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 

125 Online Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Theses

"How will I ever find a PhD thesis in here?": images from The Name of the Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986)

The ever industrious, but not nearly modest enough, Film Studies For Free has just published a new page to house a permanent and, thankfully, growing list of openly accessible, English-language, online PhD theses in Film and Moving Image Studies.

Like its other, jaw-droppingly essential pages, it is accessible from the FSFF contents index in the right-hand sidebar. So, hopefully you won't need a PhD to find it again in future.

It currently lists links to 125 theses on an enormous range of film and moving image studies topics, and it will be kept constantly updated as new items come to light.

Talking of which, if you know of any relevant, existing online theses that should be added to the list or, alternatively, of online research repositories that FSFF hasn't yet explored, please, please, please email FSFF.

Lots of Film Studies PhD Theses Online

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

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

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

• SooJeong Ahn, The Pusan International Film Festival 1996-2005: South Korean cinema in local, regional, and global context, PhD Thesis,  University of Nottingham, 2008

• Steven William Allen, A pleasure in pain: contemporary mainstream cinema's fascination with the aestheticized spectacle of the controlled body, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003

• Noor Al-Qasimi, The codes of modesty: reconfiguring the Muslim female subject, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007

• Tom Brown, From intimate pleasures to spectacular vistas: musicality and historicity in French and American 'classical' cinema of the 1930s, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007

• Felicia Chan, In Search of a Comparative Poetics: Cultural Translatability in Transnational Chinese Cinemas, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2007

• Brigid S. G. Cherry, The female horror film audience : viewing pleasures and fan practices, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 1999

• Marisa Farrugia, The plight of women in Egyptian cinema (1940s 1960s), PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 2002

• Dongning  Feng, Text, politics and society : literature as political philosophy in post-Mao China, PhD Thesis,  University of Stirling, 1997

• Michael Flanagan, True sons of Erin: catholic/nationalist ideology and the politics of adventure in Our Boys 1914-32, PhD Thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, 2006

• Mary Gillan, In the shadow of the church: Irish and Quebec cinema, PhD Thesis, Dublin City University, 2009

• Leighton Grist, Authorship and context: the films of Martin Scorsese 1963-1977, PhD Thesis,      University of Warwick, 1996

• Henrik Gustafsson, Out of Site: Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New Hollywood Cinema 1969-1974, PhD Thesis, Stockholm University, Sweden, 2007 and errata

• Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema : Origins, Functions, Meanings, PhD Thesis,  Stockholm University, Sweden, 2006

• Timothy John Hollins, The presentation of politics : the place of party publicity, broadcasting and film in British politics, 1918-1939, PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 1981, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2

• Christopher James Homewood, From Baader to Prada The Representation of Urban Terrorism in German-Language Film, PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2008

• Claire Jenkins, Family entertainment: representations of the American family in contemporary Hollywood cinema,   PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009

• Krzysztof Jozajtis, Religion and film in American culture: the birth of a nation, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 2001

• Abdelrhaffar Bourkiba Larbi, Parody and ideology: The case of Othello, PhD Thesis, Universitat de València, 2005

• Barbara Lehin, Cinema and society: Thatcher's Britain and Mitterand's France, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003

• Elaine Lennon, The screenplays of Robert Towne 1960-2000, PhD Thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009

• Maasilta Mari, African Carmen. Transnational Cinema as an Arena for Cultural Contradictions, PhD Thesis, University of Tampere, 2007

• Laurent Marie, The French Communist Party and French cinema 1944-1999, PhD Thesis,  University of Warwick, 2000

• Sara Martin Alegre, More human than human: aspects of monstrosity in the films and novels in english of the 1980s and 1990s, PhD Thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 1996, (chapters are: 1 Fascinating Bodies: The New Iconography of Monstrosity; 2 Old Monsters, New Monsters: Vision and Re-Vision From Screen Adaptation to Novelization; 3 Nostalgia for the Monster: Mythical Monsters and Freaks; 4 Evil and Monstrosity: The Moral Monster, 5 The Politics of Monstrosity: The Monsters of Power; 6: Frankenstein's Capitalist Heirs: The Uses of Making Monsters; 7 Gendered Monstrosity: The Monstrous-Feminine and the New Woman Saviour and 8 Little Monsters?: Children and Monsters)

• Anthony T.  McKenna, Joseph E. Levine: showmanship, reputation and industrial practice 1945-1977, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2008

• Christopher Meir,  Underwriting national sovereignty?: policy, the market and Scottish cinema, 1982- present, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007

• Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard and the other history of cinema, PhD Thesis,  University of Warwick, 2002

• Fabio Parasecoli, Food and men in cinema: an exploration of gender in blockbuster movies, Universität Hohenheim, 2009

• Louise Ann Parsons, An analysis of 'The Gold Diggers' (1983) by Sally Potter: feminist film, Julia Kristeva and revolutionary poetics, PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 1994, Vol. 1 and Vol 2

• Martin Luther Patrick, The myth of the Black male beast in postclassical American cinema: ‘Forging’ stereotypes and discovering Black masculinities, PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2009

• Anna Sofia Rossholm, Reproducing Languages, Translating Bodies : Approaches to Speech, Translation and Cultural Identity in Early European Sound Film, PhD Thesis, Stockholm University, Sweden, 2006

• Trevor Ryan, Labour and the media in Britain 1929-1939: a study of the attitudes of the Labour movement towards the new media, film and radio, and of its attempts to use them for political purposes,  PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 1986, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2

• Alice Stanley, Representations of sexuality in the films of Francois Ozon, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009

• Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995

• Gewain Francis Henry Tickell, Homelands and the representation of cultural and political identity in selected South-Asian texts, 1857 to the present, PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 1998

• Donato Totaro, Time and the long take in The Magnificent Ambersons, Ugetsu and Stalker, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001

• Louise Ann Williams, Masculinity on the run: history, nation and subjectivity in contemporary mainland Chinese cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 2004

• Leila Wimmer, The French reception of British cinema, PhD Thesis,  University of Warwick, 2006

Amsterdam fine links!

Image from Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), based on Stanisław Lem's 1961 novel. Read BC Biermann's film-philosophical PhD Thesis chapter on this film adaptation

A little window of opportunity for Film Studies For Free's author to bring you one of this site's regular features today: a report (or, more accurately, a labour-intensive links-harvest) from a University research repository, one of those online archives in which, on occasion, academics choose not only to store references to their published film studies work, but also to provide Open Access to that work.

The repository in question today is that of the University of Amsterdam/Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA), home to one of the best Film and Media Studies departments in the world. Below is a list of links to an amazing spread of very high quality film research accessible there, most of it in the form of full-length PhD theses.

• Mieke Bal, 'Exhibition as film', in: (Re)visualizing national history: museums and national identities in Europe in the new millennium, ed. R. Ostow (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), p. 15-43 
• M. Behlil , Home away from home: global directors of new Hollywood, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2007
• B.C. Biermann, Travelling philosophy: from literature to film [on A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Solaris], PhD Thesis, UvA, 2006 
• C.J. Birdsall, Between Noise and Silence: Sound, Technology and Urban Space during Nazi Germany, PhD Thesis, UvA (2010)
• L.T. Copier, Preposterous revelations: visions of apocalypse and martyrdom in Hollywood cinema 1980 – 2000, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• S Dasgupta, 'Art is going elsewhere: and politics has to catch it : an interview with Jacques Rancière', Krisis, 9.1, 2008
• K. van Driel, Psychology of entertainment, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2003
• JJ Ebbers, Organizational dynamics in social networks : contracts and reputations in the film industry, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Constructive Instability, or The Life of Things as the Cinema's Afterlife', Video Vortex: Responses to Youtube, eds. G. Lovink, S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2008)
• C.J. Forceville, 'The source-path-goal schema in the autobiographical journey documentary: McElwee, Van der Keuken, Cole', The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 4 (2006), p. 241-261 
• Malte Hagener, Avant-garde culture and media strategies: the networks and discourses of the European film avant-garde, 1919-39, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005
• EM Kedem, The kibbutz and Israeli cinema : deterritorializing representation and ideology, PhD Thesis, UvA 2007
• J de Kloet, 'Cosmopatriot contamination', Cosmopatriots: on distant belongings and close encounters, eds E. Jurriëns, J. de Kloet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007)
• S. Loist, M. de Valck, 'Film festivals/Film festival research: thematic, annotated bibliography', 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, Institut für Germanistik II, 2010)
• J. Noordegraaf, "'Facing Forward' with found footage: displacing colonial footage in 'Mother Dao' and the work of Fiona Tan", in: Technologies of memory in the arts (2009), eds Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik , p. 172-187 (author's original manuscript)  
• F Paalman, 'The Cheetah of Cinema', Mind the screen: media concepts according to Thomas Elsaesser, eds. J. Kooijman, P. Pisters, W. Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008)
• F. Paalman, 'Harbor, architecture, film: Rotterdam 1925-1935', in: Films that work: industrial film and the productivity of media, eds V. Hediger, P. Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 391-404 
• MJ Punt, Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2000
• Laura Schuster, “What does a scanner see?” Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film", Conference paper: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberpunk and Science Fiction, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, July 1-3, 2008
• D.W. Russell, A multifaceted multi-methodological examination of the global movie industry, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2006
• E Thanouli, Post-classical narration: a new paradigm in contemporary world cinema, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2005
• S Vojkovic, Subjectivity in the New Hollywood Cinema: Fathers, Sons and Other Ghosts, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2001

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.
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More E-theses online: Doris Day, film spectacle, telefantasy, cinema & society, Korean film & TV

Image from Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961),
starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson

Film Studies For Free had already reported that Douglas Morrey's excellent PhD thesis on the work of Jean-Luc Godard had now been posted online. Below are direct links to some equally wonderful pieces of graduate research on film and television from that very same, very rich Warwick University Research Archive:

• Allen, Steven William, (2003) A pleasure in pain: contemporary mainstream cinema's fascination with the aestheticized spectacle of the controlled body. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
• Brown, Tom, (2007) From intimate pleasures to spectacular vistas: musicality and historicity in French and American 'classical' cinema of the 1930s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
• Jeffers, Tamar Elizabeth Louise (2005) "Should I surrender?": performing and interrogating female virginity in Hollywood films 1957-64. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
• Johnson , Catherine (2002) Histories of telefantasy: the representation of the fantastic and the aesthetics of television. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
• Kim, Ju Young (2007) Rethinking media flow under globalisation: rising Korean wave and Korean TV and film policy since 1980s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
• Lehin, Barbara (2003) Cinema and society: Thatcher's Britain and Mitterand's France. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
  

Assorted articles and e-theses: costumes, sound, French and Spanish cinema, and more

Image from La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1993)

Another visit to a university research repository took Film Studies For Free to Exeter, home to some of the most original film-related research in the United Kingdom. Below are some openly accessible research items of note; four especially highly-recommended items are emboldened and marked with asterisks: ***

• Bridget Birchall, 'Patrick Dewaere and gender identity in Giscardian France (1974-1981)', e-PhD thesis, February 2009
• ***Jennie Cousins, 'Unstitching the 1950s film à costumes: Hidden Designers, Hidden Meanings.'', e-PhD thesis, October 2008
• Michael DeLashmutt, 'The sexualisation of popular culture: towards a Christian sexual aesthetic', Crucible, Summer 2006, pp. 42-56
• Michael DeLashmutt, 'The technological imaginary: bringing myth and imagination into dialogue with Bronislaw Szerszynski's "Nature, Technology and the Sacred"', Zygon, 41(4), pp.801-810
• Nikhilesh Dholakia and Jonathan Schroeder, 'Disney: delights and doubts', Journal of Research for Consumers, 2, 2001
• ***Sally Faulkner, 'A Cinema of Contradiction: Picazo's "La tía Tula" (1964) and the Nuevo Cine Español,' The Modern Language Review July 2004
• Stefan Jack Garel, 'QUEER BODIES AND SETTLEMENTS: the pertinence of queer theory in the fields of queer history and trans politics, disability and 'curative education', quantum physics and experimental art - an interdisciplinary and transnational account of three socio-cultural and filmic research projects.', e-PhD thesis, March 2009
• Anthony King, 'Serial killing and the postmodern self', History of the Human Sciences, 19(3), August 2006, pp. 109-125
• ***Amy McGill, 'The Contemporary Hollywood Film Soundtrack: Professional Practices and Sonic Styles Since the 1970s', e-PhD thesis, November 2008
• Jonathan Schroeder, 'Visual Consumption', Discussion papers in management. Final version published in The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology / edited by George Ritzer. Blackwell, 2007
• ***Thomas Wynn, 'Manon Through the Lens of Clouzot (1948): ‘images troublantes et précises’', French Cultural Studies, February 2006
  

John Ellis: Film and TV Studies Resources Online

Image from A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

In yet another daring raid on a university research repository - this time, one based at Royal Holloway, University of London, home to a wonderful department of Media Arts - Film Studies For Free discovered three openly accessible articles by John Ellis, author of Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (1992), TV producer, and one of the most influential academics in the history of media theory and British cinema studies.

• John Ellis, Watching Death at Work: An Analysis of 'A Matter of Life and Death'. In: Powell, Pressburger and Others. British Film Institute, London 1978, pp. 79-104
• John Ellis, Documentary and truth on television: The crisis of 1999. In: New challenges for documentary. University of Manchester, Manchester, 2005
• John Ellis, The past as television: are television programmes more than nostalgic ephemera. In: Fare storia con la televisione. Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 2006, pp. 167-172
  

FSFF then extended its search for other online research items by Ellis and found the following:

• John Ellis, 'Free Cinema', in J Ellis (ed.), 1951-1976: BFI Productions, London: BFI, 1977
• John Ellis, 'Study Aid to 'The Holy Family Album' (a half hour programme written by Angela Carter and broadcast on UK's Channel 4 on 3 December 1991 as part of the 'Without Walls' arts strand commissioned by Waldemar Janusczcak)

FSFF also wanted to share a related, and truly excellent article by a different esteemed author, which makes much good use of Ellis's work:

• John Kraniauskas, 'Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire', Radical Philosophy Issue 154, 2009

More V.F. Perkins Online

Image from You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937)

Film Studies For Free is extremely fond of the work of V. F. Perkins, world-renowned author of Film as Film (London: Penguin Books, 1972 - see an recent interesting review HERE).

FSFF has previously drawn attention to two pieces of Perkins' hugely influential work which are freely available online:

• 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52) republished online by Danish film studies journal 16:9 (September 2003) and accessible HERE.
• 'Moments of Choice' [on film directing] (originally published in The Movie, ch. 58, reprinted in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Movie Book of the Fifties, Orbis, 1982) republished online by the Australian journal Rouge (issue 9, 2006) and accessible HERE.

Today, it is delighted to bring to its readers' attention a further Open Access essay by Perkins which is currently stored at WRAP: the Warwick Research Archive Project.

The piece is an as yet undated and otherwise unpublished article entitled 'You Only Live Once' that brilliantly treats this magisterial 1937 film directed by Fritz Lang.

Here's an excerpt from the essay with relevant hyperlinks added by FSFF:

Anyone who wants to write usefully about You Only Live Once has to build on the work of George M Wilson. A chapter in [Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)] makes a systematic presentation of the movie’s narrative strategies, and a detailed reading of key images. Wilson shows how Lang’s picture is designed to educate its viewers in the manipulability of the image, and to demonstrate the power of the film sequence to deceive us by obscuring key points in its story and by soliciting preferred readings that the content of the images may not in fact guarantee. The achievement that Wilson uncovers is the more remarkable in that it occurs not in an illustrated lecture but in a fiction movie, one that works to powerful effect within its genre of social protest melodrama.

Wilson’s essay opened my eyes to You Only Live Once, a movie that I had previously found opaque because, apart from its evident social project, I had not seen a purpose in its meticulous design beyond that of giving power and plausibility to a noticeably contrived tale. In what follows I take for granted the main lines of Wilson’s argument in order to develop some remarks on Lang’s mise-en-scène in two representative sequences.

Reports from the E-Repositories #1: eScholarship Initiative/California Digital Library

Image from November (Hito Steyerl, 2004, DVD, 27 min)

Film Studies For Free has donned its fetching explorer's hat to check out some excellent university e-repositories for research and scholarship.

In the first of a series of posts reporting on its findings, here are five of the best, freely-accessible, film-related items that FSFF found on its e-travels, today courtesy of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library, served by the individual units of the University of California:

• Laure Astourian (2008) “Bridging Fiction and Documentary in Godard’s Notre Musique”, The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal : Vol. 21: No. 2, Article 4 (thesis adviser: Ulysse Dutoit) (abstract: This paper is a close analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique. Its primary focus is the implications of Godard’s blending of documentary footage with staged footage. Among the examples of documentary and narrative blurring, Godard stages an interview with an internationally known poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and though the pretext is completely false, the exchange that takes place is honest and potent. Aside from the famous personages who play themselves, the film’s other main characters are actors. They insert themselves seamlessly through events that actually took place in Sarajevo (i.e. that were not planned for the shooting of the film). I believe this technique echoes Godard’s belief that people have faith in the imaginary, and doubt reality. Even though the narrative curve is atypical--there is no climax, and the two main characters never meet--it offers that which the spectator needs in order to submit himself or herself to a film: the imaginary. Thanks to the lens of narrativity, the varied documentary subjects (the Israeli/Palestine conflict, the symbolic rebuilding of the Mostar Bridge, the Native American plight, the future of digital filmmaking) whose philosophical links would otherwise not be considered are conjoined into a field where realities point to imaginaries and vice versa. Throughout the film, the characters acknowledge the inability of images and words to represent certain atrocities, and strange way by which imaginary representations are at times more believable than the truth.)
  
• Deniz Göktürk (2005) “Yüksel Yavuz’s Kleine Freiheit / A Little Bit of Freedom”, TRANSIT, Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 50915 (abstract: Yüksel Yavuz’s internationally celebrated film Kleine Freiheit / A Little Bit of Freedom (2003), tells the story of a friendship between two young men, both of them illegal immigrants living in Altona, one of them a Kurd from Turkey. Baran’s application for asylum has been declined, and he has therefore fallen into an illegal status in Germany. That means that he does not have basic rights, such as health care or job protection. He works as a delivery boy in a relative’s kebab restaurant. When he has a toothache, they try to cure him in the kitchen by sticking a hot skewer into his mouth. His scream leads over into the first montage sequence of a bicycle trip. This triple exposure sequence conveys a gripping cross-section of the neighborhood by superimposing shots of city traffic with shots of the various locations to which kebab is delivered, ranging from a Turkish bakery to a construction site and a brothel. The sequence conveys a sense of multilayered locality, which is underscored by the music of Mercan Dede. Despite the excess of mobility displayed in these images, the characters remain confined within the St. Pauli neighborhood throughout the film. Taking advantage of a “Germany in transit,” Yavuz’s cinematically impressive engagement with locations in Hamburg raises a whole range of interesting questions such as: Where is home? How are transnational mobility and traumatic memory represented in cinema? Do immigrants live in a “parallel world”? Do they care about integration into German society? Do they form new inter-ethnic alliances in this new place? How do questions of race and gender come into play? And where are German (and global) spectators positioned in relation to immigrant spaces and networks?)
  
• Kathleen Sclafani (2006) “Finding Home in a Liminal Space: Exile and Return in Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe ”, TRANSIT: Vol. 2: No. 1, Article 61212 (abstract: In his film Halbe Treppe, Andreas Dresen uses stylistic elements and modes of production similar to exilic filmmakers, as described by Naficy in his book An Accented Cinema, in an attempt to portray both a sense of exile and a desire for freedom in his characters. Since exile is inextricably bound-up in questions of both homeland and identity, the film invites comparison not only to exilic cinema but also to certain aspects of New German Cinema, particularly issues of German identity that many critics argue have been too often ignored by other young German filmmakers. By emphasizing the importance of Frankfurt/Oder as the setting for his characters’ experience of exile, Dresen creates a connection between identity and “place” that encourages the spectator to reflect upon the traditional notion of “Heimat” and how it might be re-imagined in a new multicultural, unified Germany.)
  
• Dean K. Simonton, 'Film awards as indicators of cinematic creativity and achievement: A quantitative comparison of the Oscars and six alternatives', Creativity Research Journal. 16 (2-3), pp. 163-172 (abstract: Although film awards are often taken as indicating the creative achievements that underlie outstanding motion pictures, critics have questioned whether such honors represent a consensus regarding cinematic contributions. Nevertheless, a strong agreement was demonstrated by investigating 1,132films released between 1975 and 2002 that had received at least 1 award or award nomination from 7 distinct sources (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, and Los Angeles Film Critics Association). The results indicated that (a) almost all award categories exhibited a conspicuous consensus, the Oscars providing the best single indicator of that agreement; (b) Oscar awards provided meaningful information about cinematic creativity and achievement beyond that provided by Oscar nominations alone; (c) awards bestowed by the 7 organizations corresponded with more specialized awards granted by guilds and societies, with the Oscars usually providing the best correspondence; and (d) awards correlated positively with later movie guide ratings, the correlations being especially large in the categories of picture, direction, screenplay, and acting. The findings were discussed in terms of whether the awards can be considered to be indicative of cinematic creativity.)
  
• Hito Steyerl (2005) “November: A Film Treatment”, TRANSIT: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 50914 (abstract: In the eighties Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role, that of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar of exploitation films later became Wolf’s political praxis: She went to fight alongside the PKK in the Kurdish regions between Turkey and northern Iraq, where she was killed in 1998. Now honored by Kurds as an “immortal revolutionary,” her portrait is carried at demonstrations.
  In November Hito Steyerl examines the spectrum of interrelationships between territorial power politics (as practiced by Turkey in Kurdistan with the support of Germany) and individual forms of resistance. Her memories and accounts of Wolf’s life provoke the filmmaker to engage in a fundamental reflexion: She comes to understand how fact and fiction are intertwined in the global discourse. Her friend’s picture as a revolutionary pin-up would equally connect with either Asian genre cinema or a private video document. If October is the hour of revolution, November is the time of common sense afterward, though it is also the time of madness – Hito Steyerl considers from this perspective a relationship which began with a pose, and Andrea Wolf took its implications so seriously that she was no longer satisfied with symbolic action. Wolf chose the Other of filmmaking, which was what made her into a true “icon”.