On happy and other endings! Kelly Reichardt, Andrew Klevan and James MacDowell on Video (not all together!)

The filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Humanitas Visiting Professor in Film and Television, "In Conversation" with Dr Andrew Klevan at the University of Oxford on May 23, 2014. Click here to access the video (1:18:30)

Film Studies For Free brings you tidings of some more wonderful film studies related videos. Both of them, like yesterday's Rancière videos, came from top notch tip offs by Hoi Lun Law (thanks HL!).

In the above video (online here), Andrew Klevan enters into an incredibly thought-provoking and insightful conversation with the great American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her work. Reichardt's five feature films are River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Night Moves (2013); and she has also made the short narrative Ode (1999). Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, and author of, inter alia, a recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013), which he discussed in a number of formats  with Film Studies For Free. He is also a member of the editorial board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism.

Below, you can find the embedded recording of a great talk by Klevan's fellow Movie editorial board member James MacDowell, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick and a film scholar who has shared far more high quality work online for free than many academics produce in a lifetime (see here, here, here, here and here [PDF], for instance).

MacDowell discusses the romantic ‘happy ending’ in Hollywood cinema - its motifs, meanings and potential mutability - in a brilliantly illustrated and entertaining talk for an event for the Zabludowicz Collection which took place on December 6, 2013. MacDowell is the founder of great film critical website Alternate Takes, author of the book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliché, Convention and the Final Couple (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and he is currently writing a monograph on irony in film for Palgrave MacMillan (forthcoming 2016).

Embracing the Happy Ending: Cliché and Closure in Hollywood Cinema - a talk by Dr. James MacDowell from Zabludowicz Collection on Vimeo.

A Stocking Full of eReading and Viewing: Happy Holidays!

Updated December 31, 2012

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

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

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

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


SEQUENCE 1.1, 2012

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

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

NOTEBOOK, December 17, 2012

• 'Expressing the Move' by Hoi Lun Law

  

RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM: Creating the Witness

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

ALPHAVILLE, Issue 4, Winter 2012

Open Theme Edited by Stefano Odorico and Aidan Power

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

Book Reviews Edited by Pierluigi Ercole

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

Reports Edited by Ian Murphy

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

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

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

Articles

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

PGN Matters

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

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

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

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

Belén Vidal's book, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic

Belén Vidal, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Vidal is lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, co-editor (with Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones) of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Heritage Film: Nation Genre and Representation (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

This definitive work offers a new approach to the period film at the turn of the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which contemporary cinema recreates the historical past. This book explores the relation between visual motifs and cultural representation in a range of key films by James Ivory, Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion, among others. Looking at the mannerist taste for citation, detail and stylisation, the author argues for an aesthetic of fragments and figures central to the period film as an international genre. Three key figures - the house, the tableau and the letter - structure a critical journey through a selection of detailed case studies, in relation to changing notions of visual style, melodrama, and gender. This seeks to place this popular but often undervalued genre in a new light and to rethink its significance in the context of key debates in film studies.

Film Studies For Free had a very pleasant surprise, today, when it discovered that Belén Vidal's remarkable book is the latest Amsterdam University Press publication to be distributed as an Open Access ebook. The table of contents is given below.

This truly excellent volume has been added to FSFF's permanent listing of free Film Studies ebooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!

Introduction – Period Film and the Mannerist Moment - Fragments and Figures - An International Genre - Mannerism: The Possibilities of a Conservative Aesthetic

Chapter 1 – A Poetics of Figuration - The Belated Moment of Mannerism - Pastiche and the Reality Effect - From the Figurative to the Figural - Classical/Post-classical: Adaptation, Film Writing and the Technological Narrative - Credits Roll: The Figure as Threshold

Chapter 2 – Present in the Past: The House - Nostalgia Interrupted: The House and its Ghosts - Home and (Dis)Inheritance: Howards End -The Collector and the House-Museum: The Golden Bowl and End of Period - Melodrama and the Descriptive Mode: The Age of Innocence -Fidelity to the Past and the Melancholic Imagination: Woman as Ghost - The House of Mirth or, Time and Woman

Chapter 3 – Time and the Image: The Tableau - Still Images/Moving Narratives: The Tableau Effect - The Shot-Tableau: From Pregnant Moment to Hieroglyph -The Portrait as Fetish - Portraits and Tableaux in the Feminist Imagination - Deframings: The Portrait of a Lady - Double-Framing the Mythologies of the Female Artist: Artemisia - Vision, Blindness and the Displacement of Trauma - The Governess or, the Woman in Camera

Chapter 4 – The Scene of Writing: The Letter - Textual Erotics: Reading the Letter as Object and Figure - The Letter that Arrives Too Late: Figuration and Melodramatic Temporality - Letters and Spatial Displacement - The Love Letter and the Queer Encounter: Onegin - Imaginary Landscapes of Loss: To Those Who Love - Truncated Narratives, Textual Possibilities: Atonement and the Interrupted Histories of the European Period Film.

Conclusion – Second Sight: Reviewing the Past, Figuring the Present - Notes - Bibliography - Index of Film Titles - Index of Names and Subjects

The Great Ealing Film Challenge by Keith M. Johnston

A frame capture from Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick, 1952).
Read Keith M. Johnston's assessment of this film, and Pam Cook's

Today, a rather thrilled Film Studies For Free brings you news that Keith M. Johnston's truly 'Great Ealing Film Challenge' has reached its noble conclusion.

Johnston is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on the interplay of technology, aesthetics and industry in British film of the 1940s and 1950s, with particular interests in issues of colour, widescreen and 3-D.

He is the author of Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (McFarland 2009) and Science Fiction Fillm: A Critical Introduction (Berg 2011). He has also published on Ealing's colour aesthetic. You can follow him on Twitter and at the Huffington Post, as well as at his own website.

An ex-resident of Ealing, Keith has always been fascinated by Ealing Studios and its place in British cinema, both past and present. The 'Great Ealing Film Challenge' has been his attempt to better understand the films the studio produced, and what they can tell us about that period in British film history.

Just over a year ago, Keith wrote at his website about his (then) proposed experiment as follows:

[This blog has] decided to conduct its own obscure 80th anniversary celebration... and attempt to watch all of the Ealing Studios films.

Of course, there are some provisos - the list of 95 films I am working from comes from Charles Barr's Ealing Studios book, and is therefore focused entirely on the Michael Balcon years (1938-59). Given the difficulty of seeing much of the studio's output (either before 1938 or, in some cases, after), seeing all of those 95 is already something of a challenge (they're not all available on DVD ). [...]

The order in which I watch the films is largely going to be decided at whim [...] - the initial batch will include some of the well-known titles (commentary on Went the Day Well? and The Man in the White Suit will likely appear in the first week) and those lesser known titles that I realise I've never seen (the likes of The Love Lottery (1954), Nine Men (1943), The Feminine Touch (1954) and Train of Events (1950).

To celebrate the rather impressive achievement of blogging on all 95 films within a year, FSFF brings you not one, but two lists of links to Keith's highly informative and engaging entries! The first comes in the order in which Keith wrote them and the second has been organised alphabetically by year of release.

There will be much more forthcoming from Keith on Ealing Studios' films. He has also been working on co-editing Ealing Revisited with Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, and Melanie Williams. This major collection will be published by BFI-Palgrave later in 2012, tying in with the BFI's major retrospective of Ealing Studios in November/December 2012.

Oh, and don't forget FSFF's earlier post on Ealing comedy films here.

Well done and thank you, Keith! Surely there should be a wee dram as a reward? At any rate, FSFF hopes you enjoy your readers' gratitude galore!

Prologue: The Great Ealing Film Challenge


Went the Day Well? (1943); Train of Events (1949); A Run for your Money (1949); Fiddlers Three (1944); The Love Lottery (1954); The Cruel Sea (1953); The Long Arm (1956); Nine Men (1943); Nicholas Nickleby (1947); Trouble Brewing (1939); The Magnet (1950); The Ship That Died of Shame (1955); Against the Wind (1948); Another Shore (1948); The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1942); The Ghost of St. Michael’s (1941); Dead of Night (1945); The Feminine Touch (1956); The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953); The Man in the White Suit (1951); The Gentle Gunman (1952); Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945); Saloon Bar (1940); The Next of Kin (1942); The Gaunt Stranger (1938); San Demetrio, London (1943); Where No Vultures Fly (1951); West of Zanzibar (1954); They Came to a City (1944); Return to Yesterday (1940); Lease of Life (1954); Johnny Frenchman (1945); Ships with Wings (1941); Davy (1957); Touch and Go (1955); Spare a Copper (1940); Turned Out Nice Again (1941); Come on George (1939); Whisky Galore! (1949); Let George Do It (1940); Dunkirk (1958); Who Done It? (1956); My Learned Friend (1943); The Captive Heart (1946); The Blue Lamp (1950); Sailor’s Three (1940); The Goose Steps Out (1942); The Halfway House (1944); The Square Ring (1953); The Foreman Went to France (1942); The Bells Went Down (1943); Champagne Charlie (1944); Bitter Springs (1950); The Overlanders (1946); Pool of London (1951); The Rainbow Jacket (1954); The Lavender Hill Mob (1951); The Shiralee (1957); For Those in Peril (1944); The Proud Valley (1940); The Ladykillers (1955); The Siege of Pinchgut (1959); Meet Mr Lucifer (1953); Secret People (1952); The Big Blockade (1942); Out of the Clouds (1955); Cheer Boys Cheer (1939); The Maggie (1953); Undercover (1943); The Four Just Men (1939); Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948); The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947); It Always Rains on Sunday (1947); Cage of Gold (1950); Frieda (1947); The Night My Number Came Up (1955); Hue [&] Cry (1947); Let’s Be Famous (1939); There Ain’t No Justice (1939); Eureka Stockade (1949); Painted Boats (1945); Barnacle Bill (1958); I Believe in You (1952); Dance Hall (1950); Convoy (1940); Scott of the Antarctic (1948); The Man in the Sky (1957); Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949; Young Man’s Fancy (1939); Mandy (1952); The Divided Heart (1954); His Excellency (1952); The Ware Case (1938); Nowhere to Go (1958); Passport to Pimlico (1949)

1938:
The Gaunt Stranger; The Ware Case

1939:
Cheer Boys Cheer; Come on George; Let’s Be Famous; The Four Just Men; There Ain’t No Justice ; Trouble Brewing; Young Man’s Fancy

1940:
Convoy; Let George Do It; Return to Yesterday ; Sailor’s Three ; Saloon Bar ; Spare a Copper; The Proud Valley

1941:
Ships with Wings; The Ghost of St. Michael’s; Turned Out Nice Again ;

1942:
The Big Blockade; The Black Sheep of Whitehall; The Foreman Went to France; The Goose Steps Out; The Next of Kin

1943:
My Learned Friend; Nine Men; San Demetrio, London; The Bells Went Down; Undercover; Went the Day Well? 

1944:
Champagne Charlie; Fiddlers Three; For Those in Peril; Fiddlers Three; The Halfway House; They Came to a City

1945:
Dead of Night; Johnny Frenchman; Painted Boats; Pink String and Sealing Wax 

1946:
The Captive Heart; The Overlanders

1947:
Frieda; Hue&Cry; It Always Rains on Sunday; Nicholas Nickleby; The Loves of Joanna Godden

1948:
Against the Wind; Another Shore; Saraband for Dead Lovers; Scott of the Antarctic

1949:
A Run for your Money; Eureka Stockade; Kind Hearts and Coronets; Passport to Pimlico; Train of Events; Whisky Galore!

1950:
Bitter Springs; Cage of Gold; Dance Hall; The Blue Lamp; The Magnet

1951:
Pool of London; The Lavender Hill Mob; The Man in the White Suit; Where No Vultures Fly

1952:
His Excellency; I Believe in You; Mandy; Secret People; The Gentle Gunman

1953:
Meet Mr Lucifer; The Cruel Sea; The Maggie; The Square Ring; The Titfield Thunderbolt

1954:
Lease of Life; The Divided Heart; The Love Lottery; The Rainbow Jacket; West of Zanzibar

1955:
Out of the Clouds; The Ladykillers; The Night My Number Came Up; The Ship That Died of Shame; Touch and Go

1956:
The Feminine Touch; The Long Arm; Who Done It?

1957:
Davy; The Man in the Sky; The Shiralee

1958:
Barnacle Bill; Dunkirk; Nowhere to Go

1959:
The Siege of Pinchgut

Our Beautiful Wickedness: On Reading Films Queerly. In Memory of Alexander Doty

An audiovisual collage made by Catherine Grant in memory of Alexander Doty, 
brilliant author of numerous key texts in LGBT and queer film and cultural studies, 
including the one quoted from in this video: Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon 
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

[C]lassic [film] texts and personalities actually can be more queer-suggestive than “openly” gay, lesbian, or bisexual texts. That is, the coding of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts and personalities can often yield a wider range of non-straight readings because certain sexual things could not be stated baldly—and still cannot or will not in most mainstream products—thus often making it more difficult to categorize the erotics of a film or a star. Of course, if you aren’t careful, this line of thought can begin to sound like an argument valorizing the closet, for understanding queerness as always something “connotated” or suggested (and never really there “denotatively”), for “subtexting,” and for “subcultural” readings. But since I don’t see queer readings as any less there, or any less real, than straight readings of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts, I don’t think that what I do in this book is colluding with dominant representational or interpretive regimes that seek to make queerness “alternative” or “sub” straight. [Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics, pp. 1-2]

In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my “queer reception” love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses–largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add. [Alexander Doty,  in Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011]

Film Studies For Free was shocked and very saddened at the news, just over a week ago, of the untimely death of Alexander Doty, a truly trailblazing film and media scholar.

Doty, Indiana University Professor of Gender Studies and Communication and Culture (and chair of the latter department) was the author of two classic and highly enjoyable books in queer audiovisual cultural studies: Making Things Perfectly Queer (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000). He also co-edited, with Corey Creekmur, the hugely important collection Out in Culture: Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Continuum, 1995) and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas.

While Doty didn't claim to have invented queer cultural reading as a scholarly practice, he wowed us with the brilliance, daring and sincerity of his interpretations, ones often deeply rooted in his personal, affective experiences of the cultural forms he was studying. In so doing, he succeeded in showing countless other students of film and media texts why it is so vital to engage in these critical practices in public, why it is essential to be good at them, as well as what is seriously at stake in many identity or, indeed, existence-based scholar-fandoms, like those often engaged in by LGBT subjects.

If, as the Wizard of Oz tells us, 'A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others', the many tributes to Doty that have appeared in the last week prove, beyond any doubt, that he had an excellent heart. He certainly had a very courageous one. He, his unique voice, and the work he would have gone on to produce, had his life not been so cruelly cut short, will be hugely missed.

As well as putting together the video collage at the top of this entry, which introduces Doty's compelling justification for queer reading, if not the (possibly even more compelling) details of his actual queer reading of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), FSFF has also assembled a list of links in Doty's memory to online studies which perform queer readings of films and moving image culture, as well as openly accessible studies of some films that perform their own queer readings. Two further FSFF video essays are embedded--on Elizabeth Taylor and on "queer Hitchcock", both of which intersect with, and were partly inspired by Doty's own work on these and other themes.

That long list is preceded by a growing collection of links to the online tributes to Doty that have appeared since his death (this will be kept updated), as well as to his own, openly accessible, scholarly work online. FSFF's author very gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Anthony Bleach and the Facebook group Friends of Alexander Doty in assembling the first two of these three lists. Although she only knew Doty through his published work, she would like to convey her condolences for his loss to all those whose lives were graced, as so many evidently were, by knowing him personally.

Finally, at the very foot of today's entry is a call for contributions to a new website for the Global Queer Cinema project (to be launched in September). It will seek to live up to the high standards that Doty's work set for queer cultural critique as it aims to provide a new, openly accessible, internationalist resource for queer film and cultural studies. FSFF will update its readers about this exciting project in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, FSFF is sad that one of those who have most inspired LGBT film studies scholarship will not be around to witness his influence on this project.

Rest in queer peace, Alexander Doty.


Online tributes to Alexander Doty

• Corey Creekmur, 'Remembering Alexander Doty', FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Kyra Hunting, 'In Memoriam: Thanking Alexander Doty', Antenna, August 12, 2012 
• Taylor Cole Miller, 'A Star Was Born: The Inspiring Life and Work of Alexander Doty', Antenna, August 10, 2012
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 'SCMS Tribute to Alexander Doty', Society for Cinema and Media Studies website, August 8, 2012
• Camera Obscura Collective, 'Alexander Doty', Facebook, August 10, 2012 
• 'IU mourns passing of faculty member Alex Doty', Indiana University Newsroom, August 6, 2012  
• 'Pioneering queer studies scholar Alexander Doty dies...', University of Minnesota Press, August 6, 2012
• Lolachrome, 'You: A Glee multi/metavid', All Things Know, All Things Know, August 7, 2012
• Alex Doty - In Memoriam website
• Ceola Wilson, 'Tributes to "outstanding scholar and teacher"’, Royal Gazette Online, August 7, 2012

Online work by Alexander Doty 

• Alexander Doty, 'I Love Shari: My Queerly Feminist Life with TV', Republished in FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Alexander Doty, 'Modern Family, Glee, and the Limits of Television Liberalism', Republished by FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Alexander Doty, 'Hot in Cleveland: Everything Old is New Again?', Republished in FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011  
• Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part Two)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 30, 2011 

Online studies, or performances, of queer reading

• John S. Bak, 'Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations - Tennessee Williams's 'Desire', Journal of Religion and Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2005
• John Bannister, 'Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, and Susan Sontag: Campaigners of Camp and the Carry On films', Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007
• Harry Benshoff, '[Review] of Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon by Alexander Doty', Scope, August 2001
• Jenna Bond, 'Homosexuality and the Italian Spaghetti Western', Offscreen, November 30, 2007
• Orla Juliette Borreye, 'The Significance Of The Queer And The Dog In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000): A Masculinity At War', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
• Michael Bronski, 'From The Celluloid Closet to Brokeback Mountain: The Changing Nature of Queer Film Criticism', Cineaste, 2008
• Vincent Brook and Allan Campbell, '“Pansies don't float”– gay representability, film noir, and The Man Who Wasn’t There', Jump Cut, 46, Summer 2003 
• Shannon Brownlee, 'Masculinity Between Animation and Live Action, or, SpongeBob v. Hasselhoff', Animation Studies Online Journal, Vol. 6, September 2011
  
• Kathy Burdette, 'Queer Film Theory - Bibliography'
• Alain Chouinard, 'Queering the Québécois and Canadian Child in Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo', Synoptique, 13, February 2009 
• Lesley Chow, 'The Double Standard: The Twins of Two-Faced Woman and Sylvia Scarlett,' Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 59, February 2008
• Douglas Crimp, 'Getting the Warhol we Deserve: Cultural Studies and Queer Culture', Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, 1999
• Zachary Dorsey, ' Slick Moves: Queer Fight Choreography in The Transporter', In Media Res, December 5, 2007
  
• Richard Dyer, 'Homosexuality in Film Noir', from Jump Cut, No. 16, 1977
• Brett Farmer and Stacy Wolf, 'Stage Door Jennies', Genders OnLine Journal, 38, 2003
• Jane Gaines, 'Dorothy Arzner's trousers', Jump Cut, 37, July 1992  
• Jane Gaines, 'Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Queering Feminist Film Theory', Jump Cut, 41, May 1997
• 'Gays, Lesbian, and Transgendered People in Motion Pictures: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library'
• David Gerstner, 'Queer Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetics of Vincente Minnelli', Modernity, Vol. 2, 2000
• David Greven, American Medusa: Bette Davis, Beyond the Forest, femininity, and Camp', Jump Cut, 46, Summer 2003
• Todd Haynes interviewed by Richard Dyer [audio recording from the Tate Modern], 'Double Indemnity: Todd Haynes/Edward Hopper' (4 June 2004)
• Peter Kemp, 'Bi-Polar Gender-Blender: Sylvia Scarlett,' Senses of Cinema 22, Sept-Oct 2002
• Ewan Kirkland, 'Romantic Comedy and the Construction of Heterosexuality', Scope Issue 9, 2007 
• Cheuk Yin Li, 'The Absence of Fan Activism in the Queer Fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong', edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10, 2012
• Dennis Lo, 'The Politics and Aesthetics of “Asian American” Sexuality in Ang Lee’s Cross-Cultural Family Dramas: A Case Study on The Wedding Banquet and The Ice Storm', Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol. 1, 2008
• Patricia MacCormack, 'Barbara Steele's Ephemeral Skin: Feminism, Fetishism, and Film', Senses of Cinema, September 2002
• James MacDowell, 'What Value is There in Gus Van Sant's Psycho?', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 7, 2005
• Stephen Maddison, 'Pedro Almodóvar and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: the Heterosocial Spectator and Misogyny', Chapter 4 of Fags, hags, and queer sisters : gender dissent and heterosocial bonds in gay culture (New York : St. Martin's, 2000)
• Joseph McBride, 'George Cukor: The Valor of Discretion', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 32, April 2001
• Deborah Mellamphy, 'The Paradox Of Transvestism In Tim Burton’s Ed Wood', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
• Matthew Ogonofski, 'Queering the Heterosexual Male in Canadian Cinema: An Analysis of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo', Synoptique, 13, February 2009
• Rebecca Panosky, 'Dorothy Arzner and Gender Representation.” In: “International Female Film Directors: Their Contributions to the Film Industry and Women's Roles in Society.” Chapter 4 of e-Thesis
• Susan Pelle and Catherine Fox, 'Queering Desire / Querying Consumption: Rereading Visual Images of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art', Third Space, Vol. 6 Issue 1, Summer 2006
• Ryan Powell, 'Putting on the Red Dress: Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,' Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007 
• Kate Rennebohm, 'Queering Childhood: An Examination of Claude Jutra’s Dreamspeaker', Synoptique, 13, Feburary 2009
• Elena del Rio, 'Performing the Narrative of Seduction: Claire Denis's Beau Travail', Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue 7, Spring 2003
• Julian Savage, 'The Conscious Collusion of the Stare: The Viewer Implicated in Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul,' Senses of Cinema, 16, Sept-Oct 2001
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'A Tale of Two Psychos', Senses of Cinema, 2000
• Ian Scott Todd, 'Outside/In: Abjection, Space, and Landscape in Brokeback Mountain', Scope13, February 2009
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, You're so paranoid, you probably think this introduction is about you', Novel gazing : queer readings in fiction / edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)
• Craig Snyder, 'Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain', Jump Cut, 53, Summer 2011
• Carter Soles, 'A stalker’s odyssey: arrested development, gay desire, and queer comedy in Chuck&Buck', Jump Cut, 49, 2007
• Carter Michael Soles, Falling Out of the Closet: Kevin Smith, Queerness, and Independent Film, e-Thesis University of Oregon, 2008
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Ang Lee's Cowboys', Offscreen Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 28, 2007) 
• K. E. Sullivan, 'Ed Gein and the Figure of the Transgendered Serial Killer', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 38-47
• Donato Totaro, 'Psycho Redux', Offscreen Journal, 2004
• Evangelos Tziallas, 'Looking Beneath the Skin: Reconfiguring Trauma and Sexuality', Stream: A Graduate Journal of Communication, Spring 2008 1(1)
• Stacy Wolf, 'Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body', S[&]F Online, 3.3 and 4.1, Fall 2005
• Amy Villarejo, 'Interview with Tish Pearlman for Out of Bounds/Cornell University' [about Queer film and queer film theory] RealPlayer file, 29 mins 30 seconds
• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 57, August 2007
• Nicholas de Villiers, '”The vanguard - and the most articulate audience”: Queer Camp, Jack Smith and John Waters', Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007

Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE by Catherine Grant


Skipping ROPE (with audio commentary) by Catherine Grant. First published in Frames, 1, 2012. Transcript available.



Call For Queer Reading/Writing Contributions 
to the new Global Queer Cinema website

Contributions are invited to the Global Queer Cinema website, hosted by the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, UK. The site will be launched in early September 2012. 

The website forms part of the Global Queer Cinema project, an international academic research network project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Sussex. The project is led by Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (University of Warwick). The network held its first event in May of this year.

The project website will be run in conjunction with Catherine Grant (University of Sussex and Film Studies For Free) and Laura Ellen Joyce, GQC Project Co-ordinator, and will continue beyond the length of the project, acting in part as an open access archive and news filter for project-generated material, and related queer film studies resources. 

We welcome contributions from researchers interested in queer (and queering) cinema, cultural studies, media, global studies, gender and sexuality, filmmakers, artists, writers and interdisciplinary scholars, or those with an interest in the practice, exploration and dissemination of film. The below list of topics and frameworks. 

• Queer frames
• Queer uncanny
• Queer sounds and music
• Queer illusions
• Queer film festivals
• Queer decades
• Queer directors
• Queer avant garde and DIY
• New Queer Cinema
• New releases
• Classic films
• Androgyny and pandrogyny
• Queer cosmetics and prosthetics
• In-depth essays on single films
• Short essays on single images

We therefore invite short takes of 250 - 300 words, or longer essays (MLA style) of around 1500-2000 words for more in-depth analysis. Multimedia work (non-copyright infringing - using fair use/fair dealing principles) is very welcome. The above list of topics is not exhaustive, and we invite contributions on any topic or theme which you feel would may (queerly) fit our general ethos. Please correspond with us about any proposals for content by email at GQCproject[at]gmail[dot]com, on Twitter at @g_q_c, and do please 'like' us on Facebook. Thank you.

BLADE RUNNER, ALIEN, INCEPTION, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and Spielberg: Five Video Essays by Steven Benedict

Updated on August 9 to include video analyses of Spielberg's films and Ridley Scott's Alien

The Techniques and Themes of Steven Spielberg by Steven Benedict


Analysis of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) by Steven Benedict
 

Analysis of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) by Steven Benedict

Analysis of Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) by Steven Benedict

Analysis of The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) by Steven Benedict

Film Studies For Free just watched the above, very new, film analytical video essays, spotted on one of its regular trawls of the great video hosting site Vimeo. They are made for educational and critical purposes, using fair use/fair dealing procedures, by the Irish filmmaker, broadcaster, and lecturer Steven Benedict.

They are well edited, wide-ranging, insightful, and great for classroom discussion, to boot. FSFF hopes we'll be seeing more videographic film analyses made by Benedict and that these essays will inspire others, including film students, to explore this rising pedagogical and critical format, too.

There will be a post coming up shortly on the theory and practice of making film/TV educational video essays, so do please look out for that. And check out FSFF's earlier collection of links on Christopher Nolan's films.

Pantheon Level Author: In Memory of Andrew Sarris

UNL Film Studies professor Wheeler Winston Dixon describes the auteur theory of filmmaking, 
including the contribution to this theory by Andrew Sarris.You can read Professor Dixon's obituary of Sarris here.

The art of cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scene. Auteur criticism is a reaction against sociological criticism that enthroned the what against the how. However, it would be equally fallacious to enthrone the how against the what. The whole point of meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement. [Andrew Sarris]

Film Studies For Free was really saddened to hear of the death of Andrew Sarris, one of the most influential of all film critics on the academic study of the cinema.

In memory of his huge contribution to film studies, FSFF has begun to gather links to online works by Sarris as well as to studies of his writings and related items. The collection process will continue in the next days.

Meanwhile, David Hudson is very valuably collecting links to online tributes to Sarris at Fandor's Keyframe Daily site. And see the great PressPlay at Indiewire tributes, including a great video essay featuring probably the last recording of Sarris's voice, here.

Keep coming back for updates.

• Andrew Sarris, 'Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962' PDF
• Andrew Sarris's Confessions of a Cultist on the Cinema (1955, 1969) Internet Archive Free Download
• Andrew Sarris, 'Variety Lights', The Criterion Collection: Notes, August 28, 2000 
• Andrew Sarris, 'Sarris on Sirk', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

 

• Richard Armstrong, 'They Lost It at the Movies: Film Culture in the Age of Positif and Cineaste', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 40, May 2003
• Catherine Grant, 'On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theories', Film Studies For Free, June 2, 2009
  
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Theories of Authorship: Rethinking authorship', from Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986, pp. 14-16 
• Christian Hamaker, 'Sarris 101: A Film Critic’s Politics', Christian Hamaker's Blog, August 13, 2009
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part one) World view as aesthetics', from Jump Cut, no. 1, 1974, pp. 19-22
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part two) Truffaut's manifesto', from Jump Cut, no. 2 (1974), pp. 20-22
• Barrett Hodsdon, 'The mystique of mise en scene revisited', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990)
• Kent Jones, 'Hail the Conquering Hero: Andrew Sarris profiled', Film Comment, date unknown
• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture, 2, Autumn 2008
• Kartik Nair, 'Aura, Auteurism and the Key to Reserva', Wide Screen Journal, 2, 2010
• Jeffrey Overstreet, 'In memory of Andrew Sarris’s New York Observer reviews', Filmwell, August 11, 2009 
• Dana Polan, 'Auteur Desire', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Michael Powell, 'A Survivor of Film Criticism’s Heroic Age' [on Andrew Sarris] The New York Times, July 9, 2009
• Holger Römers, '“The Moral of the Auteur Theory”: Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (and Theodore Strauss’ Source Novel)', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-March 2007
• William D Routt, 'L'Evidence', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990) 
• David Schwartz, 'Bringing Up Hawks: Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell on the discovery of an auteur', Moving Image Source, September 25, 2008
• Girish Shambu, 'On Auteurism', girish, March 30, 2008