Showing posts with label feminist film theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminist film theory. Show all posts

Sunday, 20 May 2018

A Merry May Round Up of Joyous Film Links: Bergman, MAI, Jump Cut, OFFSCREEN, WIDESCREEN and lots more!

LESSON on Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata by Catherine Grant, one of a number of videos made to commemorate this year's centenary of the Swedish director's birth. Don't forget FSFF's earlier entry on Ingmar Bergman studies. 

Greetings -- it's been a while! Here's a speedy, northern-hemisphere, Spring round up from Film Studies For Free. See below for some especially choice and unmissable items!! More will be added to the below in the coming days.

Remember to follow @filmstudiesff on Twitter and on Facebook for your daily stream of great openly accessible items!


1. Jump Cut

Check out the HUGE new issue of JUMP CUT (58, 2018)
Tributes to Chuck Kleinhans. The future of Jump Cut. Special sections on experimental feature fiction, documentary strategies, international perspectives, U.S. slavery's legal and symbolic remains, radical activism, unruly women, porn again, and book reviews.

See also this excellent SCMS video tribute to Kleinhans here


2. MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture

Exciting launch issue of the new open access journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture: "A non-hierarchical journal open to multivalent feminist expression, research & critique of visual culture", featuring:
Follow @MAI_journal on Twitter here


3. CFP for The Cine-Files Special issue on Animals in Cinema

The Cine-Files, Issue 14 (Fall 2018), Call for Papers  [Download as PDF] for a Special issue on Animals in Cinema. Submission Deadline:  July 30, 2018
The Cine-Files, an online journal of cinema scholarship, is now accepting submissions for its Fall 2018 special issue on animals in the cinema that will be edited by Catherine Grant and Tracy Cox-Stanton.  
We seek submissions for scholarly essays (4000-6000 words) that explore the significance of non-human animals in moving image studies.  These essays will comprise the peer-reviewed, “featured scholarship” portion of issue 14.
Since John Berger’s 1991 essay “Why Look at Animals?” studies of animals in visual culture have steadily advanced, culminating in the 2015 anthology Animal Life and the Moving Image (BFI, Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon, editors).  In this work, scholars employ a diversity of theoretical frameworks to extend many of the insights of animal studies into the terrain of film and media studies.  Issue 14 of The Cine-Files seeks to build on that work, inviting scholars to contemplate the significance of animals in a variety of audiovisual media.
Papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following questions:
  • How do particular films or videos convey or complicate recent scholarly work about the sentience of non-human animals? 
  • What can we learn from an analysis of films that feature animal performers? How does the non-human animal performer complicate our views of film performance?
  • How might we understand the proliferation of online animal videos within the context of anthropogenic climate change and threats of “the sixth extinction”?
  • What role did animals play in early cinema’s era of “attractions,” and how can an understanding of that era help us contextualize contemporary representations?
  • How can we better understand and historicize “the colonialist trope of animalization” (identified in Unthinking Eurocentrism)—aligning non-human animals with human “others” including racial and/or ethnic minorities, as well as women, LGBTQI and others?
  • How has CGI affected the cinematic figuration of animals? 
  • How has the depiction of animals prompted particularly innovative uses of cinematic language?
  • Is it possible to depict animals in a way that is not “anthropomorphic?” How have particular films challenged anthropomorphic representation?
Please email your essay as a MS Word doc to the editors, removing your identifying information from the essay.  On a separate page, include your name, essay title, brief biographical note, and email address. Consult the guidelines for submissions at http://www.thecine-files.com/submission-guidelines/
If you would like to submit a video essay for consideration, please contact the editors by email to discuss your idea in the first instance. July 30 will also be the date for submissions in this mode.
Catherine Grant, catherine.grant1@bbk.ac.uk and Tracy Cox-Stanton, editor@thecine-files.com


4. Some recent video essays!


Also:
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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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Tuesday, 6 October 2015

NO HOME MOVIE: In Warm Memory of Chantal Akerman (1950-2015)

Last updated October 5, 2016
http://next.liberation.fr/culture-next/2015/10/06/mort-de-la-cineaste-chantal-akerman_1398190

Akerman’s search for images that represent nothing, and mean nothing else (except perhaps themselves – and even this is difficult enough) while she focuses her camera on observing the minutiae of women’s lives, is expressed in the first instance by her style: distant, clean, sober, looking at the image outside of the image. Rootless, detached images. Images in the Diaspora. Is it possible to return home, to where the image can exist, outside of the commandment? Is such an image even possible? (Dana Linssen on Akerman's filmmaking)
Despite their apparent simplicity, Akerman’s assured framing and narrative, built out of blocks of real time intercut by radical ellipses, are not easily replicated. Rather, the film’s impact is indirectly evident in the emergence of a new phenomenological sensibility and approach to observation and the weight of time... (Ivonne Margulies on Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles)
Unbelievable, unbearable news, but just confirmed by Libération.

Chantal Akerman has died.

Links to online, freely accessible studies of her work and to tributes to it will continue to be added below in the next days (as they will, undoubtedly, at KeyFrame Daily | Fandor, and elswehere). It's the only way that Film Studies For Free can process this news.... Incroyable....


By / With Chantal Akerman



Studies of Ackerman's work


 Tributes to Akerman



BERLIN: Testimony of a City by Andy Moore and Ian Magor
Using Chantal Akerman's News from Home [1977] here the city of Berlin is the stage for another journey through another city. Reflective and reversing timelines encourage the visual to interact with the spoken testimony.

The portrayal of desire on the cinema screen is necessarily problematic. Too often it is an assertion of masculine power, sometimes an idealised notion of romance, rarely the reality of sagging mattresses and aching muscles. Chantal Akerman's Je, tu, il, elle is set alongside two typical Hollywood portrayals of sexual passion.
The personal and the public. Private letters and open spaces. Home, exile. Chantal Akerman’s News From Home is often torn between personal introspection and visual ethnography. Here, its slow composure is put in to conversation with the chaos of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Whilst the former tackles the personal and transcends towards the universal, the latter uses the universal to invoke a self-observating experience. If Koyaanisqatsi signals a life out of balance, News From Home tries to rectify that balance - in pace, in space and in the everyday. - Jessica McGoff

Belgian director Chantal Akerman gained world success with her masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and consolidated her reputation with films like Toute une Nuit, Les années 80 and Le Marteau. In the early nineties Akerman shifted her career from strictly film into the arts. She participated, amongst other exhibitions, at dOCUMENTA 10 and 11. It dated from 1995 since Akerman exhibited in her native country with a massive retrospective. In Too Far, Too Close the M HKA presented an overview from Akermans oeuvre starting with the 1968 production Saute ma Ville and ending with her most recent work, Maniac Summer.
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Monday, 22 December 2014

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.


FEATURE ARTICLES
P.O.V.
[in]TRANSITION 1.4, 2014 (Issue commissioned and edited by Drew Morton)
LOLA Issue 5 has continued to roll out with the entries below published to date and others still to come:

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

NECSUS Journal, Autumn 2014: War

Features
Audiovisual essays: edited by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
Special section: War
Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier [NECS Publication Committee])
Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist [Film Festival Research Network])
Exhibition reviews (edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg [NECS Publication Committee])

 Assorted further open access linkage!

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