On Japanese Cinema

Last updated: August 3, 2010

Film Studies For Free wanted to make sure its readers didn't miss the video embedded above. It's another great offering from Fora.tv, this time a very entertaining and informative interview with Donald Richie about his internationally celebrated work on Japanese cinema and culture. FSFF heard of this via David Hudson and the Japan Society Film Blog.

In addition, FSFF has assembled some links below to openly accessible and very high quality scholarship on Japanese cinema (including numerous full-length studies), with work by Donald Richie, and many other excellent items which are indebted to his studies of Japanese cinema.

This was quite a broad category to research online, so FSFF will inevitably have missed some good resources: suggestions for any high quality additions are, therefore, even more welcome than usual! (Update: See comments  below for some of these, including the tip to link to Eigagogo's bookmarks at Delicious which lists some further great resources).

•  Kaori Ashizu, 'Kurosawa’s Hamlet?', Shakespeare Studies 33 (1995): 71-99

• Sarah M. Ball, The Uncanny in Japanese and American Horror Film: Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s Ring, MA thesis, North Carolina State University, 2006  

• Colette Balmain, 'Inside the Well of Loneliness: Towards a Definition of the Japanese Horror Film', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Papers, 2006 

• Colette Balmain, '“Vengeful Virgins in White”: Female Monstrosity in Asian Cinema', in Niall Scott (ed), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004) [scroll down through pdf to p. 123]

• David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)

• David Bordwell, 'Review of Noël Burch's "To the Distant Observer"', Wide Angle vol. 3, no. 4 (1980): 70–73

• Mio Bryce, Christie Barber, James Kelly, Siris Kunwar and Amy Plumb, 'Manga and Anime: Fluidity and Hybridity in Global Imagery', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2010

• Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (London : Scholar Press, 1979)

• Robert Castle, 'The Radical Capability of Rashomon', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 33, October 2003

• Ryan Cooke, 'Review of Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008', Screening the Past,Issue 23, 2008

• Christopher J. Coyne, 'Culture, Common Knowledge and Post-Conflict Reconstruction', Journal of Intercultural Communication, No 13 (2007)

• Darrell William Davis, Saving Face: Spectator and Spectacle in Japanese Theatre and Film (LEWI Working Paper Series/David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, October 2004)

• Darrell William Davis, 'Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi', Cinema Journal 40, No. 4, Summer 2001

• Rayna Denison, 'On Susan J. Napier's From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West', Participations, Volume 6, Issue 2 (November 2009)

• Freda Freiberg, 'The Unkindest Cut of All? Some Reflections on the Recent Cinematic Release of the Uncut Version of Nagisa Oshima's Ai no corrida', Senses of Cinema, Issue 12, Feb-Mar 2001

• Freda Freiberg, 'Pale Flower', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• Freda Freiberg, 'Miyazaki's Heroines', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• New Jinshi Fujii, 'Films That Do Culture : A Discursive Analysis of Bunka Eiga, 1935-1945', Iconics 6, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2002

• New Hideaki Fujiki, 'Dual Persona : Onoe Matsunosuke as Japan's Early Cinema Star', Iconics 7, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2004

• Tag Gallagher, 'Mizoguchi and freedom', Screening the Past, Issue 13, 2001

• Aaron Gerow, 'One print in the age of mechanical reproduction: film industry and culture in 1910s Japan', Screening the Past, 2000 (11), 11 January 2000

• New Aaron Gerow, 'The Benshi's New Face : Defining Cinema in Taisho Japan', Iconics 3, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1994

• Andrew Grossman, 'Gohatto-or the End of Oshima Nagisa?', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, 2001 July

• New Masato Hase, 'Cinemaphobia in Taisho Japan : Zigomar, delinquent boys and somnambulism', Iconics 4, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1998

• New Kyoko Hirano, 'The Banning of Japanese Period Films by the American Occupation,' Iconics 1, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1987

• Lori Hitchcock, 'Third Culture Kids: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Swallowtail Butterfly', Scope, February 2004

• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts

• Yuwen Hsiung, 'Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and East Asia's Macbeth', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004)

• Lee Wood Hung, 'Natural Culturalism in The Ballad of Narayama: A Study of Shohei Imamura's Thematic Concerns', Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2003

• Timothy Iles, 'Are We There Yet? Travelling Toward the Self in Contemporary Japanese Cinema', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2007

• Mizuko Ito, 'The Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix', A position paper prepared for the workshop and conference on Girls 'n' Games, May 8-9, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006

• New Kenji Iwamoto, 'Film Criticism and the Study of Cinema in Japan：A Historical Study', Iconics 1, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1987

• Brian Jarvis, 'Anamorphic allegory in The Ring, or, seven ways of looking at a horror video', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 3, 2007

• Lei Jin, 'Silence and Sound in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004) 

• Journal of the Imaginary and Fantastic Vol. 1.  No. 2.:  The Films of Hayao Miyazaki

• Sato Kenji, 'More animated than life', Japan Echo, Dec 1997; 24, 5; International Module pg. 50

• Chika Kinoshita, '"Choreography of desire: analysing Kinuyo Tanaka's acting in Mizoguchi's films', Screening the Past, Issue 13, 2001

• New Futoshi Koga, 'A Review of Pornographic Images in the 1970s in Japan: Centered Around Nikkatu Roman Porno Film"', Iconics 2, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1992

• Colleen A. Laird, 'Japanese cinema, the classroom, and Swallowtail Butterfly', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Annie Manion, 'Discovering Japan: Anime and Learning Japanese Culture', A Master's Thesis Submitted to the East Asian Studies Center, USC

• Dolores Martinez, 'Where the human heart goes astray: Rashomon, Boomtown and subjective experience', Film Studies, Issue 11, Winter 2007

• Yuji Matson, The Word and The Image: Collaborations between Abe Kôbô and Teshigahara Hiroshi, Masters Thesis, University of Victoria, 2007 

• Bonnie Melchior, 'King Lear and Ran: Identity Translated and Transformed', East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies Volume 5, Number 1 (2005) [scroll to p. 41 in PDF]

• New Kiseko Minaguchi, 'Yamamoto Satsuo's Haha no kyoku (Mother's Melody) : Making a Father's Story of Stella Dallas', Iconics 6, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2002

• Gary Morris, 'The Spirit Moves: The World of Kenji Mizoguchi',  Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 22, 1999

• New Hisashi Nada, 'An Aspect of the Reception of Avant Garde Films in Japan', Iconics 2, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1992

• New Hisashi Nada, 'The Little Cinema Movement in the 1920s and the Introduction of Avant-Garde Cinema in Japan', Iconics 3, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1994

• Lindsay Nelson, 'Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema', Cinemascope, Issue 13, July-December 2009

• Eimi Ozawa , 'Remaking Corporeality and Spatiality: U.S. Adaptations of Japanese Horror Films, 49th Parallel, Conference Special Edition, Autumn 2006

• Chris Payne, 'Burying the Past: Nihonjinron and the Representation of Japanese Society in Itami's The Funeral', Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1: 1 (2003), 13-20

• Michael Francis Phillips, 'A Cinematic Challenge to Modernity Critical Theory in Postwar Japanese Cinema: An Introduction to Fukasaku Kinji', eCommons@Texas State University, May 2009

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1961; Michigan Electronic Reprint 2004)

• 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

• Juneko J. Robinson , 'Review: Jay McRoy (2007) Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam: Rodopi', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010 

• Caroline Ruddell, 'Breaking Boundaries The Representation of Split Identity in Anime', Animation Studies – Vol.2, 2007

• Chi-Yun Shin, 'Art of branding: Tartan "Asia Extreme" films', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Greg M. Smith, 'Critical reception of Rashomon in the West', Asian Cinema, Fall/Winter 2002

• Ayumi Suzuki, 'A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away', Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009

• Donato Totaro, 'Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008', Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009

• William Tsutsui, 'Godzilla And Postwar Japan', East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies Volume 5, Number 1 (2005) [Scroll to p. 1 in PDF]

• Paul Waley, 'Re-scripting the city: Tokyo from ugly duckling to cool cat', Japan Forum 18(3) 2006: 361–380

• Gregory A. Walle, Narrating the new Japan: Biograph's The Hero of Liao-Yang (1904) Screen 2006 47: 43-65

• Craig Watts, 'Blood Spear, Mt. Fuji: Uchida Tomu's Conflicted Comeback from Manchuria', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, July 2001

• Erica Lee Zilleruelo, Shakespeare by Any Other Word? Shakespeare's King Lear and Macbeth Reivented in the Films of Akira Kurosawa, Masters Thesis, Wichita State University, 2002

Mapping the Lost Highway: New Perspectives on David Lynch (TATE Modern Event)

Image from Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

Film Studies For Free has taken the trouble to gather together in one (hopefully) very easily navigable setting the twelve videos (embedded below) that recorded for posterity a really excellent symposium that took place last year on October 30 2009 at London's Tate Modern. The symposium provided a space in which artists and film theorists insightfully discussed the work of filmmaker David Lynch in a range of theoretical and artistic contexts, including psychoanalysis, philosophy, prosthetics and photography.

One of cinema’s most compelling and innovative directors, David Lynch remains a major influence on contemporary art, film and culture. In this landmark event, Tate Modern [brought] together leading artists, academics and writers from around the world to offer a series of new perspectives on Lynch’s films.

[...] Speakers [included] the visual artists Gregory Crewdson, Daria Martin, and Jane and Louise Wilson, and there [were also] contributions from the writers and academics Parveen Adams, Sarah Churchwell, Simon Critchley, Roger Luckhurst, Tom McCarthy, and Jamieson Webster. A specially commissioned video interview with Lynch himself [was] screened, and an accompanying film programme [took] place at Tate Modern and the Birkbeck Cinema. 

PART 1: Marko Daniel: Welcome; Richard Martin: Introduction

PART 2: The Body: Roger Luckhurst

PART 3: The Body: Tom McCarthy

PART 4: The Body: Q+A (chaired by Marko Daniel)

PART 5: The Eye 1: Gregory Crewdson

PART 6: The Eye 1: Q+A (chaired by Sarah Churchwell)

PART 7: The Eye 2: Daria Martin

PART 8: The Eye 2: Louise Wilson

PART 9: The Eye 2: Q+A (chaired by Stuart Comer)

PART 10: The Mind: Parveen Adams

PART 11: The Mind: Q+A (chaired by Richard Martin)

PART 12: The Ear: Chris Rodley responds to the day's presentations in conversation with Sarah Churchwell. Followed by a Q+A with the symposium's speakers and the public

On "England" and "Englishness" in British Cinema and Television

Updated July 27, 2010

Image from Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)

Film Studies For Free was recently very inspired by Nick James's wonderful overview of the career of Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti for next month's Sight and Sound magazine. As a huge fan of Cavalcanti's work, and in particular of his (and Ealing's) Went the Day Well? (indeed, FSFF's author lives in a English village uncannily like that portrayed in this film), it immediately set about researching a list of links to online scholarly works on the Brazilian filmmaker, only to discover very few openly accessible ones in English (do check out, though, Kristin Thompson and David Cairn's essays on Went the Day Well?, and the latter's other postings on Cavalcanti here, here, here, here, and here).

FSFF's author's rage at this overall lack of anglophone material (see the photographic evidence above) was eventually sublimated in a different curatorial project, one still connected to themes at the heart of Cavalcanti's work, and also to some related topics explored in further August 2010 Sight and Sound articles (ones sadly not [yet] online: William Fowler's 'Absent authors: Folk in artist film', and Rob Young's 'The pattern under the plough').

Anyhow, below you will find the fruit of this inspiration and frustration: a list of links to thoughtful and thought-provoking international scholarship on expressions of "England" and (multifarious) "Englishness" in (mostly) British cinema and television.

• José Arroyo, 'The films of Isaac Julien: Look back and talk black', Jump Cut, no. 36, May 1991

• Victoria Ball, 'Female identity and the British female ensemble drama 1995-1998', PhD thesis. Queen Margaret University, 2007

• Charles Barr, 'Projecting Britain and the British Character: Ealing Studios, Part II', originally Screen, 15(2), 1974

• Alexandra Lynn Barron, 'Postcolonial Unions: The Queer National Romance in Film and Literature', PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2005

• Joe Brooker, 'England's Screening', Film-Philosophy, 3.10, 1999

• Stuart Duncan Brown, 'Uses of Laughter in the Cinematic Representation of the British Working-Class', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, December 2007

• Charlotte Brunsdon, 'The Poignancy of Place: London and the Cinema', Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2004 , pp. 59-73

• Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘A fine and private place’: the cinematic spaces of the London Underground' Screen 2006 47: 1-17

• Katherine Byrne, '“Such a fine, close weave”: Gender, Community and the Body in Cranford (2007)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 2.2, Winter 2009/2010

• Elizabeth de Cacqueray, 'New Slants on Gender and Power Relations in British Second World War Films', Miranda, No. 2, 2010

• Mónica Calvo Pascual, 'My Beautiful Laundrette: Hybrid "Identity", or the Paradox of Conflicting Identifications in "Third Space" Asian-British Cinema of the 1980s', Miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 26 (2002): pp. 59-70

• E. Anna Claydon, ‘Nostalgia in the Post-National: Contemporary British Cinema and the South-Asian Diaspora’, South Asian Cultural Studies,Vol.2 No.1, 2008, pp 26 - 38

• Robin Cohen, ' Fuzzy Frontiers of Identity: The British Case', Social Identities Vol 1. No. 1 1995, 35−62

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, 'Filmic Representations of the British Raj in the 1980s: Cultural Identity, Otherness and Hybridity', PhD Thesis, Universidad de Zaragoza, March 2009

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, 'Everything You Always Hated about Thatcher's Britain: A Cultural Analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes', Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 28, 2003

• Josephine Dolan, 'Englishness: Heroes, heroines and reciprocal encounters', Identity, Self and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006

• Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000, 157-171

• Gillian Dow, 'Lady Bathurst’s Patriotic Ballroom, or “Reading Austen at a Distance”: The French Revolutionary Wars in Recent Adaptations ', Persuasions-Online, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2008

• Geoff Eley, 'Finding the People's War: Film, British Collective Memory and World War II', American Historical Review, 105, 5 (June 2001), 818-838

• Steven Fielding , 'A mirror for England? Cinematic representations of politicians and party politics during the ‘golden age’ of party, c. 1944-64', The First Annual International Conference on Minor Parties, Independent Politicians, Voter Associations and Political Associations in Politics, University of Birmingham, 2007

• Thaïs Flores Nogueira Diniz, 'Representation and Identity: Shakespeare in the Forties', Estudos Anglo Americanos 17-18 (1993-94)

• Andrew Higson, 'Transnational developments in European cinema in the 1920s',Transnational Cinemas Volume 1, Number 1, 2010

• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema - Style and Context: An Examination of British "New Wave" Films', Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, University of Leicester, January 1997

• Elena Von Kassel, 'An Image of Britain during the Second World War: The films of Humphrey Jennings (1939-1945)',  Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [Online], Vol. IV - n°3 | 2006

• Frank Leishman, 'From Dock Green to Life on Mars: Continuity and Change in TV Copland', University of Gloucestershire Inaugural Lecture No 1, 2008

• Melinda Lewis, 'Renegotiating Britishness through Comedy television', Master Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, August 2009

• Chris Louttit, 'Cranford, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television', Adaptation, (2009) 2 (1): 34-48

• Robert Mayer, 'Not Adaptation by ‘Drifting’: Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2004

• Michael McCluskey, 'Amateur Film and the Interwar English Countryside', Scope, Using Moving Image Archives, Edited by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson, Issue 17, June 2010

• José I. Prieto Arranz, 'Images of English purity: A comparative study of Elizabeth I and Diana, Princess of Wales', Identity, Self and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006 (scroll to p. 116)

• Cornelis Martin Renes, 'Whose New World? Derek Jarman’s Subversive Vision of The Tempest (1979)', BELLS, 17, 2008

• Josh Romphf , '“Invention in the Name of Community”: Workshops, the Avant-Garde and The Black Audio Film Collective', Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 1 [2010], Iss. 1

• Pave Skopal, 'DVD marketing in U.S. of Working Title's British romantic comedies: Framing reception and strategies of cultural appropriation', Jump Cut, No. 48, winter 2006

• John C. Tibbetts, 'Between the Map and the Painted Landscape: Kevin Brownlow’s Historical Films',  PREPRINT at Kansas University Repository: Historical Journal of Film, Radio, Television, June 2000. 20(2): 227-251

• Rosie White, 'Englishness and espionage: Edith Cavell as the good spy', Identity, and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006 (scroll to p. 129)

• Jonathan Wright, 'Rereading the British Social Realist Film: Samantha Lay's British Social Realism', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 8 No. 4, January 2003

Scope on Moving Image Archives

Image from Picturegoer Magazine, archived at the Bill Douglas collection, University of Exeter, as discussed by Lisa Stead in
her article Audiences from the Film Archive: Women's Writing and Silent Cinema.
(Used in accordance with the Original License)

Across the [Using Moving Image Archives] collection, then, scholars ask: how is the archive, as a repository of memory and of the past, used to construct cultural history? What can archives tell us about the formation of particular categories of identity? How can the ephemeral, like the digital, be archived? These are pressing, important questions, and we hope the varied answers here will lead to further reflection and debate upon the place of archival research in the interdisciplinary study of moving images.  From 'Introduction', by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson

Film Studies For Free is still catching up with the busy, Summer, electronic educational traffic. Below are links to all the brilliant items in one of the most significant volumes to be published online in its recent absence on holiday: Scope's latest issue on Using Moving Image Archives, edited by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson.

FULL ISSUE AS e-BOOK

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements and Introduction by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson

Part I: The Archive and the Nation

• Amateur Film and the Interwar English Countryside by Michael McCluskey

• Critical Reflections on Film as a Historical Source: A Case Study of the Military Regime in Brazil by Nina Schneider

Part II: The Ephemerality and Textuality of the Archive

• Audiences from the Film Archive: Women's Writing and Silent Cinema by Lisa Stead

• Archival Realities and Contagious Spaces: Shopgirls, Censorship and the City in Damaged Goods by Heida Johannsdottir

Part III: The Televisual and Digital Archive

• Reading Political Comedy: Yes Minister and Comic Coherence by Matt Crowder

• The Representation by French Television of Building Construction Work in and around Paris During the 1960s by Jacob Paskins

• Archives and Prefigurative Practices: Digital Games Walkthrough Archives as Record and Resource by Daniel Ashton

Christopher Nolan Studies

An image from Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Film Studies For Free knows only too well that there's a time and a place for everything. Given that Christopher Nolan's Inception has just premiered to mostly great online acclaim, it is probably the right time and place for a bumper FSFF "Christopher Nolan Studies" entry (despite the fact that FSFF's author won't actually see his new film till the weekend... No spoilers, people!).

Much more than all you need to know about the online discussion of Nolan's latest film is linked to with customary wit and brevity by David Hudson. The below links, then, restrict themselves to online, openly accessible, and (pure-dead-brilliant) scholarly takes on Nolan's film work, and related matters, to date.

• Robert Avery, 'Violence as (Masculinist) Epistemic Rhetoric: the case of Memento', Masters Thesis, University of Maine, August 2004

• Christopher Bodnar, 'The Database, Logic, and Suffering: Memento and Random-Access Information Aesthetics', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 10, May 2003

• Holly Lynn Baumgartner, 'Visualizing Levinas: Existence and Existents through Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Vanilla Sky', PhD Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, May 2005

• Jay David Bolter, 'Transference and Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema', Intermédialités, n 6 automne 2005

• David Bordwell, 'Niceties: how classical filmmaking can be at once simple and precise', Observations on Film Art, March 22, 2009

• Matthew Campora, ''Review of Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema, by Allan Cameron, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2008', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• Melissa Clark, 'The Space-Time Image: the Case of Bergson, Deleuze, and Memento', The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2002

• Michael Duffy, 'Batman Begins', Scope, Issue 3, November 2005

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)  

• Raoul Eshelman, 'Performatism in the Movies (1997-2003)', Anthropoetics 8, no. 2 (Fall 2002 / Winter 2003)

• Mark Fisher, 'Gothic Oedipus: subjectivity and capitalism in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins', ImageTexT, Vol. 2.2, 2006

• Domènec Font, 'In the Fabric of Time', Formats, No. 5, 2009

• Juan González Etxeberria, "Metamorphosing Words in the Cinema of the Fantastic", Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008)

• Adrian Gargett, 'Nolan's Memento, Memory, and Recognition', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.3 (2002)

• Matt George, 'On Forgetting Memento', h2so4, 16, 2001

• 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)

• Davin Heckman, 'Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman', CTHeory.net, 2008

• Ann Heilmann, 'Doing It With Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist', Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2 (Winter 2009/2010) pp. 18-42

• John Ip, 'The Dark Knight's War on Terrorism', Social Science Research Network, May 2010Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Forthcoming) 

• Kathryn Muriel Kang, 'Patch and reboot in Memento', in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)

• Vicki Karaminas, 'Ubermen: Masculinity, Costume, and Meaning in Comic Book Superheroes' in Peter McNeil and Vicki Karaminas (eds), The Men's Fashion Reader, Berg, Oxford and New York, pp. 179-186 

• Vicki Karaminas, “No Capes!” Über Fashion and How “Luck Favours the Prepared”: Constructing Contemporary Superhero Identities in American Popular Culture', International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA), vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 478-508

• Zelda G Knight, 'Monsters and Monstrous Acts: Exploring the Shadow Archetype in Batman: The Dark Knight', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 7th Global Conference, Oxford 2009

• Lutz Koepnick , 'Photographs and Memories', South Central Review 21.1 (Spring 2004): 94–129

• Jung-In Kwon, 'Memory Simulated', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 3, 2004

• Randolph Lewis, 'The Dark Knight of American Empire', Jump Cut, No. 51, 2009

• Patrick McEntaggart, 'Once Upon a Paradigm Shift: Interactive Storytelling in a New Media Context', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 5th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 14, 2010

• Todd McGowan, 'The Exceptional darkness of The Dark Knight', Jump Cut, 51, 2009

• Todd McGowan, 'The Violence of Creation in The Prestige', International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol 1, No 3 (2007)

• Walter Benn Michaels, 'The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Christopher Nolan's Idea of Form', Electronic Book Review, October 2007

• John S. Nelson, 'Realism as a Political Style: Noir Insights', Poroi, 5, 2, November, 2008

• Stanley Orr, 'Connected Guys: The Reconstructed Subject of 1990s Film Noir', in Darkly perfect world : colonial adventure, postmodernism, and American noir (Ohio State University, 2010) scroll down in PDF to p. 198 

• Kimberly Ann Owczarski, 'Batman, Time Warner, and Franchise Filmmaking in the Conglomerate Era', PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2008

• Chris Pallant , 'Review: Mark T. Conrad, ed. (2007) The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010

• Brock Poulin, 'Dark time (s): non-linear narratives in the postmodern film noir', Masters Thesis, University of British Columbia, April 2005 

• Karen Renner, 'Repeat Viewings Revisited: Emotions, Memory, and Memento', Film Studies, Issue 8, Summer 2006

• Thomas Riegler, 'The “Mastermind”: Personifications of Evil in the Cinema', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 10th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 2009

• Torben Schmidt, 'Christopher Nolan’s Memento – Analysis of the narrative structure of a noirish revenge film', Seminar: “Decadence and Modernism in Late 20th Century American Cinema, 2003

• Ilana Shiloh, 'Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento', M/C Journal, Vol. 10, Issue 2, May 2007

• Giovanni Tiso, 'Impossible Recollections: the Troubled Imaginary of Mediated Memory', PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2006

• Gary Westfahl, 'Magnificent Obsessions: A Review of The Dark Knight', Locus Online, July 28, 2008

• Gary Westfahl, 'Nolan’s Labyrinth: A Review of Inception', Locus Online, July 18, 2010

Study of a Single Film: On Robert Enrico's La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 1 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 2 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 3 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

Film Studies For Free presents one of its regular features today - a little study of a (favourite) single film: La rivière du hibou, an adaptation of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", a short story by Ambrose Bierce. This short film version of Bierce's tale was directed by Robert Enrico, produced by Marcel Ichac with Paul de Roubaix, and was released in 1963. It won the award for best short subject at the 1962 Cannes film festival and 1963 Academy Awards.

In 1964 La rivière du hibou aired on U.S. television as an episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone (hence the framing, and opening and closing narrations in the slightly shortened version -- widely available online -- embedded above).

Partly because of its brilliance and partly because its adaptation of Bierce's classic story was so widely seen, Enrico's film has been cited as an important influence on many other cinematic experiments with subjective storytelling and "twist endings",  including recent ones by U.S. based directors such as Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and David Lynch.

FSFF loves the sheer cinematographic inventiveness of this film and sincerely believes that all students of audiovisual storytelling could learn a lot from studying precisely how it works. To assist with this task (always best achieved by closely watching the film and analysing its techniques first), it has concocted a small but reasonably well-formed list of links to online and openly accessible studies of La rivière du hibou and related moving image texts.

• Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", Free e-Text at Project Gutenberg, 1995

• David Auerbach, 'Occurrences at Owl Creek Bridge', Waggish, June 16, 2007
• David Auerbach, 'Occurrences at Owl Creek Bridge: Beyond the Zeroes', Waggish, August 12, 2007
• Aviva Briefel, 'What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film', Narrative, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2009, pp. 95-108
• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003
• Don A. Habibi, 'The Magic Moment: the Liminal, Distended Time Flashforward of Ambrose Bierce',  The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005
• Don Asher Habibi, 'The experience of a lifetime: philosophical reflections on a narrative device of Ambrose Bierce', Studies in the Humanities; 12/1/2002
• Richard J. Hand, 'Reanimating Peyton Farquhar: the adaptations of Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in American Radio and Television', The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005
• Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, 'Lost Finale and the Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Parallel', Wordsushi, May 25, 2010
• Justine Smith, 'Robert Enrico’s Civil War Trilogy based on stories by Ambrose Bierce', House of Mirth and Movies, May 11, 2010
• Alanna Thain, 'Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch's Lost Highway', Invisible Culture, Issue 8, 2004
• Peter Wilshire, 'Dead in the Water? Dream and Reality in Carnival of Souls: the Eternal Circle of Life and Death', Offscreen Journal, April 30, 2007

Jump Cut's Best Issue Ever?

 A re-enactment of a scene at Abu Ghraib in
Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008)

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?

Jump Cut, No. 52, summer 2010

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)]

• Introduction by David Andrews (This conference report provides an analysis of the debates surrounding Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure and introduces the two conference panels on this documentary at this year's SCMS conference in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on the panel moderated by Linda Williams) 
• Feelings of revulsion and the limits of academic discourse by Bill Nichols (Standard Operating Procedure was a monumental box office flop. Does that anything to do with the feelings of revulsion that it produced in one viewer?) 
• Speech images: Standard Operating Procedure and the staging of interrogation by Jonathan Kahana (Drawing on the adjacent histories of U.S. war documentary and military psychiatry, Standard Operating Procedure provides its subjects with a powerful historical weapon: the confession that functions as an excuse) 
• “Cluster fuck”: the forcible frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure by Linda Williams (Williams defends Errol Morris' film through an examination of its framings, metaphorical and literal, arguing that even Lynndie England needs to be seen as an ethical being wrestling with her acquiescence to an unethical situation) 
• Response to papers and comments on Standard Operating Procedure by Irina Leimbacher

Corporate Hollywood today

• Introduction: scholarship on corporate Hollywood by Chuck Kleinhans (Merging aesthetic and economic analysis in studying media) 
• Media empires: corporate structures and lines of control by Eileen R. Meehan (Sometimes it’s hard to see who’s really running the show!) 
• The future of selling the past: studio libraries in the 21st century by Eric Hoyt (The Hollywood studios have long profited from their film libraries. Two pending deals and a wave of new media ventures invite us to reconsider the libraries’ industrial and political significance) 
• It’s not film, it’s TV: rethinking industrial identity by Jennifer Holt (A revealing analysis of the revenue breakdowns for the major media conglomerates that explains how television keeps the film business afloat) 
• Hollywood handouts: tax credits in the age of economic crisis by Vicki Mayer and Tanya Goldman (For an object lesson in government bailouts, we turn to Louisiana’s history of film production giveaways)

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

• Genders and feminism in the films of Maricarmen de Lara by Eli Bartra (Violence and feminist critique: leitmotifs in the films of Mexican documentarist Maricarmen de Lara) 
• Secuestro Express and La clase: politics of realism in contemporary Venezuelan filmmaking by Mercedes Vázquez (What is propaganda filmmaking and what is not? In Venezuela today, everything is polarized, society, politics, and “socially-committed” filmmaking) 
• Battle of Chile: Struggle of a People Without Arms by Victor Wallis (Class-struggle classic, a generation later with DVD release)

Central Asian television

• Franchising culture for Kazakhstan television: producers’ ambivalence and audiences’ indifference by Amos Owen Thomas (Television programming in Kazakhstan in the post-Soviet age becomes site of cultural-economic contestation by producers and consumer between a globalized Russian and a nationalistic Kazakh one)

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

• Man-made martyrs in the age of mechanical reproduction: disturbing manufactured martyrdom in Paradise Now by Phoebe Bronstein (A discussion of media, martyrdom, and violence (or the lack thereof) in Paradise Now (2005) in the context of Hollywood representations of the Middle East and the "War on Terror.") 
• Be Calm and Count to Seven by Brian Cagle 

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

• Torture porn and surveillance culture by Evangelos Tziallas (A group of "extreme horror" films, known collectively as "torture porn," let us contemplate the social and political ramifications of visibility, exploring the evolution of "the gaze" in the 21st century) 
• Tortured logic: entertainment and the spectacle of deliberately inflicted pain in 24 and Battlestar Galactica by Isabel Pinedo (24 and Battlestar Galactica, two television series about our post-9/11 world, tackle the issue of torture from right wing and progressive perspectives, respectively, arriving at diametrically opposed positions) 
• Cross-cultural disgust: some problems in the analysis of contemporary horror cinema, part 2: Public Toilet, Visitor Q  by Chuck Kleinhans (Film artists can expand cinematic disgust beyond shock and gross out. Fruit Chan rewrites human waste in a humanistic global framework while Takahisi Miike uses it for dark social satire)

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

• Fretting about film criticism by the editors (Good film critics: in print, online, or both?)