Seeing through Avatar: Film Allegory 101

Links updated February 17

Two wounded men: an image of some of Avatar's polysemic screen layers...

"[F]or an allegory to be effective, there must remain some sense that it is actually an allegory" Jeffrey Sconce, Ludic Despair, January 3, 2010

"I'm analogizing race and species here because Cameron's space fable encourages me to do so with all the subtlety of a fry pan upside my head" Scott Eric Kaufman, Acephalous, December 20, 2009

Like/unlike (delete as appropriate) rather a lot of other spectators, Film Studies For Free's author very much enjoyed her recent absorbing encounter with James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar in 3D.

In fact, her immersion in the story-world of this film served to remind her -- in this, the age of more permanent film 'possession' (DVDs, downloads) -- that what we have always been purchasing with our cinema ticket, especially as regards a first-time film viewing, is a one-off and unrepeatable experience. 

Just as in the good old days of old-fashioned cinematic spectatorship, Avatar really has created the space for a thrilling, phenomenological ride. Thanks for the sense-memories, Mr Cameron. 

As for Avatar's plot, however, it is not so much absolutely fabulous as overwhelmingly fabular... Indeed, coming away from the cinema, it's very easy to understand the utter fascination, bordering on obsession, in reviews and discussions of Avatar, with the notion of the 'messages', 'allusions', 'analogies', 'parallels', and, especially, 'allegories' seemingly conveyed by Cameron's film. 

Here's a list, in a nice Na'vi blue, of ten of the 'allegories' most frequently detected by the reviews, together with direct links to an example or two (note: many more, online, allegory-reading reviews are listed further down the post): 

• A rainforest destruction allegory (e.g. Morningmayan, 'Pandora Lives in Us - The Allegory of Avatar' YouTube video essay) 

• A more general, "slash-and-burn extractive industries"/Neo-colonialist allegory (e.g. Neely, 'Avatar: an allegory of the West?'; 'Calder Williams, 'Mining the Unobtainable')  

• An even broader Gaia-hypothesis allegory (e.g. Rundkvist, 'Avatar and the Gaia Hypothesis'; North, 'Gaia and Dolls: James Cameron’s Avatar') 

• An allegory of the genocide and continued oppression of indigenous peoples (A) in the Americas by European/'post-European' colonialism (e.g. Monbiot, 'The Holocaust We Will Not See'; Andrew Patrick Nelson, 'Cowboys and avatars',) and (B) in Africa under the multinational slave trade (e.g. Free Republic comments thread)

• A White Messiah allegory (Huang, 'Avatar Review'; Brooks, 'The Messiah Complex'; Newitz, 'When will white people stop making movies like "Avatar"?'. But also see Bill the Lizard, 'What Does Avatar Tell Us About Masculinity and Disability?' for the opposite view) 

• A Postcolonial allegory (Tiso, 'Postcolonialicious') 

• An Iraq War/War on Terror allegory (Hoyle, 'War on Terror backdrop to James Cameron's Avatar'; Lafleur, 'Avatar: A Critical Assessment'; Nolte, ' ...Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy'; Fisher, 'They killed their mother: Avatar as ideological symptom',) 

• A more general American foreign-policy allegory (e.g. Sconce, 'Avatard', Gardiner, 'Avatar: the most expensive piece'...'; Nolte, ' ...Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy') 

• An allegory of the cinema (e.g. Sconce, 'Avatard')

• A related allegory to the latter: of cultural understanding through total immersion (e.g. Cohen, 'Next-Generation 3-D Medium of ‘Avatar’ Underscores Its Message')
  

The reviews are frequently (if by no means always) characterized by a sense that the above allegories are 'inherent' and obvious. Evidently, such critical moves obviate the need for much, if any, detailed discussion as to how we read, or do not read, particular allegories in particular films.

This is absolutely fine, of course, for journalistic, or, indeed, any "instant impression" reviews, based as they invariably are on just one viewing of the film. Taking on complex questions, such as how Avatar's subtexts might have found their expression through their particular "patterns of metaphorical substitution" (Jeff Smith, p. 1 [pdf]), is not their usual purpose - Jeffrey Sconce's hilarious demolition of some of these fabular processes in his own rapid response to the film notwithstanding ('Before racing the hare, the tortoise does not stop to opine, “By participating in this unlikely contest, I hope to teach you some important lessons about hubris, determination, complacency and the work ethic."').

But, being an earnestly scholarly blog, Film Studies For Free is not happy with any dearth of understanding on this earth. So, as heroic Jake Sully might also say, it's 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more', as FSFF humbly proffers the following notes on film allegory, together with a handy and extensive listing of online and openly accessible resources on Avatar and allegory, and also of (generally, more scholarly ones) on allegory in film.

The evidence base for allegorical interpretation?

"Allegory -- from the Greek, allos, "other" and agoreuein, "to speak in public" -- figuratively unites two orders, one of which is shown and the other of which is kept out of view, establishing relationships of resemblance between them such that the reader or spectator may construe meaning over and above the literal. Allegory stages the relationship between personal and political, private and public, which is often central to the production of political meaning in art." Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 182

Film allegory paradoxically requires spectators to take up a particular vantage point from which a story "kept out of view" (to use Page's words) can clearly be seen. As Ismail Xavier writes in Allegories of Underdevelopment, in the case of allegory, it's a particular 'narrative texture [that] places the spectator in [this] analytical posture' (FSFF's emphasis).

This 'texture' -- including repeated or repetitious story-elements, such as, sometimes, seemingly gratuitous features of characterization, dialogue (e.g. "shock and awe"), etc. -- eventually provokes in the spectator the question "why are you telling me that when you are supposed to be (necessarily and literally) telling me this (direct) story?"

The salience of the elements and their patterning, together with their hermeneutic journey from 'unnecessary' to 'necessary', are essential in the triggering of "our operations of decoding". This latter phrase comes from cultural theorist Fredric Jameson. In his many discussions of allegory, Jameson makes clear that allegorical reading is a kind of pattern recognition, involving our imaginative capacities.

For Jameson, political and historical facts and realities external to films find themselves

inscribed within the internal intrinsic experience of the film in what Sartre in a suggestive and too-little known concept in his Psychology of Imagination calls the analogon: that structural nexus in our reading or viewing experience, in our operations of decoding or aesthetic reception, which can then do double duty and stand as the substitute and the representative within the aesthetic object of a phenomenon on the outside which cannot in the very nature of things be 'rendered' directly. [Fredric Jameson, 'Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film', College English, Vol. 38, No. 8, Mass Culture, Political Consciousness and English Studies (Apr., 1977), pp. 843-859, p. 858(pdf) (hyperlinks added by FSFF)]

Allegorical recognition works best when a film's patterns of allusiveness (Jameson's 'structural nexus') offer ‘clear configurations for the essential pieces of its game'; when there's a 'graphic isolation of the [allegorical] elements put into relation’, as Xavier again puts it (p. 20): 'The greater the pedagogic impulse of the allegory, the more unmistakable is [the signalling]' (Xavier, p. 16).
 
This is probably why Avatar, with what many critics of the film have noted are its 'cardboard cutout' characters and at times 'clunky dialogue', has provoked so much discussion about its allegoricalness: the excessive signalling of its 'other stories' is, indeed, completely unmistakable. 
 
But that doesn't explain the proliferation of these stories, or why there is complete lack of agreement on what the film's 'principal allegory' is, other than Avatar's own Unobtainium, perhaps.
 
As Joanna Page continues in her theoretical exploration of allegory, it

marks a gap between representation and referent, the essential otherness of two planes of signification that is precisely the quality that permits them to be aligned in the production of meaning. Reflexivity, on the other hand, enacts a conflation of the two and a collapse of possible distinctions between them. Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 182, 189

A polysemic text par excellence, as befits one designed to draw in the largest possible global audience, Avatar literally cannot afford to convey only one allegory, to provide only two vantage-points for its stories, because it is a reflexive film -- not an especially complex one, but a reflexive one nonetheless.

As such, it chooses to conflate and collapse many of the distinctions between its literal stories and its 'hidden' ones. In other words, nothing much is really hidden, everything is seen through: indeed, Avatar veritably lets it all hang out. 

In one of the best critical assessments of Cameron's film so far, Jörg Heiser writes

Avatar is an amalgam, as if in a strange dream, of many of these kinds of allusions and associations, and you can look at it being very clever[ly] calculated to capture the widest possible audience globally, playing many cards at once; but by way of the very same strategy, it also could be seen as capturing the widest possible 3-D panorama shot of collective anxieties about the future (ecology, war, loss of social love and security etc.). And in the same contradictory way, it is this all-encompassing ambition that is interesting about it, but also what is off-putting." Jörg Heiser, Editor's Blog, Frieze Magazine, January 26, 2010

On Avatar and Allegory: 

• Bill the Lizard, 'What Does Avatar Tell Us About Masculinity and Disability?', Open Salon,December 23, 2009 
• David Brooks, 'The Messiah Complex', New York Times, January 8, 2010
• Evan Calder Williams, 'Mining the Unobtainable', Socialism and/or Barbarism,January 24, 2010
  
• Adam Cohen, 'Next-Generation 3-D Medium of ‘Avatar’ Underscores Its Message', New York Times, December 25, 2009 
• Ross Douthat, 'Heaven and Nature', New York Times, December 21, 2009 
• Gregg Egan, 'Avatar Review', GreggEgan.net, December 20, 2009 
• Thomas Eddlem, 'Avatar: A Visually Stunning and Perfect Historical Allegory' The new American, December 21, 2009 
• Jim Emerson, 'Avatar, the French New Wave and the morality of deep-focus (in 3-D)', Scanners, February 10, 2010
• Blake Eskin, David Denby and Richard Brody, 'Review of Avatar', New Yorker: Out Loud, January 4, 2010, Podcast (Mp3) 
• Mark Fisher, 'They killed their mother: Avatar as ideological symptom', k-punk, January 6, 2010 
• Nile Gardiner, 'Avatar: the most expensive piece of anti-American propaganda ever made', The Telegraph, December 25, 2009 
• Jörg Heiser, 'Extraterrestrial Irish Pub Type', Editor's Blog, Frieze Magazine, January 26, 2010 
• Ben Hoyle, 'War on Terror backdrop to James Cameron's Avatar', The Australian, December 11, 2009
• Adrian Ivakhiv, 'Avatar: Panthea v. the Capitalist War Machine', immanence blog, December 21, 2009 
  
• Adrian Ivakhiv, 'Avatar's global affects', immanence blog, February 15, 2010
• Huang Zhangjin (黄章晋) - Avatar review cited by Andy Yee, 'China: Bloggers' Reviews of Avatar' Global Voices Online, January 11, 2010 
• Dave Itzkoff, 'You Saw What in ‘Avatar’? Pass Those Glasses!', New York Times,January 20, 2010 
• Henry Jenkins, 'Five Ways to Read Avatar', Confessions of an Aca-Fan, February 1, 2010
• Boris Johnson, 'Stop pining for life on Pandora and come back to planet Earth', The Telegraph, January 25, 2010 
• Shaun Joseph, 'A look at Avatar's Achilles' heel', SocialistWorker.org, January 12, 2010 
• Daniel Kasman, 'Avatarcraft', The Auteurs: Notebook, January 17, 2010 
• Scott Eric Kaufman, 'Intentions be damned, Avatar is racist (as is praying for and/or to "JaMarcus Manning")', Acephalous, December 20, 2009 
• Roz Kaveney, 'Avatar', Strange Horizons, January 6, 2010 
• Glenn Kenny, 'James Cameron's "Avatar"', The Auteurs: Notebook, December 11, 2009 
• Steve Lafleur, 'Avatar: A Critical Assessment', Lafleur's Film Blog, December, 2009
• 
China Miéville,'Why the Na’vi Are Making Me Blue', Speakeasy, January 13, 2010 
• George Monbiot, 'The Holocaust we will not see', The Guardian, January 11, 2010 
• Nicholas Neely, 'Avatar: an allegory of the West?', The Goat Blog, January 12, 2010 
• Andrew Patrick Nelson, 'Cowboys and avatars', AP at the Movies, January 3, 2010
• Annalee Newitz, 'When will white people stop making movies like "Avatar"?', IO9, December 18, 2009 
• Annalee Newitz, 'Is Avatar Too Realistic For Its Own Good', IO9, January 21, 2010 
• John Nolte, ' REVIEW: Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy', Andrew Breibart Presents Big Hollywood, December 11, 2009 
• Dan North, 'Gaia and Dolls: James Cameron’s Avatar', Spectacular Attractions, December 23, 2009 
• Dan North, ''Digesting Avatar', Spectacular Attractions, January 6, 2010
• Bert Olivier, 'The ecopolitics of Avatar', Thought Leader, January 25, 2010 
• Bert Olivier, 'Avatar (Take Two)', Thought Leader, February 8, 2010
• Jo Piazza, 'Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues', CNN Entertainment, January 11, 2010 
• John Podhoretz, 'Avatarocious', WeeklyStandard.com, December 28, 2009 
• Andrew Price, 'Does Avatar's Political Agenda Matter?', GOOD Blog, January 16, 2010 
• Bob Rehak, 'Watching Avatar', Graphic Engine, December 30, 2009 
• Richard Roeper, ''Avatar' is no 'Star Wars' -- or leftist allegory', Chicago Sun-Times, January 7, 2010 
• Martin Rundkvist, 'Avatar and the Gaia Hypothesis', Aardvarchaeology, January 16, 2010 
• Jeffrey Sconce, 'Avatard', Ludic Despair, January 3, 2010
• Mayank Shekhar, 'D’ya really need this review?', Hindustan Times, December 18, 2009 
• Giovanni Tiso, 'Postcolonialicious', Bat, Bean, Beam, January 25, 2010 
• Chuck Tryon, 'Avatar', The Chutry Experiment, January 17, 2010 
• Jeffrey Weiss, 'Politics and Religion on Pandora: Why 'Avatar' is Crummy Allegory', Politics Daily, December 21, 2009 
• Armond White, 'Blue In the Face: James Cameron delivers dumb escapism with his expensive special effects in "Avatar"', New York Press, December 15, 2009
• Evan Calder Williams, 'Mining the Unobtainable', Socialism and/or Barbarism,January 24, 2010
• Andy Yee, 'China: Bloggers' Reviews of Avatar' Global Voices Online, January 11, 2010 
• Leela Yellesetty, 'Avatar is a great starting point', SocialistWorker.org, January 15, 2010 
• Steven Zeitchik, ''Avatar': Red-state politics + blue aliens = box-office green', January 5, 2010

On Film Allegory:

• Stephanie Baric, 'Yugoslav War Cinema: Shooting A Nation Which No Longer Exists', MA Thesis, Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 2001
• Felicity Collins, 'History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema', Trames, 2008, 12(62/57), 3, 276–286  
• Felicity Collins, 'Historical fiction and the allegorical truth of colonial violence in The Proposition', Cultural Studies Review, March 2008  
• Felicity Collins, 'Michelle Langford, Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter, Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006', Screening the Past, Issue 23, 2008 
• Sérgio Dias Branco,"Dead Inside: Allegory and Subjectivity in Abel Ferrara's The Addiction", originally published in Renegade Visions: Films and Filmmakers that Defy Popular Cinema, ed. Matthew Edwards. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010 
• Catherine Grant, 'Questions of national and transnational film aesthetics, ethics, and politics in Costa Gavras's Missing (1982)', Paper at Study day on 'The National/Transnational in Hispanic and Latin American Film and the Telenovela' , Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, November 17, 2007
  
• Catherine Grant, 'Still Moving Images: Photographs of the Disappeared in Film about the "Dirty War" in Argentina', in: Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, eds. Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), pp. 63-86 
• Catherine Grant, 'Giving up Ghosts: Eliseo Subiela's Hombre mirando al sudeste and No te mueras sin decirme a dónde vas', Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds, ed. Rob Rix and Roberto Rodríguez-Saona (Leeds: Leeds Iberian Papers - Trinity and All Saints/University of Leeds, 1997), pp. 89-120  
• Mike Ingham, 'History in the Making: Allegory, history, fiction and Chow Yun-fat in the 1980s Hong Kong films Hong Kong 1941 (Dir. Po Chieh-leong) and Love in a Fallen City (Dir. Ann Hui)', Screening the Past, Issue 24, 2009  
• Fredric Jameson, 'Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film', College English, Vol. 38, No. 8, Mass Culture, Political Consciousness and English Studies (Apr., 1977), pp. 843-859  
• Michelle Langford, 'Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh', Senses of Cinema, Issue 52, 2009 
• Ryan Lizardi, 'Repelling the Invasion of the "Other": Post-Apocalyptic Alien Shooter Videogames Addressing Contemporary Cultural Attitudes', Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2009; 3 (2), p. 295-308 
• Bernhard Malkmus and Ian Cooper, 'Introduction: "The Third" and Modernity', in Third Agents: Secret Protagonists of the Modern Imagination, Edited by Ian Cooper, Ekkehard Knörer and Bernhard Malkmus (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)  
• Lúcia Nagib,'Reframing Utopia: Contemporary Brazilian Cinema at the Turn of the Century', P: Portuguese Cultural Studies 0 Winter 2006   
• M.A. Ouellette, 'I Hope You Never See Another Day Like This': Pedagogy & Allegory in 'Post 9/11' Video Games. Game Studies 8.1, 2008  
• Daniel Serravalle de Sá, 'State of Horror: the Films of José Mojica Marins and the Brazilian Dictatorship', Tropical Gothi: Latin American Gothic Manifestations, March 9, 2009  
• Jeff Smith, 'Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Christian?: The Strange History of The Robe As Political Allegory', Film Studies, Issue 7, Winter 2005  
• Øyvind Vågnes, 'Inside the Zapruder Museum',‘Show/Tell: Relationships between Text, Narrative and Image’ Working Papers on Design 2 (2007)  
• Maurizio Viano, 'Life is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter', Jewish Social Studies 5.3 (1999) 47-66 
• Ester Võsu, Ene Kõresaar, Kristin Kuutma, 'Mediation of Memory: Towards Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Current Memory Studies - Preface to the special issue of Trames', Trames, 2008, 12(62/57), 3, 243–263 

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Tune in to Antenna

[Film Studies For Free will be sorry to say goodbye to Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker/Spider-Man...]

Film Studies For Free wanted to let its readers know about Antenna, a very stimulating blog from graduate students and faculty in the Media and Cultural Studies area of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Here's what this relatively new site says about itself:

Antenna is a collectively authored media and cultural studies blog committed to timely yet careful analysis of texts, news, and events from across the popular culture spectrum. The site regularly responds to new works and developments in television, film, music, gaming, digital video, the Internet, print, and the media industries.

Antenna is intended to address a broad public inside and outside the university walls. Within those walls, though, it further intends to bridge the gap between scholarly journals, which remain the paradigm for scholarly discourse but too often lack the ability to reply to issues and events in media with any immediacy, and single-author media scholar blogs, which support swift commentary but are limited in their reliance upon the effort and perspectives of individuals. Coordinated by a group of writers who draw on a variety of approaches and methodologies, Antenna, therefore, exists as a means to analyze media news and texts, both as they happen and from multiple perspectives.

Antenna is currently operated and edited by graduate students and faculty in the Media and Cultural Studies area of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Although, while in its current stage, the content published on the site is written largely by members of that program, Antenna is currently in the process of expanding our author team, and we hope eventually to include contributions and comments from a diverse collection of writers.

Antenna’s goal is to create a forum in which readers and contributors participate in active, open, and thoughtful debate about media and culture.

Antenna is designed to respond quickly to events, and thus rather than be published on a set, periodic schedule, Antenna updates its content continually. Because Antenna is interested in timely responses, we encourage short entries. Extensive presentation of evidence is not required, though supplementary links are encouraged.

With its extremely lively house style, and wide-ranging topics, FSFF thinks Antenna has a great future ahead of it. For examples of some good film-related posts, it recommends you check out the following to start with:  

• 'Smells Like an Ethnically Divided Teen Star System' by Mary Beltrán  

• 'THWIP!+CTRL+DEL (on the rebooting of the Spider-Man franchise)' by Derek Johnson    

• 'Egregious Product Placement: The Invention of Lying' By Erin Copple Smith

You can also follow Antenna's updates on Twitter.

On Avatar & Boss-zilla: a new issue of FlowTV

Sandra Bullock as Margaret Tate in The Proposal (Anne Fletcher, 2009). See '“Attack of Boss-zilla!” – Female Conflict and Generational Discord…' by Hannah Hamad

Film Studies For Free brings you glad tidings of the new issue of ever wonderful online journal Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture. In this latest offering there are some great film related items: Charles R. Acland on Avatar and the media language of revolutionary change; and Hannah Hamad on the film and media popularity of female characters as terrorizing figures. Links to all articles are given below:

• Amanda Ann Klein ,"Window Dressing: Spectactular Costuming in MTV's The City" (An examination of how costume trumps narrative in MTV's The City)
  

• Zoe Druick, "A Married Couple: Reality TV's Progenitor Turns 40"  (A re-examination of A Married Couple in light of the current proliferation of reality-based TV)
  

• James Bennett, "The BBC Presenter Pay Scandal: The Political Economy of Television Fame"  (A look at the recent pay scandal surrounding BBC?s Jonathan Ross ? and what it tells us about the economics of fame today)
  

• Hannah Hamad, "'Attack of Boss-zilla!' ? Female Conflict and Generational Discord in Postfeminism?s New Monstrous Feminine" (An examination of film and TV series? treatment of postfeminist identities, especially the popularity of women as terrorizing forces, or '-zillas.')
  

• Nina B. Huntemann, "Irreconcilable Differences: Gender and Labor in the Video Game Workplace"  (A look at the labor politics of the game industry )
  

• Charles R. Acland, "Avatar as Technological Tentpole" (Is James Cameron's Avatar a "game-changer," or business as usual?)
  

• Vanessa Au, "Twitter Revolution" (A consideration of the Iranian elections and the potentially revolutionary aspects of social media)

The Chris Marker Issue of IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE

Image from Owls at Noon (Chris Marker, 2005)

Film Studies For Free can barely contain its excitement as it rushes you news of the latest IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE (Vol. 11, No. 4, 2010) - a special issue devoted to philosophically informed discussion of the work of Chris Marker.

The names of the esteemed contributors to the issue (Christa Blümlinger, Sarah Cooper, Matthias De Groof, Sylvain Dreyer, Sarah French, Adrian Martin, Susana S. Martins, and editor Peter Kravanja) provide a very clear guarantee to the reader of the extremely high quality of the work on offer here. So, there's nothing more to say, other than: enjoy! Direct links to their essays are given below, but be sure to visit the IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE website for some remaining (non-Marker-related) articles in this wonderful issue.

• 'Introduction', Peter Kravanja Abstract PDF

• 'The Imaginary in the Documentary Image: Chris Marker's Level Five', Christa Blümlinger AbstractPDF
  

• 'Montage, Militancy, Metaphysics: Chris Marker and André Bazin', Sarah Cooper Abstract PDF

• 'Statues Also Die - But Their Death is not the Final Word', Matthias De Groof Abstract PDF

• Autour de 1968, en France et ailleurs : Le Fond de l'air était rouge', Sylvain Dreyer Abstract PDF
  

• '“If they don’t see happiness in the picture at least they’ll see the black”: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and the Lyotardian Sublime', Sarah French Abstract PDF
  

• 'Crossing Chris: Some Markerian Affinities', Adrian Martin Abstract PDF
  

• 'Petit Cinéma of the World or the Mysteries of Chris Marker', Susana S. Martins Abstract PDF

Good night, sweet lady, good night: R.I.P. Jean Simmons (January 31, 1929-January 22, 2010)

Jean Simmons as Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948)

Film Studies For Free today celebrates the career of the great British actress Jean Simmons who sadly died yesterday at the age of 80 (the BBC's excellent obituary is here; David Hudson's memorial posting is here).

After standing out in such early roles as the young Estella in David Lean's version of Great Expectations (1946), Kanchi in Black Narcissus (1947), and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), she successfully made the move to Hollywood and acted in some of the most brilliant films of the next decade, including Angel Face (1952), directed by Otto Preminger,  The Actress (1953), The Robe (1953), The Egyptian (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Big Country (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), (directed by her second husband, Richard Brooks), and Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960). She continued to appear in interesting film roles until just a few years ago, including her brilliantly voicing of Grandma Sophie in the anglophone version of Howl's Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro) (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004).

Below, in memory of this supremely talented and highly versatile actress, FSFF has embedded the film trailer heralding one of her greatest performances: Sister Sharon Falconer in Richard Brooks's Elmer Gantry, alongside Burt Lancaster in the title role. And below the video are FSFF's customary links to online and freely accessible scholarly and critical studies of some of the many films she starred in across her career.

• 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

• Robert Cross, 'Jean Renoir’s cinematic adaptation of Rumer Godden’s The River', Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture, 10(4), 2008: 575 – 596

• Kelly Davidson and John Hill, '‘Under control’?: Black Narcissus and the Imagining of India', Film Studies, Issue 6, Summer 2005

• Anton Karl Kozlovic, 'Sacred Servants in the Popular Cinema: Research Notes Towards a Taxonomic Survey of the Mundane Holy', Journal of Mundane Behavior, V3n2, 2002

• Kendra Preston Leonard, 'Silencing Ophelia: Male Aurality as a Controlling Element in Olivier's Hamlet', Scope, Issue 14, June 2009

• Karli Lukas, 'Black Narcissus', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009

• Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus', Images Journal, Issue 10

• Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, July 2001

• Gary Morris, 'Olivier's Hamlet', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 31

• David Ng, 'Spartacus', Images Journal, Issue 10

• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• Boris Trbic, 'Great Expectations', Senses of Cinema, Issue 10, 2000

• Alan Vanneman, 'Nine Hamlets', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 51, February 2006

Brilliant online film and media studies resources from Critical Commons

Digital Humanities and the case for Critical Commons: "Yet another Downfall detournement with Bruno Ganz holding the line against digital scholarship and fair use." (posted at ironmanx28 channel at YouTube for Critical Commons)

This great video made the rather easily amused Film Studies For Free laugh uncontrollably... But, then, in the case of this blog it was very much preaching to the converted. Thanks a lot to Corey Doctorow at Boing Boing for drawing it to our attention.

Film Studies For Free has also ecstatically been exploring the Critical Commons website promoted by the video:

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.

FSFF can most highly recommend Critical Commons not only as an immensely important campaigning organisation --one very much after its own heart -- but also as a veritable cornucopia of online, Open Access, film and media studies resources. Just check out the brilliant lecture material from its site linked to below.

FSFF readers MUST explore the rest of this magnificent and worthy organisation's offerings tout de suite! Or else, FSFF won't be laughing any more... Nein, es wird nicht lachen...

• Deleuze and Cinema by Kara Keeling The following selection of film clips from films discussed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze were compiled in the Fall of 2009 by the participants in Professor Kara Keeling's Critical Studies graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture at the University of Southern California.

• The Transverberation scene in four films featuring the life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Sherry Velasco A comparison of the Transverberation scene in four films featuring the life of Saint Teresa of Avila

• Buffy vs. Twilight - Stalking Comparison by Jonathan McIntosh A comparison of stalking scenes in the 2008 film Twilight and in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

• Documentary Epistemology by Steve Anderson This lecture considers questions of epistemology in relation to documentary media, using the construction/reconstruction of historical events as a case-study

• Database Narrative by Steve Anderson This lecture outlines some basic properties of database narratives, referring to the debate between Lev Manovich and Marsha Kinder on the nature of selection and combination in narrative.

• Postmodernism lecture by Steve Anderson An illustrated lecture on postmodernism

Support Film Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa

 

A solidary image from Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001)

As its regular readers know, Film Studies For Free normally dwells in the sunny realm of the eternally positive and does not generally rush to the barricades over just any unpleasantness (see here, however, for an earlier, important exception).

Today, though, it wishes briefly to suspend that normal service in order to state publicly, and strongly, its support for the continued existence of the programmes of the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, USA, which have recently come under threat.

Here is part of a statement from Professor Corey Creekmur, Head of Film Studies at Iowa, posted at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies website:

An ad hoc entity called the Provost's Task Force on Graduate Education and Selective Excellence has just recommended the elimination of the PhD program in Film Studies at the University of Iowa, along with the MA and PhD programs in Comparative Literature. It has also recommended that the MFA in Film and Video Production be moved to a newly proposed Division of Communications (with Journalism and Communication Studies), and that the MFA in Translation be moved to a newly proposed Division of World Languages and Cultures (with the foreign languages). These undesirable and illogical moves would in effect dismember the current Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. Ours are not the only programs under threat, but ours is the only department that would be obliterated if the committee’s recommendations were to be followed.

[...] Clearly, the impressive legacy and ongoing vitality of the Film Studies program at Iowa were ignored in this decision.  We are enormously proud of the accomplishments of our graduates, who have been crucial to the development and continued growth of Film Studies as a scholarly discipline in North America and beyond. Our current students promise to continue that legacy into the future. Former Iowa students are among the most productive scholars and influential teachers in the field, and while we do our best to continually inform the administration of this fact, we would now greatly appreciate your helping us to clearly and forcefully articulate the importance of the excellence of our programs to those who will be deciding on the future of our programs.

(Corey's full statement is linked to here)

Although this blog is called Film Studies For Free (in celebration of online film studies and of Open Access dissemination of publicly-funded film research), it knows that the best, most original, and most sustainedly high quality Film Studies scholarship takes place precisely in excellent university departments, led by brilliant faculty members who are engaged in research-led teaching.

This is clearly the case of the Iowa department: its Film Studies scholars -- of the undoubted caliber of, inter alia,  Rick Altman, Kathleen Newman, Corey Creekmur, Lauren Rabinovitz, Paula Amad, Nataša Durovicová, Astrid Oesmann, Steven Ungar, and Sasha Waters Freyer -- have, between them, helped to nurture and shape generations of great, new, film scholars. Now, FSFF humbly believes, they deserve support.

Once FSFF readers have read about the decision in more detail, they might like to consider sending their own short statements of support for the department to Corey Creekmur, as head of Iowa Film Studies, via this email address. You can also join a Facebook group set up to campaign for the Cinema and Comparative Literature programs here.

Film Studies For Free urges its readers, then, to take the time to support Corey's call, and it wishes the very best of luck to all in this department in their campaign against the decision. These are, very probably, going to be extremely testing times, everywhere in the world, for those engaged in university Film Studies teaching and research: it is, thus, more important than ever to stand together.