Saturday 24 April 2010

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:

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
Dina Iordanova and Keith Brown
University of St Andrews
“Introduction and welcome”
(8min 16sec)
Mette Hjort
Mette Hjort
Lignan University, Hong Kong
“Homophilic Transnationalism: The 'Advance Party' Initiative”

Rod Stoneman
Rod Stoneman
Huston School of Film & Digital Media, Galway, Ireland
“Dimpsey at the Edge”

Duncan Petrie
Duncan Petrie
University of Auckland, New Zealand
“Small National Cinemas in an Era of Globalisation”

Sheldon Lu
Sheldon Lu
University of California at Davis, USA
“Emerging from Underground and the Periphery: Independent Cinema in Contemporary China”

Lucia Nagib
Lucia Nagib
Leeds University, UK
“Japanese Cinema and Local Modernity”

Laura U. Marks
Laura U. Marks
Simon Fraser University, Canada
“Geopolitics Hides Something in the Image; Arab Cinema Unfolds Something Else”

Faye Ginsburg
Faye Ginsburg
New York University, USA
“Black Screens and Cultural Citizenship”

Dudley Andrew
Dudley Andrew
Yale University, USA
“Turbulent Waves, Stagnant Seas: Awash in World Cinema”

Bill Marshall
Bill Marshall
University of Glasgow, UK
“Deleuze, Quebec and Cinemas of Minor Frenchness”

John Caughie
John Caughie
University of Glasgow, UK
“The Angel's Share: Morvern Callar and the Difficulty of Art Cinema”

Pam Cook
Pam Cook
University of Southampton, UK
“Out from Down Under: Baz Luhrmann and Australian Cinema”

Patricia Pisters
Patricia Pisters
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
“Filming Tanger: Migratory Identities in North Africa”

Hamid Naficy
Hamid Naficy
Rice University, USA
“Interstitial, Transnational, and National-Iranian Silent Cinema”

Kristian Feigelson
Kristian Feigelson
Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France
“A Visual Map of the Film World”

3 comments:

Middento said...

Thanks a ton! As usual, you provide a fantastic wealth of information (and timely, as it turns out, since I am currently revamping my national cinemas course -- double thanks for the alert on the new Wayne State volume!).

Catherine Grant said...

Thanks Jeffrey. If you're revamping a national cinemas course you might also want to know about another new book - just out in the US: Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by (my University of Sussex colleague) Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, published by Oxford University Press. There are no freebie online chapters, sadly, so I didn't refer to it above. And I haven't read it yet. But it looks great, so worth getting an inspection copy to check it out.

Middento said...

Wow, you're right. This looks fantastic -- I just ordered it for our library. Thanks for the tip!