Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013 Conference Papers and Contributions Online

            Film Studies and Videographic Assemblage A Video Presentation by Catherine Grant for the S23 Workshop "Writing with Video: Beyond the Illustrated Text", Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Chicago, March 6-10, 2013.

[Catherine Grant's introduction to the above video:] My presentation to this workshop has a somewhat strange take on the notion of the capacity of "video-writing" to move beyond the "illustrated text". The video it presents (embedded above) not only uses a good deal of text, but was also originally inspired by the idea of audiovisually amplifying, or supplementing, a long pre-existing written study of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope.
    What making it demonstrated to me is that, in scholarly settings, even the simplest videographic act of presenting an assemblage of compiled film sequences involves medium-specific forms of argumentation, for example, the selection and presentation of audiovisual evidence, montage and mise en scene, titling, sound editing and other creative effects, all aiming to draw from "a broader notion of pathos, logos, and ethos than that which has been reified in the age of print literacy", as Virginia Kuhn has put it.* The result is not only the creation of an audiovisual argument, therefore, but also, importantly, of an active viewing space for live co-research - a framed experience of participant observation which, particularly through its online distribution, dialogically invites responses (including rebuttals!) through forms of remix. [Also see
Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins) and Déjà-Viewing?Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies]
    *Kuhn, Virginia. 2012. "The Rhetoric of Remix." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. Online at dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0358.

S23 Workshop chaired by Virginia Kuhn (University of Southern California), with presentations by Vicki Callahan, Catherine Grant, Michael Lachney, Virginia Kuhn and Cheryl Ball. The workshop was sponsored by the Media Literacy and Pedagogical Outreach Scholarly Interest Group. The full 2013 SCMS Conference Program PDF is here.

Film Studies For Free is happy to present links to some resources pertaining to papers or presentations at the (recently concluded) annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.

FSFF's author's own contribution to the conference, embedded and pasted in above, was part of a workshop panel on "Writing with Video" (see all of the assets from this workshop gathered by Virginia Kuhn here). In the end, this year -- for the same reasons it's been so quiet at this blog (major, unexpected construction work taking place at home at the same time as a very busy semester!) -- she was unable to travel to the US to attend this final session of the conference in person. But, thanks to the wonders of modern technology her work was kindly presented in absentia by her fellow panelists. Among these, Vicki Callahan and Michael Lachney presented on their pedagogical practices around teaching video argumentation as part of multimedia literacy programmes. In particular, Callahan discussed her classroom use of online video collaborative authoring tools including WeVideo. Cheryl Ball discussed her experience as editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (see Ball's fabulous essay for Kairos on digital scholarship here). And workshop chair Virginia Kuhn presented on her highly innovative large scale video analysis project, a wonderful example of the potential for humanities supercomputing (also see here).

Below are links to a whole host of further conference contributions, mostly collected via Twitter. Thanks very much to those who supplied the links. If you have posted your own SCMS paper online, or know of others not gathered below, please leave the link in a comment. Thank you!

SCMS Digital Humanities J23 Workshop 5_8_13 from scms at livestream.com. Featuring Miriam Posner, Jason Mittell (see below for his paper), Hannah Goodwin, Jasmijn Van Gorp, Jason Rhody and Eric Faden

• Tyler Bickford, '“The Best of Both Worlds”: Hannah Montana, “having it all,” and postfeminist tween domesticity' (Thanks to Anthony C Bleach for the link)
• Shane Denson, 'Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect'
• Theresa Geller, '"The Hardest, The Most Difficult Film:" Todd Haynes’ Safe as Feminist Film Praxis' (Thanks for the link to Julia Leyda)
• Richard Grusin, 'Post-Cinematic Atavism'
• Justin Horton, 'Disembodiment and Ecstatic Perception in The Tree of Life' 
• Amanda Ann Klein, '“To Dance Again!”: Affect, Genre, and the HARRY POTTER Franchise'
• Julia Leyda, 'Playing with Dolls: Girls and Fans in Velvet Goldmine'
• James MacDowell, 'Value, Intention, and the Aesthetics of "So Bad It's Good"'
• Jason Mittell, 'Mapping a Pluralistic Field: What Does Television Studies Really Look Like?' 
• Munib Rezaie, 'The New Chinese Mainstream? Dayyan Eng and Ning Hao’s Appeal for Young Urban Moviegoers in the People’s Republic of China' (Thanks to Justin Horton for the link)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Response to panel on “primordigital cinema,” with talks by Jonathan Freedman, Richard Grusin, and Selmin Kara'
• Chuck Tryon, 'Families are Complicated: Netflix Kids, Personalization, and Digital Delivery'
• María A. Vélez-Serna, 'Film distribution in Scotland in the 1910s: A case study in artificial scarcity as institutional strategy'
• Neil Verma, 'Sound Studies at SCMS 2013'

Also see:

• SCMS YouTube Channel with lots of videos from the conference
• SCMS Annual Conference Live: Chicago 2013 Blogs (by Alexander Cho, Alexandra Juhasz, Chuck Kleinhans, Raquel Gates and Tim Havens)
• Suzanne Scott, 'Distanced Learning: SCMS as MOOC (massively open online conference)'

A Stocking Full of eReading and Viewing: Happy Holidays!

Updated December 31, 2012

Frame grab from Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986). Read Keeley Saunders' article about the tableaux vivants in this film

'Tis the season to be jolly, apparently, and so Film Studies For Free is happy to oblige with some extremely jolly, serious, and completely free eGifts for the festive season, ones from wise men and women around the world. You can find them liberally scattered in list form, below, under the six headers in bold.

This bountiful blog will be back early in the New Year with its list of Best Online (and Open Access) Film Studies Resources in 2012. So, if you haven't taken part in the readers' poll for that yet, you still have a little time.

In the meantime, FSFF wishes you very happy holidays indeed!


SEQUENCE 1.1, 2012

The first array of eBook publications from SEQUENCE Serial Studies in Media, Film and Music has just been launched — a central element in REFRAME and SEQUENCE’s particular model of academic ePublishing.

You can now read SEQUENCE 1.1 — Steven Shaviro’s magisterial and open access article about a film about the end of world (‘MELANCHOLIA, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime‘) — in a variety of free eBook formats. Just click here to check them out and download them to your devices.

NOTEBOOK, December 17, 2012

• 'Expressing the Move' by Hoi Lun Law

  

RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM: Creating the Witness

Leshu Torchin's current research focuses on how screen media bear witness to human rights abuses and genocide in order to mobilise audiences. In her guest post for RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM, Torchin introduces some of the issues that are central to her new book, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet. Thanks to Torchin and the book’s publishers University of Minnesota Press, REFRAME has been granted the permission to share the extensive introduction to the book online. You can read it here.

ALPHAVILLE, Issue 4, Winter 2012

Open Theme Edited by Stefano Odorico and Aidan Power

• Editorial By Stefano Odorico and Aidan Power
• Who’s Got the “Reel” Power? The Problem of Female Antagonisms in Blaxploitation Cinema By Melissa DeAnn Seifert, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Egyptian Film Censorship: Safeguarding Society, Upholding Taboos By Dina Mansour, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy
• “I Get Sort of Carried Away, Being So Normal and Everything”: The Oscillating Sexuality of Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert in the works of Nabokov, Kubrick and Lyne By Emerson Storm Fillman Richards, University of Florida
• Towards an Embodied Poetics of Cinema: The Metaphoric Construction of Abstract Meaning in Film By Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja, University of Antwerp
• Film-Thinking and Narrative Indeterminacy By Jimmy Billingham, Independent Scholar
• Image Versus Imagination: Memory’s Theatre of Cruelty in Chris Marker’s La Jetée By Martina Witt-Jauch, Goettingen University
• Anima Animus: Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Bisexual Method in Last Exit to Brooklyn By Ian Murphy, University College Cork

Book Reviews Edited by Pierluigi Ercole

• Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions, by Warren Buckland (2012)  Reviewer: Kevin McDonald, Cal State Northridge  
• Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, by Elizabeth Cowie (2011) Reviewer: Amy Parziale, University of Arizona (USA)  
• The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture, by Patricia Pisters (2012) Reviewer: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait

Reports Edited by Ian Murphy

• Motion Capture: Drawing and the Moving Image. Curated by Ed Krčma and Matt Packer
  Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 26 July–4 November 2012 Reporter: Jill Murphy, University College Cork  
• The Society of Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference 2012, Boston, USA, 21–25 March 2012 Reporters: Anthony Coman and Missy Molloy, University of Florida

NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012): The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication

Editorial The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication: An Introduction PDF  Matthew Robinson

Articles

• Caravaggio’s cinematic painting: Fictionalising art and biography in the artist biopic PDF  Keeley Saunders
• Blurring Gender Boundaries – Masculine Confessional in Celebrity Auto/biographies PDF  Hanna Kylloen
• Re-Envisioning the Artist Hero Through Two Cole Porter Biopics PDF  Derek Johnston
• Digital Lives: Refiguring the recent and distant pasts in new biographical forms PDF  Adam Gallimore
• Depicting a Life Less Ordinary: Fantasy as Evidence for Deconstruction in the Contemporary Film Biopic PDF  Carolyn Ellam
• “Sex doesn’t dominate my life at all, really. I think painting does” (David Hockney): the emergence of the queer artist biopic PDF  David Bovey

PGN Matters

• Why PGN Matters: PGN, Our Family PDF  Xuelian Jin

THE CINE-FILES: A Scholarly Journal of Cinema Studies, Issue 2, 2012 

• The Actor’s Vision by Steven Ryben
• Wiping the Dust from Our Eyes by Lauren Newton Glenn
• West of Eden by Duncan Pittman

• “Sex and the City: A Festival Introduction” by Roger Rawlings
• “Wonder Women in the Savannah Film Festival: From the Page to the Screen, and Finally, Beyond” by Alexa Boehringer
• “Chris Marker and the Essay Film: a Presentation by Timothy Corrigan” by Tracy Cox-Stanton 
• Panel: A Critical Eye on Film  with Dr. Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Peter Hitchcock, City University of New York; and critic Claudia Puig, USA Today, alongside Dr. Roger Rawlings, Dr. Tracy Cox-Stanton, and Dr. Chad Newsom
• Reviews:
  
  • A Place at the Table, by Ingela Hartman
  • Brief Encounters, by Jae Matthews
  • Fat Kid Rules the World, by Ben Barbour
  • Nobody Walks, by Kyle Taubken
  • On the Road, by Kate Newell
  • Quartet, by Scotty Barnhart
  • Rust and Bone, by Scotty Barnhart
  • Silver Linings Playbook, by Kyle Taubken
  • Violet and Daisy, by Steve Drum

On 'Acid Aesthetics' and Contemporary Cinematic Stylistic 'Excess' - In Memory of Tony Scott (1944-2012)

Last updated August 30, 2012

Cine-Painting - The Kino-Brush  

A video tribute to Tony Scott, "[A] vigorous and energetic filmmaker extraordinaire"

By Matthias Stork

 

Filmmaking is like painting…Every stroke or every color impacts another and you build film on the canvas and you get ideas from the last stroke.
 [Tony Scott, audio commentary, Domino DVD]

[T]he minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning. Style is the use of repeated techniques which become characteristic of the work; these techniques are foregrounded so that the spectator will notice them and create connections between their individual uses. Excess does not equal style, but the two are closely linked because they both involve the material aspects of the film. Excess forms no specific patterns which we could say are characteristic of the work. But the formal organization provided by style does not exhaust the material of the filmic techniques, and a spectator's attention to style might well lead to a noticing of excess as well. [...] Probably no one ever watches only these non-diegetic aspects [...] through an entire film. Nevertheless, they are constantly present, a whole "film" existing in some sense alongside the narrative film we tend to think of ourselves as watching. [Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess', Ciné-Tracts, 1.2, Summer 1977, pp. 55-56]

Hollywood action scenes became ‘impressionistic,’ rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it. [David Bordwell, 'A Glance at Blows', Observations on Film Art, September 28, 2008]

In classical continuity styles, space is a fixed and rigid container, which remains the same no matter what goes on in the narrative; and time flows linearly, and at a uniform rate, even when the film’s chronology is scrambled by flashbacks. But in post-continuity films, this is not necessarily the case. We enter into the spacetime of modern physics; or better, into the “space of flows”, and the time of microintervals and speed-of-light transformations, that are characteristic of globalized, high-tech financial capital.  [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]

The essential characteristic of the acid aesthetic is the employment of early twentieth century hand-crank cameras. Loaded with high-speed reversal film, they are manually cranked forwards and backwards during the shooting, and afterwards cross-processed in an inappropriate developer. The results are quite extreme and fairly unpredictable: multiple exposures within one or more images, high contrasts and de-saturated colors, abrupt visual jolts of overexposed lighting, increased grain activity and discernible smears, cracks and trails on the frame, which add an air of physical authenticity. Film becomes tangible in this aesthetic equation. The analogue form, generally masked in the classical continuity style, is revealed, indeed placed in the foreground. Footage from digital cameras further provides an occasional visual counterpoint to the stylized primitivism of the hand-crank aesthetic, presenting crisp, overly saturated images, which seem, by contrast, manufactured and purely synthetic. The result is a dialectic of control and chaos, with the latter as the defining crux. [...] What becomes clear here is that Scott’s acid aesthetics put on display the cinematic apparatus itself, the process of constructing moving images, both in analogue and digital form. The resulting casualty is the concept of filmic realism. The gained impression is not the order of continuity but the chaos of stylistic transparency, an illustration of the formal potentialities of film, unrestrained by storytelling conventions.

[...] A blend of analogue and digital filmmaking lays bare the inner mechanics of cinema, its texture, emphasizing the process of manipulating and creating moving images. Film, in this regard, can be conceptualized as an enormous canvas, to be filled with color. It is not a coincidence that Tony Scott was trained as a visual artist and generally views himself as such, a cinematic painter. Thus, he constructs rather than documents images, both in the camera and on a post-production computer setup. In Scott’s hands, cinema rediscovers its ability for overt stylization, not eroding, but at least de-privileging what Christian Metz calls the realistic cinema-effect, in favor of a display of cinematic technique. In the words of Lev Manovich, cinema is then “no longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush”. And indeed Scott’s filmmaking transcends the mere realm of visual representation. Wielding the camera like a brush, and similar to Alexandre Astruc’s pen, the caméra-stylo, he sprays, splashes and splatters paint onto the canvas, producing an expressionistic chaos, reminiscent of paintings by Jackson Pollock. Notwithstanding the overt experimentalism, all this activity is framed by the generic conventions of Hollywood story material. The margins of Scott’s canvas are defined by the tenets of traditional and, with regard to Man on Fire and Domino, arguably quite clichéd narrative. In this regard, Scott’s cinematic paintings become more than just a display of style, namely an unrestrained sensory assault of visual abstraction that, in a postmodern twist of meta-textual discourse, exposes the process of moving image construction, and thereby reconfigures the traditional notion of what mainstream cinema should look like. [Excerpts from Matthias Stork, 'Acid Aesthetics: Tony Scott's Cinema of Chaos', SWTX Popular and American Culture Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2012]

I have cautiously championed Tony Scott’s recent work because at least he’s willing to go all the way, however misguided the direction. From Spy Games on, he has stuck to the credo that too much is never enough. His technique is swaggering and undisciplined, mannered to the nth degree. Yet I find his fevered visuals more genuinely arresting than the safe noodlings of most of today’s mainstream cinema. Man on Fire and Déja Vu reheat their genre leftovers into something spicy, if not nourishing, while Domino, the cinematic equivalent of hophead graffiti, wraps its sleazy characters in a visual design apparently inspired by the glowing interior of a peepshow booth.  [David Bordwell, '50 Days of Summer Movies Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009, hyperlink added by FSFF]

Tony Scott’s need to push the boundaries of the postclassical into the classical-plus and the hyperclassical with Man on Fire and Domino suggests a growing impatience with intensified continuity and the postmodern condition. In Top Gun and even True Romance the audience can easily float with the surface structure and identify with the fantasy of transcending both physical space and cultural time. But in Man on Fire and Domino the audience cannot ignore the deaths of Denzel Washington, Edgar Ramirez, and Mickey Rourke, the irrevocable loss of continuity, and the status of the image not as synergistic decoration or digital simulacrum, but as a symptom and agent of cultural flux and despair. Even in Deja Vu, which retreats somewhat from the volatile aesthetic of Man on Fire and Domino, Scott makes postclassical narrative hyperclassical by allowing Denzel Washington to inhabit the past and present simultaneously. Deja Vu, with its post-Katrina New Orleans, opening terrorist attack, and urgent desire to traverse time and prevent the death of Paula Patton, suggests a shell-shocked United States unable to understand the past or ponder the future — Denzel, in a Butterfly Effect-like matrix of temporal frequency and repetition, dies in one narrative thread even as he emerges unscathed in another. Scott pushes the boundaries of narrative time and space so far he doesn’t need the vomit comet or Domino-Vision to achieve the same measure of indeterminacy. Man on Fire, Domino, and Deja Vu suggest that the only sin Tony Scott has committed is not to anticipate the hyperclassical and the classical-plus sooner. [Larry Knapp, 'Tony Scott and Domino — Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical', Jump Cut, 50, 2008]

Film Studies for Free was shocked, like everyone else, by the news of Tony Scott's death yesterday. Following the news, much of the day was spent reading online assessments of his important filmmaking career.

These frequently centered, of course, on the role of 'excessive style' in his work, and its (some would say, concomitant) lack of narrative motivation. The ground was thus laid for today's tribute list of more than fifty links to academic studies centering on the debates about cinematic 'excess', as well as on issues of intensified (or 'post'-, or 'Chaos') continuity in contemporary film aesthetics.

Rather incredibly, at the weekend, Matthias Stork, talented author of the video essay series on Chaos Cinema, had sent FSFF a link to a draft version of a new video essay featuring Tony Scott's work, which explored some related issues regarding contemporary film aesthetics. Following yesterday's awful news, Stork worked around the clock to develop that essay to provide an important tribute to Scott's work. You can see the video at the top of this entry, and also at Stork's Vimeo page Cine-Essais.

For more tributes to Scott, an essential round up is given at David Hudson's post devoted to 'Tony Scott, 1944 – 2012' at Fandor's Keyframe Daily website.

A very big Danke schön goes to Matthias Stork for all his essential contributions to this entry. 

• Steven William Allen, A pleasure in pain: contemporary mainstream cinema's fascination with the aestheticized spectacle of the controlled body, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003
• Chiara Armentano, '"The Image-Interface": New Forms of Narrative Visualization, Space and Time in Postmodern Cinema', Reconstruction, 8.3 (2008)
• James Aston, 'Terrorist Attack!: The Spectacle of Evil in the Blended Horror of Cloverfield', Scope, no. 16, 2010
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Jean Baudrillard, 'The Matrix Decoded:  Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard', [Translated by: Dr. Gary Genosko and Adam Bryx], International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004) 
• Marko Bauer, 'Pure West: Drive, nostalgia for postmodernism', Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2012
• Tracey Biga, 'The Bulimic Excess and the Films of Peter Greenaway', Spectator,  date unknown
• Michael Bloom, 'Rhetoric of Excess: Hyperbolical Irony as Transcendence in Blue Velvet', Offscreen Journal, Volume 13, Issue 9, 2009 
• David Bordwell, '50 Days of Summer Movies Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009
• David Bordwell,'Forking tracks: SOURCE CODE', Observations on Film Art, May 3, 2011
• Dave Boothroyd, 'Cinematic heroin and narcotic modernity', Symbolism: Journal of Critical Aesthetics Vol.VII , 2007
• Shaun Boutwell, 'The Appeal of Murder in Style: Aestheticization of Violence, Catharsis Theory and the Paradox of Horror Cinema', The Deuce: Grindhouse Cinema Database, 2012 (?)
• Nadia Bozak, 'Four Cameras are Better than One: Division as Excess in Mike Figgis’ Timecode', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008 
• Thomas R. Britt, 'Death, Excess, and Discontinuity: On Lost Highway, Irreversible, and Visitor Q', Bright Lights Film Journal, 62, 2008
  
• Margaret Ervin Bruder, 'Aestheticizing Violence, or How To Do Things with Style',Film Studies archive, Indiana University, 1998
• Melanie Chan, 'Virtually Real and Really Virtual: Baudrillard’s Procession of Simulacrum and The Matrix', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)
• Lucy Fife Donaldson, 'Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre', MOVIE, 1, 2010
• Paul Eisenstein, 'Devouring Holes: Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and the Tectonics of Psychoanalysis',  International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1.3, Autumn 2007 
• Matthew Ferrari, 'Reading Narrative Excess in MMA', Flow, December 4, 2009
• Asbjørn Grønstad, Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema Amsterdam, 2008)
• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010
• Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson, 'World Out of Order: Tony Scott’s Vertigo', Cinema Scope Online, 2012
• Bruce Isaacs, 'The Cinematic Real: Aesthetics and Spectacle', Sydney Studies in English, Vol. 33, 2007 
• Dietmar Kammerer, 'Video Surveillance In Hollywood Movies', Surveillance and Society, 2(2.3), 2004
• Russell J.A. Kilbourn, 'Re-Writing "Reality": Reading The Matrix', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 9.2, Fall 2000, pp 43-54 
  
• Larry Knapp, 'Tony Scott and Domino — Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical', Jump Cut, 50, 2008 
• Jon Lindblom, 'Toward an Ontology of the Image: Deleuze and the Aura of Simulation', Movement Editions, 2010
• Lev Manovich, 'What is Digital Cinema?', Manovich.net, 1995
• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema and Digital Media', in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (eds), Perspectives of Media Art (1996)
• Lev Manovich, 'Moving Image Culture after Computerisation: an outline', 2003
• David Levente Palatinus, "Framing the Body, Staging the Gaze” Representations of the Body in Forensic Crime Fiction and Film, PhD Thesis, Peter Pazmany Catholic University Faculty of Humanities Doctoral School of Literary Studies Theories of Literature and Culture Program Piliscsaba 2009
• Stephen Papson, 'Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: when excess isn’t parody', Jump Cut, 53, 2011
• Michael Piggott, Time and film style, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009
• Nicholas Rombes, 'Avant Garde Realism',  C-Theory.net, January 2005
• Jae Hyung Ryu, 'The Cinema of Special Effects Attractions and Its Representation of Reality: The Comparison between the Early Tricks and Digital Effects', Georgia State University, Georgia, 2004, (Thanhouser.org)
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'Killing in Style: The Aestheticization of Violence in Donald Cammell's White of the Eye', Scope, June 2001
• Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Continuity: full text of my talk', The Pinocchio Theory, March 26, 2012
• Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, 'Gamer', The Pinocchio Theory,  December 15, 2009
• On Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect, In Media Res, August 29-September 2, 2011
• 'Cinema's Exhaustion and the Vitality ...' by Elena del Rio
• 'Post-Cinematic Effects' by Paul Bowman
• 'A hair of the dog that bit us' by Adrian Ivakhiv
• 'Fragments of unconscious' by Patricia MacCormack
• 'Steven Shaviro Presents': A response to the week
• Steven Shaviro, 'Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film', Projections, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2007: 63-82
• Steven Shaviro, 'The Cinematic Body Redux', originally published in Parallax 14:1 (February 2008), 48-54, The Pinocchio Theory
• Matthias Stork, 'In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema', Frames, 1, 2012
  
• Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• David Surman, 'CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds', Gamasutra Education Online, 2003/4 
• Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995
• Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace, 'Terminal Indifference: The Hollywood War Film Post-September 11', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)
• Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess', Ciné-Tracts, 1.2, Summer 1977
• Magnus Ullén, 'The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich', Jump Cut, 52, Summer 2011
• Anja Zagorac, '"A Splinter in Your Mind": Subjectivity, Hyperreality, and Religion in The Matrix', Masters thesis,  University of Vienna/Wien, May 2009
• Added Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, 'Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter', MUBI, August 22, 2012
  

Repulsive Film Studies? New issue of FILM-PHILOSOPHY on Cinematic Disgust

Life's Work: The Films of Roman Polanski - Chapter 5: Repulsion, the Dark Art of Desire written and narrated by Kim Morgan and edited by Matt Zoller Seitz. Video Essay Series hosted by PressPlay at IndieWire

[Tarja] Laine’s insights on disgust have important implications for thinking about the aesthetic paradox of unpleasure. In her assessment, [Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)] offers a particularly pertinent limit-case in which disgust is not readily convertible into pleasurable cognitive satisfaction. Ultimately, her reading of the film suggests that we may need to re-think theories that construct unpleasure as antithetical to aesthetic experience. In this, she joins Korsmeyer and other thinkers who have recently suggested that we may need to abandon the pleasure-unpleasure binary, in favor of thinking about disgust as ‘modifier of attention, intensifying for a host of reasons some experience that the participant would rather have continue than not’ (Korsmeyer 2011, 118). Indeed, as Laine puts it, it is possible that what we value in cinematic renderings of disgust is precisely the ‘vivid and immediate experience’ that it offers us, ‘regardless of its non-pleasurable, non-rewarding features’. [Tina Kendall in her editor's 'Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust' for the Film-Philosophy special issue on Disgust, discussing Tarja Laine's brilliant article for that issue, as well as citing Carolyn Korsmeyer's Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)]

Many of you will already have heard about the new issue of Film-Philosophy that came out in late December, but Film Studies For Free is obsessively completist in its mission to bring you news of notable, open access, film studies, hence this, otherwise possibly superfluous, entry.

Besides, it's a brilliantly provocative special issue which successfully takes explorations of filmic disgust well beyond the, to date, canonical or entrenched Film Studies approaches to film horror. Despite some of the attractions of these approaches, for those of us marking undergraduate essays on horror cinema and television from time to time, this greater plurality of conceptual pathways into these topics is a Very Good Thing - that is, in FSFF's ever so humble view.

Thanks so much for that, and more, Film-Philosophy!

Vol 15, No 2 (2011): The Disgust Issue

Guest Editor: Tina Kendall

Articles

• Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust PDF Tina Kendall
• Toward a Poetics of Cinematic Disgust PDF Julian Hanich
• Imprisoned in Disgust: Roman Polanski's Repulsion PDF Tarja Laine 
• Laura Dern’s Vomit, or, Kant and Derrida in Oz PDF Eugenie Brinkema 
• Chew on This: Disgust, Delay, and the Documentary Image in Food, Inc. PDF Jennifer Marilynn Barker
• Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia PDF Steven Shaviro

Book Reviews

• Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal (2010) Cinema at the Periphery PDF Rowena Santos Aquino
• Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds. (2010) Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead PDF Caroline Walters
• Joseph Mai (2010) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne PDF R. D. Crano
• Boaz Hagin (2010) Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema PDF Richard Lindley Armstrong
• Peter Lee-Wright (2010) The Documentary Handbook PDF Wes Skolits
• William Brown, Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin (2010) Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe PDF Alison Frank
• Richard Misek (2010) Chromatic Cinema PDF Robert Barry
• Alain Badiou (2010) Cinéma PDF Manuel Ramos
• Annie van den Oever, ed. (2010) Ostrannenie PDF Lara Alexandra Cox
• David Martin-Jones (2010) Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities PDF John Marmysz