Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine

 

RITES OF PASSAGE by Catherine Grant

A video essay, completed in memory of Joan Fontaine, studying the liminal moments of her character in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). This low resolution, educational compilation also samples and remixes music originally composed for the film by Franz Waxman.

Film Studies For Free presents its last entry of the year on the gothic film melodrama. Sadly, this entry appears just a short time after the death of one of the most notable stars of Hollywood's female Gothic tradition -- Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 − 15 December 2013) -- and is dedicated to her memory. Other tributes have been comprehensively collected by David Hudson at his Keyframe/Fandor site, including a particularly fine one by Josephine Botting for the British Film Institute

FSFF's own collection of resources begins with an item that also doubles as a tribute: its own videographic study of Fontaine's masterly physical performance of "voluptuous masochism" (to borrow the brilliant words of Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape [p. 191]) in the context of Alfred Hitchcock's mise-en-scene for Rebecca (1940), together with Franz Waxman's lushly uncanny musical score for this film.

The resources continue at length below in a customary -- for FSFF -- list of links to online scholarly resources on the cinematic gothic more generally. You can also find further, closely related studies in FSFF's earlier entry on Final Girl Studies.

FSFF warmly wishes its readers very happy holidays if they're having them! It will be back with lots more open access film studies in the new year.

• Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
• The Gothic Imagination website, University of Stirling 
• BFI Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film Resources
• BFI Gothic in the Classroom Resources 

 

• Elizabeth Abele, 'The Glory of Cary Grant and Other Girlish Delights. 3: Suspicious Looks', Images, Issue 5, 1997
• Glennis Byron, '©Branding and Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture: the case of Twilight', The Gothic Imagination, December 31, 2010
• David Cairns, 'Felicitous Rooms: Fritz Lang’s House by the River', Senses of Cinema, October 2005
• Fergus Cook, 'Questions of Authorship and Audience: A Study of Artefacts Related to the Film Rebecca (1940)', Bill Douglas Centre Documents, date unknown
• Amanda Leigh Davis, 'Gothically Postmodern: Film Noir-Gothic Hybrids and the 1980s', Velox: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Film, Vol 2, No 1 (2008)
• R D’Mont, 'Changing form: Stage, film and TV adaptations of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca', In: Carroll, R., ed. (2009) Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London: Continuum, pp. 163-173
• 'Du Maurier + Selznick + Hitchcock = Rebecca', The ASC, July 1997 
• Coralline Dupuy, '"Why don't you remember? Are you crazy?": Korean Gothic and psychosis in A Tale of Two Sisters', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 3, 2007
• Winfried Fluck, 'Mass Culture Modernism: Guilt and Subjectivity in Film Noir', Romance with America (Heidelburg, 2009)
• Catherine Grant, 'Rites of Passage [on Joan Fontaine in Rebecca]', Vimeo, December 2013
• David Greven, 'Bringing out Baby Jane: camp, sympathy, and the horror-woman’s film of the 1960s', Jump Cut, 55, Fall 2013
• Eoghain Hamilton (ed), The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries (InterDisciplinary Press, 2012)
• Jenni Heeks, Teaching Resources on The Innocents for a BFI Workshop, Autumn, 2013
• Steven Jacobs, excerpt on Rebecca from The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (101 Publishers, 2007)
• Stuart M Joy, 'The Patriarchal Reception of Hysteria: Understanding thePossessed Woman in the Paranormal Activity franchise', Monstrous Spaces/Spaces of Monstrosity, 3.1, 2013 
• Frank Lafond, 'With them, I'm howling: Guillaume Radot's Le Loup des Malveneur (The Wolf of the Malveneurs, 1942)', Kinoeye, 1, 2005
• Mark Jancovich, 'Bluebeard’s Wives: Horror, Quality and the Paranoid Woman’s Film in the 1940s', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 12 (Summer 2013) 
• Mark Jancovich, 'Shadows and Bogeymen: Horror, Stylization and the Critical Reception of Orson Welles during the 1940s', Participations, 6.1, May 2009
• Mark Jancovich, 'Crack-Up: Psychological Realism, Generic Transformation and the Demise of the Paranoid Woman's Film', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 3, 2007
• Bill Krohn et al, 'The Original Ending Shot for Suspicion', The MacGuffin, 2007
• Samatha Jane Lindop, 'The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me', M/C Journal, 15.1, 2012
• Adrian Martin, 'Lady, Beware: Female Gothic Variations', Australian Centre for the Moving Image, March 2005 
• Gary McCarron, 'Moralizing Uncertainty: Suspicion and Faith in Hitchcock's Suspicion', Canadian Journal of Communication, 27.1, 2002
• Ken Mogg, 'The Day of the Claw: A Synoptic Account of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 
• Eithne O'Neill, 'Kazan's Streetcar: Film Noir, Woman's Film or Noir Woman's Film?', Cercles, 10 (2004) 
• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009
• Phillip Novak, 'Performing Politics (Review)', PMC, 19.2, 2009
• Esther Pereen, 'Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor', The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014)
• Ana Salzberg, Beyond the looking glass: the narcissistic woman reflected and embodied in classic Hollywood film, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2010
• Aaron Smuts, ' Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002 
• Monica Cristina Soare, 'Chapter 5: The Final Girl as Female Quixote', The Female Gothic Connoisseur: Reading, Subjectivity, and the Feminist Uses of Gothic Fiction, PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 2013
• Jack Sullivan, excerpt on 'Franz Waxman and Suspicion', from Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006)
• Elizabeth Tucker, '[Review] Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives, By Maria Tatar, 2006', Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, 2007
• Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
• Patricia White/Annamarie Jagose, 'Interview', Genders, 32, 2000
• Tony Williams, 'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 41, 2006
  
• Dagmara Zając, 'Gothic Cinema: Horror on Screen and the Perils of (Over)Interpretation', The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries, ed. by Eoghain Hamilton (InterDisciplinary Press, 2012)

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Four Issues of INTENSITIES: The Journal of Cult Media and a Call for Papers

Screencap from the credit sequence of Games (Curtis Harrington, 1967). Read Steven Jay Schneider's 2003 article for Intensities in which he discusses this and other cult psychological thrillers and horror films.

Film Studies For Free just bumped into the new online incarnation of Intensities, the wonderful journal of cult media studies. Oh yes!

Always a highly innovative and valuable project, Intensities was first launched at Cardiff University in 2001 under the editorship of Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones. As its new website tells us, it later moved to Brunel University, where it was edited by David Lavery. The journal has relaunched in 2013 with Leon Hunt as its new editor and will publish two issues a year. The journal addresses all aspects of cult media including cult television, cult film, cult radio, cult comics, literary cults and cult authors, new media cults, cult figures and celebrities, cult icons, musical cults, cult geographies, historical studies of media cults and their fandoms, cult genres (e.g. science fiction, horror, fantasy, pulp fiction, Manga, anime, Hong Kong film etc.), non-generic modes of cultishness, theorisations of cult media, relevant audience and readership studies, and work that addresses the cult media industry.

In addition to publishing refereed essays (of between 6000 and 8000 words), Intensities also features a non-refereed Cult Media Review section which will carry shorter speculative reviews, reviews of cult phenomena (e.g. cult TV series, cult films, cult novels, science fiction, comics), short critical essays, interview transcripts, conference and convention reviews and articles about aspects of industry, fan culture, production and authorship.

Intensities' latest calls for papers are reproduced below, as are the tables of (linked) contents from the excellent first four issues of this journal. Let's all wish Intensities a very happy and long online life at its new website. Its entry has been updated at FSFF's permanent listing of open access film and media studies journals.

Call for Papers
Intensities will publish two themed issues in 2013.  Essays should be between 6000 and 8000 words, referenced Harvard style and sent as a word document – a 200 word abstract should be sent as a separate document.
Issue 5 Comic Book Intensities – Comics and Cult Media
The first new issue seeks submissions dealing with comics as cult media.  Topics might include:

• Cult comic book auteurs – Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Mark Millar, Joss Whedon.
• Cult films from comics – Cinefumetti, Manga and Anime, the Turkish KIlink films, Dredd 3D.
• National and international comic book cultures – French bandes dessinees, Italian fumetti, Japanese Manga.
• Comic book fan cultures – Cosplay and beyond.
• Underground and alternative traditions.
• Beyond the cape and mask – neglected comic book genres.
• From EC to Dark Horse – Horror comics.

Deadline extended to Friday March 1^st 2013

Issue 6 Historical Approaches to Cult TV
This issue seeks submissions examining TV shows that have acquired cult status at a historical distance – both established cult shows (The Avengers, The Prisoner, the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who) and those that have received less (or possibly even no) critical attention.  In addition, the papers will locate those shows historically, either by drawing on archive materials or suggesting new cultural, historical or institutional contexts in which they might be understood. Deadline for submissions: May 31^st 2013

Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 4 – Mysterious Bodies (2007)

Special Issue – Mysterious Bodies
Guest Editors: Rayna Denison and Mark Jancovich

• Rayna Denison and Mark Jancovich, ‘Introduction’ Jancovich_Intro
• Mark Jancovich, ‘An Unidentified Species: Horror, the Body and Early Television’ Jancovich, Unidentified Species
• Lincoln Geraghty, ‘Painted Men and Salt Monsters: The Alien Body in 50s and 60s American Science Fiction Television’ Geraghty, Painted Men and Salt Monsters
• Milly Williamson, ‘Television, Vampires and the Body: Somatic Pathos’ Williamson, Television, Vampires and the Body
• Matt Hills, ‘”Gothic” Body Parts in a “Postmodern” Body of Work? The Hinchcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975-77)’ Hills, Gothic Body Parts in Postmodern Body of Work
• Rayna Denison, ‘The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence: Investigating the Complexity of the Television Body’ Denison, The Muppet Show Sex and Violence
• Rebecca Feasey, ‘Investigating Angel: The Hair, the Car and the Wardrobe’ Feasey, Investigating Angel
• Peter Hutchings, ‘Welcome to Royston Vasey: Grotesque Bodies and the Horror of Comedy in The League of Gentlemen‘ Hutchings, Welcome to Royston Vasey
• Elke Weissman, ‘The Victim’s Suffering Translated: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the Crime Genre’ Weissmann, Victim’s Suffering Translated
• Julian Savage, ‘The Lost Cult of Wake in Fright‘ Savage, Lost Cult of Wake in Fright

Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 3 – Horror Issue (Spring 2003)

Edited by Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones

• Steven Jay Schneider, ‘Murder as Art/The Art of Murder: Aestheticising Violence in Modern Cinematic Horror’ Schneider, Murder as Art
• I.Q. Hunter, ‘Even Baser Instincts: Notes on Hollow Man‘ Hunter, Even Baser Instincts
• Stephen Harper, ‘”They’re Us”: Representations of Women in George Romero’s ‘Living Dead’ Series’ Harper, They’re Us
• Kate Egan, ‘The Amateur Historian and the Electronic Archive: Identity, Power, and the Function of Lists, Facts and Memories on “Video Nasty”-themed Websites’ Egan, The Amateur Historian and the Electronic Archive
• Linda C. Badley, ‘Spiritual Warfare: Postfeminism and the Cultural Politics of the Blair Witch Craze’ Badley, Spiritual Warfare

Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 2 (Autum/Winter 2001)

Edited by Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones

• Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘From The Truman Show to Survivor: Narrative versus Reality in Fake and Real Reality TV’ Ryan, From The Truman Show to Survivor
• William D. Routt, ‘Bad for Good’ Routt, Bad for Good
• Mark Jancovich, ‘Placing Sex: Sexuality, Taste and Middlebrow Culture in the Reception of Playboy Magazine’ Jancovich, Placing Sex
• Bertha Chin and Jonathan Gray, ‘”One Ring to Rule Them All”: Pre-Viewers and Pre-Texts of the Lord of the Rings Films’ Chin and Gray, One Ring to Rule Them All
• Will Brooker, ‘The Many Lives of the Jetman: A Case Study in Videogame Analysis’ Brooker, Many Lives of the Jetman
• Intensities interviews Henry Jenkins @Console-ing Passions, University of Bristol, July 7th 2001 Intensities interviews Jenkins
• Ben Talbot, Conference Review: Compete, Command and Conquer – Playing for Space at the International Games Cultures Conference Talbot, Compete, Command and Conquer

Intensities 1 (Spring/Summer 2001)

Edited by Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones

• Lynette Russell and Nathan Wolski, ‘Beyond the Final Frontier: Star Trek, the Borg and the Post-colonial’ Russell_Wolski
• Mark McLelland, ‘Why Are Japanese Girls’ Comics Full of Boys Bonking?’ McLelland
• Alan McKee, ‘Which is the Best Doctor Who story? A Case Study in Value Judgements Outside the Academy’ McKee
• Patricia MacCormack, ‘Becoming Hu-Man: Deleuze and Guattari, Gender and Third Rock from the Sun‘ MacCormack
• Annette Hill and Ian Calcutt, ‘Vampire Hunters: the Scheduling and Reception of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in the UK’ Hill_Calcutt
• Will Brooker, ‘Parallel Earths: Diana 2000 – a Review Essay’ Brooker_Earths

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Once more with paranoia: conspiracy film studies

Ewan McGregor in The Ghost Writer [aka The Ghost] (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Not only has Film Studies For Free's author been catching up with a slew of contemporary 'conspiracy films' (The Ghost [Writer]; State of Play; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among others); she has also been transfixed, like many of her (otherwise politically divided) country-people, by the real-life conspiratorial, and other, dramas of a national, post-electoral, political process.

Tired of biting her nails and shouting at the telly, she took to comfort blogging. Here, then, is an FSFF entry appropriately prepared, given its subject, under duress and on tenterhooks: a list of links to openly accessible and predominantly scholarly studies of the conspiracy film.

• Brenda Austin-Smith, 'The Conversation', Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001
• Emilia Bakola, The Paranoiacs Who Knew Too Much: Postmodern Knowledge and Hollywood Cinema, PhD Thesis, Stony Brook University, 2007
• Emily Bakola, 'How to Do Conspiracy Theory with Fetishism: The Myth of the “Slain King”', Gramma, 2008
• Karyn Ball, 'Hitchcock's "Material Whirl"', Culture Machine Reviews, 2006
• Matthew David Barber, 'Shooting the President: The Depiction of the American Presidency on Film and Television from John F. Kennedy to Josiah Bartlet', PhD Thesis, University of Exeter, 2009
• Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, 'Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism', New Political Science, Volume 28, Number 3, September 2006
• Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, 'Postmodern Cinema and Hollywood Culture in an Age of Corporate Colonization', Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2001
• David Bordwell, 'Watching a movie, page by page [on The Ghost Writer and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo]', Observations of Film Art, May 10, 2010
• Pat Brereton , 'Hollywood Representations of Irish Journalism: A Case Study of Veronica Guerin', Dublin Institute of Technology School of Media Articles, 2009
• James Amos Burton, Film, History and Cultural Memory: Cinematic Representations of Vietnam-Era America during the Culture Wars, 1987-1995, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2007
• Stephanie Chieh-Ying Chong, The Anthropomorphization of Law: Fictional Judges and Lawyers in Contemporary North American and European Settings, PhD Thesis, University of Toronto, 2009 
• William Clark , 'The Academy Awards [review of The New American Cinema, by John Lewis, ed.]', Variant, 2.10, 2000
• Graham Coulter-Smith and Maurice Owen, 'Introduction', Art in the Age of Terrorism (Paul Holberton publishing/University of Washington Press, 2005)
• David Crawford, 'Realism vs. Reality TV in the War on Terror: Artworks as Models of Interpretation', Geometer, January 19, 2009
• Brenda Cromb, 'War Films Without War: The Gulf War at the Movies', Cinephile, vol. 3, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2007
• Adam Curtis, Panel Discussion on'Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age' in association with Routledge and King's College London, and sponsored by the Body and Soul section of The Times, An Institute of Ideas symposium at King’s College London, 22 November 2003
• Christian Devine, Visionary Paranoia'', Bad Subjects, Issue #34, October 1997
• Scott Forsyth , 'Hollywood's War on the World: the New World Order as Movie', Socialist Register, 1992
• Vincent M. Gaine, ‘"We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM": Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral',Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, Vol 2, No 1 (2009)
• David Greven, 'Misfortune and Men's Eyes: Voyeurism, Sorrow, and the Homosocial in Three Early Brian De Palma Films', Genders, Issue 49, 2009
• Oscar Guardiola Rivera, 'Terrorism and the Global Public Sphere', International Law: Revista columbiana de derecho internacional, December 2004
• Steffen Hantke, 'Germany's secret history: Stefan Ruzowitzky's Anatomie (Anatomy, 2000)', Kinoeye, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2001
• John Harkness, 'The Word, the Flesh, and the Films of David Cronenberg', Cinema Canada, June 1983
• Nicholas Holm, 'Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: Considering Modalities of Paranoia and Conspiracy in Surveillance Studies', Surveillance & Society 7(1): 36-48, 2009
• Adrian Ivakhiv, 'Green Film Criticism and Its Futures', Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15.2 (Summer 2008)  
• Tom Jennings, 'The Ill-Health of the State', Variant, 36, Winter 2009
• Tom Jennings, 'Parcels of Rogues', Variant 35, Summer 2009
• Tom Jennings , 'Craven New World', Variant, 32, Summer 2008
• Tom Jennings, 'Rose Coloured Spectacles', Variant, 27, Winter 2006 
• Laura Jones , 'A Geopolitical Mapping of the Post-9/11 World: Exploring Conspiratorial Knowledge Through Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Manchurian Candidate', Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, Vol. III, 37–57, June 2008
• Orit Kamir, 'Michael Clayton, Hollywood’s Contemporary Hero-Lawyer: Beyond Outsider Within and Insider Without', Suffolk University Law Review, Vol. XLII: 829, 2009
• Dietmar Kammerer, 'Video Surveillance in Hollywood Movies', Surveillance and Society - CCTV Special (eds. Norris, McCahill and Wood) 2(2/3): 464-473
• Kathryn Muriel Kang, "Ch. 7: Picture This [scroll to p. 161]", in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)
• Kathryn Muriel Kang, 'Patch and reboot in Memento', in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here) 
• Fredric Jameson, 'Totality as Conspiracy', The Geopolitical Aesthetic (London : British Film Institute, 1992)
• Peter Knight, 'Conspiracy Theories about 9/11', Centre for International Politics Working Paper Series, No. 34, August 2007
• Robert Koehler, 'Neo-Fantasies and Ancient Myths: Adam Curtis on The Power of Nightmares', Cinema Scope Issue 23, 2005
• Li Zeng, 'Horror returns to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and the space of horror ', from Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009
• Thomas Y. Levin, 'Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”', In CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Fronhe and Peter Weibel, 578-93. Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002
• Virginia Luzón Aguado , Film Genre and its Vicissitures: the Case of the Psychothriller', Atlantis, Vol. XXIV Núm. 2 (Junio 2002): 163-72
• Adrian Martin. 'Driven', Mesh, 18, 2005
• Kyle Ross McDaniel, Reviewing the Image of the Photojournalist in Film [...] from1954 to 2006, MA Thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007
• John S. Nelson, 'Political Rhetorics for Film: Argument through Experience in War Movies', Poroi, Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2005
• John S. Nelson, 'Four Forms of Terrorism: Horror, Dystopia, Thriller, and Noir', Poroi, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2003  
• Catherine O’Rawe, 'More more Moro: Music and montage in Romanzo criminale', The Italianist 29 · 2009 · 214-226 
• Tarla R. Petersen, '“National security, and all that it implies…”: Communication and (post-) Cold War culture', Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 86, No. 4, 2000
• Katie Ryan, 'The Circling, Shades and Shadows of Polanski's Chinatown', Cross-sections, The Bruce Hall Academic Journal - Volume II, 2006 
  
• Ian S. Scott, ‘"Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water": Politics, Perceptions and the Pursuit of History in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, European journal of American studies, 2, 2007
• Aaron Smuts, 'Sympathetic spectators: Roman Polanski's Le Locataire (The Tenant, 1976)',  Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 3, 2002
• Matthew Stoddard, 'Contested Utopias: Ghost in the Shell, Cognitive Mapping, and the Desire for Communism', ImageTexT, Volume 5, Issue 2 (2010)
• Benjamin Strong, 'All the President's Men: Follow the Paper Trai', the L Magazine, May 10, 2010
• Sharon Lin Tay, (2008), long excerpt from ʻUndisclosed Recipients: documentary in an era of digital convergenceʼ, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 79–98
• Henry M. Taylor, 'The Capgras Syndrome in Film: Don Siegel's “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and its Legacy', Vol. 2, May-August 2005
• Bo Kampmann Walther, 'The art of staying tuned in real-time: remediation in 24', Revista de Comunicação e Cultura, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2003
• John Walton, 'Film as Urban history: the Case of Chinatown', in Shiel and Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) 
• Jerry White, 'Hidden Agenda. JFK: Conspiracy thrillers', from Jump Cut, no. 38, June 1993, pp. 14-18
• Mary M. Wiles, 'Mapping the Contours of Cyborg Space in the Conspiracy Film: The Feminine Ecology of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita', Post-Identity, Fall 1997

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William Friedkin in conversation

A quick post, today, to give Film Studies For Free's readers something good to watch while this blog undergoes some layout changes.

The above video presents a highly entertaining, and very informative, hour-long Q & A session with film director William Friedkin. The event, facilitated by Joseph Pascal, took place on February 24, 2009 at the Hudson Union Society, New York City, and was made available online thanks to the wonderful people from FORA.tv.

Friedkin, director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, discusses his legendary film career. He describes his on-set experiences, and explores the past, present, and future of the film industry.

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Going the distance with Claude Chabrol

Film Studies For Free is rather partial to a good film blogathon and there's potentially a very good one coming up that FSFF readers absolutely must check out. In honour of Claude Chabrol's 79th birthday this June 24, Flickhead aka Ray Young is hosting Ten Days’ Wonder: The Claude Chabrol Blogathon from Sunday, June 21 through Tuesday, June 30.

To paraphrase the kind of clichéd British crime drama dialogue in which the classy Chabrol himself would never indulge, Young has 'plenty of previous' when it comes to the films of this near octogenarian: he is the author of the Claude Chabrol Project website which, among other great resources, hosts detailed interviews with and articles about Chabrol.

The Flickhead blogathon is sure to link to further comprehensive web resources on Chabrol, so below, just to flag up the e-event, is Film Studies For Free's little list of links to online scholarly highlights pertaining to this as yet most under-studied great director.

Film Studies For Free's author is aiming to join in with the Chabrol fest next week, so... à bientôt (s'il vous plaît...). [The link to FSFF's video essay - 'Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes' is HERE.]

• Acquarello, 'CLAUDE CHABROL: Le Boucher, The Story of Women, La Ceremonie, The Flower of Evil, The Bridesmaid, Bellamy', Strictly Film School, 2002
• Richard Armstrong, 'Claude Chabrol,' (Great Directors: A Critical Database) Senses of Cinema, September 2002
• David Cairns, 'Go Ask Alice', Shadowplay, August 8, 2008
  
• Claudette Charbonneau and Lucy Winer, 'Violette: Skilled, delicate, pernicious', from Jump Cut, no. 21, Nov. 1979, pp. 6-7
• Charles Derry, 'Claude Chabrol: A career overview', The Claude Chabrol Project
• dkaz, 'image series: Les Biches (Chabrol, France, 1968)', D+Kaz, Jan 29, 2007
• Mary Donaldson-Evans, 'A Medium of Exchange: The Madame Bovary film', Dix-Neuf, No. 4, April 2005
• Catherine Grant, 'Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes - a video essay', Film Studies For Free, June 30, 2009
  
• Stefan Gullatz, 'Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror', Offscreen Journal, March 31, 2001
• Dan Harper, 'Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge', Senses of Cinema, March 2001
• Robert Kolker, The Altering Eye - Contemporary International Cinema (OUP, 1983) in: eLib, Hg. v. eLibrary Projekt, in: elib.at ( 16. Juni 2009 ) - numerous mentions of Chabrol - use 'find' in 'Edit'
• Julien Lapointe, 'La Cérémonie,' Senses of Cinema 13, 2001 Apr-May
• Kevin B Lee, 'Claude Chabrol: an online dossier', Shooting Down Pictures, March 27, 2008
• Peter Lev, 'Paul Gégauff', FilmReference.com, 2008
  
• Tony McKibbin, 'Slow Burn Suspense: The Films of Claude Chabrol', Images, Issue 9, December 2000
• Vladislav Mijic, 'Les Biches,' Senses of Cinema 13, 2001 Apr-May
• Marie-Claire Ropars, 'A Cinematic Language', Rouge 11, 2007
• Dan Sallitt/Kevin B Lee, 'Two Films By Claude Chabrol (Le boucher (1970) and La femme infidele (1969)) - 3 video essays', Shooting Down Pictures, March 27, 2008
• Andrew Slade, 'Chabrol for Beginners (and Other Interested Parties)', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 3, January 2001
• David Sterritt, 'Hitchcock, Hume, and the Matrix of Modern Cinema', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2007
• Quentin Turnour, 'Que la bête meure', Senses of Cinema, March 2001
• Tony Williams, 'Relations Between the Sexes in the Cinema of the Nouvelle Vague', WELL Project, February 28, 2002
• Ray Young, 'Stéphane Audran', Cinema and the Female Star - A Symposium Part 1, Senses of Cinema, 2002

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