THE MOST BELATED END-OF-YEAR REVIEW FOR 2010

Hello, and Happy New Year, all you cheery blog-readers and cinema-freaks! It's been a while since my last missive, much longer than I wished for – I pop my head up late last year, meerkat-like, after gruelling time spent in the wilds of work, then immediately pop my head below the surface for another month. This time it was all down to spontaneous holidays during the Christmas break, then spontaneous house-moving in the new year. Pretty much no internet access for over three weeks. Almost enjoyed not being tied to the world wide interweb, but as soon as access came up at the new apartment a couple of days ago, here I am, back in the swim.

With all the holiday hubbub, my end of year overview of best films for 2010 is coming out a tad late. Just imagine, then, that we back in old world of snail mail, and this is an edition coming atcha via seafreight. Nice and sloooowww.

Here's my Top 10 for the year.

1. NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (Patricio Guzman; France/ Germany/ Chile)

Mixing astronomy, archaeology, and the national history of Chile, this is a breath-taking and heart-breaking philosophical intertwining of universes and everyday lives, placing loss inside the heart of the cosmos. Utterly exquisite.

2. LOURDES (Jessica Hausner; France)

Using the pilgrimage to Lourdes as her framework, Hausner assesses faith and hope as an almost humdrum routine, where belief seems to be conditional rather than fervent. Sylvie Testud gives the quietest yet most engaging performance of the year, constantly watching and listening to the endless chatter of an ensemble of fellow miracle-seekers, nurses, and priests, all at odds with their desires and religious convictions.

3. CERTIFIED COPY (Abbas Kiarostami; France/ Italy)

Kiarostami returns to narrative-style film-making with boldness and poise. The couple's game (is the relationship between the man and the woman real or play-acted?) becomes the film's game becomes the audience's game. A beautiful convolution of psychological manoeuvring, revelling in the art of cinema, it reveals a buoyant new potential path of story-telling for Kiarostami.

4. ANIMAL KINGDOM (David Michôd; Australia)

An outstanding ensemble of performances, all presenting the snowballing vicious meltdown of a crime family with incredible aplomb. Ben Mendelsohn finally shucks off the shackles of years of comedy and light drama roles and presents a family firebrand not seen in Australian film since David Wenham's rage-filled turn in The Boys 12 years ago.

5. ALAMAR (Pedro González-Rubio; Mexico)

The simplest of premises – a father and his son spend time in a fishing hut in his home village before the son goes with his mother to Italy – creates a film with the richest relationship and a stunning visual palette. Pristine blue sea and sky, with the constant gentle soundtrack of lapping water, frame the tenderest bond between a father and son I've possibly ever seen on screen.

6. VILLALOBOS (Romuald Karmakar; Germany)

A sublime and engaging minimalist portrait, not just of a DJ at work in the studio or club, but of a person utterly committed to exploring life through sound. Presented in a series of long-takes, the subject's long monologues are surprising in their depth, richness, and lucidity. This is not merely a documentary for techno-heads, but an articulate depiction of a person relating the passion for their vocation to the wider world.

7. UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (Apichatpong Weerasethakul; France/ Germany/ Spain/ Thailand)

To say this is Weerasethakul's most accessible work belies a film that quietly but heartily affirms that reality might in fact consist of many worlds that interweave and co-exist, and that forests may be the gateway where the living, the deceased, and the hairy spirits all meld together.

8. OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW (Sophie Fiennes; France / UK/Netherlands)

A cinematic traipse through Anselm Kiefer's workshop/ gallery-space in Barjac, France, where the huge former factory and it's surrounding grounds have become one gigantic art-piece in it's own right. Fascinating not just for watching the artist Anselm Kiefer happily at work creating his monolithic art, but also for the regular, graceful meanders through Barjac, which looks like the ruins of an alternate world.

9. POETRY (Lee Changdong; South Korea)

Changdong's story of a grandmother dealing with encroaching memory loss and unravelling the truth behind her grandson's involvement in a girl's suicide is as delicately-woven and finely-spun as a silk garment. Although the main character struggles with poetry and writing a single poem, the film is replete with it's own exquisite, open-framed poetry.

10. SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD (Edgar Wright; USA)

Yes, really. It beguiled me with it's unshakeable infectiousness, and somehow I appreciated the film's fearlessness in being ridiculous yet sweet. It brought back memories of teenage video-game addiction and imagining the wonderful 'what-ifs' of life as an arcade game.

Screening Alert - The Salvation Hunters

Big-time screening alert! Josef von Sternberg's The Salvation Hunters (1925) will be screening at UCLA this Saturday March 14 as part of their 14th Festival of Preservation.

Preservation funded by The Stanford Theatre Foundation

THE SALVATION HUNTERS
(1925) Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg's first film--shot for less than $4,800 on location in San Pedro, Chinatown and the San Fernando Valley--was possibly Hollywood's first "independent" production. The gritty realism of its locations, the lack of artifice in its story and the lower depths of its characters shocked audiences and the industry alike. The film remains thoroughly modern. Sternberg's images thrive on composition and stasis. His ending resolves nothing and yet everything is different. The Salvation Hunters made a star not only of Sternberg, but also of Georgia Hale, who would play opposite Chaplin in The Gold Rush (1925).

Academy Photoplays. Producer: Josef von Sternberg. Screenwriter: Josef von Sternberg. Cinematographer: Edward Gheller. Editor: Josef von Sternberg. Cast: George K. Arthur, Georgia Hale, Bruce Guerin, Otto Matiesen, Nellie Bly Baker. 35mm, 72 min.

Preceded by...
OIL: A SYMPHONY IN MOTION
(1933) Directed by M.G. MacPherson

Preservation funded by The Stanford Theatre Foundation

Oil was produced by a Los Angeles collective of amateur filmmakers, called "Artkino," who here attempted a lyric documentary from the point of view of the oil itself.

Cinematographer: Jean Michelson. 35mm, 8 min.
Live musical accompaniment will be provided.

List Addiction - From Citizen Kane to Kill Bill Vol. 1

For the past four or five years, I've had this little ritual that I perform in the first month of every year. I slaughter a chicken then...no wait, not that ritual, must not talk about that one.

Ever since I ambled across the They Shoot Pictures Don't They? website about five years ago, I have pored over their two regularly updated lists, the Top 1,000 Greatest Films of All Time and the Top 250 Films of the 21st Century, and worked out my own “haven't seen them yet” lists. I'm anally retentive enough to have a document that I regularly amend, listing all the films I haven't seen yet from these lists. Remove the films I've seen, add any new additions from the annual updates, and I'm set for another year.

I'm a sucker for film lists. Yes, they're problematic – they reinforce canons and ignore the unheralded. But I usually forgive a list for for its shortcomings if it introduces me to films I'd never heard of previously, or never considered watching in a hurry. The first time I came across the Top 1000 list on TSPDT, there were scores of films that I simply had no idea about - films that I still haven't seen (due to inaccessibility), like Limite, Sugar Cane Alley, Il Sorpasso, The Childhood of Maxim Gorky. Filmmakers I'd barely heard of, like Mark Donskoi and Luis Garcia Berlanga. The list has encouraged me to watch films that have utterly blown me away – Hitler: A Film From Germany, Touki Bouki, Zorn's Lemma. Yes, the lists have also lead me to films that gave me a headache, but hey ho, small price to pay, this is always going to happen in the world of cinephilia. (Example; why is The World According to Garp on the list? This film is a great example of turning a pretty good novel into a messy, incoherent puddle of visual dribble. And Babe has entered this years Top 1000 list as a first time entrant? What the fuggin' what? Thank god I've already put myself through the hell of seeing this execrable film years ago).

And I guess that IS one problem with building a wall of cinephilia based on lists – you get addicted to the idea of conquering the list, watching everything on it, and therefore forcing yourself to watch films you really have no desire to see. Its easy to become obsessed with the lists, and viewing choices are limited only to films from those lists. There are scores of films I have put to one side in favour of watching a list film, saying to myself “I'll watch this some time later, once I've finished with the lists.” Thankfully, I'm far less obsessed than I was a few years ago. I first created a list from the 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die book in September 2005. At that stage I was woefully lacking in my 'classic Hollywood' background, and had always avoided the horror and musical genres. I think my tally of films to watch was around 450 or so. For about 2 to 3 years, almost every film-viewing choice was based on knocking films off the list. When I introduced the TSPDT lists in late 2006, it tripled my obsession. I think it was nigh-on impossible to squeeze in any other film than ones on the 3 lists I had created. I still refer to these lists now, but I've gotten a handle on the obsession and am happy to work on them a little more slowly now, knocking them off bit by bit while enjoying once more the art of browsing for ANY film to watch.

For the record, and perhaps as a note to myself here as much as anyone else, I have the following totals for films yet to be seen on each of the 3 lists:

Source Films Remaining
1001 Films You Must See Before You Die 67
TSPDT Top 1000 of All-Time (Jan. 2011) 213
TSPDT Top 250 Films 21st Century (Jan. 2011) 53

I'm also anally retentive enough to keep a tally of films that I haven't seen that have dropped off the TSPDT lists each year. The stats are as follows:

TSPDT Top 1000 of All-Time (Jan. 2011)
Last Year in Top 1000 Films To See
2010 18
2009 26
2008 48
2007 47
2006 13
2005 22

TSPDT Top 250 Films 21st Century (Jan. 2011)
Last Year in Top 250 Films To See
2010 6
2009 15
2008 11
2007 15
2006 16

Bored yet? One more stat, then I'm outta here. Taking into account that some films cross over into other lists, the grand total for all lists combined is 570 films to view. Bugger all, really.

The link to the TSPDT Top 1000 of All-Time is here.

And the link to the TSPDT 21st Century Top 250 is here.

If you haven't seen 'em before, have fun.

Back in the Cold, Black Silence

BLAST OF SILENCE (Allen Baron; USA; 1961)

This blog post is my wee inaugural contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. After the rousing success of last year's Film Preservation Blogathon, this year's efforts are for the benefit of the Film Noir Foundation, who endeavour to restore Cy Endfield's film noir classic The Sound of Fury (1950). The blogathon runs from Feb 14 to 21. Check out everyone else's blog posts, being collated by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. And donate to the Foundation!!!! It doesn't hurt. Hit the big ol' button below.

Arriving at the tail-end of the supposed heyday of film-noir filmmaking, Allen Baron's Blast of Silence comes across as an early mutation of the film noir blueprint, a kind of twisted bastard child born from years of pent-up celluloidal anger, violence, and paranoia. This is one heck of an awkward, angular, and abrasive film, it's beauty derived from unremitting seediness and grime. The inauguration of the film seems to be taking noir to its very literal extreme, offering a black screen and the words of a narrator intoning in a tough-as-nails hard-boiled way “Remembering out of the black silence. You were born in pain.” The black screen steadily reveals an ever growing aperture, and as we hear a woman's strangled screams, a smack, a baby's cry, and the narrator referring to the lead character's birth into the world, the film is born into the world, via the locomotion of a train, and the aperture reveals a tunnel. In one moment, the birth of the main character is conflated with the birth of the film, which is conflated also with the very birth of cinema itself (trains and cinema forever intertwined through Lumiere's L'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat).

And right from the outset we are introduced to two key components of the film – the relentless barrage of words spouted by the unseen, unknown narrator, and the pain, anger, and hate he talks of in his first few sentences. Frankie Bono, a hired killer originally from New York and now working in Cleveland, who comes back to New York around Christmas time to perform a routine hit, has his every action commented upon by this ceaseless voice. This continual chatter indicates some kind of psychosis, a voice in Frankie's head that can also begin to drive the spectator mad as well. The narrator spews forth a torrent of thoughts, almost all of them alluding to anger and hatred, and a preference for loneliness and coldness, emotional and physical. “You were born with hate and anger built in. Took a slap in the backside to blast out the scream and then you knew you were alive.” It's clear the narrator is talking to us as much as he is talking to and about Frankie. This inability for the narrator to shut up is annoying yet unusually appealing - here is a film that actually seems to want us to feel like we're being goaded, poked, and prodded, a film that suddenly seems to be speaking to us and telling us how damn painful the act of living is supposed to be.

Even the simplest of exchanges are imbued with savagery and petulance. The ubiquitous noir scene of the hitman meeting the anonymous messenger is presented here as a game of surreptitious physical torment, with the messenger jabbing Frankie repeated and violently in the ribs with a finger, and Frankie ending their exchange by treading firmly on the messenger's foot. Except for key moments, rage is hardly ever visibly etched on any characters face, yet the films seems to boil and bubble with constrained volatile emotions. Frankie meets an old female friend and his ice-like clarity starts to dissipate. As his emotions surface, his only way of expressing them is in a forced and brutal manner, meaning that when he tries to embrace her and woo her, he ultimately ends up trying to rape her. This seems to prove the narrator right – emotions, in this world, are best left cold, dormant, unexpressed, and unattended.

The gritty, darkened city is of course a key trope in film noir, but never before has a city been portrayed so synaesthetically. New York can be felt and smelt. Greasy food, mouldy apartments, early morning air – scenes exude scents and textures. And as Frankie's mental state seems to unravel, the sounds, rhythms, and textures become more intense, culminating in a near-hallucinatory moment in a night-club, where a bongo-thwacking beatnik sings of being “dressed in black all the time” and driving the cinematic rhythm into clipped paranoid snippets of eyes, limbs, and mania.

And before you start considering this film to be bleak as all hell and not worth the time, let me say just how cinematographically elegant this film often looks, even in all it's ugly ungainliness. I'm reminded here of an incredible long take of Frankie, walking a silent street in the early dawn, starting as barely a pinprick in the distance. During the course of a minute or two all we see is Frankie walking – yes, the narrator's still there, but the voice becomes a mosquito-like buzz as the scent of dawn seems to stretch to the nostrils, and that eerie quiet of early-morning city-streets emanates from the screen. Frankie keeps getting closer and closer, until his trench-coated bulk dwarves the screen and consumes us entirely. Back again, and briefly, to black.

Sweat and Blood

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (Phil Karlson; USA; 1955)

This brief blog post is my second contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. There's a whole slew of bloggers, all scribbling furiously to raise funds to restore Cy Endfield's film noir classic The Sound of Fury (1950), for the Film Noir Foundation. The blogathon runs from Feb 14 to 21. Browse all the other posts, being collated by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren, and flick some moolah to the Foundation!! It's terrifying simple - just smack that button below, it'll take you to where you wanna go.

Sometimes not knowing the framework behind the story of a film can add real salt and pepper to the viewing. This was definitely the case when I first saw The Phenix City Story. The film depicts a struggle between the 'good honest townsfolk' of Phenix City, Alabama, rising against the corrupt 'peddlers of vice' who have marked the city as one of sin, degradation, and turning blind eyes. It culminates in the murder of a recently elected Attorney General, Albert Patterson, at the hands of the crime syndicate who feel suddenly threatened by this man's ability to coalesce public opinion against these syndicates. The first twelve minutes of the film are devoted to a news report on the murder of Mr Patterson, and the history of crime in Phenix City. Several folks are interviewed by a reporter, and these interview segments, plus the declamatory reportage directed straight-to-camera by the dapper reporter, all felt to me, at the time of first viewing, so wonderfully realistic. Filled with halting speech, interviewees who are too shy to look at the camera, the occasional slip or stammer, this fake documentary segment bristled with an unpolished energy that fascinated me. But it was not long after seeing the film that I learnt that the whole story around Phenix City as “Sin City, USA” and the murder of Albert Patterson was entirely true. And, thus, the report at the beginning of the film, helmed by true-to-life journalist Clete Roberts, was also a true blue documentary. And returning to the film a second time, it became a little more obvious, a little clearer that this was 'real'. Clete Roberts states that there was “no careful rehearsing of speech” for his candid interviews, and heck, right after the report is over and the credits for the film roll, there's a whole spiel flashed up on the screen thanking the inhabitants of Phenix City for allowing this film to exist. I didn't see these signs as signs of the 'real' – I happily fooled myself into concocting the film as an elaborate fictionalised tale with pseudo-documentary flourishes. The opening segment, seen with new eyes, is still unusual and fascinating, a wonderfully odd choice to initiate a film. But, I like that I still have the trace of my original mis-viewed understanding of this opening section still pulsing within my vision.

The fictionalised story of Phenix City that takes up the remainder of the running time is surprisingly brutal, frank, and bloody. This is an extremely raw film, where absolutely no-one is exempt from savage attacks. Women get beaten up and bloodied, children get slapped, and in one horrifying scene the corpse of a young black girl is flung from a car. There's countless close-ups of sweaty faces, scores of scenes where people are pounded and pummelled, and yells, shrieks, and wailing are drizzled through the soundtrack. Yet, for all its coarse and brutish textures, the film derives a huge amount of vigour from being so brazenly forthright. This is not a lazy or hastily spliced film – the early sequences that introduce each character are deftly painted and woven together. The story is built from passing one character to the other – we meet a young man doting on a girl at a cheap and plain casino, and then pass to the club owner, who then visits his old lawyer pal, who then picks up his son from the airport....and from this concatenation of scenes, a certain momentum is picked up as each of these characters' lives intertwine and knot around each other. This film is predicated on crescendoing pace and rhythm, peaking and peaking and peaking, waiting for that right moment to explode.

But the film is perhaps most appealing as a docu-style traipse through small-city USA in the 1950's. We are driven through the main streets at night, allowed to soak up the seedy atmosphere, the tacky neon lights, the authenticity of night-time street bustle. Characters walk us through the streets, letting us mingle with the small but active crowds. And we drift through plain offices, functional and dull-looking clubs, ordinary homes. There's a strange pleasure to be had in seeing the mundane and quotidian parts of a city.

Quick Rocket-fire Reviews (playing catch-up on 2010, part one of possible recurring story)

I'm currently in cinema catch-up mode, although this is beginning to feel like a constant state of being. Still, this past week or so has been a decent attempt at getting back into the race, having viewed three 2010 flicks, The Black Swan, Inside Job, and Exit Through The Gift Shop. Quick rocket-fire reviews at the ready!

THE BLACK SWAN (Darren Aronofsky; USA; 2010)

I am at a total loss as to how this film has garnered the critical attention it has. This is, as has no doubt been stated before, some kind of mutated distant relative to Powell & Pressburger's 1948 classic The Red Shoes, and the story of a tortured fragile female performer going mad through utter immersion into a role feels overdone and hackneyed. Sure, its visually compelling, with the fracturing of Natalie Portman's psyche yielding occasionally disquieting and eerie moments, but this is essentially a bit of a perv-fest. My partner kinda hit it on the head after we saw the film together.I asked her what she thought, and she replied “well, you can tell it was written and directed by men.” And with that idea in the head, one can't help but start to make up the conversations going on during the creation of this film. 'Hey, let's get Natalie to masturbate.' 'Hey, let's get her to have some full-on hot lesbo rumpy-pumpy with Mila Kunis.' Give. Me. A. Break.

NSIDE JOB (Charles Ferguson; USA; 2010)

You can trust a name like Charles Ferguson. It sounds so avuncular. Or professorial. A name clothed in a tweed jacket. With elbow patches.And trust this film I did, because it takes away the 'documentarian-as-personality' effect that Michael Moore eventually bored us to tears with, and leaves us with a chaptered narrative that deftly spells out just what the fuck the global financial crisis (or the GFC, for all the cool abbreviationists out there) was all about. Evokes the kind of “bloody hell!”, “well I never”, and “grrrr” responses that were evoked by other white-collar dirty-rotten-scoundrel docos, like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and The Corporation. There's only one slight hurdle with this kind of film though – it's so super-densely packed with information that it's easy to leave the theatre with your head on fire, trying to remember all the pieces of the story. Still, only a minor hurdle, that head-on-fire sensation.

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (Banksy; UK; USA; 2010)

It's kind of boring to dwell on whether the film is a hoax or whether it's 'real', and I'm presuming that this line of enquiry has already been speculated to death. Watching the slow exchange of roles, as film-maker becomes street artist and street artist becomes filmmaker, is both remarkable and hilarious. Watching the arc of transformation of the obsessive amateur filmmaker Thierry Guetta is both wince-inducing AND jaw-dropping in the same moment. If Thierry Guetta/ Mr Brainwash is the real deal, then seeing him unintentionally out-prank the arch-prankster Banksy himself has to be the funniest thing I've seen in ages.Ultimately the film is most interesting for its active interrogation of authorship, the recording of memory, and the intense and almost tragic desire to never forget. But sometimes it's so important to forget. Just like I've forgotten that film I just saw, what was it again, The Black Pigeon? The Slack Swan? Aronofsky Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest?

On Returning

It's been over two months, but I'm finally returning to the blog-fold. There's been a series of events that have precluded me from staying on track with blog-posting. I was ill for a brief period of time, then there's been the trials and tribulations of trying to sell an apartment, mixed with new teaching responsibilities at university, and throw in the hectic schedule of organising a wedding, with everything else I'm trying to do in my life, and whammo, that's where the time goes. I've had very little time to view much in the way of cinema these past two or so months, so there's been little to write about anyway.

There's only been one memorable film I've seen in the past few weeks. It's a 22-minute short film, comprising of ultrasound images of our baby at 12 weeks. Yes, that's another reason why I've been away....my fiancee is pregnant. The grainy black and white images of our baby rolling around for 22 minutes - often wriggling, sometimes hiding, occasionally sleeping, once it even waved, I'm sure - hold infinitely more awe than any experimental film I could ever think of. I'm getting dad-sappy already, but I can't remember the last time I've ever been so floored and moved by the moving image as I have been watching this wee life stretch and squirm. Film of the year. Seriously. Check out the image of the star of the film. Cute, yeah?

New Issue of WIDE SCREEN Journal: Cinemas of the Arab World, Militant Cinema, Film Production Studies, SciFi

Frame grab from Drôle de Félix (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2000)

Film Studies For Free's author is busy with marking this weekend, and so can only look longingly for now at the below Table of Contents of a bumper new issue of the journal Wide Screen whch appears to be going from strength to strength. There are some very enticing and valuable items here, so FSFF wanted to rush its readers the usual direct links to the openly accessible contents.

Wide Screen Vol.3 No.1

• 'From the Editors' Desk' by Kuhu Tanvir PDF

 Essays:

• 'Militants and Cinema: Digital Attempts to Make the Multitude in Hunger, Che, Public Enemies' by Joshua Aaron Gooch Abstract PDF
• 'Minnelli's Yellows: Illusion, Delusion and the Impression on Film' by Kate Hext Abstract PDF
• Trauma, Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction and the Post-Human' by Anirban Kapil Baishya Abstract PDF
• 'Drôle de Félix: A Search for Cultural Identity on the Road' by Zélie Asava Abstract PDF
• 'An Analysis of the Technoscientific Imaginary in the Remake of The Stepford Wives' by Jessica Johnston and Cornelia Sears Abstract PDF 
• Home Sweet Home: The Cautionary Prison/Fairy Tale' by Paul Tremblay Abstract PDF 

Film Production Studies (Contd. from W.S. 2.2)

• Handling Financial and Creative Risk in German Film Production' by M. Bjørn von Rimscha Abstract PDF
• Opening Pandora’s (Black) Box: Towards A Methodology Of Production Studies' by Graham Roberts Abstract PDF 

Cinemas of the Arab World:  

• 'Introduction: Cinemas of the Arab World' by Latika Padgaonkar Abstract PDF
• 'Cinema “Of” Yemen And Saudi Arabia: Narrative Strategies, Cultural Challenges, Contemporary Features' by Anne Ciecko Abstract PDF 
• Director Profile: Mai Masri' by Latika Padgaonkar Abstract PDF
• Salah Abu Seif and Arab Neorealism' by Ouissal Mejri Abstract PDF 
• Review: London River' by Latika Padgaonkar Abstract PDF 

Book Reviews:

• 'Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983' by Radha Dayal Abstract PDF

Undead Links to George A. Romero Studies

Zombies intruding on the free flow of commerce? Frame grab from Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978)

In [George Romero's films], antagonism and horror are not pushed out of society (to the monster) but are rather located within society (qua the monster). The issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the “heroes”—the police, the army, good old boys with their guns and male bonding fantasies. If they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future. Romero also implements this critique structurally. As Steven Shaviro observes, the cultural discomfort is not only located in the films’ graphic cannibalism and zombie genocide: the low-budget aesthetics makes us see “the violent fragmentation of the cinematic process itself." The zombie in such a representation may be uncanny and repulsive, but the imperfect uncleanness of the zombie’s face—the bad make-up, the failure to hide the actor behind the monster’s mask—is what breaks the screen of the spectacle. [Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010] 

About a month ago, Film Studies For Free's author was delighted to take part in the first of a series of screenings and roundtables on the fascinating and complex subject of 'Intrusion' and its 'specific relation to the visual on the different but interrelated registers of the psychic, sexual, social and political'. 

This inventive and highly productive series was organised by Amber Jacobs, Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and creator and presenter of the wonderful Daily Subversions weekly radio show on ResonanceFM (available everywhere online). FSFF will post a video essay contribution on the first film in the 'Intrusion' series just as soon as the more mundane 'intrusions' of research deadlines and the hectic grading season have subsided.

An excellent podcast of the final roundtable of the series, discussing George A. Romero's 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, has just gone online. The discussion features Dr Jacobs, along with Mark Fisher (Cultural Studies and Music Culture, Goldsmiths), Gordon Hon (Artist and Lecturer in Visual Culture, Winchester School of Art), Paul Myerscough (Senior Editor at the London Review of Books), and some great contributions from the audience. The podcast lasts just under an hour. 

To accompany this new online resource, FSFF has assembled and updated a scarily good list of links to further, openly accessible studies or scholarly discussions of Romero's work. Also see previous related entries "Any Zombies Out There?" Undead Film Studies and Zombie Week at In Media Res. And also be aware that you can watch Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead in its entirety at the Internet Archive.

• Birkbeck College Roundtable Discussion on ‘Dawn of the Dead’, May 26, 2011 (with Amber Jacobs, Paul Myerscough, Gordon Hon and Mark Fisher) 
• Michael Bloom, 'Reanimating the Living Dead: Uncovering the Zombie Archetype in the Works of George A. Romero', Offscreen, April 30, 2009
• Matt Cardin, 'Spirituality in Romero’s Living Dead Films', TheoFantastique, December 3, 2009
• John Cussans, 'Tracking the Zombie Diaspora: From Subhuman Haiti to Posthuman Tucson', First published in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil edited by Paul Yoder and Peter Mario Kreuter, May 2004
• Erin Burns Davis, 'To Say Death’s Name: The Ever-changing Definition of the Zombie in Popular Culture', Academia.edu, 2006 
• Jennifer Whitney Dotson, Considering Blackness in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead: An Historical Exploration, MA Thesis, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2006
• Stephen Harper, '"They’re Us": Representations of Women in George Romero’s ‘Living Dead’ Series', Intensities, 2003
• Stephen Harper, 'Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero's Dawn of the Dead', Americana, 1.2, Fall 2002
• Stephen Harper,  “Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic”, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 50, November 2005 
• Philip Horne, 'I shopped with a zombie', Critical Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4, Winter 1992, 97-110
• Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010
• John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996
• Marco Maurizi, '“Just in Case Society Crumbles”: George A. Romero and Marxism', Historical Materialism Conference, 2006
• Kim Paffenroth, 'Religious Themes of George Romero’s Zombie Movies', Golem: Journal of Religion and Monsters, Spring 2006 
• Kim Paffenroth (Iona College), 'Dawn of the Dead (1978): Zombies and Human Nature', In Media Res, Wednesday, September 30, 2009
• Pinewood Dialogue with George A. Romero
• Steven Shaviro, 'Survival of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, September 25, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, 'Diary of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, April 26, 2008
• Jasie Stokes, Ghouls, Hell and Transcendence: the Zombie in Popular Culture from Night of the Living Dead to Shaun of the Dead, MA Thesis, Brigham Young University, April 2010
• Jesse Stommel, '"Pity Poor Flesh": Terrible Bodies in the Films of Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Romero', Bright Lights Film Journal, No. 56, May 2007
• Margaret Twohy, 'From Voodoo to Viruses: The Evolution of the Zombie in Twentieth Century Popular Culture', MPhil Thesis, Trinity College Dublin, October 2008

George A. Romero, Daddy of the Dead (a Wired.com video)

Romero's Zombies

30+ articles from the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture

Frame grab from The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928). Read Bo Florin's article on this film

[Traditionally, aesthetics] has been based on national perspectives and contexts, as well as contained within the limits of specific disciplines. However, the changing society has made this focus all too narrow. Due to globalization, media and territories merge and move in new ways, where regional, national, international, and global perspectives increasingly integrate. New contexts and new aesthetic strategies are also created, and traditional boundaries and hierarchies become transgressed, for example, between high brow and popular culture, or between art and technology. Aesthetics as well as culture thus need to be discussed and interpreted across the disciplines, through different media, over territorial borders. Finally, this is also a strong argument for Open Access publishing: to constitute a global platform and an interface for interdisciplinary discourse—free for anybody to read. [from first JAC Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson and John Sundholm]

Film Studies For Free had been meaning to post something about the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture for quite a while. It's an online open access journal, hence one very much after this blog's's heart, with a high percentage of very good quality film-studies related articles that FSFF has frequently linked to on Twitter.

Today, JAC published an excellent dossier on Transnational Cultural Memory, an event which provided a wonderful prompt to gather together, in one place, links to everything that JAC has published to date. And below, that is just what you will find.

FSFF has also added JAC to its permanent listing of excellent, Open Access film and moving image studies journals. 

Vol. 1 (2009)

• Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson, John Sundholm  (PDF HTML XML)
• Sean Cubitt, Thinking filming thinking filming (PDF HTML XML)
• Thomas Elsaesser, Ingmar Bergman in the museum? Thresholds, limits, conditions of possibility (PDF HTML XML)
• Julia Creet, Calling on Witnesses: testimony and the deictic  (PDF HTML XML)
• Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Antichrist – Chaos Reigns: the event of violence and the haptic image in Lars von Trier’s film   (PDF HTML XML)
• Anu Koivunen, Confessions of a Free Woman: telling feminist stories in postfeminist media culture (PDF HTML XML)
• Tiina Rosenberg, On feminist activist aesthetics  (PDF HTML XML)
• Bo Florin, Confronting The Wind: a reading of a Hollywood film by Victor Sjöström (PDF HTML XML) 

Vol. 2 (2010)

• Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson, John Sundholm (PDF HTML XML) 
• Irina Aristarkhova, Hosting the animal: the art of Kathy High (PDF HTML XML)
• Maaret Koskinen, Ingmar Bergman, the biographical legend and the intermedialities of memory (PDF HTML XML)
• Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, Notes on metamodernism (PDF HTML XML)
• Anita Seppä, Globalisation and the arts: the rise of new democracy, or just another pretty suit for the old emperor? (PDF(high) PDF HTML XML)
• Tytti Soila, Passion at the threshold: Doctor Glas the flaneur in the films of Rune Carlstén and Mai Zetterling (PDF HTML XML)
• Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Strategies of interactive art (PDF(high) PDF HTML XML)
• Michael Laurence Woods, What it is? A question on the derivation of musical meaning (PDF HTML XML)
• Matthew Mullane, The aesthetic ear: sound art, Jacques Rancière and the politics of listening (PDF HTML XML)
• Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Space, time, and the arts: rewriting the Laocoon (PDF HTML XML)
• Torkild Thanem, Louise Wallenberg, Buggering Freud and Deleuze: towards a queer theory of masochism (PDF HTML XML)

Vol 3 (2011)

• Lisbeth Söderqvist, Structuralism in architecture: a definition (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Per-Arne Bodin, The holy fool as a TV hero: about Pavel Lungin’s film The Island and the problem of authenticity (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Des O'Rawe, Towards a poetics of the cinematographic frame (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Erik van Ooijen, Cinematic shots and cuts: on the ethics and semiotics of real violence in film fiction (PDF HTML EBUB XML)

• Dossier on Transnational Cultural memory
• John Sundholm, Adrian Velicu, Introduction to the dossier on transnational cultural memory (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Astrid Erll, Traumatic pasts, literary afterlives, and transcultural memory: new directions of literary and media memory studies (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Steffi Hobuß, Aspects of memory acts: transnational cultural memory and ethics (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Adrian Velicu, Cultural memory between the national and the transnational (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• John Sundholm, Visions of transnational memory (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Julia Creet, Transnational archives: the Canadian case (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen, Transnational sense of place: cinematic scenes of Finnish war child memories (PDF HTML EPUB XML)

On Figural Analysis in Fim Studies

Video essay about У самого синего моря/U samogo sinyego morya/By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, 1936). Featuring commentary by Nicole Brenez, author of Abel Ferrara (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and De la figure en général et du corps en particulier (De Boeck, 1998), professor of cinema studies at Université Paris I and programmer at the Cinémathèque Française. Video essay produced by Kevin B. Lee.

At the very least, I believe this is a good, poetic way of grasping part of the art of cinema: as an art of constantly shifting figuration. Not just on the level of bringing bodies and people into being, but also animals, objects, imaginary apparitions - in fact an entire material and virtual world. […]
     For [Nicole] Brenez as for [Gilles] Deleuze, a critical and theoretical approach of this sort marks a significant departure from classical mise en scène analysis. The venerable tool of découpage - shot-by-shot breakdown - depends upon the theatrical and dramatic unity of the filmic scene, which in turn rests upon the most cherished principle of mise en scène analysis: "bodies in space", the pro-filmic reality of bodies dwelling and moving within a space defined by a set or a landscape. Deleuze asserts, to the contrary, that "the cinema is not a theatre", and that its bodies are composed "from granules, which are granules of time". This is, in a sense, analysis in two dimensions rather than the usual three; and if there is still "depth" to a movie, it will need to be a new, differently defined kind of depth.
     Figural analysis, thus, is granular or atomic, a true "frame by frame" analysis which takes its model and inspiration from the fine-grain materiality and action of experimental cinema; it is less concerned with lenses and depth of field than with the mobile arrangment, displacement and pulsation of screen particles. Shot divisions, even scenes or sequences are less pertinent for this work than analytic "ensembles", slices of text and texture that demonstrate the economy and logic of a film's ceaseless transformation of its elements. And everything to do with character, performance and actorly presence in cinema will have to be rethought from the vantage point of this ghostly, mobile flickering of the celluloid grain as it helps to form and deform the figure of the human being on screen. [Adrian Martin, 'The body has no head: corporeal figuration in Aldrich', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000]

As Bill Routt reminds us in his admirable article on the figural in film, figural analysis is a form of hermeneutics involving the historical relation between signs and events, between the text's present condition of meaning and its capacity to draw on and summon forth the past through the power of signs. The figural opens up the historicity of the film text so that the event's past is also its 'coming to presence'. Reading the figural is to read the past in the present; to read with the 'pastness' of the text as a prefiguring of something beyond what the text says in its normative, denotative mode of signification. All texts have figures, since all texts have a past, or at least point to a past as the very materiality of their signification.

     The task of figural analysis is not limited to describing figures in film texts. Rather, it concerns the mapping of an abstract machine: a machine for writing in images, composed of various historically defined elements drawn synthetically into particular arrangements and assemblages that make film happen in the way that it does. Here I am not referring to 'context', but to a genealogical tracing of the lineages and interconnectivities between older and more recent image technologies, and their hybrid formations through time. Any given film or media text will exhibit interconnections with pre-existing modes (even if those modes have been pronounced obsolete), which define and control the potential that the film undertakes to make happen. In silent film we might trace the transformation from a theatrical to a film mode of appearance, where the former is prefigured in the latter and vice versa, for instance in the coincidence of stage and film gestures in Lillian Gish's performance in Way Down East. Here we see the emergence of a new kind of film sense vibrating in the uneasy conjunction of different techniques.

     At stake here is the proliferation of a technological apparatus for the production of images, and the power arrangements that make them appear historically. The technological apparatus is not all of a piece, but is constantly riven with the effects of an outside that produces transformational change. The image machine lives on, not because of any over-riding structure that it possesses, but through the contingent interconnections that are activated in particular image-productions. This is why it is necessary to attend carefully to films themselves, to the detailing of their mode of appearance and its relation to ideational content as a particular moment in the image machine's transformational history. [Warwick Mules, 'The Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media: D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7, December 2003 Hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Today, Film Studies For Free presents a luscious list of links to online explorations or examples of figural analysis deployed in the service of film studies. It is an eclectic, but almost certainly not yet an exhaustive list. So, if you know of further good items, please leave a comment below.

It particularly figures, if you will forgive FSFF's characteristically lame pun, the online work of French film scholar and cinephile activist Nicole Brenez, alongside that of Adrian Martin, the latter an anglophone champion of Brenez's many, increasingly influential, contributions to our international field. But there are lots of other inflections of the figural represented below, too, as per FSFF's usual pluralist linkage-leanings.

• Richard Armstrong, Modernity and the Maniac: The Fall of Janet Leigh, Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture, 2005
• Raymond Bellour, 'The Film We Accompany', Rouge, 3, 2004
  
• Briana Berg, 'Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Figuration, on Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, edited by Janet Bergstrom', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7, 2003
• [Lauren Bliss, 'Ten Fingers and Nine Toes: Embodied Representations of Pregnancy in Avant-garde Cinema', Screening the Past, forthcoming 2011]
• Nicole Brenez, 'The ultimate journey: remarks on contemporary theory', Screening the Past, December 22, 1997
• Nicole Brenez, '"Jeune, dure et pure!" A history of avant-garde and experimental film in France', Senses of Cinema, 6, 2000
• Nicole Brenez, 'À propos de Nice and the Extremely Necessary, Permanent Invention of the Cinematic Pamphlet', Rouge, 7, 2005
• Nicole Brenez, 'Come Into My Sleep', Rouge, 13, 2007
• Nicole Brenez, 'T. W. Adorno: cinema in spite of itself—but cinema all the same', Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2007
• Nicole Brenez, 'Peter Whitehead: The Exigency of Joy', Rouge, 10, 2006 
• Nicole Brenez, 'The grand style of the epoch: Baise-moi - girls better than maenads, darker than furies', Screening the Past, April 2003 (originally published in Trafic n°39 (Fall 2001)
• Nicole Brenez and Adrian Martin, 'Serious Mothlight: For Stan Brakhage (1933-2003)', Rouge, 13, 2007
• Nicole Brenez, 'Symptôme, exhibition, angoisse: représentation de la terreur dans l’œuvre allemande de Fritz Lang (1919-1933 / 1959-1960)', Editions Papiers, June 2009 (in French)
• Fergus Daly, 'Powers of Anamorphosis', Undercurrent Issue 4, 2008
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Around Painting and the "End of Cinema"', Theory Kit, 2007
• Michael Grant, 'Jean-Louis Schefer and Carl-Theodor Dreyer', Michael Grant, October 28, 2008
• Paul Douglas Grant, 'Introduction: The History of an Absence', in Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema, March 2007
• Karl Hansson, 'Screening the Figural in Film and New Art Media', The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Vol 16, No 29-30 (2004)
• Mikhail Iampolski. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Katya Mandoki, 'An enigmatic Text: Schefer's Quest upon a Thing Unknown', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, 1998
  
• Adrian Martin, 'Ultimatum: an introduction to the work of Nicole Brenez', Screening the Past, December 22, 1997
• Adrian Martin, 'The undertaker: Gilberto Perez's The material ghost: films and their medium', Screening the Past, November 12, 1999
• Adrian Martin, 'The body has no head: corporeal figuration in Aldrich', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000
• Adrian Martin, 'Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and Some Others',  Provisional Insight Colloquium series, Monash University, July 18 2008 (PODCAST: ca 1hr +) [Abstract: 'In “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud”, Paul Ricoeur (drawing upon Hegel) remarks: “The appropriation of a meaning constituted prior to me presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead of itself by a succession of ‘figures’, each of which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it.” The notion of the figural has recently become popular in European film theory and analysis, especially due to the work of Nicole Brenez – in which the figure stands for “the force … of everything that remains to be constituted” in a character, object, social relation or idea. Her use of the term refers back to magisterial work of German literary philologist Erich Auerbach (Mimesis), who decoded the religious interpretive system wherein all persons and events are grasped as significant only insofar as they prefigure their fulfilment on the ‘last day’ of divine judgement. Auerbach’s 1920s work on figuration in Dante was an important influence on his friend Walter Benjamin; and it was this ‘theological’ aspect of Benjamin’s thought that caught Kracauer’s attention, leading to the problematic of the redemption of worldly things. In this lecture I will trace the notion of figural thinking from Weimar then to Paris (and beyond) today, taking in writings by William Routt and Giorgio Agamben, as well as two filmmakers also touched by figural thinking: Josef von Sternberg and Douglas Sirk.'] 
• Adrian Martin, 'Ticket to ride: Claire Denis and the cinema of the body', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006
• Judith Mayne, 'Picturing Spectatorship', in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Understanding Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 1994) 
• Daniel Morgan, ‘No Trickery with Montage’: On Reading a Sequence in Godard’s Pierrot le fou', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• Warwick Mules, 'The Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media: D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7, December 2003
• Benjamin Noys, 'Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film', Film-Philosophy,  Vol. 8, 2004
• Laura Rascaroli, 'Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory', Kinema, 2008 
• William D. Routt, 'For Criticism, Part One', Screening the Past, March 2000 and Part Two, March 2000
• Bill Schaffer, 'Cutting The Flow: Thinking Psycho', Senses of Cinema, Issue 6, 2000
• Girish Shambu, 'Nicole Brenez: Ten Levels', Girish, February 4, 2007 
• Belén Vidal, 'Labyrinths of loss: The letter as figure of desire and deferral in the literary film',  Journal of European Studies, 36, 2006