Screen Attachments: new Issue of SCREENING THE PAST

Framegrab from Nuovo cinema Paradiso/Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), a film which is the starting point of film theorist Francesco Casetti in his new article "Cinema Lost and Found"

Film Studies for Free rushes you the wonderful news that a special issue (no. 32) of Screening the Past has just gone online. The issue treats the topic of Screen Attachments and is edited by Catherine Fowler and Paola Voci. 

The obvious highlight is a brilliant article by Francesco Casetti, but a quick glance at all the other articles indicates a very high quality issue indeed. FSFF's own favourite is Fowler and Voci's study 'Brief Encounters: Theorizing Screen Attachments Outside the Movie Theatre', with its compelling use of Sara Ahmed's notion of orientation.

The Classics and Reruns section also has some real gems.

Screen Attachments

• "Screen Attachments: An Introduction" by Paola Voci and Catherine Fowler
• "Cinema Lost and Found: Trajectories of Relocation" by Francesco Casetti
• "DVD Screen Culture for Children: Theories of Play and Young Viewers" by Karin Beeler
• "Brief Encounters: Theorizing Screen Attachments Outside the Movie Theatre" by Catherine Fowler and Paola Voci
• "Fingers, Futures, Fates: Viewing Interactive Cinema in Kinoautomat and Sufferrosa"by Jenna Ng
• "Waterbodies: Moving-image installations at Termemilano Spa" by Adriano D′Aloia
• "A Minoritarian Digital Poetics of YouTube" by Eu Jin Chua 
• "Rethinking Screen Encounters: Cinema and Tamil Migrant Workers in Singapore" by Vijay Devada

Classics and Reruns

• The Artist as Ecologist by Gene Youngblood
• Cerebrum: Intermedia and the Human Sensorium by Gene Youngblood
• Intermedia Theatre  by Gene Youngblood
• What is Digital Cinema? by Lev Manovich

Reviews

• The Fall of Buster Keaton by Anna Gardner
• Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry by David Ehrenstein
• Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition by Daniel Fairfax
• Television as Digital Media by Gin Chee Tong
• Twilight of the Idols by Jonathan Auerbach
• Drawn To Sound: Animation Film Music and Sonicity by Johnny Milner
• Terry Gilliam (British Film Makers) by Josh Nelson
• Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era by Meredith A. Bak
• The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Mas Generis
• Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities by Miriam Ross
• Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age by Mike Walsh
• The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film by Patricia Aufderheide
• Steven Soderbergh by Paul Ramaeker
• Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History by Roger Hillmann
• Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema by Tom Salek
• Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship by Tony Williams
• Counter-Archive. Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète by Jan-Christopher Horak
• Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema by Gerald Sim

On 'Affect' and 'Emotion' in Film and Media Studies

Image from Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992), a film explored by Tim Groves in 'Cinema/Affect/Writing'

Emotion is a phenomenon that, according to [Sergei] Eisenstein, "is completely identical with the primary phenomenon of cinema. [In cinema] movement is created out of two motionless cells. Here, a movement of the soul, i.e. emotion (from the Latin root motio = movement), is created out of the performance of a series of incidents." ([Towards a Theory of Montage] 145, emphasis in original). Properly structured as a series of uncompleted incidents, montage calls on us to finish the actions mentally, and for Eisenstein this internal movement of filling in the gaps is emotion, a movement of the soul. [Greg M. Smith, Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein's Writings', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.4 (October-November 2004) 303-315 citing Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage. Trans. Michael Glenny. Ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor. London: BFI Publishing, 1991; hyperlinks added]

[H]ow to write about specific, personal affective experiences of the cinema? [...]

It is difficult for me to articulate, but I was affected [in Unforgiven] by the conjunction of lighting, costuming, and the melancholy, homicidal figure of [Clint] Eastwood in the final shootout in Greely’s. The mise en scène of this confrontation repeats that of the night of Will’s beating at the hands of Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). The lack of contrast in lighting and the orange and brown colours of both the characters’ costumes and saloon setting cause the characters to merge into their surroundings. It is literally difficult to see what is happening. While William Munny and the Eastwood persona are constructed as unforgiven in this scene, somewhere in the gloom I found a metaphor for the ambivalence of their forgiveness across the entire film. As a result, I declined to judge this “notoriously vicious and intemperate” figure, as he is labelled in [the film]. Instead I forgave him. I saw his thinning hair and the wounds engraved on his face, and reached out to tend to them. Forgiveness was the punctum which I found in Unforgiven and which is already there in the text, if ambiguously. [...]

But I cannot write your cinema/sadness . . . [Tim Groves, 'Cinema/Affect/Writing', Senses of Cinema, February 2003 hyperlinks added]

Film Structure and the Emotion System is concerned with this emotion system's structure, rather than with particular emotions themselves. This is not a book about sadness or joy; instead it deals with the foundational structures that make such emotions possible. Culturally nuanced work on particular emotions certainly needs to be done, but we should make sure that we first understand the basic principles of how the emotion system is constructed. [Greg M. Smith, 'An Invitation to Feel', Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) hyperlinks added]

The elicitation of affect in the audience stands firmly at the core of the film-going experience, figuring into the poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and ideology of film viewing. If our goal is to understand how mainstream viewers experience films, if we want to explore the cultural role of movies, if we wish to expand our conception of the poetics of the cinema, then we cannot ignore the place of emotion elicitation and affective experience within film viewing. [Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006 hyperlinks added]

In their work, [Torben] Grodal, [Greg M.] Smith, and [Carl] Plantinga all rely on a “downstream flow” of perception, cognition, emotional processing in narrative film. It is a uni-directional flow; the viewers see, they comprehend, they experience emotion. However, underlying all of their work are Silvan Tomkins’s foundational studies of affect from the 1960s. Tomkins’s analyses make possible a more complicated multi-directional understanding of affect [...]. Tomkins explored affect as located in the voice, skin, autonomic nervous system, hand, body, and most extensively, the face. Rather than perceive affect and emotion as developing outward from the inner organs as Henri Bergson, William James, or Carl Lange had suggested, Tomkins and his colleagues Carrol Izard and Paul Ekman focused mostly on the face as “an organ for the maximal transmission of information, to the self and to others” and concluded that “the information it transmits is largely concerned with affects.” This is the point on which narrative film studies has focused. [Randall Halle, 'Toward a Phenomenology of Emotion in Film: Michael Brynntrup and The Face of Gay Shame', MLN, Vol. 124, No. 3, April 2009 (German Issue), pp. 683-707; hyperlinks added]

AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body …  [Brian Massumi, 'Introduction' to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, xvi, cited by Eric Shouse, 'Feeling, Emotion, Affect', M/C Journal, 8.6, 2005]

Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalising upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation and distribution. They generate subjectivity and they play a crucial role in the valorisation of capital. Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance. [...]
     What does it mean to describe such processes in terms of affect? Here I follow Brian Massumi ([Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press] 2002, 23-45) in differentiating between affect and emotion. For Massumi, affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified and meaningful, a ‘content’ that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions. [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]

There is not one ‘affect’, nor even one economy, ecosystem or ecology of affect(s); just as there is not one reading of one text. Post-cinematic effects, yes; Shaviro makes an important observation. But affects? I’m not so sure why or how they would be different from everything that postmodern theorists have long been saying about postmodernity. The ultimate question, to me, is whether approaching the world in terms of affect offers anything specific for cultural theory and the understanding of culture and politics. [Paul Bowman, 'Post-Cinematic Effects', In Media Res Theme Week on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect (August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011)]

It is almost too easy to speak of affect—as if, by using this term, one had cleansed all the embarrassment and messiness from the experience. To use “affect” in the sense defined by Deleuze and Guattari, that is, as non-conscious and non-linguistic experience of intensity, appears not to be useful if one wants to explore the overlap of rationality and emotionality, as well as insist on the textual and self-reflexive—that is, self-augmenting and self-attenuating—character of emotionality. [Katrin Pahl, 'Emotionality: A Brief Introduction', Modern Language Notes, Volume 124, Number 3, April 2009 (German Issue)]

Today, Film Studies For Free makes one of its regular, little, curatorial contributions to a particular Film Studies theoretical debate. This time, it's the turn of an exploration of some much-fought-over keywords pertaining to film and media theories of feelings and related bodily and psychological experiences and behaviours - most notably, the terms 'Affect' and 'Emotion'.

The 'Affective Turn' is a rich, if at times rather complex or befuddling, vein of film studies thinking, with an array of approaches ranging from the historical-political (e.g. von Moltke's article), to the cognitivist (for example, see Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith) through the psychoanalytic (for example, see Groves' essay) and the (post-)Deleuzo-Guattarian (for a good, clear introduction, read Anna Powell's article).

As always, in the below list of links to openly accessible online studies, the ever pluralist FSFF doesn't come down on any one theoretical side. But this collection does go out especially to all those who have been curious about, or confused and dumbfounded by, the undoubted buzzword quality, particularly, of 'affect' in Film and Media Studies in the last ten to fifteen years.

• Marco Abel, 'Intensifying Affect', Electronic Book Review, October 2008

• Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs, ' Media, Affect and the Face: Biomediation and the Political Scene', Southern Review 38.2 (2006)

• Philip Bell, 'Cultural Studies as Neo-Psychology: Comments on B. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (2002)', Porceedings of Hawaian International Conference on Social Sciences, 2003

• Jamie Skye Bianco, 'Affective | Reading | Affect', draft for Cross Media Movements [date unknown]

• Lisa Blackman and John Cromby, 'Affect and feeling', International Journal of Critical Psychology, 21, 5-22 (2007)

• Paul Bowman, 'Post-Cinematic Effects', Jacques Rancière, July 26, 2011

• Will Brooker, 'Brief Tears I: Gin Talking' in Michele Byers and David Lavery (eds), On the Verge of Tears: Why the Movies, Television, Music, Art, Popular Culture, Literature, and the Real World Make Us Cry (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010)

• Giuliana Bruno, 'Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Archictecture and Film', Talk at Institut de la Ville en Mouvement, 2001(?)

• Giuliana Bruno, 'Motion and Emotion: Film and Haptic Space', 13.2, 2010

• Sarah Cefai, 'Unhappy Families [Review of Sara Ahmed, The 
Promise
 of 
Happiness
, 2010]', Cultural Studies Review, 17.1, March 2011

• Hsiao-hung Chang, 'Transnational Affect: Cold Anger, Hot Tears, and Lust, Caution', Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.1 March 2009: 31-50

• Eu Jin Chua, '[Review of] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.', BMRCL, 6.2, Fall 2007

• Annabel Cohen, 'Music as a Source of Emotion in Film',  in J. Sloboda and (Eds.). Music and emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 245-268

• Amy Coplan, 'Catching Characters' Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

• Eric Crosby, 'An Aesthetic of Wonderment: IMAX and Affect',  Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 6, 2007

• Gilles Deleuze, 'The Affection-image: Face and Close-up', Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986 (Google Books Limited Preview)

• Jens Eder, 'Ways of Being Close to characters', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

• Kathrin Fahlenbrach, 'The Emotional Design of Music Videos. Approaches to Audiovisual Metaphors', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 4, 2005

• Jonathan Frome , 'Representation, Reality, and Emotions Across Media', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

• Patrick W. Galbraith, 'Moe: Exploring Virtual Potential in Post-Millennial Japan', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, October 31, 2009

• Wendy Gan, "0.01cm: Affectivity and Urban Space in Chungking Express." Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, November 2003

• Gary Genosko, 'A Tale of Two Virtuals', TOPIA 10, Fall 2003

• Anna Gibbs, 'Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect', Australian Humanities Review, December 2001

• Jeremy Gilbert, 'Signifying Nothing: "Culture", "Discourse" and the Sociality of Affect', Culture Machine, Vol. 6, 2004

• Alessandro Giovannelli, Artistic and Ethical Values in the Experience of Narratives, PhD Thesis, University of Maryland, 2004

• Rebecca Gordon, 'Remakes, Genre, and Affect: The Thriller-Chiller-Comedy as Case Study' Paper at MLA Conference, 2007

• Sneja Gunew, 'Subaltern Empathy: Beyond European Categories in Affect Theory', Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.1 March 2009: 11-30

• Torben Grodal , 'The PECMA Flow: A General Model of Visual Aesthetics', Film Studies, Vol. 8, Summer 2006

• James J. Gross and Robert W. Levenson, 'Emotion elicitation using films', Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 9, No. 1. (1995), 87-108

• Tim Groves, 'Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006

• Tim Groves, 'Cinema/Affect/Writing', Senses of Cinema, February 2003

• Gay Hawkins, 'Documentary Affect: Filming Rubbish', Australian Humanities Review, September 2002

• William Hope, Excerpt from Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion, Cognition, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006)

• In Media Res Theme Week on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect [August 29 - Sept. 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
• A response to the week by Steven Shaviro

• Barbara M. Kennedy, 'Choreographies of the Screen', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2002

• Anu Koivunen & Susanna Paasonen (eds), Conference proceedings for Affective Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment in Feminist Media Studies (Media Studies, Turku 2000)

[Contents: Anu Koivunen, Preface: The Affective Turn?; Sara Ahmed, Communities that feel: Intensity, Difference and Attachment; Ana Paula Baltazar, Architecture as Interface: Forming and Informing Spaces and Subjects; Jennifer Lyon Bell, Character and Cognition in Modern Pornography; Rosemary Betterton, Spaces of Memory: Photographic Practices of Home and Exile; Joanna Bouldin, The Body, Animation and The Real: Race, Reality and the Rotoscope in Betty Boop; Hannu Eerikäinen, Love Your Prosthesis Like Yourself: ‘Sex’, Text and the Body in Cyber Discourse; Taru Elfving, The Girl in Space-time Encounters with and within Eija-liisa Ahtila’s Video Installations; Amy Herzog, Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory; Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas, Inventing “African Solutions”, HIV Prevention and Medical Media; Sanna Karkulehto, Effects and Affects of Queer as Folk; Martta Kaukonen, ”I Must Reveal a Shocking Secret” Transvestites in American Talk Shows; Jane Kilby, Tracking Shock: Some Thoughts on TV, Trauma, Testimony; Emmy Kurjenpuu, Women’s Magazines Meet Feminist Philosophy; Minna Lahti, “I Thought I Would Become a Millionaire” – Desire and Disillusionment in Silicon Valley, California; Mari-Elina Laukkanen, Ladies for Sale. The Finnish Press as a Profiteer; Ilmari Leppihalme, Do Muscles Have a Gender? A Female Subject Building her Body in the Film Pumping Iron II: The Women; Justine Lloyd and Lesley Johnson, The Three Faces of Eve:the Post-war Housewife, Melodrama and Home; Tapio Mäkelä, Re-reading Digitality through Scientific Discourses of Cybernetics: Fantasies of Disembodied Users and Embodied Computers; Norie Neumark, E/motional Machines: Esprit de Corps; Kaarina Nikunen, Dangerous Emotions? Finnish Television Fans and Sensibilities of Fandom; Sanna Ojajärvi, Visual Acts - Choreography of Touches, Glances and Movements between Hosts and Assistants on Television; Susanna Paasonen, Best Wives are Artefacts? Popular Cybernetics and Robot Women in the 1970s; Megan D. Pincus, Must They Be Famous Vaginas? The Effect and Affect of Celebrity on The Vagina Monologues and V-Day 2001; Liina Puustinen, Gender for Sale, Advertising Design as Technologies of Gender; Leena-Maija Rossi, Why Do I Love and Hate the Sugarfolks in Syruptown? Studying the Visual Production of Heteronormativity in Television Commercials; Christine Ross, Depression and Video Art at the Turn of the Millennium: The Work Of Diana Thater; Janne Rovio, The Vintage Van Damme Look; Moira Sullivan, Lesbographic Pornography; Rebecca Sullivan, Biotechnological Embodiment: Gender and Scientific Anxiety in Horror Films; Heidi Tikka, Missing the Point - Situated User Experience and the Materiality of Interaction; Julia Turnock, A Cataclysm of Carnage, Nausea, and Death: Saving Private Ryan and Bodily Engagement; Pasi Väliaho, An Audiovisual Brain: Towards a Digital Image of Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma; Hans Wessels, The Positioning of Lou Reed from a Profeminist Perspective; Jennifer Willet, Imagining the Self]

• Tarja Laine, 'Chapter 1: Intersubjectivity in Film Studies', in Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (Peter Lang Publishing, 2007)

• Marcia Landy, 'Traveling in Film Theory: Giuliana Bruno's Atlas of Emotion', Film-Philosophy, vol. 7 no. 44, November 2003

• Marcia Landy, 'Melodrama: Short Reflections on a Long Subject', Kinocultura, 17, 2007

• Petri Lankoski, 'Goals, Affects, and Empathy in Games', Paper at the Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games, Modena reggio Emilia, Italy, January 25-27, 2007

• Petri Lankoski, Character-Driven Game Design, (Aalto University, 2010)

• Amparo Lasén, 'Mobile Media and Affectivity: Some Thoughts about the notion of Affective Bandwidth', in Höflich, Joachim R. / Kircher, Georg F. / Linke, Christine / Schlote, Isabel (eds.) Mobile Media and the Change of Everyday Life (New York: Peter Lang, 2010)

• David Lavery, 'The Crying Game', in Michele Byers and David Lavery (eds), On the Verge of Tears: Why the Movies, Television, Music, Art, Popular Culture, Literature, and the Real World Make Us Cry (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010)

• Scott D. Lipscomb and D. E. Tolchinsky, 'The role of music communication in cinema', in D. Miell, R. MacDonald,  and D. Hargreaves' (Eds.), Musical Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 [pre-publication draft]

• Patricia MacCormack, 'A Cinema of Desire: Cinesexuality and Guattari’s Asignifying Cinema', Women: A Cultural Review, 2005

• Brian Massumi, 'REALER THAN REAL: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari', Originally published in Copyright no.1, 1987

• Brian Massumi, 'EVERYWHERE YOU WANT TO BE: Introduction to Fear', in The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)

• Kevin McHugh, 'Celestal Fire', Aether Vol. 1, 34–38, October 2007 

• Benjamin Meade, 'Emotional Response to Computer Generated Special Effects: Realism Revisited', Journal of Moving Studies, Vol. 1, 2002

• David S. Miall, 'Feeling from the Perspective of the Empirical Study of Literature', JLT 1: 2 (2007), 377–393

• Johannes von Moltke, 'Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion - A Feeling for History', New German Critique 102, Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 2007

• Christopher M. Moreno, 'Affecting and Affective Social/Media Fields', Aether Vol. 1, 39–44, October 2007

• Angela Ndalianis, '[Review of] PARABLES FOR THE VIRTUAL: Movement, affect, sensation by Brian Massumi. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002', Leonardo Digital Reviews, February 2003

• Brian L. Ott, 'The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema', eventually published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Volume 27 Issue 1, March 2010

• Katrin Pahl, 'Emotionality: A Brief Introduction', Modern Language Notes, Volume 124, Number 3, April 2009 (German Issue)

• Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, 'Biology's Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect', Body and Society, 2010, 16: 29

• Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, 'Introduction' in Plantinga and Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Chicago: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

• Carl Plantinga and Ed Tan, 'Running head: Interest and unity in the emotional response to film', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 5, 2006 

• Carl Plantinga, 'Emotional Response Model', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 5, 2006

• Carl Plantinga, 'Film Theory and Aesthetics: Notes on a Schism', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53.1, Summer 1993

• Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006 

• Carl Plantinga and Ed Tan, 'Is an overarching theory of affect in film viewing possible?', Journal of Moving Image Studies 4 (2007)

• Anna Powell, 'Ripper’s Bodies–without–Organs: Affect and Psychogeography under the scalpel in From Hell', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 7, December 2009

• John Protevi, '[Review of] Melissa Greeg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)', Culture Machine, July 2011

• Effie Rassos, 'Everyday Narratives: Reconsidering Filmic Temporality and Spectatorial Affect Through the Quotidian,' PhD, University of New South Wales, 2005

• Gopalan Ravindran, 'The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory',Bright Lights Film Journal, 63, February 2009

• Karen Renner , 'Repeat Viewings Revisited: Emotions, Memory, and Memento', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006

• Elena del Río, 'Foreword: What a Scene Can Do', Cinephile, Vol. 5, Issue 2, 2009

• Elena del Río, 'Ararat and the Event of the Mother', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 17.2, Fall 2008

• 'Roundtable Discussion: The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 (with Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham)', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011

• Anne Rutherford, 'Cinema and Embodied Affect', Senses of Cinema, Issue 25, 2003

• Shelley Day Sclater, Candida Yates, Heather Price and David W. Jones, 'Introducing PsychosocialStudies of Emotion', in Sclater, Yates, Price and Jones (eds), Emotion: New Psychosocial Perspectives(London: Palgrave, 2009)

• Steven Shaviro, 'The Cinematic Body Redux', parallax 14:1 (February 2008): 48-54

• Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
   
• Steven Shaviro, 'Excerpt from Post-Cinematic Affect (I): Gamer', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011
   
• Steven Shaviro, 'Excerpt from Post-Cinematic Affect (II): Coda', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011
   
• Steven Shaviro, 'Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film', Projections, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2007: 63-82

• Eric Shouse, 'Feeling, Emotion, Affect', M/C Journal, 8.6, 2005

• Robert Sinnerbrink, 'Time, Affect, and the Brain: Deleuze’s Cinematic Aesthetics', Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008

• Greg M. Smith, 'An Invitation to Feel', Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

• Greg M. Smith, Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein's Writings', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.4 (October-November 2004) 303-315

• Greg M. Smith, 'Reflecting on the Image: Sartrean Emotions in the Writings of André Bazin', Film and Philosophy, 10 (2006)

• Greg M. Smith, 'Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure' in Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Chicago: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

• Murray Smith, 'The Sound of Sentiment: Popular Music, Film, and Emotion', 16:9, 11, 2006

• Murray Smith, 'Empathy and the Extended Mind', University of Kent, Aesthetic Research Group Seminar Series 2006-7 Research Papers

• Monica Swindle, 'Feeling Girl, Girling Feeling: An Examination of "Girl" as "Affect"', Rhizomes, 22 2011

• John D. Teasdale et al, 'Functional MRI Study of the Cognitive Generation of Affect', American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, February 1999

• Imogen Tyler, 'Methodological Fatigue and the Politics of the Affective Turn', Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2008

• Cam Nhung Vu, Regarding Vietnam: Affects in Vietnamese and Vietnament Disasporic Literature and Film, PhD Thesis, University of Southern California, May 2010

• Imanol Zumalde-Arregi , 'The filmic emotion. A comparative analysis of film theories', Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 66, 2011, 326-349

Articles from the New Review of Film and Television Studies

Images from The Story of Adèle H. (François Truffaut, 1975) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) - two films referred to in Agustín Zarzosa's article 'Jane Campion's The Piano: melodrama as mode of exchange'

Film Studies For Free was very happy to hear that the excellent journal New Review of Film and Television Studies is now offering free access to a great selection of essays, including a recent offering by Thomas Elsaesser on Avatar, and translations from Christian Metz's book Impersonal Enunciation.

As well as the marvellous aforementioned items, FSFF also highly recommends the articles by Mette Kramer and Agustín Zarzosa.

All freely accessible material is linked to below. 

• Cinema and the two cultures: Robert Lepage's La face cachée de la lune by Sylvie Bissonnette

• Introduction to Christian Metz's Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film by Cormac Deane

• James Cameron's Avatar: access for all by Thomas Elsaesser

• The embrace of Mother Nature: appraisal processes and the regulation of affect in attachment genres by Mette Kramer

• Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts) by Christian Metz and Translated by Cormac Deane

• A lightning-image of the kaleidoscope: a review of Päsi Valiaho's Mapping the Moving Image by Imola Mikó

• The narrative structuring and interactive narrative logic of televised professional wrestling by Aaron J. Petten

• Review of Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style by Barry Salt

• Jane Campion's The Piano: melodrama as mode of exchange by Agustin Zarzosa

Links on videographical film criticism, editing, 'intensified continuity', 'chaos cinema', 'hapticity' and (post) cinematic affect

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT?

A FILMANALYTICAL video collage, made by Catherine Grant

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? offers a brief audiovisual exploration of issues of sensuous proximity, contiguity or contact in experiencing or studying films - what theorist Laura U. Marks called 'hapticity'. It quotes from Marks' essay 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes' [in FRAMEWORK: the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004, pp. 79-82], as well as from Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film PERSONA (cinematography by Sven Nykvist). The music is excerpted from Robert Lippok and Beatrice Martini's BRANCHES, available at the Free Music Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can read an accompanying written essay about this video and videographic film studies here.

A ragbag of links, today, at Film Studies For Free. But this blog wanted to flag up some recently published, and curiously related, audiovisual items of possible interest, together with some associated written resources.

First up, is the video above, the latest of FSFF's videographic film studies experiments. Compared with FSFF's other videos, this film-theoretical one turned out to be a close kin of two earlier video 'primers' (on Gilda, film noir, gender and performance and on Elizabeth Taylor, framing and child stardom/performance). As befits primers, rather than

aiming to generate completely new insights, [these 'rich text objects' attempt], within the time-space of the average YouTube fan clip, to assemble and combine quotations from existing film scholarship on [their topics] with sequences from the film in question in order to provide a meaningful, scholarly and affective, immersive experience. [FSFF, April 7, 2011]

If you are beginning to be invested in, or just mildly curious about, the possibilities of videographic film criticism and film theory, then do read 'Touching the Film Object? Notes on the 'Haptic' in Videographical Film Studies' by Catherine Grant at FSFF's sister blog Filmanalytical, and also check out further links and thoughts here.

Next up, a pointer to an exciting, film-theory related, theme week at the great website In Media Res on Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect, running between August 29 - Sept. 2, 2011.

There are a couple of interesting entries up already, with very lively comments streams. Further links will be added below as the posts go live. In the meantime, you can read a lengthy excerpt from Shaviro's book on Post-Cinematic Affect here. And do visit his blog where you will find lots more material from this work.

• '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

Finally, FSFF wanted to make sure that its own readers were alerted to a very lively debate on 'intensified continuity' and 'chaos cinema' in relation to the action film (broadly defined) that has sprung up online as a result of the publication of a two part video essay on those topics at the wonderful new (video-essay-rich) website PressPlay, curated by film critic and video essayist extraordinaire Matt Zoller Seitz. The 'Chaos Cinema' essay, embedded below, is by a young film scholar Matthias Stork and is well worth a look.

Below the videos, FSFF has linked to related online, scholarly and journalistic items treating substantially similar issues as 'Chaos Cinema', published before his essay, as well as to ones produced directly in response to Stork's work.

Enjoy! 

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork.

The video essay Chaos Cinema, administered by Indiewire's journalistic blog PRESS PLAY, examines the extreme aesthetic principles of 21st century action films. These films operate on techniques that, while derived from classical cinema, threaten to shatter the established continuity formula. Chaos reigns in image and sound. Part 1 contrasts traditional action films with chaotic ones and takes a close look at the "sound" track, especially its use in car chases.

Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork.

Part 2 takes a look at the chaotic style in dialogue scenes, musicals, "shaky-cam" extravaganzas and mourns the rich history of early cinema.

• David Bordwell, 'Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film', originally in Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 16-28
• David Bordwell, 'Intensified Continuity Revisited', Observations of Film Art, May 2007
• David Bordwell, 'Unsteadicam Chronicles', Observations on Film Art, August 17, 2007
• David Bordwell, 'Bond vs. Chan: Jackie shows how it’s done', Observations on Film Art, September 15, 2010
  
• Steven Boone, 'Blind Fury: Notes on Chaos Cinema', PressPlay, August 27, 2011
• Chris Cagle, 'More on (Post-)Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 18, 2007
• Jim Emerson, 'Agents of Chaos', Scanners, August 23, 2011
• Jim Emerson, 'The Architecture of Gravity', Scanners, January 20, 2009
• Jim Emerson, 'Bye, Sally -- Sally Menke, 1953 - 2010', Scanners, September 28, 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'Seeing the join: on film editing', Film Studies For Free, April 16, 2010
• Ian Grey, 'The Art of Chaos Cinema', PressPlay, August 26, 2011
• Ambrose Heron, 'Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the AVID', Film Detail, August 23, 2011
• Kevin Howley, 'Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction', Scope May 2004
• Neal King, 'Secret Agency in Mainstream Postmodern Cinema', Postmodern Culture, 18.3, 2008 
• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'Structural completeness in The War Is Over', Short Film Studies, 1.1, 2010
• Catherine O'Rawe, 'More more Moro: Music and montage in Romanzo criminale', the italianist 29 · 2009 · 214-226
• Steven Shaviro, 'Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films', The Pinocchio Theory, May 12, 2010
• Matthias Stork, 'Chaos Cinema: The decline and fall of action filmmaking', PressPlay, August 22, 2011
• James Udden, 'Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuaron’s Film Aesthetics in the Shadow of Globalization', Style, Volume 43, No. 1, Spring 2009
• Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Why are so many modern action movies terrible?', PressPlay, August 25, 2011

From Screen: essays on screen theory, art film and affect, and early Japanese and Chinese cinema

Image from The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) 

Film Studies For Free was ever so happy to discover that Screen, the leading international journal of academic film and television studies -- a journal with which FSFF's author has been proud to be associated as an editorial advisory board member since 1995 -- has a number of wonderful articles and reviews which have been made freely accessible online in full-text and pdf formats.  

This blog particularly liked the essays, linked to below, by Annette Kuhn (a great reflection on screen theorizing on the occasion of Screen's 50th anniversary) and by Barbara Klinger in which she revisits film theories of affect as well as the debates around Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano.

This blogpost won't mean too much to those readers who can take institutional subscriptions to Screen for granted, but FSFF knows it will be appreciated by many others, in lots of different parts of the world, who don't enjoy that particular scholarly benefit.
 
Volume 50, Number 1, Spring 2009 (50th anniversary issue)

• Annette Kuhn, Screen and screen theorizing today Screen 2009 50: 1-12; doi:10.1093/screen/hjp001[FREE Full Text][PDF]

Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2006 (first fully digital issue)

• Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘A fine and private place’: the cinematic spaces of the London Underground' Screen 2006 47: 1-17; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl001 [Abstract][FREE Full Text][PDF]

• Barbara Klinger, The art film, affect and the female viewer: The Piano revisited Screen 2006 47: 19-41; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl002 [Abstract][FREE Full Text][PDF]

• Gregory A. Walle, Narrating the new Japan: Biograph's The Hero of Liao-Yang (1904) Screen 2006 47: 43-65; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl003 [Abstract][FREE Full Text][PDF] 

• Laikwan Pang,Walking into and out of the spectacle: China's earliest film scene Screen 2006 47: 66-80; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl004[Abstract][FREE Full Text][PDF]

Research note 

• Deborah Allison, Multiplex programming in the UK: the economics of homogeneity Screen 2006 47: 81-90; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl005[FREE Full Text][PDF]
  

Debate 

• Sylvia Harvey, Ofcom's first year and neoliberalism's blind spot: attacking the culture of production Screen 2006 47: 91-105; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl006[FREE Full Text][PDF] 

• Don Reddin, The non-democratic regulator: a response to Sylvia Harvey Screen 2006 47: 107-111; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl007 [FREE Full Text][PDF]

Report 

• Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Rune Waldekranz: Swedish pioneering film historian Screen 2006 47: 113-117; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl008[FREE Full Text][PDF]

Reviews 

• James Bennett, Inventing Television Culture: Men, Women and the Box • New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television and Digital Media in the United States Screen 2006 47: 119-124; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl009[FREE Full Text][PDF]

• John Corner, The Subject in Documentary Screen 2006 47: 125-128; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl010[FREE Full Text][PDF]  

• Julie Light, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC Screen 2006 47: 129-132; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl011[FREE Full Text][PDF] 
  

• Helen Piper, Understanding Reality Television • Reality TV – Audiences and Popular Factual Television Reality TV – Realism and Revelation Screen 2006 47: 133-138; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl012 [FREE Full Text][PDF]