Lives on Film: Auto/Biographical Fiction and Documentary Film Studies

Lizzie Thynne, filmmaker, writer and Senior Lecturer in Media and Film at the University of Sussex, discusses her theoretical and practice research into film biography with FSFF's author. In REFRAME’s interview, as well as her earlier films Child of Mine (Channel Four Television, 1996) and Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (2004), and her written research on biographical, subjective and feminist filmmaking, Thynne talks about her recent experimental documentary On the Border (UK, 2013, 56 minutes), a daughter’s exploration of her Finnish family’s history prompted by the letters, objects, and photographs left in her mother’s apartment. You can find more information about the above video here. Lizzie Thynne's film On the Border is screening today, Wednesday, October 9, at 7pm in The Finnish Church, 33 Albion St, London SE16 7JG – free entry courtesy of the Finnish Church in association with the Anglo-Finnish Society. The screening will be followed by a discussion with participants: Lizzie Thynne, Titus Hjelm (UCL, School of Slavonic Studies) and others.

Film Studies For Free brings you a list of links to open access scholarly and critical resources on the subject of biopics - life (hi)stories on film in a variety of fictional and documentary forms.

This entry is produced to coincide with the publication this week of the above embedded video on film biography, part of FSFF's sister project REFRAME Conversations, a new series of in-depth, open access explorations of media, film, music and cultural studies research, published and shareable on and offline in video/audio formats.

Because of this schedule, preparation of the below list precedes the publication of a great looking new edited collection on The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture by Tom Brown (a friend of this blog - see the entry on direct address here) and Belén Vidal. The two editors have completed a podcast on their project shortly to be uploaded to this website. That great link will be added here later.

• Zélie Asava, 'Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007)', Wide Screen, 1.2, 2010
• Michael Atkinson, 'We Hardly Knew Ye: Why do we watch biopics?', Moving Image Source, November 2012
• Giselle Bastin, 'Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family', a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2009, pp. 34-52 PDF 
• Donna Lee Brien, 'Disclosure in Biographically-Based Fiction: The Challenges of Writing Narratives Based on True Life Stories', M/C Journal, Vol. 12, No. 5 (2009) - 'disclose'
• Molly Brost, 'Walking the Line: Negotiating Celebrity in the Country Music Biopic', Scope, 18,  2011
• Molly Brost, 'Negotiating Authenticity: Coal Miner's Daughter, the Biopic, and Country Music', Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2008, Volume 7, Issue 2
• Rosalind Brunt, 'The Changing Face of Royalty', Marxism Today, 1984 
• David Bovey, “Sex doesn’t dominate my life at all, really. I think painting does” (David Hockney): the emergence of the queer artist biopic' PDF, NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012)
• Kieran Cashell, 'Charm and Strangeness: The Aesthetic and Epistemic Dimensions of Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein', Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
  
• Daniel Charchuk, '“Can’t Fucking Act”: Bronson and the Art of Performance', Offscreen, March 31, 2013 
• Christopher Glazek, 'Phoenixes [On I'm Not There]', N + 1, July 23, 2011
• Pam Cook, 'Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola', Sight and Sound 16 (11), November 2006, pp. 36-40
• Ryan Diduk, 'Of Race, Representation and Responsibility in Jenni Olson’s Afro Promo', Offscreen,10.2, 2006
• Thomas Doherty, 'All the Way to the FBI Tracing the Hollywood career of J. Edgar Hoover', Moving Image Source,  November 16, 2011
• Bilge Eburi, 'Visions of Ludwig: Cinema’s fascination with the mad king of Bavaria', Moving Image Source, June 4, 2009
• Carolyn Ellam, 'Depicting a Life Less Ordinary: Fantasy as Evidence for Deconstruction in the Contemporary Film Biopic' PDF, NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012)  
• Jane Feuer, 'Daughter Rite: Living with our pain, and love', Jump Cut, 23, October 1980
• Adam Gallimore, 'Digital Lives: Refiguring the recent and distant pasts in new biographical forms' PDF,  NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012) 
• Bree Hadley and Rebecca Caines, 'Negotiating Selves: Exploring Cultures of Disclosure', M/C Journal, Vol. 12, No. 5 (2009) - 'disclose'
• Stella Hockenhull, 'Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen', Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012) PDF
• Dianne Hunter, 'From Ethereal Confrontation to Child Abuse to Womanly Conflict: Ophelia in Three Late-Twentieth Century Films', PsyArt, December 2008
• Elisa Isabel Jiménez Aguilar, '"With tears and a journey”: Recreating Shakespeare’s life on screen', MA Thesis, Universidad de Granada, June 2013
• Derek Johnstone, 'Re-Envisioning the Artist Hero Through Two Cole Porter Biopics' PDF, NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012) 
• Julia Kinzler, 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011) pp. 49-65 
• Hanna Kylloen, 'Blurring Gender Boundaries – Masculine Confessional in Celebrity Auto/biographies' PDF, NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012)
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Follow the Leader: Revisiting the Oliver Stone biopics Nixon and Alexander', Moving Image Source, March 11, 2011
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Arsenic and Apple Pie Oliver Stone Pt. 1: Patriotism and propaganda in Born on the Fourth of July', Moving Image Source, October 14, 2008 
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Unreliable Narratives Oliver Stone Pt. 2: JFK and the power of counter-myth , Moving Image Source, October 15, 2008
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Fear and Self-Loathing Oliver Stone Pt. 3: Nixon and the unmaking of a president', Moving Image Source, October 16, 2008
  
• Kevin B Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Empire of the Son Oliver Stone Pt. 4: War and civilization in Alexander, and an epilogue on W.', Moving Image Source, October 17, 2008
• Laura Mason, '"We' re just little people, Louis": Marie-Antoinette on Film', Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No.3 (1994): 211-222
• David Muldoon, 'The Postmodern Gender Divide in the Bob Dylan Biopic I'm Not There', Miscelánea, 46, 2012
• A. Mary Murphy, 'The Problem of the Literary BioPic', Kinema, 17, 2002 
• Donald Phelps, 'Ken Russell's Portraits of Elgar, Delius and Mahler', Rouge, 8, 2006
• Matthew Robinson, 'The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication: An Introduction' PDF,  NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012) 
• Keeley Saunders, 'Caravaggio’s cinematic painting: Fictionalising art and biography in the artist biopic', NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012) PDF
• Lizzie Thynne, 'Ethics, politics and representation in Child of Mine, a television documentary on lesbian parenting', Jump Cut, 23, 2011
• Andrew Tracy, 'Rare Bird: Gallant Journey and the limits of auteurism', Moving Image Source, Feburary 17, 2009

A Stocking Full of eReading and Viewing: Happy Holidays!

Updated December 31, 2012

Frame grab from Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986). Read Keeley Saunders' article about the tableaux vivants in this film

'Tis the season to be jolly, apparently, and so Film Studies For Free is happy to oblige with some extremely jolly, serious, and completely free eGifts for the festive season, ones from wise men and women around the world. You can find them liberally scattered in list form, below, under the six headers in bold.

This bountiful blog will be back early in the New Year with its list of Best Online (and Open Access) Film Studies Resources in 2012. So, if you haven't taken part in the readers' poll for that yet, you still have a little time.

In the meantime, FSFF wishes you very happy holidays indeed!


SEQUENCE 1.1, 2012

The first array of eBook publications from SEQUENCE Serial Studies in Media, Film and Music has just been launched — a central element in REFRAME and SEQUENCE’s particular model of academic ePublishing.

You can now read SEQUENCE 1.1 — Steven Shaviro’s magisterial and open access article about a film about the end of world (‘MELANCHOLIA, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime‘) — in a variety of free eBook formats. Just click here to check them out and download them to your devices.

NOTEBOOK, December 17, 2012

• 'Expressing the Move' by Hoi Lun Law

  

RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM: Creating the Witness

Leshu Torchin's current research focuses on how screen media bear witness to human rights abuses and genocide in order to mobilise audiences. In her guest post for RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM, Torchin introduces some of the issues that are central to her new book, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet. Thanks to Torchin and the book’s publishers University of Minnesota Press, REFRAME has been granted the permission to share the extensive introduction to the book online. You can read it here.

ALPHAVILLE, Issue 4, Winter 2012

Open Theme Edited by Stefano Odorico and Aidan Power

• Editorial By Stefano Odorico and Aidan Power
• Who’s Got the “Reel” Power? The Problem of Female Antagonisms in Blaxploitation Cinema By Melissa DeAnn Seifert, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Egyptian Film Censorship: Safeguarding Society, Upholding Taboos By Dina Mansour, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy
• “I Get Sort of Carried Away, Being So Normal and Everything”: The Oscillating Sexuality of Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert in the works of Nabokov, Kubrick and Lyne By Emerson Storm Fillman Richards, University of Florida
• Towards an Embodied Poetics of Cinema: The Metaphoric Construction of Abstract Meaning in Film By Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja, University of Antwerp
• Film-Thinking and Narrative Indeterminacy By Jimmy Billingham, Independent Scholar
• Image Versus Imagination: Memory’s Theatre of Cruelty in Chris Marker’s La Jetée By Martina Witt-Jauch, Goettingen University
• Anima Animus: Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Bisexual Method in Last Exit to Brooklyn By Ian Murphy, University College Cork

Book Reviews Edited by Pierluigi Ercole

• Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions, by Warren Buckland (2012)  Reviewer: Kevin McDonald, Cal State Northridge  
• Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, by Elizabeth Cowie (2011) Reviewer: Amy Parziale, University of Arizona (USA)  
• The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture, by Patricia Pisters (2012) Reviewer: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait

Reports Edited by Ian Murphy

• Motion Capture: Drawing and the Moving Image. Curated by Ed Krčma and Matt Packer
  Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 26 July–4 November 2012 Reporter: Jill Murphy, University College Cork  
• The Society of Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference 2012, Boston, USA, 21–25 March 2012 Reporters: Anthony Coman and Missy Molloy, University of Florida

NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012): The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication

Editorial The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication: An Introduction PDF  Matthew Robinson

Articles

• Caravaggio’s cinematic painting: Fictionalising art and biography in the artist biopic PDF  Keeley Saunders
• Blurring Gender Boundaries – Masculine Confessional in Celebrity Auto/biographies PDF  Hanna Kylloen
• Re-Envisioning the Artist Hero Through Two Cole Porter Biopics PDF  Derek Johnston
• Digital Lives: Refiguring the recent and distant pasts in new biographical forms PDF  Adam Gallimore
• Depicting a Life Less Ordinary: Fantasy as Evidence for Deconstruction in the Contemporary Film Biopic PDF  Carolyn Ellam
• “Sex doesn’t dominate my life at all, really. I think painting does” (David Hockney): the emergence of the queer artist biopic PDF  David Bovey

PGN Matters

• Why PGN Matters: PGN, Our Family PDF  Xuelian Jin

THE CINE-FILES: A Scholarly Journal of Cinema Studies, Issue 2, 2012 

• The Actor’s Vision by Steven Ryben
• Wiping the Dust from Our Eyes by Lauren Newton Glenn
• West of Eden by Duncan Pittman

• “Sex and the City: A Festival Introduction” by Roger Rawlings
• “Wonder Women in the Savannah Film Festival: From the Page to the Screen, and Finally, Beyond” by Alexa Boehringer
• “Chris Marker and the Essay Film: a Presentation by Timothy Corrigan” by Tracy Cox-Stanton 
• Panel: A Critical Eye on Film  with Dr. Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Peter Hitchcock, City University of New York; and critic Claudia Puig, USA Today, alongside Dr. Roger Rawlings, Dr. Tracy Cox-Stanton, and Dr. Chad Newsom
• Reviews:
  
  • A Place at the Table, by Ingela Hartman
  • Brief Encounters, by Jae Matthews
  • Fat Kid Rules the World, by Ben Barbour
  • Nobody Walks, by Kyle Taubken
  • On the Road, by Kate Newell
  • Quartet, by Scotty Barnhart
  • Rust and Bone, by Scotty Barnhart
  • Silver Linings Playbook, by Kyle Taubken
  • Violet and Daisy, by Steve Drum

Real and Fictional Monarchies on Screen

The Paradox of the Monarchy by Catherine Grant

An archive video collage exploring some of the psychological and mediatized components of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy. It features excerpts from D.W. Winnicott's 1970 essay 'The Place of the Monarchy' (published in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, compiled and edited by Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis [London: Penguin, 1986]). Although it doesn't mention this, Winnicott's essay was published after the broadcast of the ground-breaking Royal Family documentary in 1969, which opened up new breaches in what the psychoanalyst was raising about the necessary distance and proximity of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy.

Public Domain Film Excerpts (from the Internet Archive Moving Image Collections)

• Pathe News Digest, 1937, No. 3 (Prelinger Archives)
• Visit of their Majesties, June 1939 (FDR Presidential Library [CC0 1.0 Universal])
• Today -- And Yesterday, Newsreel, 1911 (Prelinger Archives)
• A Welcome Guest in the House, ca. 1957 (Prelinger Archives)

Music Excerpt
“Self-Reflect” by Jared C. Balogh. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. Available for Download from from the Fee Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org/music/Balogh/A_Compilation_From_Compilations_Of_Compositions/SELF_REFLECT

Film Studies For Free was inspired by two events -- one offline and one online -- for today's entry.

The offline happening is an excellent looking conference on the British Monarchy on Screen taking place later this week, between November 23-24.

The conference is hosted by the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, and convened by the University of London Screen Studies Group, the Institute of English Studies, the department of Media Arts and the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research at Royal Holloway, University of London.

A somewhat ambivalent republican, but one indelibly marked by growing up immersed in the UK's mediatised monarchy, FSFF would have loved to attend. But its author is presenting instead at a conference in an actual Republic this weekend, instead. So this blog contributes the above monarchical-video-meditation in lieu of its presence - and there will be an accompanying essay about it for the Filmanalytical website very shortly.

Another series of events happening this week - also, sadly, to be missed by a gadabout FSFF -- will take place in Brighton. The Global Queer Cinema project is collaborating with the annual CineCity film festival on the topic of "Curating Queer Film Culture". Information about these really excellent and important events can be found here and here. 

The inspirational online event was another one FSFF missed... It was the competition which also inspired the above video, although the video took a somewhat different (topical) turn in its making: "The Past Re-Imagined as the Future" Remix Context, held by the brilliant Prelinger Archives and the Free Music Archive.

FSFF looks forward to hearing about the winners of that event but, in the meantime, had great fun as usual remixing material from both these amazing, public domain archives, and encourages its readers to have a go at doing the same. Any good film related results should be reported here forthwith.

Below, you can find a little (growing) list of links to online studies of monarchies on screen just to keep FSFF's hand in with this blog's day-job....

• Giselle Bastin, 'Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family', a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2009, pp. 34-52 PDF Rosalind Brunt, 'The Changing Face of Royalty', Marxism Today, 1984   
• Pam Cook, 'Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola', Sight and Sound 16 (11), November 2006, pp. 36-40
• Stella Hockenhull, 'Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen', Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012) PDF
• Dianne Hunter, 'From Ethereal Confrontation to Child Abuse to Womanly Conflict: Ophelia in Three Late-Twentieth Century Films', PsyArt, December 2008
• Julia Kinzler, 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011) pp. 49-65
• Laura Mason, '"We' re just little people, Louis": Marie-Antoinette on Film', Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No.3 (1994): 211-222 
• Anna Rogers, 'Sofia Coppola', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007

"Pity we aren't madder": Ken Russell links in his magnificent memory

"I think we've all gone mad" [Jennie Linden as Ursula Brangwen]

"Pity we aren't madder" [Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin] 

 Scene from Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969)

An extract from one of Ken Russell's very first films, Amelia and the Angel (1958) 

Film Studies For Free was saddened to hear of the death yesterday of the magnificent filmmaker Ken Russell. A monumental passing. But what a cinematic life he lived!

Russell's weirdly, viscerally, brilliant Altered States (1980) was one of the first films genuinely to whet FSFF's author's off-beat cinematic appetite, and his adaptation of Women in Love (excerpted above) and his portraits of Elgar (1962), Delius (1968) and Mahler (1974) are several of her favourite British films.

Below, FSFF has gathered some links to online scholarly studies of Russell's work, and to related  resources. Readers should also check out David Hudson's essential collection of tributes to, and other material about, the British filmmaker for the Mubi Notebook here.

• Ken Russell at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Savage Messiah – a Ken Russell site by Iain Fisher 

• Complete Filmography and bibliography: Tarek Krohn and Hans J. Wulff (eds), Medienwissenschaft / Hamburg: Berichte und Papiere 110 / 2010: Ken Russell (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2010
  

• German language book on music in Ken Russell's films: Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, 7, 2011: Musik bei Ken Russell // 3- edited by Frédéric Döhl, Albrecht Riethmüller and Hans Jürgen Wulff

• Michael Adams, 'Ken Russell: Musical Mythmaker', Notes, 66 (September 2009): 143-163
• E. Anna Claydon, 'Masculinity and deviance in British cinema of the 1970s: Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n'Roll in The Wicker Man, Tommy and The Rocky Horror Picture Show', in Newland, P. (ed) Don't Look Now? British Cinema in the 1970s, (Intellect Ltd 2010) pp. 131-142
• Adrian Garvey, 'The Boy Friend', The 1970s Project Conference, 2008
• Sergio Lopez Figueroa, 'The anachronism in film music: a brief introduction on the music for “The Devils” (1971)', 1995
• Barry Keith Grant, 'A British Picture: Portrait of an Enfant Terrible, UK, 1989: Ken Russell', in Grant and Jim Hillier, 100 Documentary Films (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2009) 
• Chris Martin, 'Music in British Films in the 1970s: New Directions', The 1970s Project Conference, 2008 
• John Kenneth Muir, 'On Ken Russell, and Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist', JKM, October 10, 2009 
• Donald Phelps, 'Ken Russell's Portraits of Elgar, Delius and Mahler', Rouge, 8, 2006
• David Pomeroy, 'Films: Experiencing Tommy', Theology Today, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1975
• John A. Riley, '[Review of] Kevin M. Flanagan (ed.), Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England's Last Mannerist (London, Toronto and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2009)', Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 7, April 2010
• Donato Totaro and Peter Rist, 'An Interview With Ken Russell and Lisi Tribble~ Rock n' Roller at Heart', Offscreen Journal, April 30, 2011
• Linda Ruth Williams, 'Ken Russell: Sweet Swell Of Excess', Sight and Sound, July 2007
  

Barry Keith Grant, 'The Body Politic: Ken Russell in the 1980s', in Lester D. Friedman (ed.) Fires were started: British cinema and Thatcherism (London: Wallflower Press, 2006)

Kevin M. Flanagan (ed.), Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England's last mannerist (London: Scarecrow Press, 2009)