A major open access eBook: Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film Edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016).

• The Best Video Essays of 2016 - Fandor's End of Year Poll

As last year, Kevin B. Lee polled "esteemed video essay creators, scholars, programmers, and devoted followers of the form to highlight the best video essays of the year. Each year it becomes more necessary to crowdsource this task, for in the words of notable video essayist David Verdeure / Filmscalpel, 'It has become impossible to keep up with all video essays that are made, with the form proliferating in both academic and film fan circles.' These poll results might offer some help in sorting out the standouts of the genre. Videos mentioned most frequently in this poll are embedded below, along with the individual lists."

• Open Access Film Studies eBooks x 2!

• POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21ST-CENTURY FILM

A major scholarly collection edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, and published by REFRAME’s open access ebook imprint. 

If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, Denson and Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” Contributors explore key experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime and articulate both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries.

Download: PDF 13mb and PDF 9mb

CONTENTS AND LINKS TO WEB CHAPTERS

Perspectives on Post-Cinema: An Introduction – Shane Denson and Julia Leyda

1. Parameters for Post-Cinema 1.1  What is Digital Cinema? – Lev Manovich 1.2  Post-Continuity: An Introduction – Steven Shaviro 1.3  DVDs, Video Games, and the Cinema of Interactions – Richard Grusin

2. Experiences of Post-Cinema 2.1  The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence” – Vivian Sobchack 2.2  Post-Cinematic Affect – Steven Shaviro 2.3  Flash-Forward: The Future is Now – Patricia Pisters 2.4  Towards a Non-Time Image: Notes on Deleuze in the Digital Era – Sergi Sánchez 2.5  Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect – Shane Denson 2.6  The Error-Image: On the Technics of Memory – David Rambo

3. Techniques and Technologies of Post-Cinema 3.1  Cinema Designed: Visual Effects Software and the Emergence of the Engineered Spectacle – Leon Gurevitch 3.2  Bullet Time and the Mediation of Post-Cinematic Temporality – Andreas Sudmann 3.3  The Chora Line: RealD Incorporated – Caetlin Benson-Allott 3.4  Splitting the Atom: Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision – Steven Shaviro

4. Politics of Post-Cinema 4.1  Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory – Julia Leyda 4.2  On the Political Economy of the Contemporary (Superhero) Blockbuster Series – Felix Brinker 4.3  Reality Effects: The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso Cuarón – Bruce Isaacs 4.4  Metamorphosis and Modulation: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan – Steen Christiansen 4.5  Biopolitical Violence and Affective Force: Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown – Elena del Río

5. Archaeologies of Post-Cinema 5.1  The Relocation of Cinema – Francesco Casetti 5.2  Early/Post-Cinema: The Short Form, 1900/2000 – Ruth Mayer 5.3  Post-Cinematic Atavism – Richard Grusin 5.4  Ride into the Danger Zone: Top Gun (1986) and the Emergence of the Post-Cinematic – Michael Loren Siegel 5.5  Life in Those Shadows! Kara Walker’s Post-Cinematic Silhouettes – Alessandra Raengo

 6. Ecologies of Post-Cinema 6.1  The Art of Morphogenesis: Cinema in and beyond the Capitalocene – Adrian Ivakhiv 6.2  Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions – Selmin Kara 6.3  Algorithmic Sensibility: Reflections on the Post-Perceptual Image – Mark B. N. Hansen 6.4  The Post-Cinematic Venue: Towards an Infrastructuralist Poetics – Billy Stevenson

7. Dialogues on Post-Cinema 7.1  The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 – Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, and Steven Shaviro 7.2  Post-Cinematic Affect: A Conversation in Five Parts – Paul Bowman, Kristopher L. Cannon, Elena del Río, Shane Denson, Adrian Ivakhiv, Patricia MacCormack, Michael O’Rourke, Karin Sellberg, and Steven Shaviro 7.3  Post-Continuity, the Irrational Camera, Thoughts on 3D – Shane Denson, Therese Grisham, and Julia Leyda 7.4  Post-Cinema, Digitality, Politics – Julia Leyda, Rosalind Galt, and Kylie Jarrett

• The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities
In June 2016, REFRAME Books published The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities, edited by Charles R. Acland and Eric Hoyt – a cutting edge collection of work both surveying what media historians are doing with digital tools and charting a course for how the field of media history might move forward in an ongoing dialogue with the digital humanities. Online at: http://projectarclight.org/book/

CONTENTS:

“A Guide to the Arclight Guidebook” by Eric Hoyt, Kit Hughes, and Charles R. Acland

PART I: Searching and Mapping 1) “The Quick Search and Slow Scholarship: Researching Film Formats” by Haidee Wasson; 2) “Search and Re-search: Digital Print Archives and the History of Multi-sited Cinema” by Gregory A. Waller; 3) “Using Digital Maps to Investigate Cinema History” by Laura Horak; 4) “Field Sketches with Arclight: Mapping the Industrial Film Sector” by Kit Hughes

PART II: Approaching the Database 5) “Low-Tech Digital” by Charles R. Acland; 6) “Excavating Film History with Metadata Analysis: Building and Searching the ECHO Early Cinema Credits Database” by Derek Long; 7) “Show Me the History! Big Data Goes to the Movies” by Deb Verhoeven; 8) “How Is a Digital Project Like a Film?” by Miriam Posner

PART III: Analyzing Images, Sounds, Words 9) “Coding and Visualizing the Beauty in Hating Michelle Phan: Exploratory Experiments with YouTube, Images, and Discussion Boards” by Tony Tran; 10) “Looking for Bachelors in American Silent Film: Experiments with Digital Methods” by Lisa Spiro; 11) “Terminological Traffic in the Movie Business” by Charles R. Acland & Fenwick McKelvey; 12) “Digital Tools for Film Analysis: Small Data” by Lea Jacobs & Kaitlin Fyfe; 13) “The Slices of Cinema: Digital Surrealism as Research Strategy” by Kevin L. Ferguson

PART IV: Process, Product, and Publics 14) “Digital Tools for Television Historiography: Researching and Writing the History of US Daytime Soap Opera” by Elana H. Levine; 15) “When Worlds Collide: Sharing Historical Advertising Research on Tumblr” by Cynthia B. Meyers; 16) “Networking Moving Image History: Archives, Scholars, and the Media Ecology Project” by Mark Williams; 17) “Curating, Coding, Writing: Expanded Forms of Scholarly Production” by Eric Hoyt; “Keywords and Online Resources” by Robert Hunt and Tony Tran

• Open Access Film and Media Studies Journal Issues x 4: 

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2016_#Home

• Editorial Necsus

• Features: 
• Even today there are people who think these harmless little books are dangerous: An interview with David Bordwell by Malte Hagener 
• From single male guest worker to Muslim: An archaeology of iterating archival footage on Dutch television by Andrea Meuzelaar 
• The politics of spatiality in experimental nonfiction cinema: Jonathan Perel’s ‘Toponimia’ by Patrick Brian Smith 
• For here there is no place that does not see you: ‘Minority Report’ and art as de/legitimisation by Josef Früchtl 

• Special section: #Home 
• The Calais Jungle: Mediations of home by Mireille Rosello 
• From the bedroom to LA: Revisiting the settings of early video blogs on YouTube by Rainer Hillrichs 
• The filmic representation of home in transnational families: The case of ‘I for India’ by Efrén Cuevas 
• The home screen as an anchor point for mobile media use: Technologies, practices, identities by Stefan Werning 
• Songs of home (and away): Ethnically-coded diegetic music and multidirectional nostalgia in fiction films about Polish migrants by Kris Van Heuckelom and Iwona Guść 

• Festival reviews: edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist (Film Festival Research Network) 
• How do film festivals work?: A conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer by Greg de Cuir Jr 
• Virtual futures and cinematic pasts at the 65th Melbourne International Film Festival by Kirsten Stevens 
• Films from Asia, attention around the world: 18th Far East Film Festival, Udine by Jinuo Diao 

• Exhibition reviews: edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg (NECS Publication Committee) 
• Pierdom by Simon Roberts by Lavinia Brydon and Olu Jenzen 
• A place between desire and experience: Afterthoughts on Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting by Carlos Kong 

• Book reviews: edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier (NECS Publication Committee) 
• Dreaming of Cinema / Slow Cinema by James Newton 
• A geography of resistance: Locating US underground film and TV cultures by Andrea Mariani 

• Audiovisual essays: guest edited by Catherine Grant 
• The audiovisual essay as performative research by Catherine Grant 
• House Arrest by Domietta Torlasco 
• The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism by Ian Garwood 
• Being Bowie by Will Brooker and Rebecca Hughes

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2016_’Small data’

• Editorial Necsus 

• Features
• A philosophy of weaving the web: An interview with media theorist Sebastian Giessmann by Geert Lovink
• Remake: Chantal Akerman’s and John Smith’s plays on reality by Clara Miranda Scherffig
• Videographic film studies and the analysis of camera movement by Volker Pantenburg
• Photobiographies: The Derrida documentaries as film-philosophy by Robert Sinnerbrink
• ‘The Right Stuff’: From Western to melodrama and comedy by Wim Staat
• Pleasure | Obvious | Queer: A conversation with Richard Dyer by Catherine Grant and Jaap Kooijman 

• Special section: Small data
• Forms of binding: On data and not ‘fitting in’ by Anirban Gupta-Nigam
• Compact cinematics by Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki
• From Saul Bass to participatory culture: Opening title sequences in contemporary television series by Valentina Re
• Database aesthetics, modular storytelling, and the intimate small worlds of Korsakow documentaries by Anna Wiehl
• Towards a minor data manifesto by Jacek Smolicki and Alberto Frigo 

• Exhibition reviews: edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg (NECS Publication Committee)
• Ryoji Ikeda at ZKM by Joo Yun Lee
• Re-enacting pre-existing image collections in Akram Zaatari’s ‘Unfolding’ by Olivia Eriksson
• The milieu of poetry: Yuri An’s ‘The Unharvested Sea’ and ‘Sailing Words’ by Adeena Mey
• Festival reviews: edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist (Film Festival Research Network)
• Of calendars and industries: IDFA and CPH:DOX by Aida Vallejo
• Human rights, film, and social change: Screening Rights Film Festival, Birmingham Centre for Film Studies by Sonia Tascón
• Rediscovering Frantz Fanon at Scotland’s Africa in Motion film festival by Prince Bubacarr Aminata Sankanu 

• Book reviews: edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier (NECS Publication Committee)
• Complex series and struggling cable guys by Anne Gre Wabeke
• New media configurations and socio-cultural dynamics in Asia and the Arab world by Najmeh Moradiyan Rizi 

• Audiovisual essays: guest edited by Dana Linssen
• Whose Cinema: The video-essay on the big screen of the International Film Festival Rotterdam by Dana Linssen
• Live Streaming US by Paula Albuquerque
• re_making by Juan Daniel Molero
• Warped Reflections: The Cinematic Identity of Helmut Berger by Hugo Emmerzael

• New website:

• AHRC-funded CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL STUDIES NETWORK edited by Chris Berry and Luke Robinson. This research network brings together scholars in the UK, China, other parts of Asia, Europe and the USA who are working on film festivals in Chinese-language territories and cultures (including the People’s Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere): http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/chinesefilmfeststudies/

The website collects materials relevant to Chinese Film Festival Studies, including reports on network events, bibliographies, lists of and reports on film festivals, and much more.

• Other Open Access Resources 

• TALKS@MFM – REFRAME continues with its series of video and audio recordings of research presentations and masterclasses held at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex: 

• Professor Laura Rascaroli on “Framing: The Essay Film as Theoretical Practice”

• Dr Rarchel Moseley on "Child’s Play? Stop-Frame Television Animation for Children in the Sixties and Seventies”

• Jerry Rothwell on "HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD (2015): Production, Engagement and Distribution in Documentary”

• To Program is to Write Film History by Peter von Bagh
• Bette Davis: None But the Lonely Heart by Murielle Joudet
• Bits of Business: The American Films of Max Ophüls by Joe McElhaney
• Black Skin, White Light by James Harvey-Davitt
• Montage-at-a-Distance, or: A Theory of Distance by Artavazd Pelechian
• Fragments of Dirk Lauwaert
• ‘The Child That I Was’: Knight of Cups by Pierre Berthomieu
• Wang Bing’s ‘Til Madness Do Us Part: An Apprenticeship in Seeing  by Joseph Mai
• Interplay: (Re)Finding and (Re)Framing Cinematic Experience, Film Space, and the Child’s World by Catherine Grant
• Introduction to ‘Nouvelle Vague Manifesto’ by Aaron Gerow
• Nouvelle Vague Manifesto; or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel by Toyama Shinji

• Fembot in a Red Dress [on the cultural trope of the “lady in red” as it evolved from the genre of film noir to science fiction and from the human to the artificial female] by Allison de Fren with reviews by Kevin B. Lee and Elana Levine.
• Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s Frankenstein by Shane Denson with reviews by Steven Shaviro and Drew Morton
• A Homeless Ghost: The Moving Camera and its Analogies by Patrick Keating with reviews by Kristin Thompson and Matt Zoller Seitz
• Success [on Diana Ross and Beyoncé] by Jaap Kooijman with reviews by Richard Dyer and Chiara Grizzaffi
• Encounters [on New Argentine Cinema] by Michael Talbott with reviews by Austin Fisher and Michael Koresky

• Use No Hooks: Maurice Pialat / Manny Farber Adrian Martin

• Only in Dreams: The Big Sleep and Hollywood Fantasy Nathaniel Deyo

• Déjà Vu: Textures of Time Steen Ledet Christiansen

Moments of Texture

• Introduction Lucy Fife Donaldson

• Brokeback Mountain: A Toast Adam O'Brien

• Surfaces, Textures and the Long Take in Death Line Ian Banks

• Reading Space in Cracker Lucy Fife Donaldson

• Passing Time in Frances Ha James Zborowski

The Best Years of Our Lives: A Dossier

• Introduction James MacDowell

• Among My Souvenirs: Couples, Conventions and the America to Come in The Best Years of Our Lives Nicolas Pillai

• Performance and Style in The Best Years of Our Lives Sarah Thomas

• Black Extras in The Best Years of Our Lives Steve Neale

• Viewing the World in Till the End of Time Edward Gallafent

Book Reviews

• A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (Tom Conley, T. Jefferson Kline, eds) Douglas Morrey

• Découpage (Timothy Barnard) Douglas Pye

Also at MOVIE, new entries in its series of open access ebooks - monographs which originally appeared in the series Close-Up (Wallflower Press, 2006-09). These are free to download, and are available in epub and mobi formats.

Filmmakers’ Choices explores different areas of decision-making within filmmaking, focusing on each in the analysis of a film. The discussion of Talk to Her(Pedro Almodóvar, 2002) examines the detailed construction of point of view; the account of Lured (Douglas Sirk, 1947) reflects on narrative structure and the creative possibilities of coincidence. Other films under investigation include Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992), The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949) and Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992).

The concept of tone gestures towards some of the most crucial issues for film analysis – the relationships of a movie to its material, its traditions and its spectator – and yet tone has had a very limited place in film theory and criticism. This study asks how tonal qualities within a film can be identified, exploring the decisions which lead to our grasp of tone as a dimension of meaning that is both informing and subject to moment-by-moment modulation. Discussion centres on The Deer Hunter, Desperately Seeking Susan, Strangers on a Train, Distant Voices, Still Lives and Some Came Running. 

This study focuses on television style in the US police series. Chapters closely analyse the mise-en-scène of programmes in the 1980-2003 period including Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street and CSI. Through the detailed investigation of changing aesthetics in the police series, Bignell addresses critical issues around style and ideology, ‘quality’, genre, programme brands and authorship in US television. 

In this book Joss Whedon’s acclaimed television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is seen not just to create a richly detailed and satisfying fictional world, but to be an abundant source of complex meanings. Several aspects of Buffy are examined: its visual intelligence, the playful sophistication of its narrative strategies, and the interest the series takes in its relationship with its many fans.