Split Screen Studies

Establishing Split: On REQUIEM FOR A DREAM from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

The above is a FILMANALYTICAL, REQUIEM // 102 and FILM STUDIES FOR FREE video essay by Catherine Grant. It explores the use of split screens in some early sequences in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (Darren Aronofsky, 2000).

    The essay was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License in November 2010.

Today, Film Studies For Free presents an entry of links to online studies of the cinematic split screen. Rather excitingly (for this blog, at least), the resources include the above video essay on this very topic ... by FSFF's author. 

The essay is a contribution to the Requiem for a Dream // 102 Project, conceived by its inventor Nick Rombes, Associate Professor of English at the University of Detroit, Mercy, as a form of "collective, distributed film criticism". Requiem // 102 is modelled loosely on Rombes' ongoing 10/40/70 project, in which he “reads” three screen captures from a given film taken at the 10, 40, and 70 minute marks.

In this case, Nick has invited 102 contributors from across the film criticism spectrum to look at, or otherwise be inspired by, one frame from each minute of Darren Aronofsky’s 102 minute-long film Requiem for a Dream (2000), a movie that unsettled many audience members when it was first released in cinemas ten years ago.

To learn more about Requiem // 102, check out the 102 Project’s “About” page and/or follow it on Twitter. Chuck Tryon's great first post on the film is here. For an accompanying written text for the above video essay on the frame capture from 02:09 of Requiem for a Dream, visit FSFF's little sister site, Filmanalytical.

• Jim Bizzocchi, 'The Fragmented Frame: The Poetics of the Split-Screen', [Draft] MIT 6, 2009
• Jim Bizzocchi, 'Ambient Video: The Transformation of the Domestic Cinematic Experience', [Draft] in Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, eds. Byron Hawk, David Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo. University of Minnesota Press, February 2008
• Dave Boothroyd, 'Cinematic heroin and narcotic modernity', Symbolism: Journal of Critical Aesthetics Vol.VII , 2007
• Nadia Bozak, 'Four Cameras are Better than One: Division as Excess in Mike Figgis’ Timecode', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Cormac Deane, 'The Embedded Screen and the State of Exception: Counterterrorist Narratives and the “War on Terror”', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Sergio Dias-Branco, 'The Mosaic-Screen: Exploration and Definition', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008 
• Tessa Dwyer and Mehmet Mehmet, 'Double Trouble: Editorial', Refractory, Vol. 14, 2008 
• Paul Eisenstein, 'Devouring Holes: Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and the Tectonics of Psychoanalysis',  International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1.3, Autumn 2007
• Ian Garwood, 'Sound and Space in the Split-Screen Movie', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Catherine Grant, 'Establishing Split [video essay and text on Requiem for a Dream]', Filmanalytical, November 2, 2010
• David Grevin, 'Medusa in the Mirror: The Split World of Brian De Palma’s Carrie', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Andrew Grossman, 'Finding Unlikely Ideology in Prokofiev: Polyphonic and Anti-Authoritarian Gestures in The Gambler', Bright Lights Film Journal, No. 62, 2008
• Malte Hagener, 'The Aesthetics of Displays: How the Split Screen Remediates Other Media', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Ingrid Hoofd, 'The Threat of Modernity; Comments on Theories on the Impact of Modernity', Klari.net, March 5, 1998 
• Kirsten Johnson and Jim Bizzocchi, 'Lost Cause: An Interactive Film Project', International Digital Media and Arts Association Beyond Boundaries, October 30, 2007
• Adrian Jones, 'Meaning and the Interactive Narrative: In the context of Object-Oriented Interactive Cinema', Readings in Non-Linear Narrative (date unknown)
• Craig B. Knowles, 'The Temporal Image Mosaic and its Artistic Applications in Filmmaking', MSc Thesis, Queen's University, Ontario, December 2003
• Bruno Lessard, 'Missed Encounters: Film Theory and Expanded Cinema', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008 
• Tim Snelson, '“What Am I… Beloved or Bewitched?” Split Screens, Gender Confusion, and Psychiatric Solutions in The Dark Mirror', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Lorenza Mondada, 'Video Recording Practices and the Reflexive Constitution of the Interactional Order: Some Systematic Uses of the Split-Screen Technique', [Uncorrected proof], Human Studies, 32, 1, 67-99 
• Kim Louise Walden, 'Double Take: Rotoscoping and the Processing of Performance', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Maria Walsh, 'The Double Side of Delay: Sutapa Biswas’ film installation Birdsong and Gilles Deleuze’s Actual/Virtual Couplet', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Birk Weilberg, 'Beyond Interactive Cinema', Keyframe, August 2002 

In Defense of the Arts and Humanities: On Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993)

In Defense of Philosophy: Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993): A discussion at London's Tate Modern with the film’s producer Tariq Ali and Jonathan Derbyshire, culture editor of the New Statesman on October 22, 2010

A seminal thinker of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein’s revolutionary ideas have had an impact in disciplines beyond philosophy including psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, mathematics, logic, art, religion, artificial intelligence and software design.

Like all right-thinking scholarly blogs, Film Studies For Free has been terribly alarmed by the increasing international attacks on, as well as actual cutbacks to academic Arts and Humanities subjects in the context of the global economic crisis.

So, today's posting of the latest film-studies related video published by the Tate Channel is a timely one indeed. In this video, film producer and writer Tariq Ali defends these disciplines at the same time as he celebrates the (more relevant than ever) film work of Derek Jarman, the marvellous British artist who created his best works against the backdrop of similar, short-sighted, anti-intellectual and anti-cultural attacks. 

If these developments are of concern to you, why not join in with the dialogue about them at a newly launched, campaigning Facebook group DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES? FSFF's author will be most pleased to see you sounding off there.

In the meantime, below are a couple of highly worthwhile scholarly studies of Jarman's take on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

• Tracy Bowell, 'Making Manifest: Viewing Wittgenstein's Philosophy Through Jarman's Lens', Teaching Philosophy, 24:2, June 2001
• Martin Stokhof, 'The Quest for Purity. Another Look at the New Wittgenstein', Academia.edu, 2010

Cognitive Film Studies

An empirical approach? Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby in Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)

Scholars often resist the cognitive approach to art because they're reluctant to mount causal or functional explanations. Instead of asking how films work or how spectators understand films, many scholars prefer to offer interpretive commentary on films. Even what's called film theory is largely a mixture of received doctrines, highly selective evidence, and more or less free association. Which is to say that many humanists treat doing film theory as a sort of abstract version of doing film criticism. They don't embrace the practices of rational inquiry, which includes assessing a wide body of evidence, seeking out counterexamples, and showing how a line of argument is more adequate than its rivals.  [David Bordwell, introducing a free download of his article 'A Case for Cognitivism: Further Reflections', Iris no. 11 (Summer 1990): 107–112.]

Film Studies For Free has previously only touched on the burgeoning field of cognitivist film studies in passing. Today, however, it has decided to gather together links to some excellent online resources, above all from two journals -- Film Studies and The Journal of Moving Image Studies -- in order to provide a good introduction to this field, as well as to the related field of analytic (film) philosophy, two increasingly influential sets of approaches to our discipline.

As one of the most eloquent and persuasive champions of cognitivism is film scholar extraordinaire David Bordwell, one of the very best places to begin such an introduction is with a selection of openly accessible writings on this topic by that author. For instance, here, Bordwell summarises the history of cognitive film studies and discusses some recent work as a prelude to the second annual meeting of The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (note: link now updated).  Scroll down for lots more great work...

(Note: David Bordwell is probably the most generous of scholars in relation to making his invaluable work freely available online. As always, FSFF thanks him very sincerely for helping to make online film studies such a rewarding focus. This entry is dedicated to his work).

Introductions to Cognitivist Film Studies:

• David Bordwell, 'Minding Movies', Observations on Film Art, March 5, 2008
• David Bordwell, 'Invasion of the Brainiacs II', Observations on Film Art, June 10, 2009 
• David Bordwell, 'A Case for Cognitivism', Iris no. 9 (Spring 1989): 11–40.
• David Bordwell, 'A Case for Cognitivism: Further Reflections', Iris no. 11 (Summer 1990): 107–112.
• Noël Carroll, 'Cognitivism, Contemporary Film Theory and Method: A Response to Warren Buckland', Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Spring 1992
• Also see Warren Buckland, 'The Cognitive Turn in Film Theory', long excerpt from The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
  

Film Studies
Volume 8, Summer 2006

• Torben Grodal , 'The PECMA Flow: A General Model of Visual Aesthetics'

• Jonathan Frome , 'Representation, Reality, and Emotions Across Media'

• Amy Coplan, 'Catching Characters' Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film'

• Daniel Barratt, 'Tracing the Routes to Empathy: Association, Simulation, or Appraisal?'

• Michael Z. Newman, 'Characterization as Social Cognition in Welcome to the Dollhouse'

• Jens Eder, 'Ways of Being Close to Characters'

• Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies'

• Patrick Colm Hogan, 'Narrative Universals, Nationalism, and Sacrificial Terror: From Nosferatuto Nazism'

• Karen Renner , 'Repeat Viewings Revisited: Emotions, Memory, and Memento'

• Malcolm Turvey, 'Imagination, Simulation, and Fiction'

• Thomas E. Wartenberg , 'Film as Argument'

• Introduction: Author Meets Critics: Noël Carroll's Engaging the Moving Image

• Murray Smith, 'My Dinner with Noël; or, Can We Forget the Medium?'

• Jinhee Choi , 'Naturalizing Hollywood?: Against the Naturalistic Account of Filmic Communication'

• Cynthia Freeland, 'Evaluating Film'

• Noël Carroll , 'Engaging Critics

The Journal of Moving Image Studies -
Note: Apologies but there's currently a problem with the links set out below, which FSFF will fix as soon as it can. But in the meantime, all the below articles can be accessed via this page.

Vol. 1, 2002

• Analyzing the Reality Effect in Dogma Films By Peter Wuss
  
  
• Film Experimentation and the Sublime Experience By Laszlo Tarnay
  
  
• Motion Pictures, Mental Imagery, and Mentation By Edward S. Small
  
  
• Diegetic Breaks and the Avant-Garde By Curt Hersey
  
  
• Emotional Response to Computer Generated Special Effects:Realism Revisited By Benjamin Meade
  
  

Vol. 2, 203

• Science, Evolution, and Cinematic Representation By Stephen S. Daggett
  
  
• (NON)FICTION AND THE VIEWER: RE-INTERPRETING THE DOCUMENTARY FILM By Tammy Stone
  
  
• The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful (literary review) By Murray Smith
  

• Memory Simulated By Jung-In Kwon

• Dreamlike Images in Fellini's 8 1/2 and Tarkovsky's The Mirror: A Cognitive Approach By Peter Wuss

Vol. 3, 2004

• An Attentional Model of Film Viewing By Bruce D. Hutchinson
  
  
• Science, Evolution, and Cinematic Representation By Stephen S. Daggett
  
  
• (NON)FICTION AND THE VIEWER: RE-INTERPRETING THE DOCUMENTARY FILM By Tammy Stone
  
  
• The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful (literary review) By Murray Smith
  

• Memory Simulated By Jung-In Kwon

• Dreamlike Images in Fellini's 8 1/2 and Tarkovsky's The Mirror: A Cognitive Approach By Peter Wuss

Vol. 4, 2005

• Synthesizing approaches in film theory by Kathrin Fahlenbrach (bio) (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle, Germany)

• The Emotional Design of Music Videos. Approaches to Audiovisual Metaphors. by Stefano Ghislotti (bio)University of Bergamo - Italy

• Do you remember Sammy Jankins? Film narration and spectator's memory. by Katherine Thomson-Jones

• No-Belief Empathy in Film by Joseph G. Kickasola, Ph.D

• Cinemediacy: Theorizing an Aesthetic Phenomenon by Mette Kramer (bio)

• Melodrama as a Shortcut to Stress Tranquilizing

Vol. 5, 2006

• Video as Ambience: Reception and Aesthetics of Flat-Screen Video Display By Jim Bizzocchi
  
  
• Running head: Interest and unity in the emotional response to film By Carl Plantinga and Ed Tan
  
  
• Emotional Response Model By Carl Plantinga
  

• Re-reading the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: an evolutionary perspective By Deborah Walker

• We Don't Stop Here: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and the Death of the Subject By Greg Holden

• Voice and Gesture within the Context of Mirror Neuron Research By Charles Eidsvik

Vol. 6, 2007

• Anaconda, a Snakes and Ladders Game By Bernard Perron
  
  
• An Aesthetic of Wonderment: IMAX and Affect By Eric Crosby
  
  
• Implications of Dispositional Overattribution for Film and Television Narrative By Bruce Hutchinson
  
  
• Picturing Motion: A Semiotic Model of Image Role-Reversal and Cultural Identity Displacement
  By Michelle Waggener
  
  
• “The Case for Menippeanism: The Meaning of Life” By Pete Porteri

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Black Narcissus: the Colours of Desire

Updated October 28, 2010

Image from Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

[Black Narcissus]’s trauma-tale is inseparable from the doomed project [of Imperialism]: it is predicated on the vertiginous nature of culture shock. The lofty palace-convent perched on the edge of a mountain precipice [...] seems a visual metonym. Sister Clodagh may want to heal and enlighten “a primitive people”, but, when she looks up and then looks down from the bell tower, she is completely lost. Powell and Pressburger have transposed the ‘edge of the world’ from Foula at the tip of the Shetlands in Powell’s 1937 Scottish picture (The Edge of the World) to India’s border with the high Himalayas; from the edge of the Roman Empire to the edge of the British Empire. The former, of course, was long gone; the latter was about to expire. The end of empire is literally vertiginous, its trauma doubly embedded, or embodied, in the figures of Clodagh and sickly Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron). Ruth cannot hack the chasm of culture that confronts her and wants out; Clodagh, disillusioned after a romance in Ireland has ended when her boyfriend leaves for America without her, seeks solace in the Order. Flashback shows us the rural idyll of Irish sweethearts fishing and riding amidst fields and hills of emerald Technicolor, the flame-haired Clodagh slim, free-spirited and ravishing, like a figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The long auburn hair now concealed under the all-embracing convent habit is never to reappear. As the fragile Order starts to crumble after the unfortunate death of a local child, the febrile Sister Ruth sheds her habit to reappear in scarlet lipstick and a lush crimson dress; for the shocked Clodagh, perhaps a melodramatic return of the repressed – the erotic red of the painted lips matched by the sensual velvet that highlights the shape of the female figure rather than burying it under a mountain of white cloth. [John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009]

Filled with the joys of Open Access Week 2010, Film Studies For Free brings you a small but perfectly formed 'study of a single film' resource: a little list of openly accessible online articles on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1947 film Black Narcissus.

• Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Janice Miller, 'If Looks Could Kill: Making Up the Face of Evil', The Wicked Heart: Studies in the Phenomenology of Evil, eds Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and William Andrew Myers (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2006), scroll to p. 235
• Mary Bowen, 'Blue Nun/Red Desire: The Palette of Piety, Passion, and Monstrosity in Black Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org, 2004
• Peter Coyne, 'Black Narcissus', Scope, Issue 11, June 2008
• Robert Cross, 'Black Narcissus: A Post-colonial Empire Film?', Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture, 9(4), 2007: 593 – 611
• Kelly Davidson and John Hill, '‘Under control’?: Black Narcissus and the Imagining of India', Film Studies, Issue 6, Summer 2005
• Raymond Durgnat, 'Retrospective: Black Narcissus', Monthly Film Bulletin, 1947
• Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000, 157-171
• Anh Hua, 'Primitive Spectacle in Black Narcissus', j_spot, 1.2, 2000
• Kent Jones, 'Empire of the Senses', Criterion Collection, July 20, 2010
• Dave Kehr, 'Black Narcissus', Criterion Collection, January 29, 2001
• Karli Lukas, 'Black Narcissus', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009
• Alton Jerome McFarland, 'Madness through Music: An Analysis of Sound in Black Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org (date unknown)
• Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus', Images Journal, Issue 10
• Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, July 2001
• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009
• Michael Walker, 'Black Narcissus', From Framework 9, Winter 1978/79

Lots more links to film studies journals to celebrate Open Access Week!

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fourth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.  

It's International Open Access Week this week, and while every week is Open Access Week at Film Studies For Free, this website decided to celebrate this special week of events by flagging up the work of an individual who can rightfully claim to be one of the most hard-working supporters of this important cause: Jan Szczepanski.

FSFF was recently contacted by Jan, a librarian from Sweden who has been a collector of freely accessible scholarly e-journals since the end of the 1990's. He has been responsible for gathering the longest ever lists of links to (multilingual) Open Access scholarly journals titles, mostly in humanities and the social sciences, many of which you can access through the embedded document below (also see here).

FSFF hasn't yet fully cross-checked Jan's list with its own list of English-language online Film and Media Studies Journals (permanently accessible from the table of contents in the right-hand sidebar), but will do so as soon as possible in order to add notable items it hasn't yet come across.

FSFF has set up the document below so that you can immediately scroll down through the Film titles, from page 107. But you can also perform a search for 'Masskommunikation' to scroll automatically to page 491 for lots of Media Studies titles.

Thanks so much to Jan for getting in touch and especially for all his hard work in assembling this monumental list.

8.999 Open Access Journals. New, expanded list, December 2009