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Showing posts with label Derek Jarman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Derek Jarman. Show all posts

Saturday, 5 January 2013

On Embodiment and the Body: New Issue of CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image




Above, a recording of composer Simon Fisher Turner and sound artist Black Sifichi's live performance of SFT's score for Derek Jarman's 1994 film Blue at Glasgow's Tramway Theatre in 2008.  Below, a brief excerpt from Vivian Sobchack's article 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Today, most graduate students are in such a hurry to “professionalize” and “talk the talk” of their disciplines that they often forget to attend to their own experience of “seeing” and “listening” — or they devalue it. Instead, they rush to quote others, and describe their objects of study through a range of “floating signifiers” that tend to overdetermine and foreclose their objects and their descriptions before the latter have even really begun. Hermeneutically sophisticated yet overly dependent upon “received knowledge,” these students are also secretly insecure and worried that everyone else ‘knows’ more than they do — and intellectually aware of “the death of the subject,” they are highly suspicious of their own “subjective” experience. They ignore, mistrust, and devalue it as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevantly singular — this last, a false, indeed arrogant, humility that unwittingly rejects intersubjectivity, sociality, and culture. Thus, ignoring the apodicticity (or initial certainty) and presence of their own lived-bodies engaged in being-in-the-world (and in the cinema), their thought about the world (and cinema) has no existential ground of its own from which to empirically proceed. Phenomenological inquiry affords redress to this contemporary situation: it insists we dwell on the ground of experience before moving on to more abstract or theoretical concerns, that we experience and reflect upon our own sight before we (dare I pun?) cite others. [From Vivian Sobchack, 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Happy new year to all of Film Studies For Free's readers! FSFF has unfortunately been slowed up in its efforts to bring you its list of Best Online Film Studies Resources in 2012. That should now be published around the end of next week.

But, in the meantime, there are a few new journal-issues to catch up with, including a strong contender for the category of Best Single Issue of an Online Film Studies Journal in 2012: the below, latest offering from CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image on Embodiment and the Body. And, in this blog's humble opinion, Vivian Sobchack's article, from which FSFF has cited above, would be a shoo-in for Best and certainly most important 2012 Article...


CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF

EMBODIMENT AND THE BODY edited by Patrícia Silveirinha Castello Branco
  • EDITORIAL: CINEMA, THE BODY AND EMBODIMENT, 1-9 PDF 
  • ABSTRACTS, 10-18 PDF
Articles
  • FLESHING OUT THE IMAGE: PHENOMENOLOGY, PEDAGOGY, AND DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE, 19-38 PDF  by Vivian Sobchack
  • SEDUCTION INCARNATE: PRE-PRODUCTION CODE HOLLYWOOD AND POSSESSIVE SPECTATORSHIP, 39-61 PDF by Ana Salzberg 
  • A PHENOMENOLOGY OF RECIPROCAL SENSATION IN THE MOVING BODY EXPERIENCE OF MOBILE PHONE FILMS, 62-83 PDF by Gavin Wilson
  • CINEMA OF THE BODY: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMATIVITY IN LARS VON TRIER’S DOGVILLE AND YORGOS LANTHIMO’S DOGTOOTH, 84-108 PDF by Angelos Koutsourakis
  • THE BODY OF IL DUCE: THE MYTH OF THE POLITICAL PHYSICALITY OF MUSSOLINI IN MARCO BELLOCCHIO’S VINCERE, 109-123 PDF by Marco Luceri
  • EIJA-LIISA AHTILA: THE PALPABLE EVENT, 124-154 PDF byAndrew Conio
  • UPSIDE-DOWN CINEMA: (DIS)SIMULATION OF THE BODY IN THE FILM EXPERIENCE, 155-182 PDF by Adriano D’Aloia 
  • EMBODYING MOVIES: EMBODIED SIMULATION AND FILM STUDIES, 183-210 PDF by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra 
  • EXISTENTIAL FEELINGS: HOW CINEMA MAKES US FEEL ALIVE, 211-228 PDF by Dina Mendonça 
  • THE BODY AS INTERFACE: AMBIVALENT TACTILITY IN EXPANDED RUBE CINEMA, 229-253 PDF by Seung-hoon Jeong
Interview
  • A PROPOS D’IMAGES (A SUIVRE): ENTRETIEN AVEC MARIE-JOSE MONDZAIN [FR.], 254-271 PDF Conducted by Vanessa Brito
Conference Reports
  • CONFERENCE ROUND-UP SUMMER 2012: POWERS OF THE FALSE (INSTITUT FRANÇAIS, LONDON, 18-19 MAY), SCSMI CONFERENCE (SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE/NYU, NEW YORK, 13-16 JUN.), FILM-GAME-EMOTION-BRAIN (UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM, 14-21 JUL.), AND FILM-PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE (QUEEN MARY – UNIVERSITY OF LONDON/ KING’S COLLEGE LONDON/KINGSTON UNIVERSITY, 12-14 SEPT.), 272-283 PDF by William Brown

Special Section
  • CÍRCULOS E POÉTICAS EM FILMES LITERÁRIOS DE FERNANDO LOPES, 284-300 PDF by Eduardo Paz Barroso

Monday, 24 December 2012

A Stocking Full of eReading and Viewing: Happy Holidays!

Updated December 31, 2012
Frame grab from Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986). Read Keeley Saunders' article about the tableaux vivants in this film

'Tis the season to be jolly, apparently, and so Film Studies For Free is happy to oblige with some extremely jolly, serious, and completely free eGifts for the festive season, ones from wise men and women around the world. You can find them liberally scattered in list form, below, under the six headers in bold.

This bountiful blog will be back early in the New Year with its list of Best Online (and Open Access) Film Studies Resources in 2012. So, if you haven't taken part in the readers' poll for that yet, you still have a little time.

In the meantime, FSFF wishes you very happy holidays indeed!


SEQUENCE 1.1, 2012

The first array of eBook publications from SEQUENCE Serial Studies in Media, Film and Music has just been launched — a central element in REFRAME and SEQUENCE’s particular model of academic ePublishing.

You can now read SEQUENCE 1.1 — Steven Shaviro’s magisterial and open access article about a film about the end of world (‘MELANCHOLIA, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime‘) — in a variety of free eBook formats. Just click here to check them out and download them to your devices.


  

RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM: Creating the Witness

Leshu Torchin's current research focuses on how screen media bear witness to human rights abuses and genocide in order to mobilise audiences. In her guest post for RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM, Torchin introduces some of the issues that are central to her new book, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet. Thanks to Torchin and the book’s publishers University of Minnesota Press, REFRAME has been granted the permission to share the extensive introduction to the book online. You can read it here.


ALPHAVILLE, Issue 4, Winter 2012

Open Theme Edited by Stefano Odorico and Aidan Power
Book Reviews Edited by Pierluigi Ercole
Reports Edited by Ian Murphy

NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 5, No 3 (2012): The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication

Editorial The Biographical Narrative in Popular Culture, Media and Communication: An Introduction PDF  Matthew Robinson

Articles

PGN Matters

THE CINE-FILES: A Scholarly Journal of Cinema Studies, Issue 2, 2012 

Saturday, 4 August 2012

New Film-Philosophy: Haneke, Rivette, Cassavetes, Deleuze, Badiou, Leigh, Bacon, Jarman, Buñuel and more

Frame capture from Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008). Read Basileios Kroustallis's take on this film as a thought-experiment

Film Studies For Free is delighted to relay the excellent news that another high-quality  issue of Film-Philosophy has just been published. Edited by David Sorfa, Graham Matthews, Matthew Holtmeier and Ben Tyrer, the issue boasts no fewer than thirteen great articles as well as dozens of book reviews. The former are listed in full and linked to below.

The next annual Film-Philosophy conference will take place in London in September 2012, and the full schedule has recently been published. You can find it here.

Film-Philosophy also has its very own Facebook page and Twitter account.


Film-Philosophy, Vol 16, No 1 (2012)

Articles

  1. Interpreting Disturbed Minds: Donald Davidson and The White Ribbon PDF by James J Pearson
  2. Haptic Aurality: Resonance, Listening and Michael Haneke PDF by Lisa Coulthard
  3. To Describe a Labyrinth: Dialectics in Jacques Rivette’s Film Theory and Film Practice PDF by Douglas Morrey
  4. The Subject Trapped in Gomorrah: Undecidability and Choice in Network Cinema PDF by Maria Poulaki
  5. Film as Thought Experiment: A Happy-Go-Lucky Case? PDF by Basileios Kroustallis
  6. Losing Face: Francis Bacon's 25th Hour PDF by Arne De Boever
  7. Charm and Strangeness: The Aesthetic and Epistemic Dimensions of Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein PDF by Kieran Anthony Cashell
  8. Why He Really Doesn’t Get Her: Deleuze’s Whatever-Space and the Crisis of the Male Quest PDF by Niels Niessen
  9. Groundhog Day and the Good Life PDF by Diana Abad
  10. Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion and The Queen PDF by Stella Hockenhull
  11. Contrapuntal Close-up: The Cinema of John Cassavetes and the Agitation of Sense PDF by Daniele Rugo
  12. Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman, or, the Horror of Sex PDF by Lorenzo Chiesa
  13. Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buñuel’s Late Films PDF by Chad Trevitte
Book reviews

Friday, 29 October 2010

In Defense of the Arts and Humanities: On Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993)

In Defense of Philosophy: Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993): A discussion at London's Tate Modern with the film’s producer Tariq Ali and Jonathan Derbyshire, culture editor of the New Statesman on October 22, 2010
A seminal thinker of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein’s revolutionary ideas have had an impact in disciplines beyond philosophy including psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, mathematics, logic, art, religion, artificial intelligence and software design.

Like all right-thinking scholarly blogs, Film Studies For Free has been terribly alarmed by the increasing international attacks on, as well as actual cutbacks to academic Arts and Humanities subjects in the context of the global economic crisis.

So, today's posting of the latest film-studies related video published by the Tate Channel is a timely one indeed. In this video, film producer and writer Tariq Ali defends these disciplines at the same time as he celebrates the (more relevant than ever) film work of Derek Jarman, the marvellous British artist who created his best works against the backdrop of similar, short-sighted, anti-intellectual and anti-cultural attacks. 

If these developments are of concern to you, why not join in with the dialogue about them at a newly launched, campaigning Facebook group DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES? FSFF's author will be most pleased to see you sounding off there.

In the meantime, below are a couple of highly worthwhile scholarly studies of Jarman's take on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Thursday, 8 October 2009

Framing Jarman: New Tate Visual Arts Channel in Beta




Film Studies For Free wanted to rush you the great news that the Tate has just launched a new, highly elegant and very user-friendly channel to enable the viewing (and embedding - yay!) of hundreds of videos about visual arts, like the great film above in which James Mackay, friend of British film artist Derek Jarman, talks about Jarman's experimental work on super 8. These films that he began making in the 1970s are rarely shown. Mackay, who later produced some of Jarman’s feature films including The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993), agreed to open up his archive of these ground-breaking short films for TateShots.

FSFF also came across an even more detailed interview with Mackay about his work with Jarman here at the 400blows website. You can also find interviews there with the following people about their work and friendships with this filmmaker: Jenny Runacre; Simon Fisher Turner; Tilda Swinton; Peter Tatchell; Christopher Hobbs; Tony Peake; Tariq Ali; Ron Peck; and Gaye Temple;

FSFF has only just begun to explore the riches and the capabilities of the new Tate channel; it gleefully urges you to do the same. But it closes, today, happily in a Derek Jarman frame of mind with a sublime Jarman artifact, from his 1987 short Aria, starring Tilda Swinton, music by Gustave Charpentier from his opera Louise with its aria 'Depuis le jour', sung here by Leontyne Price:



Wednesday, 23 September 2009

Jarman Award 2009 winner is Lindsay Seers


Recording of part of Lindsay Seers' exhibition 'Swallowing Black Maria'
(more info here)
Lindsay Seers's Extramission 6 (Black Maria) [is] one of the real finds of [the Altermodern: Tate Triennal exhibition, 2009]. Seers shows a semi-autobiographical, quasi-documentary film about her life, screened in a mock-up shed whose design is a copy of Thomas Edison's Black Maria, his New Jersey film studio. The story is implausible, troubling, and beautifully told by different narrators.

As a child, Seers is so overwhelmed by visual stimulus that she cannot speak. As soon as she sees a photograph, she decides she wants to be a camera. She uses her mouth as the camera, and goes about with a black bag over her head. As she grows up, Seers stops being a camera, and wants instead to be a projector. She wears a model of Edison's studio on her head, projecting the movies in her mind. She struggles to illuminate the world.

The whole story is both dreamlike and moving. How much of it is true? There are interviews with Seers's mother and with a psychologist. Are they really who we think they are? As I staggered out, someone muttered "What is she on?" Adrian Searle, guardian.co.uk, February 3, 2009

Film Studies For Free is very happy to add its congratulations to the many being deservedly delivered today to Lindsay Seers following the award to her yesterday of this year's Jarman prize for artists working with the moving image. Seers, whose hypnotic work as an artist includes film practice-based research produced as a lecturer in arts practice at London's Goldsmiths College, receives a cash prize, but also a very valuable broadcast commission – to make four artworks for Channel 4’s acclaimed Three Minute Wonder slot (3MW). FSFF looks forward to watching those.

The Jarman Award was inspired by British avant-garde film-maker Derek Jarman, one of the most innovative, esteemed and visionary artists of the last century. Interviews and features on this year’s award shortlist and Jarman's legacy can be found at Engine, an online forum from Animate Projects.

Below are some further links to online and openly accessible resources, reviews and information about Lindsay Seers' work.