Showing posts with label Video Essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video Essays. Show all posts

Monday, 24 December 2018

Ten Festive Treats from Film Studies For Free!


Sawing Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in half.
A queer experiment in cinephilic re-spatialisation


Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays from Film Studies For Free! Let's celebrate with a new video essay (above) and nine sets of treats (below) representing some of FSFF's favourite online film and moving image studies items from 2018.


2. MEDIÁTICO - Special Dossier on Alfonso Cuarón's Roma (2018) by nine world-leading scholars on Latin American Cinema



4. NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. Autumn 2018 Issue on Mapping
Special section: #Mappingedited by Giorgio Avezzù, Teresa Castro, and Giuseppe Fidotta
  • The exact shape of the world: Mapping and the media by Giorgio Avezzù, Teresa Castro, and Giuseppe Fidotta
Festival reviews:edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist
Exhibition reviews:edited by Miriam de Rosa and Leo Goldsmith
Book reviews:edited by Lavinia Brydon and Victoria Pastor-González
Audiovisual essays:edited by Miklós Kiss

5. Erika Balsom's brilliant essay on Jean-Lun Godard's latest film Le livre d'image The Image Book

6. Latest round up of profiles at the amazing Women's Film Pioneers Project
  • Travelogue filmmaker and anthropologist Kathleen Romoli(Colombia) by Isabel Arredondo
  • Director, producer, and screenwriter Louise Kolm-Fleck(Austria, Germany, China) by Claudia Walkensteiner-Preschl
  • Director, actress, producer, and screenwriter Francesca Bertini (Italy) by Monica Dall’Asta
  • Chief accountant, office manager, and production secretary Aili Kari (Finland) by Hannu Salmi
  • Producer, screenwriter, and editor Virgínia de Castro e Almeida (Portugal, France) by Tiago Baptista
  • Director, producer, screenwriter, actress, and camerawoman Angela Murray Gibson (United States) by Charles “Buckey” Grimm
  • Set designers and location scouts Frances Baker Farrell and Lettice Ramsey & actress/editor Máirín Hayes (Ireland) by Donna Casella
  • Publicist, trade journal editor and writer, and business owner Mabel Condon (United States) by Carolyn Jacobs
  • Director, actress, and film company founder Cleo de Verberena (Brazil) by Marcella Grecco de Araujo

7. The fabulous research project and resource Timeline of Historical Film Colors is now on Instagram as @timeline_filmcolors!


9.  Allison Wilmore's 'Orientalism is Alive and Well in American Cinema' (link via Girish Shambu)

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Wednesday, 8 March 2017

Videographic screen media criticism by female critics, scholars and artists #InternationalWomensDay

Latest update January 14, 2018
GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (remix remixed 2013) by Laura Mulvey

Happy International Women's Day! Two of the questions Film Studies For Free's author gets asked  a lot—as a female video essayist, curator and editor/publisher—are:

  1. "Why are there so few female video essayists working on film and screen media topics?"
  2. And: "Can you please recommend some female video essayists?" 
The answer to the first question is that there aren't "so few": there are loads! And some of the very first video essayists in this field were foundational women film scholars (HINT: look above!)! Their numbers are ever-increasing, and they're a very international bunch! And the answer to the second question is YES!

Indeed, the answer to both questions is: please take a look at the below list - to which FSFF will keep adding as further names (and sample works) come to light or are recommended. If you would like to recommend a video or a video maker to add to the list, please leave a comment below. Thank you!

If you enjoy cultural interventions of the "there have always been many more than you think!" variety, here's a great one for International Women's Day, also listed below: Kelly Gallagher's The Herstory of the Female Filmmaker. Also, please, please, please check out Another Gaze's totally brilliant and beautiful interview with Laura Mulvey, with some of the most amazing insights about her work.

UPDATE (March 27, 2017): At the latest issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, see the related new piece by FSFF's author: “Looking at To-Be-Looked-at-ness: Feminist Videographic Criticism."



Female Video Essayists of Note in Alphabetical order by surname
http://scalar.usc.edu/works/videographic-essay/imitation-of-life-voiceover-story

FSFF also strongly recommends the following essay (including a great video) which pays great attention to the work of a good proportion of the above by Ian Garwood, "The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism," NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2016. Thanks also to Allison de Fren, Tami Williams, Gabrielle Kelly, Marit Norway, Jason Mittell, H. Perry Horton, Adrian Martin, Adrian Garvey, Glenn Stillar, Michael Mirasol, Steve Elworth, Pablo Useros, Mark Rappaport, Deane Williams and José Sarmiento Hinojosa for their great suggestions.
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Monday, 6 June 2016

The Persistence of Vision: Videos on the Work of Film Theorists and Scholars




A New Video Tribute to the Work of Film Scholar Elizabeth Cowie.

Film Studies For Free's author has just published her latest video tribute to a film theorist! The above, quite heartfelt work (with key contributions from Andrew Klevan, Christine Evans, Coral Houtman and Sarah Wood) celebrates the writing of Professor Emeritus Elizabeth Cowie, a pioneer in psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to cinema studies and author of two important books in our field (Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, 1997, and Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, 2011). She has also published the below, wonderful essays online:
The publication of the above video prompted FSFF to assemble and embed its now numerous celebratory video works on the writings (and films) of individual (to date, mostly anglophone) film theorists and scholars. So, below, you can watch video works on writings by:
Pam Cook; Elizabeth Cowie; Alexander Doty; Richard Dyer; Amber Jacobs; Andrew Klevan; Annette Kuhn; Mathieu Macherey; Laura Marks; D.A. Miller; Laura Mulvey; Vivian Sobchack; Lesley Stern; Gaylyn Studlar; Dai Vaughan; and Patricia White. 
Enjoy!
Pam Cook

Alexander Doty
Richard Dyer (and Elizabeth Cowie and Adrienne McLean)




 Richard Dyer and Pam Cook




 Amber Jacobs 


Read more about this video essay here.


Andrew Klevan


Read more about this video here.
Annette Kuhn




Mathieu Macherey
Mechanised Flights: Memories of HEIDI from Catherine Grant
Read more about this video here.


Laura Marks




Also see here.


D.A. Miller


Also see here.
Laura Mulvey



Vivian Sobchack


Published in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring, 2015. Online at: necsus-ejms.org/film-studies-in-the-groove-rhythmising-perception-in-carnal-locomotive/, where you can also read the accompanying text: "Film studies in the groove? Rhythmising perception in Carnal Locomotive."


Lesley Stern


"A GESTURE EXPANDS INTO GYMNASTICS,
RAGE IS EXPRESSED THROUGH A SOMERSAULT" 
[Eisenstein]

An experimental response to (or adaptive working through of) the following written essay:


This video by CATHERINE GRANT was presented at THE AUDIOVISUAL ESSAY Conference, Deutsches Filminstitut/Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, November 23-4, 2013


Gaylyn Studlar



Dai Vaughan



Patricia White



"In the earlier film version of Stella Dallas [Henry King, 1925], the overwrought Stella takes refuge in the ladies’ waiting room at the train station directly after her visit to Helen [the woman to whom she has just entrusted her daughter]. She’s watched very closely by a woman whose flashy dress indicates her similarity to Stella in class status, if not in her dubious profession. The stranger offers the apparently inconsolable Stella a cigarette, and Stella puts it in her mouth and lights it end to end with the cigarette in the other woman’s mouth. A fade to black gives the gesture—which resembles a kiss—an elliptical significance, though nothing else is made of this scene. The shot echoes with Stella’s connection to Helen in the previous scene. But the silent version of Stella Dallas  suggests that such sympathy, and women’s motives, need not be reduced to shared maternal feeling. The washroom “pick-up” scene doesn’t occur in the [original 1922 source novel Stella Dallas  by Olive Higgins Prouty].
QUOTATION: Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 107-8.
Patricia White (and Tania Modleski)



Also see: See "The Remix That Knew Too Much? On REBECCA, Retrospectatorship and the Making Of RITES OF PASSAGE", THE CINE-FILES, 7, Fall 2014.


Various theorists (Stanley Cavell, Linda Williams, William Rothman, and Christian Viviani)



Read the related multimedia essay "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014.  (this essay has been translated into Spanish by Cristina Álvarez López and published here)

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Monday, 4 January 2016

New LOLA, [in]TRANSITION, MOVIE, Film-Philosophy, Senses of Cinema plus a video essay on Todd Haynes' CAROL, and more!


An obvious side-by-side comparison by Catherine Grant, using images from BRIEF ENCOUNTER (David Lean, 1945) and CAROL (Todd Haynes, 2015), and the sound from the official trailer for CAROL, featuring the song ‘My Foolish Heart’ (music by Victor Young/lyrics by Ned Washington, sung by Margaret Whiting, 1950). For another recent video essay on BRIEF ENCOUNTER please visit https://www.caboosebooks.net/node/150. For further video essays on films by Todd Haynes, see (on SAFE): vimeo.com/67203493; and on FAR FROM HEAVEN: vimeo.com/78526414.


 Film Studies For Free wishes its readers a very happy new year! It celebrates the beginning of the year with an auspicious round up of publications that went online either in the last few days of 2015, or in the first days of 2016.
NEW JOURNAL ISSUES

LOLA, 6. 2015, on "Distances," edited by Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu 


This issue of LOLA will be rolled out in two stages. Soon to come: articles on The Smell of Us, Eden, Youth (Shoval), recent Spanish cinema, film criticism, and Alexandre Astruc/Bernard Stiegler …


 [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.4, 2015
A special peer-reviewed issue co-edited by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, featuring five of the videos that emerged from the June 2015 workshop Scholarship in Sound & Image, hosted at Middleburg College, U.S.A., and generously funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities.

New issue of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism, 6, 2015

Moments of Texture

The Best Years of Our Lives: A Dossier

Book Reviews

Also at MOVIE, new entries in its series of open access ebooks - monographs which originally appeared in the series Close-Up (Wallflower Press, 2006-09). These are free to download, and are available in epub and mobi formats.
Filmmakers' Choices - John Gibbs
Filmmakers’ Choices explores different areas of decision-making within filmmaking, focusing on each in the analysis of a film. The discussion of Talk to Her(Pedro Almodóvar, 2002) examines the detailed construction of point of view; the account of Lured (Douglas Sirk, 1947) reflects on narrative structure and the creative possibilities of coincidence. Other films under investigation include Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992), The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949) and Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992).
Movies and Tone - Douglas Pye 
The concept of tone gestures towards some of the most crucial issues for film analysis – the relationships of a movie to its material, its traditions and its spectator – and yet tone has had a very limited place in film theory and criticism. This study asks how tonal qualities within a film can be identified, exploring the decisions which lead to our grasp of tone as a dimension of meaning that is both informing and subject to moment-by-moment modulation. Discussion centres on The Deer Hunter, Desperately Seeking Susan, Strangers on a Train, Distant Voices, Still Lives and Some Came Running. 
The Police Series - Jonathan Bignell 
This study focuses on television style in the US police series. Chapters closely analyse the mise-en-scène of programmes in the 1980-2003 period including Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street and CSI. Through the detailed investigation of changing aesthetics in the police series, Bignell addresses critical issues around style and ideology, ‘quality’, genre, programme brands and authorship in US television. 
Reading Buffy - Deborah Thomas 
In this book Joss Whedon’s acclaimed television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is seen not just to create a richly detailed and satisfying fictional world, but to be an abundant source of complex meanings. Several aspects of Buffy are examined: its visual intelligence, the playful sophistication of its narrative strategies, and the interest the series takes in its relationship with its many fans. 


Further new articles now online at Film-Philosophy, Vol 19 (2015)



Issue 77 of Senses of Cinema

Including: a dossier entitled CHANTAL AKERMAN: LA PASSION DE L’INTIME / AN INTIMATE PASSION; a dossier entitled  THE LEGACY OF PIER PAOLO PASOLINI; a dossier entitled AUSTRALIAN FILM HISTORY; and the following feature articles:






TONI D'ANGELA / No theory, just movies: le dehors

BRUCE BAILLIE / PAUL SHARITS

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

prima linea

l'occhio che uccide

flaming creatures


ASSORTED OTHER LINKS
  • In Artforum, a wonderfully informative articles by Babette Mangolte, Chantal Akerman's cinematographer and collaborator, and by Kathy Halbreich, associate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
  • Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman... Is a True Action Movie, a video essay by Adam Cook
    • RIP Vilmos Zsigmond, legendarily brilliant cinematographer (including for McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Deliverance, The Sugarland Express and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He also worked on Obsession, Blow Out, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Black Dahlia, The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and many more films besides). Here is a 70 minute long masterclass with Zsigmond at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival:

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