New WORLD PICTURE on Distance: André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Barbara Hammer, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Phil Solomon, Yorgos Lanthimos, and much more

Frame grab from Κυνόδοντας/Kynodontas/Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009). Read Eugene Brinkema's new essay on this film

Distance suggests a standing apart—a separation, an opening or difference, a gap in space. And mirroring broader swaps of categories of time for categories of space, “distance” can also stand for remoteness on the level of time: James Phillips, for example, neatly summarizes this shift as “Odysseus longs for home; Proust is in search of lost time.”6 But neither this sense of a spatial gap or a temporal remove is precisely the sense in which distance is taken seriously in Dogtooth. For that, we require an older sense of the word. [Eugenie Brinkema, 'e.g., Dogtooth', World Picture 7, 2012]

It's been busy, busy, busy round these parts, but today Film Studies For Free stirs itself from its travails to bring you the, as usual, wonderful news that World Picture, that most original of online humanities journals, has just published a new issue.

The keyword for WP 7 is Distance, and it has activated a wide range of brilliant cultural and philosophical readings on that topic. FSFF particularly loved filmmaker Barbara Hammer's contributions to this issue here and here (see this earlier FSFF entry on her marvellous work), as well as Eugenie Brinkema on Dogtooth, Sam Ishii-Gonzales on Bergson, and  Domietta Torlasco on The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

There is much more in WP of huge worth and interest, so please dip into the below contents.

Oh, and also, please come, if you can, to the upcoming annual World Picture conference, held this year at the University of Sussex, November 2-3, 2012. A terribly excited FSFF will be in attendance!


World Picture 7: Table of Contents

• Zach Barocas Givens
• Eugenie Brinkema e.g., Dogtooth
• Robert Cavanagh Contact Sport
• David L. Clark “Not ours, this death, to take into our bones”: The Postanimal after the Posthuman
• Lorenz Engell Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze
• Victor Fan Approaching Reality: Epistemic Distance, Political Crises and Temporal Imaginations
• in the Sino-French Dialogue on Cinema Ontology
• Alexander García Düttmann The Worst, or The Lesser of Two Evils
• Sam Ishii-Gonzales Suspended Meaning: On Bergson and Cinema Perception
• Barbara Hammer, in Correspondence with John David Rhodes
• Film is Thinking: A Conversation Across Distance
• Barbara Hammer Bent Time
• Sorin Radu Media on Target in the Global System: Military Strategy and Narrative Practice
• Alessandra Raengo Reification, Reanimation and the Money of the Real
• Phil Solomon While You Were Asleep
• Phil Solomon, in Conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland
• Mediating the American Idea
• Keston Sutherland The World and John Wieners
• Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece In the House, In the Picture: Distance and Proximity in the American Mid-Century Neutralized Theatre
• Matthew Tierney The Eclipse of the Eclipse of Distance: Talking Politics in a Global Village
• Domietta Torlasco The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini's New Erotics of Vision

Double-Strength: Videos and Links in Celebration of Barbara Hammer

Clip from Maya Deren's Sink by Barbara Hammer (via UndergroundFilm at Vimeo)


Clip from NITRATE KISSES by Barbara Hammer



Clip from SANCTUS and other films from the 1980s by Barbara Hammer
(You can see Sanctus @ubuweb)

HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life Book Performance, Barbara Hammer at British Film Institute, March 2010

"I have chosen images rather than words for the act of naming myself an artist and a lesbian because the level of meanings possible for images and image conjunctions seemed richer and held more ramifications" Barbara Hammer

Film Studies For Free today presents a tribute to the remarkable American, experimental filmmaker and activist Barbara Hammer. The tribute takes the form of a listing of online videos and scholarly links to studies of Hammer's work, as well as of related queer film and politics.

Hammer is seventy-one years old, still making films and still protesting against injustice and censorship. In 2010, she published her wonderful autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, which addressed her personal history and philosophies on art (see a review here).

FSFF says, "Thank you, but... keep it up, please, Barbara! Your work and activism is needed now more than ever." (This blog can be a rather greedy and merciless task-mistress at times...)

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on her career and Feminist film

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on Maya Deren

• Barbara Hammer Faculty page at European Graduate School 

• Barbara Hammer. Resisting Paradise. Video Lecture Documentary 2005 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4

• Barbara Hammer's Video Channel at Vimeo (16 videos so far archived) 

• Barbara Hammer's website

• Barbara Hammer interviewed in February 2010 about her research on medical science film 'No bones about it!'

• Edith Becker, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, B. Ruby Rich, 'Lesbians and film, p. 2', from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Sarah Boslaugh, 'Getting Past the Stereotypes: Woman and Motorcycles in recent Lesbian Novels', IJMS, March 2006

•  Martin P. Botha, 'The New African Queer Aesthetics: the Portrayal of Homosexuality in International Cinema', Kinema,

• Joan Braderman, 'Feminism and Video: A View from the Village', Camera Obscura, Volume 22, Number 1, 2007

• Julia Erhart, 'Performing memory: compensation and redress in contemporary feminist first-person documentary', Screening the Past, December 1, 2001

• Claudia Gorbman, 'Barbara Hammer's recent work: Body displaced, body discovered', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987

• John Hess, 'Notes on U.S. radical film, 1967-8', from Jump Cut, no. 21, Nov. 1979 

• Tricia Jenkins, '‘‘Potential Lesbians at Two O’Clock’’: The Heterosexualization of Lesbianism in the Recent Teen Film', The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2005 

• Chuck Kleinhans, 'Teaching sexual images: some pragmatics', from Jump Cut, no. 40, March 1996 

• Laura U. Marks, 'Loving a Disappearing Image', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 8, n° 1-2, 1997

• Susan E. McKenna, 'Seeing lesbian queerly: visibility, community, and audience in 1980s Northampton, Massachusetts', PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts, September 2009

• Fiontán Moran, 'Anatomies of Desire', Afterall, May 2010

• Gary Morris, 'Tender Fictions: Barbara Hammer's Truth Club', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 17, 1996

• Ricardo Peach, Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema on South Africa and Australia, PhD Thesis,University of Technology, Sydney, March 2005

• John Ramirez and Larry Horne, 'UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference', from Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984 

• Jennifer Beth Simmons, Visions of Feminist (Pom(o)nanism): Masturbating Female Postmodern Subjectivity in American Television and Film, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2004

• Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage. PhD Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2006 

• William C. Wees, 'Carrying On: Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Abigail Child and American Avant-Garde Film of the Eighties', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2001

• Andrea Weiss, 'Women I Love. Double Strength : Lesbian Cinema and Romantic Love' , from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Jacquelyn Zita, 'The films of Barbara Hammer: Counter-currencies of a lesbian iconography', from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981