Performing/Representing Male Bonds: Issue 2 of INMEDIA

Screencap from The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). Read Marianne Kac-Vergne 's article Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction Films on the images of masculinity offered up by this and other scifi films.

Film Studies for Free let its readers know, early last year, of InMedia, a great online French Journal, in English, of Media and Media Representations in the English-Speaking World. Its first issue treated  Global Film and Television Industries Today.

Issue 2 on Performing/Representing Male Bonds has also been published recently and its contents, many of which are film related, are linked to below.

InMedia, Issue 2, 2012: Performing/Representing Male Bonds
Edited by Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

• Performing/Representing Male Bonds Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin
• Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction Films Marianne Kac-Vergne
• The Reluctant Patriarch: The Emergence of Lads and Lad Mags in the 1990s Nick Growse
• Seducing Women to Assess Each Other: Male Hierarchies within the Seduction Community Mélanie Gourarier
• Midlife Pop Masculinities in the Here and Now Chris Tinker

Varia

• British Party Election Broadcasts (2001, 2005 and 2010): Ideological Framing, Storytelling, Individualisation David Haigron

Bibliographical Essay

• ‘Locus of Control’: A Selective Review of Disney Theme Parks Thibaut Clément

Interview

• At the Crossroads of Media, Media Critique, and the Critique of Media critics – An Interview with Serge Halimi, Editor-in-Chief of Le Monde Diplomatique Serge Halimi and Christine Larrazet

Critical Perspective

• Social Cognition Divina Frau-Meigs

Conference and Seminar Reviews

• Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television Oliver Haag
• The Translation and Reception of Multilingual Films Samuel Bréan and Jean-François Cornu
• Contemporary Screen Narratives Fabrice Lyczba
• Internet Studies in Europe Mathieu O'Neil
• Cinema and the Crossing of Frontiers, 16th SERCIA Conference Julie Assouly and Marianne Kac-Vergne

Book Reviews

• Delphine Letort Violaine Roussel, Art vs War : les Artistes américains contre la guerre en Irak Paris : Presses de Sciences Po, 2011, 314 p.
• Elsa Grassy Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan (eds), Major Problems in American Popular Culture
• Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011, 496 p.
• Estelle Epinoux Carol MacKeogh, Díóg O’Connell, Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland since the 1990s Cork: Cork University Press, 2012, 176 p.
• Delphine Letort Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 New York & London: New York University Press, 2010, 221 p.

Index by author
Index by keyword

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

John Ford's Vision of the West by Matthias Stork

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

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

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

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

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

 

Moving Pieces - Sergio Leone's Duel by Matthias Stork

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

The Construction of Genre and Space in The Searchers by Austin Fisher

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

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



McCabe and Mrs. Miller: A Video Essay by Steven Santos

A video essay on Robert Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See the original posting here

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



Beaver's Lodge: CAIN'S CUTTHROATS from Press Play Video Blog

This is the fifth installment of BEAVER'S LODGE, a series of video essays narrated by actor Jim Beaver which will offer critical takes on some of Beaver's favorite films 

'A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...': Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters

This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

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

Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Frame By Frame - Director John Ford', UNL, August 26, 2010

Phil Peters and John Nelson, 'Studying in Western Filmmaker John Ford's Footsteps' 

Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

Once Upon a Time in the West - Jill Arrives at Flagstone from The Film League

 

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

The Failure of Once Upon a Time in the West from The Film League

Animation Studies: Three Fabulous Online Resources

Updated with a call for papers on November 15

Lignes verticales/Lines Vertical (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, 1960). Read Aimee Mollaghan's article on McLaren's Line Films here.

Pervasive Animation - Video of conference sessions.

The conference was held at the Tate Modern, London in 2007.

Animation has an unlimited potential to visually represent events, scenarios and forms that have little or no relation to our experience of the 'real' world. Implemented in many ways, in many disciplines, it is increasingly influencing our perception and experience of the world we live in. This timely and groundbreaking international conference unites speakers from a wide range of research agendas and creative practices. It facilitates much-needed dialogue centred on the ubiquitous and interdisciplinary nature of animation, its potentially radical future development, and its ethical responsibilities for spatial politics in moving image culture. The conference's contributors include Norman Klein, Michael Snow, Vivian Sobchack, Tom Gunning, Anthony McCall, George Griffin, Suzanne Buchan, Beatriz Colomina, Edwin Carels, Siegfried Zielinski, Lisa Cartwright, Johnny Hardstaff and Esther Leslie. Especially since the digital shift, the uses of animation are no longer exclusive to cinema, and animation's origins in pre-cinematic optical experiments through avant-garde experimental film continue to evolve in fascinating ways. Artists increasingly incorporate animation in installations and exhibitions, architects use computer animation software to create narratives of space in time, and scientists use it to interpret abstract concepts for a breadth of industries ranging from biomedicine to nanoworlds. Pervasive Animation provides a dynamic international forum to explore animation's myriad forms and applications across a wide band of creative and professional practice. Organised by Suzanne Buchan, Reader in Animation Studies and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University College for the Creative Arts, and Stuart Comer, Curator of Film at Tate.

Film Studies For Free animatedly highlights three fabulous Animation Studies resources today. First up, through the second of the two videos embedded above, you can access the entire, recorded proceedings of a very high quality conference on animation held in 2007 at London's Tate Modern.

FSFF heard about those videos through the fantastic Experimental Animation website which houses, and links to, many more animation treasures, like Lignes verticales/Lines Vertical,  Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart's brilliant 1960 opus embedded at the top of this post.

Finally, the third amazing resource du jour are the below contents of the volumes of Animation Studies, the online, Open Access and peer-reviewed Journal of the Society for Animation Studies (also on Twitter as @anistudies). See also the Society's Call for Papers for an upcoming conference at the foot of this post.

"Th-th-th-that's all folks!"

Animation Studies - the Journal of the Society for Animation Studies

• Volume 6, 2011
  • Shannon Brownlee – Masculinity Between Animation and Live Action, or, SpongeBob v. Hasselhoff
  • Maria O’Brien – The Secret of Kells (2009), a film for a post Celtic Tiger Ireland?
  • Aimee Mollaghan – "An Experiment in Pure Design:" The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Line Films of Norman McLaren
  • Hannes Rall – Tradigital Mythmaking: New Asian Design Ideas for Animation
  • Colleen Montgomery – Woody's Roundup and Wall-E's Wunderkammer: Technophilia and Nostalgia in Pixar Animation
  • Pierre Floquet – Actors in Sin City’s Animated Fantasy: Avatars, Aliens, or Cinematic Dead-ends?

• Volume 5, 2010
  • Van Norris – Touching cloth...Considering Satire and the Clergy in Popular Contemporary British Animation
  • Alison Loader – We're Asian, More Expected of Us:Representation, The Model Minority & Whiteness on King of the Hill
  • Meg Rickards – Uncanny breaches, flimsy borders: Jan Švankmajer’s conscious and unconscious worlds
  • María Lorenzo Hernández – Through the Looking-Glass: The Self-Portrait of the Artist and the Re-Start of Animation
  • Michael S. Daubs – Subversive or Submissive? User-Produced Flash Cartoons and Television Animation

• Volume 4, 2009
  • Adam de Beer – Kinesic constructions: An aesthetic analysis of movement and performance in 3D animation
  • Sheuo Hui Gan – To Be or Not to Be – Anime: The Controversy in Japan over the “Anime” Label
  • Max Bannah – Revolutionary cels: The Sydney waterfront, Harry Reade and Cuban animation
  • Paul St. George – Using chronophotography to replace Persistence of Vision as a theory for explaining how animation and cinema produce the illusion of continuous motion
  • Alan Cholodenko – Animation (Theory) as the Poematic

• Volume 3, 2008
  • Van Norris – Taking an Appropriate Line
  • Laura Ivins-Hulley – The Ontology of Performance in Stop Animation
  • Alan Cholodenko – The Spectre in the Screen
  • Timo Linsenmaier – Why animation historiography?
  • María Lorenzo Hernández – Visions of a Future Past: Ulysses 31, a Televised Re-interpretation of Homer’s Classic Myth
  • Birgitta Hosea – TV 2.0: Animation Readership/Authorship on the Internet
  • Lynne Perras – "Steadier, happier, and quicker at the work"? Women in Canadian Animation
  • Sheuo Hui Gan – The Newly Developed Form of Ganime and its Relation to Selective Animation¹ for Adults in Japan
  • Amy Ratelle – Half-breed Dog, Half-breed Film: Balto as Animelodrama

• Animated Dialogues, 2007
  • Amanda Third and Dirk de Bruyn – An Animated Dialogue
  • Paul Wells – Battlefields for the Undead
  • Adrian Martin – In the Sand a Line is Drawn: A Reflection on Animation Studies
  • Alan Cholodenko – (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: the Felicity of Felix, Part I
  • Dirk de Bruyn – Performing a Traumatic Effect: The Films of Robert Breer
  • Michael Broderick – Superflat Eschatology: Renewal and Religion in anime
  • Katharine Buljan – The Uncanny and the Robot in the Astro Boy Episode “Franken”
  • Matthew Butler and Lucie Joschko – Final Fantasy or The Incredibles
  • Cordelia Brown – Flowerpot Men: The Haptic Image in Brian Cosgrove and Richard Hall’s Animations
  • Andrew Buchanan – Facial Expressions for Empathic Communication of Emotion in Animated Characters
  • Peter Moyes – Behind the Flash Exterior: Scratching the Surface of Online Animated Narratives
  • Cathryn Vasseleu – The Svankmajer Touch
  • Miriam Harris – How Michaela Pavlatova both incorporates and rebels against the Czech animation tradition
  • Zhi-Ming Su – Reaching Out to Touch: Animation and Aboriginal Children in Taiwan
  • Dan and Lienors Torre – Recording Australian Animation History

• Volume 2, 2007
  • Gunnar Strøm – The Two Golden Ages of Animated Music Video
  • Pamela Turner – Early Connections Between Film and Emerging Media as Evidenced in the Animated Worlds of Adam Beckett
  • Maria Lorenzo Hernandez – The Double Sense of Animated Images. A View on the Paradoxes of Animation as a Visual Language
  • Leslie Bishko – The Uses and Abuses of Cartoon Style in Animation
  • Caroline Ruddell – Breaking Boundaries: The Representation of Split Identity in Anime
  • Alan Cholodenko – (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part II
  • Tom Klein – Animated Appeal: A Survey of Production Methods in Children’s Software

• Volume 1, 2006
  • Pierre Floquet – What is (not) so French in Les Triplettes de Belleville
  • Marina Estela Graça – Cinematic Motion by Hand
   

Call for Papers:
‘The Animation Machine’ - The 24th Society for Animation Studies Conference

Date: June 25-27, 2012

Hosted by: RMIT University
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Keynote speakers include:

•         Thomas Lamarre (McGill University, Canada)

•         Tomotaka Takahashi (The University of Tokyo, Japan)

The Society for Animation Studies (SAS) invites submissions of proposals for individual papers and panels for its 24th Annual Conference, which will be held in Melbourne, Australia at RMIT University, 25-27 June 2012.

Animation production and consumption has continued to grow as animation itself has become ever more prevalent and visible in recent years. In parallel, the field of animation studies has expanded excitingly and dramatically, bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines.

The theme of this year’s conference, ‘The Animation Machine’, reflects the wide range of processes, technologies, histories and structures in animation. As movement is an essential aspect of animation, whatever creates that movement may constitute an animation machine and one could conceive that animation is itself a machine. The animation machine can be considered from both the production process and the end product. Therefore, it refers to the machines of animation presentation, be these pre-20th century animation devices, movie or video screens, or even automata. The animation machine also relates to the multitude of animation production processes – from animating technologies (animation stands, cameras, computers), through to the animator’s individual creative practice. Ultimately, the animation machine can be described quite broadly and we welcome your own interpretations.

With the centenary of Australian animation approaching, the 2012 conference will also provide an opportunity to highlight some of Australia’s animation heritage. The conference will coincide with the Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF) and a number of crossover events are planned.

We invite proposals on a wide range of animation topics on all aspects of animation history, theory and criticism for 20-minute conference presentations. Proposals may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:


•         Australian Animation

•         Animation and the Asia-Pacific Region

•         Animation Histories

•         Future Forms of Animation

•         Industrial Methods and Changes

•         Materiality of Animation

•         Algorithmic Animation (including Games)

•         Philosophy and Animation

•         Motion Graphics

•         Scientific Visualisation

•         Contemporary Art and Animation

•         Architecture and Animation

•         Drawing and Animation

•         Web Animation

•         Narrative and Non-Narrative Animation

•         Obsolescence and Questions of Materiality

•         Augmented Reality and Vision

•         Automata (including Robotics)

•         Animation and Pedagogy

•         Documentary and Animation

•         Animation Fringes and Counter-Cultures

•         Sound and Animation

Please include with your individual submission the following:


•         Title and abstract of no more than 250 words (suitable for publication).

•         A brief biographical statement (suitable for publication).

•         Complete contact information, including name, institutional affiliation (if any), postal address, e-mail address and telephone number.

•         A head shot photo of yourself that will be suitable for publication (optional).

For panel proposals of 3-4 presenters, the chair of the panel should submit the following:


•         Overall panel title/theme, plus a 100-word description suitable for publication.

•         Name and contact information for the panel chair.

•         Titles and abstracts for each paper (as noted above).

•         Biography statement for each member (as noted above).

•         Name and contact information for each member (as noted above).

•         Photo of each presenter suitable for publication (optional).

Submit abstracts to: animation.conference@rmit.edu.au
Submission deadline: December 12, 2011
Conference website: http://www.rmit.edu.au/sas2012
Conference Chair: Dr Dan Torre, RMIT University

Journal articles on masculinity in popular cinema, and much more

Image of John Travolta as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). You can read Stelios Cristodoulou's great article on this film here

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you more excellent contents from Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, the periodical brought to you by the postgraduate network of the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association.

The links below channel the latest two issues of the journal, including a great selection of articles on masculinity and popular culture, with some very worthwhile studies of popular cinema.

And if you like these very worthy items, you might also like to check out a previous FSFF post listing some further, great articles from this journal.

Networking Knowledge, Vol 4, No 1 (2011) on Masculinity and Popular Culture  
Articles

• ‘"A straight heterosexual film": Masculinity, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Saturday Night Fever' by Stelios Christodoulou Abstract PDF 

• 'Tough Guy in Drag? How the external, critical discourses surrounding Kathryn Bigelow demonstrate the wider problems of the gender question' by Rona Murray Abstract PDF

• Interrogating Masculinity through the Child Figure in Bombay Cinema' by Siddarth Pandey Abstract PDF 

• Deviating from the Deviant: The Masculinity of Brando in Julius Caesar (1953)' by Rachael Kelly Abstract PDF

• '“Please Baby, take me Back”: Homo-social Bonds in the Contemporary British Biopic' by Matthew Robinson Abstract PDF

• '"Tell me all about your new man": (Re)Constructing Masculinity in Contemporary Chick Texts' by Amy Burns Abstract PDF

• 'Mohamed “el-Limby” Saad and the Popularization of a Masculine Code' by Koen Van Eynde Abstract PDF

• 'Metal, Machismo and Musical Mode: How the ‘Feminine’ Phrygian Second has been Appropriated and Transformed' by Sarha Moore Abstract PDF

• 'The Role of Lucha Libre in the Construction of Mexican Male Identity' by Javier Pereda, Patricia Murrieta-Flores Abstract PDF

• 'Masculinity and Institutional Identity in South Cyprus - the case of I do not forget' by Stratis Andreas Efthymiou Abstract PDF

Networking Knowledge, Vol 3, No 2 (2010)  MeCCSA-PGN Conference Edition
Articles

• 'Screen Acting and Performance Choices' by Trevor Rawlins Abstract PDF

• 'Family Photography as a phatic construction' by Patricia Prieto Blanco Abstract PDF

• 'UTV, The Network relationship and Reporting the "Troubles"’ by Orla Lafferty Abstract PDF

• 'Representations of the Irish in American Vaudeville and Early Film' by Jennifer Mooney Abstract PDF

Short Papers

• 'Public Service Broadcasting and the Public Sphere: Normative Arguments from Habermasian Theory' by Phil Ramsey Abstract PDF

• 'Postdramatic Musicality in The Black Rider' by Markee Rambo-Hood Abstract PDF

New Issue of Scope! Gollum/LOTR, Egyptian cinema, Fight Club, Snuff-Fiction

Read Mike Miley's review of Glyn Davis's study of  Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987). Read Film Studies For Free's related entry dedicated to Todd Haynes and its entry on the Sirkian melodrama. 

As usual, Film Studies For Free is delighted to bring you news of the latest issue of Scope; an Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. The full table of contents is given below. 

In addition to an excellent selection of main articles, there is an astonishing array of book and film reviews and conference reports, the latter sections in particular flagging up the enormous, but highly worthwhile, collective editorial effort that goes into producing a very good quality Open Access journal.

Thank you, Scope!

Scope, Issue 19, February 2011

Articles

• Playing with Gollum: Uncovering the Cultural Life and Transnational Travels of a Complex Character - Part One Martin Barker

• Playing with Gollum: Uncovering the Cultural Life and Transnational Travels of a Complex Character - Part Two Martin Barker

• Dying to be Seen: Snuff-Fiction's Problematic Fantasies of "Reality" Steve Jones

• Screening Egypt: Reconciling Egyptian Film's Place in "World Cinema" Omar Kholeif

• A Copy, of a Copy, of a Copy? Exploring Masculinity Under Transformation in Fight Club Simon Lindgren

• [ALL ARTICLES ON ONE PAGE]

Book Reviews

• Carmen on Film: A Cultural History by Phil Powrie, Bruce Babington, Ann Davies and Chris Perriam  100 Hundred Years of Spanish Cinema By Tatjana Pavlovi, Inmaculada Alvarez, Rosana Blanco-Cano, Anitra Grisales, Alejandra Osorio and Alejandra Sánchez Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 By Steven Ricci Reviewer: Noelia Saenz

• Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies by Terry Bolas  Beginning Film Studies By Andrew Dix Reviewer: Juli Pitzer

• Isuma: Inuit Video Art by Michael Robert Evans Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples in Canadian Dramatic Television Series By Mary Jane Miller  Reviewer: Heather Macdougall

• The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks by Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.)  Stardom in Postwar France Edited by John Gaffney and Diana Holmes Reviewer: John Berra

• Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson (eds.) Reviewer: Evan Elkins

• Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy by Paola Marrati. Translated by Alisa Hartz  Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film By Irving Singer Reviewer: Alexander Thimons

• Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema by Warren Buckland (ed.) Reviewer: Chris Pallant

• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story by Glyn Davis Reviewer: Mike Miley

• The Hitchcock Annual Anthology: Selected Essays from Volumes 10-15 by Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen (eds.) Reviewer: Christina M. Parker

• Film and Memory in East Germany by Anke Pinkert  Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema By Inga Scharf Reviewer: David Embree

• Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language by Hester Baer Reviewer: Paul Cooke

• Understanding Indian Cinema: Culture, Cognition and Cinematic Imagination by Patrick Colm Hogan  Mourning The Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition By Bhaskar Sarkar Reviewer: Scott Jordan Harris

• Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Movies by Dave Saunders Reviewer: Joseph Arton

• Jean-Pierre Jeunet by Elizabeth Ezra  The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience By Jennifer M. Barker Reviewer: Alison Frank

• Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson  The Films of Hal Ashby By Christopher Beach Reviewer: Aaron Hunter

• Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book by Dean A. Kowalski (ed.)  Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film and Philosophy By Colin Davis Reviewer: Chelsea Wessels

• The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity  by Catherine Russell   Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary By Abé Mark Nornes  Reviewer: Stephen Potter

• Anatomy of Film. Sixth Edition by Bernhard F. Dick Reviewer: Monika Raesch

• Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin by David Church (ed.)  The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers, Volume 1. Edited by George Melnyk Reviewer: Rachel Walls

• TV China by Ying Zhu and Chris Berry (eds.)  Transnational Television in Europe: Reconfiguring Global Communications Networks By Jean K. Chalaby Reviewer: Bärbel Göbel

• [ALL BOOK REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Film Reviews

• The Godfather Reviewer: Mark Chapman

• Red Hill Reviewer: Kate Harper

• The Eclipse Reviewer: Andrea Grunert

• Life on Mars Reviewer: Mary Irwin

• Kaminey Reviewer: Sagnik Banerjee

• [ALL FILM REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Conference Reports

• British Film 2000-2010: Crossing Borders, Transferring Cultures, Germersheim School of Translation, Interpreting, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Mainz, 18 – 21 February 2010 Reporter: Ron Walker

• NERFS (North-East Regional Film Seminar), Northumbria University, Newcastle, 15 July 2010 Reporter: Louise Anderson and Erin Hill-Parks

• Investigating Torchwood: Text, Context, Audiences, Cardiff School of Creative Arts, University of Glamorgan, 18 June 2010 Reporter: Ross P. Garner

• NECS 2010 Annual Conference, Communication Faculty, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, 24 – 27 June 2010 Reporter: Ozgur Cicek

• MeCCSA-PGN 2010: Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association Postgraduate Network Conference, University of Glasgow, 31 June – 1 July 2010 Reporter: Douglas McNaughton

• Screen Studies Conference: Screen Performance, University of Glasgow, 2 – 4 July 2010 Reporter: Melanie Hoyes

• [ALL CONFERENCE REPORTS ON ONE PAGE]

The Working-Class Hero in International Cinema: in Memory of Pete Postlethwaite

Pete Postlethwaite, as Danny, delivers his Albert Hall speech in Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996)

The bottom line for Danny [Pete Postlethwaite] is [his son] Phil’s emblematic loss of ‘the will to live’. He addresses the Albert Hall audience for all the world as if he were the holy ghost of Scargill and the militant miners of 1984, telling the punters, the press and us that, ‘I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks; not compared to what people matter’. Charging the government with destroying an industry, a community and its people, he refuses the prize, calculating, as the flash bulbs pop, that ‘then it becomes news. And I won’t be talking just to myself, will I?’ In this scene the shot-reverse-shots of father and son, Danny and media, band and Grimley fans, and band and approving urban audience (its cosmopolitanism symbolised by two black faces) works as much as Danny’s polemic to argue that the old-fashioned working-class values, the local, British loyalties of community, family and labour -contrasted satirically by Danny to the fashionable liberal campaigns to save ‘seals or whales’ - can cut through Tory brutalism and reconstruct progressive priorities - to be the bearer of new national hopes. [Cora Kaplan, 'The Death of the Working-Class Hero', New Formations, 52 (Summer, 2004)]

Film Studies For Free was shocked and saddened to hear of the death yesterday of much loved British actor Pete Postlethwaite. David Hudson's set of links to tributes to Postlethwaite may be found here. 

Postlethwaite was a highly versatile actor, far from limited either in his life by his English working-class background, or in his career by his talent for the working-class dramatic roles in which he was so often cast. But it is the case that some of his most memorable roles were, like that of Danny in Brassed Off, ones that set themselves in the kind of tightly-knit, but, under political attack, all too easily undone, northern English communities he came from.

FSFF's tribute, below, focuses on this aspect of Postlethwaite's work: his class act, that was not just an act. It's a rich and hopefully rewarding set of links to online and openly accessible scholarly discussions of the (usually, but not exclusively, male) "working-class hero" film character - quite a transnational cinematic trope, as it turns out.

• Dave Allen, 'MIDDLE-CLASS MODS and WORKING-CLASS SODS: Quadrophenia and the Construction of Popular Histories', The 1970s Project, 2008

• Christopher Beach, excerpt from ‘A Troubled Paradise: Utopia and Transgression in Comedies of the Early 1930s’, Class, Language and American Film Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

• BFI Screenoline 'Working Class Heroes'

• Cathy Brigden, 'Representations of labour: Images of work and workers in film', in P. Stanton and S. Young (eds) Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 2008

• Ron Briley, 'The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive in Literature, Song, and Film' , Studies in Popular Culture, 31.2, Spring 2009

• Lee Carruthers, 'Biding Our Time: Rethinking the Familiar in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey', Film Studies, Vol. 9, Winter 2006

• E. Anna Claydon, 'New Perspectives on British Cinema: Going Beyond the "Crisis" in Masculinity', Paper at the Exploring Masculinities and Film at the Centre for Research into Film and Media, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, July 2-4, 2001

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy, "Everything you always hated about Thatcher's Britain: A cultural analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988)," Miscelanea, 2004, vol.28, 145-160

• John Curzon, 'Whatever Happened to the North of England? The Spaces of Post-Industrial Northern England in Contemporary Television and Film Drama', PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2009

• Alexander Dhoest, 'How queer is L'Air de Paris? -- Marcel Carné and Queer Authorship', Scope, May 2003

• Jay Dolmage and William DeGenaro, '"I Cannot Be Like This Frankie": Disability, Social Class, and Gender in Million Dollar Baby', Disability Studies Quarterly, Spring 2005, Volume 25, No. 2

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Antigone Agnistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The Red Army Fraction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game', Rouge, 4, 2004

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