Wednesday 8 March 2017

Videographic screen media criticism by female critics, scholars and artists #InternationalWomensDay

Latest update January 14, 2018
GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (remix remixed 2013) by Laura Mulvey

Happy International Women's Day! Two of the questions Film Studies For Free's author gets asked  a lot—as a female video essayist, curator and editor/publisher—are:

  1. "Why are there so few female video essayists working on film and screen media topics?"
  2. And: "Can you please recommend some female video essayists?" 
The answer to the first question is that there aren't "so few": there are loads! And some of the very first video essayists in this field were foundational women film scholars (HINT: look above!)! Their numbers are ever-increasing, and they're a very international bunch! And the answer to the second question is YES!

Indeed, the answer to both questions is: please take a look at the below list - to which FSFF will keep adding as further names (and sample works) come to light or are recommended. If you would like to recommend a video or a video maker to add to the list, please leave a comment below. Thank you!

If you enjoy cultural interventions of the "there have always been many more than you think!" variety, here's a great one for International Women's Day, also listed below: Kelly Gallagher's The Herstory of the Female Filmmaker. Also, please, please, please check out Another Gaze's totally brilliant and beautiful interview with Laura Mulvey, with some of the most amazing insights about her work.

UPDATE (March 27, 2017): At the latest issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, see the related new piece by FSFF's author: “Looking at To-Be-Looked-at-ness: Feminist Videographic Criticism."



Female Video Essayists of Note in Alphabetical order by surname

FSFF also strongly recommends the following essay (including a great video) which pays great attention to the work of a good proportion of the above by Ian Garwood, "The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism," NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2016. Thanks also to Allison de Fren, Tami Williams, Gabrielle Kelly, Marit Norway, Jason Mittell, H. Perry Horton, Adrian Martin, Adrian Garvey, Glenn Stillar, Michael Mirasol, Steve Elworth, Pablo Useros, Mark Rappaport, Deane Williams and José Sarmiento Hinojosa for their great suggestions.

Tuesday 7 March 2017

New ALPHAVILLE on The New Old: Archaisms and Anachronisms across Media!

Vicky McClure as Lol in This Is England 86 (Shane Meadows et al, 2009) as discussed by Louis Bayman in his article "Retro Quality and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary European Television"


Film Studies For Free today links to another recent issue of a sterling open access screen media studies journal: ALPHAVILLE, Issue 12, guest edited by Stefano Baschiera and Elena Caoduro. It is devoted
to the presence of archaisms and anachronisms in the contemporary mediascape and contributes to the current interdisciplinary debates around the nostalgia phenomena. Over the past decade, the digitalisation of culture has revolutionised the way we experience and consume the arts and the mass media, deeply affecting how these are perceived in their materiality. The tangibility of cultural objects, now caught in a constant process of remediation, has slightly waned: books, photographs, films, comic books, music, maps etc. are increasingly present in our life in their digital form. At the same time, the digital disruption of media industries has contributed to the emergence of a postmodern “nostalgia for the analogue” with the rapid increase of faux-vintage and retro phenomena in different aspects of media culture. [Baschiera and Caoduro]

Articles
Reviews
Book Reviews Editor: Loretta Goff

Reports
Reports Editor: Caroline Schroeter

New FILM-PHILOSOPHY!

Screenshot from Trois Couleurs: Rouge/Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994) a film discussed by Eddy Troy in his article "Deleuze and Kieślowski: On the Cinema of Exhaustion"

Film Studies For Free returns to bring you glad tidings! There is a new issue of the excellent open-access journal  Film-Philosophy out now!! More soon from FSFF!

FILM-PHILOSOPHY, Vol 21, Issue 1 [2017]

FULL LINKED TABLE OF CONTENTS HERE

ARTICLES

  • Cartesianism and Intersubjectivity in Paranormal Activity and the Philosophy of Mind by Steve Jones
  • ‘Do I feel lucky?’: Moral Luck, Bluffing and the Ethics of Eastwood's Outlaw-Lawman in Coogan's Bluff and the Dirty Harry Films by Joel Deshaye
  • Deleuze and Kieślowski: On the Cinema of Exhaustion by Eddy Troy
  • A World in the Making: Contingency and Time in James Benning's BNSF by Samuel Adelaar
  • Thrilling Objects: The Scales of Corruption in Political Thrillers by Brian Daniel Willems
  • Nietzsche on Film by Mark Steven
  • Stanley Cavell on the Magic of the Movies by Daniel Shaw


BOOK REVIEWS

  • John Ó Maoilearca (2015) All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy, review by William Brown
  • Daniel Varndell (2014) Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox, review by María Victoria Gomez Vila
  • Patricia White (2015) Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, review by Judith Rifeser
  • Victor Fan (2015) Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory, review by David H. Fleming
  • Daniel Yacavone (2015) Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema, review by Seagate Chakravorty
  • Response to Review of Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema by Seagate Chakravorty, by Daniel Yacavone