SCREENING THE PAST 37 and LA FURIA UMANA 17

Mirror Visions in MODESTY BLAISE (Joseph Losey, 1966) 

Companion video/trailer for the written essay by Catherine Grant, 'Notes on Mirror Visions in MODESTY BLAISE (Joseph Losey, 1966)', LA FURIA UMANA, 17, 2013 (online) and  LA FURIA UMANA, Paper #3, 2013/ (paper copy)

Film Studies For Free is under the cosh of a few deadlines right now (there are some great things to come at this here open access campaigning website in the next weeks!).

But it has temporarily cast off its work shackles to rush you tidings of two new ejournal issues: the latest Screening the Past, co-edited by Adrian Martin and Anna Dzenis, and replete with Part One of a brilliant dossier on Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema and a marvellous essay by Nicole Brenez, among other treasures (Hediger, Martin and Tofts, Phelps); and the very welcome return online of the multilingual La furia umana (whose website, and fabulous archive [soon to return fully], were devastated by a malware attack), edited by Toni D'Angela and replete with dossiers on Joseph Losey and Bertrand Bonello, and a marvelous essay by Nicole Brenez, among other treasures (Ramani, Calder Williams, Small, to cite just some anglophone ones)!

Scroll down for all the wonderful contents. FSFF will be back properly soon!


SCREENING THE PAST 37, 2013

Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema (Part 1)

• Political Cinema Today – The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images  by Nicole Brenez
• Materialist Performance in the Digital Age  by Dirk de Bruyn
• Sublime Materiality: Un lac  by Sarinah Masukor
• Innocent When You Dream: Affect and Perception through Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence  by Julie Banks
• Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis: Beau Travail (1999), 35 Rhums (2008) and White Material (2009)  by Kath Dooley
• Enfolding Surfaces, Spaces and Materials: Claire Denis’ Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation  by Saige Walton
• The Immobilised Body: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange  by Anthony Macris
• Affectless Empathy, Embodied Imagination and The Killer Inside Me  by Jane Stadler
• The Bloody Innocence of a Dream: Borges, Cammell, Tourneur and the Western  by Adrian Martin and Darren Tofts
• What Do we Know When We Know Where Something Is? World Cinema and the Question of Spatial Ordering  by Vinzenz Hediger

First Release

• The Western Suburbs  by Niall Lucy
• Documenting The Dark Side: Torture and The “War On Terror” in Zero Dark Thirty, Taxi To The Dark Side, and Standard Operating Procedure  by Shohini Chaudhuri
• Interactive Cinema from Vending Machine to Database Narrative: The Case of Kinoautomat  by Marina Hassapopoulou
• A League of Their Own: The Impossibility of the Female Sports Hero by Katharina Bonzel
• ’Make Mine a Movie! In a Movie Theater!’ (Or on My Pay-TV Service): How America’s Theater Owners Learned to Stop Worrying and Accept Cable Television, 1969-1976  by Deron Overpeck

Reviews

• Ford at Fox 4  by Bill Routt
• Becoming Jack Nicholson: The Masculine Persona from Easy Rider to The Shining  by Adam Ochonicky
• Rosebud Sleds and Horses’ Heads: 50 of Film’s Most Evocative Objects  by Ben McCann
• Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation by Dion Kagan
• Alfred Hitchcock’s America  by Jonathan Kirshner
• The Film Experience: An Introduction (3rd ed.)  by Kathleen Loock
• Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-makers from Iran and Turkey (2nd ed.)  by Mike Walsh
• De-Westernizing Film Studies  by Rea Amit
• The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes  by Olivia Harsan
• Rabbit-Proof Fence (Australian Screen Classics Series)  by Lynn Smailes

 Classics and Re-runs

• The Aquarium Syndrome: On the Films of Michael Mann  by Jean-Baptiste Thoret
• Ben Hecht’s Funny Valentine  by Donald Phelps

LA FURIA UMANA 17, 2013

Editorial: T.D. / La critique comme concaténation

Confidential report
D'UNE CRITIQUE DE CINÉMA DIGNE DE SON NOM (EN FRANCE)
NICOLE BRENEZ / La Critique comme concept, exigence et praxis

JOSEPH LOSEY

• MICHEL MOURLET / Sur Joseph Losey
• LUÍS MENDONÇA / Losey e Losey: O Exílio Britânico e a Fractura Pinteriana
• TONI D'ANGELA / Lo spazio della massima pendenza del sogno americano nel primo Losey
• SUDARSHAN RAMANI/ Losey and Adolescence: The Big Night
• CATHERINE GRANT / Notes on Mirror Visions in Modesty Blaise
• EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS / Figures in A Threatscape
• CHRISTOPHER SMALL / The Postman

BERTRAND BONELLO

• CLEMENT RAUGER / Introduction au travail de Bertrand Bonello
• ALEJANDRO DÍAZ / Dos o tres cosas que (creo que sé) de Bertrand Bonello
• RICARDO ADALIA MARTIN / Ir de putas
• ÀNGEL QUINTANA / El burdel como convento o la profanación de lo mítico
• ELENA DUQUE / Manuales de autoayuda: buscándose a sí mismos. The Romantic Englishwoman de Losey y De la guerre de Bonello

Prima linea

• TONI D'ANGELA / Terrence Malick e la voce dell'essere: To the Wonder
• MICHAEL GUARNERI / Militant elegy. A conversation with Lav Diaz

Histoires du cinéma

• BEATRICE BALSAMO / I muti di Hitch. La vertigine onirica del desiderio. Il restauro dei film del periodo inglese presentati a Il Cinema Ritrovato 2013

L'occhio che uccide

• CARLOS LOSILLA / Intervenciones#7 A favor de este cine español
• PIETRO BIANCHI, TONI D'ANGELA / La percezione e lo spazio visivo. Dialogo su Merleau-Ponty, Lacan e il cinema

Flaming creatures

• ENRICO CAMPORESI / Quelques notes sur Teenage Dream Sequence: An Invocation of Jeanne d’Arc, de Katherine Bauer

The new world

• STEPHEN RAMSTEDT / Cinéma du Réel 2013: Documents, Layouts/Memories, Dreams/Reflections, Projections
• TONI D'ANGELA / Festa per gli occhi e discorsi di giustizia al Festival Internacional de Curtas de Belo Horizonte

Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University

Website header and masthead at the incredible Women Film Pioneers Project website

This project began as a search for silent cinema “women film pioneers” who challenged the idea of established great male “pioneers of cinema.” Since researchers found more women than anyone expected to find, one principle came to organize the project: What we  assume never existed is what we invariably find. [About 'Women Film Pioneers Project']

Film Studies For Free is heading away from its computer for a few days but had to rush to publish the essential news of an incredible new website resource: the Women Film Pioneers Project.

WFPP is a new free online database published by Columbia University Libraries’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. The database includes more than 150 career profiles of women who worked during the silent film era as directors, co-directors, scenario writers, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, animal trainers, studio accountants, film company owners, and theatre managers.

A monumental, open access piece of important film historical research and publishing, this first phase of the project places together the Americas, the U.S. in the North and Latin America in the South. The next phases will open up the study of women in other national silent era cinemas: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary,  India, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey,  The United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Yugoslavia.

Clearly this is an archival resource that will also grow as more people know about it and can contribute missing information to it, but the editors have done a truly fantastic job in establishing this resource and populating it with such high quality and significant material already.

Congratulations and many thanks go to the WFPP team led by the brilliant film historian Jane Gaines, whose related book on early cinema, Fictioning Histories: Women Film Pioneers was published by University of Illinois Press in 2009. The project launch will take place at MoMA this Saturday, part of the film exhibition To Save and Project: The 11th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.

Double-Strength: Videos and Links in Celebration of Barbara Hammer

Clip from Maya Deren's Sink by Barbara Hammer (via UndergroundFilm at Vimeo)


Clip from NITRATE KISSES by Barbara Hammer



Clip from SANCTUS and other films from the 1980s by Barbara Hammer
(You can see Sanctus @ubuweb)

HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life Book Performance, Barbara Hammer at British Film Institute, March 2010

"I have chosen images rather than words for the act of naming myself an artist and a lesbian because the level of meanings possible for images and image conjunctions seemed richer and held more ramifications" Barbara Hammer

Film Studies For Free today presents a tribute to the remarkable American, experimental filmmaker and activist Barbara Hammer. The tribute takes the form of a listing of online videos and scholarly links to studies of Hammer's work, as well as of related queer film and politics.

Hammer is seventy-one years old, still making films and still protesting against injustice and censorship. In 2010, she published her wonderful autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, which addressed her personal history and philosophies on art (see a review here).

FSFF says, "Thank you, but... keep it up, please, Barbara! Your work and activism is needed now more than ever." (This blog can be a rather greedy and merciless task-mistress at times...)

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on her career and Feminist film

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on Maya Deren

• Barbara Hammer Faculty page at European Graduate School 

• Barbara Hammer. Resisting Paradise. Video Lecture Documentary 2005 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4

• Barbara Hammer's Video Channel at Vimeo (16 videos so far archived) 

• Barbara Hammer's website

• Barbara Hammer interviewed in February 2010 about her research on medical science film 'No bones about it!'

• Edith Becker, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, B. Ruby Rich, 'Lesbians and film, p. 2', from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Sarah Boslaugh, 'Getting Past the Stereotypes: Woman and Motorcycles in recent Lesbian Novels', IJMS, March 2006

•  Martin P. Botha, 'The New African Queer Aesthetics: the Portrayal of Homosexuality in International Cinema', Kinema,

• Joan Braderman, 'Feminism and Video: A View from the Village', Camera Obscura, Volume 22, Number 1, 2007

• Julia Erhart, 'Performing memory: compensation and redress in contemporary feminist first-person documentary', Screening the Past, December 1, 2001

• Claudia Gorbman, 'Barbara Hammer's recent work: Body displaced, body discovered', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987

• John Hess, 'Notes on U.S. radical film, 1967-8', from Jump Cut, no. 21, Nov. 1979 

• Tricia Jenkins, '‘‘Potential Lesbians at Two O’Clock’’: The Heterosexualization of Lesbianism in the Recent Teen Film', The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2005 

• Chuck Kleinhans, 'Teaching sexual images: some pragmatics', from Jump Cut, no. 40, March 1996 

• Laura U. Marks, 'Loving a Disappearing Image', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 8, n° 1-2, 1997

• Susan E. McKenna, 'Seeing lesbian queerly: visibility, community, and audience in 1980s Northampton, Massachusetts', PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts, September 2009

• Fiontán Moran, 'Anatomies of Desire', Afterall, May 2010

• Gary Morris, 'Tender Fictions: Barbara Hammer's Truth Club', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 17, 1996

• Ricardo Peach, Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema on South Africa and Australia, PhD Thesis,University of Technology, Sydney, March 2005

• John Ramirez and Larry Horne, 'UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference', from Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984 

• Jennifer Beth Simmons, Visions of Feminist (Pom(o)nanism): Masturbating Female Postmodern Subjectivity in American Television and Film, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2004

• Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage. PhD Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2006 

• William C. Wees, 'Carrying On: Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Abigail Child and American Avant-Garde Film of the Eighties', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2001

• Andrea Weiss, 'Women I Love. Double Strength : Lesbian Cinema and Romantic Love' , from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Jacquelyn Zita, 'The films of Barbara Hammer: Counter-currencies of a lesbian iconography', from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

On Arousal: physiological film studies

Screencap from Peggy Ahwesh's The Color of Love (1994)

"Peggy Ahwesh is a cinematic alchemist with a penchant for transforming the banal into the sublime. A rare combination of technophile and mystic, Ahwesh has been making experimental and avant-garde films and videos since the seventies, when she first started shooting Super 8 films in Pittsburgh while programming for Pittsburgh Filmmakers and working on George Romero's films. In her own early films, she assembled "a kind of sketchbook of people's behaviors in relation to the camera," as she describes it; "people always 'sort of performing. But somehow some Sisyphean act of performance." Jeremy Lehrer, The Independent, March 1999

"In Peggy Ahwesh's The Color of Love (1994, 16mm), the “cinephiliac moment” finds its object in the detritus of cinema’s history: the ruin is doubled over, in the appropriation of an extant pornographic reel, an 8mm film which appears to be from the late 1960s. The film strip is in a state of florid decay. The ten-minute film has been re-edited and optically printed to preserve the evidence of deterioration, which appears as a fluid, leaking emulsion on the surface of the image, obstructing vision, forming ornate patterns and resembling an organic presence unto itself."  Elena Gorfinkel, World Picture 4.1, 2010

"The Color of Love resurrects a piece of garish silent found footage from a hardcore porn film discovered in a state of advanced chromatic decay: through the lurid poetics of film decomposition, the tawdry is transformed into sublime. It's a triumph of exquisite disfigurement, of the beneficial defect. Found footage films are sometimes called cameraless filmmaking because they're creations of pure editing. The Color of Love is not entirely cameraless, however. Although Ahwesh presents the optical/color deterioration exactly as found, she optically reframed, step-printed, and reedited certain passages for emphasis. The reediting lends the film's rhythm an intermittently abrupt, slightly disintegrating lilt that suggests the jumpy, disjunctive quality of print wear-and-tear." Gavin Smith, Film Comment, July/August 1995

Peggy Ahwesh's work [...] seems to be marked by the consistent drive to subvert the institutionalized patriarchal narrative codes faithfully reproduced by pervasive hollywoodized film production. Her films refuse to conform to the myth-weaving category of dominant, hierarchically determined discourses; instead, they deconstruct them and re-form them into new meanings, and into images whose meaning is still unutterable but definitely perceptible. In The Color of Love, Ahwesh transposes the bodies featured in a decaying porn flick from the early seventies into a painterly, sophisticated choreography under the rhythm of Astor Piazzola's nostalgic tango. The eroticism — usually lacking in pornography — is evoked here by images imbued with pulsating blotches of color, reminiscent of art nouveau, Klimt in particular. As Peggy Ahwesh once commented: "Erotic is completely subjective. Erotic is a smell of a flower, the wind in the trees. Bodies are not the easiest things to evoke erotic feelings with. It's easier to do it with other things: sheets, patterns of color, food." In short the 'male gaze' is undermined not only by the visible story, driven entirely by the two women's desire, where the man "isn't even a prop-he's set decoration" (Gavin Smith), but by the blatant refusal to conceal the 'falseness' of the narrative, renouncing any claim to its 'truthfulness.'" Maja Manojlovic, San Francisco Cinemateque, 1999

Film Studies For Free was rather thrilled, to say the least, by an excellent and original new issue of the (always excellent and original) online journal World Picture. Its subject? Arousal. Tout court.

Along with a whole host of top-notch and, as always with WP, beautifully written, articles on many aspects of cinematic arousal and desire, this stimulating issue valuably incorporates work from three legendary American experimental filmmakers.

First up are two brilliant works from artist Peggy Ahwesh, including her truly astonishing 1994 found-footage film The Color of Love, together with a superb essay on that work by Elena Gorfinkel (for an excellent overview of Ahwesh's work, see John David Rhodes's Senses of Cinema article; and for a short, but very powerful, view of The Color of Love read Steven Shaviro's essay 'Stranded in the Jungle--17).

Then there are also four unpublished poems by the legendary film artist Maya Deren produced between 1927 and 1942, retrieved from the Maya Deren Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University and which, According to John David Rhodes, the poems' 'emphasis on vision and paratactic imagery seems to anticipate her turn to filmmaking'. (Here's a 2007 essay by art historian Marina Warner on Deren's work: 'Dancing the White Darkness')

Finally, the issue also presents some work by filmmaker Ken Jacobs, including three hugely engaging experiments with 3-D filmmaking (see an hour long interview Jacobs: Conversations with History: Ken Jacobs; read an interesting interview with Jacobs by Gregory Zucker: 'Cinema and Critical Reflection', LOGOS 4.3, Summer 2005).

Below, FSFF has pasted in direct links to all the items in WP 4.1. And below that are listed links to further notable, and most definitely scholarly, items on cinema's physiological experiments with the somatic and the sexual, and with audiovisual eroticism and pornography more generally, thrown up in a high-and-low-and-down-and-dirty search of those oh-so-murky Interwebs... 

Time for a quick shower now, FSFF thinks.

World Picture 4.1 - Table of Contents:

• Peggy Ahwesh, The Color of Love

• Peggy Ahwesh, Collections: The Hermitage featuring The Qajar Dynasty, Persia

• Sam Cooper, Sex and the Situs 

• Maya Deren, Four Unpublished Poems

• Rosalind Galt, Perverse Aesthetics: Maria Beatty, Masochism, and the Cinematic

• Elena Gorfinkel, Arousal in Ruins: The Color of Love and the Haptic Object of Film History

• Ken Jacobs, About Myself, Nymph, Berkeley to San Francisco, Selections on the Theme of Arousal

• Michael Lawrence, “Carefully Posed Thighs”: The Garden of Eden in 1966

• James Mensch, Arousal: The Intertwining of the Within and the Without

• Kelly Oliver, Wake Up! Even if Life Is but a Dream: Ethics of/as Arousal

• John David Rhodes, Notes on Cinematic Desire (for Louis)

• Nicole Rizzuto, Colonial Insurgency and the Spectral Rhetoric of Arousal

• Meghan Sutherland, About Opsis

• Domietta Torlasco,  I am you, if I am: Notes for a Phenomenology of Narcissism 

Related openly accessible articles and theses on bodily sensations, affect and desire in the cinema:

• Neil Archer, 'Baise moi: The Art of Going Too Far', Episteme, Vol. 2.1, 2009

• B is for Bad Cinema, edited by Julia Vassilieva and Claire Perkins, COLLOQUY: text theory critique, 18 (2009)

• Harry Benshoff, 'Introduction: the Monster and the Homosexual', from Monsters in the Closet, 1997 

• Brenda Cromb, 'Gorno: Violence, Shock and Comedy' , Cinephile, Vol. 4, Summer 2008

• Gary Elshaw, 'The Depiction of late 1960's Counter Culture in the 1968 Films of Jean-Luc Godard', MA e-thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, November 2000

• Emma Field, Only a Trickle? Blood in Detail and Three Women's Films, PhD Thesis, University of Tasmania, 2003

• Katherine M. Franke, 'Theorizing Yes: An Essay on Feminism, Law and Desire', Columbia Law Review, Vol. 101:181, 2001 

• Jill Good, Will Godfrey and Mark Goodall , 'Introduction - Film and Representation: Three Readings', Crash Cinema,  edited by Mark Goodall, Jill Good, Will Godfrey (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)

• Terri J. Gordon, 'Film in the Second Degree: Cabaret and the Dark Side of Laughter', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 152 (Dec. 2008), 440–65

• William Johnson, 'A New View of Porn: The Films of Tatsumi Kumashiro', Film Quarterly, vol. 57, no.1, Fall 2003

• Brandon W. Joseph, '“My Mind Split Open”: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable', Grey Room. No. 8 (Winter 2002): 80-107

• Graeme Krautheim, 'Aspiring to the void: the collapse of genre and erasure of body in Gaspar Noe's Irreversible', Cinephile, Vol. 4, Summer 2008

• Thomas Lamarre, 'Platonic Sex: Perversion and Shôjo Anime (Part One)',  Animation 2006; 1; 45

• Virginia Luzón Aguado, 'Film genre and its vicissitudes: the case of the psychothriller', ATLANTIS. Vol. XXIV Núm. 2 (Junio 2002): 163-72

• Ben McCann, 'Review of Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007', Screening the Past, Issue 23, 2008

• Douglas Morrey, 'Scientia sexualis: Pornography and Technology' in Jean-Luc Godard and the Other History of Cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2002 (scroll to p. 80 in pdf)

• Chikako Nagayama, Fantasy of Empire: RI KŌRAN, Subject Positioning and the cinematic construction of space, PhD Thesis, University of Toronto, 2009 

• Thomas P. Oates, 'The Erotic Gaze in the NFL Draft', Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies Vol. 4, No. 1, March 2007, pp. 74-90

• R. Barton Palmer, 'Chance’s Main Chance: Richard Brooks’s Sweet Bird of Youth', The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 3 (2000): 25-36

• Tim Palmer, 'Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body', Journal of Film & Video. Fall 2006. 58.3. 22-32

• Tim Palmer , 'Under your skin: Marina de Van and the contemporary French cinéma du corps', Studies in French Cinema, Volume 6, Number 3, 2006

• Steven Jay Scheider, 'Murder as Art/the Art of Murder: Aestheticizing Violence in Modern Cinematic Horror',  in Steven Jay Schneider & Daniel Shaw (eds.), Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror. Scarecrow Press, 2003

• Ruth Scodel and Anja Bettenworth, 'Cleopatra's suicide in Modern Cinema and Literary Tradition', Scodel and Bettenworth Roman Movie Page, (date unknown)

• W. Anthony Sheppard, 'Cinematic realism, reflexivity and the American ‘Madame Butterfly’ narratives', Cambridge Opera Journal, 17, 1: 59–93, 2005

• Thibaut Schilt, 'Marginal Pleasure and Auteurist Cinema: the Sexual Politics of Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat and François Ozon', PhD e-thesis, Ohio State University 2005

• Moira Sullivan, 'Lesbographic Pornography', in Koivunen A. & Paasonen S. (eds), Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies , University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Media Studies, Series A, N:o 49 E-book, Media Studies, Turku 2001