Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays from Film Studies For Free! Let's celebrate with a new video essay (above) and nine sets of treats (below) representing some of FSFF's favourite online film and moving image studies items from 2018.


2. MEDIÁTICO - Special Dossier on Alfonso Cuarón's Roma (2018) by nine world-leading scholars on Latin American Cinema

• INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL DOSSIER ON ROMA (ALFONSO CUARON) by Dolores Tierney
• WATCHING ROMA IN MEXICO CITY by Paul Julian Smith
• BROKEN MEMORY, VOICE AND VISUAL STORYTELLING by Pedro Ángel Palou
• ALFONSO CUARÓN’S LOVE LETTER TO HIS NANA by Deborah Shaw
• CLASS TROUBLE by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
• MEMORIES OF C/LEO – ON AUTEURISM AND ROMA by Jeffrey Middents
• FEMINISM AND INTIMATE/EMOTIONAL LABOR by Olivia Consentino
• THE PARADOXES OF CINEPHILIA IN THE AGE OF NETFLIX by Belén Vidal
• RECUERDA, NOTES ON ALFONSO CUARÓN’S ROMA by Robert Carlos Ortiz

• Editorial NECSUS

• Early cinema, Sergei Eisenstein, and film culture today: An interview with Ian Christie on new directions in film history by Annie van den Oever and Malte Hagener

• The playfulness of Ingmar Bergman: Screenwriting from notebooks to screenplays by Anna Sofia Rossholm

• Handmade films and artist-run labs: The chemical sites of film’s counterculture by Rossella Catanese and Jussi Parikka

• Border crossings: Serial figures and the evolution of media by Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer

Special section: #Mappingedited by Giorgio Avezzù, Teresa Castro, and Giuseppe Fidotta

• The exact shape of the world: Mapping and the media by Giorgio Avezzù, Teresa Castro, and Giuseppe Fidotta

• The mapping of ‘500 Days of Summer’: A processual approach to cinematic cartography by Chris Lukinbeal

• Earth networks: ‘The Human Surge’ and cognitive mapping by Tiago de Luca 

• Digital maps and fan discourse: Moving between heuristics and interpretation by Marta Boni

• Embodied cartographies of the unscene: A feminist approach to (geo)visualising film and television production by Laura Sharp

• Making the map speak: Indigenous animated cartographies as contrapuntal spatial representations by Lola Remy 

• Plus ultra: Coloniality and the mapping of American natureculture in the empire of Philip II by Adam Wickberg

• Media mapping and oil extraction: A Louisiana story by Janet Walker

Festival reviews:edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist

• A brief study of film festivals in Mexico: Consumption and historical evolution 2010-2016 by Jacob Bañuelos and Juan Olmedo

• The Dutch film festival landscape: A walk-through by Harry van Vliet 

• Evidentiary aesthetics: Landscapes of violence at RIDM 2017 by Patrick Smith

Exhibition reviews:edited by Miriam de Rosa and Leo Goldsmith

• Codes of conflux: Collaborations between human and computer in MoMa’s ‘Thinking Machines’ by Leo Goldsmith

• Nothing stable under heaven at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by Justin Ross Muchnick

• Racial phantasmagoria: The demonisation of the other in Richard Mosse’s ‘Incoming’ by Diego Ramirez

Book reviews:edited by Lavinia Brydon and Victoria Pastor-González

• (Re)imagining African independence by Vicente Sanchez-Biosca 

• Form and feeling: Kinaesthetic Knowing / Artificial Darkness by Seth Barry Watter

Audiovisual essays:edited by Miklós Kiss

• Videographic scene analyses, part 2 by Miklós Kiss 

• Witnessing the western by Luís Azevedo 

• Marxism in ‘Metropolis’ by Greta Calaciura and Shant Bayramian 

• The l/song take in ‘Before Sunrise’ by Ian Garwood

• Agent of chaos: Discontinuous editing in ‘The Dark Knight’ by Drew Morton

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

Frame grab from The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012). Read José Gallegos' article about this film in the new issue of Mediascape

This issue of Mediascape then is designed to raise pointed questions about the role of the city as a center of both media and cultural production, especially in relation to our experience of mediated reality. The ultimate goal is to ground this larger discourse in a more specific discussion of cinematic space and its transformation in the ever-expanding era of digital media. How do films represent the city in a time of technological change and aesthetic evolution? How has the wholesale implementation of digital technologies impacted the use of space in cinema? And how does the digital era affect the relationship between the off-screen and on-screen spatial environment? Looking at the distinctive aesthetics of urban space, it is our belief, allows for an examination of how we perceive and engage with the iconography of our world. Our intent is to problematize what we understand as the urban, and how strongly it relates to our relationship with contemporary media.

[Matthias Stork and Andrew Young, Mediascape Co-Editors-in-Chief, Introduction to the Fall 2013 issue]

Film Studies For Free would like its readers to head straight on over to the new issue of Mediascape which considers matters of space and mediation. 

FSFF would particularly recommend Matthias Stork's marvellous (and marvellously illustrated) study of the 'Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games', James Gilmore's fascinating essay on The Dark Knight Rises, urban space and the cultural experience of terrorism as mediation, as well as José Gallegos' essay on the Tsunami disaster film The Impossible. The issue also boasts unmissable items in the area of game studies.

Readers may also be interested to know that the excellent Mediascape blog is seeking new contributors on a wide variety of topics. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, or if you would like more information about the blog, please write to Editor-in-Chief Matthias Stork at mstork[at]ucla[dot]edu.

• Moving Through Videogame Cities Bobby Schweizer
• The Impossible – Or How I Learned Thailand Was Filled with European Tourists Jose Gallegos
• Absolute Anxiety Test: Urban Wreckage in The Dark Knight Rises James Gilmore
• Dimensions of the Digital City Oscar Moralde
• Space-Wars: Mapping the Aesthetics of Post-Cinematic City Space in Action Films and Video Games Matthias Stork
• Negotiating Transitional Spaces in Classic Games Harrison Gish
• Invisible Walls: Narrativizing Spatial Limitation in Ico and Assassin’s Creed II Bryan Wuest
• Perpetual Game Space in Crime City: Game Design in the Age of Social Network Gaming Andrew Young

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