Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn film noir. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn film noir. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Thứ Sáu, 20 tháng 12, 2013

New FILM-PHILOSOPHY!!

Frame grab from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Read Ben Tyrer's article on film noir and this film in the latest issue of Film-Philosophy

Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013): the second to last of the brilliant new film studies e journal issues out in December with which Film Studies For Free will present you in 2013. And the daddy of them all.

There will be two more FSFF posts to appear before the holidays, that is, if you can tear yourself away from reading the below articles and reviews.

    Articles
      Book Reviews
      • Hsiu-Chuang Deppman (2010) Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film (Iris Chui Ping Kam) PDF
      • Alain Badiou (2013) Cinema and Alex Ling (2010) Badiou and Cinema (David H. Fleming) PDF
      • Timothy Corrigan, ed. (2012) Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. 2nd Edition (Shawn Loht) PDF
      • Michael Charlesworth (2011) Derek Jarman (Justin Remes) PDF
      • Sharon Lin Tay (2009) Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (Sheryl Tuttle Ross) PDF
      • Todd Berliner (2010) Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (John Anthony Bleasdale) PDF
      •  M. Keith Booker (2011) Historical Dictionary of American Cinema (Glen Melanson) PDF  
      • Shawn C. Bean (2008) The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking (Carrie Giunta) PDF
      • Julian Petley (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Zach Saltz) PDF
      • Suzanne Buchan (2011) The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Micki Nyman) PDF
      • Khatereh Sheibani (2011) The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics and Modernity After the Revolution (Paul Elliott) PDF
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      Thứ Hai, 16 tháng 9, 2013

      LOLA: Issue 4 on "Walks"; Tourneur, Hitchcock, De Palma, Pacino and much more

      Screen shot from Carlito's Way (Brian De Palma, 1993). Read Adrian Martin's essay on this film in the new issue of LOLA .
      Film Studies For Free is thrilled to hear that a new rolling issue of LOLA has launched. Issue 4 treats the very cinematic topic of 'Walks' and contains some items (Victor Bruno on lighting effects in Out of the Past, a fine translation of an Alain Bergala essay on Vertigo and Obsession, and several further excellent pieces on De Palma) that will very much repay a speedy stroll over there to check them out.

      Over the coming weeks, LOLA will go on to present further articles on Kira Muratova, Frank Tashlin, the Cinema of Compassion, CinemaScope, The Grandmaster, and much more! Those enticing contents will slowly be added to the already delightful ones linked to below.
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      Thứ Hai, 19 tháng 8, 2013

      Film and Media Studies Podcasts Galore! Cinema Journal's Aca-Media, New Books in Film Studies and NoirCasts

      Accompanying illustration for Episode 7: Aca-Media Podcast


      As its regular readers will know, Film Studies For Free is always delighted to promote non-open access film studies items if their authors and publishers make substantial related resources freely available online. So the below entry lists three different publicly accessible sets of brilliant podcast resources related, in general, to offline or subscription only journals and books: Cinema Journal's Aca-Media; Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir; and New Books in Film Studies.

      If you know of any further academic film studies podcasts that FSFF should link to, please let everyone know about those in the credits.


      1. Aca-Media
      Aca-Media is a monthly podcast that presents an academic perspective on media. Hosts Christine Becker and Michael Kackman explore current scholarship, issues in the media industries, questions in pedagogy and professional development, and events in the world of media studies. Aca-Media is sponsored by Cinema Journal, the official journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and has been funded in part by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. You can contact the show at info@aca-media.org, join its Facebook group, and follow it on Twitter at @aca_media.

      In this inaugural episode of Aca-Media, we interview incoming editor of Cinema Journal and Batman scholar Will Brooker, discuss the recent Flow Conference in Austin, TX (featuring a screening of the new Fox drama The Following), and report on the tribute to the late Alexander Doty held last fall in Bloomington, IN. 
        In this episode of Aca-Media, we premiere a new feature: one-minute media reviews called "Aca-Media Bites." If you would like to contribute one, email us for more information. Also on this episode: an interview with Yvonne Tasker about television crime drama and homeland security, a report on a Media Industries Conference in Atlanta, and our listeners' advice for the upcoming SCMS conference.
        This episode features an interview with Justin Horton on Bazin, Deleuze, and neorealism; a tour of the recent SCMS conference through the eyes of a first-timer and an old pro; and an interview with the incoming and outgoing presidents of SCMS, Barbara Klinger and Chris Holmlund. Plus an Aca-Media Bites segment proving that Ira Glass is a devil.
        This episode features an interview with David Scott Diffrient about his recent Cinema Journal article on the controversial 1970 sex comedy Myra Breckinridge. We also bring you a report on the recent SCMS Undergraduate Conference held at Notre Dame, a "Vox Scholari" segment on the texts that got us interested in studying media, and an Aca-Media Bites in praise of administrative assistants.
        This month, we introduce a new segment, "Cinema Journal Classics," in which we look back at an especially important or influential article (or just one of our favorites) from the CJ archives. In this installment, we return to the Autumn, 2005 "In Focus" feature on "The Place of Television Studies" and talk with one of those authors, Horace Newcomb, about television studies and his career in general. Then we bring you an interview with Aviva Dove-Viebahn about the SCMS website and the challenges the organization faces as it moves deeper into the online world. Finally, we invite you to contribute to an upcoming "Vox Scholari" segment: Tell us about a moment when you were surprised in the classroom. You can record your response and email it to info@aca-media.org.
        This episode features an interview with Paula Amad about her Cinema Journal article "Visual Riposte: Reconsidering the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory’s Gift to Film Studies." We also bring you a pedagogy roundtable on teaching with social media, as well as a new segment, "What We're Watching." Finally, we're still looking for contributors to our next Vox Scholari segment: What was a time when you were surprised in the classroom? Email us at info@aca-media.org for more info on how to send us your story.
        This is a great one, folks! We discuss the question of "industrial authorship" with Josh Heuman, who wrote a recent article in Cinema Journal on the topic. Then we bring you a roundtable discussion about the Trayvon Martin case, getting insights from Bambi Haggins, Miriam Petty, and Kristen Warner on what a Media Studies perspective can bring to the issue and how we might make sense of it as scholars, teachers, parents, and citizens. Plus Chris and Michael tell us about what the media they are consuming this month. Be sure to click through to the show notes for a "web extra"--a segment from the roundtable about the role of social media in the Zimmerman/Martin case that was too long to include in the podcast version.

        2. Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir
        Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir was the first analytical film podcast available on the Web, created by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards in July 2005 and running up to 2012. Each episode of Out of the Past investigates a single film in relation to the body of film noir. There are 53 episodes in total. In 2011, Clute and Edwards published their related book, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism (Dartmouth College Press).
        While many scholars have focused on noir as a dark visual style, or a worldview marked by the anxieties and stark realities of modernity, few have addressed noir's high degree of self-consciousness or its profoundly quirky humor. In their 2011 book, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism (Dartmouth College Press), Shannon Clute and Richey Edwards focus on these underappreciated characteristics of noir to demonstrate how films noir frame their "intertextual" borrowings from on another and create visual puns, and how these gestures function to generate both compelling narratives and critical reflections upon those narratives. Drawing on the on the concept of "constraint" articulated by the Oulipo (a French acronym for "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle," or "Workshop of Potential Literature"), Clute and Edwards demonstrate that noir was the most constrained of film styles, and the constraints noir embraced gave rise to its infinite variability and unprecedented self-reflexivity--the very characteristics that have often forced scholars to bracket off noir, framing it as an exception to the otherwise tidy world of studio-era American cinema. [Publisher's blurb]
        In a related video essay, Clute and Edwards used the "simple constraint of run time percentage to recombine iconic moments from 31 films noir and neo-noir, and in the process create[d] a short film that is at once a noir narrative and an investigation into the narrative constraints embraced by noir".

        Thanks a lot to Josh Cluderay for getting in touch and reminding this blog about Shannon and Richey's wonderful and hugely valuable labour of noir love).

        3. New Books in Film Studies

        New Books in Film Studies regularly provides substantial interview recordings with authors of recently published books in Film Studies are a component part of the New Books Network. The below list links to all those disseminated to date.

        You can follow this site on Facebook and via its website/RSS feed here.

        Thanks to this blog's dear friend James Williams, participant in the first listed of the interviews linked to below for alerting FSFF to this marvellous and growing resource.
        In his new book, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2013), James S. Williams engages the work of five contemporary filmmakers who are complex creators and interrogators of cinematic space in all its forms: screen, landscape, narrative, soundscape, and the space of spectatorship itself. Grappling simultaneously with film theory, the varieties of cinematic technique, and the social and political fields in which films are made and viewed, the book explores the spaces and places of films by Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. The book’s seven chapters take the reader from the “provincial” films of Dumont, to Guédiguian’s versions of Marseilles, to Cantet’s space of the classroom, Kechiche’s filmic métissage, and Denis’ cinema of diaspora.
        A theoretically sophisticated study that includes close readings of key films, the book is throughout concerned with the ways that cinema is a crucial site of representations of, and challenges to, French culture and tradition. Contemporary France and some of its most significant auteurs/directors here offer readers opportunities to think through critical concepts, practices, and experiences of and in the cinema. At the same time, the cinema and its spaces are sites of deep feeling, expression, and politics framing, de-framing, and re-framing the investments and fault lines of the wild, urban, exclusionary, multicultural, and postcolonial Republic.
        [Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] In addition to being full of wonderful anecdotes about the film and television industries, David Kirby’s Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011) is also a very enlightening exploration of the role of science consultants on television and in film, and the negotiations of expertise involved in relationships between scientists and the cinema. Scholars of STS will recognize some of the major themes that Kirby raises in the course of a fascinating look behind the scenes of the cinematic production of “science”: negotiated definitions of accuracy and plausibility, technologies of virtual witnessing, the social construction of knowledge. Many of the chapters will change the way you see representations of scientists and their work in the movies and on TV, and Kirby’s description of the filmic use of “diegetic prototypes,” or cinematic depictions of future technologies, is a stand-alone contribution in itself. This is a must-read for anyone interested in popular representations of science. Kirby describes the ways that visual media interpret, naturalize, and engage with scientific theories (be they well-accepted, controversial, or fantastical), and how some scientists in turn manipulate cinematic depictions for their own ends.
        Check out David’s recent discussion of the film Prometheus!
        [Cross-posted from New Books in Religion] As each frame of a film goes by we witness a new world that is situated in space and time. This process of worldmaking happens through the cinematic lens but also through the myths and rituals of religious traditions. Or so argues S. Brent Plate, Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, in his book Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Wallflower Press, 2008). In this short work Plate sets out to create a “critical religious film theory” and demonstrates how understanding religion and film can help us comprehend the other in more nuanced ways. Through a close examination of mise-en-scène, editing, and cinematics we discover the interrelationship of the world we live and the one on the screen. Plate reveals that film serves many of the same functions myth and ritual do in defining space and time. Both Hollywood blockbusters and avante-garde films present a way of understanding the world and reveal a new visual ethics for understanding reality. Plate also tells us what happens when film leaves the movie theatre and re-ritualizes contemporary experience. In our conversation we discuss film techniques, Star Wars, Blue Velvet, The Matrix, Chocolat, Rocky Horror Picture Show, sensual aspects of religion, the altar and the screen, ethics, aesthetics, myth, ritual, and Plates role in developing new features in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
        Did you see one of Eisenstein’s masterpieces “The Battleship Potemkin” and “Alexander Nevsky” in a Russian or Soviet history class? Were you captivated by Tarkovsky’s brooding long shots in movies such as “Solaris” and “Stalker“? Did you seek out Pichul’s “Little Vera” in the theater to get a glimpse of the new openness ushered in by Glasnost? If you did, or even more if you did not, Louis Menashe’s Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies (New Academia, 2011) offers a valuable entry into Soviet and Russian film, especially during the Gorbachev years.
        Menashe has long used Soviet film as a medium for discussing Russian and Soviet society in the classroom, thus the essays in this book will be of use to teachers. But beyond being a handy pedagogical resource, the book is a valuable history of Soviet cinema in the “Era of Stagnation,” Glasnost, and the Post-Soviet period. He argues that many very high quality films were made in the “Era of Stagnation,” though some were not shown. During Glasnost, these “lost” films made it into the theater to wide acclaim. Things were looking up. Yet, Monashe says, just as Gorbachev failed to create the foundation for an enduring open society, his Post-Soviet successors have failed to nurture a new generation of filmmakers to rival the creativity of the great Soviet directors.
        [Crossposted from New Books in History] This week we interviewed Laura Wittern-Keller about her new book, Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to Film Censorship 1915-1981. Both well written and extremely well researched, Freedom of the Screen takes the reader case by case through the history of film censorship in the United States. Dr. Wittern-Keller is a visiting assistant professor of history and public policy at the University at Albany (SUNY) and is also the recipient of the New York State Archives Award for Excellence in Research. Francis G. Couvares, author of Movie Censorship and American Culture, claims that “[Dr. Wittern-Keller's] research is prodigious and fills a significant gap in the field. All who are engaged in this field will have to incorporate her findings into their stories of movie censorship.”
        [Crossposted from New Books in History] Did you ever wonder how we got from a moment in which almost everything on film could be censored (the Progressive Era) to the moment in which nothing on film could be censored (today)? From the Nickelodeon to Deep Throat? The answer is provided by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski in their wonderful new book The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (University of Kansas Press, 2008). You’ve probably never heard of “The Miracle” or the case it launched in 1949. It’s a short film by Roberto Rossellini about a deranged women who, having slept with a man she believes is St. Joseph, gives birth to a child in a deserted mountain church. Fellini has a bit part (as “Joseph”). Critics generally liked it; Catholics in New York generally didn’t. The Church mounted a campaign against the film and the authorities relented: “The Miracle” was banned on the grounds that it was  “sacrilegious.” In 1949, those were fine grounds. Not for long. The film’s distributor–the feisty Joseph Burstyn–fought for the right to exhibit it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1952. And he won. Between 1952 and 1965, the states got out of the film-censorship business and we entered a new era of free-speech absolutism when it comes to film. One wonders if that’s a good thing.

        • Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr., "Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood" [podcast length: 36:28]

          Much ink has been spilled in telling the story of the making of Gone With the Wind- be it the book, the movie, or the subsequent musicals and merchandise. So it’s not only refreshing but downright commendable that in their biography, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011), Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr. managed to stumble upon a story that has been almost entirely ignored until now. Rather than focusing the biography on an individual involved with Gone With the Wind, the authors explore the life of the novel itself, from its inception through to its future.
          What emerges from their narrative is a fascinating perspective on the life of a tremendously successful book– a story that’s equal parts legal thriller and manners drama, and peopled by a cast of colorful characters. We’ve flapper Peggy Mitchell, her stern husband, and her lawyer brother, whose Southern affability is put to the test by the slew of glitzy publishing people they encounter in New York, all of whom seem to bungle the novel’s publication in one way or another.
          Thanks to that bungling, the case of Gone With the Wind provides a crash course in the history of United States copyright law and that may be the enduring legacy of Brown and Wiley’s book. It leaves one with a renewed appreciation for the grit and determination of Miss. Mitchell- an oftimes undervalued literary figure, who fought viciously to retain her authorial rights around the world, during war-time and in an age long before email.
        Dana Andrews was one of the major films stars of the 1940s, and yet he was never nominated for an Academy Award. The posterboy for the ‘male mask’ archetype that typified the decade, Andrews portrayed the ‘masculine ideal of steely impassivity’  in such classics as Laura and Fallen Angel. In Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) biographer Carl Rollyson cracks the mask, providing intimate insight into Andrews’s extraordinary talent and his life.
        Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rollyson’s account is that, in the end, Andrews appears to have been beloved by everyone. Often, biographies- particularly biographies of Hollywood stars- batter one’s affection for their subjects, illuminating horrible personality traits or an atrocious work ethic or a cruelty towards children, animals, and/or wives. Hollywood Enigma does no such thing. Rather, it tells the story of a man who, in Rollyson’s words, ‘always showed up for work on time, always knew his lines, and was never less than a gentleman.’
        That Hollywood Enigma is about a nice man doesn’t make it any less interesting. Origin stories in biographies are notoriously tedious- long lists of grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, like something out of Genesis- but Rollyson lays out Andrews’s story at a brisk and engaging pace. Born in rural Mississippi (a town with such an exquisite sense of humor that it christened itself ‘Don’t’ solely so that its postal abbreviation might be ‘Don’t, Miss.’), he grew up in Texas then moved to California, where he worked as an accountant, a gas station attendant, and at various other odd jobs before an employer helped finance his lessons in opera. That, in turn, led to a gig at the community theater and, nine years after setting foot in L.A., Andrews appeared onscreen.
        Andrews would a remain a popular star through the 1940s, only to drift into B-movies in the 1950s and 1960s. But he would resurface in the 1970s,  hitting upon something of a second act when he began publicly discussing his struggle with alcoholism. Andrews helped de-stigmatize alcoholism- a disease that was still taboo- while also reframing the way people thought about alcoholics.
        Hollywood Enigma is, ultimately, the story of a man who, in an industry known for its frivolity and excesses, stood out as an enigma precisely because he knew who he was.
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        Chủ Nhật, 14 tháng 10, 2012

        Hard-Boiled! Studies of Raymond Chandler's Work on Screen

        Frame grab from The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). Read Jonathan  Rosenbaum's essay on this film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel.

        Today, Film Studies For Free brings you the second of three posts devoted to online resources provided by the staff of the fantastic Film Studies department at Queen Mary, University of London. On this occasion, the resource is a two part video of an excellent, illustrated lecture by Adrian Wootton on the screen adaptations of Chandler's work, including ones the writer scripted himself.

        This time, FSFF adds value to the videos with its own presentation of a terribly hard-boiled list of links to online scholarly studies of Raymond Chandler's work and its screen adaptations.


        On December 3rd 2009, Adrian Wootton, then Chief Executive of the BFI (now CEO of Film London), visited Queen Mary, University of London, to give a talk on Raymond Chandler on screen.
        Click on the links below to access QuickTime video files of the event.


        Wootten 2 poster frame

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        Thứ Ba, 5 tháng 6, 2012

        A Place for Film Noir with Will Scheibel

           


        Production at Film Studies For Free Towers will slow up, for a month or so, due to the sheer weight of responsibilities elsewhere, FSFF is afraid.

        Some of those responsibilities are significant authorial and, especially, editorial ones which will bear truly glorious, open access, film scholarly fruit very soon!

        But this site will continue to post some occasional gems in the meantime. And this brings us to the above, excellent excerpt from one of the great Indiana University Cinema Podcasts.

        Regular hosts Andy Hunsucker and Jason Thompson invited Film Studies grad student at Indiana University (and former notable blogger) Will Scheibel to talk about Film Noir, particularly in relation to preparing a class on this fundamental film studies topic. The discussion is extremely engaging and very well informed

        Check out the full audio podcast episode at here. Lins to previous episodes are here. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. The IU podcast is also on Twitter and Facebook.

        Two earlier FSFF entries on film noir are given below:  
          And for further, film studies, podcast fun and frolics please don't forget the wonderful Film Versus Film crew series with Dustin Morrow, Chris Cagle, David Cooper Moore and Matt Prigge. Their beautiful Tumblr is here.
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          Thứ Năm, 8 tháng 3, 2012

          "Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies

          The above is a short video primer by Catherine Grant. It offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of gender, sexuality and movement in relation to Rita Hayworth's performance as Gilda in Charles Vidor's 1946 film.
          The femme fatale is a product of the male imaginary, which emerges in literature and the visual arts under contingent socio-political conditions as a challenge to coherent and stable identities. [...]
               The emergence of the femme fatale motif in literature, art and cinema generally coincides with periods of social or political instability and is not specific to a culture, society or era, but exhibits countless masks as she may manifest herself in diverse historical or geo-political contexts, and through a variety of artistic and literary forms. She embodies traces of a myriad of powerful, as well as menacing, historical, biblical and mythical female figures, such as Cleopatra, Salome, or the Sirens; yet this wicked and barren creature is always imbued with an alluring beauty and rapacious sexuality that is potentially deadly to man. The femme fatale figure is a recurrent patriarchal construct, a projection of all that exists beyond that which is normal, familiar, or safe. As Rebecca Stott observes, she is a multiple sign, or ‘the Other around whom the qualities of all Other collect in the male imagination’ (1992: 39). As such, her appearances are always symptomatic of a society in crisis.           [Eva Bru-Domínguez, 'The Body as a Conflation of Discourses: The femme fatale in Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat' (1974)', Journal of Catalan Studies 2009]
          [I]s it possible that the tangled webs of violence, sexuality, pathology, and intrigue at the core of certain film noir offer moments of reversal and exception which challenge women's role as eternal victim? How is an anti-feminist backlash or male anxiety around women's power projected into these paranoid film scenarios? To what extent can such disruptions be contained through conventional "happy family" closure - or through the violent death of the (anti-)heroine whose glittering image lingers as the credits rolls? Working against the inescapable grain of the "repressive rule" of female victimhood, I choose here to seize on the exceptional figure of the "fatale femme." While the exception may help define the rule, she also keeps alive the possibility, the inevitability, of transformation in gendered relations of power. [Julianne Pidduck, The "fatal femme" in contemporary Hollywood film noir: reframing gender, violence, and power, Masters Thesis, Concordia University, 1993: 6-7]
          Rather than promoting images of women that emphasize their spirit and unknowable power, and rather than promoting images of women that rely on their bodies, finally, we need to illustrate the contexts that inform women’s experience. I want to suggest some of the reasons why we’ve grown accustomed to identifying film noir’s “femme fatale” without examining these contexts that inform her presence in film noir, by doing just that: examining the settings—social, psychological, political, physical, and geographical—that define her experience, which is, I want strongly to suggest, a far better thing to define than “woman” herself.
               This study seeks to modify the tone of feminist discussions about film noir’s women by reorienting our attention to the narrative, social contexts, and mise-en-scene that show the relationship between women’s powers and the limits placed on them by social rules. Both the view of the “femme fatale” as misogynist projection and the view of the “femme fatale” as opaque yet transgressive female force emphasize her status as object or symbol (as object of scorn or as the mysterious and opaque “other” that threatens to destroy the male subject). My aim is to adjust our focus on film noir and gender so that we illuminate these women’s narratives rather than mystifying women as objects or images.           [Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009): 5. Book info.]
          Film Studies For Free wishes its reader a very happy International Women's Day with a varied curatorial selection of online scholarly work touching on possibly the most studied 'object' in all of feminist film theory: the 'dangerous' woman, sometimes fatal, sometimes a fatality...

          If you are a film goer you know her kind. She is attractive, alluring, enigmatic, enticing, teasing, siren-like. Totally tautological. You might come across her dancing in a cinematic cabaret or show, smoking in a private detective's office, gracing a film noir alleyway, or haunting a difficult to decipher flashback. Or turning up like a beautiful but bad penny, provoking your scopophilia (and/or your epistemophilia), just about anywhere in almost every period of international film history.

          Just what is it about these cinematic women? There certainly isn't one answer to that question, but the studies linked to below might very well help you to begin to tackle it.

          If there are any important online resources that FSFF has missed, please do list them in the comments thread.
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          Thứ Ba, 17 tháng 1, 2012

          Vertigoed! The film scholarly value of mash-up?

          Last updated January 20, 2012

          A psychosexually obsessed man wanders the streets of 1950s San Francisco; he spies [on] seemingly unavailable blonde women; he makes a woman fall from a height; she drops into water; the scene is filled with circle imagery, especially circles within circles.....  [See the original sequence]
          As Film Studies For Free's readers may have heard, Kim Novak, co-star of Vertigo, took out an ad in trade magazine Variety to protest about the recent use of an excerpt from Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film in Michel Hazanavicius’s 2011 modern silent film The Artist. "I want to report a rape," went the headline. "I feel as if my body - or at least my body of work -- has been violated by the movie, The Artist," Novak wrote. She went on to criticise the “use and abuse [of] famous pieces of work to gain attention and applause for other than what they were intended.”

          There was quite a strong international reaction to Novak's intervention. Some were dismayed by her recourse to the lexicon of rape; others were more sympathetic to her stance and background as someone very much not from the digital age of remix and creative appropriation; still others remind us that, in 'Scene d'Amour', the musical Vertigo theme in question, Herrmann was, of course, inspirationally reworking some of Richard Wagner's motifs from his Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Good artists copy; great artists steal?

          Enter the story the PRESS PLAY blog which launched a contest inviting readers to re-use Herrmann's "Scene d'Amour" music in their own mash-up, inspired by the idea that "Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score is so passionate and powerful that it can elevate an already good scene -- and a familiar one at that -- to a higher plane of expression."

          Film Studies For Free's author was only too happy to have a go, joining the legions of those who, like Hazanavicius, have used Herrmann's music in their work, in large or very small ways. Her choice of film sequence? One borrowed from The Sniper, Edward Dmytryk's 1952 film noir, with its own, obsessed, wandering male protagonist and San Francisco setting.

          The Sniper was one of the films that probably directly inspired Vertigo, as well as Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho -- see critic Dave Kehr's thoughts on this. The above mash-up chooses, then, to marry Herrmann's lush Wagnerian romance with the key 'amusement park' sequence from Dmytryk's brilliant film, with its astonishing performance of overt misogyny by Arthur Franz as Edward "Eddie" Miller -- perhaps the perfect, filmic, mirror-image of James Stewart's unforgettable, unconsciously misogynist, John "Scottie" Ferguson.

          FSFF's author was excited to experience at first-hand the scholarly possibilities of remixing film clips in this way (the contest rules state that the original film sequence cannot be re-edited in any way -- except, if you choose to, by removing its sound -- in order not to cheat with the creative re-juxtaposition process).

          Remixing is an astonishingly good (and amazingly easy) way of really -- almost literally -- getting inside a film sequence. It is thus a truly great exercise for all students of film with access to the right digital tools. Analysing just how the mash-up adapts the meaning of the original music and original sequence is rather educational and fun, too!

          If you get your skates on with the Vertigo score exercise, there are still three days left for Press Play's contest entries. Click here to watch the (over 60) entries at present.

          FSFF's favorite entry to the contest, so far, is a mash-up which, rather like its own, plays on the conscious or unconscious connections between an earlier film and Vertigo. It's Matthew Cheney's wonderful work with Mädchen in Uniform (the brilliant 1931 film by Leontine Sagan). But there are loads of other imaginative and highly satisfying remixes that you will enjoy checking out. UPDATE: the videographic legend that is Steven Boone just added a late Vertigoed entry which is FSFF's new favourite: a scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

          If you want to see even more brilliant, Vertigo mash-up work -- actually, a work of remix in a completely different, utterly sublime class -- you simply must check out The Vertigo Variations by remarkable critic-filmmaker B. Kite.

          And, for more vertiginous sublimity, don't forget FSFF's very own Study of a Single Film: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo entry.



          The mash up video at the top of the post was made according to principles of Fair Use/Fair Dealing, with non-commercial scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License in January 2012. 
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          Thứ Hai, 21 tháng 2, 2011

          Studies of Film Noirishness, with Love

          50+ new links added on February 27, 2011
          The above is a short video primer by Catherine Grant. It offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of gender, sexuality and movement in relation to Rita Hayworth's performance as Gilda in Charles Vidor's 1946 film.



          Film Studies For Free is delighted to present its own contribution to the remarkable fundraising effort for the Film Noir Foundation that has been taking place in the last week, namely the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blog-a-thon, organised by film critics Farran Smith Nehme (Self-Styled Siren) and Marilyn Ferdinand (of Ferdy on Film).

          Awed by the contributions so far, FSFF proffers (above) a little video-primer on its favourite noir - Gilda - together with a reposting of Matt Zoller Seitz's fabulous audiovisual essay on The Prowler (also above), and a whole host of direct links (below) to openly accessible scholarly reading and viewing on Film Noir, and on all varieties of Neo-Noir, too - taken altogether, some of the most essential of film studies topics.

          The Film Noir Foundation works to preserve and restore movies in its chosen mode from many eras and from many countries. The film nominated to be restored with monies raised this year is a fine and important noir called The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me) directed by Cy Endfield (1914–1995).

          One of the resources FSFF links to is an excellent interview with Endfield, conducted in 1989 by Brian Neve, in which he discusses that film in the context of his career as a whole and the historical events which formed the background to his work. Here's what Endfield concludes about The Sound of Fury.
          I consider that my talent for making pictures was best expressed in two pictures, Zulu and The Sound of Fury. I think the one big talent I have is to make big pictures. There is a sense of structure about something of dimension that I have found lacking even in pictures that were supposed to be big. [...] The Sound of Fury was made mostly from my blood circulation and nervous system. 
          FSFF knows that feeling only too well! It can't wait to see the restored film. So, please, if you love Film Noir, join this blog's author in donating some of your hard-earned dough (or even some of your ill-begotten gains...) on this occasion. Just click here. Thank you!
                            Note: The first video essay (by Catherine Grant) embedded at the top of this post was made according to principles of Fair Use/Fair Dealing, primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License in February 2011. If you found this video or FSFF's Film Noir entry useful or enjoyable, please consider supporting with a donation the valuable work of the Film Noir Foundation. Thank you.
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