Free podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) of film-scholarly note

Film Studies For Free now has a listing of links to free podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) of film-scholarly note. It is currently headed by a link to the podcast page of the website feminism 3.0 (also accessible via the blog New Research in Feminist Media Art/Theory/History) run by my friend Vicki Callahan of the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee). The podcast currently posted is of an interview with the media artist Cecelia Condit in which she discusses her work. Some of Condit's video work is posted to her website. A nice Afterimage article about Condit's work, by Kelly Mink (Jan-Feb., 1998), is available HERE.

I've also posted a link to the hugely rich Tate Galleries listing of podcasts. Film-scholarly related highlights on this enormous listing include a podcast of the Tate Modern event 25-11-2007 Film Synergies which discussed the practice of Latin-American film co-production with Europe, which became widespread in the 1990s. The event included the screening of the 46-minute documentary Latin America in Co-production (Libia Villazana, UK/Peru 2007), which explores the mechanisms of this practice.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 22-07-2007 Patrick Keiller in which Keiller presents and discusses material from Londres, Bombay (2006), his multi-screen video reconstruction of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) in Mumbai.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 16-06-2007 Surrealism and Film: Study Day, held on the occasion of that gallery's major exhibition 'Dalí & Film', which explored the work of Salvador Dalí in relation to the wider links between surrealism and film.

There's a podcast of the Tate Modern event 24-02-2007 Robert Beavers, about the season dedicated to this American film artist's work.

And there's a whole host of great podcasts on animation (beginning with this one) drawing on the three-day international conference at the Tate Modern 02-03-2007 Pervasive Animation which united speakers from a wide range of research agendas and creative practices, and thus facilitated 'much-needed dialogue centred on the ubiquitous and interdisciplinary nature of animation, its potentially radical future development, and its ethical responsibilities for spatial politics in moving image culture.'

Any suggestions of further links to good film-related podcasts (and video podcasts/webcasts) from FSFF's readers would be most welcome.

The Bioscope's 'Lost sites' posting

Over on Luke McKernan's supreme, early and silent cinema blog The Bioscope there's an essential posting of links to 'Lost sites', a list of vital web resources on the subject of silent cinema that are no more. Although the seeming impermanence of the Web can be a problem for scholarly activities on it, such as archiving, many such 'lost sites' can still be found via the Internet Archive and its ‘Wayback Machine'. But one needs to know what to look for, and this is where The Bioscope's posting comes in. McKernan lists nine such sites as an initial guide to lost early and silent cinema resources (including sites on Italian early cinema, the Lumière brothers, and Muybridge). He adds that,

Archiving the Internet is becoming a subject of increasing concern. The Internet Archive leads the field, of course, but the UK Web Archiving Consortium is building up to the day when every UK website will be archived as a matter of legal deposit. For those intrigued by dead sites in general, take a look at Ghost Sites of the Web (these are sites that still exist on the Web, but which have been abandoned).

While I'm on the subject of The Bioscope, I should mention that this blog is also very deservedly celebrating surpassing 150,000 visits since 2007, a remarkable achievement, but unsurprising considering the truly unrivalled wealth of scholarly and other resources that The Bioscope opens up for its readership. Dr Luke McKernan is Curator, Moving Image at the British Library, and has written on early cinema, newsreels, film propaganda and Shakespearean cinema. His current areas of research include early colour cinematography and children’s cinema-going before the First World War. What is particularly wonderful about his contribution to online film scholarship is that he exhibits a so-far unparalleled enthusiasm (I would say) for making a very large part of his scholarly work available to anyone who wishes to access it electronically, at the same time as being in a great position to do this, as a national library curator. He runs two further, excellent scholarly websites on early and silent cinema: Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema and, on the subject of his PhD thesis, Charles Urban, Motion Picture Pioneer.

I enjoyed reading a summary posted on the British Film Institute website, a while back, of McKernan's contribution to a series of talks at the BFI entitled 'Researchers' Tales', in which he spoke about setting up The Bioscope. You can read the full talk he gave in a pdf download available HERE. Or, read a nice (html) summary of the talk HERE. Here's the conclusion he reaches, about the value of web scholarship, in the summary version:

The web is not only an unmatched research tool, but an outstanding means to publish research, to engage with not only one's established research community but to reach out to other disciplines and new audiences. The tools that now exist, such as blogs, enable us to ask new questions of cinema history and to construct revitalised means of conveying understanding. If you know something, there is no excuse for not publishing it, sharing it, and collectively contributing to a greater body of knowledge.

Film Studies For Free takes its film scholarly-blogger's hat off to the inspirational Luke McKernan.

Expanded Cinema and Unspoken Cinema: 'Film practice as research' links

I have just placed a new link in Film Studies For Free's blogroll to the useful Expanded Cinema weblog, an 'online platform for experimental film, early video, and sound-based, durational work.' All of the material is being curated by Joao Ribas from available media online, 'emphasizing an overlooked facet of the archival function of new media.' Ribas has another good blog, commenting on art/film curatorial matters, among others, too: Notes and Queries. On Expanded Cinema, not all of the video embeds or links are permanently stored (one presumes, for technical reasons), but there's still a lot of good stuff there and it's well worth exploring.

I also posted a blog link to Unspoken Cinema (by HarryTuttle et al), a great resource for practitioners and scholars of what the blog-blurb calls

Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (C.C.C.): the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere alone, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and the star system.

Phew. The legendary HarryTuttle is also the blog author of SCREENVILLE, which, among other great features, has lists of cinema webcasts and online video. I have added his custom video search page to FSFF's list of resources aimed at those engaged in Film or Screen Media 'Practice as Research' (or 'Research by Practice').

Film Practice as Research (basically, higher-education-based film and video practice that can give a 'reflexive account of itself [its form, especially] as research’) is a lively, but still 'emerging' research area, perhaps primarily in the UK. As the meagre sources of funding for artists' (and non-commercial) film and video in this country have almost completely dried up in recent years, outside the academy, many more filmmakers than before have turned to teaching to (part-)fund their work, not only in practical filmmaking college departments and art schools, but also in Film and Media Studies University departments, too. In this latter context, the academic requirement to be 'research active' and 'excellent' (and measurably so...) has led to the growth in this discourse of 'practice as research'. The Wikipedia page on this matter, that I've linked to, covers the sometimes controversial issues raised by these new ways of working, around the 'articulation as research' of practice-based work, as well as peer-review and dissemination, etc., quite well.