Happy Holidays Round Up! Adrian Martin Interview, New Journal Issues, Videographic Film Studies and Much More!

UNCANNY FUSION by Catherine Grant: VIAGGIO IN ITALIA/JOURNEY TO ITALY meets…?

Read more about this video here and here

It's been a busy few months and a fair tuckered out Film Studies For Free is off on its annual screen-free holidays from tomorrow for just over a week. While it chills out on a sweltering beach somewhere, generous to a fault (so it says), it's leaving you with LOTS of links to fabulous open access reading, viewing and listening. Just check out the wondrousness below.

Back soonish.


New issue of [in]Transition: A Journal of Videographic Film Studies 1.2, 2014 
Edited by Christian Keathley, the new issue examines some of the formal parameters in emergent videographic film and moving studies. It contains the following entries:

• The ABCs of Forms and Genres by Christian Keathley
• Intersection by Girish Shambu
• On Video Tributes by Chiara Grizzaffi
• Compilation and Found-Footage Traditions by Corey K Creekmur

Adrian Martin Interview 
On the longest day of the year, June 21, 2014, Film Studies For Free's author interviewed film studies writer and thinker extraordinaire Adrian Martin. Our conversation took place in the quietest spot we could find in the historic center of Milan late on a World Cup match night. We were both visiting that city for the conference of the Network of European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), and had been part of a workshop panel that day on videographic film studies, or "audiovisual approaches to audiovisual subjects." We discussed Adrian's turn to audiovisual essays (many made with Cristina Álvarez López) as well as his work more generally, and talked about his new book Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, later in 2014). Adrian's latest De Filmkrant column 'Serve Yourself' offers an extract from the book as a preview of it: the column is on-line here: http://www.filmkrant.nl/world_wide_angle/10805. In the interview, Adrian talks in detail about a particular audiovisual essay -- Intimate Catastrophes -- which he co-edited with Cristina Álavarez López for the Transit: Cine y otros desvíos website.  Also see "[De Palma’s] Vision" by Martin and Álvarez López here: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/de-palmas-vision. The interview is available from Film Studies For Free's Podbean Site.

 
Two new cinephilia links from Photogénie!

• Photogénie has just updated its inaugural issue to include the following publication on cinephilia:
• Catherine Grant and Christian Keathley, 'The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations and videographic film studies', PHOTOGÉNIE 0, 2014
• Also, see Photogénie's new call for your personal accounts (in words or images) of your favorite cinephiliac moments here.

Great updates in Kracauer Lecture Video Recording Series at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (links via Vinzenz Hediger), including:

• Laura Mulvey's lecture 'Becoming History: Spectatorship, Technology and Feminist Film Theory': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/sommer-2014/laura-mulvey/ 
• Antonio Somaini's lecture on Eisenstein's 'Notes toward a General History of Cinema': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/sommer-2014/antonio-somaini
• Ginette Vincendeau's lecture 'From the Margins to the Centre: Ethnicity and the French Star-System': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/winter-2013-2014/ginette-vincendeau/
• Christa Blümlinger's lecture 'Memory and Projection': http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/winter-2012-2013/christa-bluemlinger/

New issue of OFFSCREEN (Volume 18.4, 2014) on Television

• TV Horror: Covering the Televisual Horror Landscape By Donato Totaro
• TV Vampires: From Barnabas Collins to Bill Compton By Stacey Abbott
• Contextual Analysis of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: Robert Enrico vs. Rod Serling By Donato Totaro
• Revolution and Sex: The Evolution of TV By Tom Stempel
• Robert Towne’s Television Years By Elaine Lennon 

Preceding issue of OFFSCREEN (18.3, March 2014) on Memory, Cinema and Time

• Personal/Memory Time: Past and Present Merging on the Screen (Wild Strawberries, Spider, Solaris, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) By Elisa Pezzotta
• The Disappearance (1977, Stuart Cooper): Melancholy and Murder By Donato Totaro
• Out of Time: The Costumes of Bad Timing (1980) By Elaine Lennon
• Chronos Pulls the Strings: Roaming thoughts On Koji Yamamura’s Muybridge’s Strings (2011) By Ramin S. Khanjani
• “Japan Speaks Out!” at the 27th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato at Bologna, Italy, 29 June–6 July, 2013 By Peter Rist

SCOPE, Issue 26, February 2014

• No Country for Women and Children: Pastoral American and Meaningful Despair in Palindromes and Dancer in the Dark — Charles Burnetts
• The Fine Art of Commercial Freedom: British Music Videos and Film Culture — Emily Caston
• "Disappointingly Thin and Flaccid": Gender, Authorship and Authenticity in Shane Meadows' Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) — Martin Fradley and Emma Sutton
• “We Ain’t Thinking About Tomorrow”: Narrative Immediacy and the Digital Period Aesthetic in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies — Adam Gallimore
• Melodrama as Vernacular Modernism in China: The Case of D. W. Griffith — Qijun Han
• Postmillennial Cinema and the Avenging Fatale in Sin City, Hard Candy and Descent — Samantha Jane Lindop
• Labor Relations, 16mm Film and Euston Films — Max Sexton
• DOSSIER: Film Festival Pedagogy: Using the Film Festival in or as a Film Course — curated by Ger Zielinski 
• BOOK REVIEWS PDF
• FILM REVIEWS PDF
• CONFERENCE REPORTS 

See film scholars Ben Sampson and Drew Morton's fantastic VIDEO ESSAY DIPTYCH: Good Dads/Bad Dads: A Tribute to Cinematic Fathers. Morton has also posted all five drafts of his BAD DADS video essay to share his production process: http://vimeo.com/album/2915741. Also see Morton's ingenious video on Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: Day x Day x Day: https://vimeo.com/96852873

Michael Chanan has just uploaded his marvellous video tribute to the remarkable Brazilian documentarist Eduardo Coutinho. For further tributes to Coutinho see here. 

Ian Magor's great video tribute to the films of Bela Tarr: https://vimeo.com/97625110

Interesting audiovisual essay, on film music' relationship to the image track, by students Noémie Lachance and Jana Zander https://vimeo.com/95030117 

Kevin B Lee's TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (complete version)  

Computers Watching Movies (Inception) by Benjamin Grosser: https://vimeo.com/79080565

"Walden Connection: The Thoreauvian Agenda in UPSTREAM COLOR" Video by Anna Robertson  https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy/videos/92652144

Michael Heileman's monumental videographic STAR WARS study Kitbashed" http://vimeo.com/heilemann/kitbashed 

Great updates at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation website!

Excellent interview with film scholar Richard Misek, creator of the feature length essay film ROHMER IN PARIS: http://contrappassomag.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/contrappasso-extra-interview-with-richard-misek-rohmer-in-paris/. See his short video essay Mapping Rohmer here: http://framescinemajournal.com/article/mapping-rohmer-a-video-essay/. 

Souleymane Cissé on Henri Langlois (video 2:24): https://vimeo.com/99318945 (Link via Nicole Brenez)

The Österreichisches Filmmuseum has put Vertov's "Kinoweek" online, in digitized form, for free (link via Vinzenz Hediger)

Also at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum's site, video interviews with, among others, Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Benning, Anna Karina, Michel Ciment… Link via David Hudson: http://bit.ly/1m4MSAY

Remembering Eli Wallach, 1915 - 2014: http://fan.do/r/19i
 
David Hudson's tribute entry to Robert Gardner, 1925 – 2014, Anthropologist, filmmaker, author and advocate of the avant-garde: http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-robert-gardner-1925-2014.

Ehsan Khoshbakht talks to Dariush Mehrjui, Kamran Shirdel and Masoud Kimiai about the first golden age of Iranian cinema: http://fan.do/r/19h

kinderspiel, a project on children as media archaeologists, media makers and media players (link via Vinzenz Hediger)

Excellent talk by David Archibald:  "Should Scotland have an independent film industry?" http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-archibald/should-scotland-have-independent-film-industry

David Bordwell's first dispatch from Bologna #IlCinemaRitrovato (thanks to David Hudson for the link) 

Niamh Thornton on violence in Amat Escalante's 2013 film HELI.

Great article at Sight and Sound, on "The cinema of the Palestinian revolution" 

Call for Papers for the Global Humanitarianism and Media Culture conference in February 2015 

Transit's new video essay dedicated to deers in cinema!

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Post-Conference Round Up: [IN]TRANSITION,Transnational Cinemas, MOVIE eBooks, and much more!

Homepage of [in]Transition, 1.1, 2014

Film Studies For Free is just back from attending the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. This year it took place in the distinctly cinematic, and especially fun, city of Seattle in Washington State, USA.

The big event, from this blog's point of view, was the launch of [in]Transition, a new open access periodical, co-edited by FSFF's author with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. [in]Transition – a collaboration between MediaCommons and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ official publication Cinema Journal – is the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. [in]Transition has a highly distinguished editorial board and is more than ably project managed for MediaCommons by Jason Mittell and for Cinema Journal by Chris Becker, CJ's online editor (big thanks also go to the very visionary Will Brooker [CJ editor], Avi Santo, Monica McCormick and the rest of the heroic MediaCommons team). 

You can read more about the project here, and about videographic film studies and its lineage more generally in the Resources page here. Please visit the website and be very encouraged to comment on the curated videos (on Marilyn Monroe, neorealism, F for Fake and the films of Ingmar Bergman) published in issue 1. One of the main goals of this journal is to generate debate and understanding about audiovisual moving image studies, and we would love to be able to count on the insights and questions of our viewers/readers in this project. So please visit the journal website and see whether you'd like to contribute to the Open Peer Commentary.

You can also watch video recordings (linked to below) of the historic SCMS conference workshop on Visualizing Media Studies, on March 20th, which launched [in]Transition, with contributions by Chris Becker, Drew Morton, Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley, Matthias Stork, Benjamin Sampson, Jason Mittell, and a very lively and interested audience. This session was livestreamed and then archived for online viewing among a series of other SCMS panels and workshops. These are all linked to below, along with lots of other items of interest and news from the conference.
 
SCMS Workshop Livestreaming:

• SCMS Workshop -Visualizing Media Studies Part 1 (0:14:00 - scroll to 5:58 for Chris Becker's introduction and then to 8:40 for the first part of Drew Morton's presentation)
• SCMS Workshop -Visualizing Media Studies Part 2 (1:35:49 - DM's presentation continues then scroll to 4:20 for Catherine Grant; to 20:50 for Christian Keathley; to 28:14 for Matthias Stork; to 40:00 for Ben Sampson; to 54:30 for Jason Mittell; and to 58:15 for the Q&A session)
• SCMS Workshop on Exploring Transnational Television Histories (1:45:35)
• SCMS Workshop on Media Activism and the Cultural Industries (1:58:10)

Transnational Cinemas Links:

• FSFF's New Podcast Interview with Austin Fisher at SCMS14:

On March 24, 2014, Film Studies For Free interviewed Dr Austin Fisher, Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema and editor of the forthcoming volume Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), among other publications. 
     The interview took place in Seattle, USA, after the close of the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, where Austin was contributing to a number of workshops and panels as co-chair (with Iain Robert Smith) of the SCMS Scholarly Interest Group in Transnational Cinemas. Austin talks about this topic in the interview and connects it to his longstanding interest in Italian cinema and the spaghetti western. He was also in the US as an invited speaker (with Sir Christopher Frayling) at an event at Texas Tech, in Lubbock, Texas, to celebrate 50 years since the release of A Fistful of Dollars.
     Austin is also author of a video essay on The Searchers, and in the interview he talks about the experience of making this work, a topic of particular interest at the SCMS conference where [in]Transition was launched.

• Catherine Grant, 'Single Take Horror Film [Transnational] Mutations: Remaking La casa muda in Silent House [video essay plus text for SCMS Transnational Film Remakes Panel, March 2014]', Mediático. March 31, 2014
• Dolores Tierney, 'The Link Between Funding and Text: Transnational Aesthetics in Lucrecia Martel’s Films, Mediático, March 23, 2014
• James Wicks' blog Transnational / Cinema / Reflections

MOVIE eBooks!!

• At a wonderful SCMS workshop on 'Film Scholarship and the Online Journal' (proposed by V.F. Perkins and chaired by Girish Shambu), John Gibbs announced the launch of a range of open access eBooks by MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism. The first three volumes (in EPUB and Mobi formats) are as follows:
• Movies and Tone by Douglas Pye
• The Police Series by Jonathan Bignell 
• Reading Buffy by Deborah Thomas 

Discussions of/Reflections on SCMS:

• Archived live tweets from @cinemajournal reporters about the conference: @CJ at SCMS Cinema and @ CJ at SCMS Media/TV
• Great Aca-Media podcasts (also on Twitter)
• Photos from SCMS14!!
• Check out Chris Cagle's SCMS14 commentary (at his wonderful blog Category D) here and here, and his interview with Jaimie Baron whose great new book The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (read Baron's related essay on Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception here) launched just prior to the conference. 
• James Wicks has some good posts on the transnational cinema panels at his great website:
• SCMS Conference Notes, Fri./Sat. (3/21-22), Post 3
• SCMS Conference Notes, Thursday (3/20), Post 2
• SCMS Conference Notes, Thursday (3/20), Post 1

Other material presented or referred to at SCMS (please let FSFF know of more to add to this list):

• Just added Steen Christiansen, 'Things Gone Wild: The Movie Camera in the Drone Age', Dissemination, March 19, 2014
• Justin Horton, 'Vibration, Resonance, Deformation: Deleuze's Soundfulness', Academica.edu, March 2014
• Transmedia Database (Tmdb!): 'a research hub for transmedia content in its widest sense' run by Vicki Callahan, Sarah Atkinson, Jeff Aldrich and Robert Foster.

Other news and links: 

• Save Film Studies at University of West of England!!
• New issue of SCOPE, 26, 2014!!
• New issue of Senses of Cinema, 70, 2014!!
• New issue of Wide Screen, Vol 5, No 1 (2014), Special Issue: An Unseen Century: Indian Cinema 1913-2013!!
• Remembering Stuart Hall by E. Ann Kaplan
• Remembering Scott Nygren by David Desser
• Remembering Harold Ramis by Kristen Thompson
• Remembering Věra Chytilová (DAISIES), 1929 – 2014 by David Hudson 
• Two great early German cinema links: by Enes Lukac; and by Jan-Christopher Horak
• Kevin B Lee on Chris Marker
• David Bordwell on The Grand Budapest Hotel
• VIDEO (2:23): James Mooney's brilliant video essay on Bertolucci's use of Plato's cave Imagery in THE CONFORMIST (narrated by Orson Welles...). Also see Mooney's discussion here: http://filmandphilosophy.com/.../platos-cave-and-the-cinema/
• Roberto Ortiz's essay on Latina star of the 1940s Maria Montez, and Warhol superstar and drag pioneer Mario Montez 
• Below, a short video tribute to Shirley Temple (made the day after she died) by Catherine Grant. This was screened at the SCMS panel on 'First-person Singular: Cinephilia and Writing with the “I” in Cinema and Media Studies' (proposed and chaired by David Johnson) in Christian Keathley's presentation 'Video Essays and the First-person Singular'. The video was originally published, with a short explanatory text, by Film Ireland, February 12, 2014. It will also be presented in a talk called 'Losing/finding/creating the (child) star: on online mourning and videographic objects' at the 'Film and the Psycho-Cultural: Objects, relatedness, process' symposium on Saturday 31st May at the Freud Museum in London, organised by Media and the Inner World, Psychosocial Studies at UEL and the Centre for Research in Film and Audio-Visual Cultures at Roehampton.

Mechanised Flights: Memories of Shirley Temple in HEIDI (Allan Dwan, 1937) from Catherine Grant.

Read more about this video here

              Single Take Horror Film Mutations from Catherine Grant on Vimeo. Also see
'Single Take Horror Film [Transnational] Mutations: Remaking La casa muda in Silent House [video essay plus text for SCMS Transnational Film Remakes Panel, March 2014]', Mediático. March 31, 2014