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.