Study of a Single Film: Forbidden Planet (in memory of Leslie Nielsen)

Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis star in Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)

Film Studies For Free was sad to hear that the king of deadpan movie humour, actor Leslie Nielsen, has died at the age of 84. Of all the films he starred in, the one that has most often been the subject of scholarly studies was the hugely influential science fiction movie Forbidden Planet, a film in which Nielsen played a sincerely serious role.

In (metonymic) memory of Nielsen's wonderful career (the straight part standing for the mostly comic whole), FSFF has assembled a list of links to openly accessible academic studies of this 1956 film. With its groundbreaking electronic music score by Louis and Bebe Barron, its highly personable robot character, its loose adaptation of a high culture text (Shakespeare's The Tempest), and its well elaborated allusions to classical (and post-classical) mythology, as well as to Freud (the Id monster), Forbidden Planet will probably keep film academics in business for quite some time. But, FSFF hopes some will also turn their attention to Nielsen's comic performances, before too long.

Shirley, they merit that, at the very least.

• Martin Stig Andersen, 'Audiovisual Correspondences', CEC: eContact! 12.4 — Perspectives on the Electroacoustic Work / Perspectives sur l'œuvre électroacoustique (August 2010)
• Simone Caroti, "Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest"    page 2 of 12 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004)
• David Cooper, '[Review of] James Wierzbicki: Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet: A Film Score Guide', The Journal of Film Music, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2007
• Ted Friedman, 'Jung and Lost', FlowTV, May 1, 2009
• Robert M. Geraci, 'Robots and the Sacred in Science and Science Fiction: Theological Implications of Artificial Intelligence', Zygon, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2007)
• Miguel Angel González Campos, 'Shakespeare in Outer Space: Forbidden Planet as Adaptation of The Tempest', Sederi 9 (1998)
• Greg Grewell, 'Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions Then, Now, and in the (Imagined) Future', Rocky Mountain Review, Fall 2001
• Laurie Johnson, 'Felix and Gilles's tempestuous, monstrous machine', M/C Journal: Journal of Media and Culture, 2 (6) 1999 
• David A. Kirby, 'The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films', Literature and Medicine 26, no. 1 (Spring 2007)
• T.J. Matheson, 'Marcuse, Ellul, and the Science-Fiction Film: Negative Responses to Technology', Science Fiction Studies, #58, Volume 19, Part 3, November 1992
• Anthony Miller, '"In this last tempest": Modernising Shakespeare’s Tempest on Film', Sydney Studies in English, Vol 23 (1997)
• Roy Schwartzman, '“Engenderneered Machines in Science Fiction Film.” Studies in Popular Culture 22.1 (October 1999): 75-87
• Rachel Weissbrod, 'Inter-Semiotic Translation: Shakespeare on Screen', Journal of Specialised Translation, Issue 5, January 2006

Wide Screen Journal on Film Production Studies

Javier Casanova in Vainilla Chip (Erik Knudsen, 2009) Watch this film here (or here) and read Knudsen's article on his work

Set in the small Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños, just outside Havana, Vainilla Chip tells the story of an ordinary day for an elderly ice cream maker, Javier Rodriguez Casanova. An ordinary day which, like all the other ordinary days, has become painfully pierced by an acute sense of longing for his deceased wife.
     This film is an intimate portrait of a hard working man in a contemporary Cuba far removed from clichés of The Revolution and romanticised memories of Cuban music. Vainilla Chip brings the musicality of one ordinary man’s life to the fore to reveal a universal struggle affecting many people across cultural and political divides. [Erik Knudsen]

We often hear that the power of films lays in their emotional impact. In recent years, some corners of film studies have been preoccupied with the investigation of the senses and the body, which could be related to the view of films in terms of emotions and affect. Much of the filmmaking process rests on creating and communicating this emotional power of the films. Instead of thinking, like Powdermaker did, that the film workers are collectively involved in story-telling, or like Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger, that they are preoccupied with the generation of a particular style of filmmaking, we would like to argue that films are collectively involved in generating, assembling and crafting the emotion of the film. [Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska]

Film Studies For Free is very happy to pass on news that a special issue of the online, Open Access film journal Wide Screen has just been published on "Production Studies". The issue was edited by Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska. The Table of Contents is given below.


Essays

• 'Magic, Emotions And Film Producers: Unlocking The “Black-Box” Of Film Production' by Dorota Ostrowska Abstract PDF HTML

• 'The Film Producer as a Creative Force' by Alejandro Pardo Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Housekeeper of Hong Kong cinema: The role of producer in the system of Hong Kong film industry' by Cindy Chan Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Close Encounters?: Contemporary Turkish Television And Cinema' by Melis Behlil Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Anthology Film. The Future Is Now: Film Producer As Creative Director' by Shekhar Deshpande Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Cinema Of Poverty: Independence And Simplicity In An Age Of Abundance And Complexity' by Erik Knudsen Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Understanding Orlova: Youtube producers, Hot for Words, and some pitfalls of production studies' by Patrick Vonderau Abstract PDF HTML

New Screening the Past

Image from The Portraitist/Portrecista (Ireneusz Dobrowolski, 2005),  Read Frances Guerin's essay on this film.

The developments of new digital technologies and representational forms have revived interest between photography and cinema, an interest that is both creative and critical. Independent filmmakers are availing themselves of alternative exhibition formats and spaces for their work, and moving image experimentation is now commonplace in the fields of contemporary fine art, design, music, and theatre.
     For this Special Issue of Screening the Past, guest editors Des O’Rawe and Sam Rohdie bring together a collection of original articles on the aesthetic and institutional relations between film, photography, and the visual arts, in particular writing that is attentive to cinematic forms and their recon­figuration within the contemporary visual arts.

 
As always, Film Studies For Free's little beating heart almost leapt out of its digital body at the news that a new issue of the Screening the Past journal had hit the e-stands. It's a special issue, the theme of which is Cinema/Photography: Beyond Representation (Issue 29, 2010). Below is the table of contents:

• George Kouvaros: He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother.
• Lara Thompson: Monochrome Now: Digital Black and White Cinema and the Photographic Past.
• Sarinah Masukor: The Album of Everyday Life: The Photograph in the Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
• Sam Rohdie: Profils Paysans.
• Des O’Rawe: Cinema Lucida: Johan van der Keuken and the Meaning of Loss.
• Rebecca Sheehan: The Time of Sculpture: Film, Photography and Auguste Rodin.
• Frances Guerin: Film as an Archive for Photography: The Portraitist as Witness to the Holocaust.
• Ji-hoon Kim: David Claerbout’s Digital Pensive Images.

First Release

• Wheeler Winston Dixon: Beyond Characterization: Performance in 1960s Experimental Cinema.
• George Kouvaros: Our Place in the World.
• Kathy Drayton: Inspiration and Girl in a Mirror.
• Gabrielle Murray: Fact and Fiction: The Iraq War Film in Absence.

Classics and Re-runs

• Adrian Martin: Bill Henson and the Devil, Probably.
• John Conomos: Bill Henson and the Cinematic.

Study of a Single Film: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

 

Finding Equilibrium in Hitchcock's Vertigo 

Roundtable discussion at the Philoctetes Center, New York, on November 6, 2010, with Richard Allen, John Belton, Joe McElhaney, Edward Neresessian, and Brigitte Peucker

Vertigo (1958) is the Hitchcock film in which the confusion of ontological registers—of reality with illusion—takes center stage. Indeed, it’s a case study of someone for whom this confusion is nearly pathological. The James Stewart character, Scottie, is duped by a performance with criminal intent, as he falls for a woman he believes to be Madeleine, but who in reality is a woman named Judy (played by Kim Novak) perpetrating a masquerade. Around this “false” Madeleine, a narrative is created that's designed to ensnare Scottie. The film concerns a mysterious case of “possession”—a staged fascination with death—played out in a series of silent tableaux, each of which aestheticizes and eroticizes the Madeleine figure. The film's narrative structure is circular and repetitive; it's been suggested that the film itself represents a distinct form of madness. "Vertigo is just a movie," writes Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed, "but no other movie I know so purely conveys the sealing of a mind within a scorching fantasy." What is the role of psychoanalysis in Hitchcock's work? Is psychoanalysis merely one "surface feature" of Hitchcock's work, as Richard Allen has suggested, subject to irony like all the others? What draws psychoanalytic critics to Hitchcock's work, and how, if at all, is this phenomenon related to its modernism? [Philoctetes Center]

Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular link-fests pertaining to the study of a single film: today, it's the turn of Alfred Hitchcock's truly magical thriller Vertigo (1958). 

The below list of openly-accessible resources was very much inspired by the recent posting of a hugely entertaining, and vertiginously brilliant, discussion on this film between some of the most able Film Studies academics and writers of their generation (see above). The discussion was hosted by the wonderful people at the Philoctetes Center in New York City. Thanks so much to them for making this video available for all to watch and learn from.

• Richard Allen, 'Camera Movement in Vertigo', The MacGuffin, 2007
• Pilar Andrade, 'Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts', CLC Web, Volume 10 Issue 4 (December 2008)
• Jonathan A. Austad, Hemingway and Hitchcock: An Examination of the Aesthetic Modernity, PhD Thesis, Florida State University, 2008 (see especially p. 36 onwards)
• Emanuel Berman, 'Hitchcock's Vertigo: the Collapse of a Rescue Phantasy', epff3: Film and Psychoanalysis, 2000
• Giorgio Biancorosso, 'Beginning Credits and Beyond: Music and the Cinematic Imagination', Echo, Volume 3 Issue 1 (Spring 2001) 
• John Conomos, 'The Vertigo of Time', Senses of Cinema, Issue 6, 2000
• Ben Dooley, 'Psychoanalysis in Bringing up Baby and Vertigo', Offscreen Journal, Volume 9, Issue 7, July 31, 2005
• Joyce Huntjens, 'Vertigo: A Vertiginous Gap in Reality and a Woman Who Doesn't Exist', Image [and] Narrative, Issue 5, January 2003
• John Locke, 'Last Laugh: Was Hitchcock's Masterpiece Vertigo a Private Joke?', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 18, March 1997
• David George Menard, 'Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 1 ~ Hitchcock and Romantic Irony', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 9, Sept 30, 2008; and Page 2
• David George Menard, 'Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 2 ~ Hitchcockian Suspense', Offscreen Journal, Volume 12, Issue 9, Sept 30, 2008 and Page 2
• Ken Mogg, 'Alfred Hitchcock', Senses of Cinema, 2005
• Ken Mogg, 'The Fragments of the Mirror: Vertigo and its Sources', The MacGuffin, No. 25, 2000
• Ken Mogg, 'Some Notes on Vertigo (and Strangers on a Train), The MacGuffin, 2007
• Ornam Rotem, 'The World as One Whole: The Syntactic Role Of Colour in Film', Kinema, 2008
• Tom Schneller, '[Review of] David Cooper. Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook...', The Journal of Film Music, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2007 Pages 75–78
• George J. Stack, 'Vertigo as Existentialist Film', Philosophy Today, Fall 1986
• Anthony Stagliano, 'Disruptive excesses: gender economics, excesses, and the gaze in Marnie and Vertigo', MA Thesis, DePaul University, 2010
• David Sterritt, 'Introduction', The Films of Alfred Hitchcock [extended sample] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 
• Jack Sullivan, 'Overture', Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006)
• Alanna Thain, 'Funny How Secrets Travel: DAvid Lynch's Lost Highway', Invisible Culture, Issue 8, 2004
• Jennifer Tyburczy, 'Crossing Borders and the Female Body: The Vampirization of the Female Characters in Hitchcock’s Vertigo', Text, Practice, Performance V (2003): 85-106
• Constantine Verevis, 'Remaking Film', Film Studies, Vol. 4, Summer 2004 (pp 87-103)
• Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
• McKenzie Wark, 'Vectoral Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 6, 2000 

 

Writing with Hitchcock: Plot vs. Story in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (also see here)

On Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie)

Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass on word of an excellent new website dedicated to the study of Jean-Luc Godard's 1980 film Sauve qui peut (la vie)/ Every Man for Himself / Slow Motion (co-scripted by Godard with Jean-Claude Carrière and Anne-Marie Miéville). The website joins existing, brilliant, online Godard resources, like Glen W. Norton's Cinema = Godard = Cinema, first established in 1996.

The new site is the Every Man For Himself Resource Archive that gathers links to (almost) every online item of note pertaining to this film in one, elegant, supremely useful space. This is a must-visit recommendation, especially given that this film has just been re-released in some cinemas (in a new 35mm print) in the USA.

Here are direct links to two articles on the film that EMFH doesn't yet list (but which FSFF is hopeful that it will add!)

• James Roy MacBean, 'Sauve qui peut (la vie): An Open Letter to Godard', Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986, pp. 7-12 
• Richard Morris, '"To Realise the Ideal": Miscellaneous Remarks on Godard's Conceptual Processes Apropos of Sauve qui peut (la vie)', Film Studies, Vol. 5 (Winter 2004), (pp 1-7)

There is also a really interesting discussion by David Bordwell of studies of Godard's film online here:

• David Bordwell, 'Historical Poetics of Cinema', in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed. R. Barton Palmer ((New York: AMS Press, 1989) [scroll to p. 383]

There are also numerous references to Godard's film in the following online book (just search "Sauve" in your browser's "Find [on page]" facility: 

• Robert Philip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (1983)

Below are all the excellent scholarly essays that EMFH links to so far. These links take you to the relevant page of their website where you will be referred on to the items themselves:

• Thomas Albrecht, “Sauve qui peut (l’image): Reading for a Double Life,” Cinema Journal 30:2, Winter 1991. 
• Raymond Bellour, “I am an Image,” Camera Obscura 8/9/10, Fall 1982. 
• Alain Bergala and Leos Carax, “Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie): Une Journée de Tournage,” Cahiers du Cinéma 306 December 1979.   (French) 
• Janet Bergstrom, “Violence and Enunciation,” Camera Obscura 8/9/10, Fall 1982.
• Harmut Bitomsky, “Desperation Spawns Courage,” Filmkritik V. 25.9, 1981.  (German)
• Catherine Grant, "Home Movies: The Curious Cinematic Collaboration of Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard," [pre-print draft] in Forever Gordard, ed. Temple, Williams and Witt, Black Dog Publishing, 2004.
• Peter Harcourt, “Le Nouveau Godard: An Exploration of Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie),” Film Quarterly V. 35.2 (Winter 1981/2).
• Elizabeth Lyon, “La Passion, c’est pas ca,” Camera Obscura 8/9/10, Fall 1982. 
• Colin MacCabe, “Slow Motion,” Screen 21.3, 1981. 
• Contance Penley, “Pornography Eroticism,” Camera Obscura 8/9/10, Fall 1982. 
• Robert Stam, “Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie),” Millennium Film Journal, Fall 1981/2, 10/11. 
• Hanns Zischler, “Godard’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) – Report on the Director’s Press Conference, Zurich, Jan 19, 1981,” Filmkritik V.25.9, 1981. (German)

Great e-Books on British and American cinema, and film theory and history

Image from Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) [Read Paul Grainge's wonderful essay 'Colouring the past: Pleasantville and the textuality of media memory' linked to below]

Film Studies For Free today sings the praises of the very marvellous Manchester University Press. MUP has an excellent record in Open Access publishing, and especially in Film Studies OA journal publishing, as previously reported by FSFF. But it is also in the process of making some of its full-length film books freely accessible.

So far, there are two books available, one on British cinema and one on memory and popular cinema. Direct links to the PDF files of both books and full tables of their contents and contributors are given below. These links have also been added to FSFF's  permanent, and frequently updated, listing of Open Access film and moving image studies e-books, which now links to 90 free, scholarly tomes.

• Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

'Memory and popular film' uses memory as a specific framework for the cultural study of film. Taking Hollywood as its focus, this timely book provides a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. Considering the relationship between official and popular memory, the politics of memory, and the technological and representational shifts that have come to effect memory's contemporary mediation, the book contributes to the growing debate on the status and function of the past in cultural life and discourse. By gathering key critics from film studies, American studies and cultural studies, 'Memory and popular film' establishes a framework for discussing issues of memory IN film and of film AS memory. Together with essays on the remembered past in early film marketing, within popular reminiscence, and at film festivals, the book considers memory films such as Forrest Gump, Lone Star, Pleasantville, Rosewood and Jackie Brown. 'Memory and popular film' provides a wide-ranging analysis that will benefit both students and critics of popular culture, film studies and the past. [Rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/]

Table of Contents:

• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 'Introduction: memory and popular film' by Paul Grainge

Part 1: Public history, popular memory

• 'A white man’s country: Yale’s Chronicles of America' by Roberta E. Pearson
• 'Civic pageantry and public memory in the silent era commemorative film: The Pony Express at the Diamond Jubilee' by Heidi Kenaga
• ‘Look behind you!’: memories of cinema-going in the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood' by Sarah Stubbings
• 'Raiding the archive: film festivals and the revival of Classic Hollywood' by Julian Stringer

Part 2: The politics of memory

• 'The articulation of memory and desire: from Vietnam to the war in the Persian Gulf' by John Storey
• 'The movie-made Movement: civil rites of passage' by Sharon Monteith
• 'Prosthetic memory: the ethics and politics of memory in an age of mass culture' by Alison Landsberg
• ‘"Forget the Alamo": history, legend and memory in John Sayles’ Lone Star' by Neil Campbell    

Part 3: 'Mediating memory

• '‘Mortgaged to music’: new retro movies in 1990s Hollywood cinema' by Philip Drake
• 'Colouring the past: Pleasantville and the textuality of media memory' by Paul Grainge
• 'Memory, history and digital imagery in contemporary film' by Robert Burgoyne
• 'Postcinema/Postmemory' by Jeffrey Pence

• Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (eds), British Cinema in the 1950s: A celebration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

Table of Contents:

• Acknowledgements 
• A 1950s timeline
• 'Celebrating British cinema of the 1950s' by Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard

Critics 

• 'Raymond Durgnat and A Mirror for England' by Robert Murphy
• 'Lindsay Anderson: Sequence and the rise of auteurism in 1950s Britain' by Erik Hedling

Mirroring England

• 'National snapshots: fixing the past in English war films' by Fred Inglis
• 'Film and the Festival of Britain' by Sarah Easen
• 'The national health: Pat Jackson’s White Corridors' by Charles Barr
• 'The long shadow: Robert Hamer after Ealing' by Philip Kemp
• ‘"If they want culture, they pay": consumerism and alienation in 1950s comedies' by Dave Rolinson
• 'Boys, ballet and begonias: The Spanish Gardener and its analogues' by Alison Platt
• 'Intimate stranger: the early British films of Joseph Losey' by Neil Sinyard

Painfully squalid?

• 'Women of Twilight' by Kerry Kidd
• 'Yield to the Night' by Melanie Williams
• 'From script to screen: Serious Charge and film censorship' by Tony Aldgate
• 'Housewife’s choice: Woman in a Dressing Gown' by Melanie Williams

Adaptability

• 'Too theatrical by half? The Admirable Crichton and Look Back in Anger' by Stephen Lacey
• 'A Tale of Two Cities and the Cold War' by Robert Giddings
• 'Value for money: Baker and Berman, and Tempean Films' by Brian McFarlane
• 'Adaptable Terence Rattigan: Separate Tables, separate entities?' by Dominic Shellard

Personal views

• 'Archiving the 1950s' by Bryony Dixon
• 'Being a film reviewer in the 1950s' by Isabel Quigly
• 'Michael Redgrave and The Mountebank’s Tale' by Corin Redgrave

Networking Knowledge on Michael Mann, Lindsay Anderson, Barbara Stanwyck and much more

Will Smith as Muhammad Ali in Ali (Michael Mann, 2001) [See Vincent M Gaine's article on this and other Mann films]

From time to time, Film Studies For Free can be ever so dim. It has referred on a number of occasions in previous posts to choice items published in the online periodical Networking Knowledge: Journal of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Post-Graduate Network (PGN). But it omitted to mention the journal in its permanent listing of Online Film and Media Studies Journals. D'oh!

Not only has FSFF now rectified this unfortunate error, but it has decided to carry out proper penance in the form of the below complete listing of direct links to all items so far published in this excellent journal, including many articles of note on film and moving image studies. Enjoy!

• Vol 3, No 1 (2010) - Table of Contents

Re-Mediated Mann:The Re-Mediation of Public Figures and Events in The Insider and Ali	PDF
Vincent M Gaine

The Cinema Authorship of Lindsay Anderson: Anderson’s Directorial Practice	PDF
Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard

Publicising the News: Publicity and Australian Commercial Television News	PDF
Michaela Jackson

Th’ Abstract of All Faults: Antony vs. the Hegemonic Man	PDF
Rachael Kelly

Reporting Religion and Enemy Images in the Nigerian Press	PDF
Odamah Musa

Journalistic Blogs in China: Political Dissent and the Formation of a Public Sphere	PDF
Hai Tang

The Role of Media in Supporting Communication in Cultural Institutions. Case Study: Communicating Media Art	PDF
Michela Negrini

• Vol 2, No 1 (2009) -MeCCSA PGN Conference 2008 -Table of Contents

Activism, Resistance and Online Presence

Digital vs Material: the Everyday Construction of Mediated Political Action	Abstract PDF
Veronica Barassi

Igorots in the Blogosphere: Claiming Spaces, Re-constructing Identities	Abstract PDF
Liezel C. Longboan

Blogging in China: Freedom of Expression vs Political Censorship in Sexual and Satirical Blogs	Abstract PDF
Hai Thang

The Press and the Political Process

Scottish Press Coverage of UK General Elections after Devolution: the 2001 and 2005 Campaigns	Abstract PDF
Marina Dekavalla

Women and the Media

“Focus on the Housewife”: the BBC and the Post-war Woman, 1945-1955	Abstract PDF
Kristin Skoog

The Representation of Motherhood in Post-socialist Chinese Cinema	Abstract PDF
Huili Hao

Theorising Film

‘We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM’: Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral	Abstract PDF
Vincent M. Gaine

Indeterminate Film-thinking and Interpretation	Abstract PDF
Jimmy Billingham

Audiences and Fans

Underworld vs the World of Darkness: Players and Filmgoers Respond to a Legal Battle	Abstract PDF
Rachel Mizsei Ward

Wots Not Queer: the Search for Sexual Representation in Audience Research	Abstract PDF
Craig Haslop

Screen Icons

From Below to Above the Title: the Construction of the Star Image of Barbara Stanwyck, 1930-1935	Abstract PDF
Linda Berkvens

The Iconography of Mark Antony	Abstract PDF
Rachael Kelly

Locating Media Productions

Representing National Culture, Values and Identity in the Brazilian Television Mini-series	Abstract PDF
Niall Brennan

‘I Will Survive’: Forty Years of Amber Films and the Evolution of Regional Film Policy	Abstract PDF
Paul O'Reilly

Place, Communication, Translation

Read My Voice: Expressing Silence and Sound in Text-messages	Abstract PDF
Agnieszka Knaś

The Medium is Global, the Content is not: Translating Commercial Websites	Abstract PDF
Yvonne Lee

• Vol 1, No 2 (2007) - MeCCSA PGN Conference 2007 -Table of Contents

Branding, Advertising and Corporate Cultures

Steve Jobs: the human logo	Abstract PDF
Chloe Peacock

Interpersonal Communication Competence in SME Internationalization	Abstract PDF
Pipsa Purhonen

Design for Screen

One Form, Many Letters: Fluid and transient letterforms in screen-based typographic artefacts	Abstract PDF
Barbara Brownie

Fan Culture and Online Audiences

Dressing up as Vampires: Virtual vamps - negotiating female identity in cyberspace	Abstract PDF
Maria Mellins

Film and Theatre

The Playwright as Filmmaker: History, Theory and Practice	Abstract PDF
Othniel Smith

Imperialism and Globalisation

The evolution of Hollywood's representation of Arabs before 9/11: the relationship between political events and the notion of 'Otherness'	Abstract PDF
Sulaiman Arti

Popular Culture

"Little Englander" : Fawlty Towers - A textual analysis of nationalistic ideology	Abstract PDF
Matthew Bartley

Public Service Broadcasting and Radio

Reducing the difference between citizens and consumers: a critical discourse analysis of the Communications White Paper 2000	Abstract PDF
Simon Dawes

Reporting the Conflict

The Ideology of Objectivity: Constructs of Language in the Popular Press of Early Twentieth-Century Britain	Abstract PDF
Claudia Heske

Explaining Media Frames of Contested Foreign Conflicts: Irish National ‘Opinion Leader’ Newspapers’ Frames of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (July 2000 to July 2004)	Abstract PDF
Mary O'Regan

Sexual Representations in Cinema

The Killer Father and the Final Mother: Womb-Envy in The Cell	Abstract PDF
Shweta Sharma

Still Image

Photojournalism as a Creator of Values: otherness in Sámi representations	Abstract PDF
Heli Lehtela

Uses of Music and Sound in Film

Music, identity, and oblivion	Abstract PDF
Gerry Moorey

• Vol 1, No 1 (2007) -Minding the Gap: Reflections on Media Practice & Theory -Table of Contents

Sound and Image: Alternative Methods of Research and Presentation

Summary of Panel Presentations	Abstract PDF
Dr Charlotte Crofts

'High Definitions': Articulating Media Practice As Research	Abstract PDF
Dr Charlotte Crofts

Video Diary Making as a Research Method: Just Another Jargon of Authenticity?	Abstract PDF
Tony Dowmunt

Bringing Work Back to School: Professional Experience in Media Research

Dilemmas of Ethnographic Research: The Practitioner/Academic’s Quandary	Abstract PDF
Somnath Batabyal

A Return to the ‘Big’ Discourse : Interviewing History Documentary-Makers	Abstract PDF
Dafydd Sills-Jones

Theoretical Models in Mass Media Practice: Perspectives from the West

Introduction	Abstract PDF
Line Thomsen

Do Journalists know how to listen and should they be taught how to? Some thoughts on contemporary interviewing practices.	Abstract PDF
Gavin Rees

‘Documents of Ordinariness – The BBC Video Nation Project’	Abstract PDF
Jo Henderson

Daily or Diary? Towards a New Profile in e-Journalism	Abstract PDF
Cristina Perales, Mon Rodríguez

A Shield for Whom? First Amendment Implications of a Federal Shield Law	Abstract PDF
Patrice Holderbach

Theoretical Models in Mass Media Practice: Perspectives from the Developing World

Introduction	Abstract PDF
Venkata Vemuri

Journalism and Political Democracy in Brazil	Abstract PDF
Dr Carolina Matos

‘Reporting Back’: Al Jazeera English	Abstract PDF
Nina Bigalke

Grounds for Development: Media Development Practice and Theory in Post-Conflict Afghanistan	Abstract PDF
Sarah Kamal

Understanding the Complexity of Journalistic Practices: the Case of Xinhua	Abstract PDF
Dr Xin Xin

Double Vocations: Media Practice and Theory

Introduction	Abstract PDF
Dafydd Sills-Jones

Media Corporatism: Whither Journalistic Values?	Abstract PDF
George Nyabuga

In the Hands of Fate: Existentialism in Film

Image from I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) [See Sam Mithani's thesis, The Hollywood Left: Cinematic Art and Activism in the 1930s for reflections on the existentialism of this film's director]

Viewing (30:43): In the Hands of Fate: Existentialism in Film (October 18, 2010)

Cinema condenses actions and their consequences. It puts the viewer into someone else's shoes. Dilemmas tend to be urgent, up-close and personal: ergo, all films are existential. But several films in this year's [London Film Festival] programme specifically emphasise philosophical struggles with circumstance. Veiko Õunpuu's The Temptation of St Tony makes drama out of the very discourse of existential thought. Xavier Beauvois' Of Gods and Men follows monks whose faith is shaken by fear of execution. Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte links a dying man's end, to the fate of a lost kid (as in goat) and a felled tree. Finally, the dying man in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives accepts his fate yet the past makes its own demands on him. It's more than just mortal thoughts that brings these films together; it's a heightened sensitivity to our sense of purpose. We are very excited that directors Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Michelangelo Frammartino [joined] Dr David Sorfa (Senior lecturer in Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University and managing editor of the journal, Film-Philosophy) on a panel chaired by Ian Haydn Smith, Editor of International Film Guide.

Film Studies For Free wanted to alert its readers to the above linked-to, wonderful BFI video on the topic of  existentialism and cinema. In its usual good faith, and as a perfect accompaniment, FSFF also brings you a little list of links to great, openly accessible, scholarly reading, much of it book-length, on the very same theme.

• Anders Albrechtslund, 'Surveillance pleasures: existentialism and ethics as represented in cinematic art' [Draft version], Author's Website, date unknown
• Tomas Axelson, 'Movies and Meaning: Studying Audience, Fiction Film and Existential Matters', Particip@tions, Volume 5, Issue 1, Special Edition (May 2008)
• Brian K. Bergen-Aurand, Seeing and the Seen: Post-Phenomelogical Ethics and the Cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Maryland, 2004  
• Jean-Philippe Derant, 'Existentialist Aesthetics', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009
• Marty Fairbairn, Cinema as Secular Church: A Phenomenological Typology and Hermeneutics, PhD Thesis, McMaster University, 1995
• Robert Harvey, 'Sartre/Cinema: Spectator/Art That Is Not One', Cinema Journal, 30.3, 1991 
• Sam Mithani, The Hollywood Left: Cinematic Art and Activism in the 1930s, PhD Thesis, University of Southern California, 2007 
• Katherine V. Pettit, The truth and death of indexicality: photography, philosophy and cinema, MA Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2002 
• David C. Simmons, The Dysphoric Style in Contemporary American Independent Cinema, PhD Thesis, Florida State University, Spring 2005
• Benjamin 
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, '“Show Me How to See Things the Way You Do": Existentialism in Faith, Philosophy, and Film [on The Thin Red Line]', Honours Thesis, Whitman College, 2010
• Deborah A. Walker, Self-reflexivity and the construction of subjectivity in contemporary French cinema: Alain Resnais, PhD Thesis, University of Auckland, 2001
• Tony Williams, 'Power and Paranoia: 40s Hollwyood', from Jump Cut, no. 35, April 1990, pp. 73-77