Glasgow's Finest: work by Caughie, Geraghty, and great e-theses, too

Image from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), a film studied in Philip Drake's PhD thesis on Hollywood performance

It's been a busy month here at Film Studies For Free, but let's end it on a high note. Today's little film and media studies links list is of salient items from Enlighten, the e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow, an institution of which FSFF's author is personally very fond, given its wonderful department of Theatre, Film & Television Studies.

This research repository houses some true Open-Access treasures by very important authorities in these disciplines, such as a recent item on film authorship by John Caughie, editor (and author of much) of Theories of Authorship, and four articles by Christine Geraghty, one of the most significant figures in British cinema and television studies. There are also some further excellent items by great, younger scholars, like Philip Drake (now a lecturer in the Film, Media, and Journalism Department at the University of Stirling).

• Stuart Duncan Brown, The subversion of sympathy in British social realism: uses of laughter in the cinematic representation of the British working-class. MPhil(R) thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
  

• John Caughie, 'Authors and auteurs: the uses of theory', In: Donald, J. and Renov, M. (eds.) Handbook of Film Studies. Sage, 2007

• Philip J. Drake, Stardom after the star system: economics of performance in contemporary Hollywod cinema. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2002

• Robert J. Edmonstone, Beyond “Brutality”: understanding the Italian Filone’s violent excesses. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008

• B. Franks, 'Constructing "The Wicker Man"', Chapter 3. In Murray, J. and Stevenson, L. and Harper, S. and Franks, B. (Eds) Constructing "The Wicker Man": Film and Cultural Studies perspectives, pp. 63-78: Glasgow: University of Glasgow, Crichton Publications, 2005
  

• Christine Geraghty, Classic television: a matter of time. In: The Making and Remaking of Classic Television, 19 Mar 2009, University of Warwick.
  

• Christine Geraghty, Paris, Hollywood and Kay Kendall. In: Moseley., R. (ed.) Fashioning Film Stars : Dress, Culture, Identity. London: BFI, 2005, pp. 121-133.
  

• Christine Geraghty, The study of the soap opera. In: Wasko, J. (ed.) Companion to Television. Blackwell companions in cultural studies . Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 308-323
  

• Christine Geraghty, Continuous serial - a definition. In: Dyer, R. (ed.) Coronation Street. Television monographs (British Film Institute), 13 . London: BFI, 1981, pp. 9-26.
  

• Sarah Neely, Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture: fiction to film. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003
  

• L. Smith, 'Making history: post-historical commemorations of the past in British television', Groundings 1, 2007

• Lisa E. Williamson, Contentious Comedy: Negotiating Issues of Form, Content, and Representation in American Sitcoms of the Post-Network Era, PhD Thesis, The University of Glasgow Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies 2008
  

The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos: An Appeal by a Cinephile

Image from Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg Indio Nacional/A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, Or, The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos (Raya Martin, 2005)

Martin’s Maicling Pelicula is an intensely personal film projecting the young director’s emotional impressions of the era bygone into actualities of the beginnings of the uprising, the stirrings of Philippine nationalism. [...] Maicling Pelicula throws down the gauntlet—and with rude authority—for the heights of sophistication and beauty that the Filipino aesthetic may reach.
Alexis Tioseco, November 11, 2006

Film Studies For Free's author imagines that its readers have been as shocked and upset as she has been to see the news footage of the recent Philippines floods caused when Tropical Storm Ketsana/now Typhoon Ondoy hit on Saturday. Independent filmmakers from the Philippines, like Raya Martin, are producing among the most compelling cinematic work in the world at the moment. Their communications about the floods on Twitter and Facebook have very powerfully expressed the awful scale of the country's current emergency.

FSFF urges you, if you are able, to investigate how to donate to any of the charitable organisations currently mobilising their resources to provide emergency support. One such organisation (based in the UK) is the Disasters Emergency Committee (also, a good point of call for those responding to the Southern Pacific tsunamis and the Indonesian earthquake [added Oct 1]); Google links for Help for Typhoon Ondoy Victims in the Philippines are here; the Philippine Red Cross is linked to here; other links, for those based in the Philippines, are listed here. If readers want to supply other links to, or information about, any further ways of donating, or helping, you are warmly encouraged to use the comments section of this blog for that purpose. Thank you.

Below is a small selection of key links to online resources on the subject of the cinema of the Philippines (including, at the very foot of the post, a wonderful Cahiers du cinéma video interview in English with Raya Martin) to remind us just how worthy of critical and other support that cinema is. Very sadly, as regular readers of FSFF will know, some of the best entries in the list come from a now silenced voice, that of one of the most eloquent champions of Philippine cinema: Alexis Tioseco, murdered in Quezon City, Philippines, along with partner and fellow critic Nika Bohinc, several weeks ago. They are much missed.

• Cinema of the Philippines wikipedia entry

• Phillipines' page of the late Alexis Tioseco's Criticine website on Southeast Asian cinema

• Noel Vera's blog on Philippines cinema, Critic After Dark

• Richard Bolisay's blog on Philippines Cinema, Lilok Pelicula/Sculpting Cinema

• Francis Cruz's blog on Philippines and other cinemas, Lessons From the School of Inattention - Oggs' Movie Thoughts

• Francis Joseph Cruz, 'Philippine Cinema on the Verge of Redemption', Lessons From the School of Inattention - Oggs' Movie Thoughts, August 8, 2007

• Khavn de la Cruz, Filipino digital filmmaker: his website; his YouTube channel
  

• HarryTuttle, 'Raya Martin Links', Unspoken Cinema, August 6, 2009

• Raya Martin by Alexis Tioseco, Cinema Scope, 39

• Alexis Tioseco, 'Introduction to a Programme of Philippine Experimental Film/Video Art (Untitled)'

• A short interview with Raya Martin by Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope, 27

• Emmanuel Burdeau, 'October 7: The Filipino Angle', Cahiers du cinéma, October 2007

• Francis Cruz, 'Maicling Pelicula Nañg Ysañg Indio Nacional (O Ang Mahabang Kalungkutan ng Katagalugan) (2005)', Lessons From the School of Inattention - Oggs' Movie Thoughts, July 26, 2006

• Roger Garcia, 'Interview with Raya Martin', DMC Review Online, December 2005
  

• HarryTuttle, 'Raya Martin in Cannes 2008', Unspoken Cinema, June 6, 2008

• Noel Vera, 'Indio Nacional: A Short Film about being Filipino', Critic After Dark, July 24, 2007

Rencontre avec Raya Martin 1/3 by Webcahiers

Rencontre avec Raya Martin 2/3 by Webcahiers

Lots of Links from the Twitterverse and Beyond

Tarzan Call, Number 5 in the List Universe 'Top Ten Sound Effects We All Recognize':

"The Tarzan [call] is the distinctive, ululating yell of the character Tarzan, as portrayed by actor Johnny Weismuller in the films based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, starting with [Tarzan of the Apes] (1932)."

Film Studies For Free is now regularly tweeting (and retweeting) one off links to great online and open-access resources (or, sometimes, just fun ones...). Click here if you're interested in following those leads as they are posted.

It makes sense, then, to come up with occasional round-up posts of those links for FSFF blog readers. And this also provides a good opportunity to throw into that mix other film and media studies items of note that might otherwise get missed.

So here, in no particular order, are a whole bunch of great links:

• Thanks to Ted Hope's contribution to the unmissable Hammer to Nail site, FSFF found out about 'Top 10 Movie Sound Effects We All Recognize' (see above) drawn up by List Universe

• Together with Lalita Pandit Hogan, Patrick Colm Hogan has edited the latest, wonderful, issue of Projections on Hindi cinema. His excellent editorial is freely available online, so do check it out: 'Hindi Cinema as a Challenge to Film Theory and Criticism', Projections, Volume 3, Number 2, Winter 2009 , pp. v-ix(1)

• Over at the fantastic Graphic Engine site, Bob Rehak blogs about ABC's new show Flashforward (which FSFF's author enjoyed on the UK's Channel 5 last night). Also, do check out this post in which Jason Mittell ruminates some more on Lost.

• Read Roman Polanski's Screenplay for Rosemary's Baby (based on the novel by Ira Levin), Final Draft July 24, 1967

• Following yesterday's post on Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water, FSFF discovered that if you are surfing the internet from the US or Canada you can currently watch this film online and in full for free courtesy of The Auteurs. Just click here.
  

• Thanks to Reference Site of the Day, FSFF heard of Louise Brooks and the "New Woman" in Weimar Cinema, New Histories of Photography 11, January 19 through April 29, 2007 [Photomuse, a Resource for Scholarship in the History of Photography: an alliance between George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and the International Center of Photography (ICP)
  

Drawing on the vast archives of the George Eastman House Motion Picture Collection, including Louise Brooks’ personal collection, this exhibition will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her birth. It is also a rare opportunity to examine vintage stills, which are often overlooked but were seminal to the creation of cinematic icons, particularly in the 1920s and 30s when the burgeoning picture magazines were feeding off the publicity machines of film capitals like Hollywood and Berlin.

• Thanks to The Auteurs Daily, FSFF was alerted to the existence Moving Image Source, "A Revolution on Screen: The Cinema of the People's Republic of China," Pt.1 a new video essay by Kevin B Lee. You can find Part 2 here, now. Also see 'The People's Director: The old new China of Xie Jin (1923-2008)' a related article by Leo Goldsmith posted December 11, 2008

• More great stuff from Jonathan Rosenbaum: he has republished 'Fear of Feminism (FATAL ATTRACTION)', at Jonathan Rosenbaum.com, September 25, 2009 (originally published in the Chicago Reader, October 2, 1987)

• An excellent blog post at Chris Cagle's Category D: A Film and Media Studies on Kazan's Sea of Grass (1947): 'almost a test case in auteurism'.
  

• Online Keynote Presentations & Podcasts from the 2009 Media Education Summit (Centre for Excellence in Media Practice).
  

• Check out the wonderful resources at Christian Annyas's The Movie Titles Stills Collection

• Thanks to The Auteurs Daily, FSFF heard about the great online videos for Critics' Picks at the New York Times website. In the latest instalment, 'The King of Comedy', A. O. Scott Reviews Martin Scorsese's 1983 film about the cult of celebrity.

• A must visit: Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School (Thanks to Richard Brody's The Front Row column)
  

• Great free article in good new journal on 'Segundo de Chomón and the early years of cinema'. By Joan M. Minguet Batllori.

• Thanks to cms_mit for alerting FSFF to this great (@henryjenkins) video on convergence culture
  

• Check out HarryTuttle's latest addition to his Critical Fallacies' series: 11 : Egocentrism

• Fab annual summary of Observations on Film Art blogposts that DO prove useful to those using Film Art: An Introduction

• A big recommendation for a very good blog post on Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (1969) at The Seventh Art (Thanks to @justanotheruser)
  

• See the fabulous, classic film recommendations in the Self-Styled Siren's post "Ten Melos the Siren Would Watch Instead of MAD MEN": (Thanks to @theauteursdaily)
  

• And finally, FSFF's author just republished online a 2003 essay of hers (and yes, if you've read down this far, she does know it's not a good sign that she refers to herself in the third person all the time on this site, but what's an embarrassed, self-promoting, blogger to do?): Still moving images: On the affectivity of photographs in film

Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water

Updated with more links - Oct 1, at 08.30

Sequence 1 from Nóż w wodzie/Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski, 1962)

Sequence 2 from Nóż w wodzie/Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski, 1962)

Two magisterial sequences furnish today's Film Studies For Free offering. They come from one of FSFF's author's favourite films (and perhaps her favourite film to teach): Knife in the Water (Nóż w wodzie, Poland 1962), the first full-length feature film directed by Roman Polanski and co-written by him (inter alia, with Jerzy Skolimowski; the music is by jazz composer Krzysztof Komeda, with saxophone played by Bernt Rosengren; the actors are Zygmunt Malanowicz as the boy, Jolanta Umecka as Krystyna, and Leon Niemczyk as Andrzej, the husband).

These two sequences do far more than simply hint at a directorial greatness that would only come later. Rather, they show ample evidence from the beginning of his career as to just why, FSFF humbly opines, this director mightily deserved a life-time achievement award for his cinematic oeuvre. As Peter Bradshaw wrote of Knife in the Water, to mark a 2004 retrospective of the director's work:

The raw talent of this film is still obvious, as it was to landmark Paramount producer Robert Evans ("I loved the little Polack!"), who sponsored Polanski's Hollywood career and, in movies such as Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, brought to full flower his extraordinary ability to create menace. It's all here, clenched like a fist.

By the way, if you are surfing the internet from the US or Canada you can watch this film online and in full for free, for the next month, courtesy of The Auteurs. Just click here. FSFF couldn't recommend it more highly.

Today, following news of Polanski's arrest in Switzerland, pending the processing of an extradition request by US attorneys, Zurich Film Festival president Debra Winger stood publicly in solidarity with Polanski: "We stand by and wait for his release and his next masterwork", she said.

FSFF is proud to line up beside Winger and with some of the others who have spoken out for Polanski's release. But please see here, here, here, and Richard Brody's hugely compelling 'Polanski Redux' (last link added Oct. 1) for opinions about some of the many complications of the current extradition case; these continue to provoke at least ambivalence, for plenty of us ('romantic auteurist') admirers of Polanski's films, about what should be the final legal outcome (given that Polanski pled guilty to his 1978 rape charge, he has continued to argue, albeit in absentia and unsuccessfully, that the original conviction against him was unsound due to "judicial and prosecutorial misconduct", and his victim has requested that the case now be dropped, so as not to cause any further damage to her and her family).

Here, in honour of Polanski's work for the cinema and in the hope of a rapid and proper processing of the current charges against him for all those directly affected, are some FSFF links to discussions of his first film.

• Peter Bradshaw, 'Knife in the Water', The Guardian, April 9, 2004
• Matthew Clayfield, 'Andrzej and Krystyna go Boating: Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water', Senses of Cinema, 46, 2008
• Peter Cowie, 'Knife in the Water', The Criterion Collection: Film Essays, 2008
• David Denby, 'Three in a boat', The New Yorker, May 29, 2006
  
• Michael Goddard, 'Polanski in Motion: Review of Ewa Mazierska's Roman Polanski - The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller', Senses of Cinema, 48, 2008
  
• Gary Johnson, 'Review of Knife in the Water', Images Journal, 2003
• Francisco Lopez, 'Knife in the Water', Eastern European Film, January 30, 2007
  
• Ewa Mazierska, 'Autobiographic Discourse in the Films of Jerzy Skolimowski', Kinema, Fall 2008
• Roman Polanski, 'Knife in the Water [originally from Polanski's 1984 autobiography Roman', The Criterion Collection: Film Essays, 2008
• Dan Schneider, 'Knife in the Water', cosmoetica.com, 2007
• Steven Shaviro, 'Knife in the Water', The Pinocchio Theory, January 18, 2007
  
• Ronald Wilson, 'Knife in the Water', Film International, 2008

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E-book Index: University of California Press Public Access Film Studies Books

Image of Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman) from Viaggio In Italia/Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
In honour of Peter Brunette's great book on Rossellini, now publicly acessible online via the University of California Press archives

Film Studies For Free regularly visits the brilliant online archive of the University of California Press to check out its range of public-access e-books. There are now more than thirty full-length, UC Press film-studies, or film and media-studies related, books openly accessible online now. So FSFF delightedly and painstakingly put together the list, below, of direct links to each and every last one of them. FSFF will keep you updated about future, film-related developments at the archive, too.

Thanks to UC Press and their book authors for their great attitude to publishing scholarly works online.

• Armbrust, Walter, editor. Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000 2000
• Bloch, R. Howard, and Frances Ferguson, editors Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989
• Brunette, Peter, Roberto Rossellini. University of California Press, c1996 1996
• Byg, Barton. Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Day, James. The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Flinn, Caryl. The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2004 2004
• Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Henderson, Brian, and Ann Martin, editors. Film Quarterly: Forty Years - A Selection. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999
• Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, c 1998 1998
• Iampolski, Mikhail. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Karlstrom, Paul J., editor On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996 1996
• Kenner, Hugh. Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings, Portraits of American Genius. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Matsumoto, Valerie J., and Blake Allmendinger, editors Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999
• McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991
• McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Murphy, Timothy S. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1997 1997
  
• Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Pearson, Roberta E. Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992
• Riskin, Robert. Six Screen Plays by Robert Riskin. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Smoodin, Eric, and Ann Martin, editors. Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945-1957. Berkeley: University of California, c2002 2002
• Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, editor. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001
• Toepfer, Karl. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
• Wees, William C. Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992
• Yeh, Wen-hsin, editor. Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000 2000
  
• Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999

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Jarman Award 2009 winner is Lindsay Seers

Recording of part of Lindsay Seers' exhibition 'Swallowing Black Maria'
(more info here)

'Lindsay Seers tells seductively tall tales.'
Laura McLean-Ferris, guardian.co.uk, February 27, 2009

Lindsay Seers's Extramission 6 (Black Maria) [is] one of the real finds of [the Altermodern: Tate Triennal exhibition, 2009]. Seers shows a semi-autobiographical, quasi-documentary film about her life, screened in a mock-up shed whose design is a copy of Thomas Edison's Black Maria, his New Jersey film studio. The story is implausible, troubling, and beautifully told by different narrators.

As a child, Seers is so overwhelmed by visual stimulus that she cannot speak. As soon as she sees a photograph, she decides she wants to be a camera. She uses her mouth as the camera, and goes about with a black bag over her head. As she grows up, Seers stops being a camera, and wants instead to be a projector. She wears a model of Edison's studio on her head, projecting the movies in her mind. She struggles to illuminate the world.

The whole story is both dreamlike and moving. How much of it is true? There are interviews with Seers's mother and with a psychologist. Are they really who we think they are? As I staggered out, someone muttered "What is she on?" Adrian Searle, guardian.co.uk, February 3, 2009

Film Studies For Free is very happy to add its congratulations to the many being deservedly delivered today to Lindsay Seers following the award to her yesterday of this year's Jarman prize for artists working with the moving image. Seers, whose hypnotic work as an artist includes film practice-based research produced as a lecturer in arts practice at London's Goldsmiths College, receives a cash prize, but also a very valuable broadcast commission – to make four artworks for Channel 4’s acclaimed Three Minute Wonder slot (3MW). FSFF looks forward to watching those.

The Jarman Award was inspired by British avant-garde film-maker Derek Jarman, one of the most innovative, esteemed and visionary artists of the last century. Interviews and features on this year’s award shortlist and Jarman's legacy can be found at Engine, an online forum from Animate Projects.

Below are some further links to online and openly accessible resources, reviews and information about Lindsay Seers' work.

• David Berridge, 'Lindsay Seers: It has to be this way, More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen, February 9, 2009
• Chris Fite-Wassilak, 'Lindsay Seers', Frieze Magazine, Issue 122, April 2009
• Rebecca Geldard, 'Lindsay Seers: It Has to Be This Way', ArtReview magazine, 21 April 21, 2009
• Tom Morton, 'Remember Me [monograph on Lindsay Seers]', Frieze Magazine, Issue 124, June-August 2009
• Jennifer Poole, 'Lindsay Seers: Eyes of Others...', Circa Arts Magazine, 2005
  
• Lindsay Seers at the Event Horizon exhibition (2008) webpage at the Royal Academy
• Lindsay Seers' webpages at Smart Project Space
• Lindsay Seers, 'Artist's Text', Arts Council England website, 2003
  

Pedro Costa: A Retrospective

Revised and updated version

Image from Juventude em Marcha/Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)

The Rabbit Hunters by Pedro Costa (one of three episodes of a 2007 project created by the Jeonju Film Festival to produce and distribute short films created in digital format and directed by three directors with complete creative freedom. The other episodes are Respite by Harun Farocki and Correspondences by Eugène Green).

Watching any of Pedro Costa’s films grabs hold of our gaze and forces us to personally experience the motion of the film. At times his scenes sting our eyes with their piercing pain, and at times they wrap our eyes in ineffable tenderness. [Shigehiko Hasumi]

Like his European contemporaries Ulrich Seidl and Harun Farocki, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is a veritable pioneer in the fusion of documentary and fiction. As London's Tate Modern museum is about to embark on its fantastic retrospective of the whole of Costa’s oeuvre (at the Starr Auditorium from 25 September–4 October 2009), the ever-timely Film Studies For Free presents its own retrospective of links to valuable (mostly English-language) work about him published online.
Whenever it can, FSFF stands on the shoulders of giants: on this occasion, welcome lifts were given by Girish Shambu, Michael Guillén, David Hudson, HarryTuttle, and Ryland Walker Knight with their respective links lists and discussions or interviews around the time of North American retrospectives of Costa's works and the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Thanks a lot, guys.

FSFF's London readers should also note that Costa will give a talk called 'Thoughts on Films' at Birkbeck College, associated with the Tate retrospective at 7.30pm on Tuesday 29 September (further details HERE).
And, finally, at the very foot of this post, for its francophone readers, FSFF has embedded two rather enlightening segments from a wonderful video interview with Costa (in unsubtitled French) at Cannes in 2009.

• Tate Modern Pedro Costa Retrospective Booklet (large PDF)

• David Balfour, 'Colossal Youth', Vertigo Magazine, No.16, March 2008
• Ana Balona de Oliveira, 'Rooms of Colossal Bones: Pedro Costa's Trilogy', Mute Magazine, June 26, 2008
• Bárbara Barroso, 'Ossos/Bones', Senses of Cinema, 49, 2008
• Updated: Kieron Corless, 'Crossing the Threshold: Interview with Pedro Costa', Sight and Sound, October 2009
• Pedro Costa, 'A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing [seminar at the Sendai Mediatheque 2005]', Rouge 10, 2007
• Rob Davis, 'Five Times in Colossal Youth', Errata, March 2, 2008
• Sérgio Dias Branco, Dulce Loução & Elisabete França, 'Ossos e Intimidade', Os Sentidos da Cidade, April 24, 2002 [Portuguese]
• Kenichi Eguchi, 'Pedro Costa - the trembling moment [interview with Costa]', Sempre em marcha, January 20, 2009
• Tag Gallagher, 'Straub Anti-Straub', Senses of Cinema, 43, 2007
• Updated: Miguel Gomes, 'Serenity', Sight and Sound, October 2009
• Michael Guillén,' Pedro Costa Next Stop', The Evening Class, February 29, 2008 [Here are some of the further links to reviews and items of interest linked to by Guillen: Daniel Kasman's notes on the entire Costa retrospective when it hit Manhattan; Dennis Lim's preview for The New York Times; Manohla Dargis focused in on Colossal Youth; Ed Halter's Village Voice preview; Nathan Lee on Colossal Youth; Scott Foundas's preview for L.A. Weekly; Peter Keough for the Harvard Film Archive; Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote up his thoughts for The Chicago Reader; Acquarello reviewed Colossal Youth; critical response profiled by Dave Hudson at The Greencine Daily; further reviews from Scott Foundas, Neil Young, Kevin B. Lee, and Fernando Croce]
• Michael Guillén, 'Pedro Costa: "I have to risk each shot"', GreenCine Daily, April 2, 2008
• Michael Guillén, 'Pedro Costa (and others) on Casa de lava and Tarrafal, Part One', The Evening Class, March 11, 2008
• Michael Guillén, 'Pedro Costa (and others) on Casa de lava and Tarrafal, Part Two', The Evening Class,March 12, 2008
• Shigehiko Hasumi, 'Adventure: An Essay on Pedro Costa', Rouge 10, 2007
• Daniel Kasman, 'A Digital Fugitive: Interview with Pedro Costa', The Auteurs Notebook, June 16, 2009
• Daniel Kasman, 'Cannes 2009: Costa brief ("Ne change rien", Costa)', The Auteurs Notebook, May 16, 2009
• Kevin B Lee, 'Colossal Youth: Slumland Empire', The House Next Door Online, February 21, 2007
• C.S Leigh, 'Contemplating the New Physicality of Cinema', Believer, March/April 2009
• Miguel Marías, 'No Quarto da Vanda/In Vanda’s Room', Senses of Cinema, 49, 2008
• Mark Peranson, 'A Desperate Utopian Dream - Pedro Costa: an Introduction', Vertigo Magazine, Vol.3, No.9, Spring/Summer 2008
• Mark Pernason, 'The young untold: Pedro Costa shows us the way to go', San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, March 5, 2008
• David Phelps, 'Cannes 2009: There oughtta be moonlight saving time ("Ne change rien", Costa)', The Autuers Notebook, May 15, 2009
• David Pratt-Robson, 'Approaching Colossal Youth', Videoarcadia, December 2008
• James Quandt, 'Still Lives: The Cinema of Pedro Costa', Cinemateque Ontario
• Jacques Rancière, 'Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art', Jounal of Art & Research, Volume 2. No. 1. Summer 2008
• Daniel Ribas, 'Escaping the Future', Senses of Cinema, 49, 2008
• Jonathan Romney, 'Exile and the Kingdom: Colossal Youth', Sight and Sound, June 2008
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Cinema of the Future', Chicago Reader, November 15, 2007
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'A Few Eruptions in the House of Lava', JonathanRosenbaum.com, June 25, 2008
• Sempre em marcha - great blog about Costa's work by José Oliveira, with lots of items in English
• Girish Shambu, 'Pedro Costa One-Stop', girish, June 11, 2007 - [In this post, Girish also links to the following writings on Costa's work: 'A collection of writings, many of them on blogs, in no particular order: Mark Peranson's Cannes '06 report in Cinema Scope; Dave McDougall at Chained to the Cinémathèque; Darren Hughes at Long Pauses; Acquarello at Strictly Film School; Michael Sicinski's TIFF '06 report at Greencine; Doug Cummings at Film Journey; Daniel Kasman at d+kaz; Jason Anderson in Toronto's Eye Weekly; Dave Kehr on Casa De Lava; Tom Charity's Vancouver '06 report at Greencine; Ruy Gardnier at A_Film_By; and my own post on Costa from last summer']
• HarryTuttle, 'Pedro Costa', Unspoken Cinema, March 8, 2008 Best multilingual links by far
• Ryland Walker Knight, 'Pedro Costa at PFA. Link Dump', Vinyl is Heavy, April 1, 2008
• Kim West, 'Man with the Mini-DV Camera', Site Magazine, Issue 24, 2008 (scroll down)

Pedro Costa Rushes 1/2 from Independencia on Vimeo.

Pedro Costa Rushes 2/2 from Independencia on Vimeo.

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Austrian cinema for export #1: Ulrich Seidl

Image from Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007)

Unlike [Michael] Haneke or his protégée Jessica Hausner, [...] Seidl finds the disturbing not in extraordinary outbursts of violence or helplessness, but rather in the everyday strangeness all around us, a world he transmits formally in blurring and ultimately deconstructing the boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and feature. He ranks, alongside Egon Humer, as the most important Austrian documentary filmmaker of the 1990s and has only strengthened this position in the last few years.

Ulrich Seidl has repeatedly emphasised in interviews and public appearances that he never intended to be, and indeed does not see himself solely as, a documentary filmmaker. Like others working in Austria's subsidy-dependent film landscape, Seidl stumbled upon the documentary as a means to realise his cinematic aspirations without having to resort to making movie-of-the-week fare. And even before shooting Dog Days Seidl refused to call his films documentaries, maintaining that all his films have both “documentary and fictional levels”.

Seidl's stylised, laconic regard of quotidian quirks moved his work beyond the social reportage and discourses of “authenticity” and “reality” that inform other domestic documentaries. The world he records lacks any pre-packaged shine. Seidl is uninterested in “life's few happy moments”, which he justifies by asserting the contrast between his cinematic project and a wedding photographer's job.

Mattias Frey (hyperlinks added by FSFF)

Film Studies For Free brings you the first of a number of Austrian cinema-themed links-lists: this one is to anglophone, scholarly, or otherwise very useful, and openly accessible online resources related to the film work of Ulrich Seidl. Below the links list are some excerpts from his early films (trailers for some of the later ones can be seen at the official websites in the links-list).

• Martin Brady and Helen Hughes, 'Import and Export: Ulrich Seidl’s Indiscreet Anthropology of Migration', gfl-journal, No.1/2008
• Robert von Dassanowsky, 'Austria Hungry: The Return of a Film Nation', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 51, February 2006
• Mattias Frey, 'Border Zones: The Films of Ulrich Seidl', Senses of Cinema, May 2004
• Gerd Gemünden, 'Review of Austrian Cinema: A History. By Robert von Dassanowsky. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005', Monatshefte 99.1 (2007) 131-133
• John Gorick, 'To a dog you're the world, to your girlfriend you're never sure', Vertigo Magazine, No.15, February, 2008
• Charlotte Hansen, 'The Unbearable Insistence of Authenticity', Cambridge Film Festival Daily Magazine, Issue 2008
• Aaron Hillis, 'Interview: Ulrich Seidl', GreenCine Daily, July 30, 2009
• Christoph Huber, 'Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, Austria)', Cinema Scope, Issue 31, 2007
• Import Export press folder 1
• Import Export press folder 2
• Import Export Official Website 1
• Import Export Official Website 2
• Daniel Kasman, 'Review: Import/Export', d+kaz on moving images and motion pictures, February 19, 20o8
• Glenn Kenny, 'Notes of a Seidl sceptic', Some Came Running, July 31, 2009
• Herbert Krill, 'AUSTRIA: A high between two lows? The 2002 Diagonale festival', Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 10, May 2002
• Joseph Jon Lanthier, 'Import/Export', SlantMagazine, July 28, 2009
• Joanne Leal and Klaus-Dieter Rossade, 'Introduction: Cinema and Migration since Unification', gfl-journal, No. 1/2008
• Vadim Rizov, 'The Films of Ulrich Seidl', The House Next Door Online, July 24, 2009
• Ulrich Seidl in conversation with Mark Cosgrove, 'Between Heaven and Hell: the Films of Ulrich Seidl - Director Q&A', Watershed's Head of Programme, Sept 25, 2008, Watershed, Bristol - Quicktime video 55 mins

Loss Is to Be Expected (Ulrich Seidl, 1992)

Good News (Ulrich Seidl, 1990)

Angelism and rage: Sally Potter links

Who is Sally Potter?

Sally Potter is exceptional among directors in having made both successful commercial features and experimental films. Besides filmmaking, her career incorporates dance, choreography, music and performance art; these elements are interwoven in her films, all of which - while very different from each other - confront issues around performance, gender and genre and appeal to the significance of musicality and movement in a medium which is in essence non-verbal.
Annette Kuhn

On the surface a satire on fashion, Rage is an indictment of the very market logic that forces stars to parade themselves on the red carpet in Berlin’s inevitable snow. It’s a reclamation of beauty from the bankers, and central to its ravishing struggle is Jude Law as Minx, a Russian-American supermodel. Minx refers to herself in the third person as “she” but the film leaves open the question of how Minx understands this pronoun for herself.

While not as centrally queer as Orlando, Rage is deeply concerned with that queerest of themes: what we say of ourselves and what (secretly) we cannot say but long to. Its compassion is amplified by its stunningly simple visual style; shot in tiny photographers’ studios using greenscreen, the film is also a message to budding filmmakers who think their projects are unlikely to get funding. Potter, a friend of Derek Jarman’s, is one of the few filmmakers committed to his mission of: make things with what you have.
Sophie Mayer

In a brilliant article discussing the role that other media play within film ("The Film Stilled", Camera Obscura 24, September 1990), Raymond Bellour recently suggested that these singular moments of eruption or invasion can point in two quite contrary directions. On the one hand, there are moments of video in film that point backwards, regressively, to a lost, even archaic past. Here, video becomes a sad, deathly emblem of nostalgia in the lives of people who are finding it hard to get themselves together. This occurs in the current release Falling Down, where the relentless camera movement into Michael Douglas' family video in the final shot expresses the complete disintegration of his identity. But, in a completely different spirit, video moments can point forward to utopian, transcendent, sometimes mystical states and experiences. Bellour gives this trend in cinema the curious name of 'angelism' - and what's most curious about it is that he coined the word before seeing Sally Potter's Orlando, where, in its final vision, video texture fills the screen as a child's video camera [that of Orlando's daughter] discovers an angel hovering in the sky, singing.
Adrian Martin

On the day that Rage, Sally Potter's new film, embarks on its 'multiplatform, interactive' release-week (today begin the mobile phone episodes), Film Studies For Free (a big Potter fan of old) is delighted to premiere its own selection of choice, openly accessible, scholarly links to Potter resources:

• Kathleen Barbara, 'Masquerade: The Female Body in Post-Modern Films', MP: An Online Feminist Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, December 21, 2004
• Eileen Barrett, 'Decamping Sally Potter's Orlando', from Re: Reading, Re: Writing, Re: Teaching Virginia Woolf conference papers 1994 (Pace University Press, 1995)
• BFI, Sally Potter Filmography
• Tara Brabazon and Vanessa Evangelista, 'Something Queer is Going on Here: A Binary Outlaw's Tour Through Orlando', Outskirts, Vol. 1, May 1996
• Rose Capp, 'Crocodile Tears: Sally Potter's The Man Who Cried', Senses of Cinema, May 2001
• Joan Copjec, 'Thriller: An Intrigue of Identification', Ciné-tracts. 3:3 (Autumn 1980), 33-38 (scroll down)
• David Ehrenstein, 'Out of the Wilderness: An Interview with Sally Potter,' Film Quarterly 47:1 (Autumn 1993), 2-7
• Angelica Fenner, 'Women refocusing [review of Women Filmmakers Refocusing. Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, Valerie Raoul, eds. New York: Routledge, 2003]', Jump Cut 49, 2007
• Daniel Garrett, 'Dreaming Wide Awake', Offscreen. 9:9 (September 2005)
• Zoë Heyn-Jones, 'Eye and Brain, Torn Asunder: Reading Ideology in Sally Potter’s Orlando', Synoptique 11, March 12, 2008
• Anne Jerslev, 'Sally Potter's "ecrands seconds": a reading of Sally Potter's Work', Nordicom Review, 2, 2000, pp. 275-290
• Annette Kuhn, 'Sally Potter', Screenonline
• Sophie Mayer, 'John Berger on Sally Potter', Vertigo Magazine, No.13, November 2007 See HERE for info about Mayer's book on Potter for Wallflower Press
• Michael Mazière, David Curtis and Steven Bal, 'Artists' Bibliographies: Sally Potter', studycollection.org.uk
• Kristi McKim, '“A State of Loving Detachment": Sally Potter’s Impassioned and Intellectual Cinema', Senses of Cinema, 2006
• Howie Movshovitz, 'Saying "Yes" in iambic pentameter', Podcast for NPR, June 26, 2005
• Jean Oppenheimer, 'Production Slate: Yes - A Cross-Cultural Romance', American Cinematographer Online, July 2005
• Sally Potter's Comprehensive, Chronological CV
• Sally Potter's 'Where Have All the Auteurs Gone?' Masterclass transcript excerpt
• Sally Potter's 'Rage' Pressbook
• Sally Potter: Selected Academic Bibliography
• Sally Potter's website
• Sally Potter's blog
• SP-ARK (web-based open source educational project based on Potter's multi-media archive) (more info HERE, HERE, and HERE)
• Sally Potter, 'Notes on the Adaptation of the Book Orlando', Virginia Woolf Seminar
• Timotheos Roussos, 'An off-beat adaptation: Orlando', Philament: An Online Journal of the Arts and Culture, Issue 3, 2004
• Screenonline Sally Potter pages
• Joel Whitney, 'Yes: An interview with director Sally Potter', Guernica, October 2005
  

In fond memory of Patrick Swayze

The power behind Film Studies For Free's e-throne is a 'person of a certain age', making her (chrono) logically susceptible to a good number of the many charms and talents of actor Patrick Swayze. She is, thus, saddened by the news of his untimely death.

Swayze was an actor of surprisingly slight physical stature, but one who loomed very large and very beautifully, not only in Hollywood and independent cinema, and, of course, in the estimation of his many fans and admirers, but also in the musings of quite a few Film Studies scholars. In particular relation to the latter, he helped to inspire -- FSFF is sure -- many worthwhile studies of (post-)modern gender and sexuality, 'looking relations', and acting in film.

In fond memory of his work for the screen, a few links to openly-accessible items of some of that scholarship are given below:

• Katherine Barscay, 'Kathryn Bigelow's Gen(d)re', Cinephile (Post Genre Issue), Vol. 4, Summer 2008
• Douglas Booth, 'Surfing Films and Videos: Adolescent Fun, Alternative Lifestyle, Adventure Industry, Journal of Sport History, Fall 1996
  
• Kathryn Kane, 'Passing as Queer and Racing Towards Whiteness: To Wong Foo, Thanks but No Thanks', Genders OnLine Journal, Issue 42, 2005
  
• Ahava Leibtag, '"The only thing you have to be is yourself": Ideology and Identity Politics in Dirty Dancing and The Last Dance', MA Thesis, Georgetown University, 2002
• Marianne Mulvey, 'Is there sincerity in hollow speech? Feeling the cliché in contemporary performance', Nowiswhere, Issue 3, 2009 (scroll down)
  
• Thomas Piontek, 'Kinging in the Heartland; or, The Power of Marginality', Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 43, No. 3/4, 2002, pp. 125-143
• Nicola Rehling, ''White Masculinity in Cross-Dressing Comedies', All or Nothing: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema, PhD Thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2005 (pp. 228-233)
  
• Tracy Sutton and Gregory Fouts, 'Measuring and Contextualising "Chemistry" in the Movies', Journal of Media Psychology, Volume 10, No. 1, Winter 2005
• Brenda Wilson, 'Blurring the Boundaries: Auteurism & Kathryn Bigelow', Cinephile (Gender and Violence Issue), Vol. 1, April 2005

Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993)

Christina Lane, Feminist Hollwyood: From Born in Flames to Point Break (Wayne State University Press, 2000)


John Izod, Myth, Mind, and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)