Articles from the New Review of Film and Television Studies

Images from The Story of Adèle H. (François Truffaut, 1975) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) - two films referred to in Agustín Zarzosa's article 'Jane Campion's The Piano: melodrama as mode of exchange'

Film Studies For Free was very happy to hear that the excellent journal New Review of Film and Television Studies is now offering free access to a great selection of essays, including a recent offering by Thomas Elsaesser on Avatar, and translations from Christian Metz's book Impersonal Enunciation.

As well as the marvellous aforementioned items, FSFF also highly recommends the articles by Mette Kramer and Agustín Zarzosa.

All freely accessible material is linked to below. 

• Cinema and the two cultures: Robert Lepage's La face cachée de la lune by Sylvie Bissonnette

• Introduction to Christian Metz's Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film by Cormac Deane

• James Cameron's Avatar: access for all by Thomas Elsaesser

• The embrace of Mother Nature: appraisal processes and the regulation of affect in attachment genres by Mette Kramer

• Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts) by Christian Metz and Translated by Cormac Deane

• A lightning-image of the kaleidoscope: a review of Päsi Valiaho's Mapping the Moving Image by Imola Mikó

• The narrative structuring and interactive narrative logic of televised professional wrestling by Aaron J. Petten

• Review of Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style by Barry Salt

• Jane Campion's The Piano: melodrama as mode of exchange by Agustin Zarzosa

Winds of Change: Cinema from Muslim Societies

Publicity still from The Green Wave (Ali Samadi Ahadi, 2010)

Film Studies For Free learnt of free online access to a timely and important 'Virtual Special Issue' of the journal Third Text. The excellent contents of the issue are set out below.

The selected articles are made available to accompany Winds of Change: Cinema from Muslim Societies, a series of films and talks programmed by Third Text and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 21 – 25 September 2011.

To access the issue please use this link.

For programme information and tickets to the ICA season click here.

• 'The Nakba Projected: Recent Palestinian Cinema' by Haim Bresheeth
• 'Travelling ‘Postcolonial’:Allegories of Zion, Palestine and Exile' by Ella Shohat
• 'Introduction: Is There a Muslim World?' by Ali Nobil Ahmad
• 'Paradise Delayed:With Hany Abu-Assad in Palestine' by Hamid Dabashi
• 'Between Socialism and Sufism: Islam in the Films of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty', by David Murphy
• ‘"Framed Patterns of Infinity": Takva, a Mortal Individual’s Fight for Becoming-Imperceptible' by Serazer Pekerman
• 'Introduction:The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography' by Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray
• 'Third Cinema/Militant Cinema:At the Origins of the Argentinian Experience (1968-1971)' by Mariano Mestman
• 'Social Formations of Global Media Art' by José-Carlos Mariátegui, Sean Cubitt and Gunalan Nadarajan
• 'Introduction:Art,‘EnclaveTheory’ and the Communist Imaginary' by John Roberts

Again, to access the issue please use this link.

V.F. Perkins on FILM AS FILM

Victor Perkins discusses his ideas and approaches to film aesthetics

Film Studies For Free just got wind of the below videos: seven segments of a truly fascinating interview with V.F. Perkins which took place at the Kino 8 1/2 in Saarbrücken, Germany, and was filmed by Media Art and Design Studiengang.

In the interview, Perkins engagingly discusses his approach to film studies and, in particular, talks about the trajectory of his seminal 1972 book Film as Film. A wonderful resource.

And once you've watched the videos, make sure to check out the listings of links to some of V.F. Perkins work online at the very foot of FSFF's entry.

Technology and Technique

Film as Film

Urgency of Articulation

 Loss and Cinema

Film Criticism

The Rules of the Game

Octave

• V.F. Perkins, 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52), 16:9, September 2003 
• V.F. Perkins, ' 'Reconsideration: Le Plaisir: "The Mask" and "The Model"', Film Quarterly,  Film Quarterly (Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall 2009)
• V.F. Perkins, 'Moments of Choice', originally published in The Movie, ch. 58, reprinted in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Movie Book of the Fifties, Orbis, 1982; republished online by the Australian journal Rouge (issue 9, 2006)
• V.F. Perkins, 'You only live once', WRAP, Warwick, 2009 
• V.F. Perkins, 'Ian Cameron: a Tribute', MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism, Issue 1, 2010
  
  

Documentary and Space: New issue of MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL

Framegrab from El Valley Centro (James Benning, 2000). Read Elizabeth Cowie's article on Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape which discusses Benning's film, among others. Cowie is author of the new book Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

Film Studies For Free brings you openly accessible brilliance from the latest issue of Media Fields Journal. It's a really excellent issue on documentary and space - a must-read. And however hyperbolically positive (the always hyperbolically positive) FSFF is, it doesn't always say that. So, do yourselves a big favour and click on the below links without further ado.

• Ryan Bowles and Rahul Mukherjee, 'Documentary and Space: Introduction', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Alexandra Juhasz, 'A Place in the Online Feminist Documentary Cyber-closet', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Jason Alley, 'Spaces of Reticence', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Laura Rascaroli, 'Sonic Interstices: Essayistic Voiceover and Spectatorial Space in Robert Cambrinus’s Commentary (2009)', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Elizabeth Cowie, 'Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• André Jansson and Erik Gandini, 'Gitmo Space: A Dialogue about Mediatized Warfare, Documentary Filmmaking and Heterotopic Truth', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Nonny de la Peña, 'Physical World News In Virtual Spaces: Representation and Embodiment in Immersive Nonfiction', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Brett Lashua, 'Popular Music Memoryscapes of Liverpool 8', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Erica Stein, 'The Road to Heaven Twists: The City, Urban Planning, and Experiential Space', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Christina Corfield, 'Flexible by Nature: Video and the Cultural Production of Concrete Fact', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Dan Fleming, 'The Staging of Affect and the “Elsewhens” of Documentary Space', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Sukanya Sen, 'Encountering Space: Documenting the Topography of the Migrant Home', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Maggie Hennefeld, 'The Geopolitics of Narrative Parody in Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• 'Mapping Documentary: Roundtable with Filmmaker Ido Haar and Film and Media Studies Scholar Janet Walker in Conversation with David Gray and Jade Petermon', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Renée Rhodes, 'Moving Makes a Map', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Bernadette Flynn, 'Spatial Praxis in the Staging of Material Evidence', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

Bitter Brilliance: Links to Nicholas Ray Scholarship and Criticism

Serena Bramble's video tribute to Nicholas Ray at PRESSPLAY

Kim Morgan and Matt Zoller Seitz, '[Video essay on In A Lonely Place embedded in] Please Don't Let Me Love You', Sunset Gun, July 16, 2009

...the bitter brilliance of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men... [Edward Gallafent, 'Susan Hayward in the 50s', Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 2, 2011]

If the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to. While it is easy to imagine John Ford as an admiral, Robert Aldrich on Wall Street, Anthony Mann on the trail of Belliou la Fumée or Raoul Walsh as a latter-day Henry Morgan under Caribbean skies, it is difficult to see the director of Run For Cover doing anything but make films. A Logan or a Tashlin, for instance, might make good in the theatre or music-hall, Preminger as a novelist, Brooks as a school teacher, Cukor in advertising - but not Nicholas Ray. Were the cinema suddenly cease to exist, most directors would in no way be at a loss; Nicholas Ray would. After seeing Johnny Guitar or Rebel Without A Cause, one cannot but feel that here is something which exists only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage, or anywhere else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen. [Jean-Luc Godard, [On Nicholas Ray's Hot blood]', Cahiers du cinéma, 1957, cited by Sam Rohdie, 'Studies', Screening the Past, Issue 19, 2006]

In the opening credit sequence of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Jim Stark, played by James Dean, stumbles to the foreground of the wide, Cinemascope image and lays down to play with a miniature toy monkey. After winding it up and childishly watching it march and clap its cymbals, he paternally makes a bed for it out of assorted litter and puts it to sleep under a blanket of wrinkled paper. This brief moment not only provides immediate insight into Dean’s character, but it also foreshadows the entire story to come: young Jim’s paternal drive to ‘be a man,’ induced in part by a pathetically weak father figure, leads him to adopt Plato [Sal Mineo] as a younger sibling/child whom he can protect (like he wishes he was protected). In fact, Plato acts as a direct visual stand-in for Jim’s toy, as is clear from the latter’s attempt to give Plato his jacket in the police station moments after the opening sequence, a gesture that Plato would finally accept seconds before his death at the end of the film, when Jim would put him to rest—like his cherished toy that had run out of energy—by zipping up his jacket for the cold beyond. Jim’s own father surprisingly repeats this gesture by putting his jacket over his son’s shoulders in an inaugural act signaling his desire to protect his child from the gratuitous cruelty of the world. [Gabriel Rockhill, 'Modernism as a Misnomer: Godard’s Archeology of the Image', Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XVIII, No 2 (2010) pp 107-129: 110-111]

Today, inspired in part by the appearance yesterday of Serena Bramble's video tribute (above), Film Studies For Free collects snippets from and links to scholarship and critical writing on the films of Nicholas Ray.

This year marks the centenary of Ray's birth. Interestingly, the years since are remarkably short on online and openly accessible scholarly studies of his work, but mightily longer, luckily, on some really excellent film critical work. The below list aims to link to the best and most interesting of both those categories, but if you know of great items missing from this selection, please feel free to tell FSFF about them in the comments. Thank you!

• Michael J. Anderson, 'Nicholas Ray's Least Seen Signature Features: Wind Across the Everglades, Party Girl and The Savage Innocents', Tativille, July 31, 2009
• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, '[Archive for the 'Directors: Ray, Nicholas' Category], Observations of Film Art, [various dates]
  
• Serena Bramble, 'The Heart is a “Lonely” Hunter: On Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place', Senses of Cinema, Issue 59, 2011
• David Cairns, 'The Split Screen: "We Can't Go Home Again" (Ray, 1976)', The Auteurs (now MUBI Notebook), August 11, 2009 
• Rose Capp, 'Nicholas Ray, a Sentimental Bloke', Senses of Cinema, Issue 20, 2002
• Marilyn Ferdinand, 'King of Kings (1961)', Ferdy on Films, March 31, 2008
• George Kaplan, 'They Live By Night', Senses of Cinema, Issue 59, 2011
• Glenn Kenny, 'Underneath the Bottle: In A Lonely Place and Alcoholism', The Auteurs (Now MUBI Notebook), July 15, 2009
• Kevin B. Lee, 'Video Essay: An Arena of Hurt: Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men', The Auteurs (now MUBI Notebook), August 5, 2009 
• Kevin B. Lee, 'Nicholas Ray: A Webliography', Shooting Down Pictures,  March 20, 2009
• Kevin B. Lee, 'The Lusty Men (1952, Nicholas Ray)', Shooting Down Pictures, March 20, 2009
• Kim Morgan and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Video essay on In A Lonely Place - Please Don't Let Me Love You', Sunset Gun, July 16, 2009
• Kim Morgan, 'Reading, Writing, Romance And Rage', Sunset Gun, January 18, 2008
  
• V. F. Perkins, 'Moments of Choice', originally published in The Movie, ch. 58, reprinted in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Movie Book of the Fifties, Orbis, 1982) republished Rouge, Issue 9, 2006
• Jon Rainey, 'The Cinematic Savior: Jesus Films and Related Literature', Theological Librarianship: An Online Journal of the American Theological Library Association, Volume 3, Number 2, December 2010
• Gabriel Rockhill, 'Modernism as a Misnomer: Godard’s Archeology of the Image', Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2010
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Circle of Pain: The Cinema of Nicholas Ray', Sight and Sound, Autumn 1973
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Nicholas Ray', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Steven Rybin, 'Party Girl', Senses of Cinema, Issue 59, 2011
• David Sanjek, 'Johnny Guitar', Senses of Cinema, Issue 59, 2011
• Robert Schultz, 'Celluloid History: Postwar Society in Postwar Popular Culture', American Studies, 31.2, 1990
• Self-Styled Siren/Farran Smith Nehme, 'Macao (1952', Self-Styled Siren, April 19, 2007
• Christopher Sharrett, 'False Criticism: Cinema, Bourgeois Society, and the Conservative Complaint', Film International, April 18, 2011
  
• J. David Slocum, 'Rebel Without A Cause', Senses of Cinema, Issue 59, 2011
• Farran Smith Nehme/Self-Styled Siren, 'Macao (1952', Self-Styled Siren, April 19, 2007
• Imogen Sara Smith, 'Homeless on the Range: The Lusty Men and the "Great American Search"', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 61, 2008
• Fiona A. Villella, 'Shadows on the Horizon: In a Lonely Place', Senses of Cinema, Issue 10, 2000
• Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, 'Nicholas Ray's The Janitor', Sound, Images, February 2, 2009
• Brad Weismann, 'Knock on Any Door', Senses of Cinema, Issue 59, 2011
• Chris Wood, 'Finding the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Rebel Without a Cause', Senses of Cinema, Issue 5, 2000

V. F. Perkins, 'The Cinema of Nicholas Ray', in Movies and Methods. Edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 351-352

Dana Polan, 'On the Bad Goodness of Born to be Bad', in Murray Pomerance (ed.), Bad: infamy, darkness, evil, and slime on screen (New York: SUNY Press, 2004)

Evan Meeker's video The Rebel Within uses experimental editing techniques "to probe Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause analyzing scenes and dialogue with the intention of drawing out hidden themes and character traits easily glanced over in the original."