Showing posts with label Barbara Stanwyck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barbara Stanwyck. Show all posts

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

New JUMP CUT, MOVIE, CINEMA on Deleuze, L'ATALANTE on acting and cinephile directors, CINEMA COMPAR/ATIVE CINEMA on Manny Farber and MUCH MORE


Happy 2015 from Film Studies For Free! Quite a few major online journal launches of Fall 2014 issues didn't make it into FSFF's end of year round up (which did announce new issues of The Cine Files, Mediascape, [in]Transition, NECSUS, Frames and other great items). So links and contents are gathered below for convenience.

As the brilliant Jump Cut issue 56 has just been published, FSFF wanted to rush that news to you, but will also add further links of note to the foot of the entry in the coming days. So do come back to take a look at those.

CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 6 (2014): GILLES DELEUZE AND MOVING IMAGES
    • Edited by Susana Viegas PDF
    • Editorial: Gilles Deleuze and Moving Images, 1-7 PDF by Susana Viegas
    • Abstracts, 8-15 PDF
ARTICLES
    • Cinema: The “Counter-Realization” of Philosophical Problems, by Mirjam Schaub PDF
    • Visual Effects and Phenomenology of Perceptual Control, by Jay Lampert PDF
    • Double-Deleuze: “Intelligent Materialism” Goes to the Movies, by Bernd Herzogenrath PDF
    • Bringing the Past into the Present: West of the Tracks as a Deleuzian Time-Image, by William Brown PDF
    • Thought-Images and the New as a Rarity: A Reevaluation of the Philosophical Implications of Deleuze’s Cinema Books, by Jakob Nilsson PDF
    • Visions of the Intolerable: Deleuze on Ethical Images, by Joseph Barker PDF
    • Artaud Versus Kant: Annihilation of the Imagination in the Deleuze’s Philosophy of Cinema, 
    • Jurate Baranova PDF
    • Para Além da Imagem-Cristal: Contributos para a Identificação de uma Terceira Síntese do Tempo nos Cinemas de Gilles Deleuze, by Nuno Carvalho PDF
BOOK REVIEWS
    • Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, by Niall Flynn PDF
    • Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema, Adam Cottrel PDF

CINEMA COMPAR/ATIVE CINEMA, No. 4, Fall 2014 (English language version)
CINEMA SCOPE Issue 61, 2014, online feature and interview content
JUMP CUT No. 56, fall 2014 (all items below are available here: http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/index.html)

HOLLYWOOD, MAINSTREAM
    • Saving Mr. Banks and building Mr. Brand: the Walt Disney Company in the era of corporate personhood by Mike Budd 
    • The horrors of slavery and modes of representation in 12 Years a Slave and Amistad by by Douglas Kellner
    • Django Unchained—thirteen ways of looking at a black film by Heather Ashley Hayes and Gilbert Rodman 
    • The artificial intelligence of Her By Robert Alpert 
    • Attack the Block: monsters, race, and rewriting South London’s outer spaces by Lorrie Palmer 
    • Class warfare in the Robocop films by Milo Sweedler
    • Pirates without piracy: criminality, rebellion, and anarcho-libertarianism in the pirate film by Michael D. High 
    • Demon debt: 
Paranormal Activity as recessional post-cinematic allegory By Julia Leyda 
    • Wolfen: they might be gods by Tyler Sage
    • As beautiful as a butterfly? Monstrous cockroach nature and the horror film by Robin Murray and Joseph Heuman 
    • U.S. ambivalence about torture: an analysis of post-9/11 films by Jean Rahbar 

TECH AND BUSINESS
    • Hugo. The Artist—specters of film new nostalgia movies and Hollywood’s digital transition
    • by Jason Sperb 
    • The tail wags: Hollywood’s crumbling infrastructure by Jonathan Eig
    • The white flag of surrender? NBC, The Jay Leno Show, and failure on contemporary broadcast television by Kimberly Owczarski 

INTERNATIONAL
    • Inhabiting post-communist spaces in Nimród Antal’s Kontroll by György Kalmár
    • A 'Failed Brotherhood': Polish-Jewish relations and the films of Andrzej Wajda by Tim Kennedy 
    • "Made in Bollywood”: Indian popular culture in Brazil's Caminho das Indias by Swapnil Rai 
    • Of radio, remix, and Rang de Basanti: rethinking film history through film sound by Pavitra Sundar 
    • Cinema and neoliberalism: network form and the politics of connection in Icíar Bollaín’s Even the Rain by Shakti Jaising 
    • The revolution must (not) be advertised: The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos, the discourse of advertising, and the limits of political modernism by Greg Cohen 
    • The film as essay: Jafar Panahi’s search for self in This is Not a Film by Bebe Nodjomi 

BOOKS AND FESTIVALS
    • Buffoon queers by Andrew J. Douglas [Review of Scott Balcerzak, Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013]).
    • Montgomery Clift: or, the ambiguities
    • by David Greven (Review of Elisabetta Girelli, Montgomery Clift, Queer Star [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014])
    • ‘Factory of new film expressions’: Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade festival review by Kamila Kuc 
CLASSICS FROM THE PAST
    • Broken Blossoms—artful racism, artful rape by Julia Lesage
SPECIAL SECTION
ACTIVIST COUNTER-CINEMA
    • Part one: Jump Cut 40th anniversary
      • Introduction by Chuck Kleinhans
      • Marxism and film criticism: the current situation (1977) by Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage
      • Introduction to 
Jump Cut: Hollywood and Counter Cinema (1985) by Peter Steven
      • The Sons and Daughters of Los: culture and community in Los Angeles by David E. James
    • Part two: the current scene, recurring issues
      • Perpetual subversion by Julia Lesage
      • Flying under the radar: notes on a decade of media agitation by Ernest Larson
      • Subversive media: when, why, and where by Chuck Kleinhans
      • Activist street tapes and protest pornography: participatory media culture in the age of digital reproduction by Angela Aguayo
      • Anarchist aesthetics and U.S. video activism by Chris Robé 
    • THE LAST WORD
      • John Hess, award for activism
        • Looking back, deliciously

L'ATALANTE. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS CINEMATOGRÁFICOS N°19You'll need to create a user account for free at this journal but once you have you'll be able to access lots of wonderful articles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial
Pablo Hernández Miñano, Violeta Martín Núñez


Notebook

Dialogue

(Dis)agreements

Vanishing Points
Notebook: Cinephile directors in modern times. When the Cinema Interrogates Itself
Table of Contents
Issue Masthead
2

Editorial
Rebeca Romero Escrivá 5

Notebook

Dialogue

(Dis)agreements

Vanishing Points

MOVIE: A JOURNAL OF FILM CRITICISM Issue 5, 2014 (Edited by Alex Clayton and Kathrina Glitre)
Jim Hillier: 1941 – 2014 - A Tribute
Other Online Items of Note (MANY MORE TO BE ADDED IN THE NEXT DAYS):

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Monday, 11 November 2013

Magnifying Mirror: On Barbara Stanwyck and Film Performance Studies


Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry on the wonderful work of American actress Barbara Stanwyck as well as on film performance studies more generally. Stanwyck's illustrious career began in the 1920s and spanned sixty years. During that period she starred in major films of many genres and worked with some of the most distinguished Hollywood directors. Writing on her work may provide, therefore, an excellent, indeed exemplary case for reflection on film critical methodologies in performance studies.

As well as the usual links to online scholarly work on these topics (scroll down for those), the entry presents, below, an interview with Andrew Klevan, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford. Klevan discusses the rationale behind his recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013). He also talks about some of the issues that arise when film performance is the object of study, around intention and attribution of agency and value.

During the interview, which took place in October this year, Klevan read aloud an excerpt from his book, a reading which inspired, and formed the narration of, the above FSFF video on Stanwyck, MAGNIFYING MIRROR. Klevan also wrote a short statement about the video and about his collaboration with FSFF more generally, which you can also find below.


A Note by Andrew Klevan
I am grateful to Film Studies For Free for highlighting my work, and I hope the expression of some nervousness will not be taken as ungracious. The problem of enlarging on rationale and method as I do in the interview is that, aside from risking accusations of self-importance and self-promotion, by simply stating matters which should, perhaps, remain implicit, one overstates the case, and raises expectations, especially with regard to, what we affectionately call, little books. My answers, drawing out many of the things I tried to do, may create the incorrect impression that the Barbara Stanwyck study is comprehensive and voluminous. (Even the use of expressions such as ‘moment-by-moment’ or ‘movement of meaning’ might suggest an exhaustive sequential tracking.) In fact, one of the compositional aims was to try, using the short form of the little book, to achieve a balance between elaboration and concentration, extraction and distillation. This partly reflects a similar balance achieved in the films and performances, and Catherine Grant’s fascinating video riff, ‘Magnifying Mirror’, which matches the film to my pre-existing text, captures some of this by looping a sequence and in doing so emphasises the moment’s compactness by way of repetition.

I am conscious that [fellow film scholar] E.A. Kaplan is a casualty, and it appears as if her comment on Stella Dallas is singled out where actually quite a few accounts are tested in the course of the study and the isolation is a consequence of uprooting. It is true that I take issue with her assessment, but this is a difference over an interpretation, not a charge against her work more generally, or the value of it. I feel that her account reduces, and overlooks an achievement of the film, but this is something that we are all prone to do. Indeed, much nervousness on my part again as the film returns, insistently, to probe my own description and interpretation – alas too late to make adjustments – but also some satisfaction as film and criticism are reunited. This image/speech track relationship struck me as quite different to a DVD commentary (which is limited by the real time of the film) and the narration of audio-visual criticism (which is conceived in relation to the handling of images). I got the sense of a new form of criticism, using audio-visual material, happily meeting an old form of criticism, using words, and not simply exemplifying the ‘close reading’, but enhancing and interrogating, and more generally revivifying (and magnifying). The iteration in Catherine’s video productively interacts with the distension of written representation. The collaboration with FSFF has illuminated for me the stimulating relationship between commentaries in different forms so that the book gets commented upon in an audio interview and in a video film which in turn gets commented upon in this web statement, allowing the different media to differently elucidate.
Andrew Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. He is author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film and Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. He is the co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism, and is on the editorial boards of MOVIE - A Journal of Film Criticism and Film-Philosophy Journal]

On Barbara Stanwyck

On film performance


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Thursday, 8 March 2012

"Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies

The above is a short video primer by Catherine Grant. It offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of gender, sexuality and movement in relation to Rita Hayworth's performance as Gilda in Charles Vidor's 1946 film.
The femme fatale is a product of the male imaginary, which emerges in literature and the visual arts under contingent socio-political conditions as a challenge to coherent and stable identities. [...]
     The emergence of the femme fatale motif in literature, art and cinema generally coincides with periods of social or political instability and is not specific to a culture, society or era, but exhibits countless masks as she may manifest herself in diverse historical or geo-political contexts, and through a variety of artistic and literary forms. She embodies traces of a myriad of powerful, as well as menacing, historical, biblical and mythical female figures, such as Cleopatra, Salome, or the Sirens; yet this wicked and barren creature is always imbued with an alluring beauty and rapacious sexuality that is potentially deadly to man. The femme fatale figure is a recurrent patriarchal construct, a projection of all that exists beyond that which is normal, familiar, or safe. As Rebecca Stott observes, she is a multiple sign, or ‘the Other around whom the qualities of all Other collect in the male imagination’ (1992: 39). As such, her appearances are always symptomatic of a society in crisis. [Eva Bru-Domínguez, 'The Body as a Conflation of Discourses: The femme fatale in Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat' (1974)', Journal of Catalan Studies 2009]
[I]s it possible that the tangled webs of violence, sexuality, pathology, and intrigue at the core of certain film noir offer moments of reversal and exception which challenge women's role as eternal victim? How is an anti-feminist backlash or male anxiety around women's power projected into these paranoid film scenarios? To what extent can such disruptions be contained through conventional "happy family" closure - or through the violent death of the (anti-)heroine whose glittering image lingers as the credits rolls? Working against the inescapable grain of the "repressive rule" of female victimhood, I choose here to seize on the exceptional figure of the "fatale femme." While the exception may help define the rule, she also keeps alive the possibility, the inevitability, of transformation in gendered relations of power. [Julianne Pidduck, The "fatal femme" in contemporary Hollywood film noir: reframing gender, violence, and power, Masters Thesis, Concordia University, 1993: 6-7]
Rather than promoting images of women that emphasize their spirit and unknowable power, and rather than promoting images of women that rely on their bodies, finally, we need to illustrate the contexts that inform women’s experience. I want to suggest some of the reasons why we’ve grown accustomed to identifying film noir’s “femme fatale” without examining these contexts that inform her presence in film noir, by doing just that: examining the settings—social, psychological, political, physical, and geographical—that define her experience, which is, I want strongly to suggest, a far better thing to define than “woman” herself.
     This study seeks to modify the tone of feminist discussions about film noir’s women by reorienting our attention to the narrative, social contexts, and mise-en-scene that show the relationship between women’s powers and the limits placed on them by social rules. Both the view of the “femme fatale” as misogynist projection and the view of the “femme fatale” as opaque yet transgressive female force emphasize her status as object or symbol (as object of scorn or as the mysterious and opaque “other” that threatens to destroy the male subject). My aim is to adjust our focus on film noir and gender so that we illuminate these women’s narratives rather than mystifying women as objects or images. [Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009): 5. Book info.]
Film Studies For Free wishes its reader a very happy International Women's Day with a varied curatorial selection of online scholarly work touching on possibly the most studied 'object' in all of feminist film theory: the 'dangerous' woman, sometimes fatal, sometimes a fatality...

If you are a film goer you know her kind. She is attractive, alluring, enigmatic, enticing, teasing, siren-like. Totally tautological. You might come across her dancing in a cinematic cabaret or show, smoking in a private detective's office, gracing a film noir alleyway, or haunting a difficult to decipher flashback. Or turning up like a beautiful but bad penny, provoking your scopophilia (and/or your epistemophilia), just about anywhere in almost every period of international film history.

Just what is it about these cinematic women? There certainly isn't one answer to that question, but the studies linked to below might very well help you to begin to tackle it.

If there are any important online resources that FSFF has missed, please do list them in the comments thread.
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Monday, 8 November 2010

Networking Knowledge on Michael Mann, Lindsay Anderson, Barbara Stanwyck and much more

Will Smith as Muhammad Ali in Ali (Michael Mann, 2001) [See Vincent M Gaine's article on this and other Mann films]
From time to time, Film Studies For Free can be ever so dim. It has referred on a number of occasions in previous posts to choice items published in the online periodical Networking Knowledge: Journal of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Post-Graduate Network (PGN). But it omitted to mention the journal in its permanent listing of Online Film and Media Studies Journals. D'oh!

Not only has FSFF now rectified this unfortunate error, but it has decided to carry out proper penance in the form of the below complete listing of direct links to all items so far published in this excellent journal, including many articles of note on film and moving image studies. Enjoy!
Re-Mediated Mann:The Re-Mediation of Public Figures and Events in The Insider and Ali PDF
Vincent M Gaine
The Cinema Authorship of Lindsay Anderson: Anderson’s Directorial Practice PDF
Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard
Publicising the News: Publicity and Australian Commercial Television News PDF
Michaela Jackson
Th’ Abstract of All Faults: Antony vs. the Hegemonic Man PDF
Rachael Kelly
Reporting Religion and Enemy Images in the Nigerian Press PDF
Odamah Musa
Journalistic Blogs in China: Political Dissent and the Formation of a Public Sphere PDF
Hai Tang
The Role of Media in Supporting Communication in Cultural Institutions. Case Study: Communicating Media Art PDF
Michela Negrini

Activism, Resistance and Online Presence

Digital vs Material: the Everyday Construction of Mediated Political Action Abstract PDF
Veronica Barassi
Igorots in the Blogosphere: Claiming Spaces, Re-constructing Identities Abstract PDF
Liezel C. Longboan
Blogging in China: Freedom of Expression vs Political Censorship in Sexual and Satirical Blogs Abstract PDF
Hai Thang

The Press and the Political Process

Scottish Press Coverage of UK General Elections after Devolution: the 2001 and 2005 Campaigns Abstract PDF
Marina Dekavalla

Women and the Media

“Focus on the Housewife”: the BBC and the Post-war Woman, 1945-1955 Abstract PDF
Kristin Skoog
The Representation of Motherhood in Post-socialist Chinese Cinema Abstract PDF
Huili Hao

Theorising Film

‘We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM’: Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral Abstract PDF
Vincent M. Gaine
Indeterminate Film-thinking and Interpretation Abstract PDF
Jimmy Billingham

Audiences and Fans

Underworld vs the World of Darkness: Players and Filmgoers Respond to a Legal Battle Abstract PDF
Rachel Mizsei Ward
Wots Not Queer: the Search for Sexual Representation in Audience Research Abstract PDF
Craig Haslop

Screen Icons

From Below to Above the Title: the Construction of the Star Image of Barbara Stanwyck, 1930-1935 Abstract PDF
Linda Berkvens
The Iconography of Mark Antony Abstract PDF
Rachael Kelly

Locating Media Productions

Representing National Culture, Values and Identity in the Brazilian Television Mini-series Abstract PDF
Niall Brennan
‘I Will Survive’: Forty Years of Amber Films and the Evolution of Regional Film Policy Abstract PDF
Paul O'Reilly

Place, Communication, Translation

Read My Voice: Expressing Silence and Sound in Text-messages Abstract PDF
Agnieszka Knaś
The Medium is Global, the Content is not: Translating Commercial Websites Abstract PDF
Yvonne Lee

Branding, Advertising and Corporate Cultures

Steve Jobs: the human logo Abstract PDF
Chloe Peacock
Interpersonal Communication Competence in SME Internationalization Abstract PDF
Pipsa Purhonen

Design for Screen

One Form, Many Letters: Fluid and transient letterforms in screen-based typographic artefacts Abstract PDF
Barbara Brownie

Fan Culture and Online Audiences

Dressing up as Vampires: Virtual vamps - negotiating female identity in cyberspace Abstract PDF
Maria Mellins

Film and Theatre

The Playwright as Filmmaker: History, Theory and Practice Abstract PDF
Othniel Smith

Imperialism and Globalisation

The evolution of Hollywood's representation of Arabs before 9/11: the relationship between political events and the notion of 'Otherness' Abstract PDF
Sulaiman Arti

Popular Culture

"Little Englander" : Fawlty Towers - A textual analysis of nationalistic ideology Abstract PDF
Matthew Bartley

Public Service Broadcasting and Radio

Reducing the difference between citizens and consumers: a critical discourse analysis of the Communications White Paper 2000 Abstract PDF
Simon Dawes

Reporting the Conflict

The Ideology of Objectivity: Constructs of Language in the Popular Press of Early Twentieth-Century Britain Abstract PDF
Claudia Heske
Explaining Media Frames of Contested Foreign Conflicts: Irish National ‘Opinion Leader’ Newspapers’ Frames of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (July 2000 to July 2004) Abstract PDF
Mary O'Regan

Sexual Representations in Cinema

The Killer Father and the Final Mother: Womb-Envy in The CellAbstract PDF
Shweta Sharma

Still Image

Photojournalism as a Creator of Values: otherness in Sámi representations Abstract PDF
Heli Lehtela

Uses of Music and Sound in Film

Music, identity, and oblivion Abstract PDF
Gerry Moorey

Sound and Image: Alternative Methods of Research and Presentation

Summary of Panel Presentations Abstract PDF
Dr Charlotte Crofts
'High Definitions': Articulating Media Practice As Research Abstract PDF
Dr Charlotte Crofts
Video Diary Making as a Research Method: Just Another Jargon of Authenticity? Abstract PDF
Tony Dowmunt

Bringing Work Back to School: Professional Experience in Media Research

Dilemmas of Ethnographic Research: The Practitioner/Academic’s Quandary Abstract PDF
Somnath Batabyal
A Return to the ‘Big’ Discourse : Interviewing History Documentary-Makers Abstract PDF
Dafydd Sills-Jones

Theoretical Models in Mass Media Practice: Perspectives from the West

Introduction Abstract PDF
Line Thomsen
Do Journalists know how to listen and should they be taught how to? Some thoughts on contemporary interviewing practices. Abstract PDF
Gavin Rees
‘Documents of Ordinariness – The BBC Video Nation Project’ Abstract PDF
Jo Henderson
Daily or Diary? Towards a New Profile in e-Journalism Abstract PDF
Cristina Perales, Mon Rodríguez
A Shield for Whom? First Amendment Implications of a Federal Shield Law Abstract PDF
Patrice Holderbach

Theoretical Models in Mass Media Practice: Perspectives from the Developing World

Introduction Abstract PDF
Venkata Vemuri
Journalism and Political Democracy in Brazil Abstract PDF
Dr Carolina Matos
‘Reporting Back’: Al Jazeera English Abstract PDF
Nina Bigalke
Grounds for Development: Media Development Practice and Theory in Post-Conflict Afghanistan Abstract PDF
Sarah Kamal
Understanding the Complexity of Journalistic Practices: the Case of Xinhua Abstract PDF
Dr Xin Xin

Double Vocations: Media Practice and Theory

Introduction Abstract PDF
Dafydd Sills-Jones
Media Corporatism: Whither Journalistic Values? Abstract PDF
George Nyabuga
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