Media Fields Journal on Video Stores

Melonie Diaz, Jack Black, and  Mos Def  in Be Kind, Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008 - See FSFF's post on Gondry for some reading on this film)



Film Studies For Free is thrilled to be able to pass on news of the launch of MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL: Critical Explorations in Media and Space, a new graduate online journal based in the University of California, Santa Barbara's Department of Film and Media Studies.

The first issue (1.1, 2010) on VIDEO STORES, edited by Joshua Neves and Jeff Scheible, is now available at http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/.

Neves and Scheible introduce their special issue as follows:

This new online journal represents the latest development in a research initiative launched in UCSB’s Department of Film and Media Studies in 2007. The goal of Media Fields is to provide a forum focused on the critical study of media and space, where we can dynamically present and openly debate the latest work from established and emerging scholars and practitioners. Each issue will have a theme—whether it is a topic of contemporary relevance; an exploration of a particular concept, media form, genre, or practice; or, as in this issue, a specific media space: the video rental store.
     We were compelled to focus on the space of the video store in this issue because it is a “media field” that at once allows for the kind of tangible, site-specific fieldwork that is at the heart of Media Fields and, at the same time, is a site where a range of important issues intersect: “new” media’s consequences for “old” media; uses, developments, and failures of media technologies; the cultivation of knowledge about cinema and television; global media distribution; piracy and the law; the circulation of pornography; configurations of cultural communities; relations between public and private space; and contemporary media reception. [read more]

The issue contents are linked to below. Also see the following great site mentioned by the special issue: Video Cultures.
Issue Contents:

• "Video Stores: Introduction" by Jeff Scheible and Joshua Neves
• "Home, Home (Video) on the Range: Reflections on Small-Town Video
• Stores in 2010" by Daniel Herbert
• "Things and Movies: DVD Store Culture in Fiji" by Nicole Starosielski
• "Exchange and Circulation: An Anthropological Perspective on Video
• Stores in Kinshasa" by Katrien Pype
• "A Business without a Future? The Parisian Vidéo-Club, Past and Present" by Brian R. Jacobson and Joshua Neves
• "The Death and Life of the Back Room" by Peter Alilunas
• "Mapping Hardcore Space" by J. Steven Witkowski
• "Riviera Adult Superstore" by Constance Penley
• "Pedagogical Spaces, or, What We’ve Lost in the Post-Video-Store Era" by Roger Beebe
• "Browsing for Dissonance: Paratexts, Box-Art Iconography, and Genre" by Kevin M. Flanagan
• "EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! An Interview with Future Schlock" by Jeff Scheible
• "Video Stores, Media Technologies, and Memory" by Rowan Wilken
• "Video Rental Store: An Interview with Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot and Su-Ying Lee" by Mél Hogan
• "The Long Tail of the Video Store" by Frederick Wasser
• "Free Lifetime Membership" by Matt Kaelin

Please also note that a call for submissions for an issue on DOCUMENTARY AND SPACE is now open and can be viewed here.

Michael Snow videos and links

My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor ... sometimes they all work together. (Michael Snow)

[N]o other artist has done so much to destabilise our approximation of the visible than Michael Snow. By threatening the very tools we rely on to process what we perceive, the artist creates unnerving yet frequently poetic works. His avant-garde film-making is less about a way of understanding the camera as a device for recording than as an instrument whose structural, material properties can form the main focus of the work. (Tim Clarke)

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you another video gem from the Tate Channel in which the highly distinguished Canadian artist Michael Snow, one of the most influential experimental filmmakers (including of such masterworks as Wavelength [1967)], La Région Centrale [1971], and *Corpus Callosum [2002]) discusses his work. Snow, who will reach the grand old age of 80 this December, gave this illustrated talk at the Tate Modern in London on October 26, 2001, on the occasion of a major retrospective of his work that year at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. The talk, a very detailed and insightful revisiting of the entirety of his work to that point, lasts just under two hours.

Here also, as is FSFF's wont, are links to further wonderful, freely accessible, online, scholarly Michael Snow resources. Below the list are two other embedded videos: the first, a ten minute overview of Snow's work; the second, a video version of Snow's 1967 experimental film Wavelength (please read the comments on this post for a discussion of the ethics of reproducing this very poor copy of the film):

• The Michael Snow Dossier, Offscreen Journal, November 2002 (Michael Snow: A Brief Introduction by Peter Rist;La Région Centrale by Peter Rist; Wavelength Revisitedby Donato Totaro; Master Lessons With Michael Snowby Louis Goyette;Weathering the Creative Storm: An Interview With Michael Snow by Donato Totaro and André Habib;Transcending the Fragmentation of Experience: The acousmêtre on the air in the films of Michael Snow by Randolph Jordan)

• Cleo Cacoulides, '"Too Busy Making Work":Michael Snow', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 44, 2004

• Bruce Elder, 'On Michael Snow', Ciné-Tracts 9; Vol.3, No. 1, (Winter, 1980) scroll down in pdf

• Alex Farquharson, 'Michael Snow', Frieze, Issue 64, January-February 2002

• Adèle Flannery and Maia Lussier-Seguin, 'Snow at Concordia: An Interview with Michael Snow', Offcreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 3, March 2009

• Maximilian Le Cain, 'Snow Drift: The 2007 Lucca Film Festival 28 September – 6 October 2007', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008

• Brett Kashmere, 'Underground Film, Into the Light: Two Sides of the Projected Image in American Art, 1945-1975', Synoptique 8, March 2005

• Tila Landon Kellman, Figuring redemption: resighting my self in the art of Michael Snow - (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002 -Google Books)

• Jane Simon, 'Reading in the Dark', M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, January 12, 2004

• Michael Snow, with Louise Dompierre, The collected writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University press, 1994 - Google Books)


• Michael Snow and Bruce Elder, 'In conversation', Ciné-Tracts 5, No. 1, (17), Summer/Fall, 1982) scroll down in pdf


• Michael Snow and Jesse Stewart, 'In Conversation: Toronto, November 2005', Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 3, No 1 (2007)
  

Framing Jarman: New Tate Visual Arts Channel in Beta

Film Studies For Free wanted to rush you the great news that the Tate has just launched a new, highly elegant and very user-friendly channel to enable the viewing (and embedding - yay!) of hundreds of videos about visual arts, like the great film above in which James Mackay, friend of British film artist Derek Jarman, talks about Jarman's experimental work on super 8. These films that he began making in the 1970s are rarely shown. Mackay, who later produced some of Jarman’s feature films including The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993), agreed to open up his archive of these ground-breaking short films for TateShots.

FSFF also came across an even more detailed interview with Mackay about his work with Jarman here at the 400blows website. You can also find interviews there with the following people about their work and friendships with this filmmaker: Jenny Runacre; Simon Fisher Turner; Tilda Swinton; Peter Tatchell; Christopher Hobbs; Tony Peake; Tariq Ali; Ron Peck; and Gaye Temple;

FSFF has only just begun to explore the riches and the capabilities of the new Tate channel; it gleefully urges you to do the same. But it closes, today, happily in a Derek Jarman frame of mind with a sublime Jarman artifact, from his 1987 short Aria, starring Tilda Swinton, music by Gustave Charpentier from his opera Louise with its aria 'Depuis le jour', sung here by Leontyne Price:

Aesthetic Journalism - a free preview

Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Informing

Film Studies For Free (always a fan of substantial freebie content in otherwise non-Open Access publications) thought some of its readers might be especially interested to know that they can currently preview for free the first 28 pages, or so, of the book embedded above (published by Intellect Books).

While Aesthetic Journalism doesn't touch at all on mainstream filmmaking, it does seem to be a strikingly novel study of 'the journalistic turn in the contemporary visual arts', one that may prove especially useful to those considering issues of 'documentary' and 'fiction' in relation to artists' film and video (FSFF is thinking of some of the work of such visual artists and filmmakers as Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Clio Barnard, Adam Chodzco, and Alia Syed, to name but a few).

Here's the publishers' blurb to whet your appetite some more:

As the art world eagerly embraces a journalistic approach, Aesthetic Journalism explores why contemporary art exhibitions often consist of interviews, documentaries and reportage. This new mode of journalism is grasping more and more space in modern culture and Cramerotti probes the current merge of art with the sphere of investigative journalism. The attempt to map this field, here defined as ‘Aesthetic Journalism’, challenges, with clear language, the definitions of both art and journalism, and addresses a new mode of information from the point of view of the reader and viewer. The book explores how the production of truth has shifted from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism. With examples and theories from within the contemporary art and journalistic-scape, the book questions the very foundations of journalism. Aesthetic Journalism suggests future developments of this new relationship between art and documentary journalism, offering itself as a useful tool to audiences, scholars, producers and critics alike.

The author Alfredo Cramerotti (1967) is a writer, curator and artist based in the UK. Among his recent research and curatorial activity: co-curator, Manifesta 8 European biennial of contemporary art (2009-2011); curator, QUAD Derby (2008-present), co-curator, CPS Chamber of Public Secrets (2004-present) and AGM Annual General Meeting (2003-present).

Jarman Award 2009 winner is Lindsay Seers

Recording of part of Lindsay Seers' exhibition 'Swallowing Black Maria'
(more info here)

'Lindsay Seers tells seductively tall tales.'
Laura McLean-Ferris, guardian.co.uk, February 27, 2009

Lindsay Seers's Extramission 6 (Black Maria) [is] one of the real finds of [the Altermodern: Tate Triennal exhibition, 2009]. Seers shows a semi-autobiographical, quasi-documentary film about her life, screened in a mock-up shed whose design is a copy of Thomas Edison's Black Maria, his New Jersey film studio. The story is implausible, troubling, and beautifully told by different narrators.

As a child, Seers is so overwhelmed by visual stimulus that she cannot speak. As soon as she sees a photograph, she decides she wants to be a camera. She uses her mouth as the camera, and goes about with a black bag over her head. As she grows up, Seers stops being a camera, and wants instead to be a projector. She wears a model of Edison's studio on her head, projecting the movies in her mind. She struggles to illuminate the world.

The whole story is both dreamlike and moving. How much of it is true? There are interviews with Seers's mother and with a psychologist. Are they really who we think they are? As I staggered out, someone muttered "What is she on?" Adrian Searle, guardian.co.uk, February 3, 2009

Film Studies For Free is very happy to add its congratulations to the many being deservedly delivered today to Lindsay Seers following the award to her yesterday of this year's Jarman prize for artists working with the moving image. Seers, whose hypnotic work as an artist includes film practice-based research produced as a lecturer in arts practice at London's Goldsmiths College, receives a cash prize, but also a very valuable broadcast commission – to make four artworks for Channel 4’s acclaimed Three Minute Wonder slot (3MW). FSFF looks forward to watching those.

The Jarman Award was inspired by British avant-garde film-maker Derek Jarman, one of the most innovative, esteemed and visionary artists of the last century. Interviews and features on this year’s award shortlist and Jarman's legacy can be found at Engine, an online forum from Animate Projects.

Below are some further links to online and openly accessible resources, reviews and information about Lindsay Seers' work.

• David Berridge, 'Lindsay Seers: It has to be this way, More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen, February 9, 2009
• Chris Fite-Wassilak, 'Lindsay Seers', Frieze Magazine, Issue 122, April 2009
• Rebecca Geldard, 'Lindsay Seers: It Has to Be This Way', ArtReview magazine, 21 April 21, 2009
• Tom Morton, 'Remember Me [monograph on Lindsay Seers]', Frieze Magazine, Issue 124, June-August 2009
• Jennifer Poole, 'Lindsay Seers: Eyes of Others...', Circa Arts Magazine, 2005
  
• Lindsay Seers at the Event Horizon exhibition (2008) webpage at the Royal Academy
• Lindsay Seers' webpages at Smart Project Space
• Lindsay Seers, 'Artist's Text', Arts Council England website, 2003
  

Harun Farocki on the web and in London

Image above taken from The Interview (Video, Harun Farocki, 1997):

'In the summer of 1996, we filmed application training courses in which one learns how to apply for a Job. School drop-outs, university graduates, people who have been retrained, the long-term unemployed, recovered drug addicts, and mid-level managers - all of them are supposed to learn how to market and sell themselves, a skill to which the term "self management" is applied. The self is perhaps nothing more than a metaphysical hook from which to hang a social identity. It was Kafka who Iikened being accepted for a job to entering the Kingdom of Heaven; the paths leading to both are completely uncertain. Today one speaks of getting a job with the greatest obsequiousness, but without any grand expectations.' (Harun Farocki on The Interview)

Film Studies For Free can testify that there is no better written introduction to the fascinating work of Berlin-based, visual artist and writer Harun Farocki's films and video installation work than a 2002 essay that Thomas Elsaesser (also editor of the 2004 collection Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight Lines - see HERE) wrote for Senses of Cinema. Here are a few insights from the conclusion to this piece in which Elsaesser sets out the reach of Farocki's artwork:

[...] Farocki has also noticed for us how prisons and supermarkets, video-games and theatres of war have become 'work-places' – of subjects as much as of commodities. They are spaces that are converging, once one appreciates how they all fall under the new pragmatics of the time-space logic of optimising access, flow, control. These sites a filmmaker has to take cognisance of and recognise him/herself implicated in, but so has the spectator, whose role has changed so much.

As one walks through Farocki's works, which have become our worlds, one realises that he may be one of the few filmmakers today capable of understanding the logic of this convergence, contesting its inevitability and yet feeling confident enough to continue to believe in the wit, wisdom and the poetry of images. This certainly makes Harun Farocki an important filmmaker: probably Germany's best-known important filmmaker.

Inspired by Farocki's films -- which seem more and more relevant to our daily lives -- as well as by Elsaesser's many perceptive words about them, Film Studies For Free wanted to publicize the ongoing exhibition "Harun Farocki, 3 Early Films" at the Cubitt Gallery, London (17 January – 22 February 2009), as well as the surrounding events to be held at the Goethe-Institut and Cubitt Gallery (31 January-20 February).

For those of you in search of more information about, or analyses of Farocki's work, FSFF decided to produce as extensive a list of live links as it could to some relevant online resources of note:

• Harun Farocki Dossier at Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, July 2002, compiled by Thomas Elsaesser, including:

• 'Introduction: Harun Farocki', by Thomas Elsaesser

  
  

  Painting Pavements by Volker Siebel

  
  

  Passage along the Shadow-Line: Farocki and others - approaching a certain Filmkritik-style by Olaf Möller

  
  

  The Green of the Grass: Harun Farocki in Filmkritik by Rainer Knepperges

  
  

  Image(circum)volution: On the Installation Schnittstelle (Interface) by Christa Blümlinger

  
  

  Nine Minutes in the Yard: A conversation with Harun Farocki by Rembert Hüser

  
  

  Workers Leaving the Factory by Harun Farocki (Translation by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim)

  
  

  Harun Farocki - biography, filmography, exhibitions and Retrospectives by Farocki-Filmproduktion

• 'Harun Farocki's Images of the World', Rouge 12, 2008, by Christopher Pavsek


• 'A Road Not Taken: Films by Harun Farocki' by Jonathan Rosenbaum


• 'Remaking History [on SHULIE]' by Jonathan Rosenbaum


• 'Welcome to Google Earth' by Anna Munster


• 'Contemplative Cinema: Harun Farocki (1)' by Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity, January 11, 2007


• 'Molecular Processes of Becoming' by Patricia Pisters, 1999


• 'Harun Farocki's challenging documentaries take an unorthodox look at European life' by Steven A. Erickson


• 'The Revolution Was Televised: Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica's Videograms of a Revolution', Central Europe Review, Vol 1, No 1718, October 1999, by Ray Privett


• 'Harun Farocki and the Politics of Found Footage with William Burroughs on Cut-Ups', in The Recycled Cinema weblog, January 4, 2008, by Eli Horwatt
• Harun Farocki's Ein Bild / an image (1983, c. 25 Min., D), at the transport weblog, by Jessie Emkic added Feb 3


• 'Towards an Archive of Visual Concepts' by Wolfgang Ernst and Harun Farocki


• 'Notes on the New German Cinema', Vertigo Magazine, Vol.4 No.1 - Autumn / Winter 2008, by Ekkehard Knörer


• 'Dziga Vertov - a media artist? On the contemporary relevance of the Russian avant-garde filmmaker', DOCUMENTA MAGAZINE, by Christa Blümlinger


• 'How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film', Jill Godmilow, in Conversation with Ann-Louise Shapiro, 1997


• 'The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves: An Interview with Christian Petzold', Cineaste, Vol. 33 No.3 (Summer 2008).


• 'Film Excursions / films about, besides and despite the lost moment' (scroll down to: 'Monday, June 25, 2007 Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between two wars) by Harun Farocki Germany, 1978')', in The Lost Moment weblog, 12 June 2007, by Tobias Hering


• 'Introduction' to Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000 (University of Michigan Press, 2002) by Nora M. Alter


• 'Farocki's images of the world: the inscription of subjectivity in the essay film', (abstract only) by Laura Rascaroli


• Harun Farocki Official Website


• 'I don't think I was the right seminar leader', by Harun Farocki, in Tilman Baumgärtel (ed.), Kino-Sine: Philippine-German Cinema Relations (Goethe-Institut, Manila/Anvil Publishing Inc., 2007), PDF pp. 22-24


• Harun Farocki page at the Internet Movie Database


• Video Data Bank: Harun Farocki


• Farocki resources at Cinefiles (detailed filmographic information, clippings, press kits, etc. from Pacific Film Archive database)


• Harun Farocki material at YouTube


• Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-lines at Google Books


• 'Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, edited by Thomas Elsaesser', Review, by Acquarello, at Strictly Film School, May 2005


• Other Harun Farocki material at Google Books


• Harun Farocki material at Strictly Film School, by Acquarello


• Some text (in German) from Speaking About Godard (New York University Press, New York and London 1998) on Jean-Luc Godard's Le mépris, Passion and Weekend, by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki (via Cinema=Godard=Cinema by Glen W. Norton)


• 'More Histoire(s) du Cinema?' Review of Speaking About Godard, Film-Philosophy Vol. 4, 2000, by Paul Sutton

Artists and Filmmakers' Favourite Films: frieze magazine

Screenshots from films by Clio Barnard

GreenCine Daily, Film Studies For Free's favourite site for 'Film on the Web' news, today brings word of an article (link to it HERE), in the latest, online issue of art magazine frieze, by filmmaker Clio Barnard (a former colleague of this blogger at the University of Kent). The article is part of an ongoing series in which frieze asks artists and filmmakers to list the movies that have influenced their practice.

Barnard is an artist/filmmaker, whose work has shown in cinemas, international film festivals and galleries, including Tate Modern and Tate Britain. She was one of the winners of the 2005 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and in 2007 was awarded a major commission from the Art Angel, which will involve an ambitious live performance and feature-length film.

FSFF already links to an online film by Barnard - the wonderful Dark Glass (1 min. 16 seconds, 2006; direct link to MP4 HERE; and to QuickTime HERE), part of the SingleShot series of 'newly commissioned film and video works -- shot in one single take -- by artists and new talent'.

As the Tate Modern website describes it,

Shot on a mobile phone, Clio Barnard’s Dark Glass is a taut micro-drama that visually recreates a spoken description of family photographs recalled under hypnosis. Although the recollection appears incredibly compelling, it also possesses an inherent instability, so that we are never quite sure what we’re hearing or seeing, something further emphasised by the unsteady nature of the image itself, which lends an apparitional quality to this apparent act of truth-telling.

HERE's a link to a good article about the SingleShot films by Aaron Callow for aestheticamagazine, with a few paragraphs dedicated to Dark Glass.

Below are direct links to the other frieze articles about films that have influenced particular artists and filmmakers' work; most are illustrated with video clips from the films:

Issue 101 September 2006:The Otolith Group
Issue 102 October 2006:David Noonan
Issue 103 November-December 2006: Rebecca Warren
Issue 105 March 2007: Runa Islam
Issue 106 April 2007: Jia Zhangke
Issue 107 May 2007: Luke Fowler
Issue 108 Jun-Aug 2007: Hamish Fulton
Issue 109 September 2007: Steve McQueen
Issue 110 October 2007: Rosemarie Trockel
Issue 111 Nov-Dec 2007: James Benning
Issue 113 March 2008: Peter Doig
Issue 114 April 2008: Hito Steyerl
Issue 115 May 2008: Mark Leckey
Issue 116 June - Aug 2008: Raqs Media Collective
Issue 117 September 2008: Babette Mangolte
Issue 118 October 2008: Duncan Campbell
Issue 119 Nov-Dec 2008: Clio Barnard

One final frieze-related Film Studies For Free tip: check out the frieze podcasts. There are interesting ones on: The Expanded Gallery: Mass Forms for Private Consumption; The Expanded Gallery: I Am Not a Flopper Or… (Allan Smithee-related!); and Art, Politics and Popularity (with Jacques Rancière).

More on artists' film and video: an e-book, and 'vodcast' links

From Ecology, directed by Sarah Turner, 2007. Photo: Matthew Walter/Sarah Turner

A few more links have been added to Film Studies For Free's list of film-scholarly podcasts and videocasts, most notably one to a page on the LUXONLINE site, a brilliant web resource for exploring British based artists’ film and video in-depth (offering critical writing, stills, streaming video clips, and other contextual resources).

The link I've just added is to LUXONLINE's offering of 'vodcasts' of interviews with leading British film artists and curators (link HERE, please note, though, that you need to be registered first with iTunes in order to access almost all of the vodcasts). There are video interviews with Andrew Kötting, Angela Kingston (independent curator), Tina Keane, Ruth Novaczek, Chris Welsby, Alia Syed, Stephen Dwoskin, and Harold Offeh. The latest vodcast is with Sarah Pucill (there's currently no need for an iTunes account for this one: there's a direct link HERE)

The LUXONLINE site also has a lot of original artists' films, or clips from artists' films, available for viewing in streaming video, so it is well worth taking the time to explore the site properly. You can start your searches for resources by particular artists HERE and for particular streamed films/clips HERE.

There's another organisation which has even more user-friendly listings to assist with tracking down British-based artists' film available for viewing more generally on the web (links HERE and HERE). The British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection is a research project led by David Curtis and Steven Ball and based at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London. It focuses in particular on the history of artists' film and video in Britain.

Like LUXONLINE, the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection also provides a good collection of freely accessible research papers on artists' film or by film artists (link HERE), including ones by Malcolm Le Grice and Michael Mazière. There's also a paper by my friend and former colleague in Film Studies at the University of Kent, Sarah Turner, which sets out some of the conceptual background to her 2007 film Ecology (read a BBC interview HERE), which premiered at last year's Cambridge Film Festival.

Finally, there's also a link now in Film Studies For Free's 'Film Open Access e-books' listing to Gene Youngblood's hugely influential and prescient Expanded Cinema, a 444 page book, originally published in 1970 (downloadable in a single .pdf via Ubu.com; and also accessible HERE in separate sections via http://www.vasulka.org/). Expanded Cinema, as the very useful Wikipedia article on it argues, was

the first book to consider video as an art form, [and] was influential in establishing the field of media arts. In the book [Youngblood] argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography.