STUDY OF A SINGLE FILM: On Godard's ALPHAVILLE - Dystopia 50 Years On!

Frame grab from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

"One never understands anything...then suddenly, one evening...you end up dying of it."
Lemmy Caution, Alphaville

In 1965, Jean-Luc Godard—the quintessential European auteur, the first cinephile director, the man who took it upon himself to reinvent the cinema and then to declare its death—directed a black-and-white science-fiction film noir: Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Mixing genres, combining a distant future and the recent past, pop and high art, total alienness and twentieth century Paris, dystopian scenarios and modernist architecture, the celebration of familiar tropes and the annihilation of stereotypes, Godard made a highly hybrid and visionary film that was many things at once, but also irreducibly singular. With international funding, an expatriate American lead actor (famous in France and Germany for his roles as British pulp character Lemmy Caution), foregrounding Paris simultaneously as the heart of European modernism and as the standardised, international metropolis of the future, Alphaville nodded to the tropes of an Americanised global culture while being utterly European—and the product of the post-New Wave coproduction practices of continental art cinema. Alphaville was a film that both exploited and exploded the tropes, conventions and expectations that constituted “European cinema” as a commercial product, as a critical concept and as an aesthetic category. Laura Rascaroli, Alphaville editorial

Fifty years ago today Jean-Luc Godard's dystopian science fiction film Alphaville was released in France. It remains one of the most compelling fictional studies of 'technological totalitarianism', as Andrew Sarris put it, ever produced for the cinema. To commemorate this important anniversary Film Studies For Free publishes its usual list of related scholarly links and wonderful embedded videos (including a brand new tribute video on the film by renowned film scholar Patricia Pisters) on the subject of this redoubtable film.

In an era in which many aspects of the dystopia so brilliantly and originally portrayed in Godard's film seem only too real, FSFF additionally celebrates the French director's 'strange adventure', and much of the politically committed writing about it, by declaring its solidarity with ongoing struggles to defend progressive and free education around the world, including the Amsterdam New University movement (see also here), and other valuable challenges to the logic of "Market-Driven Education" in the UK (including at the LSE) and elsewhere, including the defence of Film Studies in Hungary (see the petition here).

Finally, FSFF would also like to flag up a CFP for the wonderful journal named after Godard's film - Alphaville is planning a special issue on Women and Screen Media in the Twenty-First Century.
See the details here: http://alphavillejournal.com/Submissions.html#CFP

Coming very soon: FSFF's roundup of online resources resulting from this year's annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montréal!

Despair has no wings from Patricia Pisters

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard's film Alphaville (1965).

Watching Alphaville fifty years after its making in 2015, most striking is the enduring presence of wounds of the Second World War. The ruins, scars and the horror of the war can be felt in every image of this film, even if it is set in the future. But what is even more striking is that so much of the film's traumas related to the past, and related to the cold logic of modernity, still resonate with today’s reality. Just replace ‘Alphaville’ with ‘NSA’ and think of Lemmy Caution as Edward Snowden, and the future that Godard captured in Paris of the 1960s represented by the totalitarianism of the Alpha 60 machine has transformed into the more invisible algorithms of the billions of metadata patterns that trace, predict and control our steps in today’s global digital networks. 

The allegory I mention in this video-essay not only concerns [...] the past and an imaginary future, but [...] the actual present of our control societies that have taken the snake-like intricateness and hard to grasp modulations announced by Gilles Deleuze about twenty-five years ago. Patricia Pisters 

Henrike Lindenberger, 'On Alphaville: The Crystal Maze', The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, September 2014. Online at: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/reflections/intransition-1-3/henrike-lindenberger/ Also fCurated at [in]Transition, 1.3, 2014 by Cristina Alvarez López

• New! Barry Keith Grant, 'Jean-Luc Godard’s dystopian sci-fi classic Alphaville turns 50', BFI Online, May 5, 2015

• Ryan Babula, “The Politics of Pre-Political Godard: Alphaville, Made in USA”, The Cine-Files, 2, 2012
• Miguel Alfonso Bouhaben, 'Logic, poetics and ontology of Alphaville', L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos N°19, 2014
• Chris Darke, 'Fragments from Zeroville', Vertigo, 2.3, 2002
• Chris Darke, 'Alphaville Exists', Vertigo, 2.8, 2005 
• Olivia Keung, 'The cinematic rendering of unconscious space: Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville and Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva', Faculty Project, University of Waterloo, 2004
• Roland-François Lack, 'The point in time: precise chronology in early Godard', Studies in French Cinema 3:2, 2003 PDF
• Henrike Lindenberger, ‘On ALPHAVILLE – THE CRYSTAL MAZE’/The Audiovisual Essay as Lego Construction’, as curated at [in]Transition, 1.3, 2014
• Anuja Madan, 'The Language of Emotion in Godard's Films', Cineaction 80, 2010 PDF
• Julie Anne Monty, Textualizing the Future: Godard, Rochefort, Beckett and Dystopian Discourse, PhD thesis, The University of Texas at Austin December 2006 PDF
• Ágnes Pethő, '"Tensional Differences": The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave Films', Vertigo, 30, 2012
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Trailer for Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema', Vertigo, 7.1, 1997
• Andrew Sarris, 'Alphaville', Criterion Collection Essays, 1998
• Debra Benita Shaw, 'Systems, Architecture and The Digital Body: From Alphaville to The Matrix', Parallax, 14.3, 2008

Performing/Representing Male Bonds: Issue 2 of INMEDIA

Screencap from The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). Read Marianne Kac-Vergne 's article Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction Films on the images of masculinity offered up by this and other scifi films.

Film Studies for Free let its readers know, early last year, of InMedia, a great online French Journal, in English, of Media and Media Representations in the English-Speaking World. Its first issue treated  Global Film and Television Industries Today.

Issue 2 on Performing/Representing Male Bonds has also been published recently and its contents, many of which are film related, are linked to below.

InMedia, Issue 2, 2012: Performing/Representing Male Bonds
Edited by Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

• Performing/Representing Male Bonds Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin
• Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction Films Marianne Kac-Vergne
• The Reluctant Patriarch: The Emergence of Lads and Lad Mags in the 1990s Nick Growse
• Seducing Women to Assess Each Other: Male Hierarchies within the Seduction Community Mélanie Gourarier
• Midlife Pop Masculinities in the Here and Now Chris Tinker

Varia

• British Party Election Broadcasts (2001, 2005 and 2010): Ideological Framing, Storytelling, Individualisation David Haigron

Bibliographical Essay

• ‘Locus of Control’: A Selective Review of Disney Theme Parks Thibaut Clément

Interview

• At the Crossroads of Media, Media Critique, and the Critique of Media critics – An Interview with Serge Halimi, Editor-in-Chief of Le Monde Diplomatique Serge Halimi and Christine Larrazet

Critical Perspective

• Social Cognition Divina Frau-Meigs

Conference and Seminar Reviews

• Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television Oliver Haag
• The Translation and Reception of Multilingual Films Samuel Bréan and Jean-François Cornu
• Contemporary Screen Narratives Fabrice Lyczba
• Internet Studies in Europe Mathieu O'Neil
• Cinema and the Crossing of Frontiers, 16th SERCIA Conference Julie Assouly and Marianne Kac-Vergne

Book Reviews

• Delphine Letort Violaine Roussel, Art vs War : les Artistes américains contre la guerre en Irak Paris : Presses de Sciences Po, 2011, 314 p.
• Elsa Grassy Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan (eds), Major Problems in American Popular Culture
• Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011, 496 p.
• Estelle Epinoux Carol MacKeogh, Díóg O’Connell, Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland since the 1990s Cork: Cork University Press, 2012, 176 p.
• Delphine Letort Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 New York & London: New York University Press, 2010, 221 p.

Index by author
Index by keyword

On ’Tangibility’ and Relocating Cinema: NECSUS #2, Autumn 2012

To celebrate the new issue of NECSUS on tangibility, above is a reposting of TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? by Catherine Grant. Also see version with audio commentary

[A] media, singular, is not just its medium – it is not only a support or a device. A media is also and foremost a cultural form; it is defined by the way in which it puts us in relation with the world and with others, and therefore by the type of experience that it activates. By experience, I mean both a confrontation with reality (to gain experience) and the capacity to manage this relation and to give it meaning (to have experience). From its very beginnings, cinema has been based on the fact that it offers us moving images through which we may reconfigure the reality around us and our own position within it. Cinema has always been a way of seeing and a way of living – a form of sensibility and a form of understanding. [Francesco Casetti, 'The relocation of cinema', NECSUS, Issue 2, Autumn 2012]

A great second issue of NECSUS, the brilliant journal of NECS, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies has been published. It boasts some superlative articles including Francesco Casetti's must-read article from which Film Studies For Free has excerpted above.

For those interested in hapticity, and our experience of the material properties of film, there's a very special section on that topic.

All in all (and all the contents are directly linked to below), some truly wonderful work. Well done and thank you NECSUS!

Editorial Necsus

Articles:

• The relocation of cinema by Francesco Casetti
• MP3s, rebundled debt, and performative economics: Deferral, derivatives, and digital commodity fetishism in Lady Gaga’s spectacle of excess by Anne Kustritz
• Can you see yourself living here?: Structures of desire in recent British lifestyle television by James Zborowski
• Investigatory art: Real-time systems and network culture by Edward Shanken
• Beyond cognitive estrangement: The future of science fiction cinema by Stephen Zepke
• The care for opacity: On Tsai Ming-Liang’s conservative filmic gesture by Erik Bordeleau

Special Section: Tangibility

• Material properties of historical film in the digital age by Barbara Flueckiger
• Early cinema’s touch(able) screens: From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou by Wanda Strauven
• Aporias of the touchscreen: On the promises and failures of a ubiquitous technology by Timo Kaerlein
• Questions of embodied difference: Film and queer phenomenology by Katharina Lindner
• The intangible ground: A neurophenomenology of the film experience by Adriano D’Aloia
• From subject-effect to presence-effect: A deictic approach to the cinematic by Pepita Hesselberth
• ‘The last ray of the dying sun’: Tacita Dean’s commitment to analog media as demonstrated through FLOH and FILM by Caylin Smith

Festival Reviews:
Edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network

• The Angels’ Share at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival review by David Archibald
• The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival: Seeking the social in the virtual review by Sarah Dillard
• Alternative Film/Video Belgrade 2011 review by Maja Krajnc

Book Reviews:

• The good, the beautiful and the sublime review by Bavand Behpoor
• A multiplied medium: Reviewing recent publications on television’s transitions review by Markus Stauff
• European nightmares: Horror cinema in Europe since 1945 review by Francesco Di Chiara
• Cinema and experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno review by Malte Hagener

Exhibition Reviews:

• The Abramović Method, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (March-June 2012) review by Elena Biserna
• Non Non Non – Visiting the exhibition with Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi review by Miriam De Rosa

On the myth of the frontier in cinema and culture

'A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...': Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters

This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

      However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.

The inspiration for today's Film Studies For Free entry -- on the (transnational) myth of the frontier in cinema and related culture -- was Richard Langley's excellent, highly persuasive, short documentary embedded above. That video also has a vivid, post hoc connection to this blog's popular list of "Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies" posted but a few short weeks ago.

Like cinematic apocalypses, filmic frontier mythology turned out to be an incredibly rich vein of web scholarship. So, many thanks to Richard and all the below named scholars for making sure their very valuable work was openly accessible online.

Open Access is, after all, the real 'final [e-]frontier'.

And hopefully it won't turn out to be a myth...

• Catherine Lynn Adams, 'Africanizing the Territory: The History, Memory and Contemporary Imagination of Black Frontier Settlements in the Oklahoma Territory', PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2010
• Tyler Lorey Adams, 'The Geography of Frontier', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
  
• Jon Baldwin, 'Other Bother: The Alien in Science Fiction Cinema; Sardar and Cubitt's Aliens R Us' , Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 20, August 2003
• Ann Barrow, 'The Cutting Garden: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and ReceptionTheories of Audiences or Fans', Cultural Studies Conference Proceedings, 2004
• Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis (eds), Dislocating the Frontier: essaying the mystique of the outback (ANU E-Press, 2006)
• Maria Beatrice Bittarello, 'Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination', Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol. 1. No. 1, July 2008
• Henrik Bødker, 'The Mercy Seat as Inescapable Heat - The Proposition and Ideas of Justice in the Australian Outback', P.O.V. No.24 - The Western, December 2007
• Barbara Buchenau, 'Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography', CLCWeb Volume 3, Issue 2, June 2001 
• Angus Cameron, 'The Metaverse Frontier', PSA 2008
• Cynthia-Lou Coleman, 'Framing Cinematic Indians within the Social Construction of Place', American Studies, 46:3/4 (Fall-Winter 2005): 275-293 Indigenous Studies Today, 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006)
• Felicity Collins, 'History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema', Trames, 2008, 12(62/57), 3, 276–286
• Chris Cowan, 'Reflections on The Blair Witch Project', 49th Parallel, Issue 11, Autumn 2003
• Melissa Daniels, '"History Is a Funny Thing": African Americans in the West, American Studies, and the Screen', Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2010, Volume 9, Issue 2, Fall 2010
• Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, 'Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum', Western Journal of Communication Vol. 69, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 85–108
• Klaus Dodds, 'Hollywood and the Popular Geopolitics of the War on Terror', Third World Quarterly 2008
• Dan Edwards, 'Australian Western: Fear on the frontier [on The Proposition]', RealTime Arts Magazine, 70, December-January 2005
• Rainer Eisfeld, 'Myths and Realities of Frontier Violence: A Look at the Gunfighter Saga', Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 3(5) (1995) 106-122
• Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, Alexander Horwath (eds), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
• Thomas S. Engeman, 'Why The American "Frontier" Will Always Be Populated By Democratic, Christian Knights', The Claremont Institute, September 2002
• Theo Finigan, '"To the Stables, Robin!": Regenerating the Frontier in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns', Image Text, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010 
• Austin Fisher, 'A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier', Scope, 'Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation' e-book, 2009
• Austin Fisher, 'Out West, down south: Gazing at America in reverse shot through Damiano Damiani’s "Quien sabe?"', The Italianist, 30:2, 2010
• Peter Flynn, 'The Silent Western as Mythmaker', Images Journal, Issue 6, February 2004 
• Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos,' Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction', in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (SUNY, 2001)
• Martin Fradley, '“Why Doesn’t Your Compass Work?”: Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantasy Blockbusters and Contemporary Queer Theory', originally published in Karen Ross (ed.), "The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media" (Blackwell, 2011), pp.294-312
• Martin Fradley, '[Review of] Gary Needham, "Brokeback Mountain" (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 19:2 (Fall 2010), pp.143-146 
• Christiane Gerblinger, ‘"Fiery the Angels Fell": America, Regeneration and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner', Australasian Journal of American Studies, 21.1, July 2002
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Genre Films and Cultural Myth', Film International, April 20, 2011 
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Introduction: Spokes in the Wheels', John Ford's Stagecoach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• Michael Grimshaw, 'Preacher, or the Death of God in Pictures', JCRT 3.2
• David Gunkel and Ann Hetzel Gunkel, 'Terra Nova 2.0—The New Worlds of MMORPGs', Critical Studies in Media Communication 26(2), June 2009, pp. 104-127 
• Alia Haddad, 'An American Take on Mythic Mexico and its Revolution in The Wild Bunch', Volume VII, Number 2, Fall 2011
• Rowena Harper, 'Frontier Mythology in the American Teen Film', PhD Thesis, University of Adelaide December 2008
• Christina Judith Hein, 'Battleground Masculinity: Gendertroublers and Gatekeepers in Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986)', COPAS, Issue 8, 2007
• Kurt Hemmer, 'Political Outlaws: Beat Cowboys', American Studies Journal, No. 50, 2007
• David Ingram, ‘"Go to the forest and move": 1960s American Rock Music as Electronic Pastoral', 49th Parallel, Vol. 20, Winter 2006-2007
• Nicholas Jelley, The Potential for Rewriting Myth: Finding 'Kindness' on the Frontier, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2005
• Kathleen Kennedy, 'Bodily Pain and Nation Making: Catholics and Indians in the Protestant Historical Imagination', Queen: A Journal of Rhetoric and Power, September 2003
• Geoff King, 'Spectacular Narratives: Twister, Independence Day, and frontier mythology in contemporary Hollywood', originally published in SPECTACULAR NARRATIVESHollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: IB Tauris, 2000)
• Katherine Kinney, 'Cold Wars: Black Soldiers in Liberal Hollywood', WLA Spring/Summer 2000
• Stephen Koetzing, 'The Trespassing Cyborg: Technology, Nature, and the Nation in Wild Wild West', AS Peers 4, 2011
• Marie Claire Kolbenschlag, 'Film and the American experience', from Jump Cut, no. 6, 1975, pp. 16-21 
• Sam Kula, 'National Image, National Dream',  Cinema Canada, February 1976
• Emma Lambert, '[De]Constructing John F. Kennedy?: Herschensohn's Years of Lightning, Days of Drums', 49th Parallel, Issue 4, Winter 2000
• Richard Langley, 'American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters',Vimeo, November 17, 2011 (originally screened at the American Frontiers conference, University of Birmingham, 12 November 2011)
• Helen Laville, 'What kind of Man are you? - Masculinity in Oliver Stone JFK', 49th Parallel, Issue 5, Spring 2000
• Christopher Le Coney and Zoe Trodd, 'John Wayne and the Queer Frontier: Deconstructions of the Classic Cowboy Narrative during the Vietnam War, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2005 
• Julia Leyda, 'Black-Audience Westerns and the Politics of Cultural Identification In the 1930s', Cinema Journal, 42, No. 1, Fall 2002
• Julia Leyda, 'Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility In John Ford's The Searchers', The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13, 2002 [click on PDF]
• Stephen McVeigh, '[Review of] The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory, By Will Wright (London: Sage Publications, 2001)', Scope, November 2003
• Mark Mordue, 'Dead Men Walking', Frieze Magazine, Issue 114, April 2008
• Gabrielle Murray, 'Fact and Fiction: The Iraq War Film in Absence', Screening the Past, 29, 2010
  
• Robin Murray and Joe Heumann, 'Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”: the myth of interdependence in oil drilling film', Jump Cut, No. 53, summer 2011
• Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont, 'Daughter of Earth: Judith Merril and the Intersections of Gender, Science Fiction, and Frontier Mythology', Science Fiction Studies, 107, Volume 36, Part 1, March 2009
• Gregory H. Nobles, 'Beyond Myth and Master Narrative: Toward a New History of the American Frontier', Quaderno, 6, 2004
• Allison Perlman, 'The Brief Ride of the Biker Movie', International Journal of Motorcycle Studies, March 2007
• Lauren Rabinovitz, 'More Than Meets the Eye: Movies in American Studies', MAASA Presidential Symposium 2005
• Rod Romesburg, 'Regeneration through Vampirism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s New Frontier', Slayage 5.3 [19], February 2006
• Christina Rowley, ‘The Disappearance and Re-emergence of the Western in Vietnam War Films’, PSA 2010 
• Christian Seidl, '"Regeneration through Creativity" – The Frontier in Paul Auster's Moon Palace', PhiN 31, 2005
• Ron Smith, 'Mistaken Images in Serge: Cecil B. DeMille’s Northwest Mounted Police (1940)', 49th Parallel, Vol. 24, 2010
• Saralyn Smith, '"Come see a fat old man sometime!" Masculinity and Aging in True Grit (1969) and Unforgiven', MA Thesis, Claremont Graduate University, December 2010 
• Barry Stephenson, 'Swaggering Savagery and the New Frontier', Journal of Religion and Popula Culture, Vol. 16, Summer 2007
• John Streamas, '"Patriotic Drunk": To be Yellow, Brave, and Disappeared in Bad Day at Black Rock',  New Voices Conference, American Studies, 44:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 99-119
• András Tarnóc, 'Narratives of Confinement: Revisiting the Founding Myths of American Culture', Americana, Volume VII, Number 1, Spring 2011
• Nann Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam University Press, 2006 [on the emergence of the  Western]) 
• Edvin Vestergaard Kau, 'The Western Experience: Reflections on the Phenomenology of the Western', P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007
• Geoffrey Walker, 'Deconstructing an American Myth: Hollywood and The Last of the Mohicans', 10th Cooper Seminar, James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, July, 1995
• Jerry White, 'POSSUM, film noir, and the past/future of New Zealand', P:O.V. No.7, March 1999
• Gioia Woods, 'Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Lori Piestewa, and the Great American Makeover', Studies in Popular Culture, 29.1 October 2006
• Ray Bourgeois Zimmerman, 'Gruntspeak: Masculinity, Monstrosity and Discourse in Hasford's The Short-Timers', American Studies, 40:1 (Spring 1999): 65-93 

Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies

Updated November 21, 2011

Image from Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998)

Aside from the current stirrings of challenge to the disastrous, real-world, global order, Film Studies For Free was inspired to produce the below, awesome entry of links to studies of apocalypse and planetary disaster in film and moving image culture by three earth-shatteringly exciting things:

1. A very impressive digital-cinema screening of Lars von Trier's latest film Melancholia (Is cinema dead? FSFF thinks it may still have a few years of life left... Some good thoughts on this film are linked to here); 
2. A thrilling call for papers for an upcoming conference on The End, in relation to motion pictures (scroll to the foot of the post);
3. The just-in-the-nick-of-time appearance of a great, film-related, free-to-read-online book published by the wonderful people at OpenBook Publishers: Maria Manuela Lisboa's The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011). OBP have also produced a new, free-to read online version of Robert Philip Kolker's long freely available, classic book The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema.

Now, if you don't mind, the all-too-easily scared FSFF will anti-climactically head for the hills (or, perhaps, for the sofa) to remove itself from all this eschatological excitement.

• Karin Badt. 'Apocalypse Too Soon: Wheeler Winston Dixon's Visions of the Apocalypse', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 27, May 2005 
• Lior Barshack, 'Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini', Cardozo Law Review, 31.4, 2010
• Brent Bellamy, 'We are Apocalyptic! [on Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books, 2011)]', Reviews in Cultural Theory Vol. 2, Issue 2, 2011
• Adam Bingham, 'Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzog's La Soufrière', Senses of Cinema, September 2006
• Kurt Bullock, 'Vertical Apocalypse: Altered Noir Cityscape within Blade Runner’s Dystopia', SBCC.edu
• L.T. Copier, Preposterous revelations: visions of apocalypse and martyrdom in Hollywood cinema 1980 – 2000, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• Sérgio Dias Branco, 'Being Her/She in ‘Who Are You?’”. It’s the End of the World. Again?!?: Why Buffy Still Matters, Conference at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, March 16, 2007
• H. Bruce Franklin, 'Don't Look Where We're Going: Visions of the Future in Science-Fiction Films, 1970-82 ("Ne cherche pas à savoir où on va": les Visions de l'avenir dans le cinéma de SF de 1970 à 1982), Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), pp. 70-80 
• Asbjørn Grønstad, 'Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered', Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005
• Mark Harris, 'The New Scene Canon - Chopping Choppers Unforgettably: The "Nowhere to Go but Down" Scene in Apocalypse Now', Cinephile, 6.1, 2011
• Despina Kakoudaki, 'Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film', Camera Obscura 50, Volume 17, Number 2, 2002
• Kate S. Kelly, 'Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Century Thompson, Kirsten Moana. Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007', Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 22.1, 2010 
• New Richard Langley, 'American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters',Vimeo, November 17, 2011 (originally screened at the American Frontiers conference, University of Birmingham, 12 November 2011)
• Bruno Lessard, ‘"It’s the End of the World!": The Paradox of Event and Body in Hitchcock’s The Birds', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
• Jeff Lewis and Kirsty Best, 'Pure Filth: Apocalyptic Hedonism and the Postmodern Surfer', Scope, Issue 2, June 2005
• Maria Manuel Lisboa, The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011) [Apocalypse Now and Again; The World Gone M A D ; Is the End Ever; Falling Out with Hal and Hester; Utopia at the End of this; Libera Me Domine De Vita Æterna]
• Ewa Mazierska, 'Polish Cinematic Dystopias: Metaphos of Life Under Communism - and Beyond', Kinema. 2004
• Walter Metz, 'Atomic Animals: Toward the Re-Invention of Natural History and Science Filmmaking', IM: Interactive Media. 2. [2006]. 1-12
• Angela Ndalianis, 'Buffy, Angel and the Palimpsest Apocalypse', Slayage Online, 2003
• Conrad Ostwalt, 'Visions of the End: Secular Apocalypse in Recent Hollywood Film', Journal of Religion and Film, 2.1, 1998
• Conrad Ostwalt, 'Armageddon at the Millennial Dawn', Journal of Religion and Film, 4.1, 2000
• Iván Pintor, 'Melancholay and Sacrifice in Contemporary Science Fiction' FORMATS, No. 5, 2009
• Gyan Prakash, 'Imaging the Modern City, Darkly', in Gyan Prakash (ed.) Noir Urbanism: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton University Press, 2010)
• Justin Remes, 'Apocalyptic Premediations', Journal of Religion and Popular CultureVolume 22(2): Summer 2010
• Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, 'Visions of Apocalypse: A Rhetorical Analysis of The Day After', Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (34th, San Francisco, CA, May 24-28, 1984
• D. Bruno Starrs, 'Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer's Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)', Forum, 5, 2007
• Kevin Stewart, 'The Zombie Aesthetics and the Post-Apocalyptic Franchise', Kinema, 2007 
• Kirsten Moana Thompson, 'Apocalyptic Dread, Kierkegaard, and the Cultural Landscape of the Millennium', Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium (New York: SUNY Press, 2007)
• Robert Torry, 'Apocalypse Then: Benefits of the Bomb in Fifties Science Fiction Films', Cinema Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991) 
• Roslyn Weaver, '"The Four Horsemen of the Greenhouse Apocalypse": Apocalypse in the Science Fiction Novels of George Turner', Forum, 5, 2007

The End of ...? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures - University of Kent, UK, January 21, 2011

This one-day conference is for postgraduate students and early career researchers whose work incorporates the study of motion pictures and aims to explore the interdisciplinary conception and representation of “The End.”
     As the conspiracy theories for the end of the world in 2012 culminate in the mainstream disaster movie and the relevant literature, our concern and anxiety with closures remain within the margins of academic attention. In addition to the ubiquitous representations of “The End”, phrases such as “the end of cinema” and “death of celluloid” are recurrent in scholarly circles, calling forth a new era of engagement with film and other media. “The End” in the latter case evokes a new beginning that requires close examination: perhaps an analogy that could be extended to Film Studies as a discipline, outlining (or criticizing) its potential methodological changes in the future as well as in the past. The aesthetics of “The End”, however, is clearly evident in our direct engagement with time-based cultural artefacts. In other words, the study of various methods of narrative closure in film, music, literature and theatre can inform one of our fundamental obsessions: a good ending.
     We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations from candidates across arts and humanities, welcoming individual papers as well as group panels that investigate “The End” as a broad phenomenon that can be approached through a variety of methods. Possible research subjects include, but not limited to: End of cinema: changing patterns of distribution and exhibition; End of Theory: the methodological shifts in film studies as a discipline; End of story: the aesthetics and strategies of narrative closure, open endings, narrative inconclusiveness in relation to film and other arts; End of the world: recent preoccupation with the disaster film genres; End of cinephilia: alternative channels for watching and discussing movies; End of film: the death of celluloid, the rise of digital technologies and issues of medium specificity; Case studies of films or other media that address any of the aforementioned issues; Representation and/or conception of “The End” within the history and philosophy of art.
     The conference will conclude with a film screening and an introduction by the keynote speaker in the Gulbenkian Cinema, an independent cinema located within the university campus at Canterbury.
Please send abstracts (300 words) and a short biographical note to thendof2012@gmail.com. Deadline for applications is 15 November 2011. Should you have any queries, please do not
hesitate to contact us at the same e-mail address. Website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/film/filmcentre/the_end_of.html
Conference Organization Committee: Emre Caglayan, Frances Kamm, Pete Sillett

Tina Pippin (ed.), Apocalyptic Bodies: the biblical end of the world in text and image (London: Routledge, 1999)

New BRIGHT LIGHTS FILM JOURNAL

"Your body is a microcosm of all existence." – On Michelle LeBrun's Death: A Love Story: Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays by Matt Brennan

Film Studies For Free continues to catch up with August's bumper crop of new online journal issues. Over the weekend, it has been thoroughly enjoying the lively and eclectic brilliance of Bright Lights Film Journal's latest offering of very savvy, and sometimes sassy, articles.

They may not be 'peer reviewed' in the strict scholarly sense, but film studies academics and cinephiles will miss these at their peril.

The entire table of contents for Issue 73 is thus reproduced below. And don't miss Bright Lights After Dark, BLFJ's fabulous film blog for further, essential, movie musings. 

Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2011 | Issue 73

From the Editor

• "You can't have your cinema and eat it too" - or can you? 
• Gary Morris

Features

• Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays
• Matt Brennan 

• Boris Barnet: The Lyric Voice in Soviet Cinema by Giuliano Vivaldi

Articles

• Cylons, Avatars, and Barack Obama: Science Fiction and Hybridity After 9/11 by Natalie Bograd

• The Envelope of Time: Wrapping Up the Past in Chris Marker, Alexander Sokurov, and Josè Luis Guerìn
• Lesley Chow

• Eating Cinema: The Frozen Dessert as Audiovisual Synaesthesia
• Andrew Grossman

• Darkening the Image of American Wealth and Power: Unstoppable and The Lincoln Lawyer 
• Joseph Natoli

• Carnivorous Lunar Activities: The Origins of 1980s Metamorphosis Cinema by Alex Kirschenbaum

• Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys: Revisiting Frank Borzage's No Greater Glory and the 1930s Boy Soldier Genre by Peter Lee  

• Young Ones and Swan Songs: Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Bela Tarr in Edinburgh  
• D. J. M. Saunders

Movies

• Misery Loves Fantasy: Kim Ki-duk's Arirang (2011) by Jonathan McCalmont

• Between Silence and Sound: Children of a Lesser God  by Ian Murphy

• The Green Hornet Makes America Bossy Bottom: Who's Topping Who? by L. Andrew Cooper

• Green Lantern: The Allegory of Fear and Will Unfolded 
• Joseph Natoli

• Still Hungover: Todd Phillips and Rape Culture by Terri Carney

• You Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello: The Long Goodbye and the End of the Crime (and Competition) in American Detective Films by Allen H. Redmon

• Desert Solitaire: On Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2010) 
• Jacob Mikanowski

• Space Dust: On Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life 
• Jacob Mikanowski

Television

• Talk Is Cheap: On Aaron Sorkin's Moral Compass 
• Matt Brennan

• Concocting Character in Television: The Case of Star Trek's Annoying Old Men – and the Beautiful Young Women Who Love Them 
• Mervyn Nicholson

Short Features

• Short Takes: Cinematography "But It Did Happen" – Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia by Matthew Sewell

Stars

• Greer Garson and the Good War: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great Lady by Meredith Hicks

Directors

• A Dream That Was Not All a Dream: The Films of André Delvaux by Santiago Rubín de Celis

Festivals

• Crafting Community: The 2011 QDoc International Film Festival 
• Gary Morris

Columns

• Bright Sights: Recent DVDs 
• Gordon Thomas

Books

• The Celluloid Closet, by Vito Russo. Reviewed by Mark Adnum

• Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, by Kim Newman. Reviewed by Joseph Aisenberg

• Shock Value: How A Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, And Invented Modern Horror, by Jason Zinoman. Reviewed by Cynthia C. Scott

• They Live, by Jonathan Lethem. Reviewed by Chad Trevitte

Study of a Single Film: Forbidden Planet (in memory of Leslie Nielsen)

Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis star in Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)

Film Studies For Free was sad to hear that the king of deadpan movie humour, actor Leslie Nielsen, has died at the age of 84. Of all the films he starred in, the one that has most often been the subject of scholarly studies was the hugely influential science fiction movie Forbidden Planet, a film in which Nielsen played a sincerely serious role.

In (metonymic) memory of Nielsen's wonderful career (the straight part standing for the mostly comic whole), FSFF has assembled a list of links to openly accessible academic studies of this 1956 film. With its groundbreaking electronic music score by Louis and Bebe Barron, its highly personable robot character, its loose adaptation of a high culture text (Shakespeare's The Tempest), and its well elaborated allusions to classical (and post-classical) mythology, as well as to Freud (the Id monster), Forbidden Planet will probably keep film academics in business for quite some time. But, FSFF hopes some will also turn their attention to Nielsen's comic performances, before too long.

Shirley, they merit that, at the very least.

• Martin Stig Andersen, 'Audiovisual Correspondences', CEC: eContact! 12.4 — Perspectives on the Electroacoustic Work / Perspectives sur l'œuvre électroacoustique (August 2010)
• Simone Caroti, "Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest"    page 2 of 12 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004)
• David Cooper, '[Review of] James Wierzbicki: Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet: A Film Score Guide', The Journal of Film Music, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2007
• Ted Friedman, 'Jung and Lost', FlowTV, May 1, 2009
• Robert M. Geraci, 'Robots and the Sacred in Science and Science Fiction: Theological Implications of Artificial Intelligence', Zygon, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2007)
• Miguel Angel González Campos, 'Shakespeare in Outer Space: Forbidden Planet as Adaptation of The Tempest', Sederi 9 (1998)
• Greg Grewell, 'Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions Then, Now, and in the (Imagined) Future', Rocky Mountain Review, Fall 2001
• Laurie Johnson, 'Felix and Gilles's tempestuous, monstrous machine', M/C Journal: Journal of Media and Culture, 2 (6) 1999 
• David A. Kirby, 'The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films', Literature and Medicine 26, no. 1 (Spring 2007)
• T.J. Matheson, 'Marcuse, Ellul, and the Science-Fiction Film: Negative Responses to Technology', Science Fiction Studies, #58, Volume 19, Part 3, November 1992
• Anthony Miller, '"In this last tempest": Modernising Shakespeare’s Tempest on Film', Sydney Studies in English, Vol 23 (1997)
• Roy Schwartzman, '“Engenderneered Machines in Science Fiction Film.” Studies in Popular Culture 22.1 (October 1999): 75-87
• Rachel Weissbrod, 'Inter-Semiotic Translation: Shakespeare on Screen', Journal of Specialised Translation, Issue 5, January 2006