"[A] dense yet concise study (and experience) of the intricate poetic-cinematic patterning of Andrea Arnold’s 2009 film Fish Tank..." , published as part of the article: “Beyond tautology? Audiovisual Film Criticism”, FILM CRITICISM, Vol. 40, No.1, 2016. For a full list of Grant's online publications on audiovisual film studies to date, click here.
Film Studies For Free's latest entry is replete with openly accessible scholarly goodies. So what's new? Lots of things!
First off, two major journals in our field have moved to new (public) houses! Film Criticism celebrates its fortieth anniversary issue with a move to an open access format, under the expert new editorship of Joseph Tompkins, who, to mark this welcome shift, commissioned lots of scholars to meditate on the ever mutating space of film criticism. Meanwhile, Film-Philosophy, a very long-standing, always fully open access academic journal dedicated to the engagement between film studies and philosophy, is now published by Edinburgh University Press and remains completely open access. A good job by its excellent editor David Sorfa. The new issues of both journals are set out and linked to below, followed by a lovingly compiled list of nine new open access ebooks sourced at Oapen, and a whole host of further delectable items of openly accessible film (and TV) scholarly interest (including three further OA ebooks).
Embedded immediately below, though, are two of the latest instalments in the Fieldnotes series of interviews, with Laura Mulvey and Richard Dyer. Fieldnotes is a Society for Cinema and Media Studies project to conduct, circulate and archive interviews with pioneers of film and media studies. In addition to recognizing the contributions of key scholars, the project also aims to foster knowledge of and interest in the diverse and dynamic developments that have shaped -- and continue to shape -- our expanding field. Fieldnotes is currently led by Haidee Wasson, with the help of a committee comprised of Patrice Petro and Barbara Klinger. It is sponsored both by SCMS and by ARTHEMIS, a Concordia University based research team investigating the history and epistemology of moving image studies.
The full list of Fieldnotes interviewees, to date, is given below - all interviews are accessible here:
Francesco Cassetti interviewed by Luca Caminati; John Caughie interviewed by Haidee Wasson; Mary Ann Doane interviewed by Patrice Petro; Richard Dyer interviewed by Barbara Klinger; Thomas Elsaesser interviewed by Patrice Petro; Lucy Fischer interviewed by Paula Massud; Tom Gunning interviewed by Scott Curtis; Gertrud Koch interviewed by Robin Curtis; Scott MacDonald interviewed by Joan Hawkins; Laura Mulvey interviewed by Catherine Grant; James Naremore interviewed by Jake Smith; Ted Perry interviewed by Christian Keathley; Janet Staiger interviewed by Charles Acland; Linda Williams interviewed by Tom Waugh.
Film Criticism, 40.1, 2016.
Now OPEN ACCESS and online at: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc?page=home (will shortly be accessible also at its existing URL: http://filmcriticism.allegheny.edu)
- Editor's Note: Film Criticism—The Reboot Tompkins, Joe
- Ethics and Digital Film Aaron, Michele
- Representations of Arabs, Muslims, and Iranians in an Era of Complex Characters and Storylines Alsultany, Evelyn
- “Untitled”: Black Sounds and Music Video as an Object of Study Ball, Kevin D.
- A Case for Close Analysis Belton, John
- Confessions of a Platform Agnostic, or Film Criticism after Film Benson-Allott, Caitlin
- The Film Critic Between Theory and Practice; (Or: What Every Film Critic Needs to Know) Buckland, Warren
- Feminist Film Criticism in the 21st Century Cobb, Shelley; Tasker, Yvonne
- The Glare of Images, and the Question of Value Corrigan, Timothy
- The Dysfunction of Criticism at the Present Time Flaxman, Gregory
- Ideology Critique and Film Criticism in the New Media Ecology Flisfeder, Matthew
- Netflix Crit in the Twenty-First Century Frey, Mattias
- On Not Running in Place Ganguly, Keya
- Beyond Tautology? Audio-Visual Film Criticism Grant, Catherine
- “‘What Will Students Ever Do with That?’” Griffin, Hollis
- Film Criticism: the Challenge of the Specific Gunning, Tom
- Digital Auteurism in Film Criticism Jeong, Seung-hoon
- The Academic Film Blog (2000-2015), A Eulogy Klein, Amanda Ann
- What is Evaluative Criticism? Klevan, Andrew
- On the Couch Martin, Adrian
- Binge-Reviews? The Shifting Temporalities of Contemporary TV Criticism McNutt, Myles
- “There’s Something Rotten in Film Criticism, and His Name is, Regrettably, Not Johnny” Metz, Walter
- “Witness, Worker, Mercenary: Race and Labor in the New Culture Industries” Mukherjee, Roopali
- GIFs: The Attainable Text Newman, Michael Z.
- The Task of the Film Critic in Times of Streaming Video Niessen, Niels
- The Futures-Market for Film Criticism Polan, Dana
- The Power of Black Film Criticism Reich, Elizabeth
- In This World, Not Above It Rushton, Richard
- Third Cinema Now Saljoughi, Sara
- A Matter of (Informed) Taste Sayad, Cecilia
- Audiovisual Futures Shaviro, Steven
- Art and Realism in a Digital Age Sperling, Joshua
- The More the Change, the More the Same Staiger, Janet
- The Subject of Film Studies Stoddard, Matthew
- The Cinematic Return Verevis, Constantine
- Figures for Figuring Out Yu, Chang-Min
Film-Philosophy, Vol. 20, No. 1, February, 2016:
- What is Film-Philosophy? David Sorfa
- Introduction: Film-Philosophy and a World of Cinemas by David Martin-Jones
- Real Images Flow: Mullā Sadrā Meets Film-Philosophy by Laura U. Marks
- Islam, Consciousness and Early Cinema: Said Nursî and the Cinema of God by Canan Balan
- Trolls, Tigers and Transmodern Ecological Encounters: Enrique Dussel and a Cine-ethics for the Anthropocene by David Martin-Jones
- Non-Cinema: Digital, Ethics, Multitude by William Brown
- Non-Cinema, or The Location of Politics in Film by Lúcia Nagib
- The Filmmaker as Metallurgist: Political Cinema and World Memory by Patricia Pisters
- Sympathy for the Other: Female Solidarity and Postcolonial Subjectivity in Francophone Cinema by Kathleen Scott and Stefanie Van de Peer
9 Open Access eBOOKS sourced at Oapen! (3 more OA ebooks in the list after this!)
- Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, Mirko Tobias Schäfer (eds), Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology
- Sean Cubitt, Dabiel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Digital Light
- Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon, Talking and Listening edited : Essays on the history of sound
- Mireille van Eechoud, The Work of Authorship
- Natalie Edwards, Ben McCann and Peter Poiana (eds), Framing French Culture
- Mattias Frey, The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism. The Anxiety of Authority
- Ilona Hongisto, Soul of the Documentary. Framing, Expression, Ethics
- Maaike Lauwaert, The Place of Play: Toys and Digital Cultures
- Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi (eds), Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge
Assorted links
- An excellent excerpt from Sophie Mayer's important new book Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015)
- A new book by Peter Sutoris on the history of documentary film in India is supported by this website with dozens of films! (Thanks to Anupama Kapse, Rachel Dwyer and Corey Creekmur for alerting us to this amazing resource.)
- Alisa Lebow's magnificent metadocumentary project Filming Revolution features in the online journal Warscapes
- Film scholar Kelley Conway's magnificent lecture on Agnès Varda's LES PLAGES D’AGNÈS/THE BEACHES OF AGNES https://youtu.be/jC7hoJWL2vc and David Bordwell's introduction to her book on the French filmmaker: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/11/23/still-agnes/
- Further fabulous recent entries at Observations on Film Art:
- Pick your protagonist(s)
- Open secrets of classical storytelling: Narrative analysis 101
- They See Dead People [on how ghosts and other unworldly beings are figured in the movies]
- Living in the spotlight and the shadows: Jeff Smith on TRUMBO
- SERIES Journal, a new open access publication devoted to the study of international TV serials. Two issues are up here: http://series.unibo.it/search/titles
- BFI article: "Colour in Film: the 10 best film colour systems"
- The Problem with Disney Movies......
- Adrian Martin's latest FILMKRANT column, on CAROL and SAINT LAURENT
- Free download (PDF) of Nick Aikens's edited collection on the work of artist Hito Steyerl: TOO MUCH WORLD (thanks to Vinzenz Hediger for the link).
- Max Nelson's book review on "The Wonder of Hand-Painted Early Cinema" (via Thomas Groh)
- New video essay by Shane Denson: hijab.key (http://wp.me/p1xJM8-O7): "In part, it's about suture and ideology in Michael Bay's Benghazi movie. But it's also a formal experiment: the video is made completely in Keynote -- but completely automated, no clicking on my part."
- Geoblocking and Global Video Culture, an open-access edited collection on the politics of region control and circumvention in digital medihttp://flavorwire.com/556553/50-films-by-women-you-can-watch-online-right-now?platform=hootsuitea. Eds. Ramon Lobato and James Meese, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2016. To download the PDF, visit this website.
- Website devoted to women animators from the late 1800s to the present. (Via Isabel Stevens and Girish Shambu)
- 'An Intimate Encounter: Negotiating Subtitled Cinema' by Niall Flynn, at Open Library of Humanities
- Via Adrian Martin comes news of the archive of the Australia/New Zealand-focused SCREEN SOUND journal, which has its whole archives (annual issues since 2010) downloadable online.
- All of documentarist John Pilger's films are online!
- A video essay on Andrea Arnold's adaptation of WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Luis Rocha Antunes. Also see a written articulation of this research by him here: http://journals.sfu.ca/vict/index.php/vict/article/view/157/81
- Really interesting piece on recent cinema and screen culture, including ROOM, by Sophie Mayer.
- Interplay: Audiovisual or Videographic Film Studies Research Publications by Catherine Grant, 2012-2015 - all online and open access.
- COLUMBIA FILM LANGUAGE GLOSSARY - Rather useful online resource. (Via Anupama Kapse)
- New Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier at http://TeachingMedia.org! This one is edited by Leah Shafer and Melanie E.S. Kohnen and focuses on Digital Humanities and Media Studies pedagogical crossovers.
- Jordan Cronk with a wonderful interview with Girish Shambu on the new cinephilia and THE NEW CINEPHILIA.
- Great video playlist for the Q&A sessions of the Institute for Contemporary Art's recent "Onwards and Outwards" programme of films made by British women filmmakers. https://www.ica.org.uk/off-site/ica-cinema/onwards-outwards
- 50 Films by Women You Can Watch Online Right Now
- Some interesting videographic experiments introduced and discussed by Jason Mittell.
- Watch Miklós Kiss's latest audiovisual essay: "Denarration in Michael Haneke's funny FUNNY games GAMES"
- 'Letter to Harmony Korine' from Gerard-Jan Claes and Anton Jaeger at the marvellous Sabzian website, which has lots of items of interest (HT Ruben Demasure)
