Afore Ye Go, 2019: Essential Tributes (Elsaesser, Wollen, Lindner) Plus Favourite-of-the-Year Open Access Resources

FALLING: 3 x Girls in Uniform

A comparative videographic study by Catherine Grant showcasing the repetitions and variations across two sets of corresponding sequences from the three direct film adaptations of Christa Winsloe's MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM (aka RITTER NÉRESTAN and GESTERN UND HEUTE, 1930-32). Video first published at MEDIÁTICO in December 2019, alongside a great text on the Mexican adaptation by Roberto Carlos Ortiz.

Better late than never, so they say. But it is especially late for this to be the very first, as well as the very last, blog entry of 2019 at Film Studies For Free...

What else can this blog's author say, but sorry / not sorry for being distracted by an incredibly busy year spent in hot pursuit of other excellent open-access screen studies initiatives - all listed immediately beneath this introduction.

It has also been a year of tremendous loss for many, especially, it seems, in the realm of film and moving image studies. So this end of year/end of decade FSFF post has a somewhat sombre tone and distinctly commemorative content. It offers warm tributes in links to the work and lives of the two foundational film scholars-filmmakers who sadly died late in 2019: Thomas Elsaesser and Peter Wollen. We owe them so much. It also offers a further deeply-heart-felt tribute to a brilliant young film scholar who, in February of this year, died way too soon: Katharina "Kat" Lindner.

FSFF's author had the great fortune, honour and pleasure of meeting all three of these wonderful contributors to our discipline. She sends much love and sincere condolences to their partners, families and close friends. As further online tributes to these scholars appear, the entries below will be updated.

Other huge film studies losses, in this cruel year, have included Edward Branigan and Eileen Bowser.

Below FSFF's tributes, this end of year entry continues with this blog's customary lists of links to some of its favourite open-access film and moving image studies resources from 2019.

Film Studies For Free wishes all of its readers and viewers a happy and healthy 2020! It hopes to see a lot more of you in the next decade!

Film Studies For Free's Author's OA Activities in 2019

• 3 new open-access co-edited collections: 
• Beast Fables: On Animals in the Cinema with Tracy Cox-Stanton at The Cine-Files; 
• New ways of seeing (and hearing): The audiovisual essay and television with Jaap Kooijman at NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies; 
• Pride Revisited: Cinema, Activism and Re-Activation, with Diarmaid Kelliher at the Open Library of Humanities Journal. 
• 2 new open access, multimedia websites: 
• The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy, which collects both previously-published and new versions of writings by Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell and FSFF's author Catherine Grant, and many videos by them and others, among other useful material; 
• screenstudies.video, another still in production research resource by this blog's author, coming very soon in 2020... 
• Service on the steering committee of the brilliant new pre-print initiative MediArxiv: Open Archive for Media, Film, and Communication Studies, as well as on the boards of numerous other OA archives and journals... Also check out the new bilingual Spanish/English journal Tecmerin: Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales / Journal of Audiovisual Essays
• 2 great podcast interviews on video essays: one with Will DiGravio for the new The Video Essay Podcast; and one with José Arroyo for his Conversations with Film Scholars series 
• Much ongoing co-editorial labour of love at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, which, in 2019, added two brilliant new co-editors to its team: Neepa Majumdar and Kevin L. Ferguson. 
• 16 new online video essays on screen studies topics: 14 published here; and 2 more here; including probably her best one ever. 
• And continued daily or weekly sharing at FSFF's Twitter and Facebook accounts.

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In Memoriam Thomas Elsaesser
(1943–2019)

Personal tribute by Catherine Grant 

I still can’t believe Thomas Elsaesser has died. A foundational and inspirational figure in our field - and for me personally, especially given his utter dedication to open access publishing, both by his own example, sharing so many of his publications at his website, as well as as a hugely important figure at Amsterdam University Press.

I met Thomas in 2001 at the Forever Godard conference and remained in touch. In the last years, especially, I got to spend time with him in person quite a lot as our paths crossed on many conference trips and he visited the institutions I have worked in numerous times, including to screen his lovely film The Sun Island. From his work on melodrama, authorship (his Fassbinder book, linked to below was a huge influence on my work), media history and archaeology, through to, latterly, research by film and video practice, he was always leading the way. He was hugely supportive of Film Studies For Free over the years, and of the scholarly endeavour of videographic  approaches to our discipline, in which he was also a pioneer (see below).

Where will we go now, Thomas?

Online Tributes and Festschrifts

• 'Stories we tell: Remembering Thomas Elsaesser, by Malte Hagener, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 12 December, 2019
• 'In Memoriam Thomas Elsaesser' by Patricia Pisters, UvA website, 7 December, 2019
• Mind the Screen : Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser, edited by Patricia Pisters, Wanda Strauven and Jaap Kooijman (Amsterdam University Press, 2008)
• 'Remembering our colleague and friend Thomas Elsaesser', by Maryse Elliott, Senior Commissioning Editor at Amsterdam University Press, December 2019
• Tributes to Thomas Elsaesser, by David Hudson, Criterion Daily, 10 December 2019
• 'In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser, film scholar and filmmaker extraordinaire', The Essay Film Festival, December 2019
• Thomas Elsaesser, Film Scholar With A Broad View, Dies At 76, New York Times, by Richard Sandomir, December 19, 2019

Open Access Books

• Writing for the Medium : Television in transition, edited by Lucette Bronk, Thomas Elsaesser and Jan Simon (Amsterdam University Press, 1994)
• Fassbinder's Germany : History, Identity, Subject, by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 1996)
• A Second Life : German Cinema's First Decades, edited by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 1996)
• Harun Farocki : Working on the Sight-Lines, edited by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
• The Last Great American Picture Show : New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, edited by Noel King, Thomas Elsaesser and Alexander Horwath (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
• European Cinema : Face to Face with Hollywood, by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 2005) - this collection includes Elsaesser's essay on Peter Wollen's first solo-directed film Friendship's Death (1987).
• And Mind the Screen : Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser, edited by Patricia Pisters, Wanda Strauven and Jaap Kooijman (Amsterdam University Press, 2008)

Websites

Thomas Elsaesser - Including a list of Publications (many downloadable as PDFs)

Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses


Online Interviews (more to be added)

Essay Film Festival 2018: Thomas Elsaesser in Discussion with Erica Carter
about his 2018 film The Sun Island


Videos and Video Essays

Thomas Elsaesser's Vimeo Account

BERGMAN SENSES (Thomas Elsaesser, Anne Bachmann and Jonas Moberg)

Film Studies For Free Tribute videos

Installations and Compilations: Elsaesser Senses

Installations and Compilations: Elsaesser Senses - Commentary version

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In Memoriam Peter Wollen

(1938-2019)

Personal tribute by Catherine Grant

I only met Peter Wollen once in real life - also at the 2001 Forever Godard where I met Thomas Elsaesser and other foundational film scholars. But I encountered him in my head many many times, and will continue to do so. His work - particularly his  brilliant filmmaking explorations with Laura Mulvey, and the second edition of his book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, with its groundbreaking arguments about film authorship and 'patterns of energy cathexis' - were of huge importance to my own writing, teaching, and also filmmaking. His 2001 account of cinephilia in "An Alphabet of Cinema" (NEW LEFT REVIEW, 12) is even more of an influence on what I and others are doing now in our video essays and works of creative criticism. I am very much looking forward to the cinematic re-release of Friendship's Death, his 1987 solo-directed essay film, in 2020, and feel sure that Wollen's work, with its timely prescience, will endure in many ways that we cannot yet predict.

Online Tributes

'Peter Wollen obituary: the maven of British film theory',

by Henry K. Miller, Sight and Sound, 20 December 2019

PETER WOLLEN (1938–2019), Artforum, December 20, 2019

Online written work by Peter Wollen

'Knight's Moves', PUBLIC, 25, 2002 (about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work)
'The Field of Language on Film', October, 17, Summer 1981 [Lux Online version] (about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work)
'Interview with Tony Garnett and Ken Loach: Family Life in the making', by Anthony Barnett, John McGrath, John Mathews, and Peter Wollen, from Jump Cut, no. 10-11, 1976
Ch. 2, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema; 'The Auteur Theory' [PDF]

S.T.R.O.B.E. by Peter Wollen

[Link]

Work about Wollen's Research and Filmmaking

Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Theory and Practice, Aesthetics and Politics, 1963-1983, PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2018

European Cinema : Face to Face with Hollywood, by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 2005) - this collection includes Elsaesser's essay on Peter Wollen's first solo-directed film Friendship's Death (1987), and numerous other references to his work.

Lux Online Entry on 'Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen'

Rakhee Balaram, Entry on 'Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen', Lux Online

Eleanor Burke, BFI Screenonline entry on 'Peter Wollen'

Charles Esche,'What does it mean to say that feminism is back? A reaction to Riddles of the Sphinx', Afterall Journal, 15, Spring/Summer 2007

Chris Fennell, 'Laura Mulvey on Riddles of the Sphinx', BFI, October 1, 2013

William Fowler, BFI Screenonline entry on 'Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974)'

Laura Mulvey, 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989

Laura Mulvey on RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Mulvey and Wollen, 1977) 

Wollen epigraph by Christian Keathley



Film Studies For Free Tribute video

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In Memoriam Katharina Lindner
(1979-2019)

Personal tribute by Catherine Grant

Kat Lindner is missed so acutely by so many in her twin worlds of football and film studies. I met her only once in person, a few years ago, though we corresponded about our work over the years. She came to an event in Glasgow at which I was talking, as usual, about video essays. She was a razor sharp, deeply original thinker, with a truly glowing presence. Afterwards we talked for a long time - me trying to convince her, and almost succeeding, I think, that her fabulous work on queer cinematic phenomenology would translate brilliantly to this audiovisual format if only she would take it up. It was an exhilarating conversation and I wish it hadn't had to end. Even before that memorable encounter, I loved her work (especially her path-breaking 2017 book Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema), and used it in my own research directly and indirectly. One day I would like to make a video essay about her writing - but I haven't been able to yet.

Online Tributes

'Towards a Queer Feminist Vernacular: Dr Katharina Lindner’s Film Bodies'

by Jenny Chamarette and So Mayer with Davina Quinlivan, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, May 15, 2019

'Katharina Lindner, 1979-2019: Tributes paid to footballer turned queer theorist', by Matthew Reitz, THE, 28 February 2019
'Obituary: Kat Lindner, academic and footballer for Glasgow City', The Herald, 14 February 2019

'Screening Expectation' in Screen Bodies, by Brian Bergen-Aurand
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/screen.2018.030201 [PDF]



Online Film Studies Writing by Lindner

'Questions of embodied difference: Film and queer phenomenology',
NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2012

‘Situated bodies, cinematic orientations: Film and (queer) phenomenology’, in Saer Ba and William Higbee (eds), De-Westernizing Film. London: Routledge, 2012, [pre-print]

'Spectacular (Dis-) Embodiments: The Female Dancer on Film', Scope, 20, June 2011 PDF

 ‘‘There is a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one of them without a fella...’: The ‘lesbian’ potential of Bend it Like Beckham’. New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 9, No.2, 2011, pp. 204-223 [pre-print]

‘Bodies ‘in action’: Female athleticism on the cinema screen’. Feminist Media Studies, Vol.11, No.3, 2011, pp. 321-345 [pre-print]

‘Fighting for subjectivity: Articulations of physicality in Girlfight’. In Journal of International Women’s Studies, 2009, Vol.10, No.3, pp.4-17. [pre-print]

(Other online publications and pre-prints on media studies topics by Lindner are accessible here)


Writing about Lindner's Research

Davina Quinlivan, 'Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema, by Katharina Lindner' Times Higher Educational Supplement, January 18, 2018

Jules O'Dwyer, Katharina Lindner (2017) Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema, Film-Philosophy, 22.3

Kat's Inspirational Hartford Hawks Hall of Fame Acceptance Speech, Class of '03

Video link


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FSFF's Favourite Online Film and Moving Image Studies 2019

Favourite Contributions to Online Film Scholarly Culture by a Single Scholar

Jennifer Proctor for 'Am I Pretty? and a “Sonic Gaze”', [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2019,  plus her article 'Teaching avant-garde practice as videographic research', in Screen, 60.3, Autumn 2019; and especially for her inspirational continuing work on the inclusive teaching initiative, EDIT Media (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Teaching Media), http://www.editmedia.org


Favourite Open Access Journal Article

'“Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier”: Pola Negri, Wartime and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial', by Elisabetta Girelli, in Film-Philosophy's special issue on Stardom and Film-Philosophy (23.2, 2019), edited by Lucy Bolton

Favourite New Open Access Journal Issue

Frames Cinema Journal for Magical Women, Witches & Healers,

Issue 16, Winter 2019, edited by Ana Maria Sapountzi & Peize Li  

Favourite New Open Access Journal

Media+Environment, edited by Alenda Chang, Adrian Ivakhiv and Janet Walker

Most Missed Online Journal That Stopped Publishing in 2019

Cléo: A Journal of Film and Feminism 

(Read about its demise here. But, thanks to the generosity of filmmaker Barry Jenkins, you can purchase a compendium of the best writing in its six year run).

Favourite Three New Open Access eBooks

The Cinema of Marguerite Duras : Multisensoriality and Female Subjectivity
By Michelle Royer (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons
By Hannah Frank (University of California Press, Oakland, 2019)

The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: 
Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions
By Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam University Press, 2019)

Favourite Film Studies Blog (as Ever)

Observations on Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson


Favourite New Film and Moving Image Studies Related Podcast

Will DiGravio's The Video Essay Podcast

Favourite Online Videographic Approach to Screen Studies

Poor Jesse by Jason Mittell,

Part of "The Chemistry of Character in BREAKING BAD: An Audiovisual Book"


Favourite Collection of Online Video Essays (Not Published by FSFF)

In an excellent new issue of NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2019, devoted to treatments of gesture, came this collection of three excellent video essays in a section edited by Tracy Cox-Stanton: (scroll down)‬

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14 of Film Studies For Free Video Essays Published in 2019

End of December Round Up: THE CINE-FILES, FRAMES, [in]TRANSITION, LOLA, MEDIASCAPE, NECSUS and Much More!

The Marriages of LAUREL DALLAS by Catherine Grant

The above video is published as an integral part of a multimedia essay on two Hollywood adaptations of STELLA DALLAS "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall2014_MarriagesMelodrama.html

Another year of open access scholarly bulletins and links draws to a close at Film Studies For Free. Despite readership well exceeding 2,000,000 page views since late 2009 (thanks for coming back all of you!), it has been a fairly quiet year at this blog,* if not at its Twitter feed and Facebook page, both of which generally boast fast-flowing, usually daily content. But let's round the year off, nonetheless, with a characteristically large collection of links to lots of just (in the nick of time) published Fall 2014 issues of some brilliant online and open access film and moving image studies journals, as well as a bunch of other online delights. Just feast your festive eyes on all the below riches!

And also check out the videographic jewel at the top of this entry too - FSFF's latest audiovisual essay on the tear-jerking ending(s) of Stella Dallas. 2014 has been a golden year for the scholarly video, for sure. A clear highlight in that emergent film studies idiom has been the creation and successful launch of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Images Studies, which FSFF's author co-founded and co-edits with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. Four issues have been published, with the most recent one appearing last week - linked to below - and there's lots more great peer reviewed content lining itself up for 2015. And the audiovisual essay also now boasts its own section at NECSUS Journal, too - edited by the brilliant essayist duo Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. It's EVERYWHERE!!

If you're interested in learning more about this audiovisual film scholarly form in a classroom or presentation setting, FSFF's author will be holding video essay workshops and masterclasses at the January conference of MeCCSA in Newcastle, UK, at BIMI: Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, in London in March (that's a free to attend session!), at an event at the University of East Anglia in May, with  Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin (details soon), as well as at a National Endowment for the Humanities funded event at Middlebury College, Vermont. And those are just the events scheduled in the first half of next year!

So 2015 may be a quiet year at this blog, too........ But FSFF will try to maintain regular entries to publish alongside all its usual microblogging on open access film studies.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! WISHING EVERYONE A WONDERFUL NEW YEAR!

*One of the reasons it's been so quiet is that FSFF's author has not just been linking but also contributing rather a lot to these and other journals and online projects this year. See the long list of publications right at the foot of what follows.

THE CINE-FILES, Issue 7 (Fall 2014) on 'The Video Essay: Parameters, Practice, Pedagogy'

• "Welcome To Issue 7, 'The Video Essay: Parameters, Practice, Pedagogy'” by Tracy Cox-Stanton, Editor
• "Getting Lost In The Form: On Vertigo And Dissolution" by Gordon Hon
• "The Remix That Knew Too Much? On Rebecca, Retrospectatorship And The Making Of Rites Of Passage" by Catherine Grant
• "Dancing With Pixels: Digital Artefacts, Memory And The Beauty Of Loss" by Pam Cook
• "Strangers X: A Proof Of Concept" by Eric Faden
• "Teaching Videographic Film Studies" by Christian Keathley
• "Between Freedom And Constraints: What I Learned From Teaching Video Essays" by Chiara Grizzaffi

FRAMES Cinema Journal, Issue 6, December 2014 MondoPop: Rethinking Genre Beyond Hollywood - Guest-edited by Elena Caoduro and Beth Carroll

• Letter from the Editors By Eileen Rositzka And Amber Shields
• Introduction: Rethinking Genre Beyond Hollywood By Elena Caoduro And Beth Carroll

FEATURE ARTICLES

• Understanding A Serbian Film: The Effects of Censorship and File-sharing on Critical Reception and Perceptions of Serbian National Identity in the UK By Alexandra Kapka
• A Return to Japan? Restaging the Cinematic Past in Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins By Andrew Dorman
• Commedia all’italiana: Rethinking Comedian Comedy Beyond Hollywood By Natalie Fullwood
• Like a Child Playing Dress-up? Genre, Authorship and Pastiche in Doomsday By Daniel O'brien
• Sin nombre, Norteado, and the Contours of Genre and La Frontera By Francisco R. Monar
• Continual Re-enchantment: Tunde Kelani’s Village Films and the Spectres of Early African Cinema By Nikolaus Perneczky

P.O.V.

• British Action and Adventure: A National Take on a Global Genre By Yvonne Tasker
• The Quest for Latin American Science Fiction & Fantasy Film By Alfredo Suppia
• Notes on Nordic Noir as European Popular Culture By Olof Hedling
• Bollywood B-Movies: Cult Cosmopolitanism and the Reception of Indian Genre Cinema in the West By Iain Robert Smith
• Streaming World Genre Cinema By Stefano Baschiera
• Mondo Pop: the Challenge of Popular World Cinema By Phoenix Fry

[in]TRANSITION 1.4, 2014 (Issue commissioned and edited by Drew Morton)

• "Look. I Know You're Not Following What I'm Saying Anyway.": The Problem of the "Video Essay" and Scorsese as Cinematic Essayist by Drew Morton
• Revisiting Spike Lee’s “Racial Slur Montage”: Ya Need to Cool that Shit Out by Douglas Julien
• Essay Meets Plot: JFK and the Boundaries of Narrative by Benjamin Sampson
• The Chicken Between the Teeth: Spatial Soliloquy in the Films of Wes Anderson by David O'Grady
• Dialectical Montage in Steven Soderbergh’s PSYCHOS by R. Colin Tait

LOLA Issue 5 has continued to roll out with the entries below published to date and others still to come:

• Survival Tactics: German Filmmakers in Hollywood, 1940-1960 Joe McElhaney
• To Be or Not to Be (A Jew) Dorian Stuber and Marianne Tettlebaum
• Putting on a Show, or The Ghostliness of Gesture Lesley Stern
• All Things Shining: An Encounter with Mike Hoolboom Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
• ‘You Think You’ve Been There’: A Conversation with James Benning about Easy Rider (2012) Alison Butler
• Three Women: Bastards Cristina Álvarez López
• Cinephobia: To Wonder, To Worry Sarah Keller
• The Emperor is Calm: Eduardo Coutinho and Theodorico, Emperor of the Interior (1978) Victor Bruno
• There is one final stage of this issue of LOLA to go! Coming up: essays on anime, Blade Runner, the filmic object, Upstream Color, classic film criticism, Claude Lanzmann, and more.

MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014 on ADAPTATION (in films, television, anime, computer animation, games!)

• Once and Future: Adaptations of Camelot in Non-Arthurian Television Narratives by Shawn Edrei
• The Curious Adaptation of Benjamin Button: Or, the Dialogics of Brad Pitt’s Face by James N. Gilmore
• Adapting “8-bit” Motion Style to 3D Computer Animation for Wreck-it Ralph by Chris Carter
• Playfully Subversive: the Many Roles of Adaptation in Making Games at the UCLA Game Lab by David O’Grady
• Manga, Anime and Video Games: Between Adaptation, Transmedia Extension and Reverse Remediation by Stefan Werning
• The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator by Catherine Grant
• Transnational Adaptation: The Complex Irreverence of Narrative Strategy in Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues by Tarini Sridharan

NECSUS Journal, Autumn 2014: War

Features

• Editorial Necsus
• The documentary temptation: Fiction filmmakers and non-fiction forms by Adrian Martin
• Reconfiguring film studies through software cinema and procedural spectatorship by Marina Hassapopoulou
• Laughter and collective awareness: The cinema auditorium as public space by Julian Hanich
• Disputing Rossellini: Three French perspectives by James Harvey-Davitt

Audiovisual essays: edited by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

• Introduction to the audiovisual essay: A child of two mothers by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
• Found found found by Dirk de Bruyn
• Smells like Armageddon day – Dreamlike settings and magnified trash by Laura Lammer

Special section: War

• Serious games by Harun Farocki
• The light of God: Notes on the visual economy of drones by Pasi Väliaho
• The din of gunfire: Rethinking the role of sound in World War II newsreels by Masha Shpolberg
• Photographed by the Earth: War and media in light of nuclear events by Thomas Pringle
• Kilts, tanks, and aeroplanes: Scotland, cinema, and the First World War by David Archibald and Maria Velez-Serna
• Shell shock cinema: A discussion with Anton Kaes on the First World War, cinema, and the culture of trauma by Francesco Pitassio

Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier [NECS Publication Committee])

• Haunted by participatory culture review by Rainer Hillrichs
• Female celebrity and ageing in the limelight and under the microscope review by Julie Lobalzo Wright
• Film festival management and programming review by Greg de Cuir, Jr
• Cinema, postmedia, and resolutions review by Donatella Valente

Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist [Film Festival Research Network])

• Minds, bodies, and hearts: Flare London LGBT Film Festival 2014 review by Rosalind Galt & Karl Schoonover
• Progressive spaces and lines of battle: The Bristol Radical Film Festival 2014 review by James Newton
• River-to-River Florence Indian Film Festival: The Italian response to Bollywood cinema review by Monia Acciari

Exhibition reviews (edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg [NECS Publication Committee])

• Appropriation / Collaboration: Christian Marclay / Harrell Fletcher & Miranda July at the University of Michigan Museum of Art review by Tung-Hui Hu
• A spiritual journey in Bill Viola’s art review by Elena Marcheschi
• ‘Leviathan’: From sensory ethnography to gallery film review by Malin Wahlberg

Assorted further open access linkage!

• MPPDA Digital Archive Documents from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., 1922-1939 (Link via Vinzenz Hediger)
• Great new issue of CLÉO: A Journal of Film and Feminism: http://cleojournal.com/category/vol-2-issue-3-party/
• Some film studies content at this great new open access publishing initiative MODERN LANGUAGES OPEN: http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/index (scroll down on the page): 
• 'The corrido as Counterculture in Felipe Cazals’ Canoa' by Catherine Leen: http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/article/view/22
• 'Out of the Shadows: "New" Peruvian Cinema, National Identity and Political Violence' by Sarah Barrow: http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/article/view/18
• 'Adapting Impressionism: Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Le Voyage du ballon rouge' by Carolyn A Durham: http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/article/view/19
• Murray Smith on "From Reflex to Reflection: Experience and Explanation in the Study of Cinema", one of the latest recordings from the Kracauer Lectures, Goethe University, Frankfurt (link via Vinzenz Hediger): http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/winter-2014-2015/murray-smith/
• J. Hoberman on "Ronald Reagan: “I Ain’t Afraid of No Zeitgeist”, another of the latest recordings from the Kracauer Lectures, Goethe University, Frankfurt (link via Vinzenz Hediger): http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/winter-2014-2015/j-hoberman/
• CFP for the 2015 launch of Found Footage Magazine, an English/Spanish language publication: http://foundfootagemagazine.com/call-for-papers/
• Great new podcast from the Cinema Journal online team with excellent film and media studies content to complement all the other open access material the journal is providing these days. This Aca Media episode (no. 19) brings you the new first instalment of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Society's new FIELDNOTES project - oral histories with notable media scholars, the first one being Thomas Elsaesser.
• David Bordwell has published some new entries in the last month: 
• Rebooking at THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
• Visual storytelling: Is that all?
• Kristin Thompson gave you a wonderful list of "DVDs and Blu-rays for your letter to Santa"
• Carol Vernallis's excellent essay on Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION,  with some additional dialogue with Wheeler Winston Dixon in the comments thread: http://filmint.nu/?p=13550
• Read the introduction to Mattias Frey's new book THE PERMANENT CRISIS OF FILM
• CRITICISM (Amsterdam University Press 2014): http://www.aup.nl/wosmedia/1936/the_permanent_crisis_of_film_criticism_toc__introduction.pdf
• Nicky Hamlyn's tribute to experimental film scholar A.L. Rees who died recently (link via John Rogers on Twitter): http://nickyhamlyn.com/2014/11/29/a-l-rees-1949-2014/
• Two great free articles from the latest issue of Cineaste:
• What’s So Queer About James Franco? (Preview) by Michael Bronski
• The Dream Team: The Parker Tyler and Siegfried Kracauer Correspondence, 1947–1960 (Preview) by Adrian Martin
• Adrian Martin on the eloquence of screen moments at De Filmkrant: http://filmkrant.nl/world_wide_angle/11499
• Alexandra Heller Nicholas wrote a nice blog entry on Gothic Textures in Found Footage Horror Film at Stirling University's excellent The Gothic Imagination website
• Jennifer Fleeger's operatic entry on Frozen at the Oxford University Press website is worth a look: Frozen and the Disney Princess Song (link via Steve Elworth)
• Lucy Bolton's excellent discussion of the film ELECTRICITY at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/culture/electricity-directed-by-bryn-higgins/2017381.fullarticle
• Girish Shambu's latest round up of reading: http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/2014/12/mise-en-scene-multiplicity.html
• Thomas Stubblefield discusses 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (the subject of his new book from Indiana University Press, 2014) in this IU Press podcast: http://iupress.typepad.com/blog/2014/09/podcast-thomas-stubblefield-discusses-911-and-the-visual-culture-of-disaster.html
• Milad Tangshir's great new video essay on Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street: Lessons of the Wolf: https://vimeo.com/111415469
• More great film-related curating from Open Culture 50 films noir, films noirs or film noirs yu can view online for free (you take your linguistic pick!): http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/50-film-noirs-you-can-watch-for-free.html
• Omar Ahmed's Video Essay on Michael Mann's Thief (1981, US) and his recent piece 'Proletarian Politics' at his blog: http://omarsfilmblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/thief-michael-mann-1981-us-proletarian.html
• Mark Harris's intelligent feature on the current state of the movie franchise business (thanks to Michael Mirasol for the link): http://grantland.com/features/2014-hollywood-blockbusters-franchises-box-office/
• Pam Cook on "Sofia Coppola: elusive auteur": http://wp.me/p1dUmj-gz and "Losing the plot: writing on the screen in 'The Great Gatsby"' (2013): http://wp.me/p1dUmj-gt
• Ian Magor's latest video essay (Rapturous cinema; Bresson; Tarkovsky; Tarr; Kubrick; Truffaut and more): https://vimeo.com/114046894
• Two In Media Res theme weeks
• Sidekicks: 

• High School for Superheroes and Sidekicks by Eleanor Huntington
• Can the Sidekick Protest? The Dissonant Sidekick by Jeff Casey
• Heroes, Sidekicks, and Powerful Love by Lisa Perks
• Joan Watson Deserves Better: Audience Reception and ... by Natasha Patterson
• A Certain Bromance by Sammi Dittloff
• Open Source Academia:
• Scholarly Striptease. Or, The Unintended Consequences of Film Studies For Free by Catherine Grant 
• Lessons Learned: Using Digital Platforms to Reach Audiences Beyond the University by Dayna Chatman
• Close encounters of the open kind by Pam Cook
• Something to Prove?: Contemplating the Fake Geek Academic by Suzanne Scott
• Black Moses Barbie and the Humor of Black Trauma
by Mark Anthony Neal


• Catherine Grant's 2014 OA listings:

• Grant, C., "The Remix That Knew Too Much? On Rebecca, Retrospectatorship And The Making Of Rites Of Passage', THE CINE-FILES, Issue 7, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.thecine-files.com/grant/
• Grant, C. "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall2014_MarriagesMelodrama.html
• Grant, C. ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’, ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 1.1, 2014, Online at: http://aim.org.pt/ojs/index.php/revista/article/view/59/html
• Grant, C. with Christian Keathley, ‘The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations, and videographic film studies’, Photogénie, 0, June 2014. Co-authored introduction/individually authored text and video. Online at: http://www.photogenie.be/photogenie_blog/article/use-illusion.
• Grant, C, with Christian Keathley, ‘El uso de una ilusión: Cinefilia infantil, relaciones de objeto y estudios videográficos sobre cine’, Transit. Cine y otros desvíos, September 9, 2014. (translation into Spanish of ‘The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations, and videographic film studies’, Photogénie, 0, June 2014). Online at: http://cinentransit.com/cinefilia-infantil-relaciones-de-objeto-y-estudios-videograficos-sobre-cine/.
• Grant, C. ‘Editorial Introduction’, ‘Bergman Senses’ and ‘Resources’ page, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies - a Cinema Journal/MediaCommons Collaboration, 1.1. 2014 (Co-edited Inaugural issue of the first peer-reviewed journal of audiovisual film studies). Online at:http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/theme-week/2014/10/intransition-videographic-film-moving-image-studies
• Grant, C. solo editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies - a Cinema Journal/MediaCommons Collaboration, 1.3. September 2014 on The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory. Online at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/theme-week/2014/35/journal-videographic-film-moving-image-studies-13-2014
• Grant, C. “The Audiovisual Essay: My Favorite Things”, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies - a Cinema Journal/MediaCommons Collaboration, 1.3. September 2014 on The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory. Online at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/2014/08/26/audiovisual-essay-my-favorite-things
• Grant, C. Director/producer/lead editor of The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory in Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, a companion website with thirty + essays and curated videos. Online at: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/
• Grant, C. ‘How long is a piece of string? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, September, 2014. Online at: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/frankfurt-papers/catherine-grant/

NECSUS Issue 5 on Traces: Kracauer, Carax, Farocki, Elsaesser, mobile interfaces, film sound and much more

Frame grab from Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2013). Read Saige Walton's article on this film "The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in Holy Motors" in the Spring 2014 issue of NECSUS. Pt 1 of the LOLA
dossier of the film is here; pt 2 here.

Film Studies For Free had such a great time at the conference of the Network for European Cinema and Media Studies conference in Milan last week that it is a little delayed in bringing its readers news of the publication of the latest issue of this organisation's wonderful Open Access journal NECSUS. The great table of contents is given below.

More will be forthcoming from FSFF about the Milan conference in a few days (including the recording of a wonderful interview gathered there...). But one of the hottest news items from the conference is that video essayists Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López will develop and edit a new video essay section for NECSUS, to debut in the Autumn 2014 issue. More details about this very welcome development are given here.


Features:

• Siegfried Kracauer’s affinities by Thomas Elsaesser
• Mapping the rise of the iPhone: Between phones and mobile media by Ginette Verstraete
• Representations of Madrid in the (post-)transition to democracy by Vicente Rodriguez Ortega
• Empire is out there!?: The spirit of imperialism in the Pixar animated film ‘Up’ by Dietmar Meinel
• Representation or misrepresentation?: British media and Japanese popular culture by Perry Hinton

Special section: Traces

• The navigational gesture: Traces and tracings at the mobile touchscreen interface by Nanna Verhoeff and Heidi Rae Cooley
• Poetics and politics of the trace: Notes on surveillance practices through Harun Farocki’s work by Miriam De Rosa
• Webcams as cinematic medium: Creating chronotopes of the real by Paula Albuquerque
• Assembling traces, or the conservation of net art by Annet Dekker
• The Third Party Diary: Tracking the trackers on Dutch governmental websites by Lonneke van der Velden
• Microphysics of a rationalist utopia: Ruins, town plans, and the avant-garde documentary by Andrea Mariani
• The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in ‘Holy Motors’ by Saige Walton
• Animated maps and the power of the trace by Giuseppe Fidotta
• Enhanced echoes: Digitisation and new perspectives on film sound by Jasper Aalbers

Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier - NECS Publication Committee)

• Globalisation and television formats review by Jaap Kooijman
• Soundscapes, sound clash review by Nessa Johnston
• Shadow economies and digital disruption review by Chris Baumann
• The cinema of Béla Tarr: The circle closes review by Miklós Kiss
• Impossible dreams: Europe and love in cinema review by Fiona Handyside

Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist - Film Festival Research Network)

• Oberhausen: An interview with Lars Henrik Gass by Enrico Camporesi
• Brazil’s International Disability Film Festival Assim Vivemos review by Ana Gilbert
• Celebrating independence: 54th Thessaloniki International Film Festival review by Lydia Papadimitriou
• Initiating regional talents: 2013 Sarajevo Film Festival review by Ivan Velisavljević
• Past memories for a new future: 70th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia review by Enrico Vannucci

Exhibition reviews:

• Fassbinder Frankfurt review by Senta Siewert
• The biennale as a device: 4th Athens Biennale review by Eva Fotiadi

Amsterdam fine links!

Image from Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), based on Stanisław Lem's 1961 novel. Read BC Biermann's film-philosophical PhD Thesis chapter on this film adaptation

A little window of opportunity for Film Studies For Free's author to bring you one of this site's regular features today: a report (or, more accurately, a labour-intensive links-harvest) from a University research repository, one of those online archives in which, on occasion, academics choose not only to store references to their published film studies work, but also to provide Open Access to that work.

The repository in question today is that of the University of Amsterdam/Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA), home to one of the best Film and Media Studies departments in the world. Below is a list of links to an amazing spread of very high quality film research accessible there, most of it in the form of full-length PhD theses.

• Mieke Bal, 'Exhibition as film', in: (Re)visualizing national history: museums and national identities in Europe in the new millennium, ed. R. Ostow (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), p. 15-43 
• M. Behlil , Home away from home: global directors of new Hollywood, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2007
• B.C. Biermann, Travelling philosophy: from literature to film [on A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Solaris], PhD Thesis, UvA, 2006 
• C.J. Birdsall, Between Noise and Silence: Sound, Technology and Urban Space during Nazi Germany, PhD Thesis, UvA (2010)
• L.T. Copier, Preposterous revelations: visions of apocalypse and martyrdom in Hollywood cinema 1980 – 2000, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• S Dasgupta, 'Art is going elsewhere: and politics has to catch it : an interview with Jacques Rancière', Krisis, 9.1, 2008
• K. van Driel, Psychology of entertainment, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2003
• JJ Ebbers, Organizational dynamics in social networks : contracts and reputations in the film industry, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Constructive Instability, or The Life of Things as the Cinema's Afterlife', Video Vortex: Responses to Youtube, eds. G. Lovink, S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2008)
• C.J. Forceville, 'The source-path-goal schema in the autobiographical journey documentary: McElwee, Van der Keuken, Cole', The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 4 (2006), p. 241-261 
• Malte Hagener, Avant-garde culture and media strategies: the networks and discourses of the European film avant-garde, 1919-39, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005
• EM Kedem, The kibbutz and Israeli cinema : deterritorializing representation and ideology, PhD Thesis, UvA 2007
• J de Kloet, 'Cosmopatriot contamination', Cosmopatriots: on distant belongings and close encounters, eds E. Jurriëns, J. de Kloet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007)
• S. Loist, M. de Valck, 'Film festivals/Film festival research: thematic, annotated bibliography', 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, Institut für Germanistik II, 2010)
• J. Noordegraaf, "'Facing Forward' with found footage: displacing colonial footage in 'Mother Dao' and the work of Fiona Tan", in: Technologies of memory in the arts (2009), eds Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik , p. 172-187 (author's original manuscript)  
• F Paalman, 'The Cheetah of Cinema', Mind the screen: media concepts according to Thomas Elsaesser, eds. J. Kooijman, P. Pisters, W. Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008)
• F. Paalman, 'Harbor, architecture, film: Rotterdam 1925-1935', in: Films that work: industrial film and the productivity of media, eds V. Hediger, P. Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 391-404 
• MJ Punt, Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2000
• Laura Schuster, “What does a scanner see?” Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film", Conference paper: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberpunk and Science Fiction, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, July 1-3, 2008
• D.W. Russell, A multifaceted multi-methodological examination of the global movie industry, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2006
• E Thanouli, Post-classical narration: a new paradigm in contemporary world cinema, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005
• S Vojkovic, Subjectivity in the New Hollywood Cinema: Fathers, Sons and Other Ghosts, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2001