New MOVIE! VERTIGO, Hal Ashby, Luis Buñuel, Charles Chaplin, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Altman, Robin Wood, Andrew Sarris, George Toles, Charles Barr, Andrew Klevan, Hoagy Carmichael

Frame grab of Robert Mitchum in The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959). Read Pete Falconer's study of this film in the great new issue of MOVIE

Woohoo! The wonderful issue 4 of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism has hit the e-stands!

Edited by Andrew Klevan and Victor Perkins, this one is sure to be a classic. Highlights, for FSFF, include Andrew Sarris (on Buñuel's Viridiana [1960]) and Robin Wood tribute archives, as well as the new 'Opening Shots' feature with great contributions by Charles Barr and Pete Falconer. But there are some truly remarkable feature articles in this issue, too, including Adam O'Brien on Hal Ashby's film The Last Detail and George Toles on cinematic images of luxury.

Thanks for the film critical luxury and largesse, MOVIE people!

MOVIE, Issue 4, 2013

• Regional Horizons in The Last Detail Adam O'Brien
• Luxury and Largesse in Film George Toles
• Talking Space in Vertigo Murray Pomerance
• Play It Again, Butch, Cricket, Chick, Smoke, Happy...: The Performances of Hoagy Carmichael as a Hollywood Bar-room Pianist Ian Garwood
• Rereading A Countess from Hong Kong: Action, Speech, and Style in Charlie Chaplin's Final Feature Donna Kornhaber

• Opening Shots
• Only Yesterday Charles Barr
• The Wonderful Country Pete Falconer

• Andrew Sarris: A Tribute

• The Devil and the Nun Andrew Sarris

• A Robin Wood Archive (2)

• Mashed Marlowe Robin Wood
• Controlling the Situation Robin Wood
• Poet of the Cinema Robin Wood
• Mad Smile of a Hollow Civilisation Robin Wood
• A Matter of Life and Death Robin Wood

This issue was designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.

New SENSES OF CINEMA: Haneke, Méliès, Hanoun, Bergman, Villaverde and more

Frame grab from Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012). Read Roy Grundmann's article on this film.

Film Studies For Free brings you glad tidings of a new issue of Senses of Cinema. All the contents are linked to below. FSFF hasn't pored over all of these yet, but so far the standout piece of interest may well be Haneke scholar extraordinaire Roy Grundmann's article on the Austrian filmmaker's latest film, which argues that

[Amour]’s particular take on the moral tale becomes clearer when we compare it to the moral tales of French New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer. As Rohmer explains, the conte moral does not pivot on characters’ actions, but on their inner conflicts and on how characters rationalize their motivations that arise from these conflicts. It has been noted that Rohmer’s films, like many examples of the Nouvelle Vague, are filled with dialogue in which the protagonists verbalize their feelings, perceptions, and mental states. Haneke’s new film harkens back to this pattern. 

FSFF also liked Marc Saint-Cyr's take on one of its favourite films Fanny and Alexander. And there's lots more that catches the eye in this issue.... 

Issue 65, 2012, Editorial 

Feature Articles

• Love, Death, Truth–Amour by Roy Grundmann
• The Way Wakamatsu Chose His Own Fate: Political Mortality and Radical Dramaturgy by Philip Brophy
• Quotidian Melancholy: Marcel Hanoun’s Une simple histoire by Philip Cartelli
• A Conversation with Nicolas Rey by Darren Hughes
• The Kids Are Not All Right: Fanny and Alexander Thirty Years Later by Marc Saint-Cyr
• “One day, the swan sang this with its wings”: An Interview with Teresa Villaverde by Ela Bittencourt
• To Accept the Unacceptable: Reflections on Three Films by Teresa Villaverde by Ela Bittencourt
• ‘Chromatic Frankenstein’s Monsters?’: Restoration, Colour and Variants of Georges Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune by Wendy Haslem
• The Films of James Gray: Old Testament Narratives by Robert Alpert
• The Yet Unclaimed Baggage of Robert Zemeckis’ Flight by Joseph Natoli
• Wild and Precious –A Film by Bill Mousoulis by Fiona Villella
• Bref Magazine, or, A Tribute to Short Films and thus to the Cinema in General by Viviane Vagh
• The Desire and the Exception by Jacques Kermabon
• Andrew Sarris: The Last of a Kind by John Conomos

Great Directors

• Shirley Clarke by Angelo Koutsourakis

Special Dossier on Tasmania and the Cinema

• Introduction
• Seeing With Green Eyes: Tasmanian Landscape Cinema and the Ecological Gaze by Jane Stadler
• Jewelled Nights: ‘Can Good Movies Be Made in Australia?’ by Jeannette Delamoir
• “What sort of spot is Port Arthur?”: For the Term of His Natural Life and the Tasmanian Gothic by Stephen Gaunson
• Manganinnie– The First Tasmanian Feature Film by John Honey
• Van Diemen’s Land by Jonathan auf der Heide
• Eating and Othering in Jonathan auf der Heide’s Van Diemen’s Land by Guinevere Narraway
• A Culture Cleft in Two – The Documentaries of Scott Millwood by Dan Edwards
• Errol Flynn: A Life at Sea by Robert de Young
• “Change – why should I? I never pretended to be anything than I am”: The Films of Errol Flynn and Raoul Walsh by Adrian Danks

Festival Reports

• Jorge Mourinha DocLisboa
• Pierce Conran on Busan
• Michael Laff on Busan
• Daniel Fairfax and Joshua Sperling on New York
• Pamela Cohn on CPH:DOX
• Bérénice Reynaud on Vancouver
• Ben Cho on Lisbon & Estoril
• Ma Ran on Beijing
• Darren Hughes on Toronto

Cinémathèque Annotations on Film

• José Sarmiento on The Battle of Chile
• Christopher Sharrett on Nostalgia for the Light
• Louise Sheedy on Salvador Allende
• Lee Hill on The Pinochet Case
• Gino Moliterno on Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
• Carlota Larrea on Gomorrah

Book Reviews

• Nicholas Godfrey on The long game: Conversations with independent iconoclasts Roger Corman, George A. Romero, and Charles Burnett
• Douglas Gomery on America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures
• Richard Martin on The Cinema of Michael Haneke
• Tessa Chudy on Polanski and Perception
• Cassandra Lovejoy on Deleuze and World Cinemas
• Martin Potter on Challenge for Change
• Ryan Taylor on Terrorism TV
• Vrasidas Karalis on Greek Cinema, Texts, Histories, Identities
• Ravi Sundaram on Shadow Economies of Cinema

Pantheon Level Author: In Memory of Andrew Sarris

UNL Film Studies professor Wheeler Winston Dixon describes the auteur theory of filmmaking, 
including the contribution to this theory by Andrew Sarris.You can read Professor Dixon's obituary of Sarris here.

The art of cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scene. Auteur criticism is a reaction against sociological criticism that enthroned the what against the how. However, it would be equally fallacious to enthrone the how against the what. The whole point of meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement. [Andrew Sarris]

Film Studies For Free was really saddened to hear of the death of Andrew Sarris, one of the most influential of all film critics on the academic study of the cinema.

In memory of his huge contribution to film studies, FSFF has begun to gather links to online works by Sarris as well as to studies of his writings and related items. The collection process will continue in the next days.

Meanwhile, David Hudson is very valuably collecting links to online tributes to Sarris at Fandor's Keyframe Daily site. And see the great PressPlay at Indiewire tributes, including a great video essay featuring probably the last recording of Sarris's voice, here.

Keep coming back for updates.

• Andrew Sarris, 'Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962' PDF
• Andrew Sarris's Confessions of a Cultist on the Cinema (1955, 1969) Internet Archive Free Download
• Andrew Sarris, 'Variety Lights', The Criterion Collection: Notes, August 28, 2000 
• Andrew Sarris, 'Sarris on Sirk', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

 

• Richard Armstrong, 'They Lost It at the Movies: Film Culture in the Age of Positif and Cineaste', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 40, May 2003
• Catherine Grant, 'On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theories', Film Studies For Free, June 2, 2009
  
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Theories of Authorship: Rethinking authorship', from Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986, pp. 14-16 
• Christian Hamaker, 'Sarris 101: A Film Critic’s Politics', Christian Hamaker's Blog, August 13, 2009
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part one) World view as aesthetics', from Jump Cut, no. 1, 1974, pp. 19-22
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part two) Truffaut's manifesto', from Jump Cut, no. 2 (1974), pp. 20-22
• Barrett Hodsdon, 'The mystique of mise en scene revisited', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990)
• Kent Jones, 'Hail the Conquering Hero: Andrew Sarris profiled', Film Comment, date unknown
• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture, 2, Autumn 2008
• Kartik Nair, 'Aura, Auteurism and the Key to Reserva', Wide Screen Journal, 2, 2010
• Jeffrey Overstreet, 'In memory of Andrew Sarris’s New York Observer reviews', Filmwell, August 11, 2009 
• Dana Polan, 'Auteur Desire', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Michael Powell, 'A Survivor of Film Criticism’s Heroic Age' [on Andrew Sarris] The New York Times, July 9, 2009
• Holger Römers, '“The Moral of the Auteur Theory”: Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (and Theodore Strauss’ Source Novel)', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-March 2007
• William D Routt, 'L'Evidence', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990) 
• David Schwartz, 'Bringing Up Hawks: Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell on the discovery of an auteur', Moving Image Source, September 25, 2008
• Girish Shambu, 'On Auteurism', girish, March 30, 2008