Frame grab from Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2013). Read Saige Walton's article on this film "The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in Holy Motors" in the Spring 2014 issue of NECSUS. Pt 1 of the LOLA dossier of the film is here; pt 2 here.

Film Studies For Free had such a great time at the conference of the Network for European Cinema and Media Studies conference in Milan last week that it is a little delayed in bringing its readers news of the publication of the latest issue of this organisation's wonderful Open Access journal NECSUS. The great table of contents is given below.

More will be forthcoming from FSFF about the Milan conference in a few days (including the recording of a wonderful interview gathered there...). But one of the hottest news items from the conference is that video essayists Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López will develop and edit a new video essay section for NECSUS, to debut in the Autumn 2014 issue. More details about this very welcome development are given here.


Features:

• Siegfried Kracauer’s affinities by Thomas Elsaesser
• Mapping the rise of the iPhone: Between phones and mobile media by Ginette Verstraete
• Representations of Madrid in the (post-)transition to democracy by Vicente Rodriguez Ortega
• Empire is out there!?: The spirit of imperialism in the Pixar animated film ‘Up’ by Dietmar Meinel
• Representation or misrepresentation?: British media and Japanese popular culture by Perry Hinton

Special section: Traces

• The navigational gesture: Traces and tracings at the mobile touchscreen interface by Nanna Verhoeff and Heidi Rae Cooley
• Poetics and politics of the trace: Notes on surveillance practices through Harun Farocki’s work by Miriam De Rosa
• Webcams as cinematic medium: Creating chronotopes of the real by Paula Albuquerque
• Assembling traces, or the conservation of net art by Annet Dekker
• The Third Party Diary: Tracking the trackers on Dutch governmental websites by Lonneke van der Velden
• Microphysics of a rationalist utopia: Ruins, town plans, and the avant-garde documentary by Andrea Mariani
• The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in ‘Holy Motors’ by Saige Walton
• Animated maps and the power of the trace by Giuseppe Fidotta
• Enhanced echoes: Digitisation and new perspectives on film sound by Jasper Aalbers

Book reviews (edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier - NECS Publication Committee)

• Globalisation and television formats review by Jaap Kooijman
• Soundscapes, sound clash review by Nessa Johnston
• Shadow economies and digital disruption review by Chris Baumann
• The cinema of Béla Tarr: The circle closes review by Miklós Kiss
• Impossible dreams: Europe and love in cinema review by Fiona Handyside

Festival reviews (edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist - Film Festival Research Network)

• Oberhausen: An interview with Lars Henrik Gass by Enrico Camporesi
• Brazil’s International Disability Film Festival Assim Vivemos review by Ana Gilbert
• Celebrating independence: 54th Thessaloniki International Film Festival review by Lydia Papadimitriou
• Initiating regional talents: 2013 Sarajevo Film Festival review by Ivan Velisavljević
• Past memories for a new future: 70th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia review by Enrico Vannucci

Exhibition reviews:

• Fassbinder Frankfurt review by Senta Siewert
• The biennale as a device: 4th Athens Biennale review by Eva Fotiadi

Framegrab from I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007). Read Elena Woolley's article on "lone-survivor-in-the-dead-city" films

Image montage from Lou Romano's wonderful Cinemosaic website of frame grabs from The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Read Bryan Wuest's article on space in this film.

Framegrab image of early action heroine "Fearless" Nadia (née Mary Ann Evans) in Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936). Read Rosie Thomas's 2007 article on this film.

Today, Film Studies For Free focuses on, and links to, some remarkable film and digital media studies essays commissioned and edited by the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.

The Sarai Programme was initiated in 2000 by a group consisting of internationally renowned cinema scholar Ravi S. Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram (both fellows at CSDS) and the members of the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), a Delhi based group of media practitioners, documentarists, artists and writers.

Sarai's mission is to act as a platform for discursive and creative collaboration between theorists, researchers, practitioners and artists actively engaged in reflecting on contemporary urban spaces and cultures in South Asia. Its areas of interests include media research and theory, the urban experience in South Asia: history, environment, culture, architecture and politics, new and established media practices, media history, cinema, contemporary art, digital culture, the history and politics of technology, visual/technological cultures, free and open source software, social usage of software, the politics of information and communication, online communities and web-based practices.

The below collection of articles -- painstakingly drawn from the numerous, openly accessible Sarai Readers produced by the collective -- reflect the above interests, but have been curated here by FSFF because of their particular, potential relevance to scholars of cinema and related moving image and digital media studies.

• Rehan Ansari, 'On Mushtaq Gazdar's "History of Pakistani Cinema"’, Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Kaushik Bhaumik, 'Fear in Neo-Kaliyuga Epistemic Troubles in Techno-Smrti Times', Sarai reader 08: Fear
• Franco La Cecla, Stefano Savona and Piero Zanini, 'Light from the Box', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Saayan Chattopadhyay, 'Framing Frontiers: The Suspended Step towards Visual Construction of Geopolitical Borders', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Keti Chukhrov, 'Glamour as a Form of Culture in Post-Soviet Russia', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Rana Dasgupta, 'Beyond the Apocalypse: An Unfinished Meditation on Ethics', Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
• Tushar Dhara, 'The Khushboo Case File: Reverse Culture Jamming', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Deb Kamal Ganguly, 'Pixels of Memory on the Hypertextualised 'I’', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Shohini Ghosh, 'Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Nanna Heidenreich and Nicole Wolf, 'Conversation on Locating Conflict', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Menso Heus, 'Innovating Piracy: The Bare Act of Stealing, and Shaping the Future', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Lawrence Liang, 'Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Geert Lovink, 'Surveillance, Performance, Self-Surveillance: Interview with Jill Magid', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Geert Lovink, 'The Typewriter of the Illiterate: Interview with János Sugár', Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
• Kristian Lukic, 'Let us Become Children! Training, Simulations and Kids', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Lev Manovich, 'New Media: A User’s Guide', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Ranjani Mazumdar, 'Cracks in the Urban Frame The Visual Politics of 9/11', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Ranjani Mazumdar, 'Ruin And The Uncanny City Memory, despair and death in Parinda', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Media Researchers @ Sarai, 'Complicating the City: Media Itineraries', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Rahul Mukherjee, 'A Reply to Terrorism on a Wednesday: A Citizen Vigilante’s Prescriptions for Governing Terrorism', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Batul Mukhtiar, 'Journey through a Disaster: A Filmmaker’s Account of the Gujarat Earthquake, 2001', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media 
• Kartik Nair, 'Fear on Film The Ramsay Brothers and Bombay’s Horror Cinema', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Sandhya Devesan Nambiar, 'Factoring Fear: Investigations into Media(ted) Fear', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Warren Neidich, 'The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence 
• Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Warporn Warpunk! Autonomous Videopoesis in Wartime', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Manuel Ramos Martínez, 'Betrayed Borders: Double Agents and the Crisscrossing of Conflicts', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Pooja Rangan, 'Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood As a Signifying Practice', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Raqs Media Collective, 'Dreams and Disguises, As Usual [on Fantômas]', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Janko Röttgers, 'P2P: Power to the People', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Chandak Sengoopta, 'Art without Frontiers? Satyajit Ray and the Constraints of Universality', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Debjani Sengupta, 'Mechanicalcutta: Industrialisation, new media in the 19th century', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life 
• Bhrigupati Singh, 'Screening Injustice: Race, violence and media flows', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Radhika Subramaniam, 'Urban Physiognomies', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Ravi Sundaram, 'Recycling Modernity: Pirate electronic cultures in India', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Anand Vivek Taneja, 'Begum Samru and the Security Guard', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Kuhu Tanvir, 'Myth, Legend, Conspiracy Urban Terror in Aamir and Delhi-6', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Hansa Thapliyal, 'Evictions - Projections Watching Dharmendra in Suburban Lagos', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Rosie Thomas, 'Miss Frontier Mail: The Film That Mistook Its Star for a Train', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Ravi S. Vasudevan, 'An Imperfect Public Cinema and citizenship in the "third world"', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Ravi S. Vasudevan, 'The Exhilaration Of Dread Genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary urban action films', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Ravi Vasudevan, 'Disreputable and Illegal Publics Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Slavoj Žižek in conversation with Shuddhabrata Sengupta, 'From Anxiety to Enthusiasm', Sarai Reader 08: Fear 

Framegrab from El Valley Centro (James Benning, 2000). Read Elizabeth Cowie's article on Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape which discusses Benning's film, among others. Cowie is author of the new book Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

Film Studies For Free brings you openly accessible brilliance from the latest issue of Media Fields Journal. It's a really excellent issue on documentary and space - a must-read. And however hyperbolically positive (the always hyperbolically positive) FSFF is, it doesn't always say that. So, do yourselves a big favour and click on the below links without further ado.

• Ryan Bowles and Rahul Mukherjee, 'Documentary and Space: Introduction', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Alexandra Juhasz, 'A Place in the Online Feminist Documentary Cyber-closet', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Jason Alley, 'Spaces of Reticence', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Laura Rascaroli, 'Sonic Interstices: Essayistic Voiceover and Spectatorial Space in Robert Cambrinus’s Commentary (2009)', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Elizabeth Cowie, 'Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• André Jansson and Erik Gandini, 'Gitmo Space: A Dialogue about Mediatized Warfare, Documentary Filmmaking and Heterotopic Truth', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Nonny de la Peña, 'Physical World News In Virtual Spaces: Representation and Embodiment in Immersive Nonfiction', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Brett Lashua, 'Popular Music Memoryscapes of Liverpool 8', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Erica Stein, 'The Road to Heaven Twists: The City, Urban Planning, and Experiential Space', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Christina Corfield, 'Flexible by Nature: Video and the Cultural Production of Concrete Fact', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Dan Fleming, 'The Staging of Affect and the “Elsewhens” of Documentary Space', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Sukanya Sen, 'Encountering Space: Documenting the Topography of the Migrant Home', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Maggie Hennefeld, 'The Geopolitics of Narrative Parody in Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• 'Mapping Documentary: Roundtable with Filmmaker Ido Haar and Film and Media Studies Scholar Janet Walker in Conversation with David Gray and Jade Petermon', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Renée Rhodes, 'Moving Makes a Map', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011

• Bernadette Flynn, 'Spatial Praxis in the Staging of Material Evidence', Media Fields Journal, Issue 3, 2011