Online Film Audio-Commentaries and Video Essays Of Note

Susana Medina, Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys

(Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 )

In Film Studies For Free's humble opinion, one of the most exciting online areas for potential Film Studies' development is rapidly emerging from the already hugely popular Web 2.0 practice of video-sharing. It has never been easier to publically display work in which moving (and still) image-tracks, created by others, can be 'overlaid' with one's own recorded words/sounds/text, to create web 'video-essays' or online 'audio-commentaries'.

The practical/technical side of this activity should provide few challenges for the YouTube generation: the main issue to consider in relation to the educational uses of such 'user-generated' resources is, as ever, that of the quality of content. But there are plenty of noteworthy models around, from which Film Studies teachers and students can gain insight and inspiration, such as Susana Medina's excellent video essay on fetishism in the work of Luis Buñuel, embedded above (and also available on MySpace and at the Internet Archive).

To celebrate these developments, and to support them in a small way, Film Studies For Free has created a new (right-hand margin) list of links to freely accessible online audio commentaries, video essays, and 'alternative' DVD commentaries. The list currently links to the following websites: Shooting Down Pictures; Susana Medina, 'Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys'; Listology List of Best Fan Commentaries (until 2005); Sean Weitner and Andy Ross on Mulholland Drive; Whiggles.com on Suspiria and Profondo Rosso; and Renegade Commentaries. Suggestions of other websites or items of this kind are, as ever, warmly welcomed.

By far the richest website resource in this area, to date, is the one at the head of FSFF's current list: Kevin B. Lee's fabulous Shooting Down Pictures. As GreenCine Daily rightfully testified back in July 2008 (when Film Studies For Free was barely a twinkle in this neophyte blogger's eye): 'For some time now, Kevin B Lee's video essays have been among the most exciting developments in film blogging, suggesting not an alternative but supplemental form of film criticism accessible to anyone online.'

Lee is a filmmaker and multimedia producer based in New York City. Shooting Down Pictures primarily serves as a repository for a wide variety of materials connected with his project of viewing every film on the list of 1000 greatest films of all time, as compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Rather than simply writing about, or gathering pre-existing resources together for these films -- both of which Lee does brilliantly, it must be said -- he also makes video essays about them and commissions others to provide their own audio commentaries, including ones by such luminaries as Nicole Brenez, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Richard Brody, Karina Longworth, Andy Horbal, Mike D'Angelo, Matt Zoller Seitz, Preston Miller, Vadim Rizov, and Girish Shambu.

The current full list of video essays by Shooting Down Pictures is given below, but also check out the video index Lee maintains at YouTube where these and many other videos by him, or fabulously 'mashed up' by him, are hosted.

• Alexander
• …And God Created Woman
• America, America
• And the Ship Sails On (feat. Michael Joshua Rowin)
• Aranyer Din Ratri / Days and Nights in the Forest (1970, Satyajit Ray) - featuring Preston Miller
• Born on the Fourth of July (feat. Matt Zoller Seitz)
• Burnt by the Sun (feat. Andy Horbal)
• Dames
• Duel
• El Cid (1961, Anthony Mann) with Mike D’Angelo
• Evil Dead II
• Grey Gardens (1975, Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer) with commentary by Vadim Rizov
• Hour of the Star/A Hora da Estrela
• Il Posto (feat. Keith Uhlich)
• Inferno
• JFK
• La femme infidele feat. Dan Sallitt
• La Haine
• Le boucher feat. Dan Sallitt
• Louisiana Story
• Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht / Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where it Rules (1965, Jean-Marie Straub) featuring commentary by Richard Brody
• Nixon (feat. Matt Zoller Seitz)
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
• Peter Ibbetson
• Sugar Cane Alley
• The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982, Peter Greenaway) with Karina Longworth
• The Heiress (feat. Cindi Rowell)
• The Saragossa Manuscript
• The Sun Shines Bright (1956, John Ford) featuring Jonathan Rosenbaum
• The Vanishing
• "The Wire and the Art of the Credits Sequence” video essays on the Moving Image Source (Watch Part One; Watch Part Two - feat. Matt Zoller Seitz and Andrew Dignan)
• They Died with Their Boots On (feat. Matt Zoller Seitz)
• Tobacco Road
• Un coeur en hiver / A Heart in Winter (1991, Claude Sautet) with Mike D’Angelo
• Unfaithfully Yours
• U samogo sinyego morya / By the Bluest of Seas (1936, Boris Barnet) featuring commentary by Nicole Brenez
• While the City Sleeps
• Woman in the Window (feat. Girish Shambu)

After a recent flurry of literally feverish activity, Film Studies For Free is going to take a richly-deserved, two-week break so that its cold-ridden author can become fully healthy once more, and go off to deliver a talk on her own work (which is not totally unconnected to the focus of today's blog post, as it happens). In the meantime, FSFF leaves you with a little video essay by Lee and Dan Sallitt on another of this blog's favourite filmmakers (alongside Buñuel), Claude Chabrol. Adieu, pour le moment...

Ahoy, Me Hearties! Pirate Philosophy by Gary Hall

Open Access publishing is not all that scary

Yesterday, Film Studies For Free's author attended a very stimulating talk on a subject dear to this blog's heart: Open Access publishing in the Humanities.

Tireless proponent and exponent of radical Open Access Professor Gary Hall gave his lecture -- 'Pirate Philosophy' -- as part of the Research in Progress Seminar Series at the School of Media and Film at the University of Sussex, a talk he had also delivered at his own institution, Coventry University. The Sussex event was chaired by Caroline Bassett, whose own writing on digital media is well worth checking out: click HERE for an online Open Access article by her on Web 2.0 and read about her new book, The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media (complete with its discussion of Gus Van Sant's film Elephant) HERE.

A description of the earlier version of Gary Hall's talk, available online, reads as follows (with the odd hyperlink added, as usual, by FSFF):

This Lecture presented a series of performative media projects or ‘media gifts’. Operating at the intersection of art, media and philosophy, these projects – which include an open access archive and a ‘liquid book’ – are gifts in that they are part of the ‘academic gift economy’ which circulates research for free rather than as market commodities. They are performative in that they are instances of media that produce the things of which they speak and are engaged primarily through their performance.

The media gift that this Lecture focussed on was ‘Pirate Philosophy’. This project investigated some of the implications of internet pirate philosophy for the arts and humanities, particularly the latter’s ideas of authorship, the book, the academic journal, scholarly publishing, intellectual property, copyright law, content creation and cultural production. ‘Pirate Philosophy’ explores such ideas both philosophically and legally through the creation of an actual ‘pirate’ text.

Hall's lecture richly explored all sorts of different models for Open Access as well as, very engagingly, the current relevance to these matters of the work of a variety of cultural theorists (most prominently Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman, and the gift-economics of Marcel Mauss -- 'gifts are never free', but instead often give rise to reciprocal exchange).

The question session at the end of the seminar showed that many of those attending were, in part, inspired by Hall's call to piracy/self-piracy, but were residually anxious in the ways that academics employed (or working towards being employed) by the current system so often are about the challenges to conventional systems of academic, and other, authorship that Web 2.0 has raised, and that Web 3.0 will take even further. Hall's tactical refusal to assuage those anxieties was well met by this attendee, though. A little pirate heartiness will indeed be necessary if the lockdown culture of Western Academia is truly to change. (But that's easy for this blogger to say...)

All these debates are closely connected to ones about the spreadability of digital moving image materials as well as text-based ones. Interested FSFF readers should also check out Gary Hall's website together with Culture Machine, the online journal he co-founded and edits, which will have an upcoming issue on Pirate Philosophy. You should also visit and support CSeARCH, the pioneering Humanities online-archive he co-founded in 1999. Hall's latest book Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now is a highly compelling read, but you can get some sense of his detailed arguments from the following online conference proceedings piece: 'The Politics and Ethics of Electronic Archiving'; and from the following interview: ‘OA in the Humanities Badlands’.

If you've got as far as this point in this post, ye verily deserve today's final, 'piratical' gift: a video of Hall's lecture as given at Coventry University on September 29, 2008:

Film Studies For Free's author promises to return to the fascinating questions about authorship, online and otherwise, raised by Hall's work in a future post for her research blog Directing Cinema.

Scott Kirsner's 'Inventing the Movies': free online video

Scott Kirsner at Google HQ

Film Studies For Free has already waxed lyrical about CinemaTech, the great blog by Scott Kirsner. Today CinemaTech offered up a link to a video posted on YouTube by Google of a hugely informative 46 minute-long talk on the history of Hollywood film technological innovations given by Kirsner when he visited the company. The presentation is wonderfully delivered and festooned with great clips.

Here's the blurb for the talk, with hyperlinks added by Film Studies For Free for further information:

Scott Kirsner visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "Inventing the Movies: Hollywood's Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs." This event took place on October 16, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.From Edison to the iPod, from the Warner Brothers to George Lucas, the story of how the movies became America's favorite form of escapist entertainment--and retained their hold on our imaginations for more than a century--is a story of innovators prevailing again and again over skeptics who prefer to preserve the status quo. Inventing the Movies unspools the never-before-told story of the innovators who shaped Hollywood: how a chance meeting at the Saratoga Race Track led to the end of black-and-white movies ... how Bing Crosby brought you the VCR ... how Walt Disney tamed television ... how a shotgun blast signaled the end of hand-made models and the beginning of digital special effects ... and how even the almighty Morgan Freeman had trouble persuading theater-owners that the Internet wasn't their mortal enemy. Inventing the Movies is an important read not just for fans of Hollywood's history, but for innovators trying to make change happen in any industry.

This is obviously a very 'technology-positive', not to say 'technologically-triumphalist', take on Hollywood/California history; for much more nuanced views readers should take a look at Henry Jenkins's work, including his blog. But Film Studies For Free thinks that this free video is well worth a watch and certainly serves as a particularly good and lively introduction to film technology history for those who are fairly new to the topic.

P.S. Film Studies For Free was stunned yesterday to hear the news that the aforementioned Henry Jenkins is to depart from the MIT Comparative Media Studies program that he co-founded to take up a new position at the University of Southern California. Truly, the end of an era, but hopefully the beginning of another one for work on participatory culture.

Mickey Mouse and Animation Links

Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (1928)

GreenCine Daily reminds Film Studies For Free that it's Mickey Mouse's birthday today - eighty years to the day since his first film appearance in Steamboat Willie. GC Daily points us in the direction of a nice annotated photo gallery with informative text by Neal Gabler, author of Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, at the Guardian Online. And once there you can find a tribute video with some wonderful clips (you just have to endure a short advert to watch them). The BBC also offers some infotaining fun with the old mouse, too. If Disney World's anthropomorphism or cultural imperialism are not your cup of tea, then check out another cultural text that 'age cannot wither ..., nor custom stale': Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's enduringly essential How to Read Donald Duck.

Anyhow, on the occasion of this mousepicious anniversary, the ever event-driven Film Studies For Free decided to gather together in one place (below) all its current animation online-resource links (to archives, online films, weblogs, e-journals and noteworthy articles, e-zines, discussion and research groups, and podcasts):

• the Hollywood Animation Archive
• the Animation & Cartoons section at the Internet Archive Moving Images site
• the new website for the British Cartoon Archive
• Paul Ward's Introduction to the great Animation Studies issue of online journal Enter Text (no. 4.1)

  Here are direct links to the other articles in the issue: Giannalberto Bendazzi: African cinema Animation; Joanna Bouldin: Criminal Realism: Virtual Child Pornography, Photorealism and the Legislation of the Virtual Animated Body; David Surman: Animated Caricature: Notes on Superman, 1941-1943; Suzanne Buchan: Animation Spectatorship: The Quay Brothers' Animated "Worlds"; Michael Nottingham: Downing the Folk-festive: Menacing Meals in the Films of Jan Svankmajer; Thomas Lamarre: An Introduction to Otaku Movement; George Griffin: Willful Ignorance: Making Flying Fur; Sarah Bowen: Mindscapes and Landscapes: Pixillation and Live-Action in the Making of Daze; Penn Stevens: Making Tied Down; Richard O'Connor: Three Ways of Avoiding Animation.

• Frames Per Second Animation E-Zine
• Two further, noteworthy, Open Access articles on international animation: Gigi Hu Tze-yue, 'Understanding Japanese animation: from Miyazaki and Takahataanime'; and Paula Callus's article on African animation (commissioned by Africa in Motion)
• Aardman Animations website (see some 'breaking news' HERE)
• Aardman Animations on YouTube
• Animation weblogs of note: Anime Princess; Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation; Michael Barrier on Animation
• The Anime and manga research circle
• Animation Journal Discussion Group
• Tate Modern 02-03-2007 Pervasive Animation conference podcasts
• Many thanks to Adrian Martin who suggested that FSFF should check out Philip Brophy's great site. There are plenty of good resources on offer here; animation fans should definitely visit the animation publications page for some wonderful items from Brophy.
• There's a lot on Hayao Miyazake and Studio Ghibli at the preceding site, but FSFF also recommends the following: The Hayao Miyazaki Web // Nausicaa.net; Online Ghibli; and this great post at The Valve by Bill Benzon.
• Finally, and also on Miyazake's oeuvre, please check out the following great Open Access publication by Rayna Denison for the online journal Scope: 'Disembodied Stars and the Cultural Meanings of Princess Mononoke's Soundscape'.

Internet Archive Film E-Books: Pudovkin, Kracauer, Balázs, Rotha

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you news of some more cinema-related items from the Internet Archive. The following are links to out of copyright or otherwise legally scannable books that have been collected and archived by the IA. They may be accessed in various formats (PDF, DjVu, Full Text) and can take a while to download, but it's great that they're available online. There are quite a few film books archived (of variable quality) -- check out the IA search tool HERE -- but Film Studies For Free especially likes these classic tomes:

• Film Technique And Film Acting (1958) - V. I. Pudovkin (also on Google Books)


• Theory of the Film (1952) - Béla Balázs


• From Caligari To Hitler: A Psychological History Of The German Film (1947) - Siegfried Kracauer


• Jean Cocteau: Diary of a Film (1950 - on La Belle et la Bête) - Ronald Duncan (limited preview on Google Books)


• The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema (1949) - Paul Rotha (on Google Books)


• Rotha On The Film A Selection Of Writings About The Cinema (1958) - Paul Rotha


• Kino A History Of The Russian And Soviet Film (1960) - Jay Leyda (snippet view on Google Books)


• The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (1939) - Lewis Jacobs


• Le Fantastique au cinéma (1958) - Michel Laclos (in French)

By the way, if you want to know more about these or any other books then Film Studies For Free recommends you look no further than the wonderful Open Library site. The Open Library promises 'one web page [full of information] for every book ever published':

To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now [and there are 1,064,822 so far with full-text]), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.

The Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. It needs volunteers (like all wiki-type projects) so, to find out more about participating, please click HERE, or just start browsing around and add some book information.

Finally, thanks for all the appreciative email comments about Film Studies For Free's listing of Online and Open-Access Film and Moving-Image Studies Writing Of Note by Individual Named Authors (also see the explanation of the listing HERE). To reiterate, suggestions for further items for inclusion are also warmly welcomed: please email Film Studies For Free HERE. Thanks.

Individual Authors' Online Writing Of Note - an explanation of FSFF's list

Film Studies For Free proudly presents, in the post below this one, its current listing of 'Individual Authors' Online (and Open Access) Writing Of Note' (in the English language). List entries come in two forms: weblinks to particular articles or e-books (or online theses) by the named authors; and weblinks to the authors' own live links lists to their collected works online. These links, like all the others on FSFF, are permanently accessible via the numerous and copious lists to be found on the right-hand side of the blog - just scroll (almost) endlessly down to find the various categories.

The taxonomy of authorship is always a funny business. Academics often try to work in a spirit of disinterested enquiry and so a system of credit on the basis of names and reputations can have obvious drawbacks. Nonetheless, name recognition functions as effectively in academia as it does elsewhere; and lists of work organised by author name have very obvious uses, beyond that of propping up academic star systems.

Film Studies For Free's author list, like all its other selections, is inevitably partial. Many of those named in the post below are personally known to this blog's author, or associated with academic departments with which she is familiar (though, to be fair, there are many such departments and many such academics as she has been around rather a long time). Other name entries reflect, on occasion, this third-person's own (broad) research interests. But the list also represents a pretty good cross-section of the kinds of Open Access, academic, film and moving image studies work online at the moment, and is fairly international in focus, to boot. So, FSFF offers it up in its usual 'treasure-trove' spirit and hopes you find it useful and spreadable, too.

Any recommendations (by commenting or by email) for additions to the list -- especially for authors' 'collected online works' listings -- will be ever so gratefully received, as will notifications of any corrections or dead links. And the list in the post will be updated as necessary whenever new items come to FSFF's notice. So please keep your undoubtedly beady, Film and Moving Image Studies' eyes on it, from time to time. Thank you.

Online and Open-Access Film and Moving-Image Studies Writing Of Note (by Individual Named Authors)

[Last updated: January 11, 2009; see just added label for latest entries; the list is organised A-Z by author forename]

• Abe Mark Nornes and Yeh Yueh-yu, 'A City of Sadness--a Hypertextual Multimedia article'
• Acquarello (Strictly Film School)
• Adrian Martin (from late 2008) (Before then please see these links via Girish Shambu's blog)
• Alain Badiou
• Alexander Binns, Music in the films of Wong Kar-wai
• Alexander Cohen, 'Clockwork Orange and the Aestheticization of Violence'
• Alexandra Juhasz (also see Media Praxis)
• Alison Butler, Feminist Film in the Gallery (Ahtila)
• André Bazin, 'The Life and Death of Superimposition'
• André Bazin,'Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry?'
• André Bazin, on René Clement and literary adaptation: Two original reviews
• André Bazin, on Claude Autant-Lara and literary adaptation: Four original reviews
• André Habib, 'Origins and Death in the Work of Jean-Luc Godard'
• Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds), Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes (e-book)
• Andrew Klevan on writing about film performance (in response to Adrian Martin)
• Anna Notaro just added
• Anne Rutherford, 'Arrested Motion: Leaps and Bounds in the Korean Detective Film'
• Anne Rutherford, 'Cinema andEmbodied Affect'
• Anne Rutherford, 'Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mise en scène and the Senses in Angelopoulos' Balkans Epic'
• Anneke Smelik, Feminist Film Theory
• Antonio Negri, 'On Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus'
• Ara Osterweil on Caché
• Aylish Wood, 'Proliferating Connections and Communicating Convergence'
• B. Ruby Rich
• Barbara Klinger, 'Say It Again, Sam: Movie Quotation, Performance and Masculinity' just added
• Barry Keith Grant on Masculinity and D.W. Griffith
• Barry Keith Grant on Rethinking Authorship
• Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (e-book)
• Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film (e-book)
• Ben Brewster, 'The Fundamental Reproach (Brecht)' just added
• Bernard Stiegler, 'Our Ailing Educational Institutions'
• Brian McFarlane, Chapter 2 (on I, Claudius) from Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films, ed. by Dan North
• Brian Price on Catherine Breillat
• Caroline Bassett on Web 2.0
• Catherine Grant
• Catherine Lupton on Chris Marker
• Cecilia Sayad
• Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (e-book)
• Chris Darke, Letter from London [on surveillance culture]
• Chris Fujiwara
• Chris Marker, A free replay (notes on Vertigo)
• Chris Marker, Phenomenon (n.)
• Chris Marker, Pictures at an Exhibition
• Claudia Gorbman, 'Vigo/Jaubert' just added
• Chuck Tryon
• Coral Houtman on Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense
• Coralline Dupuy, 'Korean Gothic and psychosis in A Tale of Two Sisters'
• Cynthia Freeland
• Dana Polan on Auteur Desire
• Dana Polan, 'Film Theory Re-Assessed'
• Daniel Chandler
• Daniel Frampton, 'The Way that Movements Speak' [on Tarr and Pawlikowski]
• Daniel Frampton at Filmosophy.org
• Daniel Yacavone, 'Towards a Theory of Film Worlds'
• Dan North, chapters from Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films
• Dana Polan, 'Auteur Desire'
• David Blakesley 'Eviscerating David Cronenberg'
• David Bordwell
• David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (e-book)
• David Bordwell, 'Camera Movement and Cinematic Space' just added
• David Sorfa
• David Sterritt
• David Wellbery, 'Post-Hermeneutic Criticism' (on Kittler)
• Diane Negra, 'Quality Postfeminism?"Sex and the Single Girl on HBO'
• Dina Iordanova
• Donald Larsson on agency and film narration
• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema (e-book)
• Donato Totaro, 'Art For All "Time"' [on Tarkovsky]
• Donato Totaro, Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project
• Donato Totaro, 'Deleuzian Film Analysis: The Skin of the Film'
• Douglas Morrey on Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day
• Douglas Morrey, 'Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis'
• Douglas Pye, In and Around The Paradine Case
• Ed S. Tan, Cultural Functions and Practices in the Digital World
• Elena del Río on Claire Denis' Beau travail
• Elizabeth Cowie on Anxiety, Ethics and Horror
• Ella Shohat on Framing Post-Third Worldist Culture (Middle Eastern/North African film)
• Eugenie Brinkema, Bersani, Deleuze, Noé
• Fiona Jenkins, 'Grief’s Testimony: On Almodóvar’s All About My Mother'
• Frances Restuccia on Lacan.com
• Fred Camper on Film
• Gary Hall
• Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (e-book)
• Geoffrey Kantaris just added
• Geoffrey Nowell-Smith on the rise and fall of Film Criticism
• George Kouvaros, 'Cinema and theatre in John Cassavetes' The killing of a Chinese bookie and Opening night'
• George Kouvaros, 'Nocturnal Kinship' (John Conomos plus Calvino, Nabokov, Schefer)
• George M Wilson
• Gigi Hu Tze-yue, 'Understanding Japanese animation: from Miyazaki and Takahataanime'
• Gilberto Perez, 'Toward a rhetoric of film: identification and the spectator'
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• Girish Shambu
• Greg M Smith
• Henry A. Giroux, Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyperreal Violence: Pulp Fiction and Other Visual Tragedies
• Henry Jenkins
• Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay (e-book)
• Ian Christie, 'Protazanov: A Timely Case for Treatment'
• Jacqueline Maingard, South African Cinema in the 1940s
• Jacques Rancière, A Thwarted Fable
• James R Elkins, Reading/Teaching Lawyer Films
• Janet Staiger, 'Cabinets of Transgression: Collecting and Arranging Hollywood Images' just added
• Janine Marchessault, McLuhan’s Pedagogical Art
• Jason Mittell (on media/TV)
• Jason Sperb
• Jay Leyda, Kino A History Of The Russian And Soviet Film (e-book)
• Jean-Louis Schefer on La Jetée
• Jeanne Allen, 'Self-Reflexivity in Documentary' just added
• Jeanette Herman, Memory and Melodrama: The Transnational Politics of Deepa Mehta's Earth
• Jean-Luc Nancy on Lacan.com
• Jean-Pierre Oudart on Lacan.com
• Jennifer E. Langdon, Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood (e-book)
• Jinhee Choi on sentimentality and extreme cinema
• Joan Copjec, on 'the Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema'
• Joan Copjec on Lacan.com (scroll down page)
• Joe Wlodarz, Genre Trouble and HBO's Oz
• John Berger, On Middle of the Earth just added
• John David Rhodes on Peggy Awesh
• John Hess at Jump Cut
• John M. Frame, Theology at the Movies (e-book)
• Jon Beasley-Murray
• Jonathan Rosenbaum
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (e-book)
• Judith Mayne, 'Kino-Truth and Kino Praxis: Vertov's Man With a Movie camera' just added
• Julia Lesage online essays
• Julian Stringer at Scope just added
• Julianne Burton, Revolutionary Cuban cinema
• Justine Walden, 'The Political Aesthetic: Nation and Narrativity on the "Starship Enterprise"'
• Karen Lury at Flow TV
• Kerryn Goldsworthy, 'Austen and Authenticity'
• Kevin Lee
• Kevin Ohi, The Manchurian Candidate, Cold War Paranoia, and the Historicity of the Homosexual
• KF Yau, '3rdness: Filming,Changing, Thinking Hong Kong'
• Kim Newman, 'Irish Horror Cinema'
• Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess' just added
• Kristin Thompson (essays with David Bordwell)
• Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'
• Laura Rascaroli, 'Strange Visions: Kathryn Bigelow's Metafiction'
• Laura U. Marks
• Laura U. Marks, 'Haptic Visuality:Touching with the Eyes'
• Lesley Stern, 'Emma in Los Angeles: Clueless as a remake of the book and the city'
• Lev Manovich
• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema as Cultural Interface'
• Lev Manovich, 'Film/Telecommunication -- Benjamin/Virilio'
• Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (e-book)
• Libby Saxton on Lanzmann and Levinas
• Lisa K. Broad on Robbe-Grillet’s La Belle Captive (also see Tativille)
• Luke McKernan (on early and silent cinema)
• Malcolm Turvey, Can Science Help Film Theory?
• Manthia Diawara on Sub-Saharan African film
• Mark Poster, 'The Aesthetics of Distracting Media'
• Matilda Mroz on Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble
• Mattias Frey on Haneke 1
• Mattias Frey on Haneke 2
• Melanie Swalwell, 'The Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema'
• Michael Chanan
• Michael Grant on Dreyer and Fulci
• Michael Grant on Stanley Cavell
• Michael Grant, David Cronenberg: Style and Extremity
• Michael Grant on The Shining
• Michael J. Anderson, 'James Benning's Art of Landscape: Ontological, Pedagogical, Sacrilegious' (also see Tativille)
• Michael J. Anderson, 'Before Sunrise, or Los Angeles Plays Itself In a Lonely Place'
• Michael J. Anderson, 'Histoire de Marie et Julien: Jacques Rivette's Material Ghost Story'
• Michael J. Anderson, 'Beyond Borders (on The Wind Will Carry Us)'
• Michael Keane, Exporting Chinese Culture: Industry Financing Models in Film and Television
• Monika Jaeckel, 'Approach via the ‘Smooth Space’ - Laura U.Marks’ Research on Intercultural New Media Practice'
• Murray Smith on Music, Film, and Emotion
• Nicholas Rombes, 'Incompleteness'
• Nicole Brenez on Baise-moi
• Niklas Luhmann, 'Modern Society Shocked by its Risks'
• Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (e-book)
• Noel Burch, 'Notes on Fritz Lang's First Mabuse' just added
• Ntongela Masilela on African cinema and literature
• Patricia MacCormack on Pleasure, Perversion, Death and the Viewing Body (e-book)
• Patricia Mellencamp, 'Spectacle and Spectator: Looking Through the American Musical Comedy' just added
• Patricia Pisters, 'From Mouse to Mouse - Overcoming Information' just added
• Paul Julian Smith
• Paul Julian Smith on Pan's Labyrinth
• Paul Rotha, Rotha On The Film A Selection Of Writings About The Cinema (e-book)
• Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema (e-book)
• Paul Ward
• Ray Carney
• Rayna Denison
• Richard Abel on Mise-en-scene in Boudu
• Richard Allen, Looking at Motion Pictures
• Richard Maltby, 'How Can Cinema History Matter More?'
• Richard Maltby, '"More Sinned Against than Sinning": The Fabrications of Pre-Code Cinema'
• Richard Maltby, 'The Public Enemy'
• Richard Maltby, 'The problem of interpretation ...": authorial and institutional intentions in and around Kiss me deadly'
• Richard Raskin, 'Closure in The Third Man: On the Dynamics of an Unhappy Ending'
• Richard Raskin, '"European versus American Storytelling: The Case of The Third Man'
• Richard Rushton
• Robert Murphy, 'Raymond Durgnat and A Mirror for England'
• Robert Philip Kolker The Altering Eye (e-book)
• Robert Philip Robertson, 'Ghostwriting Hong Kong : post-colonial documentary and the western tradition'
• Robert Stam and Randal Johnson, 'Beyond Cinema Novo'
• Roberta Pearson in Scope just added
• Robin Wood
• Ronald Duncan, Jean Cocteau: Diary of a Film (e-book)
• Rosalind Galt on the Barcelona School
• Rosanna Maule
• Rupert Read (on philosophy and film)
• Sandy Flitterman Lewis, 'That "Once-Upon-A-Time" of Childish Dreams' just added
• Sarah Cooper on Levinas and Cinema
• Serge Daney in English 1
• Serge Daney in English 2 (at Steve Erickson's site - scroll down)
• Sérgio Dias Branco (essays on split-screens, Friends, Buffy and Battlestar Galactica)
• Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari To Hitler: A Psychological History Of The German Film (e-book)
• Slavoj Žižek on the 'act'/The Sweet Hereafter
• Slavoj Žižek on Lacan.com
• Stanley Cavell, A Capra Moment
• Stella Bruzzi on The Talented Mr Ripley
• Stephen Heath, 'Afterword' [on Godal's 'The Anti- Narrative']
• Stephen Heath, 'Screen Images - Film Memory' just added
• Stephen Heath, 'Film Performance' just added
• Stephen Mulhall, Ways of Thinking [a defence of On Film]
• Steve Erickson
• Steven Schneider, Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror
• Steven Shaviro
• Su Homes on Dyer, Stardom and Celebrity
• Suk-ying Shirley Yau, Horror in contemporary cinema
• Tag Gallagher
• Tag Gallagher, John Ford (e-book)
• Tanya Krzywinska
• Teshome H Gabriel on Xala
• Thomas Austin on Audience Perspectives on Screen Documentary
• Thomas Elsaesser
• Thomas E Wartenberg at Philosophy Now
• Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (e-book)
• Tim Groves, 'Cinema/Affect/Writing'
• Tim Groves, 'Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification'
• Tim Groves, 'The Un/forgiven Director'
• Tom Gunning - Making Sense of Films
• Tom Waugh, 'Cinemas, Nations, Masculinities'
• VF Perkins on Letter from an Unknown Woman
• VF Perkins, Moments of Choice
• VI Pudovkin, Film Technique And Film Acting (e-book)
• Vivian Sobchack 'Nostalgia for a Digital Object'
• Walter Benjamin
• Warren Buckland
• Warren Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film
• William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (e-book)
• William D. Routt
• William D. Routt, ''L'Evidence'
• William Rothman, On Cavell (Response to Tepper)
• Yvonne Tasker, 'Enforced Talk: Crime and Confessional in Family Forensics'
• Zuzana Pick on Chilean cinema in exile just added

Please read Film Studies For Free's accompanying explanation of this listing HERE. The list in this post will be frequently updated, so please bookmark it. Comments are closed on this post but please feel free to comment HERE or email FSFF with suggestions for addition HERE.

Documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law: free e-book and short films

The above great little comic book can currently be downloaded for free in a new and expanded edition from the Duke University Press website.

Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins takes a humorous look at copyright and fair use issues in relation to filmmaking. The book has a new foreword by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (Director of An Inconvenient Truth) and a new introduction by award-winning novelist and copyright activist Cory Doctorow.

Here's the blurb about the book (which was available, in its earlier, shorter edition, through Google Books) from the Duke University Press website:

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the Rocky theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? Eyes on the Prize, the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound by Law? reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property, and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.

The book is the fruit of the pioneering Duke Law School Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Do check out their fabulous website which, among many other resources (webcasts and online articles about fair use), has the following downloadable short films (via RealPlayer):

• To Clear or not to Clear Filmmaker Chris Hegedus discusses how rights clearance practices have changed since the making of “Don’t Look Back”
• Disappearing History? Filmmaker Orlando Bagwell talks about making “Citizen King” and why “Eyes on the Prize” is no longer in circulation
• Great Composers Steal Composer Anthony Kelley visits classical and jazz traditions and explains why you can find a doppelganger for almost any tune.

If you are a budding documentary filmmaker, or if you are teaching the next generation of budding documentarians, Film Studies For Free thinks that you should definitely check out all of the above resources.