Double-Strength: Videos and Links in Celebration of Barbara Hammer

Clip from Maya Deren's Sink by Barbara Hammer (via UndergroundFilm at Vimeo)


Clip from NITRATE KISSES by Barbara Hammer



Clip from SANCTUS and other films from the 1980s by Barbara Hammer
(You can see Sanctus @ubuweb)

HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life Book Performance, Barbara Hammer at British Film Institute, March 2010

"I have chosen images rather than words for the act of naming myself an artist and a lesbian because the level of meanings possible for images and image conjunctions seemed richer and held more ramifications" Barbara Hammer

Film Studies For Free today presents a tribute to the remarkable American, experimental filmmaker and activist Barbara Hammer. The tribute takes the form of a listing of online videos and scholarly links to studies of Hammer's work, as well as of related queer film and politics.

Hammer is seventy-one years old, still making films and still protesting against injustice and censorship. In 2010, she published her wonderful autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, which addressed her personal history and philosophies on art (see a review here).

FSFF says, "Thank you, but... keep it up, please, Barbara! Your work and activism is needed now more than ever." (This blog can be a rather greedy and merciless task-mistress at times...)

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on her career and Feminist film

Modern Women: Barbara Hammer on Maya Deren

• Barbara Hammer Faculty page at European Graduate School 

• Barbara Hammer. Resisting Paradise. Video Lecture Documentary 2005 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4

• Barbara Hammer's Video Channel at Vimeo (16 videos so far archived) 

• Barbara Hammer's website

• Barbara Hammer interviewed in February 2010 about her research on medical science film 'No bones about it!'

• Edith Becker, Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, B. Ruby Rich, 'Lesbians and film, p. 2', from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Sarah Boslaugh, 'Getting Past the Stereotypes: Woman and Motorcycles in recent Lesbian Novels', IJMS, March 2006

•  Martin P. Botha, 'The New African Queer Aesthetics: the Portrayal of Homosexuality in International Cinema', Kinema,

• Joan Braderman, 'Feminism and Video: A View from the Village', Camera Obscura, Volume 22, Number 1, 2007

• Julia Erhart, 'Performing memory: compensation and redress in contemporary feminist first-person documentary', Screening the Past, December 1, 2001

• Claudia Gorbman, 'Barbara Hammer's recent work: Body displaced, body discovered', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987

• John Hess, 'Notes on U.S. radical film, 1967-8', from Jump Cut, no. 21, Nov. 1979 

• Tricia Jenkins, '‘‘Potential Lesbians at Two O’Clock’’: The Heterosexualization of Lesbianism in the Recent Teen Film', The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2005 

• Chuck Kleinhans, 'Teaching sexual images: some pragmatics', from Jump Cut, no. 40, March 1996 

• Laura U. Marks, 'Loving a Disappearing Image', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 8, n° 1-2, 1997

• Susan E. McKenna, 'Seeing lesbian queerly: visibility, community, and audience in 1980s Northampton, Massachusetts', PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts, September 2009

• Fiontán Moran, 'Anatomies of Desire', Afterall, May 2010

• Gary Morris, 'Tender Fictions: Barbara Hammer's Truth Club', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 17, 1996

• Ricardo Peach, Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema on South Africa and Australia, PhD Thesis,University of Technology, Sydney, March 2005

• John Ramirez and Larry Horne, 'UCLA Gay and Lesbian Media Conference', from Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984 

• Jennifer Beth Simmons, Visions of Feminist (Pom(o)nanism): Masturbating Female Postmodern Subjectivity in American Television and Film, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2004

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

• William C. Wees, 'Carrying On: Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Abigail Child and American Avant-Garde Film of the Eighties', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2001

• Andrea Weiss, 'Women I Love. Double Strength : Lesbian Cinema and Romantic Love' , from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

• Jacquelyn Zita, 'The films of Barbara Hammer: Counter-currencies of a lesbian iconography', from Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981

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

Pete Postlethwaite, as Danny, delivers his Albert Hall speech in Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996)

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.

• Dave Allen, 'MIDDLE-CLASS MODS and WORKING-CLASS SODS: Quadrophenia and the Construction of Popular Histories', The 1970s Project, 2008

• Christopher Beach, excerpt from ‘A Troubled Paradise: Utopia and Transgression in Comedies of the Early 1930s’, Class, Language and American Film Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

• BFI Screenoline 'Working Class Heroes'

• Cathy Brigden, 'Representations of labour: Images of work and workers in film', in P. Stanton and S. Young (eds) Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 2008

• Ron Briley, 'The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive in Literature, Song, and Film' , Studies in Popular Culture, 31.2, Spring 2009

• Lee Carruthers, 'Biding Our Time: Rethinking the Familiar in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey', Film Studies, Vol. 9, Winter 2006

• E. Anna Claydon, 'New Perspectives on British Cinema: Going Beyond the "Crisis" in Masculinity', Paper at the Exploring Masculinities and Film at the Centre for Research into Film and Media, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, July 2-4, 2001

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy, "Everything you always hated about Thatcher's Britain: A cultural analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988)," Miscelanea, 2004, vol.28, 145-160

• John Curzon, 'Whatever Happened to the North of England? The Spaces of Post-Industrial Northern England in Contemporary Television and Film Drama', PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2009

• Alexander Dhoest, 'How queer is L'Air de Paris? -- Marcel Carné and Queer Authorship', Scope, May 2003

• Jay Dolmage and William DeGenaro, '"I Cannot Be Like This Frankie": Disability, Social Class, and Gender in Million Dollar Baby', Disability Studies Quarterly, Spring 2005, Volume 25, No. 2

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Antigone Agnistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The Red Army Fraction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game', Rouge, 4, 2004

• David Frank, 'Short Takes: The Canadian Worker on Film', Labour/Le Travail, 46 (Fall 2000), 417-37

• Michelle Gadpaille, 'Look Back in Anger and Popular Culture', Maribor International Review Vol. 1, no. 1 (2008)

• Sarah Godfrey, 'Villainous Victims: The Paradox of the ‘Damaged’: Man in Naked and Nil By Mouth', eSharp, Issue 9, Spring 2007

• Susan Hayward, 'Simone Signoret 1921-1985: the star as sign-the sign as scar', Modern Languages Publications Archive, 1995

• Heather J. Hicks, 'Postindustrial Striptease: The Full Monty and the Feminization of Work', Colby Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2000

• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema - style and context: an examination of British "New Wave" Films', Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, January 1997

• Jeffrey K. Jack, Irish Representations in the Films of Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan, Masters thesis, Marshall University, 2005

• Martin Johnes and Gavin Mellor. 'The 1953 FA Cup Final: Modernity and Tradition in British Culture', Contemporary British History, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2006

• Cora Kaplan, 'The Death of the Working-Class Hero', New Formations, 52 (Summer, 2004)

• John Kirk, 'Changing the Subject:Cultural Studies and the Demise of Class', Cultural Logic, 2002

• Chuck Kleinhans, 'Contemporary working class film heroes in Evel Knieval and The Last American Hero', from Jump Cut, no. 2, 1974

• Gérard Kraus, 'Other faces: Andy Bausch's Le Club des chômeurs (The Unemployment Club, 2002)', Kinoeye, 4.3, 2004

• J. Meryl Krieger, 'Imagining politics, popular music and remixing: YouTube, remediation and protest songs', Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting October 26, 2007

• Ernest Larsen, 'F.I.S.T. Where are you, Jimmy?', from Jump Cut, no. 19, December 1978

• Jim Leach, 'Introduction', British Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 

• Leonard J. Leff, 'White Line Fever: Promise and frustration', from Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977

• Anne Leonard, 'Review of Hodges, Graham Russell Gao, Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver', H-Urban, H-Net Reviews, April, 2008

• Julia Lesage, 'Blue collar filmography', from Jump Cut, no. 2, 1974

• Thomas Lindenberger, 'On the Road to the New Beginning: History and Utopia in Frank Beyer’s Karbid und Sauerampfer (Carbide and Sorrel)', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film StudiesVolume 18, numéro 1, automne 2007

• Brenda Longfellow, 'Hyperbolic Masculinity and the Ironic Gaze in project Grizzly', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vo. 8, No. 1, Spring 1999

• Alan Lovell, 'The British Cinema: The Known Cinema?', The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy (London: Palgrave, 2009, 3e)

• Carl Philip Wahlberg Lund, The portrayal of Working-Class speech in British film: a study of accent in British films from the 1960s and the 2000s, Masters thesis, University of Bergen, 2009

• Kenneth MacKinnon, 'The Trouble with The Trouble with Men', Film-Philosophy, vol. 9 no. 21, April 2005

• Robert Alan Marcink, The Depiction of the Working Class in American Films of the Counterculture Era, PhD thesis, Indiana University of Pennysylvania, 2009

• Lisa Milner, 'Kenny: the evolution of the battler figure in Howard's Australia', (post-print) Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2009

• Enric Monforte, 'Homosociality, Sexism and Homophobia: An Analysis of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Thee Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Fox and His Friends', BELLS, Vol. 9, No. 1, (year unknown)

• Claire Monk, ‘Hey you, standing there, what you got to stare at?’ The post-punk female in British film: Breaking Glass (Brian Gibson, UK, 1980)', Paper at 1970s British Culture conference, University of Portsmouth, July 1-3, 2008

• Jon Scott Oberacker, The people and me: Michael Moore and the politics of political documentary, PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009

• Michael Pierse, 'Introduction', Writing Ireland's Working Class: Dublin After O'Casey (London: Palgrave, 2010)

• Nicola Rehling, All or Nothing: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema, PhD Thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2005

• George Rodosthenous, 'Billy Elliot The Musical: visual representations of working-class masculinity and the all-singing, all-dancing bo[d]y', Studies in Musical Theatre, 1 (3), 2007

• Rasha Salti, 'Critical Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema', Kosmorama 237(Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen) 2006

• Robert Carl Schehr, 'Martial Arts Films and the Action-Cop Genre: Ideology, Violence and Spectatorship', Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 7(3), 2000

• Mark Schreiber, 'Re-negotiating Concepts of Masculinity in Contemporary British Film', Gender Forum, Issue 17, 2007 

• Fabian Schuppert, 'Andrzej Wajda's A Generation and Man of Marble from a Political Perspective', Kinema, Spring 2006

• Ira Shor, 'Rocky: Two faces of the American dream', from Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977 

• Andrew Spicer, 'Masculinities in British Cinema', Kwartalnik Filmowy (Film Quarterly) Poland Academy of Science (2006) in Polish. English translation

• Tetsuya Taguchi, 'The Working Class Audience of Rock Music, Liverpool in the 1960s', Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture 1-2 : pp. 293 – 313. 1998

• Olesya Venger, 'Transformation of Ukrainian and Serbian Media Identities During the Velvet Revolutions: The Impact of the Global Media', Global Media Journal, 6.10, 2007

• Ginette Vincendeau, 'The Mise-en-scene of Suffering: French chanteuses realistes', New Formations, No. 3, Winter 1987 

• Jamie Marie Wagner, 'Quai des brumes: An American Appeal', Film Matters, 2010

PhD Theses on Hal Hartley, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and Spanish cinema studies

Javier Bardem as Raúl and Penélope Cruz as Silvia in Jamón Jamón (Bigas Luna, 1992) as discussed in Rebecca Naughten's work Spain Made Flesh: Reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007

Film Studies For Free was delighted when Spanish cinema scholar Rebecca Naughten responded to its request for information about online PhD theses. Not only did Rebecca let FSFF know that her own really excellent thesis has recently been made available online, but she also did the hard work of trawling through the online repository at the University of Newcastle, where her work is stored, to find four other very good theses archived there. ¡Muchísimas gracias, Rebecca!

These works have just been added to FSFF's permanent list of Online Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Theses (see the link in the table of contents in the right-hand sidebar for future reference) which now makes more than 130 theses accessible to you at the click of your mouse.

Do please let FSFF know if your online PhD thesis, or others you know of, is not yet in this list.

• Deer, Lesley, The repetition of difference: Marginality and the films of Hal Hartley, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2000
• Durham, Christopher Louis, Masculinity in the post-war western: John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2005
• Hamilton, Jayne, Gender representation and textual strategies in the films of Pilar Miró, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 1997
• Mendez-Fiddian, Maria del Carmen, The representation of the family in Spanish cinema from 1950 to the present day, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 1989
• Naughten, Rebecca Claire, Spain Made Flesh: Reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2010

On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day!

Film Studies For Free is off on its annual holiday. 
Back in two weeks. Hasta entonces, lectores queridos

Director Todd Haynes discusses his film Far From Heaven following a screening in the Walker Cinema (November 19, 2005)

Double Indemnity: Todd Haynes/Edward Hopper  

Richard Dyer, Professor of Film Studies at University of Warwick and author of White and The Matter of Images will join Todd Haynes to discuss issues raised by his work and the Hopper film programme at the Tate Modern, London, June 4, 2004.

In the first of a two-part interview, Reel Report speaks to maverick American director Todd Haynes about his latest movie I'm Not There, an unconventional rock biopic about the life of music legend Bob Dylan. Haynes talks about the challenges of telling Dylan's story, casting the six very different actors who play Dylan, and how he plans to take on the Bush administration with his next project (December 7, 2007).

In the second part of Reel Report's two-part interview with Todd Haynes, director of I'm Not There, the rock biopic about the life of Bob Dylan, we talk more generally about aspects of his filmmaking. In particular we ask him about his unique way of story-telling, his approach to the concept of film genres and whether his sexuality has an effect on his ability to interpret characters (December 18, 2007).

On this very appropriate day, Film Studies For Free honours Todd Haynes, a true and truly wonderful American independent filmmaker, with links, above and below, to great videos and many freely accessible and high quality online studies of his work.

Haynes is a big favourite at this blog, and why wouldn't he be as one of the most "cinema-studies literate" filmmakers working today. Here's looking forward to his forthcoming reworking of that Film Studies classic Mildred Pierce...

• Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven', in The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 (scroll to p. 194)
• Zélie Asava, 'Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There', Widescreen Journal, No. 2, 2010
• Norman Bryson, 'Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema', Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999
• Rachel Carroll, 'Toxic shock: Gendered environments and embodied knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]', Transformations, Issue 14, March 2007
• Donald L. Carveth and Jean Hantman Carveth, 'Fugitives From Guilt: Postmodern De-Moralization and the New Hysterias', March 2007
• Adrian Danks,“… I’m Gone”; or Seven Characters in Search of an Exit: Some Reflections on Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008
• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (2004)
• Anthony Enns, '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• Laura E. Felschow, Todd Haynes: the Public, the Private, and the Performative, PhD Thesis, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, February 1, 2009
• Julie Grossman, “The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling [On Todd Haynes' Safe]', Other Voices 2.3 January 2005
• Todd Haynes's film: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) 
  
• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', Camera Obscura, 57, Volume 19, Number 3, 2004
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes to Queens: Genre, AIDS, and Queer Love', 2007 
• Rose Ellen Lessy, 'Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes’s Safe', Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4):291–308, 2006
• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006
• Rebecca Scherr, '(Not) queering “white vision” in Far from Heaven and Transamerica', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 
• David L. Smith, 'True, Valid Death Off a Movie Screen: Todd Haynes' I'm Not There', Journal of Religion and Film,  Vol. 12, No. 2, 2008
• Sunny Stalter, 'Down With Love/Far From Heaven', Scope, May 2004
• Nick Stevenson, 'What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk', Sociological Research Online, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005
• Mary Traester, 'Hysteria and Ruin: Feminine Immobility And the Problem of Representation in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven', COLT Symposium, April 15, 2008
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 57, August 2007
• Sharon Willis, 'Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk', Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003

 Cornell Cinema events May 6, 2008

Australian national cinema studies

Image from Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009)

Film Studies For Free presents its whopping and interdisciplinary list of scholarly links to online and openly accessible studies of one of its favourite national cinemas, that of Australia. A passable effort for a Pom website, it hopes you agree.

There are some veritably beaut resources here, but FSFF would especially like to flag up one great, but time-limited, free download opportunity: Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (eds.), Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2010)

• Martha Ansara and Lisa Milner, 'The Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit: the forgotten frontier of the fifties', Metro Magazine vol. 119, pp. 28-39 
• Pieter Aquilia, 'Wog Drama and ‘White Multiculturalists’: The Role of Non Anglo-Australian Film and Television Drama in Shaping a National Identity', originally published in Ruinard and Tilley eds. Fresh Cuts: Journal of Australian Studies no. 67, St Lucia, UQP, 2000
• Susan Barber, 'Runaway, Negligent and Abusive mothers: Alternate mother – daughter relationships in Australian Cinema', Communications, Civics, Industry – ANZCA2007 Conference Proceedings
• Susan Barber, 'Creative Disabilities and Vulnerable Bodies In Women In The Bush', Conference Proceedings, ANZCA, 2006
• Katherine Biber, 'The Threshold Moment: Masculinity at Home and on the Road in Australian Cinema', LIMINA, Volume 7, 2001 
• Christine Boman, '"Let’s get her": Masculinities and Sexual Violence in Contemporary Australian Drama and its Film Adaptations', Journal of Australian Studies, 76: 2003
• Kate Bowles, 'All the evidence is that Cobargo is slipping’: An ecological approach to rural cinema-going', Film Studies, Issue 10, Spring 2007
• Harvey Broadbent, '“A simple epic”: Gallipoli and the Australian media',United Service 61 (1) March 2010
• David Carter, The Empire Dies Back: Britishness in Contemporary Australian Culture', Pacific and American Studies, Vol. 9, 2009
• Felicity Collins, 'History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema', Trames, 2008, 12(62/57), 3, 276–286
• Robert Connolly, 'Embracing Innovation: a new methodology for feature film production in Australia', AFTRS: Centre for Screen Business, February 2008
• Joy Damousi, '“The Filthy American Twang”: Elocution, the Advent of American “Talkies,” and Australian Cultural Identity', The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 2, April 2007
• Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon, Talking and Listening in The Age of Modernity: Essays on the history of sound (ANU E Press, 2007)
• Leanne Downing, 'Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium', M/C Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 6, December 2006
• Kirsty Duncanson, 'The Scene of the Crime: The Uneasy Figuring of Anglo-Australian Sovereignty in the Landscape of Lantana', Law Text Culture, Vol. 13, 2009
• Kirsty Duncanson, Catriona Elder, and Murray Pratt, 'Entanglement and the Modern Australian Rhythm Method: Lantana’s Lessons in Policing Sexuality and Gender', Portal Vol., 1 No. 1 (2004)
• Katie Ellis, 'Isolation and Companionship: Disability in Australian (Post) Colonial Cinema', Wagadu Volume 4 Summer 2007 • Intersecting Gender and Disability Perspectives in Rethinking Postcolonial Identities
• Katie Ellis, 'Disrupting Strength, Power and Perfect Bodies: Disability as Narrative Prosthesis in 1990s Australian National Cinema', Nebula, 7.1/7.2, June 2010
• John James Emerson, The Representation of the Colonial Past in French and Australian Cinema, from 1970 to 2000, PhD Thesis, Department of French Studies and Centre for European Studies and General Linguistics, University of Adelaide, South Australia, July 2002
• Helen Forscher, Animals in the landscape :an analysis of the role of the animal image in representations of identity in selected Australian feature films from 1971 to 2001, PhD Thesis, Bond University, 2008
• Warwick Frost, 'From Dead Heart to Red Heart: Developing the Destination Image of the Australian Outback',  Monash University, Department of Management Working Paper Series, October 2004
• Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (eds.), Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2010) free download for a limited time only
• Ben Goldsmith, 'Australian National Cinema', Australian Policy Online, February 2007
  
• Lisa Gye, 'How can you be found when no-one knows that you are missing? [on Baz Luhrmann's Australia and McLean's Wolf Creek] Fibreculture Journal, Issue 15, 2009
• David Headon, 'Filming the Legends of Phar Lap and the Don — the Who, What, Where and When', Sporting Traditions, Vol. 15, no. 1, November 1998
• Alice Healy, '“Impossible Speech” and the Burden of Translation: Lilian’s Story from Page to Screen', JASAL 5, 2006
• Andrew Jakubowicz,'Australian (Dis(Contents: Film, Mass Media and Multiculturalism', n F Rizvi and S Gunew (eds) Arts for a Multicultural Australia: Issues and Strategies, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2004)
• Anthony Lambert, 'Arresting Metaphors: Anti-Colonial Females in Australian Cinema', Postcolonial Text, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2005
• Anthony Lambert, 'Movement within a Filmic Terra Nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian cinema', Balayi: Journal of Colonialism, Law and Culture, 2:1, pp 7-17, 2000
• Anthony Lambert, '(Re)Producing Country: Mapping Multiple Australias', Space and Culture, 13.3, 2010 
• Anthony Lambert and Catherine Simpson, 'Jindabyne’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland', M/C Journal, Vol. 11, No. 5, 2008
• Anthony Lambert, 'Landless White Women: Tracking a Non-Aboriginal Landscape Tradition in Australian Cinema', published in Metro, 163, Dec 2009 
• Anthony Lambert, 'White Aborigines: Women, Space, Mobility', Chapter in Diasporas of Australian Cinema (Intellect, 2009)
• Anthony Lambert, 'Mediating crime, mediating culture: Nationality, femininity, corporeality and territory in the Schapelle Corby drugs case', Crime Media Culture 2008; 4; 237
• Anthony Lambert, 'Woman as Cure: Cynthia, Praise and Cinematic Politics of Difference', Metro Magazine No. 124/125
• Raffaele Lampugnani, 'Comedy and Humour, Stereotypes and the Italian Migrant in Mangiamele’s Ninety Nine Per Cent', FULGOR (Flinders University Languages Group Online Review), Volume 3, Issue 1, December 2006
• Suzanne Langford , 'In Search of an Australian Soul: Reflections on Religion and Spirituality in Rabbit-Proof Fence and Japanese Story', in Eternal Sunshine of the Academic Mind: Essays on Religion and Film, edited by Christopher Hartney (Sydney Studies in Religion 2009)
• Pat Laughren, Debating Australian Documentary Production Prolicy: Some Practitioner perspectives', Media International Australia, Vol. 2008 (129), pp. 116-128
• Pat Laughren, 'Australian Documentary: Notes on the State of the Art of the Art of the State in the 1960s', ACUADS 2009 Conference: Interventions in the Public Domain
• David Lowe, 'An Outlaw Industry: Bushrangers on the big screen: 1906-1993', self-published, March 1995
• Sean Maher, 'The internationalisation of Australian film and television through the 1990s', Australian Film Commission Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane 2004 
• Martin Mantle, 'Disability, Heroism and Australian National Identity', M/C Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2008
• Adrian Martin, excerpt from 'Introduction', The Mad Max Movies (Sydney: Currency Press/Australian Screen Classics, 2003)
• Greg McCarthy, 'Australian Cinema and the Spectres of Post- Coloniality: Rabbit-Proof Fence, Australian Rules, The Tracker and Beneath Clouds', London Papers in Australian Studies No. 8, 2004
• Greg McCarthy, 'The Obstinate Memory in Australian Films', Refereed paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference University of Tasmania, Hobart 29 September — 1 October 2003 
• Jordi McKenzie, 'Stable Distribution and Paretian Tails: Australian Box Office Revenue Evidence', AFTRS Media, April 23, 2007
• Jordi McKenzie and Nicolas De Roos, '‘Cheap Tuesdays’ and Estimating Movie Demand: An Empirical Analysis of the Australian Cinema Industry', Discipline of Economics, University of Sydney, NSW, 2006
• Trevor Melksham, 'What Manner of Men are These? Peter Weir’s Gallipoli as an Expression of an Australian Civil Religion', in Eternal Sunshine of the Academic Mind: Essays on Religion and Film, edited by Christopher Hartney (Sydney Studies in Religion 2009)
• Toby Miller, The Dawn of an Imagined Community: Australian Sport on Film', Sporting Traditions 7, no. 1. (1990): 48–59
• Lisa Milner, ‘Commos and ratbags: the origins of trade union cinema in Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 60, 1999, pp. 133-139 
• Lisa Milner, 'Kenny and Australian cinema in the Howard era', in H Radner and P Fossen (eds), Remapping cinema, remaking history: XIVth Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand. Conference Proceedings. Volume Two: Selected Full Refereed Papers , Dunedin, New Zealand, 27-30 November, Department of Media, Film and Communication, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, pp. 171-181
• Tony Mitchell, '“Wogs still out of work": Australian television comedy as colonial discourse', Australasian Drama Studies, No. 20, 1992, 119-133
• Albert Moran and Errol Vieth, 'Historical Dictionary of Australian and New Zealand Cinema', Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts, No. 6, The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Oxford 2005 (long exceprt)
• Meaghan Morris, 'The Man from Hong Kong in Sydney, 1975', in Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe (eds), Literature and Culture in the New, New World, pp. 235 -266, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Committee on Australian, Studies, 2004
• Caroline M. Pascoe, Screening Mothers: Representations of motherhood in Australian films from 1900 to 1988, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, September 1998
• Mariacristina Petillo, 'Translating Australian Cinema for an Italian Audience The bloody case of Ned Kelly and Picnic at Hanging Rock', inTRAlinea, Vol. 12, 2010
• Ingo Petzke, 'Phillip Noyce', Humanities & Social Sciences papers, Bond University 2006
• Jonathan Pickering. 'Globalisation: A Threat to Australian Culture?', Multicultural Austrlia Research Library, November 2004
• Nick Prescott, '“All we see and all we seem...” – Australian Cinema and National Landscape', Understanding Cultural Landscapes Symposium, 11-15 July 2005
• Fiona Probyn, 'An Ethics of Following and the No Road Films: Trackers, Followers and Fanatics', Australian Humanities Review, Issue 37, December 2005
• Gaetano Rando, 'Migrant images in Italian Australian movies and documentaries', AltreItalie, 16, luglio-dicembre 1997
• Suneeti Rekhari, 'Film Representation and the Exclusion of Aboriginal Identity: Examples from Australian Cinema', TASA & SAANZ Joint Conference 2007, Refereed Papers, 4-7 December 2007 Auckland, New Zealand
• Alan Rosen, Garry Walter, Tom Politis and Michael Shortland, 'From shunned to shining: doctors, madness and psychiatry in Australian and New Zealand cinema', Medical Journal of Australia, 1997
• Mark David Ryan, 'Whither culture? Australian horror films and the limitations of cultural policy', Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy (No 133), 2009, pp. 43-55  
• Mark David Ryan, 'At Breaking Point? Challenges for Australian Film Policy through the Lens of Genre (horror) Films', ANZCA09 Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship. Brisbane, July 2009 
• Mark David Ryan (2010) 'Towards an understanding of Australian genre cinema and entertainment : beyond the limitations of ‘Ozploitation’ discourse', Continuum : Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24(6)
• Olga Seco Salvador, 'Strictly Ballroom (1991): Departure from Traditional Discourses or Veiled Confirmation of old National Encouragement Mechanisms?'miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 32 (2005): pp. 103-114
• Catherine Simpson, 'Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road', Australian Humanities Journal Issue 39-40, September 2006 
• Brian Tecies, 'Transformative Soundscapes: Innovating De Forest Phonofilms Talkies in Australia', Scope, Issue 1, February 2005
• Keyan Tomaselli, 'The South African and Australian Film Industries: A Comparison', Culture, Communication and Media Studies, 2007
• David Thomas, Extraordinary Undercurrents: Australian Cinema, Genre and the Everyday. PhD Thesis, School of Media, Communication and Culture Murdoch University 2006
• Deborah Tudor, 'Cultural Intersections in Early Australian Sound Films: Rangle River (1936)', Democratic Communique, 19, Spring 2004
• Deb Verhoeven, 'Wool blend: Sheep and the Australian social fabric', from Sheep and the Australian Cinema (MUP Academic Monograph Series, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton, 2006)
• Susan Ward, 'National Cinema or Creative Industries? Film Policy in Transition', Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, No. 112 — August 2004
• B. Yecies, 'Failures and successes: local and national Australian sound innovations, 1924-1929. Screening The Past: An International, Refereed, Electronic Journal of Visual Media and History, (16), 2004

Love builds bridges: on the romantic comedy in transnational cinema

Last updated June 1, 2010

Image of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn on the set of Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938). See Kartina Richardson's short video essay on this film at her new audio commentary website Mirror.

Film Studies For Free's author sensibly decided, on balance, that it was probably better to stay at home and draft the below list of links to good quality, openly accessible, and disciplinarily-diverse, scholarly studies of the transnational, transhistorical, romantic comedy film mode, than to haul herself out (in the rain) to the cinema to see Sex and the City 2.

Enough said, probably, but if you think she has made the wrong choice, please do leave a comment below... (More links should be added in the next few days - if you have any to suggest, please get in touch).

• María del Mar Azcona Montoliú, 'Love is a Many-Person’d Thing: Multi-Protagonist Tales of Contemporary Desire', BELLS, 17, 2008

• Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, 'Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will and Grace and the Situation Comedy Genre', Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2002, pp. 87–105

• Christopher Beach, Class, Language and American Film Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) long excerpt

• Michael Black, Bonnie Friel, Joan Jasak, Matthew Lombard, Anne Russ, 'An Evaluation of Portrayals of Telepresence and Romantic Relationships in Film and Television', Edited by Anna Spagnolli, Luciano Gamberini, Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Workshop on Presence, Padova, 16-18 October 2008

• Karen Boyle, 'Attractions and distractions: Mums, babies and ‘early’ cinemagoing', Participations, Volume 6, Issue 2, 2009

• Mary M Chan, 'Mr. Collins on Screen: Jane Austen’s Legacy of the Ridiculous', Persuasion On-Line, V.29, NO.1 (Winter 2008) 

• Isabel Sterling Clark, 'The Challenge of Being Yourself: Adaptation, Adolescence, and Disguise in Teenage Romantic Comedy Films of the Late 1990s and Early 2000s', Senior Thesis, Haverford College, 2009

• Brenda Cossman, 'Sexuality,Queer Theory,and "Feminism After": Reading and Rereading the Sexual Subject', McGill Law Journal, Vol. 49, 2004

• Celestino Deleyto, 'The Dupes Strike Back: Comedy, Melodrama and Point of View in The Apartment,' Atlantis: Revista de la Asociacion Espanola de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 14.1-2 (1992): 37-61

• Jonathan Fletcher, ‘"Anything can happen": Narrative Ambiguity and Musical Intertextuality in The Holiday', Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, 2, 2008 / 135

• Marcy J. Goodfleisch, 'Gentlemen gigolos, deceptive damsels, comedy and film: A dangerous mix', MA Thesis, Excelsior College, 2008

• Tamar Jeffers McDonald, 'Review of Celestino Deleyto's The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009), ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.2 (December 2009): 163-168

• Kimberly R. Johnson and Bjarne M. Holmes, 'Contradictory Messages: A Content Analysis of Hollywood-produced Romantic Comedy Feature Films', (draft article for Communication Quarterly, Volume 57, Issue 3 January 2009 , pages 352 - 373)

• Betty (Despoina) Kaklamanidou, 'The "Light" Side of Feminine Evil: Film Comedies', Paper at Evil, Women and the Feminine Conference, Budapest, Hungary, May 2009

• James MacDowell, 'Romantic Comedy: Love, Nervousness & Intertextuality', Alternate Takes, February 15, 2009

• Sergio Melo , 'The phenomenology of adaptation of classics: A Midsummer Night’s Dream as viewed by Ingmar Bergman’s and Woody Allen’s perspectives', Paper for FOOT 2006, The Festival of Original Theatre: Performing Adaptations

• Linda Mizejewski, 'Queen Latifah, Unruly Women, and the Bodies of Romantic Comedy ', Genders, Issue 46, 2007

• Linda Mizejewski, 'Chapter 1: Rules and Unruliness: Romantic Comedy' in It Happened One Night (Oxfod: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

• Diane Negra, 'Quality Postfeminism?"Sex and the Single Girl on HBO', Genders, Issue 39, 2004 

• Kenny K. K. Ng, 'Romantic comedies of Cathay-MP and GI in the 1950s and 60s: language, locality, and urban character', from Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007

• Jakob Isak Nielsen, 'There's something about comedy theory', P.O.V. No.26, 2008

• Beatriz Oria Gomez, 'The Importance of Being Famous: Romance and Self-identity in Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998)', Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos no 12 (2007), pp. 83-98

• Renee Penney, Desperately Seeking Redundancy? Queer Romantic Comedy and the Festival Audience, PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010

• Polona Petek, ‘"I deserve the best and I accept the best": Exploring Female Narcissism in Me Myself I', Voicing Dissent, New Talents 21C: Next Generation Australian Studies, No. 76, 2003, pp. 159-68

• Helene A. Shugart, 'Reinventing Privilege: The New (Gay) Man in Contemporary Popular Media', Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2003, pp. 67–91

• Douglas A Sonheim, 'Walker Percy's The Moviegoer as Romantic Comedy', Baiko English Journal (1987)

• Lesley Speed, 'A World Ruled by Hilarity: Gender and Low Comedy in the Films of Amy Heckerling', Senses of Cinema, Issue 22, 2002

• Lisa Trahair, 'Comedy and Beyond: Geoff King's Film Comedy', Film-Philosophy, Volume 8, 2004

• Jyotika Virdi, 'Mr. and Mrs. 55: Comedy of gender, law, and nation', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 75-85, 130 

• Stephen J. Whitfield, 'Cinéma Verité [on Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. By Stanley Cavell]', Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1983 

• Rachel Williams, "It's Like Painting Toys Blue and Pink" (Martha Coolidge, 1996): Marketing and the Female-Directed Hollywood Film , Scope, December 2000

• Norman Yusoff, 'Genre and Pleasure: The Case of Malay(sian) Romantic Comedy', SKRIN: Volume 1 Issue 1 Jan 2004

On Avatar & Boss-zilla: a new issue of FlowTV

Sandra Bullock as Margaret Tate in The Proposal (Anne Fletcher, 2009). See '“Attack of Boss-zilla!” – Female Conflict and Generational Discord…' by Hannah Hamad

Film Studies For Free brings you glad tidings of the new issue of ever wonderful online journal Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture. In this latest offering there are some great film related items: Charles R. Acland on Avatar and the media language of revolutionary change; and Hannah Hamad on the film and media popularity of female characters as terrorizing figures. Links to all articles are given below:

• Amanda Ann Klein ,"Window Dressing: Spectactular Costuming in MTV's The City" (An examination of how costume trumps narrative in MTV's The City)
  

• Zoe Druick, "A Married Couple: Reality TV's Progenitor Turns 40"  (A re-examination of A Married Couple in light of the current proliferation of reality-based TV)
  

• James Bennett, "The BBC Presenter Pay Scandal: The Political Economy of Television Fame"  (A look at the recent pay scandal surrounding BBC?s Jonathan Ross ? and what it tells us about the economics of fame today)
  

• Hannah Hamad, "'Attack of Boss-zilla!' ? Female Conflict and Generational Discord in Postfeminism?s New Monstrous Feminine" (An examination of film and TV series? treatment of postfeminist identities, especially the popularity of women as terrorizing forces, or '-zillas.')
  

• Nina B. Huntemann, "Irreconcilable Differences: Gender and Labor in the Video Game Workplace"  (A look at the labor politics of the game industry )
  

• Charles R. Acland, "Avatar as Technological Tentpole" (Is James Cameron's Avatar a "game-changer," or business as usual?)
  

• Vanessa Au, "Twitter Revolution" (A consideration of the Iranian elections and the potentially revolutionary aspects of social media)

An autumnal Saturday links roundup

Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular roundups of exceedingly fine and dandy film studies weblinks:

• FSFF discovered that issue 1 of The Soundtrack (Vol. Issue 1, 2007), an otherwise subscription-only journal from Intellect, is openly accessible online:
  

  Editorial: Prof. Stephen Deutsch; The sound of Coen comedy: music, dialogue and sound effects in Raising Arizona, by Randall Barnes; Post-production sound: a new production model for interactive media, by Rob Bridgett; The edge of perception: sound in Tarkovsky's Stalker, by Stefan Smith; plus some David Lynch related reviews.

• From @MichaelGuillen of the always wonderful The Evening Class weblog, a "Robert Beavers Online Reader"
  
• Thanks to a recommendation by Corey Creekmur for the upcoming Critical Mass: Re-Viewing Hollis Frampton A Screening Series and Symposium October 2009 – February 2, FSFF heard that an essay on Frampton's work -- 'Collecting His Thoughts: Remarks on the Writings of Hollis Frampton -- by Bruce Jenkins is freely available online. It's a sample chapter for Jenkins' book On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton
• A must read article by Victor Burgin: 'The Separateness of Things' (referring to Edward Hopper's work, the Hays Code, Steven Shainberg's Secretary [2002], and the work of Laura Mulvey) can be found at Tate Papers.
• Another wonderful Tate Papers' article is by Robert Bird: 'Andrei Tarkovsky & Contemporary Art: Medium & Mediation', 2008
• It was Pixar Week at The House Next Door Online - a great event. Check out the list of contributions here.
  
• Check out a very interesting Deleuzo-Guattarian blogpost, if that's your bag: 'The ambivalence of the future (Flash Forward)' by Matthew Holtmeier (@cinemawo).
• Also, see a really good anime blogpost by Alex Leavitt at the C3 blog on Time of Eve (Ibu no Jikan).
• Some more fabulous insights by Dan North (or @drnorth, as his Twitter moniker has it) on King Kong.
• Oh and, if you haven't already, you must visit The Auteurs' great list of film websites: 'Sites & Rounds': "a blogroll... listing ...places, friends and acquaintances we keep up with". Film Studies For Free was deeply honoured to have made the cut and to be in such fantastic company.

Follow Film Studies For Free on Twitter