In Defense of the Arts and Humanities: On Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993)

In Defense of Philosophy: Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993): A discussion at London's Tate Modern with the film’s producer Tariq Ali and Jonathan Derbyshire, culture editor of the New Statesman on October 22, 2010

A seminal thinker of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein’s revolutionary ideas have had an impact in disciplines beyond philosophy including psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, mathematics, logic, art, religion, artificial intelligence and software design.

Like all right-thinking scholarly blogs, Film Studies For Free has been terribly alarmed by the increasing international attacks on, as well as actual cutbacks to academic Arts and Humanities subjects in the context of the global economic crisis.

So, today's posting of the latest film-studies related video published by the Tate Channel is a timely one indeed. In this video, film producer and writer Tariq Ali defends these disciplines at the same time as he celebrates the (more relevant than ever) film work of Derek Jarman, the marvellous British artist who created his best works against the backdrop of similar, short-sighted, anti-intellectual and anti-cultural attacks. 

If these developments are of concern to you, why not join in with the dialogue about them at a newly launched, campaigning Facebook group DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES? FSFF's author will be most pleased to see you sounding off there.

In the meantime, below are a couple of highly worthwhile scholarly studies of Jarman's take on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

• Tracy Bowell, 'Making Manifest: Viewing Wittgenstein's Philosophy Through Jarman's Lens', Teaching Philosophy, 24:2, June 2001
• Martin Stokhof, 'The Quest for Purity. Another Look at the New Wittgenstein', Academia.edu, 2010

Full Length Feature Films Free Online via BFI and Daily Motion

A Personal Journey with Scorsese

Uploaded by BFIfilms. - Check out other Film and TV videos.

Film Studies For Free can't believe its eyes!!

The British Film Institute has entered into a partnership with the advertising-supported, video-streaming site Daily Motion to provide access to some of the incredible wealth of films that the BFI has funded and distributed over many years.

Currently, as of today, the new channel is hosting 47 films of varying lengths, from amazing silents to rare poetic documentaries (like Chris Petit's Radio On), as well as some incredibly important live action and animated fiction films, including a number of otherwise hard to see works by Terrence Davies and Lotte Reininger.

A must-visit site and a hugely laudable resource. Thank you BFI.

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

Updated July 27, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Nolan Studies

An image from Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, Vol. 0, No 51 (2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Film Authorship Studies: Romero, Welles, Portillo, Mamet, and the studio system

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

Film Studies For Free brings you some more great essays on film authorship (a favourite topic at this here blog), following the serendipitous discovery that a special issue on that subject by the (normally) subscription only periodical The Velvet Light Trap was chosen to be that journal's free online sample.


Do also check out FSFF's earlier related posts if this is a topic of particular interest: On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theories, film authorship Orson Welles. 

The Velvet Light Trap Number 57, Spring 2006 Special Issue: Authorship

• Introduction
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]

• Joe Kember, The Cinema of Affections: The Transformation of Authorship in British Cinema before 1907
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  

• Jerome Christensen, Studio Authorship, Warner Bros., and The Fountainhead
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  

• Brooke Rollins, "Some Kind of a Man": Orson Welles as Touch of Evil's Masculine Auteur
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]

• Matt Becker, A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  

• Yannis Tzioumakis, Marketing David Mamet: Institutionally Assigned Film Authorship in Contemporary American Cinema
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]

• Mónica F. Torres, Exorcizing/Exercising Treachery: Robust Subjectivity in Lourdes Portillo's The Devil Never Sleeps [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]

• Anna Notaro, Technology in Search of an Artist: Questions of Auteurism/Authorship and the Contemporary Cinematic Experience
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  

Cinema Journal

Ethel Waters in Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949). 

(For a good study of Waters' work in this film see Brian Herrera's blogpost on the actress)

On and on and on it goes...


Film Studies For Free continues its dogged exploration of the legions of free sample issues of subscription only journals. Lots more posts on that coming up over the next weeks, months, years... 

But today's post flags up the online free sample issue of one of the best film studies journals in the world, the organ of the US based Society of Cinema and Media Studies

Cinema Journal is a periodical to which academics in many anglophone countries frequently have automatic access, that is, if they are lucky enough to be able to use well-funded university libraries, or to be individual members of SCMS (as FSFF's author is proud and fortunate enough to be).

This post, then, is dedicated to just about everyone else, in other words, to those who probably make up the majority of FSFF's international readership.

Cinema Journal

46, Number 1, Fall 2006 


CONTENTS

• John Nichols, Countering Censorship: Edgar Dale and the Film Appreciation Movement [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  Abstract:
  
  In 1933 Ohio State University education professor Edgar Dale published How to Appreciate Motion Pictures for use in high school film appreciation classes. Configuring the adolescent as a reformer, Dale's text offered an alternative to the Production Code's stark theory of film reception, which predicated censorship on immature film viewers.

• Margaret T. McGehee, Disturbing the Peace: Lost Boundaries, Pinky, and Censorship in Atlanta, Georgia, 1949-1952
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  Abstract:
  
  This article investigates the reasons behind Atlanta film censor Christine Smith's 1949 banning of Lost Boundaries (Alfred Werker) and her approval, with cuts, of Pinky (Elia Kazan), examining in particular the representations of segregation and integration in each film, the studio support behind the films, and the characterization of Pinky as a "woman's picture."

• John Sedgwick, Cinemagoing in Portsmouth during the 1930s
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  Abstract:
  
  This paper uses the recently discovered box-office ledger of the first-run cinema the Regent in Portsmouth, U.K., to test the POPSTAT methodology for measuring film popularity in the general absence of such data. In order to do this a dataset of the film programs of all twenty-one cinemas screening films in the city in 1934 has been constructed from which a clear picture of film distribution and popularity emerges.

• Melanie Williams,"The most explosive object to hit Britain since the V2!": The British Films of Hardy Kruger and Anglo-German Relations during the 1950s
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  Abstract:
  
  
  This article investigates the brief British career of the German actor Hardy Kruger during the 1950s. It examines his popularity with British audiences, focusing on his appeal to younger cinemagoers, especially women. It also discusses how his star persona and screen performances reflected wider tensions in contemporary Anglo-German relations.

Film-Historia: Index to English language articles

Image from Offret/The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986). See "Images of War in Andrei Tarkovski's The Sacrifice: Four levels of meaning", by Gabriel Giralt, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1999

Over the years, Film Studies For Free has noticed that there were some excellent English-language articles on lots of different aspects of film history to be found at the (very difficult to navigate) website of the excellent Universitat de Barcelona-based film journal Film-Historia. 

Until today, however, there was no easy way to access all of these articles, but ...  (drum roll) ... ta-da! Cast your eyes at the awesome list of direct links below, and, if you feel so inclined, thank your lucky stars that FSFF's author needed some distraction from her country's general election shenanigans this morning.

• "Walker: the dramatic film as historical truth" by Robert A. Rosenstone, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1992
• "The Image of Mexican Heroes in American Films" by Paul J. Vanderwood, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1992
• "Absolved by History: On the Aesthetics and Ideology on History in the Cuban Film Institute" by John Mraz, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1993
• "The Historical Film is a Real History", by Robert A. Rosenstone, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1995
• "Social Roles/Political Responsabilities: Jean Renoir's Search for Artistic Integrity, 1928-1939" by Charles Musser, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1994
• "Hollywood, U.S.- Mexican Relations, and the Devolution of the "Golden Age" of Mexican Cinema" by Seth Fein, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1994
• "'We're just little people, Louis': Marie-Antoniette on Film" by Laura Mason, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1994
• "Against the Ivory Tower: An Apologia for 'Popular' Historical Documentaries" by Dirk Eitzen, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1995
• "Filming the "Discovery" of America: How and Whose History Is Being Told" by Luisela Alvaray, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1995
• "Film as Historical Narrative", by Hannu Salmi, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1995
• "The Politics of the Trilogy Form: Lucia, the Oresteia, and The Godfather", by Peter W. Rose, Film-Historia, No. 2-3, 1993
• "Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988): Ethnicy and a Babble of Discourses", by Leslie Fishbein, Film-Historia, No. 2-3, 1995
• "Colonial History and Anglo-American tension in 1939: Allegheny Uprising and Drums along the Mohawk", by K. R. M. Short, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1996
• "Cinematic Contextual History of High Noon (1952, dir. Fred Zinnemann)", by J. M. Caparrós-Lera and Sergio Alegre, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1996
• "Spain in U.S.: cinematic relationship, 1939-1953", by Rafael de España, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1996
• "Mothering Daughters: Subjectivity and History in the Work of Helma Sanders Brahms's Germany Pale Mother" by Judith Keene, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1997
• "Paradise Found?: Ana/chronic Nostalgia in Belle Epoque", by Jose F. Colmeiro, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1997
• "Germany after Unification: Views from Abroad", by Roger Hillman, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1997
• "The Image of Ancient Rome in the Cinema", by Carl J. Mora, Film-Historia, No. 3, 1997
• "Coping Strategies: Three Decades of Vietnam War in Hollywood", by Eusebio V. Llácer and Esther Enjuto, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1998
• "The Royal Air Force: World War II Film Propaganda and The March of the Time", by K. R. M. Short, Film-Historia, No. 2-3, 1998
• "Oliver Stone's Nixon: Politics on the Edge of Darkness", by Ian Scott, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1999
• "Images of War in Andrei Tarkovski's. The Sacrifice: Four levels of meaning", by Gabriel Giralt, Film-Historia, No. 1, 1999
• "Playful Subversions: Hollywood Pirates Plunder Spanish America", by Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1999
• "The Revolution is History: Filming the Past in Mexico and Cuba", by John Mraz, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1999
• "El día que me quieras: History, Mith and Che Guevara", by John Hess, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1999
• "Cantinfladas of the PRI: (Mis) Representations of Mexican Society and Democracy in the Films of Mario Moreno", by Jeffrey Pilcher, Film-Historia, No. 2, 1999
• "Los Hermanos Mayo: Photographing Exile", by John Mraz, Film-Historia, No. 1-2, 2000 
• "Cut from Anglophilia to Anglophobia. Hollywood's Changing Perceptions of the British" by Carl J. Mora, Film-Historia, No. 1-2, 2001
• "In search of reality through dreams: Alejandro Amenabar's Abre los ojos", by Marina Martin, Film-Historia, No. 1-2, 2002
• "The ideological meaning behind Greta Garbo's star image", by Alan McLane, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2003
• "Poor Mexican cinema, So far from Cahiers du Cinema, so close to Latino U.S.A.: A Cantankerous Essay", by Carl J. Mora, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2003
• "The War, the Air Force and the Search for Realist Cinema in Britain, 1941-1942", by Michael Paris, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2003
• The Spanish Film Industry, New Technologies, New Opportunities", by Lauren Kogen, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2006
• "The Fatherless Society: Die Blechtrommel (Tin Drum)", by Xuejuen Guo, Film-Historia, No. 1, 2007

Paranormal cinematic activity: ghost film studies

Latest update: April 27, 2010

 Publicity still for The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). See an excerpt from this film in Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay 'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film', embedded towards the foot of this entry

Film Studies For Free has gone and spooked itself, today, with its own scary persistence in compiling a list of links to openly accessible, online, scholarly articles, chapters and theses on international ghost film studies. Oh, and there are two related video essays lurking at the bottom to scare the scholarly bejesus out of you for good measure, too (added April 27) .

Like all the best posts at this blog (IOHO), the list below owes its hefty materiality to its connections with FSFF's author's own (hauntological) research, some of which, hopefully, will be directly shared with her fearless readers very shortly. So do please be a revenant, won't you?

• Michael J. Anderson, 'Histoire de Marie et Julien: Jacques Rivette's Material Ghost Story', Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004

• Guy Austin, '"In Fear and Pain": Stardom and the Body in Two French Ghost Films', Scope, Issue 7, February 2007

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

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

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

• Caetlin Benson-Allott , '“Before you die, you see The Ring”: notes on the immanent obsolescence of VHS, from Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007

• Lesley Brill, 'M. Night Shyamalan: A Preliminary Report', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008

• Ture Bural, 'Endland Umpire: A placement of David Lynch's Inland Empire', Perforations, 29, 2007

• Jodey Castricano, 'Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the Strange Question of Trans-Subjectivity', Jung: the e-Journal of the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies Volume 2, Number 3, April, 2006

• Brigid Cherry, 'Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror', Particip@tions, Vol. 5, Issue 1, 2008

• Leah A.Cheyne, 'The Sixth Sense: Humanizing Horror', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• David Church, 'Return of the Return of the Repressed: Notes on the American Horror Film (1991-2006)', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 10 (November 25, 2006)

• Michel Ciment, 'Kubrick and the Fantastic', (1982) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)

• Robyn Citizen, 'Review of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity by Linnie Blake', Senses of Cinema,Issue 51, 2009

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

• Lisa Coulthard, 'Uncanny Memories: Stan Douglas, Subjectivity and Cinema, Scope, 2000

• John Culbert, 'The Well and the Web: Phantoms of Community and the Mediatic Public Sphere', Postmodern Culture, 19.2, January 2009

• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003

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

• Carolyn Erler, 'The Obama Code: Ghosts and Monsters in the Visual Datasphere', CTheory.net, Resetting Theory Issue, December 2009
  

• Mark Fisher, 'Home is where the haunt is: The Shining's hauntology', k-punk, January 23, 2006

• Mark Fisher, 'You have always been the caretaker': the spectral spaces of the Overlook Hotel', Perforations, 29, 2007

• Brian Grady, '"We're Engaged to Be Engaged": The Paranormal Activity of Trauma and Relationship', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 67, February 2010

• Catherine Grant, 'Giving up Ghosts: Eliseo Subiela's Hombre mirando al sudeste and No te mueras sin decirme a dónde vas', Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds, ed. Rob Rix and Roberto Rodríguez-Saona (Leeds: Leeds Iberian Papers - Trinity and All Saints/University of Leeds, 1997), pp. 89-120  

• Coral Houtman, 'Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense', Scope, November 2004

• Wendy F. Hsu , 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, vol. 5 (2003)

• Annamarie Jagose, 'Hollywood Lesbians [Interview with Patricia White about Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability', Genders, 32, 2000

• Fredric Jameson, 'Historicism in The Shining', (1981) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)

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

• Bruce Kawin, 'Carnival of Souls', The Criterion Collection, Film Essays, 76

• Antonio Lázaro-Reboll , 'The Transnational Reception of El espinazo del diablo (Guillermo del Toro 2001)', Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2007, 39–51

• John Lewis, '"Mother Oh God Mother …": Analysing the 'Horror' of Single Mothers in Contemporary Hollywood Horror', Scope, Issue 2, 2005

• Owen Livermore, 'Gun and Other Play: Takashi Miike and Fantasia Festival 2004', Synoptique, December 2004

• Li Zeng, Horror returns to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and the space of horror ', from Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009

• Luo Hui, 'Chapter Four: Minor Discourses in New Peripheries', The Ghost of Liaozhai: Pu Songling's Ghostlore and its History of Reception, PhD Thesis,University of Toronto, 2009

• Nina K. Martin, 'Dread of mothering: plumbing the depths of Dark Water', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Ewa Mazierska, 'Between the Sacred and the Profane, the Sublime and the Trivial: The Magic Realism of Jan Jakub Kolski ', Scope, 2000

• Donna McRae, 'Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance', B for Bad Cinema, Colloquy, Issue 18, December 2009

• Thomas Mical, 'Introduction: Hauntology, or Spectral Space', Perforations, 29, 2007  

• Elizabeth Mullen, 'Synæsthetic Specters: Haunting Hill House on the Silver Screen', Image and Narrative, Vol. 10, Issue 1, 2009

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

• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009

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

• N. Payasopon, 'The Cultural and Filmic Elements that contribute to the popularity of the Thai film Nang Nak', BU Review, Volume 2, No. 1, January-June 2003

• Jennifer Proctor, 'Différance, the Spectral, and the Work of Mourning in Aaron Valdez’s dissolve', 2004

• Laurence A. Rickels, 'Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time', Other Voices, v.2, n.2 (March 2002)

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

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

• Steven Schneider, 'World Horror Cinema and the US: Bringing it all back home', Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence, May 10-12, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002

• Donato Totaro, 'Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 1: The Long Take., Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

• Donato Totaro, Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 2: Mise en Scène', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003

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

• Dennis Tredy, 'Shadows of Shadows - Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: J. Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), D. Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and A. Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999)', E-rea, 2.1, 2004

• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Leaving the cinema: metacinematic cruising in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Gang Gary Xu, 'Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005

• Young-joon Cho, 'Four Cinema Versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', Thannhouser Company Film Preservation, 2006

• Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Neda Hei-tung Ng, 'Magic, Medicine, Cannibalism: the China Demon in Hong Kong Horror', David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Working Paper Series, Paper Number: 74, April 2008 

Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay
'Bad Seeds: Creepy Kids on Film',

Matt Zoller Seitz's L Magazine video essay
'Unreal Estate: The Scariest Movie Locations of All Time'

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

Last updated February 24, 2010

Scene From The Other Side - Chris Petit from White DolphinFilms on Vimeo.

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.”

(Chris Petit, Screenonline 2006)

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.

John Wyver, 'The late Manny Farber: critic, painter, good guy', Illuminations, September 14, 2008

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:

• Chris Petit, 'The Last Modernist [on J.G Ballard]', Granta, April 22, 2009
• Clips from The Falconer, a 1997 film by Chris Petit about filmmaker Peter Whitehead 
• Chris Petit, 'ROAD MOVIES: Germany and England / England and Germany: Proposal for a Film, June 2008', Vertigo, Vol.4 No.1 - Autumn / Winter 2008  

Online writing about Chris Petit's films

• BFI Screenonline Chris Petit webpage
• BFI Chris Petit Filmography
• Danny Birchall, 'Radio On', Screenonline, October 2003
• Doug Cummings, 'Negative Space (1999), filmjourney.org, August 19, 2008
• Chris Darke , 'Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair Asylum', Film Comment, 2000
  
• Chris Darke, 'Lettr from London', Film Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 8, April 2003
• Benjamin Halligan, 'Notes on Negative Space', Senses of Cinema, Issue 12, 2001 
• Andrew Hedgecock, 'Interview with Chris Petit', The Edge, [date unknown] 
• Erwin Houtenbrink, 'Interview with Chris Petit [about new film Content]', February 2010
  
• Nicholas Lezard , 'Good bad dream: on the author as camera in Chris Petit's Robinson', Guardian Online, September 1, 2001
• Laura Mulvey, 'Detail, Digression, Death: The Movies in Chris Petit's Film Negative Space', Afterall - A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 5, Spring/Summer 2002 
• Serafino Murri, `Chris Petit, Anatomies of the Image', in Afterall - A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 5, February 2002
• Serafino Murri, 'Visual Irony as Virus in Panoptic Structures: Logic of Fact and Anti-Truth in Chris Petit’s “Surveillance”', ctrl[space, October 2, 2001
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'American Beauty [on Chris Petit’s NEGATIVE SPACE]', JonathanRosenbaum.com,  May 12, 2000  
• Andrew Stevens, 'De-Googled: Chris Petit', 3:AM Magazine, March 22, 2007
• Adam Sweeting, 'A Screen Full of Nothing', Guardian Online, June 18, 1999
• David Thomson, 'Film Studies: Chris Petit: intellectual, cineaste, and a national treasure', The Independent, June 13, 1999 
• John Wyver, 'The late Manny Farber: critic, painter, good guy', Illuminations, September 14, 2008