Cahiers2Cinéma: January 2011

Sunday, 30 January 2011

Sound on Screen: The Exorcist, Haneke, J-Horror, Warner Bros., animation, Apocalypse Now

Image from Apocalypse Now Redux (Francis Ford Coppola, 2001)

Film Studies For Free only just heard about the Spring 2010 issue of online journal Cinephile (Vol. 6 No. 1). So, while technically FSFF is 'rushing you the news', it red-facedly admits that it arrived a little late to this particular, openly accessible, Film Studies party...

Anyhoooo, it's an excellent issue on ‘Sound on Screen’, available as one large PDF. The contents are given below.

FSFF earnestly promises to keep its e-ears closer to the ground next time an issue is due...

Table of Contents

'William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and the Proprietary Nature of Sound' by Jay Beck

'Acoustic Infidelities: Sounding the Exchanges between J-Horror and H-Horror Remakes' by William Whittington

'Listening to Silence: The Films of Michael Haneke' by Lisa Coulthard

'Audiovisual Ecology in the Cinema' by Randolph Jordan

'Lunacy at Termite Terrace: The Slapstick Style of Warner Bros. Animation' by Andres Lombana Bermudez

'On the Occult Nature of Sound-Image Synchronization' by K. J. Donnelly

'The New Scene Canon - Chopping Choppers Unforgettably: The "Nowhere to Go but Down" Scene in Apocalypse Now' by Mark Harris

Saturday, 29 January 2011

Werner Herzog's Cave: videos and links

One of the most distinctive filmmakers of our time, Werner Herzog has been called the "romantic visionary" of the New German Cinema movement. His edgy, larger-than-life films fuse the epic with the intimate, redefining the scale and scope of filmmaking to include more than 60 works shot on every continent. He appeared in conversation with acclaimed author and essayist, Pico Iyer at UC Santa Barbara on October 25, 2010. (download the video here)

A 10 minute fragment from a 'masterclass' with Werner Herzog. For 7 Planete Doc Review, with Pamela Cohn with Michałem Chacińskim, 2010. Also see this video.

Film Studies For Free hopes its Werner Herzog-obsessive readers will have a few hours to spare. They'll need them to watch the above embedded (and linked to) videos, some of the more recent, and most worthwhile of freely accessible online encounters with LA's most interesting resident filmmaker.

These videos, and the critical and scholarly reading below, will help time pass before the Spring 2011 premiere of Herzog's latest (3D) film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (trailer, related video, second related video). Don't say that FSFF isn't looking out for you, Herzog-ites!

Scholarly online writing about Herzog:

Jesse Amato-Grill, 'Trappings', Mercer Street, 2007

Matthias Wilhelm Benfey, Religious cinema as virtual religious experience : a theory of religious cinema applied to Werner Herzog's Herz aus Glas, PhD Thesis, McGill University, 1986

Adam Bingham, 'Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzog's La Soufrière', Senses of Cinema, September 2006

Tom Bissell, 'The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the Images of Werner Herzog', Harpers Magazine, December 2006

Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, 'Of Gods and Grizzlies: The Non-Aesthetic of Nature and the new Kinship of Werner Herzog and Caspar David Friedrich', Senior Thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 2006

Buffalo Film Seminars - selected writings about Herzog (and, especially, Aguirre: Wrath of God)

Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, 'An Adaptation With Fangs: Herzog's Nosferatu,' Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 20, December 2002

Alkan Chipperfield, 'Murmurs from a Shadowless Land: Fragmentary Reflections on the Cinema of Werner Herzog', Senses of Cinema, June 2001

David Church, 'Werner Herzog', Senses of Cinema, June 2006

David Church, 'Examining the Role of Disability in Herzog's Even Dwarves Started Small', Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol 25, No 4 (2005)

Roger Dawkins, 'Thoughts of Deleuze, Spinoza and the Cinema (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)', Contretemps, 3 July 2002

Eric Dewberry, 'Conceiving Grizzly Man through the "Powers of the False"', Scope, Issue 11, June 2008

Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Cinema of Irony', Monogram no. 5, 1973

Thomas Elsaesser, 'Hyper-, Retro- or Counter-European Cinema as Third Cinema between Hollywood and Art Cinema', in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood(Amsterdam University Press, 2005)

Caryl Flynn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2004 2004

Andrew W. Hurley, 'Re-imagining Milirrpum v Nabalco in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream', Paper delivered at PASSAGES: law, aesthetics, politics 13–14 July 2006 Melbourne Australia

David T Johnson, '"You Must Never Listen to This": Lessons on Sound, Cinema, and Mortality from Herzog's Grizzly Man', Film Criticism; Spring 2008, 32: 3

Michael Koller, 'The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

Joe Muszynski, 'A Legacy of Quality: Werner Herzog's Nosferatu and the New German Cinema'

Benjamin Noys, 'Antiphusis: Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man', Film-Philosophy, 11.3, November 2006

Ingo Petzke, 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

Cynthia Rockwell, 'Werner Herzog and the Documentary Film', e-Thesis, Boston University 1994

Antonia Shanahan, 'My Best Fiend', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

John W. White, 'On Werner Herzog’s Documentary Grizzly Man: Psychoanalysis, Nature, and Meaning', Fast capitalism, 4.1, 2008

Saturday, 22 January 2011

Fifteen Film Studies Guest Lectures at the University of Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, 19 January 2011

A 'Borgesian' Film Studies Library?

Charalambos Charalambous on Film Studies for Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 13 January 2011

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

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

Clip from NITRATE KISSES by Barbara Hammer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on her career and Feminist film

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on Maya Deren

Barbara Hammer Faculty page at European Graduate School

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

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

Barbara Hammer's website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, 8 January 2011

Young and Undead: On Child and Teen Vampire Movies

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 6 January 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Special Edition: Screen Dance Audiences – why now?

Articles

Reviews

Monday, 3 January 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BFI Screenoline 'Working Class Heroes'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, 2 January 2011

On Digital Cinema, Visual Effects, and CGI Studies

Faking it? Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Happy New Year, dear readers! A truly chilled out Film Studies For Free is back from vacation, and raring to go with a pretty impressive (if it says so itself) entry of direct links to openly accessible scholarly work on digital cinema and computer generated imagery studies.

The post was inspired by news of the availability as a free download of 'Digital Bodies' - a chapter, translated into English, from esteemed scholar Barbara Flueckiger's 2008 German-language book Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer.

Flueckiger, Associate Professor at the University of Zurich's Institute of Cinema Studies, has also just published her great database on the history of CGI, VFX, and computer animation online.

Vielen Dank, Barbara! Thanks also to all the scholars listed below for choosing to publish their work in freely accessible venues online!

Finally, in case you hadn't yet heard of the best website for regular, informed discussions of special and visual effects in the cinema, do check out film scholar Dan North's awe-inspiring blog Spectacular Attractions!