Indian Cinema and its Centenary at SYNOPTIQUE

Synoptique cover by Malory Beazley based on an image by flickr user lecercle.

It's about time for some link action at Film Studies For Free. Indeed, there will be a little flurry of long overdue entries here over the next days too as there are lots of new issues of great online journals to flag up, as well as other important resources to publicise.

First up, today, news from SYNOPTIQUE about the launch of its latest issue devoted to the Centenary of Indian Cinema, guest edited by Catherine Bernier. The table of contents is given below, or follow the link to access the journal.

SYNOPTIQUE - An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, Vol 3, No 1, 2014
Table of Contents

Articles

• Size Zero Begums and Dirty Pictures: The Contemporary Female Star in Bollywood (1-29) by Tupur Chatterjee
• Recycle Industry: The Visual Economy of Remakes in Contemporary Bombay Film Culture (30-66) by Ramna Walia
• Visual Perception and Cultural Memory: Typecast and Typecast(e)ing in Malayalam Cinema (67-98) by Sujith Kumar Parayil

Interviews

• Death Becomes Her: Bombay Cinema, Nation and Kashmir (Kaushik Bhaumik in Conversation with Desire Machine Collective, Guwahati) (99-116) by Kaushik Bhaumik
• Questions for Kumar Shahani- Interview (117-126) by Aparna Frank
• Critical Review: Kumar Shahani's Maya Darpan (1972) (127-150) by Aparna Frank

Translations

• "The Writer in the Film World: Amritlal Nagar’s Seven Years of Film Experience" Translation and Introduction by Suzanne L. Schulz (151-159)

Book Reviews

• Politics as Performance: An Ambitious Exploration of Cine-Politics in Andhra Pradesh (160-166) by Parichay Patra

Miscellaneous - Festival Reports

• Is It Dead Yet?: The 42nd Festival du nouveau cinéma (167-169) by Bradley Warren

The Other Western: great new issue of TRANSFORMATIONS

Frame grab from Bend of the River (Anthony Mann, 1952). Read an article on this film by Helen Miller and Warwick Mules

Thanks to the always alert and brilliant Adrian Martin, Film Studies For Free got wind of a fantastic new issue of Transformations Journal on The Other Western (meaning [as the editors set out]: unusual Westerns as well as the "global and contemporary Western", which means that the issue provides a great accompaniment for Frames Cinema Journal's own recent take on the Cold War or political Western; and also to FSFF's podcast interview with Austin Fisher on his research on the spaghetti western).

FSFF has only just begun to dig into this issue of Transformations, but what it's read so far is really excellent. All the links are below.

And thank ye kindly, AM!

Transformations, Issue No. 24   2014 — The Other Western

• editorial  
• abstracts 
•  “Do I look Mexican?”: Translating the Western Beyond National Borders  Chelsea Wessels 
• The Singing Cowboys: Sholay and the Significance of (Indian) Curry Westerns within Post-Colonial Narratives  Madhuja Mukherjee 
• Whither the Australian Western? Performing Genre and the Archive in Outback and Beyond Grayson Cooke
• Hollywood Westerns and the Pacific: John Kneubuhl and The Wild Wild West Sarina Pearson
• “I Knew Killing a Man Would Kill You”: Lucky Luke Shaped by Myth and History Annick Pellegrin
• The Night-Time Town as an Alternative Space in the Western Genre Pete Falconer
• Anthony Mann’s Film Westerns: Mise-en-scène and the Total Image in Bend of the River Helen Miller and Warwick Mules
• Mann and Woman: the Function of the Feminine in the “Noir Westerns” of Anthony Mann David Baker and Danielle Zuvela 
• Hybridity, Agency and the Distribution of Whiteness in The Searchers Birgitta Frello

Announcing the launch of MEDIA INDUSTRIES! A new international Open Access Journal

After a hiatus due to some rather pressing research deadlines (and a little holiday), Film Studies For Free pokes its head fleetingly above the e-parapet to announce the exciting launch of a wonderful new open access journal: Media Industries online at http://mediaindustriesjournal.org.

Media Industries is a new peer-reviewed, multi-media, open-access online journal that supports critical studies of media industries and institutions worldwide. The first issue is now online and the journal is also now accepting submissions for future issues.

Issue 1 is the first in a series of three issues to be published over the summer that features essays authored by the journal's highly esteemed editorial board. Each of the board essays discusses the state of the field of media industries studies.


FSFF wishes Media Industries all the very best for a highly industrious open access future.

1.1 Table of Contents (visit the journal for live links)

• “Welcome to Media Industries” - written by the Editorial Collective: Amelia Arsenault, Stuart Cunningham, Michael Curtin, Terry Flew, Anthony Fung, Jennifer Holt, Paul McDonald, Brian McNair, Alisa Perren, and Kevin Sanson.
• “Dirt Research For Media Industries” - Charles R. Acland
• “Media Policy Research and the Media Industries” - Des Freedman
• “The Value of Ethnography” - Tejaswini Ganti
• “The Menace of Instrumentalism in Media Industries Research and Education” – David Hesmondhalgh
• “Placing International Media Production” - Aphra Kerr
• “On Automation in Media Industries: Integrating Algorithmic Media Production Into Media Industries Scholarship” - Philip Napoli
• “Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Industry Studies” - Thomas Schatz
• “Selling Television: Addressing Transformations in the International Distribution of Television Content” - Jeanette Steemers
• “There Is No Music Industry” – Jonathan Sterne
• “Globalization Through the Eyes of Runners: Student Interns as Ethnographers on Runaway Productions in Prague” – Petr Szczepanik
• “The Case for Studying In-Store Media” - Joseph Turow
• “Industry Proximity” – Patrick Vonderau

Call for Papers
Media Industries invites contributions that range across the full spectrum of media industries, including film, television, internet, radio, music, publishing, electronic games, advertising, and mobile communications. Submissions may explore these industries individually or examine inter-medial relations between industrial sectors. We encourage both contemporary and historical studies, and are especially interested in contributions that draw attention to global and international perspectives, and use innovative methodologies, imaginative theoretical approaches, and new research directions.

More About Media Industries
The journal is maintained by a managing Editorial Collective and Editorial Board comprised of an international group of media industries scholars. For additional information about the Board and Collective, as well as a list of forthcoming essays from Board members, please visit:
Media Industries

Website: http://mediaindustriesjournal.org
Email: mediaindjournal@gmail.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/mediaindustriesjournal
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mediaindjournal

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Post-Conference Round Up: [IN]TRANSITION,Transnational Cinemas, MOVIE eBooks, and much more!

Homepage of [in]Transition, 1.1, 2014

Film Studies For Free is just back from attending the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. This year it took place in the distinctly cinematic, and especially fun, city of Seattle in Washington State, USA.

The big event, from this blog's point of view, was the launch of [in]Transition, a new open access periodical, co-edited by FSFF's author with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. [in]Transition – a collaboration between MediaCommons and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ official publication Cinema Journal – is the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. [in]Transition has a highly distinguished editorial board and is more than ably project managed for MediaCommons by Jason Mittell and for Cinema Journal by Chris Becker, CJ's online editor (big thanks also go to the very visionary Will Brooker [CJ editor], Avi Santo, Monica McCormick and the rest of the heroic MediaCommons team). 

You can read more about the project here, and about videographic film studies and its lineage more generally in the Resources page here. Please visit the website and be very encouraged to comment on the curated videos (on Marilyn Monroe, neorealism, F for Fake and the films of Ingmar Bergman) published in issue 1. One of the main goals of this journal is to generate debate and understanding about audiovisual moving image studies, and we would love to be able to count on the insights and questions of our viewers/readers in this project. So please visit the journal website and see whether you'd like to contribute to the Open Peer Commentary.

You can also watch video recordings (linked to below) of the historic SCMS conference workshop on Visualizing Media Studies, on March 20th, which launched [in]Transition, with contributions by Chris Becker, Drew Morton, Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley, Matthias Stork, Benjamin Sampson, Jason Mittell, and a very lively and interested audience. This session was livestreamed and then archived for online viewing among a series of other SCMS panels and workshops. These are all linked to below, along with lots of other items of interest and news from the conference.
 
SCMS Workshop Livestreaming:

• SCMS Workshop -Visualizing Media Studies Part 1 (0:14:00 - scroll to 5:58 for Chris Becker's introduction and then to 8:40 for the first part of Drew Morton's presentation)
• SCMS Workshop -Visualizing Media Studies Part 2 (1:35:49 - DM's presentation continues then scroll to 4:20 for Catherine Grant; to 20:50 for Christian Keathley; to 28:14 for Matthias Stork; to 40:00 for Ben Sampson; to 54:30 for Jason Mittell; and to 58:15 for the Q&A session)
• SCMS Workshop on Exploring Transnational Television Histories (1:45:35)
• SCMS Workshop on Media Activism and the Cultural Industries (1:58:10)

Transnational Cinemas Links:

• FSFF's New Podcast Interview with Austin Fisher at SCMS14:

On March 24, 2014, Film Studies For Free interviewed Dr Austin Fisher, Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema and editor of the forthcoming volume Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), among other publications. 
     The interview took place in Seattle, USA, after the close of the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, where Austin was contributing to a number of workshops and panels as co-chair (with Iain Robert Smith) of the SCMS Scholarly Interest Group in Transnational Cinemas. Austin talks about this topic in the interview and connects it to his longstanding interest in Italian cinema and the spaghetti western. He was also in the US as an invited speaker (with Sir Christopher Frayling) at an event at Texas Tech, in Lubbock, Texas, to celebrate 50 years since the release of A Fistful of Dollars.
     Austin is also author of a video essay on The Searchers, and in the interview he talks about the experience of making this work, a topic of particular interest at the SCMS conference where [in]Transition was launched.

• Catherine Grant, 'Single Take Horror Film [Transnational] Mutations: Remaking La casa muda in Silent House [video essay plus text for SCMS Transnational Film Remakes Panel, March 2014]', Mediático. March 31, 2014
• Dolores Tierney, 'The Link Between Funding and Text: Transnational Aesthetics in Lucrecia Martel’s Films, Mediático, March 23, 2014
• James Wicks' blog Transnational / Cinema / Reflections

MOVIE eBooks!!

• At a wonderful SCMS workshop on 'Film Scholarship and the Online Journal' (proposed by V.F. Perkins and chaired by Girish Shambu), John Gibbs announced the launch of a range of open access eBooks by MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism. The first three volumes (in EPUB and Mobi formats) are as follows:
• Movies and Tone by Douglas Pye
• The Police Series by Jonathan Bignell 
• Reading Buffy by Deborah Thomas 

Discussions of/Reflections on SCMS:

• Archived live tweets from @cinemajournal reporters about the conference: @CJ at SCMS Cinema and @ CJ at SCMS Media/TV
• Great Aca-Media podcasts (also on Twitter)
• Photos from SCMS14!!
• Check out Chris Cagle's SCMS14 commentary (at his wonderful blog Category D) here and here, and his interview with Jaimie Baron whose great new book The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (read Baron's related essay on Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception here) launched just prior to the conference. 
• James Wicks has some good posts on the transnational cinema panels at his great website:
• SCMS Conference Notes, Fri./Sat. (3/21-22), Post 3
• SCMS Conference Notes, Thursday (3/20), Post 2
• SCMS Conference Notes, Thursday (3/20), Post 1

Other material presented or referred to at SCMS (please let FSFF know of more to add to this list):

• Just added Steen Christiansen, 'Things Gone Wild: The Movie Camera in the Drone Age', Dissemination, March 19, 2014
• Justin Horton, 'Vibration, Resonance, Deformation: Deleuze's Soundfulness', Academica.edu, March 2014
• Transmedia Database (Tmdb!): 'a research hub for transmedia content in its widest sense' run by Vicki Callahan, Sarah Atkinson, Jeff Aldrich and Robert Foster.

Other news and links: 

• Save Film Studies at University of West of England!!
• New issue of SCOPE, 26, 2014!!
• New issue of Senses of Cinema, 70, 2014!!
• New issue of Wide Screen, Vol 5, No 1 (2014), Special Issue: An Unseen Century: Indian Cinema 1913-2013!!
• Remembering Stuart Hall by E. Ann Kaplan
• Remembering Scott Nygren by David Desser
• Remembering Harold Ramis by Kristen Thompson
• Remembering Věra Chytilová (DAISIES), 1929 – 2014 by David Hudson 
• Two great early German cinema links: by Enes Lukac; and by Jan-Christopher Horak
• Kevin B Lee on Chris Marker
• David Bordwell on The Grand Budapest Hotel
• VIDEO (2:23): James Mooney's brilliant video essay on Bertolucci's use of Plato's cave Imagery in THE CONFORMIST (narrated by Orson Welles...). Also see Mooney's discussion here: http://filmandphilosophy.com/.../platos-cave-and-the-cinema/
• Roberto Ortiz's essay on Latina star of the 1940s Maria Montez, and Warhol superstar and drag pioneer Mario Montez 
• Below, a short video tribute to Shirley Temple (made the day after she died) by Catherine Grant. This was screened at the SCMS panel on 'First-person Singular: Cinephilia and Writing with the “I” in Cinema and Media Studies' (proposed and chaired by David Johnson) in Christian Keathley's presentation 'Video Essays and the First-person Singular'. The video was originally published, with a short explanatory text, by Film Ireland, February 12, 2014. It will also be presented in a talk called 'Losing/finding/creating the (child) star: on online mourning and videographic objects' at the 'Film and the Psycho-Cultural: Objects, relatedness, process' symposium on Saturday 31st May at the Freud Museum in London, organised by Media and the Inner World, Psychosocial Studies at UEL and the Centre for Research in Film and Audio-Visual Cultures at Roehampton.

Mechanised Flights: Memories of Shirley Temple in HEIDI (Allan Dwan, 1937) from Catherine Grant.

Read more about this video here

              Single Take Horror Film Mutations from Catherine Grant on Vimeo. Also see
'Single Take Horror Film [Transnational] Mutations: Remaking La casa muda in Silent House [video essay plus text for SCMS Transnational Film Remakes Panel, March 2014]', Mediático. March 31, 2014

On Cinematic Découpage

Opening paragraph from Timothy Barnard's new book Découpage (Montreal: caboose, 2014)

découpage
French term, untranslatable into English, for an EDITING “plan” of a (sometimes finished) film which is like a visual version of a “screenplay,” but not necessarily a “storyboard” or “shooting script” because these can’t include a precise conception of movement within and between shots. Most notably used by film theorist Noël Burch and director Robert Bresson. 

Peter Rist, 'Découpage' in Tim Barnard and Peter Rist 'Glossary of Film Terms', South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography 1915-1994, edited by Timothy Barnard and Peter Rist

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to present an entry on the concept of cinematic découpage to celebrate the online publication of the first half of the forthcoming volume on that topic in the Kino-Agora series (edited by Christian Keathley, author of some of the other works on découpage linked to below) published by the Canadian publisher caboose and written by Timothy Barnard. The full book will be published in Fall 2014. While you're visiting the caboose website, it's really worth having a good look around: this is one of the most generous of film publishers in offering free excerpts from its wonderful books.

FSFF will be back on Monday with a round up entry of open access goodies from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference on Seattle, at which [in]Transition, the new journal of videographic film and moving image studies was launched! So, if you have any items you'd like to share, please email them. Thanks!

REFRAME Seminar: "DÉCOUPAGE and Otto Preminger's CARMEN JONES" by Christian Keathley

The recording of a Film Studies research seminar given by Christian Keathley at the Centre for Visual Fields, University of Sussex, on December 4, 2013. For information about this video (and for an audio file version) please see here.

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of CINEPHILIA AND HISTORY, OR THE WIND IN THE TREES (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently working on a second book, THE MYSTERY OF OTTO PREMINGER (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multimedia format, including video essays (see his Vimeo account here). Keathley is editor of caboose's kino-agora book series.

For links to numerous examples of Keathley's scholarly work online, including items he mentions in this talk, please see this earlier Film Studies For Free entry.

• Timothy Barnard, Découpage [online excerpt], Montreal: Caboose, 2014 

• 'The Art of Film Editing', Special Issue of P.O.V: A Danish Journal of Film Studies, edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998
• Lutz Bacher, 'Max Ophuls's Adaptation to and Subversion of Classical Hollywood Cinema and Their Effect on his European Filmmaking', Undercurrent | Fipresci, Issue 3, 2006
• Tim Barnard, '[Note on] Découpage', caboose [date unknown]
• Jean-Pierre Coursodon, 'Desire Roped In: Notes on the Fetishism of the Long Take in Rope', Rouge, 4, 2004
• Christian Keathley,  'Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of Découpage', MOVIE, 3, 2011
• Adrian Martin, 'The body has no head: corporeal figuration in Aldrich', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000  
• Girish Shambu, 'André Bazin & caboose', Girish, March 12, 2009
• Girish Shambu, 'A Cinema Haunted By Writing', Girish, May 3, 2009
• Donato Totaro, '“What is a Good Translation?” Bazin Revisited', Offscreen, February 29, 2009
  
• Jesús Urda, 'Baroque Glances at Society: the Appropriation of Decoupage, the Long Take and Depth of Field Photography in the Early Films by J.A. Bardem', Film Studies Postgraduate Forum, Trinity College Dublin, September, 2008