Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Avant-Garde and Experimental Cinema. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Avant-Garde and Experimental Cinema. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Thứ Hai, 25 tháng 5, 2015

[in]TRANSITION Issues! Rossellini, Marclay, Burnett, Snow, Emoticons, Time, Surveillance, Volumetric Cinema, Experimental Cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, Women in Prison Genre


THEORY OF RELATIVITY by Catherine Grant is an experimental video about digital intertextuality and cinephiliac relativity. It was inspired, in part, by (the non-open access article) "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," just published in the Spring 2015 issue of Cinema Journal (54.3) by film scholar Julie Levinson. You can read a little more about this video and the connections it makes here. It was also made as a reserve entry for the new issue of [in]Transition linked to below.

Film Studies For Free is truly thrilled to present an entry on the last two issues of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, of which FSFF's author is proud to be a co-editor. The journal and its editors and project managers recently won an 'Award of Distinction' for Innovative Scholarship thanks to the 2015 Anne Friedberg Award Committee and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Board of Directors, presented at the annual SCMS conference in Montreal. Woohoo! (Btw, look out for content related to this conference in FSFF's next entry, coming soonish!)

The first of the two issues FSFF is catching up with was published to coincide with the Montreal conference back in March. It was the first issue of [in]Transition devoted exclusively to peer-reviewed videographic work! Each video was accompanied by a curatorial statement from the maker, as well as the peer reviewer evaluations, all transparently published in the spirit of openness, to encourage scholarship as conversation, and to help our discipline establish a set of criteria for what constitutes valid scholarship in this emerging, audiovisual form. [in]Transition continues to accept submissions of videographic work for peer-reviewed publication in subsequent issues. Guidelines for submission are here.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.1, 2015
And the second issue to be publicised here (commissioned and edited by FSFF's author) has just been published! It features content generated as part of an exciting collaboration with Cinema Journal, its partner publication. That journal's editor, Will Brooker, shared with [in]Transition's editors (some six months in advance of publication) four articles from the latest issue of this highly esteemed journal—54.3, Spring 2015—and asked if we would be interested in commissioning videographic responses to the work. We accepted this challenge, conceiving of it as an experiment to see how audiovisual essays (produced and published relatively quickly) could take up, adapt, or riff off debates and arguments posited by written scholarly texts (which, as is customary, had taken several years to produce and publish).

Five sets of audiovisual essayists accepted the unusual commission, and their creative, critical work forms the basis of the issue. Each video is accompanied by a written statement from the maker(s) discussing the matters at stake in composing such audiovisual responses. Further responses to the work from viewers and readers are invited in the comments threads to the entries.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.2, 2015
[Note: The video at the top of this FSFF entry was made as a reserve video for the issue. You can read more about that one here.]

There is further open access content connected to the above articles from the latest issue of Cinema Journal with which [in]Transition 2.2 interacted, as follows:

Cinema Journal Afterthoughts and Postscripts, Spring 2015, 54.3

Thứ Hai, 28 tháng 7, 2014

End of July Round Up! Grusin and Kara on the post-cinematic, new ALPHAVILLE, WORLD PICTURE and ANIKI, Keathley, Bellour, Mittell, and Wasko videos, and lots more!

               Do you ever get confused about movies, television, life? You are not alone...
SFR (Swiss Family Robinson [Ken Annakin, 1960]) by Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Film Studies For Free is delighted to present its latest handy round up of links to great online, open access items of film and media scholarly interest! 

New SEQUENCE One essays:
SEQUENCE is delighted to announce the publication of two further individual responses -- by Richard Grusin and Selmin Kara -- to Steven Shaviro’s magisterial article “MELANCHOLIA, Or The Romantic Anti-Sublime”, SEQUENCE 1.1 (2012), the launch essay for PLANET MELANCHOLIA, the inaugural issue of SEQUENCE, REFRAME‘s experimental, peer-reviewed, media, film and music studies serial publication.
    Following Rupert Read’s engagement with Shaviro in SEQUENCE 1.2, which offered a personal, affective (and deeply philosophical) account of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, in their very fine, equally philosophically-informed, contributions Grusin and Kara turn their detailed attention to the questions of "post-cinematic atavism" and "primordigitality" raised by the hybrid analog/digital technical and aesthetic contexts of a number of recent films, including Melancholia as well as Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (2011), Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011), Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) .
    SEQUENCES continues to invite further responses to Shaviro’s article as well as to those which have followed it in the SEQUENCE One thread, as well as to the second issue of SEQUENCE: ‘We Need to Talk about the Maternal Melodrama'.

Video essay on the documentaries of late Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho by Michael Chanan

Video essay on Editing Space and Time in Satoshi Kon's films by Tony Zhou

Network of European Cinema and Media Studies 2014 conference videos and audio:

New issue of ALHAVILLE, Issue 7, 2014, on Corporeal Cinema

New issue of WORLD PICTURE, 9, 2014, on 'Serious'

Great new issue of the Portuguese film studies journal ANIKI (1.2, 2014) w/ LOTS of research published in English, including a dossier on art and cinema, an interview with Jia Zhang-ke and Marshall Deutelbaum's article on Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon.

Updates at David Bordwell and Kristin Thomspon's Observations on Film Art website:

Girish Shambu's latest blog entry 'On Video Essays, Cinephilia and Affect', which includes lots of great suggestions for further reading and an excellent comments thread

Check out all the updates to Wikipedia as a result of the #SheMustBeWiki, feminist film studies wiki writing event at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, July 25, 2014:

Excellent video on Brian De Palma's cinematic art of looks and looking by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin:

Barbara Flueckiger's important update about her wonderful open access project on Film Colors

Desistfilm Issue 6, 2014
  • Online here: http://desistfilm.com/category/issue-006/
  • PETER WHITEHEAD: REVOLUTION, REVELATION – PINK FLOYD LONDON 1966-1967 By Lu Juejing
  • EMBRACING BY NAOMI KAWASE By Adrian Martin
  • SHAKING TRACKS: THE DOCUMENTARY WAYS IN THE WORK OF KORE-EDA HIROKAZU By Claudia Siefen
  • ON Hi-8/DIGITAL AND THE INTIMATE: THE FILM DIARIES OF ALAIN CAVALIER By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • DAY IS DONE DE THOMAS IMBACH Por Mónica Delgado
  • A REAL DEAD RINGER FOR LOVE. VIDEO FOOL FOR LOVE By Adrian Martin
  • DIALOGUE WITH A WOMAN DEPARTED BY LEO HURWITZ By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • ROUTE ONE/USA DE ROBERT KRAMER Por Nicolás Carrasco
  • VARIACIONES DEL “FILMADOR” EN ALGUNAS PELÍCULAS INDEPENDIENTES Y EXPERIMENTALES DE AMÉRICA LATINA Por Mónica Delgado
  • FEATURED FILMMAKER: JENNIFER REEDER By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
  • EL DIARIO FÍLMICO EN ESPAÑA, HOY Por Ricardo Adalia Martin
  • NEARSIGHT BY SAUL LEVINE By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Check out this fantastic resource on the work of Chris Marker, including IMMEMORY, Guillaume sightings worldwide, and other gems (link via Via Genevieve Yue and Nico Baumbach):

Innovative, Canada-based, film studies publisher caboose has launched the collaborative on-line project Planetary Projection, introducing some of the world’s remarkable film projectionists. We invite you to help us find a few more, in every corner of the globe, so that they might tell us their stories

Online extract from Madelon Sprenthnether's remarkable book Crying at the Movies:

Great video in which director John Akomfrah talks to Baroness Lola Young about The Stuart Hall Project, which paints a sensitive and emotionally charged portrait of the celebrated cultural theorist.  

For a few more days, enjoy temporary free online access to many articles from Routledge Film and Cinema Studies journals

'I Have to Trust My Intuition': A 40-Minute Chat Between Ingmar Bergman & AFI Film Students at NoFilmSchool:
The "Motherhood Archives" - Irene Lustzig's epic multimedia essay on institutionalization of birth and motherhood:
New ADA: A JOURNAL OF GENDER, NEW MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY issue on Queer Feminist Media Praxis:

Thứ Ba, 26 tháng 11, 2013

New Issue of JUMP CUT!


Frame grab from The Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). See the Jump Cut dossier on Ford's film, Spielberg's version of the Lincoln story, and the classic Cahiers du Cinéma debate on the earlier film. Also see  Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Film Studies For Free has been away, gadding about and gabbling at a wonderful conference in Frankfurt on The Audiovisual Essay (organised by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, with Vinzenz Hediger, for Deutsches Filminstitut and Goethe University), about which you will hear a great deal in the coming weeks and months.

Next, tomorrow, it departs for yet another exciting public event - a panel discussion on 'The Future of Film Criticism" at King's College, London, speaking alongside Jean-Michel Frodon (Editor of Cahiers du Cinéma and film critic for Le Monde) and Nick James (Editor of Sight & Sound).

In between these two magnificent events, it had to bring you news of a huge new issue of the online journal Jump Cut, which is absolutely full of incredibly interesting looking contents - FSFF particularly liked the dossier on Lincoln and ideology, but there's so much more to enjoy here. Thank you, Jump Cut!

Back soon.


Current issue, No. 55, fall 2013: INSTITUTIONS, TECHNOLOGIES, and LABOR

THIRD CINEMA/INTERNATIONAL

GENDER

IN AND AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM

EXPERIMENTAL/INDEPENDENT
LINCOLN & IDEOLOGY FORUM
HIV/AIDS ACTIVIST MEDIA

CLASSICS FROM THE PAST
S/Z and Rules of the Game by Julia Lesage
 
THE LAST WORD The war on/in higher education by the Editors

Thứ Tư, 9 tháng 10, 2013

Lives on Film: Auto/Biographical Fiction and Documentary Film Studies


Lizzie Thynne, filmmaker, writer and Senior Lecturer in Media and Film at the University of Sussex, discusses her theoretical and practice research into film biography with FSFF's author. In REFRAME’s interview, as well as her earlier films Child of Mine (Channel Four Television, 1996) and Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (2004), and her written research on biographical, subjective and feminist filmmaking, Thynne talks about her recent experimental documentary On the Border (UK, 2013, 56 minutes), a daughter’s exploration of her Finnish family’s history prompted by the letters, objects, and photographs left in her mother’s apartment. You can find more information about the above video here. Lizzie Thynne's film On the Border is screening today, Wednesday, October 9, at 7pm in The Finnish Church, 33 Albion St, London SE16 7JG – free entry courtesy of the Finnish Church in association with the Anglo-Finnish Society. The screening will be followed by a discussion with participants: Lizzie Thynne, Titus Hjelm (UCL, School of Slavonic Studies) and others.


Film Studies For Free brings you a list of links to open access scholarly and critical resources on the subject of biopics - life (hi)stories on film in a variety of fictional and documentary forms.

This entry is produced to coincide with the publication this week of the above embedded video on film biography, part of FSFF's sister project REFRAME Conversations, a new series of in-depth, open access explorations of media, film, music and cultural studies research, published and shareable on and offline in video/audio formats.

Because of this schedule, preparation of the below list precedes the publication of a great looking new edited collection on The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture by Tom Brown (a friend of this blog - see the entry on direct address here) and Belén Vidal. The two editors have completed a podcast on their project shortly to be uploaded to this website. That great link will be added here later.

Thứ Ba, 1 tháng 10, 2013

Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License



 
A fascinating and informative excerpt from the audio commentary track on the British Film Institute's brand new Dual Format Edition of RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977). You can find more information about this new video version of the film here and read a new interview with Mulvey about its making here.
Riddles of the Sphinx was made in 1976-7. The film used the Sphinx as an emblem with which to hang a question mark over the Oedipus complex, to illustrate the extent to which it represents a riddle for women committed to Freudian theory but still determined to think about psychoanalysis radically or, as I have said before, with poetic license. Riddles of the Sphinx and Penthesilea, our previous film, used ancient Greece to invoke a mythic point of origin for Western civilization, that had been critically re-affirmed by high culture throughout our history. [... S]ome primitive attraction to the fantasy of origins, a Gordian knot that would suddenly unravel, persisted for me in the Oedipus story, and its special status: belonging to very ancient mythology and to the literature of high Greek civilization, chosen by Freud to name his perception of the founding moment of the human psyche. My interest then concentrated on breaking down the binarism of the before/after opposition, by considering the story as a passage through time, a journey that could metaphorically open out or stretch the Oedipal trajectory through significant details and through its formal, narrational, properties. [Laura Mulvey, 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989, FSFF's emphasis]

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry in honour of one the most important, most brilliant, most influential and hardest-working film and moving image scholars of all time: Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and recently, co-founder of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. Mulvey is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989; second edition, 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996; 2nd ed. 2013), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series, 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006). And she has made six films in collaboration with fellow film theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI, 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980) and with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994)

FSFF's author has a pretty good record in celebrating Mulvey's influence on film studies already, having been lucky enough to take part, earlier this year, in a day devoted to this activity at Birkbeck's Institute of Humanities - an event recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting. The happy occasion for today's eFestschrift, however, is the British Film Institute's release of a new DVD/BluRay disk of Riddles of the Sphinx, the hugely significant and original feminist film Mulvey co-directed and produced in 1976/77 with her partner Wollen (the disk also contains their first film together: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons [1974]).

To accompany this entry FSFF was honoured to be able to produce a short, exclusive extract of a sequence of its choice from the DVD audio commentary accompanied version (as embedded above). FSFF warmly thanks Laura Mulvey herself, as well as Hannah Maloco and the BFI, whose Production Board thankfully funded Riddles of the Sphinx, for kindly allowing this blog to create such a memorable and instrumental item of openly accessible film studies.

Beneath the BFI's own Riddles of the Sphinx clip (embedded below) -- a commentary free version of substantially the same sequence -- you can find a wonderful listing of links to openly accessible online scholarly work by and about Laura Mulvey. It provides ample testimony, were it needed, as to why she has been, is, and always will be, one of the true greats of our subject - as Michel Foucault probably would have put, a veritable 'founder of discursivity' for our discipline... 




Online written work by Laura Mulvey: 

Online written work by Peter Wollen about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work: 

Online video/audio work by or featuring Laura Mulvey:

Online writing about Laura Mulvey's work:

Thứ Hai, 18 tháng 2, 2013

Cinemagogic Echoes? Len Lye's FREE RADICALS (1958) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's HOUR OF THE FURNACES (1968)


A real-time comparison, for scholarly purposes, of Len Lye's 1958 experimental animation FREE RADICALS and the opening minutes of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 1968 Grupo Cine Liberación activist film  LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS/HOUR OF THE FURNACES

[Len] Lye's Free Radicals (1958) […] is a black and white scratch animation short, cut to the insistent rhythmic accompaniment of an African drum solo.* It immediately calls to mind the unforgettable opening scenes of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas' Third Cinema classic La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968).** While equally exciting and radical, these strikingly similar films hint at the extent to which the world and the political landscape had changed in the decade between their respective release dates, and between then and now. We have no way of knowing if Getino and Solanas knew of Len Lye's film. We know, however, that films exchange ideas, talking to one another across time, and that the conversation between radical aesthetics and radical politics is ongoing, with both daring to 'make it new' and set the world on its feet, by turning it upside down. [Jerry Whyte, 'Free Radicals', CineOutsider.com, December 11, 2011. Online at: http://www.cineoutsider.com/articles/stories/f/free_radicals_1.html]
A demonstration and a lesson, The Hour of the Furnaces imports into cinema the affirmative aesthetics of the written political treatise. A collective ideal informs the whole film. It anticipates a liberated time. It’s not the product of a single voice but of a chorus of poems (Marti, Césaire), manifestos (Fanon, Guevara, Castro, Juan José Hernández Arregui) and films (by Fernando Birri, Joris Ivens, Nemesio Juárez). It conjoins the powers of didacticism, poetry and agogy (the agogic qualities of a work concern its rhythmic, sensible, physical properties – a notion suggested by the French aesthetician Etienne Souriau). Stylistically, the film uses all possible audiovisual techniques, from flicker to contemplative sequence shots (for instance, the final three-minute shot that reproduces a picture of the dead Che Guevara’s face with his eyes wide open), from collage to direct cinema, from blank screen to animated effects, from the rigours of the blackboard to the hallucinogenic properties of the fish-eye, from classical music to anglophone pop hits. Cinema is an arsenal and here all its weapons are unsheathed. [Nicole Brenez, 'Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces', Sight and Sound Magazine, 8 March 2012. Online at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaceshttp://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaces]
'Agogics' is a musical term that designates the use of agogic accents, that is accents consisting in a lengthening of the time-value of the note. The philosopher Étienne Souriau extended the use of the term to include all the arts existing in time. He defined 'agogics' as \what characterizes an artwork that takes place in time, through movement, and specifically through the creation of a fast or slow pace, or the use of different rhythms.' For musicians, the notion is related to gesture, to physical movements, to a bodily interaction with their instrument, to a sense of speed, an energy, a precise handling of a piece. [Christian Jacquemin et al, 'Emergence of New Institutions for Art-Science Collaboration...' [date unknown], Online at: seadnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/jacquemin_final1.pdf. Hyperlinks added by FSFF
Souriau developed his idea of the agogic as an explicit reaction to the ‘rather banal description [of] arts of space in contrast to the phonetic and cinematic arts’. [Of] interest is Popper’s use of the term to describe the quality of temporal pattern that he identifies in a range of works. At one extreme [..].] is the velocity and dramatic choreography of a Len Lye installation. The term agogic conflates speed, acceleration and duration and would appear to be a significant aspect of kinetic form. [Jules Moloney, Designing Kinetics for Architectural Facades: State Change (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011), p. 64.]
Film Studies For Free's author has been a tad busy elsewhere lately - and there will be lots to catch up with at this blog in due course.

But today FSFF is thrilled to present its (by distance) contribution to a teach-in which took place earlier today. This video was produced in a few hours this morning, using readily available materials for quotation (see above and below), in solidarity with a campus occupation that you can choose to read more about here.

Staff and students of media and cultural studies, working in a deeply personal, activist capacity, gave short presentations on their research and thinking about ideas of resistance, occupation and neoliberalism in the context of the university and beyond, in order to consider how research in their fields might offer new and diverse perspectives on activism and resistance.

FSFF has always liked its politics, like its film studies, to have rhythm and timing, so its research project today foregrounds those elements. You can find its author's scholarly discussion of this kind of "real-time" videographic comparison here: 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', MEDIASCAPE: Journal of Cinema and Media, Winter 2013.

FSFF has devoted a number of previous entries to online and openly accessible resources on Third Cinema and revolutionary aesthetics in the past. See especially this bumper post and this more recent one

And you can find the two films quoted from above, in low-res online video versions, as per the details and links below.