Thursday, 5 January 2012

FILM VERSUS FILM Series with Dustin Morrow, Chris Cagle, David Cooper Moore and Matt Prigge

The Film Versus Film crew tackles the question, "Who's the best drunk character in all of film?" Is it the antihero from Red Lights or the matriarch from La Cienaga? The panel raises issues of gender representation as they discuss the characters from Sex and the City, and discuss such functional drunks as Paul Newman in The Verdict and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. Paul Newman's Cool Hand Luke also comes up, as does Dudley Moore's Arthur.

Film Studies For Free is a big fan of the work of film scholar and blogger Chris Cagle (see his website Category D: A Film and Media Studies blog) and so was curious about the below press release when it landed in its inbox.
Lively New Web Series Focuses on Film Discussion
Film versus Film is an exciting new web series centering on the discussion of popular cinema. The show’s panel is made up of filmmakers, professors, film critics and film scholars. The panel’s discussions stem from tongue-in-cheek, pop culture-oriented “categories” like Best Use of a Pop Song in Film, Film Failure that Should Have Spawned a Great Franchise, Most Unpleasant Christmas Movie, and Hammiest Performance Ever by a Film Actor. 
     The series was the brainchild of Portland filmmaker and professor Dustin Morrow, who thought there might be an audience for the funny, passionate, good-natured arguments he was having at the pub with his fellow cinephiles over such film-obsessive questions as What’s the best film ever made starring an animal?, What’s the most uncomfortable nude scene on film?, and What films have actually been elevated by the performances of Keanu Reeves? 
     The series is shot in Philadelphia, and features in addition to Morrow, professor and film scholar Chris Cagle, media educator and documentarian David Cooper Moore, and journalist and film critic Matt Prigge. The series is directed and edited by filmmaker Matt Boyle. Each Monday’s webisode tackles one question, and runs five to ten minutes. The series can be seen on YouTube, Vimeo, and at filmversusfilm.tumblr.com. The series can also be followed on Facebook and Twitter.
     For more information, the Philadelphia Daily News recently ran a full page interview with series producer Dustin Morrow in both its print and web editions. 
Having now enjoyed a few of the Film Versus Film panel discussions, FSFF (who, when it's not bringing you quality film scholarly links, is almost always down the pub having discussions like these with its mates -- slightly less dudecentric ones, it must be said ...) was only too happy to convey the news about this fun and lightly informative web series to its readers.

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

Repulsive Film Studies? New issue of FILM-PHILOSOPHY on Cinematic Disgust


[Tarja] Laine’s insights on disgust have important implications for thinking about the aesthetic paradox of unpleasure. In her assessment, [Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)] offers a particularly pertinent limit-case in which disgust is not readily convertible into pleasurable cognitive satisfaction. Ultimately, her reading of the film suggests that we may need to re-think theories that construct unpleasure as antithetical to aesthetic experience. In this, she joins Korsmeyer and other thinkers who have recently suggested that we may need to abandon the pleasure-unpleasure binary, in favor of thinking about disgust as ‘modifier of attention, intensifying for a host of reasons some experience that the participant would rather have continue than not’ (Korsmeyer 2011, 118). Indeed, as Laine puts it, it is possible that what we value in cinematic renderings of disgust is precisely the ‘vivid and immediate experience’ that it offers us, ‘regardless of its non-pleasurable, non-rewarding features’. [Tina Kendall in her editor's 'Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust' for the Film-Philosophy special issue on Disgust, discussing Tarja Laine's brilliant article for that issue, as well as citing Carolyn Korsmeyer's Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)]
Many of you will already have heard about the new issue of Film-Philosophy that came out in late December, but Film Studies For Free is obsessively completist in its mission to bring you news of notable, open access, film studies, hence this, otherwise possibly superfluous, entry.

Besides, it's a brilliantly provocative special issue which successfully takes explorations of filmic disgust well beyond the, to date, canonical or entrenched Film Studies approaches to film horror. Despite some of the attractions of these approaches, for those of us marking undergraduate essays on horror cinema and television from time to time, this greater plurality of conceptual pathways into these topics is a Very Good Thing - that is, in FSFF's ever so humble view.

Thanks so much for that, and more, Film-Philosophy!

Vol 15, No 2 (2011): The Disgust Issue

Guest Editor: Tina Kendall

Articles

Book Reviews
  • Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal (2010) Cinema at the Periphery PDF Rowena Santos Aquino
  • Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds. (2010) Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead PDF Caroline Walters
  • Joseph Mai (2010) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne PDF R. D. Crano
  • Boaz Hagin (2010) Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema PDF Richard Lindley Armstrong
  • Peter Lee-Wright (2010) The Documentary Handbook PDF Wes Skolits
  • William Brown, Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin (2010) Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe PDF Alison Frank
  • Richard Misek (2010) Chromatic Cinema PDF Robert Barry
  • Alain Badiou (2010) Cinéma PDF Manuel Ramos
  • Annie van den Oever, ed. (2010) Ostrannenie PDF Lara Alexandra Cox
  • David Martin-Jones (2010) Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities PDF John Marmysz

New Issue of CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image

Jeff Wall's photograph A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993 (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Today, in its continuing series of catch up posts on new offerings from open access film e-journals, Film Studies For Free brings you links to the contents of the latest issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image.

Of particular interest, this time, are Tom McClelland's clear-eyed account of the respects 'in which the medium of film and the discipline of philosophy can intersect', Agustín Zarzosa's detailed evaluation of Rancière’s criticism of Deleuze, and Temenuga Trifonova's terrific discussion of the ways in which contemporary photography, like that of Jeff Wall mentioned above, 'seeks to reclaim the cinematic within the photographic from within the twilight of indexicality'.

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 2 (2011)

Abstracts and Contributors

Articles
Interview
  • Questions for Jacques Rancière around his book Les écarts du cinéma (English version and French version): Conducted by Susana Nascimento Duarte
Conference Report
In Portuguese: 
Translation

Monday, 2 January 2012

New Issue of MOVIE: Lang, Preminger, découpage, PSYCHO and its remake, and filmmakers' choices

Frame grab from Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958). See Christian Keathley's article on découpage in this film here

Film Studies For Free was thrilled that a new issue of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism -- the best yet of this relaunched journal -- has recently hit the online newstands.

Issue 3 contains part 2 of the marvellous Fritz Lang Dossier, with contributions by, among others, V. F. Perkins, Adrian Martin, Peter Evans, Stella Bruzzi, Ed Gallafent, and Deborah Thomas.

There are also excellent articles on Preminger's film art, Psycho and its remake, and filmmakers' choices by Christian Keathley, Alex Clayton and John Gibbs.

Links to all items are set out for you below.

This issue edited by Douglas Pye and Michael Walker. Designed by Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs, and James MacDowell.

New WORLD PICTURE on 'Wrong'

A Fire in My Belly is an awkward work that at first glance can appear to be both hyperbolic or overreaching and inconsistent or contradictory. This short film resembles a travel log, an illustrated lecture, or an educational slide show that mixes the unpitying gaze of a mondo cane film (unwrapped mummies with gaping mouths, unusually disabled bodies performing daily tasks, animals forced into fighting by their human captors) with the deliriously overwrought expressionism of 1980s music videos (spinning eyeballs aflame, strobed flashes of milk splashes). The film also recalls major moments in the visual avant-garde of the twentieth century by invoking 1920s surrealist iconography, aping Eisenstein’s clunkier intellectual montages, and echoing the idolatry of Kenneth Anger’s films which themselves borrow from the formal idioms [of] religious and exploitation films. A Fire in My Belly overtly conflates symbolic registers and gains momentum by joining documentary footage of workers performing precarious tasks or snakes devouring their prey to staged studio shots of symbolic transactions involving leaking blood, throwing money, spinning globes, or torched marionettes.  [from Karl Schoonover's essay 'David Wojnarowicz's Graven Image: Cinema, Censorship, and Queers'; hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Following its much appreciated seasonal break, a rather bleary-eyed but well-rested Film Studies For Free wishes its readers a very happy new year.

Its first few posts of 2012 will be devoted to catching up with some new issues of online film and moving image studies related journals, starting with a listing of links to a new collection of work from one of the most original of such journals: World Picture on the concept of 'wrong'.

FSFF particularly liked Schoonover on Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly, (as above), Schwartz's riff on Pasolini, Malsky on dystopian sound, and Manon and Temkin on glitch art.

WORLD PICTURE 6, 2011: Table of Contents