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

Monday, 28 July 2014

End of July Round Up! Grusin and Kara on the post-cinematic, new ALPHAVILLE, WORLD PICTURE and ANIKI, Keathley, Bellour, Mittell, and Wasko videos, and lots more!

               Do you ever get confused about movies, television, life? You are not alone...
SFR (Swiss Family Robinson [Ken Annakin, 1960]) by Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Film Studies For Free is delighted to present its latest handy round up of links to great online, open access items of film and media scholarly interest! 

New SEQUENCE One essays:
SEQUENCE is delighted to announce the publication of two further individual responses -- by Richard Grusin and Selmin Kara -- to Steven Shaviro’s magisterial article “MELANCHOLIA, Or The Romantic Anti-Sublime”, SEQUENCE 1.1 (2012), the launch essay for PLANET MELANCHOLIA, the inaugural issue of SEQUENCE, REFRAME‘s experimental, peer-reviewed, media, film and music studies serial publication.
    Following Rupert Read’s engagement with Shaviro in SEQUENCE 1.2, which offered a personal, affective (and deeply philosophical) account of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, in their very fine, equally philosophically-informed, contributions Grusin and Kara turn their detailed attention to the questions of "post-cinematic atavism" and "primordigitality" raised by the hybrid analog/digital technical and aesthetic contexts of a number of recent films, including Melancholia as well as Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (2011), Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011), Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) .
    SEQUENCES continues to invite further responses to Shaviro’s article as well as to those which have followed it in the SEQUENCE One thread, as well as to the second issue of SEQUENCE: ‘We Need to Talk about the Maternal Melodrama'.

Video essay on the documentaries of late Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho by Michael Chanan

Video essay on Editing Space and Time in Satoshi Kon's films by Tony Zhou

Network of European Cinema and Media Studies 2014 conference videos and audio:

New issue of ALHAVILLE, Issue 7, 2014, on Corporeal Cinema

New issue of WORLD PICTURE, 9, 2014, on 'Serious'

Great new issue of the Portuguese film studies journal ANIKI (1.2, 2014) w/ LOTS of research published in English, including a dossier on art and cinema, an interview with Jia Zhang-ke and Marshall Deutelbaum's article on Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon.

Updates at David Bordwell and Kristin Thomspon's Observations on Film Art website:

 Girish Shambu's latest blog entry 'On Video Essays, Cinephilia and Affect', which includes lots of great suggestions for further reading and an excellent comments thread

Check out all the updates to Wikipedia as a result of the #SheMustBeWiki, feminist film studies wiki writing event at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, July 25, 2014:

Excellent video on Brian De Palma's cinematic art of looks and looking by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin:

Barbara Flueckiger's important update about her wonderful open access project on Film Colors

Desistfilm Issue 6, 2014
  • Online here: http://desistfilm.com/category/issue-006/
  • PETER WHITEHEAD: REVOLUTION, REVELATION – PINK FLOYD LONDON 1966-1967 By Lu Juejing
  • EMBRACING BY NAOMI KAWASE By Adrian Martin
  • SHAKING TRACKS: THE DOCUMENTARY WAYS IN THE WORK OF KORE-EDA HIROKAZU By Claudia Siefen
  • ON Hi-8/DIGITAL AND THE INTIMATE: THE FILM DIARIES OF ALAIN CAVALIER By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • DAY IS DONE DE THOMAS IMBACH Por Mónica Delgado
  • A REAL DEAD RINGER FOR LOVE. VIDEO FOOL FOR LOVE By Adrian Martin
  • DIALOGUE WITH A WOMAN DEPARTED BY LEO HURWITZ By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • ROUTE ONE/USA DE ROBERT KRAMER Por Nicolás Carrasco
  • VARIACIONES DEL “FILMADOR” EN ALGUNAS PELÍCULAS INDEPENDIENTES Y EXPERIMENTALES DE AMÉRICA LATINA Por Mónica Delgado
  • FEATURED FILMMAKER: JENNIFER REEDER By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • EL DIARIO FÍLMICO EN ESPAÑA, HOY Por Ricardo Adalia Martin
  • NEARSIGHT BY SAUL LEVINE By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Check out this fantastic resource on the work of Chris Marker, including IMMEMORY, Guillaume sightings worldwide, and other gems (link via Via Genevieve Yue and Nico Baumbach):

Innovative, Canada-based, film studies publisher caboose has launched the collaborative on-line project Planetary Projection, introducing some of the world’s remarkable film projectionists. We invite you to help us find a few more, in every corner of the globe, so that they might tell us their stories

Online extract from Madelon Sprenthnether's remarkable book Crying at the Movies:

Great video in which director John Akomfrah talks to Baroness Lola Young about The Stuart Hall Project, which paints a sensitive and emotionally charged portrait of the celebrated cultural theorist.  

For a few more days, enjoy temporary free online access to many articles from Routledge Film and Cinema Studies journals

'I Have to Trust My Intuition': A 40-Minute Chat Between Ingmar Bergman & AFI Film Students at NoFilmSchool:
The "Motherhood Archives" - Irene Lustzig's epic multimedia essay on institutionalization of birth and motherhood:
New ADA: A JOURNAL OF GENDER, NEW MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY issue on Queer Feminist Media Praxis:
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Thursday, 21 June 2012

Pantheon Level Author: In Memory of Andrew Sarris

UNL Film Studies professor Wheeler Winston Dixon describes the auteur theory of filmmaking, 
including the contribution to this theory by Andrew Sarris.You can read Professor Dixon's obituary of Sarris here.
The art of cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scene. Auteur criticism is a reaction against sociological criticism that enthroned the what against the how. However, it would be equally fallacious to enthrone the how against the what. The whole point of meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement. [Andrew Sarris]

Film Studies For Free was really saddened to hear of the death of Andrew Sarris, one of the most influential of all film critics on the academic study of the cinema.

In memory of his huge contribution to film studies, FSFF has begun to gather links to online works by Sarris as well as to studies of his writings and related items. The collection process will continue in the next days.

Meanwhile, David Hudson is very valuably collecting links to online tributes to Sarris at Fandor's Keyframe Daily site. And see the great PressPlay at Indiewire tributes, including a great video essay featuring probably the last recording of Sarris's voice, here.

Keep coming back for updates.
 
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Wednesday, 23 May 2012

Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth



This event on March 30, 2012, was part of: Homage to Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) held at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, to mark the centenary year of the Italian director’s birth organized jointly by the Department of Italian Studies and the Department of Cinema Studies, NYU.
Above: PANEL 1: Richard Allen (NYU), ‘Hitchcock, Antonioni, and the Wandering Woman’ and Karen Pinkus (Cornell), ‘Automation, Autonomia, Anomie’; PANEL 2: John David Rhodes (Sussex), ‘Antonioni and Geopolitical Abstraction’ and Karl Schoonover (Warwick), ‘Antonioni's Toxicology’

Above: PANEL 3 Screening of N.U. (11’, 1948) and discussion with David Forgacs and Ara Merjian (NYU) Matilde Nardelli (UCL) 'Antonioni and the Cultures of Photography’ PANEL 4 Michael Siegel (Brown), ‘From Identificazione to Investigazione: Looking at Looking in Late Antonioni’ Francesco Casetti (Yale), ‘The Remains of the Modern’ PANEL 5 Eugenia Paulicelli (CUNY), David Forgacs (NYU), John David Rhodes (Sussex)
Approaching the figure and work of Michelangelo Antonioni a century after his birth, one is confronted with a number of persistent critical tropes about his oeuvre, with a substantial, if in great part dated, body of critical work and, perhaps, also with the sense that all has already been said and written on the director of the malady of feelings, of filmic slowness and temps mort, of the crisis of the postwar bourgeoisie, of epistemological uncertainties, of modernist difficulty and even boredom, of aestheticism and the hypertrophy of style, of narrative opacity. And yet, Antonioni today powerfully escapes the reach of old categorisations that have attempted to congeal his figure once and for all into an inert monument of modern cinema. His continued influence on world film-makers and the new pressing questions that his films raise today for contemporary audiences call for a renewed critical effort. [Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)]
Despite Antonioni’s deep concerns about scientific logic and any objective representation of reality, in purely formal terms his work is always defined by a clear tension between what I would call on the one hand a documentary impulse, and on the other a drive towards fiction pushed at times to the level of melodrama.
[... H]owever hollowed-out and experimental Antonioni’s works become, they always constitute fictions since they present characters in artificial situations. As Antonioni himself put it, his primary interest lies in the moment when the context or environment suddenly takes on “relief.” Which is to say, his hybrid narratives marked by temporal disjunction, disorientation, black holes, ellipses, and a lack of resolution serve to provide just enough justification for human figuration, however “unnaturally” heightened and stylized, to take hold. This recourse to melodrama, broadly defined, offered Antonioni a means of shortcircuiting and sculpting the Real in slowed-down, distended form in order to capture it as a series of tableaux vivants. [...]
Alert to the tensions in the spatiotemporal relations between people, objects, and events, the director must, according to Antonioni, engage with a “special reality” and be “committed morally in some way.” What this means in practice is dedramatizing the narrative event in order to focus attention on the physical context that both makes it possible but also eludes it. Antonioni propels his protagonists into new or alien environments, and we follow them almost ethnographically as they develop new perceptual powers in order to negotiate their changed conditions'. [James S. Williams, 'The Rhythms of Life: An Appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni, Extreme Aesthete of the Real', Film Quarterly (Fall Issue 2008, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 46-57), pp. 50-52 - my emphasis]
Today, Film Studies For Free gleefully celebrates the publication online of just under seven hours of videoed content from an excellent, recent conference in New York City that its author had really wished she'd been able to attend. Now -- virtually -- she (and you) can! 

The conference took a timely new look at the work of FSFF's favourite Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni one hundred years on from the year of his birth. It followed on from the recent publication of an excellent, similarly inspired, BFI/Palgrave collection of work on Antonioni edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes. 

Rhodes, a highly esteemed (and much loved!) colleague of FSFF's humble scribe, appears in the video frame still at the top of this post, and throughout both embedded videos. He was one of the organisers of, and main contributors to, the NYU conference. A very generous sample excerpt from his and Rascaroli's book may be found here.

To accompany the truly excellent videos, FSFF has assembled a rather fabulous list of links to other online and openly accessible studies of Antonioni's work. If you know of any significant resources missing below, please leave a link in the comments. Grazie!

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Antonioni's birthplace of Ferrara between September 30, 2012 and January 6, 2013, you'll be able to catch an excellent exhibition about his work, which opens following a public celebration of the filmmaker on the day of his birth itself (September 29). You can find more information here. Thanks to Antonioni scholar Ted Perry for his tip off about this event. Do look out for his new book on him which should be out next year.
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Wednesday, 16 June 2010

More Film Authorship Studies: Romero, Welles, Portillo, Mamet, and the studio system

Film Studies For Free brings you some more great essays on film authorship (a favourite topic at this here blog), following the serendipitous discovery that a special issue on that subject by the (normally) subscription only periodical The Velvet Light Trap was chosen to be that journal's free online sample.


Do also check out FSFF's earlier related posts if this is a topic of particular interest: On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theories, , film authorship and Orson Welles. 
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Saturday, 10 April 2010

The thrill of transcendence: Kathryn Bigelow Studies

Updated with video and new links on April 12, 2010
Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan Turner in Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)
[Kathryn] Bigelow’s earliest works are often radical experiments with genres—combinatory, subtractive, subversive, offering a tool for crafting a mode of vital self-reflexive cinema in which the spectator becomes a thrill junkie, like the restless characters in Bigelow’s films. Ultimately, however, the raw exhilaration experienced by Bigelow’s characters must end so they can come to terms with reality and the laws—be they legal or gravitational—that anchor them to society. The later films show an interest in group dynamics as a form of politics or, perhaps, as an ideal of social living contained but not determined by politics. The turning point between these two parts of Bigelow’s career is Strange Days, whose protagonist attempts to wean himself off his addiction to spectacle in order to face the violence of his urban surroundings.
     This is the double bind Bigelow investigates: while thrill is ultimately an alienating form of individualism, the “real world” tends to be a trap, whether confining or merely banal. While Bigelow’s films reveal genre cinema’s promise of glossy escapism to be a dead end, they also pointedly argue that re-engagement with community is tantamount to conformity. One possible escape is offered to Bigelow’s protagonists by seeking out those extreme situations on the bohemian, criminal and physically fraught margins of society, where the rules can be broken and the self fleetingly transcended. Kathryn Bigelow, 'Filmmaking at the Dark Edge of Exhilaration', Harvard Film Archive, 2009
A little while back, Film Studies For Free promised a list of links to openly accessible scholarly essays on the work of filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, recent recipient of the Academy Award for Best Director for Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker (2009; see that film's Press Kit/Production Notes). And now FSFF's Bigelow Study Day has finally arrived - maybe not its longest links list ever, but one full of highest quality material nonetheless. The links follow the wonderful embedded video 'Outlaw Vision: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker' created for The L Magazine by Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz.



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      Wednesday, 17 March 2010

      Dorothy Arzner and female film authorship




      Like some film blogs of great note, Film Studies For Free has been pondering Kathryn Bigelow's recent Oscar for achievement in film directing. All in all, it concurs with Steven Shaviro's assessment in his wonderful recent blogpost on this event:
      Given the Academy’s lame choices for best film and best director over the years, Bigelow’s Oscars can scarcely be credited as a verification or proof of her auteurial status; but I am nonetheless greatly pleased, and indeed thrilled, and indeed a bit amazed, that so singular and powerful an artist has actually (and quite unusually) received this sort of recognition.
      FSFF's very own Bigelow links post is in preparation, but today, in part prompted by an excellent article in the latest issue of Sight & Sound by Sophie Mayer, this blog brings you a little list of links to online and openly accessible scholarly writing touching on the wonderful work of Dorothy Arzner, one of Bigelow's (acclaimed but unrewarded by the Academy) female forbears in the commercially-successful, Hollywood, movie-directing business.

      Like Bigelow, Arzner has been a hugely important figure to feminist film scholars and theorists, and so some of the work below explores her work in that context.






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      Wednesday, 30 September 2009

      Glasgow's Finest: work by Caughie, Geraghty, and great e-theses, too


      Image from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), a film studied in Philip Drake's PhD thesis on Hollywood performance

      It's been a busy month here at Film Studies For Free, but let's end it on a high note. Today's little film and media studies links list is of salient items from Enlighten, the e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow, an institution of which FSFF's author is personally very fond, given its wonderful department of Theatre, Film & Television Studies.

      This research repository houses some true Open-Access treasures by very important authorities in these disciplines, such as a recent item on film authorship by John Caughie, editor (and author of much) of Theories of Authorship, and four articles by Christine Geraghty, one of the most significant figures in British cinema and television studies. There are also some further excellent items by great, younger scholars, like Philip Drake (now a lecturer in the Film, Media, and Journalism Department at the University of Stirling).
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      Monday, 14 September 2009

      New Journal of Screenwriting - Issue 1 Free Online


      Image from Hiroshima mon amour (France, 1959; directed by Alain Resnais, based on a screenplay by Marguerite Duras)

      Film Studies For Free is happy to announce that the first issue of the new Journal of Screenwriting (Volume 1 Number 1 - published by Intellect) has been made freely accessible online. Below are direct links to download the PDF files of articles and reviews. Some great stuff here, FSFF thinks.

      Articles
      Reviews:
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