MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism

MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism is a refereed academic publication whose aim is to create a forum for the range of analysis, debate and discussion that only a journal devoted to a detailed film criticism can adequately provide. We are committed to publishing rigorous but accessible critical writing, at a variety of lengths, that is responsive to the detailed texture and artistry of film and television, old and new. We also welcome articles that illuminate concepts, analytical methods and questions in film aesthetics that are of significance to film criticism. The journal is published on a bi-annual basis.

Film Studies For Free is jumping for joy!  MOVIE, the legendary film magazine (1962-2000) published and designed by the late, and much lamented, Ian Cameron (1937-2010) and source of some of the most brilliant and influential writing on film ever, has inspired the beautiful birth of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, an online and openly accessible scholarly periodical, with a website hosted by the University of Warwick. 

Many of the same people central to MOVIE's earlier incarnation are involved this time around (Victor Perkins, Douglas Pye, Jim Hillier, Charles Barr, Deborah Thomas, Ed Gallafent, Michael Walker) together with a whole host of some of the best and brightest younger film writers (Andrew Klevan, James Macdowell, John Gibbs, Kathrina Glitre). 

FSFF hasn't read it yet, but wanted to rush you the news. So, as usual, the table of contents (with direct links to PDF files) is pasted in below. 

Wow, wow, wow...

Issue 1, 2010

• Editorial

• Ian Cameron: a Tribute V. F. Perkins

• Films, Directors and Critics Ian Cameron, reprinted from Movie 2

• Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Lucy Fife Donaldson

• Sleeping with Half Open Eyes: Dreams and Realities in The Cry of the Owl John Gibbs

• Fugitive Physicality and Female Performance in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss and Lola Kate Leadbetter

• Notes on Quirky James MacDowell

• At the Border: the Limits of Knowledge in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men Douglas Pye

• Limbo: Frustrated Narration Deborah Thomas

• Acting Ordinary in The Shop Around the Corner George Toles

• The Rhetoric of The Wire James Zborowski

• Review: Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, 3 – 10 October 2009 Michael Walker

• Robin Wood and Ian Cameron

This issue edited by Edward Gallafent and John Gibbs, with grateful acknowledgement of the contributions of Lucy Fife Donaldson and James MacDowell.

On Pleasure: free Perkins in new Film Quarterly

Image from Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

Thanks to The Auteurs Daily, Film Studies For Free heard about the new issue of Film Quarterly (Vol. 63, No. 1, Fall 2009) which comes with a wonderful, freely-accessible article by V.F.Perkins: 'Reconsideration: Le Plaisir: "The Mask" and "The Model"'. It's a fabulously illustrated study of Max Ophüls’s 1952 film Le Plaisir, an adaptation of three short stories by Guy de Maupassant: 'Le Masque', 'La Maison Tellier', and 'Le Modèle'.

Other freely-accessible items in this issue include: Rob White, 'Editor's Notebook: Against Nature'; Joshua Clover, 'Marx and Coca-Cola: The Future in Labor'; Danny Birchall, 'Talking Point: The Avant-Garde Archive Online'

This and that (Perkins, Rich on Kuchar Bros, Westerns, Fan Videos, Timecode, Kubrick and the Coens)

Trailer for It Came From Kuchar - As Alexandra Juhasz writes at Media Praxis: '[This] documentary does little more than let the brothers, their films, and fans speak for themselves. And what more do we need? Inventive, life-long bohemians making their work outside dominant structures and to an international fanbase of crazed cineastes. As I implied regarding Fig Trees recently: it becomes an increasingly rare pleasure to see work that resides outside the dumbed down regime of the popular.'

Having been briefly out of action, Film Studies For Free is sorting through its in-tray and to-do lists. Below are some assorted bits of online news and links that it wanted you not to miss:

• Film Studies For Free was delighted to hear from VF Perkins who generously offered up some frame stills to help illustrate the first of the two sequence analyses in his online essay "You Only Live Once" which FSFF linked to some weeks back (also see HERE). FSFF has posted the stills in three sections, one HERE, two HERE and three HERE.
• Listen to B Ruby Rich on the Kuchar Brothers (also see video above) in a great podcast interview for Outtake:

In this audio interview Emmy Winner Charlotte Robinson talks with B Ruby Rich, American Scholar and Film Critic about Director Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary “It Came From Kuchar.” Long before YouTube, there were the outrageous, no-budget movies of underground, filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar. George and Mike grew up in the Bronx in the 1950’s. At the age of twelve, they became obsessed with Hollywood melodramas and began making their own homespun melodramas with their aunt’s 8mm camera. They used their friends and family as actors and their Bronx neighborhood as their set. Early Kuchar titles featured in this film include “I Was A Teenage Rumpot” and “Born of the Wind”. In the early 1960’s, alongside Andy Warhol, the Kuchar brothers shaped the New York underground film scene. Known as the “8mm Mozarts”, their films were noticeably different than other underground films of the time. They were wildly funny, but also human and vulnerable. Their films have inspired many filmmakers, including John Waters, Buck Henry, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin and Wayne Wang (all are interviewed in this film). Despite having high profile fans, the Kuchars remain largely unknown because they are only ambitious to make movies, not to be famous.

• Thanks to David Hudson's indispensable Twitter feed for The Auteurs Daily, FSFF was happy to hear of a great blog about Westerns -- Decisions at Sundown -- by Joseph "Jon" Lanthier, Ed Howard, Kevin J. Olson, Tony Dayoub, and Tommy Salami. You must read Ed Howard's lovely piece on Rio Bravo.
• Karen Hellickson has a nice essay on some 'fairly high profile transformative fan artworks': '“The Hunt for Gollum” and “Battlestar Redactica”'.
• Do check out Nick Davis's innovative approaches to Mike Figgis's Timecode (2000). Also see HERE (it works best on Firefox).
• And two interesting English-language film articles from the latest special issue of online journal Image [&] Narrative (Vol.X, issue 2 (25.) June 2009), devoted to 'The author and his imaginary: the development of particularity': Elizabeth Mullen's 'Do you speak Kubrick? Orchestrating Transgression and Mastering Malaise in The Shining' (for those interested in Kubrick, please also see The Kubrick Site and Kubrick Multimedia Archive - thanks to Jason Sperb) and Arne De Boever's 'The Politics of Retirement: Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men after September 11'
  

More V.F. Perkins Online

Image from You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937)

Film Studies For Free is extremely fond of the work of V. F. Perkins, world-renowned author of Film as Film (London: Penguin Books, 1972 - see an recent interesting review HERE).

FSFF has previously drawn attention to two pieces of Perkins' hugely influential work which are freely available online:

• 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52) republished online by Danish film studies journal 16:9 (September 2003) and accessible HERE.
• 'Moments of Choice' [on film directing] (originally published in The Movie, ch. 58, reprinted in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Movie Book of the Fifties, Orbis, 1982) republished online by the Australian journal Rouge (issue 9, 2006) and accessible HERE.

Today, it is delighted to bring to its readers' attention a further Open Access essay by Perkins which is currently stored at WRAP: the Warwick Research Archive Project.

The piece is an as yet undated and otherwise unpublished article entitled 'You Only Live Once' that brilliantly treats this magisterial 1937 film directed by Fritz Lang.

Here's an excerpt from the essay with relevant hyperlinks added by FSFF:

Anyone who wants to write usefully about You Only Live Once has to build on the work of George M Wilson. A chapter in [Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)] makes a systematic presentation of the movie’s narrative strategies, and a detailed reading of key images. Wilson shows how Lang’s picture is designed to educate its viewers in the manipulability of the image, and to demonstrate the power of the film sequence to deceive us by obscuring key points in its story and by soliciting preferred readings that the content of the images may not in fact guarantee. The achievement that Wilson uncovers is the more remarkable in that it occurs not in an illustrated lecture but in a fiction movie, one that works to powerful effect within its genre of social protest melodrama.

Wilson’s essay opened my eyes to You Only Live Once, a movie that I had previously found opaque because, apart from its evident social project, I had not seen a purpose in its meticulous design beyond that of giving power and plausibility to a noticeably contrived tale. In what follows I take for granted the main lines of Wilson’s argument in order to develop some remarks on Lang’s mise-en-scène in two representative sequences.

V.F. Perkins Online

A tiny little post to indicate the websites where two indispensable articles about film (and film studies) by Victor Perkins, world-renowned author of Film as Film (London: Penguin Books, 1972), can be found:

• 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52) republished online by Danish film studies journal 16:9 (September 2003) and accessible HERE.
• 'Moments of Choice' [on film directing] (originally published in The Movie, ch. 58, reprinted in Ann Lloyd (ed.), Movie Book of the Fifties, Orbis, 1982) republished online by the Australian journal Rouge (issue 9, 2006) and accessible HERE.

These are the two highlights of a number of recent updates to Film Studies For Free's listing of links to 'Individual Authors' Online Writing Of Note'.

[Note added on September 26, 2008: for a detailed discussion of Perkins' 'Moments of Choice', please see my posting on it on the Directing Cinema blog (link HERE).]