CINEMA AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Theo est mort.

2012-01-30T13:47:00.002-08:00

A film still from Voyage to Cythera, directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Photograph: Artificial Eye

Costas Douzinas
guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 January 2012

The Greece of Theo Angelopoulos

Forget deficits, debt and corruption. Theo Angelopoulos, the film-maker who died this week, captured the true Greek soul

The sudden death of Theo Angelopoulos, the greatest Greek film-maker, while shooting his latest film on the current troubles, has acquired great symbolic significance. In recent months, reporting on Greece has concentrated on the deficit, debt and the untrustworthiness of its people. The films of Angelopoulos remind us of another Greece and a different humanity. In his dreamlike historical films, he chronicled the melancholic nature of a nation torn between an invented tradition of classical glories and a traumatic history of repressive state policies, dictatorship, corrupt and dynastic politics. He narrated the lowly lives of the defeated in the vicious civil war 1946-9, the degradations and melancholy of exile, the Odysseus-like return of people who go back to a place they nurtured in their memories but turns out alien and unwelcoming.

In his mesmeric long sequences, a simple gesture, a silence or smile acquire philosophical depth and historic significance. This is epic cinema made out of the fragments of everyday life.

Coming from the left, as did most of the Greek cultural renaissance of the second half of the 20th century, but ascribing to no orthodoxy, Angelopoulos described the degradations of ordinary people both in the hands of rightwing governments and in the Stalinist regimes where the defeated partisans retreated but found no haven.

For Angelopoulos, humanity survives in the memories and dreams of exiled, travelling people who never fully make it back to Ithaca. What makes us human, Angelopoulos tells us, is found in traumatic memories, in the desire to preserve an imaginary beauty, and in eternal returns perennially frustrated. Angelopoulos was both the Homer of modern Greece, and the country's magical realist storyteller.

For decades, the Greek elites belittled those cultural achievements that didn't fit their view of modernisation defined as insatiable consumption. The sorry state Greece finds itself in today was built against Angelopoulos's poetry of images. If, for a moment, we put to one side the immediate economic news, a largely unreported dramatic picture of decay of the integrated political, economic and media elites that ran the country for the last 60 years emerges. The implosion of this elite is a textbook study in the collapse of a system of power.

Let me mention some recent symptoms, each of which have occurred in the last month, and which show an elite turning in on itself. First, the head of the Thessaloniki internal affairs division of the financial crimes squad (SDOE) was arrested last week for his participation in a gang of loan sharks and extortion.

Elsewhere, the government is trying to remove two economic crime prosecutors who reported the tax crimes of the rich and asked parliament to investigate the alleged 3% fraudulent increase of the country's deficit by the incoming Papandreou government in 2010. It was this upward revision of the deficit that led to the term "Greek statistics" and brought the troika of the IMF, EU and ECB to Athens.

In another example, a senior cabinet minister admitted that he did not read the memorandum detailing the measures imposed on Greece by the troika before voting for them; he added that he disagrees with them now, although he energetically implemented them.

Or witness the attack by former prime minister Papandreou on the most powerful media empire, which has consistently supported the Pasok party, for undermining his personal authority. Its CEO replied in a leader that a commercial bank had refused his company a loan on the instruction of the prime minister. He added that later he was invited into the PM's office, was ushered in Murdoch-like from the back door to avoid detection, and was asked to offer unspecified services to the government.

Greek and European elites freely admit now that the austerity – which has led to the deepest depression since the 1930s – was wrong. Former Pasok prime minister Simitis, who led Greece to the eurozone in 2001, (when the current prime minister was the governor of the Bank of Greece) and was accused by Nicolas Sarkozy of fiddling the books to achieve accession, admitted this week in Berlin that the troika measures implemented by his anointed successor were a major mistake. As the elite ship collapses, its captains run for the boats. The belated apologies confirm the suspicion that the deficit was a pretext used by the establishment to impose their desired neoliberal policies.

But there is also the Greece of Angelopoulos. This Greece is represented by men like Dinos Christianopoulos, the greatest living poet of urban solitude and malaise, who refused a Greek Academy lifetime honour stating that he does not want their gongs or money although he lives on a pension of only €600. It is also represented by those who, throughout the country, choose to show solidarity with the homeless, unemployed and poor. Only this week, farmers protesting the devaluation of their produce offered tons of free vegetables to hundreds of Athenians in Syntagma, the square where the indignants occupation last year changed the political landscape by introducing the direct democracy now seen all over the world. Ordinary people who worked hard, did not evade tax and did not participate in the great loot of the last 20 years are everywhere reviving the Greek ethos of friendship, solidarity and hospitality – characteristics lost in the get-rich-quick period.

Angelopoulos speaks of a Greece and Europe far removed from bankers' bonuses and hedge funds. An MP of the extreme right, now in coalition government with the New Democracy and Pasok parties, stated yesterday that Angelopoulos's support for open borders and "internationalism" does not represent Greece. He is wrong.

In 1971, the funeral of Nobel prize winning Giorgos Seferis became a symbolic moment of the resistance against the colonels. Greece is not a dictatorship now, but Angelopoulos's untimely death may acquire a similar meaning – it has already led to nationwide soul-searching.

The struggle for the soul of the country is currently played out in assemblies, strikes and solidarity campaigns. Ordinary Greeks now have a historic chance to redefine the meaning and values of European civilisation.

Photography, Anthropology and History. Expanding the Frame

2012-01-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

Photography, Anthropology and History. Expanding the Frame

Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards (eds)
Ashgate, 2011

The book

Photography, Anthropology and History examines the complex historical relationship between photography and anthropology, and in particular the strong emergence of the contemporary relevance of historical images. Thematically organized, and focusing on the visual practices developed within anthropology as a discipline, this book brings together a range of contemporary and methodologically innovative approaches to the historical image within anthropology. Importantly, it also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of both the historical image and the notion of the archive to recent anthropological thought.

As current research rethinks the relationship between photography and anthropology, this volume will serve as a stimulus to this new phase of research as an essential text and methodological reference point in any course that addresses the relationship between anthropology and visuality.

Contents

Introduction, by Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton

PART 1
Historicizing Visual Anthropology: 'Distempered daubs' and encyclopaedic world maps: the ethnographic significance of panoramas and mappaemundi, by Alison Griffiths;
Anthropology and the cinematic imagination, by David MacDougall.

PART2
Institutional Structures: Salvaging our past: photography and survival, by Elizabeth Edwards;
Frozen poses: Hamat'sa dioramas, recursive representation, and the making of a Kwakwaka'wakw icon, by Aaron Glass.

PART 3
Fieldwork: The initiation of Kamanga: visuality and textuality in Evans-Pritchard's Zande ethnography, by Christopher Morton;
'For scientific purposes a stand camera is essential': salvaging photographic histories in Papua, by Joshua A. Bell;
Visual methods in early Japanese anthropology: Torii Ryuzo in Taiwan, Ka F. Wong; Theodor Koch-Grünberg and visual anthropology in early 20th-century German anthropology, by Paul Hempel.

PART 4
Indigenous Histories: Faletau's photocopy, or the mutability of visual history in Roviana, by Christopher Wright;
John Layard long Malakula 1914–1915: the potency of field photography, by Anita Herle;
'Just by bringing these photographs…': on the other meanings of anthropological images, by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown;

CALL FOR FILMS

2011-12-04T11:05:00.000-08:00

Intimate Lens: Festival of Visual Ethnography

Caserta (Italy) 8-11 December 2011

CALL FOR FILMS

Intimate Lens: Festival of Visual Ethnography claims to promote documentary cinema with special attention to anthropological topics and methodologies. The international character of the festival is in fact not only wanted but also unavoidable because of the specific vocation of the discipline and the applied media. In this first edition we chose not to proceed in further specializations of presences but to offer specific examples, different in filmic languages as well as represented geographic areas, aimed at suggesting to the audience, not only the professional one, a large view, even if of course not complete. We believe that his choice not only will spring a wide exchange of idea and themes but also an extensive collaborative perspective as well. The choice of topics of general interest, diversity and relevance for a general audience is obviously fundamental. The exotic becomes an outdated and unnecessary category and the doubtful will take place, according to a perspective that may catch through the intimate lends a contemporary and global dimension way beyond the local particular.

Created and organized by ©Aldo Colucciello/Augusto Ferraiuolo
with ©Bagaria/B.R.I.O. Associations
http://www.associazionebri o.eu/home.html

Send your film at the postal address below:

Augusto Ferraiuolo
Via Ienco 13
81100 Caserta
ITALY

Contacts:

Aldo Colucciello
coluc.al@libero.it

Augusto Ferraiuolo
augusto@bu.edu

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

2011-10-12T12:58:00.001-07:00

New issue Visual Anthropology

2011-09-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

Visual Anthropology

Vol. 24, n. 4 July-September 2011

SUMMARY

Giusto, Salvatore
La fabbrica dei sogni: Italian Cinematograhy, Collective Memory and National Identity

Fisher, Alexander
Between "the Housewife" and "the Philosophy Professor": Music, narration and Address in Ousmane Sembene's Xala

Zhu, Ping
Destruction, Moral Nihilism and the Poetics of Debris in Jia Zhangke's Still Life

Harris, Anne
Slowly by Slowly : Ethnocinema, Media and YoungWomen of the Sudanese Diaspora

Jain, Pankaj
From Padosi to My Name is Khan : Portrayal of Hindu-Muslim Relations in South Asian Films

Friedman, Kerim
From Thuigs to Victims: Dakxin Bajrange Chhara's Cinema of Justice

Jain, Pankaj
Such a Long Journey : Portrayal of the Parsi Community in Films

Media Reviews

Book Reviews

Made To Be Seen

2011-09-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

Made To Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology

by Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby (eds)
University of Chicago Press, 2011

The book

Made to be Seen brings together leading scholars of visual anthropology to examine the historical development of this multifaceted and growing field. Expanding the definition of visual anthropology beyond more limited notions, the contributors to Made to be Seen reflect on the role of the visual in all areas of life. Different essays critically examine a range of topics: art, dress and body adornment, photography, the built environment, digital forms of visual anthropology, indigenous media, the body as a cultural phenomenon, the relationship between experimental and ethnographic film, and more.
The first attempt to present a comprehensive overview of the many aspects of an anthropological approach to the study of visual and pictorial culture, Made to be Seen will be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. Students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, visual studies, and cultural studies will greatly benefit from this pioneering look at the way the visual is inextricably threaded through most, if not all, areas of human activity.

Contents

Cristina Grasseni / Skilled visions : toward an ecology of visual inscriptions
Sandra Dudley / Material visions : dress and textiles
Roxana Waterson / Visual anthropology and the built environment : interpenetrations of the visible and the invisible
Arnd Schneider / Unfinished dialogues : notes toward an alternative history of art and anthropology
Brenda Farnell / Theorizing "the body" in visual culture
Elizabeth Edwards / Tracing photography
Matthew Durington and Jay Ruby / Ethnographic film
Sarah Pink / Digital visual anthropology : potentials and challenges
Faye Ginsburg / Native intelligence : a short history of debates on indigenous media and ethnographic film
Kathryn Ramey / Productive dissonance and sensuous image-making : visual anthropology and experimental film
Stephen Putnam Hughes / Anthropology and the problem of audience reception
Michael Herzfeld / Hindsight/postscript : ethical and epistemic reflections on/of anthropological vision

Cinema and Photography

2011-06-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

Freeze Frames for a combination of cinema and photography

The symposium "Freeze Frames for a combination of cinema and photography"
"arrêts sur images" taking place in Paris at Musée du quai Branly on April 9th and 10th 2010, are now available on audio/podcast on website of musee du quai Branly through the link mentionned below :

http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programmation/manifestations-scientifiques/manifestations-passees/colloques-et-symposium/colloque-arrets-sur-images.html

colloque arrêts sur images
pour une combinaison de la photographie et du film
vendredi 9 et samedi 10 avril 2010, de 9h30 à 19h

salle de cinéma

ethnologues, sociologues, artistes et historiens de l’image sont invités à venir partager leurs expériences et leurs réflexions sur :

les manières de produire et d’articuler les images fixes et les images animées
les vertus respectives de ces images et de leur association

entrée libre dans la limite des places disponibles
introduction

Sylvaine CONORD, maître de conférences, université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Urbaine/IIAC, CNRS (UMR 8177)

session 1 : photographier et/ou filmer
Introduction

Discutant : Albert PIETTE, Professeur, université d’Amiens

Observer, photographier, filmer : journal du regard d’un ethnographe

Observe, Photograph, Film : an Ethnograph’s Diary Gaze

Annie MERCIER, Phanie, Centre de l’ethnologie et de l’image

Photographies pour l’anthropologie : de la mesure à l’échange

Photography for Anthropology : from Measuring to Inter-view

Marc PIAULT, directeur de recherches, CNRS

La photographie comme story board

Photography as Story-Board

Laurent PELLE, Comité du film ethnographique

session 2 : fixer l’animé, animer la fixité
Introduction

Discutant : Emmanuel GRIMAUD, chargé de recherches, CNRS

Dramaturgie de l’arrêt du temps et arrêts sur images : le montage des performances de Kutiyattam (Kerala, Inde du Sud)

Stop-in-time Dramarturgy and Frozen Images : Editing Kutiyattam Performances (Kerala, South india)

Virginie JOHAN, université Paris 3

Effleurer le réel. Le transit artistique des images : photo / vidéo /interstice

Brushing reality. Images in artistic transit : photography, video, opening

Alain MONS, université Bordeaux III / Isic

Les Cendres Sacrées à l’Âge de Kali : hybridité au débat

Holy Ashes in the Age of Kali : Hybridity Under debate

Lena TOSTA et Olivier BOËLS, université de Brasilia

Un pèlerinage de l’Himalaya raconté à partir de 16 photographies noir et blanc, 34 pages de journal de terrain et 6 mn de film super 8

An Himalayan pilgrimage narrated through 16 black and white photographs, 34 pages of fieldwork notes and 6 minutes of super8 film

Martino NICOLLETI, university of the West of Scotland
Bar Centre des autocars - projection du film de Patrick ZACHMANN, 52 mn

Projection animée par Jean ARLAUD, professeur émérite, université Paris 7

Dans les années 80, Patrick Zachmann, photographe à l'agence Magnum et réalisateur, a animé dans les quartiers nord de Marseille un stage de photographie avec des jeunes appartenant à la première génération issue de l'immigration. Il y rencontre Hacène, Nadia, César, Chrérif, Ali, Paul et les autres. En 2007, il part à leur recherche. Plus de vingt ans se sont écoulés entre les adolescents en difficulté qu'ils étaient et les adultes qu'ils sont devenus. Des parcours de vie singuliers qui font partie de notre histoire collective. Le film conjugue images fixes et images animées.

In the 80s, Patrick Zachmann, photographer at the agency Magnum and the director, taught a photography workshop in the North districts of Marseille with young people whose parents immigrate to France. That it’s where he met Hacène, Nadia, César, Chrérif, Ali, Paul and the others there. In 2007, he decided to meet them again. After more than twenty years, he could question how the teenagers he met became adults. He show us singular routes of life which are a part of our collective history. The movie mixes still and animated frame.

session 3 : prises de vues
introduction

Discutant : Cornelia ECKERT, université de Rio Grande del Sul

Photographie et vidéo : des modes d’expression étrangers ?

Photo and Video, the divergent ways of expression ?

Jean-Pierre DURAND et Joyce SEBAG, université d’Évry

La dimension sociale de la photographie numérique dans la photo-interview effectuée par des étudiants japonais

Social dimension of Digital Photography in Photo-interview pratices by Japanese students

Miura ATSUSHI, université de Saitama, Japon

Photographier ou filmer : vers un regard qui envisage l’autre.

Photography or Film : Toward a View that meditates on the Inner Self on the Other

Ralf MARSAULT, Phanie, Centre de l’ethnologie et de l’image

Temps et narration dans le cinéma et la photographie

Times and narratives for Cinema and Photography

Nomura NAOKI, université de Nagoya, Japon

session 4 : associer les images
introduction

Discutant : Marc PIAULT, directeur de recherches, CNRS
La mort au Japon : de la photographie au multimédia

Death in Japan : From Photography to multimedia

Fabienne DUTEIL-OGATA, LAU/IIAC CNRS/EHESS (UMR 8177)

Beauté et blaxploitation dans le cinéma et la photographie

Beauty and Blaxploitation in Film and Photography

Cheryl FINLEY, université de Cornell (USA) et Thomas Hank Willis

L’image fixe ou l’invisible de l’image animée

The Stationary of Image as the invisible of the animated image

Jacques LOMBARD, IRD

Anthropologie de la et dans la ville brésilienne : un démontage d’images pour rétablir le fil du temps

Anthropologist in Brazilian Cities : un-mounting images to reassemble the time

Cornélia ECKERT et Ana Luiza CARVALHO DA ROCHA, université de Rio Grande del Sul, Brésil

Clôture

Baptiste BUOB, docteur en anthropologie filmique

musée du quai Branly
37, quai Branly
75007 – Paris
Tél : 01 56 61 70 00
mardi, mercredi et dimanche : de 11h à 19h
jeudi, vendredi et samedi : de 11h à 21h

ASTRA FILM FESTIVAL 2011

2011-04-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

ASTRA FILM FESTIVAL 2011 - Sibiu (Romania) 25th-30th October 2011

ASTRA FILM FESTIVAL – the Sibiu International Festival for Documentary Film – invites filmmakers and producers from all over the world to submit their latest productions to the 11th Astra Film Festival, to take place between 25th and 30th October 2011. The deadline is 1st of May 2011.

AFF is a major event in the European community of documentary film. The Festival is a meeting point for documentary filmmakers from all over the world, promotes the production of quality non-fiction film in Romania and in the region.
AFF is dedicated to showing realities of our world as perceived and interpreted by committed creative documentary filmmakers, and to facilitating open debates with the audience, as well as among professionals.
Over the years, AFF’s interactive, informal and friendly style has facilitated a fertile ground of dialogue among filmmakers and public, professionals, a communication that attracted a large number of true fans.
AFF is the ideal place for filmmakers to test their film with an active public. In October 2011, you are welcome to enjoy once more the ASTRA FILM spirit.

AFF .11th COMPETITION
We welcome creative documentaries produced since 2008, in one of the four competitional sections: INTERNATIONAL Section (documentary films made outside Europe); EUROPEAN Section (documentary films made about Europe);
ROMANIAN DOCUMENTARIES (documentary films about Romania);
STUDENT DOCS (documentaries made as part of a film school, documentary film course)

AFF does not select animations, experimental films, re-enactments, and docu-dramas. As a rule, AFF does not pay screening fees for the films in competition. The directors of the selected films are invited to the Festival for the whole period (accommodation expenses covered by the organizers).
You can submit your film at:

http://astrafilm.kalendasoft.com/entryform/en/submission.aspx

AFF .11th SHOWCASES various non-competitive programs related to documentary film: master classes, regional focus, and good archaic music to complete the well known Astra Film Fest atmosphere.

Astra Film Sibiu

Piata Huet No. 12, 550182 - Sibiu, Romania
Tel/Fax: +4 0269 210 134
Email: aff@astrafilm.ro | Submissions 2011: submission@astrafilm.ro
website: www.astrafilm.ro

Séminaire 2010-1011: les littératures populaires aujourd’hui

2011-04-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

Séminaire 2010-1011: les littératures populaires aujourd’hui
par
Langlet
– 14 février 2011Classé dans: Coordination

Le Polar

« Les littératures populaires en France aujourd’hui » est un séminaire du Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures Populaires et les Cultures Médiatiques (CRLPCM), E.A. 1087 EHIC, université de Limoges.
Programme 2010-2011 du séminaire :

jeudi 9 décembre 2010
Matthieu Letourneux, Université de Paris-X : le roman d’aventure
jeudi 24 février 2011
Diana Holmes, University of Leeds (U.K.) : le roman sentimental & les best-sellers féminins
jeudi 14 avril 2011
Natacha Levet, Université de Limoges & Marc Lits, Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgique) : le roman noir & le polar
jeudi 26 mai 2011
Denis Mellier, Université de Poitiers : le fantastique
jeudi 23 juin
Anne Besson, Université d’Artois : la fantasy

Responsable : Irène Langlet

affiche Letourneux

affiche Holmes

Le Polar

Argument :

A l’heure où les mass-media diffusent par tous les canaux de l’industrie culturelle une « culture qui plaît à tout le monde » (Martel, Mainstream, 2010), pendant que les études littéraires voient chaque année leur public diminuer, tant dans le cycle secondaire qu’à l’université, il est peut-être temps de s’interroger sur les livres qui prospèrent à la frontière de ces deux phénomènes contradictoires. On les appela jadis romans de gare, romans à quat’sous ; on tenta de les étudier sous les termes de littérature de grande consommation, paralittérature, littératures de divertissement, littérature populaire… Chaque nom qui leur conviendrait devient vite objet de débat, car il laisse aussi échapper une part de leur caractère. Best-sellers, polars, romans d’amour, fantasy et littératures de l’imaginaire, espionnage, thrillers… sont quelques-uns de leurs genres phares. Les connaître et les comprendre, situer leur influence dans le paysage culturel global (et globalisé), détailler leurs « recettes » pour mieux saisir leurs ingéniosités : telles sont les objectifs du Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures Populaires et les Cultures Médiatiques de l’université de Limoges.

Comment fonctionnent ces littératures installées entre l’oeuvre et le produit, entre la distinction littéraire et l’industrie culturelle ? Comment négocient-elles leur place dans la culture multimédiatique contemporaine ? Quelles sont les clés de leur succès, leur histoire récente, leurs évolutions actuelles et leurs perspectives d’avenir ? Bref, où en sont les littératures populaires aujourd’hui en France ? Le CRLPCM de Limoges lance un séminaire de recherche sur deux ans, pour aborder ces questions et partager les hypothèses de quelques spécialistes de renom.

Les séances auront lieu le jeudi, à la Faculté des Lettres de Limoges. Entrée libre et gratuite.
Mots-clés: genres littéraires, Limoges, séminaire

CALLS FOR SUBMISSION

2011-04-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

FrightFest Wants You!

Film4 FrightFest is asking filmmakers from every continent to submit their work for possible inclusion into their main August event. If you have a short film or feature you think has that X Factor and is something special, different or unique, they want to take a look at it. You never know, you could end up on stage at the prestigious Empire Cinema in London's Leicester Square introducing it to the world at large.

Film4 FrightFest has an enviable reputation for discovering and bringing bold new talent to the fore. They've launched everything from THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, THE DEAD and F to the genre careers of Simon Rumley, Tom Shankland, Christopher Smith and Federico Zampaglione. FrightFest now has a DVD label, FrightFest Features, and your film might be exactly what they're looking for in that department too.

Go to www.frightfest.co.uk to download the submission form, and get the ball rolling.

About Gregory Markopoulos

2011-02-17T12:56:00.000-08:00

On Saturday February 19th, 2011, at 3pm, the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image (New York)

will present Cycle V of ENIAIOS in its entirety as part of its inaugural series "Avant-Garde Masters."

This is the first time a complete cycle of ENIAIOS is shown outside the location of the Temenos in Greece

and it is a unique opportunity to get glimpse of Markopoulos's radical vision.

A panel discussion will precede the screening, at 1pm.

Robert Beavers and scholars from the fields of cinema, religion,

and architecture will discuss ENIAIOS and present an overview of the Temenos project.

Here are further details:

Gregory Markopoulos: A Panel Discussion
Saturday, February 19, 1:00 p.m.
The filmmaker Robert Beavers, who was Gregory Markopoulos’s companion for nearly thirty years and who directs the Temenos Association, devoted to the preservation and presentation of Markopoulos’s work, will present an overview of the Temenos Project, to place the screening of Eniaios in the context of the artist’s extraordinary vision. A panel of noted scholars, including Rebekah Rutkoff, Dr. Jeffrey Stout, and Richard Suchenski, will discuss Markopoulos’s work.
Free with museum admission.

Screening
Eniaios: Cycle Five
Saturday, February 19, 3:00 p.m.
16mm print preserved by the Temenos Association

Preserved by Temenos as part of the Avant-Garde Masters Grant program administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation and funded by The Film Foundation.
Free with museum admission.

Directions:

http://www.movingimage.us/visit/directions/

Also see: http://www.ufilmguide.com/221/gregory-markopoulos/

Cahiers de Narratologie en ligne

2011-02-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

Les Cahiers de Narratologie est une revue de théorie et d'analyse des productions culturelles, littéraires, et artistiques publiée par le Centre Interdisciplinaire Récits, Cultures, Psychanalyse, Langues et Sociétés (CIRCPLES), EA n°3159. En phase avec les avancées de la narratologie, qui, ces dernières années s’est de plus en plus affirmée comme une pratique interdisciplinaire, la revue publie des études sur les genres narratifs, la production de récits et d’objets culturels. Ces objets ne sauraient être étudiés seulement sous leur aspect formel et fonctionnel comme l’envisageait la narratologie classique. L’articulation entre le culturel et le social est aussi appréhendée dans toutes ses dimensions. L’analyse des productions narratives et culturelles dans leur dimension individuelle et sociale relève aussi bien de la psychanalyse que de l’anthropologie qui envisagent la fonction narrative chez l’homme et plus largement sa capacité à produire la mémoire et la culture dans des processus subjectifs. Mythes et religions, idéologies, grands récits de mise en ordre du monde notamment mettent en scène, sous forme narrativisée, les grands conflits, les impératifs ou les comportements sociaux, et organisent un rapport au temps et au réel.

Dernier numéro en ligne
19 | 2010
Images composites, arts pluriels

Sous la direction de Jean-Paul Aubert

Jean-Paul Aubert

Images composites – Arts pluriels [Texte intégral]

Avant-propos
Stefano Leoncini

Les génériques et incipits des « comédies historiques » italiennes (1959-1963) : un défi de composition [Texte intégral]
Nadia Fuchs

Optique moderne et post-moderne dans la composition d'images transculturelles dans trois films de Woody Allen [Texte intégral]
Patrick Louguet

La forme-balade du travelling et autres modes d’incursions mouvementées dans le film Prospero’s Books [Texte intégral]
Fabien Maheu

Cinéma, peinture et numérique : hybridité de l’image chez Peter Greenaway [Texte intégral]
Marcin Sobieszczanski

Entre l’immersion dans l’image cinématographique et l’immersion totale [Texte intégral]
Cathy Margaillan

Remise à zéro du langage : l’œuvre hybride de Ketty La Rocca (1938-1976) [Texte intégral]
Noémi Kila

Diversité esthétique et pluralité des images – un exemple francophone [Texte intégral]
Varia
- Corinne Denoyelle
  
  La fonction dramatique du dialogue dans les romans médiévaux [Texte intégral]
Comptes rendus
- Noémi Kila
  
  « C’est maintenant du passé » de Marianne Rubinstein [Texte intégral]
- Patrick Marcolini
  
  « L’Antiphilosophie du futurisme. Propagande, idéologie et concepts dans les manifestes de l’avant-garde italienne (1909-1944) » de Serge Milan [Texte intégral]

Festivals The 12th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film 2011

2011-02-02T04:03:00.001-08:00

Festivals The 12th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film 2011

London, 24 - 26 June 2011

Sponsored by
The Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and
The Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL), and
InSight Education

Submissions are invited from any field of ethnographic film. Only films released (first screened in public) after 1st January 2008 are eligible for competitive screening.
Please submit the form and stills by e-mail (film@therai.org.uk) and send the preview DVD and proof of entry fee by post. Deadline for Submission is 15 January 2011. Don’t spent a fortune on freight costs, but please make sure that the preview DVD will arrive at the RAI office by 31 January at the latest! Thanks!
For submission conditions, entry forms and awarded prizes & awards please see the attachments or check the RAI website http://www.therai.org.uk/film/film-festival/ or the dedicated Film Festival website www.raifilmfest.org.uk (under construction). Here you will soon find as well information about the international conference, workshops and a London ‘Open City‘ Documentary Weekend, which will be held in London around the festival.

Please contact me for any enquiries.

Susanne Hammacher
Film Officer | Festival Manager
------------------------------------
The Royal Anthropological Institute
50 Fitzroy Street
London W1T 5BT
UK
film@therai.org.uk or festival@therai.org.uk

http://www.therai.org.uk
phone: +44-(0)20-7387 0455

Workshops ETNOFILm 3

2011-02-02T04:00:00.000-08:00

CALL FOR VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND FILM EDITING WORKSHOP
Rovinj - Croatia, 03 – 08 April 2011.

ETNOFILm visual anthropology and film editing workshop will take place in Rovinj (Croatia) from 03–08 April 2011. The workshop forms part of ETNOFILm – Festival of ethnographic film organized for the 3rd year by the Ethnographic Museum of Istria.
The workshop is open to anthropology students, to students from related disciplines but also to anyone interested in anthropological issues and filmmaking. Previous knowledge in visual anthropology is welcomed but it is not necessary. The program is divided in 3 parts:
1. Introduction to Visual Anthropology – theory and methodology
Lecturer: Christian Suhr Nielsen, Aarhus University – Denmark, PhD student in Visual
anthropology
2. Filming – theory and practice
Lecturer: Davor Konjikušić, Academy of Performing Arts and Drama, Zagreb – Croatia
3. Editing – theory and practice
Lecturer: Vlado Gojun, Academy of Performing Arts and Drama, Zagreb - Craoatia

Aims
Participants will be introduced to theoretical and methodological issues in visual anthropology; will get the basic knowledge in using the video camera and managing the editing software; participants will gain the ability to use by themselves the audio-visual media in documentation and/or research process of cultural and social phenomena.
Participants and registration fee The workshop is limited to 15 participants. Registration deadline is 10th of January 2011. The workshop fee includes: workshop lectures, working material and technical support, one daily meal, free participation in other festival events, free movie screenings during he festival which will be held from 07-09 April 2011.
Registration fee: 450 HRK/60 EUR (students: 300 HRK/40 EUR)

Accommodation
Rooms will be available in private accommodation and in hotel. The price for private
accommodation is for double-room. More details regarding hotel accommodation and the
differences in prices between double/single rooms will be available in January 2011.
Accommodation prices: 100 HRK/15 EUR - private accommodation (breakfast is not included); 150- 250 HRK/25-30 EUR - hotel accommodation (breakfast included)

Registration information:
Please, send us your personal data (name, surname + CV) to: mario@emi.hr
Registration deadline: 10th of January 2011.
Registration fee: 450, 00 HRK/60 EUR (students: 300 HRK/40 EUR)
Payment details: Etnografski muzej Istre/Museo etnografico dell'Istria /Trg Istarskog razvoda 1275.
br. 1. 52000 Pazin/MB:1287044/OIB:60032390813/MBS:040075604/Banka: OTP banka d.d. Hrvatska/
Domovinskog 3/23000 Zadar/Account number:HR7824070001158018599/SWIFT:OTPVHR2X/
Payment description: „ETNOFILm registration fee“
www.etnofilm.com
tel: +385 52 622 220

Phil Collins: marxism today in BFI

2011-02-01T04:42:00.001-08:00

Phil Collins

Phil Collins: marxism today

4 Feb 2011 - 10 Apr 2011

Phil Collins' works in film, video and photography deftly dissect the political and aesthetic implications of popular visual formats, and often provide a platform for the disregarded and the overlooked. Shining a light on what is generally perceived as the losing side in the political and social upheavals of the past two decades, marxism today is an ongoing project that began by following the fortunes of former teachers of Marxism-Leninism in Communist East Germany. Collins' short film marxism today (prologue) (2010), first shown at the 6th Berlin Biennale, mixes contemporary interviews alongside archive material in which snapshots of life in the old GDR are offset with the teachers' own recollections of the time, and their contrasting experiences after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Contemplative, engaging and affecting, the film is supplemented by a new companion video, use! value! exchange! (2010), that revisits key concepts in the toolkit of Marxist economic analysis, and introduces them, with exemplary vigour and concision, to a new generation of students.

marxism today is co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Cornerhouse, Abandon Normal Devices, Berliner Künstlerprogramm/DAAD, and Berlin Biennale. Produced by Shady Lane Productions.

This Week at Anthology Film Archives

2011-01-29T11:48:00.001-08:00

This Week at Anthology Film Archives January 26 - 30, 2011

Showing this week:

Premiere: JOHNNY MAD DOG

New/Improved/Institutional/Quality: Kelly Spivey

EVERY HOUSE HAS A DOOR

Essential Cinema: Jean Genet, Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, Dwinell Grant, Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, and Marcel Hanoun

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

JOHNNY MAD DOG

France/Belgium/Liberia, 2008, 98 minutes, 35mm. Distributed by IFC Films; special thanks to Jonathan Hertzberg.

Today, in an unnamed African country. Johnny, 15, a kid-soldier with the look of a gangsta rapper, armed to the hilt, is inhabited by the mad dog he dreams of becoming. With his small commando - No Good Advice, Small Devil, Young Major - he robs, pillages, and slays everything in his path.

Laokolé, 16, pushing her disabled father around in a rickety wheelbarrow, attempting to achieve the glorious future that her studies seem to promise, strives to flee a city occupied by teenage-soldier militias, with her little brother Fofo, 6. As Johnny advances, Laokolé flees...

Under the windows of embassies, NGOs, and the High Commissionership for Refugees, teenagers fed by Hollywood imagery and disinformation play at war. The militias fight enemies dubbed "Patriots"; the "Dogo-Mayis" want to exterminate the "Mayi-Dogos"; the adolescent warlords call themselves "Giap" or "Rambo" and kill each other over a TV set, a basket of fruit, or a misplaced word. Sauvaire's film - unflinching, harrowing, yet ultimately humane - depicts childhoods cut short, an Africa ravaged by absurd wars, a people who are trying, in spite of it all, to survive and save their humanity.

Check out the press for JOHNNY MAD DOG:

Slant Magazine

The New York Times

The New York Post

"Many films can justifiably claim to have captured the horror of war, but few have done so as mesmerizingly. What's more, this French-made film evokes not just war's horror, but also its chaotic, vicious and fundamentally infantile nature. ... Sauvaire's cast actually contains several boys who themselves fought as soldiers, even participated in horrors like those represented. But you don't come away with the sense that the boys are being exploited for shock value, or even for gratuitous authenticity: there's a sense of ritual re-enactment at work here, a sort of community-project Theatre of Cruelty. Confrontationally intense, [this] is not only one of the most disturbing war films I've seen; it is surely among the most troubling films ever made about childhood and its exploitation." -Jonathan Romney, THE INDEPENDENT

-Through Thursday, January 27 at 7:00 & 9:00 nightly.

NEW/IMPROVED/INSTITUTIONAL/QUALITY:

KELLY SPIVEY

Filmmaker in person!
January 28

Anthology's exhibition program encompasses many different categories of screenings each calendar - along with our theatrical premieres, thematic series, and auteur and actor retrospectives, we're equally dedicated to programming the work of new, emerging, and all-too-rarely-seen avant-garde moving image artists.
Each month we present at least one program of such work under the rubric NEW/IMPROVED/INSTITUTIONAL/QUALITY, an Owen Land-inspired title for a series that, after all, features new (and new to us) cutting-edge works, exhibited at a hallowed institution, and whose high quality we're more than prepared to guarantee.

KELLY SPIVEY
Kelly Spivey's exquisite, beautifully crafted, and sensitive films have popped up in a variety of contexts over the years - at various festivals, including Toronto's SpliceThis! Super8 Film Festival, the Madcat Experimental Women's Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Lesbian Film Festival, as well as at Buffalo's Hallwalls, Brooklyn's Ocularis, and on PBS's ReelNY. But opportunities to see her work on a program of their own have been few and far between. A former Associate Director of Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo, a video editor at Mercer Media, and an instructor at Millennium Film Workshop, Spivey has devoted many years of service to the cause of experimental cinema, as programmer, administrator, educator, production advisor, and conservationist. This depth of experience is reflected in her own work, which displays a remarkable facility with a range of methods, including animation, found-footage, collage, and optical printing. We're very pleased to host her for an evening featuring a selection of the films she's created over the past decade.

WHY YOU WERE BORN (2001, 6 minutes, Super-8mm)
A Kodachrome Super-8 animation that utilizes found images delicately cut from magazines from the 1940s-70s. A hand-held camera creates agitation and a frenetic frame speed penetrates women's roles shown in advertising, shattering them and then offering humorous feminist solutions.
POOR WHITE TRASH GIRL - CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS (2003, 6 minutes, 16mm)
A semi-autobiographical fictional animation, based on the life of a poor white girl who lives amidst Fisher Price Little People.
FISH UNDER DELANCEY (2006, 26 minutes, 16mm)
The tunneling of the subways beneath the city, the people who ride the subway, and the slogan, "If you see something, say something", inspired this stop-motion, eavesdropping, dreamlike journey film, which follows poet and writer Eileen Myles on parts of the journey.
ME, MYSELF & I (2003, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Using paper dolls, magazine cutouts, and vintage valentines, this film plays with ideas of metamorphoses, gender variance, narcissism, and, somewhat subliminally, President George W. Bush.
MAKE THEM JUMP (2009, 11 minutes, 16mm)
Optically printed from found footage of animals with children, with subliminal messages, this film uses snippets from discarded educational films.

Plus: camera rolls from the work-in-progress THERE IS FROM NOTHING, an experimental film portrait of the eco-feminist artist, Helène Aylon.
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.

-Friday, January 28 at 7:30.

EVERY HOUSE HAS A DOOR

January 29-30

Anthology Film Archives, in collaboration with P.S. 122, is pleased to present a film series conceived by the Chicago-based theater company Every house has a door. These film screenings constitute an investigation of abandoned practices, endangered uses, and the fraught nostalgia of utopianism.
Every house has a door's latest theater piece, Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never., was composed largely in response to the films of the legendary Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev. In anticipation of its NYC premiere, Anthology will present two film screenings: a short film program on January 29, curated by filmmaker Melika Bass, whose new film WAKING THINGS showcases performances by the cast of Let us think...; and a special presentation of Makavejev's landmark feature, WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM.
Special thanks to Melika Bass, Vallejo Gantner (P.S. 122), Shoshona Currier, Lin Hixson & Matthew Goulish (Every house has a door), Brian Belovarac & Sarah Finklea (Janus Films), and Ute Zimmerman (Artadia).

PLEASE NOTE: P.S. 122 plans to present Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never. in their 2011-12 season. The performances have been postponed due to performer travel delays.

PROGRAM 1: SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Curator/filmmaker Melika Bass in person!
"The filmmakers featured in this program all explore the corporeal in the everyday, honing atmospheric worlds from fragments of gestures and moments. Many of the figures in these works seem lost to memory, living in a shadowy realm of hushed interior rooms, a rocky mountain slope, or a small, dank village. The visceral textures of these realms offer a silent history of use, as bodies inhabit and move through worn spaces, enacting everyday rituals or labors, possessed by solitude and a wildness of their own physicalities. We observe these characters, figures in their landscapes, left to piece together meaning, story, and poetics." -Melika Bass

Piotr Dumala FRANZ KAFKA (Poland, 1991, 16 minutes, video, b&w)
Ben Rivers AH, LIBERTY! (Scotland, 2008, 20 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Melika Bass WAKING THINGS (USA, 2011, ca. 25 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
Alla Kovgan and David Hinton NORA (USA/Zimbabwe, 2008, 35 minutes, digital video)
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

-Saturday, Saturday 29 at 4:00.

PROGRAM 2

Dusan Makavejev
WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM / WR - MISTERIJE ORGANIZMA
1971, 84 minutes, 35mm. In English, Serbian, Russian, and German with English subtitles.
"Called 'an outrageous, exuberant, marvelous work' by Amos Vogel in FILM COMMENT, WR is a unique blend of fact and fiction. Makavejev's landmark film deftly juxtaposes the story of a sexual encounter between the beautiful, liberated Milena and a repressed Soviet figure-skating champion, with an exploration of the life and theories of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. The 'WR' in the title stands for either 'Wilhelm Reich' or 'World Revolution.' Makavejev describes it as 'a black comedy, political circus, a fantasy on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of human genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others.... If you watch for more than five minutes, you become my accomplice.'" -FACETS MULTIMEDIA

-Sunday, January 30 at 6:45 & 9:00.

ESSENTIAL CINEMA: JEAN GENET, ROBERT FRANK & ALFRED LESLIE, DWINELL GRANT, KEN JACOBS & BOB FLEISCHNER, AND MARCEL HANOUN
January 29-30

A very special series of films screened on a repertory basis, the Essential Cinema Repertory collection consists of 110 programs/330 titles assembled in 1970-75 by Anthology's Film Selection Committee - James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, P. Adams Sitney, and Jonas Mekas. It was an ambitious attempt to define the art of cinema. The project was never completed but even in its unfinished state the series provides an uncompromising critical overview of cinema's history.

And remember: ALL ESSENTIAL CINEMA SCREENINGS ARE FREE FOR AFA MEMBERS

GENET / FRANK & LESLIE

Jean Genet

UN CHANT D'AMOUR

1950, 26 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent.

Jean Genet's poetic expression of male eroticism pitted against the confines of prison cells and a homophobic state...a powerfully resonant work that explores individual freedom and the laws of desire.

&
Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie

PULL MY DAISY

1959, 28 minutes, 35mm, b&w.

A largely spontaneous experiment, arranged in 1959 by Robert Frank along with Alfred Leslie. They enlisted the participation of Jack Kerouac, who offered in place of an original screenplay a stage play he'd never finished writing, "The Beat Generation." The plot is based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn. They're raising a family and trying to fit in with their suburban neighbors, and one night they invite a respectable neighborhood bishop over for dinner. But Neal's Beat friends crash the party, and that Marx Brothers-like scenario is the closest thing the film has to a storyline.

Total running time: ca. 60 minutes.

-Saturday, January 29 at 7:30.

GRANT / JACOBS & FLEISCHNER

Dwinell Grant
COMPOSITION #2 CONTRATHEMIS
1941, 5 minutes, 16mm, color, silent.
"An attempt to develop visual abstract themes and to counterpoint them in a planned, formal composition." -D.G.
"Austere and chaste combinations, with subtle manipulation of structure, density and rhythm."-William Moritz

STOP MOTION TESTS
1942, 3 minutes, 16mm, color, silent.
A self-portrait.

COLOR SEQUENCE
1943, 3 minutes, 16mm, color, silent.
"Pure solid-color frames which fade, mutate and flicker. A research into color rhythms and perceptual phenomena." -William Moritz

Ken Jacobs
LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS
1959-63, 18 minutes, 16mm, color. Featuring Jack Smith.
"Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100' rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement as well as breaking out of step." -K.J.

Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner
BLONDE COBRA
1959-63, 35 minutes, 16-to-35mm blow-up, b&w/color. Featuring Jack Smith.
Preserved by Anthology, with the generous support of The Film Foundation, The National Film Preservation Foundation, Simon Lund and Cineric, Inc.
"BLONDE COBRA is an erratic narrative - no, not really a narrative, it's only stretched out in time for convenience of delivery. It's a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guilt-strictured and yet triumphing - on one level - over the situation with style... enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal 'screw off.'" -K.J.

Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.

-Sunday, January 30 at 6:15.

Marcel Hanoun

UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE

1958, 68 minutes, 16mm. In French with no subtitles; English synopsis available.

"Based on a true incident, the film chronicles the wanderings of a woman and child looking for work and lodging in Paris. This is the only plot, and Hanoun has little interest in embellishing it with background and motivation: he never even makes it clear, for example, whether the woman is the child's mother, guardian or companion. UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE is, more than a narrative, a formal stylistic exercise so rigorously disciplined and understated that it makes the visual asceticism of Robert Bresson seem almost Fellini-esque by comparison." -TIME

-Sunday, January 30 at 8:00.

Coming Up Next Week at Anthology!

40th Anniversary Event: John Waters Presents

Douglas Heyes

KITTEN WITH A WHIP

1964, 82 minutes, 35mm. With Ann-Margret, John Forsythe, Peter Brown, Patricia Barry, and Richard Anderson.

As part of our continuing series of special events commemorating Anthology's 40th anniversary, we welcome the peerless John Waters, who will be here in-person to introduce a rare screening of the low-budget camp classic KITTEN WITH A WHIP, featuring sex siren Ann-Margret in one of her earliest roles, as an escaped juvenile delinquent. Discovering this seemingly vulnerable and confused teenager in his home while his wife is away, suburbanite John Forsythe concludes that fortune has smiled upon him - but little does he know what sort of hellion he has on his hands! Soon she's holding him captive in his own house, smearing lipstick across a framed photo of his wife, and threatening to accuse him of rape. Cheap, nasty, and irresistible, KITTEN WITH A WHIP is a film whose virtues no one is better suited to celebrate than Waters, the director of such latter-day cult classics as PINK FLAMINGOS, FEMALE TROUBLE, and SERIAL MOM.

"KITTEN WITH A WHIP is jam-packed with faux-Beat dialogue, jazzed up by a sexy TOUCH OF EVIL-esque music score, and set afire by Ann-Margret at her snarly, vampy, jailbait zenith. This one demands to be worshipped on the big screen - and we don't mean in the remake Lindsay Lohan threatens to star in." -AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE

"On the heels of her show-stopping numbers with Elvis in VIVA LAS VEGAS, Ann-Margret decided to take the low road with this no-budget, b&w melodrama. A surprisingly sleazy juvenile delinquent flick, with a killer performance from everyone's favorite sex kitten...[this] is a much-loved, vicious li'l B-movie with Ann-Margret proving once and for all that she's a slut goddess extraordinaire." -Steven Puchalski, SHOCK CINEMA

-Friday, February 4 at 7:30.

Anthology Film Archives is sponsored by:

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (@2nd Street) NYC
Tel: 212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

photography today

2010-12-24T14:17:00.000-08:00

Anne Hardy Untitled VI, 2005 Diasec mounted c-type print 120 x 150 cm
Copyright the artist and Saatchi Gallery
SAATCHI GALLERY
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY

Charlotte Cotton, Anne Hardy, Clarisse D'Arcimoles and David Campany in conversation
7.30pm, Monday 17 January 2011
Tickets: £10 / £6 students - Book now

One of the great paradigm shifts in contemporary art over the past 20 years has been the movement of photography into the realm of fine art. The critical and commercial success of artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, who are represented by contemporary art galleries, and the appointment of photography curators to top public galleries such as Tate Modern and Guggenheim, has ensured that the medium is increasingly regarded as a vital part of contemporary artistic practice. With digital techniques of manipulation becoming more and more advanced, photography stands to continually develop and change as a tool for artists.

Given that the first photograph was produced in 1826, why did it take so long for photography to be accepted by the art world? How reliable is a photograph as evidence of the real world? What makes a documentary photograph different from a 'fine art' photograph? How will the increasing impact of digital manipulation impact upon the medium? What might the future developments in photography be?

These are some of the questions that curator Charlotte Cotton, photographers Anne Hardy and Clarisse D'Arcimoles and artist and writer David Campany will discuss as they explore the most pressing questions regarding photography today.

Speakers:

David Campany
David Campany is an artist and writer and Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster, London. He is the author of Art and Photography (Phaidon 2003) and Photography and Cinema (Reaktion 2008).

Charlotte Cotton
Charlotte is Creative Director at the National Media Museum, Bradford.
Before that she was Head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), a Curator of Photography at the V&A for 12 years and then Head of Programming at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

Clarisse D'Arcimoles

Clarisse D'Arcimoles is a French emerging photographer and installation artist currently based in London. After graduating from Set Design for Performance at Central Saint Martin's, she began a Postgraduate course in Photography. During this period she started focusing on performance photography staged specifically for the camera, and exploring ways of documentation of performance art works. Her work is featured in Newspeak: British Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery.

Anne Hardy
Anne Hardy’s photographs depict fictional spaces which have both a magical and naturalistic quality. Constructed within the studio using a range of materials, from disintegrating found objects to natural forms, these spaces uncover the uneasy relationship between the natural and artificial. Anne has shown her work in many solo and group shows around the world, including the Saatchi Gallery's current exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now. She lives and works in London.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Charlotte Cotton, Anne Hardy, Clarisse D'Arcimoles and David Campany in conversation
7.30 - 9pm, Monday 17 January 2011

Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York's HQ
King's Road
London
SW3 4SQ

Niko Papatakis est mort

2010-12-22T11:44:00.000-08:00

Le réalisateur français d'origine grecque Nico Papatakis est décédé à l'âge de 92 ans, le 17 décembre, à Paris. Artiste anticonformiste, il a marqué le cinéma et le monde des arts en général par des oeuvres fortes, nourries par sa vision puissante du monde. Il a été marié à l'actrice Anouk Aimée de 1952 à 1954, avec qui il a eu une fille, Manuela, en 1951, et a également fréquenté la chanteuse Nico.

Né en Ethiopie à Addis Abeba en 1918, Nico Papatakis a été soldat dans ce pays puis s'est exilé au Liban ensuite en Grèce, et finit par s'installer à Paris. Dans la capitale française, il croise le chemin de nombreux intellectuels comme Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Jacques Prévert et une amitié naît avec l'écrivain contestataire Jean Genet, dont il produit Un chant d'amour en 1950. Réalisateur navigant dans des univers divers, il crée le cabaret La Rose Rouge, tremplin d'artistes comme Juliette Gréco.

Quittant la France en 1957 pour New York, il rencontre le mannequin Christa Päffgen. Celle-ci lui emprunte son prénom, Nico, et deviendra l'égérie d'Andy Warhol et du Velvet Underground. Le cinéma habite toujours Papatakis et il produit Shadows de John Cassavetes en 1959.

Cinéaste audacieux à qui l'on doit Les Abysses ou encore Les Bonnes, inspiré de l'histoire vraie des soeurs Papin et qui fit scandale à Cannes, Papatakis se distingue comme un artiste engagé et puissant. Epoux de l'actrice grecque Olga Karlatos, il se tourne vers la politique en s'opposant à la dictature des Colonels qui sévit en Grèce. En 1975, son film Gloria Mundi évoquant la torture en Algerie montre une nouvelle fois son engagement. C'est en 1991 qu'il offre sa dernière réalisation, Les Equilibristes, portrait de Jean Genet incarné par Michel Piccoli.

Panahi dans le prison

2010-12-21T03:30:00.000-08:00

20 décembre 2010

Six ans de prison pour le cinéaste Jafar Panahi

le 1er mars dernier, libéré sous caution le 25 mai, le réalisateur iranien Jafar Panahi a été condamné à six ans de prison, vient-on d’apprendre de son avocate Farideh Gheyrat, dans une interview à l’agence de presse iranienne Isna.

“Monsieur Panahi a été condamné à six ans de prison, 20 ans d’interdiction de réaliser des films, d’écrire toute sorte de scénarios, de voyager à l’étranger ainsi que d’accorder des interviews à la presse iranienne et étrangère, pour “rassemblement et collusion contre la sécurité nationale et propagande contre la République islamique ““, a annoncé aujourd’hui à Isna son avocate Farideh Gheyrat, qui a expliqué avoir été informée de la condamnation en même temps que son client samedi dernier. Elle a en outre indiqué qu’elle allait faire appel du jugement.

Un autre réalisateur iranien, Mohammad Rassoulof, qui travaillait sur un film avec Panahi avant son arrestation, a été lui aussi condamné à six ans de prison pour les mêmes chefs d’accusation, a indiqué son avocat, Iman Mirzadeh, à l’agence de presse Isna .

Les deux cinéastes avaient été arrêtés ensemble le 1er mars dernier, par des agents de sécurité, au domicile de Panahi en compagnie de la femme et de la fille de celui-ci. Le ministère iranien de la Culture et de la Guidance islamique les avait accusés d’avoir “préparé un film de propagande contre le régime portant sur les événements post-électoraux”, en référence aux manifestations qui ont suivi la réélection contestée du président Ahmadinejad en juin 2009.

Tandis que Rasoulof a été libéré sous caution le 18 mars suivant après avoir demandé pardon, Jafar Panahi n’a été relâché que le 25 mai, après le versement d’une caution de 150 000 euros, ainsi qu’une importante mobilisation internationale de soutien, notamment à travers le festival de Cannes.

Que reproche-t-on à Jafar Panahi?

Il a apporté son soutien au Réformateur MirHossein Moussavi, pourtant l’un des candidats officiels du Régime islamique, lors de la campagne présidentielle de juin 2009. Cet appui était une réponse à la politique d’étouffement et de censure dont ont été victimes les artistes iraniens depuis l’accès à la présidence de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad en 2005.

Pourtant, les films d’auteur de Panahi traitent essentiellement de la société iranienne et n’ont jamais critiqué directement le pouvoir ou la religion. En dépit de leur succès international, ils ont été pour la plupart censurés en République islamique. Malgré cela, le réalisateur iranien, contrairement à nombre de ces confrères, a toujours mis un point d’orgue à travailler en Iran.

Depuis les événements de juin 2009, et après l’expulsion de l’ensemble des journalistes étrangers, le réalisateur a multiplié les interviews à la presse internationale afin de témoigner de la réalité du pays. Fin août dernier 2009, Panahi a arboré une écharpe verte, couleur de l’opposition iranienne, lors du Festival du film de Montréal. A son retour, il s’est vu confisquer son passeport – et donc interdire la sortie du territoire -, ce qui l’avait déjà empêché de se rendre en février dernier au festival du Film de Berlin, dont il était pourtant l’invité.

Aujourd’hui, Jafar Panahi, ancien assistant d’Abbas Kiarostami, est à 50 ans l’un des cinéastes de la “nouvelle vague” iranienne les plus connus à l’étranger.

Il a obtenu le prix de la caméra d’or à Cannes en 1995 pour Le ballon blanc, l’odyssée d’une jeune fille dans les rues de Téhéran. Cinq ans plus tard, il décroche à la Mostra de Venise le « Lion d’or » pour Le Cercle, film traitant de la condition des femmes en Iran avant de revenir, en 2003, à ses premiers amours, Cannes, où il se voit décerner le prix « Un certain Regard » pour Sang et Or, œuvre décriant le fossé entre les classes sociales. En 2006, il remporte enfin, à la Berlinale, l’Ours d’argent pour “Offside”, dont le combat d’Iraniennes interdites de pénétrer dans un stade de football constitue le noeud de l’action.

Le 6 décembre dernier, le cinéaste iranien avait été invité à participer au jury de la prochaine session de la Berlinale, qui se tient du 10 au 16 février 2011 dans la capitale allemande.

http://iran.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/12/20/six-ans-de-prison-pour-jafar-panahi/

New issue of Senses of Cinema

2010-12-20T03:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/

Welcome to issue 57 of Senses of Cinema.

Ava Gardner The American Avatar Carlos Michael-Haneke
Issue 57 Contents

Editorial
Feature Articles

An Interview with Olivier Assayas on Carlos by Genevieve Yue

Introduction to Edgar Morin by Lorraine Mortimer

Ava Gardner by Edgar Morin

The America Endangered in The American by Joseph Natoli

African Francophone Cinema in the French New Wave by Wes Felton

Citizen Kane: Biography and the Unfinished Sentence by Pedro Blas Gonzalez

The Older Grows the Body, the Faster Run the Machines by John Downie

Making Space by Sean Cubitt

The Cinemas of Interactions by Leon Gurevitch

disney.go.com/fairies and Pixie Hollow MMOG by Allison Maplesden

Feminism and Cinema in the Digital Age by Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon

Great Directors

Mattias Frey on Michael Haneke

Matt Losada on Jean Rouch

Robert Farmer on Jean Epstein

Festival Reports

Martha P. Nochimson on New York
Gianluca Pulsoni on Lucca Film Festival
Celluloid Liberation Front on Venice
Vera Brunner-Sung on Pusan International Film Festival
Libertad Gills on Festival de Cine Cero Latitud
Huw Walmsley-Evans on Brisbane
Bérénice Reynaud on Vancouver

Book Reviews
Daniel Fairfax on Film, Theory and Philosophy
John Fidler on The Tactile Eye and Moving Viewers
Dean Brandum on Michael Winterbottom
Chris Carter on Re-Imagining Animation
Adrian Danks on Humphrey Jennings
David Melville on Beyond Paradise

Cteq Annotations
Michael Walsh on Camouflage
Marcin Wisniewski on Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease
Pedro Blas Gonzalez on The Structure of Crystals
Adrian Danks on Family Life

ELECTRIC SHEEP ONLINE Issue 45

2010-11-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

This month is dominated by fraught females, from the homicidal young professional obsessed with getting her Dream Home to Isabelle Adjani’s unhinged demon lover in Possession.
• Online issue 45
• One-off & limited screenings
• Calls for submissions
• Electric Sheep in print
• Festivals
• On general release
• Seasons & retrospectives
• More news...
ELECTRIC SHEEP ONLINE
Issue 45

THEME: WOMEN ON THE VERGE
Psychotic spinsters, possessed housewives, troubled temptresses
This month is dominated by fraught females, from the homicidal young professional obsessed with getting her Dream Home and the desperate Serbian spinsters of Tears for Sale to Isabelle Adjani’s unhinged demon lover in Possession and the murderous sister in Czech visual extravaganza Morgiana. Rounding it all up, our Reel Sounds column focuses on The Innocents’ soundtrack to a governess’s unravelling.

Possession was banned as a ‘video nasty’ on its release and the new documentary Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide provides a timely context for its UK DVD debut. Another notorious film vilified on its release is celebrating its 50th anniversary: don’t miss Michael Powell’s seminal Peeping Tom in fully restored glory.

Cannes prize-winner and wonderful Thai reverie Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is on UK screens this month, and we have an interview with director Apitchatpong Weerasethakul. We also review intriguing Mexican cannibal tale We Are What We Are and we talk to Michael Rowe, the director of the Mexico-set psycho-sexual drama Leap Year.

In the DVDs, we have a Comic Strip Review of Big Tits Zombie and Hammer and Tongs discuss their work. In Short Cuts, we have a feature on Lewis Klahr, whose work impressed us at LFF. In the blog, you can read previews of the Korean Festival, onedotzero and Utopiales as well as festival reports on Raindance and the 7th Chinese Independent Film Festival, during which we talked to director Zhao Dayong.

The November content will be updated throughout the month.

For those who missed our additional October features, we had an article on Dario Argento's 'animal' trilogy, a Reel Sounds column on Argento's use of opera, the second part of an interview with Joe Dante, reviews of A Town Called Panic, Carlos, Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood One and Legacy, a Charlie Chaplin comic strip review, an article on the London International Animation Festival and a report on Toronto and L'Etrange Festival as well as reviews of the London Film Festival.

PODCAST:
Dangerous Women and Foxy Heroes: To complement this month’s theme, we present a pair of Q&As recorded at Electric Sheep film club screenings. Alex Fitch talks to Zoe Baxter, the presenter of Resonance FM’s radio show about Asian culture in the UK, and they discuss the epic ‘wuxia’ film Hero, which featured memorable roles for female action heroes Maggie Cheung and Ziyi Zhang. In the main interview, Electric Sheep editor Virginie Sélavy talks to Brixton-based filmmaker Rebecca Johnson, director of Top Girl, about the classic ‘blaxploitation’ film Foxy Brown, starring Pam Grier.

Artists' Film & Video

2010-11-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

onedotzero_adventures in motion festival 2010
onedotzero and BFI Southbank join forces once again to present an array of audiovisual and cinematic experiences.
10 - 14 November

citystates 10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64
read more
A thrilling mix of innovation, inspiration and convergence across arts, culture and entertainment.

onedotzero preview: Chico & Rita
• 13 Nov 15:50 NFT3
This animated ballad follows Chico, a pianist with big dreams, as he falls in love with singer Rita.
onedotzero preview: Monsters + Gareth Edwards Q&A
• 10 Nov 18:30 NFT1
A photographer escorts his boss's stranded daughter back to the States through an alien infested South America.
Ninja Tune, BUG + onedotzero
• 12 Nov 20:45 NFT1
The UK's greatest purveyors of audiovisual culture celebrate record label Ninja Tune.
onedotzero - creators' talk: two x two
• 13 Nov 18:10 NFT3
Spot the stars of tomorrow as selected by some of today's established creative talent.
onedotzero - DJ Yoda: Stop Look and Listen LIVE at BFI IMAX
• 11 Nov 20:00 IMAX
• 11 Nov 22:00 IMAX
DJ Yoda takes AV to the next level at BFI IMAX.
onedotzero - Moanbot: robot-building workshop with Tinker London
• 13 Nov 10:00 Delegate Centre
Build your own robot, developing its personality and design.
onedotzero - pictoplasma: characters in motion
• 11 Nov 18:40 Studio
• 12 Nov 16:15 NFT1
• 14 Nov 15:30 NFT3
We invite character design fiend Pictoplasma to present a guest programme.
onedotzero - protein forum: data visualisation
• 12 Nov 18:10 NFT3
Forum for discussion about ideas in the world of science, technology and design.
onedotzero gallery exhibition: 'topologies' by quayola
• 10 Nov 12:00 Gallery
• 11 Nov 12:00 Gallery
• 12 Nov 12:00 Gallery
Bespoke multi-screen installation, featuring a brand new installment of the ongoing Strata series by artist Quayola.
onedotzero: citystates 10
• 10 Nov 20:50 Studio
• 12 Nov 14:00 NFT3
• 13 Nov 16:15 NFT1
An exploration of onedotzero's fascination with the city.
onedotzero: code warriors
• 11 Nov 16:20 Studio
• 13 Nov 16:20 Studio
• 14 Nov 16:20 Studion
Free drop in screening of some cutting-edge generative films.
onedotzero: code warriors + q&a
• 12 Nov 15:50 NFT3
A showcase of ambitious personal experiments and imaginative examples of generative films.
onedotzero: Dark Fibre: Holotronica x Musion
• 13 Nov 21:00 Foyer/benugo bar
An exclusive one-off and free night of AV performance.
onedotzero: extended play 10
• 11 Nov 15:50 NFT3
• 13 Nov 18:40 Studio
• 14 Nov 16:00 NFT1
An eclectic range of shorts which demonstrates how visual narrative can be used to create dramatic effect and even social change.
onedotzero: festival launch: highlights preview
• 10 Nov 20:45 NFT1
A unique and tantalizing selection of festival highlights.
onedotzero: games and film - the new 'indie'?
• 14 Nov 18:10 NFT3
A look at how directors, producers and game developers are collaborating to commission live-action shorts, animations and in-game content.
onedotzero: installations
• 10 Nov 11:00
• 11 Nov 11:00
• 12 Nov 11:00
A curated selection of free interactive and screen-based moving image installations.
onedotzero: it's nice that...
• 11 Nov 18:10 NFT3
Acclaimed quarterly magazine and influential blog It’s Nice That invite you to a live version of the magazine.
onedotzero: j-star 10
• 10 Nov 20:30 NFT3
• 12 Nov 20:50 Studio
• 13 Nov 14:00 NFT3
Presenting the latest audiovisual blast from Japan.
onedotzero: ladymation
• 11 Nov 20:45 NFT1
• 13 Nov 20:50 Studio
• 14 Nov 14:10 NFT3
A platform for both emerging and established women directors leading the way in animation.
onedotzero: new british talent 10
• 10 Nov 15:50 NFT3
• 13 Nov 13:30 NFT1
• 14 Nov 20:30 NFT3
Showcasing fresh work by the UK's brightest sparks, and styles in animation and indie film-making.
onedotzero: nightfall
• 13 Nov 20:45 NFT1
• 14 Nov 20:50 Studio
A one-off screening of some of the more extreme, leftfield and bewildering entries to this year's festival.
onedotzero: robotica
• 10 - 14 November
show all dates
Selection of work exploring the ethics and social effects of a world shared with robots and androids.
onedotzero: sprites
• 14 Nov 14:00 NFT
Selection of friendly shorts hand-picked for the new digital generation of young motion creators and critics.
onedotzero: wavelength 10
• 11 Nov 20:50 Studio
• 12 Nov 18:30 NFT1
• 14 Nov 20:45 NFT1
A serving of radical new takes in music video.
onedotzero: wow + flutter 10
• 11 - 14 November
show all dates
An international selection from a programme now synonymous with forecasting the future of moving image.
onedotzero_cascade
• 11 Nov 18:00 Delegate Centre
An education platform for creative collaboration and innovation across diverse disciplines.
onedotzero preview: Superhero Me + Steve Sale Q&A
• 11 Nov 20:30 NFT3
Steve Sales's warm-hearted documentary about his lifelong desire to become a superhero.

New book about Jean Rouch

2010-11-02T14:29:00.001-07:00

Paul Henley
The Adventure of the Real. Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema
2010, Chiacago University Press

Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema. Over the course of a fifty-year career, he completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia. Exhaustively researched yet elegantly written, The Adventure of the Real is the first comprehensive analysis of his practical filmmaking methods.
Rouch developed these methods while conducting anthropological research in West Africa in the 1940s–1950s. His innovative use of unscripted improvisation by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, Paul Henley reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch’s pioneering career, Henley examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch’s cinematographic legacy. Featuring over one hundred and fifty images, The Adventure of the Real is an essential introduction to Rouch’s work.

The London International Documentary Festival (LIDF)

2010-11-02T14:23:00.000-07:00

The London International Documentary Festival (LIDF)

CALL FOR FILMS

Text: The London International Documentary Festival (LIDF) in association with the London Review of Books is calling for submissions. The call is open and international. All subject matter is considered. Short and Feature length films are accepted. First time and established filmmakers all welcome. Films must be produced after January 1st 2009.
The LIDF is the UK's largest independent documentary festival. Since 2007 the festival has worked to ensure that London is host to exciting, diverse, challenging and inspiring films from every corner of the globe.
The festival is committed to providing the highest quality platform for international documentaries and their directors. It does this by working with globally recognised partners and venues, such as the British Museum, the Barbican Centre, and the TATE modern. It also provides a year-round programme of screenings and other events.
The LIDF 2011 is scheduled to run for 10 days between 5 May to 15 May 2011.
For full details, Frequently Asked Questions, and the On-Line Entry Form please go to: www.lidf.co.uk.
Deadline for Submissions: 1st December 2010. Late entries accepted until 30th December 2010 with additional penalty fee (see regulations).

Web Site: http://www.lidf.co.uk/

Search and seizure

2010-11-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

Search and seizure
The screening is important- it includes 16mm prints and videos coming from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, from Paris, and from Zagreb. The works experiment with the phenomenological aspects of film and include a first time program of works by seminal film artist Paul Sharits (flux films, flicker films) including a double screen projection of his masterpiece Razor Blades, Eastern European conceptual artist Ivan Ladislav Galeta, a beautiful print by Italian artists (film archeologists) Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, and two recent works by the young digital artist Takeshi Murata. The film by Gianikian/Ricci Lucchi has shown at MOMA, the Tate Modern, and been featured in a symposium on futurism at Harvard University- to name a few of the institutions showing the works in this program. There was a Paul Sharits screening at MOMA just a few days ago, one coming up at Anthology Film Archives in NY, and he's currently included in an exhibition at the Museum Ludwig. Takeshi Murata shows at Deitch Gallery in New York. Galeta is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and has works at the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.
The event has been sponsored by Arts at DEREE in collaboration with the Visual Arts Area and the Communication Department. It has been co-programmed by Jennifer Nelson, artist and Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts at DEREE and Vassilis Bourikas- film programmer for the Experimental Forum of the Thessaloniki Film Festival. The screening on the night of the 5th will conclude with a panel discussion, open to the audience, consisting of DEREE- ACG faculty Effie Halivopoulou (Visual Arts), Ourania Kouvou (Art History), Elias Markolefas (Philosophy), Melenia Arouh (Communication) and Jennifer Nelson (Visual Arts.)
We are very happy to bring these works to Greece- they've never screened here before, and we hope you will take the opportunity to see them.

Text written by Jennifer Nelson

Topographies of ‘Turkish cinema’: Hybrids, hyphens and borders

2010-11-01T13:30:00.000-07:00

International Conference

İzmir University of Economics, Department of Media and Communication

İzmir / Turkey

21-22 April 2011

http://iletisim.ieu.edu.tr/topographies

First Circular

Over the past few decades the concept of national cinema has become a hotly debated topic. The global circulation of cultures, finances, people and commodities has come to render impossible the delegation of fixed national affiliations to films, filmmakers and audiences. Furthermore, as a more recent development, the way films are being produced/co-produced, distributed and consumed are now raising new questions for, and requiring new vocabularies from film, scholars. When we look at the literature in this area the concept of national cinema is being contested increasingly. At the heart of these discussions we encounter notions such as transnationalism, globalization, diaspora, migration, post-nationalism, hybridity, exile, post-colonialism etc. Interestingly, with a few exceptions, the literature on Turkish cinema seems to have missed, or at best neglected, these discussions.

The Topographies of ‘Turkish Cinema’ conference is intended to be an intervention into these issues, aiming to shed light on Turkey-related films, filmmakers and audiences. There are approximately four million Turkey-related migrants living in western European countries, and many filmmakers with links to Turkey dispersed around the world, producing films that portray hybrid, diasporic subjectivities and experiences. These audiences, films and filmmakers are forging new transcultural fields, which scholars and critics of Turkish Cinema have yet to properly engage with. The Topographies of ‘Turkish Cinema’ conference will bring together filmmakers, researchers and academics to initiate a discussion that probletamises the concept of what ‘Turkish Cinema’ might be. Within this context the position of Turkey-related filmmakers, films and audiences will be reconsidered and the impact of its cinema on diasporic/transnational viewers will be scrutinized.

Below is a non exhaustive list of topics and themes around which interested film scholars, filmmakers and cinema professionals may give their presentations. The list is intended to be a guide; we are open to papers on topics other than the ones listed below as well.

· Films and their nationalities

· Hyphenated identities, belongings and films

· Theorizing the concepts of nationality, transnationalism, migrant, exilic and diasporic within the scope of Turkish cinema

· Rethinking conventional vocabulary used for stereotyping particular films, filmmakers and audiences (Türk asıllı/Turkish-origined, gurbetçi/expatriate etc.) – their contestations

· Film as a bridge/breach between host/guest cultures and societies

· Migratory filmmakers - their biographies, cinemas and films

· Non-conventional migrants/migrations: exiles, sojourners, etc.

· Films and audiences

· Short and documentary films

· Migratory Turkish filmmaking as a transnational industry. (Distribution, co-production, etc.)

· Celebrities and spectacles of diasporic/transnational Turkish cinema

· Screening of Turkish films abroad and their reception among audiences (theatres, premieres, festivals)

Abstracts of up to 400 words can be sent to gokcen.karanfil@ieu.edu.tr or serkan.savk@ieu.edu.tr. The abstracts should include the full name, institutional affiliation (if any) and the contact information of the author(s) along with an e-mail address. The deadline for abstract submission is the 10th of December 2010. There will be a registration fee of 50 Euros for those presenting a paper. The language of the conference will be English. Each presenter will have 20 minutes to present her/his work.

As a parallel project to the Topographies of ‘Turkish Cinema’ conference, we are planning to publish an edited collection which will include selected papers from the conference presentations. Those who are interested in contributing to this collection with their articles will need to send in the drafts of their full papers by the 1st of April 2011.

Important dates

Deadline for abstract submission: 10 December 2010

Notification of acceptance: 20 December 2010

Registration opens: 15 January 2011

Deadline for full paper drafts: 1 April 2011(for those who wish to contribute to the edited book project)

Registration ends: 8 April 2011

Conference days: 21-22 April 2011

Organizing committee

Burak Doğu

Assist. Prof. Dr. Ebru Uzunoğlu

Assist. Prof. Dr. Gökçen Karanfil

Serkan Şavk

Prof. Dr. Sevda Alankuş

Academic Advisory Board

Assist. Prof. Dr. Ahmet Gürata (Bilkent University)

Assist. Prof. Dr. Ashley Carruthers (Australian National University)

Assist. Prof. Dr. David J. Gramling (University of Arizona)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nejat Ulusay (Ankara University)

Prof. Dr. Nezih Erdoğan (İstanbul Bilgi University)

Prof. Dr. Robert Cardullo (İzmir University of Economics)

You can reach further details regarding the conference through the website located at http://iletisim.ieu.edu.tr/topographies

Please don’t hesitate to contact the Conference Organizing Committee through the following e-mails should you have any questions.

serkan.savk@ieu.edu.tr

gokcen.karanfil@ieu.edu.tr

Festival of Visual Anthropology

2010-06-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

Festival of Visual Anthropology ASPEKTY in Poland is pleased to announce opening submission for the 4th edition of festival.
Submissions are free and open for every documentary films from any field of ethnographic, anthropological, analytical approach to cultures and societies.
Festival has audience competition program

“ASPEKTY” is a yearly anthropological film festival, which aims in exploring various areas of culture.
The principle of the festival is to discover and present various relations, phenomena, interactions and mechanisms within cultures

Submitted films must have been completed after year 2005

Entry Deadlines:
Entries Deadline: August 1, 2010
Films Delivery Deadline: August 31, 2010

Festival will be held in November 2010 in the Ethnographic Museum in Torun, Poland

For more information and submission forms, rules please visit
http://aspektyfestival.pl/en
Email: festival@aspektyfestival.pl

Journals

2010-03-13T12:17:00.000-08:00

Visual Anthropology
Vol. 23, n. 1

Srinivas, Lakshmi Cinema in the City: Tangible Forms, Transformations and the Punctuation of Everiday Life

Jain, Pankaj From Kil-Armi to Anthony: The Portrayal of Christians in Indian Films

Williams, Drid Bolliwood: Postmodernism's Legacy to the International Dance World

Visual Studies
Vol. 24, n. 3

Garvens, Ellen Making devices

Hink, Melinda Australias's Bill Henson scandal: notes on the new cultural attitude to images

Joanou, Jamie Patrice The bad abd the ugly: ethical concerns in participatory photographic pethods with children living and working on the streets of Lima

Murphy, Greta The Caliban Codex: mud, blood and spurious issues

Coover, Roderick On verité to virtual: Conversations on the frontier of Film and Anthropology

Workshop

2010-03-13T12:11:00.000-08:00

Workshop
Thinking with a Video Camera

Workshop in ethnographic filmmaking with Judith and David McDougall
Berkeley Media LLC: Catalog: David MacDougall

AARHUS UNIVERSITY SUMMER SCHOOL, AUGUST 20-26, 2010

Level: BA
Credits:10 ECTS
Lecturers: David and Judith MacDougall
Organizer: Christian Suhr
Number of participants max. 12
Application deadline: April 15, 2010
http://www.aal.au.dk/en/antro/studies/summer2010/home

The Aarhus University Summer School in visual anthropology is an intensive course designed for Danish and international students interested in a brief but challenging educational experience during the summer.
The course is open to students in anthropology and related disciplines from Denmark and elsewhere and is intended for people with no or little previous experience with filmmaking. The language of teaching is English.
The course approaches video as a new language that students and researchers can acquire and apply to their own disciplines, addressing it as both a research method and medium of expression in the humanities and human sciences:~An audiovisual language that has particular relevance in anthropological studies of the role of the senses and emotions in human life, our experience of time and duration, and the relations between human beings and their immediate environments.
The course provides practical training in basic video techniques as well as in-camera editing through a series of exercises enabling researchers to use a video camera in the field with some degree of confidence. The emphasis will be upon the use of video to create knowledge significantly different from that of written texts, rather than merely gathering visual records. The course assumes no prior knowledge of video-making. Participants will be requested to provide their own video cameras for the period of the course. For students who do not have access to cameras it will be possible to lend equipment from Aarhus University.

Course aims
Participants will gain confidence to create their own video footage as an integral part of methodology in their own disciplines and to recognize the diverse ways in which video fundamentally differs from written texts.

Learning outcomes
The ability to think clearly about what is important to film
Basic skills in using a video camera; avoiding the beginner's mistakes
Skills in recording good sound; natural sounds and interview

Full participation in the course and a successfull oral presentation will attract 10 ECTS.

Tuition fee
Provided that the student will be able to have the course inserted into his/her original study programme as credit transfer, there is no tuition fee for:

Danish, Nordic and EU/EEA students
Students from Aarhus University and partner universities who have been nominated by their home university as part of an exchange agreement
Students of a foreign nationality holding a permanent residence permit in Denmark

A fee of DKK 1.520 will be charged to non-EU/EAA students and will cover tuition fees for the summer school regardless of a possible credit transfer.

Danish, Nordic and EU/EAA students who will not have the summer course inserted into his/her study programme as credit transfer, will be charged a fee of DKK 1,500 (10 ECTS) for the summer school.

Entry requirements
To be admitted you must be enrolled at a university. Students applying for admission at bachelorís level must have completed at least one year of study in a relevant subject. Students are expected to have a high level of English proficiency, to be able to read the relevant literature and follow the teaching. Documentation may be required verifying the studentís proficiency in English at a specified level.

How to apply
All applicants who wish to participate in the University of Aarhus Summer School must fill out and send the application form along with a copy of your passport,
a transcript from the Registrar or a degree diploma or the like to document your level of study. It is also required that you get an authorised representative from your home university to sign a pre-approval of credit transfer, if you wish to have the summer school credited towards your degree. The application form can be downloaded here:
http://www.aal.au.dk/en/antro/studies/summer2010/apply

For further information and questions about the summer school, applications etc. see:

http://www.aal.au.dk/en/antro/studies/summer2010/home

or contact:

Christian Suhr (suhr@hum.au.dk)
Department of Anthropology and Ethnography
Moesgaard, Aarhus University

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival 2010 - Call for Films

2010-03-13T12:06:00.000-08:00

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival

* New York, United States November 11 - 14, 2010
* Call for Entry Deadline: May 03, 2010

Festival Data:
o Established: 1977
o Genre: Documentary (click to see)
o Attendance: 3500
o Total Number of Films Submitted: 950
o Total Number of Films Screened: 24
o Total Screenings: 20
o Total National and International Premieres: 22
o # of Shorts Screened: 7
o # of Features Screened: 17
*
o Retrospective
o Catalog
o Has Panels
*
Festival Website:
www.amnh.org/ mead
*
Festival Description:

The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is the longest-running showcase for international documentaries in the United States, encompassing a broad spectrum of work, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction. The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is distinguished by its outstanding selection of titles, which tackle diverse and challenging subjects, representing a range of issues and perspectives, and by the forums for discussion with filmmakers and speakers.

The Mead Festival considers: Documentary films and videos (including shorts, experimental films, essay films, animation, and new media). Production must be completed within the last three years.

*
Film Submissions:
o Accepts direct submissions
o Call for Entry: http:/ / www.amnh.org/ programs/ mead/ submit/
*
Email: meadfest(at)amnh.org
Phone: (1) 212 769-5305
Fax: (1) 212 769-5329
Mailing Address: American Museum of Natural History Central Park West @ 79th Street
New York, New York 10024
USA

Eric Rohmer est mort

2010-01-12T09:39:00.000-08:00

Eric Rohmer (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006445/) cineaste et auteur, perssonage emblématique de la nouvelle vague, est morte à âge de 89 années.

cf. également
http://www.lemonde.fr/carnet/portfolio/2010/01/11/eric-rohmer-cineaste-romantique-et-pilier-de-la-nouvelle-vague_1290321_3382.html#ens_id=1290326"
"http://www.lemonde.fr/carnet/article/2010/01/11/eric-rohmer-a-ete-notre-createur_1290363_3382.html#ens_id=1290326"
http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2007/05/17/eric-rohmer-je-voulais-trouver-un-style-moderne_911239_3260.html#ens_id=1290326"
http://www.lemonde.fr/carnet/video/2010/01/11/jean-louis-trintignant-parle-de-la-direction-d-acteur-d-eric-rohmer_1290347_3382.html#ens_id=1290326"

Eric Rohmer: un hommage, by Agnes Poirer
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 January 2010 13.30 GMT

Rimbaud's mantra, 'one must be absolutely modern', guided the father of the New Wave, a director fascinated by France's bourgeoisie

French Director Eric Rohmer 1972

Romantic Rohmer: French film director Eric Rohmer, who has died aged 89 in Paris, photographed in New York, 1972. Photograph: JP Laffont/Sygma/Corbis

The New Wave has just lost its father, and France a rigorous observer of his time whose films represented better than most what it may mean to be French. Ten to 15 years older than the Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and François Truffaut, whom he would hire to write alongside him in the soon mythical Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday in his 90th year in Paris, had invented a completely distinct art form.

A graduate in classics and German and until the mid-1950s a professor of literature in provincial France, he always followed Rimbaud's mantra: "One must be absolutely modern."

In cinema, as a critic turned director (whose first film was made at the age of 39 in 1959), to him the poet's motto meant that one should be independent; not only intellectually and creatively but most importantly, free from financial imperatives and political pressure.

With the 18-year-old cinephile Barbet Schroeder, he founded Films du Losange, a production company which went on financing most of the 25 films he directed in his 50-year film career. His films would cost very little to make, apart from his most recent period piece fantasies such as The Lady and The Duke.

He relied on young or non-professional actors, and a small crew of faithful colleagues and friends. Resolutely modern, he would, before most film-makers, explore the technical possibilities of the medium, experimenting in the late 1970s with video, and later, with homemade 3D effects.

A moralist in the 18th-century meaning of the word, Rohmer was a master observer of what one could call France's unbearable lightness of being. His first successful films in France and abroad, My Night with Maud, Claire's Knee and Love in the Afternoon, are the last triptych of his moral tales series which shows the travails and intricacies of love among the bourgeoisie.

Later films, such as Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, which struck me when I saw it at 11 years old for its depiction of intimacy in this new suburban France of the villes nouvelles, always spoke about the present rather than the past.

Eric Rohmer was not only an intimist, moralist and aesthete – he was, crucially, free. Free from conventions and conformism; morally ambiguous at times, he was never where you expected him to be. Singular and impudent, his style was unique. For 50 years, his art was synonymous with France and its inhabitants, a country and a people which had become his own laboratory; somewhere he would mix austerity with sensuality, sentimental uncertainties with charm, romanticism and eroticism, sophistication of desire with moral dilemma.

Journal: Visual Anthropology

2010-01-05T01:01:00.000-08:00

Vol. 22, n. 4, July-September 2009

Editor: Paul Hockings

In cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology

Pipe, Katrien The Noise of Still Images. Encounters in and with sub-Saharian Africa

Morton, Christopher Fieldwork and the Participant-Photographer: E. E. Evans-Pritchard

Jemkins, Paul From a Real Body, Which Was There, Proceed Radiations Which Ultimately Touch Me, Who Am Here: An Encounter with a Missionary Portrait of a Precolonial Aka Court Official

Gocking, Roger Whom Do Men Say that I Look Like? Represening Christ and Christian Personae in Ghana

Francis, Michael Contested Histories: A Critique od a Rock Art in the Drackensberg Nountains

Finlay, Kate The In-Changing Face of the Khomani: Representation through Promotional Media

Conference

2010-01-05T00:55:00.000-08:00

Society for Visual Anthropology CFP

2010 AAA Annual Meeting New Orleans
November 17-21, 2010

Society for Visual Anthropology CFP

New Orleans has inspired the theme of the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings: “Circulation.” This theme is meant to encourage us to think about what happens when movement is the organizing trope of our questions, methodologies, analyses and accounts. We can think in terms of circulation across time as well as space, through different organizing principles, and in a variety of shapes and forms, inviting us to consider what triggers, facilitates, constrains, disrupts or stops flows; what is at stake in these processes and for whom.
The SVA always has a significant presence at the Annual Meeting, and 2010 will be no different. We encourage anthropologists of all ranks and with interests in visual research to contribute proposals. Deadlines for the submission of executive, invited and volunteered sessions are coming up, so please feel free to contact the SVA program committee with any questions or ideas you might have. Our contact information is listed at the end of this message. If you are interested in our film festival and/or the annual Visual Research Conference, see the submission information below.
For detailed information on each type of session and event, see the general AAA CFP on the AAA website (www.aaanet.org/meetings) and reposted on the SVA website (societyforvisualanthropology.org).
Executive sessions are selected by the AAA executive program committee, and proposals must be submitted directly to aaaprogramchair@gmail.com by January 22, 2010.
Public Policy Forum submissions are due February 26, 2010.
Invited paper/poster sessions must be submitted to the SVA Program Chairs by March 1, 2010. The sessions chosen for “invited” status will be notified in March, and session organizers MUST formally submit complete session information using the online system by the general AAA deadline of April 1, 2010.
Volunteered sessions, individual papers/posters, roundtables, and special events (i.e. workshops) and registration must be completed and submitted online by April 1, 2010. If you are interested in organizing a workshop with SVA, please contact the program committee as soon as possible.
We are especially interested in increasing the participatory character of the meetings by sponsoring poster sessions and roundtables. Roundtables are flexible, discussion-based sessions without standard 15-minute paper presentations. If you would like to submit a roundtable, please remember to include the word “Roundtable” in the title of your session when you submit it online.
Remember to select “Society for Visual Anthropology” as the section to review your session when you complete your submission through the online system (which will be open in February 2010).

In general, our criteria for evaluating all proposals will be:
1) Relevance to the future of the field in terms of attention to various media platforms, significance to theory, and inclusion of indigenous or community perspectives.
2) Coherence of thesis, clarity of aims, innovativeness of approach, applicability to membership.
3) Attention to methodology, especially a concern with ethics (best practices).
4) Contribution to the intellectual viability of visual anthropology, to anthropology in general, and to complementary fields of study.

The 2010 SVA/AAA Film, Video, and Interactive Media Festival will also take place during the Annual Meeting. Submissions are due April 1, 2010; for more information, please check the SVA website in early 2010. Email Carol Hermer, Festival Coordinator, with questions (chermer@pipeline.net).
The SVA Visual Research Conference traditionally takes place in the two days prior to the start of the AAA Annual Meeting. The deadline for submission is March 20, 2010 (subject to change). Submissions are taken through our own on-line system; for more information on the format of this lively event and how to submit a presentation, check the SVA website or contact Thomas Blakely (tdb5@psu.edu).
The 2010 SVA Program Committee consists of Stephanie Takaragawa (takaraga@chapman.edu) and Jenny Chio (Jenny.Chio@uts.edu.au). Please feel free to email us with your questions, ideas, and submissions well before the deadlines above so that we can address any concerns and help build the strongest possible SVA program for this year.

International Student Ethnographic Film Festival 2010

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New Issue of Senses of Cinema

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Issue 53 Contents
Editorial
Feature Articles
A letter from Pip Chodorov
Murray Pomerance on Some Limits of Technicolor
Drew Morton on Godard's Comic Strip Mise-en-Scène
Angela Dalle Vacche on Chiaroscuro
Michael C. Riedlinger on Orson Welles as Painter
Sally Shafto on Une Visite au Louvre
Sally Shafto on a Transcript to A Visit to the Louvre
Natasha Subramaniam on Ne change rien
Daniel Vilensky on Antichrist
Tag Gallagher on Francis Ford
Peter Hourigan on Joris Ivens
Deborah Allison interviews Richard Schickel
Paul Cox Dossier
Victoria Duckett on Reworking Romanticism
Roger Ebert's Paul Cox: An Appreciation
Paul Carter's Improvisation for Paul Cox
Maria Stratford on The Persistent Maverick
Asher Bilu on A Collaboration Between Two Artists
Alexander Garcia Duttmann on Idiosyncrasy and Film
Chris Haywood's To the point on point
Great Directors
Brian K. Bergen-Aurand on Jay Rosenblatt
Festival Reports
Daniel Fairfax on Rencontres Internationales
Cerise Howard on Middle East International
Cerise Howard on Mezipatra Queer
Bill Mousoulis on Thessaloniki International and Athens International
Susan Thwaites on Canberra
Shari Kizirian on Jornada Brasileira de Cinema Silencioso
Matthew Flanagan on London
Chris Berry on China Independent
Nelson Kim on New York
Paul Macovaz on Sydney Underground
Shekhar Deshpande on Sarajevo
Dan Sallitt on Toronto
Matthew Clayfield on Sydney
Patrick Friel on Avant-Garde
Book Reviews
Wheeler Winston Dixon on Nollywood
Eric Hoyt on Hidden Talent
Alex Ling on The New Face of Political Cinema
Saer Maty Ba on Building Bridges
Chris Pallant on The Mouse Machine
Maria Walsh on A Feminine Cinematics
William C. Wees on Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker
Yun-hua Chen on Michael Haneke's Cinema
Cteq Annotations
Greg Dolgopolov on Asya's Happiness
John Fidler on Commissar
John A. Riley on The Steamroller and the Violin
Rahul Hamid on The Colour of Pomegranates
Hamish Ford on Andrey Rublyov
Adam Bingham on Wings

Greek (Hi)stories Through the Lens: Photographs, Photographers and Their Testimonies

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Conference
Greek (Hi)stories Through the Lens: Photographs, Photographers and Their Testimonies

Date: 09. - 11. June 2011
Place: King's College London

Their aesthetic attributes apart, photographs have been seen (and used) as another historical source of documentation; as symbolic capital in collective narratives and propaganda wars; as windows onto a past that may or may not be singular; as testimonies that record as much the interests and concerns of photographers as they do the lives of their animate subjects and their surroundings.
Speakers are invited to engage with the above ‘truisms’ by focusing on photographic depictions of Greeks and Greece from the 1840s to the present in an empirical, and where appropriate, theoretical and comparative context.

Further information:
http://www.eens.org/archiv/Mantatoforos/Kongresse/London09-06-11.pdf

Film-Philosophy III

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The University of Warwick, with the support of its Humanities Research Centre, is hosting Film-Philosophy III: the third annual conference of the Film-Philosophy journal, 15-17 July 2010.

We welcome proposals for 30 minute papers that explore any aspect of the relationships between film, film studies and philosophy. Proposals should be sent to film.philosophy@warwick.ac.uk by 28 February 2010.

Conference registration will open in mid-January 2010. Details of the on-campus accommodation, conference dinner and registration fee will be provided in mid-January on the conference website at www.warwick.ac.uk/go/film-philosophy

For general enquiries please contact film.philosophy@warwick.ac.uk.

For details about the journal please go to www.film-philosophy.com

BOOK - LIVRE

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Strong, Mary - Wilder, Laena
Viewpoints. Visual Anthropologists at Work
2009, University of Texas

Early in its history, anthropology was a visual as well as verbal discipline. But as time passed, visually oriented professionals became a minority among their colleagues, and most anthropologists used written words rather than audiovisual modes as their professional means of communication. Today, however, contemporary electronic and interactive media once more place visual anthropologists and anthropologically oriented artists within the mainstream. Digital media, small-sized and easy-to-use equipment, and the Internet, with its interactive and public forum websites, democratize roles once relegated to highly trained professionals alone. However, having access to a good set of tools does not guarantee accurate and reliable work. Visual anthropology involves much more than media alone.

2009-11-17T13:01:00.000-08:00

Conferences
Freeze frames for a combination of cinema and photography

Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, France)
2010, April 9th and 10th
http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programmation/manifestations-scientifiques/colloques-et-symposiums.html

The abstract including 2500 signs must be sent until 2009 October 31.
This is the link to down load the call for papers and the application form
http://phanie.ethno.image.free.fr/index.htm

The persons to send the abstract are:
Sylvaine Conord : s.conord@ivry.cnrs.fr
Fabienne Duteil-Ogata : duteilogata@yahoo.fr
Baptiste Buob : baptiste.buob@gmail.com

For more info contact:

Fabienne Duteil-Ogata
Post-doctoral Fellow
CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research)
Laboratoire d'anthropologie urbaine (Center for Urban Anthropology Studies)
27, rue Paul Bert
94204 - Ivry-sur-Seine
France
fabienne.duteil-ogata @ivry.cnrs.fr
Office : (33) (0)1 49 60 40 55
Cell phone : (011) 33 6 13 07 64 50.

Workshop

2009-11-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

Workshop
Post-graduate Workshop on Visual Anthropology

Centro Incontri Umani
Ascona(Switzerland)
www.ciu-ascona.org

30 July-7 August 2010

Organized by Dr. Pedram Khosronejad and Dr. Angela Hobart

with the collaboration of University of St Andrews, University of Gottingen and University of Tromso

Applications are invited from post-graduate students in the field of
anthropology (practising visual anthropology) for up to 10 places on a
practical "Master Class".

The aim of the programme is to provide professional feedback and constructive
ideas for students who are currently working on an unfinished film or
audiovisual media project to help them further develop their ideas and learn
more about visual anthropology.

As the workshop is taking place at the Centro Incontri Umani, which seeks to
encouraging understanding and respect, reconciliation and peace
internationally, we welcome students who have an interest in humanitarian
issues.

The workshop will be staffed by four academics from the organizing universities:

Prof. Peter Crawford, Visual Cultural Studies, University of Tromso, Norway
Dr. Beate Engelbrecht, University of Gottingen, Germany
Dr. Rolf Husmann, University of Gottingen, Germany
Dr. Pedram Khosronejad, University of St Andrews, U.K.

The workshop will take place over the period of one week and will consist of
three elements:

- A five day workshop led by the staff members for up to ten participants. Each
participant will have a half-day (3 hour) session to present and discuss their
projects (two students per day).

- A five day film programme (in the evenings) in
which the staff members will present anthropological films for open discussion.

- A master class by an invited anthropologist or
filmmaker
- At the end of the workshop, two awards of 1,000 Euros each will be offered to
two of the participants for completing their project.

Contact: Dr. Pedram Khosronejad pk18@st-andrews.ac.uk

2010 International Jean Rouch Film Festival

2009-11-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

2010 International Jean Rouch Film Festival

Call for Entries

Due to the temporary closure of the Musée de l’Homme for renovation, the 2010 International Jean Rouch Film Festival will take place in Paris at the Grand Gallery of Evolution Auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History, from 27 March to 5 April 2010.
The festival addresses a wide audience, and is an event where documentary films directed by anthropologists, professional filmmakers, by film students or students of social sciences, compete together.
The selection committee will pay particular attention this year, to films which involve a special relationship between director and protagonists. The committee will also be looking at the cinematographic style of each documentary.
All documentary films completed in 2008, 2009, 2010 are eligible for submission, regardless of length of film.
For the first part in the selection process, films will be accepted in DVD or VHS (pal format) until November 30, 2009. After November 30, no entries will be taken.

Films are to be sent to the following address:

Comité du Film Ethnographique
Festival International Jean Rouch
Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, CP 22
36 Rue Geoffroy Saint Hilaire
75005 Paris - France

Enclosed is an entry form, to be returned as soon as possible.
The entry form can also be downloaded on our website, where you can learn about our other activities.
http://www.comite-film-ethno.net

The Organizing Committee :
Françoise Foucault, Pierre Lamarque ( Head of the 2010 Festival), Laurent Pellé

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

2009-11-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

Volume 56, Number 18 · November 19, 2009
American Pastoral
By Jonathan Raban
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
by Linda Gordon

Norton, 536 pp., $35.00
Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field
by Anne Whiston Spirn

University of Chicago Press, 359 pp., $30.00 (paper)

Published in 1935 in the middle of the Depression, William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses with classical names like Corydon and Phyllida. Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a "puzzling form" and a "queer business" in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied "a beautiful relation between the rich and poor" by making "simple people express strong feelings...in learned and fashionable language." From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare's complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.
Migrant Mother
'Migrant Mother,' Nipomo, California, 1936; photograph by Dorothea Lange. Her original caption for this photograph was 'Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.' (Library of Congress)

Although shepherds and shepherdesses have been in short supply in the United States, versions of pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, "The Fenimore Cooper Indian" (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson's sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.
Little Bookroom / Culinary Tuscany

Empson noted the connection between traditional pastoral and Soviet propaganda, with its elevation of the worker to a "mythical cult-figure," and something similar was going on during the New Deal when the Resettlement Administration (which later morphed into the Farm Security Administration) dispatched such figures from Manhattan's Upper Bohemia as Walker Evans and Marion Post to photograph rural poverty in the southern states. Like a Tudor court poet contemplating a shepherd, the owner of the camera was rich beyond the dreams of the people in the viewfinder, whose images were used by the government both to justify its Keynesian economic policy and to raise private funds for the relief of dispossessed flood victims, sharecroppers, and migrant farm workers. Some, though not all, of the photographers were, like Evans, conscious artists; their federal patrons, like Roy Stryker, head of the information division of the FSA, were unabashed propagandists who judged each picture by its immediate affective power and took a severely practical approach to human tragedy.

Of all the many thousands of photographs that came out of this government-sponsored enterprise, none was more instantly affecting or has remained more famous than Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. Taken in February 1936 at a pea pickers' camp near Nipomo, seventy miles northwest of Santa Barbara, it was published in the San Francisco News the following month, when it resulted in $200,000 in donations from appalled readers. In 1998, it became a 32¢ stamp in the Celebrate the Century series, with the caption "America Survives the Depression." For a long while now, I've tried to observe a self-imposed veto on the overworked words "icon" and "iconic," but in the exceptional case of Migrant Mother it's sorely tempting to lift it.

The picture defines the form of pastoral as Empson meant it, and the closer one studies it, the more one's made aware of just what a queer and puzzling business it is. A woman from the abyssal depths of the lower classes is plucked from obscurity by a female artist from the upper classes and endowed by her with extraordinary nobility and eloquence. It's not the woman's plight one sees at first so much as her arresting handsomeness: her prominent, rather patrician nose; her full lips, firmly set; the long and slender fingers of her right hand; the enigmatic depth of feeling in her eyes.

Even after many viewings, it takes several moments for the rest of the picture to sink in: the pervasive dirt, the clothing gone to shreds and holes, the seams and furrows of worry on the woman's face and forehead, the skin eruptions around her lips and chin, the swaddled, filthy baby on her lap. As one can see from the other five pictures in the six-shot series, Lange posed two elder children, making them avert their faces from the camera and bury them in the shadows behind their mother, at once focusing our undistracted attention on her face and imprisoning her in her own maternity. It's a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention, but both one's first and last impressions are of the woman's resilience, pride, and damaged beauty.

Against all odds, she's less a figure of pathos than of survival, as the inscription on the postage stamp accurately described her. In 1960, Lange said of the woman that she "seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it"—a nice instance of Empson's "beautiful relation between the rich and poor"—which was not at all how her subject remembered the occasion.

In 1958 the hitherto nameless woman surfaced as Florence Thompson, author of an angry letter, written in amateur legalese, to the magazine U.S. Camera, which had recently republished Migrant Mother:

...It was called to My attention...request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines...should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three Daughters shall be Forced to Protect our rights...Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission...

Years later, Thompson's grandson, Roger Sprague, who maintains a Web site called migrantgrandson.com, described what he believed to be her version of the encounter with Lange:

Then a shiny new car (it was only two years old) pulled into the entrance, stopped some twenty yards in front of Florence and a well-dressed woman got out with a large camera. She started taking Florence's picture. With each picture the woman would step closer. Florence thought to herself, "Pay no mind. The woman thinks I'm quaint, and wants to take my picture." The woman took the last picture not four feet away then spoke to Florence: "Hello, I'm Dorothea Lange, I work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the plight of the migrant worker. The photos will never be published, I promise."

Some of these details ring false, and Sprague has his own interest in promoting a counternarrative, but the essence of the passage, with its insistence on the gulf of class and wealth between photographer and subject, sounds broadly right. "The woman thinks I'm quaint" might be the resentful observation of every goatherd, shepherd, and leech-gatherer faced with a well-heeled poet or documentarian on his or her turf.

It also emerged that Florence Thompson was not just a representative "Okie," as Lange had thought, but a Cherokee Indian, born on an Oklahoma reservation. So, in retrospect, Migrant Mother can be read as intertwining two "mythical cult-figures": that of the refugee sharecropper from the Dust Bowl (though Thompson had originally come to California with her first husband, a millworker, in 1924) and that of the Noble Red Man. There is a strikingly visible connection, however unnoticed by Lange, between her picture of Florence Thompson and Edward S. Curtis's elaborately staged sepia portraits of dignified Native American women in tribal regalia in his extensive collection The North American Indian (1900–1930), perhaps the single most ambitious—and contentious—work of American pastoral ever created by a visual artist.
Gordonton, Person County, North Carolina, July 9, 1939.
Gordonton, Person County, North Carolina, July 9, 1939. Lange wrote in her caption for this photograph, 'Country store on dirt road. Sunday afternoon....Note the kerosene pump on the right and gasoline pump on the left. Brother of store owner stands in the doorway.' (Library of Congress)

Both Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange and Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look hew to the line that Lange suddenly became a documentary photographer in 1932, when she stepped out of her portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street in San Francisco's fashionable Union Square and took her Rolleiflex out onto the streets of the Mission District, three miles away, where she began to photograph men on the ever-lengthening breadlines in the last year of Hoover's presidency. But this is to underplay the importance of the pictures she took from 1920 onward when she accompanied her first husband, Maynard Dixon, on his months-long painting trips to Arizona and New Mexico.

Lange was twenty-four when they married in March 1920, Dixon twenty years older. She was still a relative newcomer to San Francisco, having arrived there from New York in 1918; marrying Dixon, she also embraced his nostalgic and curmudgeonly vision of the Old West. A born westerner, from Fresno, California, he stubbornly portrayed the region as it had been before it was "ruined" by railroads, highways, cities, Hollywood, and tourism. In his paintings, the horse was still the primary means of power and transportation in a land of sunbleached rock and sand, enormous skies, cholla, and saguaro cacti, with adobe as its only architecture and Indians and cowboys its only rightful inhabitants. Although Lange had already established herself as an up-and-coming portrait photographer in San Francisco, her pictures on these trips to the desert were so faithful to her husband's vision of the West that one might easily mistake many of them for Maynard Dixon paintings in black-and-white.

So she caught a group of Indian horsemen, seen from behind, riding close together across a sweep of empty tableland; a line of Hopi women and a boy, clad in traditional blankets, climbing a rough-hewn staircase trail through the pale rock of the mesa; a man teaching his son how to shoot a bow and arrow; families outside their adobe huts; and somber, unsmiling portraits of Indians whose faces show the same weary resignation to their fate as the faces that Lange would later photograph on the breadlines and in migrant labor camps. It was among the Hopi and the Navajo that she picked up the basic grammar of documentary, with its romantic alliance between the artist and the wretched of the earth.

One photograph stands out from her travels in the Southwest: a radically cropped print of the face of a Hopi man, in which much darkroom cookery clearly went into achieving Lange's desired effect. At first sight, it looks like a grotesque ebony mask, its features splashed with silver as if by moonlight. Its skin is deeply creased, its eyes inscrutable black sockets. In its sculptural immobility, it appears as likely to be the face of a corpse as of a living being.

Seeing the finished picture, no one would guess the raw material from which Lange made the image as she focused her enlarger in the dark. There's an uncropped photo of the same man, obviously shot within a minute or two of this one, to be seen in the Oakland Museum of California's vast online archive of Lange's work, in which he's wearing a striped shirt and a bead necklace strung with Christian crosses, and has his hair tied with a knotted scarf around his forehead. His face looks humorous and easygoing; he seems amused to be having his picture taken.

This is not the negative that Lange used for her print, but it's so close as to be very nearly identical. For the mask-like portrait, she moved her camera a few inches to her right, so that the razor-edged triangular shadow of the man's nose exactly meets the cleft of his upper lip, and lowered it to make him loom above the viewer. What is remarkable is how she transformed the merry fellow in high sunshine into the unsettling and deathly face of the print. It might be titled The Last of His Race, or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race. There is, alas, no record of what the subject thought of his metamorphosis into a gaunt symbol of extinction.

Linda Gordon's substantial, cradle-to-grave biography of Lange is usefully complemented by Anne Whiston Spirn's careful documentation of one year—1939—in Lange's working life. Both books have their flaws, but between them they add up to a satisfyingly binocular portrait of the photographer as she traveled the ambiguous and shifting frontier between art, journalism, social science, and propaganda. Lange's work is much harder to place than that of, say, Walker Evans, and so is her personality. If neither Gordon nor Spirn quite succeeds in bringing her to life on the page, they do convey her complex and mercurial elusiveness. Roy Stryker of the FSA, who worked closely with Lange from 1935 through 1939, repeatedly sacking then rehiring her, vastly admired her photographs but found her maddening to deal with, and readers of Gordon and Spirn are likely to find themselves similarly conflicted.

Gordon, a social historian at NYU, whose faculty bio says that she specializes in "gender and family issues," is best at placing her subject within the context of the various milieus in which she moved. She is good on the artistic and photographic scene in New York in the Teens of the last century, where the young Lange discovered Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, and the luminaries of the Pleiades Club, and excellent on the rowdier bohemian coterie that she joined in San Francisco in the Twenties, where she met Dixon (in his customary urban uniform of Stetson and spurred cowboy boots), Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. Gordon is reliably lucid on the aesthetic and political movements of the time, though Lange herself too often remains more cipher than character in an otherwise vivid picture of her place and period.

It's in the gender and family issues department, her academic specialty, that Gordon is simultaneously confident and not entirely persuasive. Much is made of Lange's childhood polio, which left her with a crippled right foot and permanent limp. Gordon calls her "a polio"—a grating phrase, which, according to Google, is rare but not without precedent. Further hurt was inflicted on Lange when her father moved out of the Hoboken house when she was twelve; and in writing of her as a wife and mother, prone to "hubris," "irascibility," "rages," and "obsessive control," Gordon portrays her as a damaged woman.

Lange acquired a stepdaughter, Consie, when she married Dixon, with whom she had two children of her own, Dan and John. In her second marriage, to the Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, she added three more stepchildren to her brood, in an age when women were expected to do all the work of parenting. Like so many people of their class and generation, the Dixons and the Taylors were in the habit of boarding out their kids whenever they threatened to interfere with their demanding work schedules. Not surprisingly, the children came to remember Lange as a domestic tyrant who neglected their needs and scarred them for life.

Autres temps, autres moeurs. Artists and writers were especially culpable in this regard, taking the line that their unique talents entitled them to days of concentrated silence and bibulous, grown-up, social evenings, undistracted by the barbaric yawps of the nursery. (Chief among Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise was "the pram in the hall.") Lange's treatment of the children in her life was not egregiously different from that of others in her set in San Francisco and Taos, and Gordon's nagging concern over her deficiencies as a parent tends to unbalance her book.

Although Gordon speculates freely about Lange's thoughts and feelings, and surrounds her with an impressive mass of contingent details, one waits in vain to catch the pitch of her voice in conversation, her wit (did she have wit?), her personal demeanor and manners when at ease among friends. She emerges from the book more as a stack of interesting attributes than as a fully realized character in her own right.
Napa Valley, California, December 1938.
Napa Valley, California, December 1938. Lange's caption: 'More than 25 years as a bindlestiff. Walks from the mines to the lumber camps to the farms. The type that formed the backbone of the IWW in California, before the war. Subject of Carleton Parker's studies on IWW.' (Library of Congress)

Where Gordon's Dorothea Lange and Spirn's Daring to Look coincide to happiest effect is on Lange's marriage to Paul Schuster Taylor and her on-again-off-again work for Stryker at the FSA. Taylor, described by Gordon as "a stiff and slightly ponderous suit-and-tie professor" (she's often sharper on her secondary characters than she is on her primary one), met Lange in 1934, shortly after her separation from Maynard Dixon, at an exhibition of her pictures of the San Francisco poor at a gallery in Oakland. Later that year, he hired her, at a typist's salary, as the official photographer for the California Division of Rural Rehabilitation, of which he'd just been appointed field director. From January 1935, they were traveling together across California, visiting enormous, featureless agribusiness farms, worked by mostly Mexican migrant laborers. Taylor, who'd learned Spanish for the purpose, conducted interviews while she took photos. She took to calling him Pablo, he called her mi chaparrito ("my little shorty"). They were married in December.

Much as she'd learned to see the uncultivated West through Maynard Dixon's eyes, and to frame her pictures like Dixon paintings, in Taylor's company she acquired the mental habits of a painstaking social anthropologist. Taylor taught economics at Berkeley, but his avidity for human data took him far outside the usual confines of his discipline and into the "field," where he transcribed the life stories of migrants. Lange copied him. A shy man, Taylor would introduce himself to groups of Mexicans by saying that he was lost and needed directions, a technique quickly adopted as her own by Lange. Soon after they'd met, she began to accompany her photographs with what she called "captions"—crisply detailed accounts, some running to essay length, of the circumstances that had led each subject to his or her present situation.

For Stryker at the FSA, the picture was the thing, and he spiked all, or nearly all, of her writing; in Daring to Look, Spirn reunites Lange's 1939 photos with their original texts in a long-overdue act of restoration. The captions are rich in themselves, full of the dollars and cents of anguished household accounting, stories of escape from starved-out Dustbowl farms in rattletrap Fords, and snatches of talk, for which Lange had a fine ear; as a North Carolina woman told her, "All the white folks think a heap of me. Mr. Blank wouldn't think about killing hogs unless I was there to help. You ought to see me killing hogs at Mr. Blank's!" She was a patient listener, and relentlessly inquisitive. Photographing tobacco farmers, for instance, she became expert on how the plant was cultivated, harvested, cured, and sold, and her captions describe with great precision what was meant by such terms as "topping," "worming," "sliding," "priming," "saving," "putting in," "yellowing," "killing out."

Gathering this sort of information from her subjects changed the way she photographed them. Before 1935 and her collaboration with Taylor, she was a fly-on-the-wall observer in her pictures of Native Americans and the unemployed. After 1935, her photographs reflect an increasingly intimate relationship between the woman behind the camera and the person in front of it. One sees a new candor and engagement in her subjects' faces, as if each shutter-click has momentarily interrupted an absorbing conversation. In this respect, Migrant Mother is quite atypical of Lange's FSA work: she spent only a few minutes with Florence Thompson, and her caption is unusually brief (according to Thompson's grandson, it was also riddled with errors of fact).

The deepening involvement in her subjects' lives seems all the more impressive when one follows the hectic itinerary of her own life in Daring to Look. Between January and October 1939 she traveled far and wide through the states of California, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, spending weeks at a time in her car, documenting the trudging "bindlestiffs" and homeless families on Highway 99, the labor camps and mile-wide fields of factory farms in the California valleys, tobacco in North Carolina, "stump farms" on logged-over forest in the Pacific Northwest, the newly irrigated orchards and farms of the Columbia basin. Wherever she went, she attached individual faces and stories to the desolate social geography of American agriculture from coast to coast. Spirn's book is redolent of the hot and dusty unpaved roads on which Lange drove by day, and of inadequately lit rooms in cheap motels, where she wrote up her captions in the evenings.

Bad as her relations with Stryker were, she made her best pictures for the FSA. The current of indignant political feeling that flows through her work was in tune with the agency's propagandist mission, and—more than Evans, Ben Shahn, Marion Post, and other FSA photographers—Lange had an increasingly deep knowledge and understanding of what she was seeing, as a result both of her own searching interviews with her subjects and of her husband's work on the inequities of the agricultural economy.[*] Time and again, she struck a perfect balance between photographing a mass plight and honoring the dignity of each singular life—a balance she never quite recaptured again. Her 1942–1943 series on Japanese internment, for instance, has ample indignation, but lacks the active and visible rapport that she made with the farmworkers.

In 1954, Lange snagged a commission from Life magazine to do a photo-essay on Ireland, and around 2,500 negatives survive from this trip, which she made with her son Dan, then twenty-nine and an aspiring writer. Daniel Dixon was assigned the job of interviewing subjects and composing captions, leaving her free to concentrate entirely on photography. The results of this unwise division of labor are revealing.
County Clare, Ireland, 1954
County Clare, Ireland, 1954; photograph by Dorothea Lange (Oakland Museum of California)

In County Clare, Lange was an enchanted tourist. After the barbed wire and vast flat landscapes of Californian agribusiness, she reveled in the small, irregular, hillocky Irish fields, their rainwashed drystone walls and ancient hedges. Instead of improvised shack-towns and government-built camps, she focused on stone bothies overhung with thatch and streets of single-storey terraced cottages with rickety horse-drawn traps parked at their doors. She stopped to take shots of ruined churches; placid, grazing cows; horses and haywains; old men with scythes; shepherds tending their flocks in the fields and driving them down narrow lanes. In Lange's Ireland, almost everybody's smiling, and her photographs form an archive of 1950s toothless, gap-toothed, and prosthetic Irish grins. Yet there's little hint of two-way rapport in the faces of these people, who appear to be saying "Cheese" to deferentially oblige the lady-visitor from America, as she roamed the countryside picturing its happy peasantry.

She hardly seemed to notice that the clothes of her Irish subjects were as tattered and patched as those of the poorest Okies. If she questioned why the farms and fields were so small, or why there were so many horses and so few machines, it doesn't show in her photographs. She was here to discover Arcadia—a land of simple folk, content with their lot, going about their time-hallowed rustic occupations, equipped with the same rudimentary technology that had served them for centuries. In Ireland, Lange reverted to pastoral in its most naive and sentimental form. It's tantalizing to wonder how she would have handled this assignment had the commission come from a social activist like Stryker instead of Henry Luce's Life. Her photos were in perfect harmony with the conservative politics of the magazine: they extol the tranquillity of a society under the law of Nature, and of God.

The magazine savagely cut Lange's essay, rejected Daniel Dixon's captions, and supplied its own, including "serenely they live in age old patterns" and "THE QUIET LIFE RICH IN FAITH AND A BIT OF FUN."

In the last chapter of Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn drives along the routes taken by Lange in 1939. By 2005 the roads were generally improved but the housing and social conditions of agricultural workers on industrial farms were little changed, and Spirn found new rural slums on the sites of the old New Deal labor camps. A caption written by Lange in 1939 still holds broadly true:

The richer the district in agricultural production, the more it has drawn the distressed who build its shacktowns. From the Salt River valley of Arizona to the Yakima valley of Washington, the richest valleys are dotted with the biggest slums.

This is painfully evident in Washington state, where I live. Were Lange to return here with her camera seventy years on, it would not be a Rip Van Winkle experience so much as a numbing sense of déjà vu. The cities and suburbs would be unrecognizable to her, but the poverty in the countryside created by the corporate agricultural system would yield material for photographs identical to those she took in 1939. There are small, Spanish-speaking farm towns on the Columbia plateau where the average per capita income is still in the middling four figures.

In summer, migrant fruit pickers pile into the Columbia and Yakima valleys, living in camps little different, and hardly more affluent, than the one where Lange found Florence Thompson. And inventive new ways of being poor continue to emerge. In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by "brushpickers," mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets.

Migrant Mother has become the symbol of a now-remote decade, to which the passage of years has lent a period glow. Yet across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition, which existed before the 1930s and is still there now, though it shifts from place to place and fluctuates in its severity. The warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange's photographs for the FSA are closer than they may appear.
Notes

[*]Taylor and Lange merged their talents in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, published in 1939. The couple assembled her photographs, his text, and their captions, working together, as they wrote, "in every aspect of the form as a whole to the least detail of arrangement or phrase."

Irving Penn

2009-10-08T07:16:00.000-07:00

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer, Is Dead at 92
By ANDY GRUNDBERG http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/arts/design/08penn.html?th&emc=th

Mr. Penn’s blend of elegance and minimalism made him one of the most influential photographers of the century

Agnès Varda

2009-06-28T02:33:00.000-07:00

Living for Cinema, and Through It

Cinema Guild
Agnès Varda in “The Beaches of Agnès,” which she composed as a sort of living, moving collage.
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: June 25, 2009
IS there something about France — the diet, perhaps, or the health-care system — that accounts for the extraordinary creative longevity of so many of its filmmakers? A half-century after the New Wave crested and crashed ashore, a remarkable number of directors associated with that movement are still making movies. Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol are approaching 80, and while Mr. Godard appears to have slowed his pace a bit, Mr. Chabrol continues to produce sinister, elegant studies of passion and power at the rate of about one a year. Jacques Rivette, 81, and Eric Rohmer, who turned 89 this year, recently have made ambitious and well-regarded films, and Alain Resnais, now 87, was seen in Cannes last month flouting the red-carpet dress code, collecting a lifetime-achievement award and presenting his latest movie.

Agnès Varda, 81, was the only female filmmaker associated with the New Wave at its high-water mark. Her latest film, “The Beaches of Agnès,” opens in New York on Wednesday.
And then there is Agnès Varda, the only female filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vague at its high-water mark and now, at 81, an artist of undiminished vigor, curiosity and intelligence. That is certainly how she appears in “The Beaches of Agnès,” her latest film, which opens in New York on Wednesday, after winning a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for best documentary feature in February. Conceived as Ms. Varda’s 80th birthday approached, “Beaches” is a cinematic memoir in two senses: an autobiography rendered in carefully chosen, meaning-rich images and the account of a life lived in, through and for cinema.
There is an elegiac undercurrent to the film — visits to familiar places that have changed over the years, recollections of the dead — but it is not so much concerned with taking stock or summing up as it is with the restless exploration of memory. “I wanted to be like a bird,” Ms. Varda said in an interview one wintry morning in Manhattan a few months ago. “I wanted to be free in my memory, to go from one part to another and see what I would find.” An inveterate collector of odd images and curious ideas — her 2003 documentary, “The Gleaners and I,” is a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over — Ms. Varda composed “Beaches” as a sort of living, moving collage.
The film includes an abundance of clips from her other films, and photographs capturing various journeys, projects and relationships, but it is less an archival exhibition than a wonder cabinet, full of whimsical inventions as well as recovered artifacts. The filmmaker Chris Marker, Ms. Varda’s “interlocutor,” appears in the guise of an orange cartoon cat with a digitally altered voice. There are dreamy montages, re-enactments and surrealist set pieces that demonstrate her continued interest in installation art and photography as well as film. The theme of the movie is beaches, and since Paris, where Ms. Varda has spent much of her working life, has none, she filled a street with sand and took the staff of her production company outside to sit at their desks in bathing suits.
The film sustains an unusual blend of gravity and playfulness, a mood at once ripe with experience and childlike in its capacity for wonder. “At one screening,” Ms. Varda said, “there was a young man, maybe 22-years-old, who said about this film: ‘It gives you the desire to grow old.’ ”
Ms. Varda has something of a complicated history with the question of age. When she was barely 30, a photo caption in a French magazine labeled her “an ancestor of the New Wave.” The title was bestowed in recognition of her first (and, at the time, her only) feature film, “La Pointe Courte,” whose modest means and restless aesthetic and intellectual ambitions anticipated the breakout films of François Truffaut, Mr. Godard and the rest by a good half-decade. “I thought, well, now that I am an ancestor, I don’t have to grow any older,” Ms. Varda has said, and the elfin, energetic figure she presents in her recent documentaries and in person is decidedly youthful, much as the unlined face that stares from the pages of the old Nouvelle Vague yearbook seems preternaturally wise.
As the sole woman in that charmed circle of young lions, Ms. Varda has taken on more than her share of symbolic roles: mother, sister, confidante, colleague and — literally in the case of Jacques Demy, a fellow director and her husband from 1962 until his death in 1990 — wife. Appearing on screen, in “Beaches” and “The Gleaners and I,” surrounded by much younger crew members and performers, she is an almost ideally grandmotherly presence, pre-empting the indignities of age with a self-mockery that subtracts nothing from her rigorous and skeptical intelligence.
A grandmother who, in telling stories about the old days, is more apt to charm — or even shock — the kids than to bore them. “Many young people love me,” she said, smiling at the forthrightness of the declaration. “Some of them call me Mamie Punk” — Granny Punk — “maybe because of the hair.” At the time her coiffure was a violet fringe surmounted by a tonsure of gray, a Rothkoesque variation on the Dutch Boy she wears, impervious to changes in style, in every era covered by “The Beaches of Agnès.”
But the nickname also acknowledges a key aspect of Ms. Varda’s personal and artistic style. Not quite the aggressive, nihilistic stance associated with punk rock, perhaps, but rather a kind of thrifty, skeptical anarchism of the spirit, a liberating willingness to find inspiration and even beauty in what might conventionally be dismissed as rough, ugly or commonplace.
“La Pointe Courte,” that great ancestral text, exemplifies this attitude, and affirms Ms. Varda’s position at the vanguard not only of the New Wave, but also of any filmmaking tendency worthy of the name independent. French cinema in 1954 was male dominated, hierarchical and rigidly bureaucratic, governed by an elaborate set of rules and protocols. An aspiring director was expected to jump through carefully placed and managed hoops of training, apprenticeship and credentialization. The idea that anyone could pick up a camera, gather a crew and just start shooting a film — it just was not done.
But that is just what Ms. Varda did. Trained as a photographer, she was, as she puts it now, almost entirely “innocent of cinema.” Unlike her soon-to-be confreres in the New Wave, who emerged from the hothouses of the Paris Cinémathèque and Cahiers du Cinéma, she was neither a critic nor even much of a film buff, having seen only a handful of movies when she decided to make her own. “I thought that pictures plus words, that was cinema,” she says at one point in an interview included on the Criterion DVD of “La Pointe Courte.” “It was only later that I discovered it was something else.”
“La Pointe Courte,” however, is anything but a naïve, literal-minded photographer’s foray into moviemaking. Its structure was suggested by “The Wild Palms,” William Faulkner’s novel composed of parallel stories told in alternating chapters. One thread of Ms. Varda’s film follows a married couple, played by Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret (in his first film role), as they discuss the ambiguous state of their love. Should they separate or not, and if so why? They pose these questions — and pose in striking, quasi-Cubist close-ups and de Chiricoesque wide compositions — in the alleys and streets of Sète, the Mediterranean port town whose working-class residents supply the other half of the narrative. These fishermen and their families, more or less playing themselves, grapple with death, work, marriage and the intrusions of health inspectors and other annoying agents of the state.
The contrast between the two halves of “La Pointe Courte” is characteristic of the tensions and complexities that flicker through nearly all of Ms. Varda’s feature films. Documentary flows into artifice, abstraction gives way to naturalism, and cinema is revealed to consist of the collision, be it serendipitous or unsettling, between the found and the made. The two “plots” converge at a jousting tournament in which local men perched on platforms atop elaborately decorated galleylike boats try to knock each other into the water with long poles. The jousting sequence collapses the distinction between documentary and performance in what might be described as a characteristically Vardaesque fashion. If this curious and ancient ritual did not exist, she might have invented it.
One of the dividends of “The Beaches of Agnès” is that Ms. Varda allows herself, and the audience, to peek behind the scenes, to learn something about her techniques and the sources of her inspiration. Some of these have been personal and geographical: Sète, so vivid in “La Pointe Courte,” was where her family took refuge during World War II after fleeing Belgium. Others are literary, artistic and political: the Surrealists, Picasso, the revolutions in China and Cuba and, above all, the rise of feminism in the West.
She pauses to point out some of the motifs and formal choices in her work: the clocks that mark the minutes in “Cléo From 5 to 7,” her 1962 real-time tour de force that follows a ravishing, anxious blonde through the silvery streets of Paris; the right-to-left tracking shots that link the vignettes in “Vagabond”; the re-enactments of scenes from Demy’s films in “Jacquot de Nantes” (1991), her loving portrait of her husband as a young man.
These movies confound easy description. (Four of the best and best known — “La Pointe Courte,” “Cléo,” “La Bonheur” and “Vagabond” — are available in an indispensable Criterion boxed set.) And Ms. Varda counts only “Vagabond,” in which Sandrine Bonnaire is heartbreaking and abrasive as a young woman adrift, as an unqualified success. It won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1985, a prize that, in “Beaches,” is placed in the sand of her homemade Parisian lido alongside Demy’s Palme d’Or for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964). Not that she is disappointed. “I am the queen of the margins,” she said. “But the films are loved. The films are remembered. And this is my aim — to be loved as a filmmaker because I want to share emotions, to share the pleasure of being a filmmaker.”
It is a pleasure she shared for nearly 30 years with Demy, who haunts “The Beaches of Agnès” like a benevolent, enigmatic ghost. “The dearest of the dead,” she calls him, and the great love of her life. Their artistic sensibilities were not closely aligned — his stated ambition was to make “calm films, films about happiness” while her work bristles with a sense of contradiction — and the intimate details of their lives together, and of his illness and death at 59, are addressed with brevity and circumspection. The tone of the film is personal, but not confessional. It is more of an essay in memory than a memoir.
And, as such, it is about the way memory intrudes into and colors the present-tense flow of experience, much as Ms. Varda’s cinema flows into the stream of everyday life. “Do I dream, or do I see a picture of Jacques Demy?” she asked at one point in our interview, which took place at the offices of Film Forum, in a room full of film stills and framed photographs of directors and stars. The one that caught her attention was at eye level, on the other side of the room. Had it been placed there on purpose, we wondered, like the tokens and talismans that find their way onto her beaches and into the frames of her films? It was, to use one of her favorite words, a puzzle. Solving it diffused some of the mystery — the picture, on closer inspection, was not of Demy after all — but did not dispel the curiosity that drives Ms. Varda to pause over details, impressions and moments. “I wonder who it is?” she said.

Visual Anthropology

2009-05-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

Visual Anthropology
Vol. 22, n. 2-3, March-June 2009

Jyostna Kapur and Sunny Yoon Gender ,Neoliberalism and Contemporary Asian Cinema

Kin-Yan Szeto A Moist Heart: Love,Politics and China's Neoliberal Transition in the Films of Jia Zhangke

Li Zeng The ROad to the Past: Socialist Nostalgia in Postsocialist China

Gina Marchetti Gender Politics and Neoliberalism in China: Ann Hui's The Postmodern Life of My Aunt

Annettte Hamilton Renovated: Gender and Cinema in Contemporary Vietnam

Jyotsna Kapur There once as a Maiden and a Middle Class: The Making of a Neoliberal Thriller

Rie Karatsu Questions for a Women's Cinema: Fact, Fiction and Memory in the films of Naomi Kawase

Chuck Keinhans Dog Eat Dog: Neo-imperialism in Kim Ki-duk's Address Unknown

Sunny Yoon The Neoliberal World Order and Patriarchal Power: A Discursive Study of Korean Cinema and International Co-production

Visual Studies

2009-05-23T12:33:00.000-07:00

Visual Studies
Vol. 24, n. 1

Aubert, Didier The doorstep portrait: intrusion and performance in mainstream American documentary photogrpahy

Woodley-Baker, Rochelle Provate and public experience captured: young women capture their everyday lives and dreams through photo-narratives

Anttila, Anu-Hanna An integrated and recreated nation: socio-semiotic approaches to Finnish vacation propagandist short films in the late 1940s

Arora, Vibha Framing the image of Sikkim

Barr, Mary The alchemy of the photograph

Photographies East. The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia

2009-05-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

Rosalind C. Morris
Photographies East. The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia
Duke University Press, 2009

Introducing Photographies East, Rosalind C. Morris notes that although the camera is now a taken-for-granted element of everyday life in most parts of the world, it is difficult to appreciate “the shock and sense of utter improbability that accompanied the new technology” as it was introduced in Asia (and elsewhere). In this collection, scholars of Asia, most of whom are anthropologists, describe frequent attribution of spectral powers to the camera, first brought to Asia by colonialists, as they examine the transformations precipitated or accelerated by the spread of photography across East and Southeast Asia. In essays resonating across theoretical, historical, and geopolitical lines, they engage with photography in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, and on the islands of Aru, Aceh, and Java in what is now Indonesia.

The contributors analyze how in specific cultural and historical contexts, the camera has affected experiences of time and subjectivity, practices of ritual and tradition, and understandings of death. They highlight the links between photography and power, looking at how the camera has figured in the operations of colonialism, the development of nationalism, the transformation of monarchy, and the militarization of violence. Moving beyond a consideration of historical function or effect, the contributors also explore the forms of illumination and revelation for which the camera has offered itself as instrument and symbol. And they trace the emergent forms of alienation and spectralization, as well as the new kinds of fetishism, that photography has brought in its wake. Taken together, the essays chart a bravely interdisciplinary path to visual studies, one that places the particular knowledge of a historicized anthropology in a comparative frame and in conversation with aesthetics and art history.

Contributors. James L. Hevia, Marilyn Ivy, Thomas LaMarre, Rosalind C. Morris, Nickola Pazderic, John Pemberton, Carlos Rojas, James T. Siegel, Patricia Spyer

The Oxford Academy Documentary Film

2009-04-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

The Oxford Academy Documentary Film
Upcoming Workshops

Imagine an organisation that puts media at the service of education.

Experiment with new ways of seeing research.

Explore the Oxford Academy of Documentary Film

OADF offers workshops, courses and production services to researchers, students and university departments interested in employing film as a valuable research tool. Providing an innovative bridge between academia and visual culture, we offer technical training in broadcast-quality film production as well as create and disseminate agendas for ethical, committed and social responsible filmmaking and broadcasting. To OADF, visualising one’s research does not simply mean to put it onscreen, but to bring those ideas to life through the rich and complex tapestry offered by the medium of film.
what we do
Led by a team of experienced professional filmmakers and visual anthropologists, OADF offers a wide range of activities, including workshops, courses and film production services, tailor-made to suit the needs of your students and institution.
Contact us
The Oxford Academy of Documentary Film
11 Burdell Ave.
Oxford OX3 8EE
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0) 1865 450976
M: +44 (0) 7779 130441
E: enquiries@oadf.co.uk
W: http://www.oadf.co.uk/

In association with
Apple
Royal Anthropological Institute
Astra Film Festival
Oxford Ethnographic Film Society

News and Events
We have two more workshops this academic year at University College London (UCL) during the Easter
and Summer vacation periods. Please see below for details of these 2 and 3-week courses in
documentary filmmaking and editing with Final Cut Pro. These workshops are open to UCL and non-UCL
participants.
OADF would like to announce the launch of a new collaboration and base in Oxford at the Department of
Media and Performing Arts at the Oxford and Cherwell Valley College (OCVC) in the city centre. On 22
May, we will be launching a new Apple Authorised Training Centre, specialising in media education. Our
first Apple Accredited Courses in Final Cut Pro will begin at the end of May. Please see
http://www.oadf.co.uk/courses/aatce.html for information on our 3-day intensive training courses
towards Apple Pro certification. This course is open to OCVC and non-OCVC participants.

We will be holding an OADF Documentary Film Summer School in Oxford on 7-11 July 2009 at the
Oxford and Cherwell Valley College Media Centre.
Please see http://www.oadf.co.uk/courses/oxford.html for details. This workshop is an
introductory course open to 16-21 year olds. You may use the application form at the end of this
newsletter to apply for this course.

OADF will be present at this year’s Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival at Leeds University on 1-
4 July 2009.

We are always open to holding workshops in your institutions. Please contact us using the information
below for more information, or email us on enquiries@oadf.co.uk.

We often receive requests for internships. Our student alumni are the first to know of professional work
placements through OADF. Please contact us if you are interested in work experience with OADF and its
industry partners on enquiries@oadf.co.u.

Upcoming courses and workshops
BEFORE YOU GO: Introduction to Documentary Filmmaking and Editing with Final Cut Pro
Held at the Oxford and Cherwell Valley College, Oxford
Dates: 7 – 11 July 2009
Time: 4 – 8 pm, Mon-Fri (5 days)
Fees: £150

This OADF workshop is intended for young people, aged 16 to 21.
The BEFORE YOU GO workshop series is aimed at younger people who want to learn the basics of documentary filmmaking. Our experts will guide the students through the pre-production, production and post-production stages of their proposals and offer practical advice about filming, as well as technical tips to get the best out of cheaper digital cameras.
The BEFORE YOU GO workshop is open to all with an interest in factual filmmaking and is taught by professionals from the industry who will introduce you to practical and ethical aspects of documentaries. You will work in teams and be accompanied by our tutors to Oxford city centre to observe and record life as you see it. Later, back in class, you will have the chance to direct your film with an editor who will help you choose music and add voiceovers to your short film. By the end of the course you will have the confidence and ability to make your own digital video:
• for uploading to the internet,
• to use as part of a class project,
• to record your family and friends,
• to enter into a short film festival,
• to begin your own portfolio of film,
• to use as a base for a longer film,
All the tutors’ notes and exercises are offered on a DVD for future reference. Attending an OADF course also enables you to join our Forum which gives you access to people and information on film festivals, funding opportunities, camera tips and advice, and a growing community of socially responsible factual filmmakers.
BEFORE YOU GO: Introduction to Documentary Filmmaking and Editing with Final Cut Pro
Held at University College London, 14 Taviton St., London WC1H 0BW
Dates: 15 June – 3 July 2009
Time: 9am-5pm, Mon-Fri (15 days)
Fees: £1500 (Concessions £1200)
OADF’s SUMMER SCHOOL at UCL is an intensive introduction to industry standard documentary filmmaking. It aims to introduce camera techniques with hands-on exercises backed up by critical analysis of footage and approaches from the outset. Our summer film school is open to all with an interest in factual filmmaking and is taught by professionals from the industry with an anthropological insight into cross-cultural filmmaking. It is aimed also at the researcher with the intent to use digital film in their fieldwork. By the end of the course you will have the confidence and ability to make your own digital video:
• for research purposes,
• as an AV addenda for a thesis or publication,
• for screening at a film festival,
• for internet distribution,
• for educational use,
• or for broadcast.
During the first 7-days you will complete four hands-on camera exercises concentrating on camera techniques, sound, camera operations, write and redraft a film proposal, learn the concepts of editing in order to shoot for an edit. You will be aware of the ethical, financial, legal, and stylistic issues involved in representing other people. By viewing a variety of different socially relevant films, you will be aware of different genres and understand the style and approach relevant to your research or individual project. Cameras available will all be of broadcast quality and be shared no more than one between two, unless you intend to use your own camera when you can work alone or in teams.
During the second 8-days we introduce you to Apple's Final Cut Pro editing software in an interactive and hands-on environment to learn the basic skills of film editing. Participants will learn the basic functions of film editing, including how to organise raw footage, create editing transitions, effects, and colour corrections, and working with audio. By the end of the course you will have edited a short film from your own footage and have burnt it on to a DVD. Each student will have his or her own workstation for the duration of the editing course.
All the tutors’ notes and exercises are offered on a DVD for future reference. Attending an OADF course also enables you to join our Forum which gives you access to people and information on film festivals, funding opportunities, camera tips and advice, and a growing community of socially responsible factual filmmakers.
Information for these workshops will soon be posted on our website http://www.oadf.co.uk/ or you can email us on enquiries@oadf.co.uk.

Information for these workshops will soon be posted on our website http://www.oadf.co.uk/ or you
can email us on enquiries@oadf.co.u.

The Film-Philosophy Conference

2009-03-27T11:07:00.001-07:00

Calls for Papers
Film-Philosophy: Announcements
The Film-Philosophy Conference 2009
22 January 2009 20:42

The Film-Philosophy Conference
Second Annual Conference of Film and Philosophy

Conference Announcement and First Call for Papers

16-18 July 2009, University of Dundee

In Association with Film-Philosophy.com

Keynote Speakers:
Alain Badiou (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris)
Edward Branigan (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Caroline Bainbridge (Roehampton University)
Martin McQuillan (University of Leeds)
Read More...

colloque sur Cultural Studies

2009-03-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

Colloque

Vendredi 20 mars 2009 | Paris (75004)
Les Cultural Studies : genèse, objets et traductions
Débat

Publié le mardi 03 mars 2009 par Delphine Cavallo
Résumé

Colloque sur le courant de recherche Cultural Studies qui interroge la notion de culture dans toutes ses dimensions et essentiellement dans son rapport au pouvoir et à l’identité. Un dialogue entre chercheurs français et anglais permettra de saisir en quoi les Cultural Studies constituent des ressources précieuses pour appréhender les identités multiculturelles des sociétés contemporaines.
Annonce
16h / petite salle - niveau -1

Né en Angleterre dans les années soixante, ce courant de recherches invite à questionner la notion de culture dans toutes ses dimensions et essentiellement dans son rapport au pouvoir et à l’identité.

Son origine remonte à la fondation, en 1964, du Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies à l'université de Birmingham par quelques chercheurs issus des départements d’analyse littéraire. Parmi eux, Richard Hoggart, dont l'ouvrage paru en 1957 The Uses of literacy, aspects of working class life, with special references to publications and entertainments a été traduit (La Culture du pauvre, étude sur le style de vie des classes populaires en Angleterre) et introduit en France par Jean-Claude Passeron en 1970.

Ce terrain d'étude, qui articule culture populaire et médias, va s'enrichir à travers les travaux sur la réception des médias et sur les industries culturelles - grâce notamment à Stuart Hall et à son célèbre article Encoding/Decoding (Codage/Décodage). Cet intellectuel engagé, Anglais d'origine jamaïcaine, a également contribué à l'essor des études post-coloniales en faisant le lien théorique entre les questions d'identités ethniques, de rapports de race et les rapports de pouvoir dans la culture.

Par leur attention aux cultures populaires, aux "subcultures" et à la réception des médias "de masse", par leur caractère transdisciplinaire, les Cultural Studies ont ouvert la voie à de multiples champs d'études : genre, génération, fans, queer, postcolonialisme…

Depuis les années soixante, des milliers d'études issues des Cultural Studies constituent un corpus foisonnant qui féconde les travaux académiques dans le monde entier. Plusieurs caractéristiques les distinguent des études culturelles françaises, notamment une approche transdisciplinaire, un intérêt pour les pratiques ordinaires, une appréhension de la culture centrée sur les modes de vie plutôt que sur le savoir associé à un panthéon de grandes œuvres littéraires et artistiques.Si ce courant est resté longtemps méconnu en France, aujourd'hui les traductions de textes se multiplient et de nombreuses recherches s'y réfèrent.

Un dialogue entre chercheurs français et anglais permettra de saisir en quoi les Cultural Studies constituent des ressources précieuses pour appréhender les identités multiculturelles des sociétés contemporaines.
PROGRAMME

16h-18h

Ouverture : Thierry Grognet, directeur de la Bibliothèque publique d'information
Origines et évolutions des Cultural Studies - spécificités nationales

Avec :

*David Morley, professeur au département Média et communications - Goldsmiths College - université de Londres

*Erik Neveu, professeur de sciences politiques à Sciences Po Rennes

*Eric Maigret, professeur de sociologie des médias et études culturelles, université de Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle : présentation de l'Anthologie, Cultural Studies

Animation : Christophe Evans, sociologue, Bibliothèque publique d'information

18h30-20h30
Les Cultural Studies et les études sur la culture contemporaine

Avec :

*Maxime Cervulle, doctorant en études culturelles, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne -CRICC: politique de l'image les Cultural Studies et la question de la représentation

*Eric Macé, professeur de sociologie à l'université de Bordeaux : Les médiacultures

*Angela McRobbie, professeur au département Média et communications - Goldsmiths College - université de Londres : Young People and the (symbolic) violence of contemporary culture

*Geneviève Sellier, professeur d'études cinématographiques à l'université de Caen, membre de l'Institut universitaire de France : Cultural Studies, gender et études
filmiques

Animation : Jade Lindgaard, journaliste, Médiapart
Mots-clés: bibliothèque publique d'information, Bpi, sociologie, courant recherche, culture, pouvoir, identité, colloque, événement, critique, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, médiacultures, Gender studies

Lieu: Paris (75004) (Centre Pompidou (entrée rue Saint-Martin) / Petite salle, niveau -1)

Date: vendredi 20 mars 2009

Contact: Carole Alter
courriel : carole.alter@bpi.fr

Pour citer cette annonce

« Les Cultural Studies : genèse, objets et traductions », Colloque, Calenda, publié le mardi 03 mars 2009, http://calenda.revues.org/nouvelle12192.html

Journals

2009-02-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

Journals

1. Visual Anthropology
Vol. 22, n. 1

James A. Clapp Stereets of Gold: Immigrants in the City and the Cinema

Harry Izmirlian The Dialectics of Contrast and Continuity in the Films of Humphrey Bogart

Brian Brown The Dialectics of Contrast and Continuity in the Films of Humphrey Bogart

Jyostna Kapur Fear on the Footsteps of Comedy: Childhood and Paranoia in Contemporary American Cinema

James A. Clapp The Romanic Travel Movie, Italian Style

2. Visual Studies
Vol. 24, n. 2

Yuet Chau, Adam An awful mark: symbolic violence and urban renewal in reform-era China

Steinmetz, George Harrowed landscapes: white ruingazers in Namibia and Detroit and the Cultivation of memory

Friedel, Tracy L. (Not so) crude text and images: staging Native in big oil advertising

Tinkler, Penny A fragmented picture: reflection on the photographic practices of young people

Baetens, Jan Colour as a visual, signifier in screen typography: less means more

3. Visual Anthropology Review
Vol. 24, n. 2

Stanley Brandes Graciela Iturbide as Anthropological Photographer

Hilda Llorens and Rosa E. CarrasquilloSculpting Blackness: Representations of Black-Puerto Ricans in Public Art

Carol Hendrickson Visual Field Notes: Drawing Insights in the Yucatan

Miguel Diaz-Barriga Distraccion: Notes on Cultural Citizenship, Visual Ethnography, and Mexican Migration to Pennsylvania

Jean Muteba Rahier Soccer and the (Tri-) color of the Ecuadorian Nation: Visual and Ideological (Dis-) Continuities of Black Otherness from Monocultural Mestizaje to Multiculturalism

Timothy Webmoor From Silicon Valley to the Valley of Teotihuacan

Art et Anthropologie

2009-02-20T12:27:00.000-08:00

Conferences
Performance, Art & Anthropology

Paris, Musée du Quay Branly, 11 -12 March, 2009
organisers: Caterina Pasqualino (CNRS)
Arnd Schneider (University of Oslo)

A major international symposium on the intersection between contemporary
art, anthropology, and performance, co-sponsored by the French-Norwegian
Research Foundation and CNRS.
Among the highlights are visual anthropologist Lucien Taylor, film-maker
Marthe Torshaug, artist (film-maker & photographer) Craigie Horsfield,
artists Miquel Barcelo and Barthélémy Togo, as well as anthropologist
George Marcus, and performance theorist Richard Schechner.
Pour des détails voir à:
http://calenda.revues.org/nouvelle12103.html

Festival of Visual Anthropology

2009-02-20T12:24:00.000-08:00

後援：トヨタ財団アジア隣人ネットワークプログラム
協力：国際映画祭をつくる会

Documentary Film Festival on Japanese Society, and Visual Anthropology
24, Feb. 2009. 16:30-22:45
Venue: Theatre Monnot, Universite St. Joseph

Program:
16:30-Screening 1(Visual Anthropology)
‘Bulozi’, by OKAMOTO Masahiro[Kyoto Univ, Japan], 2008
*English Subtitle.

‘Bisso na Bisso (Among us): Gathering, Catching,
Hunting, Filming and Beyond in Ndongo village
’by OISHI Takanori[Kyoto Univ, Japan], , 2008 *English
Subtitle.

‘Technique of wood working -A Interior Wood Processing in
Kyoto, Japan
’ by SUZUKI Haruka[Kyoto Univ, Japan], , 2007 *English
Subtitle.

‘UltrasonicScapes’ by YANAGISAWA Eisuke[Kyoto Univ,
Japan], , 2008

19:00-20:10 Screening 2
‘A Permanent Part-timer in Distress’ by IWABUCHI Hiroki,
2008 *English Subtitle.

20:30-22:45 Screening 3
‘Mental’, by SODA Kazuhiro, 2008 *English Subtitle.
*Best Documentary Pusan Film Festival
*Best Documentary Dubai Film Festival

SPONSORED BY:
The TOYOTA Foundation: Asian Neighbors Network
Program．"Seeking for the new possibilities for the visual
practice and its works"Project
Project Leader:Kazuhiro Arai[ASAFAS, Kyoto University]
Project
HP:http://web.mac.com/takaoken/iWeb/eizou_toyota/Top.html

New issue of senses of Cinema

2009-02-03T11:18:00.001-08:00

Issue 49
Contents
Editorial
General Articles
Ian Christie on Living London
Alain Kerzoncuf on The Fighting Generation
Sally Shafto on the digital revolution
Antony Sellers on Arthur Shields and The River
Emily J. May on The Darjeeling Limited
Wheeler Winston Dixon on Herman Cohen
Tony McKibbin on Michelangelo Antonioni and nudity
Pedro Blas Gonzalez on Andrei Tarkovsky and José Ortega y Gasset
Constantin Parvulescu on Man Is Not a Bird
Wes Felton on Julie Dash’s Illusions
Scott Murray on the Bond Women
Peter Hourigan on Abel Gance DVDs
Scott Murray, Darragh O’Donoghue, Adam Bingham and Aaron Goldberg on Iconic Moments in Australian Cinema
Great Directors
José Zarandona on Alfonso Cuarón
Richard Suchenski on Hans Richter
Festival Reports
David Levinson on Auckland
Alison Pouliot and Valérie Chételat on Locarno
Jim Knox on Melbourne Animation
Martyn Pedler on Melbourne
Penny Webb on Expanded Cinema at Melbourne
Tanya Vision on Revelation Perth
Jay Kuehner on San Francisco
Darren Hughes on Toronto
Jay Kuehner on Vancouver
Book Reviews
Brian McFarlane on Alvin Purple
Anna Knight on City That Never Sleeps
Patrick Ellis on Freedom to Offend
Adrian Danks on Mining the Home Movie
Cteq Annotations
Pedro Costa
Miguel Marías on In Vanda’s Room
Bárbara Barroso on Bones
Daniel Ribas on O Sangue
Howard Hawks
Pedro Blas Gonzalez on Ceiling Zero
Christopher Weedman on The Criminal Code
Tony Williams on The Crowd Roars
Brian Wilson on The Dawn Patrol
Michael Anderson on Tiger Shark

Reconstruction 10. Religion and Popular Culture

2009-02-02T03:29:00.000-08:00

Reconstruction 10.1: Religion and Popular Culture
Guest Editors: Nate Hinerman and Michael Benton
Contact: religionculture@gmail.com
Deadline: 15 May 2009

At a time when many in the U.S. and around the world encounter religion as a polarizing subject, one especially revered by some and utterly contested by others, this issue of Reconstruction seeks to explore questions arising at the intersection of religious experience and popular culture. To engage the relationship of religion and popular culture requires discipline-based, trans-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approaches in order to interpret these broad ranges of human experience.

Over the past three decades, scholarship in the Humanities evaluating the relationships between religion and popular culture has increased dramatically. This particular issue seeks a broad array of perspectives that explore, analyze, and/or interpret the myriad interrelations and interactions that exist between religion and popular culture. Despite some recent attention, the role popular culture plays in religious experience is often undervalued. Popular culture not only presents and portrays religious ideas and norms, it also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which religious meaning is communicated and understood. Submissions need not be directed toward any particular religious tradition or geared for any single definition of religion. Instead, religion might be imagined in any (or none) of the following ways: as an expression of doctrinal beliefs and/or core values, as an on-going movement between an individual or community and a larger socio-cultural matrix, or as essentially a cultural construction. Theological investigations that engage cultural studies from a faith perspective are certainly encouraged. We also welcome perspectives that interrogate the stability of meaning(s) assigned to such terms ("culture," "religion," "popular," etc.) and their complex inter-relations.

Specifically, submissions should be framed with at least one of the following four rubrics in mind: religion within popular culture, popular culture within religion, religion as popular culture (and vice versa), or religion in tension with popular culture.

We welcome manuscripts that produce conversations engaging historical, ethnographic, normative, literary, anthropological, philosophical, artistic, political or other terms that elaborate a relationship between religion and popular culture. For example, submissions might investigate religious expression(s) in relation to any of the following realms of contemporary popular culture:

* Music
* Literature
* Film
* Broadcast media (particularly religious broadcasting)
* Journaism
* Athletics
* Comic books
* Novels / poetry / short story
* Television
* Radio
* Print media
* Internet / technology
* Popular art / architecture
* Sacred vs. profane space
* Advertising
* Consumerism
* New religious movements/religious subcultures
* Socio-political religious movements (liberation theologies, Zionism, right-wing Evangelicalism, etc.)

Note: This list is representative, but certainly not exhaustive.

Please send proposals, abstracts, completed essays, multimedial performances, etc. to Nate Hinerman and Michael Benton at religionculture@gmail.com by 15 May 2009. We are happy to consider abstracts and proposals prior to this date. Publication is expected in the first quarter of 2010. All submissions are refereed. Papers must follow the Reconstruction guidelines for submission.

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006)

2009-01-19T01:23:00.000-08:00

Viewer, voyeur or prey? Slavoj Zizek navigates the ominous waters of Bodega Bay, Calif.
January 16, 2009
Sometimes Groucho’s Cigar Is Not Just a Cigar

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: January 16, 2009

If you embrace the notion that Hollywood is literally a “dream factory,” then Freud stands as a proto movie critic who taught us how to decipher the hidden meanings of its celluloid fantasies. In “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,” the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek subjects more than 40 mostly classic films, by directors ranging from Chaplin to Hitchcock, to psychoanalytic scrutiny. We need movies because they hold the clues to our true selves, Mr. Zizek argues in a wildly entertaining, digressive lecture packed with juicy clips that illustrate his points.
More About This Movie

Thus the Marx Brothers are the superego (Groucho), ego (Chico) and id (Harpo). In “Psycho,” the three levels of the Bates house — top floor, ground floor and basement — embody the same unholy trinity. In Mr. Zizek’s view, the raging male monsters of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Lost Highway” personify pure phallic aggression released from the shadows of the unconscious. It is no coincidence that the song that encapsulates “Blue Velvet” is Roy Orbison’s eerie, impassioned “In Dreams.”

Because “the ultimate object of anxiety is a living father,” Mr. Zizek declares, Mr. Lynch’s walking nightmares are manifestations of “the father who doesn’t want to die.” Anakin Skywalker’s transformation into Darth Vader in “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith,” he says, illustrates the same principle.

The clips from Hitchcock and Lynch films are so numerous and Mr. Zizek’s comments so incisive that after watching “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,” you may never see these directors’ movies the same way again. It is almost as if those filmmakers received instructions from Freud himself on how to visualize his ideas.

The use of “pervert” in the movie’s title is a bit of a come-on. Although there is kinky behavior in a number of clips (especially those from the Lynch films), this is not a textbook in Krafft-Ebing. The word merely refers to the Peeping Tom aspect of moviegoing. In the darkness of a theater we can unashamedly gape at bodies and fantasize without being observed, and in doing so we confront our demons in a safe environment. The movies of Hitchcock, who was obsessed with emotional manipulation, repeatedly toyed with the notion of the viewer as voyeur.

In this globe-trotting documentary, directed by Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph), Mr. Zizek, a blustery, excitable lecturer, is often filmed speaking on the actual locations of the films he discusses, or on recreated sets. We find him riding on a motorboat in Bodega Bay in northern California, the site of “The Birds,” and prowling around the locations of “Vertigo”; those are the two Hitchcock films besides “Psycho” to receive the closest scrutiny.

Like Freud’s division of the psyche into three parts, the movie unfolds in three loosely overlapping sections. The first examines how the movies arouse our desires and allow us to channel unconscious drives into entertaining thrills and chills. The shower drain in “Psycho” and the toilet bowl that backs up in Francis Ford Coppola’s conspiracy thriller “The Conversation,” he says, are vehicles for transporting evidence of our brute animal selves to a safe distance.

The second part examines sex and fantasy in movies and reaches some major conclusions: that sex is impossible without fantasy; that anxieties are the most authentic emotions we feel; and that fantasies, and by extension the movies that address them, are defenses against anxiety.

Part 3, which contemplates appearance versus reality in movies, explores the paradoxical scene from “The Wizard of Oz” in which the all-powerful Wizard is discovered to be an old man pontificating from behind a curtain. Even when the illusion of the Wizard’s omnipotence is exposed, Mr. Zizek theorizes, there is something more real in the illusion than in the reality behind it. And so when the old man hands the Scarecrow a diploma to prove he has a brain, the Scarecrow is convinced he is smart.

Mr. Zizek is a little bit like the Wizard. If he is a compelling speaker (despite his thick Eastern European accent), he is also an academic magician and master of intellectual sleight of hand. Many of his statements, especially those rooted in contradiction and paradox, have the ring of brainy hocus-pocus.

The teachers we remember most fondly are often the ones who entertained as they enlightened, through hyperbole seasoned with grains of salt. Mr. Zizek belongs in that company.

THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Sophie Fiennes; narrated by Slavoj Zizek; directors of photography, Remko Schnorr (in studio) and Ms. Fiennes (on location); edited by Ethel Shepherd; music by Brian Eno; production designer, Ben Zuydwijk; produced by Martin Rosenbaum, Georg Misch, Ralph Wieser and Ms. Fiennes; released by Lone Star Productions. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 2 hour 30 minutes. This film is not rated.

Made in U.S.A. by J. L. God-art

2009-01-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

Godard’s ’60s Policier, Set in Atlantic City, France

Anna Karina and László Szabó in Jean-Luc Godard's "Made in U.S.A."

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 8, 2009

The mid-1960s were Jean-Luc Godard’s heroic period, the time when the vector of his talent seemed almost uncannily aligned with the direction of history. Between 1964 and 1967 Mr. Godard directed a mind-boggling nine feature films, completing one every few months in a frenzy of productivity that blurred the line between prolific and compulsive.
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Related
Overview: 'Made in U. S. A.' Film Forum Schedule

That a handful of these films have become touchstones — classics even — is one of the jokes that history likes to play now and then as it transforms bloody-minded aesthetic radicals into canonical figures. In an essay from 1968 that managed to be both gushing and analytically acute, Susan Sontag identified Mr. Godard as “a deliberate ‘destroyer’ of cinema,” yet somewhat paradoxically, his wanton, wily and thorough deconstructions of cinematic technique have become objects of preservation and examples for the future.

But he was also, from the beginning, a conservator of film history and a fetishist of cinematic form and genre. “Made in U.S.A.,” a 1966 quasi policier starting a two-week run at Film Forum on Friday, is dedicated to “Nick and Sam,” as in Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, Hollywood mavericks who were objects of filial awe and Oedipal aggression for Mr. Godard.

As its title suggests, “Made in U.S.A.” pays ambivalent, tongue-in-cheek tribute to American movies. Shot in obviously French locations, it pretends to take place in Atlantic City and features characters whose names are a salad of American political and pop cultural references, like Robert McNamara and Paul Widmark.

One of Mr. Godard’s frequently cited sayings is the claim that all he needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. There are quite a few guns in “Made in U.S.A.,” but the axiom only really applied when the girl in question was Anna Karina, Mr. Godard’s mid-’60s muse, who had recently become his ex-wife when this movie was made.

Looking a bit weary (perhaps from the strain of having appeared in so many Godard films in such a short time), Ms. Karina plays Paula, a fetchingly dressed young woman desultorily investigating the disappearance of her boyfriend Richard, whose last name is drowned out by sound effects every time it is uttered.

The detective story trappings are vestiges of the movie’s supposed literary source, a pseudonymous novel by the American mystery writer Donald Westlake, whose death a little more than a week ago gives the film’s current release a poignant timeliness.

“Made in U.S.A,” in any case, has rarely been seen in the U.S.A. since its appearance at the 1967 New York Film Festival. And while this film is far from a lost masterpiece, it is nonetheless a bright and jagged piece of the jigsaw puzzle of Mr. Godard’s career.

Sontag noted that “one of the most modern aspects of Godard’s artistry is that each of his films derives its final value from its place in a larger enterprise, a life work.” Anyone curious about the shape and status of that work will want to seek out “Made in U.S.A,” but there are also reasons for non-Godardians to make the pilgrimage.

There is, for one thing, a pouting and lovely Marianne Faithfull singing an a capella version of “As Tears Go By.” There are skinny young men smoking and arguing. There are the bright Pop colors of modernity juxtaposed with the weathered, handsome ordinariness of Old France, all of it beautifully photographed by Raoul Coutard. There are political speeches delivered via squawk box.

And of course there is a maddening, liberating indifference to conventions of narrative coherence, psychological verisimilitude or emotional accessibility.

As assaultive as “Made in U.S.A” can be, it also seems to have been made in a spirit of insouciance, improvisation and fun. If it doesn’t merit a place, with “Weekend” and “Band of Outsiders,” on the Godard’s Greatest Hits compilation — a perverse idea, I know, but an appropriate one for just that reason — it is still a great lost B side, a time capsule whose half-strength doses of Godardian self-contradiction, self-consciousness and provocation remain surprisingly fresh.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 9, 2009, on page C18 of the New York edition.

Marlon Brando

2009-01-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

Method and Madness
SOMEBODY

The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando

By Stefan Kanfer

Illustrated. 350 pp. Alfred A. Knopf.
Reviewed by JEREMY McCARTER
Published: January 2, 2009

On the night “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on Broadway, Tennessee Williams sent his young leading man a rapturous telegram: “From the greasy Polack you will someday arrive at the gloomy Dane for you have something that makes the theater a world of great possibilities.” Looking back now, you might describe that as, word for word, the most poignant couple of lines Williams ever wrote. For one thing, “greasy Polack” reflects a pinched view of what Marlon Brando achieved. Stanley Kowalski is a brute, a vulgarian and a rapist, but Brando also gave him a canny intelligence and enough charm that the play’s audiences joined him in laughing at Williams’s heroine, Blanche DuBois, every night. Brando’s looks also helped: thanks to the poetic face he carried atop his muscled body, his loutish Stanley could have passed for a slumming demigod.

In the end, of course, Brando never played Hamlet, nor did he exhaust the “great possibilities” that Williams and so many others detected. Though he liberated generations of actors when he brought a fresh vulnerability to his early film roles — a majestic four-year run culminating in his 1954 portrayal of Terry Malloy, the anguished ex-boxer in “On the Waterfront” — Brando had barely reached his 30s before he entered his Elvis-in-the-jumpsuit phase. He picked bad projects and gave indifferent performances, however speckled they might be with astonishing flashes. His weight ballooned, and he refused to learn his lines. Acting itself seemed ridiculous to him: “a bum’s life,” useful primarily as a way to pay his shrink’s bills. After more than a decade of this dud work, Brando made an astounding comeback, putting out “The Godfather” and “Last Tango in Paris” in 1972. But the eccentric decay soon resumed. Nobody needed to see his lip-lock with Larry King, or his various family tragedies, or “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

Why do the great ones so rarely have the capacity to handle their genius? Brando is not the first talent to invite the question — his contemporary Orson Welles preceded him on the path of brilliant promise, wobbly mature work and self-sabotaging obesity — but Stefan Kanfer helps establish him as the all-time Exhibit A. His new biography, “Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando,” is not as exhaustive as Peter Manso’s 1,100-page endeavor, or as concisely illuminating as Patricia Bosworth’s more recent short book, or as engaging as Brando’s own memoir. But it is the first serious biography to appear since Brando’s death in 2004, and therefore the first account to corral in one place the whole story of what Kanfer aptly calls “a life of ludicrous excess, outlandish triumphs and appalling sorrows.”

The combination didn’t take long to emerge. Brando arrived in New York in 1943 at the age of 19, a military-school dropout from a busted Midwestern family. (His mother, a frustrated actress, drank; his father derided and brutalized him, reacting to his 4-F status in the war by sneering, “Is there anything else you could fail at?”) But Brando found his way to the classes of the legendary Stella Adler, who soon declared that “this puppy thing will be America’s finest actor.”

His time at the New School is important and poorly understood. Though Brando’s talent is frequently treated as a vindication of the Method, the memory-mining technique that Lee Strasberg sloppily adopted from the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, Kanfer points out that Brando despised Strasberg. He learned much more from Adler, though she knew better than to take credit for his success. Stanislavsky’s system is meant to help actors find the inspiration that geniuses feel with no system at all. Even as a novice, Brando made other actors look as if they were painting with rollers.

Radical as Brando’s charismatic immediacy seemed to people on Broadway — and, beginning in 1950, to movie audiences — he wasn’t the only one making such a breakthrough. Around the same time, Jackson Pollock’s art and Charlie Parker’s music reflected a similar mix of casualness and intensity, technique and spontaneity. His personal life also grew chaotic enough to rival those of his fellow modernist giants, as he roamed nocturnal New York (particularly its minority neighborhoods), tended a pet raccoon named Russell and bedded everything that moved. But unlike Parker and Pollock — or his only acting rivals in those years, James Dean (who revered him) and Montgomery Clift — Brando didn’t destroy himself, at least not all at once. He let himself be humiliated by Truman Capote in a 1957 interview in The New Yorker; unwisely entrusted his money to his father, who lost it; and collected enough lovers and children (at least 11, by the end) to keep him in almost constant need of cash.

It is customary at this point to tut-tut about the ways that American culture forces its leading lights to work on execrable junk to remain solvent. But Kanfer, who has written biographies of Groucho Marx and Lucille Ball, notes that Brando made dumb choices, turning down premieres of “The Iceman Cometh” and “Present Laughter” on Broadway and “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” on screen. The most tantalizing offer of all came from John Gielgud. After playing Cassius to Brando’s Marc Antony in the film of “Julius Caesar,” he invited the young American to join him and Paul Scofield for a full season in London. Here, in Brando’s prime, and with the best collaborators imaginable, was a path that led to the long-awaited Hamlet. Instead, he made “The Wild One” — an iconic film, but still laughably unworthy of his talent.

However much he abused them, Brando’s gifts survived the rot of his later films. Watch, in “The Godfather,” how he sniffs a rose, or strokes a cat, or slaps a co-star — all on-the-spot inventions of a fertile creative mind. To the end, he was “the same man with the same extraordinary aptitude for inhabiting a character, just older and heavier,” Kanfer writes. Having outgrown the handsome distress of youth, he “still allowed viewers to see the whole Brando, a man at risk, a vastly overweight, compulsive figure for whom meals had become what strong drink had been to his parents.” Here, as elsewhere, Kanfer is respectful toward his subject’s quest — “perhaps an Ahabian one” — to act, as Brando put it, “the way it’s never been done before.” But he doesn’t coddle Brando for taking up the causes of the Black Panthers, Native Americans and the rest of life’s oppressed: “The off-screen efforts he made on their behalf had no lasting effect.”

These attempts at philanthropy invite a pretty obvious contrast to a fine actor who did manage to be a fine citizen: Paul Newman. Alas, it’s so obvious a contrast that, as Kanfer acknowledges, Richard Schickel already made it in his own Brando biography nearly 20 years ago. Here lies the real limitation of Kanfer’s book. Though it provides a thorough account of Brando’s life, it features little fresh insight, no matter how up-to-date its diagnoses — “oppositional defiant disorder,” “narcissistic personality disorder” and the old standby “oral fixation” — may be. In fact, it’s precisely when Kanfer offers what should be the book’s punch line that its limitations lie most plain: “If there was a ‘Rosebud’ in Brando’s life,” he writes in his concluding chapter, “it was the mental illness that had dogged him for decades, probably from early childhood.” No kidding.

Kanfer’s survey of Brando’s posthumous legacy also feels a little wanting, reaching as it does to obscure Web sites and pop lyrics to round out the picture. But he had the good sense to include in his book the definitive remembrance of Brando, one delivered with a perfect blend of awe and chagrin. “There was never anyone remotely like Marlon Brando,” his New School classmate Elaine Stritch once said. “Thank God.”

But his legacy is, in a real sense, on every stage and screen in the world. You can see it when gifted actors follow their intuition to create something fresh (e.g., early Pacino) and when self-absorbed actors preen and wallow in excess (e.g., late Pacino). Even today, actors go on discovering what musicians found when they followed Charlie Parker into heroin addiction, or what you learn when you test the proposition that your kid can paint like Pollock by letting him actually try: geniuses like Brando strike self and material together in a way that sets off some incomparable spark, radiating so much charisma that they get away with choices that would seem asinine from anyone else.

Thinking about Brando’s legacy now leads to one name above all others: Heath Ledger. As an introverted gay ranch hand in “Brokeback Mountain” and the quivering, maniacal Joker in “The Dark Knight,” he touched the far extremes of a film actor’s range, and made both look as natural as Brando in his prime. There’s little point in wondering if he might have been the new Brando had he lived. As Elaine Stritch knew, there could be no such thing. Better simply to marvel that an actor so young found a way, as Brando did, to disappear into his art while remaining originally and brilliantly himself.

Jeremy McCarter writes for Newsweek and is the editor of “Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations,” by Henry Fairlie, to be published in June.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 4, 2009, on page BR12 of the New York edition.

Journal of Visual Anthropology

2008-12-27T14:16:00.000-08:00

Journals

Visual Anthropology
Vol. 21, n. 5

Wilma Kiener The Absent and the Cut

Kyle Enevoldsen Virtual Reality: Viewership and Ethnogrpahic Film

Film Reviews

Book Revies

Books

2008-12-27T14:13:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Edwards and Kaushik Bhaumik
Visual Sense. A Cultural Reader
Berg Publishers, 2008

Visual Sense introduces students to the analysis of a wide range of ways of experiencing sight across time and across cultures: from Renaissance Italy, Aztec Mexico and early Christian Europe, to Tibet, West Africa, Aboriginal Australia and South America, amongst others. It is arranged around broad themes of visual experience, ranging from navigating the sacred and ordering knowledge about the world to thinking creatively, socially and beyond vision into cyberspace and daydream. This unique approach allows cross-cultural and thematic connections to be made. A Guide to Further Reading allows students to expand their learning independently, and section introductions place the readings in context.

Terence Wright
Visual Impact. Culture and the Meaning of Images
Berg Publishers, 2008

From the office to domestic interiors to shops, images surround us in modern life. The internet has increased this visual onslaught exponentially. Is there a systematic order to this seemingly endless array of pictures and depictions? Looking at picture-making traditions around the world, the author demonstrates how schemes of depiction are ordered throughout all ages and across all cultures.
Drawing on a wide range of examples - from painting and drawing to film, photography and the Web - Visual Impact analyzes the theory and practice of visual representation. Pictures and images provide a cognitive context through which people can explore and understand their world. They frame and shape daily life. By considering the techniques and systems that inform visual displays, the author examines how cultural values and traditions shape particular visual styles.
Drawing on the growing field of visual anthropology, Visual Impact sets image making in an historical and global context, and uses it as a window for exploring the human condition at a deeper level. Anyone interested in the cultural role of art, film, the internet and interactive media will find this book an exciting and stimulating read.

Ethnocineca 2009

2008-12-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

Ethnocineca 2009 - Call for FIlms

20-23 May 2009

The "ETHNOCINECA - Ethnographic and Documentary Filmfest Vienna" is a film festival in Austria. It is being organized by MASN-Austria in cooperation with the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology in Vienna. For further details see our website: www.ethnocineca.at

Workshop

2008-12-27T14:05:00.000-08:00

Workshop

Sound Image Culture / SIC
visual anthropology - documentary - performative ethnography - experimental film - auto-ethnography

workshops for anthropological–artistic projects
werkplaats voor antropologisch–artistieke projecten
ateliers pour des projets anthropologiques-artistiques

soundimageculture.org

3 months seminars
2 months supervised filming
3 months supervised editing
continuous coaching

CALL FOR PROJECTS - OPROEP TOT PROJECTEN - APPEL AUX PROJETS SIC 2009
deadline submission projects 6 March 2009
april - december 2009 (not fulltime)

PRESENTATIONS - PRESENTATIES SIC 2008
Aalst Netwerk 24 January 2009 www.netwerk-art.be
Brussels Les Brigittines 20 February 2009 (tbc) www.brigittines.be
(Belgium)

contact@soundimageculture.org + 32 (0) 2 537 85 69 + 32 (0) 485 33 45 98

With the support of the Flemish Authorities. Subpowered by Les Brigittines, Netwerk and Polymorfilms.
picture ©Charles Fairbanks 2008
Coördinatie - Organisation
SoundImageCulture / SIC vzw - asbl
http://www.soundimageculture.org

M + 32 (0) 487 33 45 98
T + 32 (0) 2 537 85 69
Rue Theodore Verhaegenstraat 18
BE - 1060 Brussel - Bruxelles

L'art à l'épreuve du social

2008-12-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

Appel à contribution

Jeudi 18 décembre 2008 | Bordeaux (33)
L'art à l'épreuve du social

Publié le mardi 18 novembre 2008 par Delphine Cavallo
Résumé

Nombreuses sont aujourd’hui les propositions artistiques qui prennent la forme d’interventions menées dans des contextes concrets et qui, tout en jouant avec les composantes du réel, interrogent les situations, déplacent les positions, brouillent les identités et visent ainsi à produire de nouvelles modalités sociales. Avec l’apparition de pratiques que l’on peut globalement qualifier de « participatives », ressurgit la question des usages de l’art.
Annonce
Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3
9 et 10 avril 2009
laboratoire de recherche LAPRIL / Artes

Nombreuses sont aujourd’hui les propositions artistiques qui prennent la forme d’interventions menées dans des contextes concrets et qui, tout en jouant avec les composantes du réel, interrogent les situations, déplacent les positions, brouillent les identités et visent ainsi à produire de nouvelles modalités sociales. Avec l’apparition de pratiques que l’on peut globalement qualifier de « participatives », ressurgit la question des usages de l’art.

Affirmer que toute création artistique a une vocation sociale est un truisme. Toujours et partout l’artiste, à travers une expérience pourtant radicalement subjective, se fait l’interprète de valeurs collectives et révèle des intérêts politiques, esthétiques, symboliques, économiques qui sont de nature sociale. Conférant à la réalité un surcroît d’expression, il fournit des outils pour une meilleure compréhension du monde, voire des moyens pour mieux l’habiter. Mais la posture actuelle est plus novatrice qu’il n’y paraît. Deux représentations idéalisées de l’artiste sont en effet renvoyées dos-à-dos : celle du créateur autonome et retiré du monde, mais aussi celle de l’intellectuel engagé au service d’une cause. Désormais, l’artiste montre sa volonté d’accomplir autrement sa responsabilité politique, en faisant le pari réaliste que l’art pourrait bien être un vecteur efficace de transformation sociale.

C’est pourquoi, au-delà des intentions affichées, on peut s’interroger sur la nature et les finalités de ses interventions. Quelles sont les variations qu’elles opèrent et les modifications qu’elles provoquent ? Thomas Hirschhorn a beau proclamer : « Je ne suis pas un travailleur social », soucieux par là de souligner la spécificité de projets dont on doit évaluer la cohérence artistique avant d’en mesurer les effets. Il n’empêche : si l’on considère l’artiste comme un travailleur, ce qu’il produit est susceptible d’être analysé en termes d’économie relationnelle. Mais, en questionnant les modes de son agir sur le monde, ne court-on pas le risque de le confondre avec d’autres acteurs sociaux ? Pis encore, sommé de restaurer un lien social réputé distendu, l’artiste n’est-il pas instrumentalisé au profit d’une « culture-sparadrap » et assigné à un rôle thérapeutique à seule fin de dissimuler une violence réellement à l’œuvre ?

Sans doute est-ce là lui conférer une mission qu’il ne revendique même pas. Les fractures et déchirures sociales, dans leur gravité, ne sauraient être réduites par les seuls moyens artistiques. La catharsis véritable, quant à elle, n’advient jamais comme un résultat prévisible et escompté mais bien par accident. Conscient des limites de son pouvoir, l’artiste peut-il se faire artisan de « micro-utopies quotidiennes » ou encore fabricant de « reliance » et, tout en expérimentant d’autres formes de faire, sait-il trouver, comme à son insu, d’autres formes d’action sociale ?

Telles sont quelques-unes des questions que nous aimerions soulever à l’occasion du colloque international « L’art à l’épreuve du social » (Bordeaux, 9 et 10 avril 2009) en donnant la parole à des artistes, des sociologues, des critiques et des théoriciens de l’art, des acteurs politiques et des médiateurs culturels.

_________________________________________________________________

Merci d’envoyer vos propositions d’intervention (15 lignes max.) avant le 18 décembre 2008 à Elisabeth Magne ou Sabine Forero, responsables du master professionnel Pratiques artistiques et action sociale :

Université Bordeaux 3
UFR des ARTS, département Arts plastiques
Esplanade des Antilles
33405 Pessac

* sabineforero@yahoo.fr
* elisabeth.magne@u-bordeaux3.fr

Mots-clés

* art, lien social, pratiques artistiques, esthétique

Lieu

* Bordeaux (33) (Université Bordeaux 3 / Michel de Montaigne)

Date limite

* jeudi 18 décembre 2008

Contact

* Élisabeth Magne
courriel : elisabeth [point] magne (at) u-bordeaux3 [point] fr

Url de référence

* laboratoire de recherche du LAPRIL

Source de l'information

* Élisabeth Magne
courriel : elisabeth [point] magne (at) u-bordeaux3 [point] fr
Pour citer cette annonce

« L'art à l'épreuve du social », Appel à contribution, Calenda, publié le mardi 18 novembre 2008, http://calenda.revues.org/nouvelle11507.html

The Warner Bros. Story

2008-12-06T07:33:00.000-08:00

Rico, played by Edward G. Robinson, in "Little Ceasar," 1931.
The Glory and the Guts
By STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
Published: December 5, 2008

There are dogs that have sniffed out earthquake survivors and dogs that have tugged infants away from house fires. But only one dog has ever saved his own studio: as we learn in the lavish, lively picture-book history “You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story,” a pup rescued from the German trenches at the end of World War I repaid that act of kindness by bringing riches to a near-insolvent movie studio in the early 1920s. That dog was Rin Tin Tin, who at the peak of his popularity drew a salary of $6,000 a week, and also earned, from grateful Warner Brothers employees, the affectionate nickname “the mortgage lifter.” Rinty had a valet, a chef and his own limo; an on-set orchestra would play music to get him ready for his big scenes. But those classy trappings belie the feral boldness of his achievement: How fitting that the scrappiest of all studios, in terms of both its operational policy and the kinds of movies it produced, was saved by a dog.

Warner Brothers Entertainment/“You Must Remember This”
YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS
The Warner Bros. Story
By Richard Schickel and George Perry. Foreword by Clint Eastwood
Illustrated. 479 pp. Running Press. $50
“It’s perfectly obvious to everyone that in Hollywood’s classic age, the 1930s and 1940s, Warner Brothers was the working-class studio,” Richard Schickel writes in his introduction to “You Must Remember This.” “You can see that most obviously in its famously ‘tragic’ gangsters, machine-gunning their way to power only to be gunned down not so much for their depredations but for their hubris, for daring to challenge the respectable and the law-abiding.” Schickel goes on to explain that through the ’30s and ’40s and beyond, the studio provided a context (and a haven) for pictures with a degree of social consciousness, or at least for stories whose endings weren’t always happy. “At Warner Brothers the hero or the heroine tended to end up dead, or at the very least marginalized or otherwise dismissed by polite society,” Schickel writes. He cites Humphrey Bogart’s “romantic devastations” in “Casablanca” and “The Maltese Falcon,” and the “existential chill, the air of fated hopelessness” that clings to the pictures Stanley Kubrick made for the studio. He suggests that some contemporary pictures continue to show traces of that deliberately unsmooth, slightly calloused Warner Brother touch, citing the “bleakness of the conclusions” of recent films by Clint Eastwood (who has had a long association with Warner Brothers and who has written this book’s foreword) like “Million Dollar Baby” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.”
Whether or not you agree with Schickel’s estimation of any of those films, his comments provide a useful framework for the hardscrabble Warner Brothers story, one that began in 1923 when four brothers, Harry, Abe, Sam and Jack, the sons of Polish immigrants, formally incorporated a movie company that would barely survive its start-up years. The text accompanying the scads of pictures in “You Must Remember This” — more on those later — is supplied by Schickel and by the British film journalist and critic George Perry. Schickel provides the anecdotes and the critical perspective: From him we learn that in the company’s early days, Jack Warner would wander around the lot at the end of the workday, switching off lights that employees might have left burning — a small but crucial cost-cutting maneuver, considering that the electric company had once turned off Warner’s juice when it failed to pay the bill. Perry contributes a series of nuts-and-bolts thumbnail histories, covering the significant Warner Brothers pictures over the decades (from “The Jazz Singer” through “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Mean Streets” and “Batman Begins”), and offers biographical sketches of the studio’s most prominent stars (among them Bette Davis, James Cagney, James Dean and George Clooney).
Perry’s entries are the meat-and-¬potatoes of “You Must Remember This,” Schickel’s, the gravy: Even if Schickel hammers a little too relentlessly on his own enthusiasms (his championing of Eastwood, in particular, sometimes approaches fetishization), he is at least refreshingly nonobjective, and that means something in a world where a shocking number of people believe criticism should be “objective.” Schickel is unafraid to apply critical thinking to history — which is, after all, part of a critic’s job — and he has the guts to venture some heretical ideas, among them his assertion that Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” is superior to John Ford’s “The Searchers.” (He’s right.)
In the end, of course, “You Must Remember This” — which was conceived as a companion to the recent American Masters television miniseries of the same name — is a big, fat book stuffed with pictures: you couldn’t tell the story of Warner Brothers without them. This is a heavy, handsome volume, though with its steel-gray and burnished-gold cover, it’s also, fittingly, unostentatious: no need to run out and buy a fancy art deco chrome-and-glass MGM-style coffee table to put underneath it; in true Warner Brothers spirit, it will look just fine on your proletarian Ikea number. The pictures inside don’t disappoint, either. There’s a saucy-looking Bette Davis, dressed as a foxy Santa, in a 1934 publicity shot; several arresting portraits of James Dean, one as a disaffected cowboy with his hat pulled low, a cigarette dangling from his lips, another showing the youthful star hunched in his trailer, buffeting his stubble with an electric razor; and a still from the blissful 1983 film “The Man With Two Brains,” showing a demented Steve Martin clutching a jar full of brains as if this mass of crenulated pink tissue was the treasure of the Sierra Madre itself.
But the stars of Warner Brothers tell just part of the studio’s story. There’s scandal there, too, including much infighting among the brothers, the most aggressive (and most notorious) of whom was Jack. He would eventually betray his brother Harry, depriving him of power and status at the studio they both helped build. The coup was so bitter, Schickel relates, that the brothers’ descendants rarely speak to each other to this day. Stories like that reinforce the reality that the movie business isn’t a pretty one. Schickel tells another story, one about how someone once remarked to an elderly Jack Warner (who died in 1978) that he must have been relieved to relinquish the day-to-day running of the studio: “He replied: ‘Once I ran a studio. Now I’m just a rich old Jew.’ ” That comment is, Schickel writes, “slightly vulgar, slightly shocking, but like the best Warner Brothers pictures, brutally truthful. And touchingly human.” It also underscores the essential truth that while Hollywood movies have always been designed to entertain, and to make money, their more lasting qualities — the dreams they keep alive in us — are a byproduct whose value is unquantifiable. It’s a touching irony that most of the 19 films Rin Tin Tin made for Warner Brothers have been lost. But there are pictures of him in “You Must Remember This,” and you can see star quality in the directness of his gaze. His legacy survives. It’s only the celluloid around him that has disappeared.
Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 7, 2008, on page BR22 of the New York edition.

New issue of Visual Anthropology

2008-12-01T03:17:00.000-08:00

Visual Anthropology Review
Vol. 24, n. 1

Jacqueline H. Fewkes Through the Gold Filter: Representation, Color manipulation, and Technology Choices in Visual Ethnography

Karin Zitzewitz The Secular Icon: Secularist Practice and Indian Visual Culture

D. S. Farrer The Healing Arts of the Malay Mystic
http://www.visualanthropology.net/riviste/var24_1.php

Festival of Visual Anthropology

2008-12-01T03:13:00.000-08:00

Aspects" - Festival of Visual Anthropology
28-30th November 2008 - Ethnographic Muzeum in Torun, Poland

This year's edition is focused on Urban Ahtnropology. During festival, we will present documental films made by multicultural artists. The urban space is the leitmotif. One of the festivals section will absorbed on The New Wave of the Japanese Anthropological Cinema.
"The Aspects" is a yearly anthropological film festival, which aims at exploring various areas of culture. The principle of the festival is to discover and present various relations, phenomena, interactions and mechanisms, which take place within a culture or between cultures.
The main goal of "The Aspects" film festival is to propagate the ideas of intercultural dialogue. The creators of the festival want to draw attention to the subject of cultural dissimilarities, present the audience with the diversity of human experience, diversity of ways of expressing oneself within a society and the world.

For more information please see: http://aspektyfestival.pl

Workshop in Visual Anthropology

2008-12-01T03:09:00.001-08:00

Workshop

SCUOLA DI ETNOGRAFIA VISIVA - SEV
Workshop di Antropologia visuale con David MacDougall

Nei giorni 12 e 13 dicembre 2008, presso l'Istituto Superiore di Fotografia e Comunicazione Integrata (Via degli Ausoni 1, Roma), si terrà un workshop con David MacDougall.
Il costo del seminario è di € 300.
Le lezioni si svolgeranno con il seguente orario
Venerdì 12 dicembre, ore 10,00-19,00
Sabato 13 dicembre, ore 10,00-16,00

Saranno proiettati e discussi alcuni tra i più importanti documentari del regista.

Per ulteriori informazioni scrivere a info@isfci.co oppure telefonare al numero 06-4469269.

David MacDougall is a documentary filmmaker and writer on cinema. He was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Los Angeles. His first feature-length film, To Live With Herds, filmed in Uganda, won the Grand Prix Venezia Genti at the Venice Film Festival in 1972. Soon after this, he and his wife Judith MacDougall produced the Turkana Conversations trilogy of films on semi-nomadic camel herders of northwestern Kenya. Of these, Lorang’s Way won the prize of Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979, and The Wedding Camels the Film Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1980. With Judith MacDougall, he then co-directed a number of films on indigenous communities in Australia and, in 1991, a film on photographic practices in an Indian hill town, Photo Wallahs. In 1993 he made Tempus de Baristas, on goat herders in the mountains of Sardinia, winner of the 1995 Earthwatch Film Award. In 1997 he began conducting a film study of the Doon School in northern India. This led to the making of five films: Doon School Chronicles (2000), With Morning Hearts (2001), Karam in Jaipur (2001), The New Boys (2003), and The Age of Reason (2004). Recent projects include filming at a progressive, co-educational boarding school in South India. One of the resulting films, his experimental SchoolScapes (2007), won the Basil Wright Film Prize at the 2007 RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film. His latest film, Gandhi’s Children (2008), was made at a shelter for homeless children in New Delhi. MacDougall writes regularly on documentary and ethnographic cinema and is the author of Transcultural Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1998) and The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, 2006). He lives in Australia and is presently Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra.

Workshops & Courses

2008-09-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

Practical Etnographic and Documentary Filmmaking

Department of Anthropology at University College London
This will be a practical course in hands-on documentary filmmaking for credit as part of a Masters Degree in the University of London. It will be an optional half module with preference given to students taking the “History of Ethnographic Film” and the “Critical Visual Culture” modules at UCL. Places are also available for outside students to participate. Students from the University of London can take the course for credit depending on their department’s agreement. Non-university students are encouraged to take the course and will receive a stand-alone UCL certificate on completion.
Please apply for the course by the beginning of September by emailing Dr. Michael Stewart at m.stewart@ucl.ac.uk
For further course details either email senior course tutor, Dr. Michael Yorke m.yorke@ucl.ac.uk tel: +44 (0)20-7794-3824 or look at the UCL online newsflash at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/news/index.htm

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Art & Visual Anthropology Workshop Trondheim
Seminar and PhD Student Workshop in Visual Anthropology
"Experimenting the Visual in Art and Anthropology:
The Ethics of Research and Collaborations"
(organizers: Arnd Schneider & Ruth Woods)
Skiboli, Gløshaugen, NTNU Trondheim (Norway)

29 - 30 October, 2008
http://www.ntnu.no/ab/visualanthropology
enquiries to:
ruth.woods@ntnu.no /giedre.jarulaitiene@ntnu.no

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SEV2 - Scuola di Etnografia Visiva II EDIZIONE

AVVISO - Proroga scadenza iscrizioni
Le iscrizioni alla Scuola di Etnografia Visiva, per l ’anno accademico 2008-2009, sono prorogate al 10 ottobre 2008. Le lezioni della Scuola avranno inizio giovedì 6 novembre 2008 e proseguiranno nei giorni di venerdì e sabato di ogni settimana, secondo un calendario che sarà reso pubblico entro il 30 settembre.

Workshop con David MacDougall
Nell’ambito delle attività didattiche della Scuola si terrà, nei giorni 12 e 13 dicembre 2008, presso i locali dell’Istituto Superiore di Fotografia e Comunicazione Integrata, in Roma (Via degli Ausoni, 1), un workshop di David MacDougall, Adjunct Professor presso il Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, School of Humanities, della Australian National University di Canberra. Il workshop è aperto, oltre che agli allievi permanenti della SEV, a un numero massimo di 20 allievi che verranno selezionati tra coloro che avranno presentato un proprio curriculum entro il 30 ottobre 2008 (inviare il curriculum a info@isfci.com). Nella selezione verrà accordata preferenza a quanti hanno conseguito titoli di studio o frequentino corsi di carattere etnografico e antropologico e agli allievi della scuole di cinematografia, con particolare riferimento alla Scuola Nazionale di Cinematografia di Roma. Gli allievi ammessi alla frequenza del workshop saranno impegnati giovedì 11 dicembre 2008 in una lezione introduttiva alla figura e all’opera di MacDougall. Il costo della frequenza alla lezione introduttiva e al workshop è di Euro 300. Per informazioni ed iscrizioni rivolgersi alla segreteria ISFCI, Via degli Ausoni, 1 – Roma, info@isfci.com o telefonare al numero 06/4469269.

Scarica qui il manifesto degli studi

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International Network of Visual Studies in Organization (inVisio)
FREE Launch reception & seminar- 14th October 7-9.30pm (see below)
inVisio brings together researchers, educators, practitioners and artists exploring the visual dimensions of business, management & organizational life. The network is organising and hosting a series of six free seminars, sponsored by the ESRC which will run from October 2008 - November 2009. There are still a few places available for the launch seminar & reception, entitled 'Images and Organization'. This will take place at The Photographer's Gallery in London on

Tues 14th October, 7 - 9.30pm. For more information and to register for seminars, please visit our website: http://www.som.surrey.ac.uk/invisio

Etudes Photographiques

2008-09-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

Dernier numéro en ligne
no22 septembre 2008
Histoires d’ un art moyen / Les réseaux de l'art
Couverture du numéro 22
• André Gunthert
Études photographiques et au-delà [Texte intégral]
• Histoires d’ un art moyen
o Geoffrey Batchen
Les snapshots [Texte intégral]
L’histoire de l’art et le tournant ethnographique
o Irène Jonas
Portrait de famille au naturel [Texte intégral]
Les mutations de la photographie familiale
o André Gunthert
“Sans retouche” [Texte intégral]
Histoire d’un mythe photographique
o Nathalie Moureau et Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux
La construction du marché des tirages photographiques [Texte intégral]
• Les réseaux de l’art
o Astrid Ruffa
Dalí, photographe de la pensée irrationnelle [Texte intégral]
Une appropriation créative des théories psychologiques de Gabriel Dromard
o Erik Verhagen
La photographie conceptuelle [Texte intégral]
Paradoxes, contradictions et impossibilités
o Jean-Paul Fourmentaux
Images mises au net [Texte intégral]
Entre art, média et communication numériques
• Notes de lecture
o Thierry Gervais
Anne Cartier-Bresson (dir.), Le Vocabulaire technique de la photographie [Texte intégral]
o Magdalena Mazaraki
Daniel Benda et José Moure, Le Cinéma : naissance d’un art (1895-1920) [Texte intégral]
o Mathilde Arrivé
Robin Kelsey, Archive Style : Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890 [Texte intégral]
o Julie Jones
Gaëlle Morel (dir.), Photojournalisme et art contemporain. Les derniers tableaux [Texte intégral]
o François Brunet
Roberto Signorini, Alle origine del fotografico. Lettura di The Pencil of Nature (1844-46) di William Henry Fox Talbot [Texte intégral]
o François Brunet
Graham Smith, “Light that Dances in the Mind”. Photographs and Memory in the Writings of E.M. Forster and his Contemporaries [Texte intégral]

About Kenji Mizoguchi

2008-09-19T13:11:00.000-07:00

Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the three acclaimed masters - together with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa - of Japanese cinema. Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema is the definitive guide to the life and work of one of the greatest film-makers of the twentieth century.
Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema
By Tadao Sato
Kenji Mizoguchi born at the end of the nineteenth century into a wealthy family, Mizoguchi's early life influenced the themes he would take up in his work. His father's ambitious business ventures failed and the family fell into poverty. His mother died and his elder sister was obliged to enter a geisha house to support the family. Her earnings paid for Mizoguchi's education. Weak and deluded men and strong, self-sacrificing women - these were to become the obsessive motifs of Mizoguchi's films.
Mizoguchi's apprenticeship in cinema was peculiarly Japanese. His concerns - the role of women and the realist representation of the inequities of Japanese society - were not. Through two World Wars, Japan's culture changed. Though censored, Mizoguchi continued to produce films. It was only in the 1950s that Mizoguchi's astonishing cinematic vision became widely known outside Japan.
Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema tells the full story of this famously perfectionist, even tyrannical, director. Mizoguchi's key films, cinematographic techniques and his social and aesthetic concerns are all discussed and set in the context of Japan's changing popular and political culture.
Tadao Sato is one of Japan's most prestigious film critics. He has written on many of the great masters of Japanese cinema - Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura - as well as on Asian and global cinema more generally. He is currently the President of the Japan Academy of Moving Images.
Edited by Aruna Vasudev and Latika Padgaonkar
Translated from the Japanese by Brij Tankha
June 2008 • 259 pages

See also: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/mizoguchi.html

New Issue of Scences of Cinema

2008-09-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

Issue 48, Contents:

Before the Revolution

Introduction to the Bourseillers on Jean-Luc Godard by Sally Shafto

“1963-1968. Paris: The Godard Years” by Antoine Bourseiller

Excerpts from L’Aventure moderne by Christophe Bourseiller

Roland-François Lack on Vivre sa vie

Interview with Patrick Deval by Maximilian Le Cain and Fergus Daly

General Articles

Lisa K. Broad on La Belle Captive

Phil Wagner on John Ford

Derek Jenkins on Backyard

Richard Armstrong on Land of Promise

Dossier on Australian Exploitation

Interview with Richard Franklin on Roadgames

Interview with Russell Mulcahy on Razorback

Review of Long Weekend

Interview with Everett de Roche on Long Weekend

Review of Turkey Shoot

Review of Dead-End Drive-In

Review of the Barry McKenzie films

From the Senses Archives

John B. Murray on The Naked Bunyip

John B. Murray on Libido

Great Directors

Ralph Beliveau and Randolph Lewis on Alex Cox

David Minnihan on Ang Lee

Reminiscences

Geoff Gardner on Pierre Rissient
Scott Murray on Sydney Pollack

Festival Reports

Cerise Howard on AniFest
Jay Kuehner on BAFICI
Markus Keuschnigg on Cannes
Nagisa Hikino on Edinburgh
Adrian Danks on Hong Kong
Brian Coffey on Image Forum
Neil Young on IndieLisboa
David Schwartz on Rotterdam
Barbara Wurm on Rotterdam
Fiona Trigg on St Kilda
Hamish Ford on Sydney
Olaf Möller on Udine

Book Reviews

Margaret Barton-Fumo on Anarchy and Alchemy
Michael Goddard on Roman Polanski
Sean Gorman on The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Polona Petek on The Cinema of Small Nations
Karen Goodman on Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony
Diana Sandars on The Adventures of Priscilla
Constantine Verevis on The Cinema Book
Simon Weaving on Scenes from a Revolution

Cteq Annotations

Brian Wilson on Greetings
David Melville on If….
Darragh O’Donoghue on Ma vie sexuelle
Martine Pierquin on La Maman et la putain
David Sanjek on Medium Cool
Adrian Danks on Petulia
Adam Bingham on La Sentinelle
Andrew Leavold on Witches’ Hammer

Fritz Lang

Arthur Rankin on Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
John Fidler on Fury
Adrian Danks on Moonfleet
Sarah Nichols on Scarlet Street
Christopher Justice on You Only Live Once

New issue of Visual Anthropology

2008-06-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

Journals

Visual Anthropology
Vol. 21, n. 3

Gareth Davey Twenty Years of Visual Anthropology

Michael Fitzhenry China Art Phone: Mobile Movies

Liza Aziz and Veslemoy Lothe Salvesen Voice Out - An Entertainement-education Approach

Nefissa Naguib Storytelling Armenian Family Albums in the Diaspora

Sabine Marschall Zulu Heritage between Institutionalized Commemoration and Tourist Attraction

Ethnographic Film Festival in India

2008-06-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

26 to 30 November 2008

In the last few decades, analytical and empirically informed ethnographic studies and field-based research are increasingly supported by various media. An intrinsic and structural relationship between the media and contemporary ways of carrying out ethnographic research seems to have emerged. This relationship enables an understanding of the ways in which socio-cultural formations (of class, ethnicity, religiosity and identity) are represented and practiced, including in the social sciences. This link between media and ethnography is providing crucial theoretical and practical inputs to our understanding of the construction and diffusion of ideas and practices of particularism and universality, locality and globalization, diversity and uniformity. It is also leading to a re-evaluation of the category of experience itself, with media playing a significant role in social life.

The Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, hence proposes to hold an international ethnographic film festival – the first of its kind in India – from 26 to 30 November 2008, and subsequently every two years. Such an event will provide an opportunity for a debate on the parallels and departures between the methods of classical sociological and anthropological field research and that of visual ethnographies. It will provide an opportunity to assess and define the category of the ethnographic film and of standards required to make such films pedagogically productive.

Last date for entries: 30 July 2008

NEW ISSUE OF SENSES OF CINEMA

2008-06-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

Issue 47 Contents

Editorial

Feature Articles

Dušan Makavejev on Sweet Movie

Lorraine Mortimer on Sweet Movie

Peter Hourigan on 1970s Slovak Cinema

John Orr on David Lean’s films with Ann Todd

Pedro Blas Gonzalez on Seven Thieves

Jason Mark Scott on Three male friendship movies

Jeffrey Bunzendahl and Robert von Dassanowsky on James Bond

John Potts on Hammer Horror

Andrew C. Schenker on a “terminal æsthetic” in contemporary films

Matthew Boyd on Juno

Angela Dalle Vacche interviews Mahamet-Saleh Haroun

Festival Reports

Claudia Siefen on Diagonale
Patrick Friel on Media City
Dee Jefferson on Possible Worlds
Bérénice Reynaud on Sundance
Barbara Wurm on Vienna
Scott Henderson on Young At Heart
Mattias Frey on Berlin
Gabriela Trujillo on Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris
Julian Pentley on Cottbus
Lidia Merás on Gijón
Jared Rapfogel on Thessaloniki

Great Directors

Matthew Stephenson on Peter Jackson

Book Reviews

Stephen Rowley on Steven Spielberg
Scott Murray on Searching for Schindler
Tony McKibbin on The Virtual Life of Film
Jake Wilson on I Peed on Fellini
Vera Brunner-Sung on James Benning
Lars Kristensen on Pride and Panic

Letters to the Editor from Martha P. Nochimson and Lindsay Coleman

DVD Reviews

John Fidler on Killer of Sheep
James L. Neibaur on Saved from the Flames
Peter Hourigan on Death in Brunswick
Peter Hourigan on They’re a Weird Mob

Cteq Annotations

Bruce Hodsdon on Carlton + Godard = Cinema
Dylan Rainforth on Come Out Fighting
Kevin Lee on Mambo Girl
Brian Wilson on The Palm Beach Story

Carl Dreyer

Martyn Bamber on Day of Wrath
Trevor Mowchun on Gertrud
Darragh O’Donoghue on Ordet
Michael Koller on La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
Miguel Marías on Præsidenten
Catherine S. Cox on Vampyr

François Truffaut

Brian Hoyle on Day for Night
David Melville on Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent
Jonathan Dawson on Mississippi Mermaid

Andrzej Wajda

Rahul Hamid on Ashes and Diamonds
Boris Trbic on A Generation and Kanal
Adam Bingham on Man of Marble

CINEMA AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Theo est mort.

Photography, Anthropology and History. Expanding the Frame

CALL FOR FILMS

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

New issue Visual Anthropology

Made To Be Seen

Cinema and Photography

ASTRA FILM FESTIVAL 2011

Séminaire 2010-1011: les littératures populaires aujourd’hui

CALLS FOR SUBMISSION

About Gregory Markopoulos

Cahiers de Narratologie en ligne

Dernier numéro en ligne19 | 2010Images composites, arts pluriels

Varia

Comptes rendus

Festivals The 12th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film 2011

Workshops ETNOFILm 3

Phil Collins: marxism today in BFI

Phil Collins

4 Feb 2011 - 10 Apr 2011

This Week at Anthology Film Archives

photography today

Niko Papatakis est mort

Panahi dans le prison

Six ans de prison pour le cinéaste Jafar Panahi

New issue of Senses of Cinema

ELECTRIC SHEEP ONLINE Issue 45

Artists' Film & Video

New book about Jean Rouch

The London International Documentary Festival (LIDF)

Search and seizure

Topographies of ‘Turkish cinema’: Hybrids, hyphens and borders

Festival of Visual Anthropology

Journals

Workshop

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival 2010 - Call for Films

Eric Rohmer est mort

Journal: Visual Anthropology

Conference

International Student Ethnographic Film Festival 2010

New Issue of Senses of Cinema

Greek (Hi)stories Through the Lens: Photographs, Photographers and Their Testimonies

Film-Philosophy III

BOOK - LIVRE

Workshop

2010 International Jean Rouch Film Festival

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

Irving Penn

Agnès Varda

Visual Anthropology

Visual Studies

Photographies East. The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia

The Oxford Academy Documentary Film

The Film-Philosophy Conference

colloque sur Cultural Studies

Journals

Art et Anthropologie

Festival of Visual Anthropology

New issue of senses of Cinema

Reconstruction 10. Religion and Popular Culture

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006)

Made in U.S.A. by J. L. God-art

Marlon Brando

Journal of Visual Anthropology

Books

Ethnocineca 2009

Workshop

L'art à l'épreuve du social

The Warner Bros. Story

New issue of Visual Anthropology

Festival of Visual Anthropology

Workshop in Visual Anthropology

Workshops & Courses

Etudes Photographiques

About Kenji Mizoguchi

New Issue of Scences of Cinema

Issue 48, Contents:

Before the Revolution

General Articles

Dernier numéro en ligne
19 | 2010
Images composites, arts pluriels