Film Studies For Free was thrilled to learn of the publication of Issue 4 of The Cine-Files. It, in turn, is delighted to feature ten guest scholars (ranging from the top notch to the legendary!) who offer either analysis of a cinematic “moment” or responses to questions about mise-en-scène and the significance of “close reading.” There are two further excellent articles in the issue by Warwick Mules and Mark Balderston. Thank you to The Cine-Files!

Guest contributions: 
Features:

• 'Mise-en-scène and the Figural: A Reading of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life' by Warwick Mules
• “You’ll Get Your Big Trip”: Acousmatic Music, The Voice, and the Mirror Stage in Enter the Void by Mark Balderston

 

[T]he minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning. Style is the use of repeated techniques which become characteristic of the work; these techniques are foregrounded so that the spectator will notice them and create connections between their individual uses. Excess does not equal style, but the two are closely linked because they both involve the material aspects of the film. Excess forms no specific patterns which we could say are characteristic of the work. But the formal organization provided by style does not exhaust the material of the filmic techniques, and a spectator's attention to style might well lead to a noticing of excess as well. [...] Probably no one ever watches only these non-diegetic aspects [...] through an entire film. Nevertheless, they are constantly present, a whole "film" existing in some sense alongside the narrative film we tend to think of ourselves as watching. [Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess', Ciné-Tracts, 1.2, Summer 1977, pp. 55-56]

Hollywood action scenes became ‘impressionistic,’ rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it. [David Bordwell, 'A Glance at Blows', Observations on Film Art, September 28, 2008]

In classical continuity styles, space is a fixed and rigid container, which remains the same no matter what goes on in the narrative; and time flows linearly, and at a uniform rate, even when the film’s chronology is scrambled by flashbacks. But in post-continuity films, this is not necessarily the case. We enter into the spacetime of modern physics; or better, into the “space of flows”, and the time of microintervals and speed-of-light transformations, that are characteristic of globalized, high-tech financial capital.  [Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010]

The essential characteristic of the acid aesthetic is the employment of early twentieth century hand-crank cameras. Loaded with high-speed reversal film, they are manually cranked forwards and backwards during the shooting, and afterwards cross-processed in an inappropriate developer. The results are quite extreme and fairly unpredictable: multiple exposures within one or more images, high contrasts and de-saturated colors, abrupt visual jolts of overexposed lighting, increased grain activity and discernible smears, cracks and trails on the frame, which add an air of physical authenticity. Film becomes tangible in this aesthetic equation. The analogue form, generally masked in the classical continuity style, is revealed, indeed placed in the foreground. Footage from digital cameras further provides an occasional visual counterpoint to the stylized primitivism of the hand-crank aesthetic, presenting crisp, overly saturated images, which seem, by contrast, manufactured and purely synthetic. The result is a dialectic of control and chaos, with the latter as the defining crux. [...] What becomes clear here is that Scott’s acid aesthetics put on display the cinematic apparatus itself, the process of constructing moving images, both in analogue and digital form. The resulting casualty is the concept of filmic realism. The gained impression is not the order of continuity but the chaos of stylistic transparency, an illustration of the formal potentialities of film, unrestrained by storytelling conventions.

[...] A blend of analogue and digital filmmaking lays bare the inner mechanics of cinema, its texture, emphasizing the process of manipulating and creating moving images. Film, in this regard, can be conceptualized as an enormous canvas, to be filled with color. It is not a coincidence that Tony Scott was trained as a visual artist and generally views himself as such, a cinematic painter. Thus, he constructs rather than documents images, both in the camera and on a post-production computer setup. In Scott’s hands, cinema rediscovers its ability for overt stylization, not eroding, but at least de-privileging what Christian Metz calls the realistic cinema-effect, in favor of a display of cinematic technique. In the words of Lev Manovich, cinema is then “no longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush”. And indeed Scott’s filmmaking transcends the mere realm of visual representation. Wielding the camera like a brush, and similar to Alexandre Astruc’s pen, the caméra-stylo, he sprays, splashes and splatters paint onto the canvas, producing an expressionistic chaos, reminiscent of paintings by Jackson Pollock. Notwithstanding the overt experimentalism, all this activity is framed by the generic conventions of Hollywood story material. The margins of Scott’s canvas are defined by the tenets of traditional and, with regard to Man on Fire and Domino, arguably quite clichéd narrative. In this regard, Scott’s cinematic paintings become more than just a display of style, namely an unrestrained sensory assault of visual abstraction that, in a postmodern twist of meta-textual discourse, exposes the process of moving image construction, and thereby reconfigures the traditional notion of what mainstream cinema should look like. [Excerpts from Matthias Stork, 'Acid Aesthetics: Tony Scott's Cinema of Chaos', SWTX Popular and American Culture Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2012]

I have cautiously championed Tony Scott’s recent work because at least he’s willing to go all the way, however misguided the direction. From Spy Games on, he has stuck to the credo that too much is never enough. His technique is swaggering and undisciplined, mannered to the nth degree. Yet I find his fevered visuals more genuinely arresting than the safe noodlings of most of today’s mainstream cinema. Man on Fire and Déja Vu reheat their genre leftovers into something spicy, if not nourishing, while Domino, the cinematic equivalent of hophead graffiti, wraps its sleazy characters in a visual design apparently inspired by the glowing interior of a peepshow booth.  [David Bordwell, '50 Days of Summer Movies Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009, hyperlink added by FSFF]

Tony Scott’s need to push the boundaries of the postclassical into the classical-plus and the hyperclassical with Man on Fire and Domino suggests a growing impatience with intensified continuity and the postmodern condition. In Top Gun and even True Romance the audience can easily float with the surface structure and identify with the fantasy of transcending both physical space and cultural time. But in Man on Fire and Domino the audience cannot ignore the deaths of Denzel Washington, Edgar Ramirez, and Mickey Rourke, the irrevocable loss of continuity, and the status of the image not as synergistic decoration or digital simulacrum, but as a symptom and agent of cultural flux and despair. Even in Deja Vu, which retreats somewhat from the volatile aesthetic of Man on Fire and Domino, Scott makes postclassical narrative hyperclassical by allowing Denzel Washington to inhabit the past and present simultaneously. Deja Vu, with its post-Katrina New Orleans, opening terrorist attack, and urgent desire to traverse time and prevent the death of Paula Patton, suggests a shell-shocked United States unable to understand the past or ponder the future — Denzel, in a Butterfly Effect-like matrix of temporal frequency and repetition, dies in one narrative thread even as he emerges unscathed in another. Scott pushes the boundaries of narrative time and space so far he doesn’t need the vomit comet or Domino-Vision to achieve the same measure of indeterminacy. Man on Fire, Domino, and Deja Vu suggest that the only sin Tony Scott has committed is not to anticipate the hyperclassical and the classical-plus sooner. [Larry Knapp, 'Tony Scott and Domino — Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical', Jump Cut, 50, 2008]

Film Studies for Free was shocked, like everyone else, by the news of Tony Scott's death yesterday. Following the news, much of the day was spent reading online assessments of his important filmmaking career.

These frequently centered, of course, on the role of 'excessive style' in his work, and its (some would say, concomitant) lack of narrative motivation. The ground was thus laid for today's tribute list of more than fifty links to academic studies centering on the debates about cinematic 'excess', as well as on issues of intensified (or 'post'-, or 'Chaos') continuity in contemporary film aesthetics.

Rather incredibly, at the weekend, Matthias Stork, talented author of the video essay series on Chaos Cinema, had sent FSFF a link to a draft version of a new video essay featuring Tony Scott's work, which explored some related issues regarding contemporary film aesthetics. Following yesterday's awful news, Stork worked around the clock to develop that essay to provide an important tribute to Scott's work. You can see the video at the top of this entry, and also at Stork's Vimeo page Cine-Essais.

For more tributes to Scott, an essential round up is given at David Hudson's post devoted to 'Tony Scott, 1944 – 2012' at Fandor's Keyframe Daily website.

A very big Danke schön goes to Matthias Stork for all his essential contributions to this entry. 

• Steven William Allen, A pleasure in pain: contemporary mainstream cinema's fascination with the aestheticized spectacle of the controlled body, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003
• Chiara Armentano, '"The Image-Interface": New Forms of Narrative Visualization, Space and Time in Postmodern Cinema', Reconstruction, 8.3 (2008)
• James Aston, 'Terrorist Attack!: The Spectacle of Evil in the Blended Horror of Cloverfield', Scope, no. 16, 2010
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Jean Baudrillard, 'The Matrix Decoded:  Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard', [Translated by: Dr. Gary Genosko and Adam Bryx], International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004) 
• Marko Bauer, 'Pure West: Drive, nostalgia for postmodernism', Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2012
• Tracey Biga, 'The Bulimic Excess and the Films of Peter Greenaway', Spectator,  date unknown
• Michael Bloom, 'Rhetoric of Excess: Hyperbolical Irony as Transcendence in Blue Velvet', Offscreen Journal, Volume 13, Issue 9, 2009 
• David Bordwell, '50 Days of Summer Movies Part 2', Observations on Film Art, September 12, 2009
• David Bordwell,'Forking tracks: SOURCE CODE', Observations on Film Art, May 3, 2011
• Dave Boothroyd, 'Cinematic heroin and narcotic modernity', Symbolism: Journal of Critical Aesthetics Vol.VII , 2007
• Shaun Boutwell, 'The Appeal of Murder in Style: Aestheticization of Violence, Catharsis Theory and the Paradox of Horror Cinema', The Deuce: Grindhouse Cinema Database, 2012 (?)
• Nadia Bozak, 'Four Cameras are Better than One: Division as Excess in Mike Figgis’ Timecode', Refractory, Volume 14, 2008 
• Thomas R. Britt, 'Death, Excess, and Discontinuity: On Lost Highway, Irreversible, and Visitor Q', Bright Lights Film Journal, 62, 2008
  
• Margaret Ervin Bruder, 'Aestheticizing Violence, or How To Do Things with Style',Film Studies archive, Indiana University, 1998
• Melanie Chan, 'Virtually Real and Really Virtual: Baudrillard’s Procession of Simulacrum and The Matrix', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008)
• Lucy Fife Donaldson, 'Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre', MOVIE, 1, 2010
• Paul Eisenstein, 'Devouring Holes: Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and the Tectonics of Psychoanalysis',  International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1.3, Autumn 2007 
• Matthew Ferrari, 'Reading Narrative Excess in MMA', Flow, December 4, 2009
• Asbjørn Grønstad, Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema Amsterdam, 2008)
• Leon Gurevitch, 'The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions', Senses of Cinema, Issue 57, 2010
• Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson, 'World Out of Order: Tony Scott’s Vertigo', Cinema Scope Online, 2012
• Bruce Isaacs, 'The Cinematic Real: Aesthetics and Spectacle', Sydney Studies in English, Vol. 33, 2007 
• Dietmar Kammerer, 'Video Surveillance In Hollywood Movies', Surveillance and Society, 2(2.3), 2004
• Russell J.A. Kilbourn, 'Re-Writing "Reality": Reading The Matrix', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 9.2, Fall 2000, pp 43-54 
  
• Larry Knapp, 'Tony Scott and Domino — Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical', Jump Cut, 50, 2008 
• Jon Lindblom, 'Toward an Ontology of the Image: Deleuze and the Aura of Simulation', Movement Editions, 2010
• Lev Manovich, 'What is Digital Cinema?', Manovich.net, 1995
• Lev Manovich, 'Cinema and Digital Media', in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (eds), Perspectives of Media Art (1996)
• Lev Manovich, 'Moving Image Culture after Computerisation: an outline', 2003
• David Levente Palatinus, "Framing the Body, Staging the Gaze” Representations of the Body in Forensic Crime Fiction and Film, PhD Thesis, Peter Pazmany Catholic University Faculty of Humanities Doctoral School of Literary Studies Theories of Literature and Culture Program Piliscsaba 2009
• Stephen Papson, 'Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: when excess isn’t parody', Jump Cut, 53, 2011
• Michael Piggott, Time and film style, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009
• Nicholas Rombes, 'Avant Garde Realism',  C-Theory.net, January 2005
• Jae Hyung Ryu, 'The Cinema of Special Effects Attractions and Its Representation of Reality: The Comparison between the Early Tricks and Digital Effects', Georgia State University, Georgia, 2004, (Thanhouser.org)
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'Killing in Style: The Aestheticization of Violence in Donald Cammell's White of the Eye', Scope, June 2001
• Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Continuity: full text of my talk', The Pinocchio Theory, March 26, 2012
• Steven Shaviro, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, 'Gamer', The Pinocchio Theory,  December 15, 2009
• On Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect, In Media Res, August 29-September 2, 2011
• 'Cinema's Exhaustion and the Vitality ...' by Elena del Rio
• 'Post-Cinematic Effects' by Paul Bowman
• 'A hair of the dog that bit us' by Adrian Ivakhiv
• 'Fragments of unconscious' by Patricia MacCormack
• 'Steven Shaviro Presents': A response to the week
• Steven Shaviro, 'Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film', Projections, Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2007: 63-82
• Steven Shaviro, 'The Cinematic Body Redux', originally published in Parallax 14:1 (February 2008), 48-54, The Pinocchio Theory
• Matthias Stork, 'In Touch with the Film Object: Cinephilia, the Video Essay, and Chaos Cinema', Frames, 1, 2012
  
• Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• David Surman, 'CGI Animation: Pseudorealism, Perception and Possible Worlds', Gamasutra Education Online, 2003/4 
• Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995
• Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace, 'Terminal Indifference: The Hollywood War Film Post-September 11', Film-Philosophy, Vol 14, No 2 (2010)
• Kristin Thompson, 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess', Ciné-Tracts, 1.2, Summer 1977
• Magnus Ullén, 'The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich', Jump Cut, 52, Summer 2011
• Anja Zagorac, '"A Splinter in Your Mind": Subjectivity, Hyperreality, and Religion in The Matrix', Masters thesis,  University of Vienna/Wien, May 2009
• Added Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, 'Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter', MUBI, August 22, 2012
  

Maybe it's that back-to-school feeling in the air, but Film Studies For Free's attentions turn today to one of the most important topics in its discipline: the film-historical and film-theoretical behemoth that is 'Classical Hollywood Cinema'.

Below are direct links to online studies of Hollywood and other comparable cinematic classicisms -- together with related explorations -- ranging from the foundational (Bordwell, Thompson, Staiger, plus Hansen) through to the new and challenging (Cagle, Galt, Paneva, Thanouli). FSFF reckons you should also take in what one might call that most early-classical of relevant studies, online in its entirety: Aristotle's Poetics, written 350 B.C.E, Translated by S. H. Butcher.

• Deborah Allinson, 'Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema', Screening the Past, 20, 2006
• John Belton, 'Preface', American Cinema/American Culture (McGraw-Hill, 2005, 2/e)
• John Belton, 'The Mode of Production', American Cinema/American Culture (McGraw-Hill, 2005, 2/e)
• David Bordwell, 'Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures', Philip Rosen (ed). In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia U P, 1986. 17-34
• David Bordwell interviewed by Erlend Lavik, 'The Way Bordwell tells it on classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema', University of Bergen, Norway, June (Year unknown)
• David Bordwell, 'Anatomy of the Action Picture', Observations on film art and FILM ART, January 2007
• David Bordwell, 'The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema', Observations on film art and FILM ART, January 2008
• Catalin Brylla, 'How are Film Endings shaped by their socio-historical context? (part I)', Image & Narrative, Issue 8, May 2004
• Catalin Brylla, 'How are Film Endings shaped by their socio-historical context? (part II)', Image & Narrative, Issue 9, October 2004
• Chris Cagle, 'More thoughts on Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 14, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'Post-Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 15, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'More on Post-Classicism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, February 18, 2007
• Chris Cagle, 'Self-Reflexivity in Classical Cinema', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, September 2, 2007
• Susan Courtney, 'Introduction: What Happened in the Tunnel and Other Open American Secrets', Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, Princeton University Press, 2004
• Jacobia Dahm, 'Lollywood Adventures: On Robert Blanchet's Blockbuster', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 24, May 2005
• Fred Davies, 'Review of Bernardoni, James, The New Hollywood: What the Movies Did with the New Freedoms of the Seventies', H-USA, H-Net Reviews. June, 2003
• Lucy Fife, 'Review: Joe McElhaney (2006) The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli State University of New York Press: New York', Film-Philosophy, 11.3, December 2007
• Brian Gallagher, 'Greta Garbo is sad: Some Historical Reflections on the Paradoxes of Stardom in the American Film Industry, 1910-1960', Images Journal, Issue 3
• Rosalind Galt, 'The Obviousness of Cinema', World Picture Journal, Issue 2, Autumn 2008
  
• Miriam Bratu Hansen, 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', Modernism-Modernity, Vol. 6.2, 1999
• Tim Henderson, 'Classic Film Narrative and Flying with Pigs: What Have we been Missing?', Nausicaa.net, May 2005
• Curt Hersey, 'Diegetic Breaks and the Avant-Garde', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Volume 1, 2002
• Kevin Howley, Breaking, Making, and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction', Scope, May 2004
• Annamarie Jagose, Interview with Patricia White about her book, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability [Indiana University Press, 1999]', Genders 32 2000 Limited preview of book from Google Books HERE
• Hermann Kappelhoff, 'Narrative Space – Plot Space – Image Space', trans. by Brian Currid, Herman Kappelhof Articles Online, 2005
• Michelle Langford, '[Reflections on and syllabus for the teaching of] The Hollywood Sytem', The Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, July 2007
• Richard Maltby, 'Taking Hollywood Seriously', Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 2nd ed.)
• Angela Ndalianis, 'Architectures of Vision: Neo-Baroque Optical Regimes and Contemporary Entertainment Media', MIT Communications Forum, December 19, 1999
• Steve Neale, 'Review of Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique by Kristin Thompson, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999', Scope, November 2000
• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, 40, 2006
• Iva Paneva,“Chapter 1: Monster versus mainstream: classical narrative structure and the representation of women”, A study of female aggression as represented in Patty Jenkins' fiction film Monster, e--PhD Thesis, December 2008 (rest of thesis on Monster HERE)
• Janet Staiger, 'Self-Regulation and the Classical Hollywood Cinema', Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 1991
• Eleftheria Thanouli, '"Art Cinema" Narration: Breaking Down a Wayward Paradigm', Scope, Issue 14, June 2009
• Kristin Thompson, 'Classical cinema lives! New evidence for old norms!', Observations on film art and FILM ART, February 12, 2007
• David Trotter, 'Virginia Woolf and Cinema', Film Studies, Issue 6, Summer 2005
• Yigit Yuksel, 'Classical Narration And Art Narration. Or: Hollywood vs Western Europe in 1950s' , The Long Take, September 21, 2008

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post. If you are a film studies teacher searching for more good ideas for student assignments, Film Studies For Free would like to recommend a little more weblog reading about classroom applications of film criticism exercises.

Today's gem is the 10/40/70 exercise invented by Nicholas Rombes (Chair and Professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy- also see here) at his great weblog Digital Poetics. What is the gen on 10/40/70? According to Rombes, it's

[a]n experiment in writing about film: select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case the 10 minute, 40 minute, and 70 minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as the guide to writing about the film. No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. What if, instead of freely choosing what parts of the film to address, one let the film determine this? Constraint as a form of freedom.

Rombes has posted three such experiments of his own to date (10 / 40 / 70 (Ocean's Twelve); 10 / 40 / 70 (The Conversation); (10 / 40 / 70): The Grudge and The Terror of Determinism). The results really show the benefits of the creative constraints involved: some rich and insightful writing is generated on the three very different films.

It strikes FSFF that this would be a very rewarding exercise to set for students.

For more on the practicalities, legalities, and methodological advantages and disadvantages of using frame captures in published or public work, see the following:

• Capturing Stills From Video, a great tutorial by Jeremy Butler for Television: Critical Methods and Applications
  
• Shot Logger: Frame Captures and Stats (Shot Logger logs shots from DVDs and other digital video sources. It stores a frame capture of each shot and records the time code of the start of the shot in the video. It also processes that time code to determine the length of individual shots, as well as calculating several statistics for those lengths — including average shot length and standard deviation.
  Shot Logger was original intended for film and television students/scholars who wish to analyze visual style in detail, and who might want to do some basic statistical analysis of editing. In the latter regard, it was inspired by CineMetrics. What Shot Logger adds to CineMetrics is the ability to attach images, frame captures, to the statistical data. Shot Logger relies on two other, open-source applications: Videolan VLC media player and Gallery. The VLC media player facilitates the capturing of frames and Gallery, a web-based photo album organizer, handles the uploading and organization of images.)
  
• Frame-Grab Tutorial (using VLC Media Player), also from Television: Critical Methods and Applications
  
• Film Educators No Longer Criminals by Kristin Thompson
  
• And for some deeply thoughtful and enlightening writing about the advantages and disadvantages of 'syntagmatic' and 'paradigmatic' forms of film criticism, a must read is Adrian Martin's remarkable piece Scanning Godard for Screening the Past

Thanks to David Hudson's Daily blog at IFC.com, Film Studies For Free was alerted to an interesting and worthwhile experiment in the use of blogs for obtaining 'real-world' feedback for undergraduate film studies assignments.

Nick Davis is an Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of the always good to read Nick's Flick Picks, which expertly does what it says on its blog-tin, and always conducts itself with great verve and wit.

From time to time Nick also generously shares notes on some of his academic research and his teaching projects on this site (see here and here). With regard to the latter, Nick's current seminar course at Northwestern, The Film Review as Genre, has led him to pose publicly the following great questions to his students:

What is a film review? How have reviews evolved as cinema has evolved? What do film reviewers want, and what criteria do they imply not only for the movies they critique but for the prose, the logic, and the details they enlist to convey that critique? Setting aside stars and thumbs and rotten tomatoes, we will engage with the literary, rhetorical, and stylistic aspects of film reviews as pieces of writing with their own history, considering the ways in which strong reviews require the same foundations as other expository essays (structure, argument, economy, evidence) but with specific and highly diverse relations to their readers, their venues, and their points of view. As an opportunity to bridge the "critical" and "creative" facets of literary study, participants in this course will study and write about film reviews by a host of crucial figures (including Rudolf Arnheim, Carl Sandburg, H.D., James Agee, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Andrew Sarris, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, and Stephanie Zacharek) and will also write and revise their own reviews in response to a wide range of required as well as self-appointed viewings. Neither the films nor the reviews will be taken lightly, and the course expects committed and ambitious students—but wit, style, and esteem for the "popular" are warmly welcomed.

But Nick also wanted his students to have more responses to their work than just his own, 'especially since they're working in a form that aspires to a large and diverse audience'. So on this occasion he has used his blog to solicit feedback from his numerous readers on well-chosen snippets from the work produced by the course students (including on Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves [1990]). The responses to his request easily reveal the usefulness of this exercise (36 generally serious comments, to date, in just a few days). Film Studies For Free salutes Nick Davis's experiment and very much recommends that other film studies teachers check it out.

Since FSFF has gone all digital-pedagogical today, it's a good time to flag up another rich and purposeful reflection on such matters by Kevin B Lee. Regular FSFF readers will remember that a while back (see here, here, and here) this blog leapt to the e-barricades in angry defence of Lee's YouTube channel which had been temporarily (and very precipitously) suspended because of a query about copyright.

Back in January, Kevin eloquently wrote in summary about his experiences with YouTube: Things I Learned from Losing - and Regaining - My YouTube Account. But, more recently, he has also posted an exploration of the potential of his video essays as educational resources, based on his discoveries about how they are actually being used as classroom and assignment tools (see Video Essays as a teaching tool: a testimonial).

If you are interested in learning more about innovative film studies teaching methods, Lee's reflections make important reading. Also, while you're visiting Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, do please watch his fabulous new video essays - La roue (1922, Abel Gance) and Variety (1925, E.A. Dupont) featuring commentary by Kristin Thompson.