Film Studies For Free: May 2015

Monday, 25 May 2015

[in]TRANSITION Issues! Rossellini, Marclay, Burnett, Snow, Emoticons, Time, Surveillance, Volumetric Cinema, Experimental Cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, Women in Prison Genre

THEORY OF RELATIVITY by Catherine Grant is an experimental video about digital intertextuality and cinephiliac relativity. It was inspired, in part, by (the non-open access article) "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," just published in the Spring 2015 issue of Cinema Journal (54.3) by film scholar Julie Levinson. You can read a little more about this video and the connections it makes here. It was also made as a reserve entry for the new issue of [in]Transition linked to below.

Film Studies For Free is truly thrilled to present an entry on the last two issues of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, of which FSFF's author is proud to be a co-editor. The journal and its editors and project managers recently won an 'Award of Distinction' for Innovative Scholarship thanks to the 2015 Anne Friedberg Award Committee and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Board of Directors, presented at the annual SCMS conference in Montreal. Woohoo! (Btw, look out for content related to this conference in FSFF's next entry, coming soonish!)

The first of the two issues FSFF is catching up with was published to coincide with the Montreal conference back in March. It was the first issue of [in]Transition devoted exclusively to peer-reviewed videographic work! Each video was accompanied by a curatorial statement from the maker, as well as the peer reviewer evaluations, all transparently published in the spirit of openness, to encourage scholarship as conversation, and to help our discipline establish a set of criteria for what constitutes valid scholarship in this emerging, audiovisual form. [in]Transition continues to accept submissions of videographic work for peer-reviewed publication in subsequent issues. Guidelines for submission are here.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.1, 2015

And the second issue to be publicised here (commissioned and edited by FSFF's author) has just been published! It features content generated as part of an exciting collaboration with Cinema Journal, its partner publication. That journal's editor, Will Brooker, shared with [in]Transition's editors (some six months in advance of publication) four articles from the latest issue of this highly esteemed journal—54.3, Spring 2015—and asked if we would be interested in commissioning videographic responses to the work. We accepted this challenge, conceiving of it as an experiment to see how audiovisual essays (produced and published relatively quickly) could take up, adapt, or riff off debates and arguments posited by written scholarly texts (which, as is customary, had taken several years to produce and publish).

Five sets of audiovisual essayists accepted the unusual commission, and their creative, critical work forms the basis of the issue. Each video is accompanied by a written statement from the maker(s) discussing the matters at stake in composing such audiovisual responses. Further responses to the work from viewers and readers are invited in the comments threads to the entries.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.2, 2015

Spaghettis in Translation by Austin Fisher. An audiovisual response to Michelle Cho, "Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema: Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird", Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
Against the Real by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin - An audiovisual response to Sarah O'Brien, "Nous revenons à nos moutons: Regarding Animals in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep," Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
So’s Nephew by Remes (thanx to Michael Snow) by Jorrie Penn Croft by Jennifer Proctor. An adaptation of Justin Remes, “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film”, Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
The Definition of Film by Richard Misek. An audiovisual response to Justin Remes, “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film”, Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015
The Time Passing by Benjamin Sampson. An audiovisual response to Julie Levinson, "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," Cinema Journal, 54.3, Spring 2015

[Note: The video at the top of this FSFF entry was made as a reserve video for the issue. You can read more about that one here.]

There is further open access content connected to the above articles from the latest issue of Cinema Journal with which [in]Transition 2.2 interacted, as follows:

Cinema Journal Afterthoughts and Postscripts, Spring 2015, 54.3

Michelle Cho, Postscript to “Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema"
Sarah O'Brien, Postscript to “Nous revenons à nos moutons: Regarding Animals in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep”
Justin Remes, Movies That Don’t Move

Tuesday, 5 May 2015

STUDY OF A SINGLE FILM: On Godard's ALPHAVILLE - Dystopia 50 Years On!

Frame grab from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

"One never understands anything...then suddenly, one evening...you end up dying of it."
Lemmy Caution, Alphaville

In 1965, Jean-Luc Godard—the quintessential European auteur, the first cinephile director, the man who took it upon himself to reinvent the cinema and then to declare its death—directed a black-and-white science-fiction film noir: Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Mixing genres, combining a distant future and the recent past, pop and high art, total alienness and twentieth century Paris, dystopian scenarios and modernist architecture, the celebration of familiar tropes and the annihilation of stereotypes, Godard made a highly hybrid and visionary film that was many things at once, but also irreducibly singular. With international funding, an expatriate American lead actor (famous in France and Germany for his roles as British pulp character Lemmy Caution), foregrounding Paris simultaneously as the heart of European modernism and as the standardised, international metropolis of the future, Alphaville nodded to the tropes of an Americanised global culture while being utterly European—and the product of the post-New Wave coproduction practices of continental art cinema. Alphaville was a film that both exploited and exploded the tropes, conventions and expectations that constituted “European cinema” as a commercial product, as a critical concept and as an aesthetic category. Laura Rascaroli, Alphaville editorial

Fifty years ago today Jean-Luc Godard's dystopian science fiction film Alphaville was released in France. It remains one of the most compelling fictional studies of 'technological totalitarianism', as Andrew Sarris put it, ever produced for the cinema. To commemorate this important anniversary Film Studies For Free publishes its usual list of related scholarly links and wonderful embedded videos (including a brand new tribute video on the film by renowned film scholar Patricia Pisters) on the subject of this redoubtable film.

In an era in which many aspects of the dystopia so brilliantly and originally portrayed in Godard's film seem only too real, FSFF additionally celebrates the French director's 'strange adventure', and much of the politically committed writing about it, by declaring its solidarity with ongoing struggles to defend progressive and free education around the world, including the Amsterdam New University movement (see also here), and other valuable challenges to the logic of "Market-Driven Education" in the UK (including at the LSE) and elsewhere, including the defence of Film Studies in Hungary (see the petition here).

Finally, FSFF would also like to flag up a CFP for the wonderful journal named after Godard's film - Alphaville is planning a special issue on Women and Screen Media in the Twenty-First Century.
See the details here: http://alphavillejournal.com/Submissions.html#CFP

Coming very soon: FSFF's roundup of online resources resulting from this year's annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montréal!

Despair has no wings from Patricia Pisters

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard's film Alphaville (1965).

Watching Alphaville fifty years after its making in 2015, most striking is the enduring presence of wounds of the Second World War. The ruins, scars and the horror of the war can be felt in every image of this film, even if it is set in the future. But what is even more striking is that so much of the film's traumas related to the past, and related to the cold logic of modernity, still resonate with today’s reality. Just replace ‘Alphaville’ with ‘NSA’ and think of Lemmy Caution as Edward Snowden, and the future that Godard captured in Paris of the 1960s represented by the totalitarianism of the Alpha 60 machine has transformed into the more invisible algorithms of the billions of metadata patterns that trace, predict and control our steps in today’s global digital networks.

The allegory I mention in this video-essay not only concerns [...] the past and an imaginary future, but [...] the actual present of our control societies that have taken the snake-like intricateness and hard to grasp modulations announced by Gilles Deleuze about twenty-five years ago. Patricia Pisters