Back from its annual holidays, and (rather languidly) catching up with what it has missed, Film Studies For Free couldn't believe its luck to discover that the always excellent film and television studies e-journal Jump Cut had published one of its best (and biggest) issues ever. Just take a look at the following tasty section headings and then scroll down further for direct links to each and every article. Experimental documentary; Reframing Standard Operating Procedure—Errol Morris and the creative treatment of Abu Ghraib; Corporate Hollywood today; U.S. film; International film and television (East Asian film and television; South Asian film; Latin American film; Central Asian television; European film and television; Middle Eastern film); Sex and its Anxieties; Torture and horror film; Experimental and art worlds; and The last word on Fretting about film criticism.
By the way, if you are a
Facebook user and would like to receive
FSFF's frequent, short, recommendations of openly accessible film studies resources of note, but don't want to
join its merry legion of Twitter followers, then why not visit and
like Film Studies For Free's handy Facebook page where lots of great and good film and moving image studies folk hang out?
Experimental documentary
- Introduction by Chuck Kleinhans (Documentaries with different forms, different agendas, different means)
- “How it was then”: home movies as history in Peter Forgacs’ Meanwhile Somewhere... by William C. Wees (From home movies shot between 1940 and 1943, Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács creates an extraordinary account of ordinary–and not so ordinary–life in wartime Europe)
- The global repositioning of the city symphony: sound, space, and trauma in 11’09”01—September 11 by Maria Pramaggiore (The cultural work of memorializing traumatic events, here examining the film 11’9”01-September 11 (Brigand 2002) and, specifically, its use of experimental film genres and strategies)
- On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a constructivist: Perry Bard’s The Man With the Movie Camera: The Global Remake by Seth Feldman (Ninety years ago, Dziga Vertov dreamed about an entire nation collectively making films. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world can do just that — and it's Vertov's film that they are making)
- Memoradic narrative in The Shoebox by Janet Marles (An innovative approach to online documentary creates an interactive architecture mimicking the process of personal memory recall)
- Sick shit happens: everyday histories in Martin Creed’s Body Docs by James P. Hansen (In Sick Film (2006) and Shit Film (2006), contemporary British artist Martin Creed locates a unique sense of commonality and equality within the everyday historical acts of vomiting and shitting)
Conference report: Reframing Standard Operating Procedure—Errol Morris and the creative treatment of Abu Ghraib [Society for Cinema and Media Studies panel. Saturday, March 20, 2010. 2:00-3:45 pm. Chaired by Linda Williams (University of California, Berkeley). Papers by Bill Nichols (San Francisco State University), Jonathan Kahana (New York University), and Williams with a response by Irina Leimbacher (University of California, Berkeley)]Corporate Hollywood today
U.S. film
- Light Bouncing: digital processes illuminate the cultural past by Deborah Tudor (As filmmakers define the relationship between analog and digital image capture, some like JJ Abrams with Star Trek use digital tools to create a nostalgic reproduction of film effects while others like Michael Mann in Public Enemies approach digital capture as a way to try to reframe the way audiences view cinema)
- Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker: a jack-in-the-box story by Robert Alpert (In depicting the daily activities of a U.S. bomb squad in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow continues to explore the rules of engagement of her culture and the resulting emotional schizophrenia and deathly effect on those who would challenge those rules)
- "Come Back to the Humvee Ag’in James Honey," or a few comments about the sexual politics of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker by Sam Whitsitt (The great American love story between a white male and a dark-skinned male Other gets a twist that puts the White guy on top and the Black man beneath (but lovin’ it, chile!))
- Maternity divided: Avatar and the enjoyment of nature by Todd McGowan (James Cameron's Avatar politicizes the natural world by depicting it as divided against itself)
- Terminator to Avatar: a postmodern shift by Kimberly N. Rosenfeld (Two popular narratives are decoded to illustrate U.S. society’s turn from a modern Terminator mindset to a postmodern Avatar era)
- District 9 and its world by James Zborowski (Blomkamp’s up-to-the-minute representation of social problems in his thrilling South African sci-fi promises something different from what it ultimately delivers)
- Demeter and Persephone in space: transformation, femininity, and myth in the Alien films by David Greven (The Alien films are modern horror versions of the classical Hollywood woman's film that, like this genre, foregrounds the heroine's remarkable ability to transform in myriad ways)
- Another kind of monster: Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer by Dahlia Schweitzer (Office Killer is Cindy Sherman's only film, and it provides essential clues to understanding her entire body of work. So why isn't anyone talking about it?)
- Film and ecology by Stephen Rust (Review of Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (New York: SUNY Press, 2009))
- Passage as journey in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals: a narrative of environmental adaptation by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann (In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, Native Americans in Smoke Signals (1998) adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home)
- Field of American dreams: individualist ideology in the U.S. baseball movie by Tom Robson (A look at how Hollywood has used the baseball movie to reinforce and reinscribe individualist capitalist ideology and how this ideology contributed to an explosion of successful baseball films during the Reagan years)
- Who is missing in Bunny Lake? by Dahlia Schweitzer (Is Ann losing her mind or just her child? An examination of what, exactly, has gone missing in Preminger's classic film)
- The Hollywood two: 1945 and 1946 as filmgoing's best years by Catherine Clepper (Review of Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron’s Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945-1946 (Rutgers University Press, 2009)Hollywood historians often note the final wartime years as the most successful period of U.S. exhibition, but do sky-high attendance records suggest that these years were also Hollywood's creative pinnacle?)
International film and television
East Asian film and television
- The circulation of Hong Kong television: imaginary landscapes, transnational Chinese publics and global Chinatown by Amy Lee (Hong Kong television is a diasporic medium that connects Hong Kong to Chinatowns throughout the world — a transnational media geography best encapsulated by the notion of “global Chinatown.”)
- Japanese cinema, Swallowtail Butterfly, and the classroom by Colleen A. Laird (An analysis of Iwai Shunji’s popular and “problematic” film Swallowtail Butterfly addresses issues of canon and education in order to challenge some of the established patterns in Japanese cinema classrooms and scholarship)
- “It’s better not to lie, but it’s hard to stimulate the audience otherwise”: realism and melodrama in Lee Chang-Dong’s Secret Sunshine by Marc Raymond (A detailed formal analysis of the 2007 South Korean melodrama Secret Sunshine explores how melodrama and realism can interact to create and interrogate meaning in popular film form)
- Transnational China and Hollywood-ized Chineseness: interventions and discontents by Kin-Yan Szeto (Review of Gina Marchetti, Tan See Kam, and Peter X Feng’s edited volume Chinese Connections: Critical Perspective on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009) and Kenneth Chan’s Remade in Hollywood: The Global Chinese Presence in Transnational Chinese Cinemas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009) Two recent scholarly volumes deal with the overlapping contact zones between Chinese diasporic cinema and other cinemas (such as Hollywood, etc). Szeto suggests that thinking, writing and teaching film and cultural criticism demands a dialectically critical approach, one that unveils what has been concealed and failed to be articulated in the East/West dichotomy)
South Asian film
- Rage against the state: historicizing the “angry young man” in Tamil cinema by Kumuthan Maderya (Tamil cinema’s “Angry Young Man” genre enjoyed a popular run in the 1980s, depicting the violent struggle of anti-heroes against failed bureaucracies, corrupt politicians, crooked cops, and a feeble justice system)
- Indian cinema and Partition by Jyotika Virdi (Love and loss in India's historical trauma, the Partition - Review of Bhaskar Sarkar's Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009))
Latin American film
Central Asian television
European film and television
- Hidden, or fear of a black planet by Nicholas Sammond (Race and neoliberal anxiety in Caché (Haneke 2005), Europa 2005—27 octobre (Straub and Huillet 2006) and the election of Barack Obama (2008))
- Michael Haneke: a little colder than reality by Jason Kelly Roberts (Review of Peter Brunette’s Michael Haneke (University of Illinois Press, 2010) - Peter Brunette tackles one of the art cinema's most emotionally daunting bodies of work in a new monograph in the Contemporary Directors Series, published by the University of Illnois Press)
- Freaks, geniuses or biological citizens? Discourses of mental distress in British television documentaries by Stephen Harper (While television documentaries adopt an increasingly sympathetic perspective on psychological distress, some British documentaries nonetheless tend to reproduce hegemonic sexist and class-biased assumptions and reinforce a desocialized view of mental distress)
- Producing resistance: Elías Querejeta’s political landscapes by Tom Whittaker (An overview of one of Europe's most important and controversial producers)
- Goodbye Germany: emigration, reality TV and Schadenfreude by Mattias Frey (Reality TV series show Germans flocking to exotic lands, "emigration" which often ends in ruin. This article explores the European fantasy of mobility and asks, in general, why does it makes us feel good to see others feel bad?)
- Burnt by the Sun: from screen to stage by Andrea Grunert (A Russian film turned into a play in London: Burnt by the Sun emphasizes how emotions and universal themes of love and humanity convey political reflections)
Middle Eastern film
Sex and its anxieties- AIDS video: to dream and dance with the censor by Alexandra Juhasz (Censorship demands an AIDS act; it propels AIDS art. It always has; it still does. Annette Kuhn calls this “the circuit of censorship” and here I will perform the circuit not as series of parties where gay men dance, drink, and hook up, but as another sort of dance through time, one inspired by AIDS videos that spoke strategically to the censor in their own time)
- Identity scavengers: queer girl fandom, identity politics, and South of Nowhere by Whitney Monaghan (Through analysis of the fan culture of South of Nowhere, this essay opens up the complex worlds of reception and fandom, positioning queer girl fans as "identity scavengers.")
- Surveillance, space and performance: informing interstitial subjectivities in Head On by Evangelos Tziallas (Explores intersections between sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, suggesting gay identity is a spatially dependent, surveillant performance)
- Bend Over Boyfriend to Take it Like a Man: pegging pornography and the queer representation of straight sex by Curran Nault (The recent phenomenon of pegging pornography (pornography aimed at straight viewers that features acts of female-to-male penetration), puts on display a new heteroerotic in which the anus, not the penis, is situated as the principal site of male pleasure, and categorical distinctions between masculine and feminine, hetero and homo are frustrated)
Torture and horror film
Experimental and art worlds
- Revisiting “The Two Avant-Gardes” by David Andrews (Reconsiders a classic essay by Peter Wollen so as to defend a new analysis of U.S. experimental cinema. Andrews presents this field's peculiar subcultural dynamics as effects of its internal dynamics and its conflicted relations to its supporting institutions)
- Economics of the film avant-garde: networks and strategies in the circulation of films, ideas, and people by Kathryn Ramey (An ethnographic study of the economics of avant-garde film and filmmakers)
- Persevering despite the impossible: a brief history of media activism in Buffalo, NY by Marc Moscato (Examining the tradition of media activism in Buffalo, NY, a city that has only recently started to become recognized for its lo-fi, experimental and, above all, uncompromising body of film and video)
- Placing artists’ cinema by Kate Mondloch (Review of Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Bristol, UK and Chicago, USA: Intellect, 2009))
- Hollywood animation by Alla Gadassik (Review of Esther Leslie’s Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2002))
- Art treasures of the wasteland by Susan Felleman (Review of Lynn Spigel’s TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008))
- Resources: Studying the media avant-garde by Chuck Kleinhans (Books, DVDs, distributors, and online resources)
The last word
