New Issue of MEDIASCAPE Online on "History and Technology"

Frame grab from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980), one of the subjects of Film Studies For Free's author's latest videographic film study in her new article 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', which you can find in the newly published issue of Mediascape.

The much awaited Winter 2013 issue of MEDIASCAPE, UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media, has just been published. There are two very fine articles on historical film archives by Christina Petersen and Bryan Sebok, as well as two excellent columns on related historiographical themes. Meanwhile, the META section boasts some very good, new video essay work by Matthias Stork, Alexandra Schroeder, and Clifford James Galiher and reflections on videographic and other digital film studies practices by great luminaries, such as Yuri Tsivian and Daria Khitrova, alongside those of much more ordinary mortals! There's also a highly informative interview with filmmaker Thom Andersen and some very interesting reviews to catch up with.

All contents are listed and linked to below. But, also, do check out MEDIASCAPE's occasional, but very high quality blog which publishes between journal issue releases. A good place to start is this entry: 'Mastering "The Master"' by Vincent Brook

MEDIASCAPE, Winter 2013

Editorial by Andy Myers and Andrew Young

Features

• The Crowd Mind: The Archival Legacy of the Payne Fund Studies’ Movies and Conduct (1933) by Christina Petersen
• Headline Hollywood: A discourse analysis of the Variety archive by Bryan Sebok

Columns

• Alex Haley’s Roots and Hyperreal Historiography by Randy Laist
• Transmission: Considering New Media and the Online Histories of HIV/AIDS by Christopher Garland

META

• What Happens When You Sleep? Multiple Layers of Voyeurism in the Paranormal Activity Trilogy by Alexandra Schroeder
• Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies by Catherine Grant
• The Three Fates of the Maltese Falcon: Hammet's Novel at Warner Bros. by Clifford James Galiher
• Photography and Fictionality by Jens Schröter
• Transmedia Synergies — Remediating Films and Video Games by Matthias Stork
• In Retrospect: 2012 Los Angeles Animation Festival by Kelly Lake
• “A Film is Alive During its Making” – An Interview with Filmmaker Thom Andersen by Matthias Stork
• On Cinemetrics, Video Essays, and Digital Scholarship – An Interview with Dr. Yuri Tsivian and Dr. Daria Khitrova by Matthias Stork

Reviews

• Total Archive: Picturing History from the Stereographic Library to the Digital Database by Brooke Belisle
• All The World’s A Video Wall: Technology, Humanity, and the Things in Between. Reviewing Chris Salter’s Entangled by Judith Kohlenberger and Samuel Zwaan
• Murder and Montage: Oliver Stone’s Hyperreal Period by Randy Laist
• Review of Useful Cinema by Andrew Myers
• Something Borrowed from the Past: Wedding Photography and Super 8mm by Paul Gansky

 

 

New JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE on Alternative cinemas in India

Cover of JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE 10, 2012 (Alternative cinemas in India)

A new issue of Journal of the Moving Image Online, a great, online, open access publication, has hit the e-stands!

Film Studies For Free heard the news via film scholar and JMI editor Moinak Biswas, who has contributed a number of very fine pieces to Volume 10. There are also excellent articles on Mani Kaul (see also FSFF's memorial entry on this fine filmmaker), and on the brilliant MediaLab, a fantastic initiative by Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University (also the publishers of JMI), by Anustup Bastu.

All the contents are linked to below. Great work!

• Editorial by Moinak Biswas
• The Persistence of Rajasthan in Indian Cinema : One Region, So Many Views by Kaushik Bhaumik (Deputy Director, Osian's Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, New Delhi)
• John Abraham : Cinema and the Idea of the Collective by Rajan Kurai Krishnan (Senior Research Fellow, IDCR, Loyola College, Chennai)
• Alternative Cinema : Response of Indian Film Studies by Manas Ghosh (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• The Story of Arri : Imagined Landscapes, Emergent Technologies and Bengali Cinema by Madhuja Mukherjee (Associate Professor and Head, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Spectres of the New Wave : The State of the Work of Mourning, and the New Cinema Aesthetic in a Regional Industry by Parichay Patra (Student, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Authoring Space, Gender and the Past : A Film Called Shubho Mahurat by Sumit Dey (Student, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• Mani Kaul : DU : KH ke Prakar by Amrit Gangar
• Incomplete Testimonies : Tapan Sinha by Moinak Biswas (Associate Professor, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University)
• A Memorialization Without Destinying : A Revisitation of JU Media Lab's National Instruments Project Archive by Anustup Basu (Associate Professor of English, Cinema and Media, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

New SCREENING THE PAST on 'Untimely Cinema'

Framegrab from Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998). Please read Adrian Martin's new essay A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma

The question of whether cinema has run out of time, and the related question of whether it is also, therefore, out of ‘its’ time (cinema as ‘heritage’ media, a relic from another era) are questions that are often posed by, and to, those working in cinema studies today. For well over a decade, film theorists and film historians have evocatively, rigorously and at times relentlessly theorised and debated the question of whether cinema is dead, dying, living on borrowed time, or doing what it has so often done – refigure itself. In titling this essay, and this issue, “Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time” we consider this idea in two seemingly very different ways. [Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis, 'Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time', Screening the Past, ISsue 43, 2012 ]

A really wonderful new issue of Screening the Past, one of the best online and openly accessible film studies journals, has just been published, so Film Studies For Free rushes you the news. It's a timely special issue on Untimely Cinema guest edited by Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis.

The contents are incredibly rich and wide-ranging and are listed, and linked to, below.


Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time

• Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time by Jodi Brooks & Therese Davis
• Syrian Cinema: Out of Time? by Kay Dickinson
• The Restoration of The Exiles: The Untimeliness of Archival Cinema by Catherine Russell
• A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma by Adrian Martin
• Suspended Reading: Man on Wire, 9/11, and the Logic of the High-Wire by Adam Ross Rosenthal
• Kim Ki-duk’s Aporia: The Face and Hospitality (on 3-Iron) by Steve Choe
• Re-staging the Cinema: Psycho, Film Spectatorship and the Redundant New Remake by Megan Carrigy
• Parentheses in Time: L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) as Amorous Event by Alex Ling
• Missed Beats: Unseen Cinema and a Cinema of the Unseen (or Stella Dallas, Again) by Jodi Brooks
• Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary by Belinda Smaill
• Untimely Animations: Waltz with Bashir and the Incorporation of Historical Difference by Paul Atkinson and Simon Cooper

First Release

• Ten Fingers and Nine Toes: Embodied Representations of Pregnancy in Avant-Garde Cinema by Lauren Bliss
• Mapping the Cinematic Journey of Alexander Pearce, Cannibal Convict by Jane Stadler
• I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini)/The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) by Sam Rohdie
• The Great Uncredited: Sir Walter Scott and Cinema by Tim Dolin
• The Jazz Singer: Accounting for Female Agency and Reconsidering Scholarship by Karen Vered
• Encountering Elusive Cinema: Tati, Straub-Huillet and Antonioni by Edgar Jorge

Classics and Re-runs

• Directing the Avant-Garde: Raymond Durgnat interviews Stephen Dwoskin (1984) by Raymond Durgnat

Reviews

• Ford At Fox by Bill Routt
• To Wax Zizekian: On Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible by Adrian Martin
• Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-Assessment by Patricia Aufderheide
• The Shadowcatchers: a history of cinematography in Australia by Ina Bertrand
• Post – 9/11 Cinema: Through a Lens Darkly by Rod Bishop
• Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs by Dirk de Bruyn
• Deleuze and World Cinemas by Daniel Fairfax
• Celluloid Immigrant: Italian Australian Filmmaker Giorgio Mangiamele by Geoff Gardner
• Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts
• by Gabrielle Lowe
• World Film Locations: Paris by Sarinah Masukor
• The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era by Josh Nelson
• China on Video: Smaller-screen realities by Tom Salek
• Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film
• by Robert Sinnerbrink
• World Film Locations: Los Angeles & World Film Locations: London by Lynn Smailes
• Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era by Mike Walsh
• The Anatomy of Harpo Marx by Wheeler Winston Dixon
  

Journal of European Television History and Culture

A new multi-media e-journal on the past and present of European television

Journal of European Television History and Culture is to be the first peer-reviewed, multi-media and open access e-journal in the field of European television history and culture. It will offer an international platform for outstanding academic research and archival reflection on television as an important part of our European cultural heritage. With its interdisciplinary profile, the journal is open to many disciplinary perspectives on European television – including television history, media studies, media sociology, cultural studies and television studies.

If only for pretty sound, nominal reasons, Film Studies For Free doesn't usually stray too far beyond the field of free film studies. Today is an exception, however, simply because of an exceptional, new, and also free to access, online publication.

The inaugural issue of the new Journal of European Television History and Culture is devoted to 'Making Sense of Digital Sources', a hugely important topic for all audiovisual forms and cultures. Its editors write,

In the past few years national broadcasting archives and audiovisual libraries have taken important steps in the digitisation of their sources. Consequently, some of their material has already become available online. But as access to television material online across national borders remains fractured and scattered, European funded projects such as Video Active (2006-2009) and EUscreen (2009-2012) try to tackle some of the main problems with transnational access:

• the lack of interoperability between archival data-bases both at the level of metadata and semantics;
• the non-existence of proven scenarios for the use of audiovisual material at a European level;
• the complexity of rights issues and the lack of contextualisation of digitised sources.

     At the FIAT/IFTA conference in Paris in 2004, the European Television History Network (ETHN) was launched, aiming at promoting the need for a transnational perspective on the history and culture of television in Europe. The archival situation and the accessibility for researchers vary considerably in the different European countries. That is why ETHN acknowledged the necessity of cooperation between archives and academics on a European scale in order to bridge academic research and archival initiatives. The Journal of European Television History and Culture builds on these initiatives and is closely related to EUscreen of which the e-journal is an important feature.[from Andreas Fickers and Sonja de Leeuw. 'Editorial']

FSFF salutes EUScreen, ETHN, and especially, on this the occasion of its birth, the Journal of European Television History and Culture.

It can only hope that European (and, indeed, non-European) archival film culture and studies will learn much (and quickly) from the wonderful and increasingly joined up examples of its televisual counterparts.

Vol 1, No 1 (2012):Table of Contents
Editorial

• Andreas Fickers, Sonja de Leeuw. 'Editorial' PDF

Articles

• Sonja de Leeuw, 'European Television History Online: History And Challenges' PDF  
• Lilian Landes, 'Building Platforms For Historians: Making Data Findable. A Critical Reflection On Some German Initiatives' PDF 
• Andreas Fickers, 'Towards A New Digital Historicism? Doing History In The Age Of Abundance PDF
• John Ellis, 'Why Digitise Historical Television?' PDF  
• Pelle Snickars, 'If Content Is King, Context Is Its Crown' PDF
• Luca Barra, Massimo Scaglioni, 'Making The Most Of The Archive: Commercial Exploitation Of The Digital Archive On Contemporary Italian Network TV' PDF  
• Alexander Badenoch, 'Translating ‘Liebeskummer’: Combo 1965' PDF  
• Andy O’Dwyer, 'Digitising Context: The Case Of The Radio Times' PDF  
• Dana Mustata, 'History In The Backstage Of Romanian Television Archives' PDF
• Matteo Treleani, Claude Mussou, 'Retelling the Past with Broadcast Archives: Context Makes Sense' PDF

Great Video Lectures by Friedberg, Dupin, Rodowick, Chateau, Nowell-Smith, Stewart, Grieveson, Furstenau, Zryd, and White

Image from Grbavica: Land of My Dreams/Esma's Secret: Grbavica (Jasmila Žbanić , 2006), an example of 'global women's cinema' as explored by Patricia White in a 2008 lecture and in a forthcoming book (you can see a clip from this film about 36 minutes into White's talk, and the film's website is here)

Thanks to the website of the Permanent Seminar on the Histories of Film Theory, which Film Studies For Free featured yesterday, FSFF heard about another highly worthwhile online resource (although one that appears not to be being updated, currently): the website of Advanced Research Team for the History and Epistemology of Moving Image Study (ARTHEMIS).

ARTHEMIS is dedicated to the study of the evolution of film studies as a discipline. Based at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Concordia University and initiated by Martin Lefebvre, it gathers scholars from Canada, the United States and Europe. The group organizes, among other things, monthly seminars related to the different axes of research. [Some] are available on this site. We invite you to listen to the conferences and submit your comments. In addition, you will find on this site an evolving bibliography and book reviews.

The ARTHEMIS project also investigates the study of film and moving images by looking at three of its most important 'possibility conditions': Conceptual conditions; Institutional conditions; Material Conditions.

There are plenty of items worth exploring at ARTHEMIS. But FSFF was most struck by the series of online lectures from 2008/9 that are archived at the site. Here's the list of links to these - some truly wonderful items. FSFF particularly liked Patricia White's lecture on "Globalizing Women's Cinema". 

• Anne Friedberg, Conversation on her book "The Virtual Window" Video Lecture, 2008-09-23
• Christophe Dupin, BFI (part 1) Video Lecture, 2008-09-24 
• D.N. Rodowick, An Elegy for Theory Video Lecture, 2008-09-24 
• Dominique Chateau - Do Film Studies Form a Discipline Video Lecture, 2009-06-18
• Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, BFI (part 2) Video Lecture, 2008-09-24
• Jacqueline Stewart, The Politics of Film Archiving (part one) Video Lecture, 2009-04-14
• Jacqueline Stewart, The Politics of Film Archiving (part two) Video Lecture, 2009-04-14 
• Keepers of the frame (J.Stewart presentation) Video Lecture, 2008-12-09
• Lee Grieveson, Cinema Studies and the Conduct of Conduct Video Lecture, 2008-09-24 
• Marc Furstenau, Design and Use Video Lecture, 2008-09-23 
• Michael Zryd, Experimental film as Pedagogical Cinema Video Lecture, 2008-10-21 
• Patricia White, Globalizing Women's Cinema Video Lecture, 2008-09-24

Media History Digital Library

It has been brilliantly publicised already, but Film Studies For Free wanted to make sure all its readers were alerted to the launch of an amazing new website for the Media History Digital Library, an excellent non-profit organisation that, for a good while now, in conjunction with the Internet Archive, has been working to digitize and open up full public access to collections of classic film and media periodicals that belong in the public domain.

On the site, you will find access to over 200,000 digitized pages of public domain media industry trade papers and fan magazines, including Moving Picture World (1912-1918), Film Daily (1918-1936), Photoplay (1917-1940), Radio Broadcast (1922-1930), and much more.

As well as its collections, the new website sports a great blog by MHDL Founder and Director David Pierce, and it also has its own Facebook page.

You are also encouraged to support this brilliant project with sponsorship. As such brilliance doesn't just come about by accident, nor can it possibly come about for free, FSFF strongly urges you to think about supporting this work financially, especially if you know that you, or your institution, are likely to benefit to any great degree from access to these wonderful resources.

On Bill Douglas, Scottish Cinema and Magical Film Archives

Bill Douglas 'My Childhood' Masterclass with Mamoun Hassan (video by Sherief Hassan)

Film Studies For Free today presents an entry about Bill Douglas, one of the most interesting Scottish filmmakers ever, and a highly likely influence on anyone interesting working in that field today -- in FSFF's undoubtedly Sassenach view, that would include, inter alia, fine film folk like Lynne Ramsay, Peter Mullan, David MacKenzie, and Gillies MacKinnon (plus, perhaps, the otherwise English Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows).

Douglas was known especially for his amazing Trilogy (My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), and My Way Home (1978)), as well as for the wonderful 1987 film Comrades. But his lifelong collection of cinema artifacts and memorabilia also went on to form the basis of one of the most significant cinema archives in the world, named after him, at the University of Exeter. The Bill Douglas Centre also looks after one of the most important online and openly accessible cinematic archives, too: Everyone's Virtual Exhibition (EVE). If you are so inclined, you may very much like to interact with the BDC at Facebook. 

The particular occasion for this entry is an upcoming symposium on Douglas's work at the University of Exeter taking place this week on Friday September 23. There are papers from eminent scholars Karen Lury, Andrew Noble, Brian Hoyle, Jonny Murray and Paul Newland and from filmmaker Sean Martin and the BDC's principal donor, Peter Jewell, on all aspects of Douglas's work; the Trilogy, Comrades, his unmade scripts, and his collection. There will also be the first ever screening of Charlie Chaplin Lived Here, Bill and Peter's 8mm film made in 1966. The event is free but please register in advance by email. The full programme of papers is available here.

FSFF has assembled some great, freely accessible resources below, including links to work on Scottish cinema and also on film archiving. The goodies include a highly informative and clip-filled 2006 documentary "Intent on Getting the Image" about Bill Douglas's life and career, edited by Stuart Eade and produced and directed by Andy Kimpton-Nye.

At the very foot of the post is a video about the incredibly valuable work of the Bill Douglas Centre. FSFF salutes you!

On Bill Douglas's Films, and related Scottish cinema:

• Bill Douglas entry at BFI Screenonline 
• Bill Douglas: A Brief Biography', Bill Douglas Centre website

• Michael Atkinson, 'Mr. Vengeance: Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas's autobiographical trilogy', Moving Image Source, September 22, 2008
• Neil Blain, 'The Scottish Dimension in Film and Television', Scottish Life and Society: Transport and Communications, A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology, Volume 8, pp. 768 - 792
• Simon Brown, '“Anywhere but Scotland?” Transnationalism and New Scottish Cinema', International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 2011
• Yannick Deplaedt, 'Bill Douglas, ou la mémoire au cinéma' [in French], Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, journal of School of Foreign Languages, 2010 (39), 91-117, 2010-08
• Ian Goode, 'Different Trajectories: Europe and Scotland in Recent Scottish Cinema', PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, July 2007
• Rhys Graham, 'The Glimpse Given Life: An Elegy for Bill Douglas'Senses of Cinema, Issue 10, 2000
• Lynne A. Hibberd, Creative industries policy and practice. a study of BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009
• Michael McCracken, 'Lowest of the Low: Scenes of Shame and Self-Depreciation in Contemporary Scottish Cinema', MA Thesis, University of North Texas, May 2008
• Christopher Meir, Underwriting national sovereignty?: policy, the market and Scottish cinema, 1982- present, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007
• Catherine M. Munroe, From Highlander to Hard Man: Representations of Scottish Masculinity in 1990s Cinema, Masters Thesis, York University, Ontario, 2000
• Sarah Neely, Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture: fiction to film. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003
• Beatriz Oria Gómez, 'Imagining Scotland: Local Hero (1983) and Kailyardism', Bells: Barcelona English language and literature studies; Vol.: 17, 2008
• Takato Seino, Realism and Representations of the Working Class in Contemporary British Cinema, MPhil Thesis, DeMontfort University, 2010
• Linda Wood, British Films (London: BFI, 1983)

On Archive and Online Repository Matters, etc.:

• Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello, 'Introduction: Verbal and Visual Interactions in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 5 (2007)
• Fergus Cooke, 'Questions of Authorship and Audience: A Study of Artefacts Related to the Film Rebecca (1940)', Bill Douglas Centre, [date unknown] 
• Jessica Gardner, Michelle Allen, Dominic Prosser, and Helen Hanson, 'E-learning at the University of Exeter Library', SCONUL FOCUS, 2005 (RTF)
• Catherine Owen, Tony Pearson, Stephen Arnold, 'Meeting the Challenge of Film Research in the Electronic Age', D-Lib Magazine, Volume 6 Number 3, March 2000
• Duncan Petrie, 'The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture: A Report for Screen', 1999
• John Plunkett, 'DIGITISATION AND MATERIALITY FORUM From Optical to Digital (and back again)', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 6 (2008) 
• Lisa Stead, Audiences from the Film Archive: Women's Writing and Silent Cinema', Scope, Issue 17, June 2010

Christine Sprengler, 'Memory and Exile in the Bill Douglas Trilogy' in Cultures of exile: images of displacement By Wendy Ellen Everett, Peter Wagstaff (Oxford: Bergahn Books, 2004)

Graham Smith, 'The Travelling Lanternist and the Uncommercial Traveller; An Experiment in Correspondences', in Literature and the visual media by David Seed (London: DS Brewer, 2005)

Below, in eight short parts, "Intent on Getting the Image",
a documentary about the life and work of Bill Douglas

Below, a video introducing the work of the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter

Unstable Platforms? Film/Moving Image Studies Papers from MIT7 Media in Transition

Teaser image, courtesy of Warner Brothers, from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 out on July 15  (David Yates, 2011). Read Debora Lui's paper on Harry Potter: The Exhibition.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you links to film and moving image related papers from the conference proceedings of the seventh annual Media in Transition conference, which will take place next week, May 13-15, 2011, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Here's the conference's mission statement:

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence. How are we coping with the instability of platforms? 

FSFF particularly liked "“Make Any Room Your TV Room:” Media Mobility, Digital Delivery, and Family Harmony" by film and media studies scholar and blogger extraordinaire Chuck Tryon, film and television scholar and media studies blogger extraordinaire Michael Z. Newman's paper 'The Television Image and the Image of the Television", and "Who Told You You Were Special Edition? The Commercialization of the Aura" by Justin Mack.

There are other great papers online connected to the conference theme of unstable platforms and the experience of mediatic transitions that don't treat moving image topics and you can access those here.

• Teaching Smart Cinema: DVD Add-ons and New Audience Pleasures, Pat Brereton

• The Digitization of Memory at the National Film Board of Canada,
  Morgan Charles

• Promise and Problems: Independent Production in Periods of Change, Aymar Jean Christian

• How New Media Change Our Experience of Stories, Teun Dubbelman

• Making Selves/Making Citizens in the Age of YouTube, Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton

• Virtual Bliss, Analog Horrors: Reading the Imperfect Digital Image in Film and the Video Game, Robert Furze

• Hoarding the Ethereal: How We Have more Things but with Less Clutter, Gayle Gatchalian

• Lessons from the Front: Rio’s War against Drug Trafficking, Participatory Culture and New Media Paradigms for Brazilian Soap Operas, Leandro Gejfinbein, Rejane Spitz

• Stories with Choices: Artist´s Multimedia Narratives, Raivo Kelomees

• Piracy, Circulation, and Cultural Control in Cyber-Age China, Jinying Li

• From the Theater to the Gallery: Harry Potter Engagements within the Museum, Debora Lui

• Who Told You You Were Special Edition? The Commercialization of the Aura
  Justin Mack

• New Platforms: More Choice – Less Freedom?: Mediated Narratives of Human History, Klaus Peter Muller

• Conserving Digital Art for the Ages, Francis Marchese

• The Television Image and the Image of the Television, Michael Newman

• A Story about Random Memories and Fragmented History on Screens, Katharina Niemeyer

• Remembering the Past in the Dynarchive: The State of Knowledge in Digital Archives, Julia Noordegraaf

• Preserving Digital Narratives in an Age of Present-Mindedness: the View from Toronto, Kamilla Pietrzyk

• Indiana Jones Fights the Communist Police: Text Adventures as a Transitional Media Form in the 1980’s Czechoslovakia, Jaroslav Svelch

• "Make Any Room Your TV Room:” Media Mobility, Digital Delivery, and Family Harmony, Chuck Tryon 

Scope on Moving Image Archives

Image from Picturegoer Magazine, archived at the Bill Douglas collection, University of Exeter, as discussed by Lisa Stead in
her article Audiences from the Film Archive: Women's Writing and Silent Cinema.
(Used in accordance with the Original License)

Across the [Using Moving Image Archives] collection, then, scholars ask: how is the archive, as a repository of memory and of the past, used to construct cultural history? What can archives tell us about the formation of particular categories of identity? How can the ephemeral, like the digital, be archived? These are pressing, important questions, and we hope the varied answers here will lead to further reflection and debate upon the place of archival research in the interdisciplinary study of moving images.  From 'Introduction', by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson

Film Studies For Free is still catching up with the busy, Summer, electronic educational traffic. Below are links to all the brilliant items in one of the most significant volumes to be published online in its recent absence on holiday: Scope's latest issue on Using Moving Image Archives, edited by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson.

FULL ISSUE AS e-BOOK

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements and Introduction by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson

Part I: The Archive and the Nation

• Amateur Film and the Interwar English Countryside by Michael McCluskey

• Critical Reflections on Film as a Historical Source: A Case Study of the Military Regime in Brazil by Nina Schneider

Part II: The Ephemerality and Textuality of the Archive

• Audiences from the Film Archive: Women's Writing and Silent Cinema by Lisa Stead

• Archival Realities and Contagious Spaces: Shopgirls, Censorship and the City in Damaged Goods by Heida Johannsdottir

Part III: The Televisual and Digital Archive

• Reading Political Comedy: Yes Minister and Comic Coherence by Matt Crowder

• The Representation by French Television of Building Construction Work in and around Paris During the 1960s by Jacob Paskins

• Archives and Prefigurative Practices: Digital Games Walkthrough Archives as Record and Resource by Daniel Ashton

To Decasia and Back: Film Preservation Studies

Short documentary by Louise Lambert (2005) about Bill Morrison's experimental collage film Decasia (2002). You can also read David Cairn's great entry on this film for the Film Preservation Blogathon here. Further articles on this film are listed below.

Film Studies For Free is very honoured to contribute an entry to the "For the Love of Film! Film Preservation Blogathon". As FSFF readers will already know, this highly worthwhile event has been organised by greatly esteemed bloggers Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand (the latter of the wonderful Ferdy on Film). 

Below are embedded some entertaining and informative online videos about film preservation, and below those are some links to further, openly accessible, scholarly material about this essential but expensive art and science.

If you would like to make a donation to the Blogathon's chosen charitable recipient, the National Film Preservation Foundation (U.S.A), one of the most active and important preservers of film anywhere in the world,  please click here.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support. The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

So you can see for yourselves the important work that the NFPF does, here's the list of films it has helped to preserve so far.

If you would like to contribute to the cause of film preservation in a country other than the U.S. you can find details of all national affiliates to the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) via FIAF's online directory here.

To access a list of all entries to the "For the Love of Film" Blogathon to date please click here. If you need further inspiration to donate or otherwise get involved in this cause, do watch Greg Ferrara's wonderful video commercial for the Blogathon at his website Cinema Styles.

A great introduction to the practicalities of film preservation (with a terrifically entertaining voiceover). It looks at the preservation of Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's 1942 film Listen to Britain at the British Film Institute archive.

 
Treasures of the Academy/"Guardians of History" Documentary Channel/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produce an in-depth look at the importance of film preservation. John Huston's World War 2 documentaries, "Battle of San Pietro" and "Let There Be Light," which have been preserved by DOC and AMPAS, are highlighted as examples of film as living history. Featuring interviews with John Huston's son, Tony, and top directors and historians who shed considerable light on this important, exciting subject. Parts 2 & 3 below.
 
Part 2

Part 3

 
Francis Ford Coppola on Film Preservation and Technology



A sad reminder of the extreme end of celluloid's ephemerality through neglect: "Spectacular footage of 1937 Fox Film storage facility fire in Little Ferry, NJ - Digital/upload by F. Fuchs Filmed by W. Zabransky. Theda Bara and other FOX films/negatives were destroyed."

• International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) The "Journal of Film Preservation" is the Federation's main periodical publication in paper format. It offers a forum for both general and specialised discussion on all theoretical and technical aspects of moving image archival activities. Published twice a year by FIAF Brussels, each issue in paper format will be published one year later on the website. Here's the complete table of contents for the Journal between 1995 and 2008 (in other words, an index to hundreds of online and Open Access articles on this topic!) 
• Matthew Bernstein, 'Exhibition, The Film Reader (review) by Ina Rae Hark', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Eileen Bowser and Ronald S. Magliozzi, Ronald S., 'Film Archiving as a Profession: An Interview with Eileen Bowser', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Caroline Frick, an expert of film conservation, is founder and executive director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) and assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In this [ten minute long video] interview, hosted by Luis Figueroa, she emphasizes the importance of film preservation and mentions how the growth of the film media has had a positive influence in the development of this art of conservation. 
• André Gaudreault, Jean-Marc Lamotte, Tim Barnard tr., 'Fragmentation and Segmentation in the Lumière "Animated Views"', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Karen F. Gracy, 'Documenting the process of film preservation', The Moving Image, 3.1 (2003) x, 1-41
• André Habib, 'Thinking in the Ruins: Around the Films of Bill Morrison', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2004  
• André Habib, 'Cinema from the Ruins of the Archives: Matter and Memory: A Conversation with Bill Morrison', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2004
• Jan-Christopher Horak, 'Film history and film preservation: reconstructing the text of The joyless street (1925)', Screening the Past, November 1998
• Jan-Christopher Horak, 'Cinema 16: Documents toward a History of the Film Society (review) by Scott MacDonald and Amos Vogel', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Mary Ide and Leah Weisse, 'Developing Preservation Appraisal Criteria for a Public Broadcasting Station', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Priya Jaikumar, 'More Than Morality: The Indian Cinematograph Committee Interviews (1927)', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Claudy op den Kemp, 'Decasia: Plus belle que la beauté est la ruine de la beauté', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2004
• Jennie Saxena with contributions from Ken Weissman and James Cozart, 'Preserving African-American Cinema:The Case of The Emperor Jones (1933)', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Christel Schmidt, 'Preserving Pickford: The Mary Pickford Collection and the Library of Congress', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Donato Totaro, 'Review of This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film ed. Roger Smither, Associate editor Catherine A Surowiec. FIAF (Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film), London: United Kingdom, 2002', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2004
• Donato Totaro, 'The Old Made New: the Cinematic Poetry of Bill Morrison', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2004
• Donato Totaro, 'AMIA: The Moving Image Journal: The Association of Moving Image Archivists', Offscreen Journal, April 30, 2003
• Alison Trope, 'Review of Paolo Cherchi Usai's Death of cinema: history, cultural memory, and the digital dark age', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-58
• Patricia Rodden Zimmermann, 'Moviegoing in America (review) by Gregory A. Waller', The Moving Image 3.1 (2003) 42-5
  

For the Love of Film

Some of Film Studies For Free's favourite bloggers, the Self-Styled Siren of the eponymous blog and Marilyn Ferdinand of the wonderful Ferdy on Film (along with Greg Ferrara of the ever so stylish Cinema Styles) have been involved in launching and whipping up deserved support for a Film Preservation Blogathon' aptly titled 'For the Love of Film'.

It will begin next Sunday, on Valentine's Day appropriately. And the idea is for as many people as possible to join in, either with relevant posts on their blogs and/or by reading said posts and contributing financially to the cause of film preservation.

Here's what the Siren has to say:

The fine folks at the National Film Preservation Foundation have really gotten into the spirit, lending us photos and clips from films that their efforts have saved. Do have a look. And they have also arranged for a DVD giveaway, to be distributed after the blogathon via a drawing from those who have contributed to the fund.
     Because of course, the important part is to contribute to the NFPF. Film preservation is an extremely expensive process, and our goal this Valentine's Week is to help along their good work with as much money as we can give. The link to their donation page is right here.
     If everyone who visits these blogs the week of February 14th kicks something, anything, into the kitty, we could be responsible for saving even more films. And wouldn't that be much, much better than the usual run of sad bonbons and wilted bouquets this time of year?

Now FSFF appreciates sad bonbons and wilted bouquets as much as the next sappy blog, but this is a worthy cause indeed! Do visit the Siren's website to see which topics have been proposed so far (including one by the very blog you are currently reading...). Those of you on Facebook can check out the Blogathon's activities there, too.

Archives and Auteurs: conference papers online

Lindsay Anderson meeting the "Queen' ( on the set of Britannia Hospital, 1982)

As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project on 'The Cinema Authorship of Lindsay Anderson' (see detailed project outline), a conference on Archives and Auteurs was held at the University of Stirling from 2nd - 4th September 2009. The conference brought archivists, academics, curators and researchers together to discuss the ways in which the study of the archives of filmmakers and the film industry can provide new perspectives and insights into the history of cinema.

Film Studies For Free was delighted to see that the excellent papers from the conference are now freely accessible online at the Stirling University website.

Direct links to open pdf files are given below. In addition, check out Kathryn Mackenzie's wonderful blog -- Archives and Auteurs -- devoted to this project. A selection of Anderson's photograph albums from 1940s and 1950s have been made available on the University of Stirling Archives flickr pages. These albums provide a rich visual record of Anderson's early years as a filmmaker, documenting the early industrial films he made in Wakefield, his trips to the Cannes Film Festival and his contribution to Free Cinema. Those interested should also read this related article by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, 'Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If.... (1968)', Journal of Screenwriting, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010. And finally, Moving Image Source published a great article on Anderson (August 14, 2008) by Steve Erickson, entitled 'Anarchy in the U.K': 

• Charles Barr, 'About the John Ford Archive'

• Steve Chibnall, 'A Family Film Business: Researching the Adelphi Archive'

• Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, 'The Fairy-Tale Theatre: Reception and Authorship at the Margins of the Ingmar Bergman Archive'

• Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, 'Some Kind of Dialectic: Lindsay Anderson's Artistic Process'  Pt.1

• Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, 'Some Kind of Dialectic: Lindsay Anderson's Artistic Process' Pt.2

• Aaron Hunter, 'Down to the Last Detail: Archival Reconstruction of Hal Ashby's Place in Hollywood Cinema'

• John Izod, 'A bumpy ride on The White Bus'

• Kathryn Mackenzie, 'Britannia Hospital: searching the archives for an audience'   

• Karl Magee, 'O Lucky Man? Investigating the Lindsay Anderson Archive'  

• Brian Neve, 'Archives, process and discourse: Elia Kazan, Baby Doll and 'independent' American filmmaking, 1955-63'

• Andrew Spicer, 'The Creative Producer: The Michael Klinger Papers'

• Sarah  Street, '"Designing for Moving Pictures": Production Designers and/in the Archives'

• Karyn Stuckey, 'Lolita: a journey with Nabokov and Kubrick from the page to the screen'

• Marc Vernet, 'The Ince 'Method' and Film on the West Coast between 1913 and 1917'