The Obscurity of the Obvious: On the Films of Otto Preminger

Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. (Also see Keathley's 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008)

 Richard Brody on Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1967)

Auteurism got film studies into the academy, but it was 1970s “semiotic” theory (with its amalgam of structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism) that secured film studies a position as a discrete discipline. With this critical shift, however, the obvious became obscure: for in effect, the semiotic approach rendered in need of interpretation many films that appeared transparent. But while films by directors like Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli seemed tailor-made for this method—with their implicit interrogation of the social relations of post-war life in America (bourgeois, patriarchal, heterosexual, capitalist)—Preminger’s films aren’t, due to their both narrative and stylistic approach. While Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli mounted their critique of American capitalist society indirectly, through their carefully designed mise-en-scène that communicated visually things that couldn’t then be addressed directly, Preminger took the opposite approach: addressing controversial social issues (sexual affairs, drug abuse, homosexuality) head- on, so that any “symptomatic” interpretation was rendered superfluous. The social issues under interrogation in Preminger’s films were not subtextual—they were the manifest content. Indeed, to point out that there is a subtext of incest in Anatomy of a Murder, Bonjour Tristesse, and Bunny Lake Is Missing is merely to state the obvious. As a result, since the early 1970s, Preminger has been a severely under-examined filmmaker.  [Excerpt from Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008]

Film Studies For Free was so inspired by Christian Keathley's video essay on Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, part of an impressive body of scholarship on this director's films by this US based academic, that it immediately set to work on assembling an accompanying collection of direct links to other high quality and openly accessible studies of this filmmaker's oeuvre, as well as to one or two other interesting discussions of other directors' work which mention Preminger's films.

And below you have it. That is all. 

• Deborah Allinson, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006

• David Bordwell, 'Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism', The Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985

• Michael Buchler, '“Laura” and the essential ninth: were they only a dream?', Em Pauta, Porto Alegre, v. 17, n. 29, julho a dezembro, 2006

• Mary Ann Doane, 'Scale and the Negotiation of “Real” and “Unreal” Space in the Cinema',NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 1, Number 20 (December 2008), 1-38

• Chris Fujiwara, 'Otto Preminger', Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Noah Isenberg, 'Script Doktor', Bookforum, Jan/Feb 2008

• Oscar Jubis, 'From Suspicion to Trust: Biegler and Manion in Anatomy of a Murder', FilmLeaf, June 2009

• Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008

• Christian Keathley, 'A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool]', In Media Res, May 14 , 2007

• Pat McGilligan/Arthur Laurents, 'Arthur Laurents: Emotional Reality', Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 

• Ronny Loewy, 'Pure Flight or Exodus: Otto Preminger's film about Israel', First published in: Filmgeschichte. Newsletter der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Nr. 13, Juni 1999

• Miguel Marías, 'The Head and Eyes of Otto Preminger, or The Thinking Gaze', Undercurrent, Issue 3, 2006

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'Camera Movement Revisited', 16:9, 2, 2009

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'The Shape of a Western- Visual Design in Winchester '73 and The Man from Laramie', P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007 

• Martha P. Nochimson, 'Betty Grable Finally Dances... (That Lady in Ermine, Otto Preminger, 1948), Senses of Cinema, 5, 2000

• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• David Ray Papke, 'From Flat to Round: Changing Portrayals of the Judge in American Popular Culture',  Journal of the Legal Profession, Vol. 31, 2006-2007

• Luca Prono, 'Whatever Happened to Nelson Algren ?: Otto Preminger’s Adaptation Of The Man with the Golden Arm', Links and Letters 6, 1999

• Dahlia Schweitzer, 'Who is missing in Bunny Lake?', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Valerie Stulman, 'Femme/s, Film/s, Noir/e: Revisions', Thinking Gender Papers, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UC Los Angeles, January 2007 

• Boris Trbic, 'Where the Sidewalk Ends', Senses of Cinema, 8, 2000

30 Online Film Studies Books and PhD Theses from OhioLINK

Image from When Night is Falling (Patricia Rozema, 1995), a film discussed by Jamie L. Stuart

Film Studies For Free shakes itself out of an uncharacteristic, unseasonal, hot-weather related torpor to bring you one of its regular reports (and lists of links) from a University research repository. Today, it's the turn of the utterly brilliant repository at the OhioLINK ETD Center, gathering theses and books (in bold below) by film studies scholars at Ohio State University, Bowling Green State University, Ohio University, and Case Western Reserve University.

As usual, these links will be added in due course to FSFF's permanent listings of Online Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Theses and Open Access Film E-books List.

• Savas Arslan Hollywood alla Turca: A history of popular cinema in Turkey, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Dyrk Ashton, Using Deleuze: The Cinema Books, Film Studies and Effect, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Rihab Kassatly Bagnole, Imaging the Almeh : Transformation and Multiculturalization of the Eastern Dancer in Painting, Theatre, and Film, 1850-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Holly Lynn Baumgartner, Visualizing Levinas: Existence and Existents Through Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Vanilla Sky, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Rebecca H. Bias, From golden age to silver screen: French Music-Hall Cinema from 1930-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Rose Mary Bremer, Screening gender and sexuality in contemporary Quebec film adaptation, PhD, Ohio State University, 2004

• Marie Katheryn Connelly, The films of Martin Scorsese: A critical study, PhD, Ohio State University, 1991

• Carolina Siqueira Conte, Bonds: A Theory Of Appropriation For Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice Realized In Film, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Stefan Hall, "You've Seen the Movie, Now Play the Game": Recoding the Cinematic in Digital Media and Virtual Culture, PhD, Ohio State University, 2011

• Cheryl Lynn Hindrichs, Lyric narrative in late modernism: Virginia Woolf, H.D., Germaine Dulac, and Walter Benjamin, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006 (available from May 19, 2011)

• Daniel O. Jones, The Soul That Thinks: Essays on Philosophy, Narrative and Symbol in the Cinema and Thought of Andrei Tarkovsky, PhD, Ohio University, 2007

• Se Young Kim, A Sociohistorical Contextual Analysis of the Use of Violence in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, MA thesis, Ohio State University, 2010

• Joanna Klein, Making Pictures: The Pinter Screenplays (1985)

• Yo-Hsin Cindy Liu, The Examination of the Appearance and Use of French Horn in Film Scores from 1977 to 2004, DMA Thesis, Ohio State University, 2005

• Cileine I. de Lourenco, Negotiating Africanness in national identity: studies in Brazilian and Cuban cinema, PhD, Ohio State University, 1998

• Judith Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question (1989)

• Denis Mueller, John Dewey and Documentary Narrative, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2007

• James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds), Understanding Narrative (1994)

• Rob Prince, Say Hello to My Little Friend: De Palma's Scarface, Cinema Spectatorship, and the Hip Hop Gangsta as Urban Superhero, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2009

• Barbara L. Romanczuk, Screening Zola’s women, PhD, Ohio State University, 2002

• John Edward Ryan, Ordinary people: The cinema of John Sayles, PhD, Case Western Reserve University, 1994

• Thibaut Schilt, Marginal pleasure and auteurist cinema: the sexual politics of Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat and François Ozon, Ohio State University, 2005

• Lisa K. Stein, The Travel Narrative as Spin: Mitigating Charlie Chaplin's Public Persona in My Trip Abroad and "A Comedian sees the World", PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

• Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2006

• Joan Marie Titus, Modernism, socialist realism, and identity in the early film music of Dmitry Shostakovich, 1929-1932, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Maruta Zane Vitols, From the Personal to the Public: Juris Podnieks and Latvian Documentary Cinema, PhD, Ohio State University, 2008

• Stacey A. Weber-Fève, There's no place like home: homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women's filmmaking and the literature of the MÉTROPOL and the MAGHREB, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Marilyn Yaquinto, Policing the World: American Mythologies and Hollywood’s Rogue Cop Character, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

• Yi-hui Huang, An Interpretivist Study of Knowledge Provided by Seamless Digital-Synthesized Photographs, PhD, Ohio State University, 2008

• Rui Zhang, Feng Xiaogang and Chinese cinema after 1989, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005 

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

On Film Music and Digital Media

Film Music and Digital Media 
(Moderator: Martin Marks with Paul Seiko Chihara and Dan Carlin) MIT, April 2, 2009 (Running Time: 1:55:26)

Film Studies For Free really enjoyed the above highly insightful and well-illustrated video and it very much hopes you will, too. The discussion covers, with wit and great intelligence, many of the practical considerations that are part and parcel of contemporary film scoring. As it is quite long, the below text will let you know a little of what you can expect.

For more on film music studies, check out FSFF's entry "Music to the Eyes: Film Music Essays and Resources Online", as well as its other references to film music here.

About the Lecture

In a panel that at times resembles a late-night ramble and conversation, three film music professionals discuss changes in their industry, with some no-holds-barred dishing and kvetching.

Martin Marks sets the scene historically, starting with the revolutionary introduction of sound to film. He plays a clip from the original 1933 film King Kong, which he describd it hopes es as both a technological and aesthetic landmark of soundtrack production. Paul Chihara continues the story, explaining that the score’s creator, Max Steiner, was part of the first wave of film composers, classically trained musicians, fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Steiner drew on the music he knew best, the kind performed by the Vienna Staatsoper, for his King Kong score, so we get a movie that’s “wall to wall music, filled with leitmotifs,” played by a giant orchestra.

Cut to 2005, and the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong. In what he describes as “an electro-acoustic seminar on how digitally sound is enhanced,” Chihara plays several clips of the same scene that demonstrate the evolutionary leap in soundtrack scoring since 1933. The process involves the demo track, a score with digital sampling and no acoustic instruments intended to help the filmmaker imagine how music will work with the film; next an acoustic score; and the final dub version, where acoustic and digital music sources combine, and the rest of the sound elements are added in post production (dialogue and sound effects).

The new scoring process can prove dangerous to composers, as Dan Carlin reveals. “We have a term called ‘demo love,’ describing how the director gets attached to the very first track offered by the composer.” This is a digitally sampled score often drawn from other composers’ work. The editor and director become accustomed to it, and test audiences watch films with demo tracks. “So the composer comes in with a new approach, and often gets fired at this point.” This has led to composers fearful of originality. Carlin says starting in the ‘90s, generic romantic and action scores began to emerge: “Everything starts to sound alike.” He also describes how composer Georges Delerue went to see Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, and heard one of his own themes, which had started as a temporary music cue but then was essentially plagiarized. This led to a very lucrative law suit. Marks notes that “one of America’s film music geniuses,” Elmer Bernstein, essentially dropped out of the business because of the insistence on demo tracks over original music.

Panelists also bemoan the demise of orchestral recording sessions at production studios, as digital audio tools put the composer’s work in the hands of directors and editors, who play with increasingly authentic sounding software-based instruments. Companies are buying up the rights to the sounds of famous symphony orchestras, down to the staccato and legato notes of strings and horns in different keys and pitches. The craft involved in composing music, then conducting an orchestra through a movie scene, has become obsolete. Chihara concludes sadly, “It’s an unnecessary art.”

Journal of the Moving Image: Indian and South Asian cinema and media studies

Image from Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Anil Sharma, 2001). 

For more on this film, read "Beyond Partition: The Political Horizons of Contemporary Indian and Korean War Films" by Bhaskar Sarkar

Film Studies For Free just came across a really good e-journal that it hadn't bumped into before: Journal of the Moving Image, an annual publication of the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. 

It was launched in print format in 1999, but its print and online versions now co-exist. As its mission statement puts it,

JMI seeks to represent critical work on the state of contemporary screen cultures. There are many regions in the world with large viewing populations, often with vast production infrastructures for film and television; but corresponding institutions or forums for critical engagement with such audio-visual regimes are still highly inadequate. JMI seeks to address a broad set of issues ranging from formal properties of the moving image to the social foundation of its production, transmission and reception. There will be a special focus on India and South Asia, and on issues of transnational media transactions, but we would like to offer a wider range of discussion on film and television from various parts of the world made from different perspectives.

FSFF wanted to share its contents with you promptly, so direct links to all items so far online are pasted in below, with the most recent issue first. The first three issues of JMI are also being prepared for online publication. 

There are some excellent items here (you might try out Ravi Vasudevan's The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ just for starters). So FSFF heartily recommends that you subscribe to JMI ready for its next issue in December. 

(Also, please check out, if you haven't yet, FSFF's own related entry: "Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies)

JMI, Number 8, December, 2009

• Editorial Note

• Preserving Film (on Film) in a Digital Age Josef Lindner

• Together against the Mafia: Godard, Scorsese, Bit Torrent Sebastian Lutgert

• Cinema’s Floating Point Matt Hanson

• Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship Nishant Shah

• Photoshop Landscapes: Digital Mediations and Bollywood Cities Madhija Mukherjee

• Special Feature Conjunction and Flow: The Gendered Temporalities of (Media) Disasters Kumkum Sangari

JMI, Number 7, December, 2008

• Editorial Note

• Querying the ‘Traditional’ Roots of Silent Cinema in Asia  Kaushik Bhaumik

• Beyond Partition: The Political Horizons of Contemporary Indian and Korean War Films Bhaskar Sarkar

• The Subject of Representation in Korean Cinema: Two Limit Cases  Earl Jackson, Jr.

• Meet John Doe’s Order: Piracy, Temporality and the Question of Asia  Lawrence Liang

• Missing in the Original: Twin Dragons Remade in India S.V. Srinivas

• Theorizing New Asian Cinemas: Problems of the Historicist Approach Manas Ghosh

• Student Paper New Urban Spaces: Films of Tsai Ming-liang Michelle Baitali Bhowmik

• Special Feature The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ Ravi Vasudevan

JMI, Number 6, December, 2007

• Editorial Note

• An Aesthetic for Film Sound in India? Ashish Rajadhyaksha

• Communication and Signification: Voice in the Cinema M. Madhava Prasad

• Early Indian Talkies: Voice, Performance and Aura Madhuja Mukherjee

•  Musical Contests: Reflections on Musical Values in Popular Film Amlan Das Gupta

• Speaking through Troubled Times Moinak Biswas

• Seeing through the Sound: Certain Tendencies of the Soundtrack in Satyajit Ray's Films of the 1970s Anindya Sengupta

• Student Papers Sound Memories: In Search of Lost Sounds in Indian Cinema Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and  Sound of Horror: Sound and Dread in Hindi Cinema Shubham Roy Choudhury

• Special Feature  Space, Interiority and Affect in Charulata and Ghare Baire Supriya Chaudhuri

JMI, Number 5, December, 2006

• Editorial Note

• The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous ‘Exhibition’ Capital Ashish Rajadhyaksha

• Acceleration and Conflicts: Comments on the Cinematic Object in the 1990s and After Jeebesh Bagchi

• Persistence of the Feudal: Star and Film Form in Post 1970s Telugu Cinema S V Srinivas

• Mourning and Blood-Ties: Macbeth in Mumbai Moinak Biswas

• Live(li)ness and Network Publics in Post-Liberalization Indian Popular Films Abhijit Roy

• Memories of Development: The Fantastic Non-Presence of Kolkata in Post-Liberalization Bangla Cinema Sovan Tarafder

• The Middle Class: Consuming and Consumed: The Romance of Bombay Cinema Neha Chadha

JMI, Number 4, November, 2005

• Editorial Note

• The Apparatus and its Constituencies: On India’s Encounters with Television Abhijit Roy

• Panoramas of Asia and the Electronic Hearth: Michael Palin’s Connections John Hutnyk 

• The Subjects of News Television M. Madhava Prasad

• Kyunki Main Bhi Kabhi Tulsi Thi : Opening and Using the Black Box of Primetime Telereality Ipsita Chanda

• Media Trials and Courtroom Tribulations : The Battle of Images, Words and Shadows in the 13 December Case Suddhabrata Sengupta

• Television, Nationalism and Indian Cricket in the Era of Global Media Manas Ghosh

• Development (without) Communication: Viewing Doordarshan Methodologically Dipankar Sinha

• 'Reading' Television: Towards a Definition of Audio-Visual Literacy Nilanjana Gupta

• Remote Control Nationalism: Media politics in Guyana Atticus Narrain

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

"Bollywood" for Beginners and Beyond: Introductions to Popular Hindi Cinema Studies

Kajol and Shahrukh Khan in  Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge / The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride (Aditya Chopra, 1995)

With a wary eye on the fast-approaching (in many places at least) and not-so-mellow fruitfulness of a new academic year, Film Studies For Free today brings you its handy guide to online introductions to popular Hindi cinema.

Not all of the wonderful, openly accessible resources linked to below the embedded video are designed for those new to this core academic film studies subject, but all are clearly written, and thus very accessible, as well as highly informative to those at many different stages in their scholarly fascination with this most popular of world cinemas.

Talking of fascination, a nice place to start might be Jonathan Torgovnik's wonderful online portfolio of photographs: Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon Press, 2003).

 

The Seductive World of Indian Cinema (2007)

Discussion between author Anupama Chopra, leading filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and Bollywood expert and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU Tejaswini Ganti. The discussion is moderated by Richard Allen, Chair of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts.

• A Guide to South Asian Cinema, ImagineAsia: British Film Institute, 2002
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Gregory D. Booth, 'Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema', Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 54, 1995: 169-190
• Devon Burk, 'What's A Kiss: The Unchaste Chastity of Bollywood', The Virginia Review of Asian Studies, Vol. XI, Fall 2008
• Corey Creekmur, 'The Devdas Phenomenon', Philip's fil-ums, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Patrick Colm Hogan, 'Hindi Cinema as a Challenge to Film Theory and Criticism', Projections, Volume 3, Number 2, Winter 2009 , pp. v-ix(1)
• Aniruddha Dutta, 'Nation, Liberalisation And Film Songs: Technology And Hybridisation In Contemporary Hindi Film Music', Wide Screen Journal, 1.16, April 2009
• Faiza Hirji, 'When Local Meets Lucre: Commerce, Culture and Imperialism in Bollywood Cinema', Global Media Journal 4.7, Fall 2005
  
• Wendy F. Hsu, 'Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film', Virginia Review of Asian Studies, July 2003
• Tabish Khair, 'The ironies of Bollywood', 16:9,  7.31, April 2009
• Mark Lorenzen and Florian Arun Taeube, 'Breakout from Bollywood? Internationalization of Indian Film Industry', DRUID Papers, 07-06
• Philip Lutgendorf with Corey Creekmur, Philip's Fil-Ums: Notes on Indian popular cinema, University of Iowa (date unknown)
• Vijay Mishra, 'Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy', Asian Studies Institute, 2006
• Anna Morcom, 'The Cinematic Study of Hindi Film Songs', Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema (Ashgate Publishing, 2007) 
• Shammi Nanda,'Censorship and Indian Cinema: The Case of War and Peace', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 38, November 2002
• Sheila J Nayar, 'The values of fantasy: Indian popular cinema through Western scripts', Journal of Popular Culture; Summer 1997; 31, 1  
• Ally Ostrowski, 'Found in Translation: From Hollywood Hits to Bollywood Blockbusters', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 11, No. 2 October 2007
• Heidi Pauwels, '“The Woman Waylaid at the Well” or Paṇaghaṭa-līlā An Indian Folk Theme Appropriated in Myth and Movies', Asian Ethnology, Volume 69, Number 1, 2010, 1–33
• Aswin Punathambekar and Anandam Kavoori, 'Introduction', Global Bollywood, edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (NYU Press, 2008)
• Anjali Ram, 'Framing the feminine: diasporic readings of gender in popular Indian cinema', Women's Studies in Communication, March 22 2002
• Shakuntala Rao, 'The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India', The Communication Review, 10: 57–76, 2007
• Amrita Sen, 'Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions', Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009)
• Brian Shoesmith, '[Review of] Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008', Screening the Past, Issue 25, 2009
• Sangita Shresthova, 'Strictly Bollywood? Story, Camera and Movement in Hindi Film Dance', MSc e-thesis, Princeton, 2003
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex, 2010 
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited buy Iain Robert Smith, Scope, Issue 15, 2010
• Lakshmi Srinivas, 'The active audience: spectatorship, social relations and the experience of cinema in India', Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 24: 155–173, 2002

Standing Out: R.I.P. Lena Horne

Groundbreaking actress and singer Lena Horne, who died yesterday in her nineties. In the sequence above, from the movie Stormy Weather (dir. Andrew Stone, US, 1943), she sings the track for which she will always be remembered.

For more on this film, do read 'All cullud musical daily double: Stormy Weather', by Odienator at Big Media Vandalism, February 21, 2008. It is also discussed at length in a great, hour-long interview on Horne's career with Gail Buckley, the star's daughter (some other great links and video at this site).

Below are extracts from and links to a few, excellent scholarly studies of Horne's work and persona. David Hudson's round up of tributes to the actress is now online at The Auteurs Notebook

While the subject of Shane Vogel’s article “Lena Horne’s Impersona” could herself be described as a spectacular mulata musical performer, Vogel makes the case that Horne’s (in)famous “aloof” performing style has been “misunderstood . . . as a reflection of the demanding and narcissistic personality of the prima donna.” Instead, Vogel finds that, far from cultivating a Garboesque diva mask, Horne’s distant and distancing style “is a withholding of any persona at all”; its “negative affect” a “strategic mode of black [female] performance” that allowed Horne — and a number of other women—“to survive the psychic damage and physical danger of segregated cabaret performance.”
Alexander Doty, 'Introduction: The Good, the Bad, and the Fabulous; or, The Diva Issue Strikes Back', Camera Obscura 67, Volume 23, Number 1, 2008

[Lena Horne's] restraint on the cabaret stage found its cinematic counterpart in [her] film career. She appeared in more than a dozen Hollywood musicals, but primarily as what was sardonically termed a “pillar singer.” In films like Panama Hattie (dir. Norman Z. McLeod, US, 1942), I Dood It (dir. Vincente Minnelli, US, 1943), Thousands Cheer (dir. George Sidney, US, 1943), and Boogie-Woogie Dream (dir. Hans Burger, US, 1944), Horne was featured, usually propped against a marble column, in a musical number that was supplemental to the narrative of the film. This isolation from the story allowed her number to be easily deleted before distribution to southern theaters. “I looked good and I stood up against a wall and sang and sang. But I had no relationship with anybody else,” Horne recalled in 1957. “Mississippi wanted its movies without me. It was an accepted fact that any scene I did was going to be cut when the movie played the South. So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut. I had no communication with anybody.” This filmic isolation contributed to Horne’s reputation for affective distance. Even in the three films in which she had starring roles—The Duke Is Tops (dir. William L. Nolte, US, 1938), Stormy Weather (dir. Andrew Stone, US, 1943), and Cabin in the Sky (dir. Vincente Minnelli, US, 1943) — her reserve and her refusal to inhabit the images available to her seemed to render her detached from the narrative. As James Haskins notes about her performance as the seductive vixen Georgia Brown in Cabin in the Sky, “Undoubtedly she infused the role with as much dignity as she could muster and managed to be the most aloof ‘bad girl’ ever seen in a film to date. She was not believable as a slut, and as such she was an enigmatic character who invited puzzled contemplation as much as sexual desire in the male members of the audience.”

Shane Vogel, 'Lena Horne’s Impersona', Camera Obscura 67, Volume 23, Number 1

• TaKeshia Brooks, 'Boogie Woogie Dreams: Early African-American Representations in Musical Short Films', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, 2009-05-25
• Stacy Holman Jones, 'Conversations with Scholars of American Popular Culture', Americana, Fall 2008

Concordia cinema studies resources freely accessible online

The woman at the window: image from Jane Campion's Bright Star (2009); a trope explored in Julianne Pidduck's PhD thesis on the costume film now accessible online

Film Studies For Free was excited to hear last week that Concordia University has launched its online Institutional Research Repository Spectrum, with 6,000 full-text theses and dissertations. It was excited because it knows that based at Concordia is the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema of the Faculty of Fine Arts, the largest, university centre for the study of film animation, film production and film studies in Canada.

FSFF also specifically knew that highly significant Canadian scholars, such as Julianne Pidduck (now a professor at the Université de Montréal) and André Habib (also at the Université de Montréal) had produced graduate theses there.

So, it is delighted to bring you the below links to the fabulous (mostly) Film Studies thesis resources accessible via the repository, including ones by Pidduck on the costume film (and also on contemporary film noir), Habib's brilliant francophone thesis on Jean-Luc Godard, and great work by other (now) well-known scholars such as Liz Czach.

• Babineau, Dan (2003) Stairs in cinema : a formal and thematic investigation. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Ballantyne Tree, Tanya (1989) Formative evaluation of a documentary film on the effects of poverty on a Montreal family. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Bambic-Workman, Helen (1986) Development and evaluation of an instructional manual concerning the Nagra 4.2 film sound tape recorder. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Baric, Stephanie (2001) Yugoslav war cinema : shooting a nation which no longer exists. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Bird, Charles (1979) The making of 8mm film loops. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Black, Joel Elan (2003) 'Arrested for selling poetry!' or 'You wouldn't want your children reading this' : the historical significance of the "Howl" obscenity trial. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine (2003) Manufacturing culture in Cuba, an ethnography. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Brook, Glenn Leonard (2002) Canada, a people's history : an analysis of the visual narrative for a colonial nation. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Bruce, Jean Marietta (2003) A melodramatic imagined nation : the unruly subject of Canadian cinemas. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Castiel, Élie (2003) Pour une esthétique du plan-séquence dans Le Voyage des comédiens de Theo Angelopoulos. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Chang, Sandra (2003) Children's pretend play with television and film-scripted character toys. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Cheryl., Dabreo-Ramharack (1998) Uplifting The Black Race - only males need apply : Black male militancy in Malcom X, Panther, Boyz n' the hood, and Get on the bus. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Clarke, Jocelyne (1989) Moving peripheries and marginal cultures : cinema and the "Dark Continent". Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Curcin, Nikola R (1983) Investing in Canadian feature films : production and evaluation of a video-tape for potential investors. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Czach, Elizabeth (2000) Home movies then and now. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• D'Amboise, Paul (2002) "Tinseltown as teacher" : a case study of historical feature films as interpretive sources of history within an educational context. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Dancsok, Michael (1998) Transcending the documentary : the films of Arthur Lipsett. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• De B'béri, Boulou Ebanda (2003) Africanicity in Black cinema : a horizontal labyrinth of trans-geographical practices of identity. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Deschamps, Lisa Anne (2002) The effects of popular culture on youth sub-culture and how it plays a role in the school environment. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Dorland, Michael (1991) The discursive economy of the emergence of the Canadian feature film : discourses of dependency and the governmentalization of a displaced national cinema, 1957-1968. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Dufour, Marianne (2000) Through the looking glass : the therapeutic potential of videotaping as an adjunct tool in non directive art therapy in an object relations perspective. Other thesis, Concordia University.
• Egan, Catherine M (1973) Films for art programmes at the secondary level. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Frigon, Martin (2003) La fonction historique de la figure du patriote dans le cycle abitibien de Pierre Perrault. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Gasher, Mike (1999) The Grey Fox meets Jumanji : the emergence of the feature-film industry in British Columbia. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Gilbert, Sylvie (2000) Sortir de table : les performances alimentaires de Carmen Miranda, Louise Mercille et des religieuses du Moyen Âge. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Gupta, Dipti (1998) Confronting the challenge of distribution : women documentary filmmakers in India. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Habib, André (2001) Origine et fin : Méthode(s). À partir et autour des Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Jaafar, Nisrine (2001) The blue flame and the red flame: love and eroticism. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Jordan, Randolph (2003) Starting from scratch : turntables, auditory representation, and the structure of the known universe in the films of David Lynch. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Katadotis, Katina (1995) Quebec's Cinema act : policy and practical perspectives. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Keightley, Keir (1996) Frank Sinatra, hi-fi, and formations of adult culture : gender, technology, and celebrity, 1948-62. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Kolomeir, Harriet T (1987) The neighbourhood movie house in Montreal, 1925-1929 : the harmonious whole. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Kristmanson, Mark (1999) Plateaus of freedom : nationality, culture and state security in Canada, 1927-1957. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Laakso, Hanna Maria (2002) DOGMAtic iconoclasm : performative aspects of realism and excess in Lars von Trier's Breaking the waves and The idiots. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Marsh, Susan (2003) As easy as 1,2,4-- : the space of ambiguity in art and teaching. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• McKee, Tracey L (2000) Good girls do it too! : a look at the representation of women who kill in made-for-TV movies. Masters thesis, Concordia University
• McLeish, Anna (2003) To recycle is to author is to create is to recycle : transitory film authorship, from popular European cinema to post-new Hollywood cinema. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Moen, Kristian (2001) "About as shapeless as the Man in the Moon" : the representation of desire and transition in six films of Charles Laughton. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Nagy, Judy (1996) Home grown remedies : in-house innovation in the film-making industry. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Nichols, Robert Darcey (2003) From monuments to cinema : the question of the counter-monument in two works by Mark Lewis. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Pidduck, Julianne (1997) Intimate places and flights of fancy : gender, space, and movement in contemporary costume drama. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Pidduck, Julianne (1993) The "fatal femme" in contemporary Hollywood film noir : reframing gender, violence, and power. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Pinsonneault, Michael (1999) Social dimensions of Hollywood movie music. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Preville, Philip (1997) The effort to forget : collective memory and documentary film in Québec. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Primeau, François (2001) Enquête sur la représentation de la masculinité et la Méthode dans le cinéma états-unien des années mille neuf cent soixante-dix : vers une nouvelle conception de l'acteur cinématographique. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Pycock, Elizabeth (1992) Memory and anger : teen films and the female body. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Read, Robert J (2003) The film noir collection and the legacy of nineteenth century modernity. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Ryan, Cyril (1996) Black movie : five picture deal to make gun movies. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Schyngera, Wes (1993) Experiencing media : the resonance of post(modern) culture. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Shalinsky, Bernard (1977) Multi-sensory exploration of the natural environment : production and evaluation of a super 8 film-based videotape. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Simon, Cheryl Inez (1998) Gender, genre and globalization : discourses of "Femininity" in the popular culture of the 1990's. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Sinkinson, Susan (1999) The self as "other" : accessing issues of difference in Trinh T. Minh-Ha's Reassemblage. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Smith, Donna Lee (1989) Mombasa days : a feature-length film script. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Smith, Matthew (1996) Introducing a new medium : newspaper reviews of the first film screenings in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto and New York in 1896. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Spivak, Robert (1991) Christopher Durang : satire and beyond. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Stober, JoAnne (2001) That's not what I heard : synchronized sound cinema in Montreal 1926-1931. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Stoianova, Christina (1999) The Eastern European crisis of self-knowledge (1948-1989) : the relationship between state and society as reflected in Eastern European film : a genre approach. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Suchet, Simone (1994) Le cinéma rural et la société italienne des années soixante-dix : représentations idéologiques et impuissance politique : étude sur Novecento de Bernardo Bertolucci, Padre, padrone de Paolo et Vittorio Taviani, [et] l'Albero degli zoccoli de Ermanno Olmi. PhD thesis, Concordia University.
• Verma, Tina (1999) Re-imagining multiculturalism : how newness enters the world. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Weir, Jodi (1999) Performing gender : transgenderism as critique. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Zhou, Hao (2003) Application of 3D facial animation techniques for Chinese opera. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
• Zielinski, Ger (1996) Towards the "Utopie film" : aspects of Adorno's thought in Alexander Kluge's antagonistic concept of realism. Masters thesis, Concordia University.