Participations: screen dance, moviegoing in the 1930s and 40s, and the reception of gay films

Image from 3 Idiots (Rajkumar Hirani, 2009), a film referred to in Ann David's article 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'

Film Studies For Free is happy to announce that a new issue of Participations, a journal devoted to developing the broad field of study of cultural and media audiences, is now available online.

The table of contents is reproduced below. The issue includes an excellent selection of articles devoted to the topic of audience responses to screen dance, but there are also notable essays, among others, on moviegoing in the USA in the 1930s and 40s, 'bad films', and the reception of 'gay movies' in Sydney.

Particip@tions: Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010)


Special Edition: Screen Dance Audiences – why now?

• Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds (Guest Editors - Special Edition): 'Special Issue Introduction'
• Harmony Bench: 'Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media'
• Ann David: 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'
• Karen Pearlman: 'If a dancing figure falls in the forest and nobody see her...'
• Matthew Reason: 'Thinking about Audiences: a dance film-maker's perspective.  An interview with Alex Reuben'
• Karen Wood: 'An investigation into audiences' televisual experience of Strictly Come Dancing'

Articles

• Mike Chopra-Gant: 'Dirty movies, or: why film scholars should stop worrying about Citizen Kane and learn to love bad films'
• Anouk Lang: '"A Dirty Little Secret": Taste Hierarchies and Richard and Judy's Book Club'
• Scott McKinnon: 'Taking the Word 'Out' West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces'
• Jennifer Radbourne, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow: Empowering Audiences to Measure Quality'
• Becky Walter: The L Word fan fiction reimagining intimate partner violence'

Reviews

• Sarah D. Goode: Understanding and Addressing Sexual Attraction to Children: A Study of Paedophiles in Contemporary Society.  Routledge (2010).
• Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vondreau (eds.): The Youtube Reader.  National Library of Sweden (2009)

The Working-Class Hero in International Cinema: in Memory of Pete Postlethwaite

Pete Postlethwaite, as Danny, delivers his Albert Hall speech in Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996)

The bottom line for Danny [Pete Postlethwaite] is [his son] Phil’s emblematic loss of ‘the will to live’. He addresses the Albert Hall audience for all the world as if he were the holy ghost of Scargill and the militant miners of 1984, telling the punters, the press and us that, ‘I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks; not compared to what people matter’. Charging the government with destroying an industry, a community and its people, he refuses the prize, calculating, as the flash bulbs pop, that ‘then it becomes news. And I won’t be talking just to myself, will I?’ In this scene the shot-reverse-shots of father and son, Danny and media, band and Grimley fans, and band and approving urban audience (its cosmopolitanism symbolised by two black faces) works as much as Danny’s polemic to argue that the old-fashioned working-class values, the local, British loyalties of community, family and labour -contrasted satirically by Danny to the fashionable liberal campaigns to save ‘seals or whales’ - can cut through Tory brutalism and reconstruct progressive priorities - to be the bearer of new national hopes. [Cora Kaplan, 'The Death of the Working-Class Hero', New Formations, 52 (Summer, 2004)]

Film Studies For Free was shocked and saddened to hear of the death yesterday of much loved British actor Pete Postlethwaite. David Hudson's set of links to tributes to Postlethwaite may be found here. 

Postlethwaite was a highly versatile actor, far from limited either in his life by his English working-class background, or in his career by his talent for the working-class dramatic roles in which he was so often cast. But it is the case that some of his most memorable roles were, like that of Danny in Brassed Off, ones that set themselves in the kind of tightly-knit, but, under political attack, all too easily undone, northern English communities he came from.

FSFF's tribute, below, focuses on this aspect of Postlethwaite's work: his class act, that was not just an act. It's a rich and hopefully rewarding set of links to online and openly accessible scholarly discussions of the (usually, but not exclusively, male) "working-class hero" film character - quite a transnational cinematic trope, as it turns out.

• Dave Allen, 'MIDDLE-CLASS MODS and WORKING-CLASS SODS: Quadrophenia and the Construction of Popular Histories', The 1970s Project, 2008

• Christopher Beach, excerpt from ‘A Troubled Paradise: Utopia and Transgression in Comedies of the Early 1930s’, Class, Language and American Film Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

• BFI Screenoline 'Working Class Heroes'

• Cathy Brigden, 'Representations of labour: Images of work and workers in film', in P. Stanton and S. Young (eds) Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 2008

• Ron Briley, 'The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive in Literature, Song, and Film' , Studies in Popular Culture, 31.2, Spring 2009

• Lee Carruthers, 'Biding Our Time: Rethinking the Familiar in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey', Film Studies, Vol. 9, Winter 2006

• E. Anna Claydon, 'New Perspectives on British Cinema: Going Beyond the "Crisis" in Masculinity', Paper at the Exploring Masculinities and Film at the Centre for Research into Film and Media, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, July 2-4, 2001

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy, "Everything you always hated about Thatcher's Britain: A cultural analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988)," Miscelanea, 2004, vol.28, 145-160

• John Curzon, 'Whatever Happened to the North of England? The Spaces of Post-Industrial Northern England in Contemporary Television and Film Drama', PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2009

• Alexander Dhoest, 'How queer is L'Air de Paris? -- Marcel Carné and Queer Authorship', Scope, May 2003

• Jay Dolmage and William DeGenaro, '"I Cannot Be Like This Frankie": Disability, Social Class, and Gender in Million Dollar Baby', Disability Studies Quarterly, Spring 2005, Volume 25, No. 2

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Antigone Agnistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The Red Army Fraction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game', Rouge, 4, 2004

• David Frank, 'Short Takes: The Canadian Worker on Film', Labour/Le Travail, 46 (Fall 2000), 417-37

• Michelle Gadpaille, 'Look Back in Anger and Popular Culture', Maribor International Review Vol. 1, no. 1 (2008)

• Sarah Godfrey, 'Villainous Victims: The Paradox of the ‘Damaged’: Man in Naked and Nil By Mouth', eSharp, Issue 9, Spring 2007

• Susan Hayward, 'Simone Signoret 1921-1985: the star as sign-the sign as scar', Modern Languages Publications Archive, 1995

• Heather J. Hicks, 'Postindustrial Striptease: The Full Monty and the Feminization of Work', Colby Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2000

• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema - style and context: an examination of British "New Wave" Films', Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, January 1997

• Jeffrey K. Jack, Irish Representations in the Films of Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan, Masters thesis, Marshall University, 2005

• Martin Johnes and Gavin Mellor. 'The 1953 FA Cup Final: Modernity and Tradition in British Culture', Contemporary British History, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2006

• Cora Kaplan, 'The Death of the Working-Class Hero', New Formations, 52 (Summer, 2004)

• John Kirk, 'Changing the Subject:Cultural Studies and the Demise of Class', Cultural Logic, 2002

• Chuck Kleinhans, 'Contemporary working class film heroes in Evel Knieval and The Last American Hero', from Jump Cut, no. 2, 1974

• Gérard Kraus, 'Other faces: Andy Bausch's Le Club des chômeurs (The Unemployment Club, 2002)', Kinoeye, 4.3, 2004

• J. Meryl Krieger, 'Imagining politics, popular music and remixing: YouTube, remediation and protest songs', Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting October 26, 2007

• Ernest Larsen, 'F.I.S.T. Where are you, Jimmy?', from Jump Cut, no. 19, December 1978

• Jim Leach, 'Introduction', British Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 

• Leonard J. Leff, 'White Line Fever: Promise and frustration', from Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977

• Anne Leonard, 'Review of Hodges, Graham Russell Gao, Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver', H-Urban, H-Net Reviews, April, 2008

• Julia Lesage, 'Blue collar filmography', from Jump Cut, no. 2, 1974

• Thomas Lindenberger, 'On the Road to the New Beginning: History and Utopia in Frank Beyer’s Karbid und Sauerampfer (Carbide and Sorrel)', Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film StudiesVolume 18, numéro 1, automne 2007

• Brenda Longfellow, 'Hyperbolic Masculinity and the Ironic Gaze in project Grizzly', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vo. 8, No. 1, Spring 1999

• Alan Lovell, 'The British Cinema: The Known Cinema?', The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy (London: Palgrave, 2009, 3e)

• Carl Philip Wahlberg Lund, The portrayal of Working-Class speech in British film: a study of accent in British films from the 1960s and the 2000s, Masters thesis, University of Bergen, 2009

• Kenneth MacKinnon, 'The Trouble with The Trouble with Men', Film-Philosophy, vol. 9 no. 21, April 2005

• Robert Alan Marcink, The Depiction of the Working Class in American Films of the Counterculture Era, PhD thesis, Indiana University of Pennysylvania, 2009

• Lisa Milner, 'Kenny: the evolution of the battler figure in Howard's Australia', (post-print) Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2009

• Enric Monforte, 'Homosociality, Sexism and Homophobia: An Analysis of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Thee Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Fox and His Friends', BELLS, Vol. 9, No. 1, (year unknown)

• Claire Monk, ‘Hey you, standing there, what you got to stare at?’ The post-punk female in British film: Breaking Glass (Brian Gibson, UK, 1980)', Paper at 1970s British Culture conference, University of Portsmouth, July 1-3, 2008

• Jon Scott Oberacker, The people and me: Michael Moore and the politics of political documentary, PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009

• Michael Pierse, 'Introduction', Writing Ireland's Working Class: Dublin After O'Casey (London: Palgrave, 2010)

• Nicola Rehling, All or Nothing: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema, PhD Thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2005

• George Rodosthenous, 'Billy Elliot The Musical: visual representations of working-class masculinity and the all-singing, all-dancing bo[d]y', Studies in Musical Theatre, 1 (3), 2007

• Rasha Salti, 'Critical Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema', Kosmorama 237(Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen) 2006

• Robert Carl Schehr, 'Martial Arts Films and the Action-Cop Genre: Ideology, Violence and Spectatorship', Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 7(3), 2000

• Mark Schreiber, 'Re-negotiating Concepts of Masculinity in Contemporary British Film', Gender Forum, Issue 17, 2007 

• Fabian Schuppert, 'Andrzej Wajda's A Generation and Man of Marble from a Political Perspective', Kinema, Spring 2006

• Ira Shor, 'Rocky: Two faces of the American dream', from Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977 

• Andrew Spicer, 'Masculinities in British Cinema', Kwartalnik Filmowy (Film Quarterly) Poland Academy of Science (2006) in Polish. English translation

• Tetsuya Taguchi, 'The Working Class Audience of Rock Music, Liverpool in the 1960s', Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture 1-2 : pp. 293 – 313. 1998

• Olesya Venger, 'Transformation of Ukrainian and Serbian Media Identities During the Velvet Revolutions: The Impact of the Global Media', Global Media Journal, 6.10, 2007

• Ginette Vincendeau, 'The Mise-en-scene of Suffering: French chanteuses realistes', New Formations, No. 3, Winter 1987 

• Jamie Marie Wagner, 'Quai des brumes: An American Appeal', Film Matters, 2010

New Issue of Scope!

Image from Good Bye, Lenin! ( Wolfgang Becker, 2003). Read Kevin L. Ferguson's fascinating article on the film: Home Movies: Historical Space and the Mother's Memory

Good Bye Lenin!, a film commonly read as a political fable of East German nostalgia, is rather for me a successful example of autobiographical narrative that balances maternal loss and a boy's coming to manhood, framing this transition in and through home movies. As such, it provides a much-needed positive model for cinema's use of mothers and memory. [Kevin L. Ferguson]

Film Studies For Free has been far too quiet lately, but that's about to change, people! Let us kick off the burst of activity with FSFF's usual update about one of its very favourite openly accessible, film-scholarly journals, SCOPE: And Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, run by those wonderful people at the Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham. The full Table of Contents is reproduced below for your convenient reading pleasure.

Scope, Issue 18, 2010

Articles

Art Cinema as Institution, Redux: Art Houses, Film Festivals, and Film Studies
David Andrews
The Pinnacle of Popular Taste?: The Importance of Confessions of a Window Cleaner
Sian Barber
Walking the Line: Negotiating Celebrity in the Country Music Biopic
Molly Brost
Home Movies: Historical Space and the Mother's Memory
Kevin L. Ferguson
An Aristocratic Plod, Erstwhile Commandos and Ladies who Craved Excitement: Hammer Films' Post-War BBC Crime Series and Serial Adaptations
David Mann

[ALL ARTICLES ON ONE PAGE]

Book Reviews

"May Contain Graphic Material": Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Film By M. Keith Booker
Reviewer: David Simmons
Investigating Firefly and Serenity By Rhonda Wilcox and Tanya Cochran (eds.) & Special Issue on Firefly and Serenity
Reviewer: Ronald Helfrich
Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film By Adilifu Nama & Mixed Race Hollywood
Reviewer: Augusto Ciuffo de Oliveira
Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright By Lucas Hilderbrand & From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video
Reviewer: Daniel Herbert
Stanley Cavell's American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies By Lawrence F. Rhu
Reviewer: Áine Kelly
Scorsese By Roger Ebert
Reviewer: John Berra
Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror By James Leggott & Roman Polanski
Reviewer: Paul Newland
Cities In Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis By Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (eds.) & Cinematic Countrysides (Inside Popular Film)
Reviewer: Peter C. Pugsley
Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World By S. Brent Plate & Crowd Scenes: Movies and Mass Politics
Reviewer: Douglas C. MacLeod, Jr.
Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City By Mark Shiel
Reviewer: Tom Whittaker
Independent Cinema (includes DVD of Paul Cronin's Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16) By D.K. Holm & Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production
Reviewer: Carl Wilson
Seventies British Cinema By Robert Shail (ed.)
Reviewer: Lawrence Webb
Photography and Cinema (Exposures) By David Campany  & Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography
Reviewer: Tom Slevin
Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood's Russians: Biography of an Image By Harlow Robinson & How the Soviet Man was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin
Reviewer: Brian Faucette
A Companion to Spanish Cinema By Bernard P.E. Bentley & Gender and Spanish Cinema
Reviewer: Abigail Keating
The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II By David Welky & The Hidden Art of Hollywood: In Defense of the Studio Era Film
Reviewer: Hannah Durkin
Neil Jordan By Maria Pramaggiore & The Cinema of Neil Jordan: Dark Carnival
Reviewer: Steve Masters
Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory By Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi
Reviewer: Omar Kholeif
The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy (Directors' Cuts) By Peter Hames & Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex
Reviewer: Jonathan Owen
Movie Greats: A Critical Study of Classic Cinema By Philip Gillett  & Inventing Film Studies
Reviewer: Steven Rybin

[ALL BOOK REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Film Reviews

Generation Kill
Reviewer: Sheamus Sweeney
Diary of the Dead
Reviewer: Sigmund Shen
Rich and Strange & Stage Fright
Reviewer: Judy Beth Morris
Blood: The Last Vampire
Reviewer: Kia-Choong Teo
Coraline
Reviewer: Alice Mills
Before and After
Reviewer: Clodagh M. Weldon

[ALL FILM REVIEWS ON ONE PAGE]

Conference Reports

Bloodlines: British Horror Past and Present, An International Conference and Film Festival at De Montfort University and Phoenix Square, Leicester, 4 - 5 March 2010
Reporter: Michael Ahmed
IMAGEing Reality, University of Navarra, Spain, 22– 24 October 2009
Reporter: Stefano Odorico
The Moving Image: Reconfiguring Spaces of Loss and Mourning in the 21st Century, Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cambridge, 26-27 February 2010
Reporter: Jenny Chamarette
NECS 2009 3rd Annual Conference: Locating Media, Lund, Sweden, 25 - 28 June, 2009
Reporter: Andrea Virginás
New Waves: XII International Film and Media Conference, Transylvania, Romania, 22 - 23 October 2009
Reporter: Hajnal Kiraly
Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, April 16 - 17 2010
Reporter: Darren Elliott-Smith
Re-Living Disaster, Birbkeck College, London, 29-30 April 2010
Reporter: Ozlem Koksal
SCMS @ 50/LA (Society for Cinema and Media Studies): Archiving the Future, Mobilizing the Past, Los Angleles, California, US, March 10-14, 2010
Reporter: Jason Kelly Roberts
SCMS @ 50/LA (Society for Cinema and Media Studies), Los Angeles, California, March 10-14, 2010
Reporter: Martin L. Johnson
Straight Outta Uttoxeter: Studying Shane Meadows, University of East Anglia, 15 - 16 April 2010
Reporter: Emma Sutton

[ALL CONFERENCE REPORTS ON ONE PAGE]