Links on videographical film criticism, editing, 'intensified continuity', 'chaos cinema', 'hapticity' and (post) cinematic affect

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT?

A FILMANALYTICAL video collage, made by Catherine Grant

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? offers a brief audiovisual exploration of issues of sensuous proximity, contiguity or contact in experiencing or studying films - what theorist Laura U. Marks called 'hapticity'. It quotes from Marks' essay 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes' [in FRAMEWORK: the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004, pp. 79-82], as well as from Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film PERSONA (cinematography by Sven Nykvist). The music is excerpted from Robert Lippok and Beatrice Martini's BRANCHES, available at the Free Music Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can read an accompanying written essay about this video and videographic film studies here.

A ragbag of links, today, at Film Studies For Free. But this blog wanted to flag up some recently published, and curiously related, audiovisual items of possible interest, together with some associated written resources.

First up, is the video above, the latest of FSFF's videographic film studies experiments. Compared with FSFF's other videos, this film-theoretical one turned out to be a close kin of two earlier video 'primers' (on Gilda, film noir, gender and performance and on Elizabeth Taylor, framing and child stardom/performance). As befits primers, rather than

aiming to generate completely new insights, [these 'rich text objects' attempt], within the time-space of the average YouTube fan clip, to assemble and combine quotations from existing film scholarship on [their topics] with sequences from the film in question in order to provide a meaningful, scholarly and affective, immersive experience. [FSFF, April 7, 2011]

If you are beginning to be invested in, or just mildly curious about, the possibilities of videographic film criticism and film theory, then do read 'Touching the Film Object? Notes on the 'Haptic' in Videographical Film Studies' by Catherine Grant at FSFF's sister blog Filmanalytical, and also check out further links and thoughts here.

Next up, a pointer to an exciting, film-theory related, theme week at the great website In Media Res on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect, running between August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011.

There are a couple of interesting entries up already, with very lively comments streams. Further links will be added below as the posts go live. In the meantime, you can read a lengthy excerpt from Shaviro's book on Post-Cinematic Affect here. And do visit his blog where you will find lots more material from this work.

• 'Cinema's Exhaustion and the Vitality ...' by Elena del Rio
• 'Post-Cinematic Effects' by Paul Bowman
• 'A hair of the dog that bit us' by Adrian Ivakhiv
• 'Fragments of unconscious' by Patricia MacCormack
• 'Steven Shaviro Presents': A response to the week

Finally, FSFF wanted to make sure that its own readers were alerted to a very lively debate on 'intensified continuity' and 'chaos cinema' in relation to the action film (broadly defined) that has sprung up online as a result of the publication of a two part video essay on those topics at the wonderful new (video-essay-rich) website PressPlay, curated by film critic and video essayist extraordinaire Matt Zoller Seitz. The 'Chaos Cinema' essay, embedded below, is by a young film scholar Matthias Stork and is well worth a look.

Below the videos, FSFF has linked to related online, scholarly and journalistic items treating substantially similar issues as 'Chaos Cinema', published before his essay, as well as to ones produced directly in response to Stork's work.

Enjoy! 

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork.

The video essay Chaos Cinema, administered by Indiewire's journalistic blog PRESS PLAY, examines the extreme aesthetic principles of 21st century action films. These films operate on techniques that, while derived from classical cinema, threaten to shatter the established continuity formula. Chaos reigns in image and sound. Part 1 contrasts traditional action films with chaotic ones and takes a close look at the "sound" track, especially its use in car chases.

Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork.

Part 2 takes a look at the chaotic style in dialogue scenes, musicals, "shaky-cam" extravaganzas and mourns the rich history of early cinema.

• David Bordwell, 'Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film', originally in Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 16-28
• David Bordwell, 'Intensified Continuity Revisited', Observations of Film Art, May 2007
• David Bordwell, 'Unsteadicam Chronicles', Observations on Film Art, August 17, 2007
• David Bordwell, 'Bond vs. Chan: Jackie shows how it’s done', Observations on Film Art, September 15, 2010
  
• Steven Boone, 'Blind Fury: Notes on Chaos Cinema', PressPlay, August 27, 2011
• Chris Cagle, 'More on (Post-)Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 18, 2007
• Jim Emerson, 'Agents of Chaos', Scanners, August 23, 2011
• Jim Emerson, 'The Architecture of Gravity', Scanners, January 20, 2009
• Jim Emerson, 'Bye, Sally -- Sally Menke, 1953 - 2010', Scanners, September 28, 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'Seeing the join: on film editing', Film Studies For Free, April 16, 2010
• Ian Grey, 'The Art of Chaos Cinema', PressPlay, August 26, 2011
• Ambrose Heron, 'Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the AVID', Film Detail, August 23, 2011
• Kevin Howley, 'Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction', Scope May 2004
• Neal King, 'Secret Agency in Mainstream Postmodern Cinema', Postmodern Culture, 18.3, 2008 
• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'Structural completeness in The War Is Over', Short Film Studies, 1.1, 2010
• Catherine O'Rawe, 'More more Moro: Music and montage in Romanzo criminale', the italianist 29 · 2009 · 214-226
• Steven Shaviro, 'Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films', The Pinocchio Theory, May 12, 2010
• Matthias Stork, 'Chaos Cinema: The decline and fall of action filmmaking', PressPlay, August 22, 2011
• James Udden, 'Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuaron’s Film Aesthetics in the Shadow of Globalization', Style, Volume 43, No. 1, Spring 2009
• Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Why are so many modern action movies terrible?', PressPlay, August 25, 2011

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Seeing the join: on film editing

In memoriam Dede Allen  

(December 3, 1923 – April 17, 2010)

The below entry was originally published the day before Dede Allen died. Allen was the highly innovative editor of such notable films as Bonnie and Clyde, The Hustler, Rachel, Rachel, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Night Moves, Slap Shot, Reds, The Breakfast Club and Henry and June. 

Read Matt Zoller Seitz's wonderful tribute to Allen: Dede Allen: The woman who turned film violence into poetry; as well as Julia Wright's informative article, 'Making the Cut: Female Editors and Representation in the Film and Media Industry', CSW Update Newsletter, March 2009, which mentions Allen.

Dissolve by Aaron Valdez (2003): "Found footage film constructed of hundreds of dissolves taken from old educational films and reassembled to create a meditation on our own impermanence". 

Read also Jennifer Proctor, 'Différance, the Spectral, and the Work of Mourning in Aaron Valdez’s dissolve', 2004

Film Studies For Free presents a much requested links list today, one to openly accessible, high quality scholarly studies of film editing. Without further ado, let's jump cut straight to it:

• 'The Art of Film Editing', Special Issue of P.O.V: A Danish Journal of Film Studies, edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998 - PDF containing:
• Søren Kolstrup, 'The notion of editing'   
• Sidsel Mundal, 'Notes of an editing teacher'  
• Mark Le Fanu, 'On editing'
• Vinca Wiedemann, 'Film editing – a hidden art?'
• Edvin Kau, 'Separation or combination of fragments? Reflections on editing'
• Lars Bo Kimersgaard, 'Editing in the depth of the surface. Some basic principles of graphic editing'
• Martin Weinreich, 'The urban inferno. On the æsthetics of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver'
• Scott MacKenzie, 'Closing arias: Operatic montage in the closing sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone'
• Claus Christensen, 'A vast edifice of memories: the cyclical cinema of Terence Davies',
• Richard Raskin, 'Five explanations for the jump cuts in Godard's Breathless'

• André Bazin, 'Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry?' (1953), Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 2, January 2002

• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 'CHAPTER 1: Film as Art: Creativity, Technology, and Business', Film Art: An Introduction (McGraw-Hill, 2010, 9th ed.)

• Marina Burke, 'Eisenstein and the challenge of sound', Kinema, (date unknown)

• Noël Carroll, 'Cognitivism, Contemporary Film Theory and Method: A Response to Warren Buckland', Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Spring 1992

• Tom Conley, 'Review of Sam Rohdie, Montage', Screening the Past, Vol. 23, 2008

• Roger Crittenden, 'The historical perspective: how the function of editing has evolved', from The Thames and Hudson Manual of Film Editing (London: Thams and Hudson, 1981)

• Mary Debrett, 'Review of Valerie Orpen. Film editing: the art of the expressive. London and New York: Wallflower. 2003', Screening the Past, 2004

• Barry Dornfeld, 'Chronicle of a Summer and the Editing of Cinéma vérité', Visual Anthropology, Vol. 2, 1989

• Sarah Hatchuel, 'Leading the Gaze: From Showing to Telling in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Hamlet', Early Modern Literary Studies, 6.1, 1999

• Ils Huygens, 'Deleuze and Cinema: Moving Images and Movements of Thought', Image [and] Narrative,  Issue 18, September 2007

• James S. Hurley, 'David Bordwell's Iron Cage of Style', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 26, 1998

• Gal Kirn , 'Kuhle Wampe: Politics of Montage, De-montage of Politics?', Film-Philsophy, 11.1, 2007

• 
  
  Martin Lefebvre and Marc Furstenau, 'Digital Editing and Montage: The Vanishing Celluloid and Beyond', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies

  Volume 13, Number 1-2, Automne 2002, p. 69-107 (for other articles on montage and editing in the same journal issue in French see here)

• Jason Lindop, 'Eisenstein: ‘Intellectual Montage’,  Poststructuralism, and Ideology', Offscreen Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 28, 2007)  

• Gabrielle Murray, 'Knowing Icons and Transforming Experience: Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva México! (1932)', Senses of Cinema, Issue 52, 2009

• Christine E. Nothelfer, Jordan E. DeLong and James E. Cutting, 'Shot Structure in Hollywood Film', Indiana Undergraduate Journal of Cognitive Science 4 (2009) 103-113, 2009

• Jennifer Proctor, 'Différance, the Spectral, and the Work of Mourning in Aaron Valdez’s dissolve', 2004

• William D. Routt, 'Poubelle, ma belle, Rouge, 6, 2005

• Tim J. Smith, 'An Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing', PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2005 (see also descriptive statement here) 

• Murray Sperber, 'Eisenstein’s October', from Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977, pp. 15-22

• Martin Stollery, 'Review of Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive by Valerie Orpen', Scope, Issue, February 2005

• Donato Totaro, 'Sam Rohdie on Montage', Offscreen Journal, January 2008

• Yuri Tsivian, 'What is wrong with the beard : Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible as an eccentric tragedy',  Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 11, n° 2-3, 2001, p. 255-270

• Mike Wayne, 'Review of Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice by Don Fairservice and Film Production Theory by Jean-Pierre Geuens', Scope, August 2003

• Julia Wright, 'Making the Cut: Female Editors and Representation in the Film and Media Industry', CSW Update Newsletter, March 2009

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