New WORLD PICTURE on 'Left': PT Anderson, Hollis Frampton, Vincente Minnelli and much more

Screenshot from The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli, 1955). Read Agustín Zarzosa's article on this film in the new issue of World Picture

It's that wonderful time of year when a new issue from one of Film Studies For Free's favourite journals World Picture hits the open access e-stands. The brilliant contents in issue 8 on 'Left' are listed in full and linked to below.

FSFF particularly enjoyed the essay on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights by the legendary film scholar Tanya Modleski as well as Alexander García Düttmann on Hollis Frampton's 1971 film (nostalgia) (a version of which may be viewed online here) and Agustín Zarzosa on The Cobweb and the Politics of Decoration.

If you're in (or could be in) the environs of Toronto on November 7-8, 2013, you may be interested in attending the very convivial, annual World Picture conference. This year it treats the keyword 'willing' and boasts the participation of very fine keynote speakers: Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago) and Davide Panagia (Trent University).

Table of Contents

• Argos Euclid

• Rey Chow Remains’ Regime Change?

• Alexander García Düttmann Why Burn a Photograph? A Film by Hollis Frampton

• Sam Ladkin The Patient Poetry and Poetics of Rob Halpern

• Erica Levin Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows

• Tania Modleski Historical Omission and Psychic Repression in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights

• Jonathan Mullins What Remains of the Italian Left of the 1970s?

• Evan Calder Williams Pseudo-Cinema

• Agustín Zarzosa The Cobweb and the Politics of Decoration

New WORLD PICTURE on 'Wrong'

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" Original from ppow_gallery on Vimeo

A Fire in My Belly is an awkward work that at first glance can appear to be both hyperbolic or overreaching and inconsistent or contradictory. This short film resembles a travel log, an illustrated lecture, or an educational slide show that mixes the unpitying gaze of a mondo cane film (unwrapped mummies with gaping mouths, unusually disabled bodies performing daily tasks, animals forced into fighting by their human captors) with the deliriously overwrought expressionism of 1980s music videos (spinning eyeballs aflame, strobed flashes of milk splashes). The film also recalls major moments in the visual avant-garde of the twentieth century by invoking 1920s surrealist iconography, aping Eisenstein’s clunkier intellectual montages, and echoing the idolatry of Kenneth Anger’s films which themselves borrow from the formal idioms [of] religious and exploitation films. A Fire in My Belly overtly conflates symbolic registers and gains momentum by joining documentary footage of workers performing precarious tasks or snakes devouring their prey to staged studio shots of symbolic transactions involving leaking blood, throwing money, spinning globes, or torched marionettes.  [from Karl Schoonover's essay 'David Wojnarowicz's Graven Image: Cinema, Censorship, and Queers'; hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Following its much appreciated seasonal break, a rather bleary-eyed but well-rested Film Studies For Free wishes its readers a very happy new year.

Its first few posts of 2012 will be devoted to catching up with some new issues of online film and moving image studies related journals, starting with a listing of links to a new collection of work from one of the most original of such journals: World Picture on the concept of 'wrong'.

FSFF particularly liked Schoonover on Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly, (as above), Schwartz's riff on Pasolini, Malsky on dystopian sound, and Manon and Temkin on glitch art.

WORLD PICTURE 6, 2011: Table of Contents

• Mark Andrejevic: Estrangement 2.0
• Bishnupriya Ghosh: Governing by Wrong
• Seb Franklin: Is Attention Really Immaterial? Visual Culture after Post-Fordism
• Danny Hayward: The Essential Standpoint of Man: An Autopsy, In Three Parts
• Sam Lipsyte in conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland: Acategorical Imperatives
• Matt Malsky: Being Heard: Listening In–Sound and Our Dystopian Present
• Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin: Notes on Glitch
• Daniel Temkin—gl1tchw0rks gall3ry
• Davide Panagia: The Notion of Pantry: A Speculative Defense of Unuse
• Brian Price: A Theory of Regret
• Lucy Raven: Tech City
• Scott C. Richmond: “Dude, That's Just Wrong”: Mimesis, Identification, Jackass
• Karl Schoonover: David Wojnarowicz's Graven Image: Cinema, Censorship, and Queers
• Louis-Georges Schwartz: A Futher Explanation of My Last Error By Pier Paolo Pasolini
• A. L. Steiner: WELCOME TO MY RECTANGLE

New World Picture 5: Varda, Solomon, Citron, Jacobs, Schneeman, Wisconsin Death Trip,

Image from Innocence and Despair (Phil Solomon, 2001). Experience Solomon's video at World Picture Journal 5: Sustainability

Film Studies For Free is a longstanding and ardent supporter of the online journal World Picture. Today, FSFF is thrilled to bring you news of the latest issue (no. 5) on Sustainability which has just gone online. There are plenty of wonderful film-related items, as usual, as well as some timely and important essays and interviews on sustainability from a number of other key perspectives for the Arts and Humanities.

Great work, WP!

Below, you can find the issue's  table of contents, and below that you can find the call for papers for the next World Picture conference, this time in Toronto, so do please scroll down for those.

Table of Contents

• Eugenie Brinkema Burn. Object. If.

• Tina di Carlo  Excess Sustainability, Sustainable Excess: A Dossier of Statements on Architecture and Sustainability Statements by Stefano Harney, Geoffrey West, Rem Koolhaas, Jeffrey Inaba, Bjarke Ingels, and Tomas Saraceno

• Michelle Citron in conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland The Ambiguous Archive

• Alexander García Düttmann The Life and Death of the University

• Ken Jacobs 3D is Intoxicating and Three 3D Poems: Lulu in Hollywood, Routine, The Story of a Devoted Couple

• Jennifer Johung Sustainably Dependent: Bio-Architectural Living Spaces

• Maebh Long The Hedgehog and Lord Browne: The “To Come” of the Humanities

• Ian MacKaye in conversation with Brian Price Records

• Timothy Morton Unsustaining

• Karen Pinkus and Cameron Tonkinwise Want Not: A Dialogue on Sustainability with Images

• Rebekah Rutkoff The Splatter Technique: An Interior Dialogue Between the Narrator and Carolee Schneeman

• Phil Solomon Innocence and Despair (2001): A Decade Later

• Allan Stoekl Agnès Varda and the Limits of Gleaning

CALL FOR PAPERS: 2011 World Picture Conference 
October 21-22 University of Toronto 
Lorenz Engell, Bauhaus University, Weimar Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University

The annual World Picture Conference gathers scholars from a range of different disciplines to address the relation between critical theory, philosophy, and aesthetics. For this year’s meeting we welcome papers on questions of distance. Such considerations might include (but are in no sense limited to):  

• Distance and mediation (technological and otherwise) 
• Distance as abstraction (or alienation, estrangement) 
• Travel Simultaneity
• Spatial allegories of distance
• Vision (as the prime sense organ of distance)
• Modes of translation
• Geopolitics (of distance)
• Distance and/as interval (distance as time, not just space) 
• Distance and unknowing/ignorance 
• Critique of proximity/propinquity 
• Ecology and distance (global footprints, carbon calculations, etc.) 
• Scale Emotion Critical distance/objectivity

Please submit proposals (250 words, plus brief bio) by June 17 to: brian.price@utoronto.ca

Happy Saturday Reading: New 'World Picture Journal'

Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge, directed by Cui Wei and Chen Huai’ai, 1959)

Film Studies For Free is delighted to report that the new Summer 2009 issue of World Picture Journal (number 3) has just been posted at its website. The issue is on 'Happiness'

Below are direct links to its three film-related articles. The issue also includes other wonderful essays on Adorno and John Stuart Mill, and a fabulous interview with Adam Phillips:

• Sara Ahmed, Happiness and Queer Politics (includes reference to the Canadian lesbian film, Lost and Delirious [Léa Pool, 2001])


• Jason McGrath, Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People's Republic of China


• Brian Price, On Compromises (on film theory and political philosophy)

Wong Kar-wai Links: To Faye Wong (and David Bordwell), Thanks For Everything

Faye Wong sings her fabulous Cantonese cover of 'Dreams' by the Cranberries in Wong Kar-wai's Chung Hing sam lam/Chungking Express

Film Studies For Free was so inspired by David Bordwell's great recent post (Ashes to Ashes (Redux)) on Kar Wai Wong/Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Redux (2008) (also see Bordwell's Years of being obscure), and so (eternally) grateful to Faye Wong for lending her iconic classiness to FSFF's upper regions, that its festive gift to its readers this year is some extensive, scholarly, Wong Kar-wai linkage - see below. Oh and, as a little extra stocking-filler, do please check out the wonderful new issue of World Picture Journal on 'the obvious':

Derek Attridge and Henry Staten, Reading for the Obvious: A Conversation; Scott Durham, "The Center of the World Everywhere": Bamako and the Scene of the Political'; Rosalind Galt, The Obviousness of Cinema; Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder Cinema/Film; Christian Keathley, Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema' David Farrell Krell, The School for Stupefaction; Scott Krzych, Kino Ex Nihilo; Ernesto Laclau in conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland, Not a Ground but a Horizon; Sam Lipsyte, A Pimple on the Ass of Drew Barrymore Speaks; Karen Pinkus, Nothing from Nothing: Alchemy and the Economic Crisis; Angelo Restivo, The Obvious: Three Reminiscences; Stephen G. Rhodes, Interregnum Reanimated: The Living Cemetery; Jeffrey Sconce, Circuit City Unplugged.

Warm seasons greetings to every one of FSFF's readers, many thanks for a fun first six months of blogging-life, and see you all again after a short break!

• Acquarello on Wong Kar-wai at Strictly Film School
• Matt Bautch, 'The Cultural Aesthetic of Wong Kar-wai', Latent Image 2003
• Felicia Chan, 'In Search of a Comparative Poetics: Cultural Translatability in Transnational Chinese Cinemas', PhD E-thesis, Nottingham University 2007, (chapter 3 - p. 147-201 - treats Wong Kar-wai)
• Ethel Chong, 'In the Mood for Love: Urban Alienation in Wong Kar Wai’s Films', Kinema Spring 2003
• Jeremy Cohen, 'Lonely Hearts: Wong Kar-Wai's Obscure Objects of Desire', Eye Candy Winter 2006
• Christopher Doyle & Wong Kar-wai interview for Interview Magazine on Ashes Redux
• Wendy Gan, "0.01cm: Affectivity and Urban Space in Chungking Express." Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, November 2003
• John Christopher Hamm, 'Review of Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time by Wimal Dissanayake', MCLC Resource Publication, October 2005
• Ian Johnston, 'Unhappy Together: Wong Kar-Wai's 2046', Bright Lights Film Journal, vol. 47, February 2005
• Kent Jones, "Of love and the city." Film Comment, Jan/Feb 2001. Vol. 37, Issue 1; p. 22
• Daniel Kälberer, 'Reference Literature on Wong Kar-wai', Film Bibliography 2006
• Anthony Leong, 'Meditations on Loss: A Framework for the Films of Wong Kar Wai', Asian Cult Cinema 1999
• Toh Hai Leong, 'Wong Kar-wai: Time, Memory, Identity', Kinema Spring 1995
• Trish Maunder, 'Interview with Tony Leung', Senses of Cinema 2001
• Andrew O’Hehir, 'Wong Kar-wai's blueberry-pie America', Salon.com 2008
• Robert M Payne, 'Ways of seeing wild: the cinema of Wong Kar-Wai', Jump Cut 44, 2001, text version HERE
• Effie Rassos, 'Everyday Narratives: Reconsidering Filmic Temporality and Spectatorial Affect Through the Quotidian,' PhD E-thesis, University of New South Wales, 2005
• Tony Rayns, 'The Innovators 1990-2000: Charisma Express', Sight and Sound January 2000
• Quentin Tarantino on Chungking Express on YouTube
• Stephen Teo, 'Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love: Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time', Senses of Cinema 2001
• Stephen Teo, '2046: A Matter of Time, a Labour of Love', Senses of Cinema 2005
• Stephen Teo, 'Local and Global identity: Whither Hong Kong Cinema?' Senses of Cinema 2007
• Fiona A. Villella (symposium ed.), 'The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai - A 'Writing Game', Senses of Cinema 2001 (entries on Backside; Blue; Creation; Dali-esque Time' Desire; Emotion; Look; Love; Possibility; Repetition; Space; Third-World; Time; Wrongheaded)
• Elizabeth Wright, 'Profile of director Wong Kar-wai', Senses of Cinema 2002

Miscellaneous:

• Wong Kar-Wai A fan site for the Hong Kong cult director presenting news, a biography, filmography, photos, and links.
• Chasing The Metaphysical Express: A Wong Kar-Wai Fansite A fan site featuring Wong Kar-Wai, reviews, and images.
• Wong Kar-Wai Facebook The official Facebook Page of Wong Kar-Wai.
• Wong Kar Wai on YouTube
• Faye Wong - Wikipedia Page Faye Wong (王菲) (born August 8, 1969) is a Chinese singer, songwriter, actress, model, and philanthropist.
• Faye Wong at the Internet Moview Database