Science of Watchmen, War Films, plus Mira Nair, from YouTube EDU

Film Studies For Free is grateful to Peter Suber of Open Access News for the tip-off that YouTube has launched a new channel to facilitate access to video material submitted by universities and colleges: YouTube EDU.

The new channel makes it much easier than before to search for and access high-quality scholarly material related to film and media studies, FSFF has found. As Wired Campus also reports, 'The new section makes it possible to find out which college-produced video is most popular'.

The winner in the popularity stakes so far just happens to be an interview [embedded above] with a University of Minnesota [physics] professor discussing the science behind the new movie Watchmen.' In the video, Professor James Kakalios discusses how he was asked to add a physics perspective to the upcoming Warner Brothers movie, Watchmen. Kakalios explores how quantum mechanics can explain Dr. Manhattan's super human powers in the film, and how he came to become an expert on the topic of the physics of superheroes (click here to read an excerpt from Kakalios's book on this topic).

Film Studies For Free has browsed further Film Studies highlights from YouTube EDU and embedded two more of its top quality educational videos below:

1. University of California Television Presents 'My Dinner with Alain: War Cinema' (56 mins 41 secs):

Alain J. J. Cohen is a Professor of Comparative Literature at UCSD who specializes in film history. In this program presented at the UCSD Faculty Club, Cohen examines the challenges of war films as a genre. Clips from various films about World Wars I & II, Vietnam, space wars, etc., illustrate how the filmmakers battle with issues of world history, order and chaos, studio budgets, editing techniques and conflicts of interpretation to realize their vision of combat.

2. University of California Television Presents 'Cinema Diaspora: Discussion with Mira Nair' (57 mins 35 secs):

Mira Nair's films, Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake, illuminate the ambiguities of the immigrant experience and highlight the conflicts between modern and traditional cultures. She is joined for a discussion of modern cinema by Gayatri Gopinath and Juli Wyman, both of UC Davis.

More Blog Magic

A quickie from Film Studies For Free today just to shout out about two of the best film studies blogs out there which, coincidentally, have very high-quality and worthwhile recent posts on films about duelling magicians:

• David Bordwell has posted Niceties: how classical filmmaking can be at once simple and precise on Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006). He examines, in minute frame-grabbed detail, the varied patternings in Nolan's film. '[S]tudying such microforms is enlightening, Bordwell writes:

It’s a way to understand films as wholes, dynamic constructions that shift their shapes across the time of their unfolding. Moreover, by examining things this closely, we can try to understand not only how this or that film works, but how this or that film relies on principles distinctive of a filmmaking tradition. Consider this another plug for poetics.

• University of Exeter film academic Dan North's blogpost The Last Trick (Jan Švankmajer, 1964) examines the Czech surrealist 's first film Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara as part of his latest research (a larger project on puppetry and cinema). North writes,

this short film is my starting point, and it reveals to me the challenges that lie ahead. Often we have to look carefully at films to come to terms with their idiosyncrasies, but Švankmajer’s work is particularly daunting in its concentration of allegory and allusion. [...] For eleven minutes [of this film], two magicians do battle, and their tricks require a montage of colliding images and a range of animation techniques: the two actors wear giant masks on their heads, probably papier-mâché, making them look like living, stringless marionettes, and Švankmajer manipulates them accordingly. The black backdrop allows a bunraku performance of sorts, with objects appearing to fly and float unaided through space; frame-by-frame animation moves the eyes of the masks; a shot of pixilation makes their bodies flit around the stage in a lightning fast chase. These are endlessly mutable bodies, but there is none of the joyous spectacle of Méliès’ filmed tricks here - the artifice is always signposted, never seamlessly suggestive, and the stolid expressions on the masked faces convey no fun, only procedure and routine. [links added by FSFF]

In addition to this (like Bordwell's) beautifully illustrated post, Dan's blog Spectacular Attractions has also taken up the challenge of Nicholas Rombes' 10 /40 / 70 film criticism exercise (see FSFF's post on this back on March 5). 10/40/70 is, according to Rombes:

[a]n experiment in writing about film: select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case the 10 minute, 40 minute, and 70 minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as the guide to writing about the film. No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. What if, instead of freely choosing what parts of the film to address, one let the film determine this? Constraint as a form of freedom.

In recent posts, North has souped up the engine of the original exercise,

using a random number generator to choose three points from which to take my grabs, and then I have a limited amount of time to write a little about each frame. It’s a quick workout for the critical faculties, and hopefully a way of snapping a jaded blogger out of the comfortable routines of selecting only the most appropriate or illustrative images for a piece of writing

The results are both insightful and highly entertaining, as always with North's blog. Film Studies For Free urges you to check them out, as follows:

• Jaws Randomised
• Frankenstein Randomised
• The Bride of Frankenstein Randomised
• This is Spinal Tap Randomised With Two Brains

One last thought, the following movies may not all be about duelling magicians, but does anyone want to write about The Magician (1926), a horror film directed by Rex Ingram, or The Magician (1958), directed by Ingmar Bergman, or The Illusionist (2006), directed by Neil Burger, and make the highly completist Film Studies For Free one very happy blog indeed? Oh and there's the parody Magicians (2007), directed by Andrew O'Connor too. Any takers?

Reports from the E-Repositories #1: eScholarship Initiative/California Digital Library

Image from November (Hito Steyerl, 2004, DVD, 27 min)

Film Studies For Free has donned its fetching explorer's hat to check out some excellent university e-repositories for research and scholarship.

In the first of a series of posts reporting on its findings, here are five of the best, freely-accessible, film-related items that FSFF found on its e-travels, today courtesy of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library, served by the individual units of the University of California:

• Laure Astourian (2008) “Bridging Fiction and Documentary in Godard’s Notre Musique”, The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal : Vol. 21: No. 2, Article 4 (thesis adviser: Ulysse Dutoit) (abstract: This paper is a close analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique. Its primary focus is the implications of Godard’s blending of documentary footage with staged footage. Among the examples of documentary and narrative blurring, Godard stages an interview with an internationally known poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and though the pretext is completely false, the exchange that takes place is honest and potent. Aside from the famous personages who play themselves, the film’s other main characters are actors. They insert themselves seamlessly through events that actually took place in Sarajevo (i.e. that were not planned for the shooting of the film). I believe this technique echoes Godard’s belief that people have faith in the imaginary, and doubt reality. Even though the narrative curve is atypical--there is no climax, and the two main characters never meet--it offers that which the spectator needs in order to submit himself or herself to a film: the imaginary. Thanks to the lens of narrativity, the varied documentary subjects (the Israeli/Palestine conflict, the symbolic rebuilding of the Mostar Bridge, the Native American plight, the future of digital filmmaking) whose philosophical links would otherwise not be considered are conjoined into a field where realities point to imaginaries and vice versa. Throughout the film, the characters acknowledge the inability of images and words to represent certain atrocities, and strange way by which imaginary representations are at times more believable than the truth.)
  
• Deniz Göktürk (2005) “Yüksel Yavuz’s Kleine Freiheit / A Little Bit of Freedom”, TRANSIT, Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 50915 (abstract: Yüksel Yavuz’s internationally celebrated film Kleine Freiheit / A Little Bit of Freedom (2003), tells the story of a friendship between two young men, both of them illegal immigrants living in Altona, one of them a Kurd from Turkey. Baran’s application for asylum has been declined, and he has therefore fallen into an illegal status in Germany. That means that he does not have basic rights, such as health care or job protection. He works as a delivery boy in a relative’s kebab restaurant. When he has a toothache, they try to cure him in the kitchen by sticking a hot skewer into his mouth. His scream leads over into the first montage sequence of a bicycle trip. This triple exposure sequence conveys a gripping cross-section of the neighborhood by superimposing shots of city traffic with shots of the various locations to which kebab is delivered, ranging from a Turkish bakery to a construction site and a brothel. The sequence conveys a sense of multilayered locality, which is underscored by the music of Mercan Dede. Despite the excess of mobility displayed in these images, the characters remain confined within the St. Pauli neighborhood throughout the film. Taking advantage of a “Germany in transit,” Yavuz’s cinematically impressive engagement with locations in Hamburg raises a whole range of interesting questions such as: Where is home? How are transnational mobility and traumatic memory represented in cinema? Do immigrants live in a “parallel world”? Do they care about integration into German society? Do they form new inter-ethnic alliances in this new place? How do questions of race and gender come into play? And where are German (and global) spectators positioned in relation to immigrant spaces and networks?)
  
• Kathleen Sclafani (2006) “Finding Home in a Liminal Space: Exile and Return in Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe ”, TRANSIT: Vol. 2: No. 1, Article 61212 (abstract: In his film Halbe Treppe, Andreas Dresen uses stylistic elements and modes of production similar to exilic filmmakers, as described by Naficy in his book An Accented Cinema, in an attempt to portray both a sense of exile and a desire for freedom in his characters. Since exile is inextricably bound-up in questions of both homeland and identity, the film invites comparison not only to exilic cinema but also to certain aspects of New German Cinema, particularly issues of German identity that many critics argue have been too often ignored by other young German filmmakers. By emphasizing the importance of Frankfurt/Oder as the setting for his characters’ experience of exile, Dresen creates a connection between identity and “place” that encourages the spectator to reflect upon the traditional notion of “Heimat” and how it might be re-imagined in a new multicultural, unified Germany.)
  
• Dean K. Simonton, 'Film awards as indicators of cinematic creativity and achievement: A quantitative comparison of the Oscars and six alternatives', Creativity Research Journal. 16 (2-3), pp. 163-172 (abstract: Although film awards are often taken as indicating the creative achievements that underlie outstanding motion pictures, critics have questioned whether such honors represent a consensus regarding cinematic contributions. Nevertheless, a strong agreement was demonstrated by investigating 1,132films released between 1975 and 2002 that had received at least 1 award or award nomination from 7 distinct sources (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, and Los Angeles Film Critics Association). The results indicated that (a) almost all award categories exhibited a conspicuous consensus, the Oscars providing the best single indicator of that agreement; (b) Oscar awards provided meaningful information about cinematic creativity and achievement beyond that provided by Oscar nominations alone; (c) awards bestowed by the 7 organizations corresponded with more specialized awards granted by guilds and societies, with the Oscars usually providing the best correspondence; and (d) awards correlated positively with later movie guide ratings, the correlations being especially large in the categories of picture, direction, screenplay, and acting. The findings were discussed in terms of whether the awards can be considered to be indicative of cinematic creativity.)
  
• Hito Steyerl (2005) “November: A Film Treatment”, TRANSIT: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 50914 (abstract: In the eighties Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role, that of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar of exploitation films later became Wolf’s political praxis: She went to fight alongside the PKK in the Kurdish regions between Turkey and northern Iraq, where she was killed in 1998. Now honored by Kurds as an “immortal revolutionary,” her portrait is carried at demonstrations.
  In November Hito Steyerl examines the spectrum of interrelationships between territorial power politics (as practiced by Turkey in Kurdistan with the support of Germany) and individual forms of resistance. Her memories and accounts of Wolf’s life provoke the filmmaker to engage in a fundamental reflexion: She comes to understand how fact and fiction are intertwined in the global discourse. Her friend’s picture as a revolutionary pin-up would equally connect with either Asian genre cinema or a private video document. If October is the hour of revolution, November is the time of common sense afterward, though it is also the time of madness – Hito Steyerl considers from this perspective a relationship which began with a pose, and Andrea Wolf took its implications so seriously that she was no longer satisfied with symbolic action. Wolf chose the Other of filmmaking, which was what made her into a true “icon”.

Direct Cinema? Innovative Documentary Studies Online

Image from Subdivided (Dean Terry, US 2007)

Film Studies For Free is keepin' it real today with a choice selection of links to mostly very recent, definitely innovative, and freely-accessible online documentary studies (last updated April 10, 2009):

• On the 'Rocumentary': Keith Beatty, 'It's Not Only Rock and Roll: 'Rockumentary', Direct Cinema, and Performative Display', Australasian Journal of American Studies. December 2005
• On Animation and Documentary: David Bordwell, 'Showing What Can't Be Filmed', Observations on Film Art and Film Art, March 24, 2009


• On Spectacle and Documentary: Elizabeth Cowie, 'The Spectacle of Reality and Documentary Film,' Documentary Box, #10 (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival) (1997) (Also see HERE; and do visit the main site Documentary Box Online Journal for many other great articles on documentary)


• On Music and Documentary: Leonardo D'Amico, 'People and sounds”: Filming African music between visual anthropology and television documentary', Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review, #11 (2007)
• On Direct Address and Documentary: Alex Gerbaz, 'Direct Address, Ethical Imagination, and Errol Morris’s Interrotron', Film-Philosophy, 12.2, September 2008


• On Activism and Documentary: John Haynes, 'Documentary as Social Justice Activism: The Textual and Political Strategies of Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films', 49th Parallel, Vol.21 (Autumn 2007)


• On 'the Personal' in Japanese Documentary: Nada Hisashi, 'Self-Documentary: Its Origins and Present State', Documentary Box, #26 (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival), 2005


• On Adaptation and Documentary: David T. Johnson, 'Playgrounds of Unlimited Potential: Adaptation, Documentary, and Dogtown and Z-Boys', Adaptation Vol. 2 , No. 1 , pp. 1 – 16 (2009) (a free sample article from this new Oxford Journals periodical)


• On Performativity and Science Documentary: John Arthur Little, 'The Power and Potential of Performative Documentary Film', e-thesis April 2007, Montana State University
• On New Approaches to Documentary: B. Ruby Rich, 'Documentary Disciplines: An Introduction'
  
• On New Media and Documentary: Bjørn Sørenssen, 'Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized?', Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 2, no. 1 (March 2008): 47-59 (see abstract; temporarily free online. Thanks a lot to Watching YouTube for the link)


• On Stylization, Abstraction and Documentary: Billy Budd Vermillion, 'The "Wondrous Truth" of Microcosmos', 16:9 - April 2007 - 5. årgang - nummer 21

Also see the great articles for the 'New worlds of documentary' Special Section of Jump Cut, issue no. 48, winter 2006, edited by Julia Lesage:

Introduction: new worlds of documentary by Julia Lesage; Emergency analysis, Terri Schiavo: introduction The cutting edge: emergencies in visual culture by Janet Staiger; Schiavo videos' context and reception: timely triage by Diane Waldman; Emergency analysis: the academic traffic in images by Catherine L. Preston; The videographic persistence of Terri Schiavo by Janet Walker Walker; A walk on the wild side: the changing face of TV wildlife documentary by Richard Kilborn; Strange Justice: sounding out the Right: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and constructing spin in the name of justice by Steve Lipkin; Giving voice: performance and authenticity in the documentary musical by Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe; Video Vigilantes and the work of shame by Gareth Palmer; Audio documentary: a polemical introduction for the visual studies crowd by Chuck Kleinhans; TV news titles: picturing the planet by Sean Cubitt; Les Archives de la Planète: a cinematographic atlas by Teresa Castro; Cinephilia and the travel film: Gambling, Gods and LSD by Catherine Russell; Dark Days: a narrative of environmental adaptation by Joseph Heumann and Robin L. Murray; Feminist history making and Video Remains by Alexandra Juhasz.

Music to the Eyes: Film Music Essays and Resources Online

Film Studies For Free silently but sonorously brings you its list of links to high-quality and freely accessible online scholarly writings pertaining to music, sound, film, video, and television (last updated 19 May 2009).

• Tim Anderson, 'Review of Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema'
  

• Raphael Atlas, 'That Loving Feeling Meets the Danger Zone: Men, Sex, and Music in Top Gun'


• David Baker, 'I'm glad I'm not me!" Marking transitivity in Don't look back'


• Randall Barnes, 'Barton Fink: Atmospheric Sounds of the Creative Mind'


• Giorgio Biancorosso, 'Beginning Credits and Beyond: Music and the Cinematic Imagination'


• Ian Biddle, 'Love thy Neighbour? The Political Economy of Musical Neighbours?'


• Alexander Binns, 'Music in the films of Wong Kar-wai'


• Baldur Bjarnason, 'An Audiovisual Heterotopia'
  

• David Butler, 'The Days Do Not End: Film Music, Time and Bernard Herrmann'


• Lesley Chow, 'What the Sound Is Saying: How Music Moves in Bertolucci'


• Lesley Chow, 'Music, Morricone, and Jack Nicholson's Voice: The Soundscape of Wolf'


• Rebecca Coyle and Michael Hannan, 'Marking time in the Barry McKenzie films' music'


• Rebecca Coyle, 'Identifying Film Scoring [review of Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film]'
  

• Leonardo D'Amico, '"People and sounds”: Filming African music between visual anthropology and television documentary'
  

• Lynda Dee Dixon and Patricia A. Washington, 'Rap Music Videos: The Voices of Organic Intellectuals'
  

• Aniruddha Dutta, 'Nation, Liberalisation And Film Songs: Technology And Hybridisation In Contemporary Hindi Film Music'


• E. Todd Fiegel, 'Bernard Herrmann as Musical Colorist: A Musico-Dramatic Analysis of His Score for The Day the Earth Stood Still'


• Steve Fore, 'From Rock kids to Beijing bastards: PRC youth subcultures on film before and after June 4'


• Liz Garnett, 'Musical Meaning Revisited: Thoughts on an 'Epic' Critical Musicology'
• Ian Garwood, 'Sound and Space in the Split-Screen Movie'


• Claudia Gorbman, 'Vigo/Jaubert' (scroll to p. 69)
  

• Catherine Grant, '''The "Author Function" in Transnational Film Adaptation: the Case of El lugar sin límites' (Arturo Ripstein, Manuel Puig, José Donoso)'


• Andrew Grossman, 'How to Murder John Williams: Toward an Ideology of Contrapuntal Antirealism'


• Andrew Grossman, 'Finding Unlikely Ideology in Prokofiev: Polyphonic and Anti-Authoritarian Gestures in The Gambler'


• Andrew Grossman, 'False Consonance and False Consciousness: Contrarian Notes on the Ideology of Film Music'


• Amanda Howell, 'Spectacle, masculinity, and music in blaxploitation cinema'


• Randolph Jordan, 'Brakhage’s Silent Legacy for Sound Cinema'


• Randolph Jordan, 'Transcending the Fragmentation of Experience: The acousmêtre on the air in the films of Michael Snow'


• Randolph Jordan, 'The Work of Hildegard Westerkamp in the Films of Gus Van Sant'


• Brett Kashmere, 'Beyond Notes: On Music, Improvisation and Film, and Writing [Brakhage]'


• Brett Kashmere, 'Semi-Random Thoughts about Improvisation, Jazz, and/or (a) Film in No Real Particular Order (Then Again, Maybe So)'


• Anahid Kassabian, 'Songstruck: rethinking identifications in romantic comedies'


• Anahid Kassabian, 'Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity'


• Andrew L. Kaye, 'The Film Score and the African Musical Experience: Some comments on a work in progress'


• Victoria Large, Clouds and Scattered Sun: Kelly and Donen's It's Always Fair Weather'


• Jerrold Levinson, 'Film Music and Narrative Agency', in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds.) , Post-Theory (via Google Books)


• William Lawrence McGinney, 'The Whole as a Result of its Parts: Assembly in Aaron Copland's Score for The Red Pony' (e-thesis)


• Brian McMillan, 'Complicitous Critique: Dancer in the Dark as Postmodern Musical'


• Patricia Mellencamp, 'Spectacle and Spectator: Looking Through the American Musical Comedy'


• Miguel Mera, 'Reap What You Sow: "Perfect Day" [Lou Reed, 1973] / Trainspotting' in Matthew Caley and Steve Lannin (eds), Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (via Google Books)


• Cory Messenger, 'Act naturally: Elvis Presley, the Beatles and "rocksploitation"'


• Tony Mitchell, 'Minimalist menace: The Necks score The boys'


• Mladen Milicevic, 'Film Sound Beyond Reality: Subjective Sound in Narrative Cinema'
  

• Niall Moody, 'Motion as the Connection Between Audio and Visuals'


• Scott Murphy, 'The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films'


• Ellen J. Nasto, 'Bernard Herrmann: An Annotated Index of Materials'


• Andrew Patrick Nelson, 'Notes and Thoughts on the use of popular songs in John Hughes Sixteen Candles (1984)' Part One


• Andrew Patrick Nelson, 'Notes and Thoughts on the use of popular songs in John Hughes Sixteen Candles (1984)' Part Two


• David P. Neumeyer, 'Schoenberg at the Movies: Dodecaphony and Film'


• Louis Niebur, 'Review of Kay Dickinson (ed.), Movie Music: The Film Reader'


• Offscreen Journal's 'Favourite Moments of Film Sound': Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind By: Jim Batcho; Patriot Games By: Aden Evens; The Jazz Singer By: Claudia Gorbman ; La Maman et la putain By: André Habib; The Haunting By: Thomas Phillips; Love is the Devil By: Martin Shingler; Stalker By: Donato Totaro; Tati, Hitchcock, Antonioni By: Elisabeth Weis; The Exorcist By: William Whittington ; The Wilhelm Scream By: Benjamin Wright.


• Offscreen Journal's 'Discourses on Diegesis': The Success Story of a Misnomer By: Henry M. Taylor; Diegetic Commentaries By: Martin F. Norden; Constructing the Diegesis in a Multi-Channel World By: Mark Kerins; Does Anybody Hear? By: Randolph Jordan; Acoustics of the Soul By: Randy Thom.


• Offscreen Journal's 'The State of the Art [on integration between sound and image]': Visual Music as Performing Art By: Fred Collopy; Synchronous Form In Visual Music By: Michael Betancourt ; On Sound and Image as a Single Entity By: Barry Spinello


• Ted Pigeon, 'On the Cinema of Music'
  

• Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk, 'Apprehending Beauty [Review of Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line]
  

• Robert Robertson, 'Eisenstein on his audiovisual collaboration with Prokofiev'
  

• Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, 'Cultural Approaches to the Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Music Videos'
  


• Hannu Salmi, 'Composing the past: music and the sense of history in Hollywood spectacles of the 1950s and early 1960s'
  

• Diane Sandars, 'From the warehouse to the multiplex: techno and rave culture's reconfiguration of the late 1990s sci-fi spectacle as musical performance'
  

• Diana Sandars, 'Review of The Pop The Song in Cinema, edited by Matthew Caley and Steve Lannin'


• Tom Schneller, 'Death and Love: Bernard Herrmann's Score for Vertigo'
  

• Julia Schpinitskaya, 'Solaris by A. Tarkovsky: Musical-Visual Troping, Paradigmatism, Cognitive Stereoscopy'


• Linda Schubert, 'The Film Scores of Henry Vars in the United States: An Overview'
  

• Dennis C. Schweitzer, 'Ton and Traum: A Critical Analysis of the Use of Sound Effects and Music in Contemporaary Narrative Film' e-thesis
  

• 'Silent Jane', 'Beautiful Fragments of a Traumatic Memory: Synaesthesia, Sesame Street, and Hearing the Colors of an Abusive Past'
  

• Greg M. Smith, 'Streisand Shops the Museum Store: Consuming Art on Television'


• Jeff Smith 'The edge of seventeen: class, age, and popular music in Richard Linklater's School of Rock'


• Murray Smith, 'Music, Film, and Emotion'


• Robynn J. Stilwell, 'It May Look Like a Living Room…: The Musical Number and
  the Sitcom'


• Robynn J. Stilwell, 'Music in Films: A Critical Review of Literature, 1980-1996'


• Randy Thom, 'Designing a Movie for Sound [Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001]'


• Gordon Thomas, 'Will the Shark Bite? G. W. Pabst and The Threepenny Opera'


• Boris Trbic, 'Norbert [Schultze], We Hardly Knew Ye: Rethinking the Late German Composer'
  

• Ben Turner, 'Acoustic Ambience in Cinematography: An Exploration of the Descriptive and Emotive Impact of the Aural Environment'


• Alan Vanneman, 'When Fred Met Red: Fred Astaire, Red Skelton, and Vera-Ellen Commingle in Three Little Words'


• Steve Vertlieb, 'Herrmann and Hitchcock: The Torn Curtain'


• Justin Vicari, 'Space Here We Come: P. J. Harvey's Please Leave Quietly Redefines the Concert Film DVD'


• James Wierzbicki, 'Review of Anahid Kassabian: Hearing Film'


• Ken Woodgate, '"Young and in love": music and memory in Leander Haussmann's Sun Alley'


• Bill Wrobel, 'The Nature of Bernard Herrmann's Music'


• Bill Wrobel, 'Herrmann Music in Have Gun Will Travel and Other Classic CBS Television Series'

Further essential resources may be found at FilmSound.Org, SonicObjects and USC Thornton Film Composers Know the Score (YouTube video).

Coup de foudre: François Truffaut links

Antoine et Colette (François Truffaut, 1962) also see here and here

Film Studies For Free's human avatar watched François Truffaut's Antoine et Colette (1962) at the weekend and it was love at first sight, that is to say, cinephilic déjà vu, like the first experience of watching Les Mistons (1957), or even Les Quatre cent coups (1959), all over again...

Enough impenetrable solipsism, already: let's get back to FSFF's regular stock in trade.

Below are links to some great, scholarly Truffaut resources - mostly essays, freely available to all online. Merci de clicquer!

Please do be sure, also, to check out the magnificent events and screenings which form part of 'The Nouvelle Vague - 50 Years on', organised by University of London Screen Studies Group and the AHRC-supported French Cinema in Britain Research Project at the University of Southampton, to be held at the Institut français/Ciné Lumière in London later this week (conference programme HERE).

• Acquarello, 'Death in France: Liebestod and The Green Room', Senses of Cinema, June 2000
• Dudley Andrew, 'Jules and Jim', International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Vol. 1: Films, 3rd ed. (Detroit: St. James Press, 1997)
• Howard S. Berger and Kevin Marr, 'The Bride Wore Black (François Truffaut, 1967)', Destructible Man, November 20, 2007
• John Conomos, 'Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows, or the Sea, Antoine, the Sea', Senses of Cinema, June 2000
• Jonathan Dawson, 'Mississippi Mermaid', Senses of Cinema, 2008
• Georges Delerue on his musical scores for Truffaut's films
• Georges Delerue on his friendship with Truffaut
• Bruce Eder, 'Two English Girls', Criterion Collections Film Essays
• Danny Fairfax, 'Illusion 24 frames per second: François Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine', Senses of Cinema, 2005
• Daria Galateria, 'Jules and Jim: An Amorous Cyclone', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 23, December 1998 (trans. AK Bierman; originally published in La Repubblica, 9 July 1997)
• Juan Carlos González A., 'François Truffaut- Profile', Senses of Cinema, January 2003 (trans. Tristan Vasquez; originally published in Spanish in the Revista Universidad de Antioquia No. 269 (Medellín, Colombia, July–September 2002)
• Rhys Graham, 'Because of Tenderness: Thoughts on the Performance of Jean-Pierre Léaud', Senses of Cinema, 2000
• Dan Harper, 'La Peau douce, Senses of Cinema, March 2004
• Richard Harrison, 'The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, Dir: Francois Truffaut, France, 1959, 1962, 1968, 1970 and 1979', Scope, November 2004
• John Hess, 'La Politique des Auteurs', Jump Cut, no. 1, May-June 1974
• John Hess, 'La Politique des Auteurs Part 2', Jump Cut, no. 2, July-August 1974
• The Alfred Hitchcock/François Truffaut Interview tapes, numbered 1-25, at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats (gathered and posted by Tom Sutpen)
• Diane Holmes and Robert Ingram, François Truffaut, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) limited preview via Google Books
• Annette Insdorf, 'The 400 Blows', Criterion Collection Film Essays
• Kent Jones, 'Antoine and Colette', Criterion Collections Film Essays
• Maximilian Le Cain, 'Love in Flight: Francois Truffaut's La Peau Douce', Senses of Cinema, June 2004
• Kevin B Lee, 'Les deux anglaises et le continent / Two English Girls (1971, Francois Truffaut)', Shooting Down Pictures, 24 Jun 2008
• David Melville, 'Duet for Three: Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent', Senses of Cinema, 2008
• Richard Raskin, 'A Note on Closure in Truffaut's Les 400 Coups', P.O.V, Number 2, November 1996
• Mike Robins, 'Baisers volés/Stolen Kisses, Senses of Cinema, March 2004
• Marjorie Rosen, 'Truffaut’s trifle in Day for Night', Jump Cut, no. 1, 1974, p. 13
• Charles Thomas Samuels, 'François Truffaut (Interview)', originally published as "Encountering Directors", Paris, September 1 and 3, 1970, Euroscreenwriters added March 10
• Charles Taylor, 'Tout Truffaut', Salon.com, April 2004
• François Truffaut, 'A Certain Tendency of French Cinema', originally published in
  Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 1, January 1954
• Bob Wake, 'Review of Truffaut by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana [1999]', Cambridge Book Review, Issue #4, Winter 1999-2000
• David Walsh, 'The films of François Truffaut', World Socialist Web Site, 25 October 1999
• Fredrik von Zweigbergk, 'Fifteen Years Gone By: A Review of François Truffaut by Diane Holmes and Robert Ingram', Film-Philosophy, vol. 4 no. 2, January 2000

Also see:

• 'François Truffaut: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library'
• The Official François Truffaut website
• François Truffaut videos at YouTube
• Catherine Grant, 'Film directing in La Nuit américaine/Day for Night: agency within constraints', Directing Cinema, 10 September 2008

Capturing in film criticism: Digital Poetics on frame grabs

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959): A Classic 'Frame Capture Film'?

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post. If you are a film studies teacher searching for more good ideas for student assignments, Film Studies For Free would like to recommend a little more weblog reading about classroom applications of film criticism exercises.

Today's gem is the 10/40/70 exercise invented by Nicholas Rombes (Chair and Professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy- also see here) at his great weblog Digital Poetics. What is the gen on 10/40/70? According to Rombes, it's

[a]n experiment in writing about film: select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case the 10 minute, 40 minute, and 70 minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as the guide to writing about the film. No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. What if, instead of freely choosing what parts of the film to address, one let the film determine this? Constraint as a form of freedom.

Rombes has posted three such experiments of his own to date (10 / 40 / 70 (Ocean's Twelve); 10 / 40 / 70 (The Conversation); (10 / 40 / 70): The Grudge and The Terror of Determinism). The results really show the benefits of the creative constraints involved: some rich and insightful writing is generated on the three very different films.

It strikes FSFF that this would be a very rewarding exercise to set for students.

For more on the practicalities, legalities, and methodological advantages and disadvantages of using frame captures in published or public work, see the following:

• Capturing Stills From Video, a great tutorial by Jeremy Butler for Television: Critical Methods and Applications
  
• Shot Logger: Frame Captures and Stats (Shot Logger logs shots from DVDs and other digital video sources. It stores a frame capture of each shot and records the time code of the start of the shot in the video. It also processes that time code to determine the length of individual shots, as well as calculating several statistics for those lengths — including average shot length and standard deviation.
  Shot Logger was original intended for film and television students/scholars who wish to analyze visual style in detail, and who might want to do some basic statistical analysis of editing. In the latter regard, it was inspired by CineMetrics. What Shot Logger adds to CineMetrics is the ability to attach images, frame captures, to the statistical data. Shot Logger relies on two other, open-source applications: Videolan VLC media player and Gallery. The VLC media player facilitates the capturing of frames and Gallery, a web-based photo album organizer, handles the uploading and organization of images.)
  
• Frame-Grab Tutorial (using VLC Media Player), also from Television: Critical Methods and Applications
  
• Film Educators No Longer Criminals by Kristin Thompson
  
• And for some deeply thoughtful and enlightening writing about the advantages and disadvantages of 'syntagmatic' and 'paradigmatic' forms of film criticism, a must read is Adrian Martin's remarkable piece Scanning Godard for Screening the Past

Dances with Blogs: Film Criticism Assignments Online

Thanks to David Hudson's Daily blog at IFC.com, Film Studies For Free was alerted to an interesting and worthwhile experiment in the use of blogs for obtaining 'real-world' feedback for undergraduate film studies assignments.

Nick Davis is an Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of the always good to read Nick's Flick Picks, which expertly does what it says on its blog-tin, and always conducts itself with great verve and wit.

From time to time Nick also generously shares notes on some of his academic research and his teaching projects on this site (see here and here). With regard to the latter, Nick's current seminar course at Northwestern, The Film Review as Genre, has led him to pose publicly the following great questions to his students:

What is a film review? How have reviews evolved as cinema has evolved? What do film reviewers want, and what criteria do they imply not only for the movies they critique but for the prose, the logic, and the details they enlist to convey that critique? Setting aside stars and thumbs and rotten tomatoes, we will engage with the literary, rhetorical, and stylistic aspects of film reviews as pieces of writing with their own history, considering the ways in which strong reviews require the same foundations as other expository essays (structure, argument, economy, evidence) but with specific and highly diverse relations to their readers, their venues, and their points of view. As an opportunity to bridge the "critical" and "creative" facets of literary study, participants in this course will study and write about film reviews by a host of crucial figures (including Rudolf Arnheim, Carl Sandburg, H.D., James Agee, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Andrew Sarris, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, and Stephanie Zacharek) and will also write and revise their own reviews in response to a wide range of required as well as self-appointed viewings. Neither the films nor the reviews will be taken lightly, and the course expects committed and ambitious students—but wit, style, and esteem for the "popular" are warmly welcomed.

But Nick also wanted his students to have more responses to their work than just his own, 'especially since they're working in a form that aspires to a large and diverse audience'. So on this occasion he has used his blog to solicit feedback from his numerous readers on well-chosen snippets from the work produced by the course students (including on Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves [1990]). The responses to his request easily reveal the usefulness of this exercise (36 generally serious comments, to date, in just a few days). Film Studies For Free salutes Nick Davis's experiment and very much recommends that other film studies teachers check it out.

Since FSFF has gone all digital-pedagogical today, it's a good time to flag up another rich and purposeful reflection on such matters by Kevin B Lee. Regular FSFF readers will remember that a while back (see here, here, and here) this blog leapt to the e-barricades in angry defence of Lee's YouTube channel which had been temporarily (and very precipitously) suspended because of a query about copyright.

Back in January, Kevin eloquently wrote in summary about his experiences with YouTube: Things I Learned from Losing - and Regaining - My YouTube Account. But, more recently, he has also posted an exploration of the potential of his video essays as educational resources, based on his discoveries about how they are actually being used as classroom and assignment tools (see Video Essays as a teaching tool: a testimonial).

If you are interested in learning more about innovative film studies teaching methods, Lee's reflections make important reading. Also, while you're visiting Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, do please watch his fabulous new video essays - La roue (1922, Abel Gance) and Variety (1925, E.A. Dupont) featuring commentary by Kristin Thompson.

Oh Danny Boyle

From his earliest work as producer on Alan Clarke's hugely influential 1989 film Elephant onwards, Danny Boyle has never failed to stir up the oftentimes deadeningly dull world of British film drama, usually with his flamboyant visual and sonoric inventiveness. So, after all the digital and other ink spilled on his latest 'rags to riches' movie Slumdog Millionaire, Film Studies For Free keenly felt its duty to set out a little list of its favourite online studies of the storytelling techniques and filmmaking context of the ebulliently multicultural, but also very (Northern-)English director Boyle:

• David Bordwell, 'Slumdogged by the past', Observations of film art and FILM ART, February 1, 2009


• Bert Cardullo, 'Fiction into film, or bringing Welsh to a Boyle', Literature/Film Quarterly, 1997


• Peet Gelderblom, 'Sunshine and the Cinematic Experience', The House Next Door, May 16, 2007


• Miguel Mera, 'Reap What You Sow: "Perfect Day" [Lou Reed, 1973] / Trainspotting [Danny Boyle, in Matthew Caley and Steve Lannin (eds), Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005) Limited Preview on Google Books


• Alexander Linklater, 'Danny Boyle Profile', The Observer, Sunday 4 January 2009 (includes 'In the Director's Chair - Danny Boyle talks to Jason Solomons' video interview - 9min 41sec)
• Hannah Rothschild, 'Labour of Love' [on Boyle's debt to Film4], excerpt from the book Channel 4 at 25 (BFI, 2008)


• Murray Smith, 'The Sound of Sentiment: Popular Music, Film, and Emotion', [primarily on music in Trainspotting], 16:9, November 2006


• Karina M. Totah, 'Trainspotting's Playlist: A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles', Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2004 Issue 44


• Rachel Whitaker, 'Danny Boyle’s Daylight Dream [on Slumdog Millionaire]', The Oxonian Review, Issue 8.2, 2 February, 2009
• Also see: Danny Boyle biography and credits at the British Film Institute's Screenonline website.
• And Alan Bacchus's very useful career overview, 'The Cinema of Danny Boyle' (illustrated with lots of video clips) at the Daily Film Dose blog (November 16, 2008)