Film Studies For Free

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Film 'Conversations With History': Stanley Cavell, Oliver Stone, Robert Wise, and others

Stanley Cavell, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard University, joins UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler to talk about his life as a philosopher and his passion for movies as part of Kreisler's Conversations with History series.

Thanks a lot for your nice comments about Film Studies For Free's A-Z of Favourite Scholarly blogs post. If it had its fun time compiling the list all over again, the rather absent-minded FSFF would add the following two favourite items: f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g and Latest Articles on Moving Image Source (indeed they, and one or two others, will be added when the list joins the right-hand menus of this blog).

Today, Film Studies For Free is thrilled to bring you links to the great videos and transcripts of interviews with filmmakers and filmthinkers that form part of UC Berkeley's Conversations with History series. All the videos last roughly an hour, so these are rich resources indeed. The full film-related index is HERE.

Stanley Cavell; Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus; Harvard: "A Philosopher Goes to the Movies," 2/7/02 video link here
Shima Iwashita, actress: "The Movie Experience," 2/27/99
Ken Jacobs, Film Artist: "Film and the Creation of Mind," 10/14/99 video link here
Nathaniel Rich, Associate Editor, Paris Review: "San Francisco in Film Noir," 6/23/05 video link here
Donald Richie, writer and film critic: "Writing, Film, and Japan: An Expatriate's View," 9/21/01
Masahiro Shinoda, film director: "The Movie Experience," 2/27/99
Oliver Stone, Filmmaker: "History and the Movies," 4/17/97 and 6/27/97 video link here
Robert Wise, Filmmaker: "The Wise Touch," 2/28/98

See also Harry Kreisler's Conversations with History Blog for further updates about this series.

Friday, 12 December 2008

A-Z of Favourite Scholarly Film and Moving Image Blogs

Film Studies For Free has recently been infected by two viruses: one nasty but better now, thanks (ach-oo); the other relatively benign, but still totally brain-scrambling in its own way.

The latter is the dratted 'alphabet meme' still doing the film-blogospheric round (issuing from the Blog Cabins site).

As this metablog doesn't write about films (oh no), the forced A-Z of its choice is 'Favourite Scholarly Film/Moving Image Blogs' mostly in the English language, or 'Favourite [anglophone] Film/Moving Image Blogs with a Sizeable Scholarly Component or Impact'.

And, yes (note to FSFF's more litigious readers), all of the usual rules of this exercise are broken below (and more); but this piece of favouriting frenzy is a service to the community: FSFF's formal film blogroll currently has just under 200 entries, so the below choices will form the basis of a new 'Highly Recommended Scholarly Blogs List' to sit near the top of FSFF's right-hand menu.

Comments on this list are most welcome. And do please let FSFF know if it's missing any really important blogs from its various lists. Thank you.

annett's blog missing image

Bigger Picture Research for coverage of its film biz angle; Bright Lights After Dark for all else (for recognition of The Bioscope's excellence, see under 'T');

Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog (this was a close one: apologies to Henry Jenkins fans (his is easily the best Media Studies blog), and also to those many fans of Will Scheibel, Kimberly Lindbergs, Scott Kirsner, Michael E. Grost and the guys at Cinemetrics (all very good runners-up), but Chris Cagle's research-led blogging was one of the biggest inspirations for FSFF

DinaView; Digital Poetics; and Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope (yup, a genuine three way tie)

Edit Room: The Wide Screen journal editors' blog; and Expanded Cinema

Film of the Month Club; FSFF also likes Flickhead (not intentionally scholarly, perhaps, but scrupulously informative; keep an eye also on Foreigner's Guide to Film Culture in Korea)

girish and GreenCine Daily (what would a blogger's life be like without these two - not the happy one it is, that's for sure). An honorable mention, too, for Bob Rehak's Graphic Engine, which FSFF only recently (shamefully) discovered (joyfully).

House of Mirth and Movies

I Screen Studies

Jason Sperb's Jamais Vu ties with Jason Mittell's Just TV and Jonathan Rosenbaum's JonathanRosenbaum.com
Kino-Eye.com

Like Anna Karina's Sweater

Alexandra Juhasz's Media Praxis edged out Mystery Man on Film and Michael Barrier on Animation

notcoming.com is a good film review site, often looking at classic or off-the beaten track films

Observations on film art and FILM ART sine qua non; but FSFF also loves Only The Cinema

Parallax View is a worthy P-winner, but FSFF also adores Pedro Almodóvar's Blog...

Q Branch (it has to be)

rear window views : sweiv wodniw raer (very specific and somehow all the better for scholars for that)

Spectacular Attractions is FSFF's S-daddy, but mentions très honorables, aussi, for the absolutely S-fabuleux Strictly Film School (Acquarello), Shooting Down Pictures, Screenville, Self-Styled Siren and Spectres du Cinéma

The Bioscope, The Chutry Experiment (FSFF wouldn't have made it any any easier for itself by omitting the 'The', sadly...) and Tativille for consistently superb writing on film

Unspoken Cinema (now that was easy)

Vertigo Ramblings (Dan Auiler) and videoarcadia (the latter hiatus-ing at the mo', but it credibly assures us it will be back)

What's New at the Internet Archive; runner-up: Winds From The East

The Extratextuals (phew, thank you, Jonathan Gray!)
You must be Mistaken, I'm alive (aka Polar Bear's Film Journal)
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Thursday, 11 December 2008

Lick the Star: Sofia Coppola Links

For those (vast hordes) of you interested in the work of filmmaker Sofia Coppola, a tip (via GreenCine Daily) that you should visit the Cinetrix's regularly wonderful and terribly withering (to academic film theory, at least) website Pullquote where she's posted a video version of Coppola's 1996 debut short Lick the Star - see her post Boys in the attic HERE. Thanks Cinetrix!
Here's a little FSFF Sofia Coppola linkage:

Tuesday, 9 December 2008

Round up: Online Scholarship, Virtual Training Suites, and Fascinating Miscellany

Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)

Honourable mentions in despatches (from Film Studies For Free's return to [indefatigable] active duty) for the following:

Thanks to Mystery Man on Film and Kelly Sonora at the Online College Blog, FSFF heard of Jessica Merritt's article Reel Education: 50 Free Open Courses for Movie Lovers which lists 50 new freely accessible, online, practice and theory courses about films. There are some wonderful resources here. Below are links to some of the courses, but please do explore the full list:
Special Topics in Cinematic Storytelling: [MIT]
The Film Experience: [MIT]
Studies in Film: [MIT]
Topics in the Avant-Garde in Literature and Cinema: [MIT]
A Conversation with Filmmaker Mira Nair: [Harvard]
The vast majority of the above listed courses are provided by MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT. What a great initiative, FSFF thinks.

Lots of updates have appeared in the last weeks to Film Studies For Free's list of Online and Open-Access Film and Moving-Image Studies Writing Of Note by Individual Named Authors, so do please (re)visit the list and bookmark it, if you haven't already done so. Two of the most wondrous links to be added to it from the point of view of offering up academic models for Open Access publishing are those to the websites of Dr Geoffrey Kantaris and Professor Paul Julian Smith, both based in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. Muchísimas gracias for their generosity of spirit, as well as for their excellent work on Spanish-language film.

Another great model worthy of interest and emulation is Spectacular Attractions, the blog by Dr Dan North, Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture in the School of English, University of Exeter. Dan has posted a great conference paper there on Cloverfield’s Obstructed Spectacle. It's a wonderfully illustrated piece of writing and has prompted some detailed responses from readers which are very much worth following, too. In response to one glowing comment, Dan deals with some of the concerns that academics have with self-publishing their work thus:
I did think about keeping the paper away from the blog, in case I wanted to revise it for publication, but I think it would be very heavily updated for a journal article, so it might constitute a whole new piece. And the comments I get here, as well as at the conference, would help me to make those updates [...] Academics shouldn’t just talk to other academics.
Please think about self-publishing your papers, people. And RESPECT to Dr North.

Thanks to GreenCine Daily for news of the latest online issues of film journals Criticine and Cineaste.

Ed Howard at the wonderful website Only The Cinema has announced a new blog-a-thon, which will run from January 12-23, 2009 and will focus on the early films of Howard Hawks. Quite coincidentally FSFF came across a great blogpost on early Hawks -- In defense of The Front Page (1931) -- at the marvellous early cinema blog The Crowd Roars.

Intute is a UK-based free online service providing access to the best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists.The Intute Virtual Training Suite provides free Internet tutorials to help you learn how to get the best from the Web for your education and research. The tutorials are written and updated by a national team of subject specialists based in universities and colleges across the UK. HERE's a direct link to the Media and Communication tutorial.

Like Intute, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is funded by the UK HE and FE funding bodies to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research. JISC has just posted the following video of note: New animation: Intellectual Property Rights in the Web 2.0 world. Download it in QuickTime HERE

The Day The Clangers' Moon Stood Still: RIP Oliver Postgate 1925-2008

Clangers : The Intruder (season 1, Episode 5)

Back from its wee break, Film Studies For Free was saddened to hear of the passing of one of the DIY geniuses responsible for its author's early fascination with the world of filmmaking: Oliver Postgate, co-creator (with Peter Firmin) of numerous magical Small Films shown on television (Bagpuss, Clangers, Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, Pogles, Pingwings), died peacefully in Broadstairs on the Kent coast on 8 December 2008.

Here are some Postgate weblinks: