On Documentary Film Styles: Historical and Sociological Perspectives

Frame grab from Человек с киноаппаратом / Chelovek s kinoapparatom/ Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), a film mentioned in Carsten Heinze's introduction to the Documentary Film Styles. Historical and Sociological Perspectives issue of InterDisciplines - Journal of History and Sociology (Vol 4, No 1 [2013])

One of Film Studies For Free's regular automated web searches discovered the following, just published volume of essays of great interest to documentary specialists: an issue of InterDisciplines - Journal of History and Sociology (Vol 4, No 1 [2013]) on Documentary Film Styles. Historical and Sociological Perspectives.

 

Each essay has much to recommend it, but FSFF particularly enjoyed Tanja Seider's discussion of the essay film in a postcolonial context, along with Bernt Schnettler's comprehensive study of visual research methods

 

The Table of Contents is pasted in below with all the links.

• Introduction: Historical and Sociological Aspects of Documental Pictures PDF  by Carsten Heinze

• Notes on the History and Development of Visual Research Methods PDF  by Bernt Schnettler

• The Factual Treatment of Actuality: The Emergence of Educational Film in the 1920s and its Relation to Documentary Film Proper PDF  by Laurel E. Ahnert

• Documentary Film in Media Transformation PDF  by Thomas Weber

• Postcolonial Historiography in the Essay Film: >De-Colonizing< Sound and Image PDF  by Tanja Seider

• Complete Issue PDF
• Cover Picture, Front Matter, Content PDF

Comic Book INTENSITIES

Screenshot of the new issue header for INTENSITIES

Way back in the dim mists of online time (on January 23, 2013, to be precise), Film Studies For Free publicised its discovery of the new online incarnation of Intensities, the wonderful journal of cult media studies.

Not only are four existing issues of the journal freely available at its website, but a new issue has recently been published there, with lots of items of film studies related interest. The table of contents is pasted in below with links to these excellent items.

Of related interest: FSFF's entry on Studies of the Remediation of Films, Comics and Video Games.



INTENSITIES, Issue 5: Comic Book Intensities (Spring/Summer 2013) 

Articles

• Producing Transnational Cult Media- Neon Genesis Evangelion and Ghost in the Shell in Circulation – Brian Ruh
• Girls’ Fantasies, Freedom, and Brotherly Love- Incest Narratives in Shōjo Anime – Elizabeth Birmingham
• Depicting ordinary and nonstandard intimacies in public- Sex, romance and humour in women’s porn comics – Jackie Ruddock
• Architecture, Violence and Sensation- A Visitor’s Guide to Mega City One – Dan Smith
• The Joke’s On Him- Shamanism, Literary Magic, and the Textualization of Grant Morrison, Heath Ledger, and The Joker – Tim Bavlnka
• From Stories to Worlds- The Continuity of Marvel Superheroes from Comics to Film – David Sweeney
• Captain America, Watergate, and the Falcon- Rediscovering the American Dream? – Michael Ahmed

Intensive: Cult Media Review

• A Fatal Attraction- the fine line between eroticism and horror in Baba Yaga (Corrado Farina, 1973) – Adrian Smith
• Expressions of Fandom- Findings from a Psychological Survey of Cosplay and Costume Wear – Robin S. Rosenberg and Andrea M. Letamendi
• Karen Oughton interviews Fabrizio Federico, director of Black Biscuit (2011) – Karen Oughton

Expanded Cinema Studies? Free eBook on Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art

Whether it involves remaking an old Hollywood movie, projecting a quiet 16mm film, or constructing a bombastic multi-screen environment, cinema now takes place not just in the movie theatre and the home, but also in the art gallery and the museum. The author of this engaging study takes stock of this development, offering an in-depth inquiry into its genesis, its defining features, and the ramifications it has for art and cinema alike. Through the lens of contemporary art history, she examines cinema studies’ great disciplinary obsession – namely, what cinema was, is, and will become in a digital future. (blurb for Erika Balsom,  Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013])

Thanks to the legend that is Girish Shambu, Film Studies For Free heard of the latest, wonderful, freely accessible book from Amsterdam University Press: Erika Balsom's Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. The table of contents is below. It's a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of Expanded Cinema Studies. Read it for free but please order it for your libraries! It has been added to FSFF's permanent and regularly updated listing of online Open Access Film Studies e-Books

Another related resource: six video recordings have been uploaded online of all the sessions from the recent Mediamorphosis Symposium and Exhibition at the University of Sussex at which researchers, practitioners, artists (including filmmakers), designers, scientists were invited to submit, discuss, exchange and engage with analogue and digital practices as mediamorphosis. You can find links to the videos here. 

It's been so quiet around here that FSFF's readers probably won't even notice that it is going on holiday for two weeks (it will be taking Erika's book!). It promises to return refreshed, reinvigorated and possibly even sun-tanned after that, with LOTS of new Open Access items to link to. But, in the meantime, please check out this little video on a different kind of "expanded cinema studies" - it has one or two useful resources that you may find interesting.

Erika Balsom,  Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013)

Table of Contents

Introduction – The Othered Cinema 

Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition
The Passages of Cinema  Projection and Patrimony Black Box/White Cube The New Blockbusters  The Myth of Activity  Media at MoMA 

Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins  
Post-medium Post-mortem Indexing the Past A Little History of 35mm  Ruinophilia  Analogue Aura

Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives  Ambivalent Appropriations  The Four Operations Precursors  The False Promises of the “Utopia of Use”  Remaking Fandom “Room-for-Play”  VCR Memories 

Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction  Anti-anti-illusionism  Hybrid Forms Rehabilitating Narrative  A Return of the Real  Two Images of Death 
Conclusion – “Cinema and...” 

VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture: European Television Memories

Screenshot from The Paradox of the Monarchy, an archive-film video collage (by Catherine Grant) exploring some of the psychological and mediatized components of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy. Read Hazel Collie's discussion of significant, gendered, televisual memories, such as those of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in "It's Just So Hard to Bring It to Mind": The Significance of ‘Wallpaper’ in the Gendering of Television Memory Work

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that EUscreen has presented issue 03 of VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture.

The new issue treats the subject of 'European Television Memories', and it's full of wonderful discussions of 'dynamic memory practices that take place in the contemporary media landscape as an ongoing, active and performative engagement with the past', as the issue's editorial puts it. Such discussions are highly relevant to film scholars, too.

The full table of contents is given below, with FSFF's congratulations to VIEW on an excellent issue.


Editorial

• Editorial Jérôme Bourdon, Berber Hagedoorn PDF HTML

Discoveries

• ‘Remembering Our First TV Set’. Personal Memories as a Source for Television Audience History Cecilia Penati HTML PDF
• "It's Just So Hard to Bring It to Mind": The Significance of ‘Wallpaper’ in the Gendering of Television Memory Work Hazel Collie HTML PDF
• Martin Luther in Primetime. Television Fiction and Cultural Memory Construction in Cold War Germany Stewart Anderson HTML PDF 
• The Production of Czechoslovakia´s Most Popular Television Serial 'The Hospital On The Outskirts' and Its Post-1989 Repeats Petr Bednařík  HTML PDF
• Parallel Stories, Differentiated Histories. Exploring Fiction and Memory in Spanish and Portuguese Television José Carlos Rueda Laffond, Carlota Coronado Ruiz, Catarina Duff Burnay, Susana Díaz Pérez, Amparo Guerra Gómez, Rogério Santos  HTML PDF
• Looking for What You Are Looking for: a Media Researcher’s First Search in a Television Archive Jasmijn Van Gorp HTML PDF

Explorations

• Television as a Hybrid Repertoire of Memory. New Dynamic Practices of Cultural Memory in the Multi-Platform Era Berber Hagedoorn HTML PDF  
• Why Should We Study Socialist Commercials? Anikó Imre HTML PDF
• Window to the West: Memories of Watching Finnish Television in Estonia During The Soviet Period Annika Lepp, Mervi Pantti  HTML PDF 
• The Life and Afterlife of a Socialist Media Friend. On the Longterm Cultural Relevance of the Polish TV Series 'Czterdziestolatek' Kinga S. Bloch  PDF HTML 
• Chronology and Ideology. Temporal Structuring in Israeli Historical Documentary Series Bosmat Garami HTML PDF
• Great Escapes from the Past. Memory and Identity in European Transnational Television News Andreas Widholm HTML PDF
• Memory, Television and the Making of the BBC’s 'The Story Of Wales' Steve Blandford, Ruth McElroy HTML PDF

VIEW is published by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in collaboration with Utrecht University, Maastricht University and Royal Holloway University of London. It is supported by the EUscreenXL project, the European Television History Network and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture is the first peer-reviewed, multi-media and open access e-journal in the field of European television history and culture. It offers an international platform for outstanding academic research and archival reflection on television as an important part of our European cultural heritage. The journal is proud to present its third issue: European Television Memories. It has been guest-edited by Jérôme Bourdon and Berber Hagedoorn and is freely available at: http://www.viewjournal.eu
In the context of the fast development of media studies, the third issue of VIEW highlights debates around the moving borders of national memories, fostered by television in the context of European history. The articles in this issue focus on the contribution of European television researchers, covering all three areas of media studies: production, text and reception. We wish you a pleasant and inspiring journey through European Television Memories!

www.viewjournal.eu - Twitter: @ViewjournalEU

Study of a Single Film: Todd Haynes' [SAFE] (1995)

WHITE [MATER]IAL from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

Video Essay on Todd Haynes's [SAFE] (1995) by Amber Jacobs and Catherine Grant. You can read more about this work in 'Un[Contained]? On Todd Haynes's [SAFE]', Filmanalytical, June 17, 2013

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular 'studies of a single film' entries. This one is dedicated to gathering direct links to freely accessible, high-quality studies of Todd Haynes's remarkable film [SAFE] (1995).

The resources are headed (above) by a new video by FSFF's author which was completely inspired by Amber Jacobs's magnificent commentary. This audiovisual essay foregrounds the film's treatment of mothering.

FSFF is also truly delighted and grateful to offer free access (below) to a wonderful, related excerpt from Rob White's recently published book on the cinema of Todd Haynes.

Below the embedded excerpt, readers can find FSFF's customary listing of open access resources on the featured film, and, below that, further offline, bibliographies related to this film.

Rob White on Todd Haynes' SAFE

Embedded excerpts from Rob White, ' The Misery the World Is Made Of: The Cinema of Todd Haynes', TODD HAYNES (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Reproduced here at Film Studies For Free by kind permission of the author and University of Illinois Press. FSFF's thanks go to the author and publisher, and also to Steven Fast.

Notes on Contributors:

• Amber Jacobs works on feminist  theories and philosophies, film and visual culture, ancient Greek myth, tragedy and philosophy and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theories. Her Book On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother came out in 2008 with Columbia University Press. She currently works as a lecturer in the department of psychosocial studies, Birkbeck, University of London.
• Rob White spent ten years as commissioning editor of BFI Publishing (and series editor of the Classics volumes) before becoming, in 2006, editor of Film Quarterly (until 2013). He has been a columnist for Sight and Sound and is author of The Third Man (BFI Film Classics, 2003) and Freud’s Memory: Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body (Palgrave, 2008). His book on Todd Haynes has been published in the University of Illinois Press series, Contemporary Film Directors.

Open Access Resources on [SAFE]

• Andrew Burke, '"Do You Smell Fumes?": Health, Hygiene, and Suburban Life', ESC: English Studies in Canada, 32.4, December 2006
• Rachel Carroll, 'Toxic shock: Gendered environments and embodied knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]', Transformations, Issue 14, March 2007 
• Çakirlar, Cüneyt, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes’ Cinema of Queer Pastiche', Kult 1.1 (2011): 162–200
• Anthony Enns], '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• John Gill, excerpt from Far From Heaven (London: Palgrave/BFI Film Classics: 2011)
• Ruth Goldberg, 'Every Breath You Take: Re-Evaluating Time, Place and Cultural Metaphor in Safe', Screen Memories of the Mad Monstrous '80s: Trauma and Political Allegory in Horror Films that Look Back at the Reagan Years, PhD Thesis, Union Institute and University Cincinatti, Ohio, October 2010 
• Catherine Grant, 'Un[Contained]? On Todd Haynes's [SAFE]', Filmanalytical, June 17, 2013
• Julie Grossman, 'The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling', Other Voices 2.3 January 2005
• Amber Jacobs and Rob White, 'Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce: A Discussion', Film Quarterly, Feburary 2012
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love,' originally published in The Cinema of Todd Haynes, ed. James Morrison (London:Wallflower Press, 2007) 
• Jeremy Justus, "What you are seeing outside is a reflection of what you are feeling within" space, ideology and biopolitics in Safe', AmericanPopularCulture.com, October 2007
• Rose Ellen Lessy, 'Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes’s Safe', Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4):291–308, 2006 
• Jed Mayer, 'Raised in Fear: The Self-Help Horror of Todd Haynes’ SAFE', PressPlay, Indiewire, April 16, 2013 
• Joan Faber McAlister, 'Unsafe Houses: The Narrative Inversion of Suburban Morality in Popular Film', Liminalities, 4.1, 2008
• Alison McLean, 'Todd Haynes', BOMB 52/Summer 1995
• Martha Elisabeth Polk, 'What is Wrong With Carol? Narrative, Genre, Feminism, and Language in Todd Haynes’ Safe', MA dissertation, Emory University, 2013
• Susan Potter, 'Dangerous Spaces: SAFE', Camera Obscura, 57 (Volume 19, Number 3), 2004, pp. 124-154
• Anat Pick, '"No Callous Shell": The Fate of Selfhood from Walt Whitman to Todd Haynes', in James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Jason Qualls, 'Genuine Artifice, Serious Camp: The Women's Films of Todd Haynes', The McNair Scholarly Review, 2008 (scroll to p. 119)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Stranded in the Jungle [on SAFE], Interzones, October 1995
• Chuck Stephens, 'Gentlemen Prefer Haynes', Film Comment, Vol. 31, No. 4, July/August 1995 
• Nick Stevenson, 'What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk', Sociological Research Online, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005
• Amy Taubin, 'Nowhere to Hide', Sight and Sound 6:5 (May 1996) p. 32-34
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002 
• Rob White, 'Todd Haynes’s Poison Reconsidered', Film Quarterly Fall 2011, Vol. 65, No. 1

Film Studies For Free entries on Todd Haynes

• On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day! July 4, 2010
• New Todd Haynes' Masterclass November 27, 2011
• Longtime Companion? HIV/AIDS in thirty years of cinema, media and culture December 1, 2011
• All That Film Pastiche Allows: Fifty+ Online Studies April 15, 2012

Other Resources Mentioned in the Video Essay Bibliography

• Danielle Bouchard and Jigna Desai, '"There's Nothing More Debilitating than Travel“: Locating US Empire in Todd Haynes' Safe', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22(4), 2005: 359–370
• Laura Christian, 'Of Housewives and Saints: Abjection, Transgression, and Impossible Mourning in Poison and Safe', Camera Obscura (2004) 19(3 57): 93-123
• Glyn Davis], 'Health and Safety in the Home: Todd Haynes's clinical white world', in David Alderson and Linda R. Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
• Mary Ann Doane, 'Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes', Camera Obscura (2004) 19(3 57): 1-21
• Roy Grundmann, 'How Clean Was My Valley? Todd Haynes' Safe', Cineaste 21:4, 1995: 22-5
• Lisa Lynch, 'The Epidemiology of "Regrettable Kinship": Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes' [Safe] and Richard Powers' Gain', Journal of Medical Humanities vol. 23, nos. 3-4 (Winter, 2002): 203-19
• José Esteban Muñoz, 'Notes on the Whiteness of New Queer Cinema: Safe', GLQ (1998) 4:1: 126-37
• Gaye Naismith, 'Tales from the Crypt: Contamination and Quarantine in Todd Haynes's [Safe],' In P. Treichler, L. Cartwright, & C. Penley (eds), The Visible Woman: Imagine Technologies, Gender and Science (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
• Roddey Reid, 'Un[Safe] at Any Distance: Todd Haynes's Visual Culture of Health and Risk', Film Quarterly (Spring, 1998): 32-44
• John David Rhodes, 'Allegory, mise-en-scène, AIDS: interpreting Safe', in James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Rob White, Todd Haynes (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013) online excerpt

Further Offline Resources

• Andrew Burke, '"Do you smell fumes?": Health, Hygiene, and Suburban Life', English Studies in Canada, Winter 2006, Vol. 32 Issue 4, pp. 147-168
• Matthew Gandy, 'Allergy and Allegory in Todd Haynes' [Safe]', In: Screening the city edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London and New York: Verso, 2003)
• Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore and Christine Vachon, '"...and all is well in our world" - making Safe', In: Film-makers on film-making edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)
• Susan Kollin, 'Toxic Subjectivity: Gender and the Ecologies of Whiteness in Todd Haynes's Safe', Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 121-39, Winter 2002
• Christopher McQuain, 'Safe Man: Are Todd Haynes' Films Gay Enough?', Film Journal, vol. 1, no. 3, 2002
• Arij Ouweneel, 'Carol's Predicament" The Body in [Safe] (1995) and Jennifer's Body (2009)', Freudian Fadeout: The Failings of Psychoanalysis in Film Criticism (London: McFarland, 2012)
• Dorian Stuber, 'Patient Zero? Illness and Vulnerability in Todd Haynes's [Safe]." Parallax Volume 11, Number 2 / April-June 2005  

  

Front cover of Rob White, Todd Haynes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).