Truly Doing Film Criticism: Online Film Studies by Tag Gallagher

Tag Gallagher: A New Reality. Roberto Rossellini's Francesco, guillare di Dio, (US 2006)

[T]here is no formula for movie criticism. Cinema is not the same cinema in Ford and Rossellini, so you don’t use the same tools to look at it. Frame enlargements can show a lot of Ford’s art -- composition, camera angles rhyming from one shot to the next, lighting – but almost nothing of Rossellini’s art, because Rossellini turns everything into motion. All the feelings, the motivations, the characters’ sense of self, even morality and philosophy are turned into motion. So I published a thousand pages about Rossellini, but I really couldn’t deal with his cinema, until I made my video about his Francesco, giullare di Dio.  ['Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher', kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009]

The first video I made about Roberto Rossellini was [on Francesco, giullare di Dio]. I made it for a company that turned it down because it did not like the quality of the recording of my voice. So I lost the opportunity to publish this essay in that country, and in some others. [...] So I showed my video on Francesco only at some museums and gave some copies to friends, but that was it.  [Excerpts from a January 2012 interview with Gallagher: Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, 'Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico', Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]]

Today, Film Studies For Free is delighted to publish online, for the first time, film critic and historian extraordinaire Tag Gallagher's first video essay on a Roberto Rossellini film.

To celebrate and accompany this publication, for which FSFF and its readers have to thank the great Tag himself, below is a list of links to Gallagher's online film studies essays (written and audiovisual), interviews with him about his work, and studies of his work. If there is anything missing from the below lists, please leave a relevant link in the comments section. Many thanks!

Gallagher's Written Work Online:

• Tag Gallagher's website

• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007

• Tag Gallagher, 'Geometry of Force: Abel Ferrara and Simone Weil', Screening the Past, 10 (2000) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reading, culture, and auteur', Screening the Past, 12 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Mizoguchi and Freedom', Screening the Past, 13 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'All lost in wonder: Edgar G.Ulmer', Screening the Past, 12 (2001)
• Tag Gallagher, 'Going My Way', Screening the Past, December 2001

• Tag Gallagher, 'Josef von Sternberg', Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, 'Raoul Walsh', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, 'Max Ophuls: A New Art – But Who Notices?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 22, 2002
  
• Tag Gallagher, 'Hitchcock, Machines, and Us', Senses of Cinema, Issue 24, 3003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Rises from the Dead. Again', Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003
• Tag Gallagher, 'The Swine who Rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: Joseph L. Mankiewicz as Producer', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Till '47', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Making Reality', Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Renoir and the Scandal of “First Love” or The Perils of Catherine', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'Lacrimae Rerum Materialized', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, 'American Triptych: Vidor, Hawks and Ford', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Straub Anti-Straub', Senses of Cinema, Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, How to Share a Hill', Senses of Cinema,  Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Chains of Dreams: Carl Th. Dreyer', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009
• Tag Gallagher, 'Why Samuel Fuller?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009

• Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to Bleasdale', Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002

• Tag Gallagher, 'Letter to Helmut Färber', Lumen, 1, 2011

Gallagher's Video Essays Online:

• Dreaming of Jeanie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach  

Online Interviews with Gallagher:

• Toni D'Angela, 'Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, and Michael Baute (et al.), 'Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher', kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009

Online Studies or Reviews of Gallagher's Work:

• Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, 'Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico', Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]
• Adrian Martin, 'Always a window: Tag Gallagher's Rossellini', Screening the Past, March 2000 

Cambridge Film Studies Videos: Godard, Renoir, Literature and Film, Film and Forgetting, Representation of War in Film

Framestill from Scénario du film "Passion"/Script for the film "Passion" (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982). This film is discussed by Libby Saxton in her paper on gesture in Godard's films

Today, Film Studies For Free joyously tips the wink to its readers about the online availability of video recordings of papers from research events held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. 

These valuable online resources will clearly be added to in the coming months and years so while FSFF will keep its beady eye trained for the appearance of future recordings of note, its readers might like to do the same with their own beady eyes.

• Anthony Lane (film critic), 'Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne and Maupassant', 14 November 2011, Part of the Cambridge Screen Media Group series

• Dr Libby Saxton (Queen Mary, University of London), 'Passion, Energy and Matter: Godard's Gesture', Part of the Cambridge Screen Media Group series 

• Prof David Trotter (University of Cambridge), 'Literature and Film in the First Media Age', 11 October 2011, Part of the Cambridge Screen Media Group series

• Professor Jay Winter (History, Yale University) 'Moving Images: From Silent Film to Film Silences in War Films, 1914-2009'. Keynote lecture at CRASSH conference 'The Moving Image' (26-27 February, 2010). This paper explores the long history of representation of war in film, from the Great War to the present. It suggests first that silent film provided a form of public séance in an era when spiritualism was at its apogee, and secondly, that it is the silences in later 'talkies' which enable us to see how cinematic mourning practices work.

• Professor Michael Wood (English, Princeton), 'Film and the Art of Forgetting'. Paper delivered at CRASSH conference 'Changing the Humanities/the Humanities Changing' (July 2009)

V.F. Perkins on FILM AS FILM

Victor Perkins discusses his ideas and approaches to film aesthetics

Film Studies For Free just got wind of the below videos: seven segments of a truly fascinating interview with V.F. Perkins which took place at the Kino 8 1/2 in Saarbrücken, Germany, and was filmed by Media Art and Design Studiengang.

In the interview, Perkins engagingly discusses his approach to film studies and, in particular, talks about the trajectory of his seminal 1972 book Film as Film. A wonderful resource.

And once you've watched the videos, make sure to check out the listings of links to some of V.F. Perkins work online at the very foot of FSFF's entry.

Technology and Technique

Film as Film

Urgency of Articulation

 Loss and Cinema

Film Criticism

The Rules of the Game

Octave

• V.F. Perkins, 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52), 16:9, September 2003 
• V.F. Perkins, ' 'Reconsideration: Le Plaisir: "The Mask" and "The Model"', Film Quarterly,  Film Quarterly (Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall 2009)
• V.F. Perkins, 'Moments of Choice', originally published in The Movie, ch. 58, reprinted in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Movie Book of the Fifties, Orbis, 1982; republished online by the Australian journal Rouge (issue 9, 2006)
• V.F. Perkins, 'You only live once', WRAP, Warwick, 2009 
• V.F. Perkins, 'Ian Cameron: a Tribute', MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism, Issue 1, 2010
  
  

Thursday Links (Renoir's Toni, Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, McElhaney's Minnelli)

Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
(Chantal Akerman, 1975)

And on it goes... That is to say, some more, assorted, quality links to online, openly-accessible, film studies material of note, today, from the relatively indefatigible Film Studies For Free.

This blog is preparing for a legendary links post on Monday, its first birthday, so please come back for that. Until then, do enjoy the below gems:

• Matthew Flanagan's blog Landscape Suicide (named for James Benning's 1986 film) goes from strength to strength with an astonishingly beautiful post on Jean Renoir's hugely influential 1934 film Toni: 'Toni & Boating, or: Realism(s) #1'. Here's looking forward to '#2'!
• There's another good essay on Toni by Michael Campi for Senses of Cinema (2006). And you must read Charles Musser's brillant article 'Social Roles / Political Responsibilities: Jean Renoir's Search for Artistic Integrity, 1928-1939 'Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No. 1 (1994): 3-30.

• Over at The Auteurs, you can find a good, short essay by Ivone Margulies (author of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday ): 'A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'. A little taster:
  

Despite their apparent simplicity, Akerman’s assured framing and narrative, built out of blocks of real time intercut by radical ellipses, are not easily replicated. Rather, the film’s impact is indirectly evident in the emergence of a new phenomenological sensibility and approach to observation and the weight of time in the work of contemporary filmmakers as diverse as Abbas Kiarostami, Gus van Sant, Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Todd Haynes, Jia Zhangke, and Tsai Ming-liang.

• You can read another excellent Akerman essay online by Margulies: 'La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator' at Rouge 10, 2006.
  
• See a great essay by Maria Fosheim Lund, 'Deja-Vu Melodrama: An Iconographical and Iconological Analysis of "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles"' at Out 1 Film Journal (January 27, 2009).
• And you can read Ed Henderson's thoughtful review of 'Jeanne Dielman' for Slant Magazine, June 8, 2003.
  

• Joe McElhaney's fantastic edited collection on director Vincente Minnelli (Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009) has been deservedly garnering a lot of online attention (see Girish Shambu here; Jonathan Rosenbaum here; and some other review snippets here) and it certainly looks like an excellent book to own. Film Studies For Free wanted you to know, however, that some of McElhaney's hugely important work on this Hollywood director has already very generously been made available online for free: see his overview essay 'Vincente Minnelli' at Senses of Cinema. Also see The Band Wagon by Joe McElhaney, Cabin in the Sky by Rick Thompson, Putting on a Show, or The Ghostliness of Gesture by Lesley Stern (Includes discussion of performance in The Band Wagon); and Some Came Running by Dana Polan at the same journal.
  
• And you can also read McElhaney's brilliant article 'Medium Shot Gestures: Vincente Minnelli and Some Came Running' at 16:9, June 2003 (as well as his 2006 essay for the same journal on Fritz Lang HERE).