Showing posts with label Spanish cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spanish cinema. Show all posts

Wednesday, 24 August 2016

Almodóvar Studies for Free

Last updated with more links August 25

MATCHES - On similarly flammable moments in Ray and Almodóvar
(Intertextual ignition by Catherine Grant)


Experience has taught me that the more honest and personal my work is,
the more successful I am.
(Pedro Almodóvar)


It costs a lot to be authentic, ma’am.
('Agrado' in All About My Mother)


Film Studies For Free is delighted to celebrate its eighth birthday with a tiny new video essay (above) and a whole entry (below) devoted to a wide-ranging collection of links to online and open access studies of the work of one of its favourite filmmakers of all time: Pedro Almodóvar.

Thanks so much to all FSFF's readers for being (t)here over the years! It's been a 'fount of pleasure' (as José Arroyo writes of Almodóvar's films), and an authentic joy.


Online written studies of Almodóvar's work


Added Online audio about Almodóvar's work


 Online videos about Almodóvar's work


Full length BAFTA interview with Almodóvar online here (50 minutes): http://bcove.me/vprjzlwm
























vvv


In Spanish/Unsubtitled

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Tuesday, 2 April 2013

¡Cine fantástico! In Memory of Jess Franco (1930-2013)

Frame grab image of Lina Romay in Jess Franco's Les possédées du diable/Exorcism (1974)
Serge Daney distinguishes between love of cinema and passion for cinema. The latter state concerns the expressive evolution and refinement of the art, typified by the work, one might suppose, of such singular giants as Godard, Dreyer and Garrel. Love of cinema, on the other hand, is fetishistic, stemming from contentment with the medium as it already is. In the acceptance speech [Jess] Franco made on receiving his honorary lifetime achievement Goya award this February [2009], he described himself as simply ‘a man in love with cinema'. Perhaps nowhere better than in Jess Franco's oeuvre is ‘love of cinema' embodied. Yet complacency is hardly the first quality one associates with Franco's often defiantly free, personal and gloriously extreme riffs on familiar B cinema patterns. The fevered mirror he holds up to cinema reveals not a static museum of ossified formulas but a rich arsenal of figurative possibilities. Jess Franco is cinema- cinema in all its crassness, vulgarity, brutality, puerility, vitality, invention, wonder, joy, eroticism, poetry, violence, bizarreness, obsessiveness, mystery. And, of course, addictiveness. [Maximilian Le Cain, Editorial, Experimental Conversations, Spring 2009]
Film Studies For Free was muy triste when it heard the news that Spanish horror cinema maestro Jess Franco has died today, following a stroke last week.

It will be gathering tributes and links in memory of Franco's amazing film career over the next days, starting with the ones below. So do please come back for more as the below lists get longer.

Tributes
Good resources online
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Saturday, 1 October 2011

On Pictures of Moving: Articles from the International Journal of Screendance


Montage of sequences from Carmen (Carlos Saura, 1983). You can read more about this film (one of FSFF's absolute favourites!) in Marisa Zanotti's article 'When Dance is Imagined In Cinema: Disclosure in Dance Practice'. The article also examines Chantal Akerman’s documentary Un Jour Pina a Demandé (1983), about spending five weeks with Pina Bausch’s company.

Another lucky (unchoreographed) find by Film Studies For Free today. Looking for something else entirely, FSFF pirouetted (tripped) over the following, rather wonderful, online and openly accessible item: the first issue of the International Journal of Screendance. The superb contents of the issue are described in detail and linked to below.

A new issue of IJS is just about due out now, according to the website, so FSFF will let you know about that just as soon as it can.

This first issue of The International Journal of Screendance is dedicated to the proposal that screendance has not yet been invented. This is an appropriation of film theorist Andre Bazin’s suggestion, in The Myth of Total Cinema (1946), that the reality of cinema had not yet embodied the ideal of cinema. Bazin’s writing had been discussed in the first seminar of the International Screendance Network, together with Professor Ian Christie (Birkbeck College, University of London), who had given the 2006 Slade Lectures under the title “Cinema has Not Yet Been Invented.” The proposition that screendance has not yet been invented is intended as an incitement to the community to think about the art form in new ways, both critical and theoretical, and this journal aims to create a forum to sustain the debate.
     A number of themes emerge in this first issue. The presence of Maya Deren is felt in a number of articles, as are ideas about genre, criticality, authorship, disability, performance, and the phenomenology of screendance itself. Chirstinn Whyte looks at amateurism and idea of “professionalism” in “The Evolution of the ‘A’ word: Changing Notions of Professional Practice in Avant-Garde Film and Contemporary Screendance.” Gravity is explored from differing perspectives in two essays: Ann Cooper Albright rethinks the act of falling on screen as an instant in which new meaning can arise while Harmony Bench filters twentieth-century, modern and postmodern, dance techniques’ shared faith in gravity and weight through a digital and electronic lens. Sarah Whatley raises questions about the portrayal of dance and disability on screen, and Argentine critic Susanna Temperley (in Spanish with English translation) addresses the role of the critic in screendance in“Perplexed Writing”, while Kyra Norman explores ideas around the body, perception, and place in site- based screendance. Claudia Kappenberg reviews notions of originality and authorship in “The Logic of the Copy”, and Douglas Rosenberg proposes theories about genre and the diasporic nature of screendance.
     In addition to in-depth discussion and theorization of particular aspects of screen- dance practices, each issue will include interviews and reflective writing by practitioners in the field. In this issue, we publish a transcribed interview with BBC dance for television producer Bob Lockyer. In an effort to reacquaint readers with out of print or hard to find extant articles, we will be including such texts in forthcoming issues, and we begin by re-printing a paper by film theorist and philosopher Noël Carroll entitled “Toward a Definition of Moving Picture-Dance.” The paper was originally presented at the Dance for Camera Symposium in 2000 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In the paper and talk, Carroll, who has been writing about movement on screen since the 1970s, lays out an argument for a definition of the field in order to, as he states, “compare and contrast the various categorizations in play and to develop dialectically from them a comprehensive framework that makes sense of our practices and that resonates with our intuitions about its compass” (2, this issue).

International Journal of Screendance
Vol 1, No 1 (2010): Screendance Has Not Yet Been Invented

Table of Contents
Vol.1, Issue 1 [PDF of Full Issue]

Editorial comment
Articles
Interviews
Reviews
Reprints
Toward a Definition of Moving-Picture Dance by Noël Carroll

Artists' Pages
Notes on Contributors
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    Monday, 18 October 2010

    PhD Theses on Hal Hartley, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and Spanish cinema studies

    Javier Bardem as Raúl and Penélope Cruz as Silvia in Jamón Jamón (Bigas Luna, 1992) as discussed in Rebecca Naughten's work Spain Made Flesh: Reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007
    Film Studies For Free was delighted when Spanish cinema scholar Rebecca Naughten responded to its request for information about online PhD theses. Not only did Rebecca let FSFF know that her own really excellent thesis has recently been made available online, but she also did the hard work of trawling through the online repository at the University of Newcastle, where her work is stored, to find four other very good theses archived there. ¡Muchísimas gracias, Rebecca!

    These works have just been added to FSFF's permanent list of Online Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Theses (see the link in the table of contents in the right-hand sidebar for future reference) which now makes more than 130 theses accessible to you at the click of your mouse.

    Do please let FSFF know if your online PhD thesis, or others you know of, is not yet in this list.
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    Monday, 17 May 2010

    In darkened rooms: On Salvador Dalí and cinema (in memory of David Vilaseca)

    "Oh Salvador Dalí, of the olive-colored voice!
    [...]
    I sing your restless longing for the statue,
    your fear of the feelings that await you in the street."

    Excerpt from Federico García Lorca, 'Ode to Salvador Dalí'
    (first published in Revista de Occidente, Madrid, April 1926)

    "The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms."
    "[Un chien andalou/] An Andalusian Dog, one of the most universally acclaimed films in cinema history, is frequently mentioned by critics as a privileged point of reference for the Surrealist rebellion. The film remains enigmatic to this day. Criticism has concentrated on the validity and effectiveness of its images to exemplify the avant-garde attack against social conventions and against the exclusive dominance of rationality in epistemology and social discourse. But this contextual approach does not take account of the script's fragmented narrative, which finds support in Freud's psychoanalytical theories and articulates a radical proposal for identity and culture. Largely neglected by critics, this narrative has been highly influential in the history of cinema. An Andalusian Dog is central to a long list of films that explore different aspects of the irrational, among them Jean Cocteau's Le sang du poète, Hunt Stromberg's The Strange Woman, Guy Debord's script Howling in Favor of the Marquis de Sade, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, [...] David Lynch's Blue Velvet [...].
        Conventionally An Andalusian Dog has been viewed as a film about sexuality; I suggest that sexuality appears in the film as the pretext for a discussion of the threat sexual desire poses for male identity. In this respect, the film develops ideas that begin to appear in paintings completed by Dalí after his initial contact with Freud's works in the mid-1920s. These paintings display male identity as a fragile form of subsistence unfolding between two alternate forces, desire and fear: the desire for sexual realization and the opposed fear that sexual intercourse will conclude in disease and ultimately in death. Given the scarcity of Buñuel's production prior to 1929, I suggest that Dalí's monumental production of paintings during these years served as a preliminary visual point of reference for the design of some of the images in An Andalusian Dog."      Ignacio Javier López, 'Film, Freud, and Paranoia Dalí and the Representation of Male Desire in An Andalusian Dog', Diacritics, 31.2 (2001) 35-48
    "[David Vilaseca's] first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."
         Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate." Paul Julian Smith, 'David Vilaseca Obituary', The Guardian, March 11, 2010
    Film Studies For Free chooses today -- the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia -- to bring you the second of its posts created in memory of David Vilaseca, the openly gay Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London.

    Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010, having fought against homophobia, in different ways, for much of his life. A recent obituary in the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia also brutally connected these two unassailable facts in its own powerful and poetic tribute to this remarkable scholar and hugely creative writer:
    Deberíamos leer a Vilaseca, que supo esquivar la soledad y el desarraigo en un mundo homófobo hasta que este se disfrazó de camión y embistió su bicicleta.
    We really should read the works of Vilaseca; he knew how to dodge loneliness and rootlessness in a homophobic world, at least until the latter disguised itself as a truck and rammed into his bicycle.

    As Paul Julian Smith indicates in his obituary for his friend (cited above), Vilaseca's PhD thesis, which he turned into an outstanding first book, explored the highly complex question of the homophobia of artist, filmmaker, and fellow Catalan Salvador Dalí through the lens of queer cultural theories. 

    Below is a list of direct links to numerous other resources (videos, podcasts, and further, openly-accessible, scholarly material), many of which touch on Dalí's much less well-explored cinematic work in the same contexts as those studied in Vilaseca's book; that is to say, the artist's avowed 'paranoiac-critical method' and the cultural expression of his sexuality. 

    [Addendum: For two much less scholarly, but still highly (and, possibly, surprisingly) engaging, fictional examinations of the workings of paranoia and homophobia in the period of Dalí's life prior to the making of Un chien andalou, FSFF's author thoroughly recommends the films Little Ashes (Paul Morrison, 2009), starring Robert Pattinson as Dalí, and Carlos Saura's Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón. (If you need more convincing, please do read Pauline Bache's article on the former film).]

    Dreams designed by Dalí for Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Un Chien andalou

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    Tuesday, 4 May 2010

    Film-Historia: Index to English language articles


    Over the years, Film Studies For Free has noticed that there were some excellent English-language articles on lots of different aspects of film history to be found at the (very difficult to navigate) website of the excellent Universitat de Barcelona-based film journal Film-Historia. 

    Until today, however, there was no easy way to access all of these articles, but ...  (drum roll) ... ta-da! Cast your eyes at the awesome list of direct links below, and, if you feel so inclined, thank your lucky stars that FSFF's author needed some distraction from her country's general election shenanigans this morning.
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    Monday, 26 April 2010

    Paranormal cinematic activity: ghost film studies

    Latest update: April 27, 2010
     Publicity still for The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). See an excerpt from this film in Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay 'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film', embedded towards the foot of this entry

    Film Studies For Free has gone and spooked itself, today, with its own scary persistence in compiling a list of links to openly accessible, online, scholarly articles, chapters and theses on international ghost film studies. Oh, and there are two related video essays lurking at the bottom to scare the scholarly bejesus out of you for good measure, too (added April 27) .

    Like all the best posts at this blog (IOHO), the list below owes its hefty materiality to its connections with FSFF's author's own (hauntological) research, some of which, hopefully, will be directly shared with her fearless readers very shortly. So do please be a revenant, won't you?



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