Happy Holidays Round Up! Adrian Martin Interview, New Journal Issues, Videographic Film Studies and Much More!

UNCANNY FUSION by Catherine Grant: VIAGGIO IN ITALIA/JOURNEY TO ITALY meets…?

Read more about this video here and here

It's been a busy few months and a fair tuckered out Film Studies For Free is off on its annual screen-free holidays from tomorrow for just over a week. While it chills out on a sweltering beach somewhere, generous to a fault (so it says), it's leaving you with LOTS of links to fabulous open access reading, viewing and listening. Just check out the wondrousness below.

Back soonish.


New issue of [in]Transition: A Journal of Videographic Film Studies 1.2, 2014 
Edited by Christian Keathley, the new issue examines some of the formal parameters in emergent videographic film and moving studies. It contains the following entries:

• The ABCs of Forms and Genres by Christian Keathley
• Intersection by Girish Shambu
• On Video Tributes by Chiara Grizzaffi
• Compilation and Found-Footage Traditions by Corey K Creekmur

Adrian Martin Interview 
On the longest day of the year, June 21, 2014, Film Studies For Free's author interviewed film studies writer and thinker extraordinaire Adrian Martin. Our conversation took place in the quietest spot we could find in the historic center of Milan late on a World Cup match night. We were both visiting that city for the conference of the Network of European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), and had been part of a workshop panel that day on videographic film studies, or "audiovisual approaches to audiovisual subjects." We discussed Adrian's turn to audiovisual essays (many made with Cristina Álvarez López) as well as his work more generally, and talked about his new book Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, later in 2014). Adrian's latest De Filmkrant column 'Serve Yourself' offers an extract from the book as a preview of it: the column is on-line here: http://www.filmkrant.nl/world_wide_angle/10805. In the interview, Adrian talks in detail about a particular audiovisual essay -- Intimate Catastrophes -- which he co-edited with Cristina Álavarez López for the Transit: Cine y otros desvíos website.  Also see "[De Palma’s] Vision" by Martin and Álvarez López here: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/de-palmas-vision. The interview is available from Film Studies For Free's Podbean Site.

 
Two new cinephilia links from Photogénie!

• Photogénie has just updated its inaugural issue to include the following publication on cinephilia:
• Catherine Grant and Christian Keathley, 'The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations and videographic film studies', PHOTOGÉNIE 0, 2014
• Also, see Photogénie's new call for your personal accounts (in words or images) of your favorite cinephiliac moments here.

Great updates in Kracauer Lecture Video Recording Series at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (links via Vinzenz Hediger), including:

• Laura Mulvey's lecture 'Becoming History: Spectatorship, Technology and Feminist Film Theory': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/sommer-2014/laura-mulvey/ 
• Antonio Somaini's lecture on Eisenstein's 'Notes toward a General History of Cinema': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/sommer-2014/antonio-somaini
• Ginette Vincendeau's lecture 'From the Margins to the Centre: Ethnicity and the French Star-System': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/winter-2013-2014/ginette-vincendeau/
• Christa Blümlinger's lecture 'Memory and Projection': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/winter-2012-2013/christa-bluemlinger/

New issue of OFFSCREEN (Volume 18.4, 2014) on Television

• TV Horror: Covering the Televisual Horror Landscape By Donato Totaro
• TV Vampires: From Barnabas Collins to Bill Compton By Stacey Abbott
• Contextual Analysis of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: Robert Enrico vs. Rod Serling By Donato Totaro
• Revolution and Sex: The Evolution of TV By Tom Stempel
• Robert Towne’s Television Years By Elaine Lennon 

Preceding issue of OFFSCREEN (18.3, March 2014) on Memory, Cinema and Time

• Personal/Memory Time: Past and Present Merging on the Screen (Wild Strawberries, Spider, Solaris, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) By Elisa Pezzotta
• The Disappearance (1977, Stuart Cooper): Melancholy and Murder By Donato Totaro
• Out of Time: The Costumes of Bad Timing (1980) By Elaine Lennon
• Chronos Pulls the Strings: Roaming thoughts On Koji Yamamura’s Muybridge’s Strings (2011) By Ramin S. Khanjani
• “Japan Speaks Out!” at the 27th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato at Bologna, Italy, 29 June–6 July, 2013 By Peter Rist

SCOPE, Issue 26, February 2014

• No Country for Women and Children: Pastoral American and Meaningful Despair in Palindromes and Dancer in the Dark — Charles Burnetts
• The Fine Art of Commercial Freedom: British Music Videos and Film Culture — Emily Caston
• "Disappointingly Thin and Flaccid": Gender, Authorship and Authenticity in Shane Meadows' Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) — Martin Fradley and Emma Sutton
• “We Ain’t Thinking About Tomorrow”: Narrative Immediacy and the Digital Period Aesthetic in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies — Adam Gallimore
• Melodrama as Vernacular Modernism in China: The Case of D. W. Griffith — Qijun Han
• Postmillennial Cinema and the Avenging Fatale in Sin City, Hard Candy and Descent — Samantha Jane Lindop
• Labor Relations, 16mm Film and Euston Films — Max Sexton
• DOSSIER: Film Festival Pedagogy: Using the Film Festival in or as a Film Course — curated by Ger Zielinski 
• BOOK REVIEWS PDF
• FILM REVIEWS PDF
• CONFERENCE REPORTS 

See film scholars Ben Sampson and Drew Morton's fantastic VIDEO ESSAY DIPTYCH: Good Dads/Bad Dads: A Tribute to Cinematic Fathers. Morton has also posted all five drafts of his BAD DADS video essay to share his production process: http://vimeo.com/album/2915741. Also see Morton's ingenious video on Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: Day x Day x Day: https://vimeo.com/96852873

Michael Chanan has just uploaded his marvellous video tribute to the remarkable Brazilian documentarist Eduardo Coutinho. For further tributes to Coutinho see here. 

Ian Magor's great video tribute to the films of Bela Tarr: https://vimeo.com/97625110

Interesting audiovisual essay, on film music' relationship to the image track, by students Noémie Lachance and Jana Zander https://vimeo.com/95030117 

Kevin B Lee's TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (complete version)  

Computers Watching Movies (Inception) by Benjamin Grosser: https://vimeo.com/79080565

"Walden Connection: The Thoreauvian Agenda in UPSTREAM COLOR" Video by Anna Robertson  https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy/videos/92652144

Michael Heileman's monumental videographic STAR WARS study Kitbashed" http://vimeo.com/heilemann/kitbashed 

Great updates at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation website!

Excellent interview with film scholar Richard Misek, creator of the feature length essay film ROHMER IN PARIS: http://contrappassomag.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/contrappasso-extra-interview-with-richard-misek-rohmer-in-paris/. See his short video essay Mapping Rohmer here: http://framescinemajournal.com/article/mapping-rohmer-a-video-essay/. 

Souleymane Cissé on Henri Langlois (video 2:24): https://vimeo.com/99318945 (Link via Nicole Brenez)

The Österreichisches Filmmuseum has put Vertov's "Kinoweek" online, in digitized form, for free (link via Vinzenz Hediger)

Also at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum's site, video interviews with, among others, Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Benning, Anna Karina, Michel Ciment… Link via David Hudson: http://bit.ly/1m4MSAY

Remembering Eli Wallach, 1915 - 2014: http://fan.do/r/19i
 
David Hudson's tribute entry to Robert Gardner, 1925 – 2014, Anthropologist, filmmaker, author and advocate of the avant-garde: http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-robert-gardner-1925-2014.

Ehsan Khoshbakht talks to Dariush Mehrjui, Kamran Shirdel and Masoud Kimiai about the first golden age of Iranian cinema: http://fan.do/r/19h

kinderspiel, a project on children as media archaeologists, media makers and media players (link via Vinzenz Hediger)

Excellent talk by David Archibald:  "Should Scotland have an independent film industry?" http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-archibald/should-scotland-have-independent-film-industry

David Bordwell's first dispatch from Bologna #IlCinemaRitrovato (thanks to David Hudson for the link) 

Niamh Thornton on violence in Amat Escalante's 2013 film HELI.

Great article at Sight and Sound, on "The cinema of the Palestinian revolution" 

Call for Papers for the Global Humanitarianism and Media Culture conference in February 2015 

Transit's new video essay dedicated to deers in cinema!

NECSUS Issue 5 on Traces: Kracauer, Carax, Farocki, Elsaesser, mobile interfaces, film sound and much more

Frame grab from Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2013). Read Saige Walton's article on this film "The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in Holy Motors" in the Spring 2014 issue of NECSUS. Pt 1 of the LOLA
dossier of the film is here; pt 2 here.

Film Studies For Free had such a great time at the conference of the Network for European Cinema and Media Studies conference in Milan last week that it is a little delayed in bringing its readers news of the publication of the latest issue of this organisation's wonderful Open Access journal NECSUS. The great table of contents is given below.

More will be forthcoming from FSFF about the Milan conference in a few days (including the recording of a wonderful interview gathered there...). But one of the hottest news items from the conference is that video essayists Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López will develop and edit a new video essay section for NECSUS, to debut in the Autumn 2014 issue. More details about this very welcome development are given here.


Features:

• Siegfried Kracauer’s affinities by Thomas Elsaesser
• Mapping the rise of the iPhone: Between phones and mobile media by Ginette Verstraete
• Representations of Madrid in the (post-)transition to democracy by Vicente Rodriguez Ortega
• Empire is out there!?: The spirit of imperialism in the Pixar animated film ‘Up’ by Dietmar Meinel
• Representation or misrepresentation?: British media and Japanese popular culture by Perry Hinton

Special section: Traces

• The navigational gesture: Traces and tracings at the mobile touchscreen interface by Nanna Verhoeff and Heidi Rae Cooley
• Poetics and politics of the trace: Notes on surveillance practices through Harun Farocki’s work by Miriam De Rosa
• Webcams as cinematic medium: Creating chronotopes of the real by Paula Albuquerque
• Assembling traces, or the conservation of net art by Annet Dekker
• The Third Party Diary: Tracking the trackers on Dutch governmental websites by Lonneke van der Velden
• Microphysics of a rationalist utopia: Ruins, town plans, and the avant-garde documentary by Andrea Mariani
• The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in ‘Holy Motors’ by Saige Walton
• Animated maps and the power of the trace by Giuseppe Fidotta
• Enhanced echoes: Digitisation and new perspectives on film sound by Jasper Aalbers

Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier - NECS Publication Committee)

• Globalisation and television formats review by Jaap Kooijman
• Soundscapes, sound clash review by Nessa Johnston
• Shadow economies and digital disruption review by Chris Baumann
• The cinema of Béla Tarr: The circle closes review by Miklós Kiss
• Impossible dreams: Europe and love in cinema review by Fiona Handyside

Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist - Film Festival Research Network)

• Oberhausen: An interview with Lars Henrik Gass by Enrico Camporesi
• Brazil’s International Disability Film Festival Assim Vivemos review by Ana Gilbert
• Celebrating independence: 54th Thessaloniki International Film Festival review by Lydia Papadimitriou
• Initiating regional talents: 2013 Sarajevo Film Festival review by Ivan Velisavljević
• Past memories for a new future: 70th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia review by Enrico Vannucci

Exhibition reviews:

• Fassbinder Frankfurt review by Senta Siewert
• The biennale as a device: 4th Athens Biennale review by Eva Fotiadi

On happy and other endings! Kelly Reichardt, Andrew Klevan and James MacDowell on Video (not all together!)

The filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Humanitas Visiting Professor in Film and Television, "In Conversation" with Dr Andrew Klevan at the University of Oxford on May 23, 2014. Click here to access the video (1:18:30)

Film Studies For Free brings you tidings of some more wonderful film studies related videos. Both of them, like yesterday's Rancière videos, came from top notch tip offs by Hoi Lun Law (thanks HL!).

In the above video (online here), Andrew Klevan enters into an incredibly thought-provoking and insightful conversation with the great American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her work. Reichardt's five feature films are River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Night Moves (2013); and she has also made the short narrative Ode (1999). Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, and author of, inter alia, a recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013), which he discussed in a number of formats  with Film Studies For Free. He is also a member of the editorial board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism.

Below, you can find the embedded recording of a great talk by Klevan's fellow Movie editorial board member James MacDowell, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick and a film scholar who has shared far more high quality work online for free than many academics produce in a lifetime (see here, here, here, here and here [PDF], for instance).

MacDowell discusses the romantic ‘happy ending’ in Hollywood cinema - its motifs, meanings and potential mutability - in a brilliantly illustrated and entertaining talk for an event for the Zabludowicz Collection which took place on December 6, 2013. MacDowell is the founder of great film critical website Alternate Takes, author of the book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliché, Convention and the Final Couple (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and he is currently writing a monograph on irony in film for Palgrave MacMillan (forthcoming 2016).

Embracing the Happy Ending: Cliché and Closure in Hollywood Cinema - a talk by Dr. James MacDowell from Zabludowicz Collection on Vimeo.

Now ONLINE! Jacques Rancière's Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading

Jacques Rancière Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading, May 2, 2014

Private Q & A Session with Jacques Rancière, preceding his Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading, May 2, 2014

The above videos provide the sole focus for a fairly self-explanatory -- and wonderful -- entry at Film Studies For Free today: they present the recording of a lecture and discussion on cinema by the hugely eminent French philosopher Professor Jacques Rancière at the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, University of Reading, UK.

Rancière's abstract for his lecture, which took place on May 2, 2014, reads as follows:

Ars gratia artis, the three words written on the scroll surrounding the head of the roaring lion at the beginning of the MGM movies may sum up the singularity of cinema. Cinema has blurred in many ways the frontiers separating pure art from the activities of the everyday and the forms of popular performance and entertainment. By the same token, it may have questioned the very unity of what we call art. Through examples borrowed from the history of film and from the history of cinephilia I wish to examine some aspects of this subversion of the frontiers of art.

Jacques Rancière, born in Algiers (1940) is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris VIII, where he taught Philosophy from 1969 to 2000, and visiting professor in several American universities. His work deals with emancipatory politics, aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. His books translated into English include notably: The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), Disagreement (1998) , The Politics of Aesthetics ( 2006) , The Future of the Image ( 2007), The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Proletarian Nights (2012) and Aisthesis (2013). He has authored three books dedicated to cinema (Film Fables, 2006; Bela Tarr. The Time after, 2013; The Intervals of Cinema, forthcoming, 2014)

Thanks to Professor Lúcia Nagib and the other faculty at CFAC for making this event happen and, especially, for making the recording accesible online for everyone to watch it. Rancière's lecture begins about fifteen minutes into the first video.

Thanks to Hoi Lun Law for the tip-off that these recordings had gone online. FSFF can't wait to watch them!

Indian Cinema and its Centenary at SYNOPTIQUE

Synoptique cover by Malory Beazley based on an image by flickr user lecercle.

It's about time for some link action at Film Studies For Free. Indeed, there will be a little flurry of long overdue entries here over the next days too as there are lots of new issues of great online journals to flag up, as well as other important resources to publicise.

First up, today, news from SYNOPTIQUE about the launch of its latest issue devoted to the Centenary of Indian Cinema, guest edited by Catherine Bernier. The table of contents is given below, or follow the link to access the journal.

SYNOPTIQUE - An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, Vol 3, No 1, 2014
Table of Contents

Articles

• Size Zero Begums and Dirty Pictures: The Contemporary Female Star in Bollywood (1-29) by Tupur Chatterjee
• Recycle Industry: The Visual Economy of Remakes in Contemporary Bombay Film Culture (30-66) by Ramna Walia
• Visual Perception and Cultural Memory: Typecast and Typecast(e)ing in Malayalam Cinema (67-98) by Sujith Kumar Parayil

Interviews

• Death Becomes Her: Bombay Cinema, Nation and Kashmir (Kaushik Bhaumik in Conversation with Desire Machine Collective, Guwahati) (99-116) by Kaushik Bhaumik
• Questions for Kumar Shahani- Interview (117-126) by Aparna Frank
• Critical Review: Kumar Shahani's Maya Darpan (1972) (127-150) by Aparna Frank

Translations

• "The Writer in the Film World: Amritlal Nagar’s Seven Years of Film Experience" Translation and Introduction by Suzanne L. Schulz (151-159)

Book Reviews

• Politics as Performance: An Ambitious Exploration of Cine-Politics in Andhra Pradesh (160-166) by Parichay Patra

Miscellaneous - Festival Reports

• Is It Dead Yet?: The 42nd Festival du nouveau cinéma (167-169) by Bradley Warren