Caméra-Stylo

R.I.P. Caméra-Stylo (2008-2011)

2011-06-17T20:06:00.007-04:00

Anyone who has visited Caméra-Stylo over the past six months probably noticed I was on hiatus while I was studying for my Ph.D. Qualifying Exam. The process entailed a semester of intensive reading for each of my core research areas: Film Authorship & Director Reputation Studies, Contemporary Film Theory & Aesthetics, Genre Historiography, and Cultural Modernism & Modernity. I knew I wouldn’t have much to blog about—let alone time to post regularly—while I was buried under the load of nearly 100 scholarly items with all four reading lists combined. Well, I’m happy to report that I completed my essay exam responses at the end of May and passed my oral defense earlier this week.

Although I looked forward to returning to the blog in June, a part of me knew how difficult it would be to keep up with it again. My posting had been only sporadic in the fall during my last semester of coursework, with fewer and fewer pieces of the substance I’d hoped to maintain when I began in 2008. It seems like my nomination to Ph.D. candidacy marks an appropriate time to lay Caméra-Stylo to rest (I created it, after all, towards the end of my M.A. studies at Northern Illinois University) and focus on my upcoming academic projects. Yet, I think the blog always best served as my outlet for non-academic writing, mostly in the form of film reviews (you can take the kid out of the college newspaper, but you can’t take the college newspaper out of the kid) or random thoughts and opinions about film studies and film-related topics. I know I’ll miss that.

You can find me online now at my website, but I will leave the blog up for at least another year or so. If anyone is wondering where I’m honing my writing energies these days, I’m presently working on an article about Marilyn Monroe for Routledge's new journal Celebrity Studies. Most of my long-term graduate research will be devoted to director Nicholas Ray, my dissertation subject, and in the coming months I will begin the dissertation prospectus, along with editorial work for a centenary collection on Ray that I’ve enthusiastically undertaken with a colleague in Georgia.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the level of visibility Caméra-Stylo received over the past three years, and my heartfelt appreciation goes out to all of those who read, checked back during stretches of inactivity, encouraged me to keep writing, and had such nice things to say. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what purpose this blog was supposed to serve when I started, nor was I sure what audience I had or at whom I aimed to address. And while I’m not sure I ever found answers to those questions, I certainly had fun writing about movies here. In the words of Mr. Thompson from Citizen Kane, thanks for the use of the hall.

ON HIATUS UNTIL JUNE

2011-01-22T10:18:00.003-05:00

I am scheduled to take my Ph.D. qualifying exams in May, so I've decided to take a break from the blog until the summer in order to focus all of my attention outside of teaching on my reading lists: Film Authorship & Director Reputation Studies; Contemporary Film Theory & Aesthetics; Genre Historiography; and Cultural Modernism & Modernity. Thanks for your patience, and I hope to have good news to report in June!

Best Films of 2010

2011-01-07T11:38:00.006-05:00

I’m back from winter break and ready to dust off the laptop for the spring semester. The only releases that seriously interested me this Dec. were Black Swan and True Grit. By now, the reviews have come and gone and most people who had the desire to see these films have probably done so. I’ll keep my comments relatively brief, mainly because I hope people do see these films (and see them again!), rather than get burned-out on the critical buzz and wish they never heard of them in the first place.

BLACK SWAN **** (out of ****)

If you’re still trying to figure out what to expect from this hallucinatory horror-melodrama directed by millennial auteur Darren Aronofsky, try to imagine Swan Lake produced by a meeting of the minds between Max Ophuls and David Lynch…or perhaps Powell & Presburger and David Cronenberg...but those comparisons are just skin deep. Black Swan is its own wild beast: a living, breathing monster movie that undergoes a series of disturbing transformations onscreen much like its heroine, from deeply wounded to erotically-charged to both at once, shattering your nerves with a jack-hammer’s intensity and quietly burying itself into your subconscious like a sad, scary dream you think about for days. I’ve found Aronofsky to be overrated, but this is by far his masterpiece and some kind of new classic.

In one of the most mesmerizing performances of her generation, Natalie Portman stars as Nina Sayers, a psychologically tortured dancer for a New York City ballet company, whose talents impress the lecherous director (Vincent Cassell) preparing for a production of Swan Lake. Only when he catches a glimpse of the darker side of this “sweet girl” does he cast her in the dual lead role as the White Swan and Black Swan. As the demands of the part become greater, Nina begins losing her grip on reality and loses herself more in the role, fearing that her understudy (Mila Kunis) will steal it from her. Meanwhile, Nina’s mother (Barbara Hershey), a failed dancer, grows increasingly possessive as the production moves further along. Portman hits the notes of high camp, paranoia, and wrenching emotional devastation so effectively (and affectingly) it’s like witnessing a whole new career being born in front of you. Together with Aronofsky, she has given us something we haven’t seen since the 1970s: a Hollywood art film. How often do we get mainstream films in which the central conflict is one of masochistic artistic passion and expression? It aches with pain and delirious beauty, and here those sensations are not mutually exclusive.

TRUE GRIT **** (out of ****)

John Wayne’s Oscar-winning role as Rooster Cogburn in the amiable True Grit (1969) helped cement his star image as an American icon. Forgive my sacrilege: Jeff Bridges is better in the Coen brothers version. Less a remake than a more faithful adaptation of Charles Portis ’s novel of the same name, a distinction the writer-director team have made clear in the press, the True Grit of 2010 is not only a superior film, but a poignant elegy for the Western and the genre’s place in American folk culture. The film makes for an entertaining Western in its own right, low-key and deliberately paced, full of gentle humor, solid action, and gorgeous cinematography by Roger Deakins. Joel and Ethan Coen turn this well-traveled territory into a landscape of dreams and psychic imagination with their love of quirky characters and situations, musical language, and poetic imagery. Building on Portis’s themes of vengeance, punishment, and redemption, the film is also a soulful contemplation on the broader issues of mythmaking, death, and the closing of the frontier. We end on a coda reminiscent of the ambivalence in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) that takes us from a turn-of-the-century Wild West Show to a graveyard, with a last line that’s just about perfect.

And, yes, The Dude shows up The Duke as the boozy, aging marshal, who agrees to help strong-willed teenage farm girl Mattie Ross track down her father’s killer (Josh Brolin). Joining the pair is a cocky young Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) ready to claim half of the reward. Newcomer Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie and more than holds her own with these big stars—she steals every scene she’s in. Bridges and Damon are wonderful together, but Bridges should be considered a national treasure for an interpretation Cogburn so natural you’d think he created it. Those scowls and grimaces, the drunken mutterings and command of the Coens’s trademark idiom, and that one-eyed glare communicate more about the character than any flashbacks or speeches, evoking personal loss and defeated weariness, a penchant for violence, and a basic desire to do good.

From the cinematheque vaults: Father’s Little Dividend

2011-01-05T22:17:00.005-05:00

Everyone knows Vincente Minnelli’s beloved family comedy Father of the Bride (1950), even if contemporary audiences probably came to it through the cute but maudlin Steve Martin version. And yet Father’s Little Dividend has not been enshrined in the hallowed halls of Classical Hollywood favorites, even though there was a Father of the Bride: Part II starring Martin, which was another hit with Baby Boomers, and it derived largely from Minnelli’s 1951 sequel. The original 1950 film is certainly dated by its idealization of patriarchal and consumerist domestic life (although I would argue that the remake is more conservative). No wonder it inspired a short-lived sitcom on CBS for the 1961/62 season. Put all that aside, though, and you can’t deny the film’s indelible wit, grace, and charm, not to mention a pinch of satire. Dividend is just as good, maybe better—there’s Minnelli’s sophisticated directorial flourishes, the wise and sentimental Albert Hackett-Frances Goodrich script, and, of course, the bubbly star appeal of Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, and Elizabeth Taylor that's as intoxicating as a bottle of champagne. Look, I like wild and crazy Steve, but his films are not just on another page, they’re in a whole different book. Tracy and Bennett reprise their roles as bourgeois American couple Stanley and Ellie Banks, who learn that their newlywed daughter Kay (Taylor) is pregnant. Having survived the frantic marriage of the first film, Stanley now confronts the anxieties of grandfatherhood.

CFP: Global Innovations in Post-World War II Cinema (MSA 13; Oct 6-9, 2011)

2011-01-04T20:50:00.007-05:00

Prospective Conference Panel

Modernist Studies Association 13: Structures of Innovation, Buffalo, NY

Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2011

As the field of “new modernist studies” continues grappling with its geohistorical expansions, and also its containment within definitional and disciplinary boundaries, Susan Stanford Friedman proposes a transformative model of “planetary modernist studies” in the September issue of Modernism/Modernity. This approach holds fruitful possibilities for histories and theories of modernist film aesthetics, an area that has yet to be fully investigated through these recent methodological developments. Friedman explains that modernist studies should avoid the familiar polarization of aesthetics and politics, and rather “be open to different kinds of aesthetic innovation linked to different modernities around the world and through time.” “In this regard,” she argues, “the aesthetic is always imbricated in the political, the historical. And vice versa” (488).

Moving beyond traditional formalist and auteurist theoretical paradigms, as well as Euro-centric conceptions of film history and periodicity, this panel seeks to explore the heterogeneous ways in which post-World War II art cinema articulates the modern and breaks from the classical. Further, it aims to situate the aesthetic innovations of different cinematic modernisms in a global context to understand their roles within different political and cultural modernities. How do the visual, media, and national cultures of the postwar era encompass a range of ideological and stylistic contradictions through cinema as much as—or maybe more than—a coherent set of underlying modernist principles?

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

- New readings of canonical films or new perspectives on key figures and movements (Blow-Up, Jean-Luc Godard, film noir, etc.)
- The relationships between late modern art cinema of the 1950s/60s and the early modern avant-garde of the 1920s/30s
- The intersections of modernist cinema with literature, architecture, fashion, photography, music, or visual art and design
- Transnational influences: modernism and/in Hollywood
- Non-Western modernisms
- Sounds of modernism
- Experiencing modernism onscreen: affect and phenomenology
- Film performance and celebrity culture
- Film production and distribution
- Film exhibition and reception
- Archiving modernism and the circulation of cinema
- New media and technologies
- Identity politics of modernism
- Linguistic and cultural translation

Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Please visit the MSA website for more details about the 2011 conference.

From the cinematheque vaults: The Outlaw

2010-12-22T14:49:00.006-05:00

Here is the film that made young Jane Russell an overnight Hollywood sex symbol famous for her plunging neckline, and plunged director-producer Howard Hughes into hot waters with the Production Code Administration. And what an awesomely bad film it is. The Outlaw (1943) remains of interest today less for its scandalous content than for its bizarre psychoanalytic interpretation of the American Western. Looking through the first level racism and misogyny, it seems impossible not to read the film’s deeper structure as a camp variation on the legend of Billy the Kid. That ironic register is activated in large part by Russell herself, whose eroticized body functions as a site of homosocial negotiations and male sexual ambivalence, exposing the patriarchal sexual economy of the narrative as an absurd, impotent performance of male power dynamics. Rio, the fiery mistress of Doc Holliday (Walter Huston), becomes a focal point for a triangle of masculine insecurities, wherein Holliday competes with Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell) and the Kid (Jack Buetel) for possession over this "half breed" woman seeking to avenge her brother's murder.

If it seems like a sillier, kinkier Howard Hawks movie, that’s probably because Hawks directed under Hughes during the first two weeks of shooting. The cause of the breakup is unclear: Hawks claimed he had to leave to direct Sergeant York (1941), while Hughes expressed dissatisfaction over Hawks’s economized method of directing. When Hughes replaced Hawks, he hired cinematographer Gregg Toland to replace Hawks’s DP Lucien Ballard and reshoot the film. Authorship discrepancies aside, it’s Russell’s movie. One can’t deny that her sultry screen presence has commanding attitude and style to burn, and her self-aware smirking almost suggests she’s in on a joke nobody else gets. Of course, the film’s notorious reputation derives not from the intensity she brought to her debut role, something people unfortunately forget, but from Hughes’s exploitation of her cleavage in the film and its iconic publicity material (who else but Hughes would engineer a “cantilever bra” for this very purpose?). The film was completed in 1941 and, due to battles with the PCA and state censor boards, it was not released for another two years. After a public outcry, The Outlaw was quickly pulled from theaters only to be re-released in 1946 with great box-office success, its controversy not diminished over the years.

New Books in Film & Media Studies from IU Press

2010-12-17T14:16:00.009-05:00

Introduction to Documentary Second Edition

By Bill Nichols

This new edition of Bill Nichols’s bestselling text provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues in documentary history and criticism. Designed for students in any field that makes use of visual evidence and persuasive strategies, Introduction to Documentary identifies the distinguishing qualities of documentary and teaches the viewer how to read documentary film. Each chapter takes up a discrete question, from "How did documentary filmmaking get started?" to "Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?" Carefully revised to take account of new work and trends, this volume includes information on more than 100 documentaries released since the first edition, an expanded treatment of the six documentary modes, new still images, and a greatly expanded list of distributors.

Bill Nichols is Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University and author of Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (IUP, 1992) and Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (IUP, 1995).

Distribution: World
Publication date: 11/16/2010
Format: paper 368 pages, 85 b&w illus., 6 x 9 x 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22260-2

More information here.

Widescreen Worldwide

Edited by John Belton, Sheldon Hall, and Steven Neale

Examining widescreen cinema as a worldwide aesthetic and industrial phenomenon, the essays in this volume situate the individual expressions of this new technology within the larger cultural and industrial practices that inform them. What Hollywood sought to market globally as CinemaScope, SuperScope, Techniscope, Technirama, and Panavision took indigenous form in a host of compatible anamorphic formats developed around the world. The book documents how the aesthetics of the first wave of American widescreen films underwent revision in Europe and Asia as filmmakers brought their own idiolect to the language of widescreen mise-en-scène, editing, and sound practices. The work of Otto Preminger, Anthony Mann, Samuel Fuller, Sam Peckinpah, Seijun Suzuki, Kihachi Okamoto, and Tai Kato, among others, is addressed.

John Belton is Professor of English and Film at Rutgers University and author of Widescreen Cinema.

Sheldon Hall is Senior Lecturer in Stage and Screen at Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom.

Steven Neale is Professor of Film Studies at Exeter University.

Distributed for John Libbey Publishing
Sales territory is limited to North America
232 pp., 162 b&w illus.
cloth 978-0-86196-694-3 $34.95

More information here.

Japanese Animation: Time Out of Mind

By Chris Robinson

While visiting Japan, animation writer Chris Robinson gets lost. As he drifts through Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto he happens upon a number of mysterious figures including Bob Dylan, Haruki Murakami, Sumo wrestlers, Big Bird and, by good chance, many famous Japanese animators—both living and dead. Each of these characters takes Robinson into a deep, dark, mysterious world of Japanese animation that does not include Godzilla, Akira, Anime, Manga, or Hasao Miyazaki. This inventive and unusual study rewrites the history of Japanese animation looking at the work of Atsushi Wada, Taku Furukawa, Renzo and Sayoko Kinoshita, Maya Yonesho, and many more.

Chris Robinson is a Canadian writer, journalist, and biographer. He is author of Estonian Animation, Unsung Heroes of Animation, The Animation Pimp, Canadian Animation, and Ballad of a Thin Man.

Distributed for John Libbey Publishing
Sales territory is limited to North America
160 pp., 70 color illus., 21 b&w illus.
paper 978-0-86196-692-9 $29.95

More information here.

Polish Cinema Now!

Edited by Mateusz Werner

Polish cinema has exercised an independent voice for more than 20 years, challenging political censorship and breaking the old production monopoly of the previous communist government. During this time, Polish movie makers have enjoyed the same freedoms and possibilities as their French or German counterparts, producing 500 feature films and several thousand documentaries. These works are paradoxically less well known internationally than the Polish films made behind the iron curtain when cultural exchange with the western world was controlled exclusively by communist authorities. Polish Cinema Now! facilitates the discovery of this relatively unknown group of works with 11 engaging essays by leading experts from both Poland and abroad. Richly illustrated, this book contains a two-DVD set of short films.

Mateusz Werner lectures at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. He is editor of the journal Kronos; author of Wobec nihilizmu: Gombrowicz, Witkacy; and co-creator and host of the Polish public television programs The Picture Show and Half-Seriously.

Distributed for John Libbey Publishing
Sales territory is limited to North America
240 pp., 1 color illus., 11 b&w illus.
paper 978-0-86196-691-2 $39.95

More information here.

Into the Woods

2010-12-01T07:27:00.009-05:00

Before proceeding with my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, the first installment in the two part series finale, let me answer the inevitable question right away: No, I have not read the books.

About halfway through the second Potter film, I pretty much lost interest in J. K. Rowling’s convoluted narrative and mythology and have barely kept track of what’s happened since then. The reason I’ve stuck with the franchise since 2001, however, is that the films are all consistently entertaining, with enough imaginative fantasy adventure to please even a curmudgeon such as myself, who, for some reason, has always had a hard time warming up to the sword-and-sorcery genre. Despite Steve Kloves’s overstuffed and clunky screenplays, not to mention Chris Columbus’s typically banal direction of the first two films, the series has been nicely shepherded by talented directors such as Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, and David Yates, the latter of whom returns for the third time behind the camera and will direct Deathly Hallows: Part 2 scheduled for release in July 2011. More compelling than the plot is how these filmmakers have stylishly envisioned the darkening Potter universe onscreen, and yet the films themselves remain mostly uneven and forgettable even at their most diverting in the noise of the holiday/summer blockbuster season.

Deathly Hallows: Part 1 feels just as incomplete as its predecessors—and, as the subtitle tells us, it is literally just that—but finally we have an entry that transcends the series and stands as a fine film in its own right. From one of the opening scenes, in which Hermoine Granger (Emma Watson) tearfully erases herself from family photographs in order to protect her parents, we know this is going to be heavier than your younger sibling’s magic show. Calling it the best Harry Potter is an understatement.

So, this is where we came in: Dumbledore is dead, and Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) and the Death Eaters plan to kill Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) as he goes into hiding under the aid of the Order of the Phoenix. After a few close calls, Harry and his fellow wizard companions Hermione and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) flee to London and then infiltrate the fascist Ministry of Magic. There, our trio of adolescent fugitives intercepts a Horcrux locket, one of the magical vessels containing a piece Voldemort’s soul and a source of his immortality. As confusing as all of this might sound for the fair-weather Potter fan, the first half of the film plays like a marvelous chase thriller (complete with a shoot-out at an all-night coffee shop) that absorbs you into its haunted world so completely, you won’t care that you lost your score card a couple movies back.

Once Harry, Hermoine, and Ron escape to the forest and attempt to destroy the Horcrux, paranoia sets in among the three friends and the film slows down to become something else entirely: a quiet, almost mournful tone poem on nostalgia and lost childhood innocence that’s at times beautifully surreal and also downright scary. The legend of the Deathly Hallows, for example, gets retold in the form of a moody CGI puppet show. Ron experiences a lakeside hallucination in the woods that forces him to confront his own sexual fears and desires, testing his relationship with Harry and Hermoine. And how about that ghostly scene in which Harry visits his parents’ graves and falls into Voldemort’s trap in an abandoned church, a sequence that inexplicably ends with him on the floor of a child’s bedroom? This isn't the Harry Potter I remember.

If Deathly Hallows elevates the most popular movie franchise of the millennium in terms of the overall approach to the material, it also reminds us of the key to its success from the beginning. The special-effects cannot compete with Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint, who have become the most appealing young stars of their generation through Harry Potter alone. When peerless British character actors like Fiennes, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Jason Isaacs, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, and John Hurt are the additional star attractions, you know you have something really special. We believe in magic simply because it seems they do, too.

Rating: ***1/2 (out of ****)

Review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

From the cinematheque vaults: Detour

2010-11-29T15:46:00.009-05:00

Reputedly shot in six days for $20,000 at the Producers Releasing Corporation (better known as PRC) on Hollywood’s “Poverty Row,” Detour (1945) is one of the all-time great B-movies made from practically no budget. Few directors other than Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer could have pulled off the project with as much style and panache, having refined his workmanlike talents on The Black Cat (1934), his esoteric twist on Poe for Universal starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and Bluebeard (1944), his thoroughly creepy take on the legend of the French ladykiller. The technical flaws only add to the film’s surreal artistry, and the spare production, brisk editing, and economic storytelling have the visceral impact of the best hard-boiled pulp fiction from Black Mask or of the expressionistic illustrations in EC Comics’ Crime SuspenStories.

Tom Neal stars as a piano player hitchhiking to California, who descends into a personal hell the closer he gets to Hollywood, first in his nocturnal encounter with a dead man, then with a femme fatale (played to the hilt by Ann Savage) who blackmails him. It’s a noir cult classic that turned giant cups of black coffee into uncanny objects before Twin Peaks (1990) and the open road into a route towards the recesses of the male unconscious before Lost Highway (1997). Neal’s last words are still among the most fatalistic ever uttered in the genre: “Someday a car will stop to pick me up that I never thumbed. Yes, fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me…for no good reason at all.” Like a good shot of scotch, this biting little film stings your system when it first hits you and then goes down smooth.

Fall Film Series Beginning Nov. 14

2010-11-11T09:11:00.006-05:00

Jewish Film Series: Jewish Life in America

1.) The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg

Sunday, November 14
6:30 p.m.
Whittenberger Auditorium, IMU

The Life and Times is an unabashedly celebratory, yet historically sophisticated film, locating the life of “the baseball Moses,” a secular Jew from the Bronx who became one of the greatest stars in baseball, in relation to crucial events in the 1930s and 1940s.

2.) Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg

Thursday, November 18
7:00 p.m.
Location TBA

Kempner’s award-winning documentary feature on the life of comedian, performer, and businesswoman Gertrude Berg employs a combination of archival footage and contemporary interviews (including Ruth Bader-Ginsburg), to paint a portrait of Berg that moves beyond biography to speak powerfully about her moment in history. A discussion with director Aviva Kempner will immediately follow the screening.

The Pawnbroker (1965), The Plot Against Harry (1970/1989), and The Chosen (1981) are scheduled for the spring at the IU Cinema.

The DEFA DIALOGUES: 5 Film (Re)Discoveries

1.) Locked Up Time (Germany/GDR 1991, Dir. Sibylle Schönemann)
Sunday, November 14, at 3pm in the Whittenberger Auditorium, Indiana Memorial Union

The New York Times called this film about the filmmaker's reckoning with the STASI, East Germany's secret police, who locked her up and expelled her to the West in the 1980s, "an eloquent film that shows what an abstraction like 'politics' did to one woman and her family."

Schönemann was, at the time, one of the very few female directors in the state-run studio system.

At times comical, at times bitter and moving, this fascinating documentary charts Schönemann's quest to overcome her past, the past of a nation that spied on its own citizens...

1991 German Film Award in Silver
1993 New York Film Festival

Not shown in Bloomington in nearly 20 years, the film will be presented in 35mm and introduced by Helmut Morsbach, the direcor of the Berlin foundation charged with the critical preservation of East Germany's cinematic legacy. The film was re-released in Germany this year.

2.) Carbide and Sorrel (GDR 1963, Dir. Frank Beyer)
Monday, November 15, at 7pm in the Fine Arts Auditorium 015

A classic (and rare comedy) of East German cinema set in 1945, starring German acting legend Erwin Geschonneck (Mother Courage and Her Children, Naked Among Wolves, Jacob the Liar) as the nonsmoking worker Kalle, who sets off on an adventure through postwar Germany in search of carbide for a cigarette factory. A popular film in the 1960s, Carbide and Sorrel gave generations of GDR film enthusiasts a pleasurable departure from overt state propaganda. The film will be followed by a Q & A with DEFA 4th generation filmmaker Peter Kahane and RadioEins Berlin star and film journalist Knut Elstermann.

3.) Vorspiel [Foreplay/Acting/Prelude] (GDR 1987, Dir. Peter Kahane) on
Tuesday, November 16, at 7pm in the Fine Arts Auditorium 015

1980s' youth in the East German provinces. A touching and funny coming-of-age film that will celebrate its U. S. premiere here in Bloomington. The film will be followed by a Q & A with DEFA 4th generation filmmaker Peter Kahane and RadioEins Berlin star and film journalist Knut Elstermann.

Subtitled for the first time thanks to the request of Indiana High School Students.

IU Cinema Spring 2011 Program Book

2010-11-07T21:35:00.007-05:00

Here is the Spring 2011 program book for the IU Cinema, which opens in January. As one of about 10 THX® Certified university cinemas in the U. S., and arguably the country's best-equipped university cinema, the IU Cinema is on its way to becoming the leading center for the scholarly study of film in the Midwest. The events include our regular campus screenings: the City Lights and Underground series, and the Iris Film Festival, sponsored by the IU Department of Communication & Culture; the East Asian Film Series sponsored by the IU East Asian Studies Center; and the Jewish Film Series sponsored by the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at IU. And look for these new programs: David Lean, John Ford, and Michelangelo Antonioni/Monica Vitti retrospectives; the International Arthouse Series; CINEkids: International Children’s Film Series; and Women of French Cinema sponsored by the IU Department of Communication & Culture with support from the French American Cultural Exchange.

In addition to film introductions and discussions by IU cinema studies faculty, the schedule features guest lectures and screenings by filmmakers Jill Godmilow, Dr. Kenneth Anger, Albert Maysles, Stanley Nelson, Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh, and Hans Scheirl, as well as art director Terence Marsh, composers/silent film accompanists Dennis James and Dr. Philip Carli, and IFC Films President Jonathan Sehring. Dan Ford, grandson of John Ford, will also introduce a screening of the director's 16 mm home movies as part of the Ford retrospective.

I'm especially looking forward to seeing the new 35 mm print of Anthony Mann's Reign of Terror (1949). As you can tell, I'm excited!

Photo Gallery

IU Cinema Mission

Facility History

Equipment

Benton Murals

Benton Mural Restoration (video)

President McRobbie's comments

Provost Hanson's comments

The impact of digital surround sound on filmmaking

2010-11-05T15:40:00.003-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Beyond Dolby: Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

By Mark Kerins

Since digital surround sound technology first appeared in cinemas 20 years ago, it has spread from theaters to homes and from movies to television, music, and video games. Yet even as 5.1 has become the standard for audiovisual media, its impact has gone unexamined. Drawing on works from the past two decades, as well as dozens of interviews with sound designers, mixers, and editors, Mark Kerins uncovers how 5.1 surround has affected not just sound design, but cinematography and editing as well. Beyond Dolby (Stereo) includes detailed analyses of Fight Club, The Matrix, Hairspray, Disturbia, The Rock, Saving Private Ryan, and Joy Ride, among other films, to illustrate the value of a truly audiovisual approach to cinema studies.

Mark Kerins is Assistant Professor of Cinema-Television in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

Distribution: World
Publication date: 11/1/2010
Format: paper 392 pages, 35 b&w illus., 6 x 9 x .875
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22252-7

More information here.

From the cinematheque vaults: White Zombie

2010-10-27T20:44:00.004-04:00

One of the very first zombie films (some historians might say the first), this 1932 cult classic deserves its place among the greats in the genre, predating masterpieces like Night of the Living Dead (1968), Carnival of Souls (1962), and even I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Bela Lugosi stars as a Haitian voodoo priest, who “zombifies” the dead and makes them work as slaves in his sugar cane mill. When an American couple gets married on the plantation, Lugosi sets his sights on the new bride (Madge Bellamy). This independent production by Victor (director) and Edward Halperin (producer) contains some of the most beautifully nightmarish images you’ll find in any horror film from the period. Although shot on the Universal Studios lot using sets from the studio’s popular monster movies, the film’s vision is all its own, like a delirious fever dream that lingers through the saddest, darkest of nights. The Halperin brothers followed-up White Zombie with Revolt of the Zombies in 1936.

Indiana University Cinema Spring Semester Calendar

2010-10-21T19:58:00.008-04:00

The IU Cinema opens in January and will join an elite group of world-class film institutions across the nation (above is the gorgeous view from the stage). Look for the spring program book on November 10th.

January 13, 2011, Thursday, 7:00 p.m. -- Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

January 14, 2011, Friday, 6:30 p.m. - Underground Film Series

January 14, 2011, Friday, 9:30 p.m. -- Biutiful (2010)

January 15, 2011, Saturday, 3:00 p.m. -- Aardman Retrospective (1987-2010)

January 15, 2011, Saturday, 6:30 p.m. -- Biutiful (2010)

January 15, 2011, Saturday, 9:30 p.m. -- Biutiful (2010)

January 16, 2011, Sunday, 3:00 p.m. -- The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

January 16, 2011, Sunday, 6:30 p.m. -- Biutiful (2010)

January 17, 2011, Monday, 7:00 p.m. -- Summertime (1955)

January 20, 2011, Thursday, 7:00 p.m. -- Directed by John Ford (2006) with Dan Ford

January 21, 2011, Friday, 7:00 p.m. -- Stagecoach (1939)

January 22, 2011, Saturday, 3:00 p.m. -- The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

January 22, 2011, Saturday, 6:30 p.m. -- Fort Apache (1948)

January 22, 2011, Saturday, 9:30 p.m. -- She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

January 23, 2011, Sunday, 3:00 p.m. -- The Iron Horse (1924) with Dennis James

January 23, 2011, Sunday, 6:30 p.m. -- Hamlet (1920) with Larry Shanker

January 24, 2011, Monday, 7:00 p.m. -- Dr. Zhivago (1965)

January 27, 2011, Thursday -- IU Cinema Dedication

January 28, 2011, Friday, 7:00 p.m. -- My Darling Clementine (1946)

January 29, 2011, Saturday, 3:00 p.m. -- Rio Grande (1950)

January 29, 2011, Saturday, 6:30 p.m. -- The Searchers (1956)

January 29, 2011, Saturday, 9:30 p.m. -- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

January 30, 2011, Sunday, 3:00 p.m. -- Scientific Program (2010)

January 30, 2011, Sunday, 6:30 p.m. -- Brief Encounter (1945)

January 31, 2011, Monday, 7:00 p.m. -- Great Expectations (1946)

Complete spring semester calendar

Pre-opening press day Nov. 10

A place for premieres

A place for high-tech cinema

A place for live musical scores

A place for innovation

A place for academics

A place for archives

A place with a purpose

CFP: New essays for collection on Nicholas Ray

2010-09-24T15:17:00.004-04:00

Going Home: Essays on Nicholas Ray in Cinema Culture
Editors: Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel

We are currently accepting proposals for a new collection of essays on Nicholas Ray, tentatively titled Going Home: Essays on Nicholas Ray in Cinema Culture. A university press has shown an interest in this collection.

Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris once put it, but unlike his senior colleagues in Hollywood such as Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director relatively ignored by academic film scholarship. Marking the event of his 100th birthday, this new anthology of critical, historical, and theoretical perspectives on his films and work aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director, evinced by the upcoming restoration of Ray’s final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for a re-release at the 2011 Venice International Film Festival. Additionally, the Harvard Film Archive hosted a Ray retrospective earlier this summer, Ray’s daughter Nikka is writing a memoir, author Patrick McGilligan is completing a new biography, and film archivist Michael Chaiken is at work on the sale of Ray material with New York rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz.

The aim of this collection, therefore, is to demonstrate to academic film studies the ongoing vitality of Ray’s cinema, to reassess his career in the new millennium from different methodological approaches, and to consider his place within film culture at large. Essays in the book may touch on one of the following topics, but others are welcome (historical approaches are of particular interest):

• New readings of Ray’s classic films: They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1951), The Lusty Men (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Bigger Than Life (1956), Bitter Victory (1957)

• New readings of relatively ignored Ray films: Hot Blood (1955), Wind Across the Everglades (1958), Party Girl (1958), The Savage Innocents (1960), King of Kings (1961)

• Defenses of Ray’s disvalued or forgotten films: A Woman’s Secret (1949), Knock on Any Door (1949), Born to Be Bad (1950), Flying Leathernecks (1951), Run for Cover (1955), The True Story of Jesse James (1957), 55 Days at Peking (1963)

• Reevaluations, reexaminations, and reinvestments in older frameworks familiar from earlier writing on Ray (the ongoing vitality of auteurism and mise en scène criticism to contemporary film studies and Ray scholarship, for example)

• Ray’s career in media other than film: architecture, theater, radio, and television

• The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a ‘Hollywood auteur’

• Ray in the studios, with producers John Houseman and Howard Hughes; Ray out of the studios, with producers Robert Lord, Paul Graetz, Stuart Schulberg, and Samuel Bronston

• Ray’s abandoned projects

• The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s

• Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation/identification/difference

• Screening social class

• Space: rural vs. sub/urban America

• Place: Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.

• Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of ‘the rebel’

• Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion

• Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can’t Go Home Again (1973-1976); The Janitor (1974); Marco (1978)

• Film performance, stardom, and its aesthetic/social/historical contexts: Ray’s collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame, Robert Mitchum, Natalie Wood, James Cagney, and others

• Ray in film studies/film pedagogy; Ray as pedagogue

• Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on post-classical filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders

• What happened to Nicholas Ray?

• Other topics are imaginable and welcome.

Send 300-500 word abstract and a short author bio to Steven Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com); please copy both of us on the email.

Deadline for abstracts: December 1, 2010.
Deadline for final essays: November 1, 2011

Steven Rybin, Ph.D.
School of Liberal Arts
Georgia Gwinnett College
1000 University Center Ln.
Lawrenceville, GA 30043

Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405

From the cinematheque vaults: The Autobiography of a "Jeep"

2010-09-21T22:27:00.005-04:00

Those of you who know me know I'm a "Jeep guy," so you can imagine how delighted I was to come across this 1943 propaganda short produced by the United States Office of War Information about the role of the Jeep in America's war effort. (The title turned up when I was reading about Ray's brief tenure with John Houseman's Overseas Branch of the OWI). Curiously, the origins of the name "Jeep" still remain ambiguous: this documentary tells us that it comes from the initials GP for "General Purpose" vehicle, a term used by the military; other legends suggest it was named after Eugene the Jeep (that's him to the right), a magical character immortalized in the Popeye cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s who could "go anywhere." At any rate, the film is one of the most salient examples of the Jeep's appeal to wartime popular culture in the U. S.

City Lights/Underground Fall Schedule

2010-09-19T11:47:00.006-04:00

City Lights & Underground Experimental Film Series

Bi-weekly 16mm screenings of Classic Hollywood and international art cinema (presented by City Lights) and experimental film (presented by Underground) held Fridays at 7 PM in the IU Radio-Television Building Room 251. All films are free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Department of Communication & Culture.

City Lights
September 10: Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

Underground
September 17: The Sargossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, 1965)

City Lights
September 24: The Italian (Reginald Baker, 1915)

Underground
October 1: White Lines and The Fever: The Death of DJ Junebug (Travis Senger, 2010); Dancing Outlaw (Jacob Young, 1991)

City Lights
October 8: Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961)

Underground
October 15: Anvil: The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi, 2009)

City Lights
October 29: Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

City Lights
November 5: The Letter (William Wyler, 1940)

Underground
November 12: What the Water Said, Parts 1-3 (David Gatten, 1997); Print Generation (J. J. Murphy, 1974)

City Lights
December 3: The 49th Parallel (Michael Powell, 1941)

"Boardwalk Empire" premieres this Sun. at 9 p.m.

2010-09-17T21:27:00.007-04:00

I'm practically considering getting HBO just for Boardwalk Empire (although having recently finished the second season of True Blood on DVD, I must admit I'm hooked on the "V"). The Prohibition-era gangster drama set in Atlantic City was created by screenwriter-producer Terence Winter of Sopranos fame and the pilot was directed by executive producer Martin Scorsese. Steve Buscemi stars.

Forget all the heavy-hitters involved -- this trailer speaks for itself. Commence drooling.

A comprehensive reference to film production in the Arab Middle East

2010-09-17T06:51:00.001-04:00

In this landmark dictionary, Roy Armes details the scope and diversity of filmmaking across the Arab Middle East. Listing more than 550 feature films by more than 250 filmmakers, and short and documentary films by another 900 filmmakers, this volume covers the film production in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and the Gulf States. An introduction by Armes locates film and filmmaking traditions in the region from early efforts in the silent era to state-funded productions by isolated filmmakers and politically engaged documentarians. Part 1 lists biographical information about the filmmakers and their feature films. Part 2 details key feature films from the countries represented. Part 3 indexes feature-film titles in English and French with details about the director, date, and country of origin.

Roy Armes is Professor Emeritus of Film at Middlesex University. He has published widely on world cinema and is author of Dictionary of African Filmmakers (IUP, 2008).

Distribution: World
Publication date: 8/2/2010
Format: cloth 216 pages, 7 x 10 x .8125
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35518-8

More information here.

"Somewhere" wins top prize at Venice

2010-09-12T12:18:00.006-04:00

The 67th annual International Venice Film Festival closed yesterday and was presided over by Quentin Tarantino.

Sofia Coppola's Somewhere won the Golden Lion and premieres in the U. S. this December.

I've always had mixed feelings about Sofia as a writer-director, so I'm actually more excited about the film that opened the fest, which is also slated for a stateside Dec. premiere: Black Swan. Not that I don't have my reservations about director Darren Aronofsky, either, but I'm just in love with this trailer:

Films premiering in competition

Winners

Jurors

Video

Roger Ebert Comes Home

2010-09-10T14:56:00.007-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I bid a sentimental adieu to At the Movies with Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott, successors to Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. The show, which underwent a series of title changes, had aired on Disney-ABC Domestic Television since 1986. Roger Ebert just announced that the show will return in January 2011 on PBS -- where it all began with Siskel and Ebert in 1975 at WTTW Chicago. It was first called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, then it quickly became Sneak Previews, and today it remains highest rated entertainment show in PBS history. Under the title Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, the show will continue the same old programming format (complete with "thumbs up"/"thumbs down") as co-hosts Christy Lemire of the Associated Press and Elvis Mitchell of National Public Radio review new films together each week. Additionally, Los Angeles blogger and film critic Kim Morgan (a fellow noir aficionado) and San Francisco attorney Omar Moore, who edits The Popcorn Reel, will serve as correspondents. According to Ebert's press release, the show will also "expand into coverage of New Media, special segments on classics, on-demand viewing and genres, and an extended website." Ebert, who will produce the show with his wife Chaz, plans to make appearances on every episode to review classic, overlooked, and new films with the aid of a computer voice. Here are some excerpts from the pilot taped earlier this summer:

I'm looking forward to seeing where the program goes (although I will miss Phillips and Scott) and I'm delighted to see the tradition live on.

When movie-making and gaming collide

2010-09-06T21:56:00.003-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game Industries

By Robert Alan Brookey

For years, major film studios have licensed products related to their most popular films; video game spin-offs have become an important part of these licensing practices. Where blockbuster films are concerned, the video game release has become the rule rather than the exception. In Hollywood Gamers, Robert Alan Brookey explores the business conditions and technological developments that have facilitated the convergence of the film and video game industries. Brookey treats video games as rhetorical texts and critically examines several games to determine how specific industrial conditions are manifest in game design. Among the games (and films) discussed are Lord of the Rings, The Godfather, Spider-Man, and Iron Man.

Robert Alan Brookey is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northern Illinois University and author of Reinventing the Male Homosexual (IUP, 2002).

Distribution: World
Publication date: 8/5/2010
Format: paper 188 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 x .5625
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22231-2

More information here .

"Revisioning 007" available now

2010-09-01T06:55:00.004-04:00

Back in 2007, while I was working on my M.A. at Northern Illinois University, I helped edit this collection that my colleague, mentor, and friend Christoph Lindner was putting together on Casino Royale. I contributed an essay titled "The History of Casino Royale on (and off) the Screen" that looks at the film in relationship to the copyright controversy surrounding Ian Fleming's original novel and its previous adaptations in different media.

The anthology was originally scheduled for publication in 2009, but a lot has happened since the book went to press: Christoph, then my advisor at NIU, is now Professor and Chair of English Literature at the University of Amsterdam; I'm presently finishing up coursework in my Ph.D. program at Indiana University. After a series of unavoidable, financially-related delays at Wallflower, Revisioning 007: James Bond and Casino Royale is now available in the U.K. through Wallflower and in the U.S. through Columbia University Press. Congrats, Christoph, and to the talented group of international, interdisciplinary scholars who took part in the project: Brian Baker, Douglas A. Cunningham, Douglas L. Howard, Audrey D. Johnson, Richard Gabri, Monika Gehlawat, René Glas, Joyce Goggin, Keren Omry, Jason Sperb, and Estella Tincknell.

Publisher Description:
Revisioning 007 is a lively collection of new essays on the reinvention of James Bond in the 2006 film Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig in his first appearance as Agent 007. Treating Casino Royale as a case study in popular film culture and as a significant turning point in the 007 series, the book offers innovative readings of the film and its inter-relations with the Bond franchise, the culture industry and recent developments in cinema, society and world politics. Essay topics range from the analysis of 007’s masochism, voyeurism and hyper-mobility, to the examination of the film’s testicular torture scene, the links between international politics and high-stakes gambling and the changing role of the secret agent in a post-9/11 world order.

IU Cinema Opens January 2011

2010-08-29T23:20:00.002-04:00

Although originally scheduled for the fall, the grand opening of the IU Cinema has been moved to January 2011 in order to allow time for Sony Electrics to complete the necessary installations. I will be writing for the new IU Cinema blog soon (in addition to maintaining Caméra-Stylo), so I thought I'd go ahead and share this press release here from Jon Vickers, Director of the IU Cinema:

The highly anticipated Indiana University Cinema will open in late January of 2011 rather than this fall as initially planned, said IU Cinema Director Jon Vickers.

The extended timeline will allow Sony Electronics additional time to install the highest standards of 35 mm, 16 mm, 2K and 4K DCI Digital Cinema projection, making the IU Cinema a THX-certified, state-of-the-art facility and one of about 10 such cinemas on a college campus in the United States.

“The additional time was necessary to ensure that the highest equipment and installation standards are firmly in place,” Vickers said. “Once installation is complete, our testing, tuning and certification of the systems, along with the training of our staff, will provide the best cinematic experience for our patrons -- even better than we initially imagined. The extension also gives additional time to develop an even grander and more exciting slate of opening activities,” Vickers said.

Messer Construction Co. of Indianapolis oversaw refurbishment of the building, which once housed the University Theatre, also known as “Little Theatre” and home to a flourishing campus tradition of drama and performance.

A groundbreaking in October 2009 began a renovation process that will culminate with a space for film festivals and premieres as well as areas for rehearsal, performance, a dance studio and offices for the IU Department of Theatre and Drama.

As one of just a few THX-certified theaters housed at a university in the country, the IU Cinema will join an elite group of world-class film institutions across the nation. Vickers sees potential for the IU Cinema to become a top-tier contemporary with theaters that include the American Film Institute Silver Theatre, Billy Wilder Theatre, Cary Grant Theater, Gene Siskel Film Center and Samuel Goldwyn Theatre.

In addition to housing several panels of the recently restored Indiana Murals by Thomas Hart Benton (initially displayed at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair), the IU Cinema will provide a space for the university's substantial holdings in film, including those of the David S. Bradley Film Collection, the Black Film Center/Archive, the archives of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, the Lilly Library and the Department of Communication and Culture. Rare prints from archives and museums around the world and new films by national and international directors will also be screened.

If it plays in Peoria...

2010-08-26T10:37:00.007-04:00

Get Low, the new Depression-era comedy starring Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been making its way to select cities throughout the month of August (unfortunately, not including Bloomington). It opens in Peoria, IL tomorrow, and I felt I had to give a shout-out to my home town.

Shot in 24 days for $7 million, the film was directed by first-time feature filmmaker Aaron Schneider, native of Dunlap, IL (part of the Peoria metropolitan area). Schneider won an Oscar for his 2003 short Two Soldiers starring Ron Perlman, an adaptation of the Faulkner story, and I had the pleasure of interviewing both Schneider and Perlman at a Peoria screening of the film when I was home from college one summer, interning at the now defunct Peoria Times-Observer. Fun fact: Schneider and I had the same English teacher in junior high school.

R.I.P. "At the Movies"

2010-08-23T11:32:00.010-04:00

I got a little misty-eyed last weekend when At the Movies with Michael Phillips and A. O. Scott aired its final episode, including a tribute to the show back when it featured those irascible, inimitable, and always entertaining Chicago newspapermen Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Evolving from a movie review program on PBS in the mid-1970s to a syndicated series in the mid-1980s distributed by Disney-ABC Domestic Television, the show has since undergone different titles and hosts, and its history over the last two years has been especially rocky. Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and Scott of The New York Times took over in September of 2009, signaling a silver age for At the Movies -- and, if you ask me, it was never better. On March 24, 2010, Disney announced the show's cancellation: "from a business perspective it became clear this weekly, half-hour, broadcast syndication series was no longer sustainable."

I've blogged about recent developments in the show's life here and here. The cultural history and future of film reviewing was a central research interest of mine, coincidentally (or maybe not coincidentally) paralleling some of those behind-the-scenes shake-ups at At the Movies. More broadly, the print vs. online "crisis in criticism" has become the subject of an endlessly fascinating and, from certain voices, quite a productive conversation, one in which I enjoyed taking part with colleagues at SCMS last year. As much as there is still to say on this topic, I got burned-out on it and wound up returning to postwar Hollywood, my old stomping ground, where I'll happily reside for the remainder of my graduate work. However, I'm eager to see where this conversation continues among professional critics, independent writers online, and media scholars, and I'm sure the cancellation of At the Movies will spur discussion about criticism at the intersections of print media, television, and digital technologies.

This is an exciting time for online film reviewing, contrary to what the more traditional party line says about the "death of film criticism," while wonderful magazines with more academic leanings like Cahiers du cinema, CineAction, Cineaste, Film Comment, FilmInt., and Sight and Sound are still surviving the new millennium, managing to co-habitate with the Internet. For example, Film Quarterly, published by the University of California Press, remains the gold standard for writing about film and exists in print form, but makes select articles available online to download for free. Readers will soon be able to subscribe to an online only version for less than half of the print subscription rate and receive access to all issues dating back to 2001. At the same time, I'm saddened to see that the sort of critical "talk" provided by At the Movies no longer has a place on network television, and whether that format can be resurrected by new media has yet to be determined. For the past eight years or so, I usually watched episodes of At the Movies on the show's website, so I'd love it if the show could go on it that venue.

At the Movies in all of its various iterations became something of a punching bag among film academics, who grew up reading more "in-depth," more "authoritative," and less "commercially-oriented" film criticism in the high-minded magazines mentioned above. But we're really comparing apples and oranges here. It seems to me that the same sort of elitism and nostalgia informing such a position is also at work in the accusation that online reviewing has bastardized film criticism. At the Movies has been harangued for reducing film criticism to silly "thumbs up"/"thumbs down" conclusions and superficial analysis -- and yet to me those limitations seem bound up more in the constraints of the half-hour TV programming format, not in Siskel and Ebert's critical acumen. After all, Ebert always urged people to look past "the thumbs" and the star ratings, and instead listen to the debate and read the full-length reviews.

For the generation of moviegoers like me who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, Siskel and Ebert brought attention to new Hollywood releases and documentary, independent, and international films to which we might not otherwise have been exposed. On the series finale, Phillips reminisces how working in a factory in 1980, he talked to people who saw their first subtitled film because of Siskel and Ebert. My experiences with the show are fairly similar: after stumbling upon Siskel & Ebert as a junior high school student, I discovered that it was okay to take movies seriously and talk about them critically, and I was introduced to some of the films that, well, got me into film studies. Before I wanted to be a film professor, I wanted to be a film reviewer (thanks to a gig at my college paper, I got to try my hand at that). This mainstreaming of criticism, Phillips and Scott argue, widened the exposure and appeal of less mainstream films beyond newspaper reviews. Further, Scott adds that Siskel and Ebert's democratizing of film reviewing opened it up for "the noise and argumentation of the Internet, where you have a hundred flowers blooming in angry contention."

If critics can bring people together to argue in a collegial spirit about the cinema, does it matter where that dialogue takes place...or in what direction their thumb points? And if critics can teach academics anything, it's that we shouldn't be afraid to make our evaluations explicit in our historical and theoretical research. Jim Naremore hit the nail on the head when he wrote that the best writing on film is neither devoid of value judgments nor a consumer's guide to the movies, but lies in-between those extremes, "where a certain historical perspective and openness to experiment are joined with the manifest love of the thing one is discussing. I don't think it's possible to write any kind of film history, theory or criticism without engaging in value judgments on some level" (120).* Not that we should only write about the films we love, but we should come to terms with the implicit evaluations that are always already there in our writing. Siskel and Ebert sometimes played the role of contrarians and provocateurs, sometimes reactionary curmudgeons, sometimes friends of the industry, sometimes the good, PC liberals, and most often smart, impassioned cinephiles. Above everything, they just wanted to talk about the cinema, and isn't that all what we're here for, too? I can't think of a better pair to carry the torch than Phillips and Scott. There's something fitting about this post being my last word on contemporary film reviewing for a while, and also my last word on At the Movies, the show that turned my head in this direction in the first place. Here's hoping the balcony doesn't stay closed for good, no matter in what medium it reopens.

*Martin, Adrian, and James Naremore. "The Future of Academic Film Study." Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia. Eds. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin. London: BFI Publishing, 2008. 119-132.

From the cinematheque vaults: The Stranger

2010-08-18T14:29:00.014-04:00

As fascinating as it would have been to see Orson Welles take on Camus's classic work of existentialist fiction, The Stranger (1946) is not that film. A rare box-office hit for the director, it is, however, one of Welles's greatest achievements . It also remains halfway forgotten in the Citizen Kane (1941) / Magnificent Ambersons (1942) / Touch of Evil (1958) triple-threat that most firmly and popularly cemented his reputation as a Hollywood auteur. Not that those films are undeserving of their place in the canon (in fact, my colleagues and I are showing our Intro. to Media students Kane and Evil for the auteurism unit this fall), but The Stranger is certainly a small noir masterpiece that holds its own against anything Welles ever did. Along with his equally impressive and underrated follow-up The Lady from Shanghai (1947), it further demonstrates how Welles (like Hitchcock) kept one foot in the door of classical cinema and the other edging towards modernist, perhaps even especially in this more traditional postwar genre fare. Welles plays Franz Kindler, a Nazi war criminal hiding out in Harper, Connecticut, who poses as a prep school teacher and marries one of the locals (Loretta Young), only to find federal agent Edward G. Robinson snooping around his doorstep.

...the monstrous in classic and modern horror

2010-08-18T14:04:00.002-04:00

New book in Film Studies from Indiana University faculty:

The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires, Exterminating Zombies (New Edition)

By Gregory A. Waller, University of Illinois Press

With a legacy stretching back into legend and folklore, the vampire in all its guises haunts the film and fiction of the twentieth century and remains the most enduring of all the monstrous threats that roam the landscapes of horror. In The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller shows why this creature continues to fascinate us and why every generation reshapes the story of the violent confrontation between the living and the undead to fit new times.

Examining a broad range of novels, stories, plays, films, and made-for-television movies, Waller focuses upon a series of interrelated texts: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897); several film adaptations of Stoker's novel; F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922); Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954); Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot (1975); Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979); and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979). All of these works, Waller argues, speak to our understanding and fear of evil and chaos, of desire and egotism, of slavish dependence and masterful control. This paperback edition of The Living and the Undead features a new preface in which Waller positions his analysis in relation to the explosion of vampire and zombie films, fiction, and criticism in the past twenty-five years.

Gregory A. Waller is professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930.

More information here.

Lebowski Studies at Carmichael's

2010-07-28T11:57:00.009-04:00

Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, co-editors of and contributors to The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies, appeared at Carmichael's Bookstore in Louiseville, KY just before the 9th annual Lebowski Fest (July 16-17) to discuss their collection, published last year by IU Press. IUB's own Jonathan Elmer and Joshua Kates, both professors in the Department of English, also wrote essays. Click here for the Lebowski Podcast.

The anthology was a publication of the proceedings at a 2006 symposium hosted by the University of Louiseville's Department of English during the 5th annual Lebowski Fest. On a 2008 episode of the Lebowski Podcast, Ed and Aaron spoke about the event and their book project.

***

Edward P. Comentale is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde, and editor (with Stephen Watt and Skip Willman) of Ian Fleming and James Bond (IUP, 2005) and (with Andrzej Gasiorek) of T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism.

Aaron Jaffe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.

[Reminder] CFP: Auteur as Citizen: Nicholas Ray and New Directions in Director Studies

2010-07-25T09:42:00.003-04:00

Prospective Panel: Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 10-13, 2011
Ritz Carlton Hotel, New Orleans, LA

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, August 8, 2010 11:59 PM EDT

Respondent: Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University and author of In a Lonely Place (BFI Publishing, 1993).

Submissions are still welcome for essays that consider the relationship between film authorship and citizenship with respect to Nicholas Ray, director of They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Bigger Than Life (1956).

Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris put it, and yet unlike his senior colleagues Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director largely ignored by academic film scholarship on Hollywood. Marking his 100th birthday, this interdisciplinary panel aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director: the Harvard Film Archive is currently hosting a Ray retrospective; his widow Susan Ray is in the progress of restoring his final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for re-release at the 2011 Venice International Film Festival; film archivist Michael Chaiken is at work on the sale of Ray material with New York rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz; Ray’s daughter Nikka is completing a memoir; and author Patrick McGilligan is writing a new biography.

Rather than taking a traditional auteurist reassessment based on style and “personal vision” alone, we want to reframe film authorship studies to explore the communal responsibility and public life of the director at the intersections of auteurism and civic discourse. The tensions between individuality and community, and rebellion and conformism, both in Ray’s films and in his reputation working in the Classical Hollywood system, make him a representative case study in this regard. Through this socio-historical lens, we want to investigate more broadly how both the biographical legends and aesthetic practices of directors articulate civic identity in ethical, political, cultural, and national contexts.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

• Ray’s background in architecture, radio, and socialist theater

• The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a “Hollywood auteur”

• The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s

• Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation / identification

• Screening social class

• Space: rural vs. (sub)urban America

• Place: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.

• Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of “the rebel”

• Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion

• Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can't Go Home Again (1973-76), The Janitor (1974) and Marco (1978)

• Film performance, stardom, and its social contexts: Ray’s collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, and others

• Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders

Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Steve Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15, 2010. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2011 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/

The Dreamers of the Dreams

2010-07-20T11:28:00.011-04:00

No, Christopher Nolan's Inception is not the greatest movie ever made, contrary to what the early reviews and advanced buzz indicated. But following its $100 million ad campaign that included such intriguing trailers and posters, along with quite brilliant viral marketing, a part of me expected it to be just that. As Ben Fritz of the Los Angeles Times points out, Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures dropped $160 million on a production that is neither a sequel nor based on preexisting source material, releasing it in mid-July, an especially risky move to take for such a mysteriously premised film. After the juggernaut success of Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), though, how could it lose? Nolan has become a favorite young director of his generation for a lot of people (myself included) and the publicity never let us forget that he labored over this script for a decade.

The film grossed more than $60 million this weekend, but it also generated something of a critical backlash, which should only fuel the word-of-mouth attention it’s been receiving. Both the fans and the detractors make fair (as well as unfair) assessments, but rather than heralding the film as a new sci/fi masterpiece or quibbling with how it lives up to the hype, I’m hoping reviewers may come to accept the film on its own terms once the dust settles. Inception works best not as a piece of existential science fiction about the nature of dreams and reality, but as an extremely stylish, tightly-constructed crime film. Imagine, if you will, an episode of The Twilight Zone had it been directed by a hard-boiled action auteur like Jules Dassin.

Leonardo Di Caprio, who seems to get more interesting every time we see him, stars as exiled American thief Dominic Cobb, a man deeply wounded by guilt and grief after the death of his wife (played by the always luminous Marion Cotillard). The Cobb character continues Di Caprio’s hot streak of brooding, psychosexually obsessive anti-heroes in the throes of a masculine crisis, most recently as the haunted federal marshall in this year's Shutter Island. Here, Di Caprio takes the role to even darker places. Cobb’s heists are not the run-of-the-mill safecracking gigs—he works with a gang of specialists to infiltrate people’s dreams and steal their secret ideas.

When a wealthy Japanese businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires him to plant an idea instead, Cobb is granted the opportunity to return to America to be reunited with his children. It’ll be One Last Job. The target of the “inception” is the heir (Cillian Murphy) to Saito’s corporate rival (Pete Postlethwaite), who can dismantle his father’s company with the proper unconscious persuasion. Teamed with his reliable lieutenant (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Cobb then solicits a chemist to induce the dream (Dileep Rao) and a “forger” to shift identities once inside the dream (Tom Hardy, who at one point turns into Tom Berenger!). Under the recommendation of his mentor and father-in-law (Michael Caine), Cobb also recruits an “architect” to design the dream (Ellen Paige). I’m not giving anything away by noting how the film eschews a conventional twist ending. Having said that, I will tell you that the ambiguous final shot does ask one to reconsider the preceding events in smarter and more compelling ways than most “misdirection” films of late (come talk to me if you want my theory).

There are all sorts of surreal and original set pieces among the most spectacular things I’ve seen on the big screen: a Paris street folds over on itself like some kind of Ouroboros; a hotel corridor turns 360 degrees, leaving characters to tumble and free-fall in zero gravity; labyrinthine urban spaces explode, implode, and flood around dreaming characters as their dreams begin to “collapse.” Those moments essentially punctuate the film’s centerpieces, sequences of breathless action, which has always been Nolan’s comfort zone, and the action throughout Inception is as good as anything he’s ever directed. In typical Nolan fashion, the CGI is reduced to a minimum and as much as possible is done in-camera.

If anything, perhaps the film is just a little too slick for its own good, at times so perfectly controlled to the point of mechanical, which suffocates some of the emotional impact in the end. The common criticism is that for a film attempting to simulate a dream state, there is too much rational explanation, too much action-driven narrative logic, and not enough messy surrealism. I take that point, and, admittedly, Nolan does lean on his Freudian Cliffs Notes. Yet given that the dreams in the world of the film are to some degree meticulously “constructed” as artifice themselves, it doesn’t seem entirely right to expect David Lynch’s fragmented and hallucinatory sensibility of the unconscious run amok. Moreover, the film is primarily a caper movie, and makes little pretention to suggest otherwise. Criticisms over the caper formula reflect the middlebrow bias that genre films built out of intertextual archetypes cannot be art. Umberto Eco argues in his famous essay on Casablanca (1942), “When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion” (11).

A pseudo-intellectual shoot-‘em-up like The Matrix (1999) has nothing on this absorbing trip through the meta-filmic looking-glass. Underneath that flashy exterior of a blockbuster colossus beats the heart of cool, old-school noir, cleverly conceived, well-toned, and executed with the utmost formal sophistication. Inception may be more concerned with character psychologies and visceral affect of mise-en-scene than with thematic profundity, social messages, or a coherent philosophy. However, like the cult classics of pulp fiction, it also stretches beyond its moody and atmospheric suspense to touch the edges of larger, heady ideas. Quoting Eco again, “To become cult, a movie should not display a central idea but many. It should not exhibit a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on in and because of its glorious incoherence” (4). Some critics are calling it nothing more than a skillfully made genre film at best, but I’d call it nothing less. In contemporary Hollywood, isn’t that the only stuff that dreams are made of, anyway?

Rating: **** (out of ****)

Film and race at the end of apartheid

2010-07-12T08:09:00.004-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Cinema in a Democratic South Africa: The Race for Representation

By Lucia Saks

Lucia Saks uses South African cinema as a lens through which to view cultural changes resulting from the end of apartheid in 1994. She examines how media transformed the meaning of race and nation during this period and argues that, as apartheid was disbanded and new racial constructs allowed, South Africa quickly sought a new mode of representation as a way to distance itself from the violence and racism of the half-century prior, as well as to demonstrate stability amid social disruption. This rapid search for a new way to identify and portray itself is what Saks refers to as the race for representation. She contextualizes this race in terms of South African history, the media, apartheid, sexuality, the economy, community, early South African cinema, and finally speculates about the future of "counter-cinema" in present-day South Africa.

Lucia Saks is Assistant Professor in the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Series: New Directions in National Cinemas

Distribution: World

Publication date: 6/25/2010

Format: paper 272 pages, 27 b&w illus., 6.125 x 9.25 x .75ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22186-5

More information here.

From the cinematheque vaults: A Star is Born

2010-07-07T22:33:00.013-04:00

Although it may not share the classic reputation its 1954 Judy Garland musical remake has enjoyed, this powerful melodrama remains a key text in the lore of Hollywood’s reflexive image construction, its project of self-critique and self-mythologizing as the American dream factory. Janet Gaynor plays a wide-eyed innocent from North Dakota, who travels to Hollywood aspiring to—what else?—become a star. When she hooks up with aging actor Fredric March, her career begins to take off while he slides further into alcoholism, depression, and obscurity. There’s a harsh commentary in this film on fame, ambition, and the making of modern celebrity, but it’s told in the celebratory style of the industry’s grand old stock in trade. Produced by David O. Selznick and directed by William Wellman, with superb use of early Technicolor, A Star is Born (1937) is as entertaining as it is ambivalent and contradictory.

Note: Nicholas Ray retrospective at Harvard this summer

2010-06-23T08:35:00.007-04:00

The Harvard Film Archive will host a Nicholas Ray retrospective titled Nicholas Ray: Hollywood's Last Romantic from Friday July 9 to Sunday August 8. Ray's widow Susan will introduce Bigger Than Life (1956), the opening film in the series, on July 9 at 7 p.m. More information on the series here.

Information on the archive, directions, admission, etc. here.

Read Chris Fujiwara's essay in The Boston Phoenix here.

Perfect timing, no?

Beyond Infinity

2010-06-21T21:37:00.008-04:00

They did it again. Pixar had the insurmountable task of following the first two Toy Stories (1995, 1999), those movie miracles that set the almost unreachable standards for mainstream animated cinema in the digital era. Further still, the team had to follow Wall-E (2008) and Up (2009), not only the studio’s greatest achievements to date, but two of the all-time masterpieces of movie animation. Directed by Lee Unkrich and written by Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Unkrich, Toy Story 3 is the rare sequel that rounds out an instant-classic trilogy. So joyous in its vision of childlike imagination, yet so subtle and intelligent in its moments of adult heartbreak, it renders those earlier points of comparison irrelevant, totally immersing us in its beautifully textured world. Only at the end does the wonder of it all sink in on an intellectual level, and we realize how good they got us.

By now, I think most people know the premise: Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), Buzz (voiced by Tim Allen), and the rest of the toys are accidentally thrown out with the trash—instead of stored in the attic where they should be—as Andy prepares to move away to college. When they escape into a donation box en route to Sunnyside Daycare Center, they meet a cohort of other “abandoned” toys, led by an avuncular Teddy Bear named Lotso, as in Lots O’ Huggin’ Bear (voiced by Ned Beatty). Looks like a swell place to retire, until Andy’s toys receive a violent initiation from a room full of screaming, drooling toddlers, who give ominous new connotations to the term “playtime.” To our heroes’ shock, that’s nothing compared to the caste-based prison society Lotso runs when the lights go off, much like the warden from The Shawshank Redemption (1994). If this sounds a bit intense for a family film, that’s because it is—and God bless Pixar all the more for it! Not to give anything away, but among the exhilarating action set pieces includes a sequence in a garbage incinerator in which Woody and the gang quite literally face the thresholds of hell.

Make no mistake, though, the film is as funny as it is dramatic. In addition to Hanks and Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, and Estelle Harris all return in top (vocal) comedic form to play their beloved toy characters, with Blake Clark nicely filling-in for the late Jim Varney as Slinky Dog. Newcomer Michael Keaton gets some of the biggest laughs as a sexually ambivalent Ken doll leftover from the 1970s, making moves for Jodi Benson’s Barbie. Although some of the gags feel a little recycled, the film has wit and charm in spades, showing off the triteness of the usual CGI-cartoon-of-the-week.

Alongside Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Toy Story 3 is one of a mere two summer movies in which I had the slightest interest. However, if I don’t see another good film until the fall, I won’t complain. With its $30 million budget and record-breaking weekend gross of more than over $110 million, this is a commercial behemoth to be sure. Endlessly surprising and inventive, wholly original, and deeply felt, this is also what Pixar does best. As a worthy addition to the studio’s canon, it’s both a technical dazzler for the senses and a moving reflection on what it means to be human. It’s also the best film of the year so far.

Rating: **** (out of ****)

Personal Footnote: Andrea and I spent the weekend in the Chicagoland area, where we saw Toy Story 3 in 3D with our fabulous friends Dave and Amanda Frank at the Hollywood Blvd. Cinema, Bar, & Eatery in Woodridge. For a moviegoing experience out of a Hollywood cinephile’s dreams, it’s definitely worth visiting if you haven’t already.

"We Can't Go Home Again" Premieres Next Year in Venice

2010-06-17T08:38:00.007-04:00

Check out Patricia Cohen's wonderful article in yesterday's New York Times on Nicholas Ray, "Reclaiming Causes of a Filmmaking Rebel."

Susan Ray, Nick's widow, is preparing a new finished print of We Can't Go Home Again (1976) for a premiere at the Venice International Film Festival next year to celebrate his centenary. While teaching at the State University of New York at Binghampton, he made this experimental and autobiographical film with his students, involving the projection of multiple Super 8 and 16 mm images on a single screen, which were then re-shot with a 35 mm camera. An early version was screened at Cannes in 1973, but he continued tweaking the film right up until his death in 1979.

Other exciting news: The Harvard Film Archive will hold a Ray retrospective from July 9-August 9, and film archivist Michael Chaiken is currently working on the sale of Ray material with New York rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz.

CFP: Auteur as Citizen: Nicholas Ray and New Directions in Director Studies

2010-06-14T22:00:00.001-04:00

Prospective Panel:
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 10-13, 2011
Ritz Carlton Hotel, New Orleans, LA

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, August 8, 2010 11:59 PM EDT

Essay submissions sought that consider the relationship between film authorship and citizenship with respect to Nicholas Ray, director of They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Bigger Than Life (1956).

Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris put it, and yet unlike his senior colleagues Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director largely ignored by academic film scholarship. Marking his 100th birthday, this interdisciplinary panel aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director: his widow Susan Ray is currently restoring his final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for re-release in 2012; his daughter Nikka Ray is at work on a memoir; and writer Patrick McGilligan is completing a new biography. Rather than taking a traditional auteurist reassessment based on style and “personal vision” alone, we want to reframe authorship studies to explore the communal responsibility and public life of the director at the intersections of auteurism and civic discourse. The tensions between individuality and community, and rebellion and conformism, both in Ray’s films and in his reputation working in the Classical Hollywood system, make him a representative case study in this regard. Through this lens, we want to investigate more broadly how both the biographical legends and aesthetic practices of directors articulate civic identity in ethical, social, political, cultural, and national contexts.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

•Ray’s background in architecture, radio, and socialist theater

•The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a “Hollywood auteur”

•The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s

•Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation / identification

•Screening social class

•Space: rural vs. (sub)urban America

•Place: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.

•Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of “the rebel”

•Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion

•Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can't Go Home Again (1973-76), The Janitor (1974), and Marco (1978)

•Film performance, stardom, and its social contexts: Ray's collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, and others

•Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders

Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Steve Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15, 2010. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2011 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/

Family Ties

2010-06-14T21:35:00.009-04:00

Canadian-American writer-director Vincenzo Natali is best known for the low-budget cult thriller Cube (1997), a film I never appreciated as much as a lot of people, and, despite its marketing as mainstream sci/fi-horror, his new movie Splice is destined for that film’s same niche fanbase. Easily the weirdest summer flick of 2011—although Marmaduke might be a strong contender—Splice seems almost review-proof: it’s a film I would recommend to those with offbeat tastes (I’m glad I saw it myself) and yet I can’t say I particularly liked it. Folks expecting something along the lines of Species (1995) will no doubt go home disappointed; Natali’s eccentric monster movie is more like Parenthood (1989) directed by David Cronenberg.

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play Clive and Elsa, a couple of hipster scientists working for a shadowy pharmaceutical company (perhaps a medical branch of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation from the Alien series), whose success in creating hybrid animals leads them secretly to breed a new creature from both animal and human DNA. That’s her rocking the Sinead O’Connor look in the posters (smashingly played by French model, actress, and DJ Delphine Chanéac). Afraid of exposing this illegal and potentially violent “side project,” they decide to raise her on their own. As she develops more humanoid physical and behavioral characteristics, growing and growing smarter by the day, Clive and Elsa take her to Elsa’s abandoned childhood farmhouse. Instead of the generic gorefest promised by the trailers, at that point the film settles into a psychosexual domestic drama of sorts, even better than some recent Hollywood examples at that…but I’ve probably said too much.

Ultimately, Splice is not suspenseful or disturbing enough to work as a horror film, nor is it surreal enough to achieve the level of the bizarre-meets-the bizarre and art-horror experimentation to which it apparently aspires. This is all pretty tame compared to David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1976), for example. Cronenberg also must have been an influence on Natali, but the film’s derivative nature prevents it from sustaining consistent interest beyond its quirky, if not exactly avant-garde style. Comparisons to Lynch and Cronenberg are rather misleading, too, and not only because their films are vastly superior. For all of the timely ideas it dances around regarding gender and body politics, posthumanism, genetic research and corporate science, bioethics, and the twenty-first century nuclear family, Splice doesn’t get as far as one would hope in its intellectual voguing, as it succumbs to a rather conventional final act. What it lacks in a coherent vision, however, it does make up for in a refreshing sense of freakiness. That may not be quite enough for me to call it a good film per se, but it does leave one pleasantly surprised by how bad it isn’t.

Rating: **1/2 (out of ****)

Warner's Film Noir Classics Collection: Volume 5 (Available July 13)

2010-06-07T16:20:00.003-04:00

Warner's Film Noir Classics Collection, the single best noir DVD series, returns with a 5th volume of never-before-released-films. The 8-disc set includes Cornered (1945), Deadline at Dawn (1946), Armored Car Robbery (1950), Backfire (1950), Dial 1119 (1950), The Phoenix City Story (1955), Crime in the Streets (1956), and -- most exciting of all -- Anthony Mann's Desperate (1947).

More information here.

From the cinematheque vaults: Scarlet Street

2010-06-04T16:09:00.014-04:00

I am currently reading Tom Gunning's excellent The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity(London: BFI Press 2000), and felt compelled to revisit the one of the films that not only introduced me to Lang, but also to film noir: Scarlet Street. (As a high school student working at the public library, I had no idea those topics would become obsessions of mine throughout college and graduate school.) This 1945 production reunited Lang with Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea -- the stars of The Woman in the Window, his great noir for RKO one year earlier -- and the film itself was a re-make of Jean Renoir's La Chienne (1931), based on the French novel of the same name by Georges de La Fouchardière. Gunning considers it part of an expressionistic and Freudian noir cycle preceded by Window and followed by Secret Beyond the Door (1948), also starring Bennett, and House by the River (1950). Rather than focusing on the American socio-political topics that informed his earlier Hollywood films, here Lang shifts attention to issues of passion and interiority, in which Gunning claims "a work of art tries either to capture or engender the energy of desire" (286). Gunning goes on to explain, "While works of art form the central theme in this series, the price paid for art--the dialectic of promise and displacement that fuels a commodity culture [...]--skyrockets, as human lives are sacrificed" (286).

In one of his finest performances, Robinson plays a sad-sack New York City cashier, aspiring painter, and hen-pecked husband, who falls for a femme fatale of the nastiest order (Bennett in a classic role). With her sadistic boyfriend (read: pimp), played evilly well by Duryea, she conspires to exploit her new admirer...until he snaps. Although Lang directed the film for Universal, it was also the fist film for his new production company, Diana Productions, which would give him the authorial control he sought after relocating to Hollywood from Germany, where he hoped to develop his personal vision as a director. Apropos of Lang's auteurism, Gunning assesses, "Scarlet Street stands as possibly Lang's Hollywood masterpiece, partly because it offers his most complex view of the process of art-making and the identity of the artist/author" (324). Clash by Night (1952) has always been one of my favorites from Lang's tenure in Hollywood, but I'd have to agree with Gunning -- this bitter portrait of dreams deferred, aching melancholia, and lost, broken souls envisages a self-reflexive critique of art and the modern urban experience that no other wartime melodrama from Hollywood dared to muster.

Gizmo

2010-06-01T14:35:00.007-04:00

We just adopted a 2-month-old Siamese-tabby kitten. I'm quickly realizing that I'm indeed a "cat person."

From the cinematheque vaults: And Then There Were None

2010-05-13T13:05:00.005-04:00

A veritable "who's who" of Hollywood character actors from the 1940s, René Clair's 1945 adaptation of the classic Agatha Christie whodunit is one of the all-time great mystery films. Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Louis Hayward, C. Aubrey Smith, Roland Young, June Duprez, Mischa Auer, Judith Anderson, Richard Haydn, and Queenie Leonard play the ten ill-fated guests at an island mansion, where their elusive host informs them that they have all been guilty of murders for which they were never prosecuted. Trapped together in the old, dark house, each guest is picked-off one by one. The film remains a cornerstone of the genre -- and still a visual stunner, no less -- boasting one of the best ensemble casts of its day and a marvelous screenplay for the actors to chew on.

Thanks for the use of the hall

2010-05-10T15:11:00.007-04:00

About five months ago, I posted a holiday greeting implying to anyone who reads Caméra-Stylo that the blog is not dead, and that after what was sure to be my busiest semester of coursework, I would return to some semblance of regular posting in January and February. Well, my spring semester was almost as busy as the fall, so aside from my movies of the month (which completely slipped my mind in April), the occasional book or DVD release announcement, call for papers, and Bloomington news, you probably noticed the lack of substantial posts. I had every intention of reviewing Shutter Island, The Wolfman, and Alice in Wonderland, all of which I liked fair enough, and I did write up some thoughts about the Oscars in March, but the post disappeared into cyberspace -- no joke!

Having just completed my second year of my Ph.D. program, and feeling good about this past term, I come to you again with the same blogging resolutions for the summer (although I'll be out of town for a bit and won't be able to write up anything on the Cannes Film Festival soon). Thanks to all who keep checking back...I'll try to have more editorial-style pieces in the coming months. This fall will be my last semester of coursework--American Film Melodrama: Gender and Genre; Globalizing Modernism; and an independent study on Nicholas Ray--and then I plan to take my qualifying exam in May, so one of my projects this summer will be drafting my exam statement and reading lists. I may try posting comments on titles that strike me as particularly useful for my research in the hopes that colleagues and other academics out there might point me in the directions of similar resources on film authorship, reputation studies, modernism, Ray, postwar Hollywood, and other current obsessions.

Black women and Hollywood in the pre-Civil Rights era

2010-05-03T10:50:00.003-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960

By Charlene Regester

Nine actresses, from Madame Sul-Te-Wan in Birth of a Nation (1915) to Ethel Waters in Member of the Wedding (1952), are profiled in African American Actresses. Charlene Regester poses questions about prevailing racial politics, on-screen and off-screen identities, and black stardom and white stardom. She reveals how these women fought for their roles as well as what they compromised (or didn't compromise). Regester repositions these actresses to highlight their contributions to cinema in the first half of the 20th century, taking an informed theoretical, historical, and critical approach.

Charlene Regester is Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is co-editor of the Oscar Micheaux Society Newsletter and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Film and Video.

Distribution: World

Publication date: 5/1/2010

Format: paper 440 pages, 14 b&w illus., 6 x 9 x 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22192-6

More information here.

Press Release: IUB Symposium on East German Cinema

2010-04-12T21:59:00.005-04:00

German Cinema from the East Makes Its Mark in Indiana 20 Years after Unification

On April 22-25, 2010, Indiana University - Bloomington will host an international symposium and film festival entitled Making History ReVisible: East German Cinema after Unification.

This event is the grand finale of a 4-month teaching, outreach, and research initiative called The Indiana University DEFA Project: Remembering 1989-90 through East German Films of the Transition, which began in January. Faculty, university students of all levels, and high school students from across the state have been rediscovering the last films of the East German DEFA Film Studios (1946-1992), features made in the tumultuous period of political, social, and cultural upheavel surrounding the end of the Cold War. Indiana University students have run the WENDE FLICKS series, a traveling retrospective from The DEFA Film Library, throughout the semester and have steadily drawn audiences between 100-200 for these films that were largely neglected by East and West German audiences at the time of their release. Dialogue between students, professors, and community members of all generations has ensued as Bloomington, a Midwestern cultural mecca, has encountered the films of Ulrich Weiss, Dieter Schumann, Helke Misselwitz, Peter Welz, Heiner Carow, and others with great curiosity
and openness.

The symposium and film festival will feature panels and films that chart the development of an (East) German cinema after the fall of the Wall and also ask larger questions about the integration of the past into the archives of the future--through cultural politics, education, the academy, and current film industrial practice. Bringing together the East's most prolific screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase (the recipient of the Berlin Film Festival's 2010 Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement), filmmaker Peter Kahane, and production duo Katrin Schloesser and Frank Loeprich of the critically successful Oe-Filmproduktion with cultural politicians Thomas Krueger (President of the Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung) and Helmut Morsbach (Managing Director of the DEFA Foundation), film journalist Knut Elstermann (RadioEins), and a number of top U.S. scholars of German cinema, the event will combine theory and praxis.

Three German films will also have their Indiana premiere: Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon, 2005), Whiskey with Vodka (Whisky mit Wodka, 2009), and You Are Not Alone (Du bist nicht allein, 2007), which will have its U.S. premiere in Bloomington. Audiences will also have the chance to see Peter Kahane's The Architects (Die Architekten, 1990) and the GDR cult film Solo Sunny (1980). Earlier in the week, on April 18, the campus will welcome American filmmaker and video artist Amie Siegel with her filmic essay on memories of East Germany, DDR/DDR (2008). Filmmakers will be on hand for Q & A after each film.

A parallel high school symposium will introduce the next generation to university study through German history and cinema. All this enthusiasm for German culture and history comes at a time when Indiana public school systems are threatening to cut their language and culture programs.

For more information about this unique event, please see the following links:

Program

Film Schedule

To order advance tickets for the films, contact: jamastee@umail.iu.edu

Note: IU Boasts World's History of Film

2010-04-07T13:41:00.004-04:00

The Indiana Daily Student ran this wonderful article yesterday announcing the opening of the IU Cinema in Fall 2010, while also pointing to the wealth of cinema studies resources available on campus. Exciting times for Bloomington film folks. Read full story here.

Note: David Bordwell to visit IUB

2010-04-01T10:17:00.002-04:00

David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, will give a public talk on Tues., April 13, 2010. As part of the Provost Professors' Distinguished Masters Invited Lecture Series, his presentation is scheduled for 4 p.m. in the Moot Court Room in the Maurer School of Law and is titled "How Motion Pictures Became Movies." Among his numerous publications on cinema include On the History of Film Style (Harvard UP, 1997), Making Meaning (Harvard UP, 1989), Narration in the Fiction Film (U of Wisconsin P, 1985), and, with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Style (Columbia UP, 1985). More information here.

From the cinematheque vaults: Shock

2010-03-29T08:07:00.004-04:00

Vincent Price stars in this old, dark house thriller that almost sounds too good to be true. A horror-noir crossover, the 1946 film concerns a young woman (Anabel Shaw), who witnesses a murder in her next-door neighbor's window and is left comatose from the trauma. When she comes to, she identifies her psychiatrist (Price) as the murderer. Price was rarely better as the mad doctor attempting to give his "delusional" patient, ahem, more intensive treatment: sending her to a sanitarium, pumping her full of drugs, and implementing shock therapy. Of course, nobody believes she is sane, least of all her husband (Frank Latimore). This slice of postwar American anxiety cuts deep, but it hurts so good.

"Bigger Than Life" finally on DVD

2010-03-24T08:06:00.004-04:00

From the Criterion Collection:

Director: Nicholas Ray
U. S. 1956
95 minutes
Color 2.35:1
English

Though ignored at the time of its release, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life is now recognized as one of the great American films of the 1950s. When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father (James Mason, in one of his most indelible roles) is prescribed cortisone for a painful, possibly fatal affliction, he grows dangerously addicted to the experimental drug, resulting in his transformation into a psychotic and ultimately violent household despot. This Eisenhower-era throat-grabber, shot in expressive CinemaScope, is an excoriating take on the nuclear family. That it came in the day of Father Knows Best makes it all the more shocking—and wildly entertaining.

Disc Features

New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
Audio commentary featuring critic Geoff Andrew (The Films of Nicholas Ray)
Profile of Nicholas Ray (1977), a half-hour television interview with the director
New video appreciation of Bigger Than Life with author Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City)
New video interview with Susan Ray, widow of the director and editor of I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies
Theatrical trailer
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic and video maker B. Kite

Representation and negotiation of European identity

2010-03-17T14:39:00.005-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema

By Yosefa Loshitzky

Yosefa Loshitzky challenges the utopian notion of a post-national "New Europe" by focusing on the waves of migrants and refugees that some view as a potential threat to European identity, a concern heightened by the rhetoric of the war on terror, the London Underground bombings, and the riots in Paris's banlieues. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle, Loshitzky determines patterns in the representation and negotiation of European identity in several European films from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged, Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, and Michael Winterbottom's In This World, Code 46, and The Road to Guantanamo.

Yosefa Loshitzky is Professor of Film, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. She is author of Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2002, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, and editor of Spielberg's Holocaust (IUP, 1997).

Series: New Directions in National Cinemas

Distribution: World

Publication date: 2/15/2010

Format: cloth 232 pages, 20 b&w illus., 6 x 9, unjacketed library edition
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35453-2

More information here.

Russian cinema’s portrayal of the father/son dynamic

2010-03-15T10:24:00.004-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film

Edited by Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova

This wide-ranging collection investigates the father/son dynamic in post-Stalinist Soviet cinema and its Russian successor. Contributors analyze complex patterns of identification, disavowal, and displacement in films by such diverse directors as Khutsiev, Motyl’, Tarkovsky, Balabanov, Sokurov, Todorovskii, Mashkov, and Bekmambetov. Several chapters focus on the difficulties of fulfilling the paternal function, while others show how vertical and horizontal male bonds are repeatedly strained by the pressure of redefining an embattled masculinity in a shifting political landscape.

Helena Goscilo is Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University. She is editor (with Stephen Norris) of Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia (IUP, 2008).

Yana Hashamova is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University. She is author of Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film.

Distribution: World

Publication date: 3/12/2010

Format: paper 344 pages, 43 b&w illus., 6 x 9 x .813
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22187-2

The interplay of film, literature, and television in English culture

2010-03-11T09:37:00.004-05:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

English Filming, English Writing

By Jefferson Hunter

Jefferson Hunter examines English films and television dramas as they relate to English culture in the 20th century. He traces themes such as the influence of U.S. crime drama on English film, and film adaptations of literary works as they appear in screen work from the 1930s to the present. A Canterbury Tale and the documentary Listen to Britain are analyzed in the context of village pageants and other wartime explorations of Englishness at risk. English crime dramas are set against the writings of George Orwell, while a famous line from Noel Coward leads to a discussion of music and image in works like Brief Encounter and Look Back in Anger. Screen adaptation is also broached in analyses of the 1985 BBC version of Dickens’s Bleak House and Merchant-Ivory’s The Remains of the Day.

A former department chair and director of film studies, Jefferson Hunter is the Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of English and Film Studies at Smith College. He teaches courses in modern literature and film. His previous publications include Edwardian Fiction; Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts; and How to Read Ulysses, and Why.

Distribution: World

Publication date: 3/1/2010

Format: paper 376 pages, 6 x 9
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22177-3

More information here.

Wagner's legacy in sound and on screen

2010-03-01T21:20:00.005-05:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Wagner and Cinema

Edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman
Foreword by Tony Palmer
Interview with Bill Viola

The work of Richard Wagner is a continuing source of artistic inspiration and ideological controversy in literature, philosophy, and music, as well as cinema. In Wagner and Cinema, a diverse group of established and emerging scholars examines Wagner's influence on cinema from the silent era to the present. The essays in this collection engage in a critical dialogue with existing studies—extending and renovating current theories related to the topic—and propose unexplored topics and new methodological perspectives. The contributors discuss films ranging from the 1913 biopic of Wagner to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, with essays on silent cinema, film scoring, Wagner in Hollywood, German cinema, and Wagner beyond the soundtrack.

Jeongwon Joe is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Cincinnati. She is editor of Between Opera and Cinema (with Rose Theresa) and has published articles on Milos Forman’s Amadeus, Philip Glass’s La Belle et la Bête, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Gérard Corbiau’s Farinelli, and other works related to opera and film music.

Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Emory University. He is author of Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity; Multiculturalism and the Jews; Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery; Freud, Race, and Gender; and Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews.

Distribution: World

Publication date: 2/2/2010

Format: paper 504 pages, 28 b&w illus., 35 musical exx., 6 x 9
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22163-6

More information here.

Note: African Filmmakers Symposium

2010-02-25T18:36:00.003-05:00

The Black Film Center/Archive and the Department of Comparative Literature are hosting the symposium From the Postcolonial to the Global Postmodern? African and Caribbean Francophone Filmmakers and Scholars in Conversation from March 1-5, 2010. Four filmmakers--Gaston Kabore, Euzhan Palcy, Joseph Gai Ramaka, and Jean-Marie Teno--will screen and discuss their films.

For more information and screening times for the films, please see the poster.

This event is made possible through the support of the College Arts and Humanities Institute, the Dean's Office of the College of Arts and Sciences, the African Studies Program, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs, the Department of Communication and Culture, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Berlinale Recap

2010-02-21T20:31:00.004-05:00

Werner Herzog presided over the International Jury for the 60th annual Berlin Film Festival, which opened on Thurs., Feb. 11 with the Chinese film Tuan yuan (Apart Together) and closed today with the Japanese film Otôto (About Her Brother). This year's Golden Bear went to Bal (Honey), Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu's conclusion to his reverse-order "Yusuf Trilogy," preceded by Yumurta (Egg) and Süt (Milk). The British film The Ghost Writer won Roman Polanski the Best Director award, and it looks great.

Perhaps more familiar to U. S. audiences, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl, and Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me all screened in competition. I'm hoping to find time to post my Shutter Island review soon, and I can't wait until the other two reach theaters here at home.

Click here for the complete list of winners.

Note: Martin Sheen to visit IUB

2010-02-16T22:52:00.007-05:00

IU Theatre and Drama presents the 2010 Ralph L. Collins Memorial Lecture:

"An Evening with Martin Sheen"

Monday, April 19 at 7:30 p.m.
IU Auditorium, 1211 E. Seventh St.
Admission is free of charge, but tickets are required. General admission tickets are available at the IU Auditorium Box Office starting Feb. 17, 2010. For information call 812-855-1103.

More information here.

Note: Jon Vickers named first director of IU Cinema

2010-02-15T16:55:00.002-05:00

Indiana University Provost and Executive Vice President Karen Hanson announced today (Feb. 15) that Jon Vickers has been named the first director of the IU Cinema, pending approval by the IU Board of Trustees. Vickers currently serves as managing director the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at the University of Notre Dame. Read more...

Genre and the film industry in India

2010-02-08T07:07:00.004-05:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies

By Valentina Vitali

Valentina Vitali presents the history of Bombay action films, posing new questions about the relationship between movies and their socioeconomic context. She considers how action gained prominence as an ingredient in film narrative, one that made it easier to produce and market films. She traces the emergence of the stunt film in the 1920s; examines the presence and function of women in action roles from the mid-1920s to the end of the 1930s; and analyzes the socioeconomic factors responsible for the films and for the popularity of figures such as Master Vithal, Ermeline, Fearless Nadia, Dara Singh, and Amitabh Bachchan as well as other, more contemporary figures.

Valentina Vitali is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East London. She is editor (with Paul Willemen) of Theorising National Cinema.

Series: South Asian Cinemas

Distribution: World excluding South Asia

Publication date: 2/1/2010

Format: paper 299 pages, 25 b&w illus., 5.5 x 8.5
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22222-0

More information here.

South Atlantic Modern Language Association: Flannery O'Connor in Film

2010-02-07T12:32:00.006-05:00

This panel affiliated with the Flannery O'Connor Society welcomes papers that explore the SAMLA 2010 special focus "The Interplay of Text and Image" in O'Connor and film. While papers dealing with film adaptations of O'Connor's works will be considered, the session's specific goal is to expand our understanding of how filmmakers have incorporated and/or have contrasted O'Connor's themes, character types, etc. in their own works. Preference will be given to papers that seek creative connections between O'Connor's works and films that are not obvious adaptations of O'Connor's fiction.

Please e-mail abstracts (500 words) to Amy K. King at
akking@olemiss.edu before Friday, 26 March 2010.

From the cinematheque vaults: He Walked By Night

2010-02-01T08:04:00.006-05:00

Directed by Alfred L. Werker and an uncredited Anthony Mann, this old-school procedural thriller follows a cat-and-mouse game between the LAPD and a resourceful criminal wanted for killing a police officer. It's no surprise why He Walked By Night (1948) was one of the major influences behind TV's Dragnet (look for Jack Webb as a forensics specialist). Building towards a chase through the sewers worthy of The Third Man (1949), the rock solid, documentary-style directing kicks with the force of a stiff drink, while the usual otherworldly cinematography by John Alton lingers like the last flashes of a dream. Goes hand-in-hand with Mann and Alton's other B-noir gems for Eagle-Lion: T-Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948).

CFP: Midwest Conference on Language, Literature, and Media

2010-01-27T07:26:00.003-05:00

MCLLM Conference

The 18th annual
Midwest Conference on Language, Literature, and Media (MCLLM)
will be held April 9-10, 2010 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois.

Keynote speaker:
Dr. George Lakoff, University of California-Berkeley,
author of Metaphors We Live By (1980), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (1987), Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999), The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (2008).

This year’s theme is Interdisciplinarity. As exemplified by Dr. Lakoff’s application of his theories across a variety of disciplines, investigation and education at the points of disciplinary intersection are becoming increasingly important in academia and our world at large. Proposals sought for fifteen minute papers from scholars at all stages of their careers. Topics related to this year’s theme may include, but are not limited to, writing across the curriculum, linguistics and literature, cross-cultural film studies, technical communication, cognitive research and application, the construction of gender and ethnicity, language policy, and theories of knowledge creation; however, MCLLM also welcomes papers on all areas of language, literature, and media studies. Individual or panel (three to four people) proposals are welcome.

Deadline for submission has been extended to February 1, 2010.
Please include a cover page with your name, affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. Please submit your 250 word abstract as an attachment to mcllm@niu.edu.

mcllm@niu.edu
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
http://www.engl.niu.edu/mcllm/

Spring 2010 Film Series in Bloomington

2010-01-26T09:26:00.005-05:00

Check out the local venues below for screenings on or near the IUB campus this spring:

City Lights & Underground Experimental Film Series
Bi-weekly 16mm screenings of Classic Hollywood and international art cinema (presented by City Lights) and experimental film (presented by Underground) held Fridays at 7 PM in the IU Radio-Television Building Room 251. Free and open to the public.

Czech Film Series
Thursdays at 7 PM in 102 Lindley Hall
Načeradec, the King of Kibitzer by Gustav Machatý, 1932 (January 28)
Hogo Fogo Homolka by Jaroslav Papoušek, 1970 (February 25)
Little Dens by Jan Hřebejk, 1999 (March 25)
Jára Cimrman, Lying, Sleeping by Ladislav Smoljak, 1983 (April 22)

East Asian Film Series
Held Saturdays at 7 PM in IU Woodburn Hall Room 101. Free and open to the public.

Pride LGBTQ Film Festival
Screenings at the historic Buskirk-Chumley Theater, featuring films from all over the world that explore and celebrate the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer, and intersex community. The films include shorts and features, animation, documentaries, comedies, and dramas.

The Ryder
Foreign-language, independent, and classic American films usually screened at Bear's Place Ale House (1316 E. 3rd Street) . $4 general admission.

Union Board
The longest running film series in the country presenting contemporary films in the Whittenberger Auditorium of the Indiana Memorial Union. Free for IU students, $2 admission for non-students.

The IU DEFA Project
A film series titled WENDE FLICKS curated by the University of Massechusets - Amherst and presented by IUB Germanic Studies will showcase 10 features and 4 documentaries made by East German filmmakers from 1988-1994 (screened to the international public for the first time).

Note: Peter Bogdanovich to visit IUB

2010-01-25T11:07:00.006-05:00

“A Conversation with Peter Bogdanovich” (free and open to the public)

Saturday, January 30 / 4:00 pm / Radio-TV Building, Room 251

Peter Bogdanovich, American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic, was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included Brian DePalma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola. His papers, consisting of over 100,000 items, and including films, scripts, correspondence, contracts, and production materials, are held at the Lilly Library.

He will discuss his life and career in film and television, and Professor Emeritus James Naremore of IUB Film & Media Studies is scheduled to lead the conversation. This is one of an on-going series of events to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

Bogdanovich's films include Targets (1968), The Last Picture Show (1971), Paper Moon (1973), Mask (1985), Noises Off... (1992), and The Cat's Meow (2001).

Save UI Cinema & Comparative Literature

2010-01-20T23:06:00.003-05:00

Below is a message from Prof. Corey Creekmur posted today on the SCMS website. As a graduate of The University of Iowa's cinema program, I wanted to help spread the word. Discouraging to say the least.

Dear Alumni and Friends,

An ad hoc entity called the Provost's Task Force on Graduate Education and Selective Excellence has just recommended the elimination of the PhD program in Film Studies at the University of Iowa, along with the MA and PhD programs in Comparative Literature. It has also recommended that the MFA in Film and Video Production be moved to a newly proposed Division of Communications (with Journalism and Communication Studies), and that the MFA in Translation be moved to a newly proposed Division of World Languages and Cultures (with the foreign languages). These undesirable and illogical moves would in effect dismember the current Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. Ours are not the only programs under threat, but ours is the only department that would be obliterated if the committee’s recommendations were to be followed.

The committee was made up of mostly non-Humanists, and it did its work mostly on the basis of statistics like time to degree, GRE scores of applicants, and years of support offered to grad students. It identified the placement of Iowa Film Studies graduates as "good," but did not note that our graduates can be found at many of the world's finest universities, including Yale, Brown, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, among many others. It did not employ any outside evaluators. It did not collect information on the work of faculty. It did not collect information on program costs (the members of the committee know very well that Humanities grad degrees are dirt cheap by comparison with degrees in lab sciences). In short, the excellence of our programs was not something the committee had any basis for evaluating. We are preparing a response -- due very soon -- and would like your help, in part because you are in the position to offer an evaluation.

Clearly, the impressive legacy and ongoing vitality of the Film Studies program at Iowa were ignored in this decision. We are enormously proud of the accomplishments of our graduates, who have been crucial to the development and continued growth of Film Studies as a scholarly discipline in North America and beyond. Our current students promise to continue that legacy into the future. Former Iowa students are among the most productive scholars and influential teachers in the field, and while we do our best to continually inform the administration of this fact, we would now greatly appreciate your helping us to clearly and forcefully articulate the importance of the excellence of our programs to those who will be deciding on the future of our programs.

Please send me a brief testimonial – a few lines would do it – about the importance of the program/s, Iowa’s place as a leader in X (your choice), how study here helped you, etc. While the MFA in Film and Video Production is not currently threatened, the committee did not consider the MFA as connected to Film Studies, although the programs have always benefited enormously from close cooperation and linked interests. Its recommendations suggest in fact that it saw all the programs as separate entities that can be shoved around without affecting the program health of the others. If they do this, I think it will destroy not only Film Studies and Comp Lit but hard Film and Video Production and Translation as well.

I know I’m missing people but want to get this out as soon as possible. Please pass the word to other grads.

Thanks very much!

Corey Creekmur
Director of Film Studies
Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature
The University of Iowa

The work of one of Quebec’s most important filmmakers

2010-01-15T13:41:00.003-05:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Cinema as History: Michel Brault and Modern Quebec

By André Loiselle

With a career spanning more than five decades, director and cinematographer Michel Brault is one of the most influential figures in Québécois cinema. Brault’s early works, including Les Raquetteurs and Pour la suite du monde, reflect a previously unacknowledged and unfulfilled need on the part of Québécois society to see its own culture depicted onscreen, and helped spark a cultural renaissance in Quebec. His 1974 fiction feature Les Ordres, which deals with the Quebec Liberation Front crisis and the invocation of the War Measures Act, has consistently been listed as one of the best Québécois and Canadian films to date. Brault’s work as cinematographer—on groundbreaking films such as Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971) and Francis Mankiewicz’s Les Bons Débarras (1980)—and his contributions to the development of the cinema-verité movement, have been equally significant.

André Loiselle is Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University.

Distributed for the Toronto International Film Festival Group.

Distribution: World excluding Canada

Publication date: 8/28/2009

Format: paper 237 pages, 78 b&w illus., 6 x 8
ISBN-13: 978-0-96891326-0
ISBN: 0-9689132-6-1

More information here.

2009 Holiday Movie Review

2010-01-10T10:07:00.016-05:00

SHERLOCK HOLMES * 1/2 (out of ****)

Robert Downey, Jr. is always fun to watch, but his loopy charisma can’t salvage this overcooked Christmas turkey from Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver. Hack director Guy Ritchie seems primarily to blame, remaining faithful to neither the letter nor the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian mysteries. Enamored with his own hyper-stylized, hyper-masculine, special-effects set pieces, Richie obviously wants to “update” Doyle’s eccentric detective (played by Downey) for the teens—both in terms of the film’s target demographic and the new decade. As you might expect, he bastardizes the character and sullies the memory of the Universal and Hammer classics: Ritchie’s witless version of Holmes is part Jerry Bruckheimer action hero, part Robert Langdon, part Popeye. Not even five screenwriters could enrich Holmes’s universe or, at the very least, tell a coherent story with interesting characters. They shamelessly jerk us around from one plot gimmick to the next apparently for the sole purpose of setting up sequels in this would-be franchise.

UP IN THE AIR *** (out of ****)

Walter Kirn adapts his novel of the same name with co-writers Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, the former of whom directed the film coming off his success with Thank You For Smoking (2005) and Juno (2007). Up in the Air sits somewhere in between the sharply funny Smoking and the criminally overrated Juno, never as edgy or socially insightful as it should be, but spirit-raising as a timely rom com aimed at the U. S. economic crisis. Named Best Film of 2009 by the National Board of Review, and nominated for Best Drama by the Golden Globes and Best Film by the Broadcast Film Critics Association, this surprisingly acclaimed holiday release looks like the clear Oscar frontrunner.

George Clooney plays a traveling corporate downsizer, who faces a crisis of conscience and begins to question his values during his relationship with both a business woman (Vera Farmiga) sharing his commitment-free views and an ambitious college graduate (Anna Kendrick) recently hired at his company. Smart, brisk, and generally agreeable, maybe a little too agreeable, the film gets by mostly on Clooney’s appeal and the pleasant support from Farmiga and Kendrick. Just when it seems as though Reitman has put the gears in motion for a more profound character study and political commentary, the film settles into a fairly contrived and predictable groove that loses the pointed direction and ideas established in the first half. It’s a competent Hollywood dramedy with potential for lasting mainstream success, although not the important statement on our times as some reviewers have purported.

AVATAR *** (out of ****)

Twelve years after Titanic (1997), his last fiction feature film, director James Cameron returns with the immeasurably anticipated and vigorously marketed sci/fi epic that has already reinstated him as “King of the World.” Avatar reportedly took in over $232 million worldwide on opening weekend, the largest box office opening to date for a non-franchise Hollywood movie, and it became the fastest film ever to gross $1 billion worldwide. (Contrary to the advanced buzz, though, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End [2007] still holds the record for the most expensive production budget at an estimated $300 million ahead of Avatar’s $230 million). Cameron actually conceived the project 11 years ago, but waited until 2005 to start working once technology had “caught up” with his vision (the film seamlessly blends live action with stereoscopic, motion-capture CGI animation). Released in 2-D, 3-D, and IMAX 3-D formats in the wake of toy, book, and video game tie-ins, this seems to be the next “big thing,” an instant pop classic from the guy who also broke technical and commercial ground with Aliens (1986) and the first two Terminator movies (1984, 1991). The critics are going wild for the film, and while I found it entertaining enough in a bombastic sort of way, it still felt too long and a little cold around the heart.

Cameron can direct action sequences like the best of them, but Avatar suffers from his tone-deaf dialogue and broad, corny story (even though he nicely pulls off the environmentalist and anti-war message). Think Dances With Wolves (1990) meets The Abyss (1989): Sam Worthington plays a U. S. Marine assigned to police the moon of Pandora in order for a mining operation to extract minerals worth a fortune back on Earth. When he falls in love with one of the native Na’vi (Zoë Saldaña) after infiltrating her tribe vis-à-vis his Na’vi “avatar,” he decides to help protect her species from the military invasion. The best moments in the film are those in which Cameron sets the narrative and pseudo-philosophy aside, and simply invites viewers to drink in this lush world, richly textured in color and energy, strangely fascinating, and realized on mythological, technological, and biological levels. Integrating CGI and live-action has never been more convincing or immersive, and in that sense, Avatar is as significant an achievement as Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988. However, I must admit I still find a more organic connection to “realistic” characters rendered through stop-motion and hand-drawn animation, models, puppets, and actors in costumes. This is by far the prettiest movie of the holiday, and yet there’s still no substitute in my eyes for the real thing.

INVICTUS ** (out of ****)

Even the most adroit Hollywood filmmakers today have a tough time keeping up with an old pro like Clint Eastwood, who directed some of his best films in the 1970s, only to enter a Silver Age during the early part of the decade. A classical storyteller par excellence, simple without being simplistic, Eastwood has always been drawn to the generic bedrocks of American cinema. Through revisionist subversions, he also undercuts and expands upon their cinematic rhetoric: the Western (Unforgiven [1992]), the police procedural thriller (Mystic River [2003]), the World War II epic (Letters from Iwo Jima [2006]), and the melodrama (Changeling [2008]), to highlight the most salient examples of this late stage in his career.

Under the guise of a conventional sports flick, Invictus could have landed in the echelon of those films as a humanist study of rugby, civics, and ethics, the personal and international responsibilities of statesmanship, and racial prejudice in South Africa at the end of apartheid. Instead, the familiar formula only panders to fans of the genre. Don’t let the glowing reviews fool you; it’s less a work of cultural history than superficial Oscar bait, riddled with clichés to the point of self-parody. Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon are just fine, portraying the newly elected Nelson Mandela and the South African rugby team captain, respectively. Rather than exploring these two characters on such a tumultuous backdrop, Eastwood and screenwriter Anthony Peckham boringly focus on the road to the 1995 World Cup, which, they have us believe, brought the divided country together to live happily ever after.

From the cinematheque vaults: Angel and the Badman

2010-01-07T22:57:00.007-05:00

I've always been a fan of Hollywood Westerns, but I don't know that I consider myself a John Wayne fan per se. Politics aside, The Duke gave great performances in classics of the genre like Hawks's Red River (1948) and Ford's The Searchers (1956), among others, but my memories of The Alamo (1960) and McLintock! (1963) are far less flattering, at least from the snippets I caught surfing through channels. Wayne was at his best most consistently when his screen presence articulated an attitude, an embodied personal style in gestures and walks, that worked with rather than overwhelmed the sensitivity of the directing. Unlike, say, Clint Eastwood, Wayne's lighter touches are his most graceful and comfortable, when he seems effortlessly to inhabit his constructed frontier worlds. He's less interesting -- and less fun -- to watch when he's making patriotic speeches or knocking around bad guys. Angel and the Badman (1947) is a perfect example: hardly a masterpiece, but a fine romantic Western that runs primarily on its sincerity and charm. James Edward Grant wrote a number of screenplays for Wayne that hit and missed (including, coincidentally, The Alamo and McLintock!), but his workmanlike direction here from his own script displays a solid sense of both action and humor. Starring as a womanizing gunfighter, Wayne becomes involved with a Quaker family and falls for their daughter (Gail Russell), who tries to lead him away from his life of violence.

In Memoriam: Don Belton

2009-12-31T17:58:00.006-05:00

Don Belton, IUB assistant professor of English and faculty member of the Creative Writing Program, will be honored at a candlelit vigil on Fri., Jan. 1 from 5:00-6:00 p.m. at the southeast corner of the courthouse square (the intersection of Walnut Street and Kirkwood Avenue). Author of the novel Almost Midnight and editor of the anthology Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream, Prof. Belton also taught in the areas of fiction and world cinema, black literature and black popular culture, writers in community and exile, and writing about home. I did not know Prof. Belton personally, but my thoughts are with his friends, family, and the local arts and humanities community. More information here.

Off in Dreamland...

2009-12-22T09:18:00.002-05:00

The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949)

Just a quick message wishing everyone a safe and happy winter holiday. Andrea and I are about to make the annual Christmas / New Year's drive across the Midwest, visiting family in Iowa and Illinois, so Caméra-Stylo will be on hiatus until we're back in Bloomington in January. Having successfully completed my busiest and most stressful academic semester of grad. school yet, I'm particularly looking forward to disappearing from the world and going into hibernation for a few weeks. At the same time, I can't say that I'm not also looking forward to my spring schedule, teaching Introduction to Media again, and taking seminars in Histories of American Cinema, Sexual Politics and Alfred Hitchcock, and Preserving Performance: History, Archive, Show.

As some of you may have noticed, I didn't have time to blog about the new releases I saw this fall. Turns out I only had a chance to see three of them, so I'll just post the star ratings now if anyone is interested:

Where the Wild Things Are ***1/2

Paranormal Activity ***

The Fantastic Mr. Fox ****

I'm hoping to catch up over break (so many films, so little time: A Serious Man, A Single Man, Broken Embraces, Invictus, The Road, etc.), and perhaps I'll return with reviews of some of the big holiday movies. Until then...

Mystery Street (John Sturges, 1950)

Note: SCMS 2010

2009-12-22T08:54:00.017-05:00

The Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference program is now online. Marking the 50th anniversary of SCMS, the theme is "Archiving the Future / Mobilizing the Past." My panel is scheduled for Sun., March 21 from 2:00-3:45 p.m.:

X4 Popular Film Criticism in Media Culture

Chair: Will Scheibel (Indiana University - Bloomington)

James Kendrick (Baylor University), "Internet Criticism 15 Years Later"

Rachel Thibault (University of Massachusetts - Amherst), "What We Talk About When We Talk about (Movie) Love: Gendered Cinephilia in the Digital Age"

Will Scheibel (Indiana University - Bloomington), "The Mexican New Wave: Directors, Reviewers, and the Flow of Cultural Reputation"

Lorrie Palmer (Indiana University - Bloomington), "Past-Future Imperfect: Will Smith and the Dialogue of Race"

The conference will be held from Wed., March 17 - Sun., March 21 at The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites in Los Angeles. Hope to see some of you there!

Honorable Mentions

2009-12-15T10:47:00.008-05:00

Here is a list of the runners-up for my Top 15 films of the aughts:

About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004)
Directed by Alexander Payne. Written by Payne and Jim Taylor.

Adaptation (2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Directed by Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, respectively. Written by Charlie Kaufman.

Before Sunset (2004)
Directed by Richard Linklater. Written by Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, and Kim Krizan.

Big Fish (2003)
Directed by Tim Burton. Written by John August.

Far From Heaven (2002)
Directed and written by Todd Haynes.

Doubt (2008)
Directed and written by John Patrick Shanley.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
Directed by George Clooney. Written by Clooney and Grant Heslov.

Gosford Park (2001)
Directed by Robert Altman. Written by Julian Fellowes.

Rescue Dawn (2006)
Directed and written by Werner Herzog.

Match Point (2005)
Directed and written by Woody Allen.

Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Written by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce.

The Pledge (2001)
Directed by Sean Penn. Written by Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski.

Wall-E (2008) and Up (2009)
Wall-E: Directed by Andrew Stanton. Written by Stanton, Jim Reardon, and Pete Docter.
Up: Directed and written by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson.

Wonder Boys (2000)
Directed by Curtis Hanson. Written by Steven Kloves.

Zodiac (2007)
Directed by David Fincher. Written by James Vanderbilt.

My sincere thanks to all of those who followed this semester-long countdown; it was the most fun I've had blogging in my two years here at Caméra-Stylo. The new millennium may not have started with one of the greatest decades for contemporary U. S. fiction film, but these picks mean a lot to me personally, and I think any decade that offers a crop of this caliber is a great one. I began the project with the following quote from Pauline Kael: "A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is."

To close, as I look forward to reading other reflections on and evaluations of cinema over the last ten years, I'll leave you with this quote from Tom Gunning: "As a historian I think this is a good thing to do; not to indicate what the timeless masterpieces are, but to give a sense of history for our evaluations. Values are mutable, but that's the point. They change and have the power to change."

#1 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

2009-12-11T15:58:00.004-05:00

Directed by Tommy Lee Jones. Written by Guillermo Arriaga.

Trailer

Yes, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is the best U.S. fiction film of the aughts, which, despite its eccentricities, reaches near perfection. Quiet, lyrical, and at times darkly funny, this modern-day Western follows aging Texas rancher Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones) on his quixotic ride across the border to bury his friend, Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), in his home town. Spurring attention from the local law, Pete kidnaps the U.S. border patrolman who shot Melquiades, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), so that the man can give him a proper burial near his family in Mexico.

Jones directed the film and went on to pick up the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival, while Guillermo Arriaga won for his nonlinear screenplay. Reminiscent of John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996), Three Burials wisely addresses contemporary political issues in the U.S. (specifically what has been called “The Great Immigration Panic”), but without ever seeming like an “issue movie.” The film is primarily about the multifaceted relationships among its characters, which also includes Belmont (Dwight Yoakam), the ineffectual sheriff back in Texas, Rachel (Melissa Leo), the married waitress sleeping with Pete and Belmont, and Lou Ann (January Jones), Mike’s neglected wife. Balancing real, perceptive moments of social life with the magical stuff we can only get from the movies, or from dreams, this is a feverish film of aching beauty and sad ironies that only comes along once in a decade.

Read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review in the Chicago Reader

#2 In the Bedroom (2001)

#3 There Will Be Blood (2007)

#4 The Dark Knight (2008)

#5 Gangs of New York (2002)

#6 No Country for Old Men (2007)

#7 Munich (2005)

#8 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

#2 In the Bedroom (2001)

2009-12-07T08:06:00.003-05:00

Directed by Todd Field. Written by Robert Festinger and Field.

Trailer

This jagged-edged chamber piece reflects loss, grief, blame, and, finally, desperate vengeance with more heartrending detail than any film in recent memory. Actor Todd Field made his feature debut with In the Bedroom as screenwriter (with Robert Festinger) and director, adapting Andre Dubus’s short story “Killings” and capturing a sense of place with his Maine fishing town as if he’d lived there is whole life. Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson will knock you off your seat as a middle-aged couple trying to heal the emotional wounds left by an unspeakable event.

Eschewing sentimentality and plot-driven melodrama, Field and Festinger are all about looks, expressions, and verbal cues among friends and families that communicate volumes and totally absorb. They know these characters—and so do we. The haunting, regional atmosphere reminds me of some of my favorites from the 1990s: Sling Blade (1996), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), and A Simple Plan (1998). When it cools, the film is an apparently simple tone poem on the everyday, but when it boils, the film explodes with raw and at times shocking emotions.

Read Roger Ebert’s review in the Chicago Sun-Times

#3 There Will Be Blood (2007)

#4 The Dark Knight (2008)

#5 Gangs of New York (2002)

#6 No Country for Old Men (2007)

#7 Munich (2005)

#8 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

#3 There Will Be Blood (2007)

2009-12-03T09:20:00.004-05:00

Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson

Trailer

Daniel Day-Lewis’s feral performance in Gangs of New York (2002) was only a warm up act for his role as monomaniacal oil tycoon Daniel Plainview; he isn’t just as mad dog here, he’s a fucking force of nature (“I drink your milkshake!”). The following year, he won a well-deserved Oscar for giving us the most unforgettable film character of the decade. Loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Anderson recreates 1911 California for an audacious vision of wild America, or, more precisely, the American Nightmare. Plainview is the enterprising individual, who rises from humble beginnings to become a successful capitalist. But inverting the Horatio Alger narrative, he also grows alienated from himself and beyond redemption.

The film remains much like its protagonist: larger-than-life, flamboyant, excessive, and kind of an enigma. It drew comparisons to Citizen Kane (1941) in a lot of different ways, but, unlike Welles’s Kane, Plainview has no past or biography. Created out of nothing, he struggles to construct a history for himself by devouring bounded property and towering over his rival, an evangelical faith healer (played by an extraordinary Paul Dano). His Rosebud is not just locked in memory and out of reach—it never existed to begin with. In that sense, Plainview has more in common with Faulkner’s Gothic patriarch Thomas Sutpen: a figure produced by modernity itself, whose fall from grace reveals the contradictions in the ideology of American industry and entrepreneurship.

Read J. Hoberman’s review in The Village Voice

#4 The Dark Knight (2008)

#5 Gangs of New York (2002)

#6 No Country for Old Men (2007)

#7 Munich (2005)

#8 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

From the cinematheque vaults: The Last Man on Earth

2009-12-01T08:18:00.003-05:00

The first film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic sci/fi novel I Am Legend (even before The Omega Man in 1971) stars Vincent Price as a scientist who survives a plague that wipes out the entire planet. As he attempts to find a cure, he also has to defend himself against the infected roaming the city, who have been turned into vampires. While it doesn’t hold up quite as well as some of Price’s other midnite movies, such as House on Haunted Hill (1959) or The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), this 1964 Italian-U.S. co-production released by A.I.P. does a lot with a little. That eerie, post-apocalyptic imagery anticipates 28 Days Later by thirty-eight years and could teach Roland Emmerich a thing or two about the end of the world. Forget Twilight, this is my kind of vampire movie.

Film as visual ethnography

2009-11-25T07:02:00.004-05:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life

By Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz

Once hailed as a radical breakthrough in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, observational cinema has been criticized for a supposedly detached camera that objectifies and dehumanizes the subjects of its gaze. Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz provide the first critical history and in-depth appraisal of this movement, examining key works, filmmakers, and theorists, from André Bazin and the Italian neorealists, to American documentary films of the 1960s, to extended discussions of the ethnographic films of Herb Di Gioia, David Hancock, and David MacDougall. They make a new case for the importance of observational work in an emerging experimental anthropology, arguing that this medium exemplifies a non-textual anthropology that is both analytically rigorous and epistemologically challenging.

Anna Grimshaw is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University. She is author of Servants of the Buddha and The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology.

Amanda Ravetz is Research Fellow at Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Distribution: World
Publication date: December 2009
Format: paper 224 pages, 25 b&w illus., 6.125 x 9.25
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22158-2

More information here.

A towering figure of African literature and film

2009-11-23T08:58:00.005-05:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist

By Samba Gadjigo. Translated by Moustapha Diop.

Samba Gadjigo presents a unique personal portrait and intellectual history of novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Though Sembène has persistently deflected attention away from his personality, his life, and his past, Gadjigo has had unprecedented access to the artist and his family. This book is the first comprehensive biography of Sembène and contributes a critical appraisal of his life and art in the context of the political and social influences on his work. Beginning with Sembène’s life in Casamance, Senegal, and ending with his militant career as a dockworker in Marseilles, Gadjigo places Sembène into the context of African colonial and postcolonial culture and charts his achievements in film and literature. This landmark book reveals the inner workings of one of Africa’s most distinguished and controversial figures.

Samba Gadjigo is Professor of French and African literature at Mount Holyoke College. He is author of Ecole blanche, Afrique noire: L'image de l'école coloniale dans le roman africaine francophone and editor of Ousmane Sembène: Dialogue with Critics and Writers. He has directed a documentary on Sembene's film, Moolaade.

Distribution: World
Publication date: 12/1/2009
Format: cloth 218 pages, 5 b&w illus., 6 x 9
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35413-6

More information here.

Note: New Ph.D. program at UC Santa Cruz

2009-11-21T09:29:00.005-05:00

The Film & Digital Media Department of University of California Santa Cruz welcomes applications for its new Ph.D. program in Film & Digital Media.

The Department seeks applicants who challenge the boundaries between theory and production of digital media. Research within the program will span a large number of topics including avant-garde and experimental film and video; silent and classical cinema; digital, electronic, and new media; documentary; gender and sexuality; international cinema; participatory culture; public media art; race, ethnicity, nationality, colonialism and their intersections.

Core Faculty: Lawrence Andrews, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Sharon Daniel, Irene Gustafson, Amelie Hastie, Eli Hollander, L.S. Kim, Peter Limbrick, Chip Lord, Irene Lusztig, Margaret Morse, Warren Sack, Shelley Stamp, Gustavo Vazquez, Yiman Wang.

Online applications for the inaugural class of 2010 are due January 15, 2010.

#4 The Dark Knight (2008)

2009-11-18T23:19:00.006-05:00

Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, and David S. Goyer.

Trailer

The best Hollywood franchise film of the decade is also the most spectacular comic book film ever made—a monumental achievement in action moviemaking no matter where you’re sitting. My blog review back in the summer of 2008 was probably tainted by my blinding, opening weekend enthusiasm, but the film still packs almost as much of an adrenaline rush a year later, even after repeat viewings on a smaller screen. What more can be said about the late Heath Ledger as the vicious anarchist The Joker, whose live-wire performance scorched right off the screen and into pop cinema lore (“Why so serious?”). Just as he did with Batman Begins (2005), Nolan journeys deep into the heart of darkness of American superheroes and interrogates the mythos of their pulpy universe. Of all the precocious young directors that came of age this decade, Nolan has maintained one of the most consistently intriguing careers, with The Prestige (2006), Memento (2000), and, to a lesser extent, Insomnia (2002). And you’d also have to be a stone not to get goosebumps from those arresting stunts and set pieces.

Read Richard Corliss’s review in Time

#5 Gangs of New York (2002)

#6 No Country for Old Men (2007)

#7 Munich (2005)

#8 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

#5 Gangs of New York (2002)

2009-11-13T08:14:00.005-05:00

Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kennthe Lonergan.

Trailer

Daniel Day-Lewis hurls himself at his beast of a role—Bill “The Butcher” Cutting—with such fire, passion, and staggering bravura that his presence alone might have eclipsed the rest of the film. Fortunately, his volatile energy is equally matched by Scorsese, whose zip and whiz as a director also makes a “spectacle of fearsome acts,” and by Scorsese regulars Thelma Schoonmaker (editor), Michael Ballhaus (cinematographer), and Dante Ferretti (production designer), who help bring 1862 New York City to operatic, primeval life. The film is at once a bake-off and then a jam session. Watching these artists in love with their craft and in heedless abandon is enough to make it the single most exciting movie experience of the decade.

And what an epic labor of love it was. Inspired by Herbert Asbury’s famous 1928 study of gang activity, xenophobia, and political corruption in the “Five Points” district of Lower Manhattan, Scorsese carried the project with him since the 1970s. After surviving a troubled, two year production, cuts, and delays, the film was released with much ballyhoo during the Oscar season of 2002, only to be deemed everything from a flawed, auteurist masterpiece to a star-studded, $100 million disappointment. Even with its messy script and uneven supporting performances, I can’t imagine a more mesmerizing foray into the Civil War-era underworld. Our guide is Irish orphan Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo Di Caprio), who mobilizes resistance against Bill and his anti-immigrant “Natives,” the criminal bedfellows of “Boss” Tweed’s Tammany Hall. The other familiar faces include Cameron Diaz, John C. Reilly, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Neeson, Henry Thomas, and Jim Broadbent as Tweed. As much as The Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006) rocked my senses, Gangs stayed with me like a great concept album. This is American historiography written in blood, sweat, thunder, and lightening, as only the medium of cinema could render.

Read Chuck Rudolph’s review at Slant.com

#6 No Country for Old Men (2007)

#7 Munich (2005)

#8 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

#6 No Country for Old Men (2007)

2009-11-06T08:12:00.004-05:00

Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen

Trailer

Earlier in the decade, Joel and Ethan Coen delivered their most entertaining screwball comedy (O Brother, Where Art Thou? [2000]) and one of their most sophisticated films noir (The Man Who Wasn’t There [2001]). No Country for Old Men, from Cormac McCarthy’s hard-boiled novel of the same name, is a taut, spare, Southwestern thriller that tops both films and pretty much everything else from the weird world of the Coen brothers. Seemingly their most distilled genre exercise to date, at the same time the film transcends genre altogether, staring violence and death right in its ghostly face.

And who could forget the face—or hair—of Javier Bardem as sociopathic killer Anton Chigurh, one of the most disturbing incarnations of ineffable evil I’ve ever seen in a film (“Call it, friendo”). On the other side is nearly retired sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), confronting crime in post-Vietnam West Texas he can’t begin to understand. Armed with a cattle gun, Chigurh leaves a trail of dead bodies as he stalks an ordinary man (Josh Brolin), who made off with two million dollars from a botched drug deal. The film buries itself under your skin with calculated sound and image techniques, only to throw a sucker punch in the end as an elegy. Among its eight Academy Awards include Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Bardem), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture, marking one of the few years in recent memory when I was in basic agreement with the Oscars.

Read Richard Schickel’s review in Time

#7 Munich (2005)

#8 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

From the cinematheque vaults: Twin Peaks

2009-11-01T19:06:00.008-05:00

My pick this month is not a film, but the cult television series Twin Peaks, which originally aired on ABC for two seasons from 1990 to 1991. With the exception of the two-hour pilot, you can watch the complete series online here. I'm currently working on a seminar paper about the feature film prequel Fire Walk With Me (1992), which I'll be presenting at the 2010 Film & History Conference in Milwaukee, WI, so I've been trapped in the Black Lodge for the last couple weeks.

The series emerged as the perverse brainchild of David Lynch and Mark Frost. One of the names behind Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), Frost was no stranger to television. Lynch, however, was a less likely participant, best known at the time for his controversial, critically acclaimed thriller-cum-melodrama Blue Velvet (1986). Lynch and Frost served as executive producers and co-writers on the series, and Lynch even directed select episodes.

In the wake of a media frenzy, the pilot aired on April 8, 1990 as a mid-season replacement for Gabriel’s Fire. Greeted by critical praise, it earned a 16.2 rating,* ABC’s highest ratings in four years for a program scheduled in the 9 p.m. Thursday timeslot (Carter D8). U.S. television audiences were unanimously asking, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Intrigue quickly spread to Log Ladies, backwards-talking dwarfs dancing in Red Rooms, giants imparting cryptic clues, and, of course, damn fine coffee and cherry pie. The primary investigator of these mysteries was cheerful F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Mac Lachlan), who arrives in the sleepy lumber town of Twin Peaks, WA when the raped and murdered body of the local homecoming queen washes ashore.

ABC’s senior vice president of research, Alan Wurtzel, attributed the success of the pilot to what he called the “water cooler syndrome,” suggesting that people will talk about a distinctive series the next day at work (Carter D8). Beating NBC juggernauts Cheers (1982-1993) and The Cosby Show (1984-1992), the series was primed to help the then struggling ABC lead in primetime the next fall, along with America’s Funniest Home Videos (1989-present) and Doogie Howser, MD (1989-1993). Although ABC renewed the series after the subsequent seven episodes, ratings dropped significantly after the pilot, eventually leveling off to reveal a small but dependable viewership of 18 to 19 percent of Thursday night audiences (Carter D1-D14). The series was demoted from Thursday to Saturday night for almost the entirety of its second season beginning September 30, 1990.

Even then, The New York Times reported that “Twin Peaks brought to weekly television the quality of movie directing, with unusually deliberative pacing, surrealistic themes, bizarre characters and unpredictable humor,” signaling a creative originality in television that the industry hoped to sustain as it developed new programming formats (Carter D1). In addition to receiving copious media coverage and favorable reviews, the series also generated a bevy of merchandising tie-ins: novels (The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer by Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer, and The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper by series writer Scott Frost), audiotape of Cooper’s dictations to “Diane,” a soundtrack album (Thompson 156), collectible cards, and a “guidebook” to the town (Lavery 10).

Once Laura’s murder had been solved in the second season, ratings continued to drop as the show began pursuing even more outrageous and esoteric stories involving Cooper and the homespun residents of the town. ABC eventually pulled the series from their lineup in February of 1991 and canceled it in May, airing the last six episodes intermittently on Thursdays from March 28 to June 10. The two-hour series finale earned a meager 6.7 rating, coming down from the series’ 21.7 during the winter of 1990. Oh, what might have been.

*Each rating point equals 921,000 homes with televisions.
_____

Carter, Bill. “At ABC, Several Motives For Keeping ‘Twin Peaks.’” The New York Times 21 May 1990: D1, D14.

—. “‘Twin Peaks’ May Provide a Ratings Edge for ABC.” The New York Times 16 Apr. 1990: D8.

Lavery, David. “Introduction: Twin Peaks’ Interpretive Community.” Ed. Lavery. Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1995. 1-21.

Thompson, Robert J. Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER. New York: Continuum, 1999.

“‘Twin Peaks’ Finale Draws Low Ratings.” The New York Times 12 June 1991: C18.

A landmark in the study of Indian cinema

2009-10-30T09:24:00.005-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency

By Ashish Rajadhyaksha

In Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid, Ashish Rajadhyaksha argues that any exploration of the social uses to which cinema is put in a place like India can only make sense if it transforms our understanding of cinema itself. Taking as his timeframe the era of celluloid, which is also marked by public experiences of spectatorship and uses of cinema by the state, Rajadhyaksha examines three moments of crisis for the Indian State in which cinema played a central role.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, and a critic and writer on cinema, art, and culture. He is author and editor (with Paul Willemen) of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema and author of Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic.

Distribution: World

Publication date: October 2009

Format: paper 432 pages, 210 b&w photos, 9.5 x 7.5

ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22048-6

More information here.

Pioneering studies of the Coen brothers’ cult classic

2009-10-28T10:03:00.004-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies

Edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe

A massive underground sensation, The Big Lebowski has been hailed as the first cult film of the internet age. In this book, 21 fans and scholars address the film's influences—westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus—and its historical connections to the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and of course bowling. The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies contains neither arid analyses nor lectures for the late-night crowd, but new ways of thinking and writing about film culture.

Edward P. Comentale is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. He is author of Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde and editor (with Stephen Watt and Skip Willman) of Ian Fleming and James Bond (IUP, 2005) and (with Andrzej Gasiorek) of T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism.

Aaron Jaffe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.

Distribution: World
Publication date: 11/1/2009
Format: paper 512 pages, 44 b&w illus., 6.125 x 7
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22136-0

More information here.

The origins of American cinema's fascination with Italy

2009-10-23T15:50:00.004-04:00

New book in Film & Media Studies from Indiana University Press:

Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque

By Giorgio Bertellini

Giorgio Bertellini traces the origins of American cinema's century-long fascination with Italy and Italian immigrants to the popularity of the pre-photographic aesthetic—the picturesque. Once associated with landscape painting in northern Europe, the picturesque came to symbolize Mediterranean Europe through comforting views of distant landscapes and exotic characters. Showing readers how this aesthetic was transferred from 19th-century American painters to early 20th-century American filmmakers, Bertellini moves from the picturesque in silent films to the Godfather trilogy, perhaps the definitive example of the picturesque in modern cinema. Italy in Early American Cinema offers readings of early films that pay close attention to how landscape representations that were related to narrative settings and filmmaking locations conveyed distinct ideas about racial difference and national destiny.

Giorgio Bertellini is Assistant Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures and of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He is author of Emir Kusturica. His edited and co-edited volumes include The Cinema of Italy and (with Richard Abel and Rob King) Early Cinema and the “National.”

Distribution: World

Publication date: 11/1/2009

Format: paper 464 pages, 64 b&w illus., 6.125 x 9.25

ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22128-5

More information here.

Reading/Screening/Re-thinking 007

2009-10-21T18:30:00.005-04:00

I had the great pleasure of assisting Christoph Lindner edit this new anthology while I was an M.A. student at Northern Illinois University:

The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader
Second Edition

Edited by Christoph Lindner, Manchester University Press

Sean Connery’s tuxedo, Ursula Andress’ bikini, Oddjob’s bowler hat, and Q’s gadgets are just a few defining features of the 007 world examined in The James Bond phenomenon. Drawn from the fields of literary, film, music, and cultural studies, the essays in this collection range from revitalised readings of Ian Fleming’s original spy novels, to the analysis of Pussy Galore’s lesbianism, Miss Moneypenny’s filmic feminism, and Pierce Brosnan’s techno-fetishism. Together, the essays not only consider the James Bond novels and films in relation to their historical, political, and social contexts from the Cold War period onwards, but also examine the classic Bond canon from an array of theoretical perspectives. What The James Bond phenomenon shows is that there is much, much more to the 007 series than cheap thrills, fast cars, and beautiful women.

This updated and expanded edition features new essays on a range of hot topics, including Daniel Craig’s debut as Bond, Playboy magazine’s obsession with the 007 lifestyle, Roger Moore’s erotic Orientalism, and the rise of 007 video gaming.

Christoph Lindner is Professor and Chair of English Literature at the University of Amsterdam.

216x138mm 272pp
pb 9780719080951 November 2009 £14.99

More information here.

#7 Munich (2005)

2009-10-16T09:39:00.003-04:00

Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth.

Trailer

Outside of the general moviegoing populace, Spielberg gets a lot of heat for being, well, Spielberg. Almost always the consummate entertainer and cinematic technician, his very name has become a synecdoche for mainstream, big-budget Hollywood fantasies. That might explain why he’s also an easy target for hipsters, smug film majors, cranky filmmakers above his unironic sentimentality and old-fashioned storytelling. Not all of his movies are exempt from criticism, but after Munich and the cerebral sci/fi pair A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Minority Report (2002), the “family director” proved himself as a serious, ambitious artist now more than ever.

His most vocal critics of Munich came from both Israeli and Palestinian groups, as well as U.S. reviewers who found it “ideologically muddled,” all of which speaks to the film’s disarming even-handedness. Based on George Jonas’s book Vengeance, this fictionalized account of the Mossad’s retaliation against Black September after the 1972 Munich Olympics begins as an elegant, gripping thriller and slowly turns the genre on its ear. Eric Bana stars as the leader of the secret assassination squad unofficially hired by the Israeli government to kill eleven members of the Palestinian terrorist organization responsible for the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes. Rarely have I seen an actor evoke deep-seated guilt, paranoia, and moral crisis as painfully as Bana, who never upstages the international supporting cast, which includes Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz, Hanns Zischler, Mathieu Amalric, Michael Lonsdale, and Ayelet Zurer. Spielberg, along with writers Kushner and Roth, avoid pat arguments and easy answers. Instead, their project defies absolutes, meditating on the personal and the political, on historical and national trauma, and on the complicated processes that engender violent conflict.

Read David Edelstein’s review at Slate.com

#8 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

#8 Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

2009-10-11T18:32:00.005-04:00

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis.

Trailer

In Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers (2006), the seasoned actor-turned-director not only accomplished a superior film, but also one of the most thoughtful, humanist World War II films ever made by an American filmmaker. Rivaled only by Unforgiven (1992), it stands as the best work of his career behind the camera. Flags explored the lives of the U. S. Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, while Letters, released two months later, depicts the battle from the perspective of the Japanese. Ken Watanabe stars as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, whose book Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief provided the source material for the film (with Kumiko Kakehashi’s So Sad to Fall in Battle). Drawing to the inevitable outcome, Eastwood allows us to drift from one character to the next, from caves and tunnels to the battlefield, as they reflect on their fate.

Steven Spielberg produced both films, which recall the harrowing combat scenes and visceral empathy of his own Saving Private Ryan (1998). Despite the participation of Hollywood heavies Eastwood, Spielberg, and Paul Haggis (the latter of whom wrote the film with Iris Yamashita), as well as production companies Amblin, DreamWorks, Malpaso, and Warner Bros., Letters is almost entirely in Japanese with English subtitles. Moreover, its sensibility resembles less a Hollywood war movie than a film by Akira Kurosawa. The premise might seem contrived—what happens to the men fighting for the “enemy”—but the story sees us through to all of the necessary respect and complexity, never demonizing or glorifying one side over another.

Read A. O. Scott’s review in The New York Times

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

#9 Mulholland Dr. (2001)

2009-10-05T09:47:00.005-04:00

Directed and written by David Lynch

Trailer

If ever there was a film that demanded to be seen more than once, this is it. Admittedly, I’m a late bloomer when it comes to appreciating Lynch’s surrealist artistry, especially in Mulholland Dr., for which he won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Once you give yourself over to the nightmare logic at play here, the fog clears to reveal his most profound and intellectually complete work that resolves its internal mysteries by opening more subtle and elusive ones on a larger scale. For all of the film’s psychoanalytic layers, narrative puzzles, and meta-filmic questions—making its contemporaries like Memento (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001), and Donnie Darko (2001) look simplistic by comparison—Lynch has also given us the most stylish and involving neo-noir of the decade. In a conflation of cinematic form and content, the aesthetics of the mise-en-scene remain indissoluble from the film’s ambiguous ideas.

Naomi Watts brilliantly plays an aspiring actress caught between her dreams of making it big in Hollywood and her fascination with a sexy femme fatale (Laura Elena Harring), who survived a car accident with a blue key, thousands of dollars, and no memory. The two women find themselves drawn into a phantasmagoria until the film suddenly doubles-back on itself to rearrange the chess board. Viewing their relationship through an alternate lens that suggests new understandings of earlier events, Lynch moves from satire to horror, but it somehow remains all of a piece. There are countless fan interpretations and critical theories available, some good and some bad, although it’s best to avoid any before seeing the film for the first time (James Naremore’s analysis in More than Night is a must-read for those interested in the noir aspects). Love it or hate it, but, like the most uncanny of dreams, you won’t stop thinking about it for days.

Read Stephen Holden’s review in The New York Times

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

From the cinematheque vaults: Night of the Living Dead

2009-10-02T10:40:00.002-04:00

The scariest American film since Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), George Romero’s low-budget quickie from 1968 needs no introduction for horror aficionados. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum best summed up the film with the following interpretation:

“Pointedly, the film’s ghouls constitute a comic (as well as comic-book) cross section of middle-American types. One could say Night of the Living Dead was to the Vietnam war what sci-fi cheapsters like The Thing from Another World, Invaders from Mars, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers had been to the Cold War—a brilliant, open-ended metaphor for topical anxieties. The obvious distrust with which many of the film’s characters regarded Duane Jones [as the black protagonist], the images of family members feasting on each other’s flesh, and the climactic image of redneck vigilantes shooting down ‘ordinary’ citizens were as apt a projection of 1968 as anything American movies were ever to produce. Night of the Living Dead was not only an instant horror classic, but a remarkable vision of the late sixties—offering the most literal possible depiction of America devouring itself.”

After the film opened in New York, and then ran on a double bill with an exploitation film called Slaves the next summer, it gathered a cult following along with inevitable controversy. In 1970, high art collided with subcultural trash when the MoMA screened the film, and the rest is zombie movie history. Four sequels, a re-make, and hordes of imitations later, nothing has eclipsed the raw, subversive shock of Romero’s original vision of the apocalypse. Happy Halloween!

SCMS Statement on Fair Use

2009-09-25T10:25:00.002-04:00

This came off the wire a few days ago...

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Statement on Fair Use:

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) strongly supports the attempt to define the fair use of visual and aural materials by film and videomakers, educators, programmers and curators, and other film and media practitioners. As a scholarly organization with an ongoing interest in advising its members and constituents on the considerable ambiguity regarding fair use practice and its possible ensuing consequences, SCMS supports the principle of clarifying the legal, ethical, and practical implications of the fair use of visual and aural materials. To this end, SCMS has constituted a committee on public policy, which has been charged with developing a stance on fair use practice, among other policy matters. SCMS seeks to work with other organizations to develop a comprehensive policy stance regarding the fair use of visual and aural materials.

SCMS is very pleased that the Librarian of Congress has created an exemption allowing film and media studies professors to create digital clips from legally-obtained DVDs housed in college and university libraries. The exemption lasts until Oct. 29, 2009, at which point it may be renewed. For more information about this ruling, please go to http://www.asc.upenn.edu/DMCA/.

"The two Fair Use Best Practices reports are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License."

Best Practices for Media Studies Publishing
(Direct inquiries to the SCMS Public Policy Committee c/o office@cmstudies.org)

Best Practices For Fair Use in Teaching
(Direct inquiries to the SCMS Public Policy Committee c/o office@cmstudies.org)

Fair Usage Publication of Film Stills (1993)

Fair Use and Online Video

New anthology by my friend and colleague, David Church

2009-09-23T08:09:00.009-04:00

Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin

Edited by David Church, University of Manitoba Press

Playing with Memories is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. It offers extensive perspectives on his career to date, from the early experimentation of The Dead Father (1986) to the intensely intimate revelations of My Winnipeg (2007). Featuring new and updated essays from American, Canadian, and Australian scholars, collaborators, and critics, as well as an in-depth interview with Maddin, this collection explores the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin’s work, firmly situating his films within ongoing cultural debates about postmodernism, genre, and national identity.

David Church teaches in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. He has contributed to Disability Studies Quarterly, Offscreen, Senses of Cinema, and several other publications.

Contributors: William Beard, Dana Cooley, Lee Easton, Kelly Hewson, Donald Masterson, Carl Matheson, Geoff Pevere, David L. Pike, Milan Pribisic, Steven Shaviro, Will Straw, Stephen Snyder, George Toles, Darrell Varga, Saige Walton

Paper • $29.95
0-88755-712-0 • 978-0-88755-712-5
304 pp • 6 x 9 • B&W Photo Section • Filmography Bibliography • Index PER004000 Film Studies
September 2009

More information here.

Note: Top 100 Film Studies Blogs

2009-09-17T08:12:00.002-04:00

The Online Degrees Hub just posted their list of the Top 100 film studies blogs, and your humble narrator is honored to see Caméra-Stylo included alongside such invaluable resources for academic news, discussions, essays, and reviews. With sincere thanks to ODH, I am posting the complete list here, especially for those just getting into the whole film blog thing.

#10 [tie] The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Casino Royale (2006)

2009-09-15T08:25:00.005-04:00

Bourne: Directed by Paul Greengrass. Written by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, and George Nolfi.

Trailer

Bond: Directed by Martin Campbell. Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis.

Trailer

Maybe it’s cheating to squeeze two titles into the #10 spot, but this blockbuster pair represents the spy thriller par excellence, as well as two of the most purely satisfying viewing experiences in recent memory (for many of the same reasons). Elitist critics will no doubt suggest that “commercial” or “popcorn” entertainment does not belong on a Top 10 list—a claim so absurd it isn’t even worth spending the time to refute—and yet both films are as compelling in their immaculately crafted action sequences as they are in their methodical development of character and drama. Set on the post-9/11 backdrop of globalization and the War on Terror, both films also reconfigure constructions of gender, violence, media, and technology in a paranoid new political-economic space for the espionage genre.

Ultimatum wraps up the loose threads laid out by The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004) (which are almost as cool), as the hunt continues for Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac C.I.A. renegade (Matt Damon). Dodging assassins and trotting the globe, Bourne finally learns the truth behind his identity crisis and his girlfriend’s murder. The climactic car chase may just be the greatest put on film. Royale, on the other hand, provides the origin story of Ian Fleming’s MI6 agent, James Bond (Daniel Craig). A reboot for the 007 series, the film recounts Bond’s first assignment as a ‘00’: to thwart the banker to the world’s terrorist organizations by beating him at the poker table in Montenegro. Even if Sean Connery and Goldfinger (1964) are my canonical favorites, it’s hard to deny that Craig and Royale make the most solid Bond and Bond film, respectively.

Read Stephanie Zacharek’s reviews of Bourne and Bond at Salon.com

# 11 Road to Perdition (2002)

# 12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

#11 Road to Perdition (2002)

2009-09-09T09:11:00.005-04:00

Directed by Sam Mendes. Written by David Self.

Trailer

People have asked me how often I cry at movies and the answer is not very, but here’s a film that wipes me out every time I see it—partly just because it’s so damn good. The bleak, evocative formalism alone is enough to move one to tears, with Mendes’s directing, Jill Bilcock’s editing, Thomas Newman’s score, and Dennis Gassner’s production design. Most unforgettable is the Oscar-winning cinematography by the late Conrad Hall, worthy of Edward Hopper’s starkest and most expressive paintings (this was Hall’s last film as a DP). One of the finest dramas I’ve seen about fathers and sons, Catholic guilt, cycles of compulsive male violence, and the figure of the Irish-American gangster, its resonance also stems from the classicist screenplay by Self, whose thematic scope and character sensitivity deepen the film’s wrenching affect.

Adapting the 1998 graphic novel of the same name by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, Mendes and Self spin a revenge tragedy set against the Depression-era Midwest. The two central characters are Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks), a brooding hit man for an Illinois mob backed by Capone, and John Rooney (Paul Newman), the avuncular crime boss who raised him. When Michael’s twelve-year-old son (Tyler Hoechlin, a rare find) sneaks out to observe one of his father’s “secret missions,” he witnesses an unplanned killing that not only implicates his father, but also Connor (Daniel Craig), Rooney’s jealous, embittered son who pulled the trigger. Connor’s attempt to silence the Sullivans results in further bloodshed, forcing Michael and his son go into hiding on the road, but Michael seeks retribution. The performances by Hanks and Newman are unlike anything we’ve seen from these likable stars, ranking among the most impressive turns of their careers, but Jude Law steals the show as a perverse, murderous photographer who “shoots the dead.” It’s a long, dark night of the soul.

Read Kenneth Turan’s review in the Los Angeles Times

# 12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

#12 Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

2009-09-02T08:13:00.005-04:00

Directed and written by Quentin Tarantino

Trailer

…the Superman monologue, Pai Mei, Ennio Morricone, the five-point-palm-exploding-heart technique, “Malaguena Salerosa,” a fish flapping on the carpet and a fish not flapping on the carpet/the perfect visual image of life and death, “A Satisfied Mind,” the lonely grave of Paula Schultz, a black mamba, “About Her,” thumbsucking and Lana Turner, blue means pregnant, “Goodnight Moon”…

Quite possibly my favorite Tarantino film to date, comprised almost entirely of perfect little quotes, set pieces, pop culture references, and stylistic excesses that have nothing to do with advancing the plot and everything to do with enriching Q’s mad, comic book universe. It’s a video store clerk’s intertextual view of the real world, in which everything is conceived of and explained in terms of other movies, and yet characters, dialogue, conflict, and humor ring with a certain psychological and dramatic truth. There lies the difference between Tarantino and his legions of imitators: while they never actually transcend their sources, he appropriates and extends them to create a work of his own originality (Inglourious Basterds is another story, though).

Kill Bill: Volume 1 came out of a cultish reverence for samurai and yakuza movies, anime, Hong Kong action cinema (especially from Shaw Brothers), and the martial arts genre. Slowing the pace down considerably, with an emphasis on quotidian dialogue rather than kinetic swordfights, Vol. 2 moves from Eastern to Western influences and celebrates everything from Sergio Leone and European horror to U. S. exploitation films. I much prefer 2 to 1, but this is truly a double feature and in many ways should be seen as a complete epic with two distinct halves. Uma Thurman reprises her role as The Bride, who continues her “roaring rampage of revenge” that she began in the first installment, inching closer to her ex-lover Bill (David Carradine), head of the Deadly Viper Assassin Squad. Tarantino offers everything we would expect from this postmodernist pulp, such as gruesome showdowns and premature burials. Make no mistake, the real action takes place during the stuff in between about what makes his rogue’s gallery tick.

Read Elvis Mitchell’s review in The New York Times

#13 Public Enemies (2009)

#14 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

#15 Snow Angels (2008)

About the list

Fall 2009 Film Series in Bloomington

2009-09-01T21:32:00.010-04:00

In addition to the "Themester" film series I referred to over the weekend, check out the local venues below for screenings on or near the IUB campus this fall:

City Lights & Underground Experimental Film Series
Bi-weekly 16mm screenings of Classic Hollywood and international art cinema (presented by City Lights) and experimental film (presented by Underground) held Fridays at 7 PM in the IU Radio-Television Building Room 251. Free and open to the public.

Golden Age of Hollywood
Monthly screenings of Classic Hollywood films held at Bloomington's historic Buskirk-Chumley Theater (114 E. Kirkwood Ave.). $2 general admission.

The Ryder
Foreign-language, independent, and classic American films usually screened at Bear's Place Ale House (1316 E. 3rd Street) . $4 general admission.

Union Board
The longest running film series in the country, presenting contemporary films in the Whittenberger Auditorium of the Indiana Memorial Union. Free for IU students, $2 admission for non-students.

From the cinematheque vaults: T-Men

2009-09-01T07:46:00.004-04:00

“Did you ever spend ten nights in a Turkish bath looking for a man? Don’t.”

The first of director Anthony Mann’s film noir collaborations with cinematographer John Alton at Eagle-Lion, T-Men (1947) was followed the next year by Raw Deal (their masterpiece) and He Walked by Night (on which Mann was an uncredited co-director). Fading over the years by its wooden acting, dated, newsreel-style voice over, and lionization of the U.S. government, the film’s dry plot has two undercover Treasury agents (Dennis O’Keefe and Alfred Ryder) infiltrating a ring of counterfeiters. Nevermind all that, its near avant-garde “look” has become a perennial textbook on low-key, black-and-white cinematography and artful direction of pulp crime thrillers. I dare you to turn away, especially during the famous steam bath sequence. Formula B-films of the time could usually get away with edgier material in terms of onscreen violence and psychosexual themes, but also frequently demonstrated a more interesting filmmaking form than conventional productions from the major studios. If you haven’t ventured far into that “other side” of Classic Hollywood, where some of the most original auteurs honed their techniques and creative vision, T-Men makes a great place to start.