Fifteen Film Studies Guest Lectures at the University of Chicago

From the lecture "Desire and Death in Three Films by Max Ophuls" by Laura Mulvey. Delivered April 2009 at Film Studies Center, University of Chicago

Today, Film Studies For Free presents this amazing array of Film Studies taster videos, on a wide range of topics, of talks delivered expertly and engagingly by a whole host of academic and filmmaking stars. The videos embedded above and below are recordings of segments of guest lectures given at the University of Chicago's Film Studies Center. There are fifteen videos online so far. But FSFF recommends you subscribe to the FSC Vimeo channel so that you can catch them as new ones are posted.

From the lecture "Brokeback Mountain: Primal Scenes on American Screens" by Linda Williams. Presented May, 2009 at Film Studies Center, University of Chicago.

From the lecture "ARTISTS AND MODELS (1955): Modernism, Medium-Specificity, and Mayhem" by Miriam Hansen, delivered in May 2009 at the University of Chicago, Film Studies Center.

Michael Snow introducing his live performance of Hollis Frampton's "A Lecture" at the symposium "Critical Mass: The Legacy of Hollis Frampton" at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. Feb 5, 2010.

Tom Gunning introducing Frampton's film "Gloria" (1979), on the opening night of the symposium "Critical Mass: The Legacy of Hollis Frampton" at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, on Feb 5, 2010.

An excerpt from the lecture “Predator-Prey: Cinema, Nature, Ecology” by Hanna Rose Shell, delivered as the keynote of the "Cinema, Nature, Ecology" Conference, April 2009, University of Chicago Film Studies Center.

From a Fall 2008 appearance by Cheryl Dunye, director of Watermelon Woman and the upcoming film Owls, at the Univ of Chicago Film Studies Center.

From talk/screening "Immodest Objects and Fetish Subjects" by Sasha Waters Freyer, delivered at Film Studies Center, University of Chicago in November 2008.

From the lecture "Radical Politics and Experimental Film in Spain: Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972)" by Vicente Benet, delivered at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center on April 22, 2010.

From the lecture "Quilombo and Utopia: The Aesthetic of Labor in Brazilian Documentary", presented by Salomé Skvirsky at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center on Feb 19, 2010.

From a discussion with Haskell Wexler and Judy Hoffman following a screening of 'Medium Cool' at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center on May 27, 2010.

Yuri Norstein at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, January 25, 2010. Interpretation by Yuri Tsivian.

From the lecture "To Give Birth According to Sade and Pasolini's SALÓ" by Armando Maggi. Delivered November 19, 2009 at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center

From the lecture "The Unadapted: Warner Bros. Reads Zora Neale Hurston" by Elizabeth Binggeli, presented in February 2009 at the Film Studies Center, University of Chicago.

Carolee Schneemann at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center in November 2008.

A 'Borgesian' Film Studies Library?

Charalambos Charalambous on Film Studies for Free

Film Studies For Free shamelessly contemplates its own hypertextual, pedagogical, navel today, but it blushingly hopes, nonetheless, that the above embedded document will be of interest to some of its fellow educator readers. Just click on this link to transport yourself to a better-sized version for reading (and downloading).

The above document, authored by film researcher and filmmaker Charalambos Charalambous (Χαράλαμπος Χαραλάμπους) of the University of Kent's School of Arts (Film Studies) in 2010, describes itself as

A study of Web 2.0 as an actualization of the concept of the Borgesian Library: a critical evaluation of WEB 2.0 technology in reference to the academic blog Film Studies For Free authored by Dr. Catherine Grant.   

It was based in part on a research questionnaire filled in by FSFF's author, and, in the opinion of the latter, is a fascinating and very well-informed reflection on the pedagogical possibilities of the kinds of anthologizing, virtual librarianship (or digital curation) that this blog so adores, and which are completely made possible by Web 2.0 technology.

The study will shortly be permanently stored at FSFF's page dedicated to discussion of Open Access, Digital Scholarship and the Digital Humanities.

In the meantime, FSFF would like to thank Charalambos for his thoughtful words, which have made its little digital body swell with pride!

Double-Strength: Videos and Links in Celebration of Barbara Hammer

Clip from Maya Deren's Sink by Barbara Hammer (via UndergroundFilm at Vimeo)


Clip from NITRATE KISSES by Barbara Hammer



Clip from SANCTUS and other films from the 1980s by Barbara Hammer
(You can see Sanctus @ubuweb)

HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life Book Performance, Barbara Hammer at British Film Institute, March 2010

"I have chosen images rather than words for the act of naming myself an artist and a lesbian because the level of meanings possible for images and image conjunctions seemed richer and held more ramifications" Barbara Hammer

Film Studies For Free today presents a tribute to the remarkable American, experimental filmmaker and activist Barbara Hammer. The tribute takes the form of a listing of online videos and scholarly links to studies of Hammer's work, as well as of related queer film and politics.

Hammer is seventy-one years old, still making films and still protesting against injustice and censorship. In 2010, she published her wonderful autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, which addressed her personal history and philosophies on art (see a review here).

FSFF says, "Thank you, but... keep it up, please, Barbara! Your work and activism is needed now more than ever." (This blog can be a rather greedy and merciless task-mistress at times...)

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on her career and Feminist film

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on Maya Deren

• Barbara Hammer Faculty page at European Graduate School 

• Barbara Hammer. Resisting Paradise. Video Lecture Documentary 2005 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4

• Barbara Hammer's Video Channel at Vimeo (16 videos so far archived) 

• Barbara Hammer's website

• Barbara Hammer interviewed in February 2010 about her research on medical science film 'No bones about it!'

• Edith Becker, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, B. Ruby Rich, 'Lesbians and film, p. 2', from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Sarah Boslaugh, 'Getting Past the Stereotypes: Woman and Motorcycles in recent Lesbian Novels', IJMS, March 2006

•  Martin P. Botha, 'The New African Queer Aesthetics: the Portrayal of Homosexuality in International Cinema', Kinema,

• Joan Braderman, 'Feminism and Video: A View from the Village', Camera Obscura, Volume 22, Number 1, 2007

• Julia Erhart, 'Performing memory: compensation and redress in contemporary feminist first-person documentary', Screening the Past, December 1, 2001

• Claudia Gorbman, 'Barbara Hammer's recent work: Body displaced, body discovered', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987

• John Hess, 'Notes on U.S. radical film, 1967-8', from Jump Cut, no. 21, Nov. 1979 

• Tricia Jenkins, '‘‘Potential Lesbians at Two O’Clock’’: The Heterosexualization of Lesbianism in the Recent Teen Film', The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2005 

• Chuck Kleinhans, 'Teaching sexual images: some pragmatics', from Jump Cut, no. 40, March 1996 

• Laura U. Marks, 'Loving a Disappearing Image', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 8, n° 1-2, 1997

• Susan E. McKenna, 'Seeing lesbian queerly: visibility, community, and audience in 1980s Northampton, Massachusetts', PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts, September 2009

• Fiontán Moran, 'Anatomies of Desire', Afterall, May 2010

• Gary Morris, 'Tender Fictions: Barbara Hammer's Truth Club', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 17, 1996

• Ricardo Peach, Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema on South Africa and Australia, PhD Thesis,University of Technology, Sydney, March 2005

• John Ramirez and Larry Horne, 'UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference', from Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984 

• Jennifer Beth Simmons, Visions of Feminist (Pom(o)nanism): Masturbating Female Postmodern Subjectivity in American Television and Film, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2004

• Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage. PhD Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2006 

• William C. Wees, 'Carrying On: Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Abigail Child and American Avant-Garde Film of the Eighties', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2001

• Andrea Weiss, 'Women I Love. Double Strength : Lesbian Cinema and Romantic Love' , from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Jacquelyn Zita, 'The films of Barbara Hammer: Counter-currencies of a lesbian iconography', from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

Young and Undead: On Child and Teen Vampire Movies

Images from Låt den rätte komma in/Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008 - above) and Let Me In (Matt Reeves, 2010)

Film Studies For Free loves a good vampire movie, like the two relatively unconventional examples of the genre pictured above. 

In fact, FSFF doesn't turn its nose up at bad vampire movies, either. Let's face it: this blog is just not that fussy when it comes to vampire movies.

Both kinds of films are represented below, in a fairly short, but terrifyingly good, list of scholarly and other online studies of the recent flourishing of teen and pre-teen varieties of undead cinema (along with their literary sources). 

Please note that the list does not dabble in studies of the televisual versions of the genre. For those, you could no better than to visit the complete archive of Slayage articles on, inter alia, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly.

• Stacey Abbott, 'Urban Vampires in American Films of the Eighties and Nineties, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil Conference Proceedings Budapest, Hungary May 22-24 2003, ed. by Carla T. Kungl (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 2003) scroll to p. 133 
• Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, ' Contemplating the Franchise, the Fandom and the Celebrity Juggernaut of the Twilight Saga', In Media Res, July 2, 2010 
• Simon J. Bacon, 'Fangs for the memory': can the American cinematic vampire be equated with Pierre Nora's idea of the 'lieux de memoire' ? Masters thesis, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 2009
• Courtney Brannon Donoghue, ' "Twilight is a license to print money": Selling the Female Film Franchise', June 30, 2010 
• Glennis Byron, '©Branding and Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture: the case of Twilight', The Gothic Imagination, December 31, 2010
• Melissa Click, '“Rabid”, “obsessed”, and “frenzied”: Understanding Twilight Fangirls and the Gendered Politics of Fando', FlowTV, December 18, 2009
• Martin Fradley, 'Review of Contemporary Gothic, by Catherine Spooner', Journal of Transformative Works, Vol. 4, 2010
• Rebecca Housel, ' Eclipsing the "Real": Twilight & Simulacra', In Media Res, July 1, 2010
  
• Erich Kuersten, 'Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, SandM, and the Daemonic in Twilight', Bright Light Film Journal, 68, May 2010
• Stephanie Leach, 'Vampires Go to University: Academic Fads and the (Non)Future of the Humanities in the Neoliberal Academy', Graduate Student Essay, McMaster University, 2010 (Word Document) (published by Dr David L. Clarke)
• Benny LeMaster, 'Queer Imag(in)ing: Liminality as Resistance in Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In', Summer 2009
• Anders Marklund, 'Old fangs into new viewers: the American poster to Let the Right One In', Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 1.1, 2010
• Pramod Nayar, 'How to Domesticate a Vampire: Gender, Blood Relations and Sexuality in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight', Nebula, 7.3, September 2010
• Maggie Park, 'Twilight: The Multi-Media Marketing Machine', In Media Res, June 28, 2010
• Julia Pearlman, 'Happily (For)ever After: Constructing Conservative Youth Ideology in the Twilight Series', Senior Thesis, Wesleyan University, 2010
• Leonie Margaret Rutherford, 'Industries, Artsists, Friends and Fans: Marketing Young Adult Fictions Online', First Monday, Volume 14, Number 4 - 6 April 2009
• Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Scene of the Year: Let Me In', Salon.com, December 31, 2010
• Kirsten Stevens,'Meet the Cullens: Family, Romance, and Female Agency in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight', Slayage, 29, 8.1, Spring 2010
• Catherine Strong, '“...it sucked because it was written for teenage girls” — Twilight, anti-fans and symbolic violence', Papers of The Australian Sociological Association 2009 Annual Conference
• Natalie Wilson, ' Twilight Fandom: Taking a Bite Out of Gendered Backlash', In Media Res, June 29, 2010 
• Michael Wood, 'At the Movies: Let the Right One In', London Review of Books, 31.9, 2009 
• Rochelle Wright, 'Vampire in the Stockholm suburbs: Let the Right One In and genre hybridity', Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 1.1, 2010

Participations: screen dance, moviegoing in the 1930s and 40s, and the reception of gay films

Image from 3 Idiots (Rajkumar Hirani, 2009), a film referred to in Ann David's article 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'

Film Studies For Free is happy to announce that a new issue of Participations, a journal devoted to developing the broad field of study of cultural and media audiences, is now available online.

The table of contents is reproduced below. The issue includes an excellent selection of articles devoted to the topic of audience responses to screen dance, but there are also notable essays, among others, on moviegoing in the USA in the 1930s and 40s, 'bad films', and the reception of 'gay movies' in Sydney.

Particip@tions: Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010)


Special Edition: Screen Dance Audiences – why now?

• Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds (Guest Editors - Special Edition): 'Special Issue Introduction'
• Harmony Bench: 'Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media'
• Ann David: 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'
• Karen Pearlman: 'If a dancing figure falls in the forest and nobody see her...'
• Matthew Reason: 'Thinking about Audiences: a dance film-maker's perspective.  An interview with Alex Reuben'
• Karen Wood: 'An investigation into audiences' televisual experience of Strictly Come Dancing'

Articles

• Mike Chopra-Gant: 'Dirty movies, or: why film scholars should stop worrying about Citizen Kane and learn to love bad films'
• Anouk Lang: '"A Dirty Little Secret": Taste Hierarchies and Richard and Judy's Book Club'
• Scott McKinnon: 'Taking the Word 'Out' West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces'
• Jennifer Radbourne, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow: Empowering Audiences to Measure Quality'
• Becky Walter: The L Word fan fiction reimagining intimate partner violence'

Reviews

• Sarah D. Goode: Understanding and Addressing Sexual Attraction to Children: A Study of Paedophiles in Contemporary Society.  Routledge (2010).
• Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vondreau (eds.): The Youtube Reader.  National Library of Sweden (2009)

The Working-Class Hero in International Cinema: in Memory of Pete Postlethwaite

Pete Postlethwaite, as Danny, delivers his Albert Hall speech in Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996)

The bottom line for Danny [Pete Postlethwaite] is [his son] Phil’s emblematic loss of ‘the will to live’. He addresses the Albert Hall audience for all the world as if he were the holy ghost of Scargill and the militant miners of 1984, telling the punters, the press and us that, ‘I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks; not compared to what people matter’. Charging the government with destroying an industry, a community and its people, he refuses the prize, calculating, as the flash bulbs pop, that ‘then it becomes news. And I won’t be talking just to myself, will I?’ In this scene the shot-reverse-shots of father and son, Danny and media, band and Grimley fans, and band and approving urban audience (its cosmopolitanism symbolised by two black faces) works as much as Danny’s polemic to argue that the old-fashioned working-class values, the local, British loyalties of community, family and labour -contrasted satirically by Danny to the fashionable liberal campaigns to save ‘seals or whales’ - can cut through Tory brutalism and reconstruct progressive priorities - to be the bearer of new national hopes. [Cora Kaplan, 'The Death of the Working-Class Hero', New Formations, 52 (Summer, 2004)]

Film Studies For Free was shocked and saddened to hear of the death yesterday of much loved British actor Pete Postlethwaite. David Hudson's set of links to tributes to Postlethwaite may be found here. 

Postlethwaite was a highly versatile actor, far from limited either in his life by his English working-class background, or in his career by his talent for the working-class dramatic roles in which he was so often cast. But it is the case that some of his most memorable roles were, like that of Danny in Brassed Off, ones that set themselves in the kind of tightly-knit, but, under political attack, all too easily undone, northern English communities he came from.

FSFF's tribute, below, focuses on this aspect of Postlethwaite's work: his class act, that was not just an act. It's a rich and hopefully rewarding set of links to online and openly accessible scholarly discussions of the (usually, but not exclusively, male) "working-class hero" film character - quite a transnational cinematic trope, as it turns out.

• Dave Allen, 'MIDDLE-CLASS MODS and WORKING-CLASS SODS: Quadrophenia and the Construction of Popular Histories', The 1970s Project, 2008

• Christopher Beach, excerpt from ‘A Troubled Paradise: Utopia and Transgression in Comedies of the Early 1930s’, Class, Language and American Film Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

• BFI Screenoline 'Working Class Heroes'

• Cathy Brigden, 'Representations of labour: Images of work and workers in film', in P. Stanton and S. Young (eds) Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 2008

• Ron Briley, 'The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive in Literature, Song, and Film' , Studies in Popular Culture, 31.2, Spring 2009

• Lee Carruthers, 'Biding Our Time: Rethinking the Familiar in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey', Film Studies, Vol. 9, Winter 2006

• E. Anna Claydon, 'New Perspectives on British Cinema: Going Beyond the "Crisis" in Masculinity', Paper at the Exploring Masculinities and Film at the Centre for Research into Film and Media, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, July 2-4, 2001

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy, "Everything you always hated about Thatcher's Britain: A cultural analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988)," Miscelanea, 2004, vol.28, 145-160

• John Curzon, 'Whatever Happened to the North of England? The Spaces of Post-Industrial Northern England in Contemporary Television and Film Drama', PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2009

• Alexander Dhoest, 'How queer is L'Air de Paris? -- Marcel Carné and Queer Authorship', Scope, May 2003

• Jay Dolmage and William DeGenaro, '"I Cannot Be Like This Frankie": Disability, Social Class, and Gender in Million Dollar Baby', Disability Studies Quarterly, Spring 2005, Volume 25, No. 2

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Antigone Agnistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The Red Army Fraction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game', Rouge, 4, 2004

• David Frank, 'Short Takes: The Canadian Worker on Film', Labour/Le Travail, 46 (Fall 2000), 417-37

• Michelle Gadpaille, 'Look Back in Anger and Popular Culture', Maribor International Review Vol. 1, no. 1 (2008)

• Sarah Godfrey, 'Villainous Victims: The Paradox of the ‘Damaged’: Man in Naked and Nil By Mouth', eSharp, Issue 9, Spring 2007

• Susan Hayward, 'Simone Signoret 1921-1985: the star as sign-the sign as scar', Modern Languages Publications Archive, 1995

• Heather J. Hicks, 'Postindustrial Striptease: The Full Monty and the Feminization of Work', Colby Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2000

• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema - style and context: an examination of British "New Wave" Films', Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, January 1997

• Jeffrey K. Jack, Irish Representations in the Films of Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan, Masters thesis, Marshall University, 2005

• Martin Johnes and Gavin Mellor. 'The 1953 FA Cup Final: Modernity and Tradition in British Culture', Contemporary British History, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2006

• Cora Kaplan, 'The Death of the Working-Class Hero', New Formations, 52 (Summer, 2004)

• John Kirk, 'Changing the Subject:Cultural Studies and the Demise of Class', Cultural Logic, 2002

• Chuck Kleinhans, 'Contemporary working class film heroes in Evel Knieval and The Last American Hero', from Jump Cut, no. 2, 1974

• Gérard Kraus, 'Other faces: Andy Bausch's Le Club des chômeurs (The Unemployment Club, 2002)', Kinoeye, 4.3, 2004

• J. Meryl Krieger, 'Imagining politics, popular music and remixing: YouTube, remediation and protest songs', Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting October 26, 2007

• Ernest Larsen, 'F.I.S.T. Where are you, Jimmy?', from Jump Cut, no. 19, December 1978

• Jim Leach, 'Introduction', British Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 

• Leonard J. Leff, 'White Line Fever: Promise and frustration', from Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977

• Anne Leonard, 'Review of Hodges, Graham Russell Gao, Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver', H-Urban, H-Net Reviews, April, 2008

• Julia Lesage, 'Blue collar filmography', from Jump Cut, no. 2, 1974

• Thomas Lindenberger, 'On the Road to the New Beginning: History and Utopia in Frank Beyer’s Karbid und Sauerampfer (Carbide and Sorrel)', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film StudiesVolume 18, numéro 1, automne 2007

• Brenda Longfellow, 'Hyperbolic Masculinity and the Ironic Gaze in project Grizzly', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vo. 8, No. 1, Spring 1999

• Alan Lovell, 'The British Cinema: The Known Cinema?', The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy (London: Palgrave, 2009, 3e)

• Carl Philip Wahlberg Lund, The portrayal of Working-Class speech in British film: a study of accent in British films from the 1960s and the 2000s, Masters thesis, University of Bergen, 2009

• Kenneth MacKinnon, 'The Trouble with The Trouble with Men', Film-Philosophy, vol. 9 no. 21, April 2005

• Robert Alan Marcink, The Depiction of the Working Class in American Films of the Counterculture Era, PhD thesis, Indiana University of Pennysylvania, 2009

• Lisa Milner, 'Kenny: the evolution of the battler figure in Howard's Australia', (post-print) Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2009

• Enric Monforte, 'Homosociality, Sexism and Homophobia: An Analysis of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Thee Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Fox and His Friends', BELLS, Vol. 9, No. 1, (year unknown)

• Claire Monk, ‘Hey you, standing there, what you got to stare at?’ The post-punk female in British film: Breaking Glass (Brian Gibson, UK, 1980)', Paper at 1970s British Culture conference, University of Portsmouth, July 1-3, 2008

• Jon Scott Oberacker, The people and me: Michael Moore and the politics of political documentary, PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009

• Michael Pierse, 'Introduction', Writing Ireland's Working Class: Dublin After O'Casey (London: Palgrave, 2010)

• Nicola Rehling, All or Nothing: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema, PhD Thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2005

• George Rodosthenous, 'Billy Elliot The Musical: visual representations of working-class masculinity and the all-singing, all-dancing bo[d]y', Studies in Musical Theatre, 1 (3), 2007

• Rasha Salti, 'Critical Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema', Kosmorama 237(Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen) 2006

• Robert Carl Schehr, 'Martial Arts Films and the Action-Cop Genre: Ideology, Violence and Spectatorship', Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 7(3), 2000

• Mark Schreiber, 'Re-negotiating Concepts of Masculinity in Contemporary British Film', Gender Forum, Issue 17, 2007 

• Fabian Schuppert, 'Andrzej Wajda's A Generation and Man of Marble from a Political Perspective', Kinema, Spring 2006

• Ira Shor, 'Rocky: Two faces of the American dream', from Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977 

• Andrew Spicer, 'Masculinities in British Cinema', Kwartalnik Filmowy (Film Quarterly) Poland Academy of Science (2006) in Polish. English translation

• Tetsuya Taguchi, 'The Working Class Audience of Rock Music, Liverpool in the 1960s', Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture 1-2 : pp. 293 – 313. 1998

• Olesya Venger, 'Transformation of Ukrainian and Serbian Media Identities During the Velvet Revolutions: The Impact of the Global Media', Global Media Journal, 6.10, 2007

• Ginette Vincendeau, 'The Mise-en-scene of Suffering: French chanteuses realistes', New Formations, No. 3, Winter 1987 

• Jamie Marie Wagner, 'Quai des brumes: An American Appeal', Film Matters, 2010

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