The Week's Links

Film Studies For Free was all too easily distracted/mesmerised this week by momentous events, but came across, nonetheless, the following, freely-accessible, online items of note, and offers them up for your delectation, delight, and varied film/moving image education:

• Check out Barack Obama's Favourite Films online at Total Films, including One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
• Please visit the e-journal Post Identity. It's an international, fully-refereed journal of the humanities that 'publishes text-based and multi-media scholarship that problematizes the narratives underlying individual, social, and cultural identity formations; that investigates the relationship between identity formations and texts; and that argues how such formations can be challenged. In print since 1997, Post Identity has partnered with the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office to transform itself into an audio-, graphic-, and video-enhanced web-based journal that can make available the new forms and subjects of contemporary critiques of identity, as well as more traditional text-based scholarship.'
• A really great online Post Identity article worth exploring is Chuck Tryon's 'New Media Studies and the New Internet Cinema' (Print source: Post Identity, vol. 5, no. 1, Winter 2007). Tryon is assistant professor of film and media studies at Fayetteville State University, and also the author of the renowned blog The Chutry Experiment. His other online publications can be accessed at the blog HERE.
• 'Divide and Conquer: A world of possibilities in the unstudied field of DVD chaptering' by Adrian Martin at Moving Image Source (posted November 6, 2008). This and lots of other great Adrian Martin links were shouted out by Girish, including news of the latest issue of online film journal Rouge.
• Thanks to Alison Butler (Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading; author of Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen, reviewed HERE and HERE), FSFF heard of the Artivi video archive and a great online Eija-Liisa Ahtila interview (link HERE; also see an earlier FSFF post on this film artist HERE). Artivi is 'is a community-oriented Web-TV which produces and broadcasts programs about the contemporary art world. Artivi is also a website which offers user-generated contents'.
• A little bit more Ahtila surfing then revealed Medien Kunst Netz/ Media Art Net. This site has a huge number of artists' film and video resources worth checking out, including good quality, online excerpts from four of Ahtila's videos (Anne, Aki and God, Consolation Service, Talo (The House), and Tänään (Today)). HERE's a link to the A-Z list of artists' resources at the site.
• The ever bountiful GreenCine Daily posted a Tate Online link to Curing the Vampire, an online Lynn Hershman Leeson project involving four interviews by the artist-filmmaker in conjunction with Tilda Swinton, posing questions to a selection of guests, including a politician, journalist, scientist and lawyer, partially shot in the virtual world of Second Life, and released in four episodes from October. FSFF readers should check out the section of the Tate site that houses this project - Intermedia Art, which has all sorts of film-related resources, including great podcasts and texts.
• There's a good film studies article in the latest issue of Politics and Culture: An International Review of Books: Productive censorship. Revisiting recent research on the cultural meanings of film censorship by Daniel Biltereyst.
• The Fall 2008 issue of Mediascape has just been published online. The aim of Mediascape, to quote its website, 'is to create a forum which takes an interdisciplinary approach to visual cultural studies [...] focusing on the moving image and all its manifestations. We want to endorse a non-exclusive treatment of visual culture and will look for cross-disciplinary, cross-technological, and cross-cultural perspectives of our field to make up the content of the journal. Our staff comprises members of UCLA's School of Film, Television and Digital Media and represents both the field of critical studies, as well as the moving image archive program.' The new issue which focuses on politics and film/media contains the following, great, film-studies related articles and interventions: 'By, For, and About: The 'Real' Problem in the Feminist Film Movement' by Shilyh Warren; 'Gray or Black? Howard Koch and the Elusive Architecture of the Hollywood "Lists"' by Heather Heckman; 'Low and Behold: Using Fiction/Documentary Hybridity to See the Real Damage of Hurricane Katrina' by David O'Grady; and 'Scholars on the Subject of Media, Politics and the Academy (in 12 parts)' by Allyson Nadia Field, Toby Miller, Bill Nichols, and Chuck Tryon (him again).
• Finally, do, please, check out Innovate: Journal of Online Education an open-access, peer-reviewed, online periodical published bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses 'on the creative use of information technology to enhance education and training in academic, commercial, and governmental settings.' HERE's a link to film-related articles at Innovate, a list that includes the following essay FSFF has singled out: 'The Davideon Project: Capitalizing the Possibilities of Streaming Video as Flexible Learning Objects for the Humanities' by André Rosendaal and Johan Oomen.

Please go in two by two! Sally Potter's Fabulous Ark

Film Studies For Free has recently set up a small, but growing, new links list to 'Filmmakers' Websites Of Note' (just scroll down on the right-hand side of the site). The list currently contains links to the following sites: Alejandro Jodorowsky; Fernando Trueba; Gonzalo Suárez; Carlos Saura; Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea; Isabel Coixet; Bigas Luna; Alejandro Amenábar; Pedro Almodóvar's blog; Aardman Animations; Álex de la Iglesia; Atom Egoyan; Bill Melendez; The Coppola Family; The Makhmalbaf Filmhouse; and Werner Herzog (please 'excuse' the abundance of Spanish and Latin filmmakers, but that was the cohort within which FSFF began its search). Any suggestions for additions to the listing are very gratefully received indeed. And, if auteur(ist)-resources are your bag, please keep an eye on it as FSFF is sure it will rapidly expand.

A new link to by far the most innovative and promising of any filmmakers' websites ever surfed by this blogger has just been added to the list: Sally Potter's Archive SP-ARK! (Potter also has an occasional blog; and a more conventional company website, too). Potter is, as FSFF readers will know, director of radically innovative films such as Thriller, The Gold Diggers, Orlando (the principal 'object' of the SP-ARK archive), The Man Who Cried, The Tango Lesson, and more recently, Yes.

SP-ARK is currently in prototype (beta-test) form; it describes its amazing project as follows:

SP-ARK is a web-based open source educational project based on the multi-media archive of film-maker Sally Potter. SP-ARK is designed as a unique educational resource, tailored to the radically new learning preferences of students everywhere, which can be used as a model for innovative teaching and research in all disciplines and at every level. At this stage only a tiny fraction of the materials available in the Sally Potter archive has been uploaded to the site's database. During the next phase the complete ORLANDO archive will be made available, followed by materials relating to all of Potter's films and her work in dance, music and theatre. You are welcome to browse through the sample materials already available on the site, currently over 600 items. If you would like to access SP-ARK 's unique interactive features and become a trial user participating in the testing and future development of this prototype then please email us at beta [at] sp-ark.org with some information about yourself and your interest in SP-ARK. We will send you a username and password.

(Please note that you don't have to email or register in order to browse - just visit!)

Film Studies For Free l o v e s the ethos of SP-ARK, and greatly appreciates what's up and running on the site already; it very much looks forward to following its development. It also hopes that other living filmmakers (or the heirs of filmmakers from earlier generations) are inspired to build on Sally Potter's generous example.

As for the educational implications of projects like these, the 'Cloud's' the limit, if you know what FSFF means. As Chris Berry, Professor of Film and Television Studies at London's Goldsmiths College, brilliantly puts it in his endorsement of this archive:

The SP-ARK vision of social learning gives us a glimmer of the future today. Instead of locking archive materials away and restricting availability, it promises ready access to SP-ARK to anybody anywhere with a computer and the internet. Furthermore, the solitary archive user is transformed into a producer and a member of a community by the ability to build pathways of connections and commentary through the material. In the process, the cinema is extended from a fixed object to be viewed into a dynamic, interactive, and growing network of digital debate and active learning.

Some other, good, Sally Potter, online links follow:

• Who is Sally Potter? video on YouTube


• A Senses of Cinema Overview by Kristi McKim


• A ScreenOnline Overview by Annette Kuhn with links to some film clips (if accessing from an educational institution)


• Carmen out swinging: Sally Potter takes on opera's femme fatale ... (about Potter's latest project)


• Sally Potter on directing Carmen for English National Opera ...


• The Sally Potter Carmen Project on YouTube


• BBC - Films - interview - Sally Potter


• Sally Potter's Notes on the Adaptation of the Book Orlando


• The Contemporary Auteur: An Interview with Sally Potter (BFI)


• Seven Questions with Sally Potter of The Tango Lesson (The Director's Chair Interviews, by Augusta Palmer)


• The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter's Inspiration)


• Guernica Magazine Interview with Potter


• BBC summary of Potter's Carmen

Artists and Filmmakers' Favourite Films: frieze magazine

Screenshots from films by Clio Barnard

GreenCine Daily, Film Studies For Free's favourite site for 'Film on the Web' news, today brings word of an article (link to it HERE), in the latest, online issue of art magazine frieze, by filmmaker Clio Barnard (a former colleague of this blogger at the University of Kent). The article is part of an ongoing series in which frieze asks artists and filmmakers to list the movies that have influenced their practice.

Barnard is an artist/filmmaker, whose work has shown in cinemas, international film festivals and galleries, including Tate Modern and Tate Britain. She was one of the winners of the 2005 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and in 2007 was awarded a major commission from the Art Angel, which will involve an ambitious live performance and feature-length film.

FSFF already links to an online film by Barnard - the wonderful Dark Glass (1 min. 16 seconds, 2006; direct link to MP4 HERE; and to QuickTime HERE), part of the SingleShot series of 'newly commissioned film and video works -- shot in one single take -- by artists and new talent'.

As the Tate Modern website describes it,

Shot on a mobile phone, Clio Barnard’s Dark Glass is a taut micro-drama that visually recreates a spoken description of family photographs recalled under hypnosis. Although the recollection appears incredibly compelling, it also possesses an inherent instability, so that we are never quite sure what we’re hearing or seeing, something further emphasised by the unsteady nature of the image itself, which lends an apparitional quality to this apparent act of truth-telling.

HERE's a link to a good article about the SingleShot films by Aaron Callow for aestheticamagazine, with a few paragraphs dedicated to Dark Glass.

Below are direct links to the other frieze articles about films that have influenced particular artists and filmmakers' work; most are illustrated with video clips from the films:

Issue 101 September 2006:The Otolith Group
Issue 102 October 2006:David Noonan
Issue 103 November-December 2006: Rebecca Warren
Issue 105 March 2007: Runa Islam
Issue 106 April 2007: Jia Zhangke
Issue 107 May 2007: Luke Fowler
Issue 108 Jun-Aug 2007: Hamish Fulton
Issue 109 September 2007: Steve McQueen
Issue 110 October 2007: Rosemarie Trockel
Issue 111 Nov-Dec 2007: James Benning
Issue 113 March 2008: Peter Doig
Issue 114 April 2008: Hito Steyerl
Issue 115 May 2008: Mark Leckey
Issue 116 June - Aug 2008: Raqs Media Collective
Issue 117 September 2008: Babette Mangolte
Issue 118 October 2008: Duncan Campbell
Issue 119 Nov-Dec 2008: Clio Barnard

One final frieze-related Film Studies For Free tip: check out the frieze podcasts. There are interesting ones on: The Expanded Gallery: Mass Forms for Private Consumption; The Expanded Gallery: I Am Not a Flopper Or… (Allan Smithee-related!); and Art, Politics and Popularity (with Jacques Rancière).

Two more E-Journals: Forum and Other Voices

Film Studies For Free brings you very glad tidings of two more graduate E-journals: Forum and Other Voices.

To take the former first, Forum is a peer-reviewed journal for postgraduate students working in culture and the arts. The journal is based at the University of Edinburgh.

Film and film-theory related articles worth checking out in Issue 1, Autumn 2005 - Origins and Originality are as follows:

• Angelopoulos' Ulysses Gaze: Where the Old meets the New Vangelis Makriyannakis, University of Edinburgh


• The Kuleshov Effect and the Death of the Auteur Michael Russell, The University of Edinburgh (this should usefully be read alongside an essay in the same issue on literary authorship theory: The Phantom Walking the Text: The Death of the Author Reconsidered Sten Moslund, University of Southern Denmark)


• And the really excellent Jean-Luc Godard and Roy Lichtenstein: Originality, Reflexivity, and the Re-Presented Image by Daniel Yacavone, University of Edinburgh. Film Studies For Free also highly recommends Yacavone's just-published article for Film-Philosophy - 'Towards a Theory of Film Worlds'

Film articles of note in Issue 4, Camp! (Spring 2007):

• "The vanguard - and the most articulate audience": Queer Camp, Jack Smith and John Waters Nicholas de Villiers, University of Minnesota


• Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, and Susan Sontag: Campaigners of Camp and the Carry On films. John Bannister, University of Central Lancashire


• Putting on the Red Dress: Reading Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows Ryan Powell, University of East Anglia

Further film articles in the Current issue Issue 6, Desire (Spring 2008) -

• The Shanghai Gesture Homay King (Bryn Mawr College)


• Mod Murder: Death and Desire in Swinging London Film Michelle Devereaux (University of Edinburgh)


• Female Effigies and Performances of Desire: A Consideration of Identity Performance in Lars and the Real Girl. Kate E. O'Neill (University of Calgary)

And there's a Back Special Issue: Evolutions Conference with a couple of film-related pieces as follows:

• Screaming through the century: The female voice as cathartic/transformative force, from Berg's Lulu to Tykwer's Run Lola Run Maree Macmillan, RMIT University/The University of Melbourne


• "A million years...just for us": Subversive fixity in Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging RockAlex Tate, University of Newcastle, UK

As for Other Voices, it is an 'independent, award-winning, electronic journal of cultural criticism' published at the University of Pennsylvania. Founded in March 1997, Other Voices regularly publishes 'provocative essays, interviews, roundtable discussions, lecture transcriptions, audio lectures, multimedia projects, translations and reviews in the arts and humanities.'

The Other Voices Search Results page for ALL 57 articles referencing the keyword 'film' is HERE. Film Studies For Free (or its human avatar, at least) hasn't yet personally checked out all 57 listed... but links to ones that it did take a look at and are very much worth listing are given below:

• Other Voices 1.3 (January 1999), Manuel Camblor "Death Drive's Joy Ride: David Cronenberg's Crash"


• Other Voices, 3.1 (May 2007), David Scott Diffrient, "Stories that Objects Might Live to Tell: The Hand-Me-Down Narrative"


• Other Voices 2.3 (January 2005), Julie Grossman, "The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling [On Todd Haynes' Safe]"


• Other Voices 1.3 (January 1999), Jack Turner "Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text"


• And Film Studies For Free especially enjoyed Other Voices 2.2 (March 2002), Laurence A. Rickels, "Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again For the First Time" (more because FSFF's owner has a particular interest in the concept of 'recognition' than for this article's rather competent performance of high-end Lacanianism, and spendid punning... but I digress)

Enjoy, or as Lacan himself would probably put it (if he were as confused as FSFF about transitive and intransitive verbs), Jouissez!

James Bond Production Designer: Audio Slideshow

Sir Ken Adam at the Imperial War Museum's ongoing James Bond exhibition

Four minutes to spare? Then Film Studies For Free respectfully recommends that you spend them visiting the BBC site where they have a great little audio slideshow in which Sir Ken Adam, the production designer of James Bond films (and many other films besides), 'shares his thoughts on two of his most celebrated [Bond] sets'. Check out the link HERE.

It's been posted to the BBC pages in connection with the publication of Ken Adam Designs the Movies, James Bond and Beyond by Ken Adam and Christopher Frayling (by Thames and Hudson). See the Commander Bond fansite HERE for further info.

Eight more minutes to spare? See a great YouTube video about Adam's work HERE.