New BRIGHT LIGHTS FILM JOURNAL

"Your body is a microcosm of all existence." – On Michelle LeBrun's Death: A Love Story: Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays by Matt Brennan

Film Studies For Free continues to catch up with August's bumper crop of new online journal issues. Over the weekend, it has been thoroughly enjoying the lively and eclectic brilliance of Bright Lights Film Journal's latest offering of very savvy, and sometimes sassy, articles.

They may not be 'peer reviewed' in the strict scholarly sense, but film studies academics and cinephiles will miss these at their peril.

The entire table of contents for Issue 73 is thus reproduced below. And don't miss Bright Lights After Dark, BLFJ's fabulous film blog for further, essential, movie musings. 

Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2011 | Issue 73

From the Editor

• "You can't have your cinema and eat it too" - or can you? 


• Gary Morris

Features

• Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays


• Matt Brennan 

• Boris Barnet: The Lyric Voice in Soviet Cinema by Giuliano Vivaldi

Articles

• Cylons, Avatars, and Barack Obama: Science Fiction and Hybridity After 9/11 by Natalie Bograd

• The Envelope of Time: Wrapping Up the Past in Chris Marker, Alexander Sokurov, and Josè Luis Guerìn


• Lesley Chow

• Eating Cinema: The Frozen Dessert as Audiovisual Synaesthesia


• Andrew Grossman

• Darkening the Image of American Wealth and Power: Unstoppable and The Lincoln Lawyer 


• Joseph Natoli

• Carnivorous Lunar Activities: The Origins of 1980s Metamorphosis Cinema by Alex Kirschenbaum

• Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys: Revisiting Frank Borzage's No Greater Glory and the 1930s Boy Soldier Genre by Peter Lee  

• Young Ones and Swan Songs: Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Bela Tarr in Edinburgh  


• D. J. M. Saunders

Movies

• Misery Loves Fantasy: Kim Ki-duk's Arirang (2011) by Jonathan McCalmont

• Between Silence and Sound: Children of a Lesser God  by Ian Murphy

• The Green Hornet Makes America Bossy Bottom: Who's Topping Who? by L. Andrew Cooper

• Green Lantern: The Allegory of Fear and Will Unfolded 


• Joseph Natoli

• Still Hungover: Todd Phillips and Rape Culture by Terri Carney

• You Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello: The Long Goodbye and the End of the Crime (and Competition) in American Detective Films by Allen H. Redmon

• Desert Solitaire: On Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2010) 


• Jacob Mikanowski

• Space Dust: On Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life 


• Jacob Mikanowski

Television

• Talk Is Cheap: On Aaron Sorkin's Moral Compass 


• Matt Brennan

• Concocting Character in Television: The Case of Star Trek's Annoying Old Men – and the Beautiful Young Women Who Love Them 


• Mervyn Nicholson

Short Features

• Short Takes: Cinematography "But It Did Happen" – Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia by Matthew Sewell

Stars

• Greer Garson and the Good War: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great Lady by Meredith Hicks

Directors

• A Dream That Was Not All a Dream: The Films of André Delvaux by Santiago Rubín de Celis

Festivals

• Crafting Community: The 2011 QDoc International Film Festival 


• Gary Morris

Columns

• Bright Sights: Recent DVDs 


• Gordon Thomas

Books

• The Celluloid Closet, by Vito Russo. Reviewed by Mark Adnum

• Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, by Kim Newman. Reviewed by Joseph Aisenberg

• Shock Value: How A Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, And Invented Modern Horror, by Jason Zinoman. Reviewed by Cynthia C. Scott

• They Live, by Jonathan Lethem. Reviewed by Chad Trevitte

New SCREENING THE PAST

Image from After the Rainbow (2009), a two screen video installation by Soda_Jerk, the Australian artist sisters Dom and Dan Angeloro, as discussed in 'The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime' by Andrew Frost

[C]inema is surely a paradoxical object: its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity. That is where its true materiality-effect, today, is situated: in the palpable aura of a mise en scène that is always less than itself and more than itself, not only itself but also its contrary, ever vanishing and yet ever renewed across a thousand and one screens, platforms and dispositifs. [Adrian Martin, 'Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif ', Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011]

Below, Film Studies For Free presents the table of contents to the latest online issue of Screening the Past.

It's a special issue on the 'intermediality' of cinema, guest-edited by the brilliant and influential Australian film critic and scholar Adrian Martin. It begins with a marvellous contribution by him to the topic. There's also an unmissable 'rerun' of Nicole Brenez's remarkable essay 'Incomparable Bodies'.

Admirers of Martin's work should also be more than excited by the news that the first issue of LOLA, a new film journal edited by him and the film writer and blogger extraordinaire Girish Shambu, is "coming soon"...


Screening the Past, Issue 31 - Cinema Between Media 
(Incorporating U-matic to YouTube, a selection of papers from a National Symposium celebrating three decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking edited by Therese Davis).

First Release

• Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif by Adrian Martin


• Cinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch’s Inland Empire by Jodi Brooks


• The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime by Andrew Frost


• Théâtre du Soleil Meets the Cinema: Acting and Mask Work in Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière by Laura Sava


• Capital and Co.: Kluge/Eisenstein/Marx by Julia Vassilieva

Dossier: U-Matic to YouTube

• “Working in Communities, Connecting with Culture”: Reflecting on U-matic to YouTube A National Symposium Celebrating Three Decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking by Therese Davis and Romaine Moreton


• “These Are The Choices We Make”: Animating Saltwater Country by John Bradley Graham Friday Amanda Kearney and Leonard Norman


• Two Laws: A Filmmaking Journey by Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan


• Was Two Laws Experimental? by Stephen Muecke


• Story, Film Style and Cross-cultural Collaboration in Aeroplane Dance (1994) by Trevor Graham


• Aeroplane Dance: Whose Story? by Maryrose Casey and John Bradley


• Models of Collaboration in the Making of Ten Canoes (2006) by Nancy E. Wright


• Darlene Johnson on Making Films in Arnhem Land by Therese Davis


• Victorian Indigenous Communities and Digital Storytelling by Jason Eades Helen Simondson and Kimba Thompson


• The Farm (2009) and Indigenous Remembrance by Romaine Moreton

Classics and Re-runs

• Incomparable Bodies by Nicole Brenez

Reviews

• Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, Bernard Stiegler by Daniel Ross


• Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Peter Limbrick by Deane Williams


• Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing, Susan L. Carruthers by Gabrielle Murray


• Diasporas of Australian cinema, Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert (eds) by Ina Bertrand


• The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller by Michael Grant


• Dancing Ledge / Kicking the Pricks, Derek Jarman by Niall Richardson


• Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood by Regina Longo


• Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Ella Shohat by Seyda Aylin Gurses


• The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Suzanne Buchan by Mihaela Mihailova


• Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, Karen Beckman by Thomas Salek

Latest five volumes of REFRACTORY: A Journal of Entertainment Media

Frame grab from Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002). Read Samatha Lindop's 2011 article on this film here. For another interesting, psychiatrically-informed account of Cronenberg's film, see here

Thanks to Adrian Martin (whose video version of his Ritwik Ghatak talk is now online, by the way), Film Studies For Free heard about the latest issue of the online Australian journal Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. And thanks to that, FSFF realised it hadn't really mentioned an issue of Refractory since Volume 14, 2009 in its entry on "Split Screens". So, below are direct links to all of the contents of this great journal since that issue. And FSFF promises not to be quite so pommily slow next time this journal publishes one of its characteristically excellent collections of film and media studies...

Refractory, Volume 19, 2011

1. Blockbusters for the YouTube Generation: A new product of convergence culture – Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller


2. ‘Out wiv the old ay plumma?’ The Uncanny Marginalized Wastelands of Memory and Matter in David Cronenberg’s Spider – Samantha Lindop


3. A Moving Image Experience: Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, June-July, 2010 – Wendy Haslem


4. “A series of emotional remembrances”: Echoes of Bernard Herrmann -Daniel Golding


5. Don Draper On The Couch: Mad Men and the Stranger to Paradise – Mark Nicholls

Refractory, Volume 18, 2011

1. Editorial: Transitions in Popular Culture – Matthew Sini and Angie Knaggs  


2. “Never my soul”: Adaptations, Re-makes and Re-imaginings of Yeşilçam Cinema – Can Yalcinkaya  


3. Looking Past Seeing: Imaginative Space and Empathetic Engagement in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and There Will Be Blood – Elliott Logan


4. Struggling to find their place: Indigenous youth, identity, and storytelling in Beneath Clouds and Samson and Delilah – Samantha Fordham


5. Transgeneric Tendencies in New Queer Cinema – Matthew Sini


6. Before Priscilla: Male-to-Female Transgender in Australian Cinema until the 1990s – Joanna McIntyre


7. From Night and Day to De-Lovely: Cinematic Representations of Cole Porter – Penny Spirou


8. (Em)Placing Prison Break: Heterotopic Televisual Space and Place – Angie Knaggs


9. “Think Smart”: multiple casting, critical engagement and the contemporary film spectator – Nicole Choolun

Refractory, Volume 17, 2010

1. From Cult Texts to Authored Languages: Fan Discourse and the Performances of Authorship – Karolina Agata Kazimierczak


2. The Pinball Problem – Daniel Reynolds


3. The Invisible Medium: Comics Studies in Australia – Kevin Patrick


4. Acculturation of the ‘Pure’ Economy: Sci Fi, IT and the National Lampoon – Rock Chugg


5. Subversive Frames: Vermeer And Lucio Fulci’s SETTE NOTE IN NERO – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas


6. Ringu/ The Ring: Tracing the Analog Spirit in a Digital Era – Michael Fisch


7. Keaton and the Lion: A Critical Re-evaluation of The Cameraman, Free and Easy and Speak Easily – Anna Gardner


8. Rosy-Fingered Dawn: The Natural Sublime in the work of Terrence Malick – Dimitrios Latsis

Refractory, Volume 16, 2009

1. Editorial ‘All Your Base Are Belong to Us’: Videogames and Play in the Information Age : Tom Apperley and Justin Clemens


2. A Critique of Play – Sean Cubitt


3. ‘The code which governs war and play’: Computer games, sport and modern combat – Jeff Sparrow


4. Being Played: Games Culture and Asian American Dis/identifications – Dean Chan


5. “I’m OK”: How young people articulate ‘violence’ in videogames – Gareth Schott


6. How to Do Things With Images – Darshana Jayemanne


7. Myths of Neoconservatism and Privatization in World of Warcraft – Kyle Kontour


8. Babelswarm -Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash

Refractory, Volume 15, 2009

Double Issue: General Issue and Television Issue, Editors: Angela Ndalianis and Lucian Chaffey

1. Reality is in the performance’: Issues of Digital Technology, Simulation and Artificial Acting in S1mOne – Anna Notaro


2. The Neo-baroque in Lucha Libre - Kat Austin


3. Ryan Is Being Beaten: Incest, Fanfiction, and The OC – Jes Battis


4. Mobile Content Market: an Exploratory Analysis of Problems and Drivers in the U.S. – Giuseppe Bonometti, Raffaello Balocco, Peter Chu, Shiv Prabhu, Rajit Gadh


5. Televisual control: The resistance of the mockumentary – Wendy Davis


6. The Classic Hollywood Town at the Dawn of Suburbia - Stephen Rowley


7. Digital Intervention: Remixes, Mash Ups and Pixel Pirates – Amanda Trevisanut


8. The Bill 1984 – 2009: Genre, Production, Redefinition - Margaret Rogers


9. Guiding Stars – Carly Nugent

Forty more film and moving image studies theses online

Frame grab from Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951), a film discussed in Andrew Klevan's PhD thesis Disclosure of the Everyday

Film Studies For Free brings you its latest roundup of links to online and openly accessible film and moving image studies theses. These links (all of them to theses stored in European research repositories) will very shortly be added to FSFF's permanent listing of already more than 150 theses (the vast majority of them at PhD level, though one or two high quality MPhils are also included).

Particular highlights in this roundup, in FSFF's view, are the recent online publication of Andrew Klevan's 1996 thesis Disclosure of the everyday, Catherine Fowler's The films of Chantal Akerman (1995), Martin Stollery's 1994 Alternative empires on Soviet montage cinema, the British documentary movement and colonialism, Ximena Triquell's 2000 socio-semiotic approach to cinematic representations of the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983),  and David Martin-Jones' 2002 Becoming-other in time: the Deleuzian subject in cinema.

If any of FSFF's esteemed readers know that their own thesis is available online but not yet added to these listings, please email this blog with a link.

1. Aaltonen, Minna-Ella, Touch, taste and devour: phenomenology of film and the film experiencer in the cinema of sensations, MPhil Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011
2. Archibald, David, The Spanish Civil War in cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2004
3. Baker, Rosemari Elizabeth, Shklovsky in the Cinema, 1926-1932, PhD Thesis, Durham University, 2010
4. Berridge, Susan, Serialised sexual violence in teen television drama series, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010
5. Bissell, Laura, The female body, technology and performance: performing a feminist praxis. PhD thesis University of Glasgow, 2011
6. Bourkiba Larbi, Abdelrhaffar, Parody and ideology: The case of Othello, PhD Thesis, Universitat de València, 2005
7. Carrasco, Rocio, Of men and cyborgs: the construction of masculinity in contemporary U.S. science fiction cinema, PhD Thesis, Universidad de Huelva, 2010
8. Chalkou, Maria, Towards the creation of 'quality' Greek national cinema in the 1960s, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
9. Copsey, Dickon, Race, gender and nation : the cultural construction of identity within 1990s German cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2004 
10. Dymek, Mikolaj, Industrial Phantasmagoria : Subcultural Interactive Cinema Meets Mass-Cultural Media of Simulation, PhD Thesis, KTH, Sweden, 2010
11. Ferguson, Laura E., Kicking the Vietnam syndrome? Collective memory of the Vietnam War in fictional American cinema following the 1991 Gulf War, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011 
12. Fowler, Catherine, The films of Chantal Akerman: a cinema of displacements, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995
13. Goode, Ian, Voices of inheritance: aspects of British film and television in the 1980s and 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000
14. Heeren, Catherine Quirine van, Contemporary Indonesian film : spirits of reform and ghosts from the past, PhD Thesis, Leiden University, 2009
15. Hibberd, Lynne A., Creative industries policy and practice. a study of BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009
16. Hinchliffe, Alexander, Contamination and containment: representing the pathologised other in 1950s American cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2010
17. Johnston, Cristina, The use of the spoken word in contemporary French minority cinema, with specific reference to banlieue and gay cinema (1990-2000), PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005
18. Joo, Chang-Yun, The interpretative positions of the audience and the invitations of television drama, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 1997 
19. King, Martin S., "Running like big daft girls." A multi-method study of representations of and reflections on men and masculinities through "The Beatles", PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield 2009
20. Kiss, Robert James, The Doppelganger in Wilhelmine cinema (1895-1914) : modernity, audiences and identity in turn-of-the-century Germany, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000 
21. Klevan, Andrew, Disclosure of the everyday : the undramatic achievements in narrative film, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1996
22. Lehin, Barbara, Cinema and society: Thatcher's Britain and Mitterand's France, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003 
23. Martin-Jones, David, Becoming-other in time: the Deleuzian subject in cinema, PhD Thesis,  University of Glasgow, 2002 
24. Morris, Julia, An investigation into subtitling in French and Spanish heritage cinema, PhD Thesis,  University of Birmingham, 2010
25. Natzén, Christopher, The Coming of Sound Film in Sweden 1928-1932 : New and Old Technologies, PhD Thesis, Stockholm University, 2010 
26. Newsinger, Jack, From the grassroots: regional film policy and practice in England, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2010
27. Pescetelli, M., The art of not forgetting: towards a practical hermeneutics of film restoration, PhD Thesis, University College London, 2011 
28. Pigott, Michael, Time and film style, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009
29. Ragazzi, Rossella, Walking on uneven paths : the transcultural experience of migrant children in France and Ireland, PhD Thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, 2005
30. Robinson, Rebecca Grace, Scottish television comedy audiences, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2002
31. Shand, Ryan John, Amateur cinema: history, theory and genre (1930-80), PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007  
32. Shields, Ryan John, Amateur cinema: history, theory and genre (1930-80), PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007
33. Smit, Alexia Jayne, Broadcasting the body: affect, embodiment and bodily excess on contemporary television, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010
    
34. Smith, Sarah, A complicitous critique: parodic transformations of cinema in moving image art,  PhD thesis, University of Glasgow 2007
35. Sorrentino, Giuseppe, The Disappearance of the Real - Mass Media in Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, PhD Thesis, Università degli studi Roma, 2008
36. Stollery, Martin, Alternative empires : Soviet montage cinema, the British documentary movement and colonialism, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick 1994
37. Thomas, Sarah, Face-maker : the negotiation between screen performance, extra-filmic persona and conditions of employment within the career of Peter Lorre, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008
38. Triquell, Ximena, Projecting history: a socio-semiotic approach to the representations of the military dictatorship (1976-1983) in the cinematic discourses of Argentine democracy, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2000
39. Walsh, John, A Space and Time Machine: Actuality Cinema in New York City, 1890s to c. 1905, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2005
40. Yam, Chi-Keung, Study of popular Hong Kong cinema from 2001 to 2004 as resource for a contextual approach to expressions of christian faith in the public realm after the reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2008

ALPHAVILLE, a new journal of film and screen media

A poster of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

Alphaville is the first fully peer-reviewed online film journal in Ireland. It is edited by staff and PhD students in Film Studies at University College Cork. It will be published twice a year, in Summer and Winter, with both open and themed issues that will aim to provoke debate in the most topical issues in film and screen studies. [More about Alphaville]

There is no better title [...] for a new journal that proposes to explore the constitutive hybridity of the moving image—analog and digital, commercial and avant-garde, mainstream and independent, popular and elitist—without forgetting how its roots spread in artistic and productive practices that have always been far more composite and multilayered than our critical categories seemed to wish to account for. Calling for the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries, media fields and critical categories, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media aspires to be a laboratory for new interpretative ideas on the moving image of yesterday, of today and of tomorrow. This inaugural issue, in particular, foregrounds cultural, spatial, productive and aesthetic issues that aim to set in motion our thinking about European cinema within multilayered critical, cultural and geopolitical models, and in light of the complexity of the flow of images that characterises our media landscape. The transnationality, transculturality and transmediality of contemporary European cinemas are undoubtedly going to shape and occupy the research agenda for some time to come.  [Laura Rascaroli, 'Back to the Future: The European Film Studies Agenda Today']

There's a new open access film journal on the block, everybody! Great news in Film Studies For Free's humble opinion. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media has just published its first issue, along with calls for papers for two further issues, to boot.

The first issue is themed, and here's what its editors say about their choice of organising topic:

Alphaville Issue 1, European Cinema: Transnational, Transcultural, Transmedial stems thematically from an international graduate film studies conference that we co-organised in May 2010 at University College Cork. The conference addressed the permeability of European spaces—geopolitical, sociocultural, productive and aesthetic—within a post-1989 cinematic context. This Issue, however, moves the focus beyond such a specific—albeit multilayered—epoch, encompassing research on both past and contemporary filmmaking, in a bid to showcase the “movement” that was and still is at the heart of European cinema with regard to its interrelationships of geography, culture and form. Inspired by the many seminal works on European cinema that have gone before it, we seek to contribute to the debate a collection that is at once original, in its theoretical and thematic scope, and fresh, in its demonstration of inspiring new work by early career scholars (an attribute that affords us the knowledge that this thriving area in our field will continue to be so).

FSFF thinks it's a great issue packed with items of interest for film scholars, beginning with Natalia Pinázza's brilliant article on Sandra Kogut’s multinational coproduction documentary Un passeport hongrois/The Hungarian Passport (2001).

Tu es très bienvenu Alphaville!

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media Issue 1 (Summer 2011)

Editorial:

• 'Back to the Future: The European Film Studies Agenda Today' by Laura Rascaroli
• 'Issue Editors’ Note' by Abigail Keating, Jill Murphy and Aidan Power

Articles:

• 'Transnationality and Transitionality: Sandra Kogut’s The Hungarian Passport' by Natalia Pinázza
• 'Paris, Borders and the Concept of Europe in Paris, je t’aime and Code Unknown' by Vivien Silvey
• 'Lindsay Anderson: Britishness and National Cinemas' by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard
• 'The Fictive Archive: Kurdish Filmmaking in Turkey' by Özgür Çiçek
• 'Ideas of Sex: Discourses on Sexuality in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Cesare Canevari’s The Gestapo’s Last Orgy' by Nick Impey
• 'Cinema/History: Philippe Garrel, Bernardo Bertolucci and May 1968' by Michael Leonard
• 'Face to Face with the Muslim “Other”: European Cinematic Responses to Al-Qaeda' by Elena Caoduro

Book Reviews and Festival and Conference Reports:

[Compiled by Jill Moriarty, Deborah Mellamphy and Stefano Odorico, University College Cork]

• Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, by Yosefa Loshitzky (2010)  Reviewer: Aidan Power
• Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representations of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema, by Russel J.A. Kilbourn (2010)  Reviewer: Colm Ryan

• The “Biographical Narrative in Film and Television” Postgraduate Seminar Series University of Southampton, May and June 2010  Reporter: Victoria Kearley
• The Society of Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference 2011: Media Citizenship New Orleans, USA, March 10-13, 2011  Reporter: Deborah Mellamphy

• The Corona Fastnet Short Film Festival Schull, County Cork, 26-29 May 2011  Reporter: Barry Monahan
• Film 4 Frightfest, 2010 London, 26-30 August 2010  Reporter: Deborah Mellamphy

email: alphavillejournal@gmail.com

Issue 2, Winter 2011, Space and Time in Film.

Issue 3, Summer 2012, Sound, Voice, Music.

cfp: http://www.alphavillejournal.com/CallforPapers.html

New FILM-PHILOSOPHY on Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Herzog, Solondz, Cronenberg, Streitfeld, Eisenstein, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Zhang Yimou, Forgács)

Frame grab from Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). Read Adrian Ivakhiv's essay on this film in the latest issue of Film Philosophy

And the brilliant, online, film journal issues just keep on coming...

Film Studies For Free is delighted to bring you news of the latest offering from one of the highest quality e-journals of them all - Film-Philosophy.
 
FP, Vol 15, No 1 (2011) is a special issue on Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis, edited by David Sorfa. FSFF particularly liked Adrian Ivakhiv's 'ecocritical' essay which explores Tarkovsky's Stalker, along with Jacqueline Loeb's fine 'Foucauldian' study of sound in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern. But there are other excellent contributions, too. 

Readers should also note that it is now possible to donate to the journal. Film-Philosophy is an independent Open Access academic journal operating without recurring financial support. Donations of any amount to the journal are gratefully received and provide a means for the editors to continue to provide a journal of the highest quality to its readers. Just click on the "Donations" link on the FP website.

For those of you who are interested in phenomenological film studies, do take a look, if you haven't already, at FSFF's previous gathering of links to online and openly accessible work on this topic.

Table of Contents 

Articles

• Kate Ince, 'Bringing Bodies Back In: For a Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Film Criticism of Embodied Cultural Identity'  PDF
• Paula Quigley, 'Undoing the Image: Film Theory and Psychoanalysis ' PDF
• Greg Tuck, 'Sex, Dialectics and the Misery of Happiness' PDF 
• Kohei Furuya, 'Why Is Touch Sometimes So Touching?: The Phenomenology of Touch in Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions' PDF 
• Dylan Trigg, 'The Return of the New Flesh: Body Memory in David Cronenberg['s The Fly] and Merleau-Ponty' PDF
• Laszlo Strausz, 'On the River: History as a Palimpsestic Narrative in The Danube Exodus' PDF
• Adrian J. Ivakhiv, 'The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema' PDF
• Julia Vassilieva, 'Between Utopia and Event: Beyond the Banality of Local Politics in Eisenstein'  PDF
• Christine Henderson, 'The Trials of Individuation in Late Modernity: Exploring Subject Formation in Antonioni's Red Desert' PDF  
• William Verrone, 'Transgression and Transcendence in the Films of Werner Herzog' PDF  
• Jacqueline Loeb, 'Dissonance Rising: Subversive Sound in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern' PDF

Interviews

• 'Brecht Today: Interview with Alexander Kluge' PDF by Angelos Koutsourakis

Film Festival Reports

• Venice Film Festival 2010: The Mad and the Bad and the Dangerous to Know PDF by John Bleasdale
• Berlin International Film Festival - Berlinale 2011 PDF Alison Elizabeth Frank

Book Reviews

• Mark T. Conard, ed. (2009) The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers PDF by Taylor Benjamin Worley
• Frederick Wasser (2010) Steven Spielberg’s America PDF  by Steven Rybin
• Claire Molloy (2010) Memento; Geoff King (2010) Lost in Translation; Gary Needham (2010) Brokeback Mountain. American Indies Series PDF by John Bleasdale 
• Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen, eds. (2009) The Hitchcock Annual Anthology: Selected Essays from Volumes 10-15 PDF by Tifenn Brisset 
• Richard Abel, ed. (2010) Encyclopedia of Early Cinema PDF by Carrie Giunta 
• Jim Ellis (2009) Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations PDF by Jason Wakefield 
• Christopher Lindner, ed. (2009) The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. 2nd Edition PDF by Lucy Bolton

New JUMP CUT: Hollywood, Reframing, International Cinema, Documentary, Economics and Politics, Porn, Independent/Art/Avant-garde, Horror

"Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation",  Tom Paxton's song contribution to Loin du Vietnam/Far From Vietnam (Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, 1967). See Thomas Waugh's great visual essay on the film 'Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary'

Back, nicely bronzed, from its holiday, Film Studies For Free has lots of catching up to do. Let it begin with rushing you, below, the table of contents from the latest, utterly brilliant issue of Jump Cut, No. 53, summer 2011. 

There is SO much great reading here, much of it deeply politically committed, as is characteristic of this important journal. But please don't miss its marvellous book reviews section, including a look at recent books on film sound by Michael Chanan (thanks for tipping FSFF off about this latest issue, Michael!).

Hollywood

• The tracks of Sully’s tears: disability in James Cameron’s Avatar by Dana Fore
  Examining disability issues in Cameron's futuristic fairy tale reveals more complex and potentially sinister ideas at work.
• The Social Network: the contemporary pursuit of
  happiness through social connections by Robert Alpert
  The Social Network reenacts the U.S success myth and places it in the contemporary context of virtual realities in which connections are monetized and each person is emotionally detached from the next. 
• Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: when excess isn’t parody  by Stephen Papson
  Parody, excess and mythology intermix, producing contradictory readings of Luhrmann’s Australia.
• Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain by Craig Snyder
  A gay love story for the ages? Let's hope not. A textual analysis of how homosexual desire is disciplined within Brokeback Mountain.
• There's a sucker born every minute. Audiences blog about Sucker Punch. by Chuck Kleinhans
  A search for the film Sucker Punch on the microblog Tumblr provides a rich data collection to study commonplace audience discourse about a commercial entertainment film and New Media as an example of phatic communication.

Reframing

• Decay of the aura: modern art in classical cinema by Susan Felleman
  A study of real works of art—including figural sculpture, “Entartete Kunst” (works of modern art deemed “degenerate by the Nazi regime), and abstract painting—as incorporated into three popular fiction films of the classic period (The Song of Songs, 1933; Venus vor Gericht, 1941; and The Trouble with Harry, 1955), reveals that when an art object becomes part of a fiction film, it enters a space of its own symbolic appropriation; aura is replaced by (unstable) signification.
• Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”:
  the myth of interdependence in oil drilling films by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
  Louisiana Story (1948), Thunder Bay (1953), Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992), Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2009), and Crude (2009) draw on a mythology that suggests the oil and fishing industries can work interdependently once appropriate safety precautions are in place.
• American Medusa: Bette Davis, Beyond the Forest, femininity, and Camp  by David Greven
  King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest allows us to consider the feminist and queer relevance of the theme of female transformation in Bette Davis films and to revisit and challenge the category of the Camp Classic.
• Taken by Muslims: captivity narratives in
  The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Prisoner of the Mountains by Claudia Springer
  A 1935 Hollywood film's vilification of Muslims is countered by a nuanced Russian film from 1996, with both revolving around the abduction of non-Muslims by Muslims.
• A question of audience: revisiting Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come by Ulrick Casimir
  A modern attempt to unpack Henzell's iconic film, analyzing the complex relations between British and U.S. conceptualizations of the Caribbean and the film itself.

International cinema

• At the global market: Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé
  and the economics of women’s rights by Amy E. Borden
  As both a tool used by contemporary activists, such as Tostan, and within its plot, Ousmane Sembène’s final film Moolaadé demonstrates how West African women may gain collective access to juridical and political power by using local cultural customs to resist the practice of female genital cutting.
• Serbian cutting: assemblage and the archival impulse
  in the films of Dušan Makavejev by Greg DeCuir, Jr.
  "If Serbs are fond of slaughtering people, there must be a method of film cutting that corresponds."
• Global capital’s false choices in the films of Laurent Cantet by Jessica Livingston
  By looking at the four major films of French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, we receive a valuable window through which to view the false choices offered by the contemporary neoliberal economy.
• Narrating topography: Still Life and the cinema of Jia Zhangke by Eric Dalle
  Jia Zhangke’s environmental fiction film, Still Life, explores the effects of the Three Gorges Dam on the emotional lives of individuals from different social strata.
• Redeeming the woman from Maoist China in China Cry: A True Story by Jing Yang
  This 1990 filmic narrative of the Christian redemption of a Chinese woman from Maoist political frenzy exemplifies residual U.S. Cold War thinking that serves to contain the ideological other.
• Let’s get lost: unmapping history and Reformasi in the Indonesian film Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya by Dag Yngvesson
  Riri Riza's deceptively lazy 2007 Javanese Road Movie attempts to disorient itself from the pervasive sociopolitical apathy of contemporary Indonesian youth by slowly eviscerating the ubiquitous formal, narrative and cultural structures that have imbued the problems of recent history and resulting status quo with a nostalgic, translucent sheen.
• The Nakba and the construction of identity in Palestinian film by Inez Hedges
  Performative memory serves as the counterweight to dispossession from the land.

Economics and cinema

• Capital limits on creativity: Neoliberalism and its uses of art by Jyotsna Kapur:
  Why the “creative economy” is a capitalistic invention, hostile to art and ultimately to human creativity.
• “Creative Industries,” neoliberal fantasies, and the cold, hard facts
  of global recession: some basic lessons by Chuck Kleinhans
  The international financial crisis provides the ultimate stress test for myths about today’s media culture.
• Media art and economics: resources Annotated bibliography by Chuck Kleinhans
  

Politics of media production and distribution

• Woman with the movie camera redux: revisiting the position of women in the production classroom by Jennifer Proctor, River E. Branch, Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson
  A call and template for a responsive pedagogy addressing the pervasive violent representations of women in student films and the continuing under-representation of women the culture of production — a critical echo of and expansion upon Michelle Citron’s and Ellen Seiter’s call in 1981.
• Digital distribution, participatory culture, and the transmedia documentary by Chuck Tryon
  Explores the role of digital media reshaping the distribution, exhibition, and reception of documentary films.
• Claims to be heard: young self-expressivity, social change, and the Educational Video Center by Stephen Michael Charbonneau
  A historical and critical overview of New York-based Educational Video Center, a leading youth media organization, and its auto-ethnographic work with disadvantaged communities.
• Ethics, politics and representation in Child of Mine, a television documentary on lesbian parenting by Lizzie Thynne
  Re-interviewing her main character from a documentary on lesbian custody she made for UK Channel 4, Lizzie Thynne explores the ethics and politics of filming one's own community for broadcast.

Porn

• Clips, clicks and climax: notes on the relocation and remediation of pornography by Julian Hanich
  Moving-image pornography on the Internet has facilitated and intensified the masturbatory experience due to a double tendency toward privatization and individualization. This becomes particularly obvious when compared to the time when porn films were projected in theaters and consumed with other, mostly anonymous viewers.
• The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich by Magnus Ullén
  Considering the relation between pornography and different media is important, yes; but it will be difficult to historicize pornography without first historicizing the mode of reading that gave rise to the concept of porn in the nineteenth century.
• Back to the Golden Age by Thomas Waugh
  This brief intervention in the current conversation about porn contextualizes the debate within the history of porn studies and Jump Cut’s contribution since the 1970s to a materialist-feminist understanding of sexual representation.
• Porn: it’s not just about sex anymore by Nina K. Martin
  Porn's shift to online and mobile device mediums has de-stigmatized the term to the point of banality, linking "porn" to non-sexualized notions of excess.
• Beyond porno chic by Jose B. Capino
  Internet porn viewing and spectatorship at adult video arcades are more similar than we imagine.
• Pornography, technology, and masturbation: response to Julian Hanich by Peter Lehman
  Society hysterically fears the dangers of pornography and masturbation while academia represses it, and that aspect of the historically complex interaction between media, technology and porn is lost in the process.

Independent/Art/Avant-garde

• Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary  by Thomas Waugh
  Far from Vietnam, the collective French film of 1967, produced in solidarity with the Vietnamese people under U.S. attack, is explored in relation to its historical context on three continents, to its coalitional politics and the solidarity genre in general, and to the forum it provided to one contributor, veteran communist filmmaker Joris Ivens.
• Re-conceiving Misconception: birth as a site of filmic experimentation by Roxanne Samer
  This cultural history of Marjorie Keller's birth film Misconception (1977) seeks to release the film from past dichotomizing interpretative binds with the hope of opening it up to further future interpretations, re-looking and better appreciation.

Horror

• Archaeology of flesh: history and body-memory in Taxidermia by Laszlo Strausz
  As a grotesque body film with comic corporeal exaggerations, Taxidermia outlines a complex argument about 20th-century Hungarian history and historical memory.
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning: a cultural critique of the Bush-Cheney Administration by Rod Buxton
  Through a dark poetics of brutality and mayhem, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning explores the militarism and economic fallout that resulted from the political policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration.
• It takes a child to raze a village: demonizing youth rebellion by Andrew Scahill
  When children attack! The child collective horror film presents a nightmare scenario of childhood in revolt — a revolution against systems of surveillance, control, and heterosexual kinship.

Books

• Books on film sound review by Michael Chanan
  Two books about film sound come at their subject from completely different angles.
  • Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), Cinema in the Digital Sound Age
  • Andy Birtwistle, Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video
• Iranian film opposing regimes of voyeurism review by Jyotika Virdi
  Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh
  Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is seen as a dynamic alternative to Hollywood's dominant voyeurism codes, while its narratives are displaced allegories that circumvent the state's modesty laws.
• Darwin at the movies by David Andrews and Christine Andrews
  This review of Barbara Creed's book Darwin's Screens also examines the use of evolutionary ideas in the field of film studies.
• Star Trek’s allegorical monomyth review by Elspeth kydd
  David Greven in Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films tackles complex issues within this large and elusive monomyth.
• Nobody’s baby review by Kirsten Pike
  Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell
  The book examines girls’ domestic labor in the U.S. and also offers significant insight into the contradictory ways that girls are imagined, debated, and targeted by experts, advisors, and creators of popular culture.
• Sexual innocence and film: a look at scholarship on virginity review by Susan Ericsson
  Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald
  How can virginity be depicted in fiction film and television beyond dialogue or narrative moments when the condition of virginity ends?
• Documentary studies: news from the front line review by Russell Campbell
  Sociopolitical documentary comes under intensive scrutiny in a cluster of new books.
  • Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation by John Ellis
  • Recording Reality, Desiring the Real by Elizabeth Cowie
  • The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
  • Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
  • The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film by Thomas Waugh
• Documentary: intelligence and/or emotion? review by Chuck Kleinhans
  • The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
  • Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana

The last word

• Crisis politics On crises and drastic neoliberal economic makeovers by the editors