Tuesday, 1 May 2012

INMEDIA on Jarmusch, US 'Britcom' remakes, global and local cinema, contemporary Hollywood and US Independent films

Framegrab from the Limits of Control (Jim Jarnusch, ) Read Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay on this film, and also a new essay on it by Céline Murillo
The aim of InMedia is to study the media and media representations in the English-speaking world. The journal focuses on the press, photography, painting, cinema, television, video games, music, radio and the Internet among other fields of study. It provides a multidisciplinary approach and comparative perspectives. Contributions are welcome from many research areas, including history, economics, political sciences, sociology, aesthetics, anthropology or science and communication studies.
Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass onto its readers news of the birth of InMedia, an online French Journal, in English, of Media and Media Representations in the English-Speaking World. 

This is a very welcome developement: as François Cusset puts it in his great contribution to the journal -- 'Media Studies: A French Blind Spot'
Not only has French publishing started to translate the best of non-French theory which it had refused to import for so long (even if media theorists are still quite rare in French catalogs), and not only have issues of minority representation and reception theory started to be raised within the French media world (even if they have not yet been raised in more academic circles), but the French university system has come to acknowledge its belatedness with regards to the major theoretical debates of the globalized academic scene–and to half-open its doors to initial experiments in this direction, as with Gender Studies or with a serious approach to popular culture. Let us only hope that we won’t have to wait for French media to improve its own standards of accuracy and professional rigor, and to become more hospitable to minorities and alternative views, before we finally see Media Studies taught in French universities. Because that might still take a long time.
This blog wishes a good and hearty online life to InMedia. Its excellent contents are linked to below.

Finally, for today, with reference to Cusset's important point about the increasing translation into French of non-Francophone film and media theory, FSFF would very much recommend to its French-speaking/reading visitors the remarkable online, open access journal débordements
which is doing just that (see its versions of Screening Sex, Linda Williams [Les orgasmes de Jane Fonda]; Plaisir visuel et cinéma narratif, Laura Mulvey (première partie); Plaisir visuel et cinéma narratif, Laura Mulvey [seconde partie]).

Latest issue
1 | 2012
Global Film and Television Industries Today

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Wednesday, 25 April 2012

Film as a Subversive Art: R.I.P. Amos Vogel



Film Studies For Free was very sad to learn of the death yesterday of Amos Vogel. Austrian born Vogel was best known for his bestselling book Film as a Subversive Art (1974) and also as the founder of the New York City avant-garde ciné-club Cinema 16 (1947–1963).

David Hudson has gathered some great memorial links. And at the Sticking Place website you will find lots of links to excerpts from Vogel's writings as well as writing about him.

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Tuesday, 24 April 2012

A Star Was Born... : Links in Barbra Streisand's Honour on her 70th Birthday!

Frame grab from A Star Is Born ( Frank Pierson, 1976)
Each version of A Star Is Born may detail the rise of an unknown, but does so through extremely well-known performers, albeit ones at different stages of their careers. [...] Barbra Streisand [...] was at the height of her career in 1976. Her domination of A Star Is Born (she contributed to the writing and even, as Kris Kristofferson, her co-star, saw it, the directing [(Burke, Tom. "Kris Kristofferson Sings the Good-Life Blues." Esquire 86 (December 1976): 126–28ff), 208-9]) was another manifestation of a desire to play out aspects of her own life. The credited director has recounted at length how, during preproduction, Streisand debated the degree to which her autobiography should be reflected in Esther Hoffman ([Pierson, Frank. "My Battles with Barbra and Jon." New York 9 (November 15, 1976): 49–60], 50). If James Mason's character in the 1954 film becomes through role reversal the "fictional counterpart of the neurotic, self-destructive person that Garland [had] become" ([Jennings, Wade. "Nova: Garland in 'A Star Is Born.'" Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 3 (summer 1979): 321–37], 333), then Streisand's Esther Hoffman directly fulfills everything that Streisand herself has become by 1976. Richard Dyer even suggests that among the "number of cases on which the totality of a film can be laid at the door of the star" the case can be made "most persuasively" for Streisand's A Star Is Born (Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979], 175) [Jerome Delamater, '"Once More, from the Top": Musicals the Second Time Around', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 84]
Film Studies For Free wishes a very happy 70th birthday to Barbra Streisand, actor, singer, songwriter, film director, producer, and queer feminist icon extraordinaire.

Below, you can find a tiny little celebration in related scholarly links - the only gift that (rather besotted Barbra fan) FSFF knows how to give.

If anyone knows of any other good items (and it is far too short and unworthy a list so far...), please leave a comment and FSFF will add them to the list.

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"Timeline of Historical Film Colors" now online

Frame grab from Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
More than ever we need access to solid knowledge about historical film color processes in order to save our beautiful filmic heritage. [Barbara Flueckiger]
Film Studies For Free urges its readers to go and check out University of Zurich Institute of Cinema Studies professor Barbara Flueckiger's Database of Historical Film Colors and its amazing timeline of historical color processes.

Professor Flueckiger is certainly no stranger to making her important work freely accessible online for scholars all around the world to access. FSFF has previously covered some of her phenomenal sharing in its On Digital Cinema, Visual Effects, and CGI Studies entry, in which links were given both to a free download of 'Digital Bodies' (a chapter, translated into English, from Flueckiger's 2008 German-language book Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer), as well as to her great online database on the history of CGI, VFX, and computer animation.

As of April 2012, the latest of the resources she is making available, the Historical Film Colors database consists of 290 entries. It comes in the form of a timeline that connects historical and bibliographical information with primary resources from several hundred original papers and more than 400 scanned frames provided by archives and scholars from all over the world.

In this current form the database is a nucleus for a much more advanced project which will be elaborated in the forthcoming months. It is Flueckiger's plan to develop a digital platform which allows experts and researchers to collaborate on a global scale.

To date, Professor Flueckiger has been solely responsible not only for gathering and analyzing all of the data, which derives from her studies of several hundred original papers and secondary sources at Harvard University in the fall term of 2011, but also for programming most of the database and organizing all the images and copyright clearances. Only to a very limited extent has she received financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation in the framework of her research project "Film History Re-mastered". She has therefore financed a major part of this project herself.

She has thus set up a crowd-funding campaign to invite you (or your institution) to support the further development of the project, either by sharing it or by contributing financially. The goal is to raise at least $10,000 in the upcoming 90 days. There are several contribution levels, starting at $25 for buying the rights for one image and extending to $5,000 for possible co-chairs of this project.

She will be very grateful for any kind of support and will be more than willing to give proper credit for conceptual or financial contributions. Many renowned scholars and institutions have contributed already.

Film Studies For Free hopes that its readers will support this project, either by contributing themselves, or by spreading the word.
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Saturday, 21 April 2012

Screen Heritage Goes App! The Curzon Memories Project


Engaging video about the Curzon Memories App, a practice-research project by Charlotte Crofts, funded by the Digital Cultures Research Centre and the University of the West of England. The video was made by Sy Taffel.
My thinking about locative media as a means of exploring screen heritage is informed by the “apparatus theorists" of the 1970s (Baudry, Comolli, Heath, Metz, Mulvey, Wollen, all collected in Philip Rosen’s seminal collection Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, 1972), who were interested in the cinematic apparatus both in terms of the equipment of production and projection and in terms of the conditions of spectatorship (the engaged spectator in a darkened communal auditorium). At the [Curzon Memories App] project’s heart is a concern with both the culture and technologies of seeing: how we might use new screen media as a lens through which to understand the old cinematic apparatus and in turn historicise the new media. The idea is to use locative media to add depth to the everyday architecture of the cinema beyond that which is immediately apparent, and so enhance visitors’ experience and understanding of the cinema and the collection. In this sense, the project is centrally concerned with the interface between cultural memory and the technological imaginary of the moving image. [from Charlotte Crofts, 'Technologies of Seeing the Past: The Curzon Memories App', Paper published in the proceedings of the Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, London 2011 pp. 163-4]
One of the cinemas cited [in David Bordwell's recent post about the threat of digital conversion to art house cinemas] is the Art House Cinema, in Champaign-Urbana, a University town in the middle of corn fields in the mid-West (where I happened to live for a short spell [...]) [...].  I think it might be where I first saw Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven as a girl of nine, and have been haunted by it ever since. This, combined with my involvement with the Curzon, and indeed the Whiteladies Picture House campaign, made me feel how urgent it is to preserve screen heritage beyond the conservation of the films themselves – which is in itself incredibly important – but there’s something rather pressing about preserving the cinema-going experience in today’s multi-screen world: the apparatus of cinema, the built environment, the technologies; which is at the heart of the Curzon Memories App, and Projection Hero in particular. [Charlotte Crofts, '', The Curzon Project, January 31, 2012]
I hadn’t really thought I was making a documentary the whole time I was developing the app, but with hindsight, my experience as a filmmaker couldn’t help but inform the project and trying to articulate my work [...] really helped me to see that ‘experience design’ is essentially an extension of documentary practice – we all want to move people and make them see the world differently – I’m just excited about doing that in the actual place you are interested in exploring. [Charlotte Crofts, 'Curzon Memories App as interactive documentary', The Curzon Project, April 12, 2012]
[I]t is quite clear that printed works of reference are a thing of the past. I do not here mean, of course, the polders of misinformation contained in the poorly triangulated written texts of Wikipedia: rather I have in mind the breathtaking and illuminating elegance of Touch Publications and Charlotte Croft’s ‘Geo-spatial, Geo-temporal’ app to guide a tourist around a physical site. Why slap a guide-book around when your phone will tell you everything you could possibly want to know about what you are looking at. This will not destroy the publishing, on whatever platform, of unenhanced alphanumeric texts but it surely must transform the presentation of printed information. (And, ok, it’s the first major change in that since the codex started to replace the scroll in the 4th Christian century – this technicism stuff is easy to fall in with.) And Charlotte’s application isn’t going to make the tourist a citizen of the world but it will immeasurably improve their experience of travel. [Brian Winston on i-Docs 2012. Wikipedia link added by FSFF ! :)]

Like Brian Winston in the last of the above quotations, Film Studies For Free (an ever-upbeat Cassandra) has seen the future: it comes on little screens!! 

OK, so maybe that's not such an original (or all-encompassing) prophesy. But FSFF really has seen a remarkable, and original, slice of the future of 'pervasive' and 'locative', mobile Film Studies. 

The little screens in question here, with their "virtual-experience-design", are very much attached (in this particular project) to a very memorable, big screen, in three dimensions, with its associated history and real-world experiences.

The Curzon Memories App, the beautifully designed outcome of an innovative research project by Charlotte Crofts, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Video Production at the University of the West of England, provides a "locative media experience" designed to enhance visits to the Curzon Community Cinema, Clevedon, and its 'Living History' collection of cinema technology, through "context-aware oral history and dramatisation".

The above video sets out brilliantly the scope and functionality of the app. FSFF's favourite-sounding element is Projection Hero, a "miniature cinema installation which you can manipulate with your phone - open the curtains, dim the lights and play the movies - including the infamous Pearl and Dean 'Asteroid' theme and poignant interviews with retired projectionists". It looks forward to trying this out in the cinema itself.

The App is free. Just click on the relevant link, below, to access and download it. It's very much worthy of your exploration and support, even if you live nowhere near Clevedon - a lovely, little, English town not far from which FSFF's author happened to grow up, and in which she was forever traumatised by X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes... 

If you like it, please take time to rate it, and leave an appreciative comment, too, at the digital store of your choice. 

The further links below will take you to much more information about, as well as research consideration of, this wonderful project and will also tell you all about Crofts' latest, innovative, project. 

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