Wide Screen Journal on Film Production Studies

Javier Casanova in Vainilla Chip (Erik Knudsen, 2009) Watch this film here (or here) and read Knudsen's article on his work

Set in the small Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños, just outside Havana, Vainilla Chip tells the story of an ordinary day for an elderly ice cream maker, Javier Rodriguez Casanova. An ordinary day which, like all the other ordinary days, has become painfully pierced by an acute sense of longing for his deceased wife.
     This film is an intimate portrait of a hard working man in a contemporary Cuba far removed from clichés of The Revolution and romanticised memories of Cuban music. Vainilla Chip brings the musicality of one ordinary man’s life to the fore to reveal a universal struggle affecting many people across cultural and political divides. [Erik Knudsen]

We often hear that the power of films lays in their emotional impact. In recent years, some corners of film studies have been preoccupied with the investigation of the senses and the body, which could be related to the view of films in terms of emotions and affect. Much of the filmmaking process rests on creating and communicating this emotional power of the films. Instead of thinking, like Powdermaker did, that the film workers are collectively involved in story-telling, or like Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger, that they are preoccupied with the generation of a particular style of filmmaking, we would like to argue that films are collectively involved in generating, assembling and crafting the emotion of the film. [Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska]

Film Studies For Free is very happy to pass on news that a special issue of the online, Open Access film journal Wide Screen has just been published on "Production Studies". The issue was edited by Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska. The Table of Contents is given below.


Essays

• 'Magic, Emotions And Film Producers: Unlocking The “Black-Box” Of Film Production' by Dorota Ostrowska Abstract PDF HTML

• 'The Film Producer as a Creative Force' by Alejandro Pardo Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Housekeeper of Hong Kong cinema: The role of producer in the system of Hong Kong film industry' by Cindy Chan Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Close Encounters?: Contemporary Turkish Television And Cinema' by Melis Behlil Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Anthology Film. The Future Is Now: Film Producer As Creative Director' by Shekhar Deshpande Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Cinema Of Poverty: Independence And Simplicity In An Age Of Abundance And Complexity' by Erik Knudsen Abstract PDF HTML

• 'Understanding Orlova: Youtube producers, Hot for Words, and some pitfalls of production studies' by Patrick Vonderau Abstract PDF HTML

Wide Screen Journal: on film analysis, film and history, Scorsese, Altman, Panahi, and much more

An image of Lily Tomlin as Linnea Reese in Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975).

Read Chris Louis Durham's new article on this film

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the second issue of the online and Open-Access film studies journal Wide Screen has been published, with a characteristically broad spread of good quality essays.  FSFF particularly enjoyed Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yate's very original Winnicottian study of DVD Culture, and Zélie Asava's essay on Todd Haynes's film I’m Not There (2007).

Below is a list of direct links to each of the main articles. And FSFF has pasted in their abstracts, too, because there's absolutely nothing that this blog likes to do more than to encourage and inform online film-studies reading, even on sunny Saturdays like the one currently tempting its author away from her computer screen...

• Editorial - Kuhu Tanvir

• On Not Being a Fan: Masculine Identity, DVD Culture and the Accidental Collector - Caroline Bainbridge, Candida Yates 
• Abstract: Recent work on DVD and home cinema technologies, audience and the context of reception has tended to focus on fandom, privileging the fanaticism that underpins the etymology of that term. This article is premised on focus group work that suggests, in counterpoint, that many contemporary collectors of DVDs do not see themselves as ‘fans’. What does this mean for the discourses that are developing around the consumption of new media technologies and their role in everyday life? Drawing on interview material, this article discusses the relationship between Western masculinity and the phenomenon of DVD collection. It considers the pleasures of this activity alongside the spaces of resistance it produces and we argue that commentary that interprets such phenomena in terms of fetishism does not account fully enough for what is at stake. Drawing on object relations psychoanalysis, we suggest that the material object of the DVD works in tandem with its psychical equivalent to produce new spaces of exploration and creativity for men. Against the backdrop of the commonplace assumption that masculinity is in ‘crisis’, we suggest that men make use of technologies to forge new spaces of interaction with one another, arguing that this creates new formations through which to think about the cultural structuration of homosociality and its creative potential.

• Aura, Auteurism and the Key to Reserva - Kartik Nair 
• Abstract: This essay revisits some of the most significant and enduring debates over the status of cinema as a popular form. The first debate is over the ‘aura’ and film. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), Walter Benjamin celebrated the democratic moment when technical reproducibility— culminating with film—abolished the centuries-old ‘aura’ of art. Conversely, in “The Culture Industry” (1944), Theodor Adorno lamented the anti-enlightenment standardization wrought by the assembly line under monopoly capitalism, and the movies were for him a primary example of this mindlessness. Arguably, auteurism emerged in the crossfire of the legacies of Benjamin and Adorno. Since it sought to cordon films off from the undistinguished mass of studio ‘product’ by elevating certain film-makers into the rarefied air of individual expression, ‘auteur theory’ may be said to have conferred a plenitude on its chosen few, a plenitude akin to aura. The second debate that I revisit is therefore that between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, a debate surrounding the Americanization of the auteur.
      Finally, the essay concludes with a brief focus on the short film The Key to Reserva (2007), directed by Martin Scorsese. It is a playful 9-minute experiment – part mockumentary, part homage – in which Scorsese attempts to ‘preserve’ a script Hitchcock developed but left unfilmed. I shall attempt to stage The Key To Reserva as an exciting flashpoint for discussions not only of the status of Hitchcock and Scorsese in Hollywood viz. auteur theory, but also as a flashpoint for discussions of mass reproduction and cinema; the commodity form and advertising; standardization and style; anonymity, authorship, and aura.

• Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There - Zélie Asava 
• Abstract: ‘Passing’ narratives question fixed social categorisations and prove the possibility of self-determination, which is why they are such a popular literary and cinematic trope. This article explores ‘passing’ as a performance of identity, following Judith Butler’s (1993) idea of all identity as a performance language. The performance of multiple roles in I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007) draws our attention not only to ‘passing’, ‘morphing’ and cultural hybridity, but also to the nature of acting as inhabiting multiple identities.
  I’m Not There is a biopic of the musician Bob Dylan. It is a fictional account of a real man who, through his ability to plausibly ‘pass’ for a range of personae, has achieved legendary status. It uses four actors, an actress and a black child actor to perform this enigma.
      The performance of multiple identities in this film explores the ‘moral heteroglossia’, that is, the variety and ‘many-languagedness’ (as Mikhael Bakhtin put it) of identity, through its use of multiply raced and gendered actors. But the film’s use of representational strategies is problematic. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) note that mixed-race and black representations are often distorted by a Eurocentric perspective. And, as Aisha D. Bastiaans notes, representation is a process which operates ‘in the absence or displaced presence, of racial and gendered subjects’ (2008: 232). This article argues that I’m Not There, like Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991) video, exploits racial and gendered difference through ‘passing’ and ‘morphing’ narratives, to reinforce the white-centrism of American visual culture.

• Urban Imagination and the Cinema of Jafar Panahi - Sarah Niazi 
• Abstract: The city in Iranian cinema acquires a character of its own. This paper through the exploration of the fabric of Jafar Panahi’s films attempts to evaluate the claims of this statement and deduce in his cinema an ‘aesthetic of veiling’1 as a narrative and enunciative coordinate that defines the post- revolutionary cinema in Iran. Working through a Benjaminian analysis of the urban experience located in the flaneur; the essay will attempt to understand the cinematic flanerie of Panahi’s camera, the perceptual prowess of his children in The White Balloon (1995) and The Mirror (1997) and the adventures of his flaneuse in The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006) as a desire to map the experiential realm of Tehran that is located within the marvellously mundane and the monumental everyday.

• Visual Story Telling and History As A Great Toy in The Lives of Others - Gerry Coulter 
• Abstract: The Lives of Others is an important film for two reasons: 1) it is a striking example of how cinema tells a story by visual means as much as the script (which in this case is much weaker); and 2) the film raises extremely important questions for history in our virtual era, a time when the reach and influence of film makers far extends that of the historian.

• Film Analysis: A Comparison among Criticism, Interpretation, Analysis and Close Analysis - Elisa Pezzotta 
• Abstract: The first aim of this article is to summarize and discuss the definitions of film analysis reported in some of the more well known texts about this subject which were and/or are published in France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States and which are directed to undergraduate and graduate students. Because film analysis is a broad field, firstly, I will distinguish between analysis and criticism and among interpretation, analysis and close analysis. Then, I will underline what are the relationships between analysis and close analysis, what are the main instruments of close analysis, the assumptions of analysis and the goals of both close analysis and analysis.
      This discussion is not exhaustive, but it furnishes a guide to an essential bibliography of film analysis and can aid students to undertake their own analyses with more awareness of their tasks. Finally, I strongly wish to have raised some important questions about the future of film analysis.

• “Bhagat Singh Topless, Waving In Jeans”: Melancholia Through Mimesis In Rang De Basanti - Kshama Kumar 
• Abstract: How is history mapped on the topography of twenty first century India? It seems apt to study the idea through modern India’s largest popular culture industry: Bollywood. This paper will examine the interaction between history and modern India in Rang de Basanti/Paint it Yellow (2006). The film employs history to understand the present. This paper, therefore, seeks to understand the different processes by which the film accomplishes this goal.It will involve a detailed study of the melancholia within the film which allows history and the present to co-exist. Temporal and spatial fluidity is afforded in the film through the mimetic process of the meta-drama, which will also then be studied to better understand the melancholic condition. The melancholic and the mimetic in the film, allow for an examination of the socio-political condition that the film seeks to represent. The film, this paper will argue also employs a critique of modern day governance. The paper will thus come full circle and examine modern day politics as a system of political history in action: pre-colonial politics in a postcolonial world.

• Loss and Mourning: Cinema's 'Language' of Trauma in Waltz with Bashir - Natasha Jane Mansfield 
• Abstract: This paper seeks to analyse Ari Folman’s 2008 animated film Waltz with Bashir from the perspective of psychoanalysis. The aim with any form of story telling is to meaningfully convey a narrative to an intended audience. This paper seeks to address the ways in which the audio/visual characteristics of film allow it to present narrative in terms that are unavailable to the written word. In this case, the form and style specific to animation, provides further avenues for exploration with regard to the narration of trauma. The focus of this paper is the representation of traumatic memory, from the perspective of middle aged men, recalling their teenage experiences of war: in this case the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. The organising framework of Waltz with Bashir is the exploration of memory. It reconstructs experiences of war from a distance of approximately twenty years, using multiple perspectives in order to regain a sense of history. As a result, there are many strategies the film employs to try to weave together the various different narratives into an impression of events coherent enough to engage the audience and lead to some clarification of memory, and yet disparate enough to retain the idea of history as shifting and personal. The analysis also questions the difference in perception between the distance created by an artistic representation of reality through the talents of animators, and the distance created through the lens of a camera.

• “We must be doing something right to last two hundred years”: Nashville, or the American bicentennial as viewed by Robert Altman - Chris Louis Durham 
• Abstract: In this paper, I will discuss Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) in the context of its relationship to bicentennial-era American socio-political culture, contemporary American filmmaking, and other films by Altman. In particular, I will argue that Nashville is typical in its problematic representation of “America,” echoing similarly problematic representations of contemporary America found in a number of films of the period. American society in 1975 anticipated the upcoming bicentennial and presidential election in 1976, but a sense of positive American renewal was complicated by very recent memories of the withdrawal from Vietnam (a matter of weeks before Nashville’s release), Watergate, and the pervasive ideological polarization of the late 1960s onward. Nashville is characterized by both the dystopic narrative structure and the fragmentary visual style common to Altman’s films and numerous “New Hollywood” films of the 1960s and 1970s, and which was symptomatic of a period which for many American filmmakers underlined the inapposite nature of utopian fantasies and the desirability of rejecting the traditionally more ordered, invisible and “objective” style of filmmaking that defined much of the American cinematic past. Nashville’s conscious representation of contemporary America – an America defined in terms of polarized communities, a bankrupt political culture, and the threat of random violence - ensures the film’s resonance as a cultural document, and as such one that merits considered analysis.

Wide Screen Call For Papers on Contemporary European Film and Media Production

Still and Trailer for the latest film from the current master of European film production and multimedia marketing -Pedro Almodóvar's Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces (Spain, 2009)

Film Studies For Free is always happy to post Open-Access related, Film and Media Studies calls for papers. Below is one such call for an OA journal that FSFF has profiled and linked to before: Wide Screen, a peer-reviewed open access academic journal of screen studies that encompasses a multi-disciplinary approach and is devoted to the critical study of cinema and television from historical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic perspectives.

Call For Paper - Special Issue of Wide Screen

European Producers and Production: Contemporary practices in film, television and multimedia environments

Edited by Professor Graham Roberts (Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University) and Dr Dorota Ostrowska (School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck, University of London)

About the Special Issue

This issue of Wide Screen is interested in the ways in which the contemporary media environment has changed the role and function of a producer. We would like to understand new models of production emerging as a result of new media environments (multimedia, game industry, internet). Does the multimedia environment lead to a greater specialisation on the part of particular producers in relation to the content they deliver, or does it result in producers extending their activity into a wider range of media and content? How do the profession, work, role and function of a producer differ depending on the national context in which they function? What is the impact of EU-wide policies on production practices in Europe?

Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Wide Screen invites articles on individual producers focusing on one of the following themes: co-productions, festival circuits (film, television and computer games markets), EU funding programmes and policies, education and training, freelancers vs in-house producers, networking, contracts, creativity, risk-taking, types of producers (creative, executive, line-producers), contracts, relationship with talent (directors, writers, actors), DVD releases (in particular special collectors editions)/DVD companies; production companies; awards and prizes; relationship with distribution and exhibition sector; producers of shorts, documentaries, fiction; sourcing content (book fairs, theatre productions); content ownership; piracy; private funding, sponsorship, equity versus public funding;

Deadline

Deadline for submission of full papers: 10 November, 2009

Guidelines and submission information

Articles should be between 4000 and 6000 words can be submitted using the online submission system: http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/submissions

Wide Screen adheres to a strict double blind review, which is defined here: http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess

Any questions/enquiries should be sent to Dorota Ostrowska (D.Ostrowska@bbk.ac.uk) and Graham Roberts (G.Roberts@ljmu.ac.uk)

Pan's Labyrinth, the Edit Room, and Wide Screen journal

I had added the very nice looking blog Edit Room, a most welcome continuation of the now sadly defunct SubalternCinema (see definition), to Film Studies For Free's blog roll a little while back (annoyingly for me, though, not in time to add it to my - it turns out, non-updateable - scholarly blog poll...). Anyhow, I just got round to taking a much closer look at this wide-ranging blog (up and running since January 2007) and I think it has an enormous amount to recommend it to film-studies scholars and students.

The Edit Room's subtitle/tagline is 'Wide Screen Journal Editors' Blog'. Wide Screen Journal describes itself as

a peer-reviewed, open access journal. It is devoted to the critical study of cinema from historical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. With radical changes in the modes of production, distribution, and exhibition, the journal aims to combine the best of academic and journalistic critique of cinema to inform readers about the various critical vantage points from which to understand cinema in this dynamic environment. (link HERE)

Wide Screen Journal is to be launched fully with its first issue later this year and is currently calling for papers. Here's a snippet from this CFP which you can read in full HERE:

the inaugural issue of Wide Screen aims to critically re-examine cinema against the backdrop of existing hegemonies and re-conceptualise the cinema located in the gaps of the popular. We invite critical papers on "subaltern cinema" and the "subaltern" in cinema.

Wide Screen is edited by Kishore Budha, of the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, UK, Gopalan Ravindran, Dept. of Mass Media and Communication, University of Madras, India, and Kuhu Tanvir, a journalist with NDTVmovies.com, an Indian television news and entertainment company.

To return to the subject of the Edit Room, which is also run by Budha, Ravindran and Tanvir, this blog is usefully organised around the following film-cultural and film-studies related categories: Books, Call for Papers, Film and Politics, Film and Society, Film and Technology, Film Festivals, Film Industry, Film Policy, Film Reviews, Film Theory, Must Read, and Uncategorized (!).

There is a welcome emphasis, across all these blog-post categories, on global, subaltern, articulations of cinema, and some really high quality reflection, in particular, on Hindi, Tamil, and other South Asian cinemas.

But one of the items in the Edit Room that most caught my eye (with my own particular research interest in contemporary auteurism, as well as in Spanish-language cinema) was Kuhu Tanvir's discussion of Guillermo del Toro's 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno, Mexico/Spain/USA). Tanvir's article, entitled Pan's Labyrinth of History (also accessible via the Edit Room's Must Read category page), explores the allegorical and fantastic aspects of del Toro's film more deftly, concisely, and powerfully than any other piece of writing on the film that I have yet come across (and I have read quite a few...).

Here's a taste of Tanvir's subtle take on del Toro's film, from near the beginning of her discussion:

In a film based on a fascist camp in Spain during the Second World War it would be easy to think that Ofelia [the film's young protagonist] will use the fantastic as a space where she can escape Vidal [her new step-father] and his cruelties. And that del Toro will use the fantastic as symbolic of the real, in a way masking it. This is precisely what he does not do.

Tanvir wears her undoubtedly fine scholarship nice and lightly. She is as happy to support her argument with quotes from good quality online interviews with del Toro (such as this About.com one HERE) as she is with theory drawing upon Hayden White's "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality".

And why shouldn't she, and we, be happy thus? 'Open Access' oughtn't just to mean 'open and accessible' in a mere technical sense, but also 'open and accessible' intellectually, wherever possible. Tanvir's article, in particular, and the Edit Room, in general, are rich, scholarly, open, and accessible resources, as, I'm sure, the Wide Screen journal will also be in due course. Good luck to the latter and I hope that FSFF's readers will both enjoy and benefit from exploring what it and its stable mate have to offer.