Media Fields Journal on Video Stores

Melonie Diaz, Jack Black, and  Mos Def  in Be Kind, Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008 - See FSFF's post on Gondry for some reading on this film)



Film Studies For Free is thrilled to be able to pass on news of the launch of MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL: Critical Explorations in Media and Space, a new graduate online journal based in the University of California, Santa Barbara's Department of Film and Media Studies.

The first issue (1.1, 2010) on VIDEO STORES, edited by Joshua Neves and Jeff Scheible, is now available at http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/.

Neves and Scheible introduce their special issue as follows:

This new online journal represents the latest development in a research initiative launched in UCSB’s Department of Film and Media Studies in 2007. The goal of Media Fields is to provide a forum focused on the critical study of media and space, where we can dynamically present and openly debate the latest work from established and emerging scholars and practitioners. Each issue will have a theme—whether it is a topic of contemporary relevance; an exploration of a particular concept, media form, genre, or practice; or, as in this issue, a specific media space: the video rental store.
     We were compelled to focus on the space of the video store in this issue because it is a “media field” that at once allows for the kind of tangible, site-specific fieldwork that is at the heart of Media Fields and, at the same time, is a site where a range of important issues intersect: “new” media’s consequences for “old” media; uses, developments, and failures of media technologies; the cultivation of knowledge about cinema and television; global media distribution; piracy and the law; the circulation of pornography; configurations of cultural communities; relations between public and private space; and contemporary media reception. [read more]

The issue contents are linked to below. Also see the following great site mentioned by the special issue: Video Cultures.
Issue Contents:

• "Video Stores: Introduction" by Jeff Scheible and Joshua Neves
• "Home, Home (Video) on the Range: Reflections on Small-Town Video
• Stores in 2010" by Daniel Herbert
• "Things and Movies: DVD Store Culture in Fiji" by Nicole Starosielski
• "Exchange and Circulation: An Anthropological Perspective on Video
• Stores in Kinshasa" by Katrien Pype
• "A Business without a Future? The Parisian Vidéo-Club, Past and Present" by Brian R. Jacobson and Joshua Neves
• "The Death and Life of the Back Room" by Peter Alilunas
• "Mapping Hardcore Space" by J. Steven Witkowski
• "Riviera Adult Superstore" by Constance Penley
• "Pedagogical Spaces, or, What We’ve Lost in the Post-Video-Store Era" by Roger Beebe
• "Browsing for Dissonance: Paratexts, Box-Art Iconography, and Genre" by Kevin M. Flanagan
• "EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! An Interview with Future Schlock" by Jeff Scheible
• "Video Stores, Media Technologies, and Memory" by Rowan Wilken
• "Video Rental Store: An Interview with Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot and Su-Ying Lee" by Mél Hogan
• "The Long Tail of the Video Store" by Frederick Wasser
• "Free Lifetime Membership" by Matt Kaelin

Please also note that a call for submissions for an issue on DOCUMENTARY AND SPACE is now open and can be viewed here.

Online Film Audio-Commentaries and Video Essays Of Note

Susana Medina, Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys

(Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 )

In Film Studies For Free's humble opinion, one of the most exciting online areas for potential Film Studies' development is rapidly emerging from the already hugely popular Web 2.0 practice of video-sharing. It has never been easier to publically display work in which moving (and still) image-tracks, created by others, can be 'overlaid' with one's own recorded words/sounds/text, to create web 'video-essays' or online 'audio-commentaries'.

The practical/technical side of this activity should provide few challenges for the YouTube generation: the main issue to consider in relation to the educational uses of such 'user-generated' resources is, as ever, that of the quality of content. But there are plenty of noteworthy models around, from which Film Studies teachers and students can gain insight and inspiration, such as Susana Medina's excellent video essay on fetishism in the work of Luis Buñuel, embedded above (and also available on MySpace and at the Internet Archive).

To celebrate these developments, and to support them in a small way, Film Studies For Free has created a new (right-hand margin) list of links to freely accessible online audio commentaries, video essays, and 'alternative' DVD commentaries. The list currently links to the following websites: Shooting Down Pictures; Susana Medina, 'Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys'; Listology List of Best Fan Commentaries (until 2005); Sean Weitner and Andy Ross on Mulholland Drive; Whiggles.com on Suspiria and Profondo Rosso; and Renegade Commentaries. Suggestions of other websites or items of this kind are, as ever, warmly welcomed.

By far the richest website resource in this area, to date, is the one at the head of FSFF's current list: Kevin B. Lee's fabulous Shooting Down Pictures. As GreenCine Daily rightfully testified back in July 2008 (when Film Studies For Free was barely a twinkle in this neophyte blogger's eye): 'For some time now, Kevin B Lee's video essays have been among the most exciting developments in film blogging, suggesting not an alternative but supplemental form of film criticism accessible to anyone online.'

Lee is a filmmaker and multimedia producer based in New York City. Shooting Down Pictures primarily serves as a repository for a wide variety of materials connected with his project of viewing every film on the list of 1000 greatest films of all time, as compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Rather than simply writing about, or gathering pre-existing resources together for these films -- both of which Lee does brilliantly, it must be said -- he also makes video essays about them and commissions others to provide their own audio commentaries, including ones by such luminaries as Nicole Brenez, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Richard Brody, Karina Longworth, Andy Horbal, Mike D'Angelo, Matt Zoller Seitz, Preston Miller, Vadim Rizov, and Girish Shambu.

The current full list of video essays by Shooting Down Pictures is given below, but also check out the video index Lee maintains at YouTube where these and many other videos by him, or fabulously 'mashed up' by him, are hosted.

• Alexander
• …And God Created Woman
• America, America
• And the Ship Sails On (feat. Michael Joshua Rowin)
• Aranyer Din Ratri / Days and Nights in the Forest (1970, Satyajit Ray) - featuring Preston Miller
• Born on the Fourth of July (feat. Matt Zoller Seitz)
• Burnt by the Sun (feat. Andy Horbal)
• Dames
• Duel
• El Cid (1961, Anthony Mann) with Mike D’Angelo
• Evil Dead II
• Grey Gardens (1975, Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer) with commentary by Vadim Rizov
• Hour of the Star/A Hora da Estrela
• Il Posto (feat. Keith Uhlich)
• Inferno
• JFK
• La femme infidele feat. Dan Sallitt
• La Haine
• Le boucher feat. Dan Sallitt
• Louisiana Story
• Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht / Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where it Rules (1965, Jean-Marie Straub) featuring commentary by Richard Brody
• Nixon (feat. Matt Zoller Seitz)
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
• Peter Ibbetson
• Sugar Cane Alley
• The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982, Peter Greenaway) with Karina Longworth
• The Heiress (feat. Cindi Rowell)
• The Saragossa Manuscript
• The Sun Shines Bright (1956, John Ford) featuring Jonathan Rosenbaum
• The Vanishing
• "The Wire and the Art of the Credits Sequence” video essays on the Moving Image Source (Watch Part One; Watch Part Two - feat. Matt Zoller Seitz and Andrew Dignan)
• They Died with Their Boots On (feat. Matt Zoller Seitz)
• Tobacco Road
• Un coeur en hiver / A Heart in Winter (1991, Claude Sautet) with Mike D’Angelo
• Unfaithfully Yours
• U samogo sinyego morya / By the Bluest of Seas (1936, Boris Barnet) featuring commentary by Nicole Brenez
• While the City Sleeps
• Woman in the Window (feat. Girish Shambu)

After a recent flurry of literally feverish activity, Film Studies For Free is going to take a richly-deserved, two-week break so that its cold-ridden author can become fully healthy once more, and go off to deliver a talk on her own work (which is not totally unconnected to the focus of today's blog post, as it happens). In the meantime, FSFF leaves you with a little video essay by Lee and Dan Sallitt on another of this blog's favourite filmmakers (alongside Buñuel), Claude Chabrol. Adieu, pour le moment...