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

"Between Past and Future": ROME, OPEN CITY Studies

Updated November 19, 2011

Frame grab from Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

Projected on the war torn landscape for a weary people, Rome Open City poetically serves the goals of unification and restoration. In many respects, this film both conforms to and promotes an ideal image of a courageous, Resistant and unified population – from communist intellectuals, to catholic priests, to working class women and their children. Open City maintains the comfortable melodramatic schema of Rossellini’s earlier Fascist-era films in which the forces of good (the Italian people) struggle triumphantly against the forces of evil embodied in the Nazi general Bergmann and his deviant cronies. The director’s fondness for his people culminates in an apologetic portrayal of Italian fascists as either wretched or unwilling collaborators. However, in the end, Open City’s epic scope effectively precludes the possibility of another film like it: all the “fathers” (Manfredi, Pina, Don Pietro) are dead and the child soldiers are abandoned to the city, suspended “between past and future”. The conclusion, the partisan priest’s execution, witnessed by the children of his parish, forewarns of the fragmentation, destitution, and moral poverty to come. With his last words, “non è difficile morire bene, è difficile vivere bene” (it’s not difficult to die well, it’s difficult to live well”), Don Pietro intimates the struggles ahead. [Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948', PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009  97-98] 

Another teaching week beckons, and Film Studies For Free's author looks forward to pondering, for the umpteenth, pedagogical time, that intensely strange film Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945).

There are some excellent resources on this film, and on related issues of (neo)realism, that are openly accessible online. So, andiamo felicemente with one of FSFF's regular studies of a single film.

• John Bleasdale, 'The Unrealistic Rossellini', Film Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 34, 2002 
• Gian Piero Brunetta, 'Introduction', The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
• Peter Brunette, 'Rossellini and Cinematic Realism', Cinema Journa1, 25, No. 1, Fall 1985
• Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, 'Open City, Rossellini and neorealism: Sixty years on', Screening the Past, 20, 2006 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to Bleasdale',  Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002
• Ora Gelley, 'Europa '51: The Face of the Star in Neorealism's Urban Landscape', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• Sidney Gottlieb, 'Introduction: Open City: Reappropriating the Old, Making Way for the New', in Gottlieb (ed.), Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 
• A. S. Hamrah, '[Interview with Tag Gallagher] From Italy to Iran', Hermenaut, October 20, 2000
• Marcia Landy, 'Introduction', Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 
• Adrian Martin, 'Always a window: Tag Gallagher's Rossellini', Screening the Past, March 2000
• Adrian Martin, 'What is Modern Cinema?', 16:9, September 2010
• Daniel Morgan, 'Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, 32 (2006) 
• Brent J. Piepergerdes, 'Re-envisioning the Nation: Film Neorealism and the Postwar Italian Condition', ACME, 2007
• Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948', PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009 
• Luca Prono, '[Review of] Rome Open City (Roma Città Aperta) By David Forgacs, London: BFI Publishing, 2000; Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, Edited by David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London: BFI Publishing, 2001', Scope, November 2002
• Luca Prono, '[Review of] Celluloide, Dir: Carlo Lizzani, 1996', Scope, 2000
• Hugo Salas, 'Roberto Rossellini', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Erica Sheen, 'Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete', Film Studies, Vol. 7, Winter 2005
• New Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon, 'The Film of Tomorrow will be an Act of War [on ROME OPEN CITY and its legacy]', Idiom Magazine, October 17, 2011 
• Martin Walsh, 'Rome, Open City, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV: Re-evaluating Rossellini', from Jump Cut, no. 15, 1977
• Jonathan David York, 'Open Spaces, Liminal Places: the Deployment of the Sacred in Open City', JCRT, 10.3, Summer 2010

Michael P. Rogin, 'Mourning, Melancholia, and the Popular Front: Roberto Rossellini's Beautiful Revolution', in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Jaimey Fisher, 'On the Ruins of Masculinity: The Figure of the Child in Italian Nerealism and the German Rubble Film', in Italian neorealism and global cinema, eds. Laura E. Ruberto, Kristi M. Wilson (Wayne State University Press, 2007)