CINEPHILE on Contemporary Realism: Post-Classical Hollywood, Mumblecore, Neo-Neorealism,Tonacci, Reichardt, Greengrass, Van Sant

Framegrab from Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010). Read 'Beyond Neo-Neo Realism: Reconfigurations of Neorealist Narration in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff' by James Lattimer here (large PDF)

[I]n the last decade or so, a reappraisal of realism has risen to the fore. Sparked by the demise of cinema’s ontological basis (the existential link between film’s corporeal nature and its real-world referent) and the renewed pertinence of Bazin’s cardinal question, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, realism has been re-framed as a generative area of study in a parlous digital age, enabling new (or newly situated) discourse on cinematic reportage, authenticity, and representation. Recent scholars who have embraced realism’s epistemological subscription—yet managed to traverse the epistemic fissure of a positivist approach—have recognized moments of contingency in contemporary art house and marginal cinemas, rooted either in classical tenets (spatio-temporal integrity, social extension, moral despondence) or emergent ones (“haptic” visuality, profilmic exclusivity, ethical engagement). This issue of Cinephile is situated at the intersection of such discussions. [Editors' Note, Cinephile, Fall 2011]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the Fall 2011 issue of the great Canadian online film journal Cinephile -- a special issue on realism -- is now available for free download, following its usual period of availability only in a print edition.

The table of contents is given below, and you can download the PDF of the issue here. Below the list of articles, you can find the next Cinephile Call For Papers for an upcoming issue on the New Extremism.

For more on Bazinian, Neo-Bazinian, and Post-Bazinian Film Studies, please check out FSFF's entry as well as other posts accessible via its film realism tag.



Cinephile Fall 2010 Table of Contents

• Editor’s Note
• Contributors
• 'Reenactment and A-filiation in Andrea Tonacci’s Serras da Desordem' by Ivone Margulies
• 'Post-Classical Hollywood Realism and “Ideological Reality”' by Richard Rushton
• 'The Sound of Uncertain Voices: Mumblecore and the Interrogation of Realism' by Justin Horton
• 'The Aesthetics of Trauma: Authenticity and Disorientation in Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday' by Marc Di Sotto
• 'Beyond Neo-Neo Realism: Reconfigurations of Neorealist Narration in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff' by James Lattimer
• 'Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Visionary Realism' by Tiago de Luca

Call For Papers

Cinephile 8.2, Contemporary Extremism

Deadline for draft submission: September 1, 2012
The last decade has marked an escalation in the treatment of extreme subject matter in European cinema, heralded by the graphic violence and sexuality of French New Extremism at the turn of the millennium and increasingly apparent in films from across Europe. While extreme violence and graphic sexuality have long played a part in the European film tradition (Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel 1929); I Am Curious (Yellow) (Sjöman 1967), Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci 1972), Salò (Pasolini 1975), etc.), these contemporary films are exceptionally abrasive in the use of transgressive material, employing the sensory capabilities of cinema to impact the spectator on a visceral level. Scholars such as Martine Beugnet, Tanya Horeck, Tina Kendall, and Tim Palmer have pointed to New Extremism as a burgeoning cinematic trend that seeks to re-examine our relationship to the body and to the film screen itself. Onscreen penetrative sex, sexual violence, and explicit gore are central features of films like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009), and Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), to name a few films that can be situated within the New Extremist canon.
    With the Fall 2012 issue of Cinephile, we wish to interrogate the parameters and significance of New Extremism. In doing so, we are willing to extend our questions beyond Europe with the hopes of inquiring into Extremism as a global phenomenon. Is New Extremism a feature of European film in particular, prefigured by the European film tradition, or has its influence extended beyond Europe’s borders and bled into other global cinemas? Is Extremism really “new,” or is it merely a contemporary incarnation of old provocations and transgressions? What is the impact of these films, and why should we be watching them (if we should be watching them at all)?
Starting points might include:

• Extremism outside of Europe: Asian cinema (Ichi the Killer (Miike 2001), Old Boy (Park 2003), etc.), North American cinema (Deadgirl (Sarmiento & Harel 2008), August Underground (Vogel 2001), etc.), and other global cinemas
• The legitimacy of New Extremism: extreme content in art cinema vs. extreme content in exploitation, horror, and grindhouse cinemas
• Controversy, notoriety, and censorship (Antichrist, A Serbian Film (Spasojevic 2010), The Human Centipede 2 (Six 2011), etc.)
• New Extremism and horror cinema (High Tension (Aja 2003), Calvaire (Du Welz 2004), Inside (Bustillo & Maury 2007), Martyrs (Laugier 2008), etc.)
• Spectatorship, affect, and corporeality
• Approaches to New Extremism: Genre, mode, movement, or trend?
• Theory and New Extremism

We encourage submissions from graduate and doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty.
    Papers should be between 2000-3500 words, follow MLA guidelines, and include a detailed works cited page, as well as a short biography of the author.  Submissions and inquiries should be directed to: submissions@cinephile.ca
    Cinephile is the University of British Columbia’s film journal, published with the continued support of the Centre for Cinema Studies. We are proud to feature a new article by Sarah Kozloff in our Spring 2012 issue. Previous issues have featured original essays by such noted scholars as K.J. Donnelly, Barry Keith Grant, Matt Hills, Ivone Margulies, Murray Pomerance, Paul Wells, and Slavoj Žižek. Since 2009, the journal has adopted a blind peer-review process and has moved to biannual publication.  It is available both online and in print via subscription.

• The Voice-Over (Issue 8.1)
• Contemporary Realism (Issue 7.2)
• Reassessing Anime (Issue 7.1)
• Horror Ad Nauseam (Issue 6.2)
• Sound on Screen (Issue 6.1)
• The Scene (Issue 5.2)

New Issue of SCOPE: CIA, Resnais, German cinema and Dead Cities in the Cinema

Framegrab from I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007). Read Elena Woolley's article on "lone-survivor-in-the-dead-city" films

A quick post from Film Studies For Free today, simply to deliver the, as ever, excellent news that Scope, the online journal of film and tv studies, has published a new issue. Some very good articles and a marvellous array of book and film reviews, and conference reports, await you when you click on all the links below. 

Scope Issue 23, June 2012

Articles

• Intelligence Activity in Hollywood: Remembering the 'Agency' in CIA Tricia Jenkins and Matthew Alford
• Toujours sous la neige: Snow, Stasis and Immobility in Alain Resnais' L'Amour mort and Coeurs Jenny Munro
• The Dead City: The Decay of the Urban Oganisation Elena Woolley
• Constructing Consensus: teamWorx's Event Movies and the Cinema of Consensus Andrew Wormald

Book Reviews

• All Book Reviews  [PDF]
• Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms By James Walters; The Fantasy Film By Katherine A. Fowkes A review by Alexander Sergeant
• Global Art Cinema Edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover; Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties By Andrew L. Owen; Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema By Janina Falkowska A review by Billy Budd Vermillion
• Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema By Alistair Fox; The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era By Thomas Schatz A review by Deborah Mellamphy
• Possessed Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema By Stefan Andriopoulos; A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan By Aaron Gerow A review by Irena Hayter
• Ostrannenie Edited by Annie van den Oever; Optical Media By Friedrich Kittler A review by Katerina Loukopoulou
• The Language of Film By Robert Edgar-Hunt, John Marland Steven Rawie;Valuing Films: Shifting Perceptions of Worth Edited by Laura Hubner; Fifty Key American Films Edited by John White and Sabine Haenni A review by Meraj Ahmed Mubarki
• Humphrey Jennings By Keith Beattie; Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain Edited by Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor; From Pinewood to Hollywood: British Filmmakers in American Cinema 1910- 1969 By Ian Scott A review by Paul Elliot
• Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema By Derek Nystrom; He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western By Roderick McGillis A review by Gavin Harper
• The Cinema of India Edited by Lalitha Gopalan; Film in the Middle East and North Africa Edited by Josef Gugler; Bengali Cinema "An Other Nation? By Sharmistha Gooptu A review by Rohit K. Dasgupta 
• Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000 Edited by Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid; Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas By Alison Macor A review by Yusef Sayed

Film and Television Reviews

• All Film and Television Reviews [PDF]
• Jane Eyre  Catherine Paula Han
• J. Edgar Serena Daalmans
• Andy Hardy, Collection 1 Judy Beth Morris
• The Avengers Brady Hammond
• A Dangerous Method Charles Andrews
• The Shore Andrew Grunert

Conference Reports

• All Conference Reports [PDF]
• East Winds: East Asian Cinema and Cultural Crossovers Symposium A report by Pierce Conran
• SCMS 2012: Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference A report by Joan Doagle
• Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Symposium A report by Joanna Kellond
• Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject A report by Ian Pettigrew

On 'Acid Aesthetics' and Contemporary Cinematic Stylistic 'Excess' - In Memory of Tony Scott (1944-2012)

Last updated August 30, 2012

Cine-Painting - The Kino-Brush  

A video tribute to Tony Scott, "[A] vigorous and energetic filmmaker extraordinaire"

By Matthias Stork

 

Filmmaking is like painting…Every stroke or every color impacts another and you build film on the canvas and you get ideas from the last stroke.
 [Tony Scott, audio commentary, Domino DVD]

[T]he minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning. Style is the use of repeated techniques which become characteristic of the work; these techniques are foregrounded so that the spectator will notice them and create connections between their individual uses. Excess does not equal style, but the two are closely linked because they both involve the material aspects of the film. Excess forms no specific patterns which we could say are characteristic of the work. But the formal organization provided by style does not exhaust the material of the filmic techniques, and a spectator's attention to style might well lead to a noticing of excess as well. [...] Probably no one ever watches only these non-diegetic aspects [...] through an entire film. Nevertheless, they are constantly present, a whole "film" existing in some sense alongside the narrative film we tend to think of ourselves as watching. [Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess', Ciné-Tracts, 1.2, Summer 1977, pp. 55-56]

Hollywood action scenes became ‘impressionistic,’ rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it. [David Bordwell, 'A Glance at Blows', Observations on Film Art, September 28, 2008]

In classical continuity styles, space is a fixed and rigid container, which remains the same no matter what goes on in the narrative; and time flows linearly, and at a uniform rate, even when the film’s chronology is scrambled by flashbacks. But in post-continuity films, this is not necessarily the case. We enter into the spacetime of modern physics; or better, into the “space of flows”, and the time of microintervals and speed-of-light transformations, that are characteristic of globalized, high-tech financial capital.  [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]

The essential characteristic of the acid aesthetic is the employment of early twentieth century hand-crank cameras. Loaded with high-speed reversal film, they are manually cranked forwards and backwards during the shooting, and afterwards cross-processed in an inappropriate developer. The results are quite extreme and fairly unpredictable: multiple exposures within one or more images, high contrasts and de-saturated colors, abrupt visual jolts of overexposed lighting, increased grain activity and discernible smears, cracks and trails on the frame, which add an air of physical authenticity. Film becomes tangible in this aesthetic equation. The analogue form, generally masked in the classical continuity style, is revealed, indeed placed in the foreground. Footage from digital cameras further provides an occasional visual counterpoint to the stylized primitivism of the hand-crank aesthetic, presenting crisp, overly saturated images, which seem, by contrast, manufactured and purely synthetic. The result is a dialectic of control and chaos, with the latter as the defining crux. [...] What becomes clear here is that Scott’s acid aesthetics put on display the cinematic apparatus itself, the process of constructing moving images, both in analogue and digital form. The resulting casualty is the concept of filmic realism. The gained impression is not the order of continuity but the chaos of stylistic transparency, an illustration of the formal potentialities of film, unrestrained by storytelling conventions.

[...] A blend of analogue and digital filmmaking lays bare the inner mechanics of cinema, its texture, emphasizing the process of manipulating and creating moving images. Film, in this regard, can be conceptualized as an enormous canvas, to be filled with color. It is not a coincidence that Tony Scott was trained as a visual artist and generally views himself as such, a cinematic painter. Thus, he constructs rather than documents images, both in the camera and on a post-production computer setup. In Scott’s hands, cinema rediscovers its ability for overt stylization, not eroding, but at least de-privileging what Christian Metz calls the realistic cinema-effect, in favor of a display of cinematic technique. In the words of Lev Manovich, cinema is then “no longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush”. And indeed Scott’s filmmaking transcends the mere realm of visual representation. Wielding the camera like a brush, and similar to Alexandre Astruc’s pen, the caméra-stylo, he sprays, splashes and splatters paint onto the canvas, producing an expressionistic chaos, reminiscent of paintings by Jackson Pollock. Notwithstanding the overt experimentalism, all this activity is framed by the generic conventions of Hollywood story material. The margins of Scott’s canvas are defined by the tenets of traditional and, with regard to Man on Fire and Domino, arguably quite clichéd narrative. In this regard, Scott’s cinematic paintings become more than just a display of style, namely an unrestrained sensory assault of visual abstraction that, in a postmodern twist of meta-textual discourse, exposes the process of moving image construction, and thereby reconfigures the traditional notion of what mainstream cinema should look like. [Excerpts from Matthias Stork, 'Acid Aesthetics: Tony Scott's Cinema of Chaos', SWTX Popular and American Culture Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2012]

I have cautiously championed Tony Scott’s recent work because at least he’s willing to go all the way, however misguided the direction. From Spy Games on, he has stuck to the credo that too much is never enough. His technique is swaggering and undisciplined, mannered to the nth degree. Yet I find his fevered visuals more genuinely arresting than the safe noodlings of most of today’s mainstream cinema. Man on Fire and Déja Vu reheat their genre leftovers into something spicy, if not nourishing, while Domino, the cinematic equivalent of hophead graffiti, wraps its sleazy characters in a visual design apparently inspired by the glowing interior of a peepshow booth.  [David Bordwell, '50 Days of Summer Movies Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009, hyperlink added by FSFF]

Tony Scott’s need to push the boundaries of the postclassical into the classical-plus and the hyperclassical with Man on Fire and Domino suggests a growing impatience with intensified continuity and the postmodern condition. In Top Gun and even True Romance the audience can easily float with the surface structure and identify with the fantasy of transcending both physical space and cultural time. But in Man on Fire and Domino the audience cannot ignore the deaths of Denzel Washington, Edgar Ramirez, and Mickey Rourke, the irrevocable loss of continuity, and the status of the image not as synergistic decoration or digital simulacrum, but as a symptom and agent of cultural flux and despair. Even in Deja Vu, which retreats somewhat from the volatile aesthetic of Man on Fire and Domino, Scott makes postclassical narrative hyperclassical by allowing Denzel Washington to inhabit the past and present simultaneously. Deja Vu, with its post-Katrina New Orleans, opening terrorist attack, and urgent desire to traverse time and prevent the death of Paula Patton, suggests a shell-shocked United States unable to understand the past or ponder the future — Denzel, in a Butterfly Effect-like matrix of temporal frequency and repetition, dies in one narrative thread even as he emerges unscathed in another. Scott pushes the boundaries of narrative time and space so far he doesn’t need the vomit comet or Domino-Vision to achieve the same measure of indeterminacy. Man on Fire, Domino, and Deja Vu suggest that the only sin Tony Scott has committed is not to anticipate the hyperclassical and the classical-plus sooner. [Larry Knapp, 'Tony Scott and Domino — Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical', Jump Cut, 50, 2008]

Film Studies for Free was shocked, like everyone else, by the news of Tony Scott's death yesterday. Following the news, much of the day was spent reading online assessments of his important filmmaking career.

These frequently centered, of course, on the role of 'excessive style' in his work, and its (some would say, concomitant) lack of narrative motivation. The ground was thus laid for today's tribute list of more than fifty links to academic studies centering on the debates about cinematic 'excess', as well as on issues of intensified (or 'post'-, or 'Chaos') continuity in contemporary film aesthetics.

Rather incredibly, at the weekend, Matthias Stork, talented author of the video essay series on Chaos Cinema, had sent FSFF a link to a draft version of a new video essay featuring Tony Scott's work, which explored some related issues regarding contemporary film aesthetics. Following yesterday's awful news, Stork worked around the clock to develop that essay to provide an important tribute to Scott's work. You can see the video at the top of this entry, and also at Stork's Vimeo page Cine-Essais.

For more tributes to Scott, an essential round up is given at David Hudson's post devoted to 'Tony Scott, 1944 – 2012' at Fandor's Keyframe Daily website.

A very big Danke schön goes to Matthias Stork for all his essential contributions to this entry. 

• Steven William Allen, A pleasure in pain: contemporary mainstream cinema's fascination with the aestheticized spectacle of the controlled body, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003
• Chiara Armentano, '"The Image-Interface": New Forms of Narrative Visualization, Space and Time in Postmodern Cinema', Reconstruction, 8.3 (2008)
• James Aston, 'Terrorist Attack!: The Spectacle of Evil in the Blended Horror of Cloverfield', Scope, no. 16, 2010
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Jean Baudrillard, 'The Matrix Decoded:  Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard', [Translated by: Dr. Gary Genosko and Adam Bryx], International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004) 
• Marko Bauer, 'Pure West: Drive, nostalgia for postmodernism', Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2012
• Tracey Biga, 'The Bulimic Excess and the Films of Peter Greenaway', Spectator,  date unknown
• Michael Bloom, 'Rhetoric of Excess: Hyperbolical Irony as Transcendence in Blue Velvet', Offscreen Journal, Volume 13, Issue 9, 2009 
• David Bordwell, '50 Days of Summer Movies Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009
• David Bordwell,'Forking tracks: SOURCE CODE', Observations on Film Art, May 3, 2011
• Dave Boothroyd, 'Cinematic heroin and narcotic modernity', Symbolism: Journal of Critical Aesthetics Vol.VII , 2007
• Shaun Boutwell, 'The Appeal of Murder in Style: Aestheticization of Violence, Catharsis Theory and the Paradox of Horror Cinema', The Deuce: Grindhouse Cinema Database, 2012 (?)
• Nadia Bozak, 'Four Cameras are Better than One: Division as Excess in Mike Figgis’ Timecode', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008 
• Thomas R. Britt, 'Death, Excess, and Discontinuity: On Lost Highway, Irreversible, and Visitor Q', Bright Lights Film Journal, 62, 2008
  
• Margaret Ervin Bruder, 'Aestheticizing Violence, or How To Do Things with Style',Film Studies archive, Indiana University, 1998
• Melanie Chan, 'Virtually Real and Really Virtual: Baudrillard’s Procession of Simulacrum and The Matrix', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)
• Lucy Fife Donaldson, 'Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre', MOVIE, 1, 2010
• Paul Eisenstein, 'Devouring Holes: Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and the Tectonics of Psychoanalysis',  International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1.3, Autumn 2007 
• Matthew Ferrari, 'Reading Narrative Excess in MMA', Flow, December 4, 2009
• Asbjørn Grønstad, Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema Amsterdam, 2008)
• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010
• Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson, 'World Out of Order: Tony Scott’s Vertigo', Cinema Scope Online, 2012
• Bruce Isaacs, 'The Cinematic Real: Aesthetics and Spectacle', Sydney Studies in English, Vol. 33, 2007 
• Dietmar Kammerer, 'Video Surveillance In Hollywood Movies', Surveillance and Society, 2(2.3), 2004
• Russell J.A. Kilbourn, 'Re-Writing "Reality": Reading The Matrix', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 9.2, Fall 2000, pp 43-54 
  
• Larry Knapp, 'Tony Scott and Domino — Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical', Jump Cut, 50, 2008 
• Jon Lindblom, 'Toward an Ontology of the Image: Deleuze and the Aura of Simulation', Movement Editions, 2010
• Lev Manovich, 'What is Digital Cinema?', Manovich.net, 1995
• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema and Digital Media', in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (eds), Perspectives of Media Art (1996)
• Lev Manovich, 'Moving Image Culture after Computerisation: an outline', 2003
• David Levente Palatinus, "Framing the Body, Staging the Gaze” Representations of the Body in Forensic Crime Fiction and Film, PhD Thesis, Peter Pazmany Catholic University Faculty of Humanities Doctoral School of Literary Studies Theories of Literature and Culture Program Piliscsaba 2009
• Stephen Papson, 'Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: when excess isn’t parody', Jump Cut, 53, 2011
• Michael Piggott, Time and film style, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009
• Nicholas Rombes, 'Avant Garde Realism',  C-Theory.net, January 2005
• Jae Hyung Ryu, 'The Cinema of Special Effects Attractions and Its Representation of Reality: The Comparison between the Early Tricks and Digital Effects', Georgia State University, Georgia, 2004, (Thanhouser.org)
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'Killing in Style: The Aestheticization of Violence in Donald Cammell's White of the Eye', Scope, June 2001
• Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Continuity: full text of my talk', The Pinocchio Theory, March 26, 2012
• Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, 'Gamer', The Pinocchio Theory,  December 15, 2009
• On Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect, In Media Res, August 29-September 2, 2011
• 'Cinema's Exhaustion and the Vitality ...' by Elena del Rio
• 'Post-Cinematic Effects' by Paul Bowman
• 'A hair of the dog that bit us' by Adrian Ivakhiv
• 'Fragments of unconscious' by Patricia MacCormack
• 'Steven Shaviro Presents': A response to the week
• Steven Shaviro, 'Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film', Projections, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2007: 63-82
• Steven Shaviro, 'The Cinematic Body Redux', originally published in Parallax 14:1 (February 2008), 48-54, The Pinocchio Theory
• Matthias Stork, 'In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema', Frames, 1, 2012
  
• Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• David Surman, 'CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds', Gamasutra Education Online, 2003/4 
• Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995
• Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace, 'Terminal Indifference: The Hollywood War Film Post-September 11', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)
• Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess', Ciné-Tracts, 1.2, Summer 1977
• Magnus Ullén, 'The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich', Jump Cut, 52, Summer 2011
• Anja Zagorac, '"A Splinter in Your Mind": Subjectivity, Hyperreality, and Religion in The Matrix', Masters thesis,  University of Vienna/Wien, May 2009
• Added Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, 'Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter', MUBI, August 22, 2012
  

The Great Ealing Film Challenge by Keith M. Johnston

A frame capture from Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick, 1952).
Read Keith M. Johnston's assessment of this film, and Pam Cook's

Today, a rather thrilled Film Studies For Free brings you news that Keith M. Johnston's truly 'Great Ealing Film Challenge' has reached its noble conclusion.

Johnston is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on the interplay of technology, aesthetics and industry in British film of the 1940s and 1950s, with particular interests in issues of colour, widescreen and 3-D.

He is the author of Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (McFarland 2009) and Science Fiction Fillm: A Critical Introduction (Berg 2011). He has also published on Ealing's colour aesthetic. You can follow him on Twitter and at the Huffington Post, as well as at his own website.

An ex-resident of Ealing, Keith has always been fascinated by Ealing Studios and its place in British cinema, both past and present. The 'Great Ealing Film Challenge' has been his attempt to better understand the films the studio produced, and what they can tell us about that period in British film history.

Just over a year ago, Keith wrote at his website about his (then) proposed experiment as follows:

[This blog has] decided to conduct its own obscure 80th anniversary celebration... and attempt to watch all of the Ealing Studios films.

Of course, there are some provisos - the list of 95 films I am working from comes from Charles Barr's Ealing Studios book, and is therefore focused entirely on the Michael Balcon years (1938-59). Given the difficulty of seeing much of the studio's output (either before 1938 or, in some cases, after), seeing all of those 95 is already something of a challenge (they're not all available on DVD ). [...]

The order in which I watch the films is largely going to be decided at whim [...] - the initial batch will include some of the well-known titles (commentary on Went the Day Well? and The Man in the White Suit will likely appear in the first week) and those lesser known titles that I realise I've never seen (the likes of The Love Lottery (1954), Nine Men (1943), The Feminine Touch (1954) and Train of Events (1950).

To celebrate the rather impressive achievement of blogging on all 95 films within a year, FSFF brings you not one, but two lists of links to Keith's highly informative and engaging entries! The first comes in the order in which Keith wrote them and the second has been organised alphabetically by year of release.

There will be much more forthcoming from Keith on Ealing Studios' films. He has also been working on co-editing Ealing Revisited with Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, and Melanie Williams. This major collection will be published by BFI-Palgrave later in 2012, tying in with the BFI's major retrospective of Ealing Studios in November/December 2012.

Oh, and don't forget FSFF's earlier post on Ealing comedy films here.

Well done and thank you, Keith! Surely there should be a wee dram as a reward? At any rate, FSFF hopes you enjoy your readers' gratitude galore!

Prologue: The Great Ealing Film Challenge


Went the Day Well? (1943); Train of Events (1949); A Run for your Money (1949); Fiddlers Three (1944); The Love Lottery (1954); The Cruel Sea (1953); The Long Arm (1956); Nine Men (1943); Nicholas Nickleby (1947); Trouble Brewing (1939); The Magnet (1950); The Ship That Died of Shame (1955); Against the Wind (1948); Another Shore (1948); The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942); The Ghost of St. Michael’s (1941); Dead of Night (1945); The Feminine Touch (1956); The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953); The Man in the White Suit (1951); The Gentle Gunman (1952); Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945); Saloon Bar (1940); The Next of Kin (1942); The Gaunt Stranger (1938); San Demetrio, London (1943); Where No Vultures Fly (1951); West of Zanzibar (1954); They Came to a City (1944); Return to Yesterday (1940); Lease of Life (1954); Johnny Frenchman (1945); Ships with Wings (1941); Davy (1957); Touch and Go (1955); Spare a Copper (1940); Turned Out Nice Again (1941); Come on George (1939); Whisky Galore! (1949); Let George Do It (1940); Dunkirk (1958); Who Done It? (1956); My Learned Friend (1943); The Captive Heart (1946); The Blue Lamp (1950); Sailor’s Three (1940); The Goose Steps Out (1942); The Halfway House (1944); The Square Ring (1953); The Foreman Went to France (1942); The Bells Went Down (1943); Champagne Charlie (1944); Bitter Springs (1950); The Overlanders (1946); Pool of London (1951); The Rainbow Jacket (1954); The Lavender Hill Mob (1951); The Shiralee (1957); For Those in Peril (1944); The Proud Valley (1940); The Ladykillers (1955); The Siege of Pinchgut (1959); Meet Mr Lucifer (1953); Secret People (1952); The Big Blockade (1942); Out of the Clouds (1955); Cheer Boys Cheer (1939); The Maggie (1953); Undercover (1943); The Four Just Men (1939); Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948); The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947); It Always Rains on Sunday (1947); Cage of Gold (1950); Frieda (1947); The Night My Number Came Up (1955); Hue [&] Cry (1947); Let’s Be Famous (1939); There Ain’t No Justice (1939); Eureka Stockade (1949); Painted Boats (1945); Barnacle Bill (1958); I Believe in You (1952); Dance Hall (1950); Convoy (1940); Scott of the Antarctic (1948); The Man in the Sky (1957); Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949; Young Man’s Fancy (1939); Mandy (1952); The Divided Heart (1954); His Excellency (1952); The Ware Case (1938); Nowhere to Go (1958); Passport to Pimlico (1949)

1938:
The Gaunt Stranger; The Ware Case

1939:
Cheer Boys Cheer; Come on George; Let’s Be Famous; The Four Just Men; There Ain’t No Justice ; Trouble Brewing; Young Man’s Fancy

1940:
Convoy; Let George Do It; Return to Yesterday ; Sailor’s Three ; Saloon Bar ; Spare a Copper; The Proud Valley

1941:
Ships with Wings; The Ghost of St. Michael’s; Turned Out Nice Again ;

1942:
The Big Blockade; The Black Sheep of Whitehall; The Foreman Went to France; The Goose Steps Out; The Next of Kin

1943:
My Learned Friend; Nine Men; San Demetrio, London; The Bells Went Down; Undercover; Went the Day Well? 

1944:
Champagne Charlie; Fiddlers Three; For Those in Peril; Fiddlers Three; The Halfway House; They Came to a City

1945:
Dead of Night; Johnny Frenchman; Painted Boats; Pink String and Sealing Wax 

1946:
The Captive Heart; The Overlanders

1947:
Frieda; Hue&Cry; It Always Rains on Sunday; Nicholas Nickleby; The Loves of Joanna Godden

1948:
Against the Wind; Another Shore; Saraband for Dead Lovers; Scott of the Antarctic

1949:
A Run for your Money; Eureka Stockade; Kind Hearts and Coronets; Passport to Pimlico; Train of Events; Whisky Galore!

1950:
Bitter Springs; Cage of Gold; Dance Hall; The Blue Lamp; The Magnet

1951:
Pool of London; The Lavender Hill Mob; The Man in the White Suit; Where No Vultures Fly

1952:
His Excellency; I Believe in You; Mandy; Secret People; The Gentle Gunman

1953:
Meet Mr Lucifer; The Cruel Sea; The Maggie; The Square Ring; The Titfield Thunderbolt

1954:
Lease of Life; The Divided Heart; The Love Lottery; The Rainbow Jacket; West of Zanzibar

1955:
Out of the Clouds; The Ladykillers; The Night My Number Came Up; The Ship That Died of Shame; Touch and Go

1956:
The Feminine Touch; The Long Arm; Who Done It?

1957:
Davy; The Man in the Sky; The Shiralee

1958:
Barnacle Bill; Dunkirk; Nowhere to Go

1959:
The Siege of Pinchgut

Our Beautiful Wickedness: On Reading Films Queerly. In Memory of Alexander Doty

The Beautiful Wickedness of Queer Reading from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

An audiovisual collage made by Catherine Grant in memory of Alexander Doty, 

brilliant author of numerous key texts in LGBT and queer film and cultural studies, 

including the one quoted from in this video: Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon 

(London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

[C]lassic [film] texts and personalities actually can be more queer-suggestive than “openly” gay, lesbian, or bisexual texts. That is, the coding of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts and personalities can often yield a wider range of non-straight readings because certain sexual things could not be stated baldly—and still cannot or will not in most mainstream products—thus often making it more difficult to categorize the erotics of a film or a star. Of course, if you aren’t careful, this line of thought can begin to sound like an argument valorizing the closet, for understanding queerness as always something “connotated” or suggested (and never really there “denotatively”), for “subtexting,” and for “subcultural” readings. But since I don’t see queer readings as any less there, or any less real, than straight readings of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts, I don’t think that what I do in this book is colluding with dominant representational or interpretive regimes that seek to make queerness “alternative” or “sub” straight. [Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics, pp. 1-2]

In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my “queer reception” love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses–largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add. [Alexander Doty,  in Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011]

Film Studies For Free was shocked and very saddened at the news, just over a week ago, of the untimely death of Alexander Doty, a truly trailblazing film and media scholar.

Doty, Indiana University Professor of Gender Studies and Communication and Culture (and chair of the latter department) was the author of two classic and highly enjoyable books in queer audiovisual cultural studies: Making Things Perfectly Queer (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000). He also co-edited, with Corey Creekmur, the hugely important collection Out in Culture: Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Continuum, 1995) and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas.

While Doty didn't claim to have invented queer cultural reading as a scholarly practice, he wowed us with the brilliance, daring and sincerity of his interpretations, ones often deeply rooted in his personal, affective experiences of the cultural forms he was studying. In so doing, he succeeded in showing countless other students of film and media texts why it is so vital to engage in these critical practices in public, why it is essential to be good at them, as well as what is seriously at stake in many identity or, indeed, existence-based scholar-fandoms, like those often engaged in by LGBT subjects.

If, as the Wizard of Oz tells us, 'A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others', the many tributes to Doty that have appeared in the last week prove, beyond any doubt, that he had an excellent heart. He certainly had a very courageous one. He, his unique voice, and the work he would have gone on to produce, had his life not been so cruelly cut short, will be hugely missed.

As well as putting together the video collage at the top of this entry, which introduces Doty's compelling justification for queer reading, if not the (possibly even more compelling) details of his actual queer reading of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), FSFF has also assembled a list of links in Doty's memory to online studies which perform queer readings of films and moving image culture, as well as openly accessible studies of some films that perform their own queer readings. Two further FSFF video essays are embedded--on Elizabeth Taylor and on "queer Hitchcock", both of which intersect with, and were partly inspired by Doty's own work on these and other themes.

That long list is preceded by a growing collection of links to the online tributes to Doty that have appeared since his death (this will be kept updated), as well as to his own, openly accessible, scholarly work online. FSFF's author very gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Anthony Bleach and the Facebook group Friends of Alexander Doty in assembling the first two of these three lists. Although she only knew Doty through his published work, she would like to convey her condolences for his loss to all those whose lives were graced, as so many evidently were, by knowing him personally.

Finally, at the very foot of today's entry is a call for contributions to a new website for the Global Queer Cinema project (to be launched in September). It will seek to live up to the high standards that Doty's work set for queer cultural critique as it aims to provide a new, openly accessible, internationalist resource for queer film and cultural studies. FSFF will update its readers about this exciting project in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, FSFF is sad that one of those who have most inspired LGBT film studies scholarship will not be around to witness his influence on this project.

Rest in queer peace, Alexander Doty.


Online tributes to Alexander Doty

• Corey Creekmur, 'Remembering Alexander Doty', FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Kyra Hunting, 'In Memoriam: Thanking Alexander Doty', Antenna, August 12, 2012 
• Taylor Cole Miller, 'A Star Was Born: The Inspiring Life and Work of Alexander Doty', Antenna, August 10, 2012
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 'SCMS Tribute to Alexander Doty', Society for Cinema and Media Studies website, August 8, 2012
• Camera Obscura Collective, 'Alexander Doty', Facebook, August 10, 2012 
• 'IU mourns passing of faculty member Alex Doty', Indiana University Newsroom, August 6, 2012  
• 'Pioneering queer studies scholar Alexander Doty dies...', University of Minnesota Press, August 6, 2012
• Lolachrome, 'You: A Glee multi/metavid', All Things Know, All Things Know, August 7, 2012
• Alex Doty - In Memoriam website
• Ceola Wilson, 'Tributes to "outstanding scholar and teacher"’, Royal Gazette Online, August 7, 2012

Online work by Alexander Doty 

• Alexander Doty, 'I Love Shari: My Queerly Feminist Life with TV', Republished in FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Alexander Doty, 'Modern Family, Glee, and the Limits of Television Liberalism', Republished by FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Alexander Doty, 'Hot in Cleveland: Everything Old is New Again?', Republished in FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011  
• Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part Two)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 30, 2011 

Online studies, or performances, of queer reading

• John S. Bak, 'Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations - Tennessee Williams's 'Desire', Journal of Religion and Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2005
• John Bannister, 'Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, and Susan Sontag: Campaigners of Camp and the Carry On films', Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007
• Harry Benshoff, '[Review] of Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon by Alexander Doty', Scope, August 2001
• Jenna Bond, 'Homosexuality and the Italian Spaghetti Western', Offscreen, November 30, 2007
• Orla Juliette Borreye, 'The Significance Of The Queer And The Dog In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000): A Masculinity At War', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
• Michael Bronski, 'From The Celluloid Closet to Brokeback Mountain: The Changing Nature of Queer Film Criticism', Cineaste, 2008
• Vincent Brook and Allan Campbell, '“Pansies don't float”– gay representability, film noir, and The Man Who Wasn’t There', Jump Cut, 46, Summer 2003 
• Shannon Brownlee, 'Masculinity Between Animation and Live Action, or, SpongeBob v. Hasselhoff', Animation Studies Online Journal, Vol. 6, September 2011
  
• Kathy Burdette, 'Queer Film Theory - Bibliography'
• Alain Chouinard, 'Queering the Québécois and Canadian Child in Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo', Synoptique, 13, February 2009 
• Lesley Chow, 'The Double Standard: The Twins of Two-Faced Woman and Sylvia Scarlett,' Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 59, February 2008
• Douglas Crimp, 'Getting the Warhol we Deserve: Cultural Studies and Queer Culture', Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, 1999
• Zachary Dorsey, ' Slick Moves: Queer Fight Choreography in The Transporter', In Media Res, December 5, 2007
  
• Richard Dyer, 'Homosexuality in Film Noir', from Jump Cut, No. 16, 1977
• Brett Farmer and Stacy Wolf, 'Stage Door Jennies', Genders OnLine Journal, 38, 2003
• Jane Gaines, 'Dorothy Arzner's trousers', Jump Cut, 37, July 1992  
• Jane Gaines, 'Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Queering Feminist Film Theory', Jump Cut, 41, May 1997
• 'Gays, Lesbian, and Transgendered People in Motion Pictures: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library'
• David Gerstner, 'Queer Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetics of Vincente Minnelli', Modernity, Vol. 2, 2000
• David Greven, American Medusa: Bette Davis, Beyond the Forest, femininity, and Camp', Jump Cut, 46, Summer 2003
• Todd Haynes interviewed by Richard Dyer [audio recording from the Tate Modern], 'Double Indemnity: Todd Haynes/Edward Hopper' (4 June 2004)
• Peter Kemp, 'Bi-Polar Gender-Blender: Sylvia Scarlett,' Senses of Cinema 22, Sept-Oct 2002
• Ewan Kirkland, 'Romantic Comedy and the Construction of Heterosexuality', Scope Issue 9, 2007 
• Cheuk Yin Li, 'The Absence of Fan Activism in the Queer Fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong', edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10, 2012
• Dennis Lo, 'The Politics and Aesthetics of “Asian American” Sexuality in Ang Lee’s Cross-Cultural Family Dramas: A Case Study on The Wedding Banquet and The Ice Storm', Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol. 1, 2008
• Patricia MacCormack, 'Barbara Steele's Ephemeral Skin: Feminism, Fetishism, and Film', Senses of Cinema, September 2002
• James MacDowell, 'What Value is There in Gus Van Sant's Psycho?', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 7, 2005
• Stephen Maddison, 'Pedro Almodóvar and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: the Heterosocial Spectator and Misogyny', Chapter 4 of Fags, hags, and queer sisters : gender dissent and heterosocial bonds in gay culture (New York : St. Martin's, 2000)
• Joseph McBride, 'George Cukor: The Valor of Discretion', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 32, April 2001
• Deborah Mellamphy, 'The Paradox Of Transvestism In Tim Burton’s Ed Wood', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
• Matthew Ogonofski, 'Queering the Heterosexual Male in Canadian Cinema: An Analysis of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo', Synoptique, 13, February 2009
• Rebecca Panosky, 'Dorothy Arzner and Gender Representation.” In: “International Female Film Directors: Their Contributions to the Film Industry and Women's Roles in Society.” Chapter 4 of e-Thesis
• Susan Pelle and Catherine Fox, 'Queering Desire / Querying Consumption: Rereading Visual Images of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art', Third Space, Vol. 6 Issue 1, Summer 2006
• Ryan Powell, 'Putting on the Red Dress: Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,' Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007 
• Kate Rennebohm, 'Queering Childhood: An Examination of Claude Jutra’s Dreamspeaker', Synoptique, 13, Feburary 2009
• Elena del Rio, 'Performing the Narrative of Seduction: Claire Denis's Beau Travail', Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue 7, Spring 2003
• Julian Savage, 'The Conscious Collusion of the Stare: The Viewer Implicated in Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul,' Senses of Cinema, 16, Sept-Oct 2001
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'A Tale of Two Psychos', Senses of Cinema, 2000
• Ian Scott Todd, 'Outside/In: Abjection, Space, and Landscape in Brokeback Mountain', Scope13, February 2009
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, You're so paranoid, you probably think this introduction is about you', Novel gazing : queer readings in fiction / edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)
• Craig Snyder, 'Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain', Jump Cut, 53, Summer 2011
• Carter Soles, 'A stalker’s odyssey: arrested development, gay desire, and queer comedy in Chuck&Buck', Jump Cut, 49, 2007
• Carter Michael Soles, Falling Out of the Closet: Kevin Smith, Queerness, and Independent Film, e-Thesis University of Oregon, 2008
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Ang Lee's Cowboys', Offscreen Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 28, 2007) 
• K. E. Sullivan, 'Ed Gein and the Figure of the Transgendered Serial Killer', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 38-47
• Donato Totaro, 'Psycho Redux', Offscreen Journal, 2004
• Evangelos Tziallas, 'Looking Beneath the Skin: Reconfiguring Trauma and Sexuality', Stream: A Graduate Journal of Communication, Spring 2008 1(1)
• Stacy Wolf, 'Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body', S[&]F Online, 3.3 and 4.1, Fall 2005
• Amy Villarejo, 'Interview with Tish Pearlman for Out of Bounds/Cornell University' [about Queer film and queer film theory] RealPlayer file, 29 mins 30 seconds
• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 57, August 2007
• Nicholas de Villiers, '”The vanguard - and the most articulate audience”: Queer Camp, Jack Smith and John Waters', Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007

Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE by Catherine Grant


Skipping ROPE (with audio commentary) by Catherine Grant. First published in Frames, 1, 2012. Transcript available.



Call For Queer Reading/Writing Contributions 
to the new Global Queer Cinema website

Contributions are invited to the Global Queer Cinema website, hosted by the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, UK. The site will be launched in early September 2012. 

The website forms part of the Global Queer Cinema project, an international academic research network project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Sussex. The project is led by Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (University of Warwick). The network held its first event in May of this year.

The project website will be run in conjunction with Catherine Grant (University of Sussex and Film Studies For Free) and Laura Ellen Joyce, GQC Project Co-ordinator, and will continue beyond the length of the project, acting in part as an open access archive and news filter for project-generated material, and related queer film studies resources. 

We welcome contributions from researchers interested in queer (and queering) cinema, cultural studies, media, global studies, gender and sexuality, filmmakers, artists, writers and interdisciplinary scholars, or those with an interest in the practice, exploration and dissemination of film. The below list of topics and frameworks. 

• Queer frames
• Queer uncanny
• Queer sounds and music
• Queer illusions
• Queer film festivals
• Queer decades
• Queer directors
• Queer avant garde and DIY
• New Queer Cinema
• New releases
• Classic films
• Androgyny and pandrogyny
• Queer cosmetics and prosthetics
• In-depth essays on single films
• Short essays on single images

We therefore invite short takes of 250 - 300 words, or longer essays (MLA style) of around 1500-2000 words for more in-depth analysis. Multimedia work (non-copyright infringing - using fair use/fair dealing principles) is very welcome. The above list of topics is not exhaustive, and we invite contributions on any topic or theme which you feel would may (queerly) fit our general ethos. Please correspond with us about any proposals for content by email at GQCproject[at]gmail[dot]com, on Twitter at @g_q_c, and do please 'like' us on Facebook. Thank you.