Diposting oleh
good reading on Senin, 07 Januari 2013
The much awaited
Winter 2013 issue of
MEDIASCAPE, UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media, has just been published. There are two
very fine articles on historical film archives by
Christina Petersen and
Bryan Sebok, as well as two excellent columns on related historiographical themes. Meanwhile, the META section boasts some very good, new video essay work by
Matthias Stork,
Alexandra Schroeder, and
Clifford James Galiher and reflections on videographic and other digital film studies practices by great luminaries, such as
Yuri Tsivian and Daria Khitrova, alongside those of much more ordinary
mortals! There's also a highly informative interview with filmmaker
Thom Andersen and some very interesting reviews to catch up with.
All contents are listed and linked to below. But, also, do check out
MEDIASCAPE's occasional, but very high quality
blog which publishes between journal issue releases. A good place to start is this entry:
'Mastering "The Master"' by Vincent BrookMEDIASCAPE, Winter 2013Editorial by Andy Myers and Andrew Young
Features
Columns
META
Reviews
Diposting oleh
good reading on Senin, 22 Oktober 2012
This new video essay examines the representation of the frontier in John Ford's Westerns. Ford's visual poetics illustrate Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." Ford's films, in this regard, allow us to explore seminal foundational concepts of America history and ideology. "John Ford's Vision of the West" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's written study of his video essay practice. Also see Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on the art (and ideology) of John Ford's filmsThe Western is one of the most iconographic of film genres and is thus particularly well suited to (audio)visual forms of analysis. So, today,
Film Studies For Free has lass
oed and corr
alled a whole herd of beefy video studies of
film Westerns
that abundantly testify to this advantage.
The group is led, above, by a new, wonderfully researched, video essay by the very talented Matthias Stork (author of the great, and widely circulated,
Chaos Cinema video essays, along with
others published here at
FSFF). Thanks very much to him and all the other video essayists represented below for making the
ir work publicly acessible. [It's Open Access week, so this here Open Access campaigning website particularly wants to show its warm appreciation to those of you who like to share the fruits of at least part of your film studies labour for free!] And if you know of any other, freely accessible, video essays on Westerns that FSFF has missed please alert us to them by leaving a comment with the link below. Thanks! An audiovisual study of Sergio Leone's distinctive duel aesthetic. The video essay was first published, along with an accompanying written essay, in the first issue of the online film journal FRAMES. "Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's reflections on the above video here. And read Film Studies For Free's entry on the Spaghetti Western A video essay exploring the ways in which editing techniques and other cinematic processes aid the construction of genre in the opening of "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956).
A video essay on Robert Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See the original posting here
This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again. However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.
Diposting oleh
good reading on Senin, 14 Mei 2012
This year, this Blogathon will raise funds to finance the online streaming of, and recording of a new score for,
The White Shadow (1923), directed by
Graham Cutts and with everything else done by Hitchcock:
The film was long thought to have be a
lost film. In August 2011, the
National Film Preservation Foundation announced that the first three reels of the six-reel picture had been found in the garden shed of Jack Murtagh in Hastings, New Zealand in 1989 and donated to the NFPF. The film cans were mislabled
Two Sisters and
Unidentified American Film and only later identified. The film was restored by Park Road Studios and is now in the
New Zealand Film Archive [
The White Shadow Wikipedia entry]
Please consider supporting this cause by making a donation-- however small or large -- at this link. Thank you! And a huge thanks, also, to Farran Nehme (read her great post on Farley Grainger who features in both of the new video essays), Marilyn Ferdinand and
Rod Heath for devoting their marvellous websites and energies to assembling a team of well over one hundred bloggers from around the world to respond to this cause -- the third, great, year in a row.
If you know of any further Alfred Hitchcock video essays of interest online, which aren't listed above or below, please leave a link in the comments.
- Vertigo Variations, Pt 1 A few ways of seeing Alfred Hitchcock's impossible object by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo
- Vertigo Variations, Pt 2 by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo
- Vertigo Variations, Pt 3 by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo
(except for: Easy Virtue (1927); Blackmail (1929); Foreign Correspondent (1940); Suspicion (1941); Spellbound (1945); The Paradine Case (1947); Under Capricorn (1949))
Diposting oleh
good reading on Jumat, 04 Mei 2012
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)
- 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
