Frame grab from Borom Sarret/The Wagoner (Ousmane Sembène,1963). Read Alexander Fisher's article on Sembène's use of voice-over in this film in the latest issue of Cinephile

While it is true that film has been historically considered an image-centred medium, the fact that hearing plays as much a role in perceiving the motion picture as seeing does, transcends it beyond a mere visual art. Furthermore, as noted sound theorist Michel Chion asserts in The Voice in Cinema, “the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that contains it.” Therefore, studying parts of the cinema in which the voice gains particular significance is not only justified, but necessary. This issue of Cinephile revolves around diverse applications and functions of the voices in fiction films, whose sources are absent from the image frame.

Theoretical approaches to the filmic voice were only developed in the 1980s, and as the works cited in the articles here indicate, at least in the case of off-screen voices and voice-over, they have not been properly updated. One goal of this collection has been to explore various demonstrations of voice-over both in a more contemporary scope and on a more international scale. The main concern of each of the following five articles is the voice-over, showing how concentrating on this under-appreciated technique can lead to bigger conclusions about films and filmmakers. [Editorial Introduction, Cinephile, 8.1, 2013]

Today, Film Studies For Free hails the online publication (earlier this year) of volume 8.1 of Cinephile, the University of British Columbia's on and offline film journal. The special topic on this occasion is the cinematic voice-over and there are marvellous essays on it by Sarah Kozloff (author of the classic studies of VOs and film sound Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film [1988] and Overhearing Film Dialogue [2000]), Stephen Teo, Carl Laamanen, Laura Beadling and Alexander Fisher.

You can download a large PDF of this beautifully illustrated issue from this webpage. The featured contents are as follows

• 'About a Clueless Boy and Girl: Voice-Over in Romantic Comedy Today' by Sarah Kozloff
• 'What Does God Hear? Terrence Malick, Voice-Over, and The Tree of Life' by Carl Laamanen
• 'Native American Filmmakers Reclaiming Voices: Innovative Voice-Overs in Chris Eyre’s Skins' by Laura Beadling
• 'The Voice-Over as an Integrating Tool of Word and Image' by Stephen Teo
• 'Voice-Over, Narrative Agency, and Oral Culture: Ousmane Sembène’s Borom Sarret' by Alexander Fisher

Framegrab from Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu , 2006)

Babel sets out to be a new sort of film that attempts to create a “world cinema” gaze within a commercial Hollywood framework. I examine how it approaches this and ask whether the film succeeds in this attempt. I explore the tensions between progressive and conservative political agendas, and pay particular attention to the ways “other” cultures are seen in a film with “Third World” pretensions and U.S money behind it. I frame my analysis around a key question: does the Iñárritu-led outfit successfully create a paradigmatic “transnational world cinema” text that de-centers U.S. hegemony, or is this a utopian project doomed to failure in a film funded predominantly by major U.S. studios? I examine the ways in which the film engages with the tourist gaze and ask whether the film replaces this gaze with a world cinema gaze or merely reproduces it in new ways . [Deborah Shaw, "Babel and the Global Hollywood Gaze", Situations, 4.1, 2011]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce the publication of a new film issue of the Open Access journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. The special issue is entitled "Global Cinema: Cinéma Engagé or Cinéma Commerciale?" and it contains ten essays on modern international films and cinemas, including those of Iran, Nigeria, Mexico, Romania, France, China, Argentina, and India as well as on contemporary film festivals and on films documenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As the editors write:

The issue has a global reach in its coverage of countries and regions of the world ranging from Hollywood’s own “Global Gaze,” to a placement of Nigerian Cinema as the equal of Africa’s modernist cinema, to Venezuela’s difficult negotiation of a Bolivarian cinema in a neoliberal context, to a questioning of the radical othering of Eastern European cinema whose concerns now seem much closer to those of the West, and, finally, to a tracing of a complex multiperspectival fashioning of the image of the Chinese peasantry in a moment when the distinction between city and country are rapidly fading.  The global reach of the issue extends as well to the range of theoretical positions used to examine contemporary global cinema, be it:  structural-materialist aspects of the questioning of the Israeli-Palestinian problematic; the integration of economic and aesthetic methodologies in a post-Adornian examination of the Cannes Film Festival; feminist and subaltern theory utilized to critique the patriarchal aspects of what is sometimes viewed as India’s most politically progressive cinema; a rereading and deconstruction of French radical workerist post-1968 cinema; and a linking of feminist and anti-colonial perspectives to highlight the way that in Iran Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten spotlights Muslim women's emancipation.

Below are direct links to the contents, as per usual here at FSFF.

Situation homepage  Archives

Vol 4, No 1 (2011) Table of Contents PDF

• Terri Ginsberg, Dennis Broe, "Whither Globalization? An Idea Whose Time Has Come or Whose Time Has Come and Gone?" PDF
• Deborah Shaw, "Babel and the Global Hollywood Gaze" PDF
• Dennis Broe, "The Film Festival as Site of Resistance: Pro or Cannes" PDF
• Hossein Khosrowjah , "Neither a Victim nor a Crusading Heroine" PDF
• Jonathon Haynes , "African Cinema and Nollywood: Contradictions" PDF
• Terri Ginsberg, " Radical Rationalism as Cinema Aesthetics: The Palestinian–Israeli Conflict in North American Documentary and Experimental Film" PDF
• Paul Douglas Grant, "Just Some of the Ways to Shoot a Strike: Militant Filmmaking in France from Arc to the Groupe Medvedkine" PDF
• Noah Zweig, "Villa del Cine (Cinema City): Constructing Bolivarian Citizens for the Twenty-First Century" PDF
• Ping Fu, "Encircling the City: Peasant Migration in Contemporary Chinese Media" PDF
• Gayatri Devi, "Between Personal Cataclysms and National Conflicts: The Missing Labor Class in Malayalam Cinema" PDF PDF
• "Eastern European Cinema on the Margins" by Meta Mazaj PDF
• Contributors, Film Issue PDF

Images from two 'AIDS film dramas': above, Longtime Companion (Norman René, 1989), a film which, as Emmanuel Levy puts it, carried "the burden of being the first [widely distributed] theatrical movie to deal directly with AIDS"; below, a frame grab from Yesterday (Darrell Roodt, 2004), about a Zulu woman living with AIDS. Read Jean Stuart's and Olaia Cores Calvo's articles on this film.

It was [30] years ago, in the summer of 1981, when society as a whole[, including] the scientific community[,] was faced with an unknown disease that came later to be known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Several films [...] reflected the initial fears and uncertainty, the responses of the different social groups, the fight against ignorance, the [demand for] access to treatment and the suffering of the infected individuals and their families [...] due to this disease. Taking into account that these movies were filmed when these epidemics took place they can actually be considered as [...] historical documents that deserve [to be] analysed by the generations to come. Films such as And The Band Played On; Longtime Companion; Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; Les Nuits Fauves; Angels in America; Yesterday and My Brother... Nikhil have marked [30] years of AIDS history that should not be forgotten by the world. [Adapted from António Pais de Lacerda, 'Cinema as an Historical Document: AIDS in 25 years of Cinema', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 102-113; hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Film Studies For Free today commemorates the twenty-third World AIDS Day in the thirtieth year since the identification of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. The Human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], the lentivirus which causes the syndrome, was identified two years later, in 1983.

FSFF marks this anniversary year with the below entry of links to scholarly resources on the figuration of AIDS/HIV in cinema and culture.

Today's posting was also inspired by a series of film screenings and discussions on 'AIDS and its Melodramas' that have been taking place at the University of Sussex, UK, organised by Michael Lawrence and John David Rhodes. These academic events will continue next term with screenings of Fatal Love (1991), And the Band Played On (1993), Philadelphia (1993) and, one of FSFF's favourites,  Boys on the Side (1995). Please email FSFF if you'd like more details.

• ACT UP NY Webcasts
• Elana D. Anderson, 'Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow: Socio-Cultural Evolution In African Literature and Film', Mosaic African Studies, 2010 
• Carole Blair and Neil Michel, 'The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration', Rhetoric and Public Affairs Vol. 10, No. 4, 2007, pp. 595–626
• Martin P. Botha, 'Post-Apartheid Cinema: A Thematic and Aesthetic Explorations of Selected Short and Feature Films', Ilha do Desterro, Florianópolis, nº 61 p. 225- 267 jul/dez 2011
• Cüneyt Çakirlar, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes's Cinema of Queer Pastiche', KÜLT: A Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1, April 2011
• Jean Carlomusto and Jane Rosett, 'AIDS: A LIVING ARCHIVE™', SandF Online, 2.1, Summer 2003
• Olaia Cores Calvo, 'Yesterday (2004)', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 5.4 (2009):125-130
• David Campbell, The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS: A report for the AIDS, Security and Conflict Initiative, May 2008 
• Brendan Curran, Singin’ in the Scourge: Two AIDS Musicals, Two Political and Cultural Contexts, MA Thesis, Concordia University, April 2011
• Juan Luis Cuesta Jiménez, 'The Constant Gardener or the development of new Therapies', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2.3 (2006): 96-101 
• Ann Cvetkovich, 'AIDS Activism and the Oral History Archive', SandF Online, Summer 2.1, Summer 2003
• Anthony Enns, '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction,7.3, 2007
• Kyle Frackman, 'Out of Time: "Allotemporality" in Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss’ Zurück auf los', queere (t)ex(t)perimente. Eds. Franziska Bergmann, Jennifer Moos, and Claudia Münzing. Freiburg: fwpf-Verlag, 2008
• J.E. García Sánchez, E. García Sánchez and M.L. Merino Marcos, 'Antiviral, antifungal and antiprotozoal agents in the cinema', Revista Española de Quimioterapia, Marzo 2007; Vol. 20 (No 1): 106-111
• Silvia Grassi, 'Like a Carsic River: Gay Independent Cinema from Underground Films to New Queer Cinema and Beyond', Altre modernità/ Otras modernidades/ Autres modernités/ Other Modernities, N. 2 – 10/2009
• Oliver Gruner, Public Politics/Personal Authenticity: A Tale of Two Sixties in Hollywood Cinema, 1986-1994, PhD Thesis, University of East Anglia, August, 2010
• Roger Hallas, 'The Witness in the Archive', SandF Online, 2.1, Summer 2003
• Lucas Hilderbrand, 'Retroactivism', glq, 12.2, 2006
• Jim Hubbard, 'A Report on the Archiving of Film and Video Work by Makers with AIDS', DIVA TV, [date unknown]
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'AIDS Video: To Dream and Dance with the Censor', Jump Cut, No. 52, summer 2010
• Alexandra Juhasz in exchange with Antoinette Burton, 'Feminist history making and Video Remains', Jump Cut, No. 48, winter 2006
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'Alternative AIDS Videos', Cineaste, vol.XXI, nos. 1-2, 1994/5
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'Interview with Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman: ACT UP Oral History Project', CORPUS, Spring 2006
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love,' originally published in The Cinema of Todd Haynes, ed. James Morrison (London:Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Dion Kagan, '[Review of] Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Duke University Press, 2009', Screening the Past, 28, 2010
• Tim Lawrence, ‘AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plurality in Derek Jarman's Blue’ Social Text, 52/53 (Autumn - Winter 1997): 241-264
• Timothy F. Murphy, 'Part One: The Meaning of AIDS', Ethics in an Epidemic: AIDS, Morality, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
• Christo Oberholzer, An Investigation Into Nationalism and National Allegory within South African Post-Apartheid Film, MA Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2006
• António Pais de Lacerda, 'Cinema as an Historical Document: AIDS in 25 years of Cinema', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 102-113
• Georgios Pappas, Savvas Seitaridis, Nikolaos Akritidis, and Epaminondas Tsianos, 'Infectious Diseases in Cinema: Virus Hunters and Killer Microbes', Clinical Infectious Diseases,
• Volume 37, Issue 7, 2003: 939-942
• Monica B. Pearl, 'The City of Brotherly Love: Sex, Race and AIDS in Philadelphia', EnterText 2.3, Summer 2003
• Monica B. Pearl, 'American Grief: The AIDS Quilt and Texts of Witness', Gramma, 08
• Lucia Pérez Ochoa López, 'Philadelphia (1993): View of AIDS when it began to be a treatable disease', Journal of Medicine and Movies, 2 (2006): 21-28
• Jean Stuart, 'Yesterday, today … and tomorrow: The future of girlhood in the age of AIDS', AGENDA 79 2009
• Marita Sturken, 'The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions', in Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov, 1996
• Nicoletta Vallorani, 'Path(o)s of Mourning. Memory, Death and the Invisible Body in Derek Jarman’s Blue', Altre modernità/ Otras modernidades/ Autres modernités/ Other Modernities, N. 4 – 10/2010

One Touch of Venus (William A. Seiter, 1948), starring Robert Walker and Ava Gardner. See Edgar Morin's essay on Gardner here.

Issue 57 Contents

• Editorial

Feature Articles

• An Interview with Olivier Assayas on Carlos by Genevieve Yue

• Introduction to Edgar Morin by Lorraine Mortimer

• Ava Gardner by Edgar Morin

• The America Endangered in The American by Joseph Natoli

• African Francophone Cinema in the French New Wave by Wes Felton

• Citizen Kane: Biography and the Unfinished Sentence by Pedro Blas Gonzalez

• The Older Grows the Body, the Faster Run the Machines by John Downie

• Making Space by Sean Cubitt

• The Cinemas of Interactions by Leon Gurevitch

• disney.go.com/fairies and Pixie Hollow MMOG by Allison Maplesden

• Feminism and Cinema in the Digital Age by Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon

Great Directors

• Mattias Frey on Michael Haneke

• Matt Losada on Jean Rouch

• Robert Farmer on Jean Epstein

Festival Reports

• Martha P. Nochimson on New York

• Gianluca Pulsoni on Lucca Film Festival

• Celluloid Liberation Front on Venice

• Vera Brunner-Sung on Pusan International Film Festival

• Libertad Gills on Festival de Cine Cero Latitud

• Huw Walmsley-Evans on Brisbane

• Bérénice Reynaud on Vancouver

Book Reviews

• Film, Theory and Philosophy

• John Fidler on The Tactile Eye and Moving Viewers

• Dean Brandum on Michael Winterbottom

• Chris Carter on >Re-Imagining Animation

• Adrian Danks on Humphrey Jennings

• David Melville on Beyond Paradise

Cteq Annotations

• Michael Walsh on Camouflage

• Marcin Wisniewski on Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease

• Pedro Blas Gonzalez on The Structure of Crystals

• Adrian Danks on Family Life

Melonie Diaz, Jack Black, and  Mos Def  in Be Kind, Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008 - See FSFF's post on Gondry for some reading on this film)


Film Studies For Free is thrilled to be able to pass on news of the launch of MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL: Critical Explorations in Media and Space, a new graduate online journal based in the University of California, Santa Barbara's Department of Film and Media Studies.

The first issue (1.1, 2010) on VIDEO STORES, edited by Joshua Neves and Jeff Scheible, is now available at http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/.

Neves and Scheible introduce their special issue as follows:

This new online journal represents the latest development in a research initiative launched in UCSB’s Department of Film and Media Studies in 2007. The goal of Media Fields is to provide a forum focused on the critical study of media and space, where we can dynamically present and openly debate the latest work from established and emerging scholars and practitioners. Each issue will have a theme—whether it is a topic of contemporary relevance; an exploration of a particular concept, media form, genre, or practice; or, as in this issue, a specific media space: the video rental store.
     We were compelled to focus on the space of the video store in this issue because it is a “media field” that at once allows for the kind of tangible, site-specific fieldwork that is at the heart of Media Fields and, at the same time, is a site where a range of important issues intersect: “new” media’s consequences for “old” media; uses, developments, and failures of media technologies; the cultivation of knowledge about cinema and television; global media distribution; piracy and the law; the circulation of pornography; configurations of cultural communities; relations between public and private space; and contemporary media reception. [read more]

The issue contents are linked to below. Also see the following great site mentioned by the special issue: Video Cultures.
Issue Contents:

• "Video Stores: Introduction" by Jeff Scheible and Joshua Neves
• "Home, Home (Video) on the Range: Reflections on Small-Town Video
• Stores in 2010" by Daniel Herbert
• "Things and Movies: DVD Store Culture in Fiji" by Nicole Starosielski
• "Exchange and Circulation: An Anthropological Perspective on Video
• Stores in Kinshasa" by Katrien Pype
• "A Business without a Future? The Parisian Vidéo-Club, Past and Present" by Brian R. Jacobson and Joshua Neves
• "The Death and Life of the Back Room" by Peter Alilunas
• "Mapping Hardcore Space" by J. Steven Witkowski
• "Riviera Adult Superstore" by Constance Penley
• "Pedagogical Spaces, or, What We’ve Lost in the Post-Video-Store Era" by Roger Beebe
• "Browsing for Dissonance: Paratexts, Box-Art Iconography, and Genre" by Kevin M. Flanagan
• "EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! An Interview with Future Schlock" by Jeff Scheible
• "Video Stores, Media Technologies, and Memory" by Rowan Wilken
• "Video Rental Store: An Interview with Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot and Su-Ying Lee" by Mél Hogan
• "The Long Tail of the Video Store" by Frederick Wasser
• "Free Lifetime Membership" by Matt Kaelin

Please also note that a call for submissions for an issue on DOCUMENTARY AND SPACE is now open and can be viewed here.

In 1974, Teshome Gabriel, who was at the time a [UCLA] Ph.D. student but who would later be widely credited with introducing Third Cinema theory to Euro-American film scholars with the publication of his 1982 dissertation, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetic of Liberation, organized a weekly Third World Film Club. Through 1976, the club screened the work of radical filmmakers mostly from Latin American and Africa including Miguel Littín (Chile), Jorge Sanjinés (Bolivia), Solanas and Getino (Argentina), and Ousmane Sembene (Senegal). The Los Angeles School was especially influenced by the classics of Cuban and Brazilian cinema including Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, 1968), Lucía (Humberto Solás, 1968), The Last Supper (Gutierrez Alea, 1976), and the work of Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil) and Glauber Rocha (Brazil), who, invited by Gabriel, visited UCLA in 1978.

 [Footnote 15: Teshome Gabriel’s importance should not be underestimated. In a recent assessment of Third Cinema, Anthony Guneratne refers to the appearance of Gabriel’s book as a “watershed,” “the first work in English to undertake a comprehensive exposition of Third Cinema theory in relation to the social and political situations it addressed.” See Guneratne and Dissanayake, Rethinking Third Cinema].

Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, 2009, p. 150 (hyperlinks added by FSFF)

Official history tends to arrest the future by means of the past. Historians privilege the written word of the text - it serves as their rule of law. It claims a "center" which continuously marginalizes others. In this way its ideology inhibits people from constructing their own history or histories.
     Popular memory, on the other hand, considers the past as a political issue. It orders the past not only as a reference point but also as a theme of struggle. For popular memory, there are  no longer any "centers" or "margins," since the very designations imply that something has been conveniently left out.
     Popular memory, then, is neither a retreat to some great tradition nor a flight to some imagined "ivory tower," neither a self-indulgent escapism, nor a desire for the actual "experience" or "content" of the past for its own sake. Rather, it is a "look back to the future," necessarily dissident and partisan, wedded to constant change.

Teshome H. Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics.” Questions of Third Cinema. Ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 53-64

A study of style alone will not engender meaning ... Style is only meaningful in the context of its use - in how it acts on culture and helps to illuminate the ideology within.

Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: An Aesthetic of Liberation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982) p. 41 

[T]he principle characteristic of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is made, or even who makes it, but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays. In one word we might not be far from the truth when we claim the Third Cinema (as) the cinema of the Third World which stands opposed to imperialism and class oppression in all their ramifications and manifestations.

Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: An Aesthetic of Liberation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982) p. 2

• Teshome H. Gabriel, 'Xala: A cinema of wax and gold', from Jump Cut, no. 27, July 1982, pp. 31-3
• Teshome H. Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics.” Questions of Third Cinema. Ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 53-64

• Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, 2009
• Homi K. Bhabha, 'The Commitment to Theory', New Formations, No. 5, Summer 1988
• Mbye Cham, 'Official History, Popular Memory: Reconfiguration of the African Past in the Films of Ousmane Sembene', Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 11 [1993]
• Michael Chanan, 'The Changing Geography of Third Cinema', Screen Special Latin American Issue, Volume 38, number 4, Winter 1997)
• Catherine Grant, 'Studies of 'Third Cinema' and anti-Eurocentric film culture', Film Studies For Free, August 10, 2009 
• Teresa Hoefert de Turegano, 'On Questions and Critical Methodology of African Cinemas:Ukadike's Questioning African Cinema', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 8 No. 13, April 2004
• Nicola Marzano, 'The Art of Hunger: re-defining Third Cinema', 16:9, November 2009 - 7. årgang - nummer 34
• Nicola Marzano, 'Third Cinema Today', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 6, 2009
• LaShonda Naté Long, 'Evoking the Kuxa Kenema: Reconstructing History and Memory through Cinema Novo in Mozambican Cinema', Powerlines, 2002
• Carrie Peplinski, 'Oral Traditions and Weapons of Resistance: The Modern Africa Filmmaker as Griot', Culture, Communication and Media Studies, (date unknown) 
• Antonio Sison, 'Perfumed Nightmare and Negative Experiences of Contrast: Third Cinema as Filmic Interpretation of Schillebeeck', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2002
• Robert Stam, 'Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbarge', E.A.I.L, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1998
• Tia Wong, 'Eyeing Resistance: Alanis Obomsawin’s Third Cinema/Gaze/World', Cinephile, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2006
• Jonathan Wright, 'Re-remembering History in Contemporary Film', Film-Philosophy, 10.1, 2006
  

• H-AfrLitCine [an H-Net Network discussing African Literature and Cinema] 
• UC Berkeley Library African Cinema Bibliography 
• BFI African Cinema Bibliography 
• UStanford Guide to African Films Movies and Video on the Internet

Film Studies has lost two of its giants.

On Monday, Professor Teshome Gabriel of UCLA, a leading theorist and scholar of African, Third and Third World Cinema, and memory and cinema, passed away in Los Angeles.

And, just yesterday, Peter Brunette, Reynolds Professor of Film Studies at Wake Forest University, author of important books on film theory, Italian cinema and the work of individual film directors, and a very well-known and popular film critic, died while in attendance at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy.

Film Studies For free will post full, individual, tributes of its own to each of these scholars very shortly, but in the meantime is gathering together, below, a list of links to some of the online tributes to both men. If you know of any you would like to see included, please email FSFF, or link to them in the comments section of this post.

The author of this blog would like to pass on her sincere condolences to the families and friends of both men.

Tributes to Teshome Gabriel

• UCLA obituary
•  Ethiopian Review obituary   
• Friend, Master Storyteller, Scholar, and Humanist Par Excellence: Reminiscences of Teshome H. Gabriel, June 16, 2010 by Vinay Lal 
• Teshome H. Gabriel dies at 70; UCLA professor and Third World cinema expert, by Dennis McLellan LA Times, June 17, 2010

Tributes to Peter Brunette

• Gerald Peary, 'Peter Brunette, In Memory', Indiewire.com, June 21, 2010
• Wake Forest University obituary
• The Hollywood Reporter report and obituary  
• Writer Peter Brunette Dies at Italian Festival by Eugene Hernandez, Indiewire, June 16, 2010
  
• Film Scholar Brunette Dies at Taormina by Anne Thompson, Thompson on Hollywood, June 16, 2010
• Peter Brunette by Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running, June 16, 2010
• R.I.P. Peter Brunette, by Joe Leydon, MovingPictureBlog, June 16, 2010
• RIP Peter Brunette, by Movie Cricket, Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2010
• Film critic Brunette dies by Rachel Abrams, Variety.com, June 16, 2010
• Nick James, 'Peter Brunette, 1944-2010', Sight and Sound, June 17, 2010 
• Issa Clubb, 'Remembering Peter Brunette', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2010
• Peter Keough, 'Peter Brunette 1944-2010', Outside the Frame, The Boston Phoenix, June 22, 2010

For those of you not (yet) following Film Studies For Free on Twitter here's a meaty round up of FSFF's (aka @filmstudiesff) recent top tweeted recommendations of online and openly accessible film and media studies resources of note. They are listed mainly in reverse chronological order, so there are as many must-read recommendations at the foot of the list as there are at the top.

For Twitter aficionados, FSFF's 'Follow-Friday' recommendations are given in (@) brackets throughout:

• Two excellent and must-read items from David Bordwell:
  
  
  • 'Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong'
  • The hilarious and informative blogpost on bedposts and cinematic phalluses...
    

• Scorsese, Schoonmaker, and Toback talk to Aaron Hillis at GreenCineDaily about THE RED SHOES restoration (@GreenCineDaily) 
  

• At Film International, read Robert Leeming on Joseph Losey:  (thanks to @theauteursdaily)
  

• Must-read: Hito Steyerl on the 'Poor Image' (and 'swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities') (thanks to @theauteursdaily)
  

• Compelling essay by Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) at The Valve: 'Tarantino is an Inglourious Basterd'

• Excellent Guardian article by Peter Bradshaw (@guardianfilm and @peterbradshaw1) on 'What Michael Haneke owes to Kafka' 

• Fabulous piece on the essay film's jostling of cinematic pieties by Andrew Tracy for Moving Image Source (thanks to @theauteursdaily)
  

• Dan North (@drnorth) on the decline and fall of Tarzan  

• At Indian Auteur, a really good interview with Atsushi Funahashi (Deep in the Valley)  (Thanks to @niteshrohit) 
  

• Luke McKernan at The Bioscope on recovering obscure histories, e.g., that of British silent era screenwriter Mary Murillo (thanks to @theauteursdaily)

• Check out Ron Reed's fascinating post on the Coens' A Serious Man: 'Questions For Further Study' @ Filmwell  (@filmwell)

• The Open Culture blog had a good round of websites where you can watch Free Movies Online

• See Ryland Walker Knight's wonderful work transforming Michael Bay's images: "Bay Area: A Flare for "Transformers"
  

• See Matthew Flanagan's great review of "La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris" (Frederick Wiseman)  (thanks to @theauteurs) 

• A must-read: Henry Jenkins on' Strange Overtures: Vodaphone, Tchaikovsky, Ernie Kovacs and the "Wowness" of New Media  (thanks to @henryjenkins)  
  

• A last post (sob) Mystery Man on Film's old blog: [HIS] 101 BEST ARTICLES! - Lots of great educational stuff, especially on screenwriting. (thanks to @MMonFilm)
  

• Great post at The Bourne Cinema Conspiracy on 'The Best Korean and Japanese Films of the 2000s' 
  

• Excellent essay by Ernest Mathijs, 'Threat or Treat: Film, Television, and the Ritual of Halloween' at Flow TV (thanks to @flowTV)

• Truly great stuff, as always, from Michael J Anderson: "Being Above/Being Within: A Taxonomy of the 360° Panorama" (thanks to @theauteursdaily 

• The ever excellent Michael Guillén at The Evening Class on LOS SANTOS SUCIOS/THE DIRTY SAINTS (2009) - great Q&A with Luis Ortega (@MichaelGuillen)

• David Cairns (@dcairns)  is brilliant on THE HAUNTING 'Halloween Film Club: Sick Building Syndrome' at his Shadowplay blog 

• Chris Cagle's done it again - a great overview, this time, of film history textbooks (thanks to @theauteursdaily). It's a companion piece to his extremely useful review-overview of introductory textbooks.
  

•  'Kuxa Kanema: Mozambican film … and Godard' from Damon Smith's brilliant The Hands of Bresson blog
  

• Jonathan Rosenbaum compellingly asks the big Bazinian question 'What is cinema?' in his essay 'Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia'

• A Must-read: Srikanth Srinivasan (@justanotheruser) brilliantly posted about Roman Polanski's second feature REPULSION (1965) 
  

• And last but certainly not least, read Film Editor Jo Ann Kaplan on 8 "magic" cuts (with clips) at the great website APEngine (@APEngine)
  

Film Studies For Free rushes you the hot-off-the-press news that there's new issue out today of one of its favourite open access online film journals, Screening the Past. It's a hugely valuable special issue devoted to the subject of 'Colonial Africa on the Silent Screen'. The website describes the issue thus:

The Rose of Rhodesia (1918) by Harold M. Shaw is one of the earliest remaining feature films shot in Africa. Issue #25 of Screening the Past offers the first critical assessment of the film that until recently was thought lost. Essays by specialists in an array of fields situate the film in the context of South African cinema history, silent film conventions, performance styles, popular literature, imperialism, and political struggle in Zimbabwe today. Guest-edited by Stephen Donovan and Vreni Hockenjos, and in collaboration with the Nederlands Filmmuseum, this special issue includes a streamed version of the restored print of The Rose of Rhodesia.

FSFF would also like to flag up Robert Burgoyne's brilliant essay on The New World, Sam Rohdie's four essays (on Painlevé, Jennings, Vigo, and Ford), and Bill Routt's great feature review Ford At Fox: Part Two (b).

Below is the full table of contents:

Foreword: Terence Ranger

Introduction: Stephen Donovan and Vreni Hockenjos

The Rose of Rhodesia—click here to view the film

Acknowledgements

Film Information

Part I: Production and Reception

Neil Parsons: Investigating the Origins of The Rose of Rhodesia, Part I: African Film Productions

Neil Parsons: Investigating the Origins of The Rose of Rhodesia, Part II: Harold Shaw Film Productions Ltd.

James Burns: Cape Town Bioscope Culture and The Rose of Rhodesia

Part II: Cinematic Perspectives

Vreni Hockenjos: Featured Attractions: The Rose of Rhodesia and Silent Cinema

Ylva Habel: Hollywood Histrionics: Performing “Africa” in The Rose of Rhodesia

Jacqueline Maingard: The Rose of Rhodesia: Colonial Cinema as Narrative Fiction and Ethnographic Spectacle

Part III: Political Perspectives

Bernard Porter: Race, Empire, and The Rose of Rhodesia

Nhamo Anthony Mhiripiri: Blood Diamonds and State Repression: From The Rose of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe’s Chiadzwa Diamond Fields

Ashleigh Harris: “Until time make him white”: Race, Land, and Insurrection in The Rose of Rhodesia

Part IV: Literary Perspectives

Stefan Helgesson: The Rose of Rhodesia as Colonial Romance

Stephen Donovan: Guns and Roses: Reading for Gender in The Rose of Rhodesia

Commentary

Peter Davis: In Africa, Diamonds Are Forever: From The Great Kimberley Diamond Robbery to Blood Diamond

Scoring The Rose of Rhodesia: An Interview with Matti Bye

Appendices

A. Plot summary
B. Intertitles with English translation
C. Press cuttings
D. Cast and crew biographies
E. Harold Shaw filmography
F. Maps of Rhodesia and Southern Africa
G. Early Rhodesian ephemera

Contributors

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First release

Sam Rohdie, Four Essays: Painlevé; Jennings; Vigo; Ford.

Robert Burgoyne, The Columbian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World.

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Reviews

Feature Review: Bill Routt reviews Ford At Fox: Part Two (b).

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Ina Bertrand reviews Catherine Lumby, Alvin Purple, and Henry Reynolds, The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

Yvette Biro reviews Lorraine Mortimer, “Terror and Joy”. The Films of Dusan Makavejev.

Dean Brandum reviews Michael Deeley and Matthew Field, Blade Runner, Deer Hunters & Blowing The Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies.

Wheeler Winston Dixon reviews Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job.

Charles Drazin reviews Brian McFarlane, Screen Adaptations: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations: The Relationship Between Text and Film.

Seyda Aylin Gurses reviews Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory.

Jan-Christopher Horak reviews Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies.

D.B. Jones reviews Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia.

Lorraine Mortimer reviews Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York 1880-1924.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith reviews Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: an aesthetic approach.

Daniel Ross reviews Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity and Irving Singer, Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film.

Thomas Salek reviews James Walters, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms.

Brian Shoesmith reviews Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance.

Matt Wanat reviews Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Film: The Key Concepts.