Showing posts with label film sound. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film sound. Show all posts

Sunday, 31 December 2017

12 Favourite Online Film Studies Items from 2017, and Other Links of Note!

Last updated January 2, 2018

NE ME QUITTE PAS - a new video assemblage focusing on Brief Encounter and Carol by Catherine Grant

To commemorate the somewhat sad and strange outgoing year -- and very much to welcome in 2018 --- Film Studies For Free has selected, below, twelve of its favourite online film studies items encountered (or re-encountered) in 2017 for your delectation and delight - in no particular order of category.

Some of these involved poignant encounters, associated with terribly untimely passings of pathbreaking scholars (see no. 1). Some are amazing new resources from (already) the most generous of brilliant scholars (see no. 2). All come with associated links, and are well worth your time exploring.

Wishing you a radically happy and active 2018!

With openly accessible love (and a brand new video, above) from FSFF xx

P.S. Remember to follow Film Studies For Free on Twitter and Facebook for frequent news and links.



1.
Favourite Online Lecture


Hannah Frank's brilliant illustrated lecture from 2014 "The Traces of Their Hands: Women’s Work at American Animation Studios, 1928-1961" at the Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies event, Department of Performance Studies New York University April 11–13, 2014. 

Dr. Frank tragically died on August 28, 2017, at the age of 33. She was one of the most original, accomplished and promising scholars of her generation. She will be hugely missed but much remembered.



See Hannah Frank's Vimeo account; and her Google Scholar citations;

Also see the following tributes to Dr. Frank:

2.
Favourite new website

http://www.filmcritic.com.au/


"Long awaited" doesn't even get close to describing film critic and scholar extraordinaire Adrian Martin's website project to gather much of his published film criticism work and offer it up for free! But it arrived in 2017, starting with over 2000 entries to amazing pieces of writing and thinking, which are being added to every week!

Titled FILM CRITIC: ADRIAN MARTIN, the website also points to a connected 'Patreon' campaign to raise some funds to help keep it maintained and regularly updated. FSFF's author has signed up to do just that.

It's not every day that one of the world's leading writers about film gives away quite so much of his lifetime's work to the public domain. Good on ya, and thank you, Adrian!

3.
Favourite Film and Media Studies Podcast

Film and Media Studies podcasts continued to delight us in 2017. The following three (listed in alphabetical order) tied for their place as FSFF's favourite.
http://www.aca-media.org

http://www.cinematologists.com


http://www.thecinephiliacs.net


Also, check out new podcast on the block:
Eavesdropping at the Movies by Jose Arroyo and Michael Glass



4.
Favourite longstanding website


http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/

January 2017 entries:
How LA LA LAND is made
My girl Friday, and his, and yours
Fantasy, flashbacks, and what-ifs: 2016 pays off the past
February 2017 entries:
Anybody but Griffith
Oscar’s Siren song 3: A guest post by Jeff Smith
LA LA LAND: Singin’ in the sun
All my objections to Trump won’t fit on one blog
March 2017 entries:
Going inside by staying outside: L’AVVENTURA on the Criterion Channel
My cover is blown
The Oscars’ Best Picture and other Best Picture
Waldo Lydecker, James Schamus, and 1910s movie storytelling
April 2017 entries:
Film noir, a hundred years ago
Wisconsin Film Festival: Cutting to the chase, and away from it
Wisconsin Fim Festival: An unexpected gem, a Zucchini, and a farewell
May 2017 entries:
Three women of Cannes: A guest entry by Kelley Conway
Ladies at all levels
Wayward ways and roads not taken
Good morning from Ozuland
June 2017 entries:
Ritrovato 2017: Drinking from the firehose
Grand motel
James Agee: Astonishing excellence: A guest post by Charles Maland
FilmStruck and Criterion: Now Roku-ready
Thrill me!
July 2017 entries:
MONSIEUR VERDOUX: Lethal Lothario
Books not so briefly noted
We do film, dammit: Charlie Keil interviews us
Ritrovato 2017: Many faces, many places
Ritrovato 2017: An embarrassment of riches
August 2017 entries:
Venice 2017: Early days
Fassbinder’s figures: Jeff Smith on ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL
Is there a blog in this class? 2017
DUNKIRK Part 1: Straight to the good stuff
DUNKIRK Part 2: The art film as event movie
September 2017 entries:
Mmm, M good
Lubitsch redoes Lubitsch
REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD: Out of the past
Venice 2017: Crimes, no misdemeanors
Venice 2017: Martel’s drama of expectations
Venice 2017: College days
Venice 2017: Hunting Golden Lions
Venice 2017: Sensory Saturday; or, what puts the Virtual in VR?
Venice 2017: Lubitsch and Pickford, finally together again
October 2017 entries:
Biomechanics goes to the Big House: BRUTE FORCE on the Criterion Channel
Women, Oscars, and power
REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD comes to Astoria
One last big job: How heist movies tell their stories
REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD: Post-partum downs and ups
THE LOST WORLD refound, piece by piece
November 2017 entries:
Taika Waititi: The very model of a modern movie-maker
Time-shifting: THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE on the Criterion Channel
Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone: The 1910s tonight
The Fabulous Forties once more: REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD spreads out on the Net
The Celestial Arthouse: FilmStruck and Criterion Channel with an offer hard to refuse
Bill Morrison’s lyrical tale of loss, destruction, and (sometimes) recovery
Dreyer, and more, in Houghton
December 2017 entries:
The ten best films of … 1927
The Boy’s life: Harold Lloyd’s GIRL SHY on the Criterion Channel
Patchwork imagination: Lee Kwangkuk’s framed and frayed stories


5.
Favourite Online Film Studies Journal

http://www.thecine-files.com


https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/

A tie this year between The Cine-Files, which brings some truly wonderful material online, year after year, thanks largely to the amazing talents of Editor-in-Chief Tracy Cox-Stanton, and Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, similarly run by a passionate team of academics, which introduced a brilliant new audiovisual essay section!

Also see this list!

FSFF is very much looking forward to the publication of a new Jump Cut issue in Spring 2018 following on from the very sad loss of one of its pioneering editors, Chuck Kleinhans, to whom this blog dedicated its previous entry in tribute. 



6.
Favourite Video Essay on a Film Studies Topic

Chloé Galibert-Laîné's desktop documentary My crush was a superstar


This was at the the top of my top ten picks in the end of year Sight and Sound poll: "The best video essays of 2017" expertly and painstakingly gathered by Kevin B. Lee and David Verdeure.

Also check out this top 17 list curated by Jacob Oller for the ONE PERFECT SHOT (now FILM SCHOOL REJECTS) website. 


7.
Favourite video essayist

A two-way tie between:

Cristina Alvarez López and Adrian Martin for MUBI, Filmkrant, and themselves (see also this great video interview with them by Julia Vassilieva from Monash Film and Screen Studies);


Oswald Iten of FILMBULLETIN and other sites 




8.
Favourite video essay publisher/curator
(ahem...after [in]Transition and Audiovisualcy....)


Filmscalpel http://www.filmscalpel.com




9.
Best online scholarly collaboration between a filmmaker and a film scholar (who is also a filmmaker!)





10.
Best open access eBook appearing online in 2017

Two-way split between:

Farocki/Godard. Film as Theory by Volker Pantenburg

and


Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures 
edited by Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers


11.
Favourite online article:


Nina Menkes’s article "The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vacuum," FILMMAKER Magazine’s most popular post in 2017. Menkes' brilliantly uses the work of Laura Mulvey. http://filmmakermagazine.com/103801-the-visual-language-of-oppression-harvey-wasnt-working-in-a-vacuum/


12.
Favourite Film Studies Related Instagram Account:

Fictitious Interiors Curated by Davide Rapp
https://www.instagram.com/fictitiousinteriors/



And finally...

Some very very very  honourable mentions

  • Best Facebook page for Film and Media Studies in 2017: Teaching Media 
  • For its continued brilliance and generosity: Shane Denson's medieninitiative website
  • Best historiographical video essay series: The Per una controstoria del cinema italiano/Towards a Counter History of Italian Cinema project organised by Filmidée and Chiara Grizzaffi with multiple videos and authors. Watch the trailer here.
More to follow as FSFF remembers further 2017 links of great note!

 UPDATES:

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Monday, 1 June 2015

THE CINE-FILES on Film Sound (Chion, Flinn, Beck) & FRAMES CINEMA JOURNAL on "Conflicting Images, Contested Realities"

Screenshot from Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). You can read Mack Hagood's article “The Tinnitus Trope: Acoustic Trauma in Narrative Film”, which refers to this film)

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to rapidly relay news to its readers of two new open access film journal issues: The Cine-Files (8, 2015) on Film Sound and Frames Cinema Journal, Conflicting Images,Contested Realities (7, 2015). Both volumes boast truly magnificent contents, but the Sound Dossier and Issue at The Cine-Files is something really special, with contributions from the likes of Michel Chion, Caryl Flinn, Jay Beck and Kate Lacey among many other luminaries.

FSFF's author also contributed to this excellent issue - on the emergent focus on film sound, music and listening in audiovisual essays.




Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 7, June 2015 on Conflicting Images,Contested Realities, (click here to access all the below contents)

Contents
  • Conflicting Images, Contested Realities: An Introduction to Frames 7 by Eileen Rositzka and Amber Shields
Feature Articles
  • "Goya on his Shoulders: Tim Hetherington, Genre Memory, and the Body at Risk" by Robert Burgoyne and Eileen Rositzka
  • "New Ethical Questions and Social Media: Young People’s Construction of Holocaust Memory Online" by Victoria Grace Walden
  • "The War Tapes and the Poetics of Affect of the Hollywood War Film Genre" by Cilli Pogodda and Danny Gronmaier
  • "A Revolution for Memory: Reproductions of a Communist Utopia through Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain and Posters from the Cultural Revolution" by Nathan To
  • "The Long Life of Belgian WWI Documentaries in the Interwar Period" by Natalia Stachura
  • "'Choirs of Wailing Shells': Poetic and Musical Engagements in Derek Jarman’s War Requiem –between Documentary and Fiction" by Caroline Perret
Point of View
  • "Matricídio, or Queerness Explained to My Mother" by Diego Costa
  • "Bollywood Bodies: Turning the Gaze from Babes to Boys and Back Again in Farah Khan’s Happy New Year" by Amber Shields
  • "Civil War Photography and the Contemporary War Film" by John Trafton
  • "Argentine Documentaries on the Malvinas (Falklands) War: Between Testimony and Televisual Archive" by Mirta Varela
  • "The British Docudramas of the Falklands War" by Georges Fournier
Book Reviews
  • In Contrast: Croatian Film Today by Ana Grgić
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Saturday, 28 June 2014

NECSUS Issue 5 on Traces: Kracauer, Carax, Farocki, Elsaesser, mobile interfaces, film sound and much more

Frame grab from Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2013). Read Saige Walton's article on this film "The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in Holy Motors" in the Spring 2014 issue of NECSUS. Pt 1 of the LOLA
dossier of the film is here; pt 2 here.

Film Studies For Free had such a great time at the conference of the Network for European Cinema and Media Studies conference in Milan last week that it is a little delayed in bringing its readers news of the publication of the latest issue of this organisation's wonderful Open Access journal NECSUS. The great table of contents is given below.

More will be forthcoming from FSFF about the Milan conference in a few days (including the recording of a wonderful interview gathered there...). But one of the hottest news items from the conference is that video essayists Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López will develop and edit a new video essay section for NECSUS, to debut in the Autumn 2014 issue. More details about this very welcome development are given here.


Features:
Special section: Traces
Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier - NECS Publication Committee)
Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist - Film Festival Research Network)
Exhibition reviews:
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Saturday, 8 June 2013

CINEPHILE 8.1 on the Voice-Over in Cinema

Frame grab from Borom Sarret/The Wagoner (Ousmane Sembène,1963). Read Alexander Fisher's article on Sembène's use of voice-over in this film in the latest issue of Cinephile
While it is true that film has been historically considered an image-centred medium, the fact that hearing plays as much a role in perceiving the motion picture as seeing does, transcends it beyond a mere visual art. Furthermore, as noted sound theorist Michel Chion asserts in The Voice in Cinema, “the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that contains it.” Therefore, studying parts of the cinema in which the voice gains particular significance is not only justified, but necessary. This issue of Cinephile revolves around diverse applications and functions of the voices in fiction films, whose sources are absent from the image frame.

Theoretical approaches to the filmic voice were only developed in the 1980s, and as the works cited in the articles here indicate, at least in the case of off-screen voices and voice-over, they have not been properly updated. One goal of this collection has been to explore various demonstrations of voice-over both in a more contemporary scope and on a more international scale. The main concern of each of the following five articles is the voice-over, showing how concentrating on this under-appreciated technique can lead to bigger conclusions about films and filmmakers. [Editorial Introduction, Cinephile, 8.1, 2013]

Today, Film Studies For Free hails the online publication (earlier this year) of volume 8.1 of Cinephile, the University of British Columbia's on and offline film journal. The special topic on this occasion is the cinematic voice-over and there are marvellous essays on it by Sarah Kozloff (author of the classic studies of VOs and film sound Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film [1988] and Overhearing Film Dialogue [2000]), Stephen Teo, Carl Laamanen, Laura Beadling and Alexander Fisher.

You can download a large PDF of this beautifully illustrated issue from this webpage. The featured contents are as follows
  • 'About a Clueless Boy and Girl: Voice-Over in Romantic Comedy Today' by Sarah Kozloff
  • 'What Does God Hear? Terrence Malick, Voice-Over, and The Tree of Life' by Carl Laamanen
  • 'Native American Filmmakers Reclaiming Voices: Innovative Voice-Overs in Chris Eyre’s Skins' by Laura Beadling
  • 'The Voice-Over as an Integrating Tool of Word and Image' by Stephen Teo
  • 'Voice-Over, Narrative Agency, and Oral Culture: Ousmane Sembène’s Borom Sarret' by Alexander Fisher
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Monday, 18 March 2013

New issue of SCOPE! Performance and Sound, Lynne Ramsay, Contemporary Hollywood, Film Projection, Surrealism

Frame grab from Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)

Film Studies For Free is thrilled, as ever, to pass on news of a new issue of SCOPE: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies.

The February 2013 issue is packed with goodness, but FSFF particularly liked Sarah Artt's wonderful article on Lynne Ramsay's 2002 film Morvern Callar. This essay will come in very handy in preparation for an event at Birkbeck, University of London, on May 28 when FSFF's author will discuss this film in the first of a great series of explorations of cinematic Itinerancy, Dislocation, Nomadic Subjects

SCOPE: Issue 25 February 2013

Articles

Book Reviews
All Book Reviews
Conference Reports

All Conference Reports
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Wednesday, 8 August 2012

ALPHAVILLE Issue 3: Sound, Voice and Music

Framegrab from Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978)
In his discussion of the work of Hal Ashby ['When is the Now in the Here and There?'], Aaron Hunter contributes to the emerging body of scholarship on the technique of “trans-diegesis”. Taking Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) as a case study, Hunter shows how Ashby’s use of trans-diegetic music—music that crosses narrative layers—forms part of a consistently playful approach to cinematic form and functions on several levels: as a tool that allows for a merger between moments in time, as a device to create a transition between incongruent events within the diegesis, or as mechanism to create a temporal confluence between apparently sequential events. [Alphaville, 3, 2012 Editorial by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine]
 
Once again, Film Studies For Free salutes the online journal Alphaville. Its latest issue, just out, treats the important topic of sound, voice and music in film and television and boasts some excellent contributions.

FSFF enjoyed them all, but particularly liked Michael Dwyer's The Same Old Songs in Reagan-Era Teen Film and Michael Charlton's Performing Gender in the Studio and Postmodern Musical, along with the discussion of Hal Ashby's film by Aaron Hunter. There are also some great book reviews and rewarding conference reports, too, perhaps most notably James MacDowell's detailed discussion of  The End Of…? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures.

All the contents are linked to below.


Alphaville, Issue 3, Summer 2012
Sound, Voice, Music Edited by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine

Editorial by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Christopher Morris and Jessica Shine
Book Reviews Edited by Jill Murphy
Reports Edited by Ian Murphy
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Monday, 12 March 2012

Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison

Garden of Forking Paths?
A real-time space for comparison of a sequence in the sound and silent versions of Hitchcock's BLACKMAIL
(Video edited by Catherine Grant)
 
Having begun production as a silent film, the studio, British International Pictures, decided to convert [Blackmail (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)] to sound during shooting. A silent version was released [probably only in Britain] for theaters not equipped for sound (at 6740 feet), with the sound version (7136 feet) released at the same time.[*] The silent version still exists in the British Film Institute collection.[**] [Blackmail Wikipedia entry, last accessed March 12, 2012]
Critic and historian Charles Barr, in his 1976 article "Blackmail: Silent and Sound", in which he closely compares the two versions, notes that the silent version shows Hitchcock striving to escape a 'theatrical' style in which the action is generally viewed face on, with the camera occupying the position of the 'fourth wall'. In a theatre, this represents the position of the proscenium arch, which marks the boundary between a conventional stage and the audience.
     In the silent version, Hitchcock experimented with changing the position of the camera within a scene, and tried to avoid 'face-on' set-ups, that is, where the camera is placed at ninety degrees to the action. Because of the limitations of sound at this early stage - for example the need to position the microphone where it can pick up all of the actors in the scene but cannot be seen - Hitchcock was obliged to adopt a less experimental approach in the framing of the sound version. [Mark Duguid, 'Hitchcock's Style', BFI Screenonline]
Although 1929 was rather late for a "first" sound film, the delay enabled Hitchcock to produce an advanced meditation on the possible uses of sound. The text incorporates silent footage (lifted whole from the original silent version, made immediately prior to the sound version), which allows for a series of comparisons/contrasts between sound and silents/silence. The conceit of this early sound film is an attempt to keep a man silent (paying off a blackmailer). The heroine spends over a third of the film virtually speechless. When she finally speaks, her boyfriend urges her to keep quiet. The dialogue is laughably banal, yet the right word can cut like a knife. The opening scene, an exciting silent chase, is immediately contrasted with a poorly dubbed, confusingly cut dialogue scene that seems as if it will never end. But before we glibly assume silents were "better" movies, sound becomes a moral force, while silence is linked with corruption and moral lassitude.
     The text's position on "sound plus image" versus "image alone" is carefully paralleled with the depiction of Alice. Thematically, she veers from one extreme to the other. She is introduced as a chatterbox. After a violent assault, she becomes almost catatonic. Finally, she accepts speech as a moral imperative, achieving maturity and the audience's respect before slipping back under patriarchal control and enforced silence. Alice White becomes Hitchcock's personification of the course the sound film must take. [Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 119]
Hitchcock first makes us aware that he is distorting the sound track subjectively when he exaggerates the loudness of bird chirpings to stress Alice's agitation on the morning after the murder. When the mother enters Alice's bedroom to wake her, she uncovers the cage of Alice's canary. Once the mother leaves the room, the bird's chirping is loudly insistent while the girl takes off the clothes she wore the night before and puts on fresh ones. The chirps are loudest, unnaturally so, when she is looking at herself in the mirror, the most "interior" action she performs while dressing. The sound reminds us of the tiny, birdlike jerkings that the girl made immediately after stabbing the artist. Just after the knife sequence there is another subjective distortion of sound, when a customer rings a bell as he enters the store. We are in the breakfast parlor, and yet the bell resonates much more loudly than it does elsewhere in the film. The camera is on a close-up of Alice's face to indicate that it is her point of view, once again, from which we hear.
     In a sense the use of bird noises in the bedroom scene should be distinguished from the other techniques mentioned here. Whereas aural restriction and distortion of loudness are related to character point of view, the choice specifically of bird sounds has a particular meaning for Hitchcock independent of the film. This sequence marks the beginning of an ongoing association of murder and bird noises in Hitchcock's mind that accrues meaning from film to film, from Blackmail and Murder through Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and Psycho, and culminates in The Birds. [Elizabeth Weiss, 'Chapter 2: First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder' in The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcock's Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982) p. 46]

One of the elements that Film Studies For Free appreciates most about online audiovisual film studies (film studies in digital video forms) are the phenomenological possibilities they offer viewers for the experiencing of moving image and sound juxtapositions in real time. We can synchronously feel, as well as know about, the comparisons they make. In other words, unlike written texts, they don't have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us.

Embedded above is FSFF's homemade example of this kind of simple, more or less medium-specific, eloquence: a real-time video juxtaposition, made for the purposes of scholarly comparison, of corresponding sequences from the silent and sound versions of Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929). It is a work intended to supplement the contribution of an earlier blog entry here, entitled Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema in which the two sequences were separately embedded.

But it is also intended to publicise FSFF's support, as ever, for the very relevant For the Love of Film Preservation Blogathon which will take place this year between May 13-18, 2012 . The blogathon has a Hitchcock theme and will support an important film preservation and dissemination project focusing on an early 'Hitchcock film': The White Shadow (1923).

You can read more about the blogathon below, and much more about it at the linked-to websites. But suffice to say this may not be the last Hitchcockian video study here at Film Studies For Free this Spring!
It's time to reveal our fundraising project for 2012: Online streaming and recording of the new score for THE WHITE SHADOW, directed by Graham Cutts and everything else done by Alfred Hitchcock. It's all about access this year, folks. [For the Love of Film Preservation Blogathon Facebook page, February 1, 2012]
The good people at National Film Preservation Foundation are committed to making many of the films they have rescued available for cost-free viewing by streaming them on their website. But online hosting ain’t cheap. NFPF estimates that it will cost $15,000 to stream The White Shadow for four months and record the score. It is the mission of this year’s For the Love of Film Blogathon to raise that money so that anyone with access to a computer can watch this amazing early film that offered Hitchcock a chance to learn his craft, with a score that does it justice. [Marilyn Ferdinand introducing the cause supported by this year's For the Love of Film [Hitchcock] Blogathon at her website Ferdy on Films]
v
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Monday, 26 September 2011

Thrilling the Ears: Sound in Hitchcock's cinema


Hitchcock's use of sound in Blackmail and Murder is important in three respects. As historical documents the two films overturn some accepted notions of what was technically possible in filming with immobilized cameras and uneditable sound systems. As personal documents they represent Hitchcock's first major experiments in combining sound and image in ways that would not subordinate pictures to dialogue. As films that extend Hitchcock's expressionistic interests into the sound era, they reveal Hitchcock's earliest efforts to use aural techniques to convey a character's feelings. In addition, Blackmail already establishes Hitchcock's predilection for integrating music and sound effects with plot and theme, and it introduces most of his favorite aural motifs. Both films are interesting historically, but Blackmail is the more successful work of art because its aural techniques and motifs are an integral part of a stylistic whole. [Elisabeth Weis, Chapter 2: "First Experiments with Sound: Blackmail and Murder", in The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcocks Soundtrack (Rutherford, Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 28]
A new academic year is upon us and Film Studies For Free's author is very happily gearing up to teach, inter alia, Alfred Hitchcock's film Blackmail for the umpteenth time.

It's a truly great teaching topic, one which usually takes off from the fact that Hitchcock converted his silent film to sound during its production. And it has very fruitfully inspired today's entry on scholarship about sound in Hitchcock's cinema.

There are some excellent, openly accessible resources linked to below, most notably Elisabeth Weis's wonderful book on this topic, now added to FSFF's permanent listing of online and freely accessible Film Studies e-books.
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