A Stocking Full of eReading and Viewing: Happy Holidays!

Updated December 31, 2012

Frame grab from Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986). Read Keeley Saunders' article about the tableaux vivants in this film

'Tis the season to be jolly, apparently, and so Film Studies For Free is happy to oblige with some extremely jolly, serious, and completely free eGifts for the festive season, ones from wise men and women around the world. You can find them liberally scattered in list form, below, under the six headers in bold.

This bountiful blog will be back early in the New Year with its list of Best Online (and Open Access) Film Studies Resources in 2012. So, if you haven't taken part in the readers' poll for that yet, you still have a little time.

In the meantime, FSFF wishes you very happy holidays indeed!


SEQUENCE 1.1, 2012

The first array of eBook publications from SEQUENCE Serial Studies in Media, Film and Music has just been launched — a central element in REFRAME and SEQUENCE’s particular model of academic ePublishing.

You can now read SEQUENCE 1.1 — Steven Shaviro’s magisterial and open access article about a film about the end of world (‘MELANCHOLIA, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime‘) — in a variety of free eBook formats. Just click here to check them out and download them to your devices.

NOTEBOOK, December 17, 2012

• 'Expressing the Move' by Hoi Lun Law

  

RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM: Creating the Witness

Leshu Torchin's current research focuses on how screen media bear witness to human rights abuses and genocide in order to mobilise audiences. In her guest post for RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM, Torchin introduces some of the issues that are central to her new book, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet. Thanks to Torchin and the book’s publishers University of Minnesota Press, REFRAME has been granted the permission to share the extensive introduction to the book online. You can read it here.

ALPHAVILLE, Issue 4, Winter 2012

Open Theme Edited by Stefano Odorico and Aidan Power

• Editorial By Stefano Odorico and Aidan Power
• Who’s Got the “Reel” Power? The Problem of Female Antagonisms in Blaxploitation Cinema By Melissa DeAnn Seifert, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Egyptian Film Censorship: Safeguarding Society, Upholding Taboos By Dina Mansour, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy
• “I Get Sort of Carried Away, Being So Normal and Everything”: The Oscillating Sexuality of Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert in the works of Nabokov, Kubrick and Lyne By Emerson Storm Fillman Richards, University of Florida
• Towards an Embodied Poetics of Cinema: The Metaphoric Construction of Abstract Meaning in Film By Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja, University of Antwerp
• Film-Thinking and Narrative Indeterminacy By Jimmy Billingham, Independent Scholar
• Image Versus Imagination: Memory’s Theatre of Cruelty in Chris Marker’s La Jetée By Martina Witt-Jauch, Goettingen University
• Anima Animus: Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Bisexual Method in Last Exit to Brooklyn By Ian Murphy, University College Cork

Book Reviews Edited by Pierluigi Ercole

• Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions, by Warren Buckland (2012)  Reviewer: Kevin McDonald, Cal State Northridge  
• Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, by Elizabeth Cowie (2011) Reviewer: Amy Parziale, University of Arizona (USA)  
• The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture, by Patricia Pisters (2012) Reviewer: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait

Reports Edited by Ian Murphy

• Motion Capture: Drawing and the Moving Image. Curated by Ed Krčma and Matt Packer
  Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 26 July–4 November 2012 Reporter: Jill Murphy, University College Cork  
• The Society of Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference 2012, Boston, USA, 21–25 March 2012 Reporters: Anthony Coman and Missy Molloy, University of Florida

NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012): The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication

Editorial The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication: An Introduction PDF  Matthew Robinson

Articles

• Caravaggio’s cinematic painting: Fictionalising art and biography in the artist biopic PDF  Keeley Saunders
• Blurring Gender Boundaries – Masculine Confessional in Celebrity Auto/biographies PDF  Hanna Kylloen
• Re-Envisioning the Artist Hero Through Two Cole Porter Biopics PDF  Derek Johnston
• Digital Lives: Refiguring the recent and distant pasts in new biographical forms PDF  Adam Gallimore
• Depicting a Life Less Ordinary: Fantasy as Evidence for Deconstruction in the Contemporary Film Biopic PDF  Carolyn Ellam
• “Sex doesn’t dominate my life at all, really. I think painting does” (David Hockney): the emergence of the queer artist biopic PDF  David Bovey

PGN Matters

• Why PGN Matters: PGN, Our Family PDF  Xuelian Jin

THE CINE-FILES: A Scholarly Journal of Cinema Studies, Issue 2, 2012 

• The Actor’s Vision by Steven Ryben
• Wiping the Dust from Our Eyes by Lauren Newton Glenn
• West of Eden by Duncan Pittman

• “Sex and the City: A Festival Introduction” by Roger Rawlings
• “Wonder Women in the Savannah Film Festival: From the Page to the Screen, and Finally, Beyond” by Alexa Boehringer
• “Chris Marker and the Essay Film: a Presentation by Timothy Corrigan” by Tracy Cox-Stanton 
• Panel: A Critical Eye on Film  with Dr. Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Peter Hitchcock, City University of New York; and critic Claudia Puig, USA Today, alongside Dr. Roger Rawlings, Dr. Tracy Cox-Stanton, and Dr. Chad Newsom
• Reviews:
  
  • A Place at the Table, by Ingela Hartman
  • Brief Encounters, by Jae Matthews
  • Fat Kid Rules the World, by Ben Barbour
  • Nobody Walks, by Kyle Taubken
  • On the Road, by Kate Newell
  • Quartet, by Scotty Barnhart
  • Rust and Bone, by Scotty Barnhart
  • Silver Linings Playbook, by Kyle Taubken
  • Violet and Daisy, by Steve Drum

AUDIENCES - a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press and a bumper new issue of PARTICIPATIONS!

Frame grab from Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902). Read Dan North's great blog entry about the audience-oriented 'attractionist aesthetic' of this film', and Frank Kessler's chapter on this film in the collection Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception

This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the 'effects' of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioral world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional 'box office' studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms. [Publisher's blurb for Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass on news of the publication of an open access version of a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press. Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception is an extremely high quality collection edited by Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History, at Birkbeck, University of London. This great tome has, of course, been added to FSFF's permanent listing of Open Access eBooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!


Since we're on the subject of audiences, it seems a brilliant moment to reproduce, below, links to the incredibly rich contents of the latest, just published, issue of PARTICIPATIONS, the excellent online journal of audience research. Not all items are directly film studies related, but they should be of interest to all researching issues of reception in film and media culture.

Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)

CONTENTS

• Editorial; Acknowledgments
• Introduction: In Search of Audiences Ian Christie

PART I: Reassessing Historic Audiences

• “At the Picture Palace”: The British Cinema Audience, 1895-1920 25 by Nicholas Hiley
• The Gentleman in the Stalls: Georges Méliès and Spectatorship in Early Cinema by Frank Kessler
• Beyond the Nickelodeon: Cinemagoing, Everyday Life and Identity Politics by Judith Thissen
• Cinema in the Colonial City: Early Film Audiences in Calcutta by Ranita Chatterjee
• Locating Early Non-Theatrical Audiences by Gregory A. Waller
• Understanding Audience Behavior Through Statistical Evidence: London and Amsterdam in the Mid-1930s byJohn Sedgwick and Clara Pafort-Overduin

PART II: New Frontiers in Audience Research

• The Aesthetics and Viewing Regimes of Cinema and Television, and Their Dialectics by Annie van den Oever
• Tapping into Our Tribal Heritage: The Lord of the Rings and Brain Evolution by Torben Grodal
• Cinephilia in the Digital Age by Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto
• Spectator, Film and the Mobile Phone by Roger Odin
• Exploring Inner Worlds: Where Cognitive Psychology May Take Us by A dialogue between Tim J. Smith and Ian Christie

PART III: Once and Future Audiences

• Crossing Out the Audience by Martin Barker
• The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory by Raymond Bellour
• Operatic Cinematics: A New View from the Stalls by Kay Armatage
• What Do We Really Know About Film Audiences? by Ian Christie

• Notes; General Bibliography; Notes on Contributors; Index of Names; Index of Film Titles; Index of Subjects

PARTICIPATIONS, 9.2, 2012

Contents

• Editorial - Turnbull, Sue (Joint Editor): 'Editorial introduction'

Articles

• Bore, Inger-Lise Kalviknes:'Focus Group Research and TV Comedy Audiences’
• George, Kelly C.:'Self-Help as Women's Popular Culture in Suburban New Jersey: an Ethnographic Perspective'
• Redfern, Nick:‘Correspondence Analysis of Genre Preferences in UK Film Audiences’

Special Section: Comic-Book Audiences

• Sabin, Roger:'Special Section Introduction’
• Barker, Martin:'The Reception of Joe Sacco's Palestine’
• Berenstein, Ofer:'Comic-Book Fans' Recommendations Ceremony: A Look at the Inter-personal Communication Patterns of a Unique Readers/Speakers Community'
• Burke, Liam:‘"Superman in Green": An Audience Study of Comic-Book Film Adaptations Thor and Green Lantern’
• Gordon, Ian:‘Writing to Superman: Towards an Understanding of the Social Networks of Comic Book Fans’
• Patrick, Kevin:‘"Phans", not "Fans": The Phantom and Australian Comic-Book Fandom’
• Sabeti, Shari:‘"Arts of Time and Space": the Perspectives of a Teenage Audience on Reading Novels and Graphic Novels’
• Woo, Benjamin:‘Understanding Understandings of Comics: Reading and Collecting as Media-Oriented Practices’

Special Section: Music Audiences

• Bennett, Lucy:'Special Section Introduction’
• Anderson, Lauren:'"That's how it's supposed to make you feel": Talking with Audiences about 'Both Sides Now' and Love Actually’
• Anderson, Tonya:'Still Kissing Their Posters Goodnight: Female Fandom and the Politics of Popular Music'
• Avdeeff, Melissa:‘Technological Engagement and Musical Eclecticism: An Examination of Contemporary Listening Practices’
• Baym, Nancy K.:‘Fans or Friends? Seeing Social Media As Musicians Do’
• Duffett, Mark:‘Boosting Elvis: a Content Analysis of Editorial Stories from One Fan Club Magazine’
• Kaun, Anne & Fredrik Stiernstedt:‘Media Memories: The Case of Youth Radio DT64’
• Potts, Liza:‘Amanda Palmer and the #LOFNOTC: How Online Fan Participation is Rewriting Music Labels’
• Zaborowski, Rafal:‘Simple Unchanging Stories about Things We Already Know’: Japanese youth and popular songs’

Special Section: Audience Involvement and New Production Paradigms [COST Action]

• Noguera, José-Manuel, Francesca Pasquali & Mélanie Bourdaa:'Special Section Introduction’
• Hills, Matt:‘Torchwood's Trans-transmedia: Media Tie-ins and Brand “Fanagement”’
• García-Avilés, José Alberto:‘Roles of Audience Participation in Multiplatform Television: from Fans and Consumers, to Collaborators and Activists’
• Boccia Artieri, Giovanni:'Productive Publics and Transmedia Participation’
• Vobic, Igor & Ana Milojevic:‘Societal Roles of Online Journalists in Slovenia and Serbia: Self-Perceptions in Relation to the Audience and Print Journalists’
• Cordeiro, Paula:‘Radio becoming R@dio: Convergence, Interactivity and Broadcasting Trends in Perspective’’
• Bennett, Lucy:'Transformations through Twitter: The England Riots, Television Viewership and Negotiations of Power through Media Convergence'
• Horváth, Dóra, Tamás Csordás & Nóra Nyiro:‘Re-written by Machine and New Technology: Did the Internet Kill the Video Star?’
• Grandío, María del Mar & Joseba Bonaut:'Transmedia Audiences and Television Fiction: a Comparative Approach between Skins (UK) and El Barco (Spain)’
• Berriman, Liam:‘Negotiating Proximity: The Co-Existence of Habbo and its Fansites’
• Lin, Yu-Wei:‘The Emergence of the Techno Elite Audience and Free/Open Source Content: A Case Study on BBC Backstage’
• Villi, Mikko:‘Social Curation in Audience Communities: UDC (User-distributed Content) in the Networked Media Ecosystem’

Special Section: Multi-Method Audience Research [COST Action]

• Schrøder, Kim Christian, Uwe Hasebrink, Sascha Hölig and Martin Barker:'Special Section Introduction’
• Aveyard, Karina:'Observer, Mediator and Empiricist: an Account of Methodological Fusion in the Study of Rural Cinema Audiences in Australia’
• Barker, Martin & Ernest Mathijs:'Researching World Audiences: the Experience of a Complex Methodology'
• Biltereyst, Daniël, Kathleen Lotze & Philippe Meers:‘Triangulation in Historical Audience Research: Reflections and Experiences from a Multi-Methodological Research Project on Cinema Audiences in Flanders’
• Courtois, Cédric:‘When Two Worlds Meet: an Inter-Paradigmatic Mixed Method Approach to Convergent Audiovisual Media Consumption’
• Dhoest, Alexander:‘Mixed Methods, Bifocal Vision: Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Data to Assess Public Service Performance’
• Hasebrink, Uwe &Hanna Domeyer:'Media Repertoires as patterns of behaviour and as Meaningful Practices: a Multimethod Approach to Media Use in Converging Media Environments’
• Nyiro, Nóra:‘Nested Analysis-based Mixed Method Research of Television and Video-recording Audiences’
• Schrøder, Kim Christian:‘Methodological Pluralism as a Vehicle of Qualitative Generalization’

Reviews

• Gelly, Christophe & David Roche (eds.):'Approaches to Film and Reception Theories / Cinéma et Théories de la Réception’ (Reviewed by Martin Barker)
• Miller, Daniel:'The Comfort of Things, and Stuff' (Reviewed by Phil Ramsey)
• Thumim, Nancy:‘Self-Representation and Digital Culture' (Reviewed by Justin Battin)

New SENSES OF CINEMA: Haneke, Méliès, Hanoun, Bergman, Villaverde and more

Frame grab from Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012). Read Roy Grundmann's article on this film.

Film Studies For Free brings you glad tidings of a new issue of Senses of Cinema. All the contents are linked to below. FSFF hasn't pored over all of these yet, but so far the standout piece of interest may well be Haneke scholar extraordinaire Roy Grundmann's article on the Austrian filmmaker's latest film, which argues that

[Amour]’s particular take on the moral tale becomes clearer when we compare it to the moral tales of French New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer. As Rohmer explains, the conte moral does not pivot on characters’ actions, but on their inner conflicts and on how characters rationalize their motivations that arise from these conflicts. It has been noted that Rohmer’s films, like many examples of the Nouvelle Vague, are filled with dialogue in which the protagonists verbalize their feelings, perceptions, and mental states. Haneke’s new film harkens back to this pattern. 

FSFF also liked Marc Saint-Cyr's take on one of its favourite films Fanny and Alexander. And there's lots more that catches the eye in this issue.... 

Issue 65, 2012, Editorial 

Feature Articles

• Love, Death, Truth–Amour by Roy Grundmann
• The Way Wakamatsu Chose His Own Fate: Political Mortality and Radical Dramaturgy by Philip Brophy
• Quotidian Melancholy: Marcel Hanoun’s Une simple histoire by Philip Cartelli
• A Conversation with Nicolas Rey by Darren Hughes
• The Kids Are Not All Right: Fanny and Alexander Thirty Years Later by Marc Saint-Cyr
• “One day, the swan sang this with its wings”: An Interview with Teresa Villaverde by Ela Bittencourt
• To Accept the Unacceptable: Reflections on Three Films by Teresa Villaverde by Ela Bittencourt
• ‘Chromatic Frankenstein’s Monsters?’: Restoration, Colour and Variants of Georges Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune by Wendy Haslem
• The Films of James Gray: Old Testament Narratives by Robert Alpert
• The Yet Unclaimed Baggage of Robert Zemeckis’ Flight by Joseph Natoli
• Wild and Precious –A Film by Bill Mousoulis by Fiona Villella
• Bref Magazine, or, A Tribute to Short Films and thus to the Cinema in General by Viviane Vagh
• The Desire and the Exception by Jacques Kermabon
• Andrew Sarris: The Last of a Kind by John Conomos

Great Directors

• Shirley Clarke by Angelo Koutsourakis

Special Dossier on Tasmania and the Cinema

• Introduction
• Seeing With Green Eyes: Tasmanian Landscape Cinema and the Ecological Gaze by Jane Stadler
• Jewelled Nights: ‘Can Good Movies Be Made in Australia?’ by Jeannette Delamoir
• “What sort of spot is Port Arthur?”: For the Term of His Natural Life and the Tasmanian Gothic by Stephen Gaunson
• Manganinnie– The First Tasmanian Feature Film by John Honey
• Van Diemen’s Land by Jonathan auf der Heide
• Eating and Othering in Jonathan auf der Heide’s Van Diemen’s Land by Guinevere Narraway
• A Culture Cleft in Two – The Documentaries of Scott Millwood by Dan Edwards
• Errol Flynn: A Life at Sea by Robert de Young
• “Change – why should I? I never pretended to be anything than I am”: The Films of Errol Flynn and Raoul Walsh by Adrian Danks

Festival Reports

• Jorge Mourinha DocLisboa
• Pierce Conran on Busan
• Michael Laff on Busan
• Daniel Fairfax and Joshua Sperling on New York
• Pamela Cohn on CPH:DOX
• Bérénice Reynaud on Vancouver
• Ben Cho on Lisbon & Estoril
• Ma Ran on Beijing
• Darren Hughes on Toronto

Cinémathèque Annotations on Film

• José Sarmiento on The Battle of Chile
• Christopher Sharrett on Nostalgia for the Light
• Louise Sheedy on Salvador Allende
• Lee Hill on The Pinochet Case
• Gino Moliterno on Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
• Carlota Larrea on Gomorrah

Book Reviews

• Nicholas Godfrey on The long game: Conversations with independent iconoclasts Roger Corman, George A. Romero, and Charles Burnett
• Douglas Gomery on America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures
• Richard Martin on The Cinema of Michael Haneke
• Tessa Chudy on Polanski and Perception
• Cassandra Lovejoy on Deleuze and World Cinemas
• Martin Potter on Challenge for Change
• Ryan Taylor on Terrorism TV
• Vrasidas Karalis on Greek Cinema, Texts, Histories, Identities
• Ravi Sundaram on Shadow Economies of Cinema

Chronicle of an Auteur: More Antonioni Goodness!

Frame grab from Cronaca di un amore / Story of a Love Affair (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950)

Film Studies For Free presents the second of its celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Below are embedded the video recordings of a number of unmissable talks at Antonioni and the Arts, an event held at Royal Holloway, University of London, in October to mark the anniversary. 

Thanks to Royal Holloway's School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures for hosting the talks, as well as taking the trouble to record them and make them freely available online.

This latest entry coincides with Cronaca di un autor: Convegno dedicato a Michelangelo Antonioni nel centenario della nascita, a marvellous conference, with an amazing array of speakers, taking place between December 11-13, 2012, merely the latest in a series of brilliant, celebratory events in Ferrara, Antonioni's birthplace.

Who knows? Maybe there'll be some more videos to embed here at FSFF! Hope so! In any case, You can see the first FSFF Antonioni anniversary celebration here: Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth.

Part 1.a, Arts Building - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Dr. Laura Rascaroli's lecture and discussion. In conversation with Dr. Giuliana Pieri.

A study day devoted to the late Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) took place on Friday, 26 October, in Egham, co-sponsored by HARC, SMLLC, Media Arts, and the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni.

The centenary of the birth of this master of European modernist cinema was a chance to bring together a number of scholars and curators who have a particular interest in the interdisciplinary aspects of Antonioni’s oeuvre. Dr Laura Rascaroli (U. of Cork) and Dr John David Rhodes (U. of Sussex), who edited the 2011 volume, Antonioni: Centenary Essays, offered a novel perspective on the work of the Italian film-maker by focusing on the influence of art and architecture respectively. The two talks were preceded by a screening of two rare Antonioni documentaries: Gente del Po (1943-7) and Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo (2004). Documentaries are a very important but often less studied aspect of Antonioni’s production. They also ideally frame his career since Antonioni began as a documentary film maker and ended his cinematic career with his tribute to the master of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti, in a short film of extreme beauty which helped the audience to reflect upon art and tradition. The general discussion that followed covered a number of fascinating topics relating to Antonioni’s practice, including his consistently ‘open’, physical engagement with the human figure, as compared, for example, with that of Jean-Luc Godard.

Part 1.b, Arts Building - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Dr. John David Rhodes's lecture, discussion and round table with Dr. Laura Rascaroli, Dr. Giuliana Pieri and Prof. James Williams.

Part 2.a, Windsor Lecture - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Prof. Dominique Païni's presentation of the retrospective 'Antonioni And The Arts. The Gaze of Michelangelo' and lecture. Introduction by Prof. Williams James.

The second part of the study day was a lecture by film scholar and curator, Professor Dominique Païni (École du Louvre, Paris), who presented with slides his plans for the forthcoming centenary exhibition on Antonioni in his home-town of Ferrara. Prof. Païni revealed that the physical challenge of the exhibition space, the Renaissance Palazzo dei Diamanti, created the opportunity to present Antonioni’s work as a series of contrasts arising from the idea that cinema is, after all, narrative sculpture in movement, and that shapes are born out of the most basic contrast, that of light and dark. Both the lecture and ensuing discussion brought into focus a series of important characteristics of the work of Antonioni: the identification of women and the nation, ideal masculinity and Italian art and tradition, the critique of humanism and the classical heritage, and the ambiguous relationship between Antonioni and Italy’s post-war tradition of social and political engagement (impegno) which characterised the work of many of his contemporaries working in film and literature.

Part 2.b, Windsor Lecture - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

A few reflections with Professor Dominique Païni. Translation in English by Alix Agret.

Best Online Film Studies Resources in 2012: Announcing a Readers' Poll!

Dear Film Studies For Free Readers,


One of FSFF's most popular and most useful blog entries last year was its December 20 roundup: FSFF's Favourite Online Film Studies Resources in 2011.

It will repeat this endeavour this year. But FSFF will make things much more interesting, hopefully, by inviting readers' suggestions, and trying to reflect the views gathered in the results.

Below are last year's categories. Please feel free to respond to these headers or suggest new ones (FSFF will itself inaugurate some videographical/multimedia film studies categories, for example).

You can leave suggestions in the comments below, tweet them to @filmstudiesff, leave them at the Film Studies For Free Facebook page, or send your nominees to FSFF by email. Please feel free to self-nominate!

Let the crowdsourcing begin!!


Lots of love from

Film Studies For Free xx

1. Top film and moving image studies history resources online in 2012
2. Top Film Studies bloggers
3. Best new Film Studies blog/website
4. Best Media Studies approaches to film and moving image studies' blog/website
5. Most consistently original, Film and Moving Image Studies writer active online
6. Best Film Studies informed, commercial film criticism website
7. Best new online film journal in 2012
8. Best recently established online academic Film Studies journal
9. Best established online Film Studies journals
10. Most generous, Open Access Film Studies author
11. Best online cinephile news and criticism site
12. Best cinephile salon site
13. Best multimedia/multiplatform/multichannel-style film and moving image studies websites
14. Most impactful online Film Studies work in 2012
15. Best Film Studies academic links on Twitter
16. Best non-academic, film studies-informed, online film critics
17. Ten favourite FSFF blogposts (and blogpost clusters) in 2012
18. FSFF's most read post in 2012
19. Most popular resource at FSFF
20. Best search engine for Open Access Film Studies

New issue of SCOPE: Nicole Holofcener, Realism, Self-Transformation Narratives, Károly Makk, the Feature Film as "Short Story" and More

Framegrab from Lovely and Amazing (Nicole Holofcener, 2001). You can read Rachel Lister's article about Holofcener's films here

Life is good, thinks Film Studies For Free: a new issue of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies has just been published. There's a small but well-edited selection of great articles, and an enormous number of hugely useful book reviews and conference reports. FSFF particularly liked Rachel Lister on Nicole Holofcener's "short story" films and Miklós Kiss on Károly Makk's Szerelem/Love.

All contents are listed and linked to below.

Scope: Issue 24 October 2012

Articles

• Self-Making as Public Spectacle: Bodies, Bodily Training and Reality TV Bree Hadley
• Rationalising the Irrational: Artistic Realism as Cognitive Reality in Károly Makk's Szerelem/Love  Miklós Kiss
• The Feature Film as Short Story: The "Little Disturbances" of Nicole Holofcener Rachel Lister
• Cinderella vs Barbie: The Battle for Postfeminist Performance in Teen Transformation Narratives Kendra Marston

Book Reviews

• All Book Reviews
• Jacques Rivette by Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith ; Alain Robbe-Grillet by John Phillips A Review by Jonathan L. Owen
• Music and Politics by John Street ; Wagner and Cinema edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman  A Review by Nathan Waddell
• Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films by M. Keith Booker
• Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation by Chris Pallant
• A Review by Noel Brown
• Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel edited by Jeffrey Ruoff; Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement By Dimitris Eleftheriotis A Review by Sofia Sampaio
• Jerry Lewis by Chris Fujiwara ; Atom Egoyan by Emma Wilson ; Andrei Tarkovsky by Sean Martin A review by Adam Jones
• The Comedy of Chaplin: Artistry in Motion by Dan Kamin ; Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century by Matthew Solomon  A review by Bruce Bennett
• Von Sternberg by John Baxter ; Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich and Mass Culture by Barbara Kosta  A Review by Elaine Lennon
• Soldiers' Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television Since World War I by Yvonne Tasker ; A ‘Toxic Genre': The Iraq War Films by Martin Barker A Review by Jay Reid
• Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier by Homay King ; Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film-Fantasy-Fighting-Philosophy by Paul Bowman  A Review by Lin Feng

Film and Television Reviews

• All Film and Television Reviews
• Dust (Polvo) A review by Miharu M. Miyasaka

Conference Reports

• All Conference Reports
• The Distribution and Exhibition of Chinese and Asian Cinema in the UK  A report by Jonathan Wroot
• Deleuze, Guattari and China Symposium A report by Yun-hua Chen
• The Cinema of Sensations: Fourteenth International Film and Media Studies Conference A report by Francesca Hardy
• NECS Conference 2012 - Time Networks: Screen Media and Memory A report by Nessa Johnston

To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathley's Film Studies Online

A free-to-attend University of London Screen Studies Group series event. Full details are given here: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/events/view/13234.

A free-to-attend University of Sussex Centre for Visual Fields event. Further details are given here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cvf/newsandevents/events?id=16509.

Film Studies For Free is almost unspeakably thrilled that its author is helping to host a visit to her shores by the wonderful film scholar Christian Keathley. So thrilled, in fact, that a collected edition of links to his generously-shared, online, film scholarship is given below. 

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently completing a second book, The Mystery of Otto Preminger (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multi-media format, including video essays.

In addition to the two UK events detailed above, Keathley will also give a keynote lecture on his work as part of the lineup for a two-day symposium in Antwerp, Belgium, entitled "FROM PHOTOGÉNIE TO CINEPHILIA 2.0, a seminar on cinephilia then and now". The event takes place between December 7-8. Unlike the two events above, it isn't free-to-attend, but it is incredibly good value. 

This superb looking symposium is hosted by the Flemish Service for Film Culture, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (UGent) and Research Group Visual Studies and Media Culture (University of Antwerp) organised in collaboration with Research Center for Visual Poetics (University of Antwerp) and CINEMATEK, with two other internationally recognised keynotes Malte Hagener and Sarah Keller. You can find further details of the symposium here.

There should be some open access resources emerging from the above events, and if that happens, FSFF will be among the first to let you know about them.

Online Written Texts by Christian Keathley:

• Christian Keathley, 'Teaching the Scholarly Video Essay', Frames, Issue 1, July 2012

• Christian Keathley,  'Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of Découpage', MOVIE, 3, 2011

• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008

• Christian Keathley, 'A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool]', In Media Res, May 14 , 200

• Christian Keathley et al, 'The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age', MIT6 Stone Papyrus Storage and Transmission Conference, April 24-26, 2009

• Christian Keathley, 'The Cinephiliac Moment', Framework, 42, Summer 2000

Online Video Essays by Christian Keathley:

Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.
Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley

Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

50 Years On from Christian Keathley
Revision of a video made for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies' 50th anniversary conference.


Does Your Dog Bite? from Christian Keathley
A video essay by Christian Keathley on a canine moment in Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951).

About Christian Keathley's work:

• Jason Sperb, 'Review of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees by Christian Keathley (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006)', Scope: an online journal of film & TV studies, Issue 12, October 2008

FRAMES Cinema Journal Issues 2 and 1!! - Kubrick, Resnais, War Films, Digital Film Studies and more!

Frame grab from The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Read Hannah Mowat's article on this and other 'hotel films' in the new issue of Frames Cinema Journal

Film Studies For Free is very happy to announce the online publication of Issue 2 of Frames cinema journal,. The issue contains six fine articles, on a variety of topics, produced in collaboration with the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). Details and links are given below.

The publication of issue 2 marks Frames' move to a new server and a great new look. As a consequence of this move all of the original URLs for the forty or so contributions to Issue 1 (guest edited by FSFF's supremo) on Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? have had to be changed. For this reason, there's a second list of that issue's contents given below, replete with all the new links......


Frames, Issue 2,  November 2012: BAFTSS Fall 2012

Editorial

• Letter from the Editors By Kathleen Scott and Sarah Soliman

Feature articles

• An Investigation of Affect in the Cinema: Spectacle and the Melodramatic Rhetoric in Nil by Mouth By Stephen Presence
• Nature versus architecture: navigating the threshold in Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Jessica Hausner’s Hotel By Hannah Mowat
• “Things that almost killed me”: Apocalypse Now and The Hurt Locker and the influence of 19th century spectacle art in the war film By John Trafton
• “Welcome to Manchester”: Heritage, Urban Regeneration, and Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People By Joe Barton
• Keeping It All in the (Nuclear) Family: Big Brother, Auntie BBC, Uncle Sam and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four By Nigel Morris
• Cinema, Aviation and Airmindedness in Britain in the 1920s By Amy Sargeant

Frames, Issue 1, July 2012: Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? Guest-edited by Catherine Grant

Editorial

• Introducing Frames By founding co-editor Fredrik Gustafsson 

• Film and Moving Image Studies: Re-Born Digital? Some Participant Observations Guest Editor's Introduction by Catherine Grant

• Notes on Editors and Contributors 

Feature articles

• Cut, Paste, Glitch, and Stutter: Remixing Film History By Katherine Groo 
• The Malleable Computer: Software and the Study of the Moving Image By Daniel Chávez Heras
• The Image as Direct Quotation: Identity, Transformation, and the Case for Fair Use By Jaimie Baron 
• Labours of Love: In Praise of Fan Websites By Pam Cook 
• Mapping Rohmer – A Video Essay By Richard Misek 
• The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism? By Erlend Lavik 
• In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema By Matthias Stork 
• Sparking Ideas, Making Connections: Digital Film Archives and Collaborative Scholarship By Sarah Atkinson 
• Movie Tagger Alpha: Critical Tagging in Emerging Methods of Media Scholarship By Joshua McVeigh-Schultz 
• Archive Film Material – A Novel Challenge for Automated Film Analysis By Matthias Zeppelzauer, Dalibor Mitrović and Christian Breiteneder

P.O.V.

• Not in Print: Two Film Scholars on the Internet By Kristin Thompson
• Double Lives, Second Chances By Cristina Álvarez López
• In So Many Words By Adrian Martin
• You Get the Picture By Alexandra Juhasz
• Interface 2.0 By Kevin B. Lee
• Moving Pieces By Matthias Stork
• Some Reflections On My Video Essay Venture “Style in The Wire” By Erlend Lavik
• Film Studies with High Production Values: An Interview with Janet Bergstrom on Making and Teaching Audiovisual Essays By Matthias Stork and Janet Bergstrom
• Teaching the Scholarly Video By Christian Keathley
• Video Essays in the Cinema History Classroom By Kelli Marshall
• Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins) By Catherine Grant
• Thirteen Notes: A Poetics of Cinematic Randomization By Nicholas Rombes
• A Universe of New Images By Girish Shambu
• Fair Use and Media Studies in the Digital Age By Steve Anderson
• Click Here To Print This Video Essay: Observations on Open Access and Non-Traditional Format in Digital Cinema and Media Studies Publishing By Andrew Myers
• Open Video Documentary By Patricia Aufderheide
• Video Rising: Remarks on Video, Activism and the Web By Michael Chanan
• Reflections on the Evolution of Cinema=Godard=Cinema By Glen W. Norton
• Research Blogging in Film Studies By Nick Redfern
• Blogging and Tweeting in an Age of Austerity By Fredrik Gustafsson
• Media Studies Makeover By Anne Helen Petersen
• Analysis of Film Colors in a Digital Humanities Perspective By Barbara Flueckiger
• Film Theories and Living Heterogeneity By Dominic Leppla
• Opening the Colonial Film Archive By Tom Rice
• Snakes and Funerals By Emily Jeremiah, James S. Williams and Gillian Wylde
• MASHING UP Derrida and Film By Joanna Callaghan
• Screenwriting 2.0 in the Classroom? Teaching the Digital Screenplay By Andrew Kenneth Gay
• Ask Not What Your Web Can Do For You – Ask What You Can Do For Your Web! Some Speculations about Film Studies in the Age of the Digital Humanities By Adelheid Heftberger

On ’Tangibility’ and Relocating Cinema: NECSUS #2, Autumn 2012

To celebrate the new issue of NECSUS on tangibility, above is a reposting of TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? by Catherine Grant. Also see version with audio commentary

[A] media, singular, is not just its medium – it is not only a support or a device. A media is also and foremost a cultural form; it is defined by the way in which it puts us in relation with the world and with others, and therefore by the type of experience that it activates. By experience, I mean both a confrontation with reality (to gain experience) and the capacity to manage this relation and to give it meaning (to have experience). From its very beginnings, cinema has been based on the fact that it offers us moving images through which we may reconfigure the reality around us and our own position within it. Cinema has always been a way of seeing and a way of living – a form of sensibility and a form of understanding. [Francesco Casetti, 'The relocation of cinema', NECSUS, Issue 2, Autumn 2012]

A great second issue of NECSUS, the brilliant journal of NECS, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies has been published. It boasts some superlative articles including Francesco Casetti's must-read article from which Film Studies For Free has excerpted above.

For those interested in hapticity, and our experience of the material properties of film, there's a very special section on that topic.

All in all (and all the contents are directly linked to below), some truly wonderful work. Well done and thank you NECSUS!

Editorial Necsus

Articles:

• The relocation of cinema by Francesco Casetti
• MP3s, rebundled debt, and performative economics: Deferral, derivatives, and digital commodity fetishism in Lady Gaga’s spectacle of excess by Anne Kustritz
• Can you see yourself living here?: Structures of desire in recent British lifestyle television by James Zborowski
• Investigatory art: Real-time systems and network culture by Edward Shanken
• Beyond cognitive estrangement: The future of science fiction cinema by Stephen Zepke
• The care for opacity: On Tsai Ming-Liang’s conservative filmic gesture by Erik Bordeleau

Special Section: Tangibility

• Material properties of historical film in the digital age by Barbara Flueckiger
• Early cinema’s touch(able) screens: From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou by Wanda Strauven
• Aporias of the touchscreen: On the promises and failures of a ubiquitous technology by Timo Kaerlein
• Questions of embodied difference: Film and queer phenomenology by Katharina Lindner
• The intangible ground: A neurophenomenology of the film experience by Adriano D’Aloia
• From subject-effect to presence-effect: A deictic approach to the cinematic by Pepita Hesselberth
• ‘The last ray of the dying sun’: Tacita Dean’s commitment to analog media as demonstrated through FLOH and FILM by Caylin Smith

Festival Reviews:
Edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network

• The Angels’ Share at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival review by David Archibald
• The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival: Seeking the social in the virtual review by Sarah Dillard
• Alternative Film/Video Belgrade 2011 review by Maja Krajnc

Book Reviews:

• The good, the beautiful and the sublime review by Bavand Behpoor
• A multiplied medium: Reviewing recent publications on television’s transitions review by Markus Stauff
• European nightmares: Horror cinema in Europe since 1945 review by Francesco Di Chiara
• Cinema and experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno review by Malte Hagener

Exhibition Reviews:

• The Abramović Method, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (March-June 2012) review by Elena Biserna
• Non Non Non – Visiting the exhibition with Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi review by Miriam De Rosa

Real and Fictional Monarchies on Screen

The Paradox of the Monarchy by Catherine Grant

An archive video collage exploring some of the psychological and mediatized components of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy. It features excerpts from D.W. Winnicott's 1970 essay 'The Place of the Monarchy' (published in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, compiled and edited by Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis [London: Penguin, 1986]). Although it doesn't mention this, Winnicott's essay was published after the broadcast of the ground-breaking Royal Family documentary in 1969, which opened up new breaches in what the psychoanalyst was raising about the necessary distance and proximity of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy.

Public Domain Film Excerpts (from the Internet Archive Moving Image Collections)

• Pathe News Digest, 1937, No. 3 (Prelinger Archives)
• Visit of their Majesties, June 1939 (FDR Presidential Library [CC0 1.0 Universal])
• Today -- And Yesterday, Newsreel, 1911 (Prelinger Archives)
• A Welcome Guest in the House, ca. 1957 (Prelinger Archives)

Music Excerpt
“Self-Reflect” by Jared C. Balogh. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. Available for Download from from the Fee Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org/music/Balogh/A_Compilation_From_Compilations_Of_Compositions/SELF_REFLECT

Film Studies For Free was inspired by two events -- one offline and one online -- for today's entry.

The offline happening is an excellent looking conference on the British Monarchy on Screen taking place later this week, between November 23-24.

The conference is hosted by the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, and convened by the University of London Screen Studies Group, the Institute of English Studies, the department of Media Arts and the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research at Royal Holloway, University of London.

A somewhat ambivalent republican, but one indelibly marked by growing up immersed in the UK's mediatised monarchy, FSFF would have loved to attend. But its author is presenting instead at a conference in an actual Republic this weekend, instead. So this blog contributes the above monarchical-video-meditation in lieu of its presence - and there will be an accompanying essay about it for the Filmanalytical website very shortly.

Another series of events happening this week - also, sadly, to be missed by a gadabout FSFF -- will take place in Brighton. The Global Queer Cinema project is collaborating with the annual CineCity film festival on the topic of "Curating Queer Film Culture". Information about these really excellent and important events can be found here and here. 

The inspirational online event was another one FSFF missed... It was the competition which also inspired the above video, although the video took a somewhat different (topical) turn in its making: "The Past Re-Imagined as the Future" Remix Context, held by the brilliant Prelinger Archives and the Free Music Archive.

FSFF looks forward to hearing about the winners of that event but, in the meantime, had great fun as usual remixing material from both these amazing, public domain archives, and encourages its readers to have a go at doing the same. Any good film related results should be reported here forthwith.

Below, you can find a little (growing) list of links to online studies of monarchies on screen just to keep FSFF's hand in with this blog's day-job....

• Giselle Bastin, 'Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family', a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2009, pp. 34-52 PDF Rosalind Brunt, 'The Changing Face of Royalty', Marxism Today, 1984   
• Pam Cook, 'Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola', Sight and Sound 16 (11), November 2006, pp. 36-40
• Stella Hockenhull, 'Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen', Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012) PDF
• Dianne Hunter, 'From Ethereal Confrontation to Child Abuse to Womanly Conflict: Ophelia in Three Late-Twentieth Century Films', PsyArt, December 2008
• Julia Kinzler, 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011) pp. 49-65
• Laura Mason, '"We' re just little people, Louis": Marie-Antoinette on Film', Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No.3 (1994): 211-222 
• Anna Rogers, 'Sofia Coppola', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007