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Thứ Hai, 22 tháng 12, 2014

End of December Round Up: THE CINE-FILES, FRAMES, [in]TRANSITION, LOLA, MEDIASCAPE, NECSUS and Much More!

The Marriages of LAUREL DALLAS by Catherine Grant
The above video is published as an integral part of a multimedia essay on two Hollywood adaptations of STELLA DALLAS "The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator", MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall2014_MarriagesMelodrama.html


Another year of open access scholarly bulletins and links draws to a close at Film Studies For Free. Despite readership well exceeding 2,000,000 page views since late 2009 (thanks for coming back all of you!), it has been a fairly quiet year at this blog,* if not at its Twitter feed and Facebook page, both of which generally boast fast-flowing, usually daily content. But let's round the year off, nonetheless, with a characteristically large collection of links to lots of just (in the nick of time) published Fall 2014 issues of some brilliant online and open access film and moving image studies journals, as well as a bunch of other online delights. Just feast your festive eyes on all the below riches!

And also check out the videographic jewel at the top of this entry too - FSFF's latest audiovisual essay on the tear-jerking ending(s) of Stella Dallas. 2014 has been a golden year for the scholarly video, for sure. A clear highlight in that emergent film studies idiom has been the creation and successful launch of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Images Studies, which FSFF's author co-founded and co-edits with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. Four issues have been published, with the most recent one appearing last week - linked to below - and there's lots more great peer reviewed content lining itself up for 2015. And the audiovisual essay also now boasts its own section at NECSUS Journal, too - edited by the brilliant essayist duo Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. It's EVERYWHERE!!

If you're interested in learning more about this audiovisual film scholarly form in a classroom or presentation setting, FSFF's author will be holding video essay workshops and masterclasses at the January conference of MeCCSA in Newcastle, UK, at BIMI: Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, in London in March (that's a free to attend session!), at an event at the University of East Anglia in May, with  Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin (details soon), as well as at a National Endowment for the Humanities funded event at Middlebury College, Vermont. And those are just the events scheduled in the first half of next year!

So 2015 may be a quiet year at this blog, too........ But FSFF will try to maintain regular entries to publish alongside all its usual microblogging on open access film studies.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! WISHING EVERYONE A WONDERFUL NEW YEAR!

*One of the reasons it's been so quiet is that FSFF's author has not just been linking but also contributing rather a lot to these and other journals and online projects this year. See the long list of publications right at the foot of what follows.


FEATURE ARTICLES
P.O.V.
[in]TRANSITION 1.4, 2014 (Issue commissioned and edited by Drew Morton)
LOLA Issue 5 has continued to roll out with the entries below published to date and others still to come:

MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014 on ADAPTATION (in films, television, anime, computer animation, games!)

NECSUS Journal, Autumn 2014: War

Features
Audiovisual essays: edited by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
Special section: War
Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier [NECS Publication Committee])
Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist [Film Festival Research Network])
Exhibition reviews (edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg [NECS Publication Committee])

Assorted further open access linkage!

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Thứ Hai, 16 tháng 12, 2013

Get the Picture! A Community-Based Film Study Programme Using THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY


Interview with filmmaker and educator Mark Cousins about his film series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which forms the basis of the Get the Picture community film study project described below

Quite often Film Studies For Free gets asked about free film study. Not so surprising, you might think, given the name on its own tin. But what people are often asking about is free "real world", or offline, film study - and sadly not too much of that comes for free these days.

So imagine how delighted FSFF was when it was contacted by a group of generous and talented individuals who have formed an educational partnership called Get the Picture 'that aims to provide free support materials and a framework to help people to come together in their local community, to form study groups and learn about film'.

FSFF is, therefore, delighted to create a space, in today's entry, for a concise and enticing introduction to the work of this partnership, in the hope that some of its readers will go on to take up the specific invitation set out here, and that yet others will go on to concoct their own community film study projects inspired by this one. If the latter happens, do please let FSFF know.

In the meantime, thank you so much to Get the Picture!  You can follow the project on Twitter --  @GtPfilm -- and, of course, at its website.


Get the Picture: Film study groups in the community

There's a certain added frisson of pleasure in writing this post, because of its context: what I'm about to describe is a programme of informal adult film study that is free to users. The only necessary additional costs involved are the purchase of the DVD box set of Mark Cousins's The Story of Film, an Odyssey.

'Us' refers to Get the Picture, which is the collective name for three activists in the community cinema movement, John Salisbury, Julia Vickers and Jim Barratt. The programme of study we've developed and made available is a response to the rapid attrition of informal film study in the 2000s, in the UK, at least, resulting from the decision of the last government to withdraw from supporting lifelong learning. After the impact of that withdrawal of funding became evident, we set about looking for an approach to filling the gap which would, like community cinemas themselves, work in local communities everywhere in the UK. We saw the possibilities opened up by the release of The Story of Film, and our programme is the result. Incidentally, we ran the idea past Mark Cousins early on: he liked it then, and has strongly and warmly endorsed the result.

What was needed?

As we saw it, the requirement was for a programme which was
  • free to participants
  • self-organised and self-paced
  • informal, not assessed
  • of benefit whatever the starting point of the participant.
We saw there was a need for someone (a group member) to manage the group experience and chair discussions (a role we termed 'enabler'), but that shouldering this responsibility would require additional support from us. We decided to base the whole programme on advice notes (e.g. Programme Guide, How to be a Participant) and study notes (each relating to a specific study/discussion session based on an individual episode of The Story of Film). We decided that since the only distribution system for study materials which would work universally was sending pdf documents over the internet, we would embrace the internet, giving strong guidance on its use as a resource for individual study. Finally, we decided that basing a programme on all 15 chapters of The Story of Film might well seem a dauntingly large commitment for a study group, so we offered the programme in three segments of five chapters/study sessions each.

What's in the programme?

For each segment, a participant receives a document set which contains common advice notes and the study notes relevant to the sessions in that segment. The advice notes consist of the Programme Guide, How to be a Participant, How to be an Enabler, and the Key Films list. You can find more detail on this (and examples) on the Get the Picture website at getthepicture.org.uk. There is also an advice note on Enhancements and Digressions, because we recognise that some groups may wish to add to the programme we've laid out, or digress from it: nothing is set in stone.

The normal experience for a participant in each segment is that after an introductory organizing session convened by the enabler, they attend five discussion sessions in which they discuss prepared questions chosen from those found in each set of Study Notes. In between discussion sessions, participants are asked to do four things: they watch the relevant chapter of The Story of Film, they prepare for the planned discussion questions, they undertake individual study based on suggested internet resources (from Wikipedia, YouTube and specified websites), and they watch the specified key films. This means that scheduling the discussions must leave time for these individual activities, and enablers receive suitable guidance about this. To give a more comprehensive flavour, embedded below is the Programme Guide pdf document which all participants receive. If you want to view it more comfortably, or offline, you can download it from this website: http://getthepicture.org.uk.


The Key Films list is significant: for each session, we select two of the films Mark Cousins cites as notable within the episode of The Story of Film, and suggest all group members watch these films as part of their preparation, to provide a common basis for discussion. From quite early on, some of the discussion questions focus on individual key films.

Trialling the programme

We have been fortunate in that groups from a small number of film societies agreed to trial the materials for Segment One. The result has been very positive and a clear endorsement of the basic approach. We have streamlined the study materials as a result of trials feedback, and worked hard to clarify the discussion questions. As we expected, specific problems arose around the role of the enabler, especially when inexperienced enablers had to deal with obstinate group members, but these problems were by no means dealbreakers. We encountered unexpected problems (for example, the disruptive potential of refreshments) and have had to mention these in the advice notes. But in general, the trials indicated to us that it was well worth continuing with the programme and making it generally available.

Who will benefit?

The short answer is anyone, anywhere. We have set the entry threshold low by shaping each set of discussion questions so that they are readily approachable, but permit quite deep insights. We have largely refrained from the theoretical but touched on it where appropriate, and we have taken the intellectual frame as that bounded by Mark Cousins's treatment, which relates filmmaking technique to viewing experience in some complex and interesting ways.  We have shaped the individual study possibilities by introducing a wide range of resources, simply as a way of illustrating what is possible, and we have used guided Wikipedia and YouTube research as the spine for individual inquiry.  This approach offers anyone who wants to go further all that the internet allows, but gives a solid and satisfactory experience to the novice.

What we want from you.

Do you know anyone who might like to know about the Get the Picture programme? They might be in a film society, or involved in a community cinema, or they might just be into film. The benefits of making what is normally solitary - watching film, reading and thinking about it - communal and social are hard to quantify, but they do include a clear development in the individual's ability to talk and think about film. We find that, for the many generations of Britons who have received no education in film at school or since, this development is immensely liberating, so we have no hesitation in asking you to spread the word. Send them a link to this post. Get the Pictureis open for (free) business.
[The above text is by John Salisbury of Get the Picture]

Note about location: The materials were trialled with groups in the UK, but there is no reason why groups from anywhere in the English-speaking world should not take advantage of them. You only need to be sure you can access The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Study groups from anywhere in the world are welcome and invited to register with Get the Picture.
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Thứ Hai, 11 tháng 11, 2013

Magnifying Mirror: On Barbara Stanwyck and Film Performance Studies


Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry on the wonderful work of American actress Barbara Stanwyck as well as on film performance studies more generally. Stanwyck's illustrious career began in the 1920s and spanned sixty years. During that period she starred in major films of many genres and worked with some of the most distinguished Hollywood directors. Writing on her work may provide, therefore, an excellent, indeed exemplary case for reflection on film critical methodologies in performance studies.

As well as the usual links to online scholarly work on these topics (scroll down for those), the entry presents, below, an interview with Andrew Klevan, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford. Klevan discusses the rationale behind his recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013). He also talks about some of the issues that arise when film performance is the object of study, around intention and attribution of agency and value.

During the interview, which took place in October this year, Klevan read aloud an excerpt from his book, a reading which inspired, and formed the narration of, the above FSFF video on Stanwyck, MAGNIFYING MIRROR. Klevan also wrote a short statement about the video and about his collaboration with FSFF more generally, which you can also find below.


A Note by Andrew Klevan
I am grateful to Film Studies For Free for highlighting my work, and I hope the expression of some nervousness will not be taken as ungracious. The problem of enlarging on rationale and method as I do in the interview is that, aside from risking accusations of self-importance and self-promotion, by simply stating matters which should, perhaps, remain implicit, one overstates the case, and raises expectations, especially with regard to, what we affectionately call, little books. My answers, drawing out many of the things I tried to do, may create the incorrect impression that the Barbara Stanwyck study is comprehensive and voluminous. (Even the use of expressions such as ‘moment-by-moment’ or ‘movement of meaning’ might suggest an exhaustive sequential tracking.) In fact, one of the compositional aims was to try, using the short form of the little book, to achieve a balance between elaboration and concentration, extraction and distillation. This partly reflects a similar balance achieved in the films and performances, and Catherine Grant’s fascinating video riff, ‘Magnifying Mirror’, which matches the film to my pre-existing text, captures some of this by looping a sequence and in doing so emphasises the moment’s compactness by way of repetition.

I am conscious that [fellow film scholar] E.A. Kaplan is a casualty, and it appears as if her comment on Stella Dallas is singled out where actually quite a few accounts are tested in the course of the study and the isolation is a consequence of uprooting. It is true that I take issue with her assessment, but this is a difference over an interpretation, not a charge against her work more generally, or the value of it. I feel that her account reduces, and overlooks an achievement of the film, but this is something that we are all prone to do. Indeed, much nervousness on my part again as the film returns, insistently, to probe my own description and interpretation – alas too late to make adjustments – but also some satisfaction as film and criticism are reunited. This image/speech track relationship struck me as quite different to a DVD commentary (which is limited by the real time of the film) and the narration of audio-visual criticism (which is conceived in relation to the handling of images). I got the sense of a new form of criticism, using audio-visual material, happily meeting an old form of criticism, using words, and not simply exemplifying the ‘close reading’, but enhancing and interrogating, and more generally revivifying (and magnifying). The iteration in Catherine’s video productively interacts with the distension of written representation. The collaboration with FSFF has illuminated for me the stimulating relationship between commentaries in different forms so that the book gets commented upon in an audio interview and in a video film which in turn gets commented upon in this web statement, allowing the different media to differently elucidate.
Andrew Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. He is author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film and Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. He is the co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism, and is on the editorial boards of MOVIE - A Journal of Film Criticism and Film-Philosophy Journal]

On Barbara Stanwyck

    On film performance


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        Thứ Năm, 25 tháng 10, 2012

        Adrian Martin's new book, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez

        Cover of Adrian Martin's new book, Last day Every Day (Punctum Books, 2012)
        Where is film analysis at today? What is cinema theory up to, behind our backs? The field, as professionally defined (at least in the Anglo-American academic world), is presently divided between contextual historians who turn to broad formations of modernity, and stylistic connoisseurs who call for a return to old-fashioned things like authorial vision, tone, and mise en scène. But there are other, vital, inventive currents happening — in criticism, on the Internet, in small magazines, and renegade conferences everywhere — which we are not hearing much about in any official way. Last Day Every Day shines a light on one of these exciting new avenues.
              Is there a way to bring together, in a refreshed manner, textual logic, hermeneutic interpretation, theoretical speculation, and socio-political history? A way to break the deadlock between classical approaches that sought organic coherence in film works, and poststructuralist approaches that exposed the heterogeneity of all texts and scattered the pieces to the four winds? A way to attend to the minute materiality of cinema, while grasping and contesting the histories imbricated in every image and sound?
        Film Studies For Free urges its readers to go and check out the free download of Adrian Martin's important new book as described above. It is published by (the very wonderful) Punctum Books. Please support them by purchasing an incredibly reasonably priced paper copy as a lovely gift for the film scholars you love, or at the very least by ordering copies for your libraries.

        That is all. Thank you! And a very big thank you to Adrian and Punctum.

        This wonderful tome has also been added to FSFF's permanent listing of free Film Studies ebooks.
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        Thứ Hai, 22 tháng 10, 2012

        Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'! Video Studies of the Western

        This new video essay examines the representation of the frontier in John Ford's Westerns. Ford's visual poetics illustrate Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." Ford's films, in this regard, allow us to explore seminal foundational concepts of America history and ideology. "John Ford's Vision of the West" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's written study of his video essay practice. Also see Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

        The Western is one of the most iconographic of film genres and is thus particularly well suited to (audio)visual forms of analysis. So, today, Film Studies For Free has lassoed and corralled a whole herd of beefy video studies of film Westerns that abundantly testify to this advantage.

        The group is led, above, by a new, wonderfully researched, video essay by the very talented Matthias Stork (author of the great, and widely circulated, Chaos Cinema video essays, along with others published here at FSFF). Thanks very much to him and all the other video essayists represented below for making their work publicly acessible. 

        [It's Open Access week, so this here Open Access campaigning website particularly wants to show its warm appreciation to those of you who like to share the fruits of at least part of your film studies labour for free!]

        And if you know of any other, freely accessible, video essays on Westerns that FSFF has missed please alert us to them by leaving a comment with the link below. Thanks!

         
        An audiovisual study of Sergio Leone's distinctive duel aesthetic. The video essay was first published, along with an accompanying written essay, in the first issue of the online film journal FRAMES. "Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Read Matthias's reflections on the above video here. And read Film Studies For Free's entry on the Spaghetti Western



        A video essay exploring the ways in which editing techniques and other cinematic processes aid the construction of genre in the opening of "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956).




        Outlaw: Josey Wales by Matthew Cheney
        A video essay looking at a few aspects of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 



        McCabe and Mrs. Miller: A Video Essay by Steven Santos
        A video essay on Robert Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See the original posting here

        Critics' Picks: Rio Bravo from The New York Times
        A. O. Scott basks in the pleasures of taking it easy with Howard Hawks's 1959 Western.         (Related Link)



        Beaver's Lodge: CAIN'S CUTTHROATS from Press Play Video Blog
        This is the fifth installment of BEAVER'S LODGE, a series of video essays narrated by actor Jim Beaver which will offer critical takes on some of Beaver's favorite films 


        'A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...': Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters
        This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

              However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.






         
        Deconstructing the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League
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