Thursday 23 April 2009

35 Shots of Claire Denis (and more)

Film Studies For Free's author is excitedly preparing to give a talk at the event 'Drifting: The Films of Claire Denis'. This is the first of an annual series of symposia on 'Modern Directors' to be held at the University of Sussex on May 2nd (programme here), and is organised by Rosalind Galt and Michael Lawrence.

Below are more than sixty links to freely-accessible, mostly scholarly (or otherwise top-notch) material about Denis's work that FSFF's author has found helpful for this and previous work on this filmmaker (HERE's a link to the text of her paper on Denis's 2002 film Vendredi soir). The lists will be added to (all suggestions welcome), so please bookmark this post (last updated June 1, 2009).

Audio and/or Visual Resources Online:

In English/or with subtitles:

In French:
Scholarly Articles and Chapters:

Relevant (and Informative) Book Reviews:

Excellent Items of Film Criticism:

Enlightening Interviews in English:

Unmissable Articles, Criticism, and Interviews in French:
Relevant Google Books Links (limited previews):

Open Access campaigning note:
(Film Studies For Free's hobby horse...)
There are, of course, many further, excellent Denis resources available 'for free' if one is a student or member of faculty at an educational institution with a well-supplied library or with relevant online subscriptions. But the above list indicates, if nothing else, that truly openly accessible, high-quality, and, indeed, essential
resources for researchers in and outside the academy are plentiful nowadays, especially on contemporary topics.

A big thanks, then, to the authors, artists, editors and publishers of the above works who helped to ensure that their writings, recordings, or videos about Claire Denis's films were freely available to any reader or viewer on the internet.

Tuesday 21 April 2009

Film Festival Studies Online


As regular Film Studies For Free readers will know, this blog likes to flag up worthwhile examples of innovative online pedagogy in the film and media studies field (see previous related posts HERE, HERE, and HERE).

It was thrilled to hear, therefore, that internationally regarded film writer Adrian Martin, Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies in Monash University's Faculty of Arts, is teaching part of a World Film Festivals unit more or less entirely online.

Martin introduces this excellent venture as follows:

This Monash University 2009 Unit aims to give an understanding of the contemporary phenomenon of the International Film Festival as an event within global circuits of film culture. It is not a Unit devoted to film analysis per se; but rather to the socio-cultural institutions of the Festival circuit – taking in issues of audience, economics, promotion, programming and curation, cultural and ideological agendas, etc, and the relationship to other circuits of film culture such as mainstream exhibition/distribution, cinémathèques and museums, etc.

FSFF very much recommends that you visit the World Film Festivals blog (here) and read the work produced by the Unit's four festival reporters (Lesley Chow, Farah Azalea Mohamed Al Amin, Alida Tomaszewski, and Nienke Huitenga). They have been posting on a variety of topics, to date, as follows: What Tongue? (Chow); Interview with Amir Muhammad (Azalea and Chow); Albert Serra’s Birdsong (Chow); Amir Muhammad's Malaysian Gods (Azalea); The [Audi Festival of German Films] Festival as a Cultural Meeting Point (Huitenga); Interview with Amos Gitai (Chow and Azalea); Reconstructed Homelands [on the Gitai mini-retrospective at the Singapore International Film Festival] (Chow); Singapore Panorama (Azalea); and Sprechen Ze Deutsche? [on audience development at the German Film festival] (Tomaszewski).

Film Studies For Free's author very much approves of Martin's teaching practice on this unit. (She established an undergraduate course on Film Programming a couple of years ago, which is still running, albeit under new management these days.)

So here, to celebrate Martin's work, are a few excellent online (and, of course) Open Access film festival-studies resources (on festival programming, politics, business and other matters) from
FSFF's dusty reading-list archive (last updated June 17, 2009):

Also, further essential reading can always be found at Professor Dina Iordanova's brilliant blog DinaView: Film Culture Technology Money (see all her postings on Film Festivals and Film Programming).

Professor Iordanova is one the lead team members of the Dynamics of World Cinema research project undertaken by the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust. (Full disclosure note: Adrian Martin and FSFF's own author are both members of the International Advisory Board of this project). The project describes itself thus:

This two-and-a- half-year-long study will examine the patterns and cycles of various distinctly active circuits of contemporary film distribution and exhibition, and the dynamic patterns of complex interaction between them.

[Project attention] attention focuses predominantly in four areas of the global circulation of non-Hollywood cinema: the international penetration of international blockbusters mainstream distribution, the film festival circuit, the film circulation via diasporic channels, as well as the various Internet-enabled forms of dissemination. The project's distinctiveness is in the endeavour to correlate these diverse strands and foreground their dynamic interactions.

For updated news, as it happens, the Dynamics of World Cinema Blog can be found here.

Note added: This blog brought news (on June 17th) of the following great online resources:

Film Festival Workshop - Video Clips

During the Film Festival Workshop held on 4 April 2009 in St Andrews, our discussants talked about some of the most pressing issues that were concerned with the development of Film Festival Studies.

Click on the links below to hear what they said:

Clip 1

Michael Gubbins, former Editor, Screen International, UK

Clip 2

Richard Porton, Editor, Cineaste Magazine, USA

Clip 3

Nick Roddick (aka Mr. Busy), film journalist and critic, Sight & Sound, UK

Clip 4

Nick Roddick (aka Mr. Busy), film journalist and critic, Sight & Sound, UK

Clip 5

Stuart Cunningham, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Clip 6

Irene Bignardi, Filmitalia and former Locarno Festival Director, Italy

Clip 7

Núria Triana Toribio, University of Manchester, UK

Clip 8

Dina Iordanova, Director, Centre for Film Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland


Also, please check out the Fipresci (international federation of film critics) website for an abundance of fascinating and useful material about film festivals.

Monday 20 April 2009

Werner Herzog Links inc YouTube Fest

Film Studies For Free wanted to let academic fans of Werner Herzog know that (certainly in the UK, but most probably elsewhere, too, if no geoblocking) they can currently watch eight of his films on YouTube in their glorious entirety. This is thanks to the video distributor Starzmedia, one of the companies participating in YouTube's growing efforts to stream full-length films with the support of the movie companies who own the rights. Below, FSFF has embedded the trailers of seven of the Herzog films that are currently available. Click on the titles to visit the YouTube pages for the full-length films, which can be watched freely online in relatively good quality versions (Even YouTube Screens Started Small...). (Click HERE for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser added later. The Starzmedia channel for Herzog is HERE).

And, if that weren't enough excitement for one FSFF day, beneath the video-trailers, at the foot of this post, are some other choice links to freely available Herzog material online.

Aguirre The Wrath Of God



My Best Fiend





Even Dwarfs Started Small





Fitzcarraldo





Lessons Of Darkness





Woyzeck





Little Dieter Needs To Fly





Scholarly online writing about Herzog:

Thursday 16 April 2009

Queer Film and Theory Links In Memory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Image from Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999)

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear of the death at 58 of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of the discourse of 'queer theory', and an inspirational teacher and critic.

Like many other film researchers, some of
FSFF's author's own writing on queer films was deeply influenced by Sedgwick's brilliant exploration of the epistemology of the closet.

In memory of Sedgwick,
FSFF has assembled a webliography, below, of links to pieces of high quality, freely accessible, scholarly writing (or recordings/videos) on the web on the topic of queer/glbt films and/or queer film theory, a number of which, unsurprisingly, employ her critical insights.
Further links added since original post: last updated June 2, 2009.
P.S. Another set of must-reads from the Reverse Shot website - just click on the film-title links below for some great reading on queer cinema and television:

Broken Sky

The Wire

Lan Yu

Hairspray

Be Like Others

The House of Mirth

Far from Heaven

Milk

Tuesday 7 April 2009

Fruity film and television studies links!



Due to a devastating case of total PC meltdown (following painful months of on-and-off digital trouble and strife), Film Studies For Free brought you nothing new for over a week...

But now it's back.  Its mission is possible once again. And this time it's brought to you by a new, more reliable, and thoroughly inspirational computer host (think Scottish fruit). 

FSFF never wants to go away again (until vacation time at least). But it may struggle for a wee while, while its owner learns the cool new language of her wonderful new i-World.

Anyhoo, here are some choice links to celebrate its stylish return: