On CINEMATIC DIRECT ADDRESS - Part One: Mapping the Field

CINEMATIC DIRECT ADDRESS Part One: Mapping the Field - Video by Catherine Grant

This entry has been superseded by the following, later FSFF entry so why don't you head over there straightaway?

On Friday March 1, 2013, Film Studies For Free's author had the very great pleasure of interviewing Tom Brown, Lecturer in Film Studies at Kings College, London, on the subject of direct address in the cinema, a topic he knows a huge amount about as author of the only book completely dedicated to it: Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) [It's up already - you can find it here].  You can read the preface to Tom's book online here (PDF), check out another article he uploaded about it here, and visit his wonderfully illustrated Tumblr on the topic here.

The recorded interview will be presented in two parts here at FSFF: part one is above and part two -- "YOU LOOKING AT ME? On Buñuel's LOS OLVIDADOS" -- will follow soon in a separate entry accompanied, as is this blog's wont, by a full compendium of links to further online scholarly studies of this (of course not exclusively) cinematic phenomenon.

In the period of time between recording this interview and completing the editing of it for this blog, Leigh Singer's great video 'supercut' on breaking the fourth wall (see below) was published, to merited acclaim, at PressPlay. Singer's essay -- which uses examples from a number of the same films as FSFF's video, is a hugely witty, skillful, and highly thought-provoking accompaniment to it. If you know of any further videographic studies of cinematic direct address, or indeed any other good resources, please let FSFF know about them via the comments.

Thanks! Yes! You there!

Breaking the 4th Wall Movie Supercut by Leigh Singer

A compilation of scenes and moments from films that all "break the fourth wall" - that is, acknowledge (usually directly to the camera, and therefore the audience) that they're part of a movie. The term comes from the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.

The montage includes 54 different films (some used more than once) from perhaps the very first example of breaking the fourth wall right up to today. There were so many other great examples I couldn't find room for (sadly, The Dude and The Big Lebowski's narrator don't abide here), I'd love to hear which 4th wall breakers you'd also include. Email me on leigh@singer-leisinger.com, or @Leigh_Singer on Twitter. Look forward to hearing your comments!

Studies of the Remediation of Films, Comics and Video Games

Transmedia Synergies - Remediating Films and Video Games from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.
See Matthias Stork's Mediascape, Winter 2013 essay 'Transmedia Synergies – Remediating Films and Video Games', which incorporates this video

                   The Video Game Film from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

This mash-up is a playful offshoot of [Matthias Stork's] research project on the aesthetic intermediality of films and video games [e.g. see above]. Edgar Wright’s seminal film SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (2010, Universal Pictures) effectively illustrates the audiovisual parallels and differences between the two media. It organically integrates the distinctive stylistic flourishes of video game play into the dominant cinematic texture, to the point that the film, particularly in its action sequences, evolves into a subjectively rendered (and relatable) gameplay experience. It thus represents a genuine video game film. This video essay seeks to foreground this affective dimension by heightening the aesthetic strategies of the film. And it is further intended as an homage to the director’s exceptional work.

"The Video Game Film" was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly, critical, and educational aims. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

             From the Panel to the Frame: Style and Scott Pilgrim from Drew Morton on Vimeo. Originally published at PressPlay with a great introduction by Matt Zoller Seitz

Film Studies For Free today presents an entry which has long been in preparation. It was originally conceived of especially as a showcase for the above, hugely innovative and informative video essay studies by Matthias Stork and Drew Morton. But it has grown into a veritable font of wonderful links to online and open access studies of the connections between films, comics and video games.

FSFF hopes you enjoy the below list, and if you'd like to add any, as yet missing open access studies to it, please just let this blog know about those in the comments. Thank you! [Please note: FSFF can't publish one submitted suggestion for a non-open access book in the field, one which has no free excerpts. Sorry about that. But, hopefully, that commercial publisher has an advertising budget to compensate for this little blog's interest in other forms of publishing. Thanks anyway.]

Game on!

• Charles R. Acland, 'Avatar as Technological Tentpole', Flow, January 2012
• Maaheen Ahmed and Martin Lund, 'Apocalypse Why? The Neutralisation of the Antichrist Motif in Three Comics Adaptations', SCAN, 9.1, 2012 
• Matthew Bolton, 'Fidelity and Period Aesthetics in Comics Adaptation', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 6.1 (2011)
• Will Brooker, 'Maps of many worlds: Remembering computer game fandom in the 1980s', Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 2 (2009)
• Liam Burke, ''Special Effect: Have film adaptations changed mainstream comics?'', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Rebecca Carlsen, 'Games as Transformative Works', Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 2, 2009
• Josep Catala, 'A Drawing of the World: Documentary and Comic Book', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Stacey Church, 'Remediation and Video Games: Bookwork in Dragon Age: Origins', Emergence: A Journal of Undergraduate Literary Criticism and Creative Research, Vol. 2, 2011
• Damian Duffy, 'Remasters of American Comics: Sequential art as new media in the transformative museum context', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)  
• Markku Eskelinen, 'The Gaming Situation', Game Studies, 1.1, 2001
• Jim Fleury, 'Revenge of the (Angry Video Game) Nerd: James Rolfe and Web 2.0 Fandom', Mediascape, Winter 2012
• Michael Fuchs, '“My name is Alan Wake. I’m a writer.”: Crafting Narrative Complexity in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling', Academia.edu, January 2012
• Robert Furze, 'Virtual Bliss, Analog Horrors: Reading the Imperfect Digital Image in Film and the Video Game', MiT7: Unstable Platforms: the Promise and Peril of Transition, 13-15 May 2011
• Lynn Gelfand, 'Moon Prism Power, Make-Up!': Sailor Moon and the Transformation of the Multiform Story in Modern Media', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Harrison Gish, 'Media Boundaries and Bullet Time: A Hard Boiled Fan Plays Stranglehold', Mediascape, Winter 2012
• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro, No. 51, 2006
• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010
• Christopher Hayton, 'Charlton Comics' Monster Movie Adaptations', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Matthew Hepburn, 'The Technoludic Film: Remediation in Videograme to Film Adaptations', University of Warwick, Unpublished dissertation, January 2012 also see here
• Henry Jenkins, 'Game Design As Narrative Architecture',  in P. Harrington and N. Frup- Waldrop (Eds.), First Person. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002 and also at CMS / MIT, 2004
• Henry Jenkins, 'Transmedia Synergies: Remediating Films and Video Games', Confessions of an Aca-Fan, January 9, 2013
• Jesper Juul, 'Games Telling Stories? - A brief note on games and narratives', Game Studies, 1,1 2001
• Petri Lankoski, 'Goals, Affects, and Empathy in Games', Paper at the Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games, Modena reggio Emilia, Italy, January 25-27, 2007 
• Petri Lankoski, Character-Driven Game Design (Aalto University, 2010)
• Simon Locke, 'Considering comics as medium, art, and culture - the case of From Hell', SCAN, 6.1, 2009
• Vyshali Manivannan, 'Interplay Amidst the Strangeness and the Charm: Under-language and the Attenuation of Meaning in the Film Adaptation of Watchmen', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.4 (2011)
• 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
• Patrick McEntaggart, 'Once Upon a Paradigm Shift: Interactive Storytelling in a New Media Context', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 5th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 14, 2010
• Jane McGonigal, ʻ”This Is Not a Game”: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play [on The Beast/ the A.I game]', MelbourneDAC2003
• Tom Miller, 'Struggling With Godzilla: Unraveling the Symbolism in Toho’s Sci/Fi Films', Kaiju-Fan 10 (Winter), 1999
• Drew Morton, 'Sketching Under the Influence? Winsor McCay and the Question of Aesthetic Convergence Between Comic Strips and Film', Animation, 2010 
• Drew Morton, 'Comics to Film (And Halfway Back Again): A DVD Essay', FLOW, April 5, 2007
• Drew Morton, 'Godard’s Comic Strip Mise-en-Scène', Senses of Cinema, 53, 2009
• Drew Morton, David O’Grady and Jennifer Porst, 'Towards a New Genre of Video Game Play', Mediascape, Fall 2009
• Graham J. Murphy, 'Gotham (K)Nights: Utopianism, American Mythology, and Frank Miller's Bat(-topia)', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 4.2 (2008)
• Janet H. Murray, 'The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies', DiGRA 2005, Vancouver, Canada, June 17, 2005
• Lizzie Nixon, 'I Focalize, You Focalize, We All Focalize Together: Audience Participation in Persepolis', Image and Narrative, 11.2, 2010
• Brian L. Ott, 'The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema', eventually published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Volume 27 Issue 1, March 2010
• Ágnes Petho, 'Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies', Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2 (2010) 39–72 
• Paul Petrovic, 'The Culturally Constituted Gaze: Fetishizing the Feminine from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen to Zack Snyder's Watchmen', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.4 (2011)
• Michael J. Prince, ''HOWL: A Novel Graphic: Authenticity and Irony in Eric Drooker's Adaptations of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"' ', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• William Proctor, ''Beginning Again: The Reboot Phenomenon in Comic Books and Film'', SCAN, 9.1, 2012
• Charlotte Pylyser, 'Rogue Paratexts: Epo's Graphic Classic Adaptations and the Jupien Effect', SCAN, 9.1, 2012  
• J.R. Roberto, 'Godzilla and the Second World War: A Study of the Allegorical Meaning in Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again' in Kaiju-Fan 5 (Spring), 1997
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media', Game Studies, Volume 1, issue 1, 2001
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'On Defining Narrative Media', Image and Narrative, 3.2, 2003
• Marie-Laure Ryan, 'Computer Games as Narrative: The Ludology versus Narrativism Controversy', Avatars of Story, at www.dichtung-digital.org/2006
• Kevin Schut, 'Technology tells a tale: digital games and narrative', Proceedings of Digra, 2003
• Jan Simons, 'Narrative, Games, and Theory', Game Studies, 7.1, 2007
• Matthew Stoddard, 'Ghost in the Shell, Cognitive Mapping, and the Desire for Communism', ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 5.2 (2010)
• Matthias Stork, 'In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema', Frames, 1, 2012
• Matthias Stork, 'Transmedia Synergies – Remediating Films and Video Games', Mediascape, Winter 2013 
• Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• David Surman, 'Remediation and Cineliteracy: An Approach to Recent Popular Film', Academia.edu, [date unknown] also see here
• Jan-Noël Thon, 'Computer Games, Fictional Worlds, and Transmedia Storytelling: A Narratological Perspective', The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Oslo 2009
• Justine Toh, 'The tools and toys of (the) War (on Terror): Consumer desire, military fetish and regime change in Batman Begins', SCAN, 6.1, 2009

• Kevin Veale, '"Interactive Cinema" Is an Oxymoron, but May Not Always Be', Game Studies, Volume 12, issue 1, 2012

• Video Games: The State of the Field - A Discussion with Steve Mamber, Peter Lunenfeld, and Eddo Stern (March 28, 2011). Moderated by David O’Grady, Mediascape, Winter 2012 
• Mark Rowell Wallin, 'Myths, Monsters and Markets: Ethos, Identification, and the Video Game Adaptations of The Lord of the Rings', Game Studies, Volume 7, issue 1, 2007

New issue of SCOPE! Performance and Sound, Lynne Ramsay, Contemporary Hollywood, Film Projection, Surrealism

Frame grab from Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)

Film Studies For Free is thrilled, as ever, to pass on news of a new issue of SCOPE: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies.

The February 2013 issue is packed with goodness, but FSFF particularly liked Sarah Artt's wonderful article on Lynne Ramsay's 2002 film Morvern Callar. This essay will come in very handy in preparation for an event at Birkbeck, University of London, on May 28 when FSFF's author will discuss this film in the first of a great series of explorations of cinematic Itinerancy, Dislocation, Nomadic Subjects

SCOPE: Issue 25 February 2013

Articles

• Being Inside Her Silence: Silence and Performance in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar
  Sarah Artt
• "Family" Entertainment and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
  Noel Brown
• It's Not the Size (of the Screen) that Matters: IMAX, LIEMAX and the "Meaning" of a Brand
  Peter Lester
• Concrete Irrationality: Surrealist Spectators and the Cult of Harry Langdon
  Seth Soulstein

Book Reviews
All Book Reviews

• The Wiley Blackwell History of American Film, Vols. 1-4 Edited by Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann and Art Simon A Review by Paul Elliott
• Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity By Hamilton Carroll and Angel By Stacey Abbott A Review by Ryan Taylor
• The Persistence of Hollywood By Thomas Elsaesser;  Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-Line Edited by Dina Iordanova and Stuart Cunningham; and Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA Edited by Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat A Review by Akshaya Kumar
• Memento By Claire Molloy; Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social Change By Andrew Nestingen; Introduction to Japanese Horror Film By Colette Balmain A Review by Andrea Virginás
• Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film By Steven Rybin; Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective By Marguerite H. Rippy A Review by Nicholas Godfrey
• Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters By Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton; Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image By Catherine Wheatley A Review by Rowena Santos Aquino
• The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film Edited by Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić; Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image By Roger Hallas A Review by Flavia Moncer
• British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure Edited by Sue Harper and Justin Smith; The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema By James Caterer A Review by Katie Bowkett
• Chantal Akerman By Marion Schmid; Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices By Sharon Lin Tay A Review by Tess McClernon

Conference Reports

All Conference Reports

• Media Across Borders. The First International Conference on the Localisation of Film, Television and Video Games  A report by Sylwia Szostak
• Cinema of Intimacy and/or Intimacy of Cinema: The Seventeenth Internationals SERCIA Conference A report by Amanda Konkle
• Living British Cinema Presents the Film Finances Archive  A report by Aoife Sheehy

New SENSES OF CINEMA!

Frame grab from Sans Soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, 1983)

Oooh! Film Studies For Free's Sunday is complete: a new issue of Senses of Cinema is out. It has some eye-wateringly good items. Just skim, scan and click below.


Senses of Cinema, Issue 66 , March 2013
Editorial Introduction

Features

• To the Viewer: On Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again by Susan Ray
• Sirk, Hollywood and Genre by Tom Ryan
• Bodies in Filmic Space: The Mise en Scène of ‘Courtship Readiness’ in The Big Sleep by Warren Buckland
• Notes on Sans Soleil by Murray Pomerance
• Thank God We Don’t Have a Pope: Habemus Papam, Moretti’s Apocalypse by Marko Bauer
• The Angels’ Share: Ken Loach and Paul Laverty Lift Scotland’s Kilts to Expose Its Darker Parts by David Martin-Jones
• Poetry in the Air: Mad Bastards and Toomelah by Lorraine Mortimer
• It All Flows Back: Treed Murray and the Limits of Urban Community by Zachary Abram
• Umwelt, Landscape and Lupu Pick’s Sylvester by Tyson Wils
• In Dreams and Imagination: Surrealist Values in Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire by Michael Pattison
• Vertigo: The Best Film of All Time? by Peter Wertz

Great Director:

• Cecil B. DeMille by Anton Karl Kozlovic

Albie Thoms Dossier – Contents 
Adrian Danks's Introduction to the Dossier

1. The Ubu Moment and Australian Experimental Film: Interviews with Albie Thoms by Danni Zuvela for OtherFilm 
2. Albie – A Well-Directed Life by Tina Kaufman 
3. Albie Thoms (dissimilis aliqua alia) by Peter Mudie 
4. Why Albie Thoms? – A Singular Commitment and a Figure Displaced by Barrett Hodsdon 
5. Days of Future Past: Albie Thoms’ Polemics by Jake Wilson 
6. Memoir of Albie by John Flaus 
7. Albie Thoms as an Historian by Graham Shirley 
8. Albie Thoms Refractions by Danni Zuvela for OtherFilm

Cinémathèque Annotations on Film

• Darragh O’Donoghue on Ballad of Narayama 
• Brian Darr on Carmen Comes Home 
• Gregory Dolgopolov on Khrustalyov, My Car! 
• Tara Judah on Comrades 
• Hamish Ford on Two or Three Things I Know About Her 
• Christopher Weedman on Notre musique 
• Lee Hill on Prénom Carmen 
• David Melville on Carmen Jones 
• Rachel Brown on The Man With the Golden Arm
• Matthew Sorrento on Laura 
• John Fidler on Anatomy of a Murder 
• Pasquale Iannone on L’assassino 
• Wheeler Winston Dixon on La decima vittima 
• Gino Moliterno on Property is No Longer a Theft
• Federico Passi on I giorni contati 
• Gino Moliterno on Todo modo 
• Pasquale Iannone on Trial of the Road 
• Cerise Howard on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Hand
• Peter Hourigan on The Sun in a Net

Book Reviews

• Dimitrios Latsis on Film, Art, New Media: Museum without Walls?
• Kath Dooley on The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn From Contemporary French Actresses
• Daniele Rugo on To Sign One’s Life (With Cinema)
• Federico Passi on Giorgio Mangiamele
• Nick Herd on Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast
• Lia McCrae-Moore on Jedda
• Daniel Fairfax on Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination
• Tony Mc Kibbin on Film After Film

Festival Reports

• Matthew Flanagan on BFI London’s Experimenta Weekend 
• Bérénice Reynaud  on AFI FEST & American Film Market (AFM)
• Dirk de Bruyn on the Alternative Film/Video Festival
• Bérénice Reynaud  on Sundance
• Marc Saint-Cyr on Rotterdam  
• Lisa Franek on Art House Convergence
• Daniel Fairfax on Berlin 
• Gemma King on Festival du film fantastique and Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux

Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013 Conference Papers and Contributions Online

            Film Studies and Videographic Assemblage A Video Presentation by Catherine Grant for the S23 Workshop "Writing with Video: Beyond the Illustrated Text", Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Chicago, March 6-10, 2013.

[Catherine Grant's introduction to the above video:] My presentation to this workshop has a somewhat strange take on the notion of the capacity of "video-writing" to move beyond the "illustrated text". The video it presents (embedded above) not only uses a good deal of text, but was also originally inspired by the idea of audiovisually amplifying, or supplementing, a long pre-existing written study of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope.
    What making it demonstrated to me is that, in scholarly settings, even the simplest videographic act of presenting an assemblage of compiled film sequences involves medium-specific forms of argumentation, for example, the selection and presentation of audiovisual evidence, montage and mise en scene, titling, sound editing and other creative effects, all aiming to draw from "a broader notion of pathos, logos, and ethos than that which has been reified in the age of print literacy", as Virginia Kuhn has put it.* The result is not only the creation of an audiovisual argument, therefore, but also, importantly, of an active viewing space for live co-research - a framed experience of participant observation which, particularly through its online distribution, dialogically invites responses (including rebuttals!) through forms of remix. [Also see
Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins) and Déjà-Viewing?Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies]
    *Kuhn, Virginia. 2012. "The Rhetoric of Remix." In "Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. Online at dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0358.

S23 Workshop chaired by Virginia Kuhn (University of Southern California), with presentations by Vicki Callahan, Catherine Grant, Michael Lachney, Virginia Kuhn and Cheryl Ball. The workshop was sponsored by the Media Literacy and Pedagogical Outreach Scholarly Interest Group. The full 2013 SCMS Conference Program PDF is here.

Film Studies For Free is happy to present links to some resources pertaining to papers or presentations at the (recently concluded) annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.

FSFF's author's own contribution to the conference, embedded and pasted in above, was part of a workshop panel on "Writing with Video" (see all of the assets from this workshop gathered by Virginia Kuhn here). In the end, this year -- for the same reasons it's been so quiet at this blog (major, unexpected construction work taking place at home at the same time as a very busy semester!) -- she was unable to travel to the US to attend this final session of the conference in person. But, thanks to the wonders of modern technology her work was kindly presented in absentia by her fellow panelists. Among these, Vicki Callahan and Michael Lachney presented on their pedagogical practices around teaching video argumentation as part of multimedia literacy programmes. In particular, Callahan discussed her classroom use of online video collaborative authoring tools including WeVideo. Cheryl Ball discussed her experience as editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (see Ball's fabulous essay for Kairos on digital scholarship here). And workshop chair Virginia Kuhn presented on her highly innovative large scale video analysis project, a wonderful example of the potential for humanities supercomputing (also see here).

Below are links to a whole host of further conference contributions, mostly collected via Twitter. Thanks very much to those who supplied the links. If you have posted your own SCMS paper online, or know of others not gathered below, please leave the link in a comment. Thank you!

SCMS Digital Humanities J23 Workshop 5_8_13 from scms at livestream.com. Featuring Miriam Posner, Jason Mittell (see below for his paper), Hannah Goodwin, Jasmijn Van Gorp, Jason Rhody and Eric Faden

• Tyler Bickford, '“The Best of Both Worlds”: Hannah Montana, “having it all,” and postfeminist tween domesticity' (Thanks to Anthony C Bleach for the link)
• Shane Denson, 'Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect'
• Theresa Geller, '"The Hardest, The Most Difficult Film:" Todd Haynes’ Safe as Feminist Film Praxis' (Thanks for the link to Julia Leyda)
• Richard Grusin, 'Post-Cinematic Atavism'
• Justin Horton, 'Disembodiment and Ecstatic Perception in The Tree of Life' 
• Amanda Ann Klein, '“To Dance Again!”: Affect, Genre, and the HARRY POTTER Franchise'
• Julia Leyda, 'Playing with Dolls: Girls and Fans in Velvet Goldmine'
• James MacDowell, 'Value, Intention, and the Aesthetics of "So Bad It's Good"'
• Jason Mittell, 'Mapping a Pluralistic Field: What Does Television Studies Really Look Like?' 
• Munib Rezaie, 'The New Chinese Mainstream? Dayyan Eng and Ning Hao’s Appeal for Young Urban Moviegoers in the People’s Republic of China' (Thanks to Justin Horton for the link)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Response to panel on “primordigital cinema,” with talks by Jonathan Freedman, Richard Grusin, and Selmin Kara'
• Chuck Tryon, 'Families are Complicated: Netflix Kids, Personalization, and Digital Delivery'
• María A. Vélez-Serna, 'Film distribution in Scotland in the 1910s: A case study in artificial scarcity as institutional strategy'
• Neil Verma, 'Sound Studies at SCMS 2013'

Also see:

• SCMS YouTube Channel with lots of videos from the conference
• SCMS Annual Conference Live: Chicago 2013 Blogs (by Alexander Cho, Alexandra Juhasz, Chuck Kleinhans, Raquel Gates and Tim Havens)
• Suzanne Scott, 'Distanced Learning: SCMS as MOOC (massively open online conference)'

To the Close Observer: In Memory of Donald Richie

Updated February 27

Life in Japanese Film: Donald Richie from Berkeley Arts and Letters on FORA.tv

In this excerpt from The Story of Film, Mark Cousins, Donald Richie and Kyōko Kagawa discuss the life and films of the sublime Yasujiro Ozu.

What interests you about Donald Richie?
He's like my Uncle Boonmee. I think that he embodies a lot of memories about cinema, and if I work with him I almost have an excuse to research and get to know the generation of Kurosawa and Miziguchi, etc. He also lived through that time and saw the change of Japan, and I'd like to know that because it's such a fascinating country with great literature and cinema. I've only worked in Thailand, so if there's a country I want to step out and "know," it's Japan. [Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 'Interview', indieWire, May 17, 2011]

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear of the death, at the grand old age of 88, of the preeminent English-language scholar of Japanese cinema and culture Donald Richie.

Richie, author of more than thirty books (including Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character, A Lateral View, Travels in the East, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics, The Donald Richie Reader, and The Japan Journals)  was one of the must-reads of our generation but was also an experimental filmmaker of huge note, too -- see his 1968 film Five Philosophical Fables here for an example. This was one of the reasons why Apichatpong Weerasethakul (a filmmaker Richie considered to be "the new Kurosawa") was hoping to work with him - sadly, due to Donald Richie's ill health in recent years, it seems likely this intriguing collaboration did not take place.

Richie's work has featured many times over the years here at FSFF, so as well as celebrating the brilliant film studies content he produced, this blog also gives sincere thanks for his amazing scholarly generosity, placing much of his work online and in the public domain.

Key posthumous tributes to Donald Richie

• David Bordwell, 'Donald Richie', Observations on Film Art, February 25, 2013
• Peter Cowie, 'Remembering Donald Richie', Criterion Collection, February 22, 2013
• Kim Hendrickson, 'Donal Richie (1924-2013)', Criterion Collection, February 19, 2013
• Karen Severns, Donald Richie Tributes website

Online works by Donald Richie

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1961; Michigan Electronic Reprint 2004)
• Donald Richie, 'In the Realm of the Senses: Some Notes on Oshima and Pornography', Criterion Film Essays, April 30, 2009 
• Donald Richie, 'Remembering Kurosawa', Criterion Collection, December 9, 2009
• Donald Richie, 'Ikuru', Criterion Collection, January 5, 2004 
• Donald Richie, ' Stories of Floating Weeds', Criterion Collection, April 19, 2004 
• Donald Richie, 'Dersu Uzala', Criterion Collection, July 17, 1995
• Donald Richie, 'Tokyo Journal: Remembering Toshiro Mifune', Criterion Collection, September 30, 2008 
• Donald Richie, 'Ozu and Setsuko Hara', Criterion Collection, May 8, 2006
• Donald Richie, 'Samurai Rebellion: Kobayashi's Rebellion', Criterion Collection, October 24, 2005
• Donald Richie, 'Red Beard', Criterion Collection, November 19, 1989
• Donald Richie, 'Expressionism in Film', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006
• Donald Richie, 'The Daughter of the Samurai: a German-Japanese co-production', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006
• Donald Richie, writer and film critic, Conversations With History: "Writing, Film, and Japan: An Expatriate's View," 9/21/01
• Japan Times archive of work by Richie
• Donald Richie on Midnight Eye - Visions of Japanese cinema 

Online Interviews/Reviews, etc., about Donald Richie

• Alexander Jacoby, 'Donald Richie: A lifetime's observations of Japan', The Asi-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, August 2006
• Moving Image Source Interview, October 2006
• Richard Lloyd Parry, 'Smilingly Excluded [Review of The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 by Donald Richie]', London Review of Books, 28.16, August 2006
• Jasper Sharp, 'Inteview with Donald Richie', Midnight Eye, December 8, 2003
• A letter Hollis Frampton wrote in 1973 to Donald Richie, then the Film Curator at MoMA

For Donald Richie

• David Bordwell, 'Kurosawa's Early Spring', Observations on Film Art, December 8, 2009 
• Catherine Grant, 'On Japanese Cinema', Film Studies For Free, July 27, 2010

On Japanese Cinema at FSFF

• On Japanese Cinema
• Emperor of the Senses: RIP Nagisa Oshima 1932-2013
• Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013), a Tribute by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
• On Kazuo Hara and Japanese Documentary Film
• Reassessing Anime: Japanese cinema and animation
• Animation Studies: Three Fabulous Online Resources
• Horror Ad-Nauseam!
• War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction
• Dreaming Movies: RIP Satoshi Kon (1963-2010)

Cinemagogic Echoes? Len Lye's FREE RADICALS (1958) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's HOUR OF THE FURNACES (1968)

CINEMAGOGIC ECHOES? from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

A real-time comparison, for scholarly purposes, of Len Lye's 1958 experimental animation FREE RADICALS and the opening minutes of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 1968 Grupo Cine Liberación activist film  LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS/HOUR OF THE FURNACES

[Len] Lye's Free Radicals (1958) […] is a black and white scratch animation short, cut to the insistent rhythmic accompaniment of an African drum solo.* It immediately calls to mind the unforgettable opening scenes of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas' Third Cinema classic La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968).** While equally exciting and radical, these strikingly similar films hint at the extent to which the world and the political landscape had changed in the decade between their respective release dates, and between then and now. We have no way of knowing if Getino and Solanas knew of Len Lye's film. We know, however, that films exchange ideas, talking to one another across time, and that the conversation between radical aesthetics and radical politics is ongoing, with both daring to 'make it new' and set the world on its feet, by turning it upside down. [Jerry Whyte, 'Free Radicals', CineOutsider.com, December 11, 2011. Online at: http://www.cineoutsider.com/articles/stories/f/free_radicals_1.html]

A demonstration and a lesson, The Hour of the Furnaces imports into cinema the affirmative aesthetics of the written political treatise. A collective ideal informs the whole film. It anticipates a liberated time. It’s not the product of a single voice but of a chorus of poems (Marti, Césaire), manifestos (Fanon, Guevara, Castro, Juan José Hernández Arregui) and films (by Fernando Birri, Joris Ivens, Nemesio Juárez). It conjoins the powers of didacticism, poetry and agogy (the agogic qualities of a work concern its rhythmic, sensible, physical properties – a notion suggested by the French aesthetician Etienne Souriau). Stylistically, the film uses all possible audiovisual techniques, from flicker to contemplative sequence shots (for instance, the final three-minute shot that reproduces a picture of the dead Che Guevara’s face with his eyes wide open), from collage to direct cinema, from blank screen to animated effects, from the rigours of the blackboard to the hallucinogenic properties of the fish-eye, from classical music to anglophone pop hits. Cinema is an arsenal and here all its weapons are unsheathed. [Nicole Brenez, 'Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces', Sight and Sound Magazine, 8 March 2012. Online at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaceshttp://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaces]

'Agogics' is a musical term that designates the use of agogic accents, that is accents consisting in a lengthening of the time-value of the note. The philosopher Étienne Souriau extended the use of the term to include all the arts existing in time. He defined 'agogics' as \what characterizes an artwork that takes place in time, through movement, and specifically through the creation of a fast or slow pace, or the use of different rhythms.' For musicians, the notion is related to gesture, to physical movements, to a bodily interaction with their instrument, to a sense of speed, an energy, a precise handling of a piece. [Christian Jacquemin et al, 'Emergence of New Institutions for Art-Science Collaboration...' [date unknown], Online at: seadnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/jacquemin_final1.pdf. Hyperlinks added by FSFF] 

Souriau developed his idea of the agogic as an explicit reaction to the ‘rather banal description [of] arts of space in contrast to the phonetic and cinematic arts’. [Of] interest is Popper’s use of the term to describe the quality of temporal pattern that he identifies in a range of works. At one extreme [..].] is the velocity and dramatic choreography of a Len Lye installation. The term agogic conflates speed, acceleration and duration and would appear to be a significant aspect of kinetic form. [Jules Moloney, Designing Kinetics for Architectural Facades: State Change (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011), p. 64.]

Film Studies For Free's author has been a tad busy elsewhere lately - and there will be lots to catch up with at this blog in due course.

But today FSFF is thrilled to present its (by distance) contribution to a teach-in which took place earlier today. This video was produced in a few hours this morning, using readily available materials for quotation (see above and below), in solidarity with a campus occupation that you can choose to read more about here.

Staff and students of media and cultural studies, working in a deeply personal, activist capacity, gave short presentations on their research and thinking about ideas of resistance, occupation and neoliberalism in the context of the university and beyond, in order to consider how research in their fields might offer new and diverse perspectives on activism and resistance.

FSFF has always liked its politics, like its film studies, to have rhythm and timing, so its research project today foregrounds those elements. You can find its author's scholarly discussion of this kind of "real-time" videographic comparison here: 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', MEDIASCAPE: Journal of Cinema and Media, Winter 2013.

FSFF has devoted a number of previous entries to online and openly accessible resources on Third Cinema and revolutionary aesthetics in the past. See especially this bumper post and this more recent one. 

And you can find the two films quoted from above, in low-res online video versions, as per the details and links below.

• Free Radicals by Len Lye (1958). Online at: http://video.frieze.com/film/len-lye-free-radicals/
• La hora de los hornos/Hour of the Furnaces by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (1968). Online at: youtu.be/jQOXKoMHOE0