Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn videographic film studies. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn videographic film studies. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Thứ Hai, 30 tháng 6, 2014

Happy Holidays Round Up! Adrian Martin Interview, New Journal Issues, Videographic Film Studies and Much More!

UNCANNY FUSION by Catherine Grant: VIAGGIO IN ITALIA/JOURNEY TO ITALY meets…?
Read more about this video here and here

It's been a busy few months and a fair tuckered out Film Studies For Free is off on its annual screen-free holidays from tomorrow for just over a week. While it chills out on a sweltering beach somewhere, generous to a fault (so it says), it's leaving you with LOTS of links to fabulous open access reading, viewing and listening. Just check out the wondrousness below.

Back soonish.


New issue of [in]Transition: A Journal of Videographic Film Studies 1.2, 2014 
Edited by Christian Keathley, the new issue examines some of the formal parameters in emergent videographic film and moving studies. It contains the following entries:

Adrian Martin Interview 
On the longest day of the year, June 21, 2014, Film Studies For Free's author interviewed film studies writer and thinker extraordinaire Adrian Martin. Our conversation took place in the quietest spot we could find in the historic center of Milan late on a World Cup match night. We were both visiting that city for the conference of the Network of European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), and had been part of a workshop panel that day on videographic film studies, or "audiovisual approaches to audiovisual subjects." We discussed Adrian's turn to audiovisual essays (many made with Cristina Álvarez López) as well as his work more generally, and talked about his new book Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, later in 2014). Adrian's latest De Filmkrant column 'Serve Yourself' offers an extract from the book as a preview of it: the column is on-line here: http://www.filmkrant.nl/world_wide_angle/10805. In the interview, Adrian talks in detail about a particular audiovisual essay -- Intimate Catastrophes -- which he co-edited with Cristina Álavarez López for the Transit: Cine y otros desvíos website.  Also see "[De Palma’s] Vision" by Martin and Álvarez López here: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/de-palmas-vision. The interview is available from Film Studies For Free's Podbean Site.

 
Two new cinephilia links from Photogénie!

Great updates in Kracauer Lecture Video Recording Series at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (links via Vinzenz Hediger), including:

New issue of OFFSCREEN (Volume 18.4, 2014) on Television

Preceding issue of OFFSCREEN (18.3, March 2014) on Memory, Cinema and Time

SCOPE, Issue 26, February 2014

 See film scholars Ben Sampson and Drew Morton's fantastic VIDEO ESSAY DIPTYCH: Good Dads/Bad Dads: A Tribute to Cinematic Fathers. Morton has also posted all five drafts of his BAD DADS video essay to share his production process: . Also see Morton's ingenious video on Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: Day x Day x Day: https://vimeo.com/96852873

Michael Chanan has just uploaded his marvellous video tribute to the remarkable Brazilian documentarist Eduardo Coutinho. For further tributes to Coutinho see here. 

Ian Magor's great video tribute to the films of Bela Tarr: https://vimeo.com/97625110

Interesting audiovisual essay, on film music' relationship to the image track, by students Noémie Lachance and Jana Zander https://vimeo.com/95030117 

Kevin B Lee's TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (complete version)  

Computers Watching Movies (Inception) by Benjamin Grosser: https://vimeo.com/79080565

"Walden Connection: The Thoreauvian Agenda in UPSTREAM COLOR" Video by Anna Robertson  https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy/videos/92652144

Michael Heileman's monumental videographic STAR WARS study Kitbashed" http://vimeo.com/heilemann/kitbashed 

Great updates at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation website!

Excellent interview with film scholar Richard Misek, creator of the feature length essay film ROHMER IN PARIS: http://contrappassomag.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/contrappasso-extra-interview-with-richard-misek-rohmer-in-paris/. See his short video essay Mapping Rohmer here: http://framescinemajournal.com/article/mapping-rohmer-a-video-essay/. 

Souleymane Cissé on Henri Langlois (video 2:24): https://vimeo.com/99318945 (Link via Nicole Brenez)

The Österreichisches Filmmuseum has put Vertov's "Kinoweek" online, in digitized form, for free (link via Vinzenz Hediger)

Also at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum's site, video interviews with, among others, Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Benning, Anna Karina, Michel Ciment… Link via David Hudson: http://bit.ly/1m4MSAY

Remembering Eli Wallach, 1915 - 2014: http://fan.do/r/19i
 
David Hudson's tribute entry to Robert Gardner, 1925 – 2014, Anthropologist, filmmaker, author and advocate of the avant-garde: http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-robert-gardner-1925-2014.

Ehsan Khoshbakht talks to Dariush Mehrjui, Kamran Shirdel and Masoud Kimiai about the first golden age of Iranian cinema: http://fan.do/r/19h

kinderspiel, a project on children as media archaeologists, media makers and media players (link via Vinzenz Hediger)

Excellent talk by David Archibald:  "Should Scotland have an independent film industry?"

David Bordwell's first dispatch from Bologna (thanks to David Hudson for the link) 

Niamh Thornton on violence in Amat Escalante's 2013 film HELI.

Great article at Sight and Sound, on "The cinema of the Palestinian revolution" 

Call for Papers for the Global Humanitarianism and Media Culture conference in February 2015 

Transit's new video essay dedicated to deers in cinema!


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Chủ Nhật, 30 tháng 3, 2014

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

Homepage of [in]Transition, 1.1, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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    Thứ Hai, 10 tháng 2, 2014

    The Flâneur on Film: On films by Richard Linklater and others by Rob Stone

    Links added on February 25, 2014
    A short film that searches for Jesse and Celine in Vienna on Bloomsday, 16 June 2013. As their absence reveals the city, so this pilgrimage to places they have been becomes lost in time, and an homage to three films of flânerie: Before Sunrise, Sans soleil and En la ciudad de Sylvia.

    It's been a rather slow start to the year here at Film Studies For Free, with lots of other (exciting) projects diverting attention from this little URL to date (more about those soon).

    But FSFF is back with a wonderful (and generous) guest entry by Rob Stone, Professor of Film, Chair of European Film and Director of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. Rob is the author of Spanish Cinema (Longman, 2001), The Wounded Throat: Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (Edwin Mellen, 2004), Julio Medem (Manchester University Press, 2007), Walk, Don't Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (Wallflower/ Columbia University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (IB Tauris, 2015). He also co-edited The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Wallflower, 2007), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2012) and A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

    The entry begins (at the top) with Rob's fascinating video homage to Linklater's Before Sunrise (and Sans soleil/Sunless and En la ciudad de Sylvia), it continues, below, with his thoughtful and informative written text about cinematic wanderings (including his own), and it ends (at the foot of the post) with FSFF's characteristic list of links to related online items connected to the films of Richard Linklater and flânerie on film.

    BETWEEN SUNRISE AND SUNLESS
    By Rob Stone

    'Between Sunrise and Sunless' came out of my recently published book, The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run (Columbia University Press, 2013), which explores several key themes across that American director's films, including those associated with the figure of the flâneur: the sense of a single ongoing present moment, and the pursuit of elusive, meaningful connections, of closing the spaces in between people. It also came from an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project entitled Screening European Heritage, run in collaboration with Professor Paul Cooke of the University of Leeds, UK, in which the notions of film tourism and the cinematic pilgrimage became an emergent theme.
         Pilgrimage, which is targetted, might be expected to oppose the wanderings of flânerie, but this brief homage to the films directed by Linklater, which tend to feature a great deal of walking and talking, provides a combination of both. The flâneur was celebrated by the poet Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth century as a pedestrian whose wanderings enabled novel understandings of the evolving metropolis. The daytime flâneur rejected quantitative measurements of functional space and sought instead to realise new meanings for the streets. In this the flâneur had much in common with the Surrealists led by André Breton, who had sought dreamlike encounters in the streets at night, as well as the activists of the Situationist International, whose philosophy of psychogeography made the dérive or drift into a symbolic trespassing on official spaces, a pointed trampling of any prohibitive demarcations and a freeform remapping of the city for revolutionary pursuits.

         In his essay on the redemption of physical reality, Siegfried Kracauer asserts that
    the street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself. Again one will have to think mainly of the city street with its ever-moving crowds. The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out, thereby preventing the onlooker from following up any of the innumerable suggestions they offer. What appeals to him are not so much sharp-contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable pursuit as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures. Each has a story, yet the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow casts its spell over the flâneur  or even creates him. The flâneur is intoxicated with life in the street – life eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form. [1960: 72]
    Kracauer clearly defers here to the Bergsonian notion of time as something that is a durational state of mind and this idea of a moment that is unique and eternal supports the commitment and fuels the ebullient intuition of the flâneur, for whom times and places are not static or immutable but ever-becoming, incomplete and evolving. This eternal renewal can be confusing. The pursuit of the wandering Madeleine (Kim Novak) by Scottie (James Stewart) around San Francisco in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) results in him getting lost in time, memory and myth. Moreover, the idea that ‘the flâneur is a multilayered palimpsest’ (Jenks 1995: 148) is confirmed in En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia, José Luis Guerín, 2007), in which the Dreamer (Xavier Lafitte) pursues a young woman around Strasbourg in a vain quest to shore up the self-serving myth of an ideal woman whose perfection might reflect his own narcissism. Baudelaire describes the flâneur as ‘distilling the eternal from the transitory’ (1972) in his traversal of the city, but the contrast between the crumbling egos of Scottie and the Dreamer and their concrete environments is debilitating, with both films subverting the chauvinist notion of the figure as ‘a utopian representation of a carefree (male) individual in the midst of the urban maelstrom’ (Tester 1994: 67).
         The flâneur on film is rarely as carefree as his literary counterpart. Rather, films such as Vertigo and En la ciudad de Sylvia follow neurotic males in their attempts to relocate their psyches at the centre of an order of things that is so defiantly of their own making that their flânerie corresponds to a kind of ‘time-space psychosis’ (Tester, 1994: 77). The labyrinth of streets they traverse is also, of course, an apt metaphor for how the mind stores memories and retrieves them by the association of ideas, which is represented by the movement of the flâneur, for whom bridges, tunnels, alleyways and squares reveal new and unending synaptic connections. The flâneur should be Baudelaire’s ‘perfect idler [and] passionate observer’ (1972); however, the cinematic sense of time and place he or she creates can become so distorted that it provokes the disintegration of coherent experience. No-one is as confounded as Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) in La Notte (The Night, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), the unloved wife who wanders Milan during the day ‘observing the harsh, uncoordinated fragments of life’ (Thomson, 1998: 529). Her aimlessness results from the erasure of her own identity in marriage, which is ultimately revealed as an open wound of searing pain rather than indifference. Moreau strains against the architectural rigidity of the film, in which characters freeze in doorways and dissolve in their reflections. Baudelaire supposes that the flâneur sets ‘up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite’ (1972), while Walter Benjamin declares that the flâneur ‘derives pleasure from his location within the crowd, but simultaneously regards it with contempt’ (1983: 35). Neither realise that to be without a crowd entirely leaves a flâneur like Lidia annulled.
         Despite or because of the dangers of losing oneself in place, time, morbid introspection and memory, flânerie goes global in Sans soleil (Sunless, Chris Marker, 1983), wherein the elusive auteur admits ‘to have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.’ This is a peripatetic quest for understanding that searches through time in old footage as much as it explores the world that turns around the itinerant filmmaker. In Japan, Paris, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and San Francisco, where the filmmaker attempts a pilgrimage to the flânerie of Vertigo, Sans soleil presents itself as evidence that ‘new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa’ (Lefebvre 1991: 59). Repeatedly reterritorialising urban spaces as arenas of new and even revolutionary thought, Marker pauses on his travels through time and space only briefly to express affinity with the drunken Korean flâneur who ‘takes his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads.’
         Flânerie has informed many films about those who transcend the potential banality of their existence via the affinities they find in ephemeral associations. It can serve as an assertion of subjectivity, often opposing the hegemonic idea of a city with a view of it from the perspective of an Other. The female flâneur is a potent figure in Weimar culture, for example, while Frances (Greta Gerwig) dancing through Chinatown in Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013) offers a refreshing replacement for the myth of the Manhattanite hipster male. Flânerie can resemble a political stance too, when characters such as those encountered in the west Austin of Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991), for example, get to embody its interwoven enactment and philosophy, professing resistance to all kinds of social, political, generic and narrative imperatives by simply hanging out. Flânerie and psychogeography are similarly explored in The London Perambulator (John Rogers, 2009), London (Patrick Keiller, 1994)  and the Portsmouth of Flaneurs (Alex Sergeant, 2012). Flânerie is also behind the morally ambivalent and seemingly indifferent wanderers of the post-war West German state in Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, Wim Wenders, 1974).
         The flâneur’s accumulation of experiences and influences often results in an indistinct outcast figure, one who walks to a different rhythm, defined and maintained by an absence of clear origins and a lack of explicit direction. Consequently, the flâneur can be disruptive where a sense of rootlessness and rejection of settlement renders the figure as threatening Other. This outsiderness can inspire empathy, which Walter Benjamin describes in his essay on Baudelaire as ‘the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd’ (2006: 85); but the flâneur mostly drifts in a kind of pilgrimage to aimlessness, which is parodied in the frustrated efforts of the faithful to reach their illusory, sacred yet profaned objective in La Voie lactée (The Milky Way, Luis Buñuel, 1969). The association of urban drift and psychogeography with idleness in Slacker and other films directed by Linklater has also been dismissed as laziness, yet the oppositional movement of the slackers who also feature in Dazed and Confused (1993), SubUrbia (1996), The Newton Boys (1998), Waking Life (2001), and The School of Rock (2003) is quietly revolutionary. Refusing to follow rules or lines in Republican America leads them to formulate a structural and dialogic strategy that favours intertextuality as much as criss-crossing cities and even oceans, ending up in Vienna, for example, in Before Sunrise (1995), Paris in Before Sunset (2004) and Messinia in Before Midnight (2013).
         The short film Between Sunrise and Sunless is an attempt to combine elements of flânerie with an interest in film tourism, even pilgrimage. It was shot in Vienna on 16 June 2013, which is James Joyce’s Bloomsday, the most ordinary day of the year, and exactly eighteen years on from the events of Before Sunrise. The book on Linklater had just been published and it was time to put some of its ideas into practice in the manner of several film scholars in the UK, such as Catherine Grant and William Brown, who are breaking ground by producing and integrating short and even full-length films, video essays and online media into their teaching and research. The original idea was to record a cinematic pilgrimage, to understand how a film affects a place and investigate how that place is affected by the film. This kind of film tourism is a world apart from the Universal Tour in Los Angeles or the Harry Potter Experience in London, where everything is practiced, limited and laid on. Neither is it the same as taking the official, organised and guided ‘Vertigo Tour’ in San Francisco, ‘The Godfather Tour’ in Sicily, ‘The Da Vinci Code Tour’ from Edinburgh, ‘The Sopranos Tour’ in New York or ‘The Lord of the Rings Tour’ in Wellington, although each hold significant pleasures. Instead, there is much to be said for the uniquely personal, certainly metaphysical and even occasionally transcendental experiences of chasing down replicants in Los Angeles a few shrinking years before Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1981) will actually take place or visiting the towers, canals and alcoves actually in Bruges of In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008). There was also an element of affective criticism that followed (and was perhaps validated by) Robin Wood, who wrote in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 1998) that he felt compelled to preface his analysis of Before Sunrise with the admission that ‘here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration but love’ (1998: 318). Was it possible to follow the example of Wood, who not only shared his passion but made it an essential component of his craft?
         Between Sunrise and Sunless was shot on a Canon Legria HF M52 and edited with Final Cut Pro on a MacBook Pro. The music is taken (following donation) from a website offering royalty-free music called Incompetech run by Kevin MacLeod, who composes all of it himself.  Simply mapping Vienna was a curious endeavour aided by websites containing information from other fans of the film on its locations. At times, the flânerie of Before Sunrise was revealed as a cheat: the cemetery of the nameless, for example, is a long way out of town, requiring a bus and taxi for which there was no time. In addition, the actual route taken by Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) through the city, if followed chronologically, is absurdly haphazard. So the filming trajectory was plotted for practical purposes, which resulted in a mostly circular route and one essential excursion across the river by metro to the fairground. Still, Vienna was filmed as found on a gloriously warm day in ten hours that concluded with a viewing of Before Midnight in the Votivkino cinema, which also appears in the short film.
         The accumulated footage and photographs were initially going to be used to simply juxtapose images of the city now with those of the film then; but memories of Sans soleil graciously presented themselves at the editing stage as the ideal model for the investigation of time and place elaborated in the voiceover, while threaded glimpses of a woman in white refer to the pursuit of the muse in En la ciudad de Sylvia. This short film’s quest is elusive, even deluded, but ultimately and eternally redirected by optimism. It looks for real places and ends up searching for unreal times. Nevertheless, it continues. Between Sunrise and Sunless also provided a lesson in how the Internet functions and how important and necessary can be websites and blogs like Film Studies for Free and Mediático. It was picked up by Colombia University Press for its blog and website, then praised by a CNN film critic who had presumably seen it there. It has since popped up on several websites and was recently recommended on the Twitter feed of Sight and Sound. However, by far the best and most surprising result has been the ensuing correspondence from many fans of Before Sunrise and its sequels, who saw it and got in touch, thereby suggesting that this whole idea of closing the spaces in between people was not impossible after all.

    Rob Stone

    With thanks to Catherine Grant [who provided the hyperlinks above], Paul Cooke, James Clifford Kent and Jeff Stollenwerck


    References

    Baudelaire, Charles (1972) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Selected Writings on Art and
    Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet, London: Viking, 395–422.
    Online: http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/pm/baudelaire-painter.htm [accessed 10 October 2010].

    Benjamin, Walter  (1983) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
    trans. Harry Zohn, London: Verso.

    Benjamin, Walter (2006) The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press.

    Jenks, Chris (1995) ‘Watching your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur’, in
    Visual Culture, New York: Routledge, 142–60.

    Kracauer, Siegfried (1960) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Oxford:
    Oxford University Press.

    Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, London: Blackwell.

    Stone, R. (2012) ‘En la ciudad de Sylvia and the durée of a derivé’ in Delgado, M. and R. Fiddian (eds), Spanish Cinema 1973-2010: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory, Manchester: Manchester University Press. In press.

    Stone, Rob (2013) Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater, New York: Columbia University Press.

    Stone, R. and P. Cooke (2013) ‘Transatlantic Drift: Hobos, Slackers, Flâneurs, Idiots and Edukators’ in Nagib, L. and A. Jersley (eds), Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, London/New York: I.B. Tauris.

    Tester, Keith (1994), The Flâneur, New York: Routledge.

    Thomson, David (1998) A Biographical Dictionary of Film, London: André Deutsch. 
    Linklater Links:
    Flânerie Forwardings:
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    Thứ Ba, 20 tháng 3, 2012

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Otherwise, see you back here sometime in early April.

    Christian Keathley, Pass the Salt


     

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