Pantheon Level Author: In Memory of Andrew Sarris

UNL Film Studies professor Wheeler Winston Dixon describes the auteur theory of filmmaking, 
including the contribution to this theory by Andrew Sarris.You can read Professor Dixon's obituary of Sarris here.

The art of cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scene. Auteur criticism is a reaction against sociological criticism that enthroned the what against the how. However, it would be equally fallacious to enthrone the how against the what. The whole point of meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement. [Andrew Sarris]

Film Studies For Free was really saddened to hear of the death of Andrew Sarris, one of the most influential of all film critics on the academic study of the cinema.

In memory of his huge contribution to film studies, FSFF has begun to gather links to online works by Sarris as well as to studies of his writings and related items. The collection process will continue in the next days.

Meanwhile, David Hudson is very valuably collecting links to online tributes to Sarris at Fandor's Keyframe Daily site. And see the great PressPlay at Indiewire tributes, including a great video essay featuring probably the last recording of Sarris's voice, here.

Keep coming back for updates.

• Andrew Sarris, 'Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962' PDF
• Andrew Sarris's Confessions of a Cultist on the Cinema (1955, 1969) Internet Archive Free Download
• Andrew Sarris, 'Variety Lights', The Criterion Collection: Notes, August 28, 2000 
• Andrew Sarris, 'Sarris on Sirk', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

 

• Richard Armstrong, 'They Lost It at the Movies: Film Culture in the Age of Positif and Cineaste', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 40, May 2003
• Catherine Grant, 'On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theories', Film Studies For Free, June 2, 2009
  
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Theories of Authorship: Rethinking authorship', from Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986, pp. 14-16 
• Christian Hamaker, 'Sarris 101: A Film Critic’s Politics', Christian Hamaker's Blog, August 13, 2009
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part one) World view as aesthetics', from Jump Cut, no. 1, 1974, pp. 19-22
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part two) Truffaut's manifesto', from Jump Cut, no. 2 (1974), pp. 20-22
• Barrett Hodsdon, 'The mystique of mise en scene revisited', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990)
• Kent Jones, 'Hail the Conquering Hero: Andrew Sarris profiled', Film Comment, date unknown
• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture, 2, Autumn 2008
• Kartik Nair, 'Aura, Auteurism and the Key to Reserva', Wide Screen Journal, 2, 2010
• Jeffrey Overstreet, 'In memory of Andrew Sarris’s New York Observer reviews', Filmwell, August 11, 2009 
• Dana Polan, 'Auteur Desire', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Michael Powell, 'A Survivor of Film Criticism’s Heroic Age' [on Andrew Sarris] The New York Times, July 9, 2009
• Holger Römers, '“The Moral of the Auteur Theory”: Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (and Theodore Strauss’ Source Novel)', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-March 2007
• William D Routt, 'L'Evidence', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990) 
• David Schwartz, 'Bringing Up Hawks: Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell on the discovery of an auteur', Moving Image Source, September 25, 2008
• Girish Shambu, 'On Auteurism', girish, March 30, 2008

Welcome to NECSUS, A New Open Access Film and Media Studies Journal

Frame grab from The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999). Read Anna Backman Rogers's article on this film at the new NECSUS journal.

Hot off the press! To coincide with its annual conference, taking place in Lisbon from tomorrow, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) has just launched its new online and open access journal NECSUS. Feast your eyes on the marvellous contents of its first issue on Crisis below.

It has been added to Film Studies For Free's permanent listing of online and open access film and media studies journals. And now FSFF's author will read it! Yay!

Enjoy the conference, fellow NECS members!


Spring 2012: Launch Issue

• Editorial Necsus
• The gaps of cinema by Jacques Rancière
• Twitter as a multilingual space: The articulation of the Tunisian revolution through #sidibouzid by Thomas Poell and Kaouthar Darmoni
• Policing the people: Television studies and the problem of ‘quality’ by Sudeep Dasgupta
• The photo-novel, a minor medium? by Jan Baetens

Special Section: Crisis

• Sea-change: Transforming the ‘crisis’ in film theory by Robert Sinnerbrink
• A sideways view of the film economy in an age of digital piracy by Ramon Lobato
• Portraying the global financial crisis: Myth, aesthetics, and the city by Miriam Meissner
• Universal, Germany, and All Quiet on the Western Front: A case study in crisis historiography by Michael Wedel
• Ephemeral bodies and threshold creatures: The crisis of the adolescent rite of passage in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant by Anna Backman Rogers

Book Reviews:

• Crisis and capitalism in contemporary Argentine cinema reviewed by Fausto Appiolaza
• Towards a new media archaeology? A report on some books and tendencies reviewed by Petra Löffler

Conference Reviews:

• Moving image and institution: Cinema and the museum in the 21st century, University of Cambridge reviewed by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
• The impact of technological innovations on the historiography and theory of cinema, La Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal reviewed by Trond Lundemo

Festival + Exhibition Reviews:

• Busan Cinema Forum 2011 reviewed by Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck
• Atlas. How to carry the world on one’s back? reviewed by Teresa Castro

Up, up, and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

May the Fourth Be With You published on May 4, 2012 by thehpalliance.

Read Henry Jenkins' and Ashley Hinck's articles about the Harry Potter Alliance.

Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts. Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement. [Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, 'Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism' [1.9], Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)]

Film Studies For Free is a very big fan of the open access journal of Transformative Works and Cultures, so it is delighted that there's a new issue out.

It's a themed collection of studies of transformative works and fan activism, edited by media studies superheroes Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. Links to abstracts of the articles (and from there to the articles themselves) are given below.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012): Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California. 

Editorial

• Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova

Theory

• Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and political participation  by Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova
• "Cultural acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance by Henry Jenkins
• Experiencing fan activism: Understanding the power of fan activist organizations through members' narratives by Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, Chris Tokuhama
• Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance by Ashley Hinck
• The German federal election of 2009: The challenge of participatory cultures in political campaigns by Andreas Jungherr
• Wonder Woman for a day: Affect, agency, and Amazons by Matt Yockey

Praxis

• Fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms in K-pop fandom by Sun Jung
• Being of service: "X-Files" fans and social engagement by Bethan Jones
• Fan action and political participation on "The Colbert Report" by Marcus Schulzke
• Even a monkey can understand fan activism: Political speech, artistic expression, and a public of the Japanese dôjin community by Alex Leavitt, Andrea Horbinski
• "Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses by Tanya R. Cochran
• Nerdfighters, "Paper Towns," and heterotopia by Lili Wilkinson
• The absence of fan activism in the queer fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong by Cheuk Yin Li
• Too fat to fly: A case study of unsuccessful fan mobilization by Tom Phillips

Symposium

• Of snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish play at the Wisconsin protests by Jonathan Gray
• On the ordinariness of participatory culture by Aswin Punathambekar
• Imagining No-place by Stephen Duncombe
• Fan activism for social mobilization: A critical review of the literature by Lucy Bennett
• Flash activism: How a Bollywood film catalyzed civic justice toward a murder trial by Ritesh Mehta

Review

• "Fan fiction and copyright: Outside works and intellectual property protection," by Aaron Schwabach: Review by Stacey Marie Lantagne

New LOLA: Ruiz, Adair, Akerman, Rosenbaum, Brenez, García Düttmann

Frame grab image of John Hurt in Love and Death on Long Island (Richard Kwietniowski, 1997) an adaptation of the late Gilbert Adair's novel. 

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to alert its readers to the publication of a new issue of LOLA, the fantastic online journal edited by Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu.

You can read all about it, and also find the essential links to articles, at this account of the issue at Girish's blog, in which he additionally announced that, henceforth, LOLA would be releasing the contents of each issue in stages.

So, in the coming weeks, you should definitely watch for further texts on Bresson, Cronenberg, Grandrieux, Rotterdam Film Festival, Venice Biennale, and more.

In the meantime, you don't have to wait to read the following fabulous essays by stellar contributors, including a marvellous dossier on the work of Chantal Akerman.

LOLA Issue 2: 
'Devils', Dedicated to Raúl Ruiz and Gilbert Adair

• 'Cinema is Another Life' by Raúl Ruiz
• 'A Letter to My Dead Friend Gilbert Adair About Blindness' by Alexander García Düttmann
• 'A Letter' by Dana Linssen
• 'Chantal Akerman: The Pajama Interview' by Nicole Brenez
• 'Chantal Akerman: The Integrity of Exile and the Everyday' by Jonathan Rosenbaum
• 'Almayer's Folly: Synopsis and Statement of Intent' by Chantal Akerman

The Cine-Files on the French New Wave

A video essay by Catherine Grant

Today, Film Studies For Free is delighted to flag up wonderful work by the graduate students of the Cinema Studies master's program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. They recently published the second volume of their bi-annual online journal, the Cine-Files.  This issue's theme is the French New Wave.

FSFF particularly liked the really interesting take on this well-worn topic - the interviews with luminaries (including Dudley Andrew, Richard Neupert, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sylvie Blum-Reid and Timothy Corrigan) were an especially nice touch. This blog also very much appreciated the three student filmmaker takes on the New Wave's influence, including Jae Matthews' compelling reflection on Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes/Good Time Gals - not only because the latter afforded an always welcome opportunity to newly embed its old video essay on the very same (favourite) film (see above). Very well done, guys!

• “Cinephiles in The Cine-Files,”  a note from the Editor, Tracy Cox-Stanton
• “The Wave Surfs Me,” a note from the Student Editor, Scotty Barnhart
• Mary Wiles, author of Jacques Rivette (University of Illinois Press, 2012), discusses Rivette's place in the New Wave
• Elliot Thompson considers the sounds of Marx and Coca-Cola
• Ryan Babula profiles Henri Langlois, "the auteur of the cinémathèque"
   

The Legacy of the French New Wave … The Experts Answer the Cine-Files' Questions:

• Dudley Andrew 
• Morris Dickstein 
• Peter Hitchcock 
• Louis Menand 
• Richard Neupert
• Geoffrey Nowell-Smith 
• Jonathan Rosenbaum 
• Sylvie Blum-Reid 
• Timothy Corrigan

Featured Scholarship:

• Chad R. Newsom, “Cahiers du Cinéma and Evaluative Criticism”
• Ryan Babula, “The Politics of Pre-Political Godard: Alphaville, Made in USA”
• Yolande Thame, “‘The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World’:  A Production Designer Reflects on the War between the French New Wave and Scenic Design”

Student Filmmakers Reflect on the New Wave’s influence:

• Jae Matthews, “Good Time Gals”
• Ben Barbour, “Queering the French New Wave, Embracing the Cardinal Virtues”
• Britt Faulkner, “Meeting Agnès Varda:  A First-Person Fan Narrative”

"Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia" Masterclasses in Film Criticism by Adrian Martin, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jacques Rancière

Adrian Martin - Sint Lukas Brussels - 20/10/'11 from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

Jonathan Rosenbaum RITS-cinema Brussels 27/10/11 from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

Jonathan Rosenbaum KASK cinema Gent 28/10/11 from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

Jacques Rancière - Bozar studios Brussels - 18/11/'11 from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

“For me, film criticism is not a way of explaining or classifying things, it’s a way of prolonging them, making them resonate differently”

- Jacques Rancière

Today, Film Studies For Free presents some videos it's been meaning to link to here for an age: a series of very extensive, and very wonderful, masterclasses given by Adrian Martin, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jacques Rancière in Brussels in 2011.

Their talks, part of the "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia" project, explore the status and possibility of cinephilia and film critical thinking. These astonishingly good events took their title from the wonderful 2010 book by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Below are a few related links, including one to FSFF's mammoth collection of online writing on cinephilia.

• Catherine Grant, 'C is for Cinephilia Studies (plus some telephilia, too)', Film Studies For Free, May 28, 2009
• Adrian Martin, 'That Summer Feeling', Fipresci, 2005
• Adrian Martin's monthly Filmkrant columns, July 2010-present 
• Jacques Rancière, 'The Thwarted Fable', Rouge, 8, 2006
• Jacques Rancière , 'Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art',  Art and Research, 2.1, 2008
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia', JonathanRosenbaum.com, June 24, 2004
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'The Missing Image - From Cinephilia to the World - The Trajectory of Serge Daney', originally published in The New Left Review, 34, July-August 2005
• Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, 'Preface to Movie Mutations: The changing face of world cinephilia', Fipresci Documents, 2004
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Movie Love: Film-history tidbits in a monument to French cinephilia', Moving Image Source, March 5, 2009
• Jason Sperb, Be Kind...Rewind', Jamais Vu, May 13, 2012

A Place for Film Noir with Will Scheibel

   

This is an excerpt from Episode 87 of A Place For Film - The IU Cinema Podcast

Production at Film Studies For Free Towers will slow up, for a month or so, due to the sheer weight of responsibilities elsewhere, FSFF is afraid.

Some of those responsibilities are significant authorial and, especially, editorial ones which will bear truly glorious, open access, film scholarly fruit very soon!

But this site will continue to post some occasional gems in the meantime. And this brings us to the above, excellent excerpt from one of the great Indiana University Cinema Podcasts.

Regular hosts Andy Hunsucker and Jason Thompson invited Film Studies grad student at Indiana University (and former notable blogger) Will Scheibel to talk about Film Noir, particularly in relation to preparing a class on this fundamental film studies topic. The discussion is extremely engaging and very well informed

Check out the full audio podcast episode at here. Lins to previous episodes are here. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. The IU podcast is also on Twitter and Facebook.

Two earlier FSFF entries on film noir are given below:  

• Studies of Film Noirishness, with Love 
• "Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies 

And for further, film studies, podcast fun and frolics please don't forget the wonderful Film Versus Film crew series with Dustin Morrow, Chris Cagle, David Cooper Moore and Matt Prigge. Their beautiful Tumblr is here.