New Fall 2013 Issue of MEDIASCAPE on "Urban Centers, Media Centers"

Frame grab from The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012). Read José Gallegos' article about this film in the new issue of Mediascape

This issue of Mediascape then is designed to raise pointed questions about the role of the city as a center of both media and cultural production, especially in relation to our experience of mediated reality. The ultimate goal is to ground this larger discourse in a more specific discussion of cinematic space and its transformation in the ever-expanding era of digital media. How do films represent the city in a time of technological change and aesthetic evolution? How has the wholesale implementation of digital technologies impacted the use of space in cinema? And how does the digital era affect the relationship between the off-screen and on-screen spatial environment? Looking at the distinctive aesthetics of urban space, it is our belief, allows for an examination of how we perceive and engage with the iconography of our world. Our intent is to problematize what we understand as the urban, and how strongly it relates to our relationship with contemporary media.

[Matthias Stork and Andrew Young, Mediascape Co-Editors-in-Chief, Introduction to the Fall 2013 issue]

Film Studies For Free would like its readers to head straight on over to the new issue of Mediascape which considers matters of space and mediation. 

FSFF would particularly recommend Matthias Stork's marvellous (and marvellously illustrated) study of the 'Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games', James Gilmore's fascinating essay on The Dark Knight Rises, urban space and the cultural experience of terrorism as mediation, as well as José Gallegos' essay on the Tsunami disaster film The Impossible. The issue also boasts unmissable items in the area of game studies.

Readers may also be interested to know that the excellent Mediascape blog is seeking new contributors on a wide variety of topics. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, or if you would like more information about the blog, please write to Editor-in-Chief Matthias Stork at mstork[at]ucla[dot]edu.

• Moving Through Videogame Cities Bobby Schweizer
• The Impossible – Or How I Learned Thailand Was Filled with European Tourists Jose Gallegos
• Absolute Anxiety Test: Urban Wreckage in The Dark Knight Rises James Gilmore
• Dimensions of the Digital City Oscar Moralde
• Space-Wars: Mapping the Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games Matthias Stork
• Negotiating Transitional Spaces in Classic Games Harrison Gish
• Invisible Walls: Narrativizing Spatial Limitation in Ico and Assassin’s Creed II Bryan Wuest
• Perpetual Game Space in Crime City: Game Design in the Age of Social Network Gaming Andrew Young

Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address and Metalepsis in the Cinema and other Media

          

You can read Tom Brown's essay on the above video here.

 


 

[L]istening back to our conversation, I was worried about how often the two of us [...] said that characters in the film “look at us” – it is absolutely my claim about direct address that the device makes this possible (possible fictionally), though I think one has to be careful and clear about distinguishing between looks “at us” and ones that, though they might be at the camera, don’t quite carry this promise. However, on reflection, I think Catherine’s video essay brings out something that is very clearly in the film and that is how our position as spectators of Los Olvidados is something we are encouraged to reflect on; our “presence” is an active part of the film’s rhetoric. [Tom Brown on his conversation with Catherine Grant in the videos above: Breaking the Fourth Wall Tumblr, April 15, 2013]

As previously announced here, Film Studies For Free's author had the very great pleasure of interviewing Tom Brown, Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College, London, on the subject of direct address in the cinema, a topic he knows a huge amount about as author of one of the very few full length studies completely dedicated to it: Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 

The conversation, recorded on Friday March 1, 2013, has been animated in video by FSFF's author and is presented above in two parts which are preceded by a short compilation video of the moments in Luis Buñuel's 1950 film Los olvidados when actors/characters look into the camera; these instances are discussed in detail in Part Two of the "Cinematic Direct Address" videos. You can read Tom's essay on the first video at his wonderful Tumblr on Direct Address here.

The videos are accompanied below, as is this blog's wont, by a sizeable compendium of links to further online scholarly studies of this (of course not exclusively) cinematic phenomenon.

In the period of time between recording this interview and completing the editing of it for this blog, Leigh Singer's great video 'supercut' on breaking the fourth wall (linked to below) was published, to much merited acclaim, at PressPlay. If you know of any further videographic studies of cinematic direct address, or indeed any other good resources to add to the below list, please let FSFF know about them via the comments.

By the way, if there are any east coast of Ireland-based readers of this blog perusing this paragraph, FSFF's author is gearing up to visit the very fair city of Dublin at the end of this week to give a public lecture and participate in a panel discussion at a free event on digital forms of film and moving image studies at Filmbase in Temple Bar.

Her fellow panel participants will be BF Taylor (Film Studies, Dublin Business School; see his great collection of video essays here), Matthew Causey (Arts Technology Research Lab, Trinity College Dublin), Kylie Jarrett, Lecturer in Multimedia (Centre for Media Studies, NUI Maynooth) and Steven Benedict, Broadcaster, Writer, Producer (and author of some very fine video essays on film himself - watch them here).

It would be lovely to break this blog's own fourth wall and see you there!

• Deborah Allison, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006

• Philip J. Auter and Donald M. Davis, 'When Characters Speak Directly to Viewers: Breaking the Fourth Wall in Television', Journalism Quarterly,Vol. 68, No. 1/2, Spring/Summer 1991

• Lior Barshack, 'Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini', Cardozo Law Review, 31.4, 2010

• Marco Bohr, 'Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography', Dandelion Journal, 2.2, 2011

• 'Breaking The Fourth Wall: Film', TV Tropes (date unknown)

• 'Breaking the Fourth Wall', TV Tropes (date unknown)

• Tom Brown, 'Preface', Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

• Tom Brown, 'A Cinema of Repulsions: Funny Games 1997/2007', Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012

• Tom Brown 'Private Conversations in public: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)', Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012

• Tom Brown, 'Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema', Screens and Stages, May 31, 2012

• Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Film Characters who Look at the Camera Tumblr

• Tom Brown on the YOU LOOKING AT ME? video, Breaking the Fourth Wall Tumblr, April 15, 2013

• William Brown, 'The Pre-Narrative Monstrosity of Images: how images demand narrative', Image [and] Narrative, 12.4, 2011

• Saviour Catania, '“The Beached Verge”: On Filming the Unfilmable in Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet', EnterText, 1.2, 2001

• Ashley Clark, 'Clip Joint: Breaking the Fourth Wall', The Guardian, November 9, 2011

• Kathy Cleland, Image Avatars: self-other encounters in a mediated world, PhD thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 2008

• Steven Conway, 'A Circular Wall? Reformulating the Fourth Wall for Video Games', Gamasutra, 2012

• Theresa Ann Cronin, ' Horrific Subjects: The Morality of Looking in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible', in Disciplining the Spectator: Subjectivity, the Body and Contemporary Spectatorship, PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2010

• Silvia Díaz, 'The Attractions of the "Cinema Attractions" to Female Spectatorship', MA Thesis, Lehigh University, 2004

• Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'It Looks at You: the Returned Gaze of Cinema/Video Reception',  in It Looks at You: The Returned Gaze of Cinema (New York: State University of New York, 1995)

• Thomas Elsaesser, "Performative Self-Contradictions Michael Haneke's Mind Games," in Roy Grundmann (ed), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

• Eric S. Faden, 'The Cyberfilm: Hollywood and Computer Technology,', Strategies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2001

• Alex Gerbaz, 'Direct Address, Ethical Imagination, and Errol Morris’s Interrotron', Film-Philosophy, 12.2, September 2008

• George Godwin, 'Reclaiming the subject-A feminist reading of I've Heard The Mermaids Singing', Cinema Canada, May 1988

• Piers Handling, 'The Diary Films of Mike Rubbo', Cinema Canada, October 1977

• Elizabeth Harnett, 'Breaking the Fourth Wall: Adapting William Shakespeare’s Othello to the Screen', Critical Commons (date unknown)

• Terry Harpold, 'Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture', Game Studies, 7.1, Augist 2007

• Claire Henry, 'Maternal Revenge and Redemption in Postfeminist Rape-Revenge Cinema', in Sheila C. Bibb and Daniel Escandell Montiel (eds), Best Served Cold: Studies on Revenge Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010 

• Jan Jagodzinski, 'Michael Haneke: The Spectatorship of Self-refleXivity; Between Lacan and Deleuze', 'The Scope of Interdisciplinarity' Conference, Center for Integrated Studies, November 2008

• Miklós Kiss, 'Narrative Metalepsis as Diegetic Concept in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)', Acta Univ. Sapientiae Film and Media Studies, 5, 2012

• Tarja Laine, '"What are you looking at and why?" Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) with his audience', Kinoeye, Vol. 4, Issue 1, Mar 2004

• Kendra Preston Leonard, 'Silencing Ophelia: Male Aurality as a Controlling Element in Olivier's Hamlet', Scope, 14, June 2009

• Adrian Martin, 'The Front', World Wide Angle, FilmKrant, July/August 2012

• Kristi McKim, '“A state of loving detachment”: Sally Potter’s Impassioned and Intellectual Cinema', Senses of Cinema, 2006

• Zinaid Meeran, 'Inch'Allah Dimanche vs. Lila dit Ça: Transnational Feminism Counters the Streamlining of Accented Cinema', Mediascape, 1.1, 2007

• Dominique Nasta, 'Rhetorical Figures and Romanian Film Acting: From Pintilie To Mungiu', Close Up: Film and Media Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2013

• Abiodun Olayiwola, 'Beyond Hollywood Formulas: Evolvıng Indigenous Yoruba Film Aesthetic', Cross-Cultural Communication, Vol.7, No.2, 2011

• Karen Pearlman, 'If a dancing figure falls in the forest and nobody sees her...  ', Participations, 7.2, November 2010

• Roberta Pearson, '3—The Histrionic and Verisimilar Codes in the Biograph Films. The Histrionic Code', Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

• Ágnes Pethő, 'Intermediality as Metalepsis in the “Cinécriture” of Agnès Varda', Acta Univ. Sapientiae Film and Media Studies, 3, 2010

• Jared Rapfogel, 'The Cinema of Peter Watkins', Cineaste, 32.2, Spring 2007

• Retinal Echoes, 'Doctor Destouches, Leós Carax, and the "Emotive Account"', MUBI Notebook, April 15, 2013
  

• Teresa Rizzo, 'YouTube, The New Cinema of Attractions' SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 2008

• Leon Saunders Calvert, 'Inception: Film, Dreams and Freud', Offscreen, May 31, 2011

• Cecilia Sayad, 'The Auteur as Fool: Bakhtin, Barthes, and the Screen Performances of Woody Allen and Jean-Luc Godard', Journal of Film and Video, 63.4, Winter 2011

• Leigh Singer and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'VIDEO ESSAY: Breaking the Fourth Wall', PressPlay, March 7, 2013

• Keyan Tomaselli and Maureen Eke, 'Perspectives on Orality in African Cinema', Oral Tradition, 10/1 (1995): 111-128

• Ravi Vasudevan, 'The political culture of address in a "transitional" cinema: Indian popular cinema', Sarai.net, 2006

• Ravi Vasudevan, 'Devotional Transformation: Miracles, Mechanical Artifice, and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema', Postscripts 1.2/1.3 (2005)

• Valentina Vitali, 'Nationalist Hindi Cinema', Kinema, 2, 2004

• Yingjin Zhang, 'Styles, Subjects, and Special Points of View: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary ', LEWI Working Paper Series, 32, 2004

• Siwei Zhou, 'Gender, Image, and Sound in Letter to Jane', CUREJ - College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania, 2008

Studies of the Remediation of Films, Comics and Video Games

Transmedia Synergies - Remediating Films and Video Games from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.
See Matthias Stork's Mediascape, Winter 2013 essay 'Transmedia Synergies – Remediating Films and Video Games', which incorporates this video

                   The Video Game Film from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

This mash-up is a playful offshoot of [Matthias Stork's] research project on the aesthetic intermediality of films and video games [e.g. see above]. Edgar Wright’s seminal film SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (2010, Universal Pictures) effectively illustrates the audiovisual parallels and differences between the two media. It organically integrates the distinctive stylistic flourishes of video game play into the dominant cinematic texture, to the point that the film, particularly in its action sequences, evolves into a subjectively rendered (and relatable) gameplay experience. It thus represents a genuine video game film. This video essay seeks to foreground this affective dimension by heightening the aesthetic strategies of the film. And it is further intended as an homage to the director’s exceptional work.

"The Video Game Film" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

             From the Panel to the Frame: Style and Scott Pilgrim from Drew Morton on Vimeo. Originally published at PressPlay with a great introduction by Matt Zoller Seitz

Film Studies For Free today presents an entry which has long been in preparation. It was originally conceived of especially as a showcase for the above, hugely innovative and informative video essay studies by Matthias Stork and Drew Morton. But it has grown into a veritable font of wonderful links to online and open access studies of the connections between films, comics and video games.

FSFF hopes you enjoy the below list, and if you'd like to add any, as yet missing open access studies to it, please just let this blog know about those in the comments. Thank you! [Please note: FSFF can't publish one submitted suggestion for a non-open access book in the field, one which has no free excerpts. Sorry about that. But, hopefully, that commercial publisher has an advertising budget to compensate for this little blog's interest in other forms of publishing. Thanks anyway.]

Game on!

• Charles R. Acland, 'Avatar as Technological Tentpole', Flow, January 2012
• Maaheen Ahmed and Martin Lund, 'Apocalypse Why? The Neutralisation of the Antichrist Motif in Three Comics Adaptations', SCAN, 9.1, 2012 
• Matthew Bolton, 'Fidelity and Period Aesthetics in Comics Adaptation', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 6.1 (2011)
• Will Brooker, 'Maps of many worlds: Remembering computer game fandom in the 1980s', Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 2 (2009)
• Liam Burke, ''Special Effect: Have film adaptations changed mainstream comics?'', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Rebecca Carlsen, 'Games as Transformative Works', Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 2, 2009
• Josep Catala, 'A Drawing of the World: Documentary and Comic Book', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Stacey Church, 'Remediation and Video Games: Bookwork in Dragon Age: Origins', Emergence: A Journal of Undergraduate Literary Criticism and Creative Research, Vol. 2, 2011
• Damian Duffy, 'Remasters of American Comics: Sequential art as new media in the transformative museum context', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)  
• Markku Eskelinen, 'The Gaming Situation', Game Studies, 1.1, 2001
• Jim Fleury, 'Revenge of the (Angry Video Game) Nerd: James Rolfe and Web 2.0 Fandom', Mediascape, Winter 2012
• Michael Fuchs, '“My name is Alan Wake. I’m a writer.”: Crafting Narrative Complexity in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling', Academia.edu, January 2012
• Robert Furze, 'Virtual Bliss, Analog Horrors: Reading the Imperfect Digital Image in Film and the Video Game', MiT7: Unstable Platforms: the Promise and Peril of Transition, 13-15 May 2011
• Lynn Gelfand, 'Moon Prism Power, Make-Up!': Sailor Moon and the Transformation of the Multiform Story in Modern Media', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Harrison Gish, 'Media Boundaries and Bullet Time: A Hard Boiled Fan Plays Stranglehold', Mediascape, Winter 2012
• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro, No. 51, 2006
• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010
• Christopher Hayton, 'Charlton Comics' Monster Movie Adaptations', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Matthew Hepburn, 'The Technoludic Film: Remediation in Videograme to Film Adaptations', University of Warwick, Unpublished dissertation, January 2012 also see here
• Henry Jenkins, 'Game Design As Narrative Architecture',  in P. Harrington and N. Frup- Waldrop (Eds.), First Person. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002 and also at CMS / MIT, 2004
• Henry Jenkins, 'Transmedia Synergies: Remediating Films and Video Games', Confessions of an Aca-Fan, January 9, 2013
• Jesper Juul, 'Games Telling Stories? - A brief note on games and narratives', Game Studies, 1,1 2001
• Petri Lankoski, 'Goals, Affects, and Empathy in Games', Paper at the Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games, Modena reggio Emilia, Italy, January 25-27, 2007 
• Petri Lankoski, Character-Driven Game Design (Aalto University, 2010)
• Simon Locke, 'Considering comics as medium, art, and culture - the case of From Hell', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Vyshali Manivannan, 'Interplay Amidst the Strangeness and the Charm: Under-language and the Attenuation of Meaning in the Film Adaptation of Watchmen', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.4 (2011)
• Lev Manovich, 'What is Digital Cinema?', Manovich.net, 1995
• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema and Digital Media', in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (eds), Perspectives of Media Art (1996)
• Lev Manovich, 'Moving Image Culture after Computerisation: an outline', 2003
• Patrick McEntaggart, 'Once Upon a Paradigm Shift: Interactive Storytelling in a New Media Context', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 5th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 14, 2010
• Jane McGonigal, ʻ”This Is Not a Game”: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play [on The Beast/ the A.I game]', MelbourneDAC2003
• Tom Miller, 'Struggling With Godzilla: Unraveling the Symbolism in Toho’s Sci/Fi Films', Kaiju-Fan 10 (Winter), 1999
• Drew Morton, 'Sketching Under the Influence? Winsor McCay and the Question of Aesthetic Convergence Between Comic Strips and Film', Animation, 2010 
• Drew Morton, 'Comics to Film (And Halfway Back Again): A DVD Essay', FLOW, April 5, 2007
• Drew Morton, 'Godard’s Comic Strip Mise-en-Scène', Senses of Cinema, 53, 2009
• Drew Morton, David O’Grady and Jennifer Porst, 'Towards a New Genre of Video Game Play', Mediascape, Fall 2009
• Graham J. Murphy, 'Gotham (K)Nights: Utopianism, American Mythology, and Frank Miller's Bat(-topia)', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 4.2 (2008)
• Janet H. Murray, 'The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies', DiGRA 2005, Vancouver, Canada, June 17, 2005
• Lizzie Nixon, 'I Focalize, You Focalize, We All Focalize Together: Audience Participation in Persepolis', Image and Narrative, 11.2, 2010
• Brian L. Ott, 'The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema', eventually published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Volume 27 Issue 1, March 2010
• Ágnes Petho, 'Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies', Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2 (2010) 39–72 
• Paul Petrovic, 'The Culturally Constituted Gaze: Fetishizing the Feminine from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen to Zack Snyder's Watchmen', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.4 (2011)
• Michael J. Prince, ''HOWL: A Novel Graphic: Authenticity and Irony in Eric Drooker's Adaptations of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"' ', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• William Proctor, ''Beginning Again: The Reboot Phenomenon in Comic Books and Film'', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Charlotte Pylyser, 'Rogue Paratexts: Epo's Graphic Classic Adaptations and the Jupien Effect', SCAN, 9.1, 2012  
• J.R. Roberto, 'Godzilla and the Second World War: A Study of the Allegorical Meaning in Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again' in Kaiju-Fan 5 (Spring), 1997
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media', Game Studies, Volume 1, issue 1, 2001
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'On Defining Narrative Media', Image and Narrative, 3.2, 2003
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Computer Games as Narrative: The Ludology versus Narrativism Controversy', Avatars of Story, at www.dichtung-digital.org/2006
• Kevin Schut, 'Technology tells a tale: digital games and narrative', Proceedings of Digra, 2003
• Jan Simons, 'Narrative, Games, and Theory', Game Studies, 7.1, 2007
• Matthew Stoddard, 'Ghost in the Shell, Cognitive Mapping, and the Desire for Communism', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.2 (2010)
• Matthias Stork, 'In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema', Frames, 1, 2012
• Matthias Stork, 'Transmedia Synergies – Remediating Films and Video Games', Mediascape, Winter 2013 
• Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• David Surman, 'Remediation and Cineliteracy: An Approach to Recent Popular Film', Academia.edu, [date unknown] also see here
• Jan-Noël Thon, 'Computer Games, Fictional Worlds, and Transmedia Storytelling: A Narratological Perspective', The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Oslo 2009
• Justine Toh, 'The tools and toys of (the) War (on Terror): Consumer desire, military fetish and regime change in Batman Begins', SCAN, 6.1, 2009

• Kevin Veale, '"Interactive Cinema" Is an Oxymoron, but May Not Always Be', Game Studies, Volume 12, issue 1, 2012

• Video Games: The State of the Field - A Discussion with Steve Mamber, Peter Lunenfeld, and Eddo Stern (March 28, 2011). Moderated by David O’Grady, Mediascape, Winter 2012 
• Mark Rowell Wallin, 'Myths, Monsters and Markets: Ethos, Identification, and the Video Game Adaptations of The Lord of the Rings', Game Studies, Volume 7, issue 1, 2007

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

 

 

Unfolding Film and Media Studies: "Postproduction", Freeze Frames, Death, Games, Augmented Reality and Biological Media

Framegrab from Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo/Christiane F. – We Children from Bahnhof Zoo (Uli Edel, 1981). Read Varpu Rantala's essay on studying this film via the link given below.

A quick little entry today, just to alert Film Studies For Free's e-bookworm readers of the latest, excellent update to FSFF's permanent list of links to online and openly accessible ebooks:

Jukka-Pekka Puro and Jukka Sihvonen (eds.), Unfolding Media Studies: Working Papers 2010 (Turku: Media Studies, University of Turku, 2011) PDF

Full contents are set out below.

• Preface    7
  
  Film Studies
• ILONA HONGISTO: Documentary Fabulation: Folding the True and the False    9
• VARPU RANTALA: Samples of Christiane F.: Experimenting with Digital Postproduction in Film Studies    19
• TOMMI RÖMPÖTTI: To the Freeze-Frame and Beyond    33
• OUTI HAKOLA: Modeling Experience: Death Events and the Public Sphere    49
• MARIA KESTI: Science on Fire! A Flying Torch Articulates    63

New Media
• JUKKA SIHVONEN: Careless Saints: Notes for Research on the Aesthetics of Digital Games    69
• TERO KARPPI: Reality Bites: Subjects of Augmented Reality Applications    89
• TAPIO MÄKELÄ: Locative Games as Social Software: Playing in Object Oriented Neighbourhoods    103
• JUKKA-PEKKA PURO: Turning Inside: Towards a Phenomenology of Biological Media    123

New Issue of MEDIASCAPE on Film and Media Space

Image montage from Lou Romano's wonderful Cinemosaic website of frame grabs from The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Read Bryan Wuest's article on space in this film.

The theme of our newest issue is “space,” which has spawned a range of approaches in cinema and media studies. “Space” is a nebulous concept, but the very difficulty in pinning down how a spatial discussion of media should proceed is why Mediascape thought this would be an appropriate discussion to tease out in our non-traditional format.['Introduction' by Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Katy Ralko, Co-Editors-in-Chief, Mediascape, Winter 2012 Issue]

Film Studies For Free is back from its trip to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston. You can watch videos of some of the conference highlights here. And you can read the live tweets and other reports from the conference from the conference via this page. 

FSFF had a truly wonderful time meeting old friends and new, including a whole bunch of talented people who are responsible for the new issue of one of its favourite online journals, the UCLA-produced Mediascape. And a great issue it is, too. Links to all contents may be found below.

Features:

• 'Watching the River: Mise en Scène and Safe Space in The Night of the Hunter'' By Bryan Wuest
• Disneyomatics: Media, Branding, and Urban Space in Post-Katrina New Orleans' By Helen Morgan Parmett
• 'War Games at Home, Home Games at War: Geography and Military First-Person Shooting Games' By Diana M. Pozo

Reviews:

• '"Between Heaven and Here": Inner-City Apartheid and Socio-Spatial Marginalization in '' By Ioana Literat
• The Driving Forces and Scope of The Mapping of Taiwan' By Jerome F. Keating

Columns:

• 'Christopher Nolan’s Inception: The Oneiric Intruder and the Architecturalism of Space' By Andrew Young
• 'Negotiating Utopia and Dystopia: Space and Architecture in Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)' By Annie Dell’Aria
• '"Is Space Political?": Oppositional Strategies in Treme' By Katie Moylan

META:

• 'Media Boundaries and Bullet Time: A Hard Boiled Fan Plays Stranglehold' By Harrison Gish
• 'Urban Metaphysics: Creating Game Layers on Top of the World' By Nettrice R. Gaskins
• 'Revenge of the (Angry Video Game) Nerd: James Rolfe and Web 2.0 Fandom' By Jim Fleury
• Video Games: The State of the Field - A Discussion with Steve Mamber, Peter Lunenfeld, and Eddo Stern (March 28, 2011). Moderated by David O’Grady

Film,Television and Media Studies articles in STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

Framegrab of Rooney Mara as 'final girl' Nancy Holbrook in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010). Read Kyle Christensen's article on this film's source text ('The Final Girl versus Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema'), and also check out Film Studies For Free's entry of links to 'Final Girl' Studies

Below, Film Studies For Free links to the entire online contents, to date, of the excellent Open Access journal Studies in Popular Culture: a list of more than 60 great articles on film, television and media studies. 

The journal of the US Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in the South, SPC dates back, in its offline, print version, to 1977, making it one of the oldest, continuously published academic journals to treat audiovisual media.  

SPC has been online since 2006 and is a wonderful example of how an online presence indicates no necessary lowering of the quality bar for a properly peer-reviewed journal. 


29.1 October 2006 [Go here for an online table of contents)

• "Reinventing the Hero: Gardner's Grendel and the Shifting Face of Beowulf in Popular Culture" -- Michael Livingston and John William Sutton 
• "Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Loria Pestewa, and the Great American Makeover." -- Gioia Woods
• "Artistic Schizophrenia: How Fight Club's Message is Subverted by its Own Nature" -- Kyle Bishop
• "Michael, Are You Okay? You've Been Hit By a Smooth Criminal: Racism, Contraversy, and Parody in the Video Clips "Smooth Criminal" and "You Rock My World." -- Elenda Oliete
• "'Sigmund Freud, Analyze This': How Madonna Situates "Die Another Day" Beyond the Pleasure Principle" -- David Sigler 

30.2 Spring 2008 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• Little America: R.E.M., Howard Finster, and the Southern "Outsider Art" Aesthetic -- Matthew Sutton
• Brokeback Mountain: Masculinity and Manhood -- James R. Keller and Anne Goodwyn Jones
• Race, Crime, and Motherhood in George Pelecanos's Soul Circus -- Alexander Pitofsky
• The Politics of Talk: The Oprah Interview as Narrative -- Sarah Henstra
• Survival of the Stereotypical: A Study of Personal Characteristics and Order of Elimination on Reality Television -- Bryan E. Denham and Richelle N. Jones
• A Car of Her Own: Volvo's "Your Concept Car" as a Vehicle for Feminism? -- Roy Schwartzman and Merci Decker
• Trainspotting, High Fidelity, and the Diction of Addiction -- Scott Stalcup 

31.1 Fall 2008 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Culture of the Past 
• From Apicius to Gastroporn: Form, Function, and Ideology in the History of Cookery Books -- Abigail Dennis
• Queer Investigations: Foxy Ladies and Dandy Detectives in American Dime Novels -- Pamela Bedore
• Literary Art in an Age of Formula Fiction and Mass Consumption: Double Coding in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle” -- Nils Clausson 
• Lost Girl: Diminishing Dorothy of Oz -- SydneyDuncan
• The Protean Character of Jello, Icon of Food and Identity -- Susan Grove Hall
• Gazing on Fu-Manchu: Obscurity and Imperial Crisis in the Work of Sax Rohmer -- Rebecca Wingfield
• “To Renew the Old World”: Record Collecting as Cultural Production -- Kevin Moist 

31.2 Spring 2009 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Culture's "Material and Conceptual Conditions 
• Fast Food Frontiers: I've Got a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore -- Minjoo Oh
• Sexed Appeals: Network Marketing and Adult Home Novelty Parties -- Dawn Heinecken 
• Popularizing HIgh Culture: Zemeckis's Beowulf -- Kathleen Forni
• Fear and Loathing in Knoxvegas: Representations of the "Other" in the Official Press Before and During the 1982 Knoxville World's Fair -- Stephen Bales and Charlie Gee
• Paul Reveres of Early Radio: The Boy Scouts and the Origin of Broadcasting -- Noah Arceneaux 
• The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive on the Political Left in Literature, Song, and Film -- Ron BrileyTamenicia or Tammy; James or Jim Bob; Bessie or Heather: Patterns and Significance of Choosing Names for American Babies -- Claude J. Smith, Jr. 

32.1 Fall 2009 [Go here to find a PDF of the Entire Issue]

• From the Editor: Moral Choices in the Art of Popular Culture
• "Spiritual Warfare" and Intolerance in Popular Culture: The Left Behind Franchise, the Commodification of Belief, and the Consequences for Imagination -- Marnie Jones
• The Narcissism of Bipartisanship: Accessing Ann Coulter on the Internet -- Lindsey Ives
• "Not Like Other Men"?: The Vampire Body in Joss Whedon's Angel -- Lorna Jowett
• "...long before the stars were torn down ...": Sam Shepard and Bob Dylan's "Brownsville Girl" -- Katherine Weiss 
• Death and Magic in Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions: A Terror Management Perspective -- Jonathan Bassett
• Disneyfying Dickens: Oliver and Company and The Muppet Christmas Carol as Dickensian Musicals -- Marc Napolitano 
• Even a Tramp Can Dream: An Examination of the Clash Between "High Art" and "Low Art" in the Films of Charlie Chaplin -- Richard Ward 

32.2 Spring 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: No Monoliths Here
• Striking Back Without Missing a Beat: Radical Responses to Domestic Violence in Country Music’s The Dixie Chicks and Salsa’s Celia Cruz -- Delia Poey
• “But This Is the South”: Ambivalent Regionalism in Jan Karon’s Mitford Novels -- Eleanor Hersey Nickel
• Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation -- Karolina Kazimierczak
• The Jesus Fish: Evolution of a Cultural Icon -- Todd Edmondson
• The Politics of the "Open" Self: America in the Cinemas of King Vidor and Robert Altman -- Margaret Hrezo and William E. Hrezo
• Like a “Whopper Virgin”: Anthropological Reflections on Burger King’s Controversial Ad Campaign -- Ty Matejowsky 
• The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television: A Replication of the Mastro and Greenberg Study a Decade Later -- Elizabeth Monk-Turner, Mary Heiserman, Crystle Johnson, Vanity Cotton, and Manny Jackson 

33.1 Fall 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Theory and Practice
• What's Entertainment? Notes Toward a Definition -- Stephen Bates and Anthony J. Ferri 
• Popular Fiction Studies: The Advantages of a New Field -- Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
• Interpretive Methodology from Literary Criticism: Carnivalesque Analysis of Popular Culture: Jackass, South Park, and ‘Everyday’ Life -- Gulnara Karimova
• The Cinematic and Historic Weight of Stone of Destiny -- Lynnette Porter
• Ken Follett and the Scribbler's Trade: A Midnight Train to Somewhere -- Carlos Ramet
• The “Aquatic Zionist” in The Yiddish Policemen's Union -- Bennett Kravitz
• “Tons of Useful Stuff”: Defining Wellness in Popular Magazines -- Carol-Ann Farkas 

33.2 Spring 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Cultural Fragments, Cultural Flowers
• My Vampire Boyfriend: Postfeminism, “Perfect” Masculinity, and the Contemporary Appeal of Paranormal Romance -- Ananya Mukherjea
• “Thou Shalt Not Crave Thy Neighbor” : True Blood, Abjection, and Otherness -- Sabrina Boyer
• Mad Men's Color Schemes: A Changing Palette of Working Women -- Katherine Gantz
• The Revolution Will Be Soooo Cute: YouTube “Hauls” and the Voice of Young Female Consumers -- Laura Jeffries
• Outsider Nostalgia in Dazed and Confused and Detroit Rock City -- Carey L. Martin
• The Beatles and the Art of the Tambourine -- Steven Hamelman
• Outsourced: Crime Stories, New World Horrors, and Genre -- Jonathan L. Crane 

34.1 Fall 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Art for Someone Else's Sake
• Protecting a City’s Image: The Death of Las Vegas Beat, 1961 -- Larry Dale Gragg
• The Final Girl versus Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema -- Kyle Christensen
• “And I Started Wondering . . .”: Voiceover and Conversation in Sex and the City -- Ashli Dykes
• Refrigerator Design and Masculinity in Postwar Media, 1946-1960 -- Paul Gansky
• Pop Culture, Politics, and America's Favorite Animated Family: Partisan Bias in The Simpsons? -- Kenneth Michael White and Mirya Holman
• Evaluating the Presence of Social Strain in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV -- Patrick Osborne

Halloween Guide to the Philosophy of Film Horror

Animated.gif of an image of Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), posted online by skyggebarnet

Father Damien Karras: Why her? Why this girl?
Father Merrin : I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as... animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.

Philosophers getting excited about horror films may seem incongruous to the average intellectual reader, and saying that one has a "philosophy of horror" may simply sound pretentious. Maybe it’s the bad critical reputation of most monster movies, a perennially popular genre (especially with teenagers) that has always taken its lumps, both aesthetically and morally. Plato wanted to ban all representations of the monstrous from his ideal Republic, and his successors have condemned such depictions ever since. [We] believe that there is ample reason for philosophers to become interested in horror films, for they raise a number of complex and interrelated questions that lie at the heart of philosophical aesthetics.

     Primary among these is the question of horror-pleasure. Why are those of us who enjoy the genre so attracted to watching things that, in real life, would be repellent to us? Like the more traditional aesthetic issue concerning tragic pleasure, there is something puzzling about enjoying in fiction what is painful in reality. Freudian film scholars Laura Mulvey and Robin Wood offered the first compelling solution to this puzzle, and it has been tough to beat. Wood’s thesis that monsters represent a return of the repressed, gratifying the instinctive drives of the id in a cathartic fashion, had almost no serious rival in critical literature from the mid-1970s until 1990. Elizabeth Cowie [also] offers an elaboration on that long-dominant paradigm in her essay [a version of which is linked to below].

      Serious philosophical discussion of horror theory was triggered by Noël Carroll’s seminal treatise, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990)[...]. Carroll’s cognitivist approach to solving what he calls "the paradox of horror pleasure" was painstakingly modeled on David Hume’s theory of tragedy. We do not take pleasure in the painful and repugnant monster, according to Carroll, but rather in having our curiosity satisfied about its impossible nature, and whether and how the narrative’s human protagonists will dispatch it successfully. His denial that we take pleasure in the monster itself, along with his requirement that the object of horror must be an impossible being—one not believed capable of existing according to the tenets of contemporary science—have generated a good deal of critical ink. [Steven J. Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 'Introduction', Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2003)]

It struck me that certain genres, such as suspense, mystery, comedy, melodrama, and horror, are actually identified by their relation to certain emotions. As a case study, I went about analyzing horror. I began by looking at what kind of horror we expect from horror fiction. At the time, a leading theory of the emotions was what was called the cognitive theory of the emotions, which tries to identify emotions in terms of their object – that is, the criterion that determines whether or not a state is this or that emotion. For example, in the case of fear, in order to be afraid you have to be afraid of a certain kind of thing, namely something that meets the criterion of harmfulness. I argued that horror was made up of two emotions we are already familiar with, fear and disgust. So I crafted my theory of the nature of horror by saying that horror is defined in terms of its elicitation of fear and disgust. Then I needed to say what the object of those two component emotional states were. For fear, there was a long history of analysis of the formal criterion as the harmful, and I drew on that. For disgust, I hypothesized the criterion was the impure.
     [..] I think that film theory should be closer to the practice of filmmaking and fiction-making in general. There shouldn’t be these two cultures. I think in some ways the theorists have made these two cultures exist by being unconcerned with the problems of construction. The Philosophy of Horror is very concerned with the problems of construction. It’s a philosophy of horror, but in the same way that Aristotle’s Poetics is a philosophy of tragedy. Aristotle wrote a philosophy of tragedy, but he called it a poetics, where poetics is a notion that comes from poesis, which comes from making. So poetics is about construction. His philosophy of tragedy is a philosophy of construction of tragedy, and I had hoped that my Philosophy of Horror would be a philosophy of construction of horror in much the same way. [Noël Carroll in Ray Privett and James Kreul, 'The Strange Case of Noël Carroll: A Conversation with the Controversial Film Philosopher', Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001]

Film Studies For Free joins in the usual, general, Halloween hullabaloo with a scary little contribution of its own: a list of links to online and openly accessible philosophical considerations of the horror film genre.

Many of the below studies have been inspired by the extensive considerations of film horror by philosopher Noël Carroll or engage with the themes raised by his work.  

FSFF commends these to you with a little bloggish shudder: they are, after all, somewhat terrifyingly good...

• Zsolt Bátori, 'Genre Identification and the Case of Horror', Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 2, 2010
• Birkbeck College Roundtable Discussion on ‘Dawn of the Dead’, May 26, 2011 (with Amber Jacobs, Paul Myerscough, Gordon Hon and Mark Fisher) mp3
• Anne-Marie Boisvert, 'Webmonsters', Ciac's Electronic Magazine, No 18 - Spring 2004 (Mutations and Monsters Issue)
• Curtis Bowman, 'Heidegger, the Uncanny, and Jacques Tourneur’s Horror Films', in Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw (eds.), Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections On Cinematic Horror (Scarecrow Press, 2003)
• Curtis Bowman, The Uncanny. Other Voices 3, no. 1 (2007)
• Keith Brown, 'Notes on the Terror Film', Forum, Issue 2, Spring 2006
• Kate Bullen, '[Review of] The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. By Noel Carroll. New York: Routledge, 1990', B Sides, Spring 2010
• Noël Carroll, 'Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings', Film Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, (Spring, 1981), pp. 16-25
• Noël Carroll, 'The Nature of Horror', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59
• Jodey Castricano, 'For the love of smoke and mirrors: Dario Argento's Inferno (1980)', Kinoeye, 2.11, 2002
• Brigid Cherry, 'Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror', Particip@tions Volume 5, Issue 1 Special Edition (May 2008)
• Brigid Cherry, The female horror film audience: viewing pleasures and fan practices, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 1999
• Elizabeth Cowie, 'Anxiety, ethics and horror: Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)', Kinoeye, Vol 2, Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Marty Fairbairn, 'Film and Philosophy Family Reunion', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, 1998
• Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson (eds), The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror (InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009)
• Cynthia Freeland, 'Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films', Originally published in Post-Theory, eds. Bordwell and Carroll (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)
• Michael Grant, 'Clint Eastwood: Avatar of the Undead', Michael Grant, February 8, 2010
• Tim Groves, 'Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006
• Joan Hawkins, 'Revisiting the Philosophy of Horror', Film-Philosophy, 6.6, 2002
• Matt Hills, '[Review of] Daniel Shaw, ed., Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy (2001)', Aesthetics Online, 2002
• Timothy Iles, 'The Problem of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Horror Films', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Paper 4, 2005
• Kate Ince, 'Reply to Michael du Plessis', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Phevos Kallitsis , 'Urban Fears and spatial transformations: the horror movie point of view', CityFutures '09, Madrid 2009
• Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010
• John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996
• Rafael Miguel Montes, '¡Yo Soy Godzilla!—The Possibilities and Futilities of Cuban Horror', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, July 2009
• Pablo Ortega-Rodriguez, 'How is Disbelief Suspended?: The Paradox of Fiction and Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror', Film-Philosophy, 7, 2003 David Palmieri, 'Carroll Meets Karmina: Québécois Horror Between America and Europe', Equinoxes: A Graduate Journal of French and Francophone Studies, Issue 1, 2004
• Bernard Perron, 'Coming to Play at Frightening Yourself :Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games', Aesthetics of Play, October 2005
• Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006
• Michael du Plessis, 'Fantasies of the Institution: The Films of Georges Franju and Kate Ince’s Georges Franju', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Ray Privett and James Kreul, 'The Strange Case of Noël Carroll: A Conversation with the Controversial Film Philosopher', Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001
• 'Roundtable Discussion: The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 (with Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham)', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011
• Steven Schneider, 'Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror', Other Voices, v.1, n.3 (January 1999)
• Steven J. Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 'Introduction', Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2003)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Survival of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, September 25, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, 'Diary of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, April 26, 2008
• Daniel Shaw, 'A Humean Definition of Horror', Film-Philosophy,Vol. 1, 1997
• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film Philosophy, vol. 6 no 7, April 2002 
• D. Bruno Starrs, '"If we stretch our imaginations": the Monstrous-Feminine Mother in Rolf de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra's Project (2003)', Scope, Issue 10, February 2008
• David Sterritt, 'Spellbound in Darkness: Shyamalan’s Epistemological Twitch', in Spoiler Warnings: CriticalApproaches to the Films of M. Night Shyamalan, ed. Jeffrey AndrewWeinstock (forthcoming)
• Bryan Stone, 'The sanctification of fear: Images of the religious in horror films', Journal of Religion and Film, 5.2, 2001
• Richard Walsh, 'The Passion as Horror Film: St. Mel of the Cross', Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Vol. 40, Fall 2008
• Tobias Wendell, 'Wicked Villagers and the Mysteries of Reproduction: An Exploration of Horror Videos from Ghana and Nigeria', Postcolonial Text, Vol 3, No 2 (2007)
• Robert Yanal, 'Two Monsters in Search of a Concept', Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 1, 2003