Film Theory Unstilled: Raymond Bellour

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you a video recording of a two hour long talk by one of the most original and important of the major film and media theorists, Raymond Bellour, Director of Research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, and one of Europe's foremost theorists of film, video and new media.

Bellour's publications include L'Analyse du film, his now classic close readings of Hollywood films first published in 1979, several more recent collections, especially Le Cinéma americain and Le Western, as well as works on literature (especially on the Brontës, Dumas and Michaux). Since the early eighties, Bellour's work has concentrated on new media and on the relations between words and images.

Bellour's talk was recorded on May 23, 2002, a record of his contribution to the 'Moving Images' Programme, a collaboration between Tate Modern and Research at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design bringing to London major figures working in or on film and video to explore contemporary issues around these media. It is now freely available to view online as one of the many wonderful Tate Channel offerings about which FSFF waxed lyrical just the other day.

Below are links to a few other Bellour related resources -either articles by him, or ones by other scholars which discuss or employ his film theoretical insights.

• Raymond Bellour, 'The Film We Accompany', Rouge, 3, 2004 (on Ritwal Ghatak's 1960 The Cloud-Capped Star)
  

• Raymond Bellour, 'The Book, back and forth', excerpts, chrismarker.org, 2008
  

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Around Painting and the "End of Cinema"', Theory Kit, 2007

• Rosalind Galt, 'The Obviousness of Cinema', World Picture, 2, Autumn 2008

• Judith Mayne, 'Picturing Spectatorship', in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Understanding Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 1994)
  

• Christian Metz, 'Photography and Fetish', October, Vol. 34. (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90

• Daniel Morgan, ‘No Trickery with Montage’: On Reading a Sequence in Godard’s Pierrot le fou', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004

• Laura Rascaroli, 'Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory', Kinema, 2008
  

• Nick Redfern, “Leading them Down the Garden Path:” Another Look at Hitchcock’s Psycho', EnterText 1.3

• Julian Savage, 'The Lost Cult of Wake in Fright', Intensities Four, December 2007

• Herman Wasserman, 'Review of Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film [Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2000]', Scope, February 2002

• Tony Williams, 'Power and Paranoia: 1940s Hollywood [review of Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and The American Cinema 1940-1950. New York: Columbia University Press 1986]', from Jump Cut, no. 35, April 1990, pp. 73-77

Framing Jarman: New Tate Visual Arts Channel in Beta

Film Studies For Free wanted to rush you the great news that the Tate has just launched a new, highly elegant and very user-friendly channel to enable the viewing (and embedding - yay!) of hundreds of videos about visual arts, like the great film above in which James Mackay, friend of British film artist Derek Jarman, talks about Jarman's experimental work on super 8. These films that he began making in the 1970s are rarely shown. Mackay, who later produced some of Jarman’s feature films including The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993), agreed to open up his archive of these ground-breaking short films for TateShots.

FSFF also came across an even more detailed interview with Mackay about his work with Jarman here at the 400blows website. You can also find interviews there with the following people about their work and friendships with this filmmaker: Jenny Runacre; Simon Fisher Turner; Tilda Swinton; Peter Tatchell; Christopher Hobbs; Tony Peake; Tariq Ali; Ron Peck; and Gaye Temple;

FSFF has only just begun to explore the riches and the capabilities of the new Tate channel; it gleefully urges you to do the same. But it closes, today, happily in a Derek Jarman frame of mind with a sublime Jarman artifact, from his 1987 short Aria, starring Tilda Swinton, music by Gustave Charpentier from his opera Louise with its aria 'Depuis le jour', sung here by Leontyne Price:

Michael Haneke: A Ribbon of Links

For an updated Haneke links list here at Film Studies For Free please go to: 

Michael Haneke Studies: videos, podcasts and article links
 

Trailer for The White Ribbon

An interview with Michael Haneke about The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke's Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages, a.k.a. Code Unknown (France/Germany/Romania 2000), is one of Film Studies For Free's author's favourite films. So she is very much looking forward to catching some of the impressive upcoming season of the Austrian director's work at the British Film Institute, from November 5-30.

The season will also showcase Haneke's latest film, the Palme D'Or winning Das Weisse Band/The White Ribbon. Another highlight, for those able to make it to London's Southbank, is the event Key Scholars in Film Studies: Thomas Elsaesser on Michael Haneke on November 5 (hmmm, Bonfire Night in the UK... What could Haneke do with that historically and culturally-charged event, FSFF wonders?).

Here, to celebrate all the above, is a list of links to mostly scholarly, and all openly-accessible, online Michael Haneke resources. If you feel that any key ones are missing, do please let FSFF know and they'll be added forthwith. Danke schön!

• Paul Arthur, 'Endgame [on Caché]', Film Comment, November/December 2005
  
• Karin Badt, 'Family Is Hell and So Is the World: Talking to Michael Haneke at Cannes 2005', Bright Lights Films Journal, Issue 50, November 2005
• Pamela Biénzobas, 'Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon": The Sins of the Father Are to be Laid Upon the Children', Undercurrent, 2009
• Adam Bingham, 'Long night's journey into day Michael Haneke's Le Temps du loup (The Time of the Wolf, 2003)', Kinoeye, Vol 4, Issue 1, Mar 2004
  
• Adam Bingham, 'Life, or something like it: Michael Haneke's Der siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent, 1989)', Kinoeye, Vol. 4, Issue 1, Mar 2004
• Adam Bingham, 'Modern Times: Notes Toward a Reading of Michael Haneke's 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance', Senses of Cinema, January 2005
• Bill Blick, 'The Time of the Wolf', Senses of Cinema, January 2005
• Joe Bowman, 'The Year 2001: The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke)', Film For the Soul, April 28, 2009
  
• Caché - Videoed roundtable discussion of Michael Haneke's film with Roy Grundman, Edward Nersessian, Brigitte Peucker, Brian Price, and Garrett Stewart (1hr25), Philoctetes Center
• Zach Campbell, 'Blog-a-thon: Code Inconnu', Elusive Lucidity, February 12, 2006
  
• Mary Caputi, 'Ambivalence and Displacement in Michael Haneke’s Caché', Centre for Cultural Studies Research Conference Journal 2007
• John Champagne, 'Undoing Oedipus: Feminism and Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 36, April 2002
• Matthew Clayfield, 'Every Sequence an Unfinished Senten', Esoteric Rabbit Blog, February 13, 2006 [link currently not working]
  
• Dennis Cozzalio, 'Code Unknown and Crash: Collisions, Connections and Catharsis', Sergio Leone & The Infield Fly Rule, February 13, 2006
  
• Rob Davis and Robert Parks, 'Podcast Discussion: The Films of Michael Haneke', Errata, April 27, 2008
• Dipanjan, 'Haneke's Optimism' Dipanjan's Random Muses, February 13, 2006
  
• Maria van Dijk, 'Alienation & Perversion: Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 36, April 2002
• Peter Eisenman, 'Interview with Haneke for Icon', Iconeye
• Christine Evans, 'Cache', UBCinephile, Volume 2, March 2006
• Richard Falcon, 'Code Unknown', Sight and Sound, May 2001
• Hamish Ford, 'Hidden: A film for our times', RealTimeArts, 75, Oct-Nov 2006
• Mattias Frey, 'Supermodernity, Capital, and Narcissus: The French Connection to Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video', Cinetext: Film & Philosophy, September 27, 2002
• Mattias Frey, 'Michael Haneke', Senses of Cinema, August 2003
• Andrew Grant/Film Brain, 'A Crumpled Piece of Paper: Scattered & Inconsequential Musings on Code Unknown', Like Anna Karina's Sweater, February 13, 2006
  
• Asbjørn Grønstad, 'Downcast Eyes: Michael Haneke and the Cinema of Intrusion', Nordicom Review 29 (2008) 1, pp. 133-144
• Roy Grundmann, 'Auteur de force: Michael Haneke's "cinema of glaciation"', Cineaste, March 22, 2007
• Michael Guillén, 'Code Unknown', The Evening Class, February 13, 2006
  
• Steffen Hantke, 'Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film: Thoughts on Historical Continuity and Genre Consolidation', in Caligari's Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945, Edited by Steffen Hantke (Scarecrow Press, 2006)
• Eric Henderson, 'Code Unknown', When Canses Were Classeled, February 13, 2006
  
• Lee Hill, 'How Do You Think It Feels', Vertigo Magazine, No 16, March 2008
• Aaron Hillis, 'Code Well Known, Or, How to Build a Better Blog-a-thon', Cinephiliac, Fevruary 13, 2006
  
• Andrew James Horton, 'Locked Out! Michael Haneke's Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages', Central Europe review, Vol 3, No 19, May 2001
• Andrew J Horton, 'De-icing the Emotions: Michael Haneke's retrospective in London', Central Europe Review, Vol 0, No 5, October 1998
• David Hudson, 'The Auteurs Daily: The White Ribbon, How German is it?', The Auteurs Notebook, August 28, 2009
• Darren Hughes,'Code Unknown', Long Pauses, February 13, 2006
  
• Daniel Hui, 'Fun and Games: On Michael Haneke's 2007 Remake of His 1997 Funny Games', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 61, August 2008
• Nina Hutchison, ' Between Action and Repression: The Piano Teacher', Senses of Cinema, April 2003
• Jan Jagodzinski, 'Michael Haneke: The Spectatorship of Self-refleXivity; Between Lacan and Deleuze', 'The Scope of Interdisciplinarity' Conferece, Center for Integrated Studies, November 2008
• Ian Johnston, 'Lost World: Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf Reconsidered', Brights Lights Film Journal, Issue 56, May 2007
• Chris Justice, 'Funny Games', Senses of Cinema, January 2005
• Dominik Kamalzadeh for Die Tageszeitung, 'Interview "Cowardly and comfortable" Michael Haneke's new film "Cache" on France's colonial history investigates the point where private and collective guilt spill over into each other', Signand sight.com, January 2006
• Daniel Kasman, 'Cannes 09: Review of The White Ribbon', The Auteurs Notebook, May 22, 2009
• Tarja Laine, '"What are you looking at and why?" Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) with his audience', Kinoeye, Vol. 4, Issue 1, Mar 2004
• Maximilian Le Cain,' Do the Right Thing: the Films of Michael Haneke', Senses of Cinema, May 2003
• David Lowery, 'Following [On Code Unknown], Drifting, February 13, 2006
  
• Kartik Nair, 'Caché and the secret image', Wide Screen, Vol 1, No 1 (2009)
• Newly added: Dan North, 'Funny Games, Funny Games', Spectacular Attractions, October 14, 2009
  
• Darragh O'Donoghue, 'Code inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages', Senses of Cinema, January 2005
• Ara Osterwell, 'Caché ', Film Quarterly, Vol. 59, Issue 4, 2006
• Brigitte Peucker, 'Effects of the real Michael Haneke's Benny's Video (1993)', Kinoeye, Vol. 4 Issue 1, Mar 2004
• Peter Sainsbury, 'Visions, illusions, and delusions', RealTimeArts, 53, Feb-Mar 2003
• A. O. Scott, 'A Nice Middle Class Couple with their own Stalker [on Caché]', New York Times, December 23, 2005
  
• Girish Shambu, 'Cache', girish, January 23, 2006
• Girish Shambu, 'Code Unknown: An Auto-Dialogue', girish, February 13, 2006. and for the remaining contributions to the Code Unknown Blogathon:

Aaron Hillis at Cinephiliac;Darren Hughes at Long Pauses; David Lowery at Drifting; Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone & The Infield Fly Rule; .Dipanjan at Random Muses; Eric Henderson at When Canses Were Classeled; Filmbrain [Andrew Grant] at Like Anna Karina's Sweater; Matthew Clayfield at Esoteric Rabbit; Michael Guillen at The Evening Class; and Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity.

• Christopher Sharrett, 'The Seventh Continent', Senses of Cinema, February 2005
• Christopher Sharrett, 'The World that is Known: Michael Haneke Interviewed', Kino Eye vol. 4, no. 1, 8 March 2004
• Christopher Sharrett, 'The horror of the middle class: Michael Haneke's La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001)', Kinoeye, Vol. 4, Issue 1, Mar 2004
• Joerg Sternagel, 'From Inside Us: Experiencing the Film Actor in Michael Haneke’s Cache', Film International, Issue 39
• Harry Tuttle, 'Haneke on Hidden', Screenville, October 17, 2005
• Harry Tuttle, 'Three Times 4 Eggs - Funny Games (2)', Screenville, June 18, 2008
  
• Justin Vicari, 'Films of Michael Haneke: Utopia of fear', Jump Cut, No. 48, Winter 2006
• Catherine Wheatley, 'Secrets, Lies, & Videotape', Sight and Sound, February 2006
  
• Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke: The Ethic of the Image (London: Bergahn Books, 2008) limited preview on Google Books

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Zombie Week at In Media Res

Image from Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978)

Film Studies For Free today recommends an event at one of its favourite, and one of the most original, film and media studies websites -- In Media Res -- which is just concluding a special theme week devoted to Zombies! Below are the direct links to all the fun stuff, and below those you can find more information about the ethos and practicalities of the marvellous In Media Res site.

• Eric Hamako (University of Massachusetts) presents: '“The Yellow Peril rises from the grave…to get your White women!" Orientalist themes in zombie stories', Monday, September 28, 2009

• Cathy Schlund-Vials (Univ. of Connecticut), 'Racism, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonial Zombies: Resident Evil 5', Tuesday, September 29, 2009

• Kim Paffenroth (Iona College), 'Dawn of the Dead (1978): Zombies and Human Nature', Wednesday, September 30, 2009

• Elizabeth McAlister (Wesleyan Univ.), '“Obama, Zombies, and Black Male Secular Messiahs"', Thursday, October 1, 2009

ABOUT IN MEDIA RES

In Media Res is dedicated to experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.

Each day, a different scholar will curate a 30-second to 3-minute video clip/visual image slideshow accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response.

We use the title "curator" because, like a curator in a museum, you are repurposing a media object that already exists and providing context through your commentary, which frames the object in a particular way.

The clip/comment combination are intended to both introduce the curator's work to the larger community of scholars (as well as non-academics who frequent the site) and, hopefully, encourage feedback/discussion from that community.

Theme weeks are designed to generate a networked conversation between curators. All the posts for that week will thematically overlap and the participating curators each agree to comment on one another's work.

Our goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst scholars and the public about contemporary approaches to studying media.

In Media Res provides a forum for more immediate critical engagement with media at a pace closer to how we typically experience media

In Media Res is a publication of MediaCommons. MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of "fair use." If such quotation is necessary to a scholar's argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar's original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text -- but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it -- we must defend the scholar's right to quote from the media texts under study.

For more information, please contact In Media Res’ coordinating editor, Avi Santo at asanto@odu.edu

'Inglourious Basterds: Can Hollywood rewrite history?': A Fistful of Tarantino Links

Production still from Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Especially for those among you not permanently hovering in the Twittersphere, Film Studies For Free today brings a lasting record of (yesterday's) film-social-networking news du jour: an online video recording in three parts of an academic seminar hosted, on September 24, by Monash University's Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Monash's Research Unit in Film and Cultural Theory, about Quentin Tarantino's 'subversive and divisive new film,' Inglourious Basterds.

This excellent event was chaired by Age critic Philippa Hawker with the following speakers (in order): Mark Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation; Adrian Martin, film critic and co-director of the Research Unit in Film and Cultural Theory; Jan Epstein, film critic and broadcaster; and Nathan Wolski, lecturer in Jewish Studies.

You can view the video segments online at Slow TV (a site worth checking out in itself) or download them as episodes to your computer using the below links (just choose the format you want).

If you are interested in reading more about the debates that these speakers address, FSFF highly recommends you click on the following six links, too.

• Jim Emerson, 'Some ways to watch Inglourious Basterds [sic]', Scanners, August 24, 2009

• David Bordwell, 'A welcome basterdization', part of '(50) Days of summer (movies), Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Recommended Reading: Daniel Mendelsohn on the New Tarantino', JonthanRosenbaum.com, August 17, 2009

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino', JonathanRosenbaum.com, August 27, 2009
  

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'A Note on Scalping (and a postscript)', JonathanRosenbaum.com, August 29, 2009

• Added Oct 3 Srikanth Srinivasan, 'The Grand Illousion', The Seventh Art, October 3, 2009
  

Video: Part 1

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP1593.mp3 (MPEG Layer 2 Audio, 16.0 MB)

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP1143.flv (72.0 MB)

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP1153.m4v (333 MB)

Video: Part 2

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP2767.mp3 (MPEG Layer 2 Audio, 14.6 MB)

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP2465.flv (64.9 MB)

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP2335.m4v (312 MB)

Video: Part 3

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP3809.mp3 (MPEG Layer 2 Audio, 11.4 MB)

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP3817.flv (55.4 MB)

• Slowtv-InglouriousBasterdsCanHollywoodRewriteHistoryP3866.m4v (253 MB)

Stanley Kubrick interview

Thanks to TheAuteursDaily, Film Studies For Free was just alerted to the Ambrose Heron's posting at the FILMdetail website today of the above 75-minute audio interview with Stanley Kubrick conducted by Jeremy Bernstein in 1966.

News of this substantial interview has been doing the Twitter rounds for a day or two, FSFF has investigated, but this full-length version appears to have originally been publicy posted (for the first time on a non-Torrent site, at least) here by blip.tv user Sitruc. Thanks Sitruc (great pseudonym, by the way!), because this interview is fantastic!

Aesthetic Journalism - a free preview

Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Informing

Film Studies For Free (always a fan of substantial freebie content in otherwise non-Open Access publications) thought some of its readers might be especially interested to know that they can currently preview for free the first 28 pages, or so, of the book embedded above (published by Intellect Books).

While Aesthetic Journalism doesn't touch at all on mainstream filmmaking, it does seem to be a strikingly novel study of 'the journalistic turn in the contemporary visual arts', one that may prove especially useful to those considering issues of 'documentary' and 'fiction' in relation to artists' film and video (FSFF is thinking of some of the work of such visual artists and filmmakers as Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Clio Barnard, Adam Chodzco, and Alia Syed, to name but a few).

Here's the publishers' blurb to whet your appetite some more:

As the art world eagerly embraces a journalistic approach, Aesthetic Journalism explores why contemporary art exhibitions often consist of interviews, documentaries and reportage. This new mode of journalism is grasping more and more space in modern culture and Cramerotti probes the current merge of art with the sphere of investigative journalism. The attempt to map this field, here defined as ‘Aesthetic Journalism’, challenges, with clear language, the definitions of both art and journalism, and addresses a new mode of information from the point of view of the reader and viewer. The book explores how the production of truth has shifted from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism. With examples and theories from within the contemporary art and journalistic-scape, the book questions the very foundations of journalism. Aesthetic Journalism suggests future developments of this new relationship between art and documentary journalism, offering itself as a useful tool to audiences, scholars, producers and critics alike.

The author Alfredo Cramerotti (1967) is a writer, curator and artist based in the UK. Among his recent research and curatorial activity: co-curator, Manifesta 8 European biennial of contemporary art (2009-2011); curator, QUAD Derby (2008-present), co-curator, CPS Chamber of Public Secrets (2004-present) and AGM Annual General Meeting (2003-present).