Saturday, 31 December 2016

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.









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



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!
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

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

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

  • New website:
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 



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