CINEPHILE 8.1 on the Voice-Over in Cinema

Frame grab from Borom Sarret/The Wagoner (Ousmane Sembène,1963). Read Alexander Fisher's article on Sembène's use of voice-over in this film in the latest issue of Cinephile

While it is true that film has been historically considered an image-centred medium, the fact that hearing plays as much a role in perceiving the motion picture as seeing does, transcends it beyond a mere visual art. Furthermore, as noted sound theorist Michel Chion asserts in The Voice in Cinema, “the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that contains it.” Therefore, studying parts of the cinema in which the voice gains particular significance is not only justified, but necessary. This issue of Cinephile revolves around diverse applications and functions of the voices in fiction films, whose sources are absent from the image frame.

Theoretical approaches to the filmic voice were only developed in the 1980s, and as the works cited in the articles here indicate, at least in the case of off-screen voices and voice-over, they have not been properly updated. One goal of this collection has been to explore various demonstrations of voice-over both in a more contemporary scope and on a more international scale. The main concern of each of the following five articles is the voice-over, showing how concentrating on this under-appreciated technique can lead to bigger conclusions about films and filmmakers. [Editorial Introduction, Cinephile, 8.1, 2013]

Today, Film Studies For Free hails the online publication (earlier this year) of volume 8.1 of Cinephile, the University of British Columbia's on and offline film journal. The special topic on this occasion is the cinematic voice-over and there are marvellous essays on it by Sarah Kozloff (author of the classic studies of VOs and film sound Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film [1988] and Overhearing Film Dialogue [2000]), Stephen Teo, Carl Laamanen, Laura Beadling and Alexander Fisher.

You can download a large PDF of this beautifully illustrated issue from this webpage. The featured contents are as follows

• 'About a Clueless Boy and Girl: Voice-Over in Romantic Comedy Today' by Sarah Kozloff
• 'What Does God Hear? Terrence Malick, Voice-Over, and The Tree of Life' by Carl Laamanen
• 'Native American Filmmakers Reclaiming Voices: Innovative Voice-Overs in Chris Eyre’s Skins' by Laura Beadling
• 'The Voice-Over as an Integrating Tool of Word and Image' by Stephen Teo
• 'Voice-Over, Narrative Agency, and Oral Culture: Ousmane Sembène’s Borom Sarret' by Alexander Fisher

International cinema, comedy, and online film and media practices: audience research at PARTICIPATIONS

Frame grab from A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971). You can read about audience responses to this film in Peter Krämer's excellent article '‘Movies that make people sick’: Audience Responses to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971/72'

Film Studies For Free takes to the blogwaves today to shout out about a truly excellent issue of the Open Access, and openly refereed, international audience research journal Participations.

It's a bumper issue with 27 articles - an advantage of an online journal format over its offline, paper-bound relatives, as editor Martin Barker outlines in his interesting introduction to this issue.

FSFF particularly appreciated the section on international film audiences, and also especially enjoyed Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore's study 'Reviewing Romcom: (100) IMDb Users and (500) Days of Summer' and also Anne Collins Smith and Owen M. Smith's article on 'Pragmatism and Meaning: Assessing the Message of Star Trek: The Original Series'.

Special Edition Contents

Editorial

• Martin Barker (Joint Editor): 'Editorial Introduction: A Small Diatribe, and a Serious Challenge to Other Journals'

Articles

• Adrian Athique: 'Diasporic Audiences and Non-Resident Media: The Cast of Indian Films' 
• Pietari Kääpä and Guan Wenbo: 'Santa Claus in China and Wu xia in Finland: Translocal reception of transnational cinema in Finnish and Chinese film cultures' 
• Tonny Krijnen: 'Engaging the Moral Imagination by Watching Television: Different Modes of Moral Reflection' 
• Kim Trager Bohley: '“Browsing Madness” and Global Sponsors of Literacy: The Politics and Discourse of Deterritorialized Reading Practices and Space in Singapore' 
• Anne Collins Smith and Owen M. Smith: 'Pragmatism and Meaning: Assessing the Message of Star Trek: The Original Series' :

Special Section: Comedy Audiences

• Sam Friedman, Brett Mills and Tom Phillips (Guest Editors - Special Section): 'Editorial Introduction' 
• Lesley Harbidge: 'Audienceship and (Non)Laughter in the Stand-up Comedy of Steve Martin' 
• Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore: 'Reviewing Romcom: (100) IMDb Users and (500) Days of Summer' 
• Sharon Lockyer and Lynn Myers: '‘It’s About Expecting the Unexpected’: Live Stand-up Comedy from the Audiences’ Perspective' 
• Richard McCulloch: '‘Most People Bring Their Own Spoons’: The Room’s participatory audiences as comedy mediators' 
• Sophie Quirk: 'Containing the Audience: The ‘Room’ in Stand-Up Comedy' 
• Eve Smith: 'Selling Terry Pratchett's Discworld: Merchandising and the Cultural Economy of Fandom' 
• Simon Weaver: 'Definitions of the humorous in Chris Rock and Russell Peters fan blogs: A discussion of the problem of incongruity' 
• Nathan A. Wilson: 'Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power'

Special Section: International Film Audiences Conference

• Ailsa Hollinshead (Guest Editor - Special Section): 'Editorial Introduction' 
• Karina Aveyard: 'The Place of Cinema and Film in Contemporary Rural Australia' 
• Jacqui Cochrane: '16 Years of Alcohol: An Allegory of a Nation ' 
• Elizabeth Jane Evans: 'Superman vs Shrödinger’s Cat: Taste, Etiquette and Independent Cinema Audiences as Indirect Communities' 
• Roberta Gregoli: 'Transnational Reception of City of God and Elite Squad' 
• Amy Hardie:  'Symbolic Cinema and Audience Engagement' 
• Ailsa Hollinshead: '“And I felt quite posh!” Art-house cinema and the absent audience – the exclusions of choice' 
• Peter Krämer: '‘Movies that make people sick’: Audience Responses to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971/72' 
• Claire Monk: 'Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: period film audiences and online film cultures' 
• Tom Phillips: 'When Film Fans Become Fan Family: Kevin Smith Fandom and Communal Experience' 
• Pavel Skopal: '"It is not enough we have lost the war – now we have to watch it!" Cinemagoers' attitudes in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (a case study from Leipzig)'

Special Section: Approaching the Online Audience: New Practices, New Thinking

• Craig Hight, Ann Hardy, Carolyn Michelle and Adrian Athique (Guest Editors - Special Section):'Editorial Introduction' 
• Charles H. Davis and Carolyn Michelle: 'Q methodology in audience research: bridging the qualitative/quantitative ‘divide’?' 
• Luke Goode, Alexis McCullough and Gelise O'Hare: 'Unruly publics and the fourth estate on YouTube' 
• Ann Hardy, Craig Hight and Carolyn Michelle: 'Reservoir Hill and audiences for online interactive drama' 
• Bevin Yeatman: 'Still seeking the audience' 
• Ruth Zanker: 'Child audiences becoming interactive ‘viewsers’: New Zealand children’s responses to websites attached to local children’s television programmes'

Reviews

• Samantha Holland:Pole Dancing, Empowerment and Embodiment (Elke Weismann) 
• Michael V. Tueth: Laughter in the Living Room: Television Comedy and the American Home Audience (Tom Phillips) 
• Graeme Turner:  Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn (Simon Cross) 
• Richard O. Young: How Audiences Decide: a Cognitive Approach to Business Communication (Martin Barker)

Immaturity Abides! On Teen, "Gross Out" and Dumbass Comedy

Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Film Studies For Free is two years old today. You go, blog!

In honour of its tentative entry into digital post-toddlerdom (and hopefully not the terrible twos), it wanted to celebrate online and openly accessible studies of what FSFF likes to think of (in its über-scholarly way) as those liminal film genres and cycles of comic immaturity, awkwardness, stupidity, and tastelessness -- that is to say, all varieties of the teen (or arrested development) comedy (including the "teen sex comedy", the "gross-out" comedy, comic "dude flicks" and "bromances"), as well as studies of related issues.

Today's scattershot links list is partly an offshoot of FSFF's recent entry on the romantic comedy, and partly its first experiment in "crowdsourcing" via its blossoming Facebook page. Thanks so much to those who suggested items there.

If anyone else has any bright ideas for further additions, do please 'fess up. FSFF earnestly promises that you won't be ritually humiliated, or mercilessly laughed at, at all  :o)

• Joseph Aisenberg, 'Here Come the Bromides: Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 65, August 2009

• Peter Alilunas, 'Male Masculinity as the Celebration of Failure: the Frat Pack, Women, and the Trauma of "Victimization" in the "Dude Flick"', Mediascape,  Spring 2008/Fall 2009

• Steven W. Bender, 'Knocked Down Again: An East L.A. Story on the Geography of Color and Colors', Harvard Latino Law Review, Vol. 12, 2009

• Nick Burns, 'Heathers: Scent of dominance', from Jump Cut, no. 36, May 1991, pp. 32-36

• Zachary Campbell, ‘"Sorry About All the Gravity!" Anna Faris, Serious Respect for the Unserious', Rouge, 13, 2009

• Isabel Sterling Clark, 'The Challenge of Being Yourself: Adaptation, Adolescence, and Disguise in Teenage Romantic Comedy Films of the Late 1990s and Early 2000s', Senior Thesis, Haverford College, 2009

• Evan Elkins, 'Great Job?: Tim and Eric’s Comedy of Failure', FlowTV, August 8, 2008

• Caroline Haggod, 'Bruno and Bromances: Modern Masculinity Goes to the Movies', The Huffington Post, March 10, 2010

• Peter Hutchings , 'Welcome to Royston Vasey: Grotesque bodies and the horror of comedy in The League of Gentlemen', Intensities 4, December 2007

• Carmen Induráin Eraso, 'Riding on divergent but similar roads: Airbag or the Spanish experience of the American Road Movie', Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 2005, vol. 13, 107-121

• Ewan Kirkland, 'Romantic Comedy and the Construction of Heterosexuality', Scope, Portals Special Issue, Issue 13, 2008

• Barbara Klinger, 'Say It Again, Sam: Movie Quotation, Performance and Masculinity', Particip@tions Volume 5, Issue 2 (November 2008)

• Zachary Lamm, 'The Cinematic Shrews of Teen Comedy: Gendering Shakespeare in Twentieth-Century Film', Genders On-Line, Issue 49, 2009

• Christina Lee, Beyond the Pink: (Post) Youth Iconography in Cinema, PhD Thesis, Murdoch University, 2005

• Christian Lorentzen, 'Dicking Around', N1FR Issue 1, August 2010

• James MacDowell, 'Notes on Quirky', MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism, 1.1, 2010

• James MacDowell, 'Knocked Up', Alternate Takes, November 14, 2007

• Gabrielle Moss, ' From the Valley to the Hellmouth: “Buffy”’s Transition from Film to Television', Slayage: A journal of Buffy Studies, 1.2 [2], 2001 

• Joshua Louis Moss, 'Historiography of the World Part 1: The Jewish Body, Historical Crisis and The Comedic Farce', Mediascape,  Spring 2008/Fall 2009

• Scott Murray, '“Cameron Fry, this one’s for you.” Or: Why the Sausage King of Chicago Doesn’t Turn Up for Lunch at Chez Quis', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009

• Diane Negra, "Where The Boys Are: Postfeminism and the New Single Man", FlowTV April 14, 2006

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'There's something about comedy theory', P.O.V. No.26, 2008

• Sharyn Pearce, 'Sex and the cinema: What American pie teaches the young', Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning 6 (4) 2006: pp. 367-376

• Sina Rahmani, 'Hollywood and Diversity: Subversion, Apologetic, or Both? Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Dir. Danny Leiner. New Line Cinema, 2004', Colloquy, 9, 2005

• Michael Joshua Rowin, 'I Love You, Man and the Apatow Comedy Factory', Reverse Shot, Issue 24, 2009

• Philip Scepanski, 'Out of the Mouths of Babes: Animated Sitcoms and Political Incorrectness', Mediascape, Fall 2008

• Ethan de Seife, 'Gremlins in the Mix', 16:9, 6.25, 2008

• Carter Soles, Falling Out of the Closet: Kevin Smith, Queerness, and Contemporary Independent Film. PhD Thesis, University of Oregon, September 2008

• Carter Soles, 'A Stalker's Odyssey: Arrested Development, Gay Desire, and Queer Comedy in Chuck and Buck', Jump Cut 49, Spring 2007

• Lesley Speed, 'A World Ruled by Hilarity: Gender and Low Comedy in the Films of Amy Heckerling', Senses of Cinema, Vol. 22, 2002

• Scott F. Stoddart, 'Love and Death on Long Island (Dir. Richard Kwietniowski, 1998)', Scope, Portals Special Issue, Issue 13, 2008

• Donato Totaro, 'Screwballs: Teen Comedy Canadian Style', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 8, 2009

• Lisa Trahair, 'Comedy and Beyond: Geoff King's Film Comedy', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 15, 2004
  

• Eric King Watts and Mark P. Orbe , 'The Spectacular Consumption of “True” African American Culture: “Whassup” with the Budweiser Guys?', Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2002, pp. 1–20

• Cynthia Weber, '"Oi, Dancing Boy!" Masculinity, Sexuality, and Youth in Billy Elliot', Gender 37, 2003

• Jessica Winter, 'Knocked Up', Cinemascope, 31, 2008

Video Essay on The Big Lebowski, Kevin. B. Lee with Karina Longworth, March 2010

Love builds bridges: on the romantic comedy in transnational cinema

Last updated June 1, 2010

Image of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn on the set of Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938). See Kartina Richardson's short video essay on this film at her new audio commentary website Mirror.

Film Studies For Free's author sensibly decided, on balance, that it was probably better to stay at home and draft the below list of links to good quality, openly accessible, and disciplinarily-diverse, scholarly studies of the transnational, transhistorical, romantic comedy film mode, than to haul herself out (in the rain) to the cinema to see Sex and the City 2.

Enough said, probably, but if you think she has made the wrong choice, please do leave a comment below... (More links should be added in the next few days - if you have any to suggest, please get in touch).

• María del Mar Azcona Montoliú, 'Love is a Many-Person’d Thing: Multi-Protagonist Tales of Contemporary Desire', BELLS, 17, 2008

• Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, 'Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will and Grace and the Situation Comedy Genre', Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2002, pp. 87–105

• Christopher Beach, Class, Language and American Film Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) long excerpt

• Michael Black, Bonnie Friel, Joan Jasak, Matthew Lombard, Anne Russ, 'An Evaluation of Portrayals of Telepresence and Romantic Relationships in Film and Television', Edited by Anna Spagnolli, Luciano Gamberini, Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Workshop on Presence, Padova, 16-18 October 2008

• Karen Boyle, 'Attractions and distractions: Mums, babies and ‘early’ cinemagoing', Participations, Volume 6, Issue 2, 2009

• Mary M Chan, 'Mr. Collins on Screen: Jane Austen’s Legacy of the Ridiculous', Persuasion On-Line, V.29, NO.1 (Winter 2008) 

• Isabel Sterling Clark, 'The Challenge of Being Yourself: Adaptation, Adolescence, and Disguise in Teenage Romantic Comedy Films of the Late 1990s and Early 2000s', Senior Thesis, Haverford College, 2009

• Brenda Cossman, 'Sexuality,Queer Theory,and "Feminism After": Reading and Rereading the Sexual Subject', McGill Law Journal, Vol. 49, 2004

• Celestino Deleyto, 'The Dupes Strike Back: Comedy, Melodrama and Point of View in The Apartment,' Atlantis: Revista de la Asociacion Espanola de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 14.1-2 (1992): 37-61

• Jonathan Fletcher, ‘"Anything can happen": Narrative Ambiguity and Musical Intertextuality in The Holiday', Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, 2, 2008 / 135

• Marcy J. Goodfleisch, 'Gentlemen gigolos, deceptive damsels, comedy and film: A dangerous mix', MA Thesis, Excelsior College, 2008

• Tamar Jeffers McDonald, 'Review of Celestino Deleyto's The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009), ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.2 (December 2009): 163-168

• Kimberly R. Johnson and Bjarne M. Holmes, 'Contradictory Messages: A Content Analysis of Hollywood-produced Romantic Comedy Feature Films', (draft article for Communication Quarterly, Volume 57, Issue 3 January 2009 , pages 352 - 373)

• Betty (Despoina) Kaklamanidou, 'The "Light" Side of Feminine Evil: Film Comedies', Paper at Evil, Women and the Feminine Conference, Budapest, Hungary, May 2009

• James MacDowell, 'Romantic Comedy: Love, Nervousness & Intertextuality', Alternate Takes, February 15, 2009

• Sergio Melo , 'The phenomenology of adaptation of classics: A Midsummer Night’s Dream as viewed by Ingmar Bergman’s and Woody Allen’s perspectives', Paper for FOOT 2006, The Festival of Original Theatre: Performing Adaptations

• Linda Mizejewski, 'Queen Latifah, Unruly Women, and the Bodies of Romantic Comedy ', Genders, Issue 46, 2007

• Linda Mizejewski, 'Chapter 1: Rules and Unruliness: Romantic Comedy' in It Happened One Night (Oxfod: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

• Diane Negra, 'Quality Postfeminism?"Sex and the Single Girl on HBO', Genders, Issue 39, 2004 

• Kenny K. K. Ng, 'Romantic comedies of Cathay-MP and GI in the 1950s and 60s: language, locality, and urban character', from Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'There's something about comedy theory', P.O.V. No.26, 2008

• Beatriz Oria Gomez, 'The Importance of Being Famous: Romance and Self-identity in Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998)', Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos no 12 (2007), pp. 83-98

• Renee Penney, Desperately Seeking Redundancy? Queer Romantic Comedy and the Festival Audience, PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010

• Polona Petek, ‘"I deserve the best and I accept the best": Exploring Female Narcissism in Me Myself I', Voicing Dissent, New Talents 21C: Next Generation Australian Studies, No. 76, 2003, pp. 159-68

• Helene A. Shugart, 'Reinventing Privilege: The New (Gay) Man in Contemporary Popular Media', Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2003, pp. 67–91

• Douglas A Sonheim, 'Walker Percy's The Moviegoer as Romantic Comedy', Baiko English Journal (1987)

• Lesley Speed, 'A World Ruled by Hilarity: Gender and Low Comedy in the Films of Amy Heckerling', Senses of Cinema, Issue 22, 2002

• Lisa Trahair, 'Comedy and Beyond: Geoff King's Film Comedy', Film-Philosophy, Volume 8, 2004

• Jyotika Virdi, 'Mr. and Mrs. 55: Comedy of gender, law, and nation', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 75-85, 130 

• Stephen J. Whitfield, 'Cinéma Verité [on Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. By Stanley Cavell]', Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1983 

• Rachel Williams, "It's Like Painting Toys Blue and Pink" (Martha Coolidge, 1996): Marketing and the Female-Directed Hollywood Film , Scope, December 2000

• Norman Yusoff, 'Genre and Pleasure: The Case of Malay(sian) Romantic Comedy', SKRIN: Volume 1 Issue 1 Jan 2004

An E-book and more podcasts

Thanks to Chris Cagle's ever excellent Category D: a film and media studies blog (the subject of which I hope to return to shortly), I've been able to add another e-monograph to Film Studies For Free's new listing of Film Open Access e-books (joining Bordwell on Ozu and Kolker's The Altering Eye, so far). Back in July, Category D discussed and linked to Jennifer E. Langdon, Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), which has been made available as an e-monograph thanks to Gutenberg-e, a program of the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press. The Gutenberg-e blurb for Langdon's book is given as follows:

In the summer of 1947, Crossfire, a controversial thriller exposing American anti-Semitism, became a critical and box-office hit, and RKO producer Adrian Scott was at the pinnacle of his career. Within several months, however, he was infamous as a member of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted for his refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood, Jennifer E. Langdon reconstructs the production and reception of Scott's major films to explore the political and creative challenges faced by Hollywood radicals in the studio system and to reassess the relationship between film noir, antifascism and anticommunism, and the politics of Americanism.

Following yesterday's blog post, I also discovered a few more film-scholarly podcasts (or video/webcasts) of note that I added to that listing on FSFF. These are as follows:

• Irving Singer, 'Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher' (video podcast)
• Martin Scorsese: "Discusses Film-Making" at Princeton University, May 4 1999 (scroll down page for videocast)
• Monash University Film & TV Studies podcasts (inc Robert Stam and Adrian Martin)
• Stephen Gundle 'What do Greta Garbo, Madonna and Napoleon have in common? Why Glamour, Darling!'
• Tamar Jeffers McDonald, interview about 'Romantic Comedy, Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre' (London: Wallflower Press, 2007); Tamar is a former colleague of mine in Film Studies at the University of Kent
• Peter Stanfield 'Lawrence Alloway’s Pop Art Film Criticism and its Place in British Film Studies'; Peter is also a former colleague of mine in Film Studies at the University of Kent (please note, with apologies: today, I am having trouble accessing any of the Tate Galleries' podcasts that I published links to yesterday, including this one, which is a shame after listing them all! I'll keep checking them out)

[UPDATE (added 11.9.08): I followed up on the technical difficulties with accessing Tate Gallery video podcasts and found that information about these has now been posted on the Tate website:

Important Information! Tate's Real Player service is being replaced by a new service, and we are currently in the process of re-encoding all of our existing material into the new video format. Some Online Events archives are not currently available due to changes in the way Tate delivers video online. We apologise for the temporary loss and are working hard to put them online as soon as possible.]

As always, any further suggestions for FSFF's resource listings will be very gratefully received and anyone suggesting items will always be properly acknowledged.