Richly Resourceful! On B.Ruby Rich's Work, plus A Roundup of Recent Open Access Screen Studies Items

The SENSES of an ENDING from Catherine Grant

The above video treats the ending of Lucrecia Martel's La niña santa / The Holy Girl (2004), using insights about the film from Deborah Martin's book The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Sophie Mayer's chapter 'Gutta cavat lapidem: The sonorous politics of Lucrecia Martel's swimming pools', in The Cinema of The Swimming Pool, eds. Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch (Peter Lang, 2014). For Study Purposes Only - No Significant Spoilers.

The video is dedicated to pioneering queer and feminist film curator and critic B. Ruby Rich, one of the foremost advocates of the work of La niña santa's director, and much other queer New Argentine, and Latin American Cinema. 

Rich's career is justly being celebrated at a screening and discussion event taking place between June 21-25, 2017, at the Barbican Cinema (and other London venues) as part of its 2017 Film in Focus season. The event is entitled ‘Being Ruby Rich’ and is co-sponsored by Film London and co-curated by Club des Femmes, the queer-feminist film curating collective. La niña santa (a film championed by Rich, alongside Martel's other films) will be screened with an introduction by Sophie Mayer at the Barbican Cinema on Sunday, June 25, at 6pm.

For further information about these events, see here. 

Today, Film Studies For Free celebrates the much-awaited visit to London of B. Ruby Rich (foundational film critic, festival programmer, cultural theorist, and chronicler of social trends on screen and off), on the occasion of a magnificently merited celebration of her career at the Barbican and other venues, organised by Club des Femmes, the queer-feminist film curating collective (check out their interview about their work here).

The entry celebrates, as usual, in film studies links, beginning with a new video resource (above) on one of the films to be screened in this celebratory programme, and then lots of other rich Rich-related resources (below), followed by a roundup of recent Open Access Screen Studies Items, including numerous new journal issues online.

FSFF also wanted to share the great news that, from September 1, 2017, its author will be taking up the post of Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, an institution with a longstanding and wonderful record of supporting open access publishing and widening educational access, in part through film curating study and practice! Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image is also co-host of one of the free events celebrating Ruby Rich's work, taking place on June 21, 2017.

By (or Featuring) B. Ruby Rich:

B. Ruby Rich on researching the intersection between film and social movements from Arts UCSC

• 'In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism', Heresies, 3.1, 9, 1980 Index page / Large PDF
• The first chapter of B. Ruby Rich’s book New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut, (Duke University Press, 2013)
• Excerpts from Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke, 1998)
• 'Maedchen in Uniform: From repressive tolerance to erotic liberation', Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981, pp. 44-50
• Interview with VICE Magazine: ''Brokeback Mountain' Ushered in a New Era of Gay Cinema', VICE, December 13, 2015
• 'When History Makes the Cut', Film Quarterly, Spring 2017, Volume 70, Number 3
• 'Film [sic]', Film Quarterly, Winter 2013, Vol. 67, No. 2
• Film and Media in a Time of Repression: Practices & Aesthetics of Resistance, Film Quarterly, February 24, 2014
• 'Film Criticism in the Era of Algorithms', Film Quarterly, Winter 2016, Volume 70, Number 2
• 'What Is at Stake: Gender, Race, Media, or How to Brexit Hollywood', Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Volume 70, Number 1
• 'A Vocation in Film', Film Quarterly, Summer 2016, Volume 69, Number 4
• 'Academy Categories, Movie Theater Revivals & Always and Forever, Coutinho', Film Quarterly, Spring 2016, Volume 69, Number 3
• 'Evidence of Visibility', Film Quarterly, Winter 2015, Volume 69, Number 2
• 'New Visions, Old Crises', Film Quarterly, Fall 2015, Volume 69, Number 1
• 'Looking Back, Looking Ahead: What’s at Stake', Film Quarterly, Summer 2015, Volume 68, Number 4
• 'On Screen, Off Screen', Film Quarterly, Spring 2015, Volume 68, Number 3
• 'Chance Meetings and Metrics, with More to Come', Film Quarterly, Winter 2014, Volume 68, Number 2
• 'Film, Digitality, and Cultural Divides', Film Quarterly, Fall 2014, Volume 68, Number 1
• 'Thinking about Triggers, Thumbs, Sex, and Death', Film Quarterly, Summer 2014, Volume 67, Number 4
• 'Thinking Back, Thinking Ahead', Film Quarterly, Spring 2014, Volume 67, Number 3
• 'Notes on Arrival', Film Quarterly, Fall 2013, Vol. 67, No. 1
• Three Film Quarterly Reports on the Sundance Film Festival: 'Park City Remix', 'Frontlines', 'Sundance Film Festival'.
• In German: An excerpt from B. Ruby Rich's Keynote speech at the "Queer Film Culture" conference, Hamburg, October 15, 2014 (thanks to Skadi Loist and Dagmar Brunow)

B. Ruby Rich on TIFF's influence in coining the phrase New Queer Cinema

Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers Program | Conversation:Foundational Moments of New Queer Cinema with B. Ruby Rich, October 8, 2013


The Story of Queer Cinema: Edit (Anger/Warhol)

On Rich's work:

• Emma Myers, 'Profiles in Criticism: B. Ruby Rich', Indiewire, February 2014
• Patricia White, "Review Of "New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut" By B.R. Rich". Film Quarterly. Volume 67,  2013, Issue 1. 89-91

Other news and recent open access screen studies links:

1. Cinephile aggregator extraordinaire David Hudson has taken his expertly unmissable daily round-ups of cinephile links, news and events (formerly of Keyframe Daily) to the Criterion Collection "Daily" website: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts?category=The+Daily.
2. Tiago Baptista's open-access PhD thesis on the digital audiovisual essay (supervised by Laura Mulvey and externally examined by Adrian Martin)! http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/215/.
3. Rob King's great new book Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture is available in open access formats at Luminosoa here: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520288119.
4. Nicholas Mirzoeff's new free e-book The Appearance of Black Lives Matter (NAME Publications) is available here: http://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter/.
5. Out now: Issue 45.2 of Film/Literature Quarterly, a highly esteemed and long-established journal now available in an online open access version!! https://www.salisbury.edu/lfq/.
6. Just out: Issue 7 of MOVIE: Journal of Film Criticism, with new features on Opening Shots and audiovisual essays: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/.
7. Just out: Issue 12 of The Cine-Files: a special commemorative issue on Chris Marker and Jacques Rivette, featuring so many delightful and insightful pieces... including an essay by Rivette himself! http://www.thecine-files.com and http://www.thecine-files.com/dossier-rivette-marker/.
8. Issue 11 of FRAMES Cinema Journal - The Future of Horror is now available online at http://framescinemajournal.com/.
9. A NEW issue of #openaccess journal NECSUS on #TRUE! with a great new AV essay section curated by Kevin B. Lee! http://www.necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2017_true/.
10. Three new contributions to "Ghetto Films and their Afterlife", in the #openaccess journal APPARATUS: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus/issue/view/3.
11. New issue of Film-Philosophy (21, 2, 2017) now published and fully open access: http://www.euppublishing.com/toc/film/21/2. ARTICLES: Memories of the Unlived Body: Jean-Louis Schefer, Georges Bataille and Gilles Delouse by Patrick ffrench; A Body Without a Face: The Disorientation of Trauma in Phoenix (2014) and New Holocaust Cinema by Olivia Landry; Intra-Diegetic Cameras as Cinematic Actor Assemblages in Found Footage Horror Cinema by Rødje Kjetl; Fearsome Acts of Interpretation: Audiovisual Historiography, Film Theory and Gangs of New York by Mike Meneghett.
12. New issue of Media Industries (Vol. 4, No. 1) now available. It features articles by Nora Draper, Darrell Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Patryk Galuszka and Katarzyna Wyrzykowska, and Justin Wyatt. The issue also contains a Special Section curated by Annette Hill and Jeanette Steemers that focuses on Media Industries and Engagement, featuring a dialogue between industry and academic researchers: http://www.mediaindustriesjournal.org/.
13. A new international peer-reviewed open access journal of James Bond Studies, shaken not stirred: http://jamesbondstudies.roehampton.ac.uk.
14. New issue of INTENSITIES: A JOURNAL OF CULT MEDIA: https://intensitiescultmedia.com/issue-9-spring-2017/.
15. New issue of the Journal of Lusophone Studies features a special dossier on Portuguese Cinema: https://jls.apsa.us/index.php/jls/issue/view/23.
16. A great new #openaccess practice-research publication: O A R Platform! Check out Issue 1: "Sites of Research" here: http://www.oarplatform.com/issue/issue-1/.
17. On David Lynch: a new virtual special issue of the esteemed journal Screen freely accessible until end August 2017: https://academic.oup.com/screen/pages/david_lynch_virtual_issue.
18. Laura Ivins' great video and text on Maya Deren's Film-Philosophy: http://blogs.iu.edu/aplaceforfilm/2017/05/23/maya-derens-film-philosophy/.
19. New essay by Adrian, Martin for Photogénie, on 'play' in American screen comedy from the early sound era to the 50s and beyond: thttps://cinea.be/game-space-and-play-time-a-partial-history-american-screen-comedy/?language=en.
20. Peter Labuza of the Cinephiliacs podcast interviews cinephile par excellence Girish Shambu: http://www.thecinephiliacs.net.
21. Further great, recent, scholarly-related cinema podcasts available at The Cinematologists: http://www.cinematologists.com.
22. Check out 'Edit shots' - a free for personal use (or pay what you want) resource: http://learnaboutfilm.com/editshots/.
23. ‪Check out Professor Ian Christie's new research blog on cinema pioneer Robert Paul, the "undersung hero of early British filmmaking": https://paulsanimatographworks.wordpress.com.
24. Attention Hitchcock Fans: there will be a free online, interactive course with multi-media course material, games and more from Ball State University. It is in conjunction with TCM running one of Hitchcock's greatest films every Wednesday and Friday night in July. You can enroll here: https://www.canvas.net/browse/bsu/tcm3/courses/hitchcock50.
25. Great interview with Laura Mulvey at Issue 8 of  Four by Three Magazine, part of an amazing issue of the magazine on DEATH, with other contributions by luminaries on a wide range of essential specific topics.
26. The international, Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Filmmaking Research Network has designed a survey to gather data about filmmaking research. The aim of this survey is to compare and contrast examples of filmmaking research through producing case studies and a register of films as research outputs. It is also intended to build capacity through networking members via research themes, curating content from the film register for international dissemination and creating a Phd examiner list. Though the survey is primarily aimed at UK and Australian academics we welcome contributions from colleagues in other countries particularly those who have films to register. Please participate by completing the online survey at: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/filmmakingresearch. For further information about the network and to join the e-list visit: http://filmmakingresearch.net.
27. Martin Scorsese on standing up for cinema in the Times Literary Supplement: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/film-making-martin-scorsese/.
28. Great interview with Laura Mulvey at Four by Three Magazine: http://www.fourbythreemagazine.com/issue/death/laura-mulvey-interview.
29. The latest issue of Learning on Screen/BUFVC journal VIEWFINDER has published a conversation between Catherine Grant, Amber Jacobs and Ian Magor about the use of audiovisual essay in film and moving image studies.

http://bufvc.ac.uk/publications/viewfinder-archive

Queer Film Festival Studies

Click here to visit the full interactive version of the above map.

As identity-based festivals, queer film festivals have a specific relationship to the audience to which they cater. More specifically, most of these festivals have had a strong connection to the political and social movement behind the lesbian and gay/queer agenda and try to maintain this relationship between cultural event and political framework [...]. Because of this history, queer film festivals have a strong tradition of a nuanced critical inquiry into the interconnections of cultural event management, community politics, nation state politics, funding and marketing strategies, and organizational structures [...]. [From Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, 'LGBT / Queer Film Festivals', Film Festival Research Network, last updated November 2012]

Festivals are the primary markets for international queer film, but they do not simply acquire and screen the films they show; they actually create the economic conditions that enable their production. This is not to imply that queer internationalism is merely inauthentic or commercial and thus without any kind of political viability. Rather, what it indicates is that scholars, activists, and festival directors must begin to look at the economy of queer cultural production as an essential element of queer collectivities and the institutions they form. Conceiving of an international queer community through cultural circulation and consumption begs significant questions about how U.S. audiences understand the role of the festival in defining a gay and lesbian class identity within this global economy. [From Ragan Rhyne, 'The Global Economy of Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals', GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 4, 2006]

As the above two scholarly excerpts indicate, the subject of film festivals is one which raises numerous issues of central importance to cultural studies more generally. For this reason, as well as to celebrate the work of scholars who have shared their findings in particular corner of this field online, Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the latest set of links to open access queer film studies that it has created for its sibling Global Queer Cinema website is devoted to the topic of Queer Film Festival Studies. You can visit numerous earlier FSFF entries on film festival studies by clicking here.

This most recent collection in the GQC Resources section includes a link to the full, interactive, version of the map at the top of this entry, created by pioneering film festival scholar Skadi Loist (co-founder, with Marijke de Valck,  of the Film Festival Studies Network), which shows 256 LGBT/queer film festivals existing globally since 1977.

For live-link access to all the below resources, please visit this webpage.

• Chris Berry, 'My Queer Korea: Identity, Space, and the 1998 Seoul Queer Film & Video festival', Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 2, May 1999
• Noa Ben-Asher, 'Screening Historical Sexualities: A Roundtable on Sodomy, South Africa, and Proteus',Pace Law Faculty Publications, 2005. Paper 589
• Kaucyila Brooke, 'Dividers and Doorways [on the locational politics of Los Angeles's Gay and Lesbian film festival]', Jump Cut, no. 42, December 1998, pp. 50-57
• Phillip B. Cook, 'Gay Sundance 2013: The Year Ahead in Independent Queer Cinema', The Blog, Huff Post Gay Voices, January 17, 2013
• Michael Guillén, The Evening Class blog, 2006-present
• Mel Hogan, '21 years of image & nation: legitimizing the gaze', Nouvelles «vues» sur le cinéma québécois, no. 10, Hiver 2008-2009
• Jamie June, 'Is it Queer Enough?: An Analysis of the Criteria and Selection Process for Programming Films within Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Film Festivals in the United States', MA Thesis, University of Oregon, August 2003
• Alice Kuzniar, 'Schwul-lesbisches Kino aus Deutschland', in: Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg, ed. by Dorothée von Diepenbroick and Skadi Loist (Hamburg: Maennerschwarm Verlag, 2009)
• Hui-Ling Lin, Bodies in Motion: The Films of Transmigrant Queer Chinese Women Filmmakers in Canada, PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2011
• Skadi Loist, 'Precarious cultural work: about the organization of (queer) film festivals', Screen, 52.2, 2011
• Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck (2010). “Film Festivals / Film Festival Research: Thematic, Annotated Bibliography: Second Edition.” Medienwissenschaft / Hamburg: Berichte und Papiere 91 (2010). (19. May. 2010 (sections: 1. Film Festivals: The Long View; 2. Festival Time: Awards, Juries and Critics; 3. Festival Space: Cities, Tourism and Publics; 4. On the Red Carpet: Spectacle, Stars and Glamour ; 5. Business Matters: Industries, Distribution and Markets; 6. Trans/National Cinemas; 7. Programming; 8. Reception: Audiences, Communities and Cinephiles; 9. Specialized Film Festivals; 10. Publications Dedicated to Individual Film Festivals; 11. Online Resources; Contact / Bio), 2008
• Skadi Loist, 'Queer Film and the Film Festival Circuit', In Media Res, September 14, 2010
• Skadi Loist, 'Das Queer Cinema und die Bedeutung lesbisch-schwuler Filmfestivals: Monika Treut im Interview mit Skadi Loist'n: Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg. Eds. Dorothée von Diepenbroick, and Skadi Loist. Hamburg: Männerschwarm, 2009. pp. 12–20
• Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, 'Film Festival Studies: An Overview of a Burgeoning Field', in: Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit. Eds. Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2009. pp. 179–215
• Scott McKinnon, 'Taking the Word ‘Out’ West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces', Participations, Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010) 
• Kelly McWilliam, 'We're Here All Week': Public Formation and the Brisbane Queer Film Festival. Queensland Review 14(2), 2007:pp. 79-91
• Jenni Olson, 'Film Festivals', GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. 2002. 24 February 2007
• Ricardo Peach, Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema in South Africa and Australia, PhD Thesis, University of Technology, Sydney 2005
• Renee Penney, Desperately Seeking Redundancy? Queer Romantic Comedy and the Festival Audience, PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010
• Mel Pritchard, 'the big queer film festival list', QueerFilmFestivals.org
• Marc Siegel, 'Spilling Out onto Castro Street', Jump Cut No. 41 (May), 1997
• Amy Watson, Being Inappropriate: Queer Activism in Context, MA Thesis, Central European University 2009
• Gerald J. Z. Zielinski, Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence and Cultural Politics of Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals, PhD Thesis, McGill University, August 2008
• Ger Zielinski, 'On the production of heterotopia, and other spaces, in and around lesbian and gay film festivals', Jump Cut, No 54, Fall 2012
• Ger Zielinski, '"Queer Film Festivals." LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia. Eds. John C. Hawley, and Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. pp. 980–984
• Ger Zielinski in Conversation with Stephen Kent Jusick, Executive Director of MIX Festival of Queer Experimental Film and Video, FUSE Art Culture Politics (summer issue, 2010), pp. 16-23