new article on this film and its director. And read Roger Ebert's fascinating review of the film at the time of its release.

It was somewhat remiss of Film Studies For Free to tweet the link to a new, and excellent, issue of Screening the Past, and then not to follow up with an entry here. This little oversight is corrected today with the below list of contents and links.

There are a huge number of film studies topics covered in the issue (although a fair few of them, in a variety of great contributions, by Adrian Martin!). FSFF particularly liked Lorraine Sim on the ensemble film and Roger Hillman on Malick.

This blog especially recommends, also, the dossier (introduced by Martin) dedicated to the work and memory of Vikki Riley, a highly original writer on film and a tireless political activist who tragically died in a road accident in Darwin, Australia, last September.

Screening the Past, Issue 35, 2012

First Release

• Hanging Here and Groping There: On Raúl Ruiz’s “The Six Functions of the Shot”
  by Adrian Martin
• The Art of Falling Apart: Petulia and the Fate of Richard Lester
  by Adrian Danks
• Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Contemporary Iranian War Cinema
  by Michelle Langford
• Ensemble Film, Postmodernity and Moral Mapping
  by Lorraine Sim
• JLG/Jean Améry
  by Alan Wright
• Malick’s Music of the Spheres: The Tree of Life
  by Roger Hillman
• The Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Liberalisation of Film Censorship in Australia
  by Cathy Hope and Adam Dickerson 

Vikki Riley (1962-2012): Early Writings

• VOLA X (Introduction)
  by Adrian Martin
• The Canonisation of Junk (1982)
  by Vikki Riley
• Poetics of Pop: The Titles of Things (1982)
  by Vikki Riley
• ‘This Magazine is for Airing Personal Complaints’ (1983)
  by Vikki Riley
• Caught … Sunless and The State of Things (1984)
  by Vikki Riley

Classics and Re-runs

• Which Hollywood? Which Ophuls?
  by Adrian Martin
• The Six Functions of the Shot
  by Raúl Ruiz 

Web-teque

• Adrian Martin interview about his book Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez,
  interviewer Anna Dzenis

Reviews

• Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-In-Pain as Redemptive Figure
• by Jeremy V. Adolphson
• One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television
  by Lauren Anderson
• Ephemeral Media: Transitory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube
  by Rebecca Bell-Metereau
• A Post-May Adolescence: A letter to Alice Debord
  by Jan Bryant
• Sergio Leone Something To Do With Death (reprint edition)
  by Patrick Condliffe
• Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism
  by Maura Edmond
• Fantasy Film: A Critical Introduction
  by Michael Grant
• Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia.
  by David Hanan
• Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction
  by Adam Knee
• British Film Design: A History
  by Brian McFarlane
• New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images
  by Sarinah Masukor
• David Lynch
  by Josh Nelson
• The Neorealist body in Postwar Italian cinema
  by Luca Peretti
• Olivier Assayas
  by Claire Perkins
• The Miracle Woman
  by Eloise Ross
• Jedda
  by Shane Smithers
• Fashion in Film
  by Sue Thomas
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy: The Last Masterpiece
  by Jay Daniel Thompson
• Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács
  by Jeni Thornley
• Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches
  by John Vanderhoef
• Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution
  by Mike Walsh
• Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodore Adorno
  by Tyson Wils
• South African Cinema 1896-2010
  by Suzanne Woodward

More about → Issue 35 of SCREENING THE PAST: Martin, Ruiz, Godard, Marker, Malick, Ophuls, and RIP Vikki Riley

Cinema, Experience, Vernacular Modernism: More on the Work of the late Miriam Bratu Hansen

Viewing (10:33): Miriam Bratu Hansen on her work, "Post-Cinema", and much else

"Miriam Bratu Hansen (1949–2011) was one of the great film scholars of our time.  She was also a friend and colleague to us at Critical Inquiry.  In celebration of the newly-published Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, we are proud to present this short film [above] by Miriam's student Christina Petersen, along with a dossier of five major articles from our archives." [From a note at the Critical Inquiry website to accompany its "Dossier Miriam Hansen"]

"Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno—affiliated through friendship, professional ties, and argument—developed an astute philosophical critique of modernity in which technological media played a key role. [Hansen's last book] explores in depth their reflections on cinema and photography from the Weimar period up to the 1960s. Miriam Bratu Hansen brings to life an impressive archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials and reveals surprising perspectives on canonic texts, including Benjamin’s artwork essay. Her lucid analysis extrapolates from these writings the contours of a theory of cinema and experience that speaks to questions being posed anew as moving image culture evolves in response to digital technology." [Publisher's note on Miriam Hansen's Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, University of California Press, 2011]

On February 5, 2011, the hugely distinguished Film Studies scholar Miriam Bratu Hansen passed away. The next day Film Studies For Free published its appreciation of her career with links to other online tributes to her, and to examples of her work online. It is still this website's single most visited entry, a tiny sign of warm esteem in which she was held in our discipline.

Since the publication of her remarkable, final book Cinema and Experience, last year, three further, openly accessible items of great interest have appeared online.

Two of these are part of a Dossier on Hansen put together at the Critical Inquiry website: the above video about Hansen, and a collection of five major articles that Hansen published in that great journal. All are accessible at this webpage.

And you can also read the wonderful first chapter of Cinema and Experience -- on the work of Siegfried Krakauer --  at the University of California Press webpage. 

To further celebrate the above, FSFF has updated its links to useful online discussions or applications of Hansen's work, including, at the foot of this entry, a very recent video presentation.

• Chris Cagle, 'On Vernacular Modernism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, July 26, 2006
• Desley Deacon, 'World English? How an Australian Invented "Good American Speech"’, In Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound, edited by Damousi, Joy; Deacon, Desley. Canberra: ANU ePress, 2007 
• Desley Deacon, ‘Films as foreign offices’: transnationalism at Paramount in the twenties and early thirties', ‘Films as foreign offices: Transnationalism at Paramount in the twenties and earlythirties’. In Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, edited by Curthoys, Ann; Lake, 2005
• Alexander Des Forges, 'Shanghai Alleys, Theatrical Practice, and Cinematic Spectatorship: From Street Angel (1937) to Fifth Generation Film', in: Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 39, 4, 2010: 29-51
• Stephanie Hanson, '“Electrical wonders of the present age”: cinema-going on the Far South Coast of NSW and rural discourses of modernity', Screening the Past, Issue 24, 2009
• Adrian Martin, 'Balance and Linkage : Robert Mulligan's The Man in the Moon', Film Journal, Issue 11
• Allen Meek, 'Benjamin, the televisual and the "fascistic subject", Screening the Past, September 1998
• W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 22004-5
• Andrew Nelson, 'Cinema from Attractions: Story and Synergy in Disney’s Theme Park Movies', Cinephile, Vol. 4, Summer 2008
• Justus Nieland, 'Modernism's Laughter', Modernist Cultures, Issue 4, 2009
• Justus Nieland, 'Archives of Modernist Cinephilia', MODERNISM/Modernity, 14(2), 347-355, 2007
• Kyoko Omori, Detecting Japanese Vernacular Modernism: Shinseinen Magazine and the Development of the Tantei Shosetsu Genre, 1920-1931, PhD Thesis, Ohio State University, 2003 
• Pooja Rangan, 'Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood As a Signifying Practice', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers 
• Tytti Soila, 'Passion at the threshold: Doctor Glas the flaneur in the films of Rune Carlstén and Mai Zetterling', Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 1, 2010
• Kirsten Strayer, Ruins and Riots: Transnational Currents in Mexican Cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh 2009 
• Michael Syrimis , 'From Nestoroff To Garbo: Pirandellian Humour in its Cinematic Vernacular', Quaderni d'italianistica : revue officielle de la Société canadienne, Volume XXIX, No. 2, 2008, 29-52
• Mike Walsh, '[Review of] Zhang Zhen, An amorous history of the silver screen: Shanghai cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005', Screening the Past, 21, 2007
• Mark Wollaeger, 'Where and When is Modernism: Editing on a Global Scale', Kritika Kultura, 16, 2011 
• Chen Xiangyang, 'Technologizing the Vernacular: Cantonese Opera Films through The Legend of Purple Hairpin', David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), Working Paper Series, No. 67, September 2007

'Paranoid Hermeneutics as Queer Cinematic Vernacular' by Catherine Grant.
A film studies presentation prepared for the "Queer Cinema and the Politics of the Global" Workshop held at the University of Sussex, May 12, 2012. The Workshop was part of series of events held by the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network GLOBAL QUEER CINEMA based at Sussex, led by Rosalind Galt.

More about → Cinema, Experience, Vernacular Modernism: More on the Work of the late Miriam Bratu Hansen

Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth

International Conference: ANTONIONI 1912-2012 (Part 1 of 2)

This event on March 30, 2012, was part of: Homage to Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) held at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, to mark the centenary year of the Italian director’s birth organized jointly by the Department of Italian Studies and the Department of Cinema Studies, NYU.

Above: PANEL 1: Richard Allen (NYU), ‘Hitchcock, Antonioni, and the Wandering Woman’ and Karen Pinkus (Cornell), ‘Automation, Autonomia, Anomie’; PANEL 2: John David Rhodes (Sussex), ‘Antonioni and Geopolitical Abstraction’ and Karl Schoonover (Warwick), ‘Antonioni's Toxicology’

International Conference: ANTONIONI 1912-2012 (Part 2 of 2)

Above: PANEL 3 Screening of N.U. (11’, 1948) and discussion with David Forgacs and Ara Merjian (NYU) Matilde Nardelli (UCL) 'Antonioni and the Cultures of Photography’ PANEL 4 Michael Siegel (Brown), ‘From Identificazione to Investigazione: Looking at Looking in Late Antonioni’ Francesco Casetti (Yale), ‘The Remains of the Modern’ PANEL 5 Eugenia Paulicelli (CUNY), David Forgacs (NYU), John David Rhodes (Sussex)

Approaching the figure and work of Michelangelo Antonioni a century after his birth, one is confronted with a number of persistent critical tropes about his oeuvre, with a substantial, if in great part dated, body of critical work and, perhaps, also with the sense that all has already been said and written on the director of the malady of feelings, of filmic slowness and temps mort, of the crisis of the postwar bourgeoisie, of epistemological uncertainties, of modernist difficulty and even boredom, of aestheticism and the hypertrophy of style, of narrative opacity. And yet, Antonioni today powerfully escapes the reach of old categorisations that have attempted to congeal his figure once and for all into an inert monument of modern cinema. His continued influence on world film-makers and the new pressing questions that his films raise today for contemporary audiences call for a renewed critical effort. [Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)]

Despite Antonioni’s deep concerns about scientific logic and any objective representation of reality, in purely formal terms his work is always defined by a clear tension between what I would call on the one hand a documentary impulse, and on the other a drive towards fiction pushed at times to the level of melodrama.

[... H]owever hollowed-out and experimental Antonioni’s works become, they always constitute fictions since they present characters in artificial situations. As Antonioni himself put it, his primary interest lies in the moment when the context or environment suddenly takes on “relief.” Which is to say, his hybrid narratives marked by temporal disjunction, disorientation, black holes, ellipses, and a lack of resolution serve to provide just enough justification for human figuration, however “unnaturally” heightened and stylized, to take hold. This recourse to melodrama, broadly defined, offered Antonioni a means of shortcircuiting and sculpting the Real in slowed-down, distended form in order to capture it as a series of tableaux vivants. [...]

Alert to the tensions in the spatiotemporal relations between people, objects, and events, the director must, according to Antonioni, engage with a “special reality” and be “committed morally in some way.” What this means in practice is dedramatizing the narrative event in order to focus attention on the physical context that both makes it possible but also eludes it. Antonioni propels his protagonists into new or alien environments, and we follow them almost ethnographically as they develop new perceptual powers in order to negotiate their changed conditions'. [James S. Williams, 'The Rhythms of Life: An Appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni, Extreme Aesthete of the Real', Film Quarterly (Fall Issue 2008, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 46-57), pp. 50-52 - my emphasis]

Today, Film Studies For Free gleefully celebrates the publication online of just under seven hours of videoed content from an excellent, recent conference in New York City that its author had really wished she'd been able to attend. Now -- virtually -- she (and you) can! 

The conference took a timely new look at the work of FSFF's favourite Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni one hundred years on from the year of his birth. It followed on from the recent publication of an excellent, similarly inspired, BFI/Palgrave collection of work on Antonioni edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes. 

Rhodes, a highly esteemed (and much loved!) colleague of FSFF's humble scribe, appears in the video frame still at the top of this post, and throughout both embedded videos. He was one of the organisers of, and main contributors to, the NYU conference. A very generous sample excerpt from his and Rascaroli's book may be found here.

To accompany the truly excellent videos, FSFF has assembled a rather fabulous list of links to other online and openly accessible studies of Antonioni's work. If you know of any significant resources missing below, please leave a link in the comments. Grazie!

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Antonioni's birthplace of Ferrara between September 30, 2012 and January 6, 2013, you'll be able to catch an excellent exhibition about his work, which opens following a public celebration of the filmmaker on the day of his birth itself (September 29). You can find more information here. Thanks to Antonioni scholar Ted Perry for his tip off about this event. Do look out for his new book on him which should be out next year.

• Paolo Bartoloni, 'Blanchot and Ambiguity, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.4 (2010)
• Michael Bloom, 'Fragile Images and Concrete Things: Indirect Subjectivity and the Externalization of The Soul in Michelangelo Antonioni's Tetralogy', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• David Brancaleone, 'Part 2 of 'The Thin Line Between Documentary and Fiction'', Experimental Conversations, Issue 8, 2011
• James Brown, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', Senses of Cinema, 20, 2002
• James Brown, 'Il Grido: Modernising the Po', Senses of Cinema, 26, 2003
• Peter Brunette, 'Introduction [excerpt]', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Peter Brunette, 'Blow-up', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Ken Burke and Héctor Mario Cavallari, 'Julio Cortázar and Michelangelo Antonioni: Words, Images, and the Limits of Verbal and Visual Representation', Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism, 05/20/10
• Bert Cardullo, 'Introduction', in Cardullo (ed.), After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films; Essays and Interviews (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009)
• James Cisneros, 'How to Watch the Story of Film Adaptation. Cortázar, Antonioni, Blow-Up', Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, n° 2, 2003
• Jonathan Dawson, The Passenger', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
• Laurie N. Ede, '[Review of Murray Pomerance's] Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011]', Screening the Past, 33, 2011
• R. Bruce Elder, 'Antonioni's Tragic Vision: Style, Fonn and Idea in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, with Especial Emphasis on His Masterpiece, Il deserto rosso', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 1.2, 1991
• Hamish Ford, 'Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Deleuze’s Time-Image', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, Sept-Oct 2003
• Matthew Gandy, 'Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert', originally in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (2) (2003)
• Peter Goldman, 'Blowup, Film Theory, and the Logic of Realism', Anthropoetics 14, no. 1 (Summer 2008)
• Absjørn Grønstad, 'Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up', Film Journal, 9, 2004
• Mike Grost on Antonioni
• Christine Henderson, 'The Trials of Individuation in Late Modernity: Exploring Subject Formation in Antonioni's Red Desert' PDF, Film-Philosophy, 15.1, 2011
• Penelope Houston, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', originally in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980
• Ian Johnston, 'We’re Not Happy and We Never Will Be: On Cronaca di un amore', Bright Lights Film Journal, 53, 2006
• Robert Philip Kolker The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (passim.), originally published 1982
• Little Rabbit's Antonioni Archive (thanks to Mike Grost for the link)
• Gaetana Marrone, 'A Cinematic Grand Tour of Sicily: Irony, Memory and Metamorphic Desire from Goethe to Tornatore', California Italian Studies, 1(1), 2010
• 'David Martin-Jones, '[Review of Brunette's book on Antonioni', Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 50, December 1999
• David Alan Mellor, '‘Fragments of an Unknowable Whole’: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incorporation of Contemporary Visualities in London, 1966', Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, 8 (2): 2007, pp. 45-61
• Zach Melzer, 'Michelangelo Antonioni and the “Reality” of the Modern', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Gary Morris, 'Chabrol, Losey, Antonioni: Three Classic Eurofilms: Les Bonnes Femmes, Eva, Il Grido', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 31, 2010
• Gavriel Moses, 'As We [They] See [Hear] Them [Us]: Cain/Antonioni//Antonioni/Coppola', Voices in Italian Americana, 1991
• John Orr, 'Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs. Antonioni's The Passenger', Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007
• Murray Pomerance, 'Significant Cinema: The Scene of the Crime', Senses of Cinema, 61, 2011
• Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)
• Julie Ravary, 'La Femme “Antonionienne”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Elena del Río, “Antonioni’s Blowup: Freeing the Imaginary from Metaphysical Ground”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 32, June, 2005
• Christopher Sharrett, 'L’eclisse', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
• Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara, 'Reporting on The Passenger', Undercurrent, 3, 2006
• Gregory Solman, 'L'Avventura', Senses of Cinema, 31, 2004
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Realism and Reality in Antonioni’s Profession: Reporter as dramatizing the Nietzschean notion of the “power of the false”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Frank P. Tomasulo, 'The bourgeoisie is also a class: class as character in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura', Jump Cut, 49, 2007
• Donato Totaro, ' Zabriskie Point (1970, Antonioni): A Scene by Scene Analysis of a Troubled Masterpiece', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Donato Totaro, 'Alida Valli: May 31, 1921-April 22, 2006', Offscreen Journal, 10.5, 2006
• Donato Totaro, 'May 1968 and After: Cinema in France and Beyond', Offscreen Journal, 1998
• Jack Turner, 'Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text', Other Voices 1.3 (January 1999)
• Peter Verstraten, 'A Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose: On Antonioni and Malick', Image [and] Narrative, 13.2, 2012
• Fiona A.Villella, 'Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing In Antonioni's Zabriskie Point', Senses of Cinema, 4, 2000
• Elisabeth Weis, 'Tati, Hitchcock, Antonioni: Three Approaches to Sonic Creativity', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, 2007
• Matthew M. Wylie, 'Avoiding the Masculine "Gaze": Frustrated Homosexual Desire and the Eroticized Role of the Camera In Hitchcock's Rear Window and Antonioni's Blow Up', Cinetext, February 2003

More about → Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth

On Railways and the Movies

"Uncanny Arrival at a Railway Station" by Catherine Grant

The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970) was a film I ardently watched countless times on television as a child, and, I have to confess, I have seen and loved it countless times since. I had certainly seen it long before I saw  L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat (Lumière Bros., 1895). I noticed the resemblance between the two films only when watching Jeffries' film again recently. But when I explored this, I was struck by the extent of their resonance, and by the uncanniness of the later film's pastiche of the earlier one: Bernard Cribbins' Perks revivifies, down to his moustache, the La Ciotat station porter; an identical luggage trolley lurks in the background; the beshawled woman looks like she stepped off the earlier train, except that she's in Technicolor.
     I began to figure, to fantasize, that the uncanniness of The Railway Children's penultimate sequence was not only set off by its graphic and musical evocation of the uncertainty of young Bobbie (Jenny Agutter) about quite why she was standing by the rail track, but also by its palpable haunting by the Lumière's originary scene, with its powerful, ghostly, urtext of a, much more bustling, railway platform just after the arrival of cinema.
 For me, of course, it will also always be the other way round: that The Railway Children, and this film's own afterwardsness, haunt L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare...
[From the introduction to "Uncanny Arrival at a Railway Station" by Catherine Grant] 

In the 'folklore’ of cinema history there is one anecdote which seems to be perennially fascinating to layman and historian alike. It might be summarised as follows: an audience in the early days of the cinema is seated in a hall when a film of an approaching train is projected on the screen. The spectators are anxious, fearful -    some of them even panic and run.
     This fearful or panicky reaction has been called 'the train effect’. It is such a common anecdote, cited by so many writers both at the time and later, that it has also been called `the founding myth of cinema’ or the cinema’s 'myth of origin. [Stephen Bottomore, 'The Panicking Audience?: early cinema and the "train effect’", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1999]

Rather than mistaking the image for reality, the spectator is astonished by its transformation through the new illusion of projected motion. Far from credulity, it is the incredible nature of the illusion that renders the viewer speechless. What is displayed before the audience is less the impending speed of the train than the force of the cinematic apparatus. [Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator [1989]’, in Linda Williams, ed. (1994) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. 114–133.]

Cinema as we know it, as an institution, as an entertainment based on the mass spectatorship of projected moving images, was born in '95, in the Golden Age of railway travel. As the prehistory and beginnings of cinema strongly suggest, film finds an apt metaphor in railroad. The train can be seen as providing the prototypical experience of looking at a framed, moving image, and as the mechanical double of the cinematic apparatus. Both are means of transporting a passenger to a totally different place, both are highly charged vehicles of narrative events, stories, intersections of strangers, both are based on a fundamental paradox: simultaneous motion and stillness. These are two great machines of vision that give rise to similar modes of perception, and are geared to shaping the leisure time of a mass society. [Lynne Kirby, 'Male Hysteria and Early Cinema', originally in Camera Obscura May 1988 6(2 17)]

Following on from Wolfgang Schivelbusch's now seminal account of the nineteenth-century railroad and the institution of "panoramic perception" as being emblematic of modernity, critics like Lynne Kirby and Mary Ann Doane have already explored the historic connections between film and the train's profound re-configuration of vision, with its mechanical separation of the viewer's body from the actual physical space of a 'virtual' 'perception. [Saige Walton, '[Review of] Jeffrey Ruoff (ed), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006', Screening the Past, 20, 2006]

Above, Film Studies For Free gifts to you another of its author's experiments with real-time video comparison (also a further exploration of cinematic pastiche).

This tiny videographic donation accompanies the links, below, to Omar Ahmed's truly wonderful, much more comprehensive and informative video essay series on trains in Indian cinema.

And below those links are others to further, openly accessible online scholarship that touches on the topic of railways -- a very cinematic apparatus indeed -- in the movies.

Bon voyage!

• Omar Ahmed, Video essays: Iconography in Indian Cinema: Trains - Part 1 of 3; Iconography in Indian Cinema: Trains - Part 2 of 3 ; Iconography in Indian Cinema: Trains - Part 3 of 3
• Douglas Bailie,  '[Review of] Lynne Kirby. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997', H Net, December 1997
• Nandana Bose, 'The Darjeeling Limited: Critiquing Orientalism on the Train to Nowhere', Mediascape, Spring 2008
• Stephen Bottomore, 'The Panicking Audience?: early cinema and the "train effect’", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1999
• Sue Brennan, 'Time, Space, and National Belonging in The Namesake: Redrawing South Asian American Citizenship in the Shadow of 9/11', Journal of Transnational American Studies, 3(1), 2011
• Charlotte Brunsdon, 'The Poignancy of Place: London and the Cinema', Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2004, pp. 59-73(15)
• Jessica Ann Daniel, The Participatory Potential of Early Cinema: A Reexamination of Early Projected Films, MA Thesis, Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2010
• Marcus Doel, 'Pivotal Film History: Georges Melies as a Vanishing Mediator', Film-Philosophy, vol. 6 no. 24, September 2002
• Greg Eamon, 'Farmers, Phantoms and Princes. The Canadian Pacific Railway and Filmmaking from 1899- 1919', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 6, n° 1, 1995, p. 11-32.
• Thomas Elsaesser, '"One train may be hiding another": private history, memory and national identity', Screening the Past, Issue 6, 1999 
• Asif A. Ghazanfar and Stephen V. Shepherd, Monkeys at the Movies: What Evolutionary Cinematics Tells Us about Film', Projections, Volume 5, Issue 2, Winter 2011: 1–2
• Tim Harte, '[Review of] Cinetrain: 6 documentaries on the Trans-Siberian Railway', KinoKultura, 27, 2010
• 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
• Edvin Vestergaard Kau, 'Brief Encounters in Real Dreams? Derailment and Poetic Vision', P.O.V. No.15 - Derailment, March 2003
• Lynne Kirby, 'Male Hysteria and Early Cinema', originally in Camera Obscura May 1988 6(2 17)
• Emily J. May, 'The Darjeeling Limited and The New American Traveller', Senses of Cinema, Issue 49, 2008
• Daniel Bach Nielsen and Rasmus Stampe Hjorth,'Derailment', P.O.V. No.15 - Derailment, March 2003 (see here for other articles on this film)
• Noelle O’Connor, Sheila Flanagan and David Gilbert, 'The Integration of Film-inducedTourism and Destination Branding in Yorkshire, UK', International Journal of Tourism Research, 10, 423–437 (2008) 
• Vladimir Padunov and Nancy P. Condee, 'Recent Soviet Cinema and Public Responses: Abdrashitov and German', Framework, Issue 29, 1985
• Hannu Salmi, 'Cinema, Tourism and Everyday Life: From Virtual Experiences to Traveling Cultures', published in 'Traffic, Needs, Roads: Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future of Roads in Finland and the Baltic Area.' Ed Tapani Mauranen. Helsinki: The Finnish National Road Administration, 1999, pp. 115-121
• Rosie Thomas, 'Miss Frontier Mail: The Film That Mistook Its Star for a Train', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Saige Walton, '[Review of] Jeffrey Ruoff (ed), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006', Screening the Past, 20, 2006

More about → On Railways and the Movies

New SCREENING THE PAST

Image from After the Rainbow (2009), a two screen video installation by Soda_Jerk, the Australian artist sisters Dom and Dan Angeloro, as discussed in 'The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime' by Andrew Frost

[C]inema is surely a paradoxical object: its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity. That is where its true materiality-effect, today, is situated: in the palpable aura of a mise en scène that is always less than itself and more than itself, not only itself but also its contrary, ever vanishing and yet ever renewed across a thousand and one screens, platforms and dispositifs. [Adrian Martin, 'Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif ', Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011]

Below, Film Studies For Free presents the table of contents to the latest online issue of Screening the Past.

It's a special issue on the 'intermediality' of cinema, guest-edited by the brilliant and influential Australian film critic and scholar Adrian Martin. It begins with a marvellous contribution by him to the topic. There's also an unmissable 'rerun' of Nicole Brenez's remarkable essay 'Incomparable Bodies'.

Admirers of Martin's work should also be more than excited by the news that the first issue of LOLA, a new film journal edited by him and the film writer and blogger extraordinaire Girish Shambu, is "coming soon"...


Screening the Past, Issue 31 - Cinema Between Media 
(Incorporating U-matic to YouTube, a selection of papers from a National Symposium celebrating three decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking edited by Therese Davis).

First Release

• Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif by Adrian Martin


• Cinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch’s Inland Empire by Jodi Brooks


• The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime by Andrew Frost


• Théâtre du Soleil Meets the Cinema: Acting and Mask Work in Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière by Laura Sava


• Capital and Co.: Kluge/Eisenstein/Marx by Julia Vassilieva

Dossier: U-Matic to YouTube

• “Working in Communities, Connecting with Culture”: Reflecting on U-matic to YouTube A National Symposium Celebrating Three Decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking by Therese Davis and Romaine Moreton


• “These Are The Choices We Make”: Animating Saltwater Country by John Bradley Graham Friday Amanda Kearney and Leonard Norman


• Two Laws: A Filmmaking Journey by Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan


• Was Two Laws Experimental? by Stephen Muecke


• Story, Film Style and Cross-cultural Collaboration in Aeroplane Dance (1994) by Trevor Graham


• Aeroplane Dance: Whose Story? by Maryrose Casey and John Bradley


• Models of Collaboration in the Making of Ten Canoes (2006) by Nancy E. Wright


• Darlene Johnson on Making Films in Arnhem Land by Therese Davis


• Victorian Indigenous Communities and Digital Storytelling by Jason Eades Helen Simondson and Kimba Thompson


• The Farm (2009) and Indigenous Remembrance by Romaine Moreton

Classics and Re-runs

• Incomparable Bodies by Nicole Brenez

Reviews

• Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, Bernard Stiegler by Daniel Ross


• Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Peter Limbrick by Deane Williams


• Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing, Susan L. Carruthers by Gabrielle Murray


• Diasporas of Australian cinema, Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert (eds) by Ina Bertrand


• The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller by Michael Grant


• Dancing Ledge / Kicking the Pricks, Derek Jarman by Niall Richardson


• Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood by Regina Longo


• Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Ella Shohat by Seyda Aylin Gurses


• The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Suzanne Buchan by Mihaela Mihailova


• Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, Karen Beckman by Thomas Salek

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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