Catherine Grant, who’s just posted four of her recent video essays with accompanying texts at Filmanalytical, spotlights issue 2.2 of [in]Transition (we took a look at 2.1 in March). As co-editor, she explains that Will Brooker, editor of Cinema Journal, “shared with us (some six months in advance of publication) four articles from the latest issue of this highly esteemed journal—54.3, Spring 2015—and asked if we would be interested in commissioning videographic responses to the work. We accepted this challenge, conceiving of it as an experiment to see how audiovisual essays (produced and published relatively quickly) could take up, adapt, or riff off debates and arguments posited by written scholarly texts (which, as is customary, had taken several years to produce and publish).” The audiovisual essays and the articles to which they’re responding:
- Austin Fisher‘s Spaghettis in Translation and Michelle Cho‘s “Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema: Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird.”
- Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin‘s Against the Real and Sarah O’Brien‘s “Nous revenons à nos moutons: Regarding Animals in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.”
- Jennifer Proctor‘s So’s Nephew by Remes (thanx to Michael Snow) by Jorrie Penn Croft and Justin Remes‘s “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film.”
- Richard Misek‘s The Definition of Film and the same piece by Remes.
- Benjamin Sampson‘s The Time Passing and Julie Levinson‘s “Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock.”
With its new Summer 2015 issue, Cineaste has relaunched its site. The clean design makes the articles much, much easier to read. Online:
- Previews of Michał Oleszczyk‘s piece on “Pauline Kael’s Provincialism,” Michael Gray‘s review of Yann Demange’s ’71 and the second part of Gary Bettinson‘s interview with Ethan Hawk.
- “The biopic is in critical condition,” argue the editors.
- Daniel Kasman talks with Toby Haggith, senior curator at the Imperial War Museums, about German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, the British Ministry of Information documentary about German atrocities and the concentration camps.
- Aaron Cutler talks with Pedro Costa about Horse Money and reviews Antonio Pietrangeli‘s Adua and Her Friends (1960).
- Greg de Cuir Jr. on Kevin Jerome Everson.
- Jonathan Murray on Rod Stoneman’s book, Seeing is Believing: The Politics of the Visual.
- Thomas Doherty on Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper (2014).
- A Robert Altman 3-pack. Darragh O’Donoghue on Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), Rahul Hamid on The Long Goodbye (1973) and Leonard Quart on Thieves Like Us (1974).
- Christopher Sharrett on Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher.
- Robert Cashill on Jack Clayton’s Our Mother’s House (1967).
- David Sterritt on Roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire (1983).
- And Richard Porton‘s report on this year’s Berlinale.
Introducing a dossier on film sound in Issue 8 of The Cine-Files, Jacob Smith tells us that there are “three ways of thinking about ‘listening to film'” that were “the prompt given to the contributors to this dossier, all of whom were asked to curate a film clip that either 1) depicts listening as a mode of onscreen behavior, 2) features sound design that cues a particular technique of listening, or 3) demonstrates how sound can function to convene and/or activate a cinematic public.”
- Jay Beck on Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénega (2001).
- Michel Chion on Robert Altman’s The Player (1992).
- Caryl Flinn on Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965).
- Mack Hagood on “The Tinnitus Trope”; think, for example, of Clive Owen immediately after the explosion in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) and then again early on in Tom Tykwer‘s The International (2009).
- Keir Keightley on “some sort of mid-century shift in dominant listening formations. Moreover, I think this new, mainstream relationship to sound recording is also evident in post-war cinema, particularly in the work of Jerry Lewis and his film The Patsy (1964).”
- Kate Lacey on Helma Sanders-Brahms‘s Germany, Pale Mother (1980).
- Jean Ma on Dongshan Shi’s Two Stars in the Milky Way (1931).
- Mara Mills: “Ekphrasis, while by no means the only verbovisual or audiovisual relation, persists in the domain of new media—streamlined and operationalized.”
- Robert Spadoni on Walter Colmes’s The Woman Who Came Back (1945).
- Neil Verma on Fritz Lang‘s Hangmen Also Die (1943).
- Shane Vogel on Maya Angelou in Fred F. Sears’s Calypso Heat Wave (1957).
- William Whittington on Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981).
Also in this issue: Laura L. Beading on Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2008) and True Grit (2010), Matt Von Vogt on “Noise in Its Contexts at the Dawn of Sound Cinema” and—here she is again!—Catherine Grant: “Turning Up the Volume? The Emergent Focus on Film Sound, Music and Listening in Audiovisual Essays.”
The focus of Cinephile 10.2 is “New Queer Theory in Film,” and you can download the full issue as a PDF. Editor Claire Davis: “The groundbreaking work of queer theorists such as Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, David Halperin, and Jose Muñoz (to name but a few) has transformed cultural theory in the last twenty years, where now queerness as a concept exists to be dismantled, reassembled, negated, reinstated, and, most importantly, questioned. The diversity of the articles in this issue, only two of which deal directly with the topic of what could strictly be called queer cinema, is reflective of the far reaching impact of queer theory and its many and varied applications.”
Tsai Ming-liang‘s No No Sleep (2015)
Eileen Rositzka and Amber Shields introduce Issue 7 of Frames Cinema Journal: “Our choice of the theme ‘Conflicting Images, Contested Realities’ for this issue, while sparked by the discourse in the world around us, was also fortified by our own research. Despite the differences in our areas of study, one of us working on the war film’s cinematic modes of re-territorializing the body, and the other on fantasy representations of trauma, we found that we were continually attracted to the same discussions, questions, and overarching approaches concerning troubling genre or conflict representations and the discussions they provoked.”
- Robert Burgoyne and Eileen Rositzka on Tim Hetherington.
- Victoria Grace Walden “considers the extent to which pre-existing guidelines about ‘appropriate’ representation, mostly defined by survivors, are still relevant to young producers of digital Holocaust memory, and whether there might be new ethical questions that are as, if not more, important.”
- Cilli Pogodda and Danny Gronmaier on Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes (2006).
- Nathan To on Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014) and posters from the Cultural Revolution.
- Natalia Stachura on Belgian WWI documentaries.
- Caroline Perret on Derek Jarman‘s War Requiem (1988).
- Diego Costa presents his PhD thesis film, Matricídio (2014), “the culmination of a reluctant project of re-living the various insults that have founded me (faggot, feminine, foreign) in order to disarm them.”
- Amber Shields on “Bollywood Bodies” and Farah Khan’s Happy New Year (2014).
- John Trafton on “Civil War Photography and the Contemporary War Film.”
- Mirta Varela on “Argentine Documentaries on the Malvinas (Falklands) War” and Georges Fournier on “British Docudramas of the Falklands War.”
- Ana Grgić on In Contrast: Croatian Film Today, a collection edited by Aida Vidan and Gordana P. Crnković.
Noel King and Matthew Asprey Gear introduce the “Writers at the Movies” issue of Contrappasso, noting that “the common theme is ‘literary cinéphilia.'” Online:
- Clive Sinclair on Robert Siodmak’s Custer of the West (1967). Plus, a visit to Paris: “It so happens that the hotel in which we stayed, the Scribe, was where the whole business began, where the Lumière Brothers first demonstrated their new machine, the Cinematograph, on December 28, 1895.”
- Two poems by R. Zamora Linmark. “Twelve Short Takes on Montgomery Clift” and “A Letter to Claire Danes from a Fan in Manila.”
- Sarah Berry on Jean Negulesco: “Hollywood was built on close-ups of beautiful women, but Negulesco’s women talk a lot in close up. And they talk about themselves.”
The Summer 2015 issue of Artforum is out and features Johanna Fateman on the video work of Joan Jonas: “Despite its myriad and ingenious distancing strategies, from stylizations of gesture to televisual abstraction, and its lack of anything resembling autobiography, Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy [1972] feels intensely personal—an effect of Jonas’s inimitable, magical sensibility and the bold positioning of her own body at the center of her project…. Clairvoyant as well as telepathic, Jonas anticipated the contemporary ubiquity of the live feed, our endless opportunities to monitor and broadcast ourselves.”
For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily. Get Keyframe Daily in your inbox by signing in at fandor.com/daily.
