Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Orson Welles. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Orson Welles. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Chủ Nhật, 30 tháng 3, 2014

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:
Transnational Cinemas Links:
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.

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

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    Thứ Bảy, 3 tháng 12, 2011

    More Victor Perkins Video Interviews Online from Saarbruecken






    Film Studies For Free very excitedly learnt of the posting of five more fascinating and hugely insightful extracts from the marvellous recorded interview with legendary film scholar V.F. Perkins which took place at the Kino 8 1/2 in Saarbrücken, Germany, and was filmed by Media Art and Design Studiengang. They are available online here.

    If you missed the earlier seven interview extracts you can find them in one handy place (and, let's say it: FSFF is one very handy place!) here.

    What more need FSFF say, than "Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, and enjoy"!
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    Thứ Tư, 16 tháng 6, 2010

    More Film Authorship Studies: Romero, Welles, Portillo, Mamet, and the studio system

    Film Studies For Free brings you some more great essays on film authorship (a favourite topic at this here blog), following the serendipitous discovery that a special issue on that subject by the (normally) subscription only periodical The Velvet Light Trap was chosen to be that journal's free online sample.


    Do also check out FSFF's earlier related posts if this is a topic of particular interest: On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theories, , film authorship and Orson Welles. 
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    Thứ Ba, 8 tháng 6, 2010

    On Citizen Kane: film-critical and film-historical video essays




    Film Studies For Free today showcases two video approaches to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). The below video is a recording of film historians and writers Leo Braudy and David Thompson speaking at length about the film in a symposium entitled "Citizen Kane in Retrospect" held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, San Marino, CA, on May 31, 2008 [51 minutes long].

    The video embedded above takes an entirely different tack in studying Welles's film. But it is one of the most successful examples yet, FSFF believes, of the emerging form of the online film-critical video essay.

    Paul Malcolm's wonderful work came to this blog's attention entirely thanks to a comment left by Christian Keathley (who knows rather a lot about these matters) in a fascinating and valuable discussion stream still going on at Girish Shambu's blog on the subject of DVD audio commentaries and video essays. The discussion has, in part, been fuelled by a FILMKRANT column just published by the peerless film critic (and frequent DVD commentarist) Adrian Martin, in which he raised some very important doubts about these (in the case of audio commentaries, necessarily) very 'word-centred' forms.

    Film Studies For Free has a whole stack of video essays in production which are each negotiating, in different ways, some of the issues Martin has raised, but it won't be too long now, hopefully, before they can be posted at this blog... More on that very soon.



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    Thứ Năm, 11 tháng 2, 2010

    'Total realism'? On depth of focus and field in cinematography, mise-en-scène, and sound design

    Short documentary on the work of cinematographer Gregg Toland, one of the greatest Directors of Photography of all time. Also, read his article for the September 1941 issue of Theater Arts magazine The Motion Picture Cameraman.

    Film Studies For Free was so inspired by Jim Emerson's excellent essay 'Avatar, the French New Wave and the morality of deep-focus (in 3-D)' at his blog Scanners, that it decided to speed up production and publication of its long-in-preparation list of links to openly-accessible scholarly material of note on cinematographic depth of field, focus, and related matters of sound design and staging. Thanks Jim!

    Readers might also like to (re)visit FSFF's posts on 3D Studies, phenomenological film studies, film music and sound, Orson Welles  and Avatar.
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    Thứ Năm, 31 tháng 12, 2009

    Video essays from Mediascape and a New Year's resolution from FSFF


    Harry (Billy Crystal) chases down Sally (Meg Ryan) on New Year's Eve in When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989)

    It's New Year's Eve and Film Studies For Free has a prescriptive 'prediction' to make: that, in academic cinema and media studies, 2010 ought to be the year (and the subsequent 'teens' ought to be the decade...) of the video essay...

    It will certainly be the year of the video essay here at FSFF. All deities, pagan spirits, and serendipitous or voluntaristic self-happenings willing, the BIG New Year's resolution at this here verbose blog is to research the video essay's potential for film studies through repeated practice, setting FSFF's neophyte, scholarly, AV efforts alongside its regular links-lists to mind-bogglingly fabulous, or just solid and fruitful, freely-accessible film and media studies resources.

    For some time now, FSFF has been gathering inspiration and ideas from a wide variety of sources as to what truly scholarly video essays about films and film studies might look and sound like. You can visit some of its previous mutterings about these topics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. So, it was delighted to hear, via Janet Bergstrom, that some of the latest (and best) explorations in this format have been published by UCLA's online and Open Access cinema and media studies journal Mediascape.

    Below are the links to, and titles and abstracts of, this wonderful work in the latest Mediascape issue.

    Following a trend begun in Mediascape’s Spring 2008 issue, we are once again showcasing a selection of visual essays. As Eric Faden observed in “A Manifesto for Critical Media,” while media continues to move forward, we as scholars need to follow suit and embrace the new technologies available to us for our scholarship. This means expanding the traditional tools utilized by media scholars such as primary archival research, textual analysis, literature review, the written word and the occasional still image, by using moving images to engage and critique themselves, to illustrate theory, or to reveal the labor of their own construction.

    The following visual essays were created by Cinema and Media Studies students at UCLA under the guidance of Professor Janet Bergstrom, and are marked by a unique, creative approach to a variety of topics such as the filmic style and influence of HBO programming; an inter-twined production history and auteur study of Orson Welles and his film F for Fake; an industrial-genre analysis of the Wii and its style of play; and, in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to President, a look at representations of African-American presidents in film and television.

    These projects exemplify how the traditional scholarly mode of the presentation and investigation of a thesis through the introduction and analysis of various kinds of evidence that is central to the format of a conventional written essay, is not only retained but enhanced by the transformation to a moving, visual text. Here, voiceover embodies the author’s voice, and when laid over a clip of film, television, or other media, enables a more compelling and precise analysis to leap from the page to the screen.

    White House, Black President' by Clifford Hilo, Maya Montañez Smukler, Julia Wright
    Only in the most contemporary moment has the notion of a black president been a historical reality, and yet this imagined figure has been represented in film as far back as 1933's Rufus Jones for President played by a seven-year old Sammy Davis, Jr. to Terry Crews' hypermuscular President Comacho in 2006's Idiocracy. “White House, Black President” studies the imagination of black presidency and its politics of representability in three areas. In an act of retroactive reclamation, Clifford Hilo's "Barack Obama and the Politics of Joy" searches for the apropos filmic metaphor for President Barack Obama and finds it in representations of Abraham Lincoln. In dialog with Adilifu Nama's Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction, Julia Wright's "Black to the Future" explores the intersection between blackness and science fiction films since the 1990s, asserting that the presence of black presidents in such a genre provides a meditation on blackness, masculinity, and social progress in America. Maya Smukler's "White House Humor" examines the use of political satire by black comics such as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Chris Rock, in which humor arises from the incongruencies between race, power, and American history--for these comics, it is precisely the improbability of such a representation that, until recently, that has supplied the notion of a black presidency with such satirical valence.

    'Layers of Paradox in F for Fake' by Benjamin Sampson
    This visual essay explores how Orson Welles uses the text of F for Fake to comment on his long and troubled career in filmmaking. On the surface, F for Fakeseems to be a case study in charlatans, detailing the exploits of art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, who himself was also a famous book forger. In the broader view, however, Welles’ uses the film to express his personal views concerning two subjects that had hounded his profession life: the ambiguity of authorship and the negative effects of commerce on the art world. Through patterns of film construction, visual motifs, and allusions to previous works, Welles consistently foregrounds the themes of authorship and the art market and their relationship to his own past. He also expresses several views concerning success in the art world, drawing connections from the characters on screen to his own career. In the end, however, many of Welles’ opinions in F for Fake contradict themselves. His logic creates several circular paradoxes, which mirrors the playful, circular nature of the film itself.

    'HBO’s Cinematized Television' by Erin Hill and Brian Hu
    Picking up where John Caldwell left off in his discussion of post-network permutations of style and narrative in 1995's Televisuality, Erin Hill and Brian Hu discuss HBO's forging of a unique brand of quality through its original series beginning in the 90's. HBO not only increasingly chose for its original programs the filmic look first pioneered by network shows like Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues, but, through strategies such as widescreen formatting, the production of prestige properties, and the appropriation of authors and genres strongly associated with film, the cable network also aimed increasingly at obtaining for its programming the high culture status that had previously been reserved for only the greatest and most critically acclaimed works of cinematic art. The channel's success in thus defining itself as something above and beyond television (not TV but HBO), in turn, had an effect on network and basic cable narrative and aesthetics from which it had attempted to distinguish itself, causing the cinematic envelope to be pushed further and in more ways than ever before through attempts at "Quality" (a.k.a. film-like) programming.

    'Towards a New Genre of Video Game Play' by Drew Morton , David O’Grady and Jennifer Porst
    In, "Towards a New Genre of Video Game Play," Jennifer Porst, David O’Grady, and Drew Morton explore the body at play in relationship to new interfaces of video game consoles that offer digital agency beyond the click or the thumb and the experiences they offer—what the authors dub as “gestural play”—from industrial, theoretical, and generic perspectives. In the essay's first section, Porst analyzes the recent home video game console war to explicate the success of the Nintendo Wii and its different positioning in the marketplace from the X-Box 360 and Playstation 3. In part two, O'Grady provides a phenomenological examination of the Wiimote interface in a case study of Wii Tennis, arguing that gestural play enriches the dialectic between body and screen. Finally, Morton concludes with a generic and historical analysis of video game interfaces that suggests the use of the body in digital play has at last become more than a passing fad; gestural play is becoming as a new genre of video gaming and a productive mode of video game analysis.
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    Thứ Ba, 27 tháng 1, 2009

    Touching on Touch of Evil: Projecting Latin America at the Movies

    Film Studies For Free (returning after a short unplanned break filled with unfortunate technical hitches of the sick computer kind) is happy to bring its loyal readers news of a wonderful weblog devoted to studying

    the ways in which Latin America has figured in Hollywood and European cinema. Rather than lamenting the distance between stereotype and reality, it is interested in the functions served by the innumerable projections of fantasized Latin Americas onto the silver screen.
    This website - Projections - was founded in 2005 by the renowned Latin-Americanist scholar Jon Beasley-Murray, currently Assistant Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. As his university website testifies, Beasley-Murray is a longstanding practitioner and exponent of Open Access scholarship with numerous of his excellent publications archived online. He is also author of the important weblog Posthegemony.

    Projections' project is to write about Hollywood and European movies 'in which Latin America plays a part, however small'. Beasley-Murray asks: 'Is there some shared element beyond the contingent commonality of location or theme? My wager is that there is, and that it's something worth writing about. Indeed, my suspicion is that when Hollywood goes Latin, it reveals something essential about cinema tout court.' The index by title of the many films so far examined can be found by clicking HERE.

    For Spring 2009, this project has been aided by a UBC grant to hire three undergraduate student researchers to expand this online database of Latin America on screen. As Beasley-Murray notes in a blurb on the UBC website of his encouragement of students to write blogs

    The idea is in large part to get beyond the ghetto of closed, proprietary educational software (WebCT and the like), to give students a sense that they are producing research on a public stage, and to integrate their learning with their own real world experience of the internet.
    Important work, indeed. To conclude its celebration of the achievement of Projections, Film Studies For Free decided to drill down and produce an extensive series of high-quality, online-resource links pertaining to one of the films studied on that blog (and a great favourite of this blogger, too): Orson Welles's 1958 Touch of Evil. The list is headed by Projections's great entry on this film.
    Online analyses of and information about Touch of Evil:
    Online discussions of and information about the making, remaking, and DVD production of Touch of Evil:
    On Orson Welles, with significant discussion of Touch of Evil:
    Also see the wonderful Wellesnet, the Orson Welles Web Resource, together with its sister project The Museum of Orson Welles which continues to 'compile and present the available radio and recorded works of Orson Welles'.
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