Federico Fellini Studies

Richard Dyer talks about his research project at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) Weimar. Period of fellowship: February 2009 – July 2009. Also see Richard Dyer's IKKM-Site.

“What is a movie, in the beginning? A suspicion, a hypothetic[al] story, a shadow of ideas, blurred feelings. And, still, [from that] first impalpable contact, it already seems to be itself, complete, vital, pure.” (Federico Fellini, Fazer um filme (“Making a Movie”). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 2000., 204 and 205, translated by Marcelo Moreira Santos and cited by him in 'Cinema and Pragmatism: a Reflection on the Signic Genesis in Cinematographic Art', Signs, Vol. 3, 2009: pp. 30-40)

“The movie tells its worlds, its stories, its characters, through images. Its expression is figurative, like [that] of dreams. (...) The movie tries to reproduce a world, an environment, in a vital manner. It tries to remain in this dimension, trying to recreate the emotion, the enchantment, the surprise.” (Fellini, cited in op. cit. 139 and 154)

Inspired by the video, above, of the sublime Richard Dyer talking about "The Wind in Fellini" in simply one of the best Film Studies lectures currently available on the internet, Film Studies For Free today brings you some choice links to openly accessible, and high quality, studies of and further viewing on the work of director Federico Fellini, and of his collaborators, like Nino Rota (the subject of a wonderful new book by Dyer).

Just so you know, FSFF is off on a trip shortly and will be back, joyously labouring away to track down such wondrous links as these below, in just over a week. See ye efter!

• Lior Barshack, 'Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini', Cardozo Law Review, 31.4, 2010

• John Baxter, 'Juliet of the Spirits', The Criterion Collection: Notes, March 11, 2002

• Peter Bondanella, 'Federico Fellini: A Life in Cinema' - excerpt, The Films of Federico Fellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

• Peter Bondanella, 'Amacord', The Criterion Collection: Notes, November 22, 1999

• Robert Castle, 'Orchestra Rehearsal Reconsidered: In which "Fellini takes us beyond our frailties and chaos', Bright Lights, Issue 40, May 2003

• Adrian Danks, 'Roma', Senses of Cinema, February 2002

• Richard Dyer, 'The Ending of 8 ½ (1963)', in James Walters and Tom Brown (eds), Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory (2010)

• Richard Dyer, 'Tales of Plagiarism And Pastiche', Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2010)  (27 free pages) Book info. 

• David Ehrenstein, 'La Strada', The Criterion Collection: Notes, March 7, 1988

• Federico Fellini, 'Nights of Cabiria', The Criterion Collection: Notes, September 6, 1999

• Federico Fellini, 'And the Ship Sails On', The Criterion Collection: Notes, September 27, 1999

• Manuela Gieri, 'Character and Discourse from Pirandello to Fellini: Defining a Countertradition in an Italian Context', QUADERNI d'italianistica Volume XHl. No. 1, 1992

• David Hannah (with Richard Dyer), 'Film composer Nino Rota's collaborations' (Viewing: 3:24), BBC website, August 31, 2010

• Tullio Kezich, '8¹⁄2: When "He" Became "I"', The Criterion Collection: Notes, December 3, 2001

• Marcia Landy, 'Introduction', Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

• David Lavery, 'News From Africa: Fellini-Grotesque', originally published in Post Script 9.1 and 2 (1990): 82-98

• Tony Maraini, 'An Interview with Federico Fellini', Bright Lights Journal, Issue 26, November 1999

• Todd McGowan, 'Fantasy and Showing Too Much', The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (Albany: State University of New York, 2007)

• Pu Miao, 'The Two Themes: Settings in Fellini's Films', Places, 7.3, 1991

• Marcelo Moreira Santos and cited him in 'Cinema and Pragmatism: a Reflection on the Signic Genesis in Cinematographic Art', Signs, Vol. 3, 2009: pp. 30-40

• Gary Morris, 'Nights of Cabiria', Bright Lights, Issue 22, September 1998 

• Catherine O'Rawe, '‘"I padri e i maestri": Genre, Auteurs and Absences in Italian Cinema', Italian Studies, 63.2, 2008

• Tom Piazza, 'I Vitelloni: A Trip to the Station', The Criterion Collection: Notes, April 23, 2004

• George Porcari, 'Fellini Goes To The Beach', Cineaction, Issue 75, 2008

• Megan Ratner, 'Knocking on Modernity's Door: Fellini's I Vitelloni." Bright Lights Film Journal, vol. 41, August 2003

• Dana Renga, 'Irony and the Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Fellini, Zanzotto and Casanova's Redemption', QUADERNI d'italianistica, Volume XX, No. 1-2, 1999 

• Sam Rohdie, 'Amarcord: Federico of the Spirits', The Criterion Collection: Notes, September 4, 2006

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'The White Sheikh', The Criterion Collection: Notes, April 28, 2003

• Andrew Sarris, 'Variety Lights', The Criterion Collection: Notes, August 28, 2000

• Ajay Sekher, 'Ways of Seeing the Self, Subjectivity and History: Filmic Autobiographies, Biopics and Historicals', Academia.edu, date unknown

• Alexander Sesonske, '8¹⁄2: A Film with Itself as its Subject', The Criterion Collection: Notes, December 3, 2001

• Antonia Shanahan, 'Federico Fellini', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002

• Domenic Siracusa, 'Casanova, Marinetti and the Art of Seduction', Carte Italiane, 2.6, 2010

• 'Agnès Varda on Amacord', Viewing (10:49), BFI Live, May 5, 2010

• Marguerite Waller, 'Whose Dolce Vita is this anyhow? The Language of Feliini's Cinema', QUADERNI d'italianistica, Volume XI, No. 1, 1990

• Peter Wuss, 'Dreamlike Images in Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Tarkovsky’s The Mirror: A Cognitive Approach', Avila, Fall 2003

A Fistful of "Spaghetti Western" Studies

BFI Researcher's Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns 
(Frayling is author of Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans From Karl May to Sergio Leone [London: I.B.Tauris, 1981, 1998]; Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death [London: Faber and Faber, 2000]; and
Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy [London: Thames and Hudson, 2005]).

It was the spaghetti Westerns… that first eliminated the morality-play dimension and turned the Western into pure violent reverie [...] What made these [...] popular was that they stripped the Western form of its cultural burden of morality. They discarded its civility along with its hypocrisy. In a sense, they liberated the form: what the Western hero stood for was left out, and what he embodied (strength and gun power) was retained. Abroad, that was probably what he had represented all along.

Pauline Kael, Killing Time, in Karl French (ed.), Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1974), pp. 171-178: 172.

Today, to accompany its list of links to openly accessible scholarly studies of the Spaghetti (or Italian, or Euro) Western, and related topics, the normally garrulous Film Studies For Free was going to treat its readers to an improbable, digital impersonation of  Clint Eastwood's performance as the Man With No Name in what is often called "The Dollars Trilogy" directed by Sergio Leone.

Sadly, no dice: while it looks good in a poncho, not only does FSFF fall short in performing moral ambiguity, but it's also fairly hopeless when it comes to capturing taciturnity. 

Dammit. 

Do please enjoy the links, anyway. Grazie.

• Spaghetti Western Database

• Jenna Bond, 'Homosexuality and the Italian Spaghetti Western', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 11, November 2007

• Mark Brownrigg, 'Chapter 4: Music and the Western', Film Music and Film Genre, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 2003

• Timothy Campbell, 'The Corrupting Sea, Technology and Devalued Life in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns', California Italian Studies Journal 1.1, 2010

• Rolando Caputo, 'Aldrich, Leone and Vera Cruz: style and substance over the border', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000

• Paul Coughlin, '[Review of] Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: something to do with death. London: Faber and Faber., 2000', Screening the Past, November 1, 2000

• Vera Dika, 'An East German Indianerfilm: the bear in sheep's clothing', Jump Cut, No. 50, Spring 2008

• Chris Durham, 'Absent Heroism: Reconsidering Clint Eastwood's Star Persona', Scope, Issue 7, 2007

• Robert J. Edmonstone, 'Beyond “Brutality”: Understanding the Italian Filone’s Violent Excesses', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008

• Daniel Edwards, 'Sergio Leone', Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Austin Fisher, 'A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier', Scope,  Issue 15, November 2009

• Brad D. Foster, 'Constructing Heroic Identities: Masculinity and the Western Film', Masters Thesis, Oregon State University, July 2007

• Luis M. García Mainar, 'Authorship and Identity in the Cinema of Clint Eastwood', ATLANTIS 29.2 (December 2007)

• Howard Hughes, Excerpts from Aim from the Heart: The Films of Clint Eastwood (London: IB Tauris, 2009)

• Emily Anne Kausalik, A Fistful of Drama: Musical Form in the Dollars Trilogy, Masters Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2008

• Kyle Keough, 'Cowboys and Shoguns: The American Western, Japanese Jidaigeki, and Cross-Cultural Exchange', DigitalCommons@University of Rhode Island, 2008

• Evert Jan van Leeuven, 'Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a Hollywood Myth',  BRight Lights Film Journal, Issue 60, May 2008

• Scott MacKenzie, 'Closing arias: Operatic montage in the closing sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone', P.O.V. 'The Art of Film Editing', edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998 - (scroll down in large PDF)

• John Nudge, 'Wild East Productions: Spaghetti Westerns', first published in Imagesjournal.com, 1998

• Walter Przybylowski, 'The European Western', Dialogues, Vol. 5, Fall 2006

• Richard Raskin, 'Jack Elam and the Fly in Once Upon a Time in the West', P.O.V. No.24 - The Western, December 2007

• Alireza Vahdani, 'European Western vs. American Western', Offscreen Journal,  January 31, 2010

• Jeannette Vaught, 'Deserting the Desert, Salvaging the Southland: The Re-Location of the American Hero and Cultural Identity in 1970s Outlaw Movies', TPP VII (2009): 9-28

• Tony Williams, 'A Fistful of Dollars', Senses of Cinema , Issue 28, 2003

Making the meaning affective: Peter Brunette's film studies

Still image from the final shot of L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

 Luxuriating in the view over the Sicilian coast, the Mt. Etna volcano, and the Mediterranean sea here at the Taormina Film Festival. Oh yeah, and seeing some good films too!
Peter Brunette,  June 15, 2010

Rather than viewing the narrative content of Antonioni's films as symbolic, as representations of an absent meaning, [Peter] Brunette calls for an appreciation of the visual in and for itself, as meaning 'is made affective, through line, shape, and form' (60). Meaning emerges from the image, it is 'made affective'. Searching for authorial intent behind seemingly obvious symbols -- Brunette shows through the discrepancy between Antonioni's own suggestions and the contrasting critical reception of his films -- will inevitably say more about the critical frame employed, than the film itself. What Brunette is claiming is the loss of referent for the sign, the loss of signification. This links nicely to his deconstructive concern, which is itself indicative of the flaws in the existentialist debate. The absences that characteristically mark Antonioni's films (witness the vanishing Anna (Massari) in L'avventura) points not to a transcendental absence, but rather indicates the way out of the Platonic illusion of the coexisting Ideal and (vs) real. 'David Martin-Jones, '[Review of Brunette's book on Antonioni', Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 50, December 1999

Katherine's exclamation [in Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini, 1954] is also emblematic of the death theme that permeates the film, and that culminates in the sequence so aptly described by Brunette in the following passage: "The parts begin to form themselves into a man and a woman; death has caught them making love, or at least wrapped tightly in each other's arms. Suddenly, the museum, the catacombs, and the Cumaean Sybil all come together in one startling image: the physicality and rawness of the ancient world, the ubiquity of death in life, and love, however inadequate and flawed, as the only possible solution". Asbjørn Grønstad, "The Gaze of Tiresias: Joyce, Rossellini and the Iconology of "The Dead"", Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2002, citing Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 1996)

In Peter Brunette and David Wills's much under-valued Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory [Princeton University Press, 1989] they discuss the form that a deconstructive mode of analysis might take. They write: 'From a deconstructive stand-point, analysis would no longer seek the supposed center of meaning but instead turn its attentions to the margins, where the supports of meaning are disclosed, to reading in and out of the text, examining the other texts onto which it opens itself out or from which it closes itself off'. [...] [I]t strikes me that a serious discussion of Brunette and Wills's book would be essential to any work purporting to discuss cinema and deconstructive politics.[...]  David Sorfa, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 23, 1998

A number of the tributes to film critic and scholar Peter Brunette, who died last week at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy,  conveyed very movingly their opinion that he left this world while doing what he loved.

Those of us who followed Peter's activities and travels, at least from the vantage point of his social media network, certainly loved his updates on them, like his final Facebook posting above. His death was a huge shock, and a great loss, notably to the two spheres -- film scholarship and theory, and film criticism -- that he managed to join up, much more successfully than most, through his own prolific practice (he gave an account of some of the issues at stake in this choice in an interview here, and Gerald Peary's obituary beautifully refers to his unusual trajectory, for an academic, here).

FSFF's author's acquaintance with Peter Brunette began with his 'director books' (listed with his other work in his CV here), and in particular with his marvellous study of the films of Roberto Rossellini, now one of the best freely accessible e-books online, thanks to Peter and his publishers. Peter was a fan and an important supporter of freely accessible culture and ideas on the Web, as this article he wrote in 2000 testifies.

Fortunately, a very good selection of other articles and chapters (and a substantial podcast) by him may be experienced at the click of a mouse, quite aside from the virtual reams of online movie criticism under his byline. That means that the following list of links to the former work - to Peter Brunette's formal film studies - is, then, the most fitting tribute that FSFF can give to a scholar who gave so much and influenced so many in his too short (or just long enough) life.

• Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996 1996)
• Peter Brunette, 'Introduction [excerpt]', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Peter Brunette, 'Blow-up', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Peter Brunette, 'Miniature Movies, Big Ideas: Cinephiles move on to the Web', Adobe Magazine, June-August 2000
• Peter Brunette, 'The Flowers of St. Francis: God's Jester', The Criterion Collection: Film Essays, August 22, 2005 
• Peter Brunette, 'The Children are Watching Us: A Movement is Born', The Criterion Collection, Film Essays, March 27, 2006 
• Peter Brunette, 'Nowell-Smith Meets Visconti, Redux: The Old and the New', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 16, March 2005
• Peter Brunette, 'Rossellini and Cinematic Realism', Cinema Journa1, 25,  No 1, Fall 1985
• Podcast: Peter Brunette interviewed by Colin Marshall about his University of Illinois Press study of Michael Haneke's films (see below), April 15, 2010

R.I.P. Peter Brunette and Teshome Gabriel: online tributes

Last updated June 24, 2010

Teshome Gabriel, 1939-2010

Peter Brunette, 1943-2010

Film Studies has lost two of its giants.

On Monday, Professor Teshome Gabriel of UCLA, a leading theorist and scholar of African, Third and Third World Cinema, and memory and cinema, passed away in Los Angeles.

And, just yesterday, Peter Brunette, Reynolds Professor of Film Studies at Wake Forest University, author of important books on film theory, Italian cinema and the work of individual film directors, and a very well-known and popular film critic, died while in attendance at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.

Film Studies For free will post full, individual, tributes of its own to each of these scholars very shortly, but in the meantime is gathering together, below, a list of links to some of the online tributes to both men. If you know of any you would like to see included, please email FSFF, or link to them in the comments section of this post.

The author of this blog would like to pass on her sincere condolences to the families and friends of both men.

Tributes to Teshome Gabriel

• UCLA obituary
•  Ethiopian Review obituary   
• Friend, Master Storyteller, Scholar, and Humanist Par Excellence: Reminiscences of Teshome H. Gabriel, June 16, 2010 by Vinay Lal 
• Teshome H. Gabriel dies at 70; UCLA professor and Third World cinema expert, by Dennis McLellan LA Times, June 17, 2010

Tributes to Peter Brunette

• Gerald Peary, 'Peter Brunette, In Memory', Indiewire.com, June 21, 2010
• Wake Forest University obituary
• The Hollywood Reporter report and obituary  
• Writer Peter Brunette Dies at Italian Festival by Eugene Hernandez, Indiewire, June 16, 2010
  
• Film Scholar Brunette Dies at Taormina by Anne Thompson, Thompson on Hollywood, June 16, 2010
• Peter Brunette by Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running, June 16, 2010
• R.I.P. Peter Brunette, by Joe Leydon, MovingPictureBlog, June 16, 2010
• RIP Peter Brunette, by Movie Cricket, Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2010
• Film critic Brunette dies by Rachel Abrams, Variety.com, June 16, 2010
• Nick James, 'Peter Brunette, 1944-2010', Sight and Sound, June 17, 2010 
• Issa Clubb, 'Remembering Peter Brunette', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2010
• Peter Keough, 'Peter Brunette 1944-2010', Outside the Frame, The Boston Phoenix, June 22, 2010

Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Verga and beyond: Italian Cinema research from new look eScholarship.org/uc/

Image from I pugni in tasca/Fists in pocket (Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 1965).
See Deborah Young's short essay on this film here.

Here's another post to celebrate Open Access Week, just in the nick of time.

Film Studies For Free, tipping its jaunty e-hat to the fabulous weblog Open Access News for the information, has been delighted today to revisit the eScholarship archive of the University of California, which has had a makeover. Here's the explanation of the whys and wherefores. FSFF can happily testify that it is now even more user-friendly than before, so do please explore it.

To celebrate, here's a little crop of wonderful, openly-accessible articles on Italian cinema, all published in the UCLA journal Carte Italiane, that FSFF was able to harvest in a even shorter jiffy than usual.

• Sarah A. Carey, Before and After the Revolution: The Power(lessness) of the Image in I pugni in tasca, Buongiorno, notte, Prima della rivoluzione and The Dreamers, Carte Italiane, 2:4, 2008

• Brendan W. Hennessy, A Cinematic Premonition of Disorder: Social and Political Satire in Bellocchio's La cina è vicina (1967), Carte Italiane, 2:4, 2008
  

• Antonio Idini, Stealing Home: Flight from Exile in Il ladro di bambini, Carte Italiane, 1:14, 1994

• Peggy Kidney, Recent Publications in the Field of Italian Cinema, Carte Italiane, 1:7, 1986

• David Pendleton, Pasolini's Cinema of Regression, Carte Italiane, 1:12, 1992

• Dana Renga, Women's Place: Contradictory Models of Female Behavior in Italian Cinema (1932-1940), Carte Italiane, 1:16, 1999

• Robert Spiegel, Verga and the Realist Cinema, Carte Italiane, 1:2, 1981

Film International for free - Lynch, Kieślowśki, Gomorrah, Brokeback Mountain, Tearoom, and Caché

Still from Tearoom (William E Jones, 1962/2007)

A very busy Film Studies For Free has just got round to reading yet another of Intellect's freely accessible journal issues: Film International (Volume: 7 | Issue: 1 February 2009). This was an excellent, highly stimulating read indeed. Below are links to all the main articles. FSFF particularly enjoyed the essays by Orr, Supanick, Sharrett and Ogrodnik.

• 'McMafia rising [on Gomorrah, the Camorra, Roberto Saviano, deregulation, free trade, Naples, Italy, Matteo Garrone]' Rajko Radovic

• 'Last Year at Mansfield: William E. Jones's Tearoom' Jim Supanick

• 'Death of the Strong, Silent Type: The Achievement of Brokeback Mountain' Christopher Sharrett

• 'A Cinema of Parallel Worlds Lynch & Kieślowśki + Inland Empire' John Orr

• 'Performative Radicalism in contemporary Canadian documentary film' William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson

• 'Deep Cuts [on Haneke's Caché, colonialism, distanciation, politics & media]' Benjamin Ogrodnik
  

Glasgow's Finest: work by Caughie, Geraghty, and great e-theses, too

Image from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), a film studied in Philip Drake's PhD thesis on Hollywood performance

It's been a busy month here at Film Studies For Free, but let's end it on a high note. Today's little film and media studies links list is of salient items from Enlighten, the e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow, an institution of which FSFF's author is personally very fond, given its wonderful department of Theatre, Film & Television Studies.

This research repository houses some true Open-Access treasures by very important authorities in these disciplines, such as a recent item on film authorship by John Caughie, editor (and author of much) of Theories of Authorship, and four articles by Christine Geraghty, one of the most significant figures in British cinema and television studies. There are also some further excellent items by great, younger scholars, like Philip Drake (now a lecturer in the Film, Media, and Journalism Department at the University of Stirling).

• Stuart Duncan Brown, The subversion of sympathy in British social realism: uses of laughter in the cinematic representation of the British working-class. MPhil(R) thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
  

• John Caughie, 'Authors and auteurs: the uses of theory', In: Donald, J. and Renov, M. (eds.) Handbook of Film Studies. Sage, 2007

• Philip J. Drake, Stardom after the star system: economics of performance in contemporary Hollywod cinema. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2002

• Robert J. Edmonstone, Beyond “Brutality”: understanding the Italian Filone’s violent excesses. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008

• B. Franks, 'Constructing "The Wicker Man"', Chapter 3. In Murray, J. and Stevenson, L. and Harper, S. and Franks, B. (Eds) Constructing "The Wicker Man": Film and Cultural Studies perspectives, pp. 63-78: Glasgow: University of Glasgow, Crichton Publications, 2005
  

• Christine Geraghty, Classic television: a matter of time. In: The Making and Remaking of Classic Television, 19 Mar 2009, University of Warwick.
  

• Christine Geraghty, Paris, Hollywood and Kay Kendall. In: Moseley., R. (ed.) Fashioning Film Stars : Dress, Culture, Identity. London: BFI, 2005, pp. 121-133.
  

• Christine Geraghty, The study of the soap opera. In: Wasko, J. (ed.) Companion to Television. Blackwell companions in cultural studies . Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 308-323
  

• Christine Geraghty, Continuous serial - a definition. In: Dyer, R. (ed.) Coronation Street. Television monographs (British Film Institute), 13 . London: BFI, 1981, pp. 9-26.
  

• Sarah Neely, Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture: fiction to film. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003
  

• L. Smith, 'Making history: post-historical commemorations of the past in British television', Groundings 1, 2007

• Lisa E. Williamson, Contentious Comedy: Negotiating Issues of Form, Content, and Representation in American Sitcoms of the Post-Network Era, PhD Thesis, The University of Glasgow Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies 2008