Paranormal cinematic activity: ghost film studies

Latest update: April 27, 2010

 Publicity still for The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). See an excerpt from this film in Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay 'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film', embedded towards the foot of this entry

Film Studies For Free has gone and spooked itself, today, with its own scary persistence in compiling a list of links to openly accessible, online, scholarly articles, chapters and theses on international ghost film studies. Oh, and there are two related video essays lurking at the bottom to scare the scholarly bejesus out of you for good measure, too (added April 27) .

Like all the best posts at this blog (IOHO), the list below owes its hefty materiality to its connections with FSFF's author's own (hauntological) research, some of which, hopefully, will be directly shared with her fearless readers very shortly. So do please be a revenant, won't you?

• Michael J. Anderson, 'Histoire de Marie et Julien: Jacques Rivette's Material Ghost Story', Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004

• Guy Austin, '"In Fear and Pain": Stardom and the Body in Two French Ghost Films', Scope, Issue 7, February 2007

• Sarah M. Ball, The Uncanny in Japanese and American Horror Film: Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s Ring, MA thesis, North Carolina State University, 2006  

• Colette Balmain, '“Vengeful Virgins in White”: Female Monstrosity in Asian Cinema', in Niall Scott (ed), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004) [scroll down through pdf to p. 123]

• Colette Balmain, 'Inside the Well of Loneliness: Towards a Definition of the Japanese Horror Film', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Papers, 2006

• Caetlin Benson-Allott , '“Before you die, you see The Ring”: notes on the immanent obsolescence of VHS, from Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007

• Lesley Brill, 'M. Night Shyamalan: A Preliminary Report', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008

• Ture Bural, 'Endland Umpire: A placement of David Lynch's Inland Empire', Perforations, 29, 2007

• Jodey Castricano, 'Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the Strange Question of Trans-Subjectivity', Jung: the e-Journal of the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies Volume 2, Number 3, April, 2006

• Brigid Cherry, 'Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror', Particip@tions, Vol. 5, Issue 1, 2008

• Leah A.Cheyne, 'The Sixth Sense: Humanizing Horror', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• David Church, 'Return of the Return of the Repressed: Notes on the American Horror Film (1991-2006)', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 10 (November 25, 2006)

• Michel Ciment, 'Kubrick and the Fantastic', (1982) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)

• Robyn Citizen, 'Review of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity by Linnie Blake', Senses of Cinema,Issue 51, 2009

• Ryan Cooke, 'Review of Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008', Screening the Past,Issue 23, 2008

• Lisa Coulthard, 'Uncanny Memories: Stan Douglas, Subjectivity and Cinema, Scope, 2000

• John Culbert, 'The Well and the Web: Phantoms of Community and the Mediatic Public Sphere', Postmodern Culture, 19.2, January 2009

• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Blackwell 2009)

• Carolyn Erler, 'The Obama Code: Ghosts and Monsters in the Visual Datasphere', CTheory.net, Resetting Theory Issue, December 2009
  

• Mark Fisher, 'Home is where the haunt is: The Shining's hauntology', k-punk, January 23, 2006

• Mark Fisher, 'You have always been the caretaker': the spectral spaces of the Overlook Hotel', Perforations, 29, 2007

• Brian Grady, '"We're Engaged to Be Engaged": The Paranormal Activity of Trauma and Relationship', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 67, February 2010

• Catherine Grant, 'Giving up Ghosts: Eliseo Subiela's Hombre mirando al sudeste and No te mueras sin decirme a dónde vas', Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds, ed. Rob Rix and Roberto Rodríguez-Saona (Leeds: Leeds Iberian Papers - Trinity and All Saints/University of Leeds, 1997), pp. 89-120  

• Coral Houtman, 'Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense', Scope, November 2004

• Wendy F. Hsu , 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, vol. 5 (2003)

• Annamarie Jagose, 'Hollywood Lesbians [Interview with Patricia White about Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability', Genders, 32, 2000

• Fredric Jameson, 'Historicism in The Shining', (1981) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)

• Brian Jarvis, 'Anamorphic allegory in The Ring, or, seven ways of looking at a horror video', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 3, 2007

• Bruce Kawin, 'Carnival of Souls', The Criterion Collection, Film Essays, 76

• Antonio Lázaro-Reboll , 'The Transnational Reception of El espinazo del diablo (Guillermo del Toro 2001)', Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2007, 39–51

• John Lewis, '"Mother Oh God Mother …": Analysing the 'Horror' of Single Mothers in Contemporary Hollywood Horror', Scope, Issue 2, 2005

• Owen Livermore, 'Gun and Other Play: Takashi Miike and Fantasia Festival 2004', Synoptique, December 2004

• Li Zeng, Horror returns to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and the space of horror ', from Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009

• Luo Hui, 'Chapter Four: Minor Discourses in New Peripheries', The Ghost of Liaozhai: Pu Songling's Ghostlore and its History of Reception, PhD Thesis,University of Toronto, 2009

• Nina K. Martin, 'Dread of mothering: plumbing the depths of Dark Water', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Ewa Mazierska, 'Between the Sacred and the Profane, the Sublime and the Trivial: The Magic Realism of Jan Jakub Kolski ', Scope, 2000

• Donna McRae, 'Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance', B for Bad Cinema, Colloquy, Issue 18, December 2009

• Thomas Mical, 'Introduction: Hauntology, or Spectral Space', Perforations, 29, 2007  

• Elizabeth Mullen, 'Synæsthetic Specters: Haunting Hill House on the Silver Screen', Image and Narrative, Vol. 10, Issue 1, 2009

• Lindsay Nelson, 'Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema', Cinemascope, Issue 13, July-December 2009

• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009

• Eimi Ozawa , 'Remaking Corporeality and Spatiality: U.S. Adaptations of Japanese Horror Films, 49th Parallel, Conference Special Edition, Autumn 2006

• N. Payasopon, 'The Cultural and Filmic Elements that contribute to the popularity of the Thai film Nang Nak', BU Review, Volume 2, No. 1, January-June 2003

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

• Laurence A. Rickels, 'Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time', Other Voices, v.2, n.2 (March 2002)

• Juneko J. Robinson , 'Review: Jay McRoy (2007) Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam: Rodopi', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010

• Caroline Ruddell, 'Breaking Boundaries The Representation of Split Identity in Anime', Animation Studies – Vol.2, 2007

• Steven Schneider, 'World Horror Cinema and the US: Bringing it all back home', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002

• Donato Totaro, 'Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 1: The Long Take., Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• Donato Totaro, Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 2: Mise en Scène', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• Donato Totaro, 'Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008', Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009

• Dennis Tredy, 'Shadows of Shadows - Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: J. Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), D. Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and A. Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999)', E-rea, 2.1, 2004

• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Leaving the cinema: metacinematic cruising in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Gang Gary Xu, 'Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005

• Young-joon Cho, 'Four Cinema Versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', Thannhouser Company Film Preservation, 2006

• Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Neda Hei-tung Ng, 'Magic, Medicine, Cannibalism: the China Demon in Hong Kong Horror', David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Working Paper Series, Paper Number: 74, April 2008 

Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay
'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film',

Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay
'Unreal Estate: The Scariest Movie Locations of All Time'

Cinema at the Periphery: world cinema studies articles and videos

Sequence from Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, featuring Samantha Morton as Morvern and the psychedelic song 'Some Velvet Morning' written by Lee Hazlewood in 1967 and performed by Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra (for more on Ramsay's great film, see Scott Tobias, 'The New Cult Canon: Morvern Callar', The A.V. Club, February 27, 2008; as well as John Caughie, 'The Angel's Share: Morvern Callar and the Difficulty of Art Cinema', video also linked to below)

With Spring (and a spring) in its step, Film Studies For Free brings you a whole, golden, host of articles as well as little video tasters to the work of some of the world's leading film scholars on the topic of international (and/or 'interstitial', or 'transnational', or 'peripheral') cinema.

The videos are recordings of presentations from the Cinema at the Periphery conference held at the University of St Andrews between June 15th and June 17th 2006. While those external to that university can only see the first ten minutes of each presentation, they're still very informative, and showcase, in miniature at least, some brilliant film studies research.

They've been newly publicised on the occasion of the publication of the conference book Cinema at the Periphery by Wayne State University Press, part of its series on Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television, under the general editorship of Barry Keith Grant. The book is edited by Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal.

As FSFF always endeavours to add value to the free resources it links to, it decided also to assemble an accompanying list of related, high quality, freely accessible, online articles:

• Kim Byeongcheol, 'Production and Consumption of Contemporary Korean Cinema', Korea Journal, Spring 2006
• Hamilton Carroll, 'Resisting the Nation: John Sayles' Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) as Postnational Cinema', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 
• Ruby Cheung and D. H. Fleming, 'Introduction: Cinema and Identities', Cinemas, Identities and Beyond, edited by Ruby Cheung with D. H. Fleming (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) 
• E. Anna Claydon, ‘Nostalgia in the Post-National: Contemporary British Cinema and the South-Asian Diaspora’, South Asian Cultural Studies,Vol.2 No.1, 2008, pp 26 - 38  
• Pam Cook, 'Transnational Utopias: Baz Lurhmann and Australian Cinema', Transnational Cinema, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2010 
• Austin Fisher, 'A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier', Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert Smith,  Scope, Issue 15, 2010
• Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora', Framework (no.36), 1989 
• Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, 'Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies', Transnational Cinema, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2010 
• Andrew Higson, 'Transnational Developments in European Cinema in the 1920s', Transnational Cinema, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2010
• Teresa Hoefert de Turégano, 'Transnational Cinematic Flows: World Cinema as World Music?', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• Jan Holmberg, 'Globalized Vision', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA  
• Paul Kerr, 'Babel's Network Narrative: Packaging a Globalized Art Cinema', Transnational Cinema, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2010
  
• 'Kinocultura: on Russian, Russo-Soviet, Eastern European, and Central Asian cinemas & television', Film Studies For Free, April 11, 2010 (for dozens of relevant article son Eastern and Central European/Asian cinemas)
• Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, 'Historical Introduction', Transnational Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawai‘i Press and copyrighted, 1997)
• Ewa Mazierska, 'Eastern European cinema: old and new approaches', Studies in Eastern European Cinema Volume 1 Number 1, 2010 
• Marcus Power, 'Post-colonial cinema and the reconfiguration of Moçambicanidade', Lusotoipie 2004: 261-278
• Phil Powrie, 'Heritage, History and the New Realism', French Cinema in the 1990s." French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference. Ed. Phil Powrie. New York: Oxford, 1998
• Steven Schneider, 'World Horror Cinema and the US: Bringing it all back home', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• Brigitte Schulze, 'Globalization and Divergence Dynamics of Dissensus in Non-Dominant Cinema Cultures of South India', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert Smith,  Scope, Issue 15, 2010

The clips can be viewed using Quicktime player 7, VLC player or similar MP4 player. Just click on the pictures to access.
The clips are currently set to stream at a quality of medium (512Kbps) - they are also available to watch as low (56Kbps) or high (2Mbps). 

Dina Iordanova and Keith Brown

University of St Andrews

“Introduction and welcome”

(8min 16sec)

Mette Hjort

Lignan University, Hong Kong

“Homophilic Transnationalism: The 'Advance Party' Initiative”

Rod Stoneman

Huston School of Film & Digital Media, Galway, Ireland

“Dimpsey at the Edge”

Duncan Petrie

University of Auckland, New Zealand

“Small National Cinemas in an Era of Globalisation”

Sheldon Lu

University of California at Davis, USA

“Emerging from Underground and the Periphery: Independent Cinema in Contemporary China”

Lucia Nagib

Leeds University, UK

“Japanese Cinema and Local Modernity”

Laura U. Marks

Simon Fraser University, Canada

“Geopolitics Hides Something in the Image; Arab Cinema Unfolds Something Else”

Faye Ginsburg

New York University, USA

“Black Screens and Cultural Citizenship”

Dudley Andrew

Yale University, USA

“Turbulent Waves, Stagnant Seas: Awash in World Cinema”

Bill Marshall

University of Glasgow, UK

“Deleuze, Quebec and Cinemas of Minor Frenchness”

John Caughie

University of Glasgow, UK

“The Angel's Share: Morvern Callar and the Difficulty of Art Cinema”

Pam Cook

University of Southampton, UK

“Out from Down Under: Baz Luhrmann and Australian Cinema”

Patricia Pisters

University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

“Filming Tanger: Migratory Identities in North Africa”

Hamid Naficy

Rice University, USA

“Interstitial, Transnational, and National-Iranian Silent Cinema”

Kristian Feigelson

Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France

“A Visual Map of the Film World”

Audiovisual Thinking: Online Video Journal about Audiovisuality, Communication & Media

Screen caps from 'What is Academic Video' by Inge Ejbye Sørensen  
for Audiovisual Thinking 

Film Studies For Free predicted at the beginning of this year that 2010 would be the year of the video essay. And thus it has come to pass... Woohoo!

Audiovisual Thinking -- an online video journal about "audiovisuality, communication and media" -- has just launched and it looks to FSFF to be a very worthwhile venture indeed. All relevant information has been pasted in below to tempt you to the excellent AT website. There are lots of introductory videos embedded there which will inform you audiovisually about the Audiovisual Thinking ethos.

Audiovisual Thinking has issued its first call for videos for its first proper issue which will explore the "legacy and merit of the use of audiovisual material in academic thinking, research and teaching, in the past, present and in the future" (deadline: June 15, 2010; do note: according to the submission form (as of April 22) the videos should be no longer than seven minutes and a maximum of [an as yet quite tiny] 10 Mb [Update: The editors reported to FSFF that they are working on achieving a larger, automated, upload volume. If you have larger submissions, these can be uploaded manually, so just get in touch with the editors via the website's contact page].

If you don't yet completely understand why FSFF is so pleased with this development, you should check out the following propaganda piece that it published last July: Video Essays on Films: A Multiprotagonist Manifesto. Also, do have a peruse of all the video essays embedded at FSFF, including this little one we prepared earlier (sadly, it's just a little longer than seven minutes and larger than 10Mb or 100Mb...).

About Audiovisual Thinking

Audiovisual Thinking is a pioneering forum where academics and educators can articulate, conceptualize and disseminate their research about audiovisuality and audiovisual culture through the medium of video.

     International in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, the purpose of Audiovisual Thinking is to develop and promote academic thinking in and about all aspects of audiovisuality and audiovisual culture.

    Advised by a board of leading academics and thinkers in the fields of audiovisuality, communication and the media, the journal seeks to set the standard for academic audiovisual essays now and in the future.

    Video submissions are welcome from all fields of study and, as one would expect, the main criteria for submissions are that the discussion and thinking are conveyed through audiovisual means.

Audiovisual Thinking Issues

Each issue of Audiovisual Thinking will call for and then showcase academic videos around a specific theme within audiovisual culture and the media. The journal also accepts ‘opinion’ or ‘reflective’ audiovisual pieces on any area of audiovisual research or pedagogy. 

    Submissions are welcome from the areas of the Arts, Journalism, Media and Communication studies, as well as Education and the Social Sciences where audiovisual material is routinely used, or is gaining ground, as an academic research tool or teaching method.
     This first issue will explore the legacy of audiovisual content in contemporary academic research and thinking. Submit your video here.

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BFI Researchers' Tales: Mulvey, Dyer, Kubrick, Frayling

 Image of Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

For some time now, Film Studies For Free has been enjoying the videos that the British Film Institute has been posting at BFI Live, its online video channel exploring film and TV culture. There are lots of videos worth seeing at the site but, below, FSFF has singled out and directly linked to some which are especially deserving of the attention of film scholars.

Laura Mulvey on the Blonde

8 Mar 2010: The world-renowned film theorist presents her thoughts on the Hitchcock Blonde.

Researchers' Tales: Richard Dyer

8 Mar 2010: The writer and academic discusses his instrumental role in the creation of the BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious celebrations of queer cinema.

Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? (Part 1)

13 Jan 2010: An illustrated lecture on Stanley Kubrick’s most ambitious yet unrealised project.

Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? (Part 2)

11 Jan 2010: An onstage discussion of the finer points of Stanley Kubrick’s failed production.

Researchers' Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns

14 Dec 2009: Eminent academic and writer Sir Christopher Frayling discusses the Spaghetti Western genre as part of the BFI National Library’s Researcher’s Tales strand.

Researchers' Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Film Research

14 Dec 2009: Eminent educationalist and writer Sir Christopher Frayling discusses the practice of researching film.

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

La Science de Michel Gondry: online scholarship on his films & videos

Last updated April 19, 2010

Electric Dreams? Above and below, images from Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008)

 

Michel Gondry and Robert Stickgold discuss dreams, filmmaking and the scientific method (SeedMagazine.com, 2007).

Film Studies For Free presents un petit hommage -- en images, hypertexte, et vidéos --to one of its favourite filmmakers, Michel Gondry, French maestro of the music-video form, and also responsible, as director, for the audiovisual brilliance of the following films: Human Nature (2001); Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); La Science des rêves/The Science of Sleep (2006); Be Kind Rewind (2008); and The Green Hornet (2010).

There are some truly wonderful scholarly resources linked to below: merci bien, as ever, to their authors, editors and publishers for making them freely accessible online.

• Dwayne Avery, 'The Future is behind you: the Reclamation of Place in Be Kind Rewind', Movement 1.1: the futures of cinema, 2009 
• Jim Batcho, 'Overlapping Levels of the Diegesis in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007
• New Julia Driver, 'Memory, Desire, and Value in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', in Christopher Grau (ed), Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (Routledge, 2009)
• New Michel Gondry, 'Foreword', in Christopher Grau (ed), Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (Routledge, 2009)
• New Christopher Grau, 'Introduction' to Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (Routledge, 2009)
• New Christopher Grau, 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the morality of memory',  Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (1), Winter 2006
• Carolyn Jess-Cooke, 'Narrative and Mediatized Memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', Scope, Issue 8, June 2007
• Brandon M. Hancock, 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 9, No. 1 April 2005
• Erin Hill-Parks, 'From Film to Life: The Construction of Identity in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I “Heart” Huckabees', From Camera Lens To Critical Lens A Collection Of Best Essays On Film Adaptation, edited by Rebecca Housel (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006) 
• Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - screenplay, 2003
• John Finlay Kerr, ‘Rereading’ Be Kind Rewind (USA 2008): How film history can be remapped through the social memories of popular culture', Screening the Past, Issue 24, 2009
• Mike Lim, 'Review of Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007', Screening the Past, Issue 23, 2008
• Colm O'Shea, 'Out of His Head: Metaphysical Escape Attempts in the Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman ', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 63, February 2009 
• Heidi Peeters , 'The semiotics of music videos: it must be written in the stars', Image [and] Narrative, Issue 8, May 2004
• A Raz, and M Paasivirta, 'The Science and Fiction of Memory Removal', PsycCRITIQUES, Vol 50(42), 2005
• Richard Rushton, 'Cinema After Deleuze After 9/11', Postmodern Culture, Volume 19, No. 2, 2009 
• Fredericka Shulman, 'The Objects of Memory: Collecting Eternal Sunshine', Philament, Issue 5, 2005
• Jason Sperb, 'Be Kind Rewind / or, an incomplete essay on Off-Modern American Cinephilia', Jamais Vu, December 13, 2009
• Gunnar Strøm, 'The Two Golden Ages  of Animated Music Video', Animation Studies, Vol.2, 2007
• Dayton Taylor and Hector Macleod, Digital Air Techniques (2008)
• Scott Thrill, '"How My Brain Works": An Interview with Michel Gondry', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 53, August 2006
• José van Dijck, 'Memory Matters in the Digital Age', Configurations, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2004
• Thomas E. Wartenberg, 'Film as Argument', Film Studies, Issue 8, Summer 2006

Matt Zoller Seitz shares his thoughts with fellow filmmaker critic Kevin B Lee while rewatching Michel Gondry's 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, May 2009

 

 The original music video of Gary Jules' and Michael Andrews' cover version of Tears for Fears' song Mad World, directed by Michel Gondry. This song features in the soundtrack of Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)

Kinocultura: on Russian, Russo-Soviet, Eastern European, & Central Asian cinemas & television

Excerpt from the beginning of Nastroishchik/The Tuner (Kira Muratova, Russia/Ukraine, 2004)

Muratova’s tight and intricate narrative is punctuated by familiar cinematic devices, red herrings, and pranks immediately identifiable—even beyond cinema production—with Muratova’s sui generic style. [F]irst, her inclusion of a “cultural intermezzo” by an amateur artist-enthusiast.  [...]  In The Tuner, this device takes the form of a girl singer-songwriter performing on public transport and a number of other charmingly inept musicians (a clarinetist, two tuba players, random, elderly singers, and Andrei’s spontaneous “Uzbek” improvisation).  This is the utopian dimension of Muratova’s creative act: irredeemably unprofessional, yet utterly complete, self-sufficient in itself, the flawless conjuration of an inner hallucination. Nancy Condee, 'Kira Muratova, The Tuner [Nastroishchik] (2004)', Kinocultura, Issue 7  January 2005

(See also Emma Widdis: Muratova's Clothes, Muratova's Textures, Muratova's Skin Kinocultura, Issue 8, April 2005; Acquarello, 'The Tuner, 2004', Strictly Film School, July 27, 2006)

Film Studies For Free was alerted yesterday by David Hudson at The Auteurs Daily that the April 2010 issue of Kinocultura, the Open Access journal of New Russian Cinema, had just been published online.  

This journal has been appearing since July 2003, and that simple fact makes for a true wealth of freely accessible scholarly resources. With its editorial board of leading scholars in this field, Kinocultura is quite simply one of the best film studies e-journals, with its incredibly wide-ranging scholarly articles alongside wonderful film and book reviews and dossiers/reports/roundtable discussions/videos.  

Below, FSFF has copied and pasted in the index of all full-length articles and interviews published by the journal to date. Here also is a list of Kinocultura's special issues on particular countries:#1 Central Asia (2004); #2 Poland (2005); #3 Slovakia (2005); #4 Czech Rep. (2006); #5 Bulgaria (2006); #6 Romania (2007); #7 Hungary (2008); #8 Serbia (2009); #9 Ukraine (2009); #10 Estonia (2010). Note that there are forthcoming issues on Kazakhstan and Croatia.
 
Those of you interested in Russian and Soviet film studies should also know about the following great, online bibliography, too: University of Pittsburgh Russian and Soviet Cinema.

Kinocultura - Issue 28: April 2010

• Mariya Y. Boston: "Speaking in Tongues: Poetic Language in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun"

• Andrey Shcherbenok: "Asymmetric Warfare: The Vision of the Enemy in American and Soviet Cold War Cinemas"

Festival Report

• Birgit Beumers: " Restoring Images: Belye Stolby 2010"

Issue 27: January 2010

• David MacFadyen: Cinematic Abuse as Self-Affirmation: Russian Video Mash-ups, Illegal Social Networking, and the Rise of Bekmambetov’s “Office Plankton”

• Maria Vinogradova: Amateur Cinema in the Soviet Union and the Leningrad of Film Amateurs in the 1970s-1980s

Festival Reports

• Dar'ia Borisova: Kinoshok 2009: The Expiring Principle of Soviet Brotherhood

AAASS 2009 Roundtable on Young Kazakh Cinema

• Birgit Beumers: Waves, old and new, in Kazakh Cinema

• Jane Knox-Voina: Young Kazakh Filmmakers:  New “New Wave” on the Road

• Stephen M. Norris: The Gifts of History: Young Kazakh Cinema and the Past

• Eugénie Zvonkine: “Kazakhstan Rules the World:” Satybaldy Narymbetov’s Mustafa Shokai (2008) and the Rewriting of History

Issue 26: October 2009

• Evgenii Margolit: “Monumental Sculptures in Soviet Cinema of the 1920s”

Festival Reports

• Birgit Beumers: “A Return to Folklore?—Suzdal 2009”

• Birgit Beumers, “Kinotavr 2009: The Victory of New Drama”

• Christina Stojanova: “Characters and Circumstances: Notes on the Competition Program of the 31st Moscow International Film Festival”

Issue 25: July 2009

• Kristina Matvienko: With a Cine-Eye through Russia: The Festival “Kinoteatr.doc” 2009

• Irina Mel’nikova: (Re)presentation of The Metamorphosis: Valerii Fokin, Franz Kafka, René Magritte and the Issue of Cinematic Adaptation

• [Interview] Anton Sidarenka: Interview with Sergei Loznitsa. Conversations on Cinema: "A Master of Time"

Issue 24: April 2009

• Nikolai Izvolov: Designed Sound in the USSR

• Jane Knox-Voina: New ‘New’ Wave Filmmakers Welcome Their Audiences’ Discomfort: Kazakh and Kyrgyz Youth Films

• Gulnara Abikeeva: Central Asian Documentary Films of the Soviet Era as a Factor in the Formation of National Identity

Festival Report:

• Gulbara Tolomushova: The Secret Sense of the Tashkent Messages

Issue 23: January 2009

• Maria Belodubrovskaya: Understanding the Magic: Special Effects in Ladislas Starewitch's L'Horloge magique

• Larisa Maliukova: The State of the Art: Russian Animation Today

• Evgenii Margolit: The Image of Germans in Russian Cultural Space

Festival Reports:

• Birgit Beumers: New Voices and Old Images: Eurasia 2008

• Gulbara Tolomushova: Dushanbe Flights to Googoosh's Songs: Didor 2008

Issue 22: October 2008

• Klaus Eder: Moscow 2008: The Center of the Province

• Nina Tsyrkun: "Forward to the Past, or: What kind of millennium has begun?" (on the Russian Program of the Moscow International Film Festival)

• Diliara Tasbulatova: "Kinotavr 19"

• Aliya Moldalieva: "New Cinema in Kyrgyzstan"

Issue 21: July 2008
Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium 2008 — The Ideological Occult: Russian Cinema under Putin:

• Seth Graham: "Two Decades of Post-Soviet Cinema: Taking Stock of Our Stocktaking"
• Stephen Norris: "Packaging the Past: Cinema and Nationhood in the Putin Era"
• Marina Drozdova: "Tremors: Various Types of Unrest"
• Aleksandr Kiselev: " 'No Power Can Force Us to Live Badly' "
• Gregory Dolgopolov: “Liquidating the Happy end of the Putin-era”

• Birgit Beumers: "The 13th Open Russian Animation Festival Suzdal" (2008)

• Dina Goder: "Kinoteatr.doc 2008: Some Notes on the Cuffs"

• David MacFadyen: “The Presumed Threat of Digital Culture to Russian Cinema”

Issue 20: April 2008

• Tom Birchenough: The Koktebel Studio

• Dar'ia Borisova: The Forum of National Cinematographies Played at Being a Film School

• Barbara Wurm: The International Film Festival Rotterdam — A Festival of Significance for Russian Cinema; In Focus: Svetlana Proskurina

• Birgit Beumers: Returning to the Roots: Central Asia in Rottterdam

• [Interview] Inna Smailova: Interview with Abai Kulbai: The Keeper of Eternal Values in Cinema

Issue 19: January 2008

• [Interview] Giulia Marcucci: Interview with Aleksandr Mindadze: From Scriptwriter to Director

• Irina Shilova: Renata Litvinova: Actress and Persona

• Michael Rouland: A Tour through Kinostan

• Inna Smailova: Three Generations of Kazakh Cinematographers: Action - Reaction - Change of Reality

• Eugénie Zvonkine: "On a Motorbike or on a Horse?": The IV Eurasia International Film Festival 2007

Issue 18: October 2007

• Tom Birchenough: "Vladivostok 2007": The lnternational Pacific Meridian Festival

• Mihai Chirilov: "Phony Games: The Moscow International Film Festival 2007"

• Jeremy Hicks: “Reflections of Andrei Tarkovskii: The Zerkalo Festival and Conference”

• David MacFadyen: “Strike Up, Pipers! The Russian Program of the Moscow Film Festival, 2007”

• Kirill Razlogov: "Kinotavr: Caught in the Crossfire"

Issue 17: July 2007
Melodrama and Kino-Ideology: Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium Roundtable:

• Peter Bagrov: "Soviet Melodrama: A Historical Overview"
• Dawn Seckler: "Orphans of the Storm: Economic Destitution, Physical Lack, and Social Alienation in the Contemporary Russian Melodrama"
• Oleg Sulkin: "Melodrama as the Experience of the Moment"
• Dmitrii Savel'ev: "Out of Ideology: The Post-Soviet Melodrama"
• Mikhail Trofimenkov: "Origin of the Species: Post-Soviet Melodrama"
• David MacFadyen: "Ethical Masochism in Recent Russian Melodrama"
• Marcia Landy: "Melodrama: Short Reflections on a Long Subject"

• Kristina Matvienko: The Third Festival of Real Cinema: "Kinoteatr.doc" (2007)

Issue 16: April 2007

• Jose Alaniz: Cinema without Barriers

• Thomas Campbell: A Khakassian Sends a Postcard Home: The Strange Career of Evgenii "Debil" Kondrat'ev

• David MacFadyen: Changing Notions of Realism in Primetime Russian TV Drama

• Stephen Norris: In the Gloom: The Political Lives of Undead Bodies in Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch

Issue 15: January 2007

• Peter Bagrov: Ermler, Stalin, and Animation: On the Film The Peasants (1934)

• Birgit Beumers and Michael Rouland: Eurasia 2006: An International Festival?

• Konstantine Klioutchkine: The Kamenskaia Television Series and the Conventions of Russian Television

• Alena Solntseva: KINOTEATR.DOC: The First Three Years

Issue 14: October 2006

• Svetlana Khokhriakova: Starless, Prize-less: The Moscow International Film Festival 2006

• Adam Lowenstein: From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema (Lincoln Center Program, August 2006)

• Elena Plakhova: Victims of Euphoria: The 17th Open Russian Film Festival (Kinotavr 2006)

• Birgit Beumers: Cannes 2006: The Russian Presence

Issue 13: July 2006

• Natalia Lukinykh: Inspired by the Oscar, Hardened by the Marketplace. On the Everydays and Holidays of Russian Animation. (Suzdal Animation Festival)

• Eugenie Zvonkine: The Tenth Forum for National Cinematographies of the CIS and the Baltic States (Kinoforum)

• Aleksandr Deriabin: Judgment Day: Recreation and Stylization (On Ethics in Documentary Filmmaking and Other Matters)

Issue 12: April 2006

• Bauyrzhan Nogerbek: "The Eurasia-2005 Film Festival: Ambitions and Realities"

• Vladimir Padunov: Storing and Restoring History: Gosfil'mofond and the 10th Belye Stolby Archival Film Festival

• Thomas Campbell: Five Theses About Timur Bekmambetov's Day Watch

Russian TV-Serials: AAASS Roundtable 2005: "Russian TV: Past Issues of Present Concern"

• Birgit Beumers: "The Serialization of the War"
• David MacFadyen: "The Significance of Brezhnev for Russian TV Drama Today"
• Alexander Prokhorov: "Size Matters: The Ideological Functions of the Length of Soviet Feature Films and Television Mini-Series in the 1950s and 1960s"

Issue 11: January 2006

• José Alaniz: Moscow Conceptualism and the ArtKomiks of Gosha Ostretsov

• Thomas H. Campbell: The Bioaesthetics of Evgenii Iufit

• Seth Graham: Iusup Razykov and Contemporary Uzbek Cinema

Issue 10: October 2005

• Elena Stishova: There's No Point Arguing with the Marketplace: The Ninth KinoForum

• Aleksandr Shpagin: Newly Sprouting Seedlings in the Rustling Field of Domestic Cinema (Kinotavr 2005)

• Diliara Tasbulatova: Study, Study, Study: The Grand Prize of the 27th Moscow International Film Festival Went to Aleksei Uchitel''s Dreaming of Space  

Issue 9: July 2005

• Ian Christie: Iakov Protazanov: A Timely Case for Treatment

• Konstantine Klioutchkine: "Fedor Mikhailovich Lucked Out with Vladimir Vladimirovich": The Idiot

• Television Series in the Context of Putin's Culture

Issue 8: April 2005

• John MacKay:  The "Spinning Top" Takes Another Turn: Vertov Today

• Petre Petrov:  The Freeze of Historicity in Thaw Cinema

• Emma Widdis: Muratova's Clothes, Muratova's Textures, Muratova's Skin

• David MacFadyen: Literature Has Left the Building: Russian Romance and Today 's TV Drama

Issue 7: January 2005

• Special Feature: Dziga Vertov: John MacKay: Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective

• KinoShock 2004: Gul'nara Abikeyeva: KinoShock: A Panorama of National Cinemas  

Issue 6: October 2004
"National Cinema": Pittsburgh Film Colloquium roundtable featuring:  

• Nancy Condee: Imperial Ectoplasm
• Marcia Landy: Frames or Frame Ups of National Cinema
• Adam Lowenstein: David Cronenberg and the 'Face' of National Authorship

Moscow International Film Festival 2004 : Susan Larsen: At the Intersection of Art, Commerce, and National Pride  

Issue 5:  July 2004

• Kinoforum 2004: Vladimir Padunov: Imperial Acorn -→ National Oaks: The Eighth KinoForum .

• Kinotavr 2004: Victor Matizen: Masses and Classes: Kinotavr 2004 .

Issue 4:  April 2004

• Josephine Woll: Exorcising the Devil: Russian Cinema and Horror.

Issue 3:  January 2004

• Vladimir Padunov: Stars Above Almaty: Kazakh Cinema Between 1998 and 2003 .

• Bauyrzhan Nogerbek: Demythologizing and Reconstructing National Space in the Kazakh "New Wave" .

Issue 1:  July 2003

• Nancy Condee and Vladimir Padunov: Subtropical Cinema: Kinotavr, Collective Heroes and Small Screens: The Fourteenth Annual Open Russian Film Festival (3-17 June 2003).

• Vladimir Padunov: Moscow's Silver Anniversary: XXV Moscow International Film Festival (20-29 June 2003).