Real and Fictional Monarchies on Screen

The Paradox of the Monarchy by Catherine Grant

An archive video collage exploring some of the psychological and mediatized components of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy. It features excerpts from D.W. Winnicott's 1970 essay 'The Place of the Monarchy' (published in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, compiled and edited by Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis [London: Penguin, 1986]). Although it doesn't mention this, Winnicott's essay was published after the broadcast of the ground-breaking Royal Family documentary in 1969, which opened up new breaches in what the psychoanalyst was raising about the necessary distance and proximity of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy.

Public Domain Film Excerpts (from the Internet Archive Moving Image Collections)

• Pathe News Digest, 1937, No. 3 (Prelinger Archives)
• Visit of their Majesties, June 1939 (FDR Presidential Library [CC0 1.0 Universal])
• Today -- And Yesterday, Newsreel, 1911 (Prelinger Archives)
• A Welcome Guest in the House, ca. 1957 (Prelinger Archives)

Music Excerpt
“Self-Reflect” by Jared C. Balogh. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. Available for Download from from the Fee Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org/music/Balogh/A_Compilation_From_Compilations_Of_Compositions/SELF_REFLECT

Film Studies For Free was inspired by two events -- one offline and one online -- for today's entry.

The offline happening is an excellent looking conference on the British Monarchy on Screen taking place later this week, between November 23-24.

The conference is hosted by the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, and convened by the University of London Screen Studies Group, the Institute of English Studies, the department of Media Arts and the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research at Royal Holloway, University of London.

A somewhat ambivalent republican, but one indelibly marked by growing up immersed in the UK's mediatised monarchy, FSFF would have loved to attend. But its author is presenting instead at a conference in an actual Republic this weekend, instead. So this blog contributes the above monarchical-video-meditation in lieu of its presence - and there will be an accompanying essay about it for the Filmanalytical website very shortly.

Another series of events happening this week - also, sadly, to be missed by a gadabout FSFF -- will take place in Brighton. The Global Queer Cinema project is collaborating with the annual CineCity film festival on the topic of "Curating Queer Film Culture". Information about these really excellent and important events can be found here and here. 

The inspirational online event was another one FSFF missed... It was the competition which also inspired the above video, although the video took a somewhat different (topical) turn in its making: "The Past Re-Imagined as the Future" Remix Context, held by the brilliant Prelinger Archives and the Free Music Archive.

FSFF looks forward to hearing about the winners of that event but, in the meantime, had great fun as usual remixing material from both these amazing, public domain archives, and encourages its readers to have a go at doing the same. Any good film related results should be reported here forthwith.

Below, you can find a little (growing) list of links to online studies of monarchies on screen just to keep FSFF's hand in with this blog's day-job....

• Giselle Bastin, 'Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family', a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2009, pp. 34-52 PDF Rosalind Brunt, 'The Changing Face of Royalty', Marxism Today, 1984   
• Pam Cook, 'Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola', Sight and Sound 16 (11), November 2006, pp. 36-40
• Stella Hockenhull, 'Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen', Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012) PDF
• Dianne Hunter, 'From Ethereal Confrontation to Child Abuse to Womanly Conflict: Ophelia in Three Late-Twentieth Century Films', PsyArt, December 2008
• Julia Kinzler, 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011) pp. 49-65
• Laura Mason, '"We' re just little people, Louis": Marie-Antoinette on Film', Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No.3 (1994): 211-222 
• Anna Rogers, 'Sofia Coppola', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007

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

Conversations from the REMIX CINEMA Workshop

In conversation with Richard Misek at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

Film Studies For Free took a little break to meet a few deadlines in the last two weeks. Normal service resumes this week, thankfully.

In the next days, there will be an entry of links in memory of Theo Angelopoulos who sadly died last week. So, do please come back for that.

Today, though, FSFF posts links to some recently uploaded audio files which very valuably record great interviews with the contributors to an important workshop conference that took place last March at Oxford University.

The event explored the topic of Remix Cinema: the collaborative making, deconstruction and distribution of digital artefacts, and was part of a wider project exploring the role of audio-visual remix practices in contemporary digital culture.

Thanks to everyone taking part for making these excellent resources available to everyone working in the field.

• 2:50

  In conversation with Erlend Lavik at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011
• 2:55

  In conversation with Paolo Peverini at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011 

  
  
• 3:18

  In conversation with Irene Cassarino at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 2:48

  In conversation with Nicolás Alcalá at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

  2:51

  In conversation with Joan Carles Martorell at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

  2:53

  In conversation with Indrek Ibrus at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 3:07

  In conversation with Mette Birk and Owen Gallagher at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

  2:09

  In conversation with Rune Saugmann Andersen at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

  3:17

  In conversation with Maynou and Steele at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

  3:12

  In conversation with Marisol Salanova at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 2:45

  In conversation with Gabriel Menotti at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

  
  
• 2:30

  In conversation with Dave Griffiths at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

  3:05

  In conversation with Evelin Stermitz at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

  3:16

  In conversation with Daniel Chávez at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 3:00

  In conversation with Aurite Kouts at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 2:57

  In conversation with Toni Roig at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 2:08

  In conversation with Thijs van Exel at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 3:16

  In conversation with Sanna Marttila at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 2:34

  In conversation with Kati Hyyppa at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 3:12

  In conversation with Karin Wenz at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 2:53

  In conversation with Ethan Plaut at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 2:00

  In conversation with Annelies Termeer at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

• 3:17

  In conversation with Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss at the Remix Cinema Workshop 2011

Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?

Last updated January 20, 2012

FSFF's entry for Press Play's VERTIGOED Contest.
Still three more days to submit your own entry!

A psychosexually obsessed man wanders the streets of 1950s San Francisco; he spies [on] seemingly unavailable blonde women; he makes a woman fall from a height; she drops into water; the scene is filled with circle imagery, especially circles within circles.....  [See the original sequence]

As Film Studies For Free's readers may have heard, Kim Novak, co-star of Vertigo, took out an ad in trade magazine Variety to protest about the recent use of an excerpt from Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film in Michel Hazanavicius’s 2011 modern silent film The Artist. "I want to report a rape," went the headline. "I feel as if my body - or at least my body of work -- has been violated by the movie, The Artist," Novak wrote. She went on to criticise the “use and abuse [of] famous pieces of work to gain attention and applause for other than what they were intended.”

There was quite a strong international reaction to Novak's intervention. Some were dismayed by her recourse to the lexicon of rape; others were more sympathetic to her stance and background as someone very much not from the digital age of remix and creative appropriation; still others remind us that, in 'Scene d'Amour', the musical Vertigo theme in question, Herrmann was, of course, inspirationally reworking some of Richard Wagner's motifs from his Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Good artists copy; great artists steal?

Enter the story the PRESS PLAY blog which launched a contest inviting readers to re-use Herrmann's "Scene d'Amour" music in their own mash-up, inspired by the idea that "Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score is so passionate and powerful that it can elevate an already good scene -- and a familiar one at that -- to a higher plane of expression."

Film Studies For Free's author was only too happy to have a go, joining the legions of those who, like Hazanavicius, have used Herrmann's music in their work, in large or very small ways. Her choice of film sequence? One borrowed from The Sniper, Edward Dmytryk's 1952 film noir, with its own, obsessed, wandering male protagonist and San Francisco setting.

The Sniper was one of the films that probably directly inspired Vertigo, as well as Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho -- see critic Dave Kehr's thoughts on this. The above mash-up chooses, then, to marry Herrmann's lush Wagnerian romance with the key 'amusement park' sequence from Dmytryk's brilliant film, with its astonishing performance of overt misogyny by Arthur Franz as Edward "Eddie" Miller -- perhaps the perfect, filmic, mirror-image of James Stewart's unforgettable, unconsciously misogynist, John "Scottie" Ferguson.

FSFF's author was excited to experience at first-hand the scholarly possibilities of remixing film clips in this way (the contest rules state that the original film sequence cannot be re-edited in any way -- except, if you choose to, by removing its sound -- in order not to cheat with the creative re-juxtaposition process).

Remixing is an astonishingly good (and amazingly easy) way of really -- almost literally -- getting inside a film sequence. It is thus a truly great exercise for all students of film with access to the right digital tools. Analysing just how the mash-up adapts the meaning of the original music and original sequence is rather educational and fun, too!

If you get your skates on with the Vertigo score exercise, there are still three days left for Press Play's contest entries. Click here to watch the (over 60) entries at present.

FSFF's favorite entry to the contest, so far, is a mash-up which, rather like its own, plays on the conscious or unconscious connections between an earlier film and Vertigo. It's Matthew Cheney's wonderful work with Mädchen in Uniform (the brilliant 1931 film by Leontine Sagan). But there are loads of other imaginative and highly satisfying remixes that you will enjoy checking out. UPDATE: the videographic legend that is Steven Boone just added a late Vertigoed entry which is FSFF's new favourite: a scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

If you want to see even more brilliant, Vertigo mash-up work -- actually, a work of remix in a completely different, utterly sublime class -- you simply must check out The Vertigo Variations by remarkable critic-filmmaker B. Kite.

And, for more vertiginous sublimity, don't forget FSFF's very own Study of a Single Film: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo entry.

The Sniper's amusement park sequence without Herrmann's music

The original 'Scene d'Amour' sequence from Vertigo

The mash up video at the top of the post was made according to principles of Fair Use/Fair Dealing, with non-commercial scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License in January 2012.