On ’Tangibility’ and Relocating Cinema: NECSUS #2, Autumn 2012

To celebrate the new issue of NECSUS on tangibility, above is a reposting of TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? by Catherine Grant. Also see version with audio commentary

[A] media, singular, is not just its medium – it is not only a support or a device. A media is also and foremost a cultural form; it is defined by the way in which it puts us in relation with the world and with others, and therefore by the type of experience that it activates. By experience, I mean both a confrontation with reality (to gain experience) and the capacity to manage this relation and to give it meaning (to have experience). From its very beginnings, cinema has been based on the fact that it offers us moving images through which we may reconfigure the reality around us and our own position within it. Cinema has always been a way of seeing and a way of living – a form of sensibility and a form of understanding. [Francesco Casetti, 'The relocation of cinema', NECSUS, Issue 2, Autumn 2012]

A great second issue of NECSUS, the brilliant journal of NECS, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies has been published. It boasts some superlative articles including Francesco Casetti's must-read article from which Film Studies For Free has excerpted above.

For those interested in hapticity, and our experience of the material properties of film, there's a very special section on that topic.

All in all (and all the contents are directly linked to below), some truly wonderful work. Well done and thank you NECSUS!

Editorial Necsus

Articles:

• The relocation of cinema by Francesco Casetti
• MP3s, rebundled debt, and performative economics: Deferral, derivatives, and digital commodity fetishism in Lady Gaga’s spectacle of excess by Anne Kustritz
• Can you see yourself living here?: Structures of desire in recent British lifestyle television by James Zborowski
• Investigatory art: Real-time systems and network culture by Edward Shanken
• Beyond cognitive estrangement: The future of science fiction cinema by Stephen Zepke
• The care for opacity: On Tsai Ming-Liang’s conservative filmic gesture by Erik Bordeleau

Special Section: Tangibility

• Material properties of historical film in the digital age by Barbara Flueckiger
• Early cinema’s touch(able) screens: From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou by Wanda Strauven
• Aporias of the touchscreen: On the promises and failures of a ubiquitous technology by Timo Kaerlein
• Questions of embodied difference: Film and queer phenomenology by Katharina Lindner
• The intangible ground: A neurophenomenology of the film experience by Adriano D’Aloia
• From subject-effect to presence-effect: A deictic approach to the cinematic by Pepita Hesselberth
• ‘The last ray of the dying sun’: Tacita Dean’s commitment to analog media as demonstrated through FLOH and FILM by Caylin Smith

Festival Reviews:
Edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network

• The Angels’ Share at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival review by David Archibald
• The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival: Seeking the social in the virtual review by Sarah Dillard
• Alternative Film/Video Belgrade 2011 review by Maja Krajnc

Book Reviews:

• The good, the beautiful and the sublime review by Bavand Behpoor
• A multiplied medium: Reviewing recent publications on television’s transitions review by Markus Stauff
• European nightmares: Horror cinema in Europe since 1945 review by Francesco Di Chiara
• Cinema and experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno review by Malte Hagener

Exhibition Reviews:

• The Abramović Method, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (March-June 2012) review by Elena Biserna
• Non Non Non – Visiting the exhibition with Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi review by Miriam De Rosa

Real and Fictional Monarchies on Screen

The Paradox of the Monarchy by Catherine Grant

An archive video collage exploring some of the psychological and mediatized components of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy. It features excerpts from D.W. Winnicott's 1970 essay 'The Place of the Monarchy' (published in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, compiled and edited by Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis [London: Penguin, 1986]). Although it doesn't mention this, Winnicott's essay was published after the broadcast of the ground-breaking Royal Family documentary in 1969, which opened up new breaches in what the psychoanalyst was raising about the necessary distance and proximity of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy.

Public Domain Film Excerpts (from the Internet Archive Moving Image Collections)

• Pathe News Digest, 1937, No. 3 (Prelinger Archives)
• Visit of their Majesties, June 1939 (FDR Presidential Library [CC0 1.0 Universal])
• Today -- And Yesterday, Newsreel, 1911 (Prelinger Archives)
• A Welcome Guest in the House, ca. 1957 (Prelinger Archives)

Music Excerpt
“Self-Reflect” by Jared C. Balogh. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. Available for Download from from the Fee Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org/music/Balogh/A_Compilation_From_Compilations_Of_Compositions/SELF_REFLECT

Film Studies For Free was inspired by two events -- one offline and one online -- for today's entry.

The offline happening is an excellent looking conference on the British Monarchy on Screen taking place later this week, between November 23-24.

The conference is hosted by the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, and convened by the University of London Screen Studies Group, the Institute of English Studies, the department of Media Arts and the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research at Royal Holloway, University of London.

A somewhat ambivalent republican, but one indelibly marked by growing up immersed in the UK's mediatised monarchy, FSFF would have loved to attend. But its author is presenting instead at a conference in an actual Republic this weekend, instead. So this blog contributes the above monarchical-video-meditation in lieu of its presence - and there will be an accompanying essay about it for the Filmanalytical website very shortly.

Another series of events happening this week - also, sadly, to be missed by a gadabout FSFF -- will take place in Brighton. The Global Queer Cinema project is collaborating with the annual CineCity film festival on the topic of "Curating Queer Film Culture". Information about these really excellent and important events can be found here and here. 

The inspirational online event was another one FSFF missed... It was the competition which also inspired the above video, although the video took a somewhat different (topical) turn in its making: "The Past Re-Imagined as the Future" Remix Context, held by the brilliant Prelinger Archives and the Free Music Archive.

FSFF looks forward to hearing about the winners of that event but, in the meantime, had great fun as usual remixing material from both these amazing, public domain archives, and encourages its readers to have a go at doing the same. Any good film related results should be reported here forthwith.

Below, you can find a little (growing) list of links to online studies of monarchies on screen just to keep FSFF's hand in with this blog's day-job....

• Giselle Bastin, 'Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family', a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2009, pp. 34-52 PDF Rosalind Brunt, 'The Changing Face of Royalty', Marxism Today, 1984   
• Pam Cook, 'Portrait of a Lady: Sofia Coppola', Sight and Sound 16 (11), November 2006, pp. 36-40
• Stella Hockenhull, 'Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen', Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012) PDF
• Dianne Hunter, 'From Ethereal Confrontation to Child Abuse to Womanly Conflict: Ophelia in Three Late-Twentieth Century Films', PsyArt, December 2008
• Julia Kinzler, 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:2 (2011) pp. 49-65
• Laura Mason, '"We' re just little people, Louis": Marie-Antoinette on Film', Film-Historia, Vol. IV, No.3 (1994): 211-222 
• Anna Rogers, 'Sofia Coppola', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007

Truly Doing Film Criticism: Online Film Studies by Tag Gallagher

Tag Gallagher: A New Reality. Roberto Rossellini's Francesco, guillare di Dio, (US 2006)

[T]here is no formula for movie criticism. Cinema is not the same cinema in Ford and Rossellini, so you don’t use the same tools to look at it. Frame enlargements can show a lot of Ford’s art -- composition, camera angles rhyming from one shot to the next, lighting – but almost nothing of Rossellini’s art, because Rossellini turns everything into motion. All the feelings, the motivations, the characters’ sense of self, even morality and philosophy are turned into motion. So I published a thousand pages about Rossellini, but I really couldn’t deal with his cinema, until I made my video about his Francesco, giullare di Dio.  ['Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher', kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009]

The first video I made about Roberto Rossellini was [on Francesco, giullare di Dio]. I made it for a company that turned it down because it did not like the quality of the recording of my voice. So I lost the opportunity to publish this essay in that country, and in some others. [...] So I showed my video on Francesco only at some museums and gave some copies to friends, but that was it.  [Excerpts from a January 2012 interview with Gallagher: Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, 'Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico', Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]]

Today, Film Studies For Free is delighted to publish online, for the first time, film critic and historian extraordinaire Tag Gallagher's first video essay on a Roberto Rossellini film.

To celebrate and accompany this publication, for which FSFF and its readers have to thank the great Tag himself, below is a list of links to Gallagher's online film studies essays (written and audiovisual), interviews with him about his work, and studies of his work. If there is anything missing from the below lists, please leave a relevant link in the comments section. Many thanks!

Gallagher's Written Work Online:

• Tag Gallagher's website

• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007

• Tag Gallagher, 'Geometry of Force: Abel Ferrara and Simone Weil', Screening the Past, 10 (2000) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reading, culture, and auteur', Screening the Past, 12 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Mizoguchi and Freedom', Screening the Past, 13 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'All lost in wonder: Edgar G.Ulmer', Screening the Past, 12 (2001)
• Tag Gallagher, 'Going My Way', Screening the Past, December 2001

• Tag Gallagher, 'Josef von Sternberg', Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, 'Raoul Walsh', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, 'Max Ophuls: A New Art – But Who Notices?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 22, 2002
  
• Tag Gallagher, 'Hitchcock, Machines, and Us', Senses of Cinema, Issue 24, 3003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Rises from the Dead. Again', Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003
• Tag Gallagher, 'The Swine who Rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: Joseph L. Mankiewicz as Producer', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Till '47', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Making Reality', Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Renoir and the Scandal of “First Love” or The Perils of Catherine', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'Lacrimae Rerum Materialized', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, 'American Triptych: Vidor, Hawks and Ford', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Straub Anti-Straub', Senses of Cinema, Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, How to Share a Hill', Senses of Cinema,  Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Chains of Dreams: Carl Th. Dreyer', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009
• Tag Gallagher, 'Why Samuel Fuller?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009

• Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to Bleasdale', Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002

• Tag Gallagher, 'Letter to Helmut Färber', Lumen, 1, 2011

Gallagher's Video Essays Online:

• Dreaming of Jeanie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach  

Online Interviews with Gallagher:

• Toni D'Angela, 'Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, and Michael Baute (et al.), 'Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher', kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009

Online Studies or Reviews of Gallagher's Work:

• Elpidio del Campo Cañizares, 'Los «ensayos visuales» de Tag Gallagher como paradigma de nuevos modelos de análisis cinematográfico', Revista Comunicación, No. 10, Vol.1, año 2012: 1334-1347 [PDF]
• Adrian Martin, 'Always a window: Tag Gallagher's Rossellini', Screening the Past, March 2000 

Dreaming of Westerns... More video essays including Tag Gallagher's classic on STAGECOACH

Dreaming of Jeanie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach by Tag Gallagher

When Film Studies For Free published its popular entry on video studies of the Western a few weeks back, it asked its readers if they knew of any further essays.

Thankfully, the veritable 'Daddy' of the online video essay format, Kevin B. Lee got in touch to flag up some more, including one of the best such essays ever made, Tag Gallagher's 'Dreaming of Jeanie' (above).

Many thanks for the additions, Kevin!

If you would like to see more of the brilliant Gallagher's fantastic work online, please leave a comment and maybe we can convince him (we did! see here!)! Also, please let FSFF know if you know of even further great video essays as yet unlisted....

A two-parter by Kevin B/ Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz  on Raoul Walsh's THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON: Part 1

 

 Part 2

 Below, Kevin B. Lee analyzed a scene in Sam Peckinpah's PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID, both at normal and at half speed: Part 1: Normal  

Below, Part 2: Half speed
 

Below, another video essay on the same scene, by Derek Dehart

Belén Vidal's book, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic

Belén Vidal, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Vidal is lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, co-editor (with Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones) of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Heritage Film: Nation Genre and Representation (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

This definitive work offers a new approach to the period film at the turn of the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which contemporary cinema recreates the historical past. This book explores the relation between visual motifs and cultural representation in a range of key films by James Ivory, Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion, among others. Looking at the mannerist taste for citation, detail and stylisation, the author argues for an aesthetic of fragments and figures central to the period film as an international genre. Three key figures - the house, the tableau and the letter - structure a critical journey through a selection of detailed case studies, in relation to changing notions of visual style, melodrama, and gender. This seeks to place this popular but often undervalued genre in a new light and to rethink its significance in the context of key debates in film studies.

Film Studies For Free had a very pleasant surprise, today, when it discovered that Belén Vidal's remarkable book is the latest Amsterdam University Press publication to be distributed as an Open Access ebook. The table of contents is given below.

This truly excellent volume has been added to FSFF's permanent listing of free Film Studies ebooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!

Introduction – Period Film and the Mannerist Moment - Fragments and Figures - An International Genre - Mannerism: The Possibilities of a Conservative Aesthetic

Chapter 1 – A Poetics of Figuration - The Belated Moment of Mannerism - Pastiche and the Reality Effect - From the Figurative to the Figural - Classical/Post-classical: Adaptation, Film Writing and the Technological Narrative - Credits Roll: The Figure as Threshold

Chapter 2 – Present in the Past: The House - Nostalgia Interrupted: The House and its Ghosts - Home and (Dis)Inheritance: Howards End -The Collector and the House-Museum: The Golden Bowl and End of Period - Melodrama and the Descriptive Mode: The Age of Innocence -Fidelity to the Past and the Melancholic Imagination: Woman as Ghost - The House of Mirth or, Time and Woman

Chapter 3 – Time and the Image: The Tableau - Still Images/Moving Narratives: The Tableau Effect - The Shot-Tableau: From Pregnant Moment to Hieroglyph -The Portrait as Fetish - Portraits and Tableaux in the Feminist Imagination - Deframings: The Portrait of a Lady - Double-Framing the Mythologies of the Female Artist: Artemisia - Vision, Blindness and the Displacement of Trauma - The Governess or, the Woman in Camera

Chapter 4 – The Scene of Writing: The Letter - Textual Erotics: Reading the Letter as Object and Figure - The Letter that Arrives Too Late: Figuration and Melodramatic Temporality - Letters and Spatial Displacement - The Love Letter and the Queer Encounter: Onegin - Imaginary Landscapes of Loss: To Those Who Love - Truncated Narratives, Textual Possibilities: Atonement and the Interrupted Histories of the European Period Film.

Conclusion – Second Sight: Reviewing the Past, Figuring the Present - Notes - Bibliography - Index of Film Titles - Index of Names and Subjects