The Road to Digital - New AUP eBooks on Film Archives and Mobile Screens and a Video Lecture on Digital Cinematic Attractions

• Digital Cinema Essay-Film-Lecture (for Film History and Criticism, University of Roehampton, 29 March 2012) by William Brown
• Films mentioned in William Brown's essay-film-lecture, above: Arabesque (John Whitney, USA, 1975); TRON (Steven Lisberger, USA, 1982); Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, USA, 1991); Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1993); Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, USA, 1994); The Incredibles (Brad Bird, USA, 2004); A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France/USA, 2004); Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, Mexico/USA, 2008); Day Watch (Timur Bekmambetov, Russia, 2006); The Host (Joon-ho Bong, South Korea, 2006); Panic Attack! (Fede Alvarez, Uruguay, 2009); O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen, UK/USA, 2000); Making Of O Brother, Where Art Thou?; 300 (Zack Snyder, USA, 2006); Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, USA, 2007); Singin' in the Rain Golf GTI Advert (Ne-o, 2005); Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, USA, 2008); Fight Club (David Fincher, USA, 1999); War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, USA, 2006); Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, USA, 2002); Avatar (James Cameron, USA, 2009); The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, USA, 2004); The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999); Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez, USA, 2007); The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, USA/New Zealand, 2003)
• Academic texts mentioned in the above lecture: Bordwell, David (2002). ‘Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film’, Film Quarterly, 55:3 (Spring), pp. 16-28; Brown, William (2009). ‘Man Without a Movie Camera – Movies Without Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema?’ in Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies (ed. Warren Buckland), Abingdon/New York: Routledge/AFI, pp. 66-85;  Buckland, Warren (2006). Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster, London: Continuum; Elsaesser, Thomas, and Warren Buckland (2002). Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis, London: Arnold; Gunning, Tom (1986). ‘The Cinema of Attraction, Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle, 8:3-4, pp. 63-70; Manovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; Minnis, Stuart (1998). ‘Digitalisation and the Instrumentalist Approach to the Photographic Image,’ Iris, 25, pp. 49-59; Prince, Stephen (1996). ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,’ Film Quarterly, 49:3 (Spring), pp. 27-37; Wood, Aylish (2002). ‘Timespaces in spectacular cinema: crossing the great divide between spectacle versus narrative,’ Screen, 43:4, pp. 370-386

 

Film Studies For Free presents a delightfully digital trove of film studies treasure today. Above, a fabulously illustrated, highly informative, and very wide-ranging, first year university lecture on Digital Cinema by University of Roehampton film scholar (and filmmaker) William Brown.  

 

And, below, links to two wonderful, openly accessible, online "digital film studies" books published by Amsterdam University Press, the best academic publisher ever, in FSFF's admittedly, somewhat biased view: Giovanna Fossati's 2009 From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition; and, just published, Nanna Verhoeff's 2012 Mobile Screens The Visual Regime of Navigation.  

 

Both have been added to FSFF's continuously updated list of openly accessible film studies books.

• Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam, 2009) Open Access PDF and To Purchase

Film is in a state of rapid change, with the transition from analog to digital profoundly affecting not just filmmaking and distribution, but also the theoretical conceptualization of the medium of film and the practice of film archiving. New forms of digital archives are being developed that make use of participatory media to provide a more open form of access than any traditional archive has offered before. Film archives are thus faced with new questions and challenges. From Grain to Pixel attempts to bridge the fields of film archiving and academic research, by addressing the discourse on film ontology and analysing how it affects the role of film archives. Fossati proposes a new theoretization of film archival practice as the starting point for a renewed dialogue between film scholars and film archivists.

• Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements 9
• Framing Film (in Transition): an Introduction    13

• part one practice and theory of (archival) film

• 1    Film Practice in Transition    33 
• 2    Theorizing Archival Film    103

• part two theorizing (archival) practice

• 3    Film Archival Field in Transition    149
• 4    Restoration Case Studies: Theorizing Archival Practice    211
• A New Mindset for (Archival) Film in Transition: a Conclusion    255 
• Notes 261 Glossary of Technical Terms    285 List of Illustrations    291 Filmography 293 Bibliography 297 Index 311

• Nanna Verhoeff, Mobile Screens The Visual Regime of Navigation (Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam 2012) Open Access PDF and To Purchase

"Nanna Verhoeff’s new book is a must for anybody interested in visual culture and media theory. It offers a rich and stimulating theoretical account of the central dimension of our contemporary existence – interfacing and navigating both data and physical world through a variety of screens (game consoles, mobile phones, car interfaces, GPS devices, etc.) In the process of exploring these new screen practices, Verhoeff offers fresh perspectives on many of the key questions in media and new media studies as well as a number of new original theoretical concepts. As the first theoretical manual for the society of mobile screens, this book will become an essential reference for all future investigations of our mobile screen condition". – Lev Manovich

• Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements    9
• List of Illustrations    11
  Introduction    13

• 1. Panoramic Complex    27 Building Visions    28 Panoramic Desire    32 Movement in the Panorama    39 Modes of Viewing    42 The Gaze in Motion    44 A Panoramic Complex    46 The Windshield as Screen    48

• 2. Self-Reflection    51 The Point of Self-Reflection    51 Meanings of the Screen    56 Spatial Attractions and Visual Deixis    57 Navigating the Screen    65 Navigation as Narration    68 Boundary-Crossings    70

• 3. Theoretical Consoles    73 The Status of the Gadget: The Case of Nintendo DS    73 Portrait of the Gadget as a Theoretical Console    77 Touch Screen: Dirty Windows    82 Mobile Screen: Carrying, Sharing, Transporting    89 Double Screen: Split, Insert, Map    92 Gadgetivity    95

• 4. Urban Screens    99 Places of Transit    99 Screenspace    104 Urban Transformation    107 Screen Practices    114 Installation    116 Programming Hybridity    124 Responsive Presence    129

• 5. Performative Cartography Mobile Dispositif Contesting Cartography Performative Cartography Cartographic Interface Tagging, Plotting, Stitching Layering in Augmented Reality Haptic Engagement

• Epilogue: You Are Here!

• Notes Bibliography Index of Names and Titles Index of Terms

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

Great new Essays on Film and Video from Mediascape

The above video is a very short, but effective, introduction to issues affecting small nations as they produce cinema, using the example of the Nordic countries, by film scholar Mette Hjort. It is also a fascinating digital promotional tool for a University of Washington Press book series co-edited by her. See Hjort's excellent essay on 'small nation cinema studies' in the new issue of Mediascape. And also see Tom Zaniello's excellent article there on emerging, new-media forms of documentary including the digital advert.

Film Studies For Free was really delighted to see that there's a new issue out of online journal Mediascape. The Winter 2011 issue explores

the complex notions of the local and global as they intersect with media: industries and studies; cultures of production, distribution, exhibition and reception; as well as the text itself. Some of the questions this issue engages with include: In what ways does the global marketplace facilitate local products and productions? How do actors negotiate the politics of globalization in how they represent themselves in either the digitally enhanced or real worlds? How can digital media balance both the autonomy of local communities and the ongoing impact of corporate globalization? What role do academic scholars and students play in the globalization of media studies? [read more of this introduction here].

As with earlier issues of this high quality and strikingly original journal, there are a good number of items in audiovisual formats (including video essays, video exemplars, etc). Alongside Mette Hjort's and Tom Zaniello's articles, FSFF particularly appreciated Brian Hu's excellent video essay on the use of popular music in Wong Kar-wai’s films: truly wonderful, analytical viewing and listening! But there are many others pieces of great interest and these are all directly linked to below.

Thanks for a really great issue, Mediascape.

Features: 

• 'From Synthespian to Avatar: Re-framing the Digital Human in Final Fantasy and The Polar Express' by Jessica Aldred
• 'Tsuruko Aoki: Wife, Lover, Transcultural Star (visual essay)' by Bryan Hikari Hartzheim
• 'Pop Music and Wong Kar-wai (visual essay)' by Brian Hu
• 'Impact on Soft Power of Cultural Mobility: Japan to East Asia' by Seiko Yasumoto

Reviews:

• 'Suturing the Wound of Globalization: Immigration and Organs in Dirty Pretty Things' by Abby Hinsman
• 'Coming of Age in Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches' by Dennis Lo

Meta:

• 'Small Cinemas: How They Thrive and Why They Matter' by Mette Hjort
• 'Roundtable Discussion on the Local and Global in Media Studies' Respondents: Amelie Hastie, Roshanak Khesti and Laura U. Marks (link not yet working)

Columns:

• 'Introduction' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Robert Greenwald Interview' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Ina Inaba Interview' by Ross Lenihan
• 'Amie Williams Interview' by Ben Sampson
• 'Globalization, Digital Films, and New Directions in Documentary' by Tom Zaniello
• 'Speculations on the Virtual and the Viral Witness to Human Rights Crises' by Sam Gregory and Patricia Zimmermann

Columns Video:

• 'Local/Global in Documentary Films: Traditional Media and New Media (video interview)' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Local/Global in Documentary Films: Short Format vs Long Format (video interview)' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Local/Global in Documentary Films: New Media and Social Change (video interview)' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Local/Global in Documentary Films: Effectiveness of Advocacy Media (video interview)' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson

On Digital Cinema, Visual Effects, and CGI Studies

Faking it? Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Happy New Year, dear readers! A truly chilled out Film Studies For Free is back from vacation, and raring to go with a pretty impressive (if it says so itself) entry of direct links to openly accessible scholarly work on digital cinema and computer generated imagery studies.

The post was inspired by news of the availability as a free download of 'Digital Bodies' - a chapter, translated into English, from esteemed scholar Barbara Flueckiger's 2008 German-language book Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer.

Flueckiger, Associate Professor at the University of Zurich's Institute of Cinema Studies, has also just published her great database on the history of CGI, VFX, and computer animation online.  

Vielen Dank, Barbara! Thanks also to all the scholars listed below for choosing to publish their work in freely accessible venues online! 

Finally, in case you hadn't yet heard of the best website for regular, informed discussions of special and visual effects in the cinema, do check out film scholar Dan North's awe-inspiring blog Spectacular Attractions!

• Joseph D. Anderson, 'Scene and Surface in the Cinema : Implications for Realism', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 12, n° 2, 2002, p. 61-73

• Torben Holm Antonsen, Sublime Pixels: Exploring the Audience Experience in Digital Special Effects Cinema, PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2008

• James Aston, 'Terrorist Attack!: The Spectacle of Evil in the Blended Horror of Cloverfield', Scope, no. 16, 2010

• Karyn Becker, 'Comments on Tom Gunning’s and Vivian Sobchack’s presentations', Digital Aesthetics, Special Issue of Nordicom Review: The 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, Kristiansand, 15-17 August 2003

• Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon, 'We (Still) Need a Woman for the Job: The Warrior Woman, Feminism and Cinema in the Digital Age', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010

• Jay David Bolter, 'Transference and Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema', Intermédialités, n 6 automne 2005

• Jay David Bolter, 'Digital Media and Cinematic Point of View', Heinz Heise, Hannover, 1997

• Marianne van den Boomen et al (eds), Digital Material (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009)

• Celluloid Liberation Front, 'World on a Wire: Reality is Colder than Fiction', Senses of Cinema, Issue 56, 2010

• Melanie Chan, 'Virtually Real and Really Virtual: Baudrillard’s Procession of Simulacrum and The Matrix', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)

• Patrick Crogan, 'Oshii’s ‘Avalon’ (2001) and Military-Entertainment Technoculture', Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media, Issue 4, 2010
  

• Sean Cubitt, 'Making Space', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010

• Arild Fetveit, 'Comments on Vivian Sobchack’s and Tom Gunning’s presentations', Digital Aesthetics, Special Issue of Nordicom Review: The 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, Kristiansand, 15-17 August 2003

• Mary Flanagan , 'Mobile Identities, Digital Stars, and Post-Cinematic Selves', Wide Angle, 1999

• Barbara Flückiger, 'Digital Bodies', English translation of chapter in Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer (Marburg: Schüren, 2008)

• Vincent M. Gaine, '‘We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM’: Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral', Networking Knowledge, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2009

• Vincent M. Gaine, Re-Mediated Mann:The Re-Mediation of Public Figures and Events in The Insider and Ali', Networking Knowledge, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010

• Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) See especially Part 3: 'Mediating memory:'‘Mortgaged to music’: new retro movies in 1990s Hollywood cinema' by Philip Drake; 'Colouring the past: Pleasantville and the textuality of media memory' by Paul Grainge; 'Memory, history and digital imagery in contemporary film' by Robert Burgoyne; 'Postcinema/Postmemory' by Jeffrey Pence)

• Catherine Grant, 'A Cinematic World? On Jean Baudrillard and Film Studies', Film Studies For Free, September 2, 2010

• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, Vol. 0, No 51 (2006)

• Tom Gunning, 'What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs', Digital Aesthetics, Special Issue of Nordicom Review: The 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, Kristiansand, 15-17 August 2003

• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010

• Davin Heckman, 'Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman', CTHeory.net, 2008

• Jae Hyung Ryu, 'The Cinema of Special Effects Attractions and Its Representation of Reality: The Comparison between the Early Tricks and Digital Effects', Georgia State University, Georgia, 2004, (Thanhouser.org)

• Wijnand Ijsselsteijn, 'Presence in the Past: what can we learn from Media History?', in Being There: Concepts, effects and measurement of user presence in synthetic environments G. Riva, F. Davide, W.A IJsselsteijn (eds.) ( Amsterdam: Ios Press, 2003)

• Tim Iles, 'The Matrix and the Subversion of Wu xia: Reasserting the Hollywood Ideological Hegemony', Scope, Issue 8, June 2007

• Bruce Isaacs, 'The Cinematic Real: Aesthetics and Spectacle', Sydney Studies in English, Vol. 33, 2007

• Bruce Isaacs, 'Film Cool: Towards a New Film Aesthetic', PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006

• Frank Kessler, 'What you get is what you see: Digital images and the claim on the real', Digital Material, Edited by Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009) Scroll to p. 187

• Ji-hoon Kim, 'David Claerbout’s Digital Pensive Images', Screening the Past, Issue 29, 2010.

• Gérard Kraus, 'Deadly Game along the Wistula: East European Imagery in Oshii’s ‘Avalon’ (2001)', Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media, Issue 4, 2010

• Adi Kuntsman, 'Online Memories, Digital Conflicts and the Cybertouch of War', Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media, Issue 4, 2010

• Ohad Landesman, 'In and out of this world: digital video and the aesthetics of realism in the new hybrid documentary', Studies in Documentary Film, Volume 2, Number 1, 2008

• David Lavery, 'From Cinespace to Cyberspace: Zionists and Agents, Realists and Gamers in The Matrix and eXistenZ', The Journal of Popular Film and Television, 28 (2001): 150-58

• Thomas Y. Levin, 'Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”', In CTRL[SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Fronhe and Peter Weibel, 578-93. Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002

• Lev Manovich, 'What is Digital Cinema?', Manovich.net, 1995

• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema and Digital Media', in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (eds), Perspectives of Media Art (1996)

• Lev Manovich, 'Moving Image Culture after Computerisation: an outline', 2003

• Allison Maplesden, 'Pixie Dust: Gender, Embodiment and Consumer Identities in disney.go.com/fairies and Pixie Hollow MMOG, Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010

• Michael Nitsche, 'Film live: And Excursion into Machinima' in: Developing Interactive Narrative Content: sagas_sagasnet_reader, ed. by Brunhild Bushoff (Munich: High Text, 2005), 210-243

• Anna Notaro, 'Reality is in the performance’: Issues of Digital Technology, Simulation and Artificial Acting in S1mOne', Refractory, Vol. 15, 2009

• Ian Alan Paul, 'Desiring-Machines in American Cinema: What Inception tells us about our experience of reality and film', Senses of Cinema,  Issue 56, 2010

• Stephen Prince, 'The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts: Cinema and Cinematography in the Digital Era', Film Quarterly, Vol. no. 57, Issue no. 3, pages 24-33

• Nicholas Rombes, 'Avant Garde Realism',  C-Theory.net, January 2005

• Steven Shaviro, 'Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film', Projections, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2007: 63-82

• Steven Shaviro, 'The Cinematic Body Redux', originally published in Parallax 14:1 (February 2008), 48-54, The Pinocchio Theory

• Vivian Sobchack, 'Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime', Millennium Film Journal No. 34 (Fall 1999): The Digital

• Jason Sperb, 'Time Passing in the Simulacrum of Videodrome', Intertheory, Vol. 3, 2006

• David Surman, 'CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds', Gamasutra Education Online, 2003/4

• Lara Thompson, 'Monochrome Now: Digital Black and White Cinema and the Photographic Past, Screening the Past, Issue 29, 2010

• Giovanni Tiso, Impossible Recollections: the Troubled Imaginary of Mediated Memory, PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2006

• Deborah Tudor, Light Bouncing: digital processes illuminate the cultural past', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Aylish Wood, 'Proliferating Connections and Communicating Convergence', Fibreculture, Issue 13, 2008

• Anja Zagorac, '"A Splinter in Your Mind": Subjectivity, Hyperreality, and Religion in The Matrix', Masters thesis,  University of Vienna/Wien, May 2009

Split Screen Studies

The above is a FILMANALYTICAL, REQUIEM // 102 and FILM STUDIES FOR FREE video essay by Catherine Grant. It explores the use of split screens in some early sequences in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (Darren Aronofsky, 2000).

    The essay 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 License in November 2010.

Today, Film Studies For Free presents an entry of links to online studies of the cinematic split screen. Rather excitingly (for this blog, at least), the resources include the above video essay on this very topic ... by FSFF's author. 

The essay is a contribution to the Requiem for a Dream // 102 Project, conceived by its inventor Nick Rombes, Associate Professor of English at the University of Detroit, Mercy, as a form of "collective, distributed film criticism". Requiem // 102 is modelled loosely on Rombes' ongoing 10/40/70 project, in which he “reads” three screen captures from a given film taken at the 10, 40, and 70 minute marks.

In this case, Nick has invited 102 contributors from across the film criticism spectrum to look at, or otherwise be inspired by, one frame from each minute of Darren Aronofsky’s 102 minute-long film Requiem for a Dream (2000), a movie that unsettled many audience members when it was first released in cinemas ten years ago.

To learn more about Requiem // 102, check out the 102 Project’s “About” page and/or follow it on Twitter. Chuck Tryon's great first post on the film is here. For an accompanying written text for the above video essay on the frame capture from 02:09 of Requiem for a Dream, visit FSFF's little sister site, Filmanalytical.

• Jim Bizzocchi, 'The Fragmented Frame: The Poetics of the Split-Screen', [Draft] MIT 6, 2009
• Jim Bizzocchi, 'Ambient Video: The Transformation of the Domestic Cinematic Experience', [Draft] in Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, eds. Byron Hawk, David Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo. University of Minnesota Press, February 2008
• Dave Boothroyd, 'Cinematic heroin and narcotic modernity', Symbolism: Journal of Critical Aesthetics Vol.VII , 2007
• Nadia Bozak, 'Four Cameras are Better than One: Division as Excess in Mike Figgis’ Timecode', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Cormac Deane, 'The Embedded Screen and the State of Exception: Counterterrorist Narratives and the “War on Terror”', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Sergio Dias-Branco, 'The Mosaic-Screen: Exploration and Definition', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008 
• Tessa Dwyer and Mehmet Mehmet, 'Double Trouble: Editorial', Refractory, Vol. 14, 2008 
• Paul Eisenstein, 'Devouring Holes: Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and the Tectonics of Psychoanalysis',  International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1.3, Autumn 2007
• Ian Garwood, 'Sound and Space in the Split-Screen Movie', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Catherine Grant, 'Establishing Split [video essay and text on Requiem for a Dream]', Filmanalytical, November 2, 2010
• David Grevin, 'Medusa in the Mirror: The Split World of Brian De Palma’s Carrie', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Andrew Grossman, 'Finding Unlikely Ideology in Prokofiev: Polyphonic and Anti-Authoritarian Gestures in The Gambler', Bright Lights Film Journal, No. 62, 2008
• Malte Hagener, 'The Aesthetics of Displays: How the Split Screen Remediates Other Media', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Ingrid Hoofd, 'The Threat of Modernity; Comments on Theories on the Impact of Modernity', Klari.net, March 5, 1998 
• Kirsten Johnson and Jim Bizzocchi, 'Lost Cause: An Interactive Film Project', International Digital Media and Arts Association Beyond Boundaries, October 30, 2007
• Adrian Jones, 'Meaning and the Interactive Narrative: In the context of Object-Oriented Interactive Cinema', Readings in Non-Linear Narrative (date unknown)
• Craig B. Knowles, 'The Temporal Image Mosaic and its Artistic Applications in Filmmaking', MSc Thesis, Queen's University, Ontario, December 2003
• Bruno Lessard, 'Missed Encounters: Film Theory and Expanded Cinema', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008 
• Tim Snelson, '“What Am I… Beloved or Bewitched?” Split Screens, Gender Confusion, and Psychiatric Solutions in The Dark Mirror', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Lorenza Mondada, 'Video Recording Practices and the Reflexive Constitution of the Interactional Order: Some Systematic Uses of the Split-Screen Technique', [Uncorrected proof], Human Studies, 32, 1, 67-99 
• Kim Louise Walden, 'Double Take: Rotoscoping and the Processing of Performance', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Maria Walsh, 'The Double Side of Delay: Sutapa Biswas’ film installation Birdsong and Gilles Deleuze’s Actual/Virtual Couplet', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008
• Birk Weilberg, 'Beyond Interactive Cinema', Keyframe, August 2002 

La Science de Michel Gondry: online scholarship on his films & videos

Last updated April 19, 2010

Electric Dreams? Above and below, images from Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008)

 

Michel Gondry and Robert Stickgold discuss dreams, filmmaking and the scientific method (SeedMagazine.com, 2007).

Film Studies For Free presents un petit hommage -- en images, hypertexte, et vidéos --to one of its favourite filmmakers, Michel Gondry, French maestro of the music-video form, and also responsible, as director, for the audiovisual brilliance of the following films: Human Nature (2001); Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); La Science des rêves/The Science of Sleep (2006); Be Kind Rewind (2008); and The Green Hornet (2010).

There are some truly wonderful scholarly resources linked to below: merci bien, as ever, to their authors, editors and publishers for making them freely accessible online.

• Dwayne Avery, 'The Future is behind you: the Reclamation of Place in Be Kind Rewind', Movement 1.1: the futures of cinema, 2009 
• Jim Batcho, 'Overlapping Levels of the Diegesis in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007
• New Julia Driver, 'Memory, Desire, and Value in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', in Christopher Grau (ed), Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (Routledge, 2009)
• New Michel Gondry, 'Foreword', in Christopher Grau (ed), Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (Routledge, 2009)
• New Christopher Grau, 'Introduction' to Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (Routledge, 2009)
• New Christopher Grau, 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the morality of memory',  Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (1), Winter 2006
• Carolyn Jess-Cooke, 'Narrative and Mediatized Memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', Scope, Issue 8, June 2007
• Brandon M. Hancock, 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 9, No. 1 April 2005
• Erin Hill-Parks, 'From Film to Life: The Construction of Identity in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I “Heart” Huckabees', From Camera Lens To Critical Lens A Collection Of Best Essays On Film Adaptation, edited by Rebecca Housel (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006) 
• Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - screenplay, 2003
• John Finlay Kerr, ‘Rereading’ Be Kind Rewind (USA 2008): How film history can be remapped through the social memories of popular culture', Screening the Past, Issue 24, 2009
• Mike Lim, 'Review of Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007', Screening the Past, Issue 23, 2008
• Colm O'Shea, 'Out of His Head: Metaphysical Escape Attempts in the Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman ', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 63, February 2009 
• Heidi Peeters , 'The semiotics of music videos: it must be written in the stars', Image [and] Narrative, Issue 8, May 2004
• A Raz, and M Paasivirta, 'The Science and Fiction of Memory Removal', PsycCRITIQUES, Vol 50(42), 2005
• Richard Rushton, 'Cinema After Deleuze After 9/11', Postmodern Culture, Volume 19, No. 2, 2009 
• Fredericka Shulman, 'The Objects of Memory: Collecting Eternal Sunshine', Philament, Issue 5, 2005
• Jason Sperb, 'Be Kind Rewind / or, an incomplete essay on Off-Modern American Cinephilia', Jamais Vu, December 13, 2009
• Gunnar Strøm, 'The Two Golden Ages  of Animated Music Video', Animation Studies, Vol.2, 2007
• Dayton Taylor and Hector Macleod, Digital Air Techniques (2008)
• Scott Thrill, '"How My Brain Works": An Interview with Michel Gondry', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 53, August 2006
• José van Dijck, 'Memory Matters in the Digital Age', Configurations, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2004
• Thomas E. Wartenberg, 'Film as Argument', Film Studies, Issue 8, Summer 2006

Matt Zoller Seitz shares his thoughts with fellow filmmaker critic Kevin B Lee while rewatching Michel Gondry's 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, May 2009

 

 The original music video of Gary Jules' and Michael Andrews' cover version of Tears for Fears' song Mad World, directed by Michel Gondry. This song features in the soundtrack of Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)