Film Enthusiasts Research Articles

Enthusiastic amateurs: Australia’s film societies and the birth of audience-driven film festivals in post-war Melbourne

The global film festival’s origins in the post-Second World War era are often considered uniquely European. Yet this period also saw the arrival of a distinctly non-European event. Emerging in 1952 from the Australian film society movement, the Melbourne Film Festival developed as a different type of celebration and in response to its particular local context. Unlike events in Cannes, Venice or Berlin, the MFF was a grassroots celebration, run by film enthusiasts for film enthusiasts. This article examines the development of the Australian film society movement, the origins and operation of MFF as an audience-led festival and, through close examination of the event’s genesis, offers an intervention into the current understanding of the international film festival’s development and spread.

Scientific Creativity: The Notebooks of Rose Lowder

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I was first exposed to Rose Lowder's films in 2003, while attending monthly screenings at Pittsburgh's experimental film focused micro-cinema, Jefferson Presents. The audience for Jefferson Presents typically consisted of artists, musicians, filmmakers, and experimental film enthusiasts. Screenings were loud and lively, and it was uncommon for a film to go by without enthusiastic cheers and jeers from the audience. But when a Rose Lowder film was shown, the room was inevitably silent (as are most of her films), and the audience became fully immersed in an all-engrossing visual experience: red poppies danced in sunny fields traversed by sailboats gliding on shimmering blue oceans; bustling city streets in summer intertwined with empty urban plazas in autumn; peach trees trembled between morning light and evening shade, l ime and space juxtaposed in rhythmic visual patterns, and brought about an acute awareness of each frame of film and its relationship to the cadence of the overall composition. I was mesmerized by those first experiences of Lowder's work. As an artist interested in the engagement between vision and the physiological experience of projected celluloid cinema, I wanted to decode the structures of Lowder's films to better understand the perceptual dynamics of her work. In 2011, as part of my thesis work at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, I invited Lowder to the United States for a lecture and screening tour of Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York. While in Boston she gave a lecture on her unique approach to working with 16mm film as a tool for perceptual experimentation, showing excerpts from her film notebooks to demonstrate her methods. Each hand-drawn page, Lowder explained, was transcribed after the film was shot, and served as both a record of the process and an illustration of the resulting structure of each individual film. Graphically complex, semantically rich and visually stimulating, each design revealed the complexity of Lowder's techniques, and demonstrated the results of her experimentation with the perceptual potential of 16mm film. Since being introduced to these documents in 2011, I have come to understand how the notebooks are vital to understanding the phenomenology of Lowder's films, and provide a key to comprehending how her work integrates her creative process with the scientific method. In the opening sentence of Opticks, Sir Isaac Newton declared his intention to prove his theories on the nature of light and color--not by hypothesis, but through direct experimentation and observation. (1) Using detailed diagrams and descriptions to illustrate his procedures, Newton set forth an inductive approach to the method of scientific investigation, proclaiming that the only truth is one that can be directly observed. Newton's notebooks reveal his dedication to recording and transcribing every visible detail of his experiments, sometimes through mathematical equations, sometimes through pictorial illustration. The resulting text introduced graphic illustrations that have remained essential to the study of the scientific properties of light. Lowder has been a prolific practitioner of perceptual experimentation with 16mm film since the 1970s, and, like Newton, has kept detailed records of her research over the course of her career. Born in 1941 to British parents in Lima, Peru, Lowder now lives and works in the bucolic municipality of Avignon in southeastern France. She has composed more than fifty experimental films exploring the beauty of the botanical world, scenes of daily life in various towns and villages, and extraordinary moments of ordinary existence. Her films are methodically composed entirely in camera, using a precise, frame-by-frame technique which, when projected, culminates in an astonishing perceptual experience of light, color, form, and motion. In many of her films, she captures sequences of individual frames along the film roll, winding the film back and forth through the camera to choose frames selectively, rather than successively, as a painter would choose a point on a canvas upon which to compose. …

Residual Film Cultures: Real and Imagined Futures of Spanish Cinema

During the Zapatero years (2004-2011), film cultures in Spain were subjected to intense media debates around their purpose and funding. This article argues that these years were key to bringing to light certain elements of film cultures that were declining: the models of desirable national films together with the manner in which these were financed and the forms of consumption that are dear to the auteurist cinephiles who make up the bulk of cultural institutions such as the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematograficas. These elements were challenged when non-auteurist film enthusiasts accessed power. It is argued here that these years showed deep weaknesses of the film as art model. In contrast, emergent practices that are linked to transformations of media industries attendant to a market-driven culture, and the increased transnational access to cultural contents on the Internet showed the future.

Latin American documentary filmmaking: major works

American Documentary Filmmaking is the first volume written in English to explore Latin American documentary filmmaking with extensive and intelligent analysis. David William Foster, the leading authority on Latin American urban cultural production, provides rich, new interpretations on the production of gender, political persecution, historical conflicts, and exclusion from the mainstream in many of Latin America s most important documentary films. Foster provides a series of detailed examinations of major texts of Latin American filmmaking, discussing their textual production and processes of meaning. His analysis delves deeply into the world of Latin American film and brings forth a discourse of structure that has previously been absent from the fields of filmmaking and Latin American studies. This volume provides perspective on diverse and methodological approaches, pulling from a wide scope of cinematic traditions. Using his own critical readings and research, Foster presents his findings in terms that are accessible to non-Spanish speakers and Latin American film enthusiasts. A much-needed contribution to the field of Latin American documentary film, Foster s research and perspective will be a valuable source for those interested in film studies, gender studies, and culture.

In Memoriam: Jean Decock

822 In Memoriam: Jean Decock Readers of the French Review have been accustomed to seeing in each year’s February issue a detailed account of the previous year’s Cannes Film Festival. Its author, with his practiced eye and his inimitable style en pointillé managed, year after year, something approaching the impossible: a digest of dozens and dozens of films, an état présent of the medium of cinema in its French and international contexts; wise, often prescient readings of the artistic evolution of an extraordinary number of directors; and, always, his coups de cœur du Festival. Jean Decock left us in January of this year. He was the longest serving film review editor in the journal’s history, in which capacity he worked to make film a regular part of the French Review’s offerings. He built and nurtured the journal’s first true network of film enthusiasts. They were loyal to his rubric and wrote for it with pleasure because they understood he was striving to make the journal a place where film scholarship would be welcome. And for nearly 15 years after he handed the reins over to his successor and “retired,” Jean Decock published regularly on film and on theater. He never missed a review of the Festival, and thanks to him we felt like we were seated in the screening rooms with an immensely knowledgeable and generous companion. He would have appreciated the irony that his passing preceded by mere weeks the appearance of the issue containing his final Cannes review—too late for him to take a curtain call! That is as it should be: the very idea of one would have seemed absurd to this modest, lovely man. But it would have been richly deserved. Skidmore College John Anzalone ...

Brutal Mathematics: Narrative Structure in the Films of Chang Cheh

Abstract In the years shortly before Chang Cheh's death, the not-insubstantial segment of the Internet populated by Hong Kong film enthusiasts lit up with the possibly apocryphal news that the director, who had made scores of dynamic martial-arts films from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, had proclaimed that he would retire only after he had directed his 101st film.1 Alas, Chang did not live to see that milestone: he died in 2002, nine years removed from directing his 97th and final film, Ninja in Ancient China. The fact that he or someone else allegedly suggested as the capstone to his career a bold numerical marker is oddly suggestive of a curious patterning that recurs in Chang's many films.

Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India

AbstractThis paper offers a history of the creation and development of film societies in India from 1947 to 1980. Members of the film society movement consisted of important Indian film directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterji, Mani Kaul, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and Mrinal Sen, as well as film enthusiasts, numbering about 100,000 by 1980. The movement, confined though it was to members who considered themselves film aficionados, was propelled by debates similar to those that animated left-oriented cultural movements which originated in late colonial India, namely, the Progressive Writers Association in 1936, and the Indian People's Theatre Association in 1942. By looking at the film society movement as an early and sustained attempt at civil-social organization in postcolonial India, this paper highlights the two distinct definitions of ‘good cinema’—from an aesthetically sophisticated product to a radical political text—that were debated during the time of the movement.

Film festivals: a view from the inside

My time as a regular festival attendee has been relatively brief: four years' habitual travel as artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF); five years ‘on the circuit' before that as a critic and programmer. I have witnessed a period of extraordinary film festival proliferation, and throughout this time I have been in a position to experience the most solemnly highbrow and the most tawdrily decadent of the associated extremes – as well as all the plodding mundanity and intermittent minor revelations in between. I have also witnessed, within the UK context, some violent lurches in the perceived status of, and available support for, film festivals as hubs of film culture and industry: New Labour specifically committing itself in its 2005 manifesto to support of EIFF;1 the formation of the UK Film Council's Film Festival Strategy in 2008,2 and its dispersal of £4.5 million in funds to EIFF, the London Film Festival and various other significant national events; the economic crisis and the resulting dramatic drain on corporate and public support; the new coalition government's recent decision to abolish the UK Film Council, and the uncertainty left in its wake.3 I have, the whole time, been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the film festival generally and for EIFF specifically. And yet I have also wondered why there is this psychotic mushrooming of the format. Why the hordes of industry ‘insiders' are self-importantly packing their sunglasses and business cards for Cannes every year when so many of the films in the competition, the side strands and the market alike will swiftly sink without trace. What the real-world value is of the repetitious onslaught of ‘industry events' (heaven preserve us from another panel on digital distribution). And with film enthusiasts finding their fix in any number of new and instantaneous ways, and funding models looking increasingly insecure, I have wondered what the future holds.

Report on Canadian Film Archives

INTERNATIONALLY, there are Archives, Archives, Archives, from Film to TV - but where to put them and what to keep? Canada makes some progress. At almost every film festival, internationally, when early print of a classic turns up, the question permanently asked is where did that print come from? And the answer is usually from such and such an Archive in some part of the world. For Canadians, the Archive was a seldom visited place in Ottawa, where somewhere films in dented cans or broken boxes, hardly separated from papers, journals, and material having little to do with movies. In spite of the clamour from film enthusiasts, the federal government remained unmoved, while the staff, without temperature control, tried to keep them from becoming dead reels. Now, after years of pleading and asking the Dominion Government has finally built an astonishing film archive across the river from Ottawa in...

A new history of documentary film

A New History of Documentary Film, Second Edition offers a much-needed resource, considering the very rapid changes taking place within documentary media. Building upon the best-selling 2005 edition, Betsy McLane keeps the same chronological examination, factual reliability, ease of use and accessible prose style as before, while also weaving three new threads - Experimental Documentary, Visual Anthropology and Environmental/Nature Films - into the discussion. She provides emphasis on archival and preservation history, present practices, and future needs for documentaries. Along with preservation information, specific problems of copyright and fair use, as they relate to documentary, are considered. Finally, A History of Documentary Film retains and updates the recommended readings and important films and the end of each chapter from the first edition, including the bibliography and appendices. Impossible to talk learnedly about documentary film without an audio-visual component, a companion website will increase its depth of information and overall usefulness to students, teachers and film enthusiasts.

Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency in Film and History

Winner of the 2003 Ray and Pat Browne Book Award, given by the Popular Culture Association The contributors to Hollywood's White House examine the historical accuracy of these presidential depictions, illuminate their influence, and uncover how they reflect the concerns of their times and the social and political visions of the filmmakers. The volume, which includes a comprehensive filmography and a bibliography, is ideal for historians and film enthusiasts.

Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives

Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946-55. As this anthology reveals, however, his production was remarkably multifaceted. The essays included here - some newly commissioned, some reprinted, and others in translation - look at De Sica's varied career from many perspecives. Structured chronologically, the volume begins by introducing readers to De Sica's early popularity as an actor and singer during the years of Italian Fascism, and to his initial directorial efforts before the end of World War II. It was not until the postwar era, however, that De Sica made his mark in film history. Special attention is given to this critical phase of his career, which encompasses the neorealist films that made him famous: .Shoeshine., .Bicycle Thieves., .Miracle in Milan., and .Umberto D.. When the neorealist movement waned after 1955, De Sica returned to his roots in Neapolitan comedy for a series of commercially successful films starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Memorable works from this period include .Two Women. and .Marriage Italian Style. as well as .Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. , which won De Sica an Academy Award in 1965. In one of his final films, .The Garden of the Finzi Continis., he returned to the subject of World War II and to the human tragedy characteristic of his best neorealist productions. This fine anthology offers a comprehensive critical survey that covers the entire scope of De Sica's career, and is an excellent resource for students, critics and film enthusiasts.

Jules Verne on film: a filmography of the cinematic adaptations of his works, 1902 through 1997

Jules Verne - Voila! - is a name that resonates with visions of fantastic adventures and images of exotic exploits. In his voyages extraordinaires, the noted French author integrates his encyclopedic knowledge of science and geography with his ability to tell fascinating and entertaining tales, taking his readers on unprecedented journeys across the globe, into the earth, and out into space. This revered writer, who with his boundless imagination had hoped to contribute substantially to the world of letters, has surpassed that expectation to become coincidentally a significant influence on film. This comprehensive filmography not only offers an incisive analysis of Verne's epic creations, but also presents an examination of the films inspired by his stories and characters. If one tries to think of all the films adapted from the works of Jules Verne, a fair sampling might be easy to come up with. If one looks more closely at the plots and motifs of many other films, science fiction and otherwise, their origins are revealed to have been derived from Verne. For example, most film enthusiasts are familiar with Disney's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and a few may even be aware of the 1916 silent version. But Verne's classic undersea novel also provided the underpinnings for such other movies as Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Innerspace (1987). The central arrangement is by Verne's title with a brief thematic analysis of the novel. The entry then presents in chronological order all cinematic adaptations of that work, allowing the user to make comparative analyses of not only the movies but also their relationships to Verne's original story. Filmographic data are provided for each adaptation, along with a plot synopsis that blends critical commentary with an examination of the connection between the movie and Verne's work.

Hitchcock: the making of a reputation

From the beginning of his career, Alfred Hitchcock wanted to be considered an artist. Although his thrillers were immensely popular, and Hitchcock himself courted reviewers, he was, for many years, regarded as no more than a master craftsman. By the 1960s, though, critics began calling him an artist of unique vision and gifts. What happened to make Hitchcock's reputation as a true innovator and singular talent? Through a close examination of Hitchcock's personal papers, scripts, production notes, publicity files, correspondence, and hundreds of British and American reviews, Robert Kapsis here traces Hitchcock's changing critical fortunes. Vertigo, for instance, was considered a flawed film when first released; today it is viewed by many as the signal achievement of a great director. According to Kapsis, this dramatic change occurred because the making of the Hitchcock legend was not solely dependant on the quality of his films. Rather, his elevation to artist was caused by the successful blending of self-promotion, sponsorship by prominent members of the film community, and, most important, changes in critical theory which for the first time allowed for the idea of director as auteur Kapsis also examines the careers of several other filmmakers who, like Hitchcock, have managed to cross the line that separates craftsman from artist, and shows how Hitchcock's legacy and reputation shed light on the way contemporary reputations are made. In a chapter about Brian De Palma, the most reknowned thriller director since Hitchcock, Kapsis explores how Hitchcock's legacy has affected contemporary work in--and criticism of--the thriller genre. Filled with fascinating anecdotes and intriguingexcerpts, and augmented by interviews with Hitchcock's associates, this thoroughly documented and engagingly written book will appeal to scholars and film enthusiasts alike. Required reading for Hitchcock scholars...scrupulously researched, invaluable material for those who continue to ask: what made the master tick?--Anthony Perkins

Faith Hubley: An Interview

John and Faith Hubley broke away from Hollywood in the mid-1950s to form their own independent, small-scale studio in New York City, making animated films in an anti-Disney visual style that was closer in form and spirit to European surrealism and impressionism. They pioneered the use of name performers and of their own children with improvised dialogue. They sponsored marvelous jazz and new-music sound tracks. Their (mostly short) films were not about talking animals, but about adult and philosophical themes: the absurdity of war, the nuclear threat, environmental concerns, overpopulation, love, marriage, childhood development, spirituality, and feminism. The highly original and straight-from-theheart films that resulted from their collaboration have been feted worldwide-with three Oscars (out of seven nominations to date), film festival citations from Jerusalem to Zagreb, and museum anointings. Their films were never block-booked into theaters and their household ledger did not always balance, but the Hubleys became exemplars for an entire upand-coming generation of non-traditional animated film-makers. The thirty-odd Hubley short films and two features are not only beloved by film enthusiasts, but by generations of schoolchildren, and nowadays they have a healthy second life on Disney and Pyramid video (see list following interview). John Hubley was the senior artist. A noted background painter for Walt Disney on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi, he left Disney after the bitter strike of 1941 and was among the founders of the alternative United Productions of America, source of Mr. Magoo and of a strong flat graphic style featuring parody, serious subject matter, and abstract forms. John Hubley was a staunch unionist and cultural progressive whose moonlighting included production design for the 1947 staging of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo and collaboration with director Joseph Losey on Losey's early films. When the anti-Communist blacklist descended on Hollywood, Hubley suddenly found himself unemployable, and at a turning-point in his career. The blacklist precipitated his move into animated commercials and, circuitously, into marriage and partnership with Faith Hubley. Their mutual pact to produce at least one short film per year according to their own artistic standards, and to sit down for the evening meal with their children, lasted until his untimely death in 1977.

Film and American Studies: Introduction

buffs who seem to be obsessed with directorial styles or the minutiae of film language. Of course, a myopic concern for texts is familiar to students of American literature. New Critics of the late 1940s and early 1950s were guilty of such shortsightedness, and many who now identify themselves with American Studies recoiled. At the other extreme of film studies today are traditional historians who seem to respond exclusively to fashionable thematic concerns such as racism and sexism. Their insensitivity to cinematic details echoes the error of those who, like V. L. Parrington, ignored the literary qualities of American writing because of ideological objections. In American Studies, the past forty years have seen an attempt to balance textual and contextual studies. Film studies have yet to reach such an equilibrium. essays in this special issue of the American Quarterly are all concerned with the relationship of text to context. Vivian C. Sobchack refines cinematic approaches to a film usually discussed in political or literary terms in The Grapes of Wrath (1940): Thematic Emphasis Through Visual Style. The Negro Soldier (1944): Film Propaganda in Black and White by Thomas Cripps and David Culbert reveals the importance of exhaustive research to film scholarship while explaining how content is communicated by a visual medium bent on persuasion. Kenneth Hey, in Ambivalence as a Theme in On the Waterfront (1954): An Interdisciplinary Approach to Film Study, decodes the ideology behind a classic film, while carefully relating background assumptions to specific elements of mise en scene, the use of the camera, and acting. Leslie Fishbein, in The Snake Pit (1948): Sexist Nature of Sanity, and Charles Maland, in Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus, explain their films in terms of intellectual and political background often lacking in the writings of film enthusiasts. John E. O'Connor, in Teaching Film and American Culture: A Survey of Texts, describes film-oriented texts suitable for use in American Studies courses. In my bibliographical essay, I point out sources for those who want to integrate motion picture research with work in political science, history, or literature. Taken as a whole, this special issue demonstrates that film studies are compatible with the concept of interdisciplinary analysis. These essays reveal collectively the importance of both fiction and nonfiction films to research and teaching in American Studies.

Confessions of a Festival Goer

In 1976 film festivals will be 40 years old. On this occasion, Gideon Bachmann asks a few pertinent and vexing questions concerning this institution, based on his observations of Venice, Cannes, London, Tehran, and other festivals. The pattern set by the London Festival has been followed closely by the New York Festival and to some extent by the San Francisco Festival and more recently by the enormously successful Los Angeles Filmex: all aim directly at their resident film enthusiasts, and have gradually minimized society involvement and expensive publicity gimmickry.

Icem — The Early Years

Before the Second World War, there were few occasions for educational film enthusiasts in Britain to meet their fellow enthusiasts in other European countries and little exchange of information or films — in spite of the existence of the Institute por la Cinematografica Educativa, a body set up by the League of Nations. I do remember meeting Bertil Lauritzen of Sweden and Ebbe Neergaard of Denmark and seeing some excellent silent films from Germany: ‘Der Schwirrfiug der Kolibris’, ‘Talbildung’ and ‘Flussanzapfung’.