We'll Tak' a Cup o' Kindness Yet: Awesome Open Access Film Studies Links to See Out 2016!

 A major open access eBook: Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film
Edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016).

In this end of year post, Film Studies For Free reflects on and links to some of its very favourite 2016 open access resources selected from the ones that this blog's author had a hand in producing, contributing to, or publishing. 

It has been a (deadly) funny old year, to be sure, one that began with tributes aplenty to David Bowie and has concluded with ones to Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (see also here, here and here). David Hudson rounds up some of the cinematic losses here. And some of FSFF's own tributes are linked to below, alongside blog entries, amazing free ebooks, and wonderful journal issue contents.

FSFF wishes all its readers and supporters a happy, healthy 2017. And it looks forward to producing and purveying plenty more open access film studies resources in the year ahead.

• Film Studies For Free 2016 entries x 10:

• The Film-Play's the Thing: RIP Jacques Rivette 1928-2016 
• New FILM CRITICISM, FILM-PHILOSOPHY, 12 new film and media open access eBooks, Mulvey and Dyer interviews, and lots of other links!,
• For the Starman Who Fell to Earth - In Memory of David Bowie 
• New LOLA, [in]TRANSITION, MOVIE, Film-Philosophy, MOVIE, Film-Philosophy, Senses of Cinema plus a video essay on Todd Haynes' CAROL, and more!
• The Persistence of Vision: Videos on the Work of Film Theorists and Scholars
• For all to see, and to see the sense of: In Memory of V. F. Perkins (1936-2016)
• Almodovar Studies For Free
• My Year’s Work in Audiovisual Essays and Videographic Film Studies
• We'll Tak' a Cup o' Kindness Yet: Awesome Open Access Film Studies Links to See Out 2016!

• Film Studies For Free Videographic Tributes Bookending the Year x 3

SIMULACRUM (For Carrie Fisher) by Catherine Grant

MOVIE MOTHER (For Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher) by Catherine Grant

LOS OLVIDADOS / LAZARUS (Bowie meets Buñuel) by Catherine Grant

• The Best Video Essays of 2016 - Fandor's End of Year Poll

As last year, Kevin B. Lee polled "esteemed video essay creators, scholars, programmers, and devoted followers of the form to highlight the best video essays of the year. Each year it becomes more necessary to crowdsource this task, for in the words of notable video essayist David Verdeure / Filmscalpel, 'It has become impossible to keep up with all video essays that are made, with the form proliferating in both academic and film fan circles.' These poll results might offer some help in sorting out the standouts of the genre. Videos mentioned most frequently in this poll are embedded below, along with the individual lists."

• Open Access Film Studies eBooks x 2!

• POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21ST-CENTURY FILM

A major scholarly collection edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, and published by REFRAME’s open access ebook imprint. 

If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, Denson and Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” Contributors explore key experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime and articulate both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries.

Download: PDF 13mb and PDF 9mb

CONTENTS AND LINKS TO WEB CHAPTERS

Perspectives on Post-Cinema: An Introduction – Shane Denson and Julia Leyda

1. Parameters for Post-Cinema 1.1  What is Digital Cinema? – Lev Manovich 1.2  Post-Continuity: An Introduction – Steven Shaviro 1.3  DVDs, Video Games, and the Cinema of Interactions – Richard Grusin

2. Experiences of Post-Cinema 2.1  The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence” – Vivian Sobchack 2.2  Post-Cinematic Affect – Steven Shaviro 2.3  Flash-Forward: The Future is Now – Patricia Pisters 2.4  Towards a Non-Time Image: Notes on Deleuze in the Digital Era – Sergi Sánchez 2.5  Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect – Shane Denson 2.6  The Error-Image: On the Technics of Memory – David Rambo

3. Techniques and Technologies of Post-Cinema 3.1  Cinema Designed: Visual Effects Software and the Emergence of the Engineered Spectacle – Leon Gurevitch 3.2  Bullet Time and the Mediation of Post-Cinematic Temporality – Andreas Sudmann 3.3  The Chora Line: RealD Incorporated – Caetlin Benson-Allott 3.4  Splitting the Atom: Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision – Steven Shaviro

4. Politics of Post-Cinema 4.1  Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory – Julia Leyda 4.2  On the Political Economy of the Contemporary (Superhero) Blockbuster Series – Felix Brinker 4.3  Reality Effects: The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso Cuarón – Bruce Isaacs 4.4  Metamorphosis and Modulation: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan – Steen Christiansen 4.5  Biopolitical Violence and Affective Force: Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown – Elena del Río

5. Archaeologies of Post-Cinema 5.1  The Relocation of Cinema – Francesco Casetti 5.2  Early/Post-Cinema: The Short Form, 1900/2000 – Ruth Mayer 5.3  Post-Cinematic Atavism – Richard Grusin 5.4  Ride into the Danger Zone: Top Gun (1986) and the Emergence of the Post-Cinematic – Michael Loren Siegel 5.5  Life in Those Shadows! Kara Walker’s Post-Cinematic Silhouettes – Alessandra Raengo

 6. Ecologies of Post-Cinema 6.1  The Art of Morphogenesis: Cinema in and beyond the Capitalocene – Adrian Ivakhiv 6.2  Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions – Selmin Kara 6.3  Algorithmic Sensibility: Reflections on the Post-Perceptual Image – Mark B. N. Hansen 6.4  The Post-Cinematic Venue: Towards an Infrastructuralist Poetics – Billy Stevenson

7. Dialogues on Post-Cinema 7.1  The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 – Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, and Steven Shaviro 7.2  Post-Cinematic Affect: A Conversation in Five Parts – Paul Bowman, Kristopher L. Cannon, Elena del Río, Shane Denson, Adrian Ivakhiv, Patricia MacCormack, Michael O’Rourke, Karin Sellberg, and Steven Shaviro 7.3  Post-Continuity, the Irrational Camera, Thoughts on 3D – Shane Denson, Therese Grisham, and Julia Leyda 7.4  Post-Cinema, Digitality, Politics – Julia Leyda, Rosalind Galt, and Kylie Jarrett

• The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities
In June 2016, REFRAME Books published The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities, edited by Charles R. Acland and Eric Hoyt – a cutting edge collection of work both surveying what media historians are doing with digital tools and charting a course for how the field of media history might move forward in an ongoing dialogue with the digital humanities. Online at: http://projectarclight.org/book/

CONTENTS:

“A Guide to the Arclight Guidebook” by Eric Hoyt, Kit Hughes, and Charles R. Acland

PART I: Searching and Mapping 1) “The Quick Search and Slow Scholarship: Researching Film Formats” by Haidee Wasson; 2) “Search and Re-search: Digital Print Archives and the History of Multi-sited Cinema” by Gregory A. Waller; 3) “Using Digital Maps to Investigate Cinema History” by Laura Horak; 4) “Field Sketches with Arclight: Mapping the Industrial Film Sector” by Kit Hughes

PART II: Approaching the Database 5) “Low-Tech Digital” by Charles R. Acland; 6) “Excavating Film History with Metadata Analysis: Building and Searching the ECHO Early Cinema Credits Database” by Derek Long; 7) “Show Me the History! Big Data Goes to the Movies” by Deb Verhoeven; 8) “How Is a Digital Project Like a Film?” by Miriam Posner

PART III: Analyzing Images, Sounds, Words 9) “Coding and Visualizing the Beauty in Hating Michelle Phan: Exploratory Experiments with YouTube, Images, and Discussion Boards” by Tony Tran; 10) “Looking for Bachelors in American Silent Film: Experiments with Digital Methods” by Lisa Spiro; 11) “Terminological Traffic in the Movie Business” by Charles R. Acland & Fenwick McKelvey; 12) “Digital Tools for Film Analysis: Small Data” by Lea Jacobs & Kaitlin Fyfe; 13) “The Slices of Cinema: Digital Surrealism as Research Strategy” by Kevin L. Ferguson

PART IV: Process, Product, and Publics 14) “Digital Tools for Television Historiography: Researching and Writing the History of US Daytime Soap Opera” by Elana H. Levine; 15) “When Worlds Collide: Sharing Historical Advertising Research on Tumblr” by Cynthia B. Meyers; 16) “Networking Moving Image History: Archives, Scholars, and the Media Ecology Project” by Mark Williams; 17) “Curating, Coding, Writing: Expanded Forms of Scholarly Production” by Eric Hoyt; “Keywords and Online Resources” by Robert Hunt and Tony Tran

• Open Access Film and Media Studies Journal Issues x 4: 

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2016_#Home

• Editorial Necsus

• Features: 
• Even today there are people who think these harmless little books are dangerous: An interview with David Bordwell by Malte Hagener 
• From single male guest worker to Muslim: An archaeology of iterating archival footage on Dutch television by Andrea Meuzelaar 
• The politics of spatiality in experimental nonfiction cinema: Jonathan Perel’s ‘Toponimia’ by Patrick Brian Smith 
• For here there is no place that does not see you: ‘Minority Report’ and art as de/legitimisation by Josef Früchtl 

• Special section: #Home 
• The Calais Jungle: Mediations of home by Mireille Rosello 
• From the bedroom to LA: Revisiting the settings of early video blogs on YouTube by Rainer Hillrichs 
• The filmic representation of home in transnational families: The case of ‘I for India’ by Efrén Cuevas 
• The home screen as an anchor point for mobile media use: Technologies, practices, identities by Stefan Werning 
• Songs of home (and away): Ethnically-coded diegetic music and multidirectional nostalgia in fiction films about Polish migrants by Kris Van Heuckelom and Iwona Guść 

• Festival reviews: edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist (Film Festival Research Network) 
• How do film festivals work?: A conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer by Greg de Cuir Jr 
• Virtual futures and cinematic pasts at the 65th Melbourne International Film Festival by Kirsten Stevens 
• Films from Asia, attention around the world: 18th Far East Film Festival, Udine by Jinuo Diao 

• Exhibition reviews: edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg (NECS Publication Committee) 
• Pierdom by Simon Roberts by Lavinia Brydon and Olu Jenzen 
• A place between desire and experience: Afterthoughts on Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting by Carlos Kong 

• Book reviews: edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier (NECS Publication Committee) 
• Dreaming of Cinema / Slow Cinema by James Newton 
• A geography of resistance: Locating US underground film and TV cultures by Andrea Mariani 

• Audiovisual essays: guest edited by Catherine Grant 
• The audiovisual essay as performative research by Catherine Grant 
• House Arrest by Domietta Torlasco 
• The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism by Ian Garwood 
• Being Bowie by Will Brooker and Rebecca Hughes

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2016_’Small data’

• Editorial Necsus 

• Features
• A philosophy of weaving the web: An interview with media theorist Sebastian Giessmann by Geert Lovink
• Remake: Chantal Akerman’s and John Smith’s plays on reality by Clara Miranda Scherffig
• Videographic film studies and the analysis of camera movement by Volker Pantenburg
• Photobiographies: The Derrida documentaries as film-philosophy by Robert Sinnerbrink
• ‘The Right Stuff’: From Western to melodrama and comedy by Wim Staat
• Pleasure | Obvious | Queer: A conversation with Richard Dyer by Catherine Grant and Jaap Kooijman 

• Special section: Small data
• Forms of binding: On data and not ‘fitting in’ by Anirban Gupta-Nigam
• Compact cinematics by Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki
• From Saul Bass to participatory culture: Opening title sequences in contemporary television series by Valentina Re
• Database aesthetics, modular storytelling, and the intimate small worlds of Korsakow documentaries by Anna Wiehl
• Towards a minor data manifesto by Jacek Smolicki and Alberto Frigo 

• Exhibition reviews: edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg (NECS Publication Committee)
• Ryoji Ikeda at ZKM by Joo Yun Lee
• Re-enacting pre-existing image collections in Akram Zaatari’s ‘Unfolding’ by Olivia Eriksson
• The milieu of poetry: Yuri An’s ‘The Unharvested Sea’ and ‘Sailing Words’ by Adeena Mey
• Festival reviews: edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist (Film Festival Research Network)
• Of calendars and industries: IDFA and CPH:DOX by Aida Vallejo
• Human rights, film, and social change: Screening Rights Film Festival, Birmingham Centre for Film Studies by Sonia Tascón
• Rediscovering Frantz Fanon at Scotland’s Africa in Motion film festival by Prince Bubacarr Aminata Sankanu 

• Book reviews: edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier (NECS Publication Committee)
• Complex series and struggling cable guys by Anne Gre Wabeke
• New media configurations and socio-cultural dynamics in Asia and the Arab world by Najmeh Moradiyan Rizi 

• Audiovisual essays: guest edited by Dana Linssen
• Whose Cinema: The video-essay on the big screen of the International Film Festival Rotterdam by Dana Linssen
• Live Streaming US by Paula Albuquerque
• re_making by Juan Daniel Molero
• Warped Reflections: The Cinematic Identity of Helmut Berger by Hugo Emmerzael

• SEQUENCE (4.1 [2016]) — ‘THINKING WITH DIGITS: Cinema and the Digital-Analogue Opposition’ by Paul Atkinson

• SEQUENCE (5.1 [2016]) — 'Silence' by Liz Greene

• New website:

• AHRC-funded CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL STUDIES NETWORK edited by Chris Berry and Luke Robinson. This research network brings together scholars in the UK, China, other parts of Asia, Europe and the USA who are working on film festivals in Chinese-language territories and cultures (including the People’s Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere): http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/chinesefilmfeststudies/

The website collects materials relevant to Chinese Film Festival Studies, including reports on network events, bibliographies, lists of and reports on film festivals, and much more.

• Other Open Access Resources 

• TALKS@MFM – REFRAME continues with its series of video and audio recordings of research presentations and masterclasses held at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex: 

• Professor Laura Rascaroli on “Framing: The Essay Film as Theoretical Practice”

• Dr Rarchel Moseley on "Child’s Play? Stop-Frame Television Animation for Children in the Sixties and Seventies”

• Jerry Rothwell on "HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD (2015): Production, Engagement and Distribution in Documentary”

My Year’s Work in Audiovisual Essays and Videographic Film Studies

There is a bumper entry still to come here at Film Studies For Free before the global annus horribilis of 2016 is out, you mark this blog's words.

But in the meantime, below is a handy list of links to the thirteen free film-studies videos its author has made and formally published in the last twelve months (see here for more information). There are a few unlisted ones that were also made this year and await publication, including yet another videographic work on Brief Encounter... These should see the light of online day in the next calendar year.

• DISSOLVES OF PASSION: This video on Brief Encounter formed an integral part of Catherine Grant’s contribution to The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, a collection of work edited by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell (Caboose Books, 2016; http://caboosebooks.net/the-videographic-essay and http://caboosebooks.net/node/150)

• INTERPLAY: A tribute to the work (on psychoanalytic object relations and the cinema) of film scholar Annette Kuhn, featuring excerpts from Mandy (1952), My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973), Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999), Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988) and Where Is the Friend’s Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987) This video was published, with a short accompanying text, here: 'INTERPLAY: (Re)Finding and (Re)Framing Cinematic Experience, Film Space, and the Child’s World', LOLA, 6, 2015. Online at: http://lolajournal.com/6/interplay.html 

• UN/CONTAINED: On Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank: Published as part of ‘Beyond tautology? Audiovisual Film Criticism’, Film Criticism, Vol. 40, No.1, 2016. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13761232.0040.113

• THERESE and CAROL and ALEC & LAURA (A Brief Encounter): Todd Haynes’ Carol meets Brief Encounter https://vimeo.com/149791810

• LOS OLVIDADOS / LAZARUS: Buñuel meets Bowie. Made on the awful day we heard of David Bowie’s untimely death: https://vimeo.com/151541761

• SPARKLE: A tiny video-remix comparison of some glimmering audio/visual moments from Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999) and The Falling (Carol Morley, 2014). https://vimeo.com/157653540

• SIDE-BY-SIDE | UP-AND-DOWN: Comparative Videographic Approaches to Transnational Cinema Studies: On split screen techniques of audiovisual comparison as a sensuous film critical methodology in transnational cinema studies.  http://filmanalytical.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/side-by-side-up-and-down-comparative.html

• THE ARCADES VARIATIONS A collaborative video experiment using film images from De Stad In Spiegelbeeld Amsterdam, J.P. Smits Filmdistribution, 1925 (From BITS and PIECES Collection - BP300 EYE Film Instituut Nederland) by Catherine Grant and Stanislaw Liguziński https://vimeo.com/168220320. See project documentation here: https://vimeo.com/filmarcades.

• THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION: A video tribute to the work of film scholar Elizabeth Cowie, featuring Morocco, Now, Voyager and Let There Be Light, as well as the voices and choices of Andrew Klevan, Christine Evans, Coral Houtman and Sarah Wood https://vimeo.com/169120246

• DÉCORUMS A video on Renoir’s Le Règle du Jeu/Rules of the Games. Made as a tribute to the work and life of film scholar V.F. Perkins https://vimeo.com/175573896

• MATCHES - featuring Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios / Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988) https://vimeo.com/178181337

• REAR WINDOW Syncopated. What the title says.... https://vimeo.com/184217966

• A GIRL LIKE I | An Unruly Duet - on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes https://vimeo.com/192340183

Almodóvar Studies for Free

Last updated with more links August 25

MATCHES - On similarly flammable moments in Ray and Almodóvar
(Intertextual ignition by Catherine Grant)

Experience has taught me that the more honest and personal my work is,

the more successful I am.

(Pedro Almodóvar)

It costs a lot to be authentic, ma’am.

('Agrado' in All About My Mother)

Film Studies For Free is delighted to celebrate its eighth birthday with a tiny new video essay (above) and a whole entry (below) devoted to a wide-ranging collection of links to online and open access studies of the work of one of its favourite filmmakers of all time: Pedro Almodóvar.

Thanks so much to all FSFF's readers for being (t)here over the years! It's been a 'fount of pleasure' (as José Arroyo writes of Almodóvar's films), and an authentic joy.


Online written studies of Almodóvar's work

• José Arroyo, 'Johnny Guitar/ Women on the Verge: A Cinephile Moment at the Cinemateca Portuguesa', Notes on Film, Feburary 24, 2016
• José Arroyo, 'One of the times I interviewed Almodóvar', Notes on Film, October 24, 2015
• José Arroyo, 'A Fount of Pleasure and a Matrix of Meaning: Notes Arising from a Viewing of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’, Notes on Film, April 18, 2014
• José Arroyo, 'Autobiography and Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2004)', Notes on Film, November 28, 2013
• Jeremy Biles, 'The Skin I Live In,' Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 16: 1, 2012. 
• Diana Bilbao, 'Volver' in Female Subjectivity and Feminist Aesthetics in Revisions of the Maternal Melodrama, PhD thesis, Mount Holyoke College, 2011 large PDF
• Nancy Blake, 'Che vuoi? Enjoying the perverse symptom in the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar'. Paper at The 22nd International Literature and Psychology Conference, 2005
• Jessica Burke, 'Body, Performance, and Control in Pedro Almodóvar’s Hable con ella', L’Érudit franco-espagnol 2, 2012
• Frédéric Conrod, ‘Castrating The Body of the Police: Portraits of an Impotent Institution in The Early Films of Pedro Almodóvar’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue Canadienne D’études Cinématographiques, 21:1, Spring/Printemps, 2012
• Kelly Dafne, 'Pedro Almodovar's Renegotiation of the Spanish Identity', Movies in 203, 2011
• Marvin D'Lugo, 'Almodóvar, El Deseo and the co-Production of Latin American Space', Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 24.1, 2013
• Brett Jessie Drummond, The Recycling of Filth: Transcultural Discourses in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar and John Waters, PhD thesis, University of Alabama, 2013
• Lucy Fischer, 'Modernity and postmaternity: High heels and Imitation of life', in: Play it again, Sam : retakes on remakes, edited by Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998)
• Cătălina-Florina Florescu, ‘Questioning Two Canonical Concepts of ‘Self’ and ‘Authenticity’ in Pedro Almodóvar’s Film All about My Mother’, University of Bucharest Review Vol. X, no. 1, 2008
• John Gibbs, 'Looking, talking and understanding: subjectivity and point of view in Talk to Her (2002)', in Filmmakers' Choices (“Close-Up 01/MOVIE eBooks, 2006/2015), downloadable here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/ebooks
• Jorge Gorostiza, 'Backdrops and Miniatures: The Other Madrid Built by Pedro Almodóvar', Cine y...., vol. 1, nº 2, 2008
• Fiona Jenkins, 'Grief’s Testimony: On Almodóvar’s All About My Mother', SCAN, 4.2, 2007
• Orit Kamir, 'Feminist Law and Film: Imagining Judges and Justice', Chicago-Kent Law Review, 75:3, Symposium on Unfinished Feminist Business, June 2000 [a close reading of Pedro Almodóvar's High Heels] 
• Lam, Sze-man, 'All about sexuality: gender studies in Pedro Almodovar's films', The HKU Scholars' Hub, 2004
• Kevin B. Lee, '937 (78). La Ley del deseo / Law of Desire (1987, Pedro Almodovar)', Shooting Down Pictures, November 30, 2008
• 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)
• Stephen Maddison, 'All about women: Pedro Almodóvar and the heterosocial dynamic', Textual Practice, 2000
• Carla Marcantonio, 'The Flower of My Secret', Senses of Cinema, 35, 2005
• Carla Marcantonio, 'The transvestite figure and film noir: Pedro Almodóvar's transnational imaginary', Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, 2008
• Carla Marcantonio, 'Cinema, Transgenesis, and History in The Skin I Live In,' Social Text, 2015
• Steven Marsh, 'Pedro Almodóvar', Senses of Cinema, July 2006
• Daniel Mendelsohn, 'The Women of Pedro Almodóvar', The New York Review of Books, 54: 3, March 1, 2007
• Felix Monguilot, 'The Skin I Live In: Sexual Identity and Captivity in a Film by Pedro Almodóvar', Offscreen, 9.9, 2015
• Adriana Novoa, 'Whose Talk Is It? Almodóvar and the Fairy Tale in Talk to Her', Marvels & Tales 19.2 (2005)
• Kamila Oleksiak, Intertextuality in the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, Masters Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2009 
• Corinne Pache, 'Almodóvar's Female Odyssey'. Classical Outlook, 87(2), 2010
• Marie Piganiol, ‘Transgenderism and Transsexuality in Almodovar’s Movies’, Amsterdam Social Science, Vol. 1(2), 2009
• Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, 'Almodóvar, Cyberfandom, and Participatory Culture', Academia.edu, 2013
• Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, 'Trailing the Spanish Auteur: Amenábar, Almodóvar and de la Iglesia's generic routes in the US market', Academia.edu, 2008
• María Rox Barasoain, The Films of Pedro Almodóvar: Translation and Reception in the United States, PhD thesis, University of León, 2008
• Vanna Sann, Authorship in Transnational Cinema: Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-wai, and the Star-Auteur, PhD thesis, Faculty of theGraduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University, 2007
• Candace Skibba, 'The Other Body: Psychiatric Disability and Pedro Almodóvar', Academia.edu, 2016
• Added Paul Julian Smith, Pedro Almodóvar’s Los Amantes Pasajeros (I’m So Excited), Film Quarterly, Spring 2013, Vol. 66, No. 3
• Added Paul Julian Smith, 'Escape Artistry: Debating The Skin I Live In', Film Quarterly, 2011
• Added Paul Julian Smith, 'Only Connect: On Hable con ella', Sight and Sound, July 2002
• Added Paul Julian Smith, 'Silicone and Sentiment: All About My Mother', Sight and Sound, 1999
• Added Paul Julian Smith, 'La piel que habito/The Skin I live In', Film Quarterly, September 2011
• Roberto Strongman, 'The Latin American Queer Aesthetics of El Bolereo', Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Vol. 32, No. 64, 2007
• Silviya Svejenova, 'The Path with the Heart’: Creating the Authentic Career', Journal of Management Studies, 42.5, 2005 [a management studies approach to Almodóvar's career]
• Karl J. Trybus, ‘Recasting the Post-Fascist Male Body: The Films of Germany’s Fassbinder and Spain’s Almodóvar’, Historia Actual Online,15, Winter 2008
• Kathleen M. Vernon, 'Almodóvar’s Global Musical Marketplace,' A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar. Eds. Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon. London: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2013,
• Sônia Weidner Maluf, ‘Embodiment and Desire: All About my Mother and Gender at the Margins’, LSE Gender Institute: New Working Paper Series, Issue 14, May 2005
• Barrie Wharton, 'All About Almodóvar; a revisionist assessment of the cultural revolution in post-transition Spain'. Voces Hispanas: Australian Journal Of Hispanic Studies, 6 (1), 2011
• Linda M. Willem, 'Almodóvar on the Verge of Cocteau's La Voix humaine,' Literature/Film Quarterly 26 (1998)
• Linda M. Willem, 'Rewriting Rendell: Pedro Almodovar's Carne trémula', Literature/Film Quarterly 30 (2002)

• Pedro Almodóvar: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library

Added Online audio about Almodóvar's work

• The Cinematologists on Broken Embraces, Episode 29b, August 2016

Online videos about Almodóvar's work

Full length BAFTA interview with Almodóvar online here (50 minutes): http://bcove.me/vprjzlwm

The Portrayal of Illness in the Oeuvre of Pedro Almodovar: Blindness and the Voyeur - Candace Skibba, Carnegie Mellon University by Candace Skibba

The Colour Red in Pedro Almodóvar's Cinema from UCC Film and Screen Media

Pedro Almodóvar's Obsessions (I): Red Color by Jorge Luengo Ruiz

Pedro Almodóvar’s Obsessions (II): Circles by Jorge Luengo Ruiz

Pedro Almodóvar’s Obsessions (III): Art by Jorge Luengo Ruiz.

VIDEO ESSAY - BOOKS IN ALMODÓVAR FILMS. by Jessica Cabrera Marín

Modernismo y Postmodernismo en el cine from Trailer Book Factory


Que he hecho yo para merecer esto video essay from Cristina A.Matamoros


Alms of Almodóvar: Money and Gender Roles in¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto! from Matt Bateman

ALMODOVAR REMIX by mia makela

El mundo compartido de Hopper y Almodóvar by Guillermo Braga

Touch from Ava Burke

Cinema as Skin—Body and Touch by Lili Bravi

vvv

Pedro Almodóvar: Reverse Shot Talkies #6 from Reverse Shot

In Spanish/Unsubtitled

Por más iconos Pedro Almodóvar parte II from alealelab

For all to see, and to see the sense of: In Memory of V. F. Perkins (1936-2016)

Last updated on December 31, 2016

[S]election by the camera [...] asserts significance. The image is displayed not only to relay information but to claim that it matters and to guide us towards the ways in which it matters...

[A] film’s form and method are incomprehensible outside of a recognition that its story takes place, and its images are both made and found, in a world...

Movies always take us into the middle of things because the film and its story begin, but the world does not...

V. F. Perkins, ‘Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction’

in Gibbs and Pye (eds.), Style and Meaning... (MUP, 2005); 22-25. 

I suggest that a prime task of interpretation is to articulate in the medium of prose some aspects of what artists have made perfectly and precisely clear in the medium of film. The meanings I have discussed in the Caught fragment are neither stated nor in any special sense implied. They are filmed. Whatever else that means (which it is a purpose of criticism and theory to explore) it means that they are not hidden in or behind the movie, and that my interpretation is not an attempt to clarify what the picture has obscured. I have written about things that I believe to be in the film for all to see, and to see the sense of.

V.F. Perkins, 'Must We Say What We Mean?', Movie 34/35, Winter 1990

It is with very great sadness that Film Studies For Free brings you its latest entry: a commemoration of the life, film criticism, theory and scholarship of Victor Perkins who died a week ago today.

V. F. Perkins was a founding editor of the hugely influential film critical publication MOVIE. He was also the author of Film as Film (Penguin, 1972), one of the most inspiring of the foundational texts in film studies, and of two thrilling monographs on individual films for the BFI Film Classics series: The Magnificent Ambersons (1999); and La Règle du jeu (2012). After beginning to teach on cinema in a number of institutional settings from the 1960s (including at Bulmershe College of Education), he lectured on that subject at Warwick University (in the remarkable department he co-founded) from 1978 and was Honorary Professor in Film Studies.

Although Victor had been ill for several years, his passing was quite sudden and thus shocking to his family, friends and colleagues. He is, without doubt, someone who will be greatly missed by all those blessed by his personal and professional acquaintance (by all accounts, he was a truly wonderful colleague, teacher and research supervisor), as well as by the many, many thousands of people around the world who have loved and learned from his writing on the cinema.

FSFF's author had the very great pleasure of knowing Victor a little, and spent some very enjoyable (and inspiring) times with him over the last two decades. He was an enthusiastic supporter of this website and its ethos from FSFF's earliest days back in 2008, and was a most welcome correspondent on the topic of online film resources. He was a passionate advocate for, and practical supporter of, open-access publishing and multimedia film studies, as his key role in the relaunch as an online journal of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism testifies. Victor always wondered if he'd go on to make video essays, a form in which he had a very keen interest. FSFF had always fervently hoped that he would....

There will undoubtedly be many tributes to his work from those who are much better qualified to write these than FSFF's author. So the aim of what follows is confined mostly to the significant task of updating existing entries at this website on Perkins' online work, and in collecting together links to online interviews with him, and writings about him.

But FSFF also offers up, below, four videos about Victor's work - three of these newly commissioned and produced in memoriam since Victor's death - by Christian Keathley, Hoi Lun Law and Catherine Grant (the fourth is by film scholar Patrick Keating). Update: Alex Clayton's tribute "Spin the Wheel" was added on July 27 and Ian Garwood's "Choice Moments" on July 30.

Furthermore, it warmly invites its readers to produce and submit their own online tribute videos and texts (please send links to these via the comments function below, or by email, and also please send on links to any relevant work or resources not yet listed below. Thank you). 

In the meantime, FSFF's author offers her deepest condolences to Victor's family (especially his daughter and son), and to his close friends and colleagues at this very sad time.

Tributes #forvictor #vfperkins

for Victor Perkins by Christian Keathley

Absorbing the Unobserved - a tribute to V.F. Perkins by Hoi Lun Law

DÉCORUMS - For V.F. Perkins by Catherine Grant

'A video tribute about delicate moments of (decorous) choice that reworks a much loved paragraph from the truly remarkable writing of film critic and scholar V.F. Perkins (1936-July 15, 2016). Warm thanks go to my friend Andrew Klevan who introduced me to Victor's reading of this sequence from Renoir's La Règle du jeu back in 1998'

Spin the Wheel - For Victor by Alex Clayton


NEW Choice Moments by Ian Garwood


NEW "Ridiculous Old Fanny" from Corey Creekmur

[V.F. Perkins] Epigraph Exercise: Trouble in Paradise by Patrick Keating

Online writing by V.F. Perkins

• V.F. Perkins, 'Moments of Choice', originally published in The Movie, ch. 58, 1981, reprinted in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Movie Book of the Fifties, Orbis, 1982; Republished online by Rouge, 9, 2006)
• V.F. Perkins, 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52), 16:9, September 2003 
• V.F. Perkins, [On the Klosterkirche Chandelier], Rouge, 5, 2004
• V.F. Perkins, 'Reconsideration: Le Plaisir: "The Mask" and "The Model"', Film Quarterly (Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall 2009)  (Warwick repository version)
• V.F. Perkins, 'Ian Cameron: a Tribute', MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism, Issue 1, 2010
• V.F. Perkins, 'You only live once', MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism, 3, 2011
• V.F. Perkins, 'Making Unmaking Remaking', (free sample chapter from), La Règle du jeu (BFI Film Classics, Palgrave 2012)
• V.F. Perkins, 'Acting on Objects [1. Stella Dallas (King Vidor, USA, 1937): Stella and the Bow Tie; 2. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, USA, 1954): Emma and the Chandelier], The Cine-Files: A Scholarly Journal of Cinema Studies, 4, 2013

Online Interviews with V.F. Perkins

Victor Perkins interviews Stephen Merchant, actor, filmmaker and Warwick Film & TV Studies alumnus [VIDEO]


A two-part interview excerpt with V.F. Perkins by Dr Richard Wallace (Department of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick), Part of a larger interview conducted by Wallace for the 'Voices of the University: Memories of Warwick, 1965-2015' oral history project:

• On his early career, the origin of Movie and Film as Film and getting a job at the education department at the British Film Institute;
• On VFP's reasons for using a particular photograph in his teaching.

The below embedded videos are the twelve constituent parts of a truly fascinating interview with V.F. Perkins which took place at the Kino 8 1/2 in Saarbrücken, Germany, and was filmed by Media Art and Design Studiengang. In the interview, Perkins engagingly discusses his approach to film studies and, in particular, talks about the trajectory of his foundational 1972 book Film as Film, and about his research on Jean Renoir's1939 film Le Régle du jeu about which he had written a 2012 book for the BFI Film Classics series (excerpt here).

Technology and Technique

Film as Film

Urgency of Articulation

 Loss and Cinema

Film Criticism

The Rules of the Game

Octave


Death


Casting


Max Ophüls


Classicism


Orson Welles

Online writing about V.F. Perkins

• Richard Armstrong on Perkins' La Règle du jeu (BFI Film Classics, 2012)
• David Bordwell, 'Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism', The Velvet Light Trap, no. 21, Summer 1985
• NEW Fredrik Gustafsson, 'Film as Film by Victor Perkins', Fredrik on Film, July 29, 2016
• James MacDowell, '‘Surface Meanings, Irony, and Film Interpretation’, Conference paper delivered at the Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Oxford, 2015
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies', From Sight and Sound (Summer 1973)
• David Sorfa, ‘Achievement and Appreciation in V.F. Perkins, or, The Thing We See on the Screen, or, Film as Film as Film as Film-Philosophy’ [DRAFT], Conference paper delivered at the Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Oxford, 2015
• Srikanth Srinivasan on Film as Film, May 29, 2009
• Aaron Smuts, 'V. F. Perkins' Functional Credibility and the Problem of Imaginative Resistance', Film and Philosophy 10 (2006): 85-99
• Alireza Vahdani, 'There Will Be Blood: A Study in Mise en Scène', Offscreen, 15.8, 2011
• Richard Wallace, 'Understanding the ‘Lubitsch Touch’: Does it Increase Our Appreciation of Trouble in Paradise?', Offscreen, 12.3, 2008

The Persistence of Vision: Videos on the Work of Film Theorists and Scholars

THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION by Catherine Grant

A New Video Tribute to the Work of Film Scholar Elizabeth Cowie.

Film Studies For Free's author has just published her latest video tribute to a film theorist! The above, quite heartfelt work (with key contributions from Andrew Klevan, Christine Evans, Coral Houtman and Sarah Wood) celebrates the writing of Professor Emeritus Elizabeth Cowie, a pioneer in psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to cinema studies and author of two important books in our field (Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, 1997, and Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, 2011). She has also published the below, wonderful essays online:

• Elizabeth Cowie, 'Anxiety, ethics and horror: Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)', Kinoeye, Vol 2, Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Elizabeth Cowie, 'Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011
• Elizabeth Cowie, 'The Spectacle of Reality and Documentary Film,' Documentary Box, #10 (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival) (1997)

The publication of the above video prompted FSFF to assemble and embed its now numerous celebratory video works on the writings (and films) of individual (to date, mostly anglophone) film theorists and scholars. So, below, you can watch video works on writings by:

Pam Cook; Elizabeth Cowie; Alexander Doty; Richard Dyer; Amber Jacobs; Andrew Klevan; Annette Kuhn; Mathieu Macherey; Laura Marks; D.A. Miller; Laura Mulvey; Vivian Sobchack; Lesley Stern; Gaylyn Studlar; Dai Vaughan; and Patricia White. 

Enjoy!

Pam Cook

JOAN WEBSTER SHARES A SMOKE from Catherine Grant

Alexander Doty

The Beautiful  Wickedness of Queer Reading from Catherine Grant

Richard Dyer (and Elizabeth Cowie and Adrienne McLean)

Refashioning the Femme Fatale? Gilda in Motion from Catherine Grant
Read more about this video here.

Richard Dyer and Pam Cook

All That Pastiche Allows REDUX from Catherine Grant
Also see All That Pastiche Allows (original version)

Amber Jacobs 

WHITE [MATER]IAL from Catherine Grant

Read more about this video essay here.

Andrew Klevan

MAGNIFYING MIRROR from Catherine Grant

Read more about this video here.

Annette Kuhn

INTERPLAY from Catherine Grant

Read more about this video here: 'INTERPLAY: (Re)Finding and (Re)Framing Cinematic Experience, Film Space, and the Child’s World', LOLA, 6, 2015.

Mathieu Macherey


Mechanised Flights: Memories of HEIDI from Catherine Grant
Read more about this video here.


Laura Marks

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? from Catherine Grant
Also see here.

Touching The Film Object with AUDIO COMMENTARY from Catherine Grant

Also see here.

D.A. Miller

Skipping ROPE from Catherine Grant
Also see here.

Skipping ROPE with AUDIO COMMENTARY from Catherine Grant

Also see here.

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey on RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Mulvey and Wollen, 1977) from Catherine Grant

Vivian Sobchack

CARNAL LOCOMOTIVE from Catherine Grant

Published in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring, 2015. Online at: necsus-ejms.org/film-studies-in-the-groove-rhythmising-perception-in-carnal-locomotive/, where you can also read the accompanying text: "Film studies in the groove? Rhythmising perception in Carnal Locomotive."

Lesley Stern

REPLICANT from Catherine Grant

"A GESTURE EXPANDS INTO GYMNASTICS,
RAGE IS EXPRESSED THROUGH A SOMERSAULT" 

[Eisenstein]

An experimental response to (or adaptive working through of) the following written essay:

LESLEY STERN, "I THINK, SEBASTIAN, THEREFORE ... I SOMERSAULT: Film and the Uncanny", Australian Humanities Review, November 1997. 

This video by CATHERINE GRANT was presented at THE AUDIOVISUAL ESSAY Conference, Deutsches Filminstitut/Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, November 23-4, 2013

Gaylyn Studlar

Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE from Catherine Grant

Dai Vaughan

On Cinematic Spontaneity from Catherine Grant
Also see here.

Patricia White

Women's Wash Room from Catherine Grant

"In the earlier film version of Stella Dallas [Henry King, 1925], the overwrought Stella takes refuge in the ladies’ waiting room at the train station directly after her visit to Helen [the woman to whom she has just entrusted her daughter]. She’s watched very closely by a woman whose flashy dress indicates her similarity to Stella in class status, if not in her dubious profession. The stranger offers the apparently inconsolable Stella a cigarette, and Stella puts it in her mouth and lights it end to end with the cigarette in the other woman’s mouth. A fade to black gives the gesture—which resembles a kiss—an elliptical significance, though nothing else is made of this scene. The shot echoes with Stella’s connection to Helen in the previous scene. But the silent version of Stella Dallas  suggests that such sympathy, and women’s motives, need not be reduced to shared maternal feeling. The washroom “pick-up” scene doesn’t occur in the [original 1922 source novel Stella Dallas  by Olive Higgins Prouty].
QUOTATION: Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 107-8.

Patricia White (and Tania Modleski)

RITES OF PASSAGE from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

Also see: See "The Remix That Knew Too Much? On REBECCA, Retrospectatorship and the Making Of RITES OF PASSAGE", THE CINE-FILES, 7, Fall 2014.

Various theorists (Stanley Cavell, Linda Williams, William Rothman, and Christian Viviani)

The Marriages of LAUREL DALLAS from Catherine Grant

Read the related multimedia essay "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014.  (this essay has been translated into Spanish by Cristina Álvarez López and published here)