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

Chủ Nhật, 30 tháng 3, 2014

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Post-Conference Round Up: [IN]TRANSITION,Transnational Cinemas, MOVIE eBooks, and much more!

Homepage of [in]Transition, 1.1, 2014

Film Studies For Free is just back from attending the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. This year it took place in the distinctly cinematic, and especially fun, city of Seattle in Washington State, USA.

The big event, from this blog's point of view, was the launch of [in]Transition, a new open access periodical, co-edited by FSFF's author with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton. [in]Transition – a collaboration between MediaCommons and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ official publication Cinema Journal – is the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. [in]Transition has a highly distinguished editorial board and is more than ably project managed for MediaCommons by Jason Mittell and for Cinema Journal by Chris Becker, CJ's online editor (big thanks also go to the very visionary Will Brooker [CJ editor], Avi Santo, Monica McCormick and the rest of the heroic MediaCommons team). 

You can read more about the project here, and about videographic film studies and its lineage more generally in the Resources page here. Please visit the website and be very encouraged to comment on the curated videos (on Marilyn Monroe, neorealism, F for Fake and the films of Ingmar Bergman) published in issue 1. One of the main goals of this journal is to generate debate and understanding about audiovisual moving image studies, and we would love to be able to count on the insights and questions of our viewers/readers in this project. So please visit the journal website and see whether you'd like to contribute to the Open Peer Commentary.

You can also watch video recordings (linked to below) of the historic SCMS conference workshop on Visualizing Media Studies, on March 20th, which launched [in]Transition, with contributions by Chris Becker, Drew Morton, Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley, Matthias Stork, Benjamin Sampson, Jason Mittell, and a very lively and interested audience. This session was livestreamed and then archived for online viewing among a series of other SCMS panels and workshops. These are all linked to below, along with lots of other items of interest and news from the conference.
 
SCMS Workshop Livestreaming:
Transnational Cinemas Links:
On March 24, 2014, Film Studies For Free interviewed Dr Austin Fisher, Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema and editor of the forthcoming volume Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), among other publications. 
     The interview took place in Seattle, USA, after the close of the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, where Austin was contributing to a number of workshops and panels as co-chair (with Iain Robert Smith) of the SCMS Scholarly Interest Group in Transnational Cinemas. Austin talks about this topic in the interview and connects it to his longstanding interest in Italian cinema and the spaghetti western. He was also in the US as an invited speaker (with Sir Christopher Frayling) at an event at Texas Tech, in Lubbock, Texas, to celebrate 50 years since the release of A Fistful of Dollars.
     Austin is also author of a video essay on The Searchers, and in the interview he talks about the experience of making this work, a topic of particular interest at the SCMS conference where [in]Transition was launched.

MOVIE eBooks!!
  • At a wonderful SCMS workshop on 'Film Scholarship and the Online Journal' (proposed by V.F. Perkins and chaired by Girish Shambu), John Gibbs announced the launch of a range of open access eBooks by MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism. The first three volumes (in EPUB and Mobi formats) are as follows:
    • Movies and Tone by Douglas Pye
    • The Police Series by Jonathan Bignell 
    • Reading Buffy by Deborah Thomas 
Discussions of/Reflections on SCMS:
Other material presented or referred to at SCMS (please let FSFF know of more to add to this list):
    Other news and links: 

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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 Bảy, 16 tháng 3, 2013

          Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013 Conference Papers and Contributions Online

                      Film Studies and Videographic Assemblage A Video Presentation by Catherine Grant for the S23 Workshop "Writing with Video: Beyond the Illustrated Text", Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Chicago, March 6-10, 2013.

          [Catherine Grant's introduction to the above video:] My presentation to this workshop has a somewhat strange take on the notion of the capacity of "video-writing" to move beyond the "illustrated text". The video it presents (embedded above) not only uses a good deal of text, but was also originally inspired by the idea of audiovisually amplifying, or supplementing, a long pre-existing written study of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope.
              What making it demonstrated to me is that, in scholarly settings, even the simplest videographic act of presenting an assemblage of compiled film sequences involves medium-specific forms of argumentation, for example, the selection and presentation of audiovisual evidence, montage and mise en scene, titling, sound editing and other creative effects, all aiming to draw from "a broader notion of pathos, logos, and ethos than that which has been reified in the age of print literacy", as Virginia Kuhn has put it.* The result is not only the creation of an audiovisual argument, therefore, but also, importantly, of an active viewing space for live co-research - a framed experience of participant observation which, particularly through its online distribution, dialogically invites responses (including rebuttals!) through forms of remix. [Also see
          Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins) and Déjà-Viewing?Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies]
              *Kuhn, Virginia. 2012. "The Rhetoric of Remix." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. Online at dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0358.
          S23 Workshop chaired by Virginia Kuhn (University of Southern California), with presentations by Vicki Callahan, Catherine Grant, Michael Lachney, Virginia Kuhn and Cheryl Ball. The workshop was sponsored by the Media Literacy and Pedagogical Outreach Scholarly Interest Group. The full 2013 SCMS Conference Program PDF is here.
          Film Studies For Free is happy to present links to some resources pertaining to papers or presentations at the (recently concluded) annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.

          FSFF's author's own contribution to the conference, embedded and pasted in above, was part of a workshop panel on "Writing with Video" (see all of the assets from this workshop gathered by Virginia Kuhn here). In the end, this year -- for the same reasons it's been so quiet at this blog (major, unexpected construction work taking place at home at the same time as a very busy semester!) -- she was unable to travel to the US to attend this final session of the conference in person. But, thanks to the wonders of modern technology her work was kindly presented in absentia by her fellow panelists. Among these, Vicki Callahan and Michael Lachney presented on their pedagogical practices around teaching video argumentation as part of multimedia literacy programmes. In particular, Callahan discussed her classroom use of online video collaborative authoring tools including WeVideo. Cheryl Ball discussed her experience as editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (see Ball's fabulous essay for Kairos on digital scholarship here). And workshop chair Virginia Kuhn presented on her highly innovative large scale video analysis project, a wonderful example of the potential for humanities supercomputing (also see here).

          Below are links to a whole host of further conference contributions, mostly collected via Twitter. Thanks very much to those who supplied the links. If you have posted your own SCMS paper online, or know of others not gathered below, please leave the link in a comment. Thank you!



          SCMS Digital Humanities J23 Workshop 5_8_13 from scms at livestream.com. Featuring Miriam Posner, Jason Mittell (see below for his paper), Hannah Goodwin, Jasmijn Van Gorp, Jason Rhody and Eric Faden

          Also see:
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            Thứ Ba, 7 tháng 8, 2012

            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




            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.
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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 Ba, 20 tháng 3, 2012

              Video Essays and Scholarly Remix: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Forms - Audiovisual Film Studies, Pt 2


              Catherine Grant will discuss the above companion piece to her video essay Touching the Film Object? at a workshop on "Video Essays: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Form" at the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, 5pm on March 22, 2012 in Boston.
                   Her fellow workshop participants will include Christian Keathley (Middlebury College), Girish Shambu (Canisius College), Benjamin Sampson (UCLA), Richard Misek (University of Kent), Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida) and Matthias Stork (UCLA).  
              In her book Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey considered how the intersection of cinema with various digital technologies has changed film studies in recent decades.  Most obviously, DVDs allow film scholars unprecedented access to high-quality copies of our objects of study, and the internet has supplemented this with a wealth of online critical and archival material.  As a result, these various digital tools have significantly enhanced film scholars’ research and teaching.  But this intersection of cinema and digital technologies has brought not just accessibility, but the potential for dramatic transformation in the study of film.  Mulvey wrote, “New ways of consuming old movies on electronic and digital technologies,” she wrote, “should bring about a ‘reinvention’ of textual analysis and a new wave of cinephilia."
              One place where this ‘reinvention’ of analysis and revived cinephilia can be seen is in the emergence recently of a new scholarly form -- the video essay.  Practitioners of this form are exploring the ways in which digital technologies afford a new way of conducting and presenting film research -- for the full range of digital technologies enables film scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their object of study: moving images and sounds.  Examples of this video essay work can be readily viewed online, especially at the Moving Image Source website, and at the vimeo site Audiovisualcy .  But most of the work in this new form is being produced by scholars outside academia (with some key exceptions), in part because the strictures of written academic discourse pose a challenge for this nascent form of multi-media scholarship.
              This workshop -- which will include presentations by film scholars who are also video essay producers -- will consider the challenges faced in legitimizing the video essay as a valid form of academic scholarship.  The participants will address such issues as: How does the use of images and sounds in the presentation of scholarship demand a rethinking of the rhetorical strategies employed by the film scholar?  How does aesthetics play a role in an academic discourse that aims to produce knowledge and emotional response?  How would teaching courses on video essays help legitimize the form, and how might such instruction be undertaken?  How might emerging scholars situate themselves as leaders of this emerging academic mode? [SCMS workshop proposal drafted by Christian Keathley, author of the must-read essay 'La caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia', in Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011]
              *****
              [H]apticity -- a grasp of what can be sensed of an object in close contact with it -- seems to me now to be very helpful in conceiving what can take place in the process of creating videographic film studies. It can also help us more fully to understand videographic studies as objects to be experienced themselves.

              In the old days, the only people who really got to               touch films were those who worked on them, particularly film editors. As Annette Michelson (1990) and others have argued, the democratization of the 'heady delights' of editing (Michelson, 1990: 22) was brought about by the introduction of video technology in the 1970s and 80s. Now, with the relatively wide availability of digital technology, we can even more easily share 'the euphoria one feels at the editing table [...] a sharpening cognitive focus and [...] a ludic sovereignty, grounded in that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence " [Michelson, 1990: 23].

              But, are there other ways in which 'touching film' is just a fantasy? In videographic film studies, do videographers actually touch or handle the real               matter of the film? Or are we only ever able to touch upon the film experience? Our film experiences? Do video essays only make objects of, or objectify, our film experiences, our insuperable memories of them, our own cinematic projections?

              These questions may not flag up significantly new limitations. Film critical video essays do seem to work, it seems to me, in the same 'intersubjective' zone as that of written film criticism. As Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton argue of this zone, 'we are immersed in the film as the critic sees it, hence brought to share a deeply involved perspective' (2011: 9).

              Yet, in videographical criticism, is there not a different intersubjective relation, a more               transitional one, to the physicality or materiality of the objective elements of films that the video essays reproduce? Like written essays, video essays may well '"stir our recall"' (Klevan and Clayton, 2011: 9) of a film moment or sequence, but they usually do this by confronting us with a replay of the actual sequence, too. How might this difference count?

              If nothing else, this confrontation with, or, to put it more gently, this inevitable re-immersion in the film experience, ought to make videographic critics pursue               humility in their analytical observations with an even greater focus, make them especially 'willing to alter [their analyses] according to what [they come into] contact with [...] give up ideas when they stop touching the other’s surface' (Marks, 2004: 80).

              A further, built-in, random element in non-linear digital video editing -- the fact that this process frequently confronts the editor with graphic matter from the film (e.g. thumbnails) that s/he may not specifically have chosen to dwell on -- may also encourage a particularly humble, usefully (at times)               non-instrumental form of looking that Swalwell (2002) detects in Marks' notion of hapticity.
              As Marks writes, 'Whether criticism is haptic, in touch with its object, is a matter of the point at which the words lift off' (2004: 80). Haptic criticism must be what happens, then, when the words don't lift off the surface of the film object, if they (or any of the other film-analytical elements conveyed through montage or other non-linear editing techniques and tools) remain on the surface of the film object, as they often do in videographic film studies. In addition to this, video essays on films may often be an especially 'superficial' form of criticism, frequently using slow motion or zoom-in effects to allow those experiencing them to close in on the grain or detail of the film image.
              With so many words, or other filmanalytical strategies, simultaneously available to be sensed on the surface of the image and, in terms of sound strategies (such as voiceovers or other added elements), seeming to emanate from it, videographical film studies may be curiously haptic objects, then. It is useful to remember that the art historical concept of haptic visuality emerged from the scholarly and artistic traditions of formalism, which made procedures such as defamiliarization central to their practice. Defamiliarization -- the uncanny distancing effect of an altered perspective on (such as a hyper-proximity to) an otherwise familiar object -- may be one of the greatest benefits of the particular hapticity of videographical film criticism. [Catherine Grant, 'Touching the Film Object', Filmanalytical, August 29, 2011: citing Laura U. Marks, 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes', Framework" the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004 (large pdf - scroll down to p. 79); Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton, 'Introduction', in Clayton and Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011; and Michelson,  Annette, 'The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning: Prolegomena for the Analysis of a Textual System,' October 52 (Spring 1990)]
              *****
              One of the elements that Film Studies For Free appreciates most about online audiovisual film studies (film studies in digital video forms) are the phenomenological possibilities they offer viewers for the experiencing of moving image and sound juxtapositions in real time. We can synchronously feel, as well as know about, the comparisons they make. In other words, unlike written texts, they don't have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us. [Catherine Grant, 'Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison', Film Studies For Free, March 12, 2012]
              *****
              What interests me most in academic study is the exploration of what Gérard Genette called "transtextuality", that is to say, "everything that brings the text into relation (manifest or hidden) with other texts" (Genette, Palimpsestes, 1992: 81). Sometimes this interest alights on matters of cultural influence and film authorship (see here, for example), but often it focuses itself on the issue of the recognition of cinematic interconnectedness.

              Now, in an age of digital and multimedia scholarship, how better to explore filmic connections of different kinds than to use the format of the video               mashup? [This video essay on Peeping Tom and Code Unknown] is, then, the first in a series of "scholarly mashups" [...] examining the obvious and obscure connections between particular films in ways that are both striking and, hopefully, more precisely illuminating with regard to their form as films, than comparisons performed purely in non-audiovisual formats might be. [Catherine Grant, 'True likeness: Peeping Tom and Code inconnu/Code Unknown', Filmanalytical, June 26, 2010]

              Here is the second entry in a mini-series of posts here at Film Studies For Free on the practical possibilities for, and the critical debates about, audiovisual film studies research and 'publication'.

              Today the focus is on two of film scholarship's emergent forms, much loved by FSFF: video essays on, or scholarly remixes about, film. The above quotations draw attention to the range of issues these forms  raise for film studies: from the changes they involve in the processes of film studies research to the questions they pose about its publication forms and knowledge effects, as well as the possible roles for creativity and affect in our discipline.

              The occasion for this latest meditation is an upcoming workshop discussion at the annual conference of the U.S. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. But  there are also a whole raft of online developments in, and other important, recent, publications on, this genre that FSFF wanted to flag up. Those are listed below.

              Beneath all the links you will find embedded versions of some of the online video essays by FSFF's very talented, fellow workshop panellists and respondents in Boston. (You can find all of FSFF's audiovisual essays here).

              If you are able to come to the workshop, hurray! Do please say hello to us all at the end! If you can't come but would like us to discuss any questions you have about video essays, do post those in the comments below. Thanks.

              FSFF will take a little blogging break during and after the SCMS conference, but will tirelessly tweet during the conference, reporting on panels attended and other events. So do please follow @filmstudiesff if you'd like those updates.

              Otherwise, see you back here sometime in early April.

              Christian Keathley, Pass the Salt


               

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