The Marriages of LAUREL DALLAS by Catherine Grant
The above video is published as an integral part of a multimedia essay on two Hollywood adaptations of STELLA DALLAS "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall2014_MarriagesMelodrama.html
Another year of open access scholarly bulletins and links draws to a close at Film Studies For Free. Despite readership well exceeding 2,000,000 page views since late 2009 (thanks for coming back all of you!), it has been a fairly quiet year at this blog,* if not at its Twitter feed and Facebook page, both of which generally boast fast-flowing, usually daily content. But let's round the year off, nonetheless, with a characteristically large collection of links to lots of just (in the nick of time) published Fall 2014 issues of some brilliant online and open access film and moving image studies journals, as well as a bunch of other online delights. Just feast your festive eyes on all the below riches!
And also check out the videographic jewel at the top of this entry too - FSFF's latest audiovisual essay on the tear-jerking ending(s) of Stella Dallas. 2014 has been a golden year for the scholarly video, for sure. A clear highlight in that emergent film studies idiom has been the creation and successful launch of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Images Studies, which FSFF's author co-founded and co-edits with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. Four issues have been published, with the most recent one appearing last week - linked to below - and there's lots more great peer reviewed content lining itself up for 2015. And the audiovisual essay also now boasts its own section at NECSUS Journal, too - edited by the brilliant essayist duo Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. It's EVERYWHERE!!
If you're interested in learning more about this audiovisual film scholarly form in a classroom or presentation setting, FSFF's author will be holding video essay workshops and masterclasses at the January conference of MeCCSA in Newcastle, UK, at BIMI: Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, in London in March (that's a free to attend session!), at an event at the University of East Anglia in May, with Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin (details soon), as well as at a National Endowment for the Humanities funded event at Middlebury College, Vermont. And those are just the events scheduled in the first half of next year!
So 2015 may be a quiet year at this blog, too........ But FSFF will try to maintain regular entries to publish alongside all its usual microblogging on open access film studies.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS! WISHING EVERYONE A WONDERFUL NEW YEAR!
*One of the reasons it's been so quiet is that FSFF's author has not just been linking but also contributing rather a lot to these and other journals and online projects this year. See the long list of publications right at the foot of what follows.
- "Welcome To Issue 7, 'The Video Essay: Parameters, Practice, Pedagogy'” by Tracy Cox-Stanton, Editor
- "Getting Lost In The Form: On Vertigo And Dissolution" by Gordon Hon
- "The Remix That Knew Too Much? On Rebecca, Retrospectatorship And The Making Of Rites Of Passage" by Catherine Grant
- "Dancing With Pixels: Digital Artefacts, Memory And The Beauty Of Loss" by Pam Cook
- "Strangers X: A Proof Of Concept" by Eric Faden
- "Teaching Videographic Film Studies" by Christian Keathley
- "Between Freedom And Constraints: What I Learned From Teaching Video Essays" by Chiara Grizzaffi
FRAMES Cinema Journal, Issue 6, December 2014 MondoPop: Rethinking Genre Beyond Hollywood - Guest-edited by Elena Caoduro and Beth Carroll
- Letter from the Editors By Eileen Rositzka And Amber Shields
- Introduction: Rethinking Genre Beyond Hollywood By Elena Caoduro And Beth Carroll
FEATURE ARTICLES
- Understanding A Serbian Film: The Effects of Censorship and File-sharing on Critical Reception and Perceptions of Serbian National Identity in the UK By Alexandra Kapka
- A Return to Japan? Restaging the Cinematic Past in Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins By Andrew Dorman
- Commedia all’italiana: Rethinking Comedian Comedy Beyond Hollywood By Natalie Fullwood
- Like a Child Playing Dress-up? Genre, Authorship and Pastiche in Doomsday By Daniel O'brien
- Sin nombre, Norteado, and the Contours of Genre and La Frontera By Francisco R. Monar
- Continual Re-enchantment: Tunde Kelani’s Village Films and the Spectres of Early African Cinema By Nikolaus Perneczky
P.O.V.
- British Action and Adventure: A National Take on a Global Genre By Yvonne Tasker
- The Quest for Latin American Science Fiction & Fantasy Film By Alfredo Suppia
- Notes on Nordic Noir as European Popular Culture By Olof Hedling
- Bollywood B-Movies: Cult Cosmopolitanism and the Reception of Indian Genre Cinema in the West By Iain Robert Smith
- Streaming World Genre Cinema By Stefano Baschiera
- Mondo Pop: the Challenge of Popular World Cinema By Phoenix Fry
[in]TRANSITION 1.4, 2014 (Issue commissioned and edited by Drew Morton)
MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014 on ADAPTATION (in films, television, anime, computer animation, games!)
NECSUS Journal, Autumn 2014: War
- "Look. I Know You're Not Following What I'm Saying Anyway.": The Problem of the "Video Essay" and Scorsese as Cinematic Essayist by Drew Morton
- Revisiting Spike Lee’s “Racial Slur Montage”: Ya Need to Cool that Shit Out by Douglas Julien
- Essay Meets Plot: JFK and the Boundaries of Narrative by Benjamin Sampson
- The Chicken Between the Teeth: Spatial Soliloquy in the Films of Wes Anderson by David O'Grady
- Dialectical Montage in Steven Soderbergh’s PSYCHOS by R. Colin Tait
LOLA Issue 5 has continued to roll out with the entries below published to date and others still to come:
- Survival Tactics: German Filmmakers in Hollywood, 1940-1960 Joe McElhaney
- To Be or Not to Be (A Jew) Dorian Stuber and Marianne Tettlebaum
- Putting on a Show, or The Ghostliness of Gesture Lesley Stern
- All Things Shining: An Encounter with Mike Hoolboom Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
- ‘You Think You’ve Been There’: A Conversation with James Benning about Easy Rider (2012) Alison Butler
- Three Women: Bastards Cristina Álvarez López
- Cinephobia: To Wonder, To Worry Sarah Keller
- The Emperor is Calm: Eduardo Coutinho and Theodorico, Emperor of the Interior (1978) Victor Bruno
- There is one final stage of this issue of LOLA to go! Coming up: essays on anime, Blade Runner, the filmic object, Upstream Color, classic film criticism, Claude Lanzmann, and more.
MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014 on ADAPTATION (in films, television, anime, computer animation, games!)
- Once and Future: Adaptations of Camelot in Non-Arthurian Television Narratives by Shawn Edrei
- The Curious Adaptation of Benjamin Button: Or, the Dialogics of Brad Pitt’s Face by James N. Gilmore
- Adapting “8-bit” Motion Style to 3D Computer Animation for Wreck-it Ralph by Chris Carter
- Playfully Subversive: the Many Roles of Adaptation in Making Games at the UCLA Game Lab by David O’Grady
- Manga, Anime and Video Games: Between Adaptation, Transmedia Extension and Reverse Remediation by Stefan Werning
- The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator by Catherine Grant
- Transnational Adaptation: The Complex Irreverence of Narrative Strategy in Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues by Tarini Sridharan
Features
- Editorial Necsus
- The documentary temptation: Fiction filmmakers and non-fiction forms by Adrian Martin
- Reconfiguring film studies through software cinema and procedural spectatorship by Marina Hassapopoulou
- Laughter and collective awareness: The cinema auditorium as public space by Julian Hanich
- Disputing Rossellini: Three French perspectives by James Harvey-Davitt
Audiovisual essays: edited by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
- Introduction to the audiovisual essay: A child of two mothers by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
- Found found found by Dirk de Bruyn
- Smells like Armageddon day – Dreamlike settings and magnified trash by Laura Lammer
Special section: War
- Serious games by Harun Farocki
- The light of God: Notes on the visual economy of drones by Pasi Väliaho
- The din of gunfire: Rethinking the role of sound in World War II newsreels by Masha Shpolberg
- Photographed by the Earth: War and media in light of nuclear events by Thomas Pringle
- Kilts, tanks, and aeroplanes: Scotland, cinema, and the First World War by David Archibald and Maria Velez-Serna
- Shell shock cinema: A discussion with Anton Kaes on the First World War, cinema, and the culture of trauma by Francesco Pitassio
Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier [NECS Publication Committee])
- Haunted by participatory culture review by Rainer Hillrichs
- Female celebrity and ageing in the limelight and under the microscope review by Julie Lobalzo Wright
- Film festival management and programming review by Greg de Cuir, Jr
- Cinema, postmedia, and resolutions review by Donatella Valente
Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist [Film Festival Research Network])
- Minds, bodies, and hearts: Flare London LGBT Film Festival 2014 review by Rosalind Galt & Karl Schoonover
- Progressive spaces and lines of battle: The Bristol Radical Film Festival 2014 review by James Newton
- River-to-River Florence Indian Film Festival: The Italian response to Bollywood cinema review by Monia Acciari
Exhibition reviews (edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg [NECS Publication Committee])
- Appropriation / Collaboration: Christian Marclay / Harrell Fletcher & Miranda July at the University of Michigan Museum of Art review by Tung-Hui Hu
- A spiritual journey in Bill Viola’s art review by Elena Marcheschi
- ‘Leviathan’: From sensory ethnography to gallery film review by Malin Wahlberg
Assorted further open access linkage!
- MPPDA Digital Archive Documents from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., 1922-1939 (Link via Vinzenz Hediger)
- Great new issue of CLÉO: A Journal of Film and Feminism: http://cleojournal.com/category/vol-2-issue-3-party/
- Some film studies content at this great new open access publishing initiative MODERN LANGUAGES OPEN: http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/index (scroll down on the page):
- 'The corrido as Counterculture in Felipe Cazals’ Canoa' by Catherine Leen: http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/article/view/22
- 'Out of the Shadows: "New" Peruvian Cinema, National Identity and Political Violence' by Sarah Barrow: http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/article/view/18
- 'Adapting Impressionism: Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Le Voyage du ballon rouge' by Carolyn A Durham: http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/article/view/19
- Murray Smith on "From Reflex to Reflection: Experience and Explanation in the Study of Cinema", one of the latest recordings from the Kracauer Lectures, Goethe University, Frankfurt (link via Vinzenz Hediger): http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/winter-2014-2015/murray-smith/
- J. Hoberman on "Ronald Reagan: “I Ain’t Afraid of No Zeitgeist”, another of the latest recordings from the Kracauer Lectures, Goethe University, Frankfurt (link via Vinzenz Hediger): http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/winter-2014-2015/j-hoberman/
- CFP for the 2015 launch of Found Footage Magazine, an English/Spanish language publication: http://foundfootagemagazine.com/call-for-papers/
- Great new podcast from the Cinema Journal online team with excellent film and media studies content to complement all the other open access material the journal is providing these days. This Aca Media episode (no. 19) brings you the new first instalment of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Society's new FIELDNOTES project - oral histories with notable media scholars, the first one being Thomas Elsaesser.
- David Bordwell has published some new entries in the last month:
- Kristin Thompson gave you a wonderful list of "DVDs and Blu-rays for your letter to Santa"
- Carol Vernallis's excellent essay on Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION, with some additional dialogue with Wheeler Winston Dixon in the comments thread: http://filmint.nu/?p=13550
- Read the introduction to Mattias Frey's new book THE PERMANENT CRISIS OF FILM
- CRITICISM (Amsterdam University Press 2014): http://www.aup.nl/wosmedia/1936/the_permanent_crisis_of_film_criticism_toc__introduction.pdf
- Nicky Hamlyn's tribute to experimental film scholar A.L. Rees who died recently (link via John Rogers on Twitter): http://nickyhamlyn.com/2014/11/29/a-l-rees-1949-2014/
- Two great free articles from the latest issue of Cineaste:
- What’s So Queer About James Franco? (Preview) by Michael Bronski
- The Dream Team: The Parker Tyler and Siegfried Kracauer Correspondence, 1947–1960 (Preview) by Adrian Martin
- Adrian Martin on the eloquence of screen moments at De Filmkrant: http://filmkrant.nl/world_wide_angle/11499
- Alexandra Heller Nicholas wrote a nice blog entry on Gothic Textures in Found Footage Horror Film at Stirling University's excellent The Gothic Imagination website
- Jennifer Fleeger's operatic entry on Frozen at the Oxford University Press website is worth a look: Frozen and the Disney Princess Song (link via Steve Elworth)
- Lucy Bolton's excellent discussion of the film ELECTRICITY at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/culture/electricity-directed-by-bryn-higgins/2017381.fullarticle
- Girish Shambu's latest round up of reading: http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/2014/12/mise-en-scene-multiplicity.html
- Thomas Stubblefield discusses 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (the subject of his new book from Indiana University Press, 2014) in this IU Press podcast: http://iupress.typepad.com/blog/2014/09/podcast-thomas-stubblefield-discusses-911-and-the-visual-culture-of-disaster.html
- Milad Tangshir's great new video essay on Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street: Lessons of the Wolf: https://vimeo.com/111415469
- More great film-related curating from Open Culture 50 films noir, films noirs or film noirs yu can view online for free (you take your linguistic pick!): http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/50-film-noirs-you-can-watch-for-free.html
- Omar Ahmed's Video Essay on Michael Mann's Thief (1981, US) and his recent piece 'Proletarian Politics' at his blog: http://omarsfilmblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/thief-michael-mann-1981-us-proletarian.html
- Mark Harris's intelligent feature on the current state of the movie franchise business (thanks to Michael Mirasol for the link): http://grantland.com/features/2014-hollywood-blockbusters-franchises-box-office/
- Pam Cook on "Sofia Coppola: elusive auteur": http://wp.me/p1dUmj-gz and "Losing the plot: writing on the screen in 'The Great Gatsby"' (2013): http://wp.me/p1dUmj-gt
- Ian Magor's latest video essay (Rapturous cinema; Bresson; Tarkovsky; Tarr; Kubrick; Truffaut and more): https://vimeo.com/114046894
- Two In Media Res theme weeks
- Sidekicks:
- High School for Superheroes and Sidekicks by Eleanor Huntington
- Can the Sidekick Protest? The Dissonant Sidekick by Jeff Casey
- Heroes, Sidekicks, and Powerful Love by Lisa Perks
- Joan Watson Deserves Better: Audience Reception and ... by Natasha Patterson
- A Certain Bromance by Sammi Dittloff
- Open Source Academia:
- Scholarly Striptease. Or, The Unintended Consequences of Film Studies For Free by Catherine Grant
- Lessons Learned: Using Digital Platforms to Reach Audiences Beyond the University by Dayna Chatman
- Close encounters of the open kind by Pam Cook
- Something to Prove?: Contemplating the Fake Geek Academic by Suzanne Scott
- Black Moses Barbie and the Humor of Black Trauma by Mark Anthony Neal
- Catherine Grant's 2014 OA listings:
- Grant, C., "The Remix That Knew Too Much? On Rebecca, Retrospectatorship And The Making Of Rites Of Passage', THE CINE-FILES, Issue 7, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.thecine-files.com/grant/
- Grant, C. "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall2014_MarriagesMelodrama.html
- Grant, C. ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’, ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 1.1, 2014, Online at: http://aim.org.pt/ojs/index.php/revista/article/view/59/html
- Grant, C. with Christian Keathley, ‘The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations, and videographic film studies’, Photogénie, 0, June 2014. Co-authored introduction/individually authored text and video. Online at: http://www.photogenie.be/photogenie_blog/article/use-illusion.
- Grant, C, with Christian Keathley, ‘El uso de una ilusión: Cinefilia infantil, relaciones de objeto y estudios videográficos sobre cine’, Transit. Cine y otros desvíos, September 9, 2014. (translation into Spanish of ‘The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations, and videographic film studies’, Photogénie, 0, June 2014). Online at: http://cinentransit.com/cinefilia-infantil-relaciones-de-objeto-y-estudios-videograficos-sobre-cine/.
- Grant, C. ‘Editorial Introduction’, ‘Bergman Senses’ and ‘Resources’ page, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies - a Cinema Journal/MediaCommons Collaboration, 1.1. 2014 (Co-edited Inaugural issue of the first peer-reviewed journal of audiovisual film studies). Online at:http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/theme-week/2014/10/intransition-videographic-film-moving-image-studies
- Grant, C. solo editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies - a Cinema Journal/MediaCommons Collaboration, 1.3. September 2014 on The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory. Online at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/theme-week/2014/35/journal-videographic-film-moving-image-studies-13-2014
- Grant, C. “The Audiovisual Essay: My Favorite Things”, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies - a Cinema Journal/MediaCommons Collaboration, 1.3. September 2014 on The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory. Online at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/2014/08/26/audiovisual-essay-my-favorite-things
- Grant, C. Director/producer/lead editor of The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory in Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, a companion website with thirty + essays and curated videos. Online at: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/
- Grant, C. ‘How long is a piece of string? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, September, 2014. Online at: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/frankfurt-papers/catherine-grant/