ALPHAVILLE Issue 3: Sound, Voice and Music

Framegrab from Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978)

In his discussion of the work of Hal Ashby ['When is the Now in the Here and There?'], Aaron Hunter contributes to the emerging body of scholarship on the technique of “trans-diegesis”. Taking Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) as a case study, Hunter shows how Ashby’s use of trans-diegetic music—music that crosses narrative layers—forms part of a consistently playful approach to cinematic form and functions on several levels: as a tool that allows for a merger between moments in time, as a device to create a transition between incongruent events within the diegesis, or as mechanism to create a temporal confluence between apparently sequential events. [Alphaville, 3, 2012 Editorial by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine]

 
Once again, Film Studies For Free salutes the online journal Alphaville. Its latest issue, just out, treats the important topic of sound, voice and music in film and television and boasts some excellent contributions.

FSFF enjoyed them all, but particularly liked Michael Dwyer's The Same Old Songs in Reagan-Era Teen Film and Michael Charlton's Performing Gender in the Studio and Postmodern Musical, along with the discussion of Hal Ashby's film by Aaron Hunter. There are also some great book reviews and rewarding conference reports, too, perhaps most notably James MacDowell's detailed discussion of  The End Of…? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures.

All the contents are linked to below.


Alphaville, Issue 3, Summer 2012
Sound, Voice, Music Edited by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine

Editorial by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine

• The Same Old Songs in Reagan-Era Teen Film by Michael D. Dwyer, Arcadia University
• Performing Gender in the Studio and Postmodern Musical by Michael Charlton, Missouri Western State University
• When is the Now in the Here and There? Trans-diegetic Music in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home by Aaron Hunter, Queen’s University Belfast
• Beneath Sci-fi Sound: Primer, Science Fiction Sound Design, and American Independent Cinema by Nessa Johnston, University of Glasgow
• Cultural Innovation and Narrative Synergy in R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet by Ioana Literat, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
• Emotion Capture: Vocal Performances by Children in the Computer-animated Film by Christopher Holliday, King’s College London

Book Reviews Edited by Jill Murphy

• Media and Memory, by Joanne Garde-Hansen (2011) Reviewer: Elena Caoduro, University of Southampton
• Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen, by Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong (2011) Reviewer: Fiona Lee, City University of New York – The Graduate Center
• Music Video and the Politics of Representation, by Diane Railton and Paul Watson (2011) Reviewer: Antonio Sanna, Università degli Studi di Cagliari (Italy)
• Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview, by Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty and Jochen Eisentraut (eds.) (2009) Reviewer: Penny Spirou, Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia)
• Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores, by Peter Franklin (2011) Reviewer: K. A. Wisniewski, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA)
• Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir, by Robert Miklitsch (2011) Reviewer: James A. Wren, San José State University

Reports Edited by Ian Murphy

• Dysfunctionalities. Annual Conference of the German Society for Media Science (GfM) Postdam, Germany, 5-8 October 2011 Reporter: Patricia Prieto Blanco, Huston School of Film and Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway
• The Impact of Technological Innovations on the Historiography and Theory of Cinema Montreal, Canada, 1-6 November 2011 Reporter: Daniel Fitzpatrick, DAH, National University of Ireland, Galway
• The End Of…? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures University of Kent, Canterbury, 21-22 January 2012 Reporter: James MacDowell, University of Warwick

More about → ALPHAVILLE Issue 3: Sound, Voice and Music

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

Sound on Screen: The Exorcist, Haneke, J-Horror, Warner Bros., animation, Apocalypse Now

Image from Apocalypse Now Redux (Francis Ford Coppola, 2001)

Film Studies For Free only just heard about the Spring 2010 issue of online journal Cinephile (Vol. 6 No. 1). So, while technically FSFF is 'rushing you the news', it red-facedly admits that it arrived a little late to this particular, openly accessible, Film Studies party...

Anyhoooo, it's an excellent issue on ‘Sound on Screen’, available as one large PDF. The contents are given below.

FSFF earnestly promises to keep its e-ears closer to the ground next time an issue is due...


Table of Contents

• 'William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and the Proprietary Nature of Sound' by Jay Beck

• 'Acoustic Infidelities: Sounding the Exchanges between J-Horror and H-Horror Remakes' by William Whittington

• 'Listening to Silence: The Films of Michael Haneke' by Lisa Coulthard

• 'Audiovisual Ecology in the Cinema' by Randolph Jordan

• 'Lunacy at Termite Terrace: The Slapstick Style of Warner Bros. Animation' by Andres Lombana Bermudez

• 'On the Occult Nature of Sound-Image Synchronization' by K. J. Donnelly

• 'The New Scene Canon - Chopping Choppers Unforgettably: The "Nowhere to Go but Down" Scene in Apocalypse Now' by Mark Harris

More about → Sound on Screen: The Exorcist, Haneke, J-Horror, Warner Bros., animation, Apocalypse Now

Study of a Single Film: Forbidden Planet (in memory of Leslie Nielsen)

Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis star in Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)

Film Studies For Free was sad to hear that the king of deadpan movie humour, actor Leslie Nielsen, has died at the age of 84. Of all the films he starred in, the one that has most often been the subject of scholarly studies was the hugely influential science fiction movie Forbidden Planet, a film in which Nielsen played a sincerely serious role.

In (metonymic) memory of Nielsen's wonderful career (the straight part standing for the mostly comic whole), FSFF has assembled a list of links to openly accessible academic studies of this 1956 film. With its groundbreaking electronic music score by Louis and Bebe Barron, its highly personable robot character, its loose adaptation of a high culture text (Shakespeare's The Tempest), and its well elaborated allusions to classical (and post-classical) mythology, as well as to Freud (the Id monster), Forbidden Planet will probably keep film academics in business for quite some time. But, FSFF hopes some will also turn their attention to Nielsen's comic performances, before too long.

Shirley, they merit that, at the very least.

• Martin Stig Andersen, 'Audiovisual Correspondences', CEC: eContact! 12.4 — Perspectives on the Electroacoustic Work / Perspectives sur l'œuvre électroacoustique (August 2010)
• Simone Caroti, "Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest"    page 2 of 12 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004)
• David Cooper, '[Review of] James Wierzbicki: Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet: A Film Score Guide', The Journal of Film Music, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2007
• Ted Friedman, 'Jung and Lost', FlowTV, May 1, 2009
• Robert M. Geraci, 'Robots and the Sacred in Science and Science Fiction: Theological Implications of Artificial Intelligence', Zygon, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2007)
• Miguel Angel González Campos, 'Shakespeare in Outer Space: Forbidden Planet as Adaptation of The Tempest', Sederi 9 (1998)
• Greg Grewell, 'Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions Then, Now, and in the (Imagined) Future', Rocky Mountain Review, Fall 2001
• Laurie Johnson, 'Felix and Gilles's tempestuous, monstrous machine', M/C Journal: Journal of Media and Culture, 2 (6) 1999 
• David A. Kirby, 'The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films', Literature and Medicine 26, no. 1 (Spring 2007)
• T.J. Matheson, 'Marcuse, Ellul, and the Science-Fiction Film: Negative Responses to Technology', Science Fiction Studies, #58, Volume 19, Part 3, November 1992
• Anthony Miller, '"In this last tempest": Modernising Shakespeare’s Tempest on Film', Sydney Studies in English, Vol 23 (1997)
• Roy Schwartzman, '“Engenderneered Machines in Science Fiction Film.” Studies in Popular Culture 22.1 (October 1999): 75-87
• Rachel Weissbrod, 'Inter-Semiotic Translation: Shakespeare on Screen', Journal of Specialised Translation, Issue 5, January 2006

More about → Study of a Single Film: Forbidden Planet (in memory of Leslie Nielsen)

"Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies

Kajol and Shahrukh Khan in  Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge / The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride (Aditya Chopra, 1995)

With a wary eye on the fast-approaching (in many places at least) and not-so-mellow fruitfulness of a new academic year, Film Studies For Free today brings you its handy guide to online introductions to popular Hindi cinema.

Not all of the wonderful, openly accessible resources linked to below the embedded video are designed for those new to this core academic film studies subject, but all are clearly written, and thus very accessible, as well as highly informative to those at many different stages in their scholarly fascination with this most popular of world cinemas.

Talking of fascination, a nice place to start might be Jonathan Torgovnik's wonderful online portfolio of photographs: Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon Press, 2003).

 

The Seductive World of Indian Cinema (2007)

Discussion between author Anupama Chopra, leading filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and Bollywood expert and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU Tejaswini Ganti. The discussion is moderated by Richard Allen, Chair of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts.

• A Guide to South Asian Cinema, ImagineAsia: British Film Institute, 2002
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Gregory D. Booth, 'Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema', Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 54, 1995: 169-190
• Devon Burk, 'What's A Kiss: The Unchaste Chastity of Bollywood', The Virginia Review of Asian Studies, Vol. XI, Fall 2008
• Corey Creekmur, 'The Devdas Phenomenon', Philip's fil-ums, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Patrick Colm Hogan, 'Hindi Cinema as a Challenge to Film Theory and Criticism', Projections, Volume 3, Number 2, Winter 2009 , pp. v-ix(1)
• Aniruddha Dutta, 'Nation, Liberalisation And Film Songs: Technology And Hybridisation In Contemporary Hindi Film Music', Wide Screen Journal, 1.16, April 2009
• Faiza Hirji, 'When Local Meets Lucre: Commerce, Culture and Imperialism in Bollywood Cinema', Global Media Journal 4.7, Fall 2005
  
• Wendy F. Hsu, 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, July 2003
• Tabish Khair, 'The ironies of Bollywood', 16:9,  7.31, April 2009
• Mark Lorenzen and Florian Arun Taeube, 'Breakout from Bollywood? Internationalization of Indian Film Industry', DRUID Papers, 07-06
• Philip Lutgendorf with Corey Creekmur, Philip's Fil-Ums: Notes on Indian popular cinema, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Vijay Mishra, 'Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy', Asian Studies Institute, 2006
• Anna Morcom, 'The Cinematic Study of Hindi Film Songs', Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema (Ashgate Publishing, 2007) 
• Shammi Nanda,'Censorship and Indian Cinema: The Case of War and Peace', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 38, November 2002
• Sheila J Nayar, 'The values of fantasy: Indian popular cinema through Western scripts', Journal of Popular Culture; Summer 1997; 31, 1  
• Ally Ostrowski, 'Found in Translation: From Hollywood Hits to Bollywood Blockbusters', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 11, No. 2 October 2007
• Heidi Pauwels, '“The Woman Waylaid at the Well” or Paṇaghaṭa-līlā An Indian Folk Theme Appropriated in Myth and Movies', Asian Ethnology, Volume 69, Number 1, 2010, 1–33
• Aswin Punathambekar and Anandam Kavoori, 'Introduction', Global Bollywood, edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (NYU Press, 2008)
• Anjali Ram, 'Framing the feminine: diasporic readings of gender in popular Indian cinema', Women's Studies in Communication, March 22 2002
• Shakuntala Rao, 'The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India', The Communication Review, 10: 57–76, 2007
• Amrita Sen, 'Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions', Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009)
• Brian Shoesmith, '[Review of] Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008', Screening the Past, Issue 25, 2009
• Sangita Shresthova, 'Strictly Bollywood? Story, Camera and Movement in Hindi Film Dance', MSc e-thesis, Princeton, 2003
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex, 2010 
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited buy Iain Robert Smith, Scope, Issue 15, 2010
• Lakshmi Srinivas, 'The active audience: spectatorship, social relations and the experience of cinema in India', Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 24: 155–173, 2002

More about → "Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies

Sonic Image: Exploring relationships between the sound and visual worlds

Thanks to Adrian Martin Film Studies For Free heard about the online availability in one volume of the second edition of Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference (2009). It is downloadable as a large pdf file/e-book here. The excellent contents, some of which are brilliantly film-related, are listed below, together with page numbers for ease of scrolling.

The volume explores the theme of 'Sonic Image: Exploring relationships between the sound and visual worlds', and features papers presented at the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference, including the keynote address from cinema-sound expert Philip Brophy, a critical examination (by Jonathan W. Marshall) of the work of the 2007 keynote artist, Dutch contemporary opera composer Michel van der Aa, and other papers addressing the theme of the sonic image.

Also included is a discussion of the aesthetics microsonic vibration and bio-art (Paul Thomas), sonic immanence and dwelling within the space of sound (Bruce Mowson), Badalementi’s music for the films of David Lynch (Clare Nina Norelli), sonic Surrealism and the work of Nurse With Wound (Darren Jorgenson), Christoph Herndler’s notes to his visual score Im Schnitt, der Punkt [At Interface, the Point] (2003), flânerie, sonic flatness and the work of David Chesworth and Sonia Leber (Jonathan W. Marshall), low frequency effects in contemporary film composition (Cat Hope), the translation of the sights and environment of Antarctica into musical form (Patrick Shepherd), and Ross Bolleter’s account of his own work translating Australian landscapes and history into music via the Ruined Piano.

Grazie ancora, Adrian!

SOUND SCRIPTS Volume 2 (2009)
Edited by Cat Hope and Jonathan W. Marshall
Published by Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts Faculty and Education Edith Cowan University and the Australian Music Centre

Editorial: Cat Hope    5
The Nth Art: The State of the Sonic Image at the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference
2.    Keynote 1: Philip Brophy    9
Pseudo Soundtracks: The myth of inventive audiovision in contemporary cinema
3.    Keynote 2: Jonathan W. Marshall    16
Freezing the Music and Fetishising the Subject: The audiovisual dramaturgy of Michel van der Aa
4.    Paul Thomas    26
Audionano—Vibrating Matter
5.    Bruce Mowson    32
Being Within Sound: Immanence and listening
6.    Clare Nina Norelli    38
Suburban Dread: The music of Angelo Badalamenti in the films of David Lynch
7.    Darren Jorgenson    44
The Marvellous Surrealism of Nurse With Wound and The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion 8.    Christoph Herndler    51
Im Schnitt, der Punkt [At Interface, the Point] (2003)
9.    Jonathan W. Marshall    55
Flatness, Ornamentality and the Sonic Image: Puncturing flânerie and postcolonial memorialisation in the work of David Chesworth and Sonia Leber
10. Cat Hope    74
The Bottom End of Cinema: Low frequency effects in soundtrack composition
11. Patrick Shepherd    79
From Ice to Music: The challenges of translating the sights and sounds of Antarctica into music
12. Ross Bolleter    89
The Well Weathered Piano: A study in ruin

More about → Sonic Image: Exploring relationships between the sound and visual worlds

An Index to SCAN Journal of Media Arts Culture

Frame grab from All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) from an image-essay by Ryland Walker Knight) - see also Fiona Jenkins' wonderful SCAN essay, Grief’s Testimony: On Almodóvar’s All About My Mother

It's Open Access Week this week, and while every Film Studies For Free blogpost brings you links to openly accessible Film and Media Studies resources, FSFF thought it was a good moment to celebrate one of the most consistently excellent OA e-journals, the Australia-based SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture. Below, then, is a complete and convenient one-stop index of live links to all the refereed articles on film and media that SCAN has published in its five and a half years of online existence.

FSFF's highlights are: the Film as Philosophy and Screenscapes Past Present Future special issues; the fantastic Cinematic Scriptwriting issue, edited by Kathryn Millard; Elizabeth A. Wilson's brilliant reflections on artificial intelligence; Justine Toh on Batman Begins; Christopher Hayton on Charlton Comics' Monster Movie Adaptations; Darrin Verhagen on audiovision; and Ahu Paköz on Persepolis.

• Vol 6 Number 2 September 2009 on Sound.Music.Design

The Expanded-contracted Field of Recent Audio-Visual Art Ian Andrews

Developing the Practice and Theory of Stream-based Sonification Stephen Barrass

Captured Space Philip Samartzis

Audiovision, psy-ops and the perfect crime: Zombie Agents and sound design Darrin Verhagen

Body≈Sounds: an emergent sonic practice Danielle Wilde

• vol 6 number 1 June 2009 Reading Between the Panels (Part II)
  

Considering comics as medium, art, and culture - the case of From Hell Simon Locke

The tools and toys of (the) War (on Terror): Consumer desire, military fetish and regime change in Batman Begins Justine Toh

Remasters of American Comics: Sequential art as new media in the transformative museum context Damian Duffy

Fantastic Giants: Charlton Comics' Monster Movie Adaptations Christopher Hayton

Reading Comics Rhetorically: Orality, Literacy, and Hybridity in Comic Narratives Bobby Kuechenmeister

• vol 5 number 3 December 2008 Biopolitics of the senses: touch, sound and embodied being

Possession without a touch: letters of Marina Tsvetaeva: Written in and translated from the Russian by Natalija Arlauskaite

"When the grinding starts": Negotiating touch in rehearsal Kate Rossmanith

Sound, touch, the felt body and emotion: Toward a haptic art of voice Yvon Bonenfant

Interactive instrumental performance and gesture sonification Kirsty Beilharz

Critical Dialogues 1 David Chapman and Louise K. Wilson, with Anne Cranny-Francis

Sonic Assault to Massive Attack: touch, sound and embodiment Anne Cranny-Francis

• vol 5 number 2 September 2008 Reading Between the Panels (Part I)

(Re)Constructing History: Italy's Post-War Resistence Movement in Contemporary Comics Laura Perna

Too Cruel: The Diseased Teens and Mean Bodies of Charles Burns's Black Hole James Zeigler

"His greatest enemy – intolerance!" The Superman radio show in 1946 Michael Goodrum

Out of Africa: The Saga of Exiled Cartoonists in Europe John A. Lent

A Reawakening of Memories in Comic Form: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi Ahu Paköz

The Cultural Biographies and Social Lives of Manga: Lessons from the Mangaverse Mio Bryce, Jason Davis and Christie Barber

If Walls Could Talk: Spatialising Narrative in the Museum Peter Doyle

• vol 5 number 1 May 2008 Screenscapes Past Present Future

For a History of Black Sean Cubitt

YouTube: the New Cinema of Attractions Teresa Rizzo

S.M.L.XL: Feature film across the Screenscape Alex Munt

Voice, Image, Television: Beckett’s Divided Screens Julian Murphet

James Ellroy's Cinematic Crime Writing: From 'Stephanie' to My Dark Places Rodney Taveira

Surveillance Screens and Screening in Code 46 Peter Marks

From Big to Little Screens: Recurring Images of Democratic Credibility and the Net Mark Rolfe

• vol 4 number 3 December 2007 Mobile Media/Public Spaces

Uncertain Spaces: Artists’ Exploration of New Socialities in Mediated Public Space Maria Miranda

Dead to the World: The future of hand-held art Darren Tofts

iApparatus or How the Culture of Personalised Media Creates Millions of iOperators Andreas Ströhl

• vol 4 number 2 august 2007 Film as Philosophy

A phenomenology of tragedy: illness and body betrayal in The Fly Havi Carel

Grief’s Testimony: On Almodóvar’s All About My Mother Fiona Jenkins

A Play of Memory: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil Catherine Summerhayes

Grace and Violence: Questioning Politics and Desire in Lars von Trier’s Dogville Robert Sinnerbrink

Even Better than the Real Thing: Sadism and Real(ity) T.V. Matthew Sharpe

Thinking cinema(tically) and the Industrial Temporal Object: Schemes and technics of experience in Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time series Patrick Crogan

The cinematic condition of the politico-philosophical future Daniel Ross

• vol 4 number 1 April 2007 e-Performance: Post-disciplinary contexts and theorisation

soundAFFECTs: transcoding, writing, new media, affect Hazel Smith

Performing the Network Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark

Sonic Immersion: Interactive Engagement in Real-Time Immersive Environments Garth Paine

Performing Posthuman Perspective: Can You See Me Now? Rosemary Klich

e-Collaborations in Sixties America: 9 Evenings, the Dancer’s Body, and Electronic Technologies Meredith Morse

• vol 3 number 3 December 2006 Technological Interventions
  

Somatechnics, or Monstrosity Unbound Nikki Sullivan

Somatic Technologies: Embodiment, New Technologies and the Undead Anne Cranny-Francis

Cyber Disobedience: Gandhian Cyberpunks Cynthia Townley & Mitch Parsell

Deus est Machina: Technology, Religion and Derrida’s Autoimmunity Nick Mansfield

(De)constructing Technologies of Subjectivity Nicole Anderson

Border Trouble: photography, strategies, and transsexual identities Sara Davidmann

Grow Your Own - Angiogenetic Body Adornment Norman Cherry

The theatrical text as a misrecognised technological practice: Shape-shifting interventions between words and bodies Mark Seton

• vol 3 number 2 October 2006 Cinematic Scriptwriting (edited by Kathryn Millard)

Kind of a Revolution, and Kind of Not: Digital Low-Budget Cinema in Australia Today Adrian Martin

Writing for the Screen: Beyond the Gospel of Story Kathryn Millard

Re-telling History in the Digital Age: The Scripting Of Hunt Angels Alec Morgan

Digital Kiarostami & The Open Screenplay Alex Munt

Writing the 'Real'/ Really Writing Maree Delofski

Writing on the screen John Grech

• vol 3 number 1 June 2006 News and the Net: Convergences and Divergences
  

Wikinews: The Next Generation of Alternative Online News? Axel Bruns

Disaggregating Online News: The Canadian Federal Election, 2005-2006 Greg Elmer, Zach Devereaux & David Skinner

Democracy & Online News: Indymedia and the Limits of Participatory Media Lee Salter

News on the Net: A critical analysis of the potential of online alternative journalism to challenge the dominance of mainstream news media Trish Bolton

The Daily Show, Crossfire, and the Will to Truth Megan Boler

• vol 2 number 3 December 2005 Shadows of the Dead: Mediating the Archive Photograph
  

The Utilitarian Photographer Lindsay Barrett

Doomed streets of Sydney 1900-1928: Images from the City Council's Demolition Books Sue Doyle

Haunted by a Vitality that is No More - Interpreting the Photograph in the Crime Archive Caleb Williams

Public eye, private eye: Sydney police mug shots, 1912-1930 Peter Doyle

• vol 2 number 2 September 2005 Memory, Media, and Embodied Cognition
  

"Can you think what I feel? Can you feel what I think?": Notes on affect, embodiment and intersubjectivity in AI Elizabeth A. Wilson

"The Chain of Memory": Distributed Cognition in Early Modern England Evelyn Tribble

Tangkic Orders of Time: an anthropological approach to time study Paul Memmott

Body Memory in Muscular Action on Trapeze Peta Tait

The Dynamic Body Image and the Moving Body: revisiting Schilder's theory for psychological research Francine Hanley

The Mutation of "Cognition" and the Fracturing of Modernity: cognitive technics, extended mind and cultural crisis Andrew Murphie

Indexing Audio-Visual Digital Media: the PathScape prototype Mike Leggett

Seeking self-consistency with integrity: an interdisciplinary approach to the ethics of self and memory Russell Downham

On the Likely Form of 'Autobiographical Memory' for Aristotle James William Ley

• vol 2 number 1 April 2005 "The Glittering Tart": Imaging Sydney
  

The Enigma of Arrival James Donald

SYD: the city as airport Gillian Fuller & Ross Rudesch Harley

Morphings and Ur-Forms: From Flâneur to Driveur Sherman Young

Drawing Sydney: Flatlands and the Chromatic Contours of a Global City Stephanie Hemelryk Donald & John Gammack

"I’d rather take Methadone than Ken Done": Branding Sydney in the 1980s Susie Khamis

Blue Murder: a RE-IMAGINED history Greg Levine & Stephen McElhinney

• vol 1 number 3 November 2004 BODILY (Trans)Formations

Body Politics in Post-Soviet Russia Dmitry Mikhel

'It's as plain as the nose on his face': Michael Jackson, modificatory practices, and the question of ethics Nikki Sullivan

Fleshly Impressions: The Work of Paddy Hartley Paddy Hartley

The Monster Body of Myra Hindley Cathy Hawkins

Producing Identity: Elective Amputation and Disability Harminder Dosanjh Kaur

Queering Performativity: Disability After Deleuze Margrit Shildrick

Better dicks through drugs? The penis as a pharmaceutical target Petra Boynton

Digital memories, analogues of affect Robert Payne

“Pagan Poetry”, Piercing, Pain and the Politics of Becoming Greg Hainge

The Christological Imperative: notes towards a speculative re-interpretation of Catholic martyrdom Daniel Nourry

• vol 1 number 2 June 2004 Ghost & Their Machines: Magic, Technology and the Uncanny
  

Contingency on the Island of Ghosts Stephen Muecke

Machine Love and the Uncanny Object: A Children's Story Annette Hamilton

The Ghost In/On The Machine: Magic, Technology And The "Modest Witness" Anne Cranny-Francis

Dream Cities: The Uncanny Powers of Electric Light Scott McQuire

Seeing Impossible Bodies: Fascination as a Spatial Experience Patricia Pringle

Technology and Magick Steve Collins

• vol 1 number 1 January 2004 Ludic Moments

Co-Creative Media: Online Multiplayer Computer Game Culture Sue Morris

The Experience of Information in Computer Games
Patrick Crogan

Playing in the Zone: Thirdspace in Jet Set Radio Future and Shenmue II Brett Nicholls & Simon Ryan

Games, Simulation & Serious Fun: An Interview With Espen Aarseth Patrick Crogan

Neither gaze nor glance, but glaze: relating to console game screens Chris Chesher

More about → An Index to SCAN Journal of Media Arts Culture

An autumnal Saturday links roundup

Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular roundups of exceedingly fine and dandy film studies weblinks:

• FSFF discovered that issue 1 of The Soundtrack (Vol. Issue 1, 2007), an otherwise subscription-only journal from Intellect, is openly accessible online:
  

  Editorial: Prof. Stephen Deutsch; The sound of Coen comedy: music, dialogue and sound effects in Raising Arizona, by Randall Barnes; Post-production sound: a new production model for interactive media, by Rob Bridgett; The edge of perception: sound in Tarkovsky's Stalker, by Stefan Smith; plus some David Lynch related reviews.

• From @MichaelGuillen of the always wonderful The Evening Class weblog, a "Robert Beavers Online Reader"
  
• Thanks to a recommendation by Corey Creekmur for the upcoming Critical Mass: Re-Viewing Hollis Frampton A Screening Series and Symposium October 2009 – February 2, FSFF heard that an essay on Frampton's work -- 'Collecting His Thoughts: Remarks on the Writings of Hollis Frampton -- by Bruce Jenkins is freely available online. It's a sample chapter for Jenkins' book On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton
• A must read article by Victor Burgin: 'The Separateness of Things' (referring to Edward Hopper's work, the Hays Code, Steven Shainberg's Secretary [2002], and the work of Laura Mulvey) can be found at Tate Papers.
• Another wonderful Tate Papers' article is by Robert Bird: 'Andrei Tarkovsky & Contemporary Art: Medium & Mediation', 2008
• It was Pixar Week at The House Next Door Online - a great event. Check out the list of contributions here.
  
• Check out a very interesting Deleuzo-Guattarian blogpost, if that's your bag: 'The ambivalence of the future (Flash Forward)' by Matthew Holtmeier (@cinemawo).
• Also, see a really good anime blogpost by Alex Leavitt at the C3 blog on Time of Eve (Ibu no Jikan).
• Some more fabulous insights by Dan North (or @drnorth, as his Twitter moniker has it) on King Kong.
• Oh and, if you haven't already, you must visit The Auteurs' great list of film websites: 'Sites & Rounds': "a blogroll... listing ...places, friends and acquaintances we keep up with". Film Studies For Free was deeply honoured to have made the cut and to be in such fantastic company.

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More about → An autumnal Saturday links roundup