Issues of KINEMA (Spring and Fall 2010)

Image from Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007). Read Alessandro's Zir's article on this film for Kinema (Spring 2010)

Film Studies For Free continues with its roundup of recent offerings from online film studies journal by catching up with the last two issues posted at Kinema: a Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media.

Lots of good stuff here, but FSFF particularly enjoyed Alessandro Zir's essay on Paranoid Park, Antonio Sanna on the connections between the Alien series of films and Bram Stoker's Dracula novel, and Des O'Rawe's study of Godard's Film Socialisme.

Spring 2010

'The Art of Creative Scriptural Extrapolation [on Celil B. De Mille's films]' by Anton Karl Kozlovic
'Reproducing the Fin-de-siècle Gothic with Techno-Gothic Vampires' by Antonio Sanna
'Film, Arts and Culture as Community Outreach Tools' by Victor S. O. Yu
'Interview with Gary Tooze' by Jan Uhdeby
'Going to the Movies in Egypt' by Mustafa Mahmoud Yousry
'The Desire for History in Lars von Trier’s Europa and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork' by Angelos Koutsourakis
'Non-Realism and Ontology in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park' by Alessandro Zir

Fall 2010

'The Fraternity of Metaphors: Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme' by Des O'Rawe'
'Interview with Kevin Brownlow on the Making of Winstanley' by Tony Tracy
'Targeting Alien Filmmakers in 1930s Hollywood' by J. Emmett Winn
'Woody Allen as Impossible Cassandra' by Alessandro Zir
'The Language and Genealogy of Early Spy Cinema' by Lukasz Boron
'Interview with Singapore Filmmaker Boo Junfeng' by Yvonne Ng
'The New Vicissitudes of Auteur Cinema' by Christina Stojanova

On the Documentary Real - in Fiction and Documentary cinema and television

Stella Bruzzi, 'Plenary Lecture: Approximation: Mad Men, the death of JFK and nearly history' [NOTE: Presentation begins a few minutes in after a brief 'Blooper' Reel, with some profanities...!] (Audio: Stella Bruzzi: lecture ; Video: Stella Bruzzi: questions; Audio: Stella Bruzzi: questions)

A fairly self-explanatory post from Film Studies For Free today: a collection of brilliant videos, above and below, recorded at the Documentary Real symposium which took place at October 21st, 2010 at the 'Vooruit' in Ghent, Belgium.

The main participants were Cis Bierinckx (curator, artistic director Beurshouwburg Brussels), Stella Bruzzi (film theory, University of Warwick), Edwin Carels (curator, art theory, KASK), Marc De Kesel (Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, Artevelde Hogeschool Gent), Katerina Gregos (curator), Steven Jacobs (art history, KASK and Antwerp University), Vincent Meessen (artist), Jasper Rigole (artist), Avi Mograbi (Israeli filmmaker), and Duncan Speakman (artist).

So, with no further ado, here's the symposium introduction, and below that are the remainder of the videos: 

The symposium 'The Documentary Real invite[d] artists and theorists to interrogate the ambiguous relation between documentary film and reality. To what extent can a reel of film capture reality—if this is possible at all—and when can we say that it calls a new reality into being? Do not most films oscillate between ‘document’ and ‘argument’; that is, between representing, rewriting and creating reality? Moreover, what strategies do artists use to document our daily lives? Is the detour through alienation and animation perhaps the proper way to make an outright and truthful work? Do new developments in technological media provide new opportunities for documentary artists? Finally, how do these artistic experiments and their problems represent the culture we live in?

Robrecht Vanderbeeken, 'Introduction' to The Documentary Real Symposium.

Katerina Gregos, 'The Elastic Documentary' (Audio: Katerina Gregos: lecture); Video: Katerina Gregos: questions; Audio: Katerina Gregos: questions)

Edwin Carels, 'Re-animating Animation' (Audio: Edwin Carels)

Steven Jacobs, 'Framing Pictures' (Audio: Steven Jacobs)

Vincent Meessen, 'CLINAMEN Cinema - the Documentary Swerve: A Performative Lecture' (NOTE: The performative lecture of Vincent Meessen included a screening of unique footage of a famous modernist architect protected by copyrights. For this reason the presentation cannot be made available online. Only the introduction and questions after the performance are shown). Audio: Vincent Meessen

Duncan Speakman, 'Subtlemob' (Audio: Duncan Speakman)

Marc De Kesel, 'Hotel Holocaust: On "Shoah Documentary Real"' (Audio: Marc De Kesel: lecture; Video: Marc De Kesel: questions; Audio: Marc De Kesel: questions) 

Cis Bierinckx introduces two films '"Details 2 and 3" by Avi Mograbi' (Audio: Cis Bierinckx)

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

Jump Cut's Best Issue Ever?

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

Back from its annual holidays, and (rather languidly) catching up with what it has missed, Film Studies For Free couldn't believe its luck to discover that the always excellent film and television studies e-journal Jump Cut had published one of its best (and biggest) issues ever.  Just take a look at the following tasty section headings and then scroll down further for direct links to each and every article. 

Experimental documentary; Reframing Standard Operating Procedure—Errol Morris and the creative treatment of Abu Ghraib; Corporate Hollywood today; U.S. film; International film and television (East Asian film and television; South Asian film; Latin American film; Central Asian television; European film and television; Middle Eastern film); Sex and its Anxieties; Torture and horror film; Experimental and art worlds; and The last word on Fretting about film criticism. 

By the way, if you are a Facebook user and would like to receive FSFF's frequent, short, recommendations of openly accessible film studies resources of note, but don't want to join its merry legion of Twitter followers, then why not visit and like Film Studies For Free's handy Facebook page where lots of great and good film and moving image studies folk hang out?

Jump Cut, No. 52, summer 2010

Experimental documentary

 

• Introduction by Chuck Kleinhans (Documentaries with different forms, different agendas, different means) 
• “How it was then”: home movies as history in Peter Forgacs’ Meanwhile Somewhere... by William C. Wees (From home movies shot between 1940 and 1943, Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács creates an extraordinary account of ordinary–and not so ordinary–life in wartime Europe) 
• The global repositioning of the city symphony: sound, space, and trauma in 11’09”01—September 11 by Maria Pramaggiore (The cultural work of memorializing traumatic events, here examining the film 11’9”01-September 11 (Brigand 2002) and, specifically, its use of experimental film genres and strategies) 
• On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a constructivist: Perry Bard’s The Man With the Movie Camera: The Global Remake by Seth Feldman (Ninety years ago, Dziga Vertov dreamed about an entire nation collectively making films. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world can do just that — and it's Vertov's film that they are making) 
• Memoradic narrative in The Shoebox by Janet Marles (An innovative approach to online documentary creates an interactive architecture mimicking the process of personal memory recall) 
• Sick shit happens: everyday histories in Martin Creed’s Body Docs  by James P. Hansen (In Sick Film (2006) and Shit Film (2006), contemporary British artist Martin Creed locates a unique sense of commonality and equality within the everyday historical acts of vomiting and shitting)

Conference report: Reframing Standard Operating Procedure—Errol Morris and the creative treatment of Abu Ghraib [Society for Cinema and Media Studies panel. Saturday, March 20, 2010. 2:00-3:45 pm. Chaired by Linda Williams (University of California, Berkeley). Papers by Bill Nichols (San Francisco State University), Jonathan Kahana (New York University), and Williams with a response by Irina Leimbacher (University of California, Berkeley)]

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

Corporate Hollywood today

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

U.S. film

• Light Bouncing: digital processes illuminate the cultural past by Deborah Tudor (As filmmakers define the relationship between analog and digital image capture, some like JJ Abrams with Star Trek use digital tools to create a nostalgic reproduction of film effects while others like Michael Mann in Public Enemies approach digital capture as a way to try to reframe the way audiences view cinema) 
• Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker: a jack-in-the-box story by Robert Alpert (In depicting the daily activities of a U.S. bomb squad in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow continues to explore the rules of engagement of her culture and the resulting emotional schizophrenia and deathly effect on those who would challenge those rules) 
• "Come Back to the Humvee Ag’in James Honey," or a few comments about the sexual politics of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker by Sam Whitsitt (The great American love story between a white male and a dark-skinned male Other  gets a twist that puts the White guy on top and the Black man beneath (but lovin’ it, chile!)) 
• Maternity divided: Avatar and the enjoyment of nature by Todd McGowan (James Cameron's Avatar politicizes the natural world by depicting it as divided against itself) 
• Terminator to Avatar: a postmodern shift by Kimberly N. Rosenfeld (Two popular narratives are decoded to illustrate U.S. society’s turn from a modern Terminator mindset to a postmodern Avatar era) 
• District 9 and its world by James Zborowski (Blomkamp’s up-to-the-minute representation of social problems in his thrilling South African sci-fi promises something different from what it ultimately delivers) 
• Demeter and Persephone in space: transformation, femininity, and myth in the Alien films by David Greven (The Alien films are modern horror versions of the classical Hollywood woman's film that, like this genre, foregrounds the heroine's remarkable ability to transform in myriad ways) 
• Another kind of monster: Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer by Dahlia Schweitzer (Office Killer is Cindy Sherman's only film, and it provides essential clues to understanding her entire body of work. So why isn't anyone talking about it?) 
• Film and ecology by Stephen Rust (Review of Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (New York: SUNY Press, 2009)) 
• Passage as journey in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals: a narrative of environmental adaptation by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann (In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, Native Americans in Smoke Signals (1998) adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home) 
• Field of American dreams: individualist ideology in the U.S. baseball movie by Tom Robson (A look at how Hollywood has used the baseball movie to reinforce and reinscribe individualist capitalist ideology and how this ideology contributed to an explosion of successful baseball films during the Reagan years) 
• Who is missing in Bunny Lake? by Dahlia Schweitzer (Is Ann losing her mind or just her child? An examination of what, exactly, has gone missing in Preminger's classic film) 
• The Hollywood two: 1945 and 1946 as filmgoing's best years by Catherine Clepper (Review of Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron’s Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945-1946 (Rutgers University Press, 2009)Hollywood historians often note the final wartime years as the most successful period of U.S. exhibition, but do sky-high attendance records suggest that these years were also Hollywood's creative pinnacle?)

International film and television

East Asian film and television

• The circulation of Hong Kong television: imaginary landscapes, transnational Chinese publics and global Chinatown by Amy Lee (Hong Kong television is a diasporic medium that connects Hong Kong to Chinatowns throughout the world — a transnational media geography best encapsulated by the notion of “global Chinatown.”) 
• Japanese cinema, Swallowtail Butterfly, and the classroom by Colleen A. Laird (An analysis of Iwai Shunji’s popular and “problematic” film Swallowtail Butterfly addresses issues of canon and education in order to challenge some of the established patterns in Japanese cinema classrooms and scholarship) 
• “It’s better not to lie, but it’s hard to stimulate the audience otherwise”: realism and melodrama in Lee Chang-Dong’s Secret Sunshine by Marc Raymond (A detailed formal analysis of the 2007 South Korean melodrama Secret Sunshine explores how melodrama and realism can interact to create and interrogate meaning in popular film form) 
• Transnational China and Hollywood-ized Chineseness: interventions and discontents by Kin-Yan Szeto (Review of Gina Marchetti, Tan See Kam, and Peter X Feng’s edited volume Chinese Connections: Critical Perspective on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009) and Kenneth Chan’s Remade in Hollywood: The Global Chinese Presence in Transnational Chinese Cinemas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009) Two recent scholarly volumes deal with the overlapping contact zones between Chinese diasporic cinema and other cinemas (such as Hollywood, etc). Szeto suggests that thinking, writing and teaching film and cultural criticism demands a dialectically critical approach, one that unveils what has been concealed and failed to be articulated in the East/West dichotomy)

South Asian film

• Rage against the state: historicizing the “angry young man” in Tamil cinema by Kumuthan Maderya (Tamil cinema’s “Angry Young Man” genre enjoyed a popular run in the 1980s, depicting the violent struggle of anti-heroes against failed bureaucracies, corrupt politicians, crooked cops, and a feeble justice system) 
• Indian cinema and Partition by Jyotika Virdi (Love and loss in India's historical trauma, the Partition - Review of Bhaskar Sarkar's Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009))

Latin American film

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

Central Asian television

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

European film and television

• Hidden, or fear of a black planet by Nicholas Sammond (Race and neoliberal anxiety in Caché (Haneke 2005), Europa 2005—27 octobre (Straub and Huillet 2006) and the election of Barack Obama (2008)) 
• Michael Haneke: a little colder than reality by Jason Kelly Roberts (Review of Peter Brunette’s Michael Haneke (University of Illinois Press, 2010) - Peter Brunette tackles one of the art cinema's most emotionally daunting bodies of work in a new monograph in the Contemporary Directors Series, published by the University of Illnois Press) 
• Freaks, geniuses or biological citizens? Discourses of mental distress in British television documentaries by Stephen Harper (While television documentaries adopt an increasingly sympathetic perspective on psychological distress, some British documentaries nonetheless tend to reproduce hegemonic sexist and class-biased assumptions and reinforce a desocialized view of mental distress) 
• Producing resistance: Elías Querejeta’s political landscapes by Tom Whittaker (An overview of one of Europe's most important and controversial producers) 
• Goodbye Germany: emigration, reality TV and Schadenfreude by Mattias Frey (Reality TV series show Germans flocking to exotic lands, "emigration" which often ends in ruin. This article explores the European fantasy of mobility and asks, in general, why does it makes us feel good to see others feel bad?) 
• Burnt by the Sun: from screen to stage by Andrea Grunert (A Russian film turned into a play in London: Burnt by the Sun emphasizes how emotions and universal themes of love and humanity convey political reflections)

Middle Eastern film

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

Sex and its anxieties

• AIDS video: to dream and dance with the censor by Alexandra Juhasz (Censorship demands an AIDS act; it propels AIDS art. It always has; it still does. Annette Kuhn calls this “the circuit of censorship” and here I will perform the circuit not as series of parties where gay men dance, drink, and hook up, but as another sort of dance through time, one inspired by AIDS videos that spoke strategically to the censor in their own time) 
• Identity scavengers: queer girl fandom, identity politics, and South of Nowhere by Whitney Monaghan (Through analysis of the fan culture of South of Nowhere, this essay opens up the complex worlds of reception and fandom, positioning queer girl fans as "identity scavengers.") 
• Surveillance, space and performance: informing interstitial subjectivities in Head On by Evangelos Tziallas (Explores intersections between sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, suggesting gay identity is a spatially dependent, surveillant performance) 
• Bend Over Boyfriend to Take it Like a Man: pegging pornography and the queer representation of straight sex by Curran Nault (The recent phenomenon of pegging pornography (pornography aimed at straight viewers that features acts of female-to-male penetration), puts on display a new heteroerotic in which the anus, not the penis, is situated as the principal site of male pleasure, and categorical distinctions between masculine and feminine, hetero and homo are frustrated)

Torture and horror film

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

Experimental and art worlds

• Revisiting “The Two Avant-Gardes” by David Andrews (Reconsiders a classic essay by Peter Wollen so as to defend a new analysis of U.S. experimental cinema. Andrews presents this field's peculiar subcultural dynamics as effects of its internal dynamics and its conflicted relations to its supporting institutions) 
• Economics of the film avant-garde: networks and strategies in the circulation of films, ideas, and people by Kathryn Ramey (An ethnographic study of the economics of avant-garde film and filmmakers) 
• Persevering despite the impossible: a brief history of media activism in Buffalo, NY by Marc Moscato (Examining the tradition of media activism in Buffalo, NY, a city that has only recently started to become recognized for its lo-fi, experimental and, above all, uncompromising body of film and video) 
• Placing artists’ cinema by Kate Mondloch (Review of Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Bristol, UK and Chicago, USA: Intellect, 2009)) 
• Hollywood animation by Alla Gadassik (Review of Esther Leslie’s Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2002)) 
• Art treasures of the wasteland by Susan Felleman (Review of Lynn Spigel’s TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008))
• Resources: Studying the media avant-garde by Chuck Kleinhans (Books, DVDs, distributors, and online resources)

The last word

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

Amsterdam fine links!

Image from Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), based on Stanisław Lem's 1961 novel. Read BC Biermann's film-philosophical PhD Thesis chapter on this film adaptation

A little window of opportunity for Film Studies For Free's author to bring you one of this site's regular features today: a report (or, more accurately, a labour-intensive links-harvest) from a University research repository, one of those online archives in which, on occasion, academics choose not only to store references to their published film studies work, but also to provide Open Access to that work.

The repository in question today is that of the University of Amsterdam/Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA), home to one of the best Film and Media Studies departments in the world. Below is a list of links to an amazing spread of very high quality film research accessible there, most of it in the form of full-length PhD theses.

• Mieke Bal, 'Exhibition as film', in: (Re)visualizing national history: museums and national identities in Europe in the new millennium, ed. R. Ostow (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), p. 15-43 
• M. Behlil , Home away from home: global directors of new Hollywood, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2007
• B.C. Biermann, Travelling philosophy: from literature to film [on A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Solaris], PhD Thesis, UvA, 2006 
• C.J. Birdsall, Between Noise and Silence: Sound, Technology and Urban Space during Nazi Germany, PhD Thesis, UvA (2010)
• L.T. Copier, Preposterous revelations: visions of apocalypse and martyrdom in Hollywood cinema 1980 – 2000, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• S Dasgupta, 'Art is going elsewhere: and politics has to catch it : an interview with Jacques Rancière', Krisis, 9.1, 2008
• K. van Driel, Psychology of entertainment, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2003
• JJ Ebbers, Organizational dynamics in social networks : contracts and reputations in the film industry, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Constructive Instability, or The Life of Things as the Cinema's Afterlife', Video Vortex: Responses to Youtube, eds. G. Lovink, S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2008)
• C.J. Forceville, 'The source-path-goal schema in the autobiographical journey documentary: McElwee, Van der Keuken, Cole', The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 4 (2006), p. 241-261 
• Malte Hagener, Avant-garde culture and media strategies: the networks and discourses of the European film avant-garde, 1919-39, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005
• EM Kedem, The kibbutz and Israeli cinema : deterritorializing representation and ideology, PhD Thesis, UvA 2007
• J de Kloet, 'Cosmopatriot contamination', Cosmopatriots: on distant belongings and close encounters, eds E. Jurriëns, J. de Kloet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007)
• S. Loist, M. de Valck, 'Film festivals/Film festival research: thematic, annotated bibliography', 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, Institut für Germanistik II, 2010)
• J. Noordegraaf, "'Facing Forward' with found footage: displacing colonial footage in 'Mother Dao' and the work of Fiona Tan", in: Technologies of memory in the arts (2009), eds Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik , p. 172-187 (author's original manuscript)  
• F Paalman, 'The Cheetah of Cinema', Mind the screen: media concepts according to Thomas Elsaesser, eds. J. Kooijman, P. Pisters, W. Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008)
• F. Paalman, 'Harbor, architecture, film: Rotterdam 1925-1935', in: Films that work: industrial film and the productivity of media, eds V. Hediger, P. Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 391-404 
• MJ Punt, Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2000
• Laura Schuster, “What does a scanner see?” Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film", Conference paper: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberpunk and Science Fiction, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, July 1-3, 2008
• D.W. Russell, A multifaceted multi-methodological examination of the global movie industry, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2006
• E Thanouli, Post-classical narration: a new paradigm in contemporary world cinema, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005
• S Vojkovic, Subjectivity in the New Hollywood Cinema: Fathers, Sons and Other Ghosts, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2001

Obstinate Battles for Documentary Memory: Patricio Guzmán Resources Online

Regular readers will know, hopefully, that Film Studies For Free issues forth only on the topics that take its fancy. It receives no commercial or other patronage, and it does not respond to 'prompts' for its hypertextual-utterances: nor does it want any! It loves and supports free online culture, and it prefers to make its own reading, viewing and blogging choices. Sometimes, though, it does get independently inspired by commercially-available film releases or new offline publications of a very worthwhile kind, as was the case today. And the result is a little bit of unsolicited free advertising...

FSFF was so HAPPY to hear that Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán's films The Battle of Chile (1975-1978), The Pinochet Case (2001) and a particular personal favourite, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997 - see the opening sequences above) have been released on a new DVD by a great and longstanding supporter of Latin American film culture -- Icarus Films -- that it decided to mark this very auspicious occasion with a related scholarly links-list in honour, and warm appreciation, of Guzmán's hugely important films.

• Articles on Guzmán's website:

• MOVIES THAT MARKED ME FOREVER
• When I was about eight or nine years old (I really don’t remember exactly)...
• THE DOCUMENTARY EXPLOSION
• THE LOST IMAGES
• PIECES OF LIFE
• STAINS ON THE NEGATIVE
• OBLIVION AS A CENTRAL THEME
• THE CHILEAN DOCUMENTARY, A PANORAMIC LOOK

• Pat Aufderheide, 'Interview with Patricio Guzmán', Center for Social Media, Oct. 25, 2002

• Pamela Biénzobas, 'Patricio Guzmán's Salvador Allende: The Personal Painting of a Universal Myth', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, January 2005

• Katherine Bliss, 'Review of Chile, Obstinate Memory/Battle of Chile', The Public Historian, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 1999

• Judy Branfman, 'Poking in the wound or reclaiming history? Documentary Films as Gendered Historical Memory in Post-Dictatorship Chile and Spain', CSW Update, October 2007
  

• Michael Chanan, 'The Changing Geography of Third Cinema, originally published in Screen Special Latin American Issue (edited by Catherine Grant and Jackie Stacey), Volume 38 number 4 Winter 1997

• Michael Chanan, 'The economic condition of cinema in Latin America ', Third World Affairs 1985, London: Third World Foundation, pp.379-389

• Michael Chanan, 'Latin American Cinema in the 90s. Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema', E.I.A.L. ESTUDIOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE, Vol. 9, No. 1, enero-junio 1998 (Cultura visual en América Latina, Editor invitado: John Mraz)

• Michael Chanan, New Cinemas in Latin America (1960-1995), from The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, OUP, 1996

• Hugo Chaparro Valderrama, 'Patricio Guzmán according to Jorge Ruffinelli', El ojo que piensa, 2002
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-1978), CHILE, OBSTINATE MEMORY (1997), THE PINOCHET CASE (2001), Films by Patricio Guzmán
  

• First Run/Icarus Films Presskit for SALVADOR ALLENDE (2004), Film by Patricio Guzmán

• Jim Hillier, 'The Battle of Chile/La batalla de Chile, Patricio Guzmán, 1975–9', 100 Documentary Films (London: BFI/Palgrave, BFI Film Guides, 2009 (scroll down to Ch. 14))
  

• Sarah Kessler, 'An Imperfect Cinema', The Brooklyn Rail, September 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, 'Third Cinema Today', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 6, 2009
  

• Nicola Marzano, 'The Art of Hunger: re-defining Third Cinema', 16:9, November 2009 - 7. årgang - nummer 34

• Zuzana M. Pick, 'Chilean cinema: ten years of exile (1973-83)', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 66-70
  

• Margaret Power, 'Chile, Obstinate Memory', H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. September, 1998
  

• Margaret Power, 'The Battle of Chile', H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. August, 1998
  

• Juan Carlos Rodríguez, The Postdictatorial Documentaries of Patricio Guzmán: Chile, Obstinate Memory, The Pinochet Case, and Island of Robinson Crusoe, PhD Thesis, Duke University 2007
  

• Antonio Traverso, 'Unsettled Screens: The Cinema of Latin America', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 12, March 2005
  

• And a very special bonus for French or Spanish speakers: … à Valparaiso (1963 France/Chile 29 mins, directed by Joris Ivens, with a script by Chris Marker and assistance from Patricio Guzmán). See Adrian Danks' Senses of Cinema article on this film here.

Happy birthday Albert Maysles! Videos and Other Links

[The video embedded above presents a conversation with] one of America's foremost non-fiction filmmakers, Albert Maysles who along with his brother David (1932-1987) is recognized as a pioneer of direct cinema, the distinctly American version of French cinéma vérité. Their seminal early films Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter(1970), and Grey Gardens (1976) became cult classics and are still finding new rapturous audiences. On the occasion of the publication of A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs/Cinemagraphs/Documents, Maysles screens selections from filmed portraits of Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, and Truman Capote, and takes audience questions (courtesy of Hammer Museum at UCLA, March 10, 2009 on YouTube).

'The documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles describes how using his digital video camera inspired him "to tape the little things that I witness in everyday life. They’d be pieces of poetry"', Aisling Kelliher, Everyday Cinema, MIT Media Lab

'We can see two types of truth here. One is the raw material, which is the footage, the kind of truth that you get in literature in diary form – it’s immediate, no one has tampered with it. Then there’s the other kind of truth that comes in extracting and juxtaposing the raw material into a more meaningful and coherent storytelling form, which finally can be said to be more than just raw data.' Stella Bruzzi citing Albert Maysles in 'The Talented Mr Ripley', EnterText 1.2, Spring 2001

It's Thanksgiving and Albert Maysles's birthday today. It's very much a poignant timing for the latter occasion as the artist (and partner to Christo) Jeanne-Claude (Denat de Guillebo), who featured in a series of the Maysles's Brothers' films, died on November 18, 2009. But, this year, Film Studies For Free is marking all three observances, and giving thanks for the Maysles's highly influential filmmaking, with its usual tribute of links, below, to high-quality scholarly and other interesting online resources, in addition to the great video embedded above.

Video and website resources:

• Albert Maysles interviewed about In Transit (with clips) at Index Magazine, 2008

• Albert Maysles's video interview at the People's Archive

• Kevin B. Lee's video essay on Grey Gardens (1975, Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer) with commentary by Vadim Rizov

• Shooting People's Albert Maysles Glasses website

• Grey Gardens Online - official website

• RealPlayer video of Albert Maysles with Christo and Jeanne-Claude

• Gimme Shelter at Google Video

• Elaine Heinzman, 'A Musical Trip to Grey Gardens', NPR, March 5, 2008

Interviews with or about the Maysles:

• Williams Cole, 'Uncontrolled Cinema: Albert Maysles', The Brooklyn Rail, July 2006

• Jonathan B. Vogels, 'Conversations with Scholars' series, Americana, Spring 2009

• Joy Yoon, 'Albert Maysles: The Ultimate Salesman', New Order, 2002

Scholarly/critical articles:

• Chloe Aaron, 'The Video Underground', Art in America, May 1971

• Søren Birkvad, 'A Battle for Public Mythology: History and Genre in the Portrait Documentary', Nordicom Review 2/2000
  

• Joseph Heumann and Robin L. Murray, 'Dark Days: A narrative of environmental adaptation', Jump Cut, No. 48, Winter 2006
  

• Tim O'Farrell, 'Review of Jonathan B Vogels, The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2005', Screening the Past, Vol. 20, 2006
  
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• Tim O’Farrell, 'No Direction Home: Looking Forward from Don’t Look Back', Senses of Cinema, 38, 2006

• H. Russell Searight, 'Review of: The Beales of Grey Gardens By Albert and David Maysles (Directors)'

• Warren Spector, 'Review of Salesman', Cinema Texas Program Notes, Vol. 14, No. 3, March 27, 1978