30+ articles from the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture

Frame grab from The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928). Read Bo Florin's article on this film

[Traditionally, aesthetics] has been based on national perspectives and contexts, as well as contained within the limits of specific disciplines. However, the changing society has made this focus all too narrow. Due to globalization, media and territories merge and move in new ways, where regional, national, international, and global perspectives increasingly integrate. New contexts and new aesthetic strategies are also created, and traditional boundaries and hierarchies become transgressed, for example, between high brow and popular culture, or between art and technology. Aesthetics as well as culture thus need to be discussed and interpreted across the disciplines, through different media, over territorial borders. Finally, this is also a strong argument for Open Access publishing: to constitute a global platform and an interface for interdisciplinary discourse—free for anybody to read. [from first JAC Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson and John Sundholm]

Film Studies For Free had been meaning to post something about the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture for quite a while. It's an online open access journal, hence one very much after this blog's's heart, with a high percentage of very good quality film-studies related articles that FSFF has frequently linked to on Twitter.

Today, JAC published an excellent dossier on Transnational Cultural Memory, an event which provided a wonderful prompt to gather together, in one place, links to everything that JAC has published to date. And below, that is just what you will find.

FSFF has also added JAC to its permanent listing of excellent, Open Access film and moving image studies journals. 

Vol. 1 (2009)

• Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson, John Sundholm  (PDF HTML XML)
• Sean Cubitt, Thinking filming thinking filming (PDF HTML XML)
• Thomas Elsaesser, Ingmar Bergman in the museum? Thresholds, limits, conditions of possibility (PDF HTML XML)
• Julia Creet, Calling on Witnesses: testimony and the deictic  (PDF HTML XML)
• Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Antichrist – Chaos Reigns: the event of violence and the haptic image in Lars von Trier’s film   (PDF HTML XML)
• Anu Koivunen, Confessions of a Free Woman: telling feminist stories in postfeminist media culture (PDF HTML XML)
• Tiina Rosenberg, On feminist activist aesthetics  (PDF HTML XML)
• Bo Florin, Confronting The Wind: a reading of a Hollywood film by Victor Sjöström (PDF HTML XML) 

Vol. 2 (2010)

• Editorial by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Lars Gustaf Andersson, John Sundholm (PDF HTML XML) 
• Irina Aristarkhova, Hosting the animal: the art of Kathy High (PDF HTML XML)
• Maaret Koskinen, Ingmar Bergman, the biographical legend and the intermedialities of memory (PDF HTML XML)
• Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, Notes on metamodernism (PDF HTML XML)
• Anita Seppä, Globalisation and the arts: the rise of new democracy, or just another pretty suit for the old emperor? (PDF(high) PDF HTML XML)
• Tytti Soila, Passion at the threshold: Doctor Glas the flaneur in the films of Rune Carlstén and Mai Zetterling (PDF HTML XML)
• Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Strategies of interactive art (PDF(high) PDF HTML XML)
• Michael Laurence Woods, What it is? A question on the derivation of musical meaning (PDF HTML XML)
• Matthew Mullane, The aesthetic ear: sound art, Jacques Rancière and the politics of listening (PDF HTML XML)
• Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Space, time, and the arts: rewriting the Laocoon (PDF HTML XML)
• Torkild Thanem, Louise Wallenberg, Buggering Freud and Deleuze: towards a queer theory of masochism (PDF HTML XML)

Vol 3 (2011)

• Lisbeth Söderqvist, Structuralism in architecture: a definition (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Per-Arne Bodin, The holy fool as a TV hero: about Pavel Lungin’s film The Island and the problem of authenticity (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Des O'Rawe, Towards a poetics of the cinematographic frame (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Erik van Ooijen, Cinematic shots and cuts: on the ethics and semiotics of real violence in film fiction (PDF HTML EBUB XML)

• Dossier on Transnational Cultural memory
• John Sundholm, Adrian Velicu, Introduction to the dossier on transnational cultural memory (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Astrid Erll, Traumatic pasts, literary afterlives, and transcultural memory: new directions of literary and media memory studies (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Steffi Hobuß, Aspects of memory acts: transnational cultural memory and ethics (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Adrian Velicu, Cultural memory between the national and the transnational (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• John Sundholm, Visions of transnational memory (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Julia Creet, Transnational archives: the Canadian case (PDF HTML EPUB XML)
• Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen, Transnational sense of place: cinematic scenes of Finnish war child memories (PDF HTML EPUB XML)

Issues of KINEMA (Spring and Fall 2010)

Image from Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007). Read Alessandro's Zir's article on this film for Kinema (Spring 2010)

Film Studies For Free continues with its roundup of recent offerings from online film studies journal by catching up with the last two issues posted at Kinema: a Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media.

Lots of good stuff here, but FSFF particularly enjoyed Alessandro Zir's essay on Paranoid Park, Antonio Sanna on the connections between the Alien series of films and Bram Stoker's Dracula novel, and Des O'Rawe's study of Godard's Film Socialisme.

Spring 2010

'The Art of Creative Scriptural Extrapolation [on Celil B. De Mille's films]' by Anton Karl Kozlovic
'Reproducing the Fin-de-siècle Gothic with Techno-Gothic Vampires' by Antonio Sanna
'Film, Arts and Culture as Community Outreach Tools' by Victor S. O. Yu
'Interview with Gary Tooze' by Jan Uhdeby
'Going to the Movies in Egypt' by Mustafa Mahmoud Yousry
'The Desire for History in Lars von Trier’s Europa and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork' by Angelos Koutsourakis
'Non-Realism and Ontology in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park' by Alessandro Zir

Fall 2010

'The Fraternity of Metaphors: Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme' by Des O'Rawe'
'Interview with Kevin Brownlow on the Making of Winstanley' by Tony Tracy
'Targeting Alien Filmmakers in 1930s Hollywood' by J. Emmett Winn
'Woody Allen as Impossible Cassandra' by Alessandro Zir
'The Language and Genealogy of Early Spy Cinema' by Lukasz Boron
'Interview with Singapore Filmmaker Boo Junfeng' by Yvonne Ng
'The New Vicissitudes of Auteur Cinema' by Christina Stojanova

B for Bad Cinema: Colloquy from Monash

Image from Snakes on a Plane (David R. Ellis, 2006); Read Kirsten Stevens's article Snakes on a Plane and the prefabricated cult film' (pdf) from the new issue of Colloquy

It's going to continue to be a little quiet around here at Film Studies For Free as its author busies herself with finishing off a couple of video essays that will be posted here very shortly.

The essays will also form the basis of two talks to be given in the next few weeks: on March 8 at Liverpool John Moores University; and on March 17 at the University of Sussex (details to follow).

The title of both talks, as per the following abstract, is:

Quote/Unquote? The "Unattainable [Film] Text" in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Following the lead of scholars Christian Keathley, Eric Faden, Jason Mittell, Andrew Miller and Craig Cieslikowski in the summary of their conference panel on The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age (MIT6, Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, April 24-26, 2009), in this talk Catherine Grant will revisit Raymond Bellour's essay on 'The Unattainable Text' (Screen, Vol 16, No 3, 1975: 19-27), as well as Laura Mulvey's more recent considerations of film 'possession', and 'pensiveness' in the digital age (Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion, 2006). Then she will examine the issue of film quotation in audiovisual work, as well as, more generally, the possibilities offered to film studies by the rising generation of online digital-video essays about films and film theory.

To sustain FSFF's terribly loyal readers until then, here's news (via David Hudson @theauteursdaily) of a wonderful e-journal special issue entitled B for Bad Cinema. All the film-related contents are linked to below. Enjoy! It has some particularly choice items on horror cinema, as well as on David Lynch and Lars von Trier.

This usually indefatigable blog will be back properly soon. In the meantime you can continue to follow its much more succinct recommendations on Twitter courtesy of @filmstudiesff.

All articles are in pdf format. To download the whole issue as one file, click Issue 18.
Front
Contents
Editorial

B for Bad Cinema from Colloquy (Monash University), Issue 18, December 2009

• Introduction: B for Bad Cinema Julia Vassilieva and Claire Perkins

• Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception: Configuring a Scatological Gaze in Trash Filmmaking Zoe Gross

• “They don’t call ’em exploitation movies for nothing!”: Joe Bob Briggs and the Critical Commentary on I Spit on Your Grave Tristan Fidler

• Erasing the B out of Bad Cinema: Remaking Identity in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Craig Frost

• “Fucking Americans”: Postmodern Nationalisms in the Contemporary Splatter Film Phoebe Fletcher

• Their Time Has Come: Bad Cinema Nerds as Late-Capitalist Paradigm Mark Steven

• Snakes on a Plane and the prefabricated cult film Kirsten Stevens

• “Bad Form”: Contemporary Cinema’s Turn to the Perverse. David Lynch: Lost Highway (1997) Lars von Trier: Breaking the Waves (1996) Hester Joyce and Scott Wilson

• The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films Ekky Imanjaya

• Doing It for the Kids: Rebels and Prom Queens in the Cold War Classroom Film Anika Ervin-Ward

• Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance Donna McRae

• B for Bad, B for Bogus and B for Bold: Rupert Kathner, The Glenrowan Affair and Ned Kelly Stephen Gaunson

• Horror-Ritual: Horror Movie Villains as Collective Representations, Uncanny Metaphors and Ritual Transgressors Mario Rodriguez

• From Kracauer to Clover: Some Reflections on Genre and Gender in 70s/80s Slasher Films Tyson Namow

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.