Adrian Martin – CATHERINE GRANT

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.

My recommendation today, another addition to Film Studies For Free’s listing of scholarly resources in audio or audiovisual form (also see HERE and HERE), is for podcasts of audio-recordings of several sessions from the 2001 For Ever Godard conference. The link (to a MySpace page, which takes a while to load) is HERE.

The site’s blurb about the conference reads as follows:

FOR EVER GODARD was a four-day international conference held at Tate Modern, London, 21-24 June 2001. It is the first event of its kind ever to be devoted to Godard’s work in Britain. It brings together both well-established commentators and the younger generation of critics working in the fields of film and television, art history, cultural studies, philosophy, music, and literature. It draws on talent from many different countries and from different intellectual backgrounds.

There are also lots of Godard-related YouTube videos embedded on this site, as well as some great images. There’s a good review of the conference by Maximilian Le Cain at senses of cinema HERE (and a detailed review of the related book collection For Ever Godard, on Film-Philosophy, 10. 1, by Katerina Loukopoulou HERE).

Film Studies For Free’s principle of full disclosure requires me to note my own involvement in the For Ever Godard conference; I was a member of the advisory committee, and was also lucky enough to chair a great session on Godard’s lyricism with both Adrian Martin (see a lovely article by Martin on Godard in a special issue on ‘French Cinema Present And Past’ at senses of cinema HERE; as an aside, I highly recommend girish‘s enlightening interview with Martin HERE) and André Habib (see a good piece by Habib on Godard at senses of cinema HERE). I also contributed to the published collection of work which was based on the conference, from which sample spreads can downloaded for free via this link HERE.

[An addition to the original posting: I was just exploring some of the YouTube Godard links and came across one I wished I’d known about when I was writing my chapter for the For Ever Godard book, which dealt with Godard’s collaboration with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville on Sauve qui peut (la vie) and other films: this really interesting 8 minute long video of Godard promoting Sauve qui peut (la vie) in America in 1980 (posted on YouTube by evillights)]

Godard Interviewed by Deanna Kamiel – 1980

Category: Adrian Martin

The Week’s Links

For Ever Godard