A Simple Plan: Ben Goldsmith on the Windfall Fantasy Film

Film Studies For Free is preparing a long, long, long post on freely-accessible, online, film-studies writing of note by particular named authors (a snappier title will hopefully occur to this befuddled author soon). But, in the process of preparing it, I stumbled across one piece that merited a much more urgent flagging up, especially given FSFF and almost everyone else's 'sideline' interest in the global financial crisis and the upcoming US elections.

Ben Goldsmith, he of the wonderful weblog I Screen Studies, has recently posted a version of his published article 'Something Rotten in the State of Minnesota, or The Morality of Backwoodsmen: A Simple Plan' on his site. Here's how Goldsmith introduces his views now on Sam Raimi's 1998 film and his revisiting of the essay about it:

I remember I really didn’t like this film when I first saw it, but something kept drawing me back, and I went to see it three or four times at the movies (very unusual for me). I made copious notes, and delved into work on chance and fiction, and even came up with a sub-genre: the windfall fantasy, of which A Simple Plan is a variant: the windfall fantasy gone wrong. Reading this again almost a decade later, I remember how much the film affected me, stuck in my mind. It speaks to me now in a different way, as we experience what may well be the end of the Long Twentieth Century (Giovanni Arrighi). The film bespeaks the moral decay at the heart of America. [Hyperlinks added by FSFF]

As someone who had a very similar reaction, way back when (pre-9/11!), to A Simple Plan, I very much rate Goldsmith's article on it. Much more good Film-Studies work, like this, is needed now on the economic aspects of the American (and Northern Hemispheric) Imaginary. And how much more wonderful it would be if that work, like this essay, were also freely accessible to all who might be interested in learning from it.

So, Hail to I Screen Studies and to its very generous Chief!

P.S. A propos of all this, please do check out Dina Iordanova's fab, recent, blog post 'And End of an Era? Popular cinema, Gordon Gekko’s ‘Greed is Good!’ and the collapse of Wall Street. More about DinaView: Film Culture Technology Money anon.

Atom Egoyan (Adoration) and Directors' Notes (Appreciation)

A quickie today. Film Studies For Free hopes you'll check out the great, 10 minute long, podcast (and streaming audio) with Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan, whose new film Adoration showed at last night's London Film Festival. The podcast is brought to you by Directors' Notes (see below for more info). As for Adoration, Sandra Hebron, artistic director of the LFF (see a video interview with her HERE), writes,

This twelfth feature from Atom Egoyan begins with a teacher setting an assignment to a class of high school students, and this seemingly everyday exercise is the catalyst for an exploration of the ways in which we make connections – with each other, with our families and our personal histories, with new technology and the modern world. When Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) asks her class to translate a news story about a terrorist who plants a bomb in the airline luggage of his pregnant girlfriend, this has a profound effect on one of the students, Simon ([Devon Bostick]). Re-imagining this to be his own family's story, he begins to perpetuate this fictitious history via internet chatrooms. [...]

Ambitious in structure and scope, Adoration unfolds as a multi-layered mystery story in which chronology is fractured, and narrators sometimes unreliable. The rich visual texture of the film reflects this, combining sumptuous 35mm photography with images from the internet and mobile phones. Woven through with themes of terrorism, prejudice and fear, Adoration is unfailingly intelligent and unquestionably timely. [with hyperlinks added by FSFF]

There's a good detailed review of the film by Cinematical. Other good links to Egoyan include: his company website; Girish Shambu's Senses of Cinema essay on the director ('The Pleasure And Pain Of "Watching": Atom Egoyan's Exotica'); a very good survey piece at the Canadian Film Encyclopedia/Film Reference Library; another one at MovieMaker.com; and another, really excellent, very detailed, and more 'academic' one at Bright Lights Film Journal, by David L. Pike. Some great YouTube videos related to Atom Egoyan are HERE. And a really interesting Cineaste interview with Egoyan online HERE at The Free Library.

Film Studies For Free urges you to explore what's on offer more generally at Directors' Notes; it's a nicely organised site that brings weekly podcasts with indie directors and other film personnel, along with up-to-date and varied reviews, and other news and articles. RSS feed available HERE.

Assorted e-journal and website recommendations

As it is so nice and sunny today, and Film Studies For Free's author (not pictured above) likes the outdoors as much as, if not more than, the dark confines of the cinema, or the equally artificially-lit terrain of her happy, new-media, hunting grounds, she will strive to keep her extraneous comments to a bare minimum as she snappily shares with you the following nods to excellent online resources, before heading for the nearby hills...

• Do, please, check out Gramma/Γράμμα: Journal of Theory and Criticism; it's an international peer-reviewed journal, published in English and Greek once a year by the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. It welcomes articles and book reviews from a wide range of areas within the theory and criticism of literature and culture, especially ones with an interdisciplinary approach. The latest issue - Vol. 15, Shakespeare Worldwide and the Idea of an Audience, edited by Tina Krontiris and Jyotsna Singh - has a good article on film: Xenia Georgopoulou's 'Parting “totally sucks”: Filming Romeo and Juliet for Generation X'. Back articles of note include the following very interesting pieces: Joan Copjec, The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema; Sean Homer, “The Roma do not Exist”: The Roma as an Object of Cinematic Representation and the Question of Authenticity; Sylvia Karastathi, Filming the Dutch Still Life: Peter Greenaway’s Objects; and Mary Jacobus, Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible.
• eSharp: eSharp is an international online journal for postgraduate research in the arts, humanities, social sciences and education. Based at the University of Glasgow and run entirely by graduate students, it aims to provide a critical but supportive entry into the realm of academic publishing for emerging academics, including postgraduates and recent postdoctoral students. There are fewer articles on film, than Gramma, but still some worthwhile ones, for example: Jessie Gibbs, Road Movies Mapping the Nation: Y tu mamá también; Anna Ball, Writing in the Margins: Exploring the Borderland in the Work of Janet Frame and Jane Campion; Sarah Godfrey, Villainous Victims: The Paradox of the 'Damaged' Man in Naked and Nil By Mouth; and last but not least, Shira Segal, The Masculinization Project of Hospital Birth Practices and Hollywood Comedies.
• Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture is a peer-reviewed journal, published four times a year in hard copy and PDF format, and based at the University of Westminster. Particular interests include, but are not limited to, work related to Popular Culture, Media Audiences, Political Economy, Promotional Culture, New Media, Political communication, Migration and Diasporic Studies. A major goal of the WPCC is to help develop a de-westernised and transcultural sphere that engages both young and established scholars from different parts of the world in a critical debate about the relationship between communication, culture and society in the 21st Century. What's on offer here at WPCC is mostly (excellent) Media Studies but a brilliant film-media 'crossover' piece is Su Holmes' (a former colleague of mine, now at the University of East Anglia) unmissable: `Starring Dyer?': Re-visiting Star Studies and Contemporary Celebrity Culture.
• cinetext is a bilingual internet forum for film and philosophy located at the University of Vienna, addressing students, researchers, scholars, and anyone with an interest in the thoughtful exploration of cinema, film, and television. Check out the index at the site as there are far too many worthwhile pieces (in English and German) here to list, but Film Studies For Free's favourites were Daniel Garrett, The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc; and Mattias Frey, Supermodernity, Capital, and Narcissus: The French Connection to Michael Haneke's Benny's Video
• Finally, for today, a warm recommendation for Critical Studies in Television, a new website connected to the hard-copy journal of the same name, published by Manchester University Press (HERE's a link to that journal's Open Access content), and edited by (among others) Kim Akass and Janet McCabe. As well as running the website, McCabe and Akass are also co-Series Editors of the wonderful Reading Contemporary Television series at IB Tauris . CST online is a scholarly resource and critical forum for studying television, sponsored by the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. Its mission is 'to enrich television studies by providing comprehensive access to information, as well as to disseminate knowledge and stimulate debate'. The website is only just up and running but already has great items about and links to news stories, debate, and other media resources about global television. A particularly nice feature is its 'Featured Archive' spot. The site is updated twice weekly with information on new TV books, Calls for Papers and invitations to forthcoming conferences. And there's a space for 'TV Reflections' currently filled by a nice piece by McCabe and Akass themselves, 'Writing TV into Discourse', with a great clip of one of Film Studies For Free's favourite TV shows, Ugly Betty, in Arabic. Good luck to CST online!

New Links to Free Film Studies E-books

Thanks to some rifling around at the great UPenn.edu search tool The Online Books Page, the always bountiful Film Studies For Free can now proudly present you with some wonderful new links to the following, online and freely accessible, Film Studies E-books (most of these 'scholarship editions' were made available online by the mighty University of California Press - thank you UC!):

• Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds), Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes


• Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub


• Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company


• John M. Frame, Theology at the Movies


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies


• Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany


• William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film

These join Film Studies For Free's existing links to the following great books:

• David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema


• Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema


• Jennifer E. Langdon, Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood


• Robert Philip Kolker, The Altering Eye

Happy E-reading, folks!

[Addendum - at 16.43: An old friend from my early Kent days, Dr David Sorfa [now Managing Editor of the peerless (...but peer-reviewed!) Open-Access journal Film-Philosophy, and Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University], got in touch with two further and very welcome additions to the E-books list. Both these classics are offered up courtesy of the Centre for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan:

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema
• Nöel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema

Díky moc / Arigatou gozaimasu / Thank you very much!]

'If it doesn't spread, it's dead': Michael Moore, Henry Jenkins, and Sheila Seles

As many of you will already know (Film Studies For Free hopes), the best English-language Media Studies blog in the whole World Wide Web is Henry Jenkins' Confessions of an Aca-Fan. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Two of the Aca-Fan's most recent posts ('Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part One)' and 'Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part Two)') are such important contributions to debates about the future role of the internet in university-level education (and beyond) that I feel they should be required reading for anyone at any level in the academy responsible for determining future policies about 'user-generated content' and other related matters.

Film Studies For Free will leave that resounding recommendation with you for now. Today's blog post is concerned more with a slightly different intervention from Jenkins and the MIT Comparative Media Studies lab, on 'spreadable media'.

In the Aca-Fan's post on April 24, 2007, 'Slash Me, Mash Me, Spread Me...', Jenkins wrote the following about 'the sensibilities of a generation of popular artists who have grown up in an era of cult media' and participatory culture.

They know what fan creativity can accomplish and they want to be part of the game rather than sitting on the sidelines.

At the same time, we can see this as reflecting the growing appreciation within the media industry of what often gets called "viral marketing": that is, they recognize the buzz that comes when grassroots intermediaries embrace a property and pass it along to their friends. C3 research associate Joshua Green and I have begun exploring what we call "spreadable media." Our core argument is that we are moving from an era when stickiness was the highest virtue because the goal of pull media was to attract consumers to your site and hold them there as long as possible, not unlike, say, a roach hotel. Instead, we argue that in the era of convergence culture, what media producers need to develop [is] spreadable media. Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values. In a world of spreadable media, we are going to see more and more media producers openly embrace fan practices, encouraging us to take media in our own hands, and do our part to insure the long term viability of media we like. [All hyper-links added by Film Studies For Free]

In her most recent posting (October 17, 2008) on the group blog Convergence Culture Consortium -- 'Looking a Gift Economy in the Mouth: Michael Moore's SLACKER UPRISING' -- Sheila Seles very valuably takes up this matter of 'spreadable content' in relation to the kind of online, free, film content with which Film Studies For Free, not idly named, is hugely concerned: specifically, in Seles' post, the free online distribution by documentarian Michael Moore of his latest film Slacker Uprising (get it HERE only if you reside in the USA or Canada).

I haven't seen this film yet, but Seles asks some very important questions about Moore's distribution tactic, and she compares the case of Slacker Uprising with that of other films distributed in this and similar ways, such as Robert Greenwald's Iraq for Sale, which used to be (putatively) legally available completely for free via Google Video (the much linked-to page suggests it's now been removed).

Film Studies For Free urges you to read Seles' fascinating post, and asks its readers earnestly for any opinions about her concluding argument in it, in the context of wider debates about spreadable culture: will 'Slacker Uprising [...] provide an interesting example of the impact of quality and branding as we try to articulate tangible distinctions between "free" content and content that will spread'?

We might wonder also if, to borrow Seles' post's titular metaphor (and 'mashup' along the way two old proverbs and a cliché), are these 'gift horses' for courses, or is there no such thing -- in indie-film download-land, at least -- as a truly free thoroughbred?

Answers, please, in an email or on a comments page.