Get the Picture! A Community-Based Film Study Programme Using THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY

Interview with filmmaker and educator Mark Cousins about his film series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which forms the basis of the Get the Picture community film study project described below

Quite often Film Studies For Free gets asked about free film study. Not so surprising, you might think, given the name on its own tin. But what people are often asking about is free "real world", or offline, film study - and sadly not too much of that comes for free these days.

So imagine how delighted FSFF was when it was contacted by a group of generous and talented individuals who have formed an educational partnership called Get the Picture 'that aims to provide free support materials and a framework to help people to come together in their local community, to form study groups and learn about film'.

FSFF is, therefore, delighted to create a space, in today's entry, for a concise and enticing introduction to the work of this partnership, in the hope that some of its readers will go on to take up the specific invitation set out here, and that yet others will go on to concoct their own community film study projects inspired by this one. If the latter happens, do please let FSFF know.

In the meantime, thank you so much to Get the Picture!  You can follow the project on Twitter --  @GtPfilm -- and, of course, at its website.

Get the Picture: Film study groups in the community

There's a certain added frisson of pleasure in writing this post, because of its context: what I'm about to describe is a programme of informal adult film study that is free to users. The only necessary additional costs involved are the purchase of the DVD box set of Mark Cousins's The Story of Film, an Odyssey.

'Us' refers to Get the Picture, which is the collective name for three activists in the community cinema movement, John Salisbury, Julia Vickers and Jim Barratt. The programme of study we've developed and made available is a response to the rapid attrition of informal film study in the 2000s, in the UK, at least, resulting from the decision of the last government to withdraw from supporting lifelong learning. After the impact of that withdrawal of funding became evident, we set about looking for an approach to filling the gap which would, like community cinemas themselves, work in local communities everywhere in the UK. We saw the possibilities opened up by the release of The Story of Film, and our programme is the result. Incidentally, we ran the idea past Mark Cousins early on: he liked it then, and has strongly and warmly endorsed the result.

What was needed?

As we saw it, the requirement was for a programme which was

• free to participants
• self-organised and self-paced
• informal, not assessed
• of benefit whatever the starting point of the participant.

We saw there was a need for someone (a group member) to manage the group experience and chair discussions (a role we termed 'enabler'), but that shouldering this responsibility would require additional support from us. We decided to base the whole programme on advice notes (e.g. Programme Guide, How to be a Participant) and study notes (each relating to a specific study/discussion session based on an individual episode of The Story of Film). We decided that since the only distribution system for study materials which would work universally was sending pdf documents over the internet, we would embrace the internet, giving strong guidance on its use as a resource for individual study. Finally, we decided that basing a programme on all 15 chapters of The Story of Film might well seem a dauntingly large commitment for a study group, so we offered the programme in three segments of five chapters/study sessions each.

What's in the programme?

For each segment, a participant receives a document set which contains common advice notes and the study notes relevant to the sessions in that segment. The advice notes consist of the Programme Guide, How to be a Participant, How to be an Enabler, and the Key Films list. You can find more detail on this (and examples) on the Get the Picture website at getthepicture.org.uk. There is also an advice note on Enhancements and Digressions, because we recognise that some groups may wish to add to the programme we've laid out, or digress from it: nothing is set in stone.

The normal experience for a participant in each segment is that after an introductory organizing session convened by the enabler, they attend five discussion sessions in which they discuss prepared questions chosen from those found in each set of Study Notes. In between discussion sessions, participants are asked to do four things: they watch the relevant chapter of The Story of Film, they prepare for the planned discussion questions, they undertake individual study based on suggested internet resources (from Wikipedia, YouTube and specified websites), and they watch the specified key films. This means that scheduling the discussions must leave time for these individual activities, and enablers receive suitable guidance about this. To give a more comprehensive flavour, embedded below is the Programme Guide pdf document which all participants receive. If you want to view it more comfortably, or offline, you can download it from this website: http://getthepicture.org.uk.

The Key Films list is significant: for each session, we select two of the films Mark Cousins cites as notable within the episode of The Story of Film, and suggest all group members watch these films as part of their preparation, to provide a common basis for discussion. From quite early on, some of the discussion questions focus on individual key films.

Trialling the programme

We have been fortunate in that groups from a small number of film societies agreed to trial the materials for Segment One. The result has been very positive and a clear endorsement of the basic approach. We have streamlined the study materials as a result of trials feedback, and worked hard to clarify the discussion questions. As we expected, specific problems arose around the role of the enabler, especially when inexperienced enablers had to deal with obstinate group members, but these problems were by no means dealbreakers. We encountered unexpected problems (for example, the disruptive potential of refreshments) and have had to mention these in the advice notes. But in general, the trials indicated to us that it was well worth continuing with the programme and making it generally available.

Who will benefit?

The short answer is anyone, anywhere. We have set the entry threshold low by shaping each set of discussion questions so that they are readily approachable, but permit quite deep insights. We have largely refrained from the theoretical but touched on it where appropriate, and we have taken the intellectual frame as that bounded by Mark Cousins's treatment, which relates filmmaking technique to viewing experience in some complex and interesting ways.  We have shaped the individual study possibilities by introducing a wide range of resources, simply as a way of illustrating what is possible, and we have used guided Wikipedia and YouTube research as the spine for individual inquiry.  This approach offers anyone who wants to go further all that the internet allows, but gives a solid and satisfactory experience to the novice.

What we want from you.

Do you know anyone who might like to know about the Get the Picture programme? They might be in a film society, or involved in a community cinema, or they might just be into film. The benefits of making what is normally solitary - watching film, reading and thinking about it - communal and social are hard to quantify, but they do include a clear development in the individual's ability to talk and think about film. We find that, for the many generations of Britons who have received no education in film at school or since, this development is immensely liberating, so we have no hesitation in asking you to spread the word. Send them a link to this post. Get the Pictureis open for (free) business.

[The above text is by John Salisbury of Get the Picture]

Note about location: The materials were trialled with groups in the UK, but there is no reason why groups from anywhere in the English-speaking world should not take advantage of them. You only need to be sure you can access The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Study groups from anywhere in the world are welcome and invited to register with Get the Picture.

So That You Can Live: In Memory of Paul Willemen

Updated August 6, 2012

If I were to claim one single main achievement for Framework, it would be this: the journal was among the quickest to recognize the need, and to argue, for the elaboration of a transnational critical-theoretical discourse, which would leave no 'existing' frame of reference undisturbed. [Paul Willemen] 

In a 1994 dialogue with Noel King, Paul Willemen noted that in the varied body of critical writings associated with cinephilia there exists a recurring preoccupation with an element of the cinematic experience 'which resists, which escapes existing networks of critical discourse and theoretical frameworks' ([Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory] 1994: 231). Willemen and King locate this resistant element specifically in the cinephile's characteristic 'fetishising of a particular moment, the isolating of a crystallisingly expressive detail' in the film image (1994: 227). That is, what persists in these cinephilic discourses is a preoccupation or fascination with what the various writers 'perceive to be the privileged, pleasure-giving, fascinating moment of a relationship to what's happening on screen' in the form of 'the capturing of fleeting, evanescent moments' (1994: 232). Whether it is the gesture of a hand, the odd rhythm of a horse's gait, or the sudden change of expression on a face, these moments are experienced by the viewer who encounters them as nothing less than a revelation. [Christian Keathley, 'The Cinephiliac Moment', Framework, 42, 200]

The concept of 'double outsideness' in the work of a displaced film-maker is articulated in essays on Sirk and Ophuls, while the essay 'An Avant-Garde for the 90s' usefully connects Willemen's early work in film studies to his later preoccupation with non-Euro-American cinema.

Overall his work challenges dominant preconceptions about cinema and its attendant critical discourses, and makes itself available for broader application. Looks and Frictions is by no means an easy or comfortable read, but in its reminder to the critic to consider their own position in relation to the objects of criticism, and of the need to ground criticism in the real, to fit social and historical circumstances and determinants into even the most esoteric flights of theoretical fancy, it is both productive and provocative and deserves to be widely read. [Ben Goldsmith, 'To Be Outside and In-Between: On Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory', Film-Philosophy, 2.1, 1998]

Film Studies For Free was saddened by the crushing news of the death, just over a week ago, of Paul Willemen, the brilliant and hugely influential film theorist, critic, programmer, historian and, above all, activist.

Willemen started work at the British Film Institute in the early 1970s, and was part of the editorial group of Screen in the second part of that decade. In 1976, he became involved with the journal Framework, which had been founded two years earlier by Donald Ranvaud, Sheila Whitaker, and others at Warwick University. He took over as its editor in 1982, handing over that role fully to Jim Pines between 1986 and 1989.

Working as a BFI employee with film museums and cinemateques,  he collaborated over many years with the Edinburgh Film Festival. In 1986, in that festival's 40th anniversary year, he, Pines and June Givanni organised a famous "Third Cinema" conference. Questions of Third Cinema, the landmark volume that resulted from the conference, co-edited by Pines and Willemen, was in part a transcription of contributions that importantly explored the "cinema of diasporic subjects living and working in the metropolitan centres of London, Paris, New York" (p. vii) as well as elsewhere. As well as one of Framework's principal contributors over the years, he was also author and editor of many other important books, pamphlets, and articles on cinema. Some of these are pictured or named above, and more are listed, passim, below. 

Having dropped out of his Belgian university in 1960 ('And I never went back'), Willemen's first proper experience of working in a higher educational context was a three month trip in 1980 to Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, where he participated in many groundbreaking seminars on cinema and film theory. In the late 1990s, he was Professor of Critical Studies at Napier University in Edinburgh, and from 1999 until his retirement in 2008 he was Research Professor of Media Studies at the University of Ulster. 

In memory of Paul Willemen and his contributions to Film Studies, Film Studies For Free is very honoured to present, below, some wonderful, fitting tributes to him and his work by four people who knew and worked with him over the years: Adrian Martin, Lesley Stern, Martin McLoone and Michael Chanan. Thanks very much to each of them for their words.

Below their tributes are FSFF's customary links to online publications of Willemen's writing and to discussions of his work.

It is appropriate on such occasions to wish that the person who has just died will rest in peace. After his struggles with illness in recent times, especially, FSFF certainly wishes that for Paul Willemen. But to honour his inspirational contribution to our field properly, those of us who work in his wake -- on cinephilia, on comparative film studies, on film and politics -- need more than ever to take up his passionate restlessness, even as it would impossible, or undesirable, to embrace every one of his personal stances or attitudes. He will always be in our memory. We will forever be in his debt.

Indelible Memories of Paul Willemen

Paul Willemen is sometimes off-handedly regarded, by those who haven’t looked at his work terribly closely, as someone who was (and remained) part of a horde of ‘Screen theorists’ emerging in the 1970s, single-mindedly dedicated to enforcing the shotgun marriage of Lacan, Althusser, Barthes and Derrida within the then institutionally burgeoning field of cinema studies in the UK. In fact, Paul always followed a very singular path, and he was fiercely critical of many of the developments and tendencies around him.

His distinctive contribution begins, in my opinion, with the early meditation (published in 1974) on the concept of inner speech in cinema, via the theories of Boris Eikhenbaum. It was a concept he was to return to again and again, in key articles of 1981 (“Cinematic Discourse – The Problem of Inner Speech”) and 1995 (“Regimes of Subjectivity and Looking” [The UTS Review 1(2)). What was inner speech all about? Fundamentally, a doubling: images arise (in the mind, and on screen) with words attached, encoded in their veritable DNA; no image exists in some pure realm of visual expressivity or imagination, but rather is always-already enmeshed in what Paul would refer to ‘webs of meaning’, threads of social discourse.

Beyond being a specific trope, I believe inner speech served as a sort of figure or metaphor for Paul, and for his way of thinking. Nothing (certainly no film text) was ever pristine for him, everything was produced in an intersection of forces, lines, influences and contexts; each person, each action, each object was the result of a ‘subject formation’ that needed to be grasped and explicated. But, as determining as such a subject-grid could be, it also – as in the always unstable interplay of images and inner speech – provided a space for interference, short-circuiting, and thus for internal modulation and change.

Paul had little faith in the movement known as cultural studies as it emerged in the 1980s, and even less in its almost religious invocation of ‘popular resistance’; but he did believe in the hopeful force of desire (starting with the desire for cinema itself, cinephilia), and in its constant process of mobilisation – a mobilisation that had to occur not just in writing and teaching about film, but also in editing and publishing (his years at the helm of Framework, and with various BFI book and DVD projects), in the programming and presenting of work (the film culture of organisations and festivals), and in active, collaborative relations with real filmmakers (and Paul knew many, from Stephen Dwoskin to Amos Gitai).

Over the last 15 years of his life, Paul sketched out, in various places, an ambitious program for a ‘comparative film studies’ of world cinema; these pieces need to be collected in a book now, because they constitute a theory – and a critical-pedagogical practice – that we sorely need. Paul was someone who (as the saying goes) didn’t suffer fools lightly, and he made a polemical show of denigrating most forms of sloppy, sentimental humanism; but his politics was of a truly passionate kind, and its core was summed up in the title of a film that he championed: So That You Can Live.

Adrian Martin
Associate Professor, Arts
Monash University (also see: Adrian Martin, 'The Front', Filmkrant, August 2012)

Beguiled. I was beguiled by Willemen. The first film we ever discussed (or argued about) was Don Seigel’s The Beguiled, a baroque Freudian parable in which Clint Eastwood plays a Confederate soldier who has his leg cut off by a group of demented Southern women. It was 1975 and I had just scored a job as assistant publicity officer in the Regional Film Theatres Dept at the BFI. Soon after I arrived Paul Willemen came in as boss of the section. I knew who he was, had earnestly devoured the Edinburgh Film festival publications, and gobbled up all the film theory emerging at that time. I was enthralled by the distant figures who populated the stage: Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Sam Rohdie, Stephen Heath, Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen among others. Willemen was the most mysterious and attractive to me: striding or lounging or soapboxing, in his leather jacket and boots he seemed to me a sort of European intellectual Marlon Brandon.

At the BFI he ignored me. I mainly did filing, boring boring, but occasionally was allowed to write capsule reviews. Then one day, doing his job, he read my few words on The Beguiled and instigated an interrogation. It was terrifying. It was just a measly little paragraph but I had to defend it as though it really mattered, as though every word mattered. I had never been challenged about film like this. But it was also exhilarating. And I learnt a few things about Paul: for him the intellectual stakes were always high, no matter what the context, no matter who the interlocutor; he had a cinephiliac taste for the baroque and trashy; he had a droll sardonic sense of humour which was integral to his critical modus; for all his association with high theory he was also a pragmatist, clear-sighted about what working in cultural institutions was about.

Within a few months I had moved to Australia, but over the years and across continents—meeting at conferences and festivals and bookshops—Paul and I became friends. We also fell pretty much out of contact in the last fifteen years or so. When I heard that he had died, an unexpected and terrible grief roared into the world. And a sense of loss. Of something lost from the world. Not just the person called Paul Willemen, but what he stood for. For many people. For someone with a not undeserved reputation for being cantankerous, aggressive, acrimonious, polemical, scornful, contemptuous he had a huge network of friends across the world. How come? And what would they all say? Very different things I imagine (many of his friends would probably not be inclined to talk to one another) so it is disingenuous to try and conjure into being a sense of PW through a few personal memories and encounters. But that is what I have, and how I can do it, and I hope that this question (of his irascibility combined with sociality) though submerged in what follows, will rise to the surface.

Two scenarios, two extended exchanges: one taking place in the context of Framework, the other in BFI publishing.

In the first half of the 1980s I was working on experimental Japanese cinema and spending time in Japan (living in Australia), and Paul was editing Framework. He cajoled me into writing up some of my material for the journal. This was at a time when I had left the academy and was very disenchanted with academic writing in general, screenese in particular; I also found the experience of being in Japan, of researching the various strands of experimentation from the sixties through to the contemporary scene, hyper stimulating but also culturally very difficult. I did not know how to write about it, how to find a language that was true to the history, that was informative for people who had no familiarity with these films and their cultural location, but that nevertheless somehow eschewed the anaemia of a disaffected third person voice.

To some extent I saw Paul as the enemy here (a representative of screenese). But Paul liked to have enemies, and I liked the Framework project. Paul’s own account of the emergence and early history of the journal is on the Framework web site, but let me just say how significant the Framework intervention was and remains today, indeed how it is differentiated from much of today’s euphoric babble about the global, about world cinema. Although Framework was coherently dedicated to giving voice to, to researching, and unearthing voices, films, figures from outside the contemporary Euro-American mainstream it was remarkably eclectic and heterodox. Not only in the range of materials (interviews, archival documents, industry figures, theory, criticism, history, bibliographies, filmographies) but in modes of writing, modes of address.

Throughout the years Paul was tenaciously committed to theorizing national cinemas and the concept of the national (instantiated in Theorizing National Cinema, the book he edited with Valentina Vitali) but he was also militantly opposed to institutionalized theory, to a professionalization of film studies which was totally ungrounded, lacking in historical research, untethered from political perspective and meaningful critical engagement. He practiced this precept in his own engagement in a variety of forums—film festival events and publications, involvement in various alternative cinema campaigns, writing encyclopaedias (on horror films for instance, and a monumental work on Indian cinema), collaborating on writing monographs and editing collections, and publishing. He was always curious about location, audience, address, and about how to write differently for different contexts and in order to make different kinds of interventions.

So Paul patiently listened to me going on about Japan and the impossibility of writing about it. Interjected questions. Never patronized, never accused me of self-indulgence and preciousness. Simply assumed I would get it done. So I did. As editor he was dealing with lots of writers, not to mention filmmakers and others. From different places, different cultural formations. Making new friends, keeping up old feuds. And with all these balls in the air he had this fabulous capacity to give attention, to focus energy, to shape discursive threads and formulate a critique out of discontinuous and fragmented social entities.

Some time after that, though the timeline is hazy for me now, Paul solicited and eventually rescued my Scorsese project from oblivion. He was a great editor, never dodging an argument, never imposing a point of view (even though we argued), but also never reluctant to cut my wordiness. I derived much pleasure from trying on occasion to outfox him by writing some sections that I knew he wouldn’t much like in such a way that he would find it impossible to cut. Sometimes it worked.

I will be eternally grateful to Paul, first of all for suggesting Scorsese as a topic (for seeing something that I myself could not see), and secondly for publishing The Scorsese Connection. I cannot imagine where else I could have taken the project at that time. It did not adhere to any of the familiar protocols of academic publishing in Britain or the U.S. But his gesture is symptomatic more generally of his work as both a publisher and cultural activist, often forging pathways and opening up viewing and reading parameters, inflecting the conception of cultural production through frictional in-between spaces.

Paul’s own book Looks and Frictions was part of the same “Perspectives” series. In her introduction Meaghan Morris suggests thinking of Willemen as “a thoroughly pragmatic utopian.” One aspect of that utopian pragmatism (to invert the terms) is manifested in the number of collaborators Willemen has had; the way his name is linked with other names on major books and projects for instance (Claire Johnston, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Jim Pines, Valentina Vitali to name a few) suggests a pragmatic approach to cultural production as joint work, involving provisional alliances, and assumed intellectual and political negotiations. The utopian dimension was socialist, not always in easily recognizable terms, but always concerned with intervention and underpinned by the belief that all transformative aspirations need to be two-way, to arise out of knowledge and analysis.

And then it came about that I fell out of contact with PW so I cannot speak of recent years. Eventually we had a very long and fierce and exhausting argument, as I remember it about affect and performance and cinephilia (his exchange with Noel King about cinephilia in Looks and Frictions, incidentally, is a pleasurable read and a truly collaborative intellectual working-through). In martialling his ammunition Paul showed me Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-CappedStar), which was a revelation. But we were each intransigent. We parted with affection on that occasion but somehow our exchange had run its course, and we never really connected again. Hearing of his death I felt overwhelming regret at losing touch. But then I remembered that Paul was the least sentimental of beings. I remembered being beguiled. I remembered many things about PW and his work that I do not want to forget. His dire dystopic warnings—just as much as the utopian pragmatism—seem pertinent today. It is timely to be reminded that the intellectual stakes should be high.

Lesley Stern
Professor, Visual Arts Department,
University of California at San Diego

Paul Willemen embraced academic life relatively late, arriving at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1999 after a short spell at Napier in Edinburgh. His reputation and standing within academic film studies was, of course, formidable by this stage. He had played a key role in the 1970s and 1980s in defining the subject area in the UK and helping to shape and mould both the subject’s theoretical terrain and its institutional structures. These earlier years were characterised by his dual commitment to promoting a ‘cinephiliac’ understanding of popular cinema – especially mainstream American cinema – and to promoting an understanding of alternative cinema in all its formal and political diversity.

In his years at Ulster, he pursued two further theoretical obsessions – the concept of comparative film studies and the pleasures of and political contexts of the action film, especially in its heroic classical mode. He entertained a rapt audience at Ulster during his professorial lecture by showing some muscle-bound examples of the genre and offering a political and economic critique of the Italian peplum tradition. He was also vexed and intrigued by the concept of national cinema and his dissatisfaction with the ‘national’ was the spur to his interest in comparative film studies. Ulster provided him with an incongruous but strangely apt environment to pursue this interest.

He was also very generous with his time. When my own study of Irish cinema was published in 2000, he attended a launch event in Dublin on the Monday evening and deposited a three-page critique of the book in my pigeonhole at Coleraine on the Friday morning. He pointed out the theoretical shortcomings of the book and spotted an ambiguity at its centre as well as offering a reasoned and wholly professional critique. He was, of course, spot on as usual and it was the measure of his erudition and insight that I was neither annoyed nor dismayed by his critique. He was right. And since I knew well that Paul did not suffer fools, as he saw them, gladly I was also flattered by the attention. This is what made him, despite his formidable intelligence and learning, popular with students as well. He took the time to take them seriously.

Paul was not an institutional person and he always found the workings of bureaucracy draining and straining and in the end, I think he found the University system counter-intuitive to his conception of learning and thinking. He was, however, a good colleague and friend and when he retired in 2008 I certainly missed having his intellectual engagement around the place. I assumed that he would continue to write and teach in retirement, operating with the relative freedom of the independent scholar. It is extremely sad that his illness and early death has deprived us of one of the most accomplished and challenging intellects in our field.

Martin McLoone
Prof. of Media Studies,
University of Ulster

Sad to hear of the death of Paul Willemen. I didn't know him well; our relationship was that of professional colleagues. And I often disagreed with him. But he was a splendid intellectual interlocutor. I recall in particular a summer afternoon in Italy in the early 1980s where we coincided at the Pesaro film festival. Pesaro had come into its own in the late 60s as perhaps the most radical of Europe's film festivals, and among other things, a place to see new films from Latin America, of which there were several that year. Simply meeting there was a sign of certain shared values about film and politics. We wandered off between two screenings to eat ice cream and got stuck into an argument that I've never forgotten, about artistic languages, in which he fiercely defended a Lacanian position that I couldn't accept because I didn't think it worked for music. I came to the conclusion that Paul didn't have a musical ear, but also that I needed to try and grapple with Lacan (something I only did many years later).

I have another indelible memory of Paul from the end of the 90s. I had run into problems at the college where I was then teaching. In those early years of New Labour, a new non-academic Dean had been appointed on the promise of bringing contacts with industry. She quickly proved a disaster who thought that academic committees were like the rubber-stamping variety she'd known at the BBC, whence she came. For various reasons too complicated to rake over, I was the poor sod who got scapegoated with a specious disciplinary charge that the institution was subsequently forced to withdraw on legal advice. But not before a large number of friends and colleagues had written emails to the Head of College in my support. The very first to write, in an exemplary demonstration of solidarity, was Paul, who, in a few elegant but trenchant lines, charged the college with infringement of academic freedom. His was a principled voice of a kind that we urgently need more of today, and I'm glad at least of the opportunity to pay tribute to him here.

Michael Chanan
Professor of Film
Department of Media, Culture and Language
University of Roehampton, London
Putney Debater website

Paul Willemen's work online

• Paul Willemen, 'An Introduction to Framework', Framework, 42, 1999
• Paul Willemen, 'On Framework', Framework,  (date unknown)
• Paul Willemen (interviewed by Deane Williams), 'The Double Access, Film Culture and the Ossification of Film Studies', Screening the Past, 23, 2008 (scroll down)
• Paul Willemen, 'Note on Dancer in the Dark', Framework, 42, 1999 (scroll down)
• Paul Willemen, '[Obituary] Eduardo Guedes [of Cinema Action]: His creative energy widened recognition of the independent film-maker's art', The Guardian, October 17, 2000
  

 Other online discussions of Willemen's work and influence:

• Acquarello, 'Questions of Third Cinema edited by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen', Strictly Film School, March 12, 2008
  
• Homi Bhabha, 'The Commitment to Theory', new formations 5, Summer 1988
• Jean-Loup Bourget, 'Sirk and the Critics', Bright Lights Film Journal, 48, 2005 (originally published in Issue 6, 1977)
• Jeremy B. Butler, 'Imitation of Life (John Stahl, 1934. Douglas Sirk, 1959): Style and the domestic melodrama', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 25-28
• Michael Chanan, 'The Changing Geography of Third Cinema', Screen Special Latin American Issue (edited by Catherine Grant and Jackie Stacey), Volume 38 number 4 Winter 1997
• Ben Goldsmith, 'To Be Outside and In-Between: On Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory', Film-Philosophy, 2.1, 1998]
• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003
• Christian Keathley, 'The Cinephiliac Moment', Framework, Issue 42, 2000
• Amy Lawrence, 'The Face of a Saint', The Passion of Montgomery Clift (University of California Press, 2010)
• André de Alencar Lyon, 'The Afterlife of Melodrama: Roger Michell's Changing Lanes', SURJ., Spring 2004
• New Adrian Martin, 'The Front', Filmkrant, August 2012 
• Tom O'Regan (interviewed by Deane Williams), ‘The Circulation of Ideas’, Screening the Past, 26, 2009
• Ryan Powell, 'Putting on the Red Dress: Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,' Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007
• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006
• Peter Stanfield, 'Notes Toward a History of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1969–77', Film International, Issue 34, 2008 
• Lesley Stern (interviewed by Deane Williams), ‘I’m going to be met by a phalanx of safari-suited men’, Screening the Past, 28, 2010

Free Sample Chapters from 50+ New Palgrave Macmillan/BFI Film and TV Books

Professor Jon Lewis of Oregon State University on his BFI Film Classics book on The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). See the 41 page sample from this book linked to below.

Once again, Film Studies For Free celebrates the fabulous, free, Film and Television Studies book samples available for perusal and download at the Palgrave Macmillan website. 

These are not properly Open Access works, but this blog chooses not to be purist when there are some amazingly generous PDF excerpts -- from soon-to-be as well as recently published works -- available online by scholars of the renown of those listed below. Thanks to the British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan! For an earlier list of great, free Palgrave Macmillan/BFI excerpts linked to at FSFF, click here.

• Mark Aldridge, The Birth of British Television: A History and 27 sample pages
• Shakuntala Banaji, Reading 'Bollywood': The Young Audience and Hindi Films and 30 sample pages
• Craig Batty, Movies That Move Us: Screenwriting and the Power of the Protagonist's Journey and 27 sample pages
• Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women and 16 sample pages
• Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film and 41 sample pages
• Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete (eds), Filming and Performing Renaissance History and 29 sample pages
• Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (eds), New Takes in Film-Philosophy and 12 sample pages
• Bryony Dixon, 100 Silent Films and 71 sample pages
• Christine Etherington-Wright and Ruth Doughty, Understanding Film Theory and 32 sample pages 
• Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (eds), Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication and 44 sample pages
• Vincent M. Gaine, Existentialism and Social Engagement in the Films of Michael Mann and 19 sample pages
• Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film and 32 sample pages  
• Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire and 25 sample pages
• Asbjørn Grønstad, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema and 25 sample pages
• Michael Hammond and Michael Williams (eds), British Silent Cinema and the Great War and 24 sample pages
• John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television and 30 sample pages  
• Jim Hillier and Doug Pye, 100 Film Musicals and 34 sample pages
• Matthew Kerry, The Holiday and British Film and 26 sample pages 
• Elspeth Kydd, The Critical Practice of Film: An Introduction and 31 sample pages
• Neal King, The Passion of the Christ (Controversies series) and 30 sample pages
• Peter Krämer, A Clockwork Orange (Controversies series) and 34 sample pages
• Vivian P.Y. Lee (ed.), East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations and 19 sample pages
• Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward (eds), The Chinese Cinema Book and 21 sample pages
• Fran Mason, Hollywood Detectives: Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir and 36 sample pages
• Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, 100 Cult Films and 37 sample pages
• Ewa Mazierska, European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics and 34 sample pages
• Kristi McKim, Love in the Time of Cinema and 37 sample pages
• Steven Peacock, Hollywood and Intimacy and 28 sample pages
• Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays and 27 sample pages
• Sue Short, Cyborg Cinema and 24 sample pages 
• Stevie Simkin, Straw Dogs (Controversies series) and 58 sample pages
• Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood (eds),  Reality Television and Class and 37 sample pages
• J.E. Smyth (ed.), Hollywood and the American Historical Film and 19 sample pages

BFI Film Classics: 

• Michael Berry, Jia Zhangke's 'Hometown Trilogy': Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures and 12 sample pages
• Will Brooker, Star Wars and 12 sample pages
• John Coldstream, Victim and 12 sample pages 
• John Gill, Far From Heaven and 17 sample pages
• Barry Keith Grant, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and 8 sample pages
• Amelie Hastie, The Bigamist and 6 sample pages 
• Noah Isenberg, Detour and 14 sample pages
• Julian Jackson, La Grande Illusion and 7 sample pages
• Sarah Kozloff, The Best Years of Our Lives and 18 sample pages
• Peter Krämer, 2001: A Space Odyssey and 6 sample pages
• Jon Lewis, The Godfather and 41 sample pages
• James Naremore, Sweet Smell of Success and 11 sample pages
• John David Rhodes, Meshes of the Afternoon and 5 sample pages
• Amy Sargeant, The Servant and 10 sample pages
• Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate, Back to the Future and 18 sample pages 
• Melvyn Stokes, Gilda and 10 sample pages
• Matthew Tinkcom, Grey Gardens and 22 sample pages
• Catherine Wheatley, Caché (Hidden) and 22 sample pages

Great Video Lectures by Friedberg, Dupin, Rodowick, Chateau, Nowell-Smith, Stewart, Grieveson, Furstenau, Zryd, and White

Image from Grbavica: Land of My Dreams/Esma's Secret: Grbavica (Jasmila Žbanić , 2006), an example of 'global women's cinema' as explored by Patricia White in a 2008 lecture and in a forthcoming book (you can see a clip from this film about 36 minutes into White's talk, and the film's website is here)

Thanks to the website of the Permanent Seminar on the Histories of Film Theory, which Film Studies For Free featured yesterday, FSFF heard about another highly worthwhile online resource (although one that appears not to be being updated, currently): the website of Advanced Research Team for the History and Epistemology of Moving Image Study (ARTHEMIS).

ARTHEMIS is dedicated to the study of the evolution of film studies as a discipline. Based at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Concordia University and initiated by Martin Lefebvre, it gathers scholars from Canada, the United States and Europe. The group organizes, among other things, monthly seminars related to the different axes of research. [Some] are available on this site. We invite you to listen to the conferences and submit your comments. In addition, you will find on this site an evolving bibliography and book reviews.

The ARTHEMIS project also investigates the study of film and moving images by looking at three of its most important 'possibility conditions': Conceptual conditions; Institutional conditions; Material Conditions.

There are plenty of items worth exploring at ARTHEMIS. But FSFF was most struck by the series of online lectures from 2008/9 that are archived at the site. Here's the list of links to these - some truly wonderful items. FSFF particularly liked Patricia White's lecture on "Globalizing Women's Cinema". 

• Anne Friedberg, Conversation on her book "The Virtual Window" Video Lecture, 2008-09-23
• Christophe Dupin, BFI (part 1) Video Lecture, 2008-09-24 
• D.N. Rodowick, An Elegy for Theory Video Lecture, 2008-09-24 
• Dominique Chateau - Do Film Studies Form a Discipline Video Lecture, 2009-06-18
• Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, BFI (part 2) Video Lecture, 2008-09-24
• Jacqueline Stewart, The Politics of Film Archiving (part one) Video Lecture, 2009-04-14
• Jacqueline Stewart, The Politics of Film Archiving (part two) Video Lecture, 2009-04-14 
• Keepers of the frame (J.Stewart presentation) Video Lecture, 2008-12-09
• Lee Grieveson, Cinema Studies and the Conduct of Conduct Video Lecture, 2008-09-24 
• Marc Furstenau, Design and Use Video Lecture, 2008-09-23 
• Michael Zryd, Experimental film as Pedagogical Cinema Video Lecture, 2008-10-21 
• Patricia White, Globalizing Women's Cinema Video Lecture, 2008-09-24

In the Hands of Fate: Existentialism in Film

Image from I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) [See Sam Mithani's thesis, The Hollywood Left: Cinematic Art and Activism in the 1930s for reflections on the existentialism of this film's director]

Viewing (30:43): In the Hands of Fate: Existentialism in Film (October 18, 2010)

Cinema condenses actions and their consequences. It puts the viewer into someone else's shoes. Dilemmas tend to be urgent, up-close and personal: ergo, all films are existential. But several films in this year's [London Film Festival] programme specifically emphasise philosophical struggles with circumstance. Veiko Õunpuu's The Temptation of St Tony makes drama out of the very discourse of existential thought. Xavier Beauvois' Of Gods and Men follows monks whose faith is shaken by fear of execution. Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte links a dying man's end, to the fate of a lost kid (as in goat) and a felled tree. Finally, the dying man in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives accepts his fate yet the past makes its own demands on him. It's more than just mortal thoughts that brings these films together; it's a heightened sensitivity to our sense of purpose. We are very excited that directors Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Michelangelo Frammartino [joined] Dr David Sorfa (Senior lecturer in Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University and managing editor of the journal, Film-Philosophy) on a panel chaired by Ian Haydn Smith, Editor of International Film Guide.

Film Studies For Free wanted to alert its readers to the above linked-to, wonderful BFI video on the topic of  existentialism and cinema. In its usual good faith, and as a perfect accompaniment, FSFF also brings you a little list of links to great, openly accessible, scholarly reading, much of it book-length, on the very same theme.

• Anders Albrechtslund, 'Surveillance pleasures: existentialism and ethics as represented in cinematic art' [Draft version], Author's Website, date unknown
• Tomas Axelson, 'Movies and Meaning: Studying Audience, Fiction Film and Existential Matters', Particip@tions, Volume 5, Issue 1, Special Edition (May 2008)
• Brian K. Bergen-Aurand, Seeing and the Seen: Post-Phenomelogical Ethics and the Cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Maryland, 2004  
• Jean-Philippe Derant, 'Existentialist Aesthetics', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009
• Marty Fairbairn, Cinema as Secular Church: A Phenomenological Typology and Hermeneutics, PhD Thesis, McMaster University, 1995
• Robert Harvey, 'Sartre/Cinema: Spectator/Art That Is Not One', Cinema Journal, 30.3, 1991 
• Sam Mithani, The Hollywood Left: Cinematic Art and Activism in the 1930s, PhD Thesis, University of Southern California, 2007 
• Katherine V. Pettit, The truth and death of indexicality: photography, philosophy and cinema, MA Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2002 
• David C. Simmons, The Dysphoric Style in Contemporary American Independent Cinema, PhD Thesis, Florida State University, Spring 2005
• Benjamin 
P.
 Spencer
, '“Show Me How to See Things the Way You Do": Existentialism in Faith, Philosophy, and Film [on The Thin Red Line]', Honours Thesis, Whitman College, 2010
• Deborah A. Walker, Self-reflexivity and the construction of subjectivity in contemporary French cinema: Alain Resnais, PhD Thesis, University of Auckland, 2001
• Tony Williams, 'Power and Paranoia: 40s Hollwyood', from Jump Cut, no. 35, April 1990, pp. 73-77