Showing posts with label Video Essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video Essays. Show all posts

Monday, 11 April 2011

Audiovisualcy: Videographic Film Studies

Logo for Audiovisualcy at Vimeo

At the weekend, Film Studies For Free's author dreamt of a beautiful online archive, gathering together works in the burgeoning scholarly and critical genre of video essays about films and moving image studies. 

A little feverish curatorial and neologistical work later, the marvellous dream became a reality.  Audiovisualcy is that reality.

Audiovisualcy is a group page at Vimeo which gathers together in one handy and easy to find place, the numerous video essays about films, film studies and film theory already posted at that video hosting site by individual users. Twenty-eight videos [more than seventy, as of April 12], on all manner of films, are available for your perusal so far. More will be added as they are discovered or created.

If you join the group, you will automatically receive updates as new videos are posted, but you can also follow @AUDIOVISUALCY and get those at Twitter, too. If you know of any other relevant video essays at Vimeo or ones hosted on other sites, you can let the group know about them by emailing us here, and, if appropriate, these will be added and publicised.

If you are curious about the possibilities for Film Studies or for film criticism offered by this format, do please check out the links to the work of some of more prolific, and (beginning with Matt Zoller Seitz) talented, essayists, below.


Catherine Grant: 
Matt Zoller Seitz:
Kevin B. Lee:
Steven Santos:
Jim Emerson:
Kartina Richardson:
Jason Bellamy:
Ben Sampson:
Paul Malcolm:
Eric Faden:
Also see the following online journals which have regularly published video essays:
Posted by purnawan at 06:17 0 comments
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Sunday, 12 September 2010

Le Génie de la liberté: In Memory of Claude Chabrol




Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear this morning of the death at the age of 80 of French film-maker Claude Chabrol, one of the true giants of world cinema.

David Hudson is gathering links to online tributes to the filmmaker. Below, FSFF has assembled an (updated/expanded) list of links to online and freely accessible studies of Chabrol's magnificent cinematic legacy.


    Posted by purnawan at 03:41 0 comments
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    Tuesday, 3 August 2010

    "Roots of Third Cinema" and other Michael Chanan films and videos online

    Roots of Third Cinema from Michael Chanan on Vimeo 
    (made available for teaching and private viewing only)

    As regular readers of this blog will know, Film Studies For Free is a fervent admirer of the work of filmmaker and academic writer Michael Chanan, Professor of Film at Roehampton University. Chanan has been making his work accessible online for a long time now. And now his professional website and his great blog Putney Debater have been joined by a Vimeo account where he is gradually archiving some marvellous audiovisual work from an impressive back catalogue.

    FSFF has embedded one of its favourite items above, Roots of Third Cinema which has been extracted and re-edited from Chanan's enormously important and influential documentary New Cinema of Latin America (Channel Four, 1983). This is an incredibly rich and useful scholarly resource, FSFF is sure you will agree.

    Written, produced, and directed by Chanan with photography by Peter Chappell, part I of New Cinema of Latin America traced the origins and development of the new cinema movement in the countries of Latin America from the early 1950s to the present and examines its political and social themes. In part II the political and cultural dimensions of the new cinema since the 1960s were explored in greater detail. The film examined the new cinema's political concerns, its desire to give expression to the traditional cultures, national identities, and everyday experiences of Latin Americans, and the growing prominence of feminist cinema. Both parts included commentary by directors and others active in the new cinema movement and excerpts from numerous films.

    [FSFF has devoted a number of previous entries to online and openly accessible resources on Third Cinema in the past. See especially this bumper post.]
    Posted by purnawan at 04:37 0 comments
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    Thursday, 10 June 2010

    Film Critics of Tomorrow, Yesteryear and Today: Two Competitions

    (If you'd like to help with Boone's next venture, click here).

    Film Studies For Free begins its rather atypical post with the following questions: does FSFF have any film fanatical/cinephile, teenage readers? Or, do any of its venerable, film-academic readers have any film fanatical/cinephile, teenage relatives? If so (and if they are UK based), please read/get them to read about the "Film Critic of Tomorrow" competition - all details given at the foot of this post. Do please fondly remember this potentially life-changing blog-post if any of you or yours win...

    Secondly, FSFF would like to help whip up some timely interest in the work one of the more talented, cinema-inspired, video essayists working today, New-York based Steven Boone, in order to help him make some more films. So, it proudly presents its first ever competition (and there's no age restriction, unlike the Film Critic of Tomorrow comp, as set out at the foot of this post)!

    Here are the rules: write a piece of film criticism, in 200-400 words, about Boone's video "Notes for a David Lynch adaptation of [Michael Jackon's autobiography] Moonwalk" embedded above. Submit your entry by email to this address by next Thursday, July 1st (deadline extended), 17.00 hours GMT.

    The most interesting entries received (and hopefully there will be some...) will be published in a future FSFF post. And the author of the most insightful and well-crafted will be mailed the more pristine copy (of the two in FSFF's possession) of Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb's important and fascinating 2009 collection of essays Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, Vol. 1. . Let the competition commence! (And thank you for your kind indulgence).

    Finally, today's FSFF post exists to exhort you, were such exhortation really necessary, to read David Bordwell's latest brilliant blogpost: "Glancing backward, mostly at critics".

    You may not believe it, but magical things will happen if you do. Indeed, it was while she was doing just that, that FSFF's author noticed for the first time an item in Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's wonderful list of freely accessible research items (in the upper left hand column of the site): a link to a PDF file of the introductory chapter to Bordwell's magnificent opus The Way Hollywood Sees It: Story and Style in Modern Movies [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006]). If you haven't read this before, you must. And now you easily can!

      Here’s looking at you kids......
      VIRGIN MEDIA and JAMES KING LAUNCH SEARCH FOR THE FILM CRITIC OF TOMORROW

      Virgin Media has joined forces with broadcaster, James King [a Film and Television Studies graduate from the University of Warwick's brilliant degree programme], in searching the country for aspiring young film critics, to join the judging panel for the third annual Virgin Media Shorts competition.

      As one of the industry’s finest film critics, James has already secured his place on the Virgin Media Shorts judging panel and is now looking for one lucky teenager to join him, alongside follow judges:
      -          Award-winning British film actress, Thandie Newton
      -          Film director, Duncan Jones, best known for his directorial debut Moon
      -          Film director, Mike Newell, director of Four Weddings and a Funeral
      -          Executive director of digital entertainment at Virgin Media, Cindy Rose
      -          Senior production executive at the UK Film Council, Chris Collins

      As part of the judging panel, the lucky teen will work with the expert panel to select the Grand Prize Winner from the short-listed films entered into this year’s competition. The winner will also get the Hollywood treatment, receiving an all expenses paid trip to London to attend the red carpet awards ceremony and mingle with the star-studded judging panel. Following in the footsteps of last year’s winner, 14-year old Jordan Campbell from Glasgow, who described the experience as feeling as popular as Susan Boyle!

      Speaking about the competition, James King said: “Virgin Media Shorts already offers a fantastic opportunity for British film-making talent – shining a light on new and established individuals. However, what I am most looking forward to is discovering the talent of tomorrow. The search for a young film critic to join me on the Virgin Media Shorts judging panel will open the door to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for one aspiring youngster. And, I may even pick up some tips from them too!”

      Entry is open to film fanatics aged between 13-19 years old and who think they’ve got what it takes to impress James. To enter, young film fans should visit www.virginmediashorts.co.uk/vipjudge and fill out the simple entry form. Deadline for entries is 5pm on Wednesday 30th June when all entries will be reviewed and one teenager crowned the overall winner.

      For more information about Virgin Media Shorts and to view some of this year’s entries, visit www.virginmediashorts.co.uk
      Posted by purnawan at 05:08 0 comments
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      Thursday, 22 April 2010

      Audiovisual Thinking: Online Video Journal about Audiovisuality, Communication & Media



      Film Studies For Free predicted at the beginning of this year that 2010 would be the year of the video essay. And thus it has come to pass... Woohoo!

      Audiovisual Thinking -- an online video journal about "audiovisuality, communication and media" -- has just launched and it looks to FSFF to be a very worthwhile venture indeed. All relevant information has been pasted in below to tempt you to the excellent AT website. There are lots of introductory videos embedded there which will inform you audiovisually about the Audiovisual Thinking ethos.

      Audiovisual Thinking has issued its first call for videos for its first proper issue which will explore the "legacy and merit of the use of audiovisual material in academic thinking, research and teaching, in the past, present and in the future" (deadline: June 15, 2010; do note: according to the submission form (as of April 22) the videos should be no longer than seven minutes and a maximum of [an as yet quite tiny] 10 Mb [Update: The editors reported to FSFF that they are working on achieving a larger, automated, upload volume. If you have larger submissions, these can be uploaded manually, so just get in touch with the editors via the website's contact page].

      If you don't yet completely understand why FSFF is so pleased with this development, you should check out the following propaganda piece that it published last July: Video Essays on Films: A Multiprotagonist Manifesto. Also, do have a peruse of all the video essays embedded at FSFF, including this little one we prepared earlier (sadly, it's just a little longer than seven minutes and larger than 10Mb or 100Mb...).
      About Audiovisual Thinking
      Audiovisual Thinking is a pioneering forum where academics and educators can articulate, conceptualize and disseminate their research about audiovisuality and audiovisual culture through the medium of video.
           International in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, the purpose of Audiovisual Thinking is to develop and promote academic thinking in and about all aspects of audiovisuality and audiovisual culture.
          Advised by a board of leading academics and thinkers in the fields of audiovisuality, communication and the media, the journal seeks to set the standard for academic audiovisual essays now and in the future.
          Video submissions are welcome from all fields of study and, as one would expect, the main criteria for submissions are that the discussion and thinking are conveyed through audiovisual means.
      Each issue of Audiovisual Thinking will call for and then showcase academic videos around a specific theme within audiovisual culture and the media. The journal also accepts ‘opinion’ or ‘reflective’ audiovisual pieces on any area of audiovisual research or pedagogy. 
          Submissions are welcome from the areas of the Arts, Journalism, Media and Communication studies, as well as Education and the Social Sciences where audiovisual material is routinely used, or is gaining ground, as an academic research tool or teaching method.
           This first issue will explore the legacy of audiovisual content in contemporary academic research and thinking. Submit your video here.
      Posted by purnawan at 08:01 0 comments
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      Saturday, 10 April 2010

      The thrill of transcendence: Kathryn Bigelow Studies

      Updated with video and new links on April 12, 2010
      Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan Turner in Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)
      [Kathryn] Bigelow’s earliest works are often radical experiments with genres—combinatory, subtractive, subversive, offering a tool for crafting a mode of vital self-reflexive cinema in which the spectator becomes a thrill junkie, like the restless characters in Bigelow’s films. Ultimately, however, the raw exhilaration experienced by Bigelow’s characters must end so they can come to terms with reality and the laws—be they legal or gravitational—that anchor them to society. The later films show an interest in group dynamics as a form of politics or, perhaps, as an ideal of social living contained but not determined by politics. The turning point between these two parts of Bigelow’s career is Strange Days, whose protagonist attempts to wean himself off his addiction to spectacle in order to face the violence of his urban surroundings.
           This is the double bind Bigelow investigates: while thrill is ultimately an alienating form of individualism, the “real world” tends to be a trap, whether confining or merely banal. While Bigelow’s films reveal genre cinema’s promise of glossy escapism to be a dead end, they also pointedly argue that re-engagement with community is tantamount to conformity. One possible escape is offered to Bigelow’s protagonists by seeking out those extreme situations on the bohemian, criminal and physically fraught margins of society, where the rules can be broken and the self fleetingly transcended. Kathryn Bigelow, 'Filmmaking at the Dark Edge of Exhilaration', Harvard Film Archive, 2009
      A little while back, Film Studies For Free promised a list of links to openly accessible scholarly essays on the work of filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, recent recipient of the Academy Award for Best Director for Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker (2009; see that film's Press Kit/Production Notes). And now FSFF's Bigelow Study Day has finally arrived - maybe not its longest links list ever, but one full of highest quality material nonetheless. The links follow the wonderful embedded video 'Outlaw Vision: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker' created for The L Magazine by Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz.



          Posted by purnawan at 08:36 0 comments
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          Wednesday, 3 March 2010

          B for Bad Cinema: Colloquy from Monash

          Image from Snakes on a Plane (David R. Ellis, 2006); Read Kirsten Stevens's article Snakes on a Plane and the prefabricated cult film' (pdf) from the new issue of Colloquy

          It's going to continue to be a little quiet around here at Film Studies For Free as its author busies herself with finishing off a couple of video essays that will be posted here very shortly.

          The essays will also form the basis of two talks to be given in the next few weeks: on March 8 at Liverpool John Moores University; and on March 17 at the University of Sussex (details to follow).

          The title of both talks, as per the following abstract, is:
          Quote/Unquote? The "Unattainable [Film] Text" in the Age of Digital Reproduction
          Following the lead of scholars Christian Keathley, Eric Faden, Jason Mittell, Andrew Miller and Craig Cieslikowski in the summary of their conference panel on The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age (MIT6, Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, April 24-26, 2009), in this talk Catherine Grant will revisit Raymond Bellour's essay on 'The Unattainable Text' (Screen, Vol 16, No 3, 1975: 19-27), as well as Laura Mulvey's more recent considerations of film 'possession', and 'pensiveness' in the digital age (Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2006). Then she will examine the issue of film quotation in audiovisual work, as well as, more generally, the possibilities offered to film studies by the rising generation of online digital-video essays about films and film theory.


          All articles are in pdf format. To download the whole issue as one file, click Issue 18.
          Front
          Contents
          Editorial

          B for Bad Cinema from Colloquy (Monash University), Issue 18, December 2009
          Posted by purnawan at 02:58 0 comments
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          Tuesday, 23 February 2010

          Road movies: On Chris Petit's film & video essays

          Last updated February 24, 2010
          Brilliant profile of film director Chris Petit in conversation with Allan Bairstow. 

          “I was interested in seeing if there was a way of producing a film which was constructed more like writing - because when you are writing something you don't necessarily know where it is going to end up... The Falconer [Petit, 1997] for example never really aspired to be a film, more to a state of mutation or hybrid. It was an essay or graphic novel as much as it was a film, an exercise in vertical layering rather than linear unfolding.”
          Truth and invention, real lives and fiction become indistinct and equal elements, merging with other people's work in the found-footage style, to create a single fabric of random spontaneous expressiveness, not unlike the life that slides by in front of a shop video camera. Each piece of film presents a clue to an inextricable tangle to which everything in the world is connected in its spider web of time, space and chance.
             — Excerpt from Serafino Murri, `Chris Petit, Anatomies of the Image', in Afterall - A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 5, February 2002
          Chris [Petit] was much taken with [critic Manny Farber's] writings on American cinema of the 1940s, and with the way in which Farber could notice a detail in a movie, a moment, a glance, and celebrate the beauty and complexity of just that. The narrative was largely unimportant, but the way an actor like Robert Mitchum moved, or the way Bogart looked up just before crossing a street, these were the things that Farber believed were significant.
               So Chris made a film essay about these ideas that is a road trip across Arizona and Nevada and California, and through the psyche of American cinema. It's a documentary in which the road becomes a movie, just as it did for Wenders and so many others. It's about film and about memory, as well as about the way we mis-remember movies -- and life -- all the time. It's a television programme that's also about photography (the Polaroid frame is a key device) and about painting. It's about Rossellini and Godard, and about Europe and the USA. And it's a sort of a love story too, between the filmmaker and his travelling companion.
               There are so many things to like about negative space: the ways in which it interrogates sequences and the surfaces of the cinema image; its complex, half-heard and half-recalled soundtrack; the sense of nostalgia for cinema, and for a particular studio-based cinema from a specific historical moment; the unexpected beauty of small-town America in both the 1940s and the 1990s; its analysis of physical and psychological and cinematic space; the bold, deliberate provocation of a film made for television that breaks most of the rules; and then at its centre, the rueful, wise and fragile Manny Farber, filmed so informally by the director on a camcoder that sometimes you wonder if he ever looked through the viewfinder.

          Film Studies For Free's author has been doing a little research on the wonderful work of British filmmaker and video essayist Chris Petit. It seemed only proper, therefore, that she should share the excellent online and freely accessible sources she came across in the process -- including the remarkable documentary embedded above - with this blog's faithful readers.

          If you are specifically interested in Manny Farber, subject of Petit's brilliant 1999 film for television negative space (someone, anyone, please release this film on DVD!), then you should also check out yesterday's FSFF post.

          Petit has recently premiered, in Rotterdam and London, a new documentary called Content, described in its press material thus:
          an ambient 21st century road movie that is essay rather than fiction, drift rather than destination. It is a film about life in the rearview mirror, memories of other journeys (Poland to Texas), the You Tube generation and email seduction. It is also about driving into the flatlands of late middle age, about fathers and sons and growing up in the cold war, about genocide and political assassination, and the postwar landscapes of Europe and the USA.
          Content will be screened again in early March at London's ICA.

          If you live in or near that city, you can see two of Petit's feature-length films for free at the BFI Southbank Mediatheque (Radio On [1997] and London Orbital [2002], co-directed by Iain Sinclair).

          Online work by Chris Petit:
          Online writing about Chris Petit's films
            Posted by purnawan at 05:36 0 comments
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            Thursday, 14 January 2010

            Study of a Single Film: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)




            What makes A.I. Steven Spielberg’s strangest, most interesting, and (though it may sound ironic to say it) most mature work is that, whether by accident or design, it’s the first of his movies to be both a “children’s” film, ingratiating and manipulative, and a film for adults—complex, ambiguous, brutal and cold. Or, to put it another way, both a Steven Spielberg film and a Stanley Kubrick film.
            Tim Kreider, 'A.I.: Artificial Intelligence', originally published in Film Quarterly, Vol. 56, no. 2, December 2002


            Although Stanley Kubrick spent almost two decades developing A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Steven Spielberg would eventually write and direct the final film after Kubrick’s death. While it may seem odd for a single work to result from two creators—especially two directors so distinct in style and temperament—this combination of minds actually reflects the themes and motifs of the film. Within its visual text, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is obsessed with patterns of doubling and circular design. Throughout the film, faces become superimposed on top of one another, different characters repeat similar actions, and even the film narrative circles around on itself. In addition, specific characters are repeatedly framed through oval structures or reflected against rounded surfaces. These repetitions of shot choice and composition suggest multiple readings and underlying themes, including an interconnection between humans and machines that spans both desire and destiny.
            Ben Sampson, ''Intelligence Doubled: A Visual Study of A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, UCLA, 2010
            Way back in the increasingly dim and distant past, when Film Studies For Free's author used to teach film studies in a real classroom ... to real people ... (imagine!), one of her favourite courses was called Study of a Single Film. It fruitfully took a single film as its subject and object, for a whole semester,  revealing -- even to students who had hoped they might be able to choose the film themselves... -- the many benefits of truly concentrated film analysis and scholarship.

            FSFF was reminded of these benefits when its attention was drawn to a marvellous new video essay on a single film by Benjamin Sampson, a graduate researcher in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. Sampson is the creator of another visual essay that this blog loved, on Orson Welles's F for Fake, originally published in the online UCLA journal Mediascape. According to the Mediascape website, prior to his graduate studies, Sampson worked for four years as a freelance videographer and video editor. His current research focuses on the later films of Orson Welles, audience segmentation in the 1950s, and essay films

            Sampson's magnificently edited and profoundly argued new essay, embedded above, studies in detail the design and purpose of the many motifs of duality in Steven Spielberg's 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence. As Sampson himself notes in his commentary, duality is a particularly interesting aspect to study in relation to A.I., as it was the film with which Spielberg 'completed' Stanley Kubrick's original project in his own fashion. The essay is very timely, too: while somewhat derided by serious film criticism at the time of its release, A.I. recently found its way into some of the most discerning 'Best Films of the Decade' lists (see here [Reverse Shot], here [Glenn Kenny], and here [Jonathan Rosenbaum]), very deservedly in this blog's humble opinion.

            In honour of A.I., as well as in celebration of Ben Sampson's wonderful, multimedia essay on it -- a piece of work which really begins to show what scholarly video essays can achieve, FSFF today launches its occasional series of 'Study of a Single Film' blog-posts.

            There'll be links galore to online and openly accessible film scholarship or criticism of note (as below), all pertaining to great films of particular relevance to academic film studies. More of the usual, really...

            But if you'd like to suggest a fruitful film for this series on which FSFF might base future such blogposts, or if, like Sampson, you have produced a really good scholarly video essay on a single film (or know of someone else who has) that might be centrepiece of future posts, do please get in touch by email.
            Posted by purnawan at 03:53 0 comments
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