Now ONLINE! Jacques Rancière's Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading

Jacques Rancière Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading, May 2, 2014

Private Q & A Session with Jacques Rancière, preceding his Lecture on ‘Cinema and the Frontiers of Art’ at CFAC, University of Reading, May 2, 2014

The above videos provide the sole focus for a fairly self-explanatory -- and wonderful -- entry at Film Studies For Free today: they present the recording of a lecture and discussion on cinema by the hugely eminent French philosopher Professor Jacques Rancière at the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures, University of Reading, UK.

Rancière's abstract for his lecture, which took place on May 2, 2014, reads as follows:

Ars gratia artis, the three words written on the scroll surrounding the head of the roaring lion at the beginning of the MGM movies may sum up the singularity of cinema. Cinema has blurred in many ways the frontiers separating pure art from the activities of the everyday and the forms of popular performance and entertainment. By the same token, it may have questioned the very unity of what we call art. Through examples borrowed from the history of film and from the history of cinephilia I wish to examine some aspects of this subversion of the frontiers of art.

Jacques Rancière, born in Algiers (1940) is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris VIII, where he taught Philosophy from 1969 to 2000, and visiting professor in several American universities. His work deals with emancipatory politics, aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. His books translated into English include notably: The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), Disagreement (1998) , The Politics of Aesthetics ( 2006) , The Future of the Image ( 2007), The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Proletarian Nights (2012) and Aisthesis (2013). He has authored three books dedicated to cinema (Film Fables, 2006; Bela Tarr. The Time after, 2013; The Intervals of Cinema, forthcoming, 2014)

Thanks to Professor Lúcia Nagib and the other faculty at CFAC for making this event happen and, especially, for making the recording accesible online for everyone to watch it. Rancière's lecture begins about fifteen minutes into the first video.

Thanks to Hoi Lun Law for the tip-off that these recordings had gone online. FSFF can't wait to watch them!

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

• The Facts Before Our Eyes: Wittgenstein and the Film Noir Investigator Keith Dromm PDF
• 'How Can It Not Know What It Is?': Self and Other in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner  Andrew Norris PDF
• Ghost in the Shell 2, Technicity and the Subject  Daniel Hourigan PDF
• Throne of Blood and the Metaphysics of Tragedy  Henry Somers-Hall PDF
• 'That Man Behind the Curtain': Atheism and Belief in The Wizard of Oz  Justin Remes PDF
• Film Noir as Point de Capiton: Double Indemnity, Structure and Temporality Ben Tyrer PDF
• Shooting for Dead Time in Gus Van Sant's Elephant William Little  PDF
• Bad Memories: Haneke with Locke on Personal Identity and Post-Colonial Guilt Justine McGill PDF
• 'Misfortune's Image': The Cinematic Representation of Trauma in Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967)  Mark Cresswell, Zulfia Karimova PDF
• The Ister: Cinema's Interruption Linda Daley PDF
• Otherness and the Renewal of Freedom in Jarmusch's Down by Law: A Levinasian and Arendtian Reading Mark Cauchi  PDF
• Mimesis Reconsidered: Adorno and Tarkovsky contra Habermas  Simon Mussell PDF
• Nietzsche and Bad Conscience on Mosquito Coast James Edward Gough, Sue Matheson PDF
• The Closure of the 'Gold Window': From 'Camera-Eye' to 'Brain-Screen' Morgan M Adamson  PDF
• A New/Old Ontology of Film Rafe McGregor  PDF
• Internal Needs, Endoxa and the Truth: An Aristotelian Approach to the Popular Screenplay Daniel McInerny PDF
• Extreme Makeover: Art and Morality in The Shape of Things Joseph H. Kupfer  PDF
• 'Even the Ghost was more than one person': Hauntology and Authenticity in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There Carolyn D'Cruz, Glenn D'Cruz PDF
• I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Subjective Dissolution, Schizoanalysis and Post-Structuralist Ethics in the Films of Todd Haynes  Helen Darby PDF
• Truth, Autobiography and Documentary: Perspectivism in Nietzsche and Herzog Katrina Mitcheson  PDF
• Left-over Spaces: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers  Benoit Dillet, Tara Puri PDF
• Homeopathic Repetition and Memories of Underdevelopment: The Dialectic of Subjective Experience and Objective Historical Forces  Trevor James Cunnington PDF
• Charcoal Matter with Memory: Images of Movement, Time and Duration in the animated films of William Kentridge  David H. Fleming PDF
• The Philosophical Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes: The Silent Films of Stan Brakhage   James Michael Magrini PDF
• 'The Epidermis of Reality': Artaud, the Material Body and Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc Ros Murray PDF

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

On Embodiment and the Body: New Issue of CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image

Above, a recording of composer Simon Fisher Turner and sound artist Black Sifichi's live performance of SFT's score for Derek Jarman's 1994 film Blue at Glasgow's Tramway Theatre in 2008.  Below, a brief excerpt from Vivian Sobchack's article 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Today, most graduate students are in such a hurry to “professionalize” and “talk the talk” of their disciplines that they often forget to attend to their own experience of “seeing” and “listening” — or they devalue it. Instead, they rush to quote others, and describe their objects of study through a range of “floating signifiers” that tend to overdetermine and foreclose their objects and their descriptions before the latter have even really begun. Hermeneutically sophisticated yet overly dependent upon “received knowledge,” these students are also secretly insecure and worried that everyone else ‘knows’ more than they do — and intellectually aware of “the death of the subject,” they are highly suspicious of their own “subjective” experience. They ignore, mistrust, and devalue it as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevantly singular — this last, a false, indeed arrogant, humility that unwittingly rejects intersubjectivity, sociality, and culture. Thus, ignoring the apodicticity (or initial certainty) and presence of their own lived-bodies engaged in being-in-the-world (and in the cinema), their thought about the world (and cinema) has no existential ground of its own from which to empirically proceed. Phenomenological inquiry affords redress to this contemporary situation: it insists we dwell on the ground of experience before moving on to more abstract or theoretical concerns, that we experience and reflect upon our own sight before we (dare I pun?) cite others. [From Vivian Sobchack, 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Happy new year to all of Film Studies For Free's readers! FSFF has unfortunately been slowed up in its efforts to bring you its list of Best Online Film Studies Resources in 2012. That should now be published around the end of next week.

But, in the meantime, there are a few new journal-issues to catch up with, including a strong contender for the category of Best Single Issue of an Online Film Studies Journal in 2012: the below, latest offering from CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image on Embodiment and the Body. And, in this blog's humble opinion, Vivian Sobchack's article, from which FSFF has cited above, would be a shoo-in for Best and certainly most important 2012 Article...

CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF

EMBODIMENT AND THE BODY edited by Patrícia Silveirinha Castello Branco

• EDITORIAL: CINEMA, THE BODY AND EMBODIMENT, 1-9 PDF 
• ABSTRACTS, 10-18 PDF

Articles

• FLESHING OUT THE IMAGE: PHENOMENOLOGY, PEDAGOGY, AND DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE, 19-38 PDF  by Vivian Sobchack
• SEDUCTION INCARNATE: PRE-PRODUCTION CODE HOLLYWOOD AND POSSESSIVE SPECTATORSHIP, 39-61 PDF by Ana Salzberg 
• A PHENOMENOLOGY OF RECIPROCAL SENSATION IN THE MOVING BODY EXPERIENCE OF MOBILE PHONE FILMS, 62-83 PDF by Gavin Wilson
• CINEMA OF THE BODY: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMATIVITY IN LARS VON TRIER’S DOGVILLE AND YORGOS LANTHIMO’S DOGTOOTH, 84-108 PDF by Angelos Koutsourakis
• THE BODY OF IL DUCE: THE MYTH OF THE POLITICAL PHYSICALITY OF MUSSOLINI IN MARCO BELLOCCHIO’S VINCERE, 109-123 PDF by Marco Luceri
• EIJA-LIISA AHTILA: THE PALPABLE EVENT, 124-154 PDF byAndrew Conio
• UPSIDE-DOWN CINEMA: (DIS)SIMULATION OF THE BODY IN THE FILM EXPERIENCE, 155-182 PDF by Adriano D’Aloia 
• EMBODYING MOVIES: EMBODIED SIMULATION AND FILM STUDIES, 183-210 PDF by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra 
• EXISTENTIAL FEELINGS: HOW CINEMA MAKES US FEEL ALIVE, 211-228 PDF by Dina Mendonça 
• THE BODY AS INTERFACE: AMBIVALENT TACTILITY IN EXPANDED RUBE CINEMA, 229-253 PDF by Seung-hoon Jeong

Interview

• A PROPOS D’IMAGES (A SUIVRE): ENTRETIEN AVEC MARIE-JOSE MONDZAIN [FR.], 254-271 PDF Conducted by Vanessa Brito

Conference Reports

• CONFERENCE ROUND-UP SUMMER 2012: POWERS OF THE FALSE (INSTITUT FRANÇAIS, LONDON, 18-19 MAY), SCSMI CONFERENCE (SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE/NYU, NEW YORK, 13-16 JUN.), FILM-GAME-EMOTION-BRAIN (UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM, 14-21 JUL.), AND FILM-PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE (QUEEN MARY – UNIVERSITY OF LONDON/ KING’S COLLEGE LONDON/KINGSTON UNIVERSITY, 12-14 SEPT.), 272-283 PDF by William Brown

Special Section

• CÍRCULOS E POÉTICAS EM FILMES LITERÁRIOS DE FERNANDO LOPES, 284-300 PDF by Eduardo Paz Barroso

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

Cover of Adrian Martin's new book, Last day Every Day (Punctum Books, 2012)

Where is film analysis at today? What is cinema theory up to, behind our backs? The field, as professionally defined (at least in the Anglo-American academic world), is presently divided between contextual historians who turn to broad formations of modernity, and stylistic connoisseurs who call for a return to old-fashioned things like authorial vision, tone, and mise en scène. But there are other, vital, inventive currents happening — in criticism, on the Internet, in small magazines, and renegade conferences everywhere — which we are not hearing much about in any official way. Last Day Every Day shines a light on one of these exciting new avenues.
      Is there a way to bring together, in a refreshed manner, textual logic, hermeneutic interpretation, theoretical speculation, and socio-political history? A way to break the deadlock between classical approaches that sought organic coherence in film works, and poststructuralist approaches that exposed the heterogeneity of all texts and scattered the pieces to the four winds? A way to attend to the minute materiality of cinema, while grasping and contesting the histories imbricated in every image and sound?

Film Studies For Free urges its readers to go and check out the free download of Adrian Martin's important new book as described above. It is published by (the very wonderful) Punctum Books. Please support them by purchasing an incredibly reasonably priced paper copy as a lovely gift for the film scholars you love, or at the very least by ordering copies for your libraries.

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

This wonderful tome has also been added to FSFF's permanent listing of free Film Studies ebooks.

Film Philosophy Conference Keynote Presentations Online

A slide from the Film-Philosophy Conference keynote lecture by Francesco Casetti

Film Studies For Free can only marvel at, and be very thankful for, the efficiency and commitment to open access research and scholarship involved in the speedy publication online of five excellent keynote lectures from the very recent annual conference held by the Film-Philosophy journal earlier this month.

Below are links to four audio files and some slides from presentations, too. Thank you F-P!

The London Graduate School presents Film-Philosophy Conference 2012

Film-Philosophy continues to grow as an important discipline within the fields of both Film Studies and Philosophy. The Film-Philosophy Conference brought together scholars from all over the world to present their research on a broad range of topics within the subject area.

The 2012 conference took place on September 12-14, and was jointly hosted by King’s College London, Queen Mary, University of London and Kingston University.

Keynote Speakers:

• Bernard Stiegler (Goldsmiths, University of London; University of Technology of Compiègne) and Ken McMullen (Director of Ghost Dance) AUDIO HERE
• Francesco Casetti (Yale University) AUDIO HERE
• Damian Sutton (Middlesex University) AUDIO HERE
• Libby Saxton (Queen Mary, University of London) AUDIO HERE

New Film-Philosophy: Haneke, Rivette, Cassavetes, Deleuze, Badiou, Leigh, Bacon, Jarman, Buñuel and more

Frame capture from Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008). Read Basileios Kroustallis's take on this film as a thought-experiment

Film Studies For Free is delighted to relay the excellent news that another high-quality  issue of Film-Philosophy has just been published. Edited by David Sorfa, Graham Matthews, Matthew Holtmeier and Ben Tyrer, the issue boasts no fewer than thirteen great articles as well as dozens of book reviews. The former are listed in full and linked to below.

The next annual Film-Philosophy conference will take place in London in September 2012, and the full schedule has recently been published. You can find it here.

Film-Philosophy also has its very own Facebook page and Twitter account.


Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012)

Articles

1. Interpreting Disturbed Minds: Donald Davidson and The White Ribbon PDF by James J Pearson
2. Haptic Aurality: Resonance, Listening and Michael Haneke PDF by Lisa Coulthard
3. To Describe a Labyrinth: Dialectics in Jacques Rivette’s Film Theory and Film Practice PDF by Douglas Morrey
4. The Subject Trapped in Gomorrah: Undecidability and Choice in Network Cinema PDF by Maria Poulaki
5. Film as Thought Experiment: A Happy-Go-Lucky Case? PDF by Basileios Kroustallis
6. Losing Face: Francis Bacon's 25th Hour PDF by Arne De Boever
7. Charm and Strangeness: The Aesthetic and Epistemic Dimensions of Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein PDF by Kieran Anthony Cashell
8. Why He Really Doesn’t Get Her: Deleuze’s Whatever-Space and the Crisis of the Male Quest PDF by Niels Niessen
9. Groundhog Day and the Good Life PDF by Diana Abad
10. Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen PDF by Stella Hockenhull
11. Contrapuntal Close-up: The Cinema of John Cassavetes and the Agitation of Sense PDF by Daniele Rugo
12. Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman, or, the Horror of Sex PDF by Lorenzo Chiesa
13. Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buñuel’s Late Films PDF by Chad Trevitte

Book reviews

Knowing that/knowing how? On audiovisual film studies, part 1: practice-led film research

Research in progress by Joanna Callaghan for the fourth long format film in the series 'Ontological Narratives' which will take Jacques Derrida's epistolary novel The Post Card as starting point.
    In this research film, the possibility of a deconstructive film is discussed with world leading experts on Derrida using a range of clips as counterpoints.
    Ontological Narratives is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by Callaghan in collaboration with Martin McQuillan. [Also see 'The Post Card - Adaptation'; for more on this project see here and here]. See also Callaghan and McQuillan's important film on the current convulsive state of UK Higher Education, "I melt the glass with my forehead".

We can therefore turn this [film theory/film practice divide] debate into an explicitly philosophical issue, by not presupposing that knowing that and knowing how simply overlap; they are two different types of knowledge whose relationship needs to be thought through. It is the theorization of the link/overlap between the two types of knowledge that seems to be missing. [Warren Buckland, Film-Philosophy Discussion List, January 31, 2012]

[The debate about film theory and practice] has a history which, in the UK at least, goes back to the 1970s, when the art colleges taught experimental film making, and the then polytechnics and a few new universities began to include film-making in their undergraduate film courses. Film theory as such was still taking shape, and video was in its earliest stages.  In an atmosphere charged with radical intellectual fervour, the theoretical input led to much experimentation in colleges of creative practice—the watchword of the time was deconstruction. The paradigm for the infusion of theory into practice could be found in the work, for example, of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who established themselves on screen and on page, together and separately, as leading denizens of both. Some of the people emerging from this habitus made the break and went on to successful careers in the mainstream, but independent film-making informed by theoretical critique remained in the margins. [Michael Chanan, 'Revisiting the Theory/Practice Debate', Putney Debater, February 15, 2012 (hyperlinks added)]

Audiovisual works, it may be argued – films, videos or some other form – are already discursively articulated, they not only incorporate language (as dialogue, voice-over, intertitle, and so on) but are quasi-linguistic in their very form. The analogy between language and cinema, for example, has been explored with particular rigour in structuralist film theory, not least in the work of Christian Metz. It might be argued that if audiovisual forms are inherently discursive, then an intellectual argument can equally well be presented in the form of a film or video as in a more conventional written form. [Victor Burgin, 'Thoughts on 'research' degrees in visual arts departments', Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2006] (hyperlink added)]

The misgivings about the legitimacy of practice-based research degrees in the creative and performing arts arise mainly because people have trouble taking research seriously which is designed, articulated and documented with both discursive and artistic means. The difficulty lurks in the presumed impossibility of arriving at a more or less objective assessment of the quality of the research – as if a specialised art forum did not already exist alongside the academic one, and as if academic or scientific objectivity itself were an unproblematic notion. In a certain sense, a discussion is repeating itself here that has already taken place (and still continues) with respect to the emancipation of the social sciences: the prerogative of the old guard that thinks it holds the standard of quality against the rights of the newcomers who, by introducing their own field of research, actually alter the current understanding of what scholarship and objectivity are. [Henk Borgdorff, 'The debate on research in the arts', The Sensuous Knowledge Project, 2006]

And so begins 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'.

Below, in this first instalment, FSFF links to freely-accessible, online resources relating to the notion of film practice as a form of film/video theorising, in other words, as a reflexive and/or affective meditation on the ontological qualities of film or video (a 'felt framing', in Julian Klein's great phrase to describe artistic research). It's certainly a good excuse to showcase some of the burgeoning, open access work (and open access publications, or free publishers' samples) in the very healthy field of Moving Image Practice as Research (aka 'Research by Practice' or 'Practice-Led research).

Some studies of Practice-Led Research

• Desmond Bell, 'Is there a doctor in the house? A riposte to Victor Burgin on practice-based arts and audiovisual research', Journal of Media Practice, 9.2, 2008
• Michael A.R. Biggs, "The Role of ‘the Work’ in Research" (Paper presented at the PARIP 2003 Conference, 11-14 September 2003.) Bristol, UK
• Christin Bolewski, 'Practice as Research: Philosophy and Aesthetics of Chinese Landscape Painting Applied to Contemporary Western Film and Digital Visualisation Practice', The
 Art
 of
 Research
 Processes,
 Results 
and
 Contributions, Conference at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, 24 – 25 November 2009
• Henk Borgdorff, 'The debate on research in the arts', The Sensuous Knowledge Project, 2, 2006
• Henk Borgdorff, 'The Conflict of the Faculties On Theory, Practice and Research in Professional Arts Academies', Revised Version of 'The Conflict of the Faculties: on Sense and Nonsense in Art Research) in the arts, culture and policy journal', Boekman (58/59, Spring 2004, p. 191-96
• Victor Burgin, 'Thoughts on 'research' degrees in visual arts departments', Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2006
• Michael Chanan, 'Revisiting the Theory/Practice Debate', Putney Debater, February 15, 2012
• Charlotte Crofts, 'Bluebell, Short Film and Feminist Film Practice As Research: Strategies for Dissemination and Peer Review', a pre-print of an article in Journal of Media Practice, 2007 (See an excerpt from this work here)
• Steve Dixon, 'Digits, Discourse, and Documentation: Performance Research and Hypermedia', The Drama Review 43, 1 (T161), Spring 1999
• Julian Klein, 'The Other Side of the Frame, Artistic Experience as Felt Framing: Fundamental principles of an artistic theory of relativity', originally in: S. Flach and J. Söffner, (eds.), Habitus in Habitat II - Other Sides of Cognition (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010)
• Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis, 'Transforming the Rhetoric: Making Images as Practice-Led Research', ACUADS 2009 CONFERENCE: Interventions in the Public Domain
• Nicholas Rowe and Susan Carter, 'Ways of Knowing: PhDs with creative practice', MAI Review, 2011, 2, Te Kokonga
• Deborah Smith-Shank and Karen Keifer-Boyd, 'Editorial: AutoEthnography and Arts-Based Research', Visual Culture and Gender, Vol. 2, 2007
• Lindsay Vickery, 'The Problem of Objectivity and the Artistic Conception of the Participant Observer: thoughts on using Lacan’s psychological model of representation in the documentation of creative arts practice as research', Creative Connections Symposium @ BEAP2004
• Helen L. Yeates, 'Embedded engagements: the challenge of creative practice research to the humanities', The International Journal of the Humanities, 7(1), 2009. pp. 139-147

Two Open Access journals for AV/media practice work:

• The Journal of Media practice: SCREENWORKS  (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 [on AVPhD practice work])
• The Journal for Artistic Research

Two free publishers journal samples:

• Journal of Media Practice 11.1, 2010, Free Sample Issue

• Sar Maty Ba and Will Higbee, 'Free Content Re-presenting diasporas in cinema and new (digital) media: Introduction'
• Hamid Naficy, 'Free Content Multiplicity and multiplexing in today's cinemas: Diasporic cinema, art cinema, and mainstream cinema'
• John Akomfrah, 'Free Content Digitopia and the spectres of diaspora'
• Rajinder Dudrah, 'Free Content Haptic urban ethnoscapes: Representation, diasporic media and urban cultural landscapes'
• Edward George and Anna Piva, 'Free Content Astro Dub Morphologies'
• Roshini Kempadoo, 'Free Content Interpolating screen bytes: Critical commentary in multimedia artworks'
• Coco Fusco, 'Free Content Operation Atropos'

• MIRAJ 1:1, 2012 (the journal of the Artists' Moving Image Research Network) – Free Inaugural issue

Editorial:

• Catherine Elwes

Articles:

• Erika Balsom, ‘Brackhage’s Sour Grapes’ on the place of experimental cinema in the contemporary museum
• David E. James, ‘Letter to Paul Arthur’ on the relationship between ‘hipster’ cinema and private sponsorship.
• Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Les Walkling, ‘Reflections on Medium Specificity Occasioned by the Symposium “Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation”, Melbourne, 2011′.

Features:

• Maeve Connolly, ‘Apperception, Duration and Temporalities of Reception: The Repetition Festival Show’ on the Dublin show.
• Nick Fitch and Anne-Sophie Dinant, ‘The emergence of Video Art in Brazil in the 1970s’.
• Maria Walsh, ‘Re- enacting Cinema at the Crossroads: Nicky Coutt’s Passing Place'
• Round Table Discussion on ‘The affects of the abstract image in film and video art’ chaired by Maxa Zoller with contributions from Bridget Crone, Nina Danino, Jaspar Joseph-Lester, RUBEDO (Vesna Petresin Robert and Laurent-Paul Robert).
• Eu Jin Chua, ‘The Film-work Recomposed into Nature: From Art to Noise in Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds’ on recent work by Manon de Boer.

Reviews:

• JJ Charlesworth on ‘Doug Fishbone: Elmina’ at Tate Britain.
• Pryle Behrman on ‘David Claerbout: The Time that Remains’ at Wiels Contemporary Art, Brussels.
• Catherine Elwes on ‘Peter Campus: Opticks’ at BFI Southbank Gallery, London.
• Claire Flannery on ‘Miroslaw Balka: Between Honey and Ashes’ at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.
• Honor Beddard on Hilary Lloyd at Raven Row, London.
• Colin Perry on ‘Modern Women: Single Channel’ at MOMA PS1, New York.
• Adam Kossoff on ‘William Raban: About Now MMX’, Tate Modern and touring.
• Michael Szpakowski review of ‘One Minute Volumes 1-4′, DVD series touring internationally.
• Alice Haylett Bryan, book review of ‘Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War’ by Rosalyn Deutsche (Columbia University Press). 

Permanent Seminar on the Histories of Film Theory

Picture of Sergei Eisenstein, pioneering Soviet film director and theorist

Thanks to Michał Oleszczyk, Film Studies For Free found out about a truly fascinating, and highly promising, project: the Permanent Seminar on the Histories of Film Theory.

The Seminar is

an open network of film scholars interested in rediscovering and re-reading historical contributions and debates on film. Special attention is devoted to early writings on cinema, as well as more recent reconsiderations of film's role in the new media landscape. The Permanent Seminar is affiliated with the Film Theory in Media History book series published through the Amsterdam University Press.

The very high quality of the project is guaranteed by its coordinators -- Jane Gaines (Columbia University) and Francesco Casetti (Yale University & University of Milan) --  as well as by its scientific board: Dudley Andrew (Yale University); Chris Berry (University of London-Goldsmiths); André Gaudreault (University of Montréal); Vinzenz Hediger (University of Bochum); John McKay (Yale University); Markus Nornes (University of Michigan); David Rodowick (Harvard University); Philip Rosen (Brown University); Leonardo Quaresima (University of Udine); Maria “Masha” Salazkina (Concordia University, Montréal); and Petr Szczepanik (University of Brno).

There's not much up on the website yet as the project has just begun, but FSFF recommends that its readers take a look and then keep on going back for further film-theoretical delights of the kind linked to below.

• Sergei Eisenstein, "Forthcoming] "Unpublished “Notes for a General History of Cinema” – New York, 2010

• Francesco Orestano, "Motion Pictures and Scholastic Education" (Italy, 1914)

• Giovanni Papini, "Philosophical Observations on the Motion Picture" (Italy, 1907)

• Mario Ponzo, "Certain Psychological Observations Made During Motion Picture Screenings" (Italy, 1911)

• Emilio Scaglione, "Motion Pictures in Provincial Towns" (Italy, 1916)

• Enrico Thovez, "The Art of Celluloid" (Italy, 1908)

• Giuseppe d’Abundo, "Concerning the Effects of Film Viewing on Neurotic Individuals" (Italy, 1911)

Halloween Guide to the Philosophy of Film Horror

Animated.gif of an image of Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), posted online by skyggebarnet

Father Damien Karras: Why her? Why this girl?
Father Merrin : I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as... animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.

Philosophers getting excited about horror films may seem incongruous to the average intellectual reader, and saying that one has a "philosophy of horror" may simply sound pretentious. Maybe it’s the bad critical reputation of most monster movies, a perennially popular genre (especially with teenagers) that has always taken its lumps, both aesthetically and morally. Plato wanted to ban all representations of the monstrous from his ideal Republic, and his successors have condemned such depictions ever since. [We] believe that there is ample reason for philosophers to become interested in horror films, for they raise a number of complex and interrelated questions that lie at the heart of philosophical aesthetics.

     Primary among these is the question of horror-pleasure. Why are those of us who enjoy the genre so attracted to watching things that, in real life, would be repellent to us? Like the more traditional aesthetic issue concerning tragic pleasure, there is something puzzling about enjoying in fiction what is painful in reality. Freudian film scholars Laura Mulvey and Robin Wood offered the first compelling solution to this puzzle, and it has been tough to beat. Wood’s thesis that monsters represent a return of the repressed, gratifying the instinctive drives of the id in a cathartic fashion, had almost no serious rival in critical literature from the mid-1970s until 1990. Elizabeth Cowie [also] offers an elaboration on that long-dominant paradigm in her essay [a version of which is linked to below].

      Serious philosophical discussion of horror theory was triggered by Noël Carroll’s seminal treatise, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990)[...]. Carroll’s cognitivist approach to solving what he calls "the paradox of horror pleasure" was painstakingly modeled on David Hume’s theory of tragedy. We do not take pleasure in the painful and repugnant monster, according to Carroll, but rather in having our curiosity satisfied about its impossible nature, and whether and how the narrative’s human protagonists will dispatch it successfully. His denial that we take pleasure in the monster itself, along with his requirement that the object of horror must be an impossible being—one not believed capable of existing according to the tenets of contemporary science—have generated a good deal of critical ink. [Steven J. Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 'Introduction', Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2003)]

It struck me that certain genres, such as suspense, mystery, comedy, melodrama, and horror, are actually identified by their relation to certain emotions. As a case study, I went about analyzing horror. I began by looking at what kind of horror we expect from horror fiction. At the time, a leading theory of the emotions was what was called the cognitive theory of the emotions, which tries to identify emotions in terms of their object – that is, the criterion that determines whether or not a state is this or that emotion. For example, in the case of fear, in order to be afraid you have to be afraid of a certain kind of thing, namely something that meets the criterion of harmfulness. I argued that horror was made up of two emotions we are already familiar with, fear and disgust. So I crafted my theory of the nature of horror by saying that horror is defined in terms of its elicitation of fear and disgust. Then I needed to say what the object of those two component emotional states were. For fear, there was a long history of analysis of the formal criterion as the harmful, and I drew on that. For disgust, I hypothesized the criterion was the impure.
     [..] I think that film theory should be closer to the practice of filmmaking and fiction-making in general. There shouldn’t be these two cultures. I think in some ways the theorists have made these two cultures exist by being unconcerned with the problems of construction. The Philosophy of Horror is very concerned with the problems of construction. It’s a philosophy of horror, but in the same way that Aristotle’s Poetics is a philosophy of tragedy. Aristotle wrote a philosophy of tragedy, but he called it a poetics, where poetics is a notion that comes from poesis, which comes from making. So poetics is about construction. His philosophy of tragedy is a philosophy of construction of tragedy, and I had hoped that my Philosophy of Horror would be a philosophy of construction of horror in much the same way. [Noël Carroll in Ray Privett and James Kreul, 'The Strange Case of Noël Carroll: A Conversation with the Controversial Film Philosopher', Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001]

Film Studies For Free joins in the usual, general, Halloween hullabaloo with a scary little contribution of its own: a list of links to online and openly accessible philosophical considerations of the horror film genre.

Many of the below studies have been inspired by the extensive considerations of film horror by philosopher Noël Carroll or engage with the themes raised by his work.  

FSFF commends these to you with a little bloggish shudder: they are, after all, somewhat terrifyingly good...

• Zsolt Bátori, 'Genre Identification and the Case of Horror', Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 2, 2010
• Birkbeck College Roundtable Discussion on ‘Dawn of the Dead’, May 26, 2011 (with Amber Jacobs, Paul Myerscough, Gordon Hon and Mark Fisher) mp3
• Anne-Marie Boisvert, 'Webmonsters', Ciac's Electronic Magazine, No 18 - Spring 2004 (Mutations and Monsters Issue)
• Curtis Bowman, 'Heidegger, the Uncanny, and Jacques Tourneur’s Horror Films', in Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw (eds.), Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections On Cinematic Horror (Scarecrow Press, 2003)
• Curtis Bowman, The Uncanny. Other Voices 3, no. 1 (2007)
• Keith Brown, 'Notes on the Terror Film', Forum, Issue 2, Spring 2006
• Kate Bullen, '[Review of] The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. By Noel Carroll. New York: Routledge, 1990', B Sides, Spring 2010
• Noël Carroll, 'Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings', Film Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, (Spring, 1981), pp. 16-25
• Noël Carroll, 'The Nature of Horror', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59
• Jodey Castricano, 'For the love of smoke and mirrors: Dario Argento's Inferno (1980)', Kinoeye, 2.11, 2002
• Brigid Cherry, 'Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror', Particip@tions Volume 5, Issue 1 Special Edition (May 2008)
• Brigid Cherry, The female horror film audience: viewing pleasures and fan practices, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 1999
• Elizabeth Cowie, 'Anxiety, ethics and horror: Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)', Kinoeye, Vol 2, Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Marty Fairbairn, 'Film and Philosophy Family Reunion', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, 1998
• Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson (eds), The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror (InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009)
• Cynthia Freeland, 'Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films', Originally published in Post-Theory, eds. Bordwell and Carroll (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)
• Michael Grant, 'Clint Eastwood: Avatar of the Undead', Michael Grant, February 8, 2010
• Tim Groves, 'Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006
• Joan Hawkins, 'Revisiting the Philosophy of Horror', Film-Philosophy, 6.6, 2002
• Matt Hills, '[Review of] Daniel Shaw, ed., Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy (2001)', Aesthetics Online, 2002
• Timothy Iles, 'The Problem of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Horror Films', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Paper 4, 2005
• Kate Ince, 'Reply to Michael du Plessis', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Phevos Kallitsis , 'Urban Fears and spatial transformations: the horror movie point of view', CityFutures '09, Madrid 2009
• Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010
• John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996
• Rafael Miguel Montes, '¡Yo Soy Godzilla!—The Possibilities and Futilities of Cuban Horror', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, July 2009
• Pablo Ortega-Rodriguez, 'How is Disbelief Suspended?: The Paradox of Fiction and Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror', Film-Philosophy, 7, 2003 David Palmieri, 'Carroll Meets Karmina: Québécois Horror Between America and Europe', Equinoxes: A Graduate Journal of French and Francophone Studies, Issue 1, 2004
• Bernard Perron, 'Coming to Play at Frightening Yourself :Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games', Aesthetics of Play, October 2005
• Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006
• Michael du Plessis, 'Fantasies of the Institution: The Films of Georges Franju and Kate Ince’s Georges Franju', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Ray Privett and James Kreul, 'The Strange Case of Noël Carroll: A Conversation with the Controversial Film Philosopher', Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001
• 'Roundtable Discussion: The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 (with Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham)', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011
• Steven Schneider, 'Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror', Other Voices, v.1, n.3 (January 1999)
• Steven J. Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 'Introduction', Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2003)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Survival of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, September 25, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, 'Diary of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, April 26, 2008
• Daniel Shaw, 'A Humean Definition of Horror', Film-Philosophy,Vol. 1, 1997
• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film Philosophy, vol. 6 no 7, April 2002 
• D. Bruno Starrs, '"If we stretch our imaginations": the Monstrous-Feminine Mother in Rolf de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra's Project (2003)', Scope, Issue 10, February 2008
• David Sterritt, 'Spellbound in Darkness: Shyamalan’s Epistemological Twitch', in Spoiler Warnings: CriticalApproaches to the Films of M. Night Shyamalan, ed. Jeffrey AndrewWeinstock (forthcoming)
• Bryan Stone, 'The sanctification of fear: Images of the religious in horror films', Journal of Religion and Film, 5.2, 2001
• Richard Walsh, 'The Passion as Horror Film: St. Mel of the Cross', Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Vol. 40, Fall 2008
• Tobias Wendell, 'Wicked Villagers and the Mysteries of Reproduction: An Exploration of Horror Videos from Ghana and Nigeria', Postcolonial Text, Vol 3, No 2 (2007)
• Robert Yanal, 'Two Monsters in Search of a Concept', Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 1, 2003

New FILM-PHILOSOPHY on Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (Herzog, Solondz, Cronenberg, Streitfeld, Eisenstein, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Zhang Yimou, Forgács)

Frame grab from Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). Read Adrian Ivakhiv's essay on this film in the latest issue of Film Philosophy

And the brilliant, online, film journal issues just keep on coming...

Film Studies For Free is delighted to bring you news of the latest offering from one of the highest quality e-journals of them all - Film-Philosophy.
 
FP, Vol 15, No 1 (2011) is a special issue on Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis, edited by David Sorfa. FSFF particularly liked Adrian Ivakhiv's 'ecocritical' essay which explores Tarkovsky's Stalker, along with Jacqueline Loeb's fine 'Foucauldian' study of sound in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern. But there are other excellent contributions, too. 

Readers should also note that it is now possible to donate to the journal. Film-Philosophy is an independent Open Access academic journal operating without recurring financial support. Donations of any amount to the journal are gratefully received and provide a means for the editors to continue to provide a journal of the highest quality to its readers. Just click on the "Donations" link on the FP website.

For those of you who are interested in phenomenological film studies, do take a look, if you haven't already, at FSFF's previous gathering of links to online and openly accessible work on this topic.

Table of Contents 

Articles

• Kate Ince, 'Bringing Bodies Back In: For a Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Film Criticism of Embodied Cultural Identity'  PDF
• Paula Quigley, 'Undoing the Image: Film Theory and Psychoanalysis ' PDF
• Greg Tuck, 'Sex, Dialectics and the Misery of Happiness' PDF 
• Kohei Furuya, 'Why Is Touch Sometimes So Touching?: The Phenomenology of Touch in Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions' PDF 
• Dylan Trigg, 'The Return of the New Flesh: Body Memory in David Cronenberg['s The Fly] and Merleau-Ponty' PDF
• Laszlo Strausz, 'On the River: History as a Palimpsestic Narrative in The Danube Exodus' PDF
• Adrian J. Ivakhiv, 'The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema' PDF
• Julia Vassilieva, 'Between Utopia and Event: Beyond the Banality of Local Politics in Eisenstein'  PDF
• Christine Henderson, 'The Trials of Individuation in Late Modernity: Exploring Subject Formation in Antonioni's Red Desert' PDF  
• William Verrone, 'Transgression and Transcendence in the Films of Werner Herzog' PDF  
• Jacqueline Loeb, 'Dissonance Rising: Subversive Sound in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern' PDF

Interviews

• 'Brecht Today: Interview with Alexander Kluge' PDF by Angelos Koutsourakis

Film Festival Reports

• Venice Film Festival 2010: The Mad and the Bad and the Dangerous to Know PDF by John Bleasdale
• Berlin International Film Festival - Berlinale 2011 PDF Alison Elizabeth Frank

Book Reviews

• Mark T. Conard, ed. (2009) The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers PDF by Taylor Benjamin Worley
• Frederick Wasser (2010) Steven Spielberg’s America PDF  by Steven Rybin
• Claire Molloy (2010) Memento; Geoff King (2010) Lost in Translation; Gary Needham (2010) Brokeback Mountain. American Indies Series PDF by John Bleasdale 
• Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen, eds. (2009) The Hitchcock Annual Anthology: Selected Essays from Volumes 10-15 PDF by Tifenn Brisset 
• Richard Abel, ed. (2010) Encyclopedia of Early Cinema PDF by Carrie Giunta 
• Jim Ellis (2009) Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations PDF by Jason Wakefield 
• Christopher Lindner, ed. (2009) The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. 2nd Edition PDF by Lucy Bolton

30 Online Film Studies Books and PhD Theses from OhioLINK

Image from When Night is Falling (Patricia Rozema, 1995), a film discussed by Jamie L. Stuart

Film Studies For Free shakes itself out of an uncharacteristic, unseasonal, hot-weather related torpor to bring you one of its regular reports (and lists of links) from a University research repository. Today, it's the turn of the utterly brilliant repository at the OhioLINK ETD Center, gathering theses and books (in bold below) by film studies scholars at Ohio State University, Bowling Green State University, Ohio University, and Case Western Reserve University.

As usual, these links will be added in due course to FSFF's permanent listings of Online Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Theses and Open Access Film E-books List.

• Savas Arslan Hollywood alla Turca: A history of popular cinema in Turkey, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Dyrk Ashton, Using Deleuze: The Cinema Books, Film Studies and Effect, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Rihab Kassatly Bagnole, Imaging the Almeh : Transformation and Multiculturalization of the Eastern Dancer in Painting, Theatre, and Film, 1850-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Holly Lynn Baumgartner, Visualizing Levinas: Existence and Existents Through Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Vanilla Sky, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Rebecca H. Bias, From golden age to silver screen: French Music-Hall Cinema from 1930-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Rose Mary Bremer, Screening gender and sexuality in contemporary Quebec film adaptation, PhD, Ohio State University, 2004

• Marie Katheryn Connelly, The films of Martin Scorsese: A critical study, PhD, Ohio State University, 1991

• Carolina Siqueira Conte, Bonds: A Theory Of Appropriation For Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice Realized In Film, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Stefan Hall, "You've Seen the Movie, Now Play the Game": Recoding the Cinematic in Digital Media and Virtual Culture, PhD, Ohio State University, 2011

• Cheryl Lynn Hindrichs, Lyric narrative in late modernism: Virginia Woolf, H.D., Germaine Dulac, and Walter Benjamin, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006 (available from May 19, 2011)

• Daniel O. Jones, The Soul That Thinks: Essays on Philosophy, Narrative and Symbol in the Cinema and Thought of Andrei Tarkovsky, PhD, Ohio University, 2007

• Se Young Kim, A Sociohistorical Contextual Analysis of the Use of Violence in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, MA thesis, Ohio State University, 2010

• Joanna Klein, Making Pictures: The Pinter Screenplays (1985)

• Yo-Hsin Cindy Liu, The Examination of the Appearance and Use of French Horn in Film Scores from 1977 to 2004, DMA Thesis, Ohio State University, 2005

• Cileine I. de Lourenco, Negotiating Africanness in national identity: studies in Brazilian and Cuban cinema, PhD, Ohio State University, 1998

• Judith Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question (1989)

• Denis Mueller, John Dewey and Documentary Narrative, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2007

• James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds), Understanding Narrative (1994)

• Rob Prince, Say Hello to My Little Friend: De Palma's Scarface, Cinema Spectatorship, and the Hip Hop Gangsta as Urban Superhero, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2009

• Barbara L. Romanczuk, Screening Zola’s women, PhD, Ohio State University, 2002

• John Edward Ryan, Ordinary people: The cinema of John Sayles, PhD, Case Western Reserve University, 1994

• Thibaut Schilt, Marginal pleasure and auteurist cinema: the sexual politics of Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat and François Ozon, Ohio State University, 2005

• Lisa K. Stein, The Travel Narrative as Spin: Mitigating Charlie Chaplin's Public Persona in My Trip Abroad and "A Comedian sees the World", PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2006

• Joan Marie Titus, Modernism, socialist realism, and identity in the early film music of Dmitry Shostakovich, 1929-1932, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Maruta Zane Vitols, From the Personal to the Public: Juris Podnieks and Latvian Documentary Cinema, PhD, Ohio State University, 2008

• Stacey A. Weber-Fève, There's no place like home: homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women's filmmaking and the literature of the MÉTROPOL and the MAGHREB, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Marilyn Yaquinto, Policing the World: American Mythologies and Hollywood’s Rogue Cop Character, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Yi-hui Huang, An Interpretivist Study of Knowledge Provided by Seamless Digital-Synthesized Photographs, PhD, Ohio State University, 2008

• Rui Zhang, Feng Xiaogang and Chinese cinema after 1989, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005 

On the Documentary Real - in Fiction and Documentary cinema and television

Stella Bruzzi, 'Plenary Lecture: Approximation: Mad Men, the death of JFK and nearly history' [NOTE: Presentation begins a few minutes in after a brief 'Blooper' Reel, with some profanities...!] (Audio: Stella Bruzzi: lecture ; Video: Stella Bruzzi: questions; Audio: Stella Bruzzi: questions)

A fairly self-explanatory post from Film Studies For Free today: a collection of brilliant videos, above and below, recorded at the Documentary Real symposium which took place at October 21st, 2010 at the 'Vooruit' in Ghent, Belgium.

The main participants were Cis Bierinckx (curator, artistic director Beurshouwburg Brussels), Stella Bruzzi (film theory, University of Warwick), Edwin Carels (curator, art theory, KASK), Marc De Kesel (Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, Artevelde Hogeschool Gent), Katerina Gregos (curator), Steven Jacobs (art history, KASK and Antwerp University), Vincent Meessen (artist), Jasper Rigole (artist), Avi Mograbi (Israeli filmmaker), and Duncan Speakman (artist).

So, with no further ado, here's the symposium introduction, and below that are the remainder of the videos: 

The symposium 'The Documentary Real invite[d] artists and theorists to interrogate the ambiguous relation between documentary film and reality. To what extent can a reel of film capture reality—if this is possible at all—and when can we say that it calls a new reality into being? Do not most films oscillate between ‘document’ and ‘argument’; that is, between representing, rewriting and creating reality? Moreover, what strategies do artists use to document our daily lives? Is the detour through alienation and animation perhaps the proper way to make an outright and truthful work? Do new developments in technological media provide new opportunities for documentary artists? Finally, how do these artistic experiments and their problems represent the culture we live in?

Robrecht Vanderbeeken, 'Introduction' to The Documentary Real Symposium.

Katerina Gregos, 'The Elastic Documentary' (Audio: Katerina Gregos: lecture); Video: Katerina Gregos: questions; Audio: Katerina Gregos: questions)

Edwin Carels, 'Re-animating Animation' (Audio: Edwin Carels)

Steven Jacobs, 'Framing Pictures' (Audio: Steven Jacobs)

Vincent Meessen, 'CLINAMEN Cinema - the Documentary Swerve: A Performative Lecture' (NOTE: The performative lecture of Vincent Meessen included a screening of unique footage of a famous modernist architect protected by copyrights. For this reason the presentation cannot be made available online. Only the introduction and questions after the performance are shown). Audio: Vincent Meessen

Duncan Speakman, 'Subtlemob' (Audio: Duncan Speakman)

Marc De Kesel, 'Hotel Holocaust: On "Shoah Documentary Real"' (Audio: Marc De Kesel: lecture; Video: Marc De Kesel: questions; Audio: Marc De Kesel: questions) 

Cis Bierinckx introduces two films '"Details 2 and 3" by Avi Mograbi' (Audio: Cis Bierinckx)