Frame grab from Sans Soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, 1983)

• To the Viewer: On Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again by Susan Ray
• Sirk, Hollywood and Genre by Tom Ryan
• Bodies in Filmic Space: The Mise en Scène of ‘Courtship Readiness’ in The Big Sleep by Warren Buckland
• Notes on Sans Soleil by Murray Pomerance
• Thank God We Don’t Have a Pope: Habemus Papam, Moretti’s Apocalypse by Marko Bauer
• The Angels’ Share: Ken Loach and Paul Laverty Lift Scotland’s Kilts to Expose Its Darker Parts by David Martin-Jones
• Poetry in the Air: Mad Bastards and Toomelah by Lorraine Mortimer
• It All Flows Back: Treed Murray and the Limits of Urban Community by Zachary Abram
• Umwelt, Landscape and Lupu Pick’s Sylvester by Tyson Wils
• In Dreams and Imagination: Surrealist Values in Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire by Michael Pattison
• Vertigo: The Best Film of All Time? by Peter Wertz

• Cecil B. DeMille by Anton Karl Kozlovic

1. The Ubu Moment and Australian Experimental Film: Interviews with Albie Thoms by Danni Zuvela for OtherFilm 
2. Albie – A Well-Directed Life by Tina Kaufman 
3. Albie Thoms (dissimilis aliqua alia) by Peter Mudie 
4. Why Albie Thoms? – A Singular Commitment and a Figure Displaced by Barrett Hodsdon 
5. Days of Future Past: Albie Thoms’ Polemics by Jake Wilson 
6. Memoir of Albie by John Flaus 
7. Albie Thoms as an Historian by Graham Shirley 
8. Albie Thoms Refractions by Danni Zuvela for OtherFilm

• Darragh O’Donoghue on Ballad of Narayama 
• Brian Darr on Carmen Comes Home 
• Gregory Dolgopolov on Khrustalyov, My Car! 
• Tara Judah on Comrades 
• Hamish Ford on Two or Three Things I Know About Her 
• Christopher Weedman on Notre musique 
• Lee Hill on Prénom Carmen 
• David Melville on Carmen Jones 
• Rachel Brown on The Man With the Golden Arm
• Matthew Sorrento on Laura 
• John Fidler on Anatomy of a Murder 
• Pasquale Iannone on L’assassino 
• Wheeler Winston Dixon on La decima vittima 
• Gino Moliterno on Property is No Longer a Theft
• Federico Passi on I giorni contati 
• Gino Moliterno on Todo modo 
• Pasquale Iannone on Trial of the Road 
• Cerise Howard on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Hand
• Peter Hourigan on The Sun in a Net

• Dimitrios Latsis on Film, Art, New Media: Museum without Walls?
• Kath Dooley on The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn From Contemporary French Actresses
• Daniele Rugo on To Sign One’s Life (With Cinema)
• Federico Passi on Giorgio Mangiamele
• Nick Herd on Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast
• Lia McCrae-Moore on Jedda
• Daniel Fairfax on Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination
• Tony Mc Kibbin on Film After Film

• Matthew Flanagan on BFI London’s Experimenta Weekend 
• Bérénice Reynaud  on AFI FEST & American Film Market (AFM)
• Dirk de Bruyn on the Alternative Film/Video Festival
• Bérénice Reynaud  on Sundance
• Marc Saint-Cyr on Rotterdam  
• Lisa Franek on Art House Convergence
• Daniel Fairfax on Berlin 
• Gemma King on Festival du film fantastique and Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux

• Tag Gallagher's website

• Tag Gallagher, John Ford, the Man and His Films, 2007

• Tag Gallagher, 'Geometry of Force: Abel Ferrara and Simone Weil', Screening the Past, 10 (2000) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reading, culture, and auteur', Screening the Past, 12 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Mizoguchi and Freedom', Screening the Past, 13 (2001) 
• Tag Gallagher, 'All lost in wonder: Edgar G.Ulmer', Screening the Past, 12 (2001)
• Tag Gallagher, 'Going My Way', Screening the Past, December 2001

• Tag Gallagher, 'Josef von Sternberg', Senses of Cinema, Issue 19, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, 'Raoul Walsh', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Tag Gallagher, 'Max Ophuls: A New Art – But Who Notices?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 22, 2002
  
• Tag Gallagher, 'Hitchcock, Machines, and Us', Senses of Cinema, Issue 24, 3003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Rises from the Dead. Again', Senses of Cinema, Issue 26, 2003
• Tag Gallagher, 'The Swine who Rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: Joseph L. Mankiewicz as Producer', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, 2003 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Ford Till '47', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Making Reality', Senses of Cinema, Issue 32, 2004
• Tag Gallagher, 'Renoir and the Scandal of “First Love” or The Perils of Catherine', Senses of Cinema, Issue 34, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'Lacrimae Rerum Materialized', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005
• Tag Gallagher, 'Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, 2006
• Tag Gallagher, 'American Triptych: Vidor, Hawks and Ford', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Straub Anti-Straub', Senses of Cinema, Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, How to Share a Hill', Senses of Cinema,  Issue 43, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Chains of Dreams: Carl Th. Dreyer', Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007
• Tag Gallagher, 'Brother Feeney: Francis Ford" Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009
• Tag Gallagher, 'Why Samuel Fuller?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 50, 2009

• Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to Bleasdale', Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002

• Tag Gallagher, 'Letter to Helmut Färber', Lumen, 1, 2011

• Dreaming of Jeanie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach  

• Toni D'Angela, 'Interview with Tag Gallagher about John Ford', La Furia Umana, No. 3, Winter 2010 
• Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, and Michael Baute (et al.), 'Truly Doing Film Criticism: Interview with Tag Gallagher', kunst-der-vermittlung.de,  2009

• Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven', in The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 (scroll to p. 194)
• Deborah Allison, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006
• Lee Barron, 'Droogs, electro-voodoo and kyborgs: pastiche, postmodernism and Kylie Minogue live', Nebula, 2009  
• Tilman Baumgärtel, 'Imitation, Indigenization, Assimilation? No, Globalization!: The Cinema of Bobby Suarez', Asia Culture Forum, 2006
• Katherine Biber, 'The Threshold Moment: Masculinity at Home and on the Road in Australian Cinema', Limina, Vol. 7, 2001
• Norman Bryson, 'Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema', Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999
• Cüneyt Çakirlar, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes's Cinema of Queer Pastiche', KÜLT: A Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1, April 2011
• Brigid Cherry, 'From Cult to Subculture: Re­imaginings of Cult Films in Alternative Music Video' Scope, 15, 2010
• Simon Chia-rong Wu, 'Gender Pastiche: Thai Queerness in Beautiful Boxer', Cultural Studies Monthly, 78, 2008
•  E. Anna Claydon, 'British South Asian Cinema and Identity II:'When did Mr Collins become the 'Ugly American'? Representing America in the films of Gurinder Chadha'', South Asian Cultural Studies, 2009, 2 (2)
• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven,' Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, No. 5
• Cynthia Duncan, 'Reading Angeles Mastretta's Arráncame la vida through the Lens of Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema', Rocky Mountain Review, 63.2, 1997
  
• Richard Dyer, 'Tales of Plagiarism And Pastiche', Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2010)  (27 free pages) Book info. 
• Darren Elliott, 'Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Horror Icon in Charles Lum's Indelible', Scope, 15, 2010
• Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood(Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
• Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam University Press, 1996)
• Laura E. Felschow, Todd Haynes: the Public, the Private, and the Performative, PhD Thesis, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, February 1, 2009 
• T Ferrero-Regis, 'Cinema On Cinema: Self-reflexive Memories in Recent Italian History Films', transformationsjournal.org, Issue 3, 2002 
• Lucy Fischer, 'Modernity and Postmaternity: High Heels and Imitation of Life', in Horton, Andrew Horton (ed.), Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)  
• Caryl Flynn,The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
• Catherine Grant, 'In authenticity: Douglas Sirk and the Sirkian Melodrama', Film Studies For Free, September 21, 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day!', Film Studies For Free, July 4, 2010 
• Catherine Grant, New Todd Haynes' Masterclass', Film Studies For Free, November 27, 2011
• Catherine Grant, 'Storytelling sans frontières? On Adaptation, Remaking, Intertextuality, and Transmediality', Film Studies For Free, November 21, 2009
• Val Hill, 'Postmodernism and cinema', in S. Sim (ed.), The Routledge companion to postmodernism (Lndon: Routledge, 2000)
• Dom Holdaway, 'Da fatti realmente accaduti: Performing History in Contemporary Italian Cinema', New Readings 11 (2011)
• Marlie Centawer Huisman, ' Representations of Swinging London in 1960s British Cinema: Blowup (1966), Smashing Time (1967) and Performance (1970)', MA Thesis, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, May 2011
• Kate Ince, 'Francois Ozon's cinema of desire', in Ince (ed.), Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon (Manchester University Press, 2008)
• Shen Jiang, Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1993-2008): A Reflection of China's Socio-Cultural Postmodernity, PhD Thesis, University of Canterbury, 2010
• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003
• Jordan Lavender-Smith, 'Irony Inc.: Parodic-Doc Horror and The Blair Witch Project', Scope, 15, 2010
• James MacDowell, 'Beneath the Surface of Things: Interpretation and Far From Heaven', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 5 (May 31, 2006)
• Norimasa Morita, 'Avant-garde, Pastiche, and Media Crossing: Films of Terayama Shūji', Waseda Global Forum No. 3, 2006
• Chi Hyun Park, Orientalism in U. S. Cyberpunk Cinema from Blade Runner to The Matrix, PhD Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, May 2004
• Jack Post, 'The Ambiguity of Weeping. Baroque and Mannerist Discourses in Haynes’ Far from Heaven and Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows', Image and Narrative, 13.2, 2012 
• James Ricci, Attractions and Negotiations of Film Noir in American Cinema and Culture, PhD Thesis, University of South Florida, April, 2008
• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006
• Timothy Robinson, 'Cultural Value in Historical Pastiche: Reclaiming the Past as Modern ‘Parody’ and Postmodern ‘Pastiche’ in The Hours and Marie Antoinette', Honors Thesis, The College of William and Mary, 2008
• Richard Rushton, 'Douglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation', Screening the Past, Issue 21, 2007
• Rebecca Scherr, '(Not) queering “white vision” in Far from Heaven and Transamerica', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 
• Robert Stam, 'Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage: the Case of Brazilian Cinema', E.I.A.L. ESTUDIOS INTERDISCIPLINARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE, Vol. 9, No. 1, enero-junio 1998 (Cultura visual en América Latina, Editor invitado: John Mraz)
• Sunny Stalter, 'Down With Love/Far From Heaven', Scope, May 2004  
• Will Straw, 'Mannerism in Recent Cinema', Cultural Studies, 1987
• Margaret M. Toscano, 'Homer Meets the Coen Brothers: Memory as Artistic Pastiche in O Brother, Where Art Thou?', Film and History, Volume 39.2, Fall 2009
• Michael Töteberg, 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: All That Fassbinder Allows', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2003
• Mary Traester, 'Hysteria and Ruin: Feminine Immobility And the Problem of Representation in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven', COLT Symposium, April 15, 2008 
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Tony Veale, and M. T. Keane (1997). A Computational Treatment of Metaphoric Blends with Special Regard to Cinematic "Borrowing", in the proceedings of Mind II: Computational Models of Creative Cognition, Dublin, Ireland, 1997
• Sharon Willis, 'Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003 
• Chris Wisniewski, 'Far from Heaven', Reverse Shot, - Proposition 24: Defining a New Queer Cinema', 2009
• Jonathan Wright, '[Review of] Re-remembering History in Contemporary Film: Pam Cook (2005) Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema', Film-Philosophy, 10.1, 2006
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema. PhD thesis, University of Sussex, 2010
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Scope, 15, 2010
• Rie Yamasaki, 'The films of Mitani Kōki: Intertextuality and comedy in contemporary Japanese cinema', New Voices, Volume 4, January 2011

Image from Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

I first saw Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life in 1959 at The Yeadon, a neighbourhood movie house in a white working-class suburb of Philadelphia. I was 16. Imitation of Life was about four women, two of them black. When we came out afterward, most of us were crying. The theatre owner's wife was standing in the lobby with a box of Kleenex. Many people gratefully took a tissue to dry their eyes. This is what Sirk wanted, I believe. [Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005]

[W]ith the reconsideration of directors like Douglas Sirk and the application of (gasp) irony, “melodrama” isn’t the dirty word it once was. Initially, film studies criticism used the term pejoratively to connote unrealistic, pathos-filled, campy tales of romance or domestic situations with cliché-ridden characters intended to appeal to female audiences. Understandably, these were considered to be lesser films, sentimental pap churned out by the Hollywood tear-jerk machine. And if one couldn’t look beyond these tropes – if the viewer were unable to see through them – they might find themself (like many critics of the 1950s) unjustly unwilling to give credit where credit is due.

     Sirk, for example, a contract director working mostly at Universal, was known for turning out dizzy romantic fiascos; glossy and kitsch, excessive and (sometimes) silly, these dependable studio projects were routinely panned by critics and “sophisticated” audiences. What these viewers missed was the subversive strain running through Sirk’s art. He wasn’t just making a melodrama, he was using it. Even the critic James Harvey admits to “missing” Sirk the first time around, remembering his biggest hits, Written on the Wind (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959), to be “unredeemably bad”. But twenty years after its release, Harvey returned to Imitation of Life and found himself overwhelmed.

     My awareness of even a possible ironic intention seemed to transform the movie for me. As it had, it seemed, for the audience around me, who were responding to it in a way no imaginable 1950s audience could have: being alert and to and amused by every hollow ring in Lana Turner’s multi-costumed, leading-lady performance, for example, just as I was being. We had become an audience for the “Sirkian subtext”, as it was called. And we were no longer (as we had been years before) jeering alone. This time even the director was on our side.

     And so there is the Melodrama and there is the melodramatic. The trick is to figure out which is which. [Sam Wasson, Bigger Than Life: The Picture, The Production, The Press', Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006]

The most important ironies in Sirk are those of so much film melodrama of the 1950s, namely the ironies of the failure of dominant ideology, the vast distance between how social institutions, gender roles, and other fundamental values are supposed to function and how they actually do function. Much of this “ironic” social critique of Sirk’s films is overt and uncomplicated (the country-club values in All That Heaven Allows or Lana Turner’s kitsch glamour in Imitation of Life [USA, 1959]). What the “irony in Sirk” debate is mostly directed to, instead, is the fact that the films often take up an attitude critical of ideological norms without overtly acknowledging that they are conducting such a cri- tique, and that they present characters in the grip of dominant values (therefore “good” characters) whose ideological conformity is objectively destructive but who are never overtly labelled by the film as hollow or destructive (the Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall characters in Written on the Wind are a clear example). The melodrama of Sirk and his contemporaries is quite different in this respect from most earlier forms of cinematic melodrama (Griffith for example), where all the values inherent in the films are plainly depicted as what the films think they are. But although the hollowness of some of Sirk’s “good” characters does indeed interfere with the overt ideological work of the narrative, it hardly disables the melodrama of these characters’ sufferings, or the pathos of their entrapment in ideology. Indeed, the reverse is the case: they are rendered more pathetic by their impossibility, and the film’s distance from their “false consciousness” then functions much like dramatic irony, and not at all like any kind of scornful detachment. [William Beard, 'Maddin and Melodrama', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 14:2, Autumn 2005, fn 6, pp.15-16]

[T]o understand what Imitation of Life is trying to do audiences have to trust in its distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, between its evocations of real life and its manifestations of life’s imitations. The evocations of real life rely on emotional manipulation – the emotion of motion pictures. It is only by way of these moments of intense emotional involvement that the moments of authenticity in the film can be distinguished from those of pretence. And it is the moments of pretence, of escaping into falsifying theatres of one form or another, that Sirk is holding up for criticism. Finally, that is what is produced by Sirkian ‘ironic distanciation’: an acknowledgment of the inauthentic imitation of life.[Richard Rushton, 'Douglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation', Screening the Past, Issue 21, 2007]

• Jeanine Basinger, “The Lure of the Gilded Cage: All I Desire and There's Always Tomorrow”, Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• William Beard, 'Maddin and Melodrama', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 14:2, Autumn 2005, fn 6, pp.15-16

• Jean-Loup Bourget, 'Sirk and the Critics', Translated by Eithne Bourget,  Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Jean-Loup Bourget, 'God Is Dead, or, Through a Glass Darkly', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Jeremy B. Butler, 'Imitation of Life (John Stahl, 1934. Douglas Sirk, 1959): Style and the domestic melodrama', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 25-28

• Fred Camper, 'The Films of Douglas Sirk: The Epistemologist of Despair', Chicago Reader, April 14, 2006

• Susan Courtney, ‘Picturizing race: Hollywood’s censorship of miscegenation and production of racial visibility through Imitation of Life’, Genders, vol. 27, 1998 (mostly on the Stahl film)

• Adrian Danks, “The Far Side of Paradise”: Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005

• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven,' Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, No. 5

Film Studies For Free is delighted to inform its readers, today, about a really worthwhile podcast by Adrian Martin - a recording of a great talk he gave in the Provisional Insight Colloquium series at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, on July 18 2008, entitled 'Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and some others'.

The abstract for the talk is given below. The podcast (just over an hour long) can be accessed (with or without a slideshow) from the Monash University Arts website HERE.

For further great podcasts from the same series (by Ian Aitken; Andrew Benjamin; Graeme Gilloch; Helen Grace; Deane Williams; and the wonderful Lesley Stern) click HERE.

Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and Some Others

Adrian Martin

In “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud”, Paul Ricoeur (drawing upon Hegel) remarks: “The appropriation of a meaning constituted prior to me presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead of itself by a succession of ‘figures’, each of which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it.” The notion of the figural has recently become popular in European film theory and analysis, especially due to the work of Nicole Brenez – in which the figure stands for “the force … of everything that remains to be constituted” in a character, object, social relation or idea. Her use of the term refers back to magisterial work of German literary philologist Erich Auerbach (Mimesis), who decoded the religious interpretive system wherein all persons and events are grasped as significant only insofar as they prefigure their fulfilment on the ‘last day’ of divine judgement. Auerbach’s 1920s work on figuration in Dante was an important influence on his friend Walter Benjamin; and it was this ‘theological’ aspect of Benjamin’s thought that caught Kracauer’s attention, leading to the problematic of the redemption of worldly things. In this lecture I will trace the notion of figural thinking from Weimar then to Paris (and beyond) today, taking in writings by William Routt and Giorgio Agamben, as well as two filmmakers also touched by figural thinking: Josef von Sternberg and Douglas Sirk.

Adrian Martin is Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). His books include What is Modern Cinema? (Uqbar 2008), Raul Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions (Altamira 2004), The Mad Max Movies (Screensound/Currency 2003), Once Upon a Time in America (BFI 1998) and Phantasms (Penguin 1994), and he has regular columns in Film Quarterly (US), De Filmkrant (Holland) and Cahiers du cinéma España (Spain). He is the Co-editor of Movie Mutations (BFI 2003) and the Internet film magazine Rouge.