The Week's Links

Film Studies For Free was all too easily distracted/mesmerised this week by momentous events, but came across, nonetheless, the following, freely-accessible, online items of note, and offers them up for your delectation, delight, and varied film/moving image education:

• Check out Barack Obama's Favourite Films online at Total Films, including One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
• Please visit the e-journal Post Identity. It's an international, fully-refereed journal of the humanities that 'publishes text-based and multi-media scholarship that problematizes the narratives underlying individual, social, and cultural identity formations; that investigates the relationship between identity formations and texts; and that argues how such formations can be challenged. In print since 1997, Post Identity has partnered with the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office to transform itself into an audio-, graphic-, and video-enhanced web-based journal that can make available the new forms and subjects of contemporary critiques of identity, as well as more traditional text-based scholarship.'
• A really great online Post Identity article worth exploring is Chuck Tryon's 'New Media Studies and the New Internet Cinema' (Print source: Post Identity, vol. 5, no. 1, Winter 2007). Tryon is assistant professor of film and media studies at Fayetteville State University, and also the author of the renowned blog The Chutry Experiment. His other online publications can be accessed at the blog HERE.
• 'Divide and Conquer: A world of possibilities in the unstudied field of DVD chaptering' by Adrian Martin at Moving Image Source (posted November 6, 2008). This and lots of other great Adrian Martin links were shouted out by Girish, including news of the latest issue of online film journal Rouge.
• Thanks to Alison Butler (Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading; author of Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen, reviewed HERE and HERE), FSFF heard of the Artivi video archive and a great online Eija-Liisa Ahtila interview (link HERE; also see an earlier FSFF post on this film artist HERE). Artivi is 'is a community-oriented Web-TV which produces and broadcasts programs about the contemporary art world. Artivi is also a website which offers user-generated contents'.
• A little bit more Ahtila surfing then revealed Medien Kunst Netz/ Media Art Net. This site has a huge number of artists' film and video resources worth checking out, including good quality, online excerpts from four of Ahtila's videos (Anne, Aki and God, Consolation Service, Talo (The House), and Tänään (Today)). HERE's a link to the A-Z list of artists' resources at the site.
• The ever bountiful GreenCine Daily posted a Tate Online link to Curing the Vampire, an online Lynn Hershman Leeson project involving four interviews by the artist-filmmaker in conjunction with Tilda Swinton, posing questions to a selection of guests, including a politician, journalist, scientist and lawyer, partially shot in the virtual world of Second Life, and released in four episodes from October. FSFF readers should check out the section of the Tate site that houses this project - Intermedia Art, which has all sorts of film-related resources, including great podcasts and texts.
• There's a good film studies article in the latest issue of Politics and Culture: An International Review of Books: Productive censorship. Revisiting recent research on the cultural meanings of film censorship by Daniel Biltereyst.
• The Fall 2008 issue of Mediascape has just been published online. The aim of Mediascape, to quote its website, 'is to create a forum which takes an interdisciplinary approach to visual cultural studies [...] focusing on the moving image and all its manifestations. We want to endorse a non-exclusive treatment of visual culture and will look for cross-disciplinary, cross-technological, and cross-cultural perspectives of our field to make up the content of the journal. Our staff comprises members of UCLA's School of Film, Television and Digital Media and represents both the field of critical studies, as well as the moving image archive program.' The new issue which focuses on politics and film/media contains the following, great, film-studies related articles and interventions: 'By, For, and About: The 'Real' Problem in the Feminist Film Movement' by Shilyh Warren; 'Gray or Black? Howard Koch and the Elusive Architecture of the Hollywood "Lists"' by Heather Heckman; 'Low and Behold: Using Fiction/Documentary Hybridity to See the Real Damage of Hurricane Katrina' by David O'Grady; and 'Scholars on the Subject of Media, Politics and the Academy (in 12 parts)' by Allyson Nadia Field, Toby Miller, Bill Nichols, and Chuck Tryon (him again).
• Finally, do, please, check out Innovate: Journal of Online Education an open-access, peer-reviewed, online periodical published bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses 'on the creative use of information technology to enhance education and training in academic, commercial, and governmental settings.' HERE's a link to film-related articles at Innovate, a list that includes the following essay FSFF has singled out: 'The Davideon Project: Capitalizing the Possibilities of Streaming Video as Flexible Learning Objects for the Humanities' by André Rosendaal and Johan Oomen.