Showing posts with label video essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video essay. Show all posts

Monday, 22 December 2014

End of December Round Up: THE CINE-FILES, FRAMES, [in]TRANSITION, LOLA, MEDIASCAPE, NECSUS and Much More!

The Marriages of LAUREL DALLAS by Catherine Grant
The above video is published as an integral part of a multimedia essay on two Hollywood adaptations of STELLA DALLAS "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall2014_MarriagesMelodrama.html


Another year of open access scholarly bulletins and links draws to a close at Film Studies For Free. Despite readership well exceeding 2,000,000 page views since late 2009 (thanks for coming back all of you!), it has been a fairly quiet year at this blog,* if not at its Twitter feed and Facebook page, both of which generally boast fast-flowing, usually daily content. But let's round the year off, nonetheless, with a characteristically large collection of links to lots of just (in the nick of time) published Fall 2014 issues of some brilliant online and open access film and moving image studies journals, as well as a bunch of other online delights. Just feast your festive eyes on all the below riches!

And also check out the videographic jewel at the top of this entry too - FSFF's latest audiovisual essay on the tear-jerking ending(s) of Stella Dallas. 2014 has been a golden year for the scholarly video, for sure. A clear highlight in that emergent film studies idiom has been the creation and successful launch of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Images Studies, which FSFF's author co-founded and co-edits with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. Four issues have been published, with the most recent one appearing last week - linked to below - and there's lots more great peer reviewed content lining itself up for 2015. And the audiovisual essay also now boasts its own section at NECSUS Journal, too - edited by the brilliant essayist duo Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. It's EVERYWHERE!!

If you're interested in learning more about this audiovisual film scholarly form in a classroom or presentation setting, FSFF's author will be holding video essay workshops and masterclasses at the January conference of MeCCSA in Newcastle, UK, at BIMI: Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, in London in March (that's a free to attend session!), at an event at the University of East Anglia in May, with  Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin (details soon), as well as at a National Endowment for the Humanities funded event at Middlebury College, Vermont. And those are just the events scheduled in the first half of next year!

So 2015 may be a quiet year at this blog, too........ But FSFF will try to maintain regular entries to publish alongside all its usual microblogging on open access film studies.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! WISHING EVERYONE A WONDERFUL NEW YEAR!

*One of the reasons it's been so quiet is that FSFF's author has not just been linking but also contributing rather a lot to these and other journals and online projects this year. See the long list of publications right at the foot of what follows.


FEATURE ARTICLES
P.O.V.
[in]TRANSITION 1.4, 2014 (Issue commissioned and edited by Drew Morton)
LOLA Issue 5 has continued to roll out with the entries below published to date and others still to come:

MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014 on ADAPTATION (in films, television, anime, computer animation, games!)

NECSUS Journal, Autumn 2014: War

Features
Audiovisual essays: edited by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
Special section: War
Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier [NECS Publication Committee])
Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist [Film Festival Research Network])
Exhibition reviews (edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg [NECS Publication Committee])

 Assorted further open access linkage!

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Thursday, 27 November 2014

Thanksgiving Round Up! On the Audiovisual Essay, Bordwellian Beneficence, FROZEN, Fincher, SNOWPIERCER, Jodorowsky, Charles Barr interview, Horror Grrls, Fan Studies, Media Industries, Animation, and SO MUCH MORE!!



An audiovisual essay by Adrian Martin. Read Martin's accompanying text at [in]Transition 1.3, 2014, where you can see the other entries in this latest issue of the new journal of videographic film and moving image studies. Also, check out the latest issue of LOLA (co-edited by Martin and Girish Shambu), which features great new essays by Joe McElhaney (on German cinema) and Lesley Stern (on the ghostliness of gesture in film), among others.



Life, travel and lots happening at the good old salaried job rather got in the way, in the last three months, of Film Studies For Free's foolish claim that it would be "right back" after its last entry. This miscalculation heralded the longest hiatus in this blog's six and half year long existence! But FSFF is BACK and (even more foolishly) claiming that December should see some further new entries! Don't believe a word of it, people, till you see them with your own eyes!

Just be thankful, then, if you're so inclined, for all the openly accessible film and moving image studies that have appeared or been located online since the last entry. Links to many of these are lovingly gathered below for your reading and viewing pleasure and for your film and media studies edification.

Two further items of interest: first, you still have time to apply to attend a free two-week long workshop on making videographic criticism at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA, in June 2015, run by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, with Eric Faden and Catherine Grant as guest presenters! In case you think that, while free, this will still be an expensive venture, through a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, participants will receive a small stipend as well as having all travel, housing, and food expenses covered. The application deadline is Monday December 1, 2014.... So go to it! Full details here: http://sites.middlebury.edu/videoworkshop/.

Finally, do be sure to tune in to In Media Res from Monday (December 1) for a weeklong discussion of Open Source Academia: "Featuring communications and media scholars from various avenues and alleyways, this multimedia discussion will take place at the In Media Res website as well as at Facebook, Twitter and beyond! Curators for this week include Catherine Grant, of Film Studies for Free, writing on "Scholarly Striptease," and Suzanne Scott, drawing on the troublesome canard of the "Fake Geek Girl" to address the possibility of the 'Fake Geek Academic.' Open Source Academia week is a collaboration between In Media Res and the students of IML 501, Seminar in Contemporary Digital Media in the Media Arts and Practices Division in The University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Follow Open Source Academia on Facebook and Twitter to enjoy custom curated web content to enrich the conversation as it unfolds."

P.S. It's not open access, sadly, but USC film and media scholar Holly Willis published a great profile of Film Studies For Free in the Fall 2014 issue of FILMMAKER Magazine. If you're a subscriber you can find it here: "Film Studies in the 21st Century": http://filmmakermagazine.com/87920-film-studies-for-the-21st-century/.

  • NEW ISSUE! Media Industries Journal 1.2 is now out with twelve think pieces from its editorial board: http://www.mediaindustriesjournal.org/index.php/mij/issue/view/2
  • More podcast brilliance: the Aca Media team have published two episodes since FSFF's last entry:
    • Episode 18 (aka The Halloween episode) has lots of laughs and frights! Also: Forrest Gump and the SCMS-U conference. http://www.aca-media.org/episode18
    • Episode 17 features Courtney Brannon Donoghue discussing Sony's film production in Brazil. an introduction to an exciting new outlet for video essays, [in]Transition, and a discussion of baseball players who don't have a clue and a couple of British detectives who do: http://www.aca-media.org/episode17
  • VIEWING! From the OPEN HERE conference and festival on social, technological & cultural issues re. the digital commons: https://vimeo.com/user33775574
  • ALSO! 1000 Frames of Hitchcock: See Each of Hitchcock’s 52 Films Reduced to 1,000 Artistic Frames: http://goo.gl/Wa8ulI 
  • ALSO! Darren Tofts and Mark Amerika, joined new media philosophy journal Ctrl-Z editor Niall Lucy and film director Ken Miller to "discuss the flows and eruptions of remix culture, to reflect on its technological and intellectual pre-histories, and to consider its implications for cultural practice": http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/press/media/ (link via Adrian Martin)
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Thursday, 29 November 2012

To Cinephilia and Beyond! Christian Keathley's Film Studies Online

A free-to-attend University of London Screen Studies Group series event. Full details are given here: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/events/view/13234.

A free-to-attend University of Sussex Centre for Visual Fields event. Further details are given here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cvf/newsandevents/events?id=16509.

Film Studies For Free is almost unspeakably thrilled that its author is helping to host a visit to her shores by the wonderful film scholar Christian Keathley. So thrilled, in fact, that a collected edition of links to his generously-shared, online, film scholarship is given below. 

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently completing a second book, The Mystery of Otto Preminger (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multi-media format, including video essays.

In addition to the two UK events detailed above, Keathley will also give a keynote lecture on his work as part of the lineup for a two-day symposium in Antwerp, Belgium, entitled "FROM PHOTOGÉNIE TO CINEPHILIA 2.0, a seminar on cinephilia then and now". The event takes place between December 7-8. Unlike the two events above, it isn't free-to-attend, but it is incredibly good value. 

This superb looking symposium is hosted by the Flemish Service for Film Culture, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (UGent) and Research Group Visual Studies and Media Culture (University of Antwerp) organised in collaboration with Research Center for Visual Poetics (University of Antwerp) and CINEMATEK, with two other internationally recognised keynotes Malte Hagener and Sarah Keller. You can find further details of the symposium here.

There should be some open access resources emerging from the above events, and if that happens, FSFF will be among the first to let you know about them.

Online Written Texts by Christian Keathley:
Online Video Essays by Christian Keathley:
Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

50 Years On from Christian Keathley
Revision of a video made for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies' 50th anniversary conference.


Does Your Dog Bite? from Christian Keathley
A video essay by Christian Keathley on a canine moment in Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951).

About Christian Keathley's work:
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Monday, 22 October 2012

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'! Video Studies of the Western

This new video essay examines the representation of the frontier in John Ford's Westerns. Ford's visual poetics illustrate Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." Ford's films, in this regard, allow us to explore seminal foundational concepts of America history and ideology. "John Ford's Vision of the West" 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. Read Matthias's written study of his video essay practice. Also see Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

The Western is one of the most iconographic of film genres and is thus particularly well suited to (audio)visual forms of analysis. So, today, Film Studies For Free has lassoed and corralled a whole herd of beefy video studies of film Westerns that abundantly testify to this advantage.

The group is led, above, by a new, wonderfully researched, video essay by the very talented Matthias Stork (author of the great, and widely circulated, Chaos Cinema video essays, along with others published here at FSFF). Thanks very much to him and all the other video essayists represented below for making their work publicly acessible. 

[It's Open Access week, so this here Open Access campaigning website particularly wants to show its warm appreciation to those of you who like to share the fruits of at least part of your film studies labour for free!]

And if you know of any other, freely accessible, video essays on Westerns that FSFF has missed please alert us to them by leaving a comment with the link below. Thanks!

 
An audiovisual study of Sergio Leone's distinctive duel aesthetic. The video essay was first published, along with an accompanying written essay, in the first issue of the online film journal FRAMES. "Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's reflections on the above video here. And read Film Studies For Free's entry on the Spaghetti Western



A video essay exploring the ways in which editing techniques and other cinematic processes aid the construction of genre in the opening of "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956).




Outlaw: Josey Wales by Matthew Cheney
A video essay looking at a few aspects of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 



McCabe and Mrs. Miller: A Video Essay by Steven Santos
A video essay on Robert Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See the original posting here

Critics' Picks: Rio Bravo from The New York Times
A. O. Scott basks in the pleasures of taking it easy with Howard Hawks's 1959 Western. (Related Link)



Beaver's Lodge: CAIN'S CUTTHROATS from Press Play Video Blog
This is the fifth installment of BEAVER'S LODGE, a series of video essays narrated by actor Jim Beaver which will offer critical takes on some of Beaver's favorite films 


'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.






 
Deconstructing the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League
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