DAILY | Global Queer Cinema—and New Books

Early next month, a website will be launched for Global Queer Cinema, an international academic research network project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and hosted by the School of Media, Film & Music at the University of Sussex. Catherine Grant, who runs the vital Film Studies for Free, will have a hand in the site and its social media presence, and today, she’s posted this moving audiovisual collage at the top of another amazing roundup, “Our Beautiful Wickedness: On Reading Films Queerly. In Memory of Alexander Doty“:In other news. “Lars von Trier has set the rules of a project that aims to challenge and inspire people worldwide. While he creates the frame—you must create the content.” So reads the call for participation in Gesamt, a project launched by the Copenhagen Art Festival. Von Trier has issued six challenges in the form of artworks by Paul Gaugin, Albert Speer (yes, really), Cesar Franck, James Joyce, August Strindberg, and Sammy Davis Jr. Submit your work and filmmaker Jenle Hallund will work it into a Gesamtkunstwerk premiering on October 12.Reading. In Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Cinema and the Wounds of War, Anton Kaes “shows us how and where to look in order to see the invisible made visible on screens during the interwar period, over and over again and leans into the many studies of psychological trauma soldiers suffered during and after the war, using the period’s language of shell shock to argue for the pervasiveness with which the war itself functioned like a psychic wound in film of the period, unresolved and looming in its repeated appearances.” Kate Elswit asks, “What paranoiac fantasies haunt our own cultural productions?”Also in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah Weinman revisits three novels by Dorothy B. Hughes, her “favorite crime writer,” one of them being In a Lonely Place (1947), “the source material for the fine, but very different, 1950 movie starring Humphrey Bogart as Dix, recast as bona-fide hero accused of crimes he never committed, and the luscious Gloria Grahame as Laurel.””Conspiring to rip off Hollywood’s prized properties has been a popular practice of merchants and moviegoers since the dawn of cinema,” writes Thomas Doherty at Moving Image Source, “but the rise of digital technology has ratcheted up the stakes from the nickelodeon pocket change of the early part of the last century to the billions of dollars siphoned off in the present one, a fact that makes Peter Decherney‘s Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (Columbia University Press), a splendid new study of the legal, technological, and aesthetic wrangling over motion picture copyright wrongs and rights, particularly timely.”In “The Aura in the age of New Materialism,” Jonathan Rozenkrantz argues in Film International that “that the constitution of material and experiential existence is so manifold that the very concept of ‘copy’ is problematic. This is not to say that [Walter] Benjamin is wrong in claiming that experience (in his words ‘perception’) changes over time, but that we must take his claim even further: experience is always already a process of change.””Those who are using the new tenth edition of Film Art will have noticed that tucked away in its margins are references to blog entries relevant to the topics of each chapter. But since the new edition went to press, we’ve kept blogging.” Kristin Thompson presents a guide to recently posted supplements from herself and David Bordwell.Viewing. Alfred Hitchcock would have been 113 today. Tonight in New York, Steven DeRosa will be talking about his new book, Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. Meantime, here, via the Playlist, are all of Hitch’s cameos in his own films: