Chronicle of an Auteur: More Antonioni Goodness!

Frame grab from Cronaca di un amore / Story of a Love Affair (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950)

Film Studies For Free presents the second of its celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Below are embedded the video recordings of a number of unmissable talks at Antonioni and the Arts, an event held at Royal Holloway, University of London, in October to mark the anniversary. 

Thanks to Royal Holloway's School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures for hosting the talks, as well as taking the trouble to record them and make them freely available online.

This latest entry coincides with Cronaca di un autor: Convegno dedicato a Michelangelo Antonioni nel centenario della nascita, a marvellous conference, with an amazing array of speakers, taking place between December 11-13, 2012, merely the latest in a series of brilliant, celebratory events in Ferrara, Antonioni's birthplace.

Who knows? Maybe there'll be some more videos to embed here at FSFF! Hope so! In any case, You can see the first FSFF Antonioni anniversary celebration here: Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth.

Part 1.a, Arts Building - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Dr. Laura Rascaroli's lecture and discussion. In conversation with Dr. Giuliana Pieri.

A study day devoted to the late Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) took place on Friday, 26 October, in Egham, co-sponsored by HARC, SMLLC, Media Arts, and the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni.

The centenary of the birth of this master of European modernist cinema was a chance to bring together a number of scholars and curators who have a particular interest in the interdisciplinary aspects of Antonioni’s oeuvre. Dr Laura Rascaroli (U. of Cork) and Dr John David Rhodes (U. of Sussex), who edited the 2011 volume, Antonioni: Centenary Essays, offered a novel perspective on the work of the Italian film-maker by focusing on the influence of art and architecture respectively. The two talks were preceded by a screening of two rare Antonioni documentaries: Gente del Po (1943-7) and Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo (2004). Documentaries are a very important but often less studied aspect of Antonioni’s production. They also ideally frame his career since Antonioni began as a documentary film maker and ended his cinematic career with his tribute to the master of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti, in a short film of extreme beauty which helped the audience to reflect upon art and tradition. The general discussion that followed covered a number of fascinating topics relating to Antonioni’s practice, including his consistently ‘open’, physical engagement with the human figure, as compared, for example, with that of Jean-Luc Godard.

Part 1.b, Arts Building - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Dr. John David Rhodes's lecture, discussion and round table with Dr. Laura Rascaroli, Dr. Giuliana Pieri and Prof. James Williams.

Part 2.a, Windsor Lecture - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Prof. Dominique Païni's presentation of the retrospective 'Antonioni And The Arts. The Gaze of Michelangelo' and lecture. Introduction by Prof. Williams James.

The second part of the study day was a lecture by film scholar and curator, Professor Dominique Païni (École du Louvre, Paris), who presented with slides his plans for the forthcoming centenary exhibition on Antonioni in his home-town of Ferrara. Prof. Païni revealed that the physical challenge of the exhibition space, the Renaissance Palazzo dei Diamanti, created the opportunity to present Antonioni’s work as a series of contrasts arising from the idea that cinema is, after all, narrative sculpture in movement, and that shapes are born out of the most basic contrast, that of light and dark. Both the lecture and ensuing discussion brought into focus a series of important characteristics of the work of Antonioni: the identification of women and the nation, ideal masculinity and Italian art and tradition, the critique of humanism and the classical heritage, and the ambiguous relationship between Antonioni and Italy’s post-war tradition of social and political engagement (impegno) which characterised the work of many of his contemporaries working in film and literature.

Part 2.b, Windsor Lecture - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

A few reflections with Professor Dominique Païni. Translation in English by Alix Agret.

Cinema, Experience, Vernacular Modernism: More on the Work of the late Miriam Bratu Hansen

Viewing (10:33): Miriam Bratu Hansen on her work, "Post-Cinema", and much else

"Miriam Bratu Hansen (1949–2011) was one of the great film scholars of our time.  She was also a friend and colleague to us at Critical Inquiry.  In celebration of the newly-published Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, we are proud to present this short film [above] by Miriam's student Christina Petersen, along with a dossier of five major articles from our archives." [From a note at the Critical Inquiry website to accompany its "Dossier Miriam Hansen"]

"Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno—affiliated through friendship, professional ties, and argument—developed an astute philosophical critique of modernity in which technological media played a key role. [Hansen's last book] explores in depth their reflections on cinema and photography from the Weimar period up to the 1960s. Miriam Bratu Hansen brings to life an impressive archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials and reveals surprising perspectives on canonic texts, including Benjamin’s artwork essay. Her lucid analysis extrapolates from these writings the contours of a theory of cinema and experience that speaks to questions being posed anew as moving image culture evolves in response to digital technology." [Publisher's note on Miriam Hansen's Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, University of California Press, 2011]

On February 5, 2011, the hugely distinguished Film Studies scholar Miriam Bratu Hansen passed away. The next day Film Studies For Free published its appreciation of her career with links to other online tributes to her, and to examples of her work online. It is still this website's single most visited entry, a tiny sign of warm esteem in which she was held in our discipline.

Since the publication of her remarkable, final book Cinema and Experience, last year, three further, openly accessible items of great interest have appeared online.

Two of these are part of a Dossier on Hansen put together at the Critical Inquiry website: the above video about Hansen, and a collection of five major articles that Hansen published in that great journal. All are accessible at this webpage.

And you can also read the wonderful first chapter of Cinema and Experience -- on the work of Siegfried Krakauer --  at the University of California Press webpage. 

To further celebrate the above, FSFF has updated its links to useful online discussions or applications of Hansen's work, including, at the foot of this entry, a very recent video presentation.

• Chris Cagle, 'On Vernacular Modernism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, July 26, 2006
• Desley Deacon, 'World English? How an Australian Invented "Good American Speech"’, In Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound, edited by Damousi, Joy; Deacon, Desley. Canberra: ANU ePress, 2007 
• Desley Deacon, ‘Films as foreign offices’: transnationalism at Paramount in the twenties and early thirties', ‘Films as foreign offices: Transnationalism at Paramount in the twenties and earlythirties’. In Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, edited by Curthoys, Ann; Lake, 2005
• Alexander Des Forges, 'Shanghai Alleys, Theatrical Practice, and Cinematic Spectatorship: From Street Angel (1937) to Fifth Generation Film', in: Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 39, 4, 2010: 29-51
• Stephanie Hanson, '“Electrical wonders of the present age”: cinema-going on the Far South Coast of NSW and rural discourses of modernity', Screening the Past, Issue 24, 2009
• Adrian Martin, 'Balance and Linkage : Robert Mulligan's The Man in the Moon', Film Journal, Issue 11
• Allen Meek, 'Benjamin, the televisual and the "fascistic subject", Screening the Past, September 1998
• W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 22004-5
• Andrew Nelson, 'Cinema from Attractions: Story and Synergy in Disney’s Theme Park Movies', Cinephile, Vol. 4, Summer 2008
• Justus Nieland, 'Modernism's Laughter', Modernist Cultures, Issue 4, 2009
• Justus Nieland, 'Archives of Modernist Cinephilia', MODERNISM/Modernity, 14(2), 347-355, 2007
• Kyoko Omori, Detecting Japanese Vernacular Modernism: Shinseinen Magazine and the Development of the Tantei Shosetsu Genre, 1920-1931, PhD Thesis, Ohio State University, 2003 
• Pooja Rangan, 'Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood As a Signifying Practice', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers 
• Tytti Soila, 'Passion at the threshold: Doctor Glas the flaneur in the films of Rune Carlstén and Mai Zetterling', Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 1, 2010
• Kirsten Strayer, Ruins and Riots: Transnational Currents in Mexican Cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh 2009 
• Michael Syrimis , 'From Nestoroff To Garbo: Pirandellian Humour in its Cinematic Vernacular', Quaderni d'italianistica : revue officielle de la Société canadienne, Volume XXIX, No. 2, 2008, 29-52
• Mike Walsh, '[Review of] Zhang Zhen, An amorous history of the silver screen: Shanghai cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005', Screening the Past, 21, 2007
• Mark Wollaeger, 'Where and When is Modernism: Editing on a Global Scale', Kritika Kultura, 16, 2011 
• Chen Xiangyang, 'Technologizing the Vernacular: Cantonese Opera Films through The Legend of Purple Hairpin', David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), Working Paper Series, No. 67, September 2007

'Paranoid Hermeneutics as Queer Cinematic Vernacular' by Catherine Grant.
A film studies presentation prepared for the "Queer Cinema and the Politics of the Global" Workshop held at the University of Sussex, May 12, 2012. The Workshop was part of series of events held by the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network GLOBAL QUEER CINEMA based at Sussex, led by Rosalind Galt.

Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth

International Conference: ANTONIONI 1912-2012 (Part 1 of 2)

This event on March 30, 2012, was part of: Homage to Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) held at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, to mark the centenary year of the Italian director’s birth organized jointly by the Department of Italian Studies and the Department of Cinema Studies, NYU.

Above: PANEL 1: Richard Allen (NYU), ‘Hitchcock, Antonioni, and the Wandering Woman’ and Karen Pinkus (Cornell), ‘Automation, Autonomia, Anomie’; PANEL 2: John David Rhodes (Sussex), ‘Antonioni and Geopolitical Abstraction’ and Karl Schoonover (Warwick), ‘Antonioni's Toxicology’

International Conference: ANTONIONI 1912-2012 (Part 2 of 2)

Above: PANEL 3 Screening of N.U. (11’, 1948) and discussion with David Forgacs and Ara Merjian (NYU) Matilde Nardelli (UCL) 'Antonioni and the Cultures of Photography’ PANEL 4 Michael Siegel (Brown), ‘From Identificazione to Investigazione: Looking at Looking in Late Antonioni’ Francesco Casetti (Yale), ‘The Remains of the Modern’ PANEL 5 Eugenia Paulicelli (CUNY), David Forgacs (NYU), John David Rhodes (Sussex)

Approaching the figure and work of Michelangelo Antonioni a century after his birth, one is confronted with a number of persistent critical tropes about his oeuvre, with a substantial, if in great part dated, body of critical work and, perhaps, also with the sense that all has already been said and written on the director of the malady of feelings, of filmic slowness and temps mort, of the crisis of the postwar bourgeoisie, of epistemological uncertainties, of modernist difficulty and even boredom, of aestheticism and the hypertrophy of style, of narrative opacity. And yet, Antonioni today powerfully escapes the reach of old categorisations that have attempted to congeal his figure once and for all into an inert monument of modern cinema. His continued influence on world film-makers and the new pressing questions that his films raise today for contemporary audiences call for a renewed critical effort. [Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)]

Despite Antonioni’s deep concerns about scientific logic and any objective representation of reality, in purely formal terms his work is always defined by a clear tension between what I would call on the one hand a documentary impulse, and on the other a drive towards fiction pushed at times to the level of melodrama.

[... H]owever hollowed-out and experimental Antonioni’s works become, they always constitute fictions since they present characters in artificial situations. As Antonioni himself put it, his primary interest lies in the moment when the context or environment suddenly takes on “relief.” Which is to say, his hybrid narratives marked by temporal disjunction, disorientation, black holes, ellipses, and a lack of resolution serve to provide just enough justification for human figuration, however “unnaturally” heightened and stylized, to take hold. This recourse to melodrama, broadly defined, offered Antonioni a means of shortcircuiting and sculpting the Real in slowed-down, distended form in order to capture it as a series of tableaux vivants. [...]

Alert to the tensions in the spatiotemporal relations between people, objects, and events, the director must, according to Antonioni, engage with a “special reality” and be “committed morally in some way.” What this means in practice is dedramatizing the narrative event in order to focus attention on the physical context that both makes it possible but also eludes it. Antonioni propels his protagonists into new or alien environments, and we follow them almost ethnographically as they develop new perceptual powers in order to negotiate their changed conditions'. [James S. Williams, 'The Rhythms of Life: An Appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni, Extreme Aesthete of the Real', Film Quarterly (Fall Issue 2008, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 46-57), pp. 50-52 - my emphasis]

Today, Film Studies For Free gleefully celebrates the publication online of just under seven hours of videoed content from an excellent, recent conference in New York City that its author had really wished she'd been able to attend. Now -- virtually -- she (and you) can! 

The conference took a timely new look at the work of FSFF's favourite Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni one hundred years on from the year of his birth. It followed on from the recent publication of an excellent, similarly inspired, BFI/Palgrave collection of work on Antonioni edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes. 

Rhodes, a highly esteemed (and much loved!) colleague of FSFF's humble scribe, appears in the video frame still at the top of this post, and throughout both embedded videos. He was one of the organisers of, and main contributors to, the NYU conference. A very generous sample excerpt from his and Rascaroli's book may be found here.

To accompany the truly excellent videos, FSFF has assembled a rather fabulous list of links to other online and openly accessible studies of Antonioni's work. If you know of any significant resources missing below, please leave a link in the comments. Grazie!

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Antonioni's birthplace of Ferrara between September 30, 2012 and January 6, 2013, you'll be able to catch an excellent exhibition about his work, which opens following a public celebration of the filmmaker on the day of his birth itself (September 29). You can find more information here. Thanks to Antonioni scholar Ted Perry for his tip off about this event. Do look out for his new book on him which should be out next year.

• Paolo Bartoloni, 'Blanchot and Ambiguity, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.4 (2010)
• Michael Bloom, 'Fragile Images and Concrete Things: Indirect Subjectivity and the Externalization of The Soul in Michelangelo Antonioni's Tetralogy', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• David Brancaleone, 'Part 2 of 'The Thin Line Between Documentary and Fiction'', Experimental Conversations, Issue 8, 2011
• James Brown, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', Senses of Cinema, 20, 2002
• James Brown, 'Il Grido: Modernising the Po', Senses of Cinema, 26, 2003
• Peter Brunette, 'Introduction [excerpt]', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Peter Brunette, 'Blow-up', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Ken Burke and Héctor Mario Cavallari, 'Julio Cortázar and Michelangelo Antonioni: Words, Images, and the Limits of Verbal and Visual Representation', Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism, 05/20/10
• Bert Cardullo, 'Introduction', in Cardullo (ed.), After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films; Essays and Interviews (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009)
• James Cisneros, 'How to Watch the Story of Film Adaptation. Cortázar, Antonioni, Blow-Up', Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, n° 2, 2003
• Jonathan Dawson, The Passenger', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
• Laurie N. Ede, '[Review of Murray Pomerance's] Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011]', Screening the Past, 33, 2011
• R. Bruce Elder, 'Antonioni's Tragic Vision: Style, Fonn and Idea in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, with Especial Emphasis on His Masterpiece, Il deserto rosso', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 1.2, 1991
• Hamish Ford, 'Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Deleuze’s Time-Image', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, Sept-Oct 2003
• Matthew Gandy, 'Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert', originally in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (2) (2003)
• Peter Goldman, 'Blowup, Film Theory, and the Logic of Realism', Anthropoetics 14, no. 1 (Summer 2008)
• Absjørn Grønstad, 'Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up', Film Journal, 9, 2004
• Mike Grost on Antonioni
• Christine Henderson, 'The Trials of Individuation in Late Modernity: Exploring Subject Formation in Antonioni's Red Desert' PDF, Film-Philosophy, 15.1, 2011
• Penelope Houston, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', originally in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980
• Ian Johnston, 'We’re Not Happy and We Never Will Be: On Cronaca di un amore', Bright Lights Film Journal, 53, 2006
• Robert Philip Kolker The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (passim.), originally published 1982
• Little Rabbit's Antonioni Archive (thanks to Mike Grost for the link)
• Gaetana Marrone, 'A Cinematic Grand Tour of Sicily: Irony, Memory and Metamorphic Desire from Goethe to Tornatore', California Italian Studies, 1(1), 2010
• 'David Martin-Jones, '[Review of Brunette's book on Antonioni', Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 50, December 1999
• David Alan Mellor, '‘Fragments of an Unknowable Whole’: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incorporation of Contemporary Visualities in London, 1966', Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, 8 (2): 2007, pp. 45-61
• Zach Melzer, 'Michelangelo Antonioni and the “Reality” of the Modern', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Gary Morris, 'Chabrol, Losey, Antonioni: Three Classic Eurofilms: Les Bonnes Femmes, Eva, Il Grido', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 31, 2010
• Gavriel Moses, 'As We [They] See [Hear] Them [Us]: Cain/Antonioni//Antonioni/Coppola', Voices in Italian Americana, 1991
• John Orr, 'Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs. Antonioni's The Passenger', Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007
• Murray Pomerance, 'Significant Cinema: The Scene of the Crime', Senses of Cinema, 61, 2011
• Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)
• Julie Ravary, 'La Femme “Antonionienne”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Elena del Río, “Antonioni’s Blowup: Freeing the Imaginary from Metaphysical Ground”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 32, June, 2005
• Christopher Sharrett, 'L’eclisse', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
• Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara, 'Reporting on The Passenger', Undercurrent, 3, 2006
• Gregory Solman, 'L'Avventura', Senses of Cinema, 31, 2004
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Realism and Reality in Antonioni’s Profession: Reporter as dramatizing the Nietzschean notion of the “power of the false”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Frank P. Tomasulo, 'The bourgeoisie is also a class: class as character in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura', Jump Cut, 49, 2007
• Donato Totaro, ' Zabriskie Point (1970, Antonioni): A Scene by Scene Analysis of a Troubled Masterpiece', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Donato Totaro, 'Alida Valli: May 31, 1921-April 22, 2006', Offscreen Journal, 10.5, 2006
• Donato Totaro, 'May 1968 and After: Cinema in France and Beyond', Offscreen Journal, 1998
• Jack Turner, 'Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text', Other Voices 1.3 (January 1999)
• Peter Verstraten, 'A Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose: On Antonioni and Malick', Image [and] Narrative, 13.2, 2012
• Fiona A.Villella, 'Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing In Antonioni's Zabriskie Point', Senses of Cinema, 4, 2000
• Elisabeth Weis, 'Tati, Hitchcock, Antonioni: Three Approaches to Sonic Creativity', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, 2007
• Matthew M. Wylie, 'Avoiding the Masculine "Gaze": Frustrated Homosexual Desire and the Eroticized Role of the Camera In Hitchcock's Rear Window and Antonioni's Blow Up', Cinetext, February 2003

On Railways and the Movies

"Uncanny Arrival at a Railway Station" by Catherine Grant

The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970) was a film I ardently watched countless times on television as a child, and, I have to confess, I have seen and loved it countless times since. I had certainly seen it long before I saw  L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat (Lumière Bros., 1895). I noticed the resemblance between the two films only when watching Jeffries' film again recently. But when I explored this, I was struck by the extent of their resonance, and by the uncanniness of the later film's pastiche of the earlier one: Bernard Cribbins' Perks revivifies, down to his moustache, the La Ciotat station porter; an identical luggage trolley lurks in the background; the beshawled woman looks like she stepped off the earlier train, except that she's in Technicolor.
     I began to figure, to fantasize, that the uncanniness of The Railway Children's penultimate sequence was not only set off by its graphic and musical evocation of the uncertainty of young Bobbie (Jenny Agutter) about quite why she was standing by the rail track, but also by its palpable haunting by the Lumière's originary scene, with its powerful, ghostly, urtext of a, much more bustling, railway platform just after the arrival of cinema.
 For me, of course, it will also always be the other way round: that The Railway Children, and this film's own afterwardsness, haunt L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare...
[From the introduction to "Uncanny Arrival at a Railway Station" by Catherine Grant] 

In the 'folklore’ of cinema history there is one anecdote which seems to be perennially fascinating to layman and historian alike. It might be summarised as follows: an audience in the early days of the cinema is seated in a hall when a film of an approaching train is projected on the screen. The spectators are anxious, fearful -    some of them even panic and run.
     This fearful or panicky reaction has been called 'the train effect’. It is such a common anecdote, cited by so many writers both at the time and later, that it has also been called `the founding myth of cinema’ or the cinema’s 'myth of origin. [Stephen Bottomore, 'The Panicking Audience?: early cinema and the "train effect’", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1999]

Rather than mistaking the image for reality, the spectator is astonished by its transformation through the new illusion of projected motion. Far from credulity, it is the incredible nature of the illusion that renders the viewer speechless. What is displayed before the audience is less the impending speed of the train than the force of the cinematic apparatus. [Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator [1989]’, in Linda Williams, ed. (1994) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. 114–133.]

Cinema as we know it, as an institution, as an entertainment based on the mass spectatorship of projected moving images, was born in '95, in the Golden Age of railway travel. As the prehistory and beginnings of cinema strongly suggest, film finds an apt metaphor in railroad. The train can be seen as providing the prototypical experience of looking at a framed, moving image, and as the mechanical double of the cinematic apparatus. Both are means of transporting a passenger to a totally different place, both are highly charged vehicles of narrative events, stories, intersections of strangers, both are based on a fundamental paradox: simultaneous motion and stillness. These are two great machines of vision that give rise to similar modes of perception, and are geared to shaping the leisure time of a mass society. [Lynne Kirby, 'Male Hysteria and Early Cinema', originally in Camera Obscura May 1988 6(2 17)]

Following on from Wolfgang Schivelbusch's now seminal account of the nineteenth-century railroad and the institution of "panoramic perception" as being emblematic of modernity, critics like Lynne Kirby and Mary Ann Doane have already explored the historic connections between film and the train's profound re-configuration of vision, with its mechanical separation of the viewer's body from the actual physical space of a 'virtual' 'perception. [Saige Walton, '[Review of] Jeffrey Ruoff (ed), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006', Screening the Past, 20, 2006]

Above, Film Studies For Free gifts to you another of its author's experiments with real-time video comparison (also a further exploration of cinematic pastiche).

This tiny videographic donation accompanies the links, below, to Omar Ahmed's truly wonderful, much more comprehensive and informative video essay series on trains in Indian cinema.

And below those links are others to further, openly accessible online scholarship that touches on the topic of railways -- a very cinematic apparatus indeed -- in the movies.

Bon voyage!

• Omar Ahmed, Video essays: Iconography in Indian Cinema: Trains - Part 1 of 3; Iconography in Indian Cinema: Trains - Part 2 of 3 ; Iconography in Indian Cinema: Trains - Part 3 of 3
• Douglas Bailie,  '[Review of] Lynne Kirby. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997', H Net, December 1997
• Nandana Bose, 'The Darjeeling Limited: Critiquing Orientalism on the Train to Nowhere', Mediascape, Spring 2008
• Stephen Bottomore, 'The Panicking Audience?: early cinema and the "train effect’", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1999
• Sue Brennan, 'Time, Space, and National Belonging in The Namesake: Redrawing South Asian American Citizenship in the Shadow of 9/11', Journal of Transnational American Studies, 3(1), 2011
• Charlotte Brunsdon, 'The Poignancy of Place: London and the Cinema', Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2004, pp. 59-73(15)
• Jessica Ann Daniel, The Participatory Potential of Early Cinema: A Reexamination of Early Projected Films, MA Thesis, Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2010
• Marcus Doel, 'Pivotal Film History: Georges Melies as a Vanishing Mediator', Film-Philosophy, vol. 6 no. 24, September 2002
• Greg Eamon, 'Farmers, Phantoms and Princes. The Canadian Pacific Railway and Filmmaking from 1899- 1919', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 6, n° 1, 1995, p. 11-32.
• Thomas Elsaesser, '"One train may be hiding another": private history, memory and national identity', Screening the Past, Issue 6, 1999 
• Asif A. Ghazanfar and Stephen V. Shepherd, Monkeys at the Movies: What Evolutionary Cinematics Tells Us about Film', Projections, Volume 5, Issue 2, Winter 2011: 1–2
• Tim Harte, '[Review of] Cinetrain: 6 documentaries on the Trans-Siberian Railway', KinoKultura, 27, 2010
• Jan Holmberg, 'Ideals of Immersion in Early Cinema', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 14, n° 1, 2003, p. 129- 147
• Edvin Vestergaard Kau, 'Brief Encounters in Real Dreams? Derailment and Poetic Vision', P.O.V. No.15 - Derailment, March 2003
• Lynne Kirby, 'Male Hysteria and Early Cinema', originally in Camera Obscura May 1988 6(2 17)
• Emily J. May, 'The Darjeeling Limited and The New American Traveller', Senses of Cinema, Issue 49, 2008
• Daniel Bach Nielsen and Rasmus Stampe Hjorth,'Derailment', P.O.V. No.15 - Derailment, March 2003 (see here for other articles on this film)
• Noelle O’Connor, Sheila Flanagan and David Gilbert, 'The Integration of Film-inducedTourism and Destination Branding in Yorkshire, UK', International Journal of Tourism Research, 10, 423–437 (2008) 
• Vladimir Padunov and Nancy P. Condee, 'Recent Soviet Cinema and Public Responses: Abdrashitov and German', Framework, Issue 29, 1985
• Hannu Salmi, 'Cinema, Tourism and Everyday Life: From Virtual Experiences to Traveling Cultures', published in 'Traffic, Needs, Roads: Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future of Roads in Finland and the Baltic Area.' Ed Tapani Mauranen. Helsinki: The Finnish National Road Administration, 1999, pp. 115-121
• Rosie Thomas, 'Miss Frontier Mail: The Film That Mistook Its Star for a Train', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Saige Walton, '[Review of] Jeffrey Ruoff (ed), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006', Screening the Past, 20, 2006

Voyage to Cinema: Studies of the Work of Theo Angelopoulos

Framegrabs from Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα/Voyage to Cythera ( Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1984)

The world needs cinema now more than ever. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Andrew Horton]

Realism? Me? I’ve not a damn thing to do with it. The religious attitude to reality has never concerned me. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Raymond Durgnat in “The Long Take in Voyage to Cythera: Brecht and Marx vs. Bazin and God.” Film Comment 26.6 (November/December, 1990): 43-46]

[Some] complain that Angelopoulos’ films are long, slow and boring, but that is exactly what they are not. They are too short (for the subject matters they cover [...]), quite fast (within the image or sound or the narrative, there is always something occurring) and always fascinating (in the multi-layered way they mix the personal with the political, the aesthetic surface with the deeper meaning, etc.). [Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000]

What is important, what has meaning, is the journey... [and] journeys are through history as well as through a landscape. [Theo Angelopoulos, quoted in Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, 1997: 98]

Today, Film Studies For Free solemnly pays tribute to the monumental cinematic career of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who very sadly died last week while near the set of his film The Other Sea.

David Hudson has collected a wonderful series of links to items of interest to anyone who has been touched by or is studying Angelopoulos's films. Below, as is its memorialising wont, FSFF points its readers in the online direction of a whole host of high quality academic studies of his work, including a number of freely-accessible, book-length items.

• Acquarello, 'Theodoros Angelopoulos', Senses of Cinema, Issue 27, 2003
• Maria Chalkou, Towards the creation of 'quality' Greek national cinema in the 1960s, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
• Hsin-Ning Chang, Viewing the Long Take in Post-World War II Films: A Cognitive Approach, MA Thesis,  Ohio University, 2008 
• Burcu Fikretoglu, 'Gazing at Decay in the Narratives of Theo Angelopoulos and W.G. Sebald', Academia.edu [date unknown]
• Andrew Horton, 'The Greek and Balkan Spirit of Comedy During the Journeys with the Films of Theo Angelopoulos', GreeceTravel.com, [date unknown]
• Smaro Kamboureli, 'Memory under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze', Paper at Performing Identity/Crossing Borders: The Cyprus Symposium: Cicac, 2007
• Angelos Koutsourakis, 'The Desire for History in Lars von Trier’s Europa and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork' , Kinema, Spring 2010
• Antonis Liakos, 'Historical Time and National Space in Modern Greece', Slavic Euroasian Studies, Hokkaido University “Regions in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Present”, Sapporo, Japan, December 14-16, 2005
• Vangelis Makriyannakis, 'Angelopoulos’ Ulysses' Gaze: Where the Old meets the New', Forum, Issue 1 - Origins and Originality, Autumn 2005
• Evangelos Makrygiannakis, Films of Theo Angelopoulos: a voyage in time, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009
• Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000
• Arthur J. Pomeroy, 'The sense of epiphany in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze', Classical Receptions Journal Vol 3. Iss. 2 (2011) pp. 213–226
• Anne Rutherford, 'Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mise en scène and the Senses in Angelopoulos’ Balkans Epic', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Irini Stathi, Eleftherios Tsouris, Nikos Soulakellis, 'Geography as Utopia. From the Rigas Pheraios Map to the Division and Establishment of Borders in the Balkans: An Intercultural Itinerary through the Geography of Ulysses's Gaze', Earth Conference, University of the Aegean, 2008
• Gonda A.H. van Steen, 'Playing by the Censors' Rules? Classical Drama Revived under the Greek Junta (1967-1974)', Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 27.1-2 (2001)
• Lasse Thomassen, 'Heterogeneity, Representation and Justice: Borders and Communities in Angelopoulos’s Balkan Trilogy', originally in D. Morgan and G. Banham (eds), Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 191-210 
• Paris Tsekouras, 'Narrative and historical accuracy in The Travelling Players', Academia.edu [date unknown]
• Katerina Zacharia, '"Reel" Hellenisms: Perceptions of Greece In Greek Cinema, in K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Cutlure, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Ashgate 2008) 

Cambridge Film Studies Videos: Godard, Renoir, Literature and Film, Film and Forgetting, Representation of War in Film

Framestill from Scénario du film "Passion"/Script for the film "Passion" (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982). This film is discussed by Libby Saxton in her paper on gesture in Godard's films

Today, Film Studies For Free joyously tips the wink to its readers about the online availability of video recordings of papers from research events held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. 

These valuable online resources will clearly be added to in the coming months and years so while FSFF will keep its beady eye trained for the appearance of future recordings of note, its readers might like to do the same with their own beady eyes.

• Anthony Lane (film critic), 'Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne and Maupassant', 14 November 2011, Part of the Cambridge Screen Media Group series

• Dr Libby Saxton (Queen Mary, University of London), 'Passion, Energy and Matter: Godard's Gesture', Part of the Cambridge Screen Media Group series 

• Prof David Trotter (University of Cambridge), 'Literature and Film in the First Media Age', 11 October 2011, Part of the Cambridge Screen Media Group series

• Professor Jay Winter (History, Yale University) 'Moving Images: From Silent Film to Film Silences in War Films, 1914-2009'. Keynote lecture at CRASSH conference 'The Moving Image' (26-27 February, 2010). This paper explores the long history of representation of war in film, from the Great War to the present. It suggests first that silent film provided a form of public séance in an era when spiritualism was at its apogee, and secondly, that it is the silences in later 'talkies' which enable us to see how cinematic mourning practices work.

• Professor Michael Wood (English, Princeton), 'Film and the Art of Forgetting'. Paper delivered at CRASSH conference 'Changing the Humanities/the Humanities Changing' (July 2009)

"An incarnation of the modern": In Memory of Miriam Bratu Hansen, 1949-2011

Last updated: May 13, 2012

The cover of Miriam Hansen's last book. Published posthumously. [Image added on May 13, 2012]

Hollywood cinema was perceived, not just in the United States but in modernizing capitals all over the world, as an incarnation of the modern. [...]

American movies of the classical period offered something like the first global vernacular. If this vernacular had a transnational and translatable resonance it was not just because of its optimal mobilization of biologically hard-wired structures and universal narrative templates, but because this vernacular played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernization; because it articulated, brought into optical consciousness (to vary Benjamin), and disseminated a particular historical experience. [Miriam Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54.1 (Fall 2000): 10-22, 30]

[Miriam] Hansen’s argument [about “vernacular modernisms”] is that early “classical” or studio cinemas are inextricably intertwined with the experience of modernization and modernity. While this argument, as she claims, is in and of itself not incredibly radical, her argument provides significant [additions to] three areas of film scholarship: it enlarges the discussion of modernism to [include] other media affected by the process of modernization, it intervenes in the binary between psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches to classical Hollywood cinema, and it [...] speaks to the question of Hollywood cinema’s early global hegemony during the 1920s-40s. In this last discussion, Hansen speaks of Hollywood’s flexibility in appropriating an amalgamation of diverse domestic interests in its inauguration of mass audience. [Kirsten Strayer, Ruins and Riots: Transnational Currents in Mexican Cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh 2009, p. 49]

Miriam Hansen differentiates between the use of the terms “audience” and “spectator” not just as a theoretical or methodological distinction operative within viewer-oriented studies (as do Kuhn, Mayne, Staiger and others who posit the former as a “real” social collective and the latter as a hypothetical or ideal construct of the text); instead, Hansen argues that the emergence of the “spectator” (and concomitant suppression of the “audience” as such) is historically specific, marking a paradigm shift between early and later cinema (around 1909). [Melanie Nash, 'Introduction', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 14, n° 1, 2003, p. 7-19; citing Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991 (pp. 23-24), p. 18]

The unprecedented acceleration of technological innovation and circulation have created conditions in which consciousness is more than ever inadequate to the state of technological development, its power to destroy and enslave human bodies, hearts, and minds. At the same time, new media such as video and the digital media have expanded the formal and material arsenal for imaginative practices and have opened up new modes of publicness that already enact a different, and potentially alternative, engagement with technology.
    This antinomic situation eludes the perspective of strictly media theory, especially in its ontological and teleological bent (for example, Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, Norbert Bolz), to say nothing of popular pundits' techno-pessimism. It requires understanding the practices, both productive and receptive, of technology in increasingly overlapping yet fractured, unequal yet unpredictable public spheres. It urges us to resume Benjamin's concern for the conditions of apperception, sensorial affect, and cognition, experience and memory—in short, for a political ecology of the senses.
    For us—teachers, scholars, intellectuals—to engage on both sides of this antinomy, we need theory, and we need aesthetics. The current reinvention of the aesthetic in the humanities would do well to heed Benjamin's lesson. The question of the fate of art in the age of technological reproducibility still maps a heuristic—and historical—horizon that no serious effort to refocus the study of literature and other traditional arts can afford to ignore. At the very least, awareness of that horizon should guard the renewed attention to formal and stylistic questions against illusory attempts to revive artistic autonomy, as an enclave protected against technical mediation and commodification. [Miriam Hansen, 'Why Media Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2004-5]

When Film Studies For Free posted the above embedded video a week ago, in an entry on online film studies lectures at the University of Chicago, it couldn't have imagined the almost immediate and extremely sad circumstances in which it would be reposted. But word has come, via Tom Gunning and other film scholars, that Miriam Hansen, one of the true paradigm-shifters of our discipline, one of its most gifted historians and theorists, has passed away.

Miriam Hansen was Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she also taught in the Department of English and the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies. Her publications include a book on Ezra Pound’s early poetics (1979) and Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991). She was completing a study entitled The Other Frankfurt School: Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno on Cinema, Mass Culture, and Modernity. Her next project was to be a book on the notion of cinema as vernacular modernism.

Inspired by her lifelong study of the Frankfurt School, Hansen's work rethought cinema as a part of the public and counterpublic spheres, situating it within a larger discourse of popular culture, and thus opening up the essential study of such 'periphery texts' as fan magazines, gossip columns, movie reviews, and so on. But her development of the concept of vernacular modernism also completely set the scene for the field of world or transnational cinema studies; and her historical work on cinematic spectatorship and her highly original addressing of the sensual experiences of film and new media are likewise in the process of revolutionizing their field of study (as W.J. T. Mitchell argues in relation to 'Miriam Hansen’s urging that cinema and other media be regarded as a vernacular modernism in which new theoretical propositions might be articulated while the senses are being reeducated').

It is hard to think, then, of anyone who has made a more significant contribution to Film Studies (and, latterly, new media studies), in the context of the Humanities as a whole, than she did.

Film Studies For Free hopes that Hansen knew just how grateful we are for her research -- how changed we are by it -- as well as for her inspiring work as a teacher. Here is a link to a warm and touching tribute by one of Hansen's former students.

Links to some of Hansen's work, as well as to some of the work it inspired, are given below. Further links, including ones to online tributes to her, will be added here as they come to FSFF's notice.

Online Tributes to Miriam Hansen:

• Tom Gunning, 'A Tribute to Miram Hansen', Society for Cinema and Media Studies, February 7, 2011
• Margalit Fox, 'Miriam Hansen, a Scholar of Cinema, Dies at 61', The New York Times,February 12, 2011
• Steven Pate, 'Renowned Film Scholar Miriam Hansen Dies', Chicagoist, February 9, 2011
• Cinetrix Pullquote, 'RIP Miriam Hansen', Cinetrix, February 6, 2011
• Azra Raza, 'In Memory of Miriam Bratu Hansen, 1949-2011', 3QuarksDaily, February 6, 2011
• Chris Cagle, 'Miriam Bratu Hansen', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 7, 2011 

Work by Miriam Hansen online:

• Miriam Bratu Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', Modernism-Modernity, Vol. 6.2, 1999

• Miriam Bratu Hansen, 'America, Paris, The Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity', John F. Kennedy-Institut fur Nordamerikastudien, Working Paper No. 72, 1994

• Miriam Hansen, 'Early cinema, late cinema: permutations of the public sphere', Screen, 34:3, 1993 (currently Open Access)

• Miriam Hansen, 'Why Media Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2004-5

• Miriam Hansen, 'Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: "The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"', New German Critique, No. 40, Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory. (Winter, 1987), pp. 179-224

• Miriam Hansen, 'Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer', New German Critique, No. 56, Special Issue on Theodor W. Adorno. (Spring - Summer, 1992), pp. 43-73

• Miriam Bratu Hansen, 'Room-For-Play: Benjamin's Gamble with Cinema', The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture, Canadian Journal of Film Studies; Spring 2004; 13, 1

• Miriam Hansen, 'Visual Pleasure, Fetishism and the Problem of Feminine/Feminist Discourse: Ulrike Ottinger's Ticket of No Return', New German Critique, No. 31, West German Culture and Politics. (Winter, 1984), pp. 95-108

• Alexander Kluge; Thomas Y. Levin; Miriam B. Hansen, 'On Film and the Public Sphere', New German Critique, No. 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema. (Autumn, 1981 - Winter, 1982), pp. 206-220

• Miriam Bratu Hansen, 'Excerpt from Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One Way Street', Critical Inquiry,Vol. 25, No. 2, 1999

Other Scholars on aspects of Hansen's work:

• Dudley Andrew, 'An Atlas of World Cinema', later published in Framework, 45.2, Fall 2004

• Chris Cagle, 'On Vernacular Modernism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, July 26, 2006

• Jan Campbell, 'Editorial: Kracauer', New Formations 61

• Stephanie Hanson, '“Electrical wonders of the present age”:cinema-going on the Far South Coast of NSW and rural discourses of modernity', Screening the Past, Issue 24, 2009

• Adrian Martin,'Balance and Linkage : Robert Mulligan's The Man in the Moon', Film Journal, Issue 11

• Allen Meek, 'Benjamin, the televisual and the "fascistic subject", Screening the Past, September 1998

• W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 22004-5

• Andrew Nelson, 'Cinema from Attractions: Story and Synergy in Disney’s Theme Park Movies', Cinephile, Vol. 4, Summer 2008

• Justus Nieland, 'Modernism's Laughter', Modernist Cultures, Issue 4, 2009

• Justus Nieland, 'Archives of Modernist Cinephilia', MODERNISM/Modernity, 14(2), 347-355, 2007

• Kyoko Omori, Detecting Japanese Vernacular Modernism: Shinseinen Magazine and the Development of the Tantei Shosetsu Genre, 1920-1931, PhD Thesis, Ohio State University, 2003

• Kirsten Strayer, Ruins and Riots: Transnational Currents in Mexican Cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh 2009

• Chen Xiangyang, 'Technologizing the Vernacular: Cantonese Opera Films through The Legend of Purple Hairpin', David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), Working Paper Series, No. 67, September 2007



"A fusion of life and dream": In memory of John Orr

Image from Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003). This  film topped John Orr's list of favourite films in 2003 (here are his 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2009 lists)

What is trauma if not, as in the original Greek, a kind of wound? In cinema, though, it is something more: a wound that seldom heals, a deep wounding of body and soul from which, often, the subject does not recover. Hence, the critical formula for the outcome of the trauma picture: at the least, significant damage; at the most, violent death.

If film horror often sources the supernatural, film trauma focuses on the fears of the natural world. What is out there as waking nightmare in a dangerous world is often a mirror of what is hidden in here, in the human heart. The monsters that horror films project onto the screen are often the monsters of our dream worlds. The wounding events of the trauma film are by contrast a fusion of life and dream.

In film, there is no absolute borderline between these opposites – human trauma and supernatural horror  but the question of emphasis, one way or the other, is crucial: the threat of aliens, mutants, werewolves, monsters, robots, slasher killers, vampires et alia, or the threat of evil that is here and now, that is contingent and recurrent in the life-world, yet also seems onscreen to inhabit the world of dream. Horror is, thus, the popular genre of superhuman evil, trauma its human and dreamlike subset. [John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009]

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear, via Dina Iordanova's website, of the death of influential film theorist and scholar John Orr.

Appointed as a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh in 1967, Orr began teaching film and cultural studies in that department in 1984. A few years later, he founded, with John Ellis, the joint honours film course for Sociology and English Literature. From 1998 onwards, he taught on the MSc in Film Studies, based in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.

Best known for his pioneering work on the sociology of film and art, Orr was author of Cinema and Modernity, Contemporary Cinema, The Art and Politics of Film and Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema. He also co-edited important works on Andzrej Wajda and Roman Polanski and had written recent essays on Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, and Dogme 95. His most recent book was Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He had recently retired from his post as Professor Emeritus in Social and Political Studies at Edinburgh, but was still very active in his research and publishing on cinema.

Orr was both prolific and very generous with his work. In recent years, he published a number of significant essays online, many of which set out in depth his brilliant thinking on trauma, fright, and paranoia in the cinema. Below, in tribute to and with gratitude for his work, both on and offline, FSFF has gathered links to those essays.

• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 

• John Orr, 'A Cinema of Parallel Worlds Lynch and Kieślowśki + Inland Empire', Film International, Volume: 7 | Issue: 1 February 2009

• John Orr, 'Pinter and the paranoid style in English theatre', cyc, Volume 12 n°1, 2008

• John Orr, 'Hitchcock and Hume Revisited: Fear, Confusion and Stage Fright', Film-Philosophy, 11.1, June 2007

• John Orr, 'Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs. Antonioni's The Passenger', Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007

• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• John Orr, 'Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet', Senses of Cinema, No. 37, 2005

• John Orr, 'Right Direction, Wrong Turning: On Zizek's The Fright of Real Tears', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 30, September 2003

• John Orr, 'Hidden Agenda: Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton', Edinburgh Working Papers in Sociology, No. 14 (1999)