New SENSES OF CINEMA: Marker, Kubrick, Akerman, Payne, Comolli, Australian Cinema and more

Frame grab from Les Statues meurent aussi/Statues Also Die (Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, 1953). Read Daniel Vilensky's article on this film

Film Studies For Free brings you links to the heady delights of a new issue of Senses of Cinema. It has a special commemorative Chris Marker dossier, a strong focus on Australian and French language cinema, and some excellent festival reports.

Senses of Cinema 64, September 2012

Editorial

Features

Chris Marker Special Dossier:

• My Letter from Siberia by Murray Pomerance
• Séance “C.M.” by Gavin Keeney
• Montage as Resonance: Chris Marker and the Dialectical Image by Daniel Fairfax
• Chris Marker: Film as Geopolitical Enlightenment by Nick Shimmin
• Statues Also Die, or Schroedinger's Black Cat by Daniel Vilensky
• The Cats in the Hats Come Back; or “at least they’ll see the cats”: Pussycat Poetics and the Work of Chris Marker by Adrian Danks

Other Features:

• Kubrick Creator: Alchemy in Stanley Kubrick's Films by Rutger H. Cornets de Groot
• “Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am...”: interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 2) by Daniel Fairfax
• Claude Sautet: Purity and Invention by A. Jay Adler
• Chance and Choice, Biology and Theology in Alexander Payne’s Election by Lesley Brill
• The Corpse is in Australia, or The Cinematic Death of White Supremacy by Thomas A. Foster
• Invested in Expression or in Its Destruction?: The Politics of Space and Representation in Chantal Akerman’s Cinema by Zain Jamshaid

Key Moments in Australian Cinema
Luke Buckmaster on Dead End Drive-In; Kit Harvey on Red Hill; Lesley Speed on Ants in His Pants; Adrian Danks on The Overlanders; Stephen Gaunson on Bitter Springs; Robert Picking on The Tracker; Tim Groves on Everynight, Everynight

Festival Reports
Jorge Mourinha on Vila do Conde International Short Film Festival; Sally Shafto on Khouribga; Bill Mousoulis on Karlovy Vary; Alison Frank on New Horizons; Paul Macovaz on Sydney; Damien Spiccia on Revelation; Nicholas Godfrey on Melbourne

Book Reviews
Mary Harrod on Richard Linklater; Mike Walsh on The Shadowcatchers: A History of Cinematography in Australia; Richard Martin on David Lynch; Todd Herzog on Peter Lorre: Face Maker; Trent Griffiths on Australian Documentary; Tony McKibbin on Noriko Smiling; Claire Henry on Rape in Art Cinema; Lia McCrae-Moore on Peter Weir: A Creative Journey from Australia to Hollywood; James Neibaur on Syd Chaplin

Cinémathèque Annotations on Film
Tony Williams on The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks Shari Kizirian on The Girl with the Hat Box David Melville on The Hourglass Sanatorium Darragh O'Donoghue on The Saragossa Manuscript Beata Lukasiak on Three Lives and Only One Death John Fidler on Time Regained Fran Bren on Bad Luck Greg Dolgopolov on The House on Trubnaya Hamish Ford on Three Crowns of the Sailor Bilge Ebiri on Alyonka

Film Philosophy Conference Keynote Presentations Online

A slide from the Film-Philosophy Conference keynote lecture by Francesco Casetti

Film Studies For Free can only marvel at, and be very thankful for, the efficiency and commitment to open access research and scholarship involved in the speedy publication online of five excellent keynote lectures from the very recent annual conference held by the Film-Philosophy journal earlier this month.

Below are links to four audio files and some slides from presentations, too. Thank you F-P!

The London Graduate School presents Film-Philosophy Conference 2012

Film-Philosophy continues to grow as an important discipline within the fields of both Film Studies and Philosophy. The Film-Philosophy Conference brought together scholars from all over the world to present their research on a broad range of topics within the subject area.

The 2012 conference took place on September 12-14, and was jointly hosted by King’s College London, Queen Mary, University of London and Kingston University.

Keynote Speakers:

• Bernard Stiegler (Goldsmiths, University of London; University of Technology of Compiègne) and Ken McMullen (Director of Ghost Dance) AUDIO HERE
• Francesco Casetti (Yale University) AUDIO HERE
• Damian Sutton (Middlesex University) AUDIO HERE
• Libby Saxton (Queen Mary, University of London) AUDIO HERE

New JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE on Alternative cinemas in India

Cover of JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE 10, 2012 (Alternative cinemas in India)

A new issue of Journal of the Moving Image Online, a great, online, open access publication, has hit the e-stands!

Film Studies For Free heard the news via film scholar and JMI editor Moinak Biswas, who has contributed a number of very fine pieces to Volume 10. There are also excellent articles on Mani Kaul (see also FSFF's memorial entry on this fine filmmaker), and on the brilliant MediaLab, a fantastic initiative by Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University (also the publishers of JMI), by Anustup Bastu.

All the contents are linked to below. Great work!

• Editorial by Moinak Biswas
• The Persistence of Rajasthan in Indian Cinema : One Region, So Many Views by Kaushik Bhaumik (Deputy Director, Osian's Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, New Delhi)
• John Abraham : Cinema and the Idea of the Collective by Rajan Kurai Krishnan (Senior Research Fellow, IDCR, Loyola College, Chennai)
• Alternative Cinema : Response of Indian Film Studies by Manas Ghosh (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• The Story of Arri : Imagined Landscapes, Emergent Technologies and Bengali Cinema by Madhuja Mukherjee (Associate Professor and Head, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Spectres of the New Wave : The State of the Work of Mourning, and the New Cinema Aesthetic in a Regional Industry by Parichay Patra (Student, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Authoring Space, Gender and the Past : A Film Called Shubho Mahurat by Sumit Dey (Student, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Mani Kaul : DU : KH ke Prakar by Amrit Gangar
• Incomplete Testimonies : Tapan Sinha by Moinak Biswas (Associate Professor, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• A Memorialization Without Destinying : A Revisitation of JU Media Lab's National Instruments Project Archive by Anustup Basu (Associate Professor of English, Cinema and Media, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

New WORLD PICTURE on Distance: André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Barbara Hammer, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Phil Solomon, Yorgos Lanthimos, and much more

Frame grab from Κυνόδοντας/Kynodontas/Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009). Read Eugene Brinkema's new essay on this film

Distance suggests a standing apart—a separation, an opening or difference, a gap in space. And mirroring broader swaps of categories of time for categories of space, “distance” can also stand for remoteness on the level of time: James Phillips, for example, neatly summarizes this shift as “Odysseus longs for home; Proust is in search of lost time.”6 But neither this sense of a spatial gap or a temporal remove is precisely the sense in which distance is taken seriously in Dogtooth. For that, we require an older sense of the word. [Eugenie Brinkema, 'e.g., Dogtooth', World Picture 7, 2012]

It's been busy, busy, busy round these parts, but today Film Studies For Free stirs itself from its travails to bring you the, as usual, wonderful news that World Picture, that most original of online humanities journals, has just published a new issue.

The keyword for WP 7 is Distance, and it has activated a wide range of brilliant cultural and philosophical readings on that topic. FSFF particularly loved filmmaker Barbara Hammer's contributions to this issue here and here (see this earlier FSFF entry on her marvellous work), as well as Eugenie Brinkema on Dogtooth, Sam Ishii-Gonzales on Bergson, and  Domietta Torlasco on The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

There is much more in WP of huge worth and interest, so please dip into the below contents.

Oh, and also, please come, if you can, to the upcoming annual World Picture conference, held this year at the University of Sussex, November 2-3, 2012. A terribly excited FSFF will be in attendance!


World Picture 7: Table of Contents

• Zach Barocas Givens
• Eugenie Brinkema e.g., Dogtooth
• Robert Cavanagh Contact Sport
• David L. Clark “Not ours, this death, to take into our bones”: The Postanimal after the Posthuman
• Lorenz Engell Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze
• Victor Fan Approaching Reality: Epistemic Distance, Political Crises and Temporal Imaginations
• in the Sino-French Dialogue on Cinema Ontology
• Alexander García Düttmann The Worst, or The Lesser of Two Evils
• Sam Ishii-Gonzales Suspended Meaning: On Bergson and Cinema Perception
• Barbara Hammer, in Correspondence with John David Rhodes
• Film is Thinking: A Conversation Across Distance
• Barbara Hammer Bent Time
• Sorin Radu Media on Target in the Global System: Military Strategy and Narrative Practice
• Alessandra Raengo Reification, Reanimation and the Money of the Real
• Phil Solomon While You Were Asleep
• Phil Solomon, in Conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland
• Mediating the American Idea
• Keston Sutherland The World and John Wieners
• Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece In the House, In the Picture: Distance and Proximity in the American Mid-Century Neutralized Theatre
• Matthew Tierney The Eclipse of the Eclipse of Distance: Talking Politics in a Global Village
• Domietta Torlasco The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini's New Erotics of Vision

New SCREENING THE PAST on 'Untimely Cinema'

Framegrab from Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998). Please read Adrian Martin's new essay A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma

The question of whether cinema has run out of time, and the related question of whether it is also, therefore, out of ‘its’ time (cinema as ‘heritage’ media, a relic from another era) are questions that are often posed by, and to, those working in cinema studies today. For well over a decade, film theorists and film historians have evocatively, rigorously and at times relentlessly theorised and debated the question of whether cinema is dead, dying, living on borrowed time, or doing what it has so often done – refigure itself. In titling this essay, and this issue, “Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time” we consider this idea in two seemingly very different ways. [Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis, 'Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time', Screening the Past, ISsue 43, 2012 ]

A really wonderful new issue of Screening the Past, one of the best online and openly accessible film studies journals, has just been published, so Film Studies For Free rushes you the news. It's a timely special issue on Untimely Cinema guest edited by Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis.

The contents are incredibly rich and wide-ranging and are listed, and linked to, below.


Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time

• Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time by Jodi Brooks & Therese Davis
• Syrian Cinema: Out of Time? by Kay Dickinson
• The Restoration of The Exiles: The Untimeliness of Archival Cinema by Catherine Russell
• A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma by Adrian Martin
• Suspended Reading: Man on Wire, 9/11, and the Logic of the High-Wire by Adam Ross Rosenthal
• Kim Ki-duk’s Aporia: The Face and Hospitality (on 3-Iron) by Steve Choe
• Re-staging the Cinema: Psycho, Film Spectatorship and the Redundant New Remake by Megan Carrigy
• Parentheses in Time: L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) as Amorous Event by Alex Ling
• Missed Beats: Unseen Cinema and a Cinema of the Unseen (or Stella Dallas, Again) by Jodi Brooks
• Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary by Belinda Smaill
• Untimely Animations: Waltz with Bashir and the Incorporation of Historical Difference by Paul Atkinson and Simon Cooper

First Release

• Ten Fingers and Nine Toes: Embodied Representations of Pregnancy in Avant-Garde Cinema by Lauren Bliss
• Mapping the Cinematic Journey of Alexander Pearce, Cannibal Convict by Jane Stadler
• I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini)/The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) by Sam Rohdie
• The Great Uncredited: Sir Walter Scott and Cinema by Tim Dolin
• The Jazz Singer: Accounting for Female Agency and Reconsidering Scholarship by Karen Vered
• Encountering Elusive Cinema: Tati, Straub-Huillet and Antonioni by Edgar Jorge

Classics and Re-runs

• Directing the Avant-Garde: Raymond Durgnat interviews Stephen Dwoskin (1984) by Raymond Durgnat

Reviews

• Ford At Fox by Bill Routt
• To Wax Zizekian: On Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible by Adrian Martin
• Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-Assessment by Patricia Aufderheide
• The Shadowcatchers: a history of cinematography in Australia by Ina Bertrand
• Post – 9/11 Cinema: Through a Lens Darkly by Rod Bishop
• Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs by Dirk de Bruyn
• Deleuze and World Cinemas by Daniel Fairfax
• Celluloid Immigrant: Italian Australian Filmmaker Giorgio Mangiamele by Geoff Gardner
• Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts
• by Gabrielle Lowe
• World Film Locations: Paris by Sarinah Masukor
• The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era by Josh Nelson
• China on Video: Smaller-screen realities by Tom Salek
• Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film
• by Robert Sinnerbrink
• World Film Locations: Los Angeles & World Film Locations: London by Lynn Smailes
• Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era by Mike Walsh
• The Anatomy of Harpo Marx by Wheeler Winston Dixon