Showing posts with label feminist filmmaking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminist filmmaking. 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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Saturday, 10 June 2017

Richly Resourceful! On B.Ruby Rich's Work, plus A Roundup of Recent Open Access Screen Studies Items

The above video treats the ending of Lucrecia Martel's La niña santa / The Holy Girl (2004), using insights about the film from Deborah Martin's book The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Sophie Mayer's chapter 'Gutta cavat lapidem: The sonorous politics of Lucrecia Martel's swimming pools', in The Cinema of The Swimming Pool, eds. Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch (Peter Lang, 2014). For Study Purposes Only - No Significant Spoilers.
The video is dedicated to pioneering queer and feminist film curator and critic B. Ruby Rich, one of the foremost advocates of the work of La niña santa's director, and much other queer New Argentine, and Latin American Cinema. 
Rich's career is justly being celebrated at a screening and discussion event taking place between June 21-25, 2017, at the Barbican Cinema (and other London venues) as part of its 2017 Film in Focus season. The event is entitled ‘Being Ruby Rich’ and is co-sponsored by Film London and co-curated by Club des Femmes, the queer-feminist film curating collective. La niña santa (a film championed by Rich, alongside Martel's other films) will be screened with an introduction by Sophie Mayer at the Barbican Cinema on Sunday, June 25, at 6pm.
For further information about these events, see here. 

Today, Film Studies For Free celebrates the much-awaited visit to London of B. Ruby Rich (foundational film critic, festival programmer, cultural theorist, and chronicler of social trends on screen and off), on the occasion of a magnificently merited celebration of her career at the Barbican and other venues, organised by Club des Femmes, the queer-feminist film curating collective (check out their interview about their work here).

The entry celebrates, as usual, in film studies links, beginning with a new video resource (above) on one of the films to be screened in this celebratory programme, and then lots of other rich Rich-related resources (below), followed by a roundup of recent Open Access Screen Studies Items, including numerous new journal issues online.

FSFF also wanted to share the great news that, from September 1, 2017, its author will be taking up the post of Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, an institution with a longstanding and wonderful record of supporting open access publishing and widening educational access, in part through film curating study and practice! Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image is also co-host of one of the free events celebrating Ruby Rich's work, taking place on June 21, 2017.

 By (or Featuring) B. Ruby Rich:



On Rich's work:


 Other news and recent open access screen studies links:
  1. Cinephile aggregator extraordinaire David Hudson has taken his expertly unmissable daily round-ups of cinephile links, news and events (formerly of Keyframe Daily) to the Criterion Collection "Daily" website: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts?category=The+Daily.
  2. Tiago Baptista's open-access PhD thesis on the digital audiovisual essay (supervised by Laura Mulvey and externally examined by Adrian Martin)! http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/215/.
  3. Rob King's great new book Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture is available in open access formats at Luminosoa here: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520288119.
  4. Nicholas Mirzoeff's new free e-book The Appearance of Black Lives Matter (NAME Publications) is available here: http://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter/.
  5. Out now: Issue 45.2 of Film/Literature Quarterly, a highly esteemed and long-established journal now available in an online open access version!! https://www.salisbury.edu/lfq/.
  6. Just out: Issue 7 of MOVIE: Journal of Film Criticism, with new features on Opening Shots and audiovisual essays: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/.
  7. Just out: Issue 12 of The Cine-Files: a special commemorative issue on Chris Marker and Jacques Rivette, featuring so many delightful and insightful pieces... including an essay by Rivette himself! http://www.thecine-files.com and http://www.thecine-files.com/dossier-rivette-marker/.
  8. Issue 11 of FRAMES Cinema Journal - The Future of Horror is now available online at http://framescinemajournal.com/.
  9. A NEW issue of #openaccess journal NECSUS on #TRUE! with a great new AV essay section curated by Kevin B. Lee! http://www.necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2017_true/.
  10. Three new contributions to "Ghetto Films and their Afterlife", in the #openaccess journal APPARATUS: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus/issue/view/3.
  11. New issue of Film-Philosophy (21, 2, 2017) now published and fully open access: http://www.euppublishing.com/toc/film/21/2. ARTICLES: Memories of the Unlived Body: Jean-Louis Schefer, Georges Bataille and Gilles Delouse by Patrick ffrench; A Body Without a Face: The Disorientation of Trauma in Phoenix (2014) and New Holocaust Cinema by Olivia Landry; Intra-Diegetic Cameras as Cinematic Actor Assemblages in Found Footage Horror Cinema by Rødje Kjetl; Fearsome Acts of Interpretation: Audiovisual Historiography, Film Theory and Gangs of New York by Mike Meneghett.
  12. New issue of Media Industries (Vol. 4, No. 1) now available. It features articles by Nora Draper, Darrell Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Patryk Galuszka and Katarzyna Wyrzykowska, and Justin Wyatt. The issue also contains a Special Section curated by Annette Hill and Jeanette Steemers that focuses on Media Industries and Engagement, featuring a dialogue between industry and academic researchers: http://www.mediaindustriesjournal.org/.
  13. A new international peer-reviewed open access journal of James Bond Studies, shaken not stirred: http://jamesbondstudies.roehampton.ac.uk.
  14. New issue of INTENSITIES: A JOURNAL OF CULT MEDIA: https://intensitiescultmedia.com/issue-9-spring-2017/.
  15. New issue of the Journal of Lusophone Studies features a special dossier on Portuguese Cinema: https://jls.apsa.us/index.php/jls/issue/view/23.
  16. A great new #openaccess practice-research publication: O A R Platform! Check out Issue 1: "Sites of Research" here: http://www.oarplatform.com/issue/issue-1/.
  17. On David Lynch: a new virtual special issue of the esteemed journal Screen freely accessible until end August 2017: https://academic.oup.com/screen/pages/david_lynch_virtual_issue.
  18. Laura Ivins' great video and text on Maya Deren's Film-Philosophy: http://blogs.iu.edu/aplaceforfilm/2017/05/23/maya-derens-film-philosophy/.
  19. New essay by Adrian, Martin for Photogénie, on 'play' in American screen comedy from the early sound era to the 50s and beyond: thttps://cinea.be/game-space-and-play-time-a-partial-history-american-screen-comedy/?language=en.
  20. Peter Labuza of the Cinephiliacs podcast interviews cinephile par excellence Girish Shambu: http://www.thecinephiliacs.net.
  21. Further great, recent, scholarly-related cinema podcasts available at The Cinematologists: http://www.cinematologists.com.
  22. Check out 'Edit shots' - a free for personal use (or pay what you want) resource: http://learnaboutfilm.com/editshots/.
  23. ‪Check out Professor Ian Christie's new research blog on cinema pioneer Robert Paul, the "undersung hero of early British filmmaking": https://paulsanimatographworks.wordpress.com.
  24. Attention Hitchcock Fans: there will be a free online, interactive course with multi-media course material, games and more from Ball State University. It is in conjunction with TCM running one of Hitchcock's greatest films every Wednesday and Friday night in July. You can enroll here: https://www.canvas.net/browse/bsu/tcm3/courses/hitchcock50.
  25. Great interview with Laura Mulvey at Issue 8 of  Four by Three Magazine, part of an amazing issue of the magazine on DEATH, with other contributions by luminaries on a wide range of essential specific topics.
  26. The international, Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Filmmaking Research Network has designed a survey to gather data about filmmaking research. The aim of this survey is to compare and contrast examples of filmmaking research through producing case studies and a register of films as research outputs. It is also intended to build capacity through networking members via research themes, curating content from the film register for international dissemination and creating a Phd examiner list. Though the survey is primarily aimed at UK and Australian academics we welcome contributions from colleagues in other countries particularly those who have films to register. Please participate by completing the online survey at: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/filmmakingresearch. For further information about the network and to join the e-list visit: http://filmmakingresearch.net.
  27. Martin Scorsese on standing up for cinema in the Times Literary Supplement: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/film-making-martin-scorsese/.
  28. Great interview with Laura Mulvey at Four by Three Magazine: http://www.fourbythreemagazine.com/issue/death/laura-mulvey-interview.
  29. The latest issue of Learning on Screen/BUFVC journal VIEWFINDER has published a conversation between Catherine Grant, Amber Jacobs and Ian Magor about the use of audiovisual essay in film and moving image studies.
http://bufvc.ac.uk/publications/viewfinder-archive

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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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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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Tuesday, 1 October 2013

Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License



 
A fascinating and informative excerpt from the audio commentary track on the British Film Institute's brand new Dual Format Edition of RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977). You can find more information about this new video version of the film here and read a new interview with Mulvey about its making here.
Riddles of the Sphinx was made in 1976-7. The film used the Sphinx as an emblem with which to hang a question mark over the Oedipus complex, to illustrate the extent to which it represents a riddle for women committed to Freudian theory but still determined to think about psychoanalysis radically or, as I have said before, with poetic license. Riddles of the Sphinx and Penthesilea, our previous film, used ancient Greece to invoke a mythic point of origin for Western civilization, that had been critically re-affirmed by high culture throughout our history. [... S]ome primitive attraction to the fantasy of origins, a Gordian knot that would suddenly unravel, persisted for me in the Oedipus story, and its special status: belonging to very ancient mythology and to the literature of high Greek civilization, chosen by Freud to name his perception of the founding moment of the human psyche. My interest then concentrated on breaking down the binarism of the before/after opposition, by considering the story as a passage through time, a journey that could metaphorically open out or stretch the Oedipal trajectory through significant details and through its formal, narrational, properties. [Laura Mulvey, 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989, FSFF's emphasis]

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry in honour of one the most important, most brilliant, most influential and hardest-working film and moving image scholars of all time: Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and recently, co-founder of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. Mulvey is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989; second edition, 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996; 2nd ed. 2013), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series, 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006). And she has made six films in collaboration with fellow film theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI, 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980) and with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994)

FSFF's author has a pretty good record in celebrating Mulvey's influence on film studies already, having been lucky enough to take part, earlier this year, in a day devoted to this activity at Birkbeck's Institute of Humanities - an event recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting. The happy occasion for today's eFestschrift, however, is the British Film Institute's release of a new DVD/BluRay disk of Riddles of the Sphinx, the hugely significant and original feminist film Mulvey co-directed and produced in 1976/77 with her partner Wollen (the disk also contains their first film together: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons [1974]).

To accompany this entry FSFF was honoured to be able to produce a short, exclusive extract of a sequence of its choice from the DVD audio commentary accompanied version (as embedded above). FSFF warmly thanks Laura Mulvey herself, as well as Hannah Maloco and the BFI, whose Production Board thankfully funded Riddles of the Sphinx, for kindly allowing this blog to create such a memorable and instrumental item of openly accessible film studies.

Beneath the BFI's own Riddles of the Sphinx clip (embedded below) -- a commentary free version of substantially the same sequence -- you can find a wonderful listing of links to openly accessible online scholarly work by and about Laura Mulvey. It provides ample testimony, were it needed, as to why she has been, is, and always will be, one of the true greats of our subject - as Michel Foucault probably would have put, a veritable 'founder of discursivity' for our discipline... 




Online written work by Laura Mulvey: 

Online written work by Peter Wollen about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work: 

Online video/audio work by or featuring Laura Mulvey:

Online writing about Laura Mulvey's work:
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