Film Studies For Free: Quentin Tarantino

Showing posts with label Quentin Tarantino. Show all posts

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

‘Daddy’s dead. Noooo!’: Quentin Tarantino and Psychoanalysis Beyond the Paternal principle

Image from Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you links to audio recordings from a symposium on Quentin Tarantino and psychoanalysis "beyond the paternal principle", hosted by The London Graduate School and the London Society for the New Lacanian School. It took place on 4th April, at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London. The symposium engagingly described itself thus:

‘Daddy’s dead. Noooo!’ (Tarantino, from Dusk Till Dawn)

Tarantino’s movies frequently turn on the abjection of a paternal figure (Marcellus Wallace, Jacob Fuller, Bill, Stuntman Mike), who loses his place and authority to become a redundant figure of consumption and expenditure. Tarantino’s movies themselves, in their restless play of reflexive images and references, are always seeking to produce the maximum in cinematic affect irrespective of the aesthetic unities of generic form, symbolic consistency, realism. This symposium explores the suggestion that Tarantino’s movies best symptomatise a tendency in Hollywood generally where cinema is no longer a vehicle of (anti)Oedipal desire, but a febrile, speculative generator of thrills, pleasures and anxieties swarming along an accelerating death drive which is itself death proof. In Tarantino’s film of the same name, for example, the impotence of itinerant ex-stuntman Mike is the condition of a romance between two iconic automobiles, vehicles not of male potency but an altogether Other jouissance.

INTRODUCTION: Véronique Voruz (the London Society of the New Lacanian School)[AUDIO HERE] Right click to save

TARANTINO’s GIRLS: Gérard Wajcman (writer, psychoanalyst, curator and art critic. He teaches at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University and is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis) read by Scott Wilson [AUDIO HERE]

POST-PHALLIC LIBIDINAL ECONOMIES: Hager Weslati (London Graduate School, Kingston University) [AUDIO HERE]

SCREEN, DRIVE, ROMANCE: Fred Botting (London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001)) [AUDIO HERE]

PSYCHE, THAT INGLOURIOUS BASTERD: Scott Wilson (London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001)) [AUDIO HERE]

TOUGH LOVE: Marie-Hélène Brousse (practising psychoanalyst in Paris, a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis) [AUDIO HERE]

Sunday, 8 May 2011

New Bright Lights Film Journal

Image from My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (Wai Ka-Fai with Johnny To, 2002).

Read The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011) By Lesley Chow

Film Studies For Free heard, via David Hudson, of a brand new, and excellent, issue of online Bright Lights Film Journal. Just feast your eyes on the below, directly-linked-to contents.

As an old advertising campaign used to say, "I never knew there was so much in it..." Except that FSFF always did know this about BLFJ, a truly brilliant repository of incredibly lively, scrupulously edited, and highly informative online film writing....

From the Editor

ARTICLES

Tarantino’s Transformations: Inglourious Basterds’ Dizzying Array of Sources ,By JD Markel. In which Tarantino reshapes Shakespeare, World War II movies, Leni Riefenstahl, Spaghetti Westerns, and more, under the deft guidance of that Italian master Ovid

The Tomb of Thingness and Self-Doubt: Against the Cult of Infinity, By Andrew Grossman “One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics. I am speaking of the infinite.” — Jorge Luis Borges

Culture and the Individual Talent? Three Filmmakers on Male Mid-Life Crisis, By John Engle“A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries.” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Our Orgasms, Ourselves: Meditations on Movie Sex, By Marilyn Papayanis “How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” — Rachel P. Maines

The Film Criticism of Alexis De Tocqueville: Or, When Heroes Yearn as Clouds Drift, By Andrew Grossman “These characters, alone or twinned, slumber in the blanket of the Natural Cliché and sit and wait, just as we long for a tinge of disgust, hysteria, or irreverence to dismantle stoic facades inherited from some icy cinematic factory.”

Helping Humanity: We All Get Stressed Out, By D. J. M. Saunders But have you stopped behaving strangely?

Short Takes: Mise-en-Scène: Dorothy’s Pigtails, or Integrating Imperfection into Meaning By Matthew Sewell “George Lucas, engaged in an endless quest for perfect, seamless fantasy, hopes to erase any trace of the tricks necessary to build it. Oz instead understands that the evidence of artifice can itself bear meaning: in this case, that our wildest, most wish-fulfilling fantasies will still reflect our limitations.”

A Propaganda Opportunity Shot Down: The Changing Image of the FBI Agent in G-Men (1935) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), By John Hall “Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”

Sirk or Brecht? Or Both?: Determining the Guiding Influence in Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, By Peter Tyson “Is Fassbinder a Sirkian who, despite distancing techniques and irony, achieves audience identification and emotional catharsis? Or is he a hard-nosed Brechtian who distances us clinically from his characters so that we can calmly criticise their shortcomings?”

Notions of Gender in Hindi Cinema: The Passive Indian Woman in the Global Discourse of Consumption, By Prakash Kona “During the so-called ‘repressive’ ages sex was a joy, because it was practiced in secret and it made a mockery of all of the obligations and duties that the repressive power imposed. Instead, in tolerant societies, as the one we live in is declared to be, sex produces neuroses because the freedom granted is false and above all, it is granted from above and not won from below.” — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006)

EXPLOITATION

Strangers with Candy: The Highway Safety Foundation and The Child Molester (1964), By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas “The issues surrounding The Child Molester have become only more ambiguous: despite its cheesy retro aesthetics, it allows no room for nostalgic reflection at how far attitudes have progressed or how much things have changed.”

MOVIES

Dream Girls: On Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Cathering Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty, By Jacob Mikanowski “When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”

(God)Father and Son: The Enigma of Michael Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather, By Joseph Aisenberg “There’s something curiously remote and cool at the center of it, something slightly out of focus that makes this melodrama rather ambiguous and hard to assemble.”

Slash and Burn: Revisiting William Friedkin’s The Hunted (2003), By Ian Murphy “Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”

Who Took the Folk Out of Music? Everybody, It Seems, By Norman Ball “How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”

TELEVISION

“You Had Me at “Farrier”! Matt Thompson and Adam Reed Supply Cheap Thrills for the Socially Challenged in Archer, By Alan Vanneman Like a straight, poorly drawn, less fluid Ambiguously Gay Duo

STARS

Norman, Is That You? The Long Wait of Norman Foster, By Jake Hinkson “Sadly, this oversight neglects Foster’s contributions to both film noir and world cinema, and it dismisses a life nearly as fascinating as that of Welles.”

Deborah Kerr: An Actress in Search of an Author, By Penelope Andrew “The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.” — Peter Viertel, Kerr’s husband

The King of Chutzpah: On the Singular Pleasures of Phil Silvers, By Christopher Sandford “Silvers raised the smart-aleck, rapid-fire monolog to high art.”

DIRECTORS

The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes, By Rob Smart “These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”

Between Heaven and Hell: Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground, By Joanne De Simone “Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”

Mapping the Mind Between Movies: Intertextuality in the Work of Wong Kar-wai, By Michael Ward “Frustrated by their unrequited love, their inability to capture their objet petit a, Wong’s characters search desperately for appropriate supplements onto which they can displace their yearnings and desires.”

FILM FESTIVALS

The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011), By Lesley Chow, “This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”

A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival (2011), By Megan Ratner “Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”

Cinemas of Poetry and Violence: The 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010) By Tijana Mamula, Rotterdam’s edge is intact despite increasing hints of commercialism

COLUMNS

Bright Sights: A Blonde in Love, The Lighthouse, The Clowns, Senso, Our Hospitality, William S. Burroughs: The Man Within By Gordon Thomas An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

INTERVIEW

Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce By Matthew Sorrento “Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field.”

BOOKS

Swedish Sensationfilms, Daniel Ekeroth, reviewed by Erich Kuersten

Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign, by David Del Valle, reviewed by C. J. Kutner

Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema: Images of Growth, Rebellion and Survival, by Justin Vicari, reviewed by Robert von Dassanowsky

Back to the Future, by Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate, reviewed by Leah Anderst

Friday, 6 November 2009

Follow-Friday Links Round Up

Image from Frederick Wiseman’s La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris (2009)

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)

Monday, 2 November 2009

New Brights Lights Film Journal

Delphine Seyrig (as A) in L'Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France 1961)

A quick post to begin the blogging week: Film Studies For Free is delighted to flag up that Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online. Below are all the relevant links. There are some very good articles, written as always in BLFJ's entertaining, but still scholarly-critical, house style, including ones on Polanski, Chaplin, Delphine Seyrig, Kubrick, Tarantino, and a great interview with Jonas Mekas. Keep up with Bright Lights between issues by visiting its companion blog, Bright Lights After Dark. Those of you on Twitter might also like to follow the BLF Journal @blfj

From the editor

Keep watching the lights...

Articles

Roman Polanski: What's on Trial? By Karin Luisa Badt

Looking at Charlie: Modern Times An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin "Buck up! Never say die! We’ll get along!" By Alan Vanneman

Past Sunset: Noir in the West "I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me." By Imogen Sara Smith

On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong Especially when the lovers aren't, By D. J. M. Saunders

Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America "Tease was out, honesty was in." By Jack Stevenson

The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual "We keep returning to this story about pod people because we're terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era." By Jesse Stommel

The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover How a movie exposé of "abuse of power" defends those in power and their institutions, By Jay Rothermel

Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah "In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality — and its alternate currents — is caught with a glance." By Rob Faunce

Can't Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can't — and Shouldn't Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century, By Suzanne del Gizzo

Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age A tour of Edwards' curious 1988 film, with side trips to variations by James Ivory, John Schlesinger, and others, By Barry Wurst II

Actors

Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return "Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice." By Dan Callahan

Sean Connery: A "Natural Thrust" "Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever." By Christopher Sandford

Directors

Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men "I'm shitting bricks, thinking he's onto me." By Damon Smith

Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas "One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me." By Jon Lanthier

Columns

Bright Sights: Play Time, Gaumont Treasures, Diary for My Children, Winstanley, Marlene, Bill Douglas Trilogy An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases, By Gordon Thomas

Letter from New York (c. 1980) "The problem is other people — crazy people." By Howard Mandelbaum

Movies

Film Kills: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 1 "Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates." By Vlad Dima

"Do You Find Me Sadistic?" Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 2 "This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them." By Lee Weston Sabo

Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing "His plan mirrors Johnny's, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place."" By Robert Castle

Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11 "Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being 'about' 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp." By Devan Goldstein

Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann's Public Enemies "Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances." By Joan McGettigan

"They Come in Peace": Andy Fickman's Race to Witch Mountain "Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . .", By Jay Rothermel

Far from Elementary: Debra Chasnoff's Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up"I told him, 'I'm not gay. My neck was cold.'"By Gary Morris

Festivals

After the Surge: The 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival "An alternative agenda for the festival might be: what can we make of modernism?", By Lesley Chow

Bucking the Tide: The 2009 New York Film Festival This year's strong, idiosyncratic line-up reminds us that moviegoing can still be more than "a museum experience", By Megan Ratner

Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Getting out of the ghetto, By Gary Morris

From Air Dolls to the Anchorage: The 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival "VIFF remains the unspoiled oasis for cinephiles looking to get away from it all." By Ben Cho

Books

In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder, By Joseph McBride

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Politot, By Jon Lanthier

America’s Film Vault: A Reference Guide to the Motion Pictures Held by the U.S. National Archives, by Phillip W. Stewart, By Matthew Kennedy

Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor, by Dan North, By Deborah Allison

Thursday, 1 October 2009

'Inglourious Basterds: Can Hollywood rewrite history?': A Fistful of Tarantino Links

Production still from Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Especially for those among you not permanently hovering in the Twittersphere, Film Studies For Free today brings a lasting record of (yesterday's) film-social-networking news du jour: an online video recording in three parts of an academic seminar hosted, on September 24, by Monash University's Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Monash's Research Unit in Film and Cultural Theory, about Quentin Tarantino's 'subversive and divisive new film,' Inglourious Basterds.

This excellent event was chaired by Age critic Philippa Hawker with the following speakers (in order): Mark Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation; Adrian Martin, film critic and co-director of the Research Unit in Film and Cultural Theory; Jan Epstein, film critic and broadcaster; and Nathan Wolski, lecturer in Jewish Studies.

You can view the video segments online at Slow TV (a site worth checking out in itself) or download them as episodes to your computer using the below links (just choose the format you want).

If you are interested in reading more about the debates that these speakers address, FSFF highly recommends you click on the following six links, too.