Video Vortex: Moving Images Beyond YouTube

Mass Ornament by Natalie Bookchin - Documentation of HD video installation with 5.1 surround sound. (See also Kristina Schlosser, "The Twenty-First Century Tiller Girls of YouTube in Natalie Bookchin's Mass Ornament', UCDAVIS MA presentation, 2010] And also read: Brian Willems, 'Increasing the Visibility of Blindness: Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament' and 'Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, 'Out in public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with Blake Stimson' linked to below.

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to present a link to the second of two Video Vortex Readers (both freely available online): Moving beyond YouTube (large PDF), which has just been published to coincide with the Sixth Video Vortex conference now taking place in Amsterdam.

The first VV Reader (Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube, eds. G. Lovink, S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2008) was previously flagged up by FSFF. And this blog also posted on the wonderful presentations (all available for online viewing) from the Fifth VV conference.

With its own interest in web cinema and digital film and video studies, FSFF is a great admirer of the work associated with Video Vortex and the Institute of Network Cultures. It very much hopes its own author will be able to attend next year's conference to catch some of this great work in person.

Here's the opening section of Geert Lovink's 'Introduction' (and below this, the Reader's table of contents), so that you can see the important issues raised and explored by this latest, excellent collection:

This second Video Vortex Reader marks the transition of online video into the mainstream. Staggering statistics of hypergrowth no longer impress us. Discussing a possible online video project for the first time in late 2006 in Melbourne with Seth Keen, the topic was still a matter of ‘becoming’. One collaborative research project, six conferences and two anthologies later, the Video Vortex project seems at a crossroads. Massive usage is not an indication of relevance. Heavy use does not automatically translate into well-funded research or critical art practices. Is the study of online video, like most new media topics, doomed to remain a niche activity – or will we see a conceptual quantum leap, in line with the billions of clips watched daily? So far, there is no evidence of a dialectical turn from quantity into quality. It is remarkable how quickly both pundits and cultural elites became
used to online video libraries containing millions of mini-films. In our ‘whatever’ culture nothing seems to surprise us. Who cares about the internet? Continuous technological revolution, from social networking to smartphones, seems to have numbed us down. B-S-B: Boredom-Surprise-Boredom. Instead of an explosion of the collective imaginary we witness digital disillusion – a possible reason why online theory has had a somewhat unspectacular start. The low quality of YouTube’s most popular videos certainly indicates that this platform is not a hotbed of innovative aesthetics.
           What are the concerns here? Was will das Medium? Are we condemned to fight over the exact percentage of user-generated content in comparison to remediated film and television material? Will online video remain a jukebox item that is passed from one social network to the next? Have we all switched from zapping to searching? Should we approach the potential of YouTube culture from the plasma screen angle? Is the final destination to be found in the living room, where the online video logic starts to compete with cable and free-to-air television? Is online video liberating us from anything? Instead of trying merely to measure this ever-changing field, we can also try to define future scenarios. Let’s dig into the destiny of online video and discuss three possible directions [...].  [Geert Lovink, 'Engage in Destiny Design: Online Video Beyond Hypergrowth: Introduction to Video Vortex Reader II', in Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles (eds), Video Vortex Reader: Moving Images Beyond YouTube (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011) p. 9]

VV2: TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Geert Lovink, 'Engage in Destiny Design: Online Video Beyond Hypergrowth: Introduction to Video Vortex Reader II'

THEORY and AESTHETICS

• Stefan Heidenreich, 'Vision Possible: A Methodological Quest for Online Video'
• Andreas Treske, 'Frames within Frames - Windows and Doors'
• Robrecht Vanderbeeken, 'Web Video and the Screen as a Mediator and Generator of Reality'
• Vito Campanelli, 'The DivX Experience'
• Sarah Késenne, 'Regarding the Sex, Lies and Videotapes of Others: Memory, Counter-Memory, and Mystified Relations'

IMAGES ON THE MOVE

• Gabriel Menotti, 'Objets Propagés: The Internet Video as an Audiovisual Format'
• Andrew Gryf Paterson, 'From a Pull-down Screen, Fold-up Chairs, a Laptop and a Projector: The Development of Clip Kino Screenings, Workshops and Roles in Finland'
• Jan Simons, 'Between iPhone and YouTube: Movies on the Move? '

COLLECTION CASE STUDIES

• Sandra Fauconnier, 'Video Art Distribution in the Era of Online Video'
• Evelin Stermitz, 'ArtFem.TV: Feminist Artistic Infiltration of a Male Net Culture'
• Mél Hogan, 'Crashing the Archive/Archiving the Crash: The Case of SAW Video’s Mediatheque'
• Teague Schneiter, 'Ethical Presentation of Indigenous Media in the Age of Open Video: Cultivating Collaboration, Sovereignty and Sustainability'

ASIA ONLINE

• David Teh, 'The Video Agenda in Southeast Asia, or, ‘Digital, So Not Digital’'
• Ferdiansyah Thajib, Nuraini Juliastuti, Andrew Lowenthal and Alexandra Crosby, 'A Chronicle of Video Activism and Online Distribution in Post-New Order Indonesia'
• Larissa Hjorth, 'Still Mobile: Networked Mobile Media, Video Content and Users in Seoul'

TECHNOLOGICAL APPROACHES

• Matthew Williamson, 'Degeneracy in Online Video Platforms'
• Andrew Clay, 'Blocking, Tracking, and Monetizing: YouTube Copyright Control and the Downfall Parodies'
• Tara Zepel, 'Cultural Analytics at Work: The 2008 U.S. Presidential Online Video Ads'
• Rachel Somers Miles, 'Free, Open and Online: An Interview with Denis Roio aka Jaromil'
• Alejandro Duque, 'Streaming Counter Currents: ‘W.A.S.T.E’'

POLITICS and HUMAN RIGHTS

• Sam Gregory, 'Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent'
• Elizabeth Losh, 'Shooting for the Public: YouTube, Flickr, and the Mavi Marmara Shootings'

ONLINE VIDEO ART

• Brian Willems, 'Increasing the Visibility of Blindness: Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament'
• Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, 'Out in public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with Blake Stimson'
• Linda Wallace, 'non-western and garland'
• Perry Bard, 'When Film and Database Collide'
• Cecilia Guida, 'YouTube as a Subject: Interview with Constant Dullaart'
• Rosa Menkman, 'Glitch Studies Manifesto'
• Albert Figurt, 'The Thin Line Between On and Off: a (re:)cyclothymic exploration'

APPENDICES

• Video Vortex Conferences
• Video Vortex III in Ankara
• Video Vortex IV in Split
• Video Vortex V in Brussels 
• Video Vortex VI in Amsterdam

New Issue of Scope! Gollum/LOTR, Egyptian cinema, Fight Club, Snuff-Fiction

Read Mike Miley's review of Glyn Davis's study of  Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987). Read Film Studies For Free's related entry dedicated to Todd Haynes and its entry on the Sirkian melodrama. 

As usual, Film Studies For Free is delighted to bring you news of the latest issue of Scope; an Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. The full table of contents is given below. 

In addition to an excellent selection of main articles, there is an astonishing array of book and film reviews and conference reports, the latter sections in particular flagging up the enormous, but highly worthwhile, collective editorial effort that goes into producing a very good quality Open Access journal.

Thank you, Scope!

Scope, Issue 19, February 2011

Articles

• Playing with Gollum: Uncovering the Cultural Life and Transnational Travels of a Complex Character - Part One Martin Barker

• Playing with Gollum: Uncovering the Cultural Life and Transnational Travels of a Complex Character - Part Two Martin Barker

• Dying to be Seen: Snuff-Fiction's Problematic Fantasies of "Reality" Steve Jones

• Screening Egypt: Reconciling Egyptian Film's Place in "World Cinema" Omar Kholeif

• A Copy, of a Copy, of a Copy? Exploring Masculinity Under Transformation in Fight Club Simon Lindgren

• [ALL ARTICLES ON ONE PAGE]

Book Reviews

• Carmen on Film: A Cultural History by Phil Powrie, Bruce Babington, Ann Davies and Chris Perriam  100 Hundred Years of Spanish Cinema By Tatjana Pavlovi, Inmaculada Alvarez, Rosana Blanco-Cano, Anitra Grisales, Alejandra Osorio and Alejandra Sánchez Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 By Steven Ricci Reviewer: Noelia Saenz

• Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies by Terry Bolas  Beginning Film Studies By Andrew Dix Reviewer: Juli Pitzer

• Isuma: Inuit Video Art by Michael Robert Evans Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples in Canadian Dramatic Television Series By Mary Jane Miller  Reviewer: Heather Macdougall

• The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks by Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.)  Stardom in Postwar France Edited by John Gaffney and Diana Holmes Reviewer: John Berra

• Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson (eds.) Reviewer: Evan Elkins

• Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy by Paola Marrati. Translated by Alisa Hartz  Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film By Irving Singer Reviewer: Alexander Thimons

• Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema by Warren Buckland (ed.) Reviewer: Chris Pallant

• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story by Glyn Davis Reviewer: Mike Miley

• The Hitchcock Annual Anthology: Selected Essays from Volumes 10-15 by Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen (eds.) Reviewer: Christina M. Parker

• Film and Memory in East Germany by Anke Pinkert  Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema By Inga Scharf Reviewer: David Embree

• Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language by Hester Baer Reviewer: Paul Cooke

• Understanding Indian Cinema: Culture, Cognition and Cinematic Imagination by Patrick Colm Hogan  Mourning The Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition By Bhaskar Sarkar Reviewer: Scott Jordan Harris

• Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Movies by Dave Saunders Reviewer: Joseph Arton

• Jean-Pierre Jeunet by Elizabeth Ezra  The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience By Jennifer M. Barker Reviewer: Alison Frank

• Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson  The Films of Hal Ashby By Christopher Beach Reviewer: Aaron Hunter

• Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book by Dean A. Kowalski (ed.)  Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film and Philosophy By Colin Davis Reviewer: Chelsea Wessels

• The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity  by Catherine Russell   Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary By Abé Mark Nornes  Reviewer: Stephen Potter

• Anatomy of Film. Sixth Edition by Bernhard F. Dick Reviewer: Monika Raesch

• Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin by David Church (ed.)  The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers, Volume 1. Edited by George Melnyk Reviewer: Rachel Walls

• TV China by Ying Zhu and Chris Berry (eds.)  Transnational Television in Europe: Reconfiguring Global Communications Networks By Jean K. Chalaby Reviewer: Bärbel Göbel

• [ALL BOOK REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Film Reviews

• The Godfather Reviewer: Mark Chapman

• Red Hill Reviewer: Kate Harper

• The Eclipse Reviewer: Andrea Grunert

• Life on Mars Reviewer: Mary Irwin

• Kaminey Reviewer: Sagnik Banerjee

• [ALL FILM REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Conference Reports

• British Film 2000-2010: Crossing Borders, Transferring Cultures, Germersheim School of Translation, Interpreting, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Mainz, 18 – 21 February 2010 Reporter: Ron Walker

• NERFS (North-East Regional Film Seminar), Northumbria University, Newcastle, 15 July 2010 Reporter: Louise Anderson and Erin Hill-Parks

• Investigating Torchwood: Text, Context, Audiences, Cardiff School of Creative Arts, University of Glamorgan, 18 June 2010 Reporter: Ross P. Garner

• NECS 2010 Annual Conference, Communication Faculty, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, 24 – 27 June 2010 Reporter: Ozgur Cicek

• MeCCSA-PGN 2010: Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association Postgraduate Network Conference, University of Glasgow, 31 June – 1 July 2010 Reporter: Douglas McNaughton

• Screen Studies Conference: Screen Performance, University of Glasgow, 2 – 4 July 2010 Reporter: Melanie Hoyes

• [ALL CONFERENCE REPORTS ON ONE PAGE]

FILM MOMENTS and other free book excerpts from Palgrave Macmillan and BFI

Image from The Band Wagon ( Vincente Minnelli, 1953) starring Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire (above)

Today, Film Studies For Free celebrates the bountiful, free, Film Studies book samples available for perusal and download at the Palgrave Macmillan website. These may not be the Open Access works this blog normally labours to ferret out and champion. But there have been some astonishingly generous excerpts available online at Palgrave lately, perhaps most notably 72 pages from one of the most exciting of recent film publishing efforts, edited by and with stunning contributions from some brilliant former students, colleagues and friends of FSFF's author: James Walters and Tom Brown's remarkable collection Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory.

Full contents of the free sample pages are given below, together with numerous other references and links to Palgrave PDFs below those.

If you are in London tomorrow you may like to know that there will be a Film Moments launch event, with some fascinating-looking talks by a number of the contributors to the collection at 2pm at the BFI Southbank (full details here).

• James Walters and Tom Brown (eds), Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory (2010) (72 free pages including the chapters below)
• Preface
• PART ONE: CRITICISM 
• Shadow Play and Dripping Teat: The Night of the Hunter (1955); Tom Gunning 
• Between Melodrama and Realism: Under the Skin of the City (2001); Laura Mulvey
• Internalising the Musical: The Band Wagon (1953); Andrew Klevan 
• The Visitor's Discarded Clothes in Theorem (1968); Stella Bruzzi
• Style and Sincerity in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004); James Walters
• The Moves: Blood (1989); Adrian Martin
• The Properties of Images: Lust for Life (1956); Steve Neale
• Two Views Over Water: Action and Absorption in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957); Ed Gallafent
• Making an Entrance: Bette Davis's First Appearance in Jezebel (1938); Martin Shingler 
• A Narrative Parenthesis in Life is Beautiful (1997); Deborah Thomas 
• The End of Summer: Conte d'été (1996); Jacob Leigh
• Enter Lisa: Rear Window (1954); Douglas Pye
• Opening Up The Secret Garden (1993); Susan Smith
• A Magnified Meeting in Written on the Wind (1956); Steven Peacock
• 'Everything is connected, and everything matters': Relationships in I [heart] Huckabees (2004); John Gibbs 
• The Ending of 8 ½ (1963); Richard Dyer 
• Full book info.

• Caroline Bainbridge, 'Introduction', A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (2008) (16 free pages) Book info.

• Emma Bell, 'Introduction', Reading Management and Organization in Film (2008)  (16 free pages) Book info.

• Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (eds), 'Introduction', European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (2010)  (35 free pages) Book info.

• Peter Brooker, 'American Modernists in Modern London', Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations (2001) (39 free pages) Book info.

• Liora Brosh, 'Introduction', Screening Novel Women: From British Domestic Fiction to Film (2008)  (21 free pages) Book info.

• James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper (eds), 'Introduction', The New Film History (2007) (24 free pages) Book info.

• Teresa De Lauretis, 'Introduction: Death @ Work', Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (2008) (29 free pages) Book info.

• Dennis Denisoff,, 'Introduction: Unsightly Desires' Sexual Visuality From Literature To Film 1850-1950 (2004) (24 free pages) Book info.

• K.J. Donnelly, 'Introduction', British Film Music and Film Musicals (2007)  (22 free pages) Book info.

• Reena Dube, 'The Discourse of Colonial Enterprise and Its Representation of the Other Through the Expanded Cultural Critique', Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players and Post Colonial Film Theory: Postcolonialism and Film Theory (2005) (46 free pages) Book info.

• Richard Dyer, 'Tales of Plagiarism And Pastiche', Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (2010)  (27 free pages) Book info.

• Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford (eds),  'Introduction', Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2007)  (20 free pages) Book info.
  

• Martin Flanagan, 'Dialogism and Film Studies: The Dialogic Spectator', Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film (2009) (48 free pages) Book info.
  

• Thomas S. Freeman, 'Introduction: It’s Only a Movie',  in Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (eds), Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (2008)  (41 free pages) Book info.

• Patrick Fuery, 'Introduction: Film and Theory' and 'The Gaze: Masochism, Identification and Fantasy in the Spectator', New Developments in Film Theory (2000)  (31 free pages) Book info.

• Roberta Garrett, 'Postmodernism, New Hollywood and Women’s Films', Postmodern Chick Flicks: The Return of the Woman's Film (2007) (49 free pages) Book info.
  

• Greg Giesekam, 'Introduction: Contamination or Remediation?', Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre (2007) (31 free pages) Book info.

• Kristyn Gorton, 'Theorising Desire', Theorising Desire: From Freud to Feminism to Film (2008) (40 free pages) Book info. 

• Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (2009)  (22 free pages) Book info.

• Stephen Hutchings (ed.), 'Introduction', Russia and its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue (2006) (36 free pages) Book info.

• Stephen Keane, 'Screens', CineTech: Film, Convergence and New Media (2006)  (30 free pages) Book info.

• Maurice Hindle, 'Introduction', Studying Shakespeare on Film (2007) (19 free pages) Book info.

• Nick Lacey, [various sections], Introduction to Film Studies (2004)  (52 free pages) Book info.  Companion website

• Michael O'Pray, 'Representation, Depiction and Portrayal in Film' Film, Form and Phantasy: Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics (2004) (32 free pages) Book info.

• Michael Paris (ed.), 'Introduction: Film, Television, and the Second World War – The First Fifty Years', Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television (2007)  (20 free pages) Book info.

• Patrick Russell and James Taylor (eds), 'The Long Tail', Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (2010)  (12 free pages) Book info.

• Adrian Schober, Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film: Contrary States (2004)   (49 free pages) Book info.
  

• Sharon Lin Tay, 'On the Edges of the Authorial Voice: Liv Ullmann’s Faithless, Gendered Authorship, and Ingmar Bergman', Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (2009)  (25 free pages) Book info.

• Keith Tester, 'The Period Films: Tragedies and Miracles', Eric Rohmer: Film as Theology (2008)  (36 free pages) Book info.
  

• Brian Lindsay Thomson, 'Institutional and Critical Priorities at the Beginning of Graham Greene’s Career', Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction and Film (2009) (24 free pages)  Book info.