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Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Flânerie and (Post)Modernity: Links in memory of Anne Friedberg



Slavko Vorkapić's original montage sequence "The Furies" (created for the film Crime Without Passion, 1934; music by Ludwig van Beethoven). While Vorkapić had complete creative freedom in writing, designing, directing and editing his montage sequences for feature films, his work was often reduced to its bones in the released productions. In the 1930s, Vorkapić was dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. For more information about Vorkapić, see this great post at Bright Lights After Dark


Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear last week of the untimely death, on October 9, of Anne Friedberg, a much loved and admired professor, and inspiring Chair of the Critical Studies Division, at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts (see her wonderful 2008 commencement speech here).

As her LA Times obituary put it so well (also see here), Friedberg expanded the study of film, emphasizing its relationship to other visual fields, including architecture, art history and digital media. She was author of the important book Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern and co-editor of an influential anthology of critical and theoretical writing about film, Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism.

In 2008, Friedberg was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an academy film scholar. It awarded her $25,000 to research and write a multimedia project about Slavko Vorkapić, a Serbian director and editor who achieved prominence in the 1930s for his montage work in such Hollywood films as Crime Without Passion (see above), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and The Good Earth.

Always a hugely innovative as well as generous scholar, last year Professor Friedberg launched a freely-accessible, interactive translation, or extension, of her most recent book (The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, 2006): The Virtual Window Interactive. It was through this latter project, as well as her brilliant work on cinema, culture, and (post)modernism, that FSFF's author became a fervent admirer of her work.

In memory of Anne Friedberg, and in honour of her important legacy for screen studies, here is a list of links to pieces of online and openly-accessible scholarship on the topic of flânerie, and the flâneur/flâneuse, in film and (old and new) media studies, all of which acknowledge their debt to the great Californian scholar's work:
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