Showing posts with label film and politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film and politics. Show all posts

Sunday, 5 June 2011

New Issue of WIDE SCREEN Journal: Cinemas of the Arab World, Militant Cinema, Film Production Studies, SciFi

Frame grab from Drôle de Félix (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2000)

Film Studies For Free's author is busy with marking this weekend, and so can only look longingly for now at the below Table of Contents of a bumper new issue of the journal Wide Screen whch appears to be going from strength to strength. There are some very enticing and valuable items here, so FSFF wanted to rush its readers the usual direct links to the openly accessible contents.

Wide Screen Vol.3 No.1
  • 'From the Editors' Desk' by Kuhu Tanvir PDF
 Essays:
  • 'Militants and Cinema: Digital Attempts to Make the Multitude in Hunger, Che, Public Enemies' by Joshua Aaron Gooch Abstract PDF
  • 'Minnelli's Yellows: Illusion, Delusion and the Impression on Film' by Kate Hext Abstract PDF
  • Trauma, Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction and the Post-Human' by Anirban Kapil Baishya Abstract PDF
  • 'Drôle de Félix: A Search for Cultural Identity on the Road' by Zélie Asava Abstract PDF
  • 'An Analysis of the Technoscientific Imaginary in the Remake of The Stepford Wives' by Jessica Johnston and Cornelia Sears Abstract PDF 
  • Home Sweet Home: The Cautionary Prison/Fairy Tale' by Paul Tremblay Abstract PDF 
Film Production Studies (Contd. from W.S. 2.2)
  • Handling Financial and Creative Risk in German Film Production' by M. Bjørn von Rimscha Abstract PDF
  • Opening Pandora’s (Black) Box: Towards A Methodology Of Production Studies' by Graham Roberts Abstract PDF 
Cinemas of the Arab World:  
  • 'Introduction: Cinemas of the Arab World' by Latika Padgaonkar Abstract PDF
  • 'Cinema “Of” Yemen And Saudi Arabia: Narrative Strategies, Cultural Challenges, Contemporary Features' by Anne Ciecko Abstract PDF 
  • Director Profile: Mai Masri' by Latika Padgaonkar Abstract PDF
  • Salah Abu Seif and Arab Neorealism' by Ouissal Mejri Abstract PDF 
  • Review: London River' by Latika Padgaonkar Abstract PDF 
Book Reviews:
  • 'Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983' by Radha Dayal Abstract PDF
Posted by purnawan at 06:09 0 comments
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Thursday, 2 June 2011

Undead Links to George A. Romero Studies

Zombies intruding on the free flow of commerce? Frame grab from Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978)
In [George Romero's films], antagonism and horror are not pushed out of society (to the monster) but are rather located within society (qua the monster). The issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the “heroes”—the police, the army, good old boys with their guns and male bonding fantasies. If they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future. Romero also implements this critique structurally. As Steven Shaviro observes, the cultural discomfort is not only located in the films’ graphic cannibalism and zombie genocide: the low-budget aesthetics makes us see “the violent fragmentation of the cinematic process itself." The zombie in such a representation may be uncanny and repulsive, but the imperfect uncleanness of the zombie’s face—the bad make-up, the failure to hide the actor behind the monster’s mask—is what breaks the screen of the spectacle. [Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010] 

About a month ago, Film Studies For Free's author was delighted to take part in the first of a series of screenings and roundtables on the fascinating and complex subject of 'Intrusion' and its 'specific relation to the visual on the different but interrelated registers of the psychic, sexual, social and political'. 

This inventive and highly productive series was organised by Amber Jacobs, Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and creator and presenter of the wonderful Daily Subversions weekly radio show on ResonanceFM (available everywhere online). FSFF will post a video essay contribution on the first film in the 'Intrusion' series just as soon as the more mundane 'intrusions' of research deadlines and the hectic grading season have subsided.

An excellent podcast of the final roundtable of the series, discussing George A. Romero's 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, has just gone online. The discussion features Dr Jacobs, along with Mark Fisher (Cultural Studies and Music Culture, Goldsmiths), Gordon Hon (Artist and Lecturer in Visual Culture, Winchester School of Art), Paul Myerscough (Senior Editor at the London Review of Books), and some great contributions from the audience. The podcast lasts just under an hour. 

To accompany this new online resource, FSFF has assembled and updated a scarily good list of links to further, openly accessible studies or scholarly discussions of Romero's work. Also see previous related entries "Any Zombies Out There?" Undead Film Studies and Zombie Week at In Media Res. And also be aware that you can watch Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead in its entirety at the Internet Archive.


Romero's Zombies
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Wednesday, 27 April 2011

New Issue of Screening the Past

Image from The Party (Blake Edwards, 1968). Read Charles Barr's article on this film, reprinted in issue 30 of Screening the Past
Film Studies For Free rushes you news, via Adrian Martin, that not only has Screening the Past, that wonderful, A* rated, online journal of screen history, theory and criticism, posted its latest issue, but it has changed URL, and is in the process of upgrading its website.

All the new contents are listed below. FSFF hasn't read everything yet, but is enjoying STP's tributes to Blake Edwards, as well as the Open Access reprint of Chris Berry's wonderful essay China’s New “Women’s Cinema”.

First Release

Tribute to Blake Edwards

Classics and Re-runs

Reviews

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Monday, 3 January 2011

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


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

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

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


                        Posted by purnawan at 07:01 0 comments
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                        Monday, 6 December 2010

                        War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction

                        Image from Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2001)

                        Below are links to some of the most interesting items to have come Film Studies For Free's way in the last weeks: a special issue of the high quality online, Open Access journal Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media on War, Conflict and Commemoration. Not all of the items are film-related, though most are, in some way (asbtracts are included for easy skimming to see which). And there are two great essays on Mamoru Oshii's 2001 film Avalon, which FSFF particularly rated.

                        Issue 4, 2010: War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction (guest-edited by Adi Kuntsman (University of Manchester).)

                        4.0 Editorial | Vlad Strukov

                        4.1 Online Memories, Digital Conflicts and the Cybertouch of War | Adi Kuntsman 

                        This opening essay addresses the political and intellectual necessity that enabled me to assemble this special issue. Firstly, I argue for the need to examine the role of digital media in negotiating and commemorating wars in countries outside of the USA and Western Europe and in languages other than English. Secondly, drawing on some recent developments in research on digital media, on one hand, and war, conflict and commemoration, on the other, I claim the importance of examining the two fields together. I argue for a complex approach that would capture the ways digital media and computer technologies affect the warfare itself, its social perception as well as the ways of remembrance and commemoration. I also present several theoretical concepts – cyberscapes of memory, digital battlefields, the aftermath, passionate politics and the cybertouch of war – and outline the structure of the special issue.

                        4.2 The Commemoration of Nazi ‘Children’s Euthanasia’ Online and On Site | Lutz Kaelber

                        An integral part of the German National Socialist ‘bio-political developmental dictatorship’ programme (Schmuhl 2008), ‘euthanasia’ involved the murder of over 300,000 physically or mentally disabled persons in National Socialist Germany and its occupied territories, including children in ‘special children’s wards’ (Kinderfachabteilungen). Using the concept of traumascape as past trauma embodied at a site and brought into the present through commemoration, this article analyses the emergence of virtual traumascapes created by local memory agents who use new digital media as a means to represent these crimes and commemorate the victims of ‘special children’s wards’ in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic. This article shows that virtual traumascapes have contributed to a diverse landscape of memory concerning the murder of disabled children and youths described in five case studies. It also briefly discusses their impact on national memory regimes and the future of commemoration. 

                        4.3 World War 2.0: Commemorating War and Holocaust in Poland Through Facebook | Dieter De Bruyn 

                        The Internet seems to have become the area where instances of individual and collective remembrance, of private and public commemoration, and of memory and postmemory intersect in a new and effective way. This article explores two Polish examples of World War II and Holocaust commemoration that have recently been issued on Facebook: the Warsaw Rising commemorative campaign and the educational project on the young Holocaust victim Henio Zytomirski. As the analysis demonstrates, what determines the value of such online projects is their performative effectiveness. The examination of both examples aims to contribute to the current debate on cultural memory, in which the focus is increasingly on the dynamical and processual character of remembering, rather than on memory as a static product.

                        4.4 Past Wars in the Russian Blogosphere: On the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Memory | Elena Trubina 

                        In Russia, for decades, the collective memory of World War II has served two major functions. It has provided the major source of legitimatising the state and the ethical ground for sustaining the collective identity of those whose country now is very different from the one defended by their grandparents. Along with the state-imposed versions of the war and tired rituals and clichéd expressions of pride and gratitude, new ways of reflecting on the war began emerging. These are facilitated by new socio-technical practices made possible by globalisation and, in particular, by the Internet. Based on an analysis of selected Russian-language blogs, this article argues that although the nationalistic master narratives continue to function as glue for the nation, they become combined with stories and recollections that are attuned to the growing openness and interconnectedness of the world, problematising exclusionary renderings of the country’s contribution to the victory.

                        4.5 Deadly Game along the Wistula: East European Imagery in Oshii’s ‘Avalon’ (2001) | Gérard Kraus 

                        Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon stands firmly engrained in the director’s science fiction oeuvre of completely visually controlled films, focusing on a strong female protagonist shown in critical situations. At the same time the film marks Oshii’s return to live action cinema and takes him outside of Asia. This essay seeks to combine biographical information on the director with an aesthetic analysis of some of the images created for the purpose of this film. In particular the essay addresses Oshii’s interests in the relations between futuristic technologies and militarised societies, and his use of Polish and Eastern European imagery. I will argue that their combination can be seen as remediating and recontextualising images of war and conflict for a new generation that, through digital media, has developed a new dynamic relationship with history and the conflicts that build Europe and the world.

                        4.6 Oshii’s ‘Avalon’ (2001) and Military-Entertainment Technoculture | Patrick Crogan 

                        This essay takes Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon (2001) as a starting point for consideration of the impact of simulational interactive media on contemporary technoculture. The connections made in the film between virtual reality games and military research and development, and its quasi-simulational modelling of various historical ‘Polands’ in re-sequencing a dystopian end of history are the most valuable resources it brings to this study of how simulation’s predominant development represents a major challenge to the forms of critical cultural reflection associated with narrative-based forms of recording and interrogating experience. Analysis of the methods and rhetorics of simulation design in the military-industrial (and now military-entertainment) complex will elaborate the nature and stakes of this challenge for today’s globalising technoculture of ‘militainment’.

                        4.7 ‘The Weight of Meaninglessness’ | Naida Zukić 

                        The Weight of Meaninglessness is a video performance that evokes the atrocities of the recent Bosnian history in an effort to highlight the ethical urgencies, complexities and paradoxes of externalising trauma within a site that collapses meaning and creates possibilities for the return of traumatic memory. The performance shows the artist violently and continuously scrubbing clean her permanently marked arm, withstanding bodily pain and struggling to breathe. The video also confronts the viewer with Srebrenica Genocide; the images of mass graves render the memory of the atrocity traumatising in its insufferable intensity. In the moment of examining trauma and locating its agency, the artist lays bare the paradox of violent memories that can only be externalised through inflicting violence on oneself. The artist’s essay addresses the historical and ideological conditions under which The Weight of Meaninglessness critiques and exercises violence.

                        4.8 ‘Roma Snapshots: A Day in Sarajevo’ | Vanja Čelebičić 

                        The recent war in Bosnia-Herzegovina serves as an undercurrent in this short ethnographic film Roma Snapshots: a Day in Sarajevo. The film attempts to enquire into Sarajevan Roma’s sense of identification, belonging and memory. It portrays the daily lives of Roma through snapshots of their concurrent realities, where painful memories, laughter and religious beliefs exist side by side. The film comprises of simultaneous screening of four episodes, drawing attention to the filmmaker’s dilemma of how to best represent her subjects and which aspects of their lives to highlight. The film addresses visual anthropology’s concerns regarding ways of portraying reality and challenges the standard narrative approach to documentary filmmaking. Roma Snapshots: a Day in Sarajevo is accompanied by the filmmaker’s reflexive essay on anthropological filmmaking, digital media and life in post-war zones.

                        4.9 The Portrayal of Russian Hackers During Cyber Conflict Incidents | Athina Karatzogianni 

                        This article analyses various cyber conflicts and cyber crime incidents attributed to Russian hackers, such as the Estonian and Georgian cyber conflicts and the ‘Climategate hack’. The article argues that Russian hackers were blamed by dozens of outlets for the Climategate hack, because that was consistent with global media coverage of cyber crime incidents which portrayed Russians as highly powerful hackers responsible for many hacking incidents. This narrative also was congruent with the new Cold War rhetoric that consistently takes issue with Russia acting on its geopolitical interests. These interests are seen to manifest themselves in Russia’s objection to countries, formerly under its influence, participating in the NATO alliance and its seemingly obstructive stance at the Copenhagen summit on climate change. 

                        4.10 A Study on a Russian-American Non-Reflexive Discourse | Olga Baysha 

                        This study investigates one such case study – the outburst of anti-Americanism among Russia Internet users during the Russia-Georgia military crisis of 2008. The paper analyzes the discussions of Washington Post articles at the Washington PostForeign Media Russian Internet site. The study shows that, despite numerous attempts by Russian users to deliver their messages to the American readers, their postings were ignored by the American users and global dialogue did not occur. It is this exclusion from the conversation, together with the denigration of Russia by writers in the United States that led to the intensification of anti-American sentiments among the Russians. The study makes clear that for the establishment of effective global public spheres access to new communication technologies and knowledge of English are inadequate, unless accompanied by the willingness to listen to others and a desire to understand them.   

                        4.11 Web Wars: Digital Diasporas and the Language of Memory | Ellen Rutten 

                        Web Wars: Digital Diasporas and the Language of Memory in Russia & Ukraine is a three-year research project within the collaborative HERA-funded project Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Russia, Poland & Ukraine. Led by Dr Alexander Etkind (Cambridge University), this project zeroes in on the ongoing memory wars between Russia, Ukraine, and Poland – nations where political conflicts take the shape of heated debates about the recent past. For Memory at War, five European universities – Cambridge, Helsinki, Tartu, Groningen and Bergen – cooperate to scrutinize Eastern Europe’s memory wars from varying angles. Web Wars is the Bergen pendant, which focuses on their outlines in digital media, and Russian and Ukrainian social media in particular. This submission maps the project design, methods and research objectives.

                        4.12 Book Reviews

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                        Tuesday, 28 September 2010

                        "Any Zombies Out There?" Undead Film Studies

                        Image from I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
                        The zombies in these films are a kind of revolutionary force of predators without a revolutionary program. Their only concern is to satisfy an instinctual drive for predation; a drive which, as is pointed out in Day of the Dead, serves no actual biological purpose. They appear and attack without explanation or reason, violating taken for granted principles of sufficient cause and rationality. Because of this, they are especially threatening to the surviving human beings. Enemies such as Nazis or Communists are comprehensible in terms of their historical backgrounds, economic interests, religious, political or philosophic beliefs. But these zombies are a new breed of enemy in that they do not operate according to the same underlying motivations human beings share in common. They are a nihilistic enemy which, as lifeless, spiritless automatons, exemplify the epitome of passive nihilism. They wander the landscape exhibiting only the bare minimum of power that is required for locomotion and the consumption of living flesh. They must steal life from the strong because they possess such a depressed store of innate energy. They are, literally, the walking dead. [John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996] 
                        In [George Romero's films], antagonism and horror are not pushed out of society (to the monster) but are rather located within society (qua the monster). The issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the “heroes”—the police, the army, good old boys with their guns and male bonding fantasies. If they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future. Romero also implements this critique structurally. As Steven Shaviro observes, the cultural discomfort is not only located in the films’ graphic cannibalism and zombie genocide: the low-budget aesthetics makes us see “the violent fragmentation of the cinematic process itself." The zombie in such a representation may be uncanny and repulsive, but the imperfect uncleanness of the zombie’s face—the bad make-up, the failure to hide the actor behind the monster’s mask—is what breaks the screen of the spectacle. [Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010] 
                        The fear of one's own body, of how one controls it and relates to it, and the fear of not being able to control other bodies, those bodies whose exploitation is too fundamental to capitalist economy, are both at the heart of whiteness. Never has this horror been more deliriously evoked than in these films of the Dead [Richard Dyer,  White: Essays in Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997)].

                        Film Studies For Free is quaking in its digital boots as a whole host of freely accessible zombie studies gathers menacingly on the online horizon and shuffles ever nearer.... No, no, no, nooooo...

                        Yes.

                        Resistance is futile on this the Night of the Living Links.

                        (The only comforting thought is that film zombies also grow old and win the undying loyalty of their fans...)

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                          Friday, 20 August 2010

                          Lots of Film Studies PhD Theses Online

                          Masculine 'musculinity' (almost) all grown up -  Sylvester Stallone, in The Expendables ( Stallone, 2010). (See Yvonne Tasker's PhD on masculinity and action movies)

                          It was time for one of Film Studies For Free's regular visits to a research repository search-engine to see which PhD theses have been made openly accessible online since this blog last took a look.

                          A few of the below PDF files have been linked to before by FSFF but the vast majority have not come up in earlier searches. And there are some fabulous items here: such as Yvonne Tasker's paradigm shifting thesis on gender and action cinema, and Donato Totaro on time and the long take in the cinema. And what a truly astounding variety of topics!

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