New issue of SCOPE! Performance and Sound, Lynne Ramsay, Contemporary Hollywood, Film Projection, Surrealism

Frame grab from Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)

Film Studies For Free is thrilled, as ever, to pass on news of a new issue of SCOPE: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies.

The February 2013 issue is packed with goodness, but FSFF particularly liked Sarah Artt's wonderful article on Lynne Ramsay's 2002 film Morvern Callar. This essay will come in very handy in preparation for an event at Birkbeck, University of London, on May 28 when FSFF's author will discuss this film in the first of a great series of explorations of cinematic Itinerancy, Dislocation, Nomadic Subjects

SCOPE: Issue 25 February 2013

Articles

• Being Inside Her Silence: Silence and Performance in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar
  Sarah Artt
• "Family" Entertainment and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
  Noel Brown
• It's Not the Size (of the Screen) that Matters: IMAX, LIEMAX and the "Meaning" of a Brand
  Peter Lester
• Concrete Irrationality: Surrealist Spectators and the Cult of Harry Langdon
  Seth Soulstein

Book Reviews
All Book Reviews

• The Wiley Blackwell History of American Film, Vols. 1-4 Edited by Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann and Art Simon A Review by Paul Elliott
• Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity By Hamilton Carroll and Angel By Stacey Abbott A Review by Ryan Taylor
• The Persistence of Hollywood By Thomas Elsaesser;  Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-Line Edited by Dina Iordanova and Stuart Cunningham; and Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA Edited by Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat A Review by Akshaya Kumar
• Memento By Claire Molloy; Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social Change By Andrew Nestingen; Introduction to Japanese Horror Film By Colette Balmain A Review by Andrea Virginás
• Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film By Steven Rybin; Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective By Marguerite H. Rippy A Review by Nicholas Godfrey
• Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters By Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton; Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image By Catherine Wheatley A Review by Rowena Santos Aquino
• The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film Edited by Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić; Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image By Roger Hallas A Review by Flavia Moncer
• British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure Edited by Sue Harper and Justin Smith; The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema By James Caterer A Review by Katie Bowkett
• Chantal Akerman By Marion Schmid; Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices By Sharon Lin Tay A Review by Tess McClernon

Conference Reports

All Conference Reports

• Media Across Borders. The First International Conference on the Localisation of Film, Television and Video Games  A report by Sylwia Szostak
• Cinema of Intimacy and/or Intimacy of Cinema: The Seventeenth Internationals SERCIA Conference A report by Amanda Konkle
• Living British Cinema Presents the Film Finances Archive  A report by Aoife Sheehy

Latest issues of KINEMA: von Trier, Czech cinema, Romanian cinema, Woody Allen, cult cinema, de Mille, Schnabel, Practice vs. Theory

So bad it's good? Framegrab from The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003). Read Rod Stoneman's study of cult cinema "Inside The Room and Beyond"

Film Studies For Free continues to catch up with (fairly) recently published issues of online Film Studies journals. Below are links to the articles from the Spring and Fall 2011 issues of Canadian journal Kinema.

Lots of good stuff here, and even some good stuff on bad stuff, but FSFF especially recommends Mette Hjort's wonderful article on Lars von Trier.

Fall 2011

• "On Lars von Trier, Enfant Terrible of Danish Art Film: by Mette Hjort
• "Inside The Room and Beyond" by Rod Stoneman
• "Czech Surrealism and Czech New Wave Realism" by Alison Frank
• "Remarks on the Actual Status of Romanian Cinema" Christina Stojanova
• "Moral Luck in the Films of Woody Allen" by Ewa Mazierska

Spring 2011

• "Gerald Arthur Pratley, OC (1923-2011)" by The Editor   
• "Themes in the Cinema of Darrell James Roodt" by Martin P. Botha   
• "The Primacy of Practice?" by Desmond Bell   
• "Cecil B. DeMille and the Art of Applied Suggestibility" by Anton Karl Kozlovic    
• "The Films of Julian Schnabel" by Alex Britton   

In darkened rooms: On Salvador Dalí and cinema (in memory of David Vilaseca)

Screen Test with Salvador Dalí (Andy Warhol, 1966-68) [Read Brian Dillon's article about Warhol's Screen Tests]

"Oh Salvador Dalí, of the olive-colored voice!

[...]

I sing your restless longing for the statue,

your fear of the feelings that await you in the street."

Excerpt from Federico García Lorca, 'Ode to Salvador Dalí'

(first published in Revista de Occidente, Madrid, April 1926)

"The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms."

André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)

"[Un chien andalou/] An Andalusian Dog, one of the most universally acclaimed films in cinema history, is frequently mentioned by critics as a privileged point of reference for the Surrealist rebellion. The film remains enigmatic to this day. Criticism has concentrated on the validity and effectiveness of its images to exemplify the avant-garde attack against social conventions and against the exclusive dominance of rationality in epistemology and social discourse. But this contextual approach does not take account of the script's fragmented narrative, which finds support in Freud's psychoanalytical theories and articulates a radical proposal for identity and culture. Largely neglected by critics, this narrative has been highly influential in the history of cinema. An Andalusian Dog is central to a long list of films that explore different aspects of the irrational, among them Jean Cocteau's Le sang du poète, Hunt Stromberg's The Strange Woman, Guy Debord's script Howling in Favor of the Marquis de Sade, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, [...] David Lynch's Blue Velvet [...].
    Conventionally An Andalusian Dog has been viewed as a film about sexuality; I suggest that sexuality appears in the film as the pretext for a discussion of the threat sexual desire poses for male identity. In this respect, the film develops ideas that begin to appear in paintings completed by Dalí after his initial contact with Freud's works in the mid-1920s. These paintings display male identity as a fragile form of subsistence unfolding between two alternate forces, desire and fear: the desire for sexual realization and the opposed fear that sexual intercourse will conclude in disease and ultimately in death. Given the scarcity of Buñuel's production prior to 1929, I suggest that Dalí's monumental production of paintings during these years served as a preliminary visual point of reference for the design of some of the images in An Andalusian Dog."  Ignacio Javier López, 'Film, Freud, and Paranoia Dalí and the Representation of Male Desire in An Andalusian Dog', Diacritics, 31.2 (2001) 35-48

"[David Vilaseca's] first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."
     Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate." Paul Julian Smith, 'David Vilaseca Obituary', The Guardian, March 11, 2010

Film Studies For Free chooses today -- the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia -- to bring you the second of its posts created in memory of David Vilaseca, the openly gay Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010, having fought against homophobia, in different ways, for much of his life. A recent obituary in the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia also brutally connected these two unassailable facts in its own powerful and poetic tribute to this remarkable scholar and hugely creative writer:

Deberíamos leer a Vilaseca, que supo esquivar la soledad y el desarraigo en un mundo homófobo hasta que este se disfrazó de camión y embistió su bicicleta.

We really should read the works of Vilaseca; he knew how to dodge loneliness and rootlessness in a homophobic world, at least until the latter disguised itself as a truck and rammed into his bicycle.

As Paul Julian Smith indicates in his obituary for his friend (cited above), Vilaseca's PhD thesis, which he turned into an outstanding first book, explored the highly complex question of the homophobia of artist, filmmaker, and fellow Catalan Salvador Dalí through the lens of queer cultural theories. 

Below is a list of direct links to numerous other resources (videos, podcasts, and further, openly-accessible, scholarly material), many of which touch on Dalí's much less well-explored cinematic work in the same contexts as those studied in Vilaseca's book; that is to say, the artist's avowed 'paranoiac-critical method' and the cultural expression of his sexuality. 

[Addendum: For two much less scholarly, but still highly (and, possibly, surprisingly) engaging, fictional examinations of the workings of paranoia and homophobia in the period of Dalí's life prior to the making of Un chien andalou, FSFF's author thoroughly recommends the films Little Ashes (Paul Morrison, 2009), starring Robert Pattinson as Dalí, and Carlos Saura's Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón. (If you need more convincing, please do read Pauline Bache's article on the former film).]

• Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, France, 1928 ) on Google Video
• L'Âge d'Or (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, France/Spain, 1930) on Google Video
• "An Addiction to Cinema: Salvador Dalí", LITERAL: Latin American Voices, Fall 2008
• Ian Christie, 'Lights, Camera, ... Metamorphosis', TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Neil Coombs , 'Introduction', Studying Surrealist and Fantasy Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
• 'Dalí, and the Media', Salvador Dalí Liquid Desire: Melbourne Winter Masterpieces,
• Christopher Jones and José Montes Baquer, 'The Great Collaborator', TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• 'Dalí and Disney's surreal collaboration', TateShots Video Podcast, June 20, 2007 (embedded below) 
• Roy Disney, 'Uncle Walk and Salvador', TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Eugene de Klerk, 'A Striptease in Pink Limelight: Removing the Veil between the Subjective and Objective', eSharp, Issue 5, Summer 2005
• James Magrini , 'Surrealism’s Revisionist Reading of Freudian Psychology: Surreal Film and the Dream', OTHERZINE, Issue 17, Fall 2009 
• Victoria L. McCard, 'Salvador Dalí or the Persistence of Memories --True and False', Ciberletras, Vol. 14, 2005
• Jonas Mekas, 'The Performance Years', TATE ETC, Issue 10, Summer 2007
• Nanette Rißler-Pipka, 'A reflection on his mind: Bergson, perception and memory in Dalí’s writing', Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 21 (2008), 167–178
• Astrid Ruffa, 'Dalí’s surrealist activities and the model of scientific experimentation', Papers of Surrealism, Issue 4, Winter 2005
• 'Salvador Dalí Forgotten Horizon 1936', Modern Painters podcast
• 'Surrealism and Film: Study Day', Tate Modern Webcast - 7 videos 
• 'Un chien andalou, 50 years later', Tabacalera, 2008 
• Alexandre Werneck, 'The Apparitions of a Surrealist Eye: Dalí & Film', Studio International, December 17, 2007

Dreams designed by Dalí for Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Un Chien andalou

'Dalí and Disney's surreal collaboration', TateShots Video Podcast, June 20, 2007

Free podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) of film-scholarly note

Film Studies For Free now has a listing of links to free podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) of film-scholarly note. It is currently headed by a link to the podcast page of the website feminism 3.0 (also accessible via the blog New Research in Feminist Media Art/Theory/History) run by my friend Vicki Callahan of the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee). The podcast currently posted is of an interview with the media artist Cecelia Condit in which she discusses her work. Some of Condit's video work is posted to her website. A nice Afterimage article about Condit's work, by Kelly Mink (Jan-Feb., 1998), is available HERE.

I've also posted a link to the hugely rich Tate Galleries listing of podcasts. Film-scholarly related highlights on this enormous listing include a podcast of the Tate Modern event 25-11-2007 Film Synergies which discussed the practice of Latin-American film co-production with Europe, which became widespread in the 1990s. The event included the screening of the 46-minute documentary Latin America in Co-production (Libia Villazana, UK/Peru 2007), which explores the mechanisms of this practice.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 22-07-2007 Patrick Keiller in which Keiller presents and discusses material from Londres, Bombay (2006), his multi-screen video reconstruction of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) in Mumbai.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 16-06-2007 Surrealism and Film: Study Day, held on the occasion of that gallery's major exhibition 'Dalí & Film', which explored the work of Salvador Dalí in relation to the wider links between surrealism and film.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 24-02-2007 Robert Beavers, about the season dedicated to this American film artist's work.

And there's a whole host of great podcasts on animation (beginning with this one) drawing on the three-day international conference at the Tate Modern 02-03-2007 Pervasive Animation which united speakers from a wide range of research agendas and creative practices, and thus facilitated 'much-needed dialogue centred on the ubiquitous and interdisciplinary nature of animation, its potentially radical future development, and its ethical responsibilities for spatial politics in moving image culture.'

Any suggestions of further links to good film-related podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) from FSFF's readers would be most welcome.