I was just commenting last week on Jason's post that soon we'll be talking about SCMS 2010. If you check the site under Conference Submission Forms - where you originally submitted your proposal - there should be a status update to the right of your proposal info.
Hope everybody did OK, though I know it was a tough year. I hope as many old and new Mabuse faces as possible will be present.
I thought everybody could "edit" and add their panel below. I would love to see what everybody is doing for 2010.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hollywood History / Jewish History: The Past and Future of a Popular Jewish Identity
Chair: Scott Balcerzak (Northern Illinois University)
1. Vincent Brook (University of Southern California), "The Four Jazz Singers: Mapping the Jewish Assimilation Narrative"
2. Steven Carr (Indiana University/Purdue University), "Movies, Jews, and Profits to Lose: Hollywood and the European Market Before World War II"
3. Scott Balcerzak (Northern Illinois University), "‘Whitefacing’ the Nebbish: Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence"
4. Michael Rennett (Moorpark College), "An Eye for an Eye?: Post-Holocaust Issues of Revenge and Forgiveness in Spielberg’s Films"
Respondent: Lester Friedman (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)
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1940s Cinema: Affective Form and World Historical Change
Chair, Chris Cagle (Temple University)
Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex), “The Geopolitics of Decoration: Powell and Pressburger, Orientalism and 'Stuff'”
Jennifer Fay (Michigan State University), “Film Aesthetics and Democratic Feeling”
Karl Schoonover (Michigan State University), “Before Our Eyes: Cinema as Humanism”
Chris Cagle (Temple University), “Reappraising Melodrama: Nostalgia, Historical Trauma, and the 1940s Sentimental Drama”
Respondent: Corey Creekmur (University of Iowa)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comics and Film: The Aesthetics of Adaptation
Chair, Drew Morton (University of California-Los Angeles)
[NOTE: Titles of papers may have changed and an extra person may have been added since this was originally a Tokyo '09 Panel.]
Bob Rehak (Swarthmore College): Watchmen's Frames of Reference
Chris Hagenah (University of California-Santa Barbara): Deleuze and the System of Comics
Drew Morton (UCLA): Winsor McCay and the Adaptation of Space
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Popular Film Criticism in Media Culture
Chair: Will Scheibel (Indiana University - Bloomington)
James Kendrick (Baylor University), "Internet Criticism 15 Years Later"
Rachel Thibault (University of Massachusetts - Amherst), "What We Talk About When We Talk About Movie Love: Gendered Cinephilia in the Digital Age"
Will Scheibel (Indiana University - Bloomington), "The Mexican New Wave: Directors, Reviewers, and the Flow of Cultural Reputation"
Lorrie Palmer (Indiana University - Bloomington), "Past-Future Imperfect: Will Smith and the Dialogue of Race"
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Title : THE CONTEMPORARY MEDIA INDUSTRIES: CASE STUDIES OF MEDIA IN TRANSITION
Chair : Kimberly Owczarski (University of Arizona)
Chuck Tryon (Fayetteville State University), "Redbox or Red Envelope, or What Happens When the Infinite Aisle Swings through the Grocery Store"
Courtney Brannon Donoghue (University of Texas), "Global Cataclysms and Connectivity: Sony and the Contemporary Tentpole Picture"
Alisa Perren (Georgia State University), "A Brand New Identity: The Revival of the Made-for-TV Movie"
Kimberly Owczarski (University of Arizona), "Simple Surrender or Smart Strategy? NBC’s Decision to Air THE JAY LENO SHOW"
____________________________________________________________________________________
Title : 'Brer Rabbit with a Switchblade': 35 Years with (and without) Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin
Chair : Jason Sperb (Indiana University)
Michael Gillespie (Ohio University), "The Racial Grotesque and Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin (1975)"
Jason Sperb (Indiana University), "A Period of Acute Racial Sensitivity: Coonskin, Disney’s Song of the South and White Flights of Fancy"
Jason LaRiviere (Columbia University), "A Didactic Tragedy: On the place of Coonskin in Hip Hop Culture"
Respondent: Roopali Mukherjee (City University of New York, Queens College)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The New Woman in 20th Century Crime Films
Chair: Sarah Delahousse (Wayne State University)
Sarah Delahousse, "American Detectives, French Criminals: An Examination of Crime, Modernity and the New Woman in AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN (1913), THE HAZARDS OF HELEN (1914-17), LES VAMPIRES (1915) and JUDEX (1917)"
Kathleen Murray (University of Pittsburgh), "Doing the Legwork: The Investigating Woman in TRAFFIC IN SOULS (1913), THE MYSTERY OF THE DOUBLE CROSS (1917), and THE PENALTY (1920)"
Anne Morey (Texas A&M University), "The New Woman as Criminal: Films and Novels by Alice Duer Miller and Adela Rogers St. Johns"
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: "On Motion Capture: Technologies and Theories of Digital Kinesthesia in the Moving Image"
Chair: Jenna Ng (Umeå University)
Emanuel Jannasch (Dalhousie University), "Gollum vs the Academy: The Captivity and Death of Motion, or The Animated and the Dead: The Fate of Motion in Captivity"
Pasi Väliaho (Goldsmiths, University of London),“Motion Capture, Cinematic Image and Kinesthetic Consciousness”
Trond Lundemo (Stockholm University), "Motion Capture and Video Compression: Pattern Recognition Techniques in the Digital Moving Image"
Jenna Ng (Umeå University), "Crossing Space-Time-Action: Motion Capture and the Ontology of Performance in HAPPY FEET"
Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
An Idea to Reinvigorate Mabuse...
Since we're coming to the end of the decade (I know, not officially, but for what everyone refers to as the Aughts), and every critic and their mother seems to be coming up with a "Top 10 of the Decade" list, why don't we create something similar but with a little twist to it? A series called "Things We Loved About the Aughts," if you will. Basically you can pick some part of pop culture from the Aughts that you may think was under-appreciated and you can make a scholarly argument as to why that film or album or whatever should be looked back upon and appreciated or how it may have influenced the rest of the decade. It shouldn't take too long to write a piece, since it's invariably about something you enjoy, and it would certainly help re-energize things here. Plus, I think you can submit as many posts as you want instead of just limiting it to one.
Would anybody else be interested in participating in this?
Would anybody else be interested in participating in this?
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
CFP: Canadian Journal of Film Studies
The editors of CJFS/RCEC - Charles Acland (Communication Studies) and Catherine Russell (Film Studies) at Concordia University, Montreal - seek submissions of manuscripts in film and moving image studies for the following special topics issues. The recommended maximum length for articles is 6000 words. La Revue publie les manuscrits rédigés en français ou en anglais. |
FILM PUBLICS RECONSIDERED: Few concepts have been as influential to contemporary film studies as the concept of the public sphere, as theorized by Habermas, Negt and Kluge. Especially as advanced in Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon, the public sphere has been a central way in which film and media scholars have written about the relationships between text, space and the prospects for democratic life. With this special issue, we are seeking work that reassesses the legacy of this framework. Papers may be exemplary applications of the concept of the public sphere (e.g. examining film festivals or non-theatrical exhibition) or may be theoretical surveys and evaluations.
Deadline for FILM PUBLICS RECONSIDERED
September 1, 2009
STAR PERFORMANCE: Film and media stars are by definition multi-media figures, and evolve as a complex mix of individually embodied- and industrially-generated assemblages of gesture, expression and narrative. This special issue seeks research that specifically addresses the intersection of performance and persona in star-making, and star-sustaining, enterprises. Papers may investigate star performance styles, cross-media manifestations of star personas, and star labour in creative cultural industries.
Deadline for submission for STAR PERFORMANCE
December 1, 2009
EXPANDED SCREENS: The site, situation and occasion of moving image culture is so varied that it can no longer be contained under Gene Youngblood’s groundbreaking category of “expanded cinema.” Accordingly, this special issue will assemble research that explores the outermost boundaries of the implications and consequences of our broadening screen culture. Future cinema, miniaturized formats, clip culture, game aesthetics, and digital moving image circulation are all possible areas of research attention for contributions to this issue.
Deadline for submission for EXPANDED SCREENS
March 1, 2010
As always, we continue to seek high quality research for general topic issues. The CJFS/RCEC is Canada’s leading scholarly venue for moving image studies, refereed using a double-blind review process. We publish innovative research on all topics and formats related to moving image studies. We also regularly publish book reviews.
Complete guidelines for contributors can be found in each issue of the journal as well as on our website at http://www.filmstudies.ca/journal
Friday, August 21, 2009
Initial Responses to ‘Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction’ – Part Two
Earlier this month, Jason was kind enough to post his initial responses to our co-edited collection Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture. I think he covered many important points and raised logical concerns, though I also wanted to provide some thoughts. Overall, I am very pleased with the volume and proud of the intelligent and often provocative work supplied by our contributors. Despite this, ever the pessimist, I’ll begin by addressing some of the concerns raised thus far.
As Jason has suggested, in so many words, the most frustrating aspect of doing a technology-focused collection is that the length of the publication process ultimately makes some topics feel conspicuously missing. For example, Blue-Ray and Netflix are not mentioned despite both feeling intensely significant to questioning cinema culture today. As Jason also outlined, a good portion of the first volume is based in work explicitly on CGI, which might disappoint those readers wishing for a longer look at home viewing. To our defense, I believe these chapters (such as Tobey Crockett, Kevin Fisher, Lisa Purse, and my own) has a place (almost ironically since on CGI) in historically grounding the collection within a longstanding tradition of cinephilia. I place Jason, Jenna Ng, Robert Burgoyne, and other fantastic work with some CGI foci into a different category here - more explicitly about cinephilia itself within a contextual sense in the book. But let me elaborate on my original point ‘defending’ the other “CGI chapters” and their purpose.
Of the two co-editors, I always felt a bit more like the “historical guy,” less about questioning cinephilia as contemporary or anticipatory (as Jason so wonderfully does). I am more focused on the historical significance - in so much as I authored much of the ‘history of cinephilia’ section of the intro and a chapter on the mo-cap actor as, in a way, historical precedent. In short, I am the less “sexy” of the two as I looked more backward than forward. Thus, of the editors, I probably more expressly fit the label that Jason coined for himself a while back, “a steward of ideas,” for this particular project. I am not an active blogger, despite some failed attempts in the past to do so. More importantly, I never have written in any great length my personal definition of cinephilia today as movement, experience, or practice . . . and probably never will.
Like many scholars (more of us cinephiles than are willing to admit), I find myself lost in the glorious details of history or simply lost in the image (digital or otherwise) itself. Thus, I believe the CGI-heavier sections of the book - ‘Ontologies’ and, especially, ‘ Bodies’ - to be crucial since the writers do the work of cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction. In considering the movements of the past century, cinephiles were less concerned about reflecting on their social movement or even the technological changes. (Both topics, I know, must be key components to a collection of this sort, though). They more so practiced on individual films, often on the images themselves. Thus, we see practice at work in our collection’s later sections, from the theoretically-rigid academic to the intelligent blogger. As such, the play on Walter Benjamin is one of the reasons I ultimately grew to like the current title. (Something I might have yet to admit to my co-editor - I like it now more than the originally planned title). In the volume, we see writers doing the work of cinephilia, not only contemplating on the movement or the technology – but working on image itself to suggest something profound about this moment in cinema.
Personally, the collection will probably always have a strong resonance for me since it marked a period of my life rocked by profound changes both of a personal and professional nature. Almost as a wonderful (thought at times, demanding) escape, the collection allowed for collaboration with a close friend and helped me make connections within the world of cinephilia – both based in academia and the blogosphere. Thus, I am happy to see the book foster a community within a format (the essay collection) that often invites the non-collaborative.
Of all the collection’s accomplishments, having it exist as, in many ways, a truly collaborative entity might be the most impressive. This could have something to do with the editors’ original intentions, but I think it more so can be credited to our contributors/collaborators. To me, this accomplishment ultimately overshadows any individual omissions of topics or personal laments by us scholars (at this point, I am thinking of my work on Andy Serkis is too historically limited in its tie to the original King Kong – oh well, the curse of a 30s scholar). The collection brings together bloggers, scholars, and journalists in an attempt to blur classifications found for too long in film studies. In the end, some of my favorite points in the book find Zach Campbell and Girish Shambu’s blog work and letters project providing key insights that, due to limitations of style, could never be properly expressed in academic essays.
In short, such moments reminded us we are all cinephiles with something to contribute. As Christian Keathley so kindly suggests in his preface, the collection does “what cinephiles do best: watch, think, talk, rethink, and write in ways that demonstrate a passionate commitment to the cinema, and that stimulate that passion in others.”
So, here's to the 'work!' Here's to Vol. 2!
As Jason has suggested, in so many words, the most frustrating aspect of doing a technology-focused collection is that the length of the publication process ultimately makes some topics feel conspicuously missing. For example, Blue-Ray and Netflix are not mentioned despite both feeling intensely significant to questioning cinema culture today. As Jason also outlined, a good portion of the first volume is based in work explicitly on CGI, which might disappoint those readers wishing for a longer look at home viewing. To our defense, I believe these chapters (such as Tobey Crockett, Kevin Fisher, Lisa Purse, and my own) has a place (almost ironically since on CGI) in historically grounding the collection within a longstanding tradition of cinephilia. I place Jason, Jenna Ng, Robert Burgoyne, and other fantastic work with some CGI foci into a different category here - more explicitly about cinephilia itself within a contextual sense in the book. But let me elaborate on my original point ‘defending’ the other “CGI chapters” and their purpose.
Of the two co-editors, I always felt a bit more like the “historical guy,” less about questioning cinephilia as contemporary or anticipatory (as Jason so wonderfully does). I am more focused on the historical significance - in so much as I authored much of the ‘history of cinephilia’ section of the intro and a chapter on the mo-cap actor as, in a way, historical precedent. In short, I am the less “sexy” of the two as I looked more backward than forward. Thus, of the editors, I probably more expressly fit the label that Jason coined for himself a while back, “a steward of ideas,” for this particular project. I am not an active blogger, despite some failed attempts in the past to do so. More importantly, I never have written in any great length my personal definition of cinephilia today as movement, experience, or practice . . . and probably never will.
Like many scholars (more of us cinephiles than are willing to admit), I find myself lost in the glorious details of history or simply lost in the image (digital or otherwise) itself. Thus, I believe the CGI-heavier sections of the book - ‘Ontologies’ and, especially, ‘ Bodies’ - to be crucial since the writers do the work of cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction. In considering the movements of the past century, cinephiles were less concerned about reflecting on their social movement or even the technological changes. (Both topics, I know, must be key components to a collection of this sort, though). They more so practiced on individual films, often on the images themselves. Thus, we see practice at work in our collection’s later sections, from the theoretically-rigid academic to the intelligent blogger. As such, the play on Walter Benjamin is one of the reasons I ultimately grew to like the current title. (Something I might have yet to admit to my co-editor - I like it now more than the originally planned title). In the volume, we see writers doing the work of cinephilia, not only contemplating on the movement or the technology – but working on image itself to suggest something profound about this moment in cinema.
Personally, the collection will probably always have a strong resonance for me since it marked a period of my life rocked by profound changes both of a personal and professional nature. Almost as a wonderful (thought at times, demanding) escape, the collection allowed for collaboration with a close friend and helped me make connections within the world of cinephilia – both based in academia and the blogosphere. Thus, I am happy to see the book foster a community within a format (the essay collection) that often invites the non-collaborative.
Of all the collection’s accomplishments, having it exist as, in many ways, a truly collaborative entity might be the most impressive. This could have something to do with the editors’ original intentions, but I think it more so can be credited to our contributors/collaborators. To me, this accomplishment ultimately overshadows any individual omissions of topics or personal laments by us scholars (at this point, I am thinking of my work on Andy Serkis is too historically limited in its tie to the original King Kong – oh well, the curse of a 30s scholar). The collection brings together bloggers, scholars, and journalists in an attempt to blur classifications found for too long in film studies. In the end, some of my favorite points in the book find Zach Campbell and Girish Shambu’s blog work and letters project providing key insights that, due to limitations of style, could never be properly expressed in academic essays.
In short, such moments reminded us we are all cinephiles with something to contribute. As Christian Keathley so kindly suggests in his preface, the collection does “what cinephiles do best: watch, think, talk, rethink, and write in ways that demonstrate a passionate commitment to the cinema, and that stimulate that passion in others.”
So, here's to the 'work!' Here's to Vol. 2!
Monday, August 03, 2009
CFP: Socialist Cinema, from Eisenstein to Chavez
Society for Cinema & Media Studies 2010 Conference, March 17-21
Los Angeles
Filmmakers and producers in socialist countries have always been involved in the discussion ofthe cinematic form that better suits a popular cinema and its distinction from art house cinema. This panel seeks papers which explore the theory and practice of socialist cinema from Eisenstein through Cinema Novo to contemporary cinema promoted by 21st century socialist governments such as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. While all these agents advocate a truly national cinema for the people, there is no agreement as to what the exact definition of popular/populist cinema is and the role of cinematic experimentation in shaping a political relationship between film and spectators. Earlier discussions in this direction sustained between Rocha and Godard or Carlos Diegues and Rui Guerra perfectly illustrate this debate and may be still influencing the way revolutionary cinema is conceived nowadays.
Proposals are welcome on topics that include, but are not limited to the following:
- materialization of socialist principles in cinema
- legacy of socialist filmmaking in contemporary practices
- Latin American 21st century filmmaking
- Third Cinema
- Populist Cinema
Please send a 300 word abstract along with a bibliography and a brief bio as a Word attachment to mercedes [at] hku.hk no later than August 20. Submitters will be notified whether their proposals have been accepted for the panel by August 25. For more details on the Conference, please visit the SCMS website: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Mercedes Vazquez
The University of Hong Kong
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Los Angeles
Filmmakers and producers in socialist countries have always been involved in the discussion ofthe cinematic form that better suits a popular cinema and its distinction from art house cinema. This panel seeks papers which explore the theory and practice of socialist cinema from Eisenstein through Cinema Novo to contemporary cinema promoted by 21st century socialist governments such as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. While all these agents advocate a truly national cinema for the people, there is no agreement as to what the exact definition of popular/populist cinema is and the role of cinematic experimentation in shaping a political relationship between film and spectators. Earlier discussions in this direction sustained between Rocha and Godard or Carlos Diegues and Rui Guerra perfectly illustrate this debate and may be still influencing the way revolutionary cinema is conceived nowadays.
Proposals are welcome on topics that include, but are not limited to the following:
- materialization of socialist principles in cinema
- legacy of socialist filmmaking in contemporary practices
- Latin American 21st century filmmaking
- Third Cinema
- Populist Cinema
Please send a 300 word abstract along with a bibliography and a brief bio as a Word attachment to mercedes [at] hku.hk no later than August 20. Submitters will be notified whether their proposals have been accepted for the panel by August 25. For more details on the Conference, please visit the SCMS website: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Mercedes Vazquez
The University of Hong Kong
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Initial Responses to 'Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction'
author's note: Scott has since posted his own thoughts here. js
When I finally received a copy, I was deeply touched and so proud of everyone's hard work that went into the collection. Let me be very clear that Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Vol. 1, is an excellent collection of work by film scholars and critics uniformily of the first order. And yet I am never so kind to myself.
Every time I look back at my work after its been published, whether its a book, a collection, or a lowly article in an obscure journal no one will ever actually read, I recall screenwriter Howard Koch's observation about his own work on co-writing Casablanca (in some ways still my all-time favorite film):
I'd like to think of this as an open thread for folks--friends and strangers alike--to post some of their responses, complimentary and 'constructive' to the collection. It will help shape Volume 2 and it will, I hope, help people better frame and negotiate responses to the ideas in the book itself. Since it is a book intentionally, if distractedly at times, about cinephilia in an age of participatory culture, such a thread as this only makes sense.
I will, of course, start with myself, since I am at this point as much an audience member as anyone else. I co-wrote the introduction with Scott and contributed two essays to it--one a republished article from Film Criticism ("Sensing an Intellectual Nemesis", which originally appeared in 2007), the other an article written solely for the book ("Deja Vu for Something that Hasn't Happened Yet"). I also read every chapter of the book at least 3 or 4 times in the course of the editing process, which itself took over two years. And yet I claim no inside truth or ownership of anything now that the words have been published and sent off in circulation.
I will say, for my limited part in the collection, that I do not like the "Nemesis" essay--it is too tentative in getting where I wanted to go in theorizing cinephilia. It is more a recounting of cinephilia scholarship and less an intervention into digital effects--the opposite of how I would write that if I were doing it today. Ironically, I very much want to write that paper now, as the asethetics of digital cinema is slowly emerging as my next area of focus, but do not have any time as I finish revisions on my dissertation (which is a reception history of Disney's Song of the South, and an all-together different matter).
I was devastated recently to read a comment on an internet forum discussing the aesthetics of Blu-Ray (the particular area I want to write about eventually) where one person commented that they had ordered the book:
I was also devastated because of course the collection should. Its a fascinating subject for the cinephile and for a theorist of the ontological nature of film, and absolutely falls under the umbrella of "digital reproduction." On the other hand, in fairness to us, Blu-Ray was non-existent other than as a niche hypothetical when the idea for our project first began (mid-2005/early-2006), and still largely an emergent unknown by the time the essays were commisioned in late 2006.
Yet still this comment points to how a big problem with the collection's focus is that it conceives of cinephilia's influence in such a wide scope of possibility that invariably many people will not find what they are hoping to find in the collection, because they are defining "cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction" much differently than Scott and I originally did (and honestly, that wasn't even originally the book's title--another story for another day).
The alternate definitions are every bit as valid, just different. For instance, I feel compelled here to reiterate something Scott and I brush upon in the introduction--this project began as a panel at the international meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Vancouver 2006 that was dealing exclusively with digital visual effects, where Tobey Crockett and Jenna Ng forst presented their work. The collection then spread out from there.
So the project began as a study on visual imagery and that explains the CGI-heavy emphasis of the articles (likely to be a not invalid criticism of the book). Girish and Zach's excellent collection of letters was intended partly as a later addition explicitly to help correct this imbalance, and later volumes will, I hope, be less digital effects-oriented.
I am saddened, for example, that my second essay (of which I am somewhat more proud as it better lays out my own theory of cinephilia as I've come to believe in it) is one of the only ones to take up the issue of cinephilia and DVDs--or how home viewing and movie collecting affects being a cinephile (Zach's first of two excellent contributions, in this case on "Ghosts before Breakfast", does talk about watching movies on a computer).
Most of the essays are either about blogging or CGI, with the exception of Burgoyne's wonderful essay on avant-garde artists, and cinephilia related to home viewing and private collecting sort of falls in the cracks between. I suppose I like my second essay better in part because its one of the few on cinephilia to touch on theatrical experiences, genre, affect, blogging, and DVDs, as well as offer a more heftly theoretical framework than "Nemesis" does (how come more people don't use Barthes when writing about cinephilia?).
"Deja Vu" better accounts for a film's "life-cycle," as it were, in its circulation and personal duration as a cinephiliac text. (Truth be told, I only included the "Nemesis" essay in the collection because, as the one previously published work in it, I felt it would have made the project more "marketable" to a press at a time when--as second year PhD students then--neither Scott nor I had built up the scholarly credibility or cinephiliac authority that we perhaps have now).
I'm starting to ramble. Anyway, this collection is a strong compilation of distinguished and promising scholars, as well as a vital contribution (a crucial snapshot in time) from some of the leading cinephiles in the English-speaking world. But I see how some will be disappointed, and not without good reason.
But that's okay, and that's--in part--what this is for: "the unlimited possibilities of digital culture reminds us that, in short, cinephilia has not yet been invented!"
Your thoughts?
Best,
Jason
Jamais Vu
When I finally received a copy, I was deeply touched and so proud of everyone's hard work that went into the collection. Let me be very clear that Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Vol. 1, is an excellent collection of work by film scholars and critics uniformily of the first order. And yet I am never so kind to myself.
Every time I look back at my work after its been published, whether its a book, a collection, or a lowly article in an obscure journal no one will ever actually read, I recall screenwriter Howard Koch's observation about his own work on co-writing Casablanca (in some ways still my all-time favorite film):
"looking back now, I see only its flaws."I suppose that might help frame the following personal comments (and I speak only for myself, and only about my own contributions).
I'd like to think of this as an open thread for folks--friends and strangers alike--to post some of their responses, complimentary and 'constructive' to the collection. It will help shape Volume 2 and it will, I hope, help people better frame and negotiate responses to the ideas in the book itself. Since it is a book intentionally, if distractedly at times, about cinephilia in an age of participatory culture, such a thread as this only makes sense.
I will, of course, start with myself, since I am at this point as much an audience member as anyone else. I co-wrote the introduction with Scott and contributed two essays to it--one a republished article from Film Criticism ("Sensing an Intellectual Nemesis", which originally appeared in 2007), the other an article written solely for the book ("Deja Vu for Something that Hasn't Happened Yet"). I also read every chapter of the book at least 3 or 4 times in the course of the editing process, which itself took over two years. And yet I claim no inside truth or ownership of anything now that the words have been published and sent off in circulation.
I will say, for my limited part in the collection, that I do not like the "Nemesis" essay--it is too tentative in getting where I wanted to go in theorizing cinephilia. It is more a recounting of cinephilia scholarship and less an intervention into digital effects--the opposite of how I would write that if I were doing it today. Ironically, I very much want to write that paper now, as the asethetics of digital cinema is slowly emerging as my next area of focus, but do not have any time as I finish revisions on my dissertation (which is a reception history of Disney's Song of the South, and an all-together different matter).
I was devastated recently to read a comment on an internet forum discussing the aesthetics of Blu-Ray (the particular area I want to write about eventually) where one person commented that they had ordered the book:
"A disdain for grain apparently is a normal reaction for an audience that is used to watching reality television. I love grain myself, its part of the aesthetics of cinema. I've just ordered the book Cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction, which will no doubt touch on this subject, as it seems to be a pretty major issue for a vast portion of the audience."I was devastated because the book doesn't discuss this anywhere, and because she/he's probably not the only one hoping that it will. There is talk about the digital image's panoramic nature in the work of Ng, Burgoyne and myself, but not in the way that the poster was referring to--the grain of the image which Blu-Ray intensifies.
I was also devastated because of course the collection should. Its a fascinating subject for the cinephile and for a theorist of the ontological nature of film, and absolutely falls under the umbrella of "digital reproduction." On the other hand, in fairness to us, Blu-Ray was non-existent other than as a niche hypothetical when the idea for our project first began (mid-2005/early-2006), and still largely an emergent unknown by the time the essays were commisioned in late 2006.
Yet still this comment points to how a big problem with the collection's focus is that it conceives of cinephilia's influence in such a wide scope of possibility that invariably many people will not find what they are hoping to find in the collection, because they are defining "cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction" much differently than Scott and I originally did (and honestly, that wasn't even originally the book's title--another story for another day).
The alternate definitions are every bit as valid, just different. For instance, I feel compelled here to reiterate something Scott and I brush upon in the introduction--this project began as a panel at the international meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Vancouver 2006 that was dealing exclusively with digital visual effects, where Tobey Crockett and Jenna Ng forst presented their work. The collection then spread out from there.
So the project began as a study on visual imagery and that explains the CGI-heavy emphasis of the articles (likely to be a not invalid criticism of the book). Girish and Zach's excellent collection of letters was intended partly as a later addition explicitly to help correct this imbalance, and later volumes will, I hope, be less digital effects-oriented.
I am saddened, for example, that my second essay (of which I am somewhat more proud as it better lays out my own theory of cinephilia as I've come to believe in it) is one of the only ones to take up the issue of cinephilia and DVDs--or how home viewing and movie collecting affects being a cinephile (Zach's first of two excellent contributions, in this case on "Ghosts before Breakfast", does talk about watching movies on a computer).
Most of the essays are either about blogging or CGI, with the exception of Burgoyne's wonderful essay on avant-garde artists, and cinephilia related to home viewing and private collecting sort of falls in the cracks between. I suppose I like my second essay better in part because its one of the few on cinephilia to touch on theatrical experiences, genre, affect, blogging, and DVDs, as well as offer a more heftly theoretical framework than "Nemesis" does (how come more people don't use Barthes when writing about cinephilia?).
"Deja Vu" better accounts for a film's "life-cycle," as it were, in its circulation and personal duration as a cinephiliac text. (Truth be told, I only included the "Nemesis" essay in the collection because, as the one previously published work in it, I felt it would have made the project more "marketable" to a press at a time when--as second year PhD students then--neither Scott nor I had built up the scholarly credibility or cinephiliac authority that we perhaps have now).
I'm starting to ramble. Anyway, this collection is a strong compilation of distinguished and promising scholars, as well as a vital contribution (a crucial snapshot in time) from some of the leading cinephiles in the English-speaking world. But I see how some will be disappointed, and not without good reason.
But that's okay, and that's--in part--what this is for: "the unlimited possibilities of digital culture reminds us that, in short, cinephilia has not yet been invented!"
Your thoughts?
Best,
Jason
Jamais Vu
Sunday, July 26, 2009
[Reminder] CFP: Popular Film Criticism in Media Culture
Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference, March 17-21, 2010
The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, Los Angeles, CA
Deadline for submissions to this panel: August 9, 2009 11:59 PM CST
Submissions are still welcome for a panel that considers the relationship between film reviewing and media culture. Those interested in submitting have two weeks until the deadline. Papers addressing film criticism in ways that relate to the overall conference theme (SCMS at 50: Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past) are particularly encouraged.
Cinema scholars such as Robert Kapsis, Barbara Klinger, and Charles Maland have examined the role of reviews in discursively constructing popular genres and directorial reputations during the Classical Hollywood era. As professional film critics writing for corporate-owned print publications continue losing their jobs due to buyouts, layoffs, and reorganizations, the past three years has witnessed a flourishing of criticism online. Further, the so-called “amateur” critic has risen to prominence, evidenced by review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes, movie websites such as IMDB, and blogs dedicated to film analysis and evaluation. This panel aims to investigate not only the status of the film critic in the contemporary mediascape, but also the impact of print and Internet film reviewing in the context of global cinema culture.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
- Film reviews as historical evidence
- The future of film criticism
- Canonicity, connoisseurship, and taste politics
- Reviewing, academia, and cinephilia
- Fans, audiences, and popular opinion
- Moviegoing and the DVD market
- Film criticism and film advertising
- The cultural presence of the public intellectual
- Print media vs. new media and the “professional” vs. the “amateur”
- Coverage of international/independent films, art house retrospectives, and film festivals
- Genre definitions (e.g. David Edelstein’s coinage of “torture porn”)
- The cult of the director
- The influence of the late Manny Farber
Send 300 word abstract (including a 5 item bibliography), with full academic CV, as separate e-mail attachments to: Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2010 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, Los Angeles, CA
Deadline for submissions to this panel: August 9, 2009 11:59 PM CST
Submissions are still welcome for a panel that considers the relationship between film reviewing and media culture. Those interested in submitting have two weeks until the deadline. Papers addressing film criticism in ways that relate to the overall conference theme (SCMS at 50: Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past) are particularly encouraged.
Cinema scholars such as Robert Kapsis, Barbara Klinger, and Charles Maland have examined the role of reviews in discursively constructing popular genres and directorial reputations during the Classical Hollywood era. As professional film critics writing for corporate-owned print publications continue losing their jobs due to buyouts, layoffs, and reorganizations, the past three years has witnessed a flourishing of criticism online. Further, the so-called “amateur” critic has risen to prominence, evidenced by review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes, movie websites such as IMDB, and blogs dedicated to film analysis and evaluation. This panel aims to investigate not only the status of the film critic in the contemporary mediascape, but also the impact of print and Internet film reviewing in the context of global cinema culture.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
- Film reviews as historical evidence
- The future of film criticism
- Canonicity, connoisseurship, and taste politics
- Reviewing, academia, and cinephilia
- Fans, audiences, and popular opinion
- Moviegoing and the DVD market
- Film criticism and film advertising
- The cultural presence of the public intellectual
- Print media vs. new media and the “professional” vs. the “amateur”
- Coverage of international/independent films, art house retrospectives, and film festivals
- Genre definitions (e.g. David Edelstein’s coinage of “torture porn”)
- The cult of the director
- The influence of the late Manny Farber
Send 300 word abstract (including a 5 item bibliography), with full academic CV, as separate e-mail attachments to: Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2010 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Hollywood History / Jewish History: The Past and Future of a Popular Jewish Identity (SCMS 2010)
I've decided to try for a panel at SCMS 2010.
See Below:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hollywood History / Jewish History: The Past and Future of a Popular Jewish Identity (SCMS 2010)
A Jewish presence in Hollywood history is undeniably defined through a substantial yet complex influence upon American popular culture. From the founding of the Hollywood studio system by Jewish moguls to the early creative presence of such stage stars as Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor to the musical influence of songwriters Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern - the birth of the modern entertainment industry in the first half of the century was defined by the ingenuity and creativity of immigrant Jews and their offspring. Yet, almost paradoxically, during this influential period, xenophobia and anti-Semitism was openly expressed by numerous important people, institutions, and legislative acts. With this conflict in mind, this panel explores the presence of a Jewish influence in the Hollywood of yesterday and today. It will examine this ethnic history through the complicated cultural narratives of segregation, resistance, and assimilation that define Jewish identity in gentile American society.
In keeping with the conference’s theme of “Archiving/Screening/Mobilizing the Pasts and Futures of SCMS,” this panel hopes to include work that is both archival (documenting and analyzing Jewish-American history in Hollywood) and theoretical (welcoming work employing ethnic, postmodern, feminist, queer, ideological, and reception theory). Topics can include studies of classic or modern Jewish filmmakers or stars, Jewish influence upon studio production, Jewish/gentile-audience studies, de-Semitization/re-Semitization in popular texts, and other variations upon the panel topic.
Please send an abstract of maximum 500 words (including a 5 item bibliography), with a short bio as a Word attachment via email to sbalcerzak@niu.edu no later than August 12. Expect a response by August 16. Please consult the SCMS guidelines before you submit.
Scott Balcerzak
Assistant Professor of Film and Literature
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL, 60115
See Below:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hollywood History / Jewish History: The Past and Future of a Popular Jewish Identity (SCMS 2010)
A Jewish presence in Hollywood history is undeniably defined through a substantial yet complex influence upon American popular culture. From the founding of the Hollywood studio system by Jewish moguls to the early creative presence of such stage stars as Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor to the musical influence of songwriters Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern - the birth of the modern entertainment industry in the first half of the century was defined by the ingenuity and creativity of immigrant Jews and their offspring. Yet, almost paradoxically, during this influential period, xenophobia and anti-Semitism was openly expressed by numerous important people, institutions, and legislative acts. With this conflict in mind, this panel explores the presence of a Jewish influence in the Hollywood of yesterday and today. It will examine this ethnic history through the complicated cultural narratives of segregation, resistance, and assimilation that define Jewish identity in gentile American society.
In keeping with the conference’s theme of “Archiving/Screening/Mobilizing the Pasts and Futures of SCMS,” this panel hopes to include work that is both archival (documenting and analyzing Jewish-American history in Hollywood) and theoretical (welcoming work employing ethnic, postmodern, feminist, queer, ideological, and reception theory). Topics can include studies of classic or modern Jewish filmmakers or stars, Jewish influence upon studio production, Jewish/gentile-audience studies, de-Semitization/re-Semitization in popular texts, and other variations upon the panel topic.
Please send an abstract of maximum 500 words (including a 5 item bibliography), with a short bio as a Word attachment via email to sbalcerzak@niu.edu no later than August 12. Expect a response by August 16. Please consult the SCMS guidelines before you submit.
Scott Balcerzak
Assistant Professor of Film and Literature
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL, 60115
Thursday, July 02, 2009
SCMS LA Update
Looks like the Tokyo crowd has been brought into the LA conference...if they so choose of course!
From the SCMS Website: http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1136&Itemid=1
Dear SCMS members:
We are writing to you with important news about our 2010 Los Angeles conference and our plans to incorporate as much of the Tokyo conference program as possible into it.
Please be assured that there will be no shortage of space for new panels and workshops in Los Angeles. We have added a full day to the 2010 conference schedule as well as additional rooms and slots for each day of the five-day event, which will now take place on March 17-21 (Wednesday through Sunday). We typically schedule 220 panels and workshops at our annual conferences. In Los Angeles, we are anticipating having nearly twice that amount. The 2010 Los Angeles conference will not be compressed.
In order to facilitate conference planning, please carefully read the following information:
1. All papers, panels, and workshops listed in the official 2009 Tokyo conference program [http://www.cmstudies.org/documents/SCMS%202009%20INT-web%203.pdf] are automatically accepted for the 2010 Los Angeles conference, pending notification to the SCMS office by 1 August 2009.
2. We request the cooperation of panel and workshop Chairs--including Chairs assigned to panels assembled from the 2009 Open Call proposals--in determining whether their panel or workshop will be included in the 2010 Los Angeles conference and which participants will be presenting papers. Chairs must be in touch immediately with each participant of their panel or workshop to determine whether they will attend the 2010 Los Angeles conference.
3. Panel and workshop Chairs must communicate via email with the SCMS Office by 15 July to confirm whether or not their panels or workshops will be part of the 2010 Los Angeles conference. Please send this email to office@cmstudies.org. If the SCMS Office has not heard from a panel or workshop Chair by 15 July, the SCMS Office will directly contact participants on that panel or workshop to determine their interest in participating in the 2010 Los Angeles conference. The deadline for all Chairs and individuals to inform the SCMS Office of the status of their panel, paper or workshop is 1 August.
4. The SCMS Office will work with the 2010 Program Committee to facilitate the scheduling of the 2009 Tokyo panels and workshops within the 2010 Los Angeles conference. In order to accommodate as many participants as possible in the 2010 conference, the Program Committee may add participants to those 2009 Tokyo panels and workshops that have open slots, where appropriate, including originally pre-constituted panels and workshops.
5. For those individuals who had papers accepted for the Tokyo conference but did not register for it, and who are therefore not listed on the official Tokyo conference program, you will need to apply to the 2010 Los Angeles conference via the normal submission process. You may submit the same paper you submitted for the 2009 conference. There is no guarantee, however, that your previously accepted paper will be accepted for the 2010 conference.
6. Normal deadlines (September 1) and procedures will apply for new participants in the 2010 conference. The online proposal submission form is available at http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=476&Itemid=87]
7. Individuals from the Tokyo conference who agree to participate in the Los Angeles conference are subject to the posted restrictions on SCMS conference participation, as are new applicants for 2010. Individuals can present only one paper and can serve in only two different capacities (e.g., present a paper and serve as a panel chair; present a paper and participate in a workshop; present a paper and serve as a respondent; serve as a panel chair and participate in a workshop, etc.). These policies are in place to assure the widest participation of all SCMS members in our annual conferences and can be accessed on the SCMS website: http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=100
Thank you very much for your immediate attention to this matter. We appreciate your assistance and look forward to the celebration of our 50th year as a Society in Los Angeles in 2010.
Sincerely,
The SCMS Board of Directors
Patrice Petro, President
Stephen Prince, Past President
Chris Holmlund, President-Elect
Mary Celeste Kearney, Secretary
Paula Massood, Treasurer
Scott Curtis, Member of the Board
Hollis Griffin, Member of the Board
Michele Hilmes, Member of the Board
Victoria Johnson, Member of the Board
Diane Negra, Member of the Board
Jacqueline Stewart, Member of the Board
Michael Zryd, Member of the Board
From the SCMS Website: http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1136&Itemid=1
Dear SCMS members:
We are writing to you with important news about our 2010 Los Angeles conference and our plans to incorporate as much of the Tokyo conference program as possible into it.
Please be assured that there will be no shortage of space for new panels and workshops in Los Angeles. We have added a full day to the 2010 conference schedule as well as additional rooms and slots for each day of the five-day event, which will now take place on March 17-21 (Wednesday through Sunday). We typically schedule 220 panels and workshops at our annual conferences. In Los Angeles, we are anticipating having nearly twice that amount. The 2010 Los Angeles conference will not be compressed.
In order to facilitate conference planning, please carefully read the following information:
1. All papers, panels, and workshops listed in the official 2009 Tokyo conference program [http://www.cmstudies.org/documents/SCMS%202009%20INT-web%203.pdf] are automatically accepted for the 2010 Los Angeles conference, pending notification to the SCMS office by 1 August 2009.
2. We request the cooperation of panel and workshop Chairs--including Chairs assigned to panels assembled from the 2009 Open Call proposals--in determining whether their panel or workshop will be included in the 2010 Los Angeles conference and which participants will be presenting papers. Chairs must be in touch immediately with each participant of their panel or workshop to determine whether they will attend the 2010 Los Angeles conference.
3. Panel and workshop Chairs must communicate via email with the SCMS Office by 15 July to confirm whether or not their panels or workshops will be part of the 2010 Los Angeles conference. Please send this email to office@cmstudies.org. If the SCMS Office has not heard from a panel or workshop Chair by 15 July, the SCMS Office will directly contact participants on that panel or workshop to determine their interest in participating in the 2010 Los Angeles conference. The deadline for all Chairs and individuals to inform the SCMS Office of the status of their panel, paper or workshop is 1 August.
4. The SCMS Office will work with the 2010 Program Committee to facilitate the scheduling of the 2009 Tokyo panels and workshops within the 2010 Los Angeles conference. In order to accommodate as many participants as possible in the 2010 conference, the Program Committee may add participants to those 2009 Tokyo panels and workshops that have open slots, where appropriate, including originally pre-constituted panels and workshops.
5. For those individuals who had papers accepted for the Tokyo conference but did not register for it, and who are therefore not listed on the official Tokyo conference program, you will need to apply to the 2010 Los Angeles conference via the normal submission process. You may submit the same paper you submitted for the 2009 conference. There is no guarantee, however, that your previously accepted paper will be accepted for the 2010 conference.
6. Normal deadlines (September 1) and procedures will apply for new participants in the 2010 conference. The online proposal submission form is available at http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=476&Itemid=87]
7. Individuals from the Tokyo conference who agree to participate in the Los Angeles conference are subject to the posted restrictions on SCMS conference participation, as are new applicants for 2010. Individuals can present only one paper and can serve in only two different capacities (e.g., present a paper and serve as a panel chair; present a paper and participate in a workshop; present a paper and serve as a respondent; serve as a panel chair and participate in a workshop, etc.). These policies are in place to assure the widest participation of all SCMS members in our annual conferences and can be accessed on the SCMS website: http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=100
Thank you very much for your immediate attention to this matter. We appreciate your assistance and look forward to the celebration of our 50th year as a Society in Los Angeles in 2010.
Sincerely,
The SCMS Board of Directors
Patrice Petro, President
Stephen Prince, Past President
Chris Holmlund, President-Elect
Mary Celeste Kearney, Secretary
Paula Massood, Treasurer
Scott Curtis, Member of the Board
Hollis Griffin, Member of the Board
Michele Hilmes, Member of the Board
Victoria Johnson, Member of the Board
Diane Negra, Member of the Board
Jacqueline Stewart, Member of the Board
Michael Zryd, Member of the Board
Monday, June 15, 2009
CFP: Passions: Promises and Perils Conference
Call for Abstracts
Conference hosted by the Graduate Program in Communication
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Date: October 16-17, 2009
E-mail: passions_conference [at] googlegroups.com to contact organizers
Deadline to submit abstracts has been extended to Monday, June 30, 2009.
Abstracts need not explicitly engage "passions." The conference theme is used
to organize panel discussions of the scholarly investments that inform our work.
While this is the organizing theme, we use it to signify broadly the social,
cultural, and economic investments that organize the things we study, and how we
study them.
Concept
Commitments and investments in the world emerge from passions. These passions
form the basis for promise and peril, peace and violence, oppression and
liberation. Yet why is it that passions can contradict self-interest? How are
passions constructed and manipulated to various ends? How are they
both “natural” and naturalized? Where are passions enacted, to what ends, and
for whose benefit?
Passions inform and mediate communication in both limiting and enabling ways.
Passion(s) viewed as a cultural performance is/are bounded, identified, and
interpreted variously depending on locations of race, ethnicity, gender, and
sexuality. They influence patterns of consumer culture and behavior in both
material and virtual worlds. Passions mobilize policy decisions. They prevent
and promote intercultural dialogue. The communicative lives of fantasy,
imitation, play, sport, and representation begin and end in passions.
We invite submissions that examine and/or demonstrate such significant
commitments and investments from a variety of perspectives and areas of
communication study including but not limited to: film, media, and cultural
studies; critical theory and philosophy; social interaction; intercultural
communication and ethnography of communication; race, gender, and sexuality;
cultural policy and political economy; rhetorical studies; critical pedagogy;
and performance studies. As a conference we are concerned with the place of
passion(s) both inside and outside of the academy. That is, we focus on
passions not only “out there,” but “in here” as well, and the benefits and
limitations of our academic investments. With passions as our theme we hope to
foster fresh responses to concerns with theory, method, culture, and politics
facing communication scholars today.
Process
This conference treats Passions as an organizing theme. Small panels will be
structured with the objective of stimulating mutually informing dialogue.
The deadline to submit abstracts of 250 words maximum is Monday, June 29, 2009.
Submissions should be e-mailed to: passions_conference[at] googlegroups.com.
***The conference is open to BOTH STUDENTS AND FACULTY.
Invited participants will be asked to submit short position papers on an issue
related to the subject of their abstract. Position papers will be made
available to attendees on our conference website, requiring each participant to
present only a brief summary of their paper at the conference. Panel time will
be devoted to guided discussion among panel members and the audience.
We are also soliciting submissions of alternative format research presentations
and creative works, including but not limited to: performance, multimedia
installation, and film and video work dealing directly with social themes (such
as social documentary, ethnography and auto-ethnography, and experimental audio-
visual works which encode social, cultural, political, and economic issues).
Abstracts describing the presentations are due on Monday, June 29, 2009.
Submission Deadlines
• Abstracts due: Monday, June 29, 2009
• Notice of acceptance sent: Monday, July 2009
• Invited position papers due: Friday, September 18, 2009
Example Panel Topics
The following are examples of topics around which panels may be organized. But
submissions are not required to conform to any of these topics.
Dis/locating Passions: Spaces Where Passion is Expected, Assumed, or Not
Permitted
Discourses of Agency and Structure
Discourses of Social Movements & Social Justice
Discourses in Race, Racism, and Inequality
Future of the Field of Communication
Passion and Discourses of Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
Passion and Excess (of Body, Knowledge, etc.)
Passion in Film, Media, and Technology
Passions in Cultural Consumption
Pedagogy & Communication
Performing and Rethinking Communication
Conference hosted by the Graduate Program in Communication
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Date: October 16-17, 2009
E-mail: passions_conference [at] googlegroups.com to contact organizers
Deadline to submit abstracts has been extended to Monday, June 30, 2009.
Abstracts need not explicitly engage "passions." The conference theme is used
to organize panel discussions of the scholarly investments that inform our work.
While this is the organizing theme, we use it to signify broadly the social,
cultural, and economic investments that organize the things we study, and how we
study them.
Concept
Commitments and investments in the world emerge from passions. These passions
form the basis for promise and peril, peace and violence, oppression and
liberation. Yet why is it that passions can contradict self-interest? How are
passions constructed and manipulated to various ends? How are they
both “natural” and naturalized? Where are passions enacted, to what ends, and
for whose benefit?
Passions inform and mediate communication in both limiting and enabling ways.
Passion(s) viewed as a cultural performance is/are bounded, identified, and
interpreted variously depending on locations of race, ethnicity, gender, and
sexuality. They influence patterns of consumer culture and behavior in both
material and virtual worlds. Passions mobilize policy decisions. They prevent
and promote intercultural dialogue. The communicative lives of fantasy,
imitation, play, sport, and representation begin and end in passions.
We invite submissions that examine and/or demonstrate such significant
commitments and investments from a variety of perspectives and areas of
communication study including but not limited to: film, media, and cultural
studies; critical theory and philosophy; social interaction; intercultural
communication and ethnography of communication; race, gender, and sexuality;
cultural policy and political economy; rhetorical studies; critical pedagogy;
and performance studies. As a conference we are concerned with the place of
passion(s) both inside and outside of the academy. That is, we focus on
passions not only “out there,” but “in here” as well, and the benefits and
limitations of our academic investments. With passions as our theme we hope to
foster fresh responses to concerns with theory, method, culture, and politics
facing communication scholars today.
Process
This conference treats Passions as an organizing theme. Small panels will be
structured with the objective of stimulating mutually informing dialogue.
The deadline to submit abstracts of 250 words maximum is Monday, June 29, 2009.
Submissions should be e-mailed to: passions_conference[at] googlegroups.com.
***The conference is open to BOTH STUDENTS AND FACULTY.
Invited participants will be asked to submit short position papers on an issue
related to the subject of their abstract. Position papers will be made
available to attendees on our conference website, requiring each participant to
present only a brief summary of their paper at the conference. Panel time will
be devoted to guided discussion among panel members and the audience.
We are also soliciting submissions of alternative format research presentations
and creative works, including but not limited to: performance, multimedia
installation, and film and video work dealing directly with social themes (such
as social documentary, ethnography and auto-ethnography, and experimental audio-
visual works which encode social, cultural, political, and economic issues).
Abstracts describing the presentations are due on Monday, June 29, 2009.
Submission Deadlines
• Abstracts due: Monday, June 29, 2009
• Notice of acceptance sent: Monday, July 2009
• Invited position papers due: Friday, September 18, 2009
Example Panel Topics
The following are examples of topics around which panels may be organized. But
submissions are not required to conform to any of these topics.
Dis/locating Passions: Spaces Where Passion is Expected, Assumed, or Not
Permitted
Discourses of Agency and Structure
Discourses of Social Movements & Social Justice
Discourses in Race, Racism, and Inequality
Future of the Field of Communication
Passion and Discourses of Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
Passion and Excess (of Body, Knowledge, etc.)
Passion in Film, Media, and Technology
Passions in Cultural Consumption
Pedagogy & Communication
Performing and Rethinking Communication
Sunday, May 31, 2009
CFP: Popular Film Criticism in Media Culture
Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference, March 17-21, 2010
The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, Los Angeles, CA
Deadline for submissions to this panel: August 9, 2009 11:59 PM CST
Submissions sought for a panel that considers the relationship between film reviewing and media culture. Papers addressing film criticism in ways that relate to the overall conference theme (SCMS at 50: Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past) are particularly welcome.
Cinema scholars such as Robert Kapsis, Barbara Klinger, and Charles Maland have examined the role of reviews in discursively constructing popular genres and directorial reputations during the Classical Hollywood era. Over the past three years, however, more than 55 professional film critics have lost their jobs, a statistic reported by Sean P. Means of The Salt Lake Tribune, who attributes this plight to buyouts, layoffs, reassignment, retirement, or the death of their print publications. Meanwhile, online criticism continues to flourish, as evidenced by review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes, movie websites such as IMDB, and blogs dedicated to film analysis and evaluation. This panel aims to investigate not only the status of the film critic in the contemporary mediascape, but also the impact of print and Internet film reviewing on global cinema culture.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
- Film reviews as historical evidence
- The future of film criticism
- Reviewing, academia, and cinephilia
- Popular opinion, moviegoing, and the DVD market
- Film criticism and film advertising
- The cultural presence of the public intellectual
- Canonicity, connoisseurship, and taste politics
- Print media vs. new media
- Coverage of international/independent films and film festivals
- Genre definitions (e.g. David Edelstein’s coinage of “torture porn”)
- The cult of the director
- The influence of the late Manny Farber
Send 300 word abstract and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2010 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47404
The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, Los Angeles, CA
Deadline for submissions to this panel: August 9, 2009 11:59 PM CST
Submissions sought for a panel that considers the relationship between film reviewing and media culture. Papers addressing film criticism in ways that relate to the overall conference theme (SCMS at 50: Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past) are particularly welcome.
Cinema scholars such as Robert Kapsis, Barbara Klinger, and Charles Maland have examined the role of reviews in discursively constructing popular genres and directorial reputations during the Classical Hollywood era. Over the past three years, however, more than 55 professional film critics have lost their jobs, a statistic reported by Sean P. Means of The Salt Lake Tribune, who attributes this plight to buyouts, layoffs, reassignment, retirement, or the death of their print publications. Meanwhile, online criticism continues to flourish, as evidenced by review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes, movie websites such as IMDB, and blogs dedicated to film analysis and evaluation. This panel aims to investigate not only the status of the film critic in the contemporary mediascape, but also the impact of print and Internet film reviewing on global cinema culture.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
- Film reviews as historical evidence
- The future of film criticism
- Reviewing, academia, and cinephilia
- Popular opinion, moviegoing, and the DVD market
- Film criticism and film advertising
- The cultural presence of the public intellectual
- Canonicity, connoisseurship, and taste politics
- Print media vs. new media
- Coverage of international/independent films and film festivals
- Genre definitions (e.g. David Edelstein’s coinage of “torture porn”)
- The cult of the director
- The influence of the late Manny Farber
Send 300 word abstract and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2010 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47404
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Ways of Watching: Tenth Annual Summer Symposium, July 24-25, 2009
Ways of Watching: Tenth Annual Summer Symposium, July 24-25, 2009
Northeast Historic Film, Bucksport, Maine USA
For two days this summer on the coast of Maine in the 1916 Alamo Theatre, scholars, filmmakers, archivists, students, and members of the public will gather to learn and discuss how and where art, educational, and amateur films have been shown. More than 90 presenters have shared their knowledge since the symposium was established in 2000. Our traditions include lively conversation, evening screenings, and a lobster dinner. The Northeast Historic Film annual symposium welcomes the following authors, archivists, teachers, and researchers who will bring forward the immensely varied practices of exhibition and viewing of non-commercial film. Please register by July 1.
Program details, registration, and lodging information at http://oldfilm.org/symp_2009 ; or contact jessica [at] oldfilm.org.
From Introspection to Convivial Participation: Departures from Black Box Topology in Contemporary Video Art Display
Cristina Albu, Ph.D. student, Department of History of Art and Architecture,
University of Pittsburgh
Western Ways Gone South: George Herbert as Failed Showman
Jennifer L. Jenkins, Ph.D., Division Head, Film and Television Studies,
School of Media Arts, University of Arizona
This Splendid Temple: Watching Films in the Wanamaker Department Stores
Caitlin McGrath, University of Chicago
Purposeful Pleasures: Social Awareness and Amateur Film Practic e in Britain, ca. 1927-1977
Heather Norris Nicholson, Ph.D., Department of History and Economic History, Manchester Metropolitan University, England
Watching Medical Films
Kirsten Ostherr, Associate Professor of English, Rice University
Spectatorship in the Classroom
Jennifer Peterson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Film Studies Program, University of Colorado
What You See is What You Get: Watching Swedish Private Film Collections
from the 1960s and the 1970s
Cecilia Mörner, Ph.D., School of Humanities and Media, Dalarna University,
Falun, Sweden
Through Trondheim in a Time Machine: Local Film History as Part of Contemporary Audiovisual Practices
Bjørn Sørenssen, Ph.D., Department of Art and Media Studies,
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
’Round the World and Back Again: An Examination of the Production and Exhibition of Adelaide Pearson Travel Films
Kimberly Tarr, NYU Moving Image Archives and Preservation Program
Our Cameras, Our Lives: Lesbian Home Movies, ca. 1935 – 1999
Sharon Thompson, author, Going All the Way: Teenage Girls’ Tales of Sex, Romance,
and Pregnancy, Hill & Wang/Farrar Straus Giroux
Watching on Cell Phones, Online and on Television
Bilge Yesil, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, CUNY-College of Staten Island
ORGANIZERS
Snowden Becker
School of Information
University of Texas, Austin
Janna Jones
School of Communication
Cinema and Visual Culture Program
Northern Arizona University
Mark Neumann
School of Communication
Northern Arizona University
Northeast Historic Film, Bucksport, Maine USA
For two days this summer on the coast of Maine in the 1916 Alamo Theatre, scholars, filmmakers, archivists, students, and members of the public will gather to learn and discuss how and where art, educational, and amateur films have been shown. More than 90 presenters have shared their knowledge since the symposium was established in 2000. Our traditions include lively conversation, evening screenings, and a lobster dinner. The Northeast Historic Film annual symposium welcomes the following authors, archivists, teachers, and researchers who will bring forward the immensely varied practices of exhibition and viewing of non-commercial film. Please register by July 1.
Program details, registration, and lodging information at http://oldfilm.org/symp_2009 ; or contact jessica [at] oldfilm.org.
From Introspection to Convivial Participation: Departures from Black Box Topology in Contemporary Video Art Display
Cristina Albu, Ph.D. student, Department of History of Art and Architecture,
University of Pittsburgh
Western Ways Gone South: George Herbert as Failed Showman
Jennifer L. Jenkins, Ph.D., Division Head, Film and Television Studies,
School of Media Arts, University of Arizona
This Splendid Temple: Watching Films in the Wanamaker Department Stores
Caitlin McGrath, University of Chicago
Purposeful Pleasures: Social Awareness and Amateur Film Practic e in Britain, ca. 1927-1977
Heather Norris Nicholson, Ph.D., Department of History and Economic History, Manchester Metropolitan University, England
Watching Medical Films
Kirsten Ostherr, Associate Professor of English, Rice University
Spectatorship in the Classroom
Jennifer Peterson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Film Studies Program, University of Colorado
What You See is What You Get: Watching Swedish Private Film Collections
from the 1960s and the 1970s
Cecilia Mörner, Ph.D., School of Humanities and Media, Dalarna University,
Falun, Sweden
Through Trondheim in a Time Machine: Local Film History as Part of Contemporary Audiovisual Practices
Bjørn Sørenssen, Ph.D., Department of Art and Media Studies,
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
’Round the World and Back Again: An Examination of the Production and Exhibition of Adelaide Pearson Travel Films
Kimberly Tarr, NYU Moving Image Archives and Preservation Program
Our Cameras, Our Lives: Lesbian Home Movies, ca. 1935 – 1999
Sharon Thompson, author, Going All the Way: Teenage Girls’ Tales of Sex, Romance,
and Pregnancy, Hill & Wang/Farrar Straus Giroux
Watching on Cell Phones, Online and on Television
Bilge Yesil, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, CUNY-College of Staten Island
ORGANIZERS
Snowden Becker
School of Information
University of Texas, Austin
Janna Jones
School of Communication
Cinema and Visual Culture Program
Northern Arizona University
Mark Neumann
School of Communication
Northern Arizona University
Monday, May 18, 2009
VAP Position in Digital Media and TV Studies at IU (09-10)
a great opportunity, if you're a fit. js
The Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington has been authorized to hire a Visiting Assistant Professor for the 2009-2010 academic year (August 2009-May 2010) to teach courses in digital media and television studies. We invite candidates from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds and encourage applicants whose teaching and research interests are grounded in critical humanities scholarship concerning the cultural, political, and communicative aspects of digital game studies. Ph.D. and teaching experience required. Applications will be reviewed starting May 21, 2009. Indiana University is an equal opportunity employer.
Send inquiries, CV, and names of three references to:
Gregory A. Waller
Chair, Department of Communication and Culture
gwaller [ at ] indiana.edu
The Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington has been authorized to hire a Visiting Assistant Professor for the 2009-2010 academic year (August 2009-May 2010) to teach courses in digital media and television studies. We invite candidates from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds and encourage applicants whose teaching and research interests are grounded in critical humanities scholarship concerning the cultural, political, and communicative aspects of digital game studies. Ph.D. and teaching experience required. Applications will be reviewed starting May 21, 2009. Indiana University is an equal opportunity employer.
Send inquiries, CV, and names of three references to:
Gregory A. Waller
Chair, Department of Communication and Culture
gwaller [ at ] indiana.edu
Brief Notes on Two Summer Indie Movies: The Girlfriend Experience and The Brothers Bloom
Brief Notes on Two Summer Indie Movies
While I kicked off the summer movie season proper with J.J. Abram's Star Trek and can tell you that I enjoyed it, having not seen the other films or any of the television series, I remain unsure of exactly what my analysis can entail that would be worthy of reading. The film is far from perfect, but my criticisms remain largely aesthetic such as the overuse of a glowing filter/lighting technique everyone seems to be talking about and handheld camera at unnecessary moments. Star Trek is this year's Iron Man...I just hope there is something on par with The Dark Knight. This noted, I feel like my notes on two other summer films, Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom, while brief and far from complete, can offer more than my elementary review of Star Trek.
The Girlfriend Experience
Steven Soderbergh, as I have described elsewhere, is a master of what I have called "twin cinema." He is filmmaker who crosses the border between indie and mainstream rather easily and while some of these efforts undoubtedly fail (The Good German, Full Frontal) and others succeed (Out of Sight, Che), they always are intellectually engaging and worthy of viewing (even the low-bar of Ocean's 12). The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh's second low budget/day and date release film for Magnolia Pictures and 2929, does not match the intense experience of Bubble. The problem with The Girlfriend Experience is that Soderbergh seems to have once again over-relied on homage. Whereas his reliance on Casablanca and The Third Man crippled The Good German in many respects, Soderbergh's reliance on the "world's oldest profession" preoccupation of Jean-Luc Godard have taken much of the bite out of Girlfriend Experience.
Porn star Sasha Grey stars as Chelsea, a high-priced call girl who provides clients with the title of the movie: an experience in which sex almost always is present, but along side a night of extravagant dinners and trips to the local cinema. When she is off the clock, she spends her spare time keeping a journal (which are essentially characterless chronicles of the previous night's work, included a list of the clothing she wore) and going out with her boyfriend Chris (Christopher Santos). I should note that Chris is aware of Chelsea's occupation and is, for the most part, accepting. After all, he essentially performs the same services and makes the same compromises as Chelsea in his own occupation as a gym trainer. The film, a 77 minute non-linear narrative, finds its focal point in an analysis of the social obstacles that Chelsea must construct in order to engage in this line of work, which essentially cripples her attempts at a non-professional romantic relationship. Yet, after spending my last quarter in a Jean-Luc Godard class and revisiting Vivre Sa Vie and 2 ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais D'Elle, I could not help but wonder what is new about this approach. While Soderbergh tries to contextualize it differently by consistently alluding to the harsh economic climate of the United States in the days running up to the 2008 election, it does not differentiate itself enough to be engaging to a viewer already familiar with its line of engagement.
With regard to the performance by Sasha Grey, who undoubtedly has a presence, it remains difficult to evaluate. While she often comes off as wooden, it remains unclear to me whether she is a poor actress or quite a good one by utilizing this wooden characterization to highlight the mask she is forced to wear to be a prostitute. If I had to make a take one side or the other, I would tend to drift towards the good. A cameo of note comes from film critic Glenn Kenny as a escort reviewer simply known as "The Erotic Connoisseur" which climaxes (pun intended) with a street rendition of "Everyone's a Critic." To quote Juliette in "2 ou 3 Choses" with relation to my thoughts on the film, "To define myself, one word: indifference." Maybe a second viewing will change my opinions. After all, I still felt engaged by it and find myself thinking about it a great deal, so from that standpoint it is worth watching but, especially after Che and Bubble, I still feel a tinge of disappointment.
The Brothers Bloom
Director Rian Johnson's follow-up to his superb high school-noir Brick takes another genre and tilts it on its head: the con man flick. Johnson discussed in a post-screening Q&A how this genre can be traditionally distancing to a viewer due to its reliance on a hall of mirrors structure in which cons are favored over people. Watching films like David Mamet's House of Games or Christopher Nolan's The Prestige for the first time, I certainly felt a distance and only upon repeated viewings did I start to walk away with a greater appreciation. The con man genre is a tight rope to walk and Rian Johnson's film proved to be quite the feat.
My notes will be brief and vague, due to the nature of the genre and the film and my fear of showing too much of Johnson's hand. The film begins with the brothers Bloom, Bloom (Adrian Brody) and Stephen (Mark Ruffalo), two of the greatest con men in this Wes Anderson-esque world of 40s suits, delightful banter, and 60s rock. Stephen is the master of the con, writing and planning his brother into the consistent role of the brokenhearted bait. Bloom, as the years and cons progress, has become under whelmed with his role and intends to retire to an island alone before being talked into one last con. The mark? An epileptic photographer, millionaire, and hobby collector named Penelope (Rachel Weisz), whom Bloom must trick into falling in love with him in order for the swindle to progress.
While the first two-acts of the film follow the Mamet-esque emphasis on trickery, Johnson never completely loses sight of the characters and utilizes a third-act, which initially appears unnecessary, as a means of underlining his intent. The third-act is what differentiates itself from the genre and while I held initial fears upon its unveiling, it leads the film towards perfection. The cast here, of course, is incredibly solid. Ruffalo might have benefited from some additional screen time, particularly with Brody alone in order to sketch out their relationship a bit more, but this is a minor quibble. Brody plays his usual sap, much like his role in The Darjeeling Limited except this film should show Wes Anderson what it is like to make a good movie within his stylistic preoccupations again. Weisz is quite amazing in a role of a complete eccentric but, like Audrey Tautou in Amelie, the quirks never overwhelm the person and the audience cannot help but follow Bloom in falling in love with her. There are some lively supporting roles here as well by Robbie Coltrane and Maximilian Schell but the real highlight in this band of outsiders is Babel actress and Academy Award nominee Rinko Kikuchi as the mute demolitions expert Bang Bang. My enthusiasm for this film cannot go understated and if these brief reflections do not make you want to see it, let me just say what else the film has to offer: a cat with a wooden leg and a roller skate.
While I kicked off the summer movie season proper with J.J. Abram's Star Trek and can tell you that I enjoyed it, having not seen the other films or any of the television series, I remain unsure of exactly what my analysis can entail that would be worthy of reading. The film is far from perfect, but my criticisms remain largely aesthetic such as the overuse of a glowing filter/lighting technique everyone seems to be talking about and handheld camera at unnecessary moments. Star Trek is this year's Iron Man...I just hope there is something on par with The Dark Knight. This noted, I feel like my notes on two other summer films, Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom, while brief and far from complete, can offer more than my elementary review of Star Trek.
The Girlfriend Experience
Steven Soderbergh, as I have described elsewhere, is a master of what I have called "twin cinema." He is filmmaker who crosses the border between indie and mainstream rather easily and while some of these efforts undoubtedly fail (The Good German, Full Frontal) and others succeed (Out of Sight, Che), they always are intellectually engaging and worthy of viewing (even the low-bar of Ocean's 12). The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh's second low budget/day and date release film for Magnolia Pictures and 2929, does not match the intense experience of Bubble. The problem with The Girlfriend Experience is that Soderbergh seems to have once again over-relied on homage. Whereas his reliance on Casablanca and The Third Man crippled The Good German in many respects, Soderbergh's reliance on the "world's oldest profession" preoccupation of Jean-Luc Godard have taken much of the bite out of Girlfriend Experience.
Porn star Sasha Grey stars as Chelsea, a high-priced call girl who provides clients with the title of the movie: an experience in which sex almost always is present, but along side a night of extravagant dinners and trips to the local cinema. When she is off the clock, she spends her spare time keeping a journal (which are essentially characterless chronicles of the previous night's work, included a list of the clothing she wore) and going out with her boyfriend Chris (Christopher Santos). I should note that Chris is aware of Chelsea's occupation and is, for the most part, accepting. After all, he essentially performs the same services and makes the same compromises as Chelsea in his own occupation as a gym trainer. The film, a 77 minute non-linear narrative, finds its focal point in an analysis of the social obstacles that Chelsea must construct in order to engage in this line of work, which essentially cripples her attempts at a non-professional romantic relationship. Yet, after spending my last quarter in a Jean-Luc Godard class and revisiting Vivre Sa Vie and 2 ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais D'Elle, I could not help but wonder what is new about this approach. While Soderbergh tries to contextualize it differently by consistently alluding to the harsh economic climate of the United States in the days running up to the 2008 election, it does not differentiate itself enough to be engaging to a viewer already familiar with its line of engagement.
With regard to the performance by Sasha Grey, who undoubtedly has a presence, it remains difficult to evaluate. While she often comes off as wooden, it remains unclear to me whether she is a poor actress or quite a good one by utilizing this wooden characterization to highlight the mask she is forced to wear to be a prostitute. If I had to make a take one side or the other, I would tend to drift towards the good. A cameo of note comes from film critic Glenn Kenny as a escort reviewer simply known as "The Erotic Connoisseur" which climaxes (pun intended) with a street rendition of "Everyone's a Critic." To quote Juliette in "2 ou 3 Choses" with relation to my thoughts on the film, "To define myself, one word: indifference." Maybe a second viewing will change my opinions. After all, I still felt engaged by it and find myself thinking about it a great deal, so from that standpoint it is worth watching but, especially after Che and Bubble, I still feel a tinge of disappointment.
The Brothers Bloom
Director Rian Johnson's follow-up to his superb high school-noir Brick takes another genre and tilts it on its head: the con man flick. Johnson discussed in a post-screening Q&A how this genre can be traditionally distancing to a viewer due to its reliance on a hall of mirrors structure in which cons are favored over people. Watching films like David Mamet's House of Games or Christopher Nolan's The Prestige for the first time, I certainly felt a distance and only upon repeated viewings did I start to walk away with a greater appreciation. The con man genre is a tight rope to walk and Rian Johnson's film proved to be quite the feat.
My notes will be brief and vague, due to the nature of the genre and the film and my fear of showing too much of Johnson's hand. The film begins with the brothers Bloom, Bloom (Adrian Brody) and Stephen (Mark Ruffalo), two of the greatest con men in this Wes Anderson-esque world of 40s suits, delightful banter, and 60s rock. Stephen is the master of the con, writing and planning his brother into the consistent role of the brokenhearted bait. Bloom, as the years and cons progress, has become under whelmed with his role and intends to retire to an island alone before being talked into one last con. The mark? An epileptic photographer, millionaire, and hobby collector named Penelope (Rachel Weisz), whom Bloom must trick into falling in love with him in order for the swindle to progress.
While the first two-acts of the film follow the Mamet-esque emphasis on trickery, Johnson never completely loses sight of the characters and utilizes a third-act, which initially appears unnecessary, as a means of underlining his intent. The third-act is what differentiates itself from the genre and while I held initial fears upon its unveiling, it leads the film towards perfection. The cast here, of course, is incredibly solid. Ruffalo might have benefited from some additional screen time, particularly with Brody alone in order to sketch out their relationship a bit more, but this is a minor quibble. Brody plays his usual sap, much like his role in The Darjeeling Limited except this film should show Wes Anderson what it is like to make a good movie within his stylistic preoccupations again. Weisz is quite amazing in a role of a complete eccentric but, like Audrey Tautou in Amelie, the quirks never overwhelm the person and the audience cannot help but follow Bloom in falling in love with her. There are some lively supporting roles here as well by Robbie Coltrane and Maximilian Schell but the real highlight in this band of outsiders is Babel actress and Academy Award nominee Rinko Kikuchi as the mute demolitions expert Bang Bang. My enthusiasm for this film cannot go understated and if these brief reflections do not make you want to see it, let me just say what else the film has to offer: a cat with a wooden leg and a roller skate.
Monday, May 11, 2009
UPDATED (May 12 2009): SCMS Cancelled
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to you with news about our upcoming Tokyo conference that requires your immediate attention. Please forward this announcement to anyone you know who is planning to attend the Tokyo conference.
With the advent of the H1N1 virus (“swine flu”), the Japanese government has issued a travel advisory and is aggressively monitoring the situation. Among the actions being taken are quarantines of anyone who appears to have symptoms of the flu. If a case were to emerge on your flight or among our membership at the conference, anyone who came into contact with an infected person may be quarantined. Quarantine can last up to ten days and you may be required to pay for medical attention if you show signs of being ill. Additional airline change fees may also apply if you were to become ill. On Saturday, three cases of the H1N1 flu were confirmed in Japan.
Both the National Government and the Chiyoda District Government, where the Josai University-Kioichô Campus is located, have asked Josai to cancel the conference. The Josai University administration has resisted this request and has kindly negotiated conditions under which the conference can take place. These include the following:
1) To monitor the situation and inform conference participants of any outbreak, the government requires information regarding each participant’s whereabouts, including hotel location and contact numbers during the conference and for ten days afterward.
2) Conference participants will have their temperatures taken when they enter the conference each day. Those registering a temperature above 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit will be given an additional test to rule out the H1N1 virus. If the test is positive, there is a chance that conference participants, along with the infected individual, could be quarantined.
3) Participants will need to fill out a health declaration form each day of the conference. The declaration will ask about symptoms (including fever, nausea, dizziness, etc.) experienced during the past twenty-four hours.
4) Participants will be required to wear surgical masks during the conference.
5) If the World Health Organization raises the alert level to phase 6 (either before or during the conference), or if a conference participant is found to have the H1N1 virus, then we will be required to cancel the conference. This could happen anytime up to and including the conference dates. Any potential financial costs resulting from quarantine and associated delays are the responsibility of the traveler; the Society is not responsible for these costs, and members traveling agree to incur them.
Although the US Centers for Disease Control and various other health officials have determined that the H1N1 virus is much milder than was originally anticipated, we nevertheless need to alert you to the situation in Japan. We feel it is our responsibility to inform you to prepare for long airport delays and inconveniences, daily health screenings, and paperwork that travelers to Japan are currently experiencing. The cases of swine flu currently in Japan were brought in via air travel. All nonstop flights from the US and Canada will be boarded by health workers in bio-hazard suits and passengers on such flights will be monitored while on the plane for fever and other flu signs.
We ask that you let us know whether, under these conditions, you intend to attend the conference or not. Your response will enable us to determine whether or not the conference should take place. SCMS is unable to postpone or reschedule this event. Please let us know of your plans immediately and no later than 5:00 CST tomorrow, May 12, 2009 by clicking on the following link and responding to our survey http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Y5nh04W0KpjyzJ8mmEkkqQ_3d_3d.
If you decide to cancel your trip and inform us by 5:00pm CST tomorrow, SCMS will reimburse your registration fees. Those who choose not to attend the conference may wish to investigate their airline’s particular cancellation and postponement terms and conditions. Many airlines charge a change fee but will allow travelers to change the terms of their tickets for up to a year.
If you decide to attend the conference, you must provide us with your contact information in Tokyo (and for ten days after the conference), and you must agree to the terms which Josai University has arranged with the Health Ministries, outlined above.
We ask for your understanding of these difficult circumstances, which are beyond the Society’s control.
Sincerely,
Patrice Petro
SCMS President
UPDATE POSTED MAY 12th 2009:
A decision regarding the Tokyo conference has not been made. The Board of Directors will discuss the survey results this evening. We will post an announcement on the website and send an e-mail to everyone Wednesday morning with the decision. We have contacted Japan Travel Bureau regarding refunds for hotel reservations for individuals who can not attend the conference. As soon as we know what the outcome will be we will post another announcement and send an e-mail to everyone.
UPDATED:
Dear Colleagues:
It is with a very great regret that we are announcing the cancellation of the SCMS conference in Tokyo scheduled for May 21-24, 2009.
Late last week we learned that the Government of Japan and the Chiyoda District Government requested that Josai International University cancel the conference due to concerns about containing the H1N1 ("Swine Flu") virus. That request, and the conditions that were imposed under which the conference might occur, resulted in daily discussions among the officers of SCMS, members of the Board of Directors, the Society's legal counsel, and representatives of Josai.
We have determined that proceeding with the conference under the conditions ordered by the government present too many risks for our members and the Society. These include the personal risks to individual members (including possible quarantine, additional expense, and considerable stress), potential liability to SCMS, as well as pressures on the Society's small infrastructure. Moreover, the survey conducted yesterday (564 of 748 registrants replied) indicated that almost one-third of those responding chose to withdraw from the conference. Many of those who said that they would still attend indicated that they would do so out of a sense of obligation or said that they would spend minimal time at the conference. It was also clear that some registrants who did not respond to the survey, but who communicated in other ways, were waiting for more information before making a decision.
We are extremely grateful for the efforts of JIU, on behalf of SCMS, for negotiating with the national and local governments to create conditions under which the conference could move forward. But it is clear that members felt that those conditions would not be conducive to a satisfactory conference experience. The high cancellation rate - with more likely - presented us with a depleted program rather than the robust intellectual and social experience our members have come to expect of the SCMS conference.
You are urged to cancel your hotel reservations and flights immediately, unless you plan to travel to Japan for pleasure. You should contact your airline to arrange for credit on your airfare. We will be working with Japan Travel Bureau to reduce or eliminate hotel cancellation penalties.
Conference fees will be refunded, or individuals may request that their registration fee be used for the 2010 conference in Los Angeles. More details will follow.
We are working on plans to retain as much of the Tokyo conference as possible as a part of our Los Angeles conference. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
We will be creating a forum on the SCMS website for individuals to register their comments.
If you have already arrived in Japan and need assistance, please contact the SCMS office staff as soon as possible. Others can expect their e-mail messages and phone calls to be answered in the order that are received as soon as the staff can respond.
This has been a severe trial for the SCMS leadership, and we realize that the uncertainty caused by this global health situation has created great confusion and anxiety among our members.
We are extremely disappointed that we have had to make this decision, especially in light of the tremendous amount of planning and work that our members, the SCMS staff, and our exhibitors committed to this conference. Again, we offer our heartfelt gratitude to the Chancellor of Josai and Josai International Universities, Dean En Fukuyuki, Shinozaki Kayo and the rest of the staff at JIU who generously offered his or her services above and beyond any duties, responsibilities, or obligations and on top of their already considerable responsibilities at JIU.
We are saddened that we will not be able to meet in Tokyo, but we look forward to a combined Tokyo/Los Angeles conference at which we will be able to celebrate our 50th anniversary and to demonstrate our resilience.
Sincerely,
Patrice Petro, President
Anne Friedberg, President-Elect
Stephen Prince, Past-President
Eric Schaefer, Secretary
Paula Massood, Treasurer
Scott Curtis, Member of the Board
F. Hollis Griffin, Graduate Student Representative
Michele Hilmes, Member of the Board
Priya Jaikumar, Member of the Board
Victoria Johnson, Member of the Board
Charles Wolfe, Member of the Board
Michael Zryd, Member of the Board
I am writing to you with news about our upcoming Tokyo conference that requires your immediate attention. Please forward this announcement to anyone you know who is planning to attend the Tokyo conference.
With the advent of the H1N1 virus (“swine flu”), the Japanese government has issued a travel advisory and is aggressively monitoring the situation. Among the actions being taken are quarantines of anyone who appears to have symptoms of the flu. If a case were to emerge on your flight or among our membership at the conference, anyone who came into contact with an infected person may be quarantined. Quarantine can last up to ten days and you may be required to pay for medical attention if you show signs of being ill. Additional airline change fees may also apply if you were to become ill. On Saturday, three cases of the H1N1 flu were confirmed in Japan.
Both the National Government and the Chiyoda District Government, where the Josai University-Kioichô Campus is located, have asked Josai to cancel the conference. The Josai University administration has resisted this request and has kindly negotiated conditions under which the conference can take place. These include the following:
1) To monitor the situation and inform conference participants of any outbreak, the government requires information regarding each participant’s whereabouts, including hotel location and contact numbers during the conference and for ten days afterward.
2) Conference participants will have their temperatures taken when they enter the conference each day. Those registering a temperature above 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit will be given an additional test to rule out the H1N1 virus. If the test is positive, there is a chance that conference participants, along with the infected individual, could be quarantined.
3) Participants will need to fill out a health declaration form each day of the conference. The declaration will ask about symptoms (including fever, nausea, dizziness, etc.) experienced during the past twenty-four hours.
4) Participants will be required to wear surgical masks during the conference.
5) If the World Health Organization raises the alert level to phase 6 (either before or during the conference), or if a conference participant is found to have the H1N1 virus, then we will be required to cancel the conference. This could happen anytime up to and including the conference dates. Any potential financial costs resulting from quarantine and associated delays are the responsibility of the traveler; the Society is not responsible for these costs, and members traveling agree to incur them.
Although the US Centers for Disease Control and various other health officials have determined that the H1N1 virus is much milder than was originally anticipated, we nevertheless need to alert you to the situation in Japan. We feel it is our responsibility to inform you to prepare for long airport delays and inconveniences, daily health screenings, and paperwork that travelers to Japan are currently experiencing. The cases of swine flu currently in Japan were brought in via air travel. All nonstop flights from the US and Canada will be boarded by health workers in bio-hazard suits and passengers on such flights will be monitored while on the plane for fever and other flu signs.
We ask that you let us know whether, under these conditions, you intend to attend the conference or not. Your response will enable us to determine whether or not the conference should take place. SCMS is unable to postpone or reschedule this event. Please let us know of your plans immediately and no later than 5:00 CST tomorrow, May 12, 2009 by clicking on the following link and responding to our survey http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Y5nh04W0KpjyzJ8mmEkkqQ_3d_3d.
If you decide to cancel your trip and inform us by 5:00pm CST tomorrow, SCMS will reimburse your registration fees. Those who choose not to attend the conference may wish to investigate their airline’s particular cancellation and postponement terms and conditions. Many airlines charge a change fee but will allow travelers to change the terms of their tickets for up to a year.
If you decide to attend the conference, you must provide us with your contact information in Tokyo (and for ten days after the conference), and you must agree to the terms which Josai University has arranged with the Health Ministries, outlined above.
We ask for your understanding of these difficult circumstances, which are beyond the Society’s control.
Sincerely,
Patrice Petro
SCMS President
UPDATE POSTED MAY 12th 2009:
A decision regarding the Tokyo conference has not been made. The Board of Directors will discuss the survey results this evening. We will post an announcement on the website and send an e-mail to everyone Wednesday morning with the decision. We have contacted Japan Travel Bureau regarding refunds for hotel reservations for individuals who can not attend the conference. As soon as we know what the outcome will be we will post another announcement and send an e-mail to everyone.
UPDATED:
Dear Colleagues:
It is with a very great regret that we are announcing the cancellation of the SCMS conference in Tokyo scheduled for May 21-24, 2009.
Late last week we learned that the Government of Japan and the Chiyoda District Government requested that Josai International University cancel the conference due to concerns about containing the H1N1 ("Swine Flu") virus. That request, and the conditions that were imposed under which the conference might occur, resulted in daily discussions among the officers of SCMS, members of the Board of Directors, the Society's legal counsel, and representatives of Josai.
We have determined that proceeding with the conference under the conditions ordered by the government present too many risks for our members and the Society. These include the personal risks to individual members (including possible quarantine, additional expense, and considerable stress), potential liability to SCMS, as well as pressures on the Society's small infrastructure. Moreover, the survey conducted yesterday (564 of 748 registrants replied) indicated that almost one-third of those responding chose to withdraw from the conference. Many of those who said that they would still attend indicated that they would do so out of a sense of obligation or said that they would spend minimal time at the conference. It was also clear that some registrants who did not respond to the survey, but who communicated in other ways, were waiting for more information before making a decision.
We are extremely grateful for the efforts of JIU, on behalf of SCMS, for negotiating with the national and local governments to create conditions under which the conference could move forward. But it is clear that members felt that those conditions would not be conducive to a satisfactory conference experience. The high cancellation rate - with more likely - presented us with a depleted program rather than the robust intellectual and social experience our members have come to expect of the SCMS conference.
You are urged to cancel your hotel reservations and flights immediately, unless you plan to travel to Japan for pleasure. You should contact your airline to arrange for credit on your airfare. We will be working with Japan Travel Bureau to reduce or eliminate hotel cancellation penalties.
Conference fees will be refunded, or individuals may request that their registration fee be used for the 2010 conference in Los Angeles. More details will follow.
We are working on plans to retain as much of the Tokyo conference as possible as a part of our Los Angeles conference. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
We will be creating a forum on the SCMS website for individuals to register their comments.
If you have already arrived in Japan and need assistance, please contact the SCMS office staff as soon as possible. Others can expect their e-mail messages and phone calls to be answered in the order that are received as soon as the staff can respond.
This has been a severe trial for the SCMS leadership, and we realize that the uncertainty caused by this global health situation has created great confusion and anxiety among our members.
We are extremely disappointed that we have had to make this decision, especially in light of the tremendous amount of planning and work that our members, the SCMS staff, and our exhibitors committed to this conference. Again, we offer our heartfelt gratitude to the Chancellor of Josai and Josai International Universities, Dean En Fukuyuki, Shinozaki Kayo and the rest of the staff at JIU who generously offered his or her services above and beyond any duties, responsibilities, or obligations and on top of their already considerable responsibilities at JIU.
We are saddened that we will not be able to meet in Tokyo, but we look forward to a combined Tokyo/Los Angeles conference at which we will be able to celebrate our 50th anniversary and to demonstrate our resilience.
Sincerely,
Patrice Petro, President
Anne Friedberg, President-Elect
Stephen Prince, Past-President
Eric Schaefer, Secretary
Paula Massood, Treasurer
Scott Curtis, Member of the Board
F. Hollis Griffin, Graduate Student Representative
Michele Hilmes, Member of the Board
Priya Jaikumar, Member of the Board
Victoria Johnson, Member of the Board
Charles Wolfe, Member of the Board
Michael Zryd, Member of the Board
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Mabuse at SCMS Tokyo 2009
Anyone interested in trying to set up a Mabuse night out in Tokyo? I'll be in town from Weds. 20th (when I fly in) to Monday the 25th. My cell will not be traveling with me, but I will be in the dorms at the conference site and you can probably reach me via e-mail. I've heard there is a French-style cinephile bar in town that is supposed to be quite the attraction...
Any thoughts?
Also, congrats to Jason and Scott on the book. Looking forward to reading it!
Any thoughts?
Also, congrats to Jason and Scott on the book. Looking forward to reading it!
Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction
To me, 2006 was a very good SCMS. It was my first trip to the conference. Vancouver was truly a fascinating city ... yet one that was relatively affordable for, at the time, a poor graduate student. It was here I met some particular scholars I now consider as dear friends.It was also here where my collaborator (and longtime friend) Jason Sperb and I began to explore the subject of cinephilia in the digital age with a well-received panel. Over coffee at a diner across from our hotel, we realized neither one of us were ready to abandon this subject after the week. 'Cinephilia' denotes a deep, even limitless passion for cinema including consuming, defining, sharing, discussing and writing about films. We wanted to consider the term in its current context within our interconnected digital world - as something truly expansive beyond (yet respectful) of the cine-club movements of the 20th century.
Three years later, I am pleased to write that the collection Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture, Vol. 1, is going to press. If you don't mind a little self-promotion, here is a link to the page on the Wallflower Press website.
Focusing mainly on digital imagery and cinephilia, the original panel included the work of current contributors Jenna Ng and Tobey Crockett. Since that time, the project has evolved to consider the pleasures of cinema within digital imagery along with online communication and digitized home viewing. The project has grown to include the work of critics, scholars and bloggers from around the world, including Robert Burgoyne, Zach Campbell, Brian Darr, Kevin Fisher, Andy Horbal, Christian Keathley, Adrian Martin, Lisa Purse, Dan Sallitt, Girish Shambu, Jason, and myself. As this suggests, the expressed goal of the book is to include engaging work from the worlds of academia, journalism, and the blogosphere -- exploring 21st century cinephilia through a new form of collaboration between such worlds.
As such, I am proud to say we never set out to make a conventional academic collection. And thanks to our contributors (or should I write 'collaborators'?), I do believe we have created something original and worthwhile. With plans for a Volume 2 in the works, it makes me curious to see where cinephilia might take us next.
As I began, 2006 was a very good SCMS ...Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Is Donkey Kong Fun? Because I'm Feeling More Donkey and Less Kong
"You know, he's gonna have to play it perfectly, he's at the hardest part of Donkey Kong, and it's not gonna get any easier. So we may have an exciting moment here, or you know, the pressure may get to him, one of those random elements might happen. Sounds like he just cleared another board, but we could have a wild barrel, or some aggressive fireballs. I thought I was gonna be the first FunSpot kill screen, and then I had three fireballs trap me, I had the hammer in my hand, they still got me. So anything can happen in Donkey Kong. So for someone else to be mean to the kill screen would be a letdown, but lets see what happens, maybe he'll crack under the pressure and maybe I'll get my chance to do it first."-Avid Donkey Kong player Brian Kuh in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007).
There's a kill screen in Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981)? After playing the Game Boy Advance copy of the game on a Nintendo DS for several hours, I had yet to advance past the second stage and, frustrated by my lack of progress, I could not help but ask myself if I was having a good time. However, my ill will towards the game was not as simplistic as it would seem. After all, I did not hate Donkey Kong; I just felt it did not fulfill one point of ludologist Jesper Juul's definition of a game, namely that "the player feels attached to the outcome." My own attachment to the outcome of Donkey Kong had devolved from setting out to conquer that damn dirty ape and his barrels to livid frustration with the game over screen to apathy each time I lost my three lives. My shifting relationship to the game's outcome led me to ask myself "What makes Donkey Kong fun?" Why do players like Brian Kuh keep returning to the title? While I assume there is a certain degree of nostalgia inherent it such a consideration, I would to apply the formal characteristics of DK to Henry Jenkins' article "Games, the New Lively Art" to better understand what makes retro gaming rewarding to players.
In the essay, Jenkins, utilizing the work of Gilbert Seldes, outlines several aesthetic characteristics that can be used to describe games as an art form. The three I would like to focus on are memorable moments, play as performance, and expressive amplification. The first characteristic, memorable moments, is not to be equated with spectacle. Jenkins writes, "Spectacle refers to something that stops you dead in your tracks, forces you to stand and look. Game play becomes memorable when it creates the opposite effect-when it makes you want to move, when it convinces you that you really are in charge of what's happening in the game, when the computer seems to be totally responsive." While this category may seem to run contrary to the fact that I was engaging with a game that is nearly thirty years old and whose graphics are elementary when compared to a contemporary title like Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), I did experience what Jenkins describes as memorable moments in DK. These moments came upon the unveiling of each new level. My memory of the game was based around images of iron girding, ladders, and an ape and princess at the top, which turned out to be an apt description of the first level except for the fact that I had forgotten about the almighty hammer. Yet, when I reached the second stage, I was amazed to find platforms that went up and down. I wasted a few thousand bonus points trying to mentally map the space before setting out onto the first elevating platform.
While I experienced what Jenkins would describe as a memorable moment in a game, the luster of the sensation was temporary. As I attempted to map the space, I came to the realization that I did not want to move because I was not in charge of what was happening in the game. In Brian Kuh's epigraph, he speaks of "random elements" in DK and, as the game progressed, I quickly grew frustrated with them because the memorable moment did not reveal some sort of logic to the game. For instance, does a barrel rolling down the platforms descend the first ladder it encounters? Not necessarily. Despite this illogical behavior on behalf of the barrels, I noticed as I played (and watched others do so as well) that to win at DK is to essentially condition yourself to a set rhythm via the game's reliance on time to trigger events. This struck me as being a fundamentally different mode of interaction than the majority of contemporary games employs. For instance, in a game such as Resident Evil 5 (2009), a player's spatial location will trigger an obstacle. If a zombie can see you, he will attack you. The obstacles of Resident Evil 5 are not triggered by a set time but are motivated by the player's action. With this noted, DK only partially fulfilled the aesthetic characteristic of a memorable moment for me. I felt a burst of interactive inspiration upon the reveal of each new stage but, as I progressed, I began to doubt my own capacity to affect the outcome due to the game's random elements.
Jenkins' second characteristic, play as performance, has two facets. First, the player needs to "feel as if they are in control of the situation at all times, even though their gameplay and emotional experience are significantly sculpted by the designer." I've already addressed this to a degree, but it should be noted that Jenkins speaks explicitly about DK game designer Shigeru Miyamoto as being a designer who "designs his games around verbs, that is, around the actions the game enables players to perform...he designs a playing space that both facilitates and thwarts our ability to carry out that action and thus creates a dramatic context in which the action takes aesthetic shape and narrative significance." While Miyamoto's use of random elements no doubt creates a dramatic context, my game play experience made me begin to question if, perhaps, random elements were too often employed. In fact, over Miyamoto's career, I would argue that he began to find a more fruitful mix of random elements and patterns that the player can recognize in games such as Super Mario Brothers (1985) and Super Mario Brothers 3 (1988). Within these particular games, timing and patterns became the essence of the game's formal logic, hence many of the YouTube videos where players are able to complete these games without losing any lives whatsoever. Once you recognize the pattern and perfect your knowledge, you can perfect your playing of the game.
Jenkins continues to describe play as performance as a means of rendering domestic space or arcade space into a performance space. While he writes that this is a characteristic of many "contemporary games" and explicitly references Dance Dance Revolution (1998), I would argue that this would apply to a DK as well. While my experiences in arcades during the 1990s did not include DK, the arcade atmosphere is most nurturing to this type of performance and almost begs the question: is it the game or the environment that makes a game performance based? I would argue that it is both, although I would tend to emphasize the environment. For instance, DK is a completely different game space and interface than Wii Sports (2006). In fact, DK would appear to go directly against the performance or, what my colleagues and I have called "gestural play," a form of play in which a player re-enacts physical gestures with the help of a proper interface as key part of game play or perhaps even the core mechanic (which would firmly fall within Jenkin's category of "play as performance"). The game play and interface of DK does not encourage gestural play. Players do not jump up and down as they grab a hammer or leap over a flaming barrel nor do they mimic climbing a ladder. While DK does not encourage gestural play, playing it in a proper venue would have the potential to turn play into performance. This form of performance is it does encourage a space for performance that is perhaps magnified by the "random elements" of the game play. Watching Steve Wiebe break the world's highest score in King of Kong may not be a physically impressive feat, as a player conquering the Guns-N-Roses song "Shackler's Revenge" on a hard difficulty on the Rock Band (2007) drum set might be, but it would be an impressive feat of the intellect, of response time, and mastery of a text. After all, why do television stations in South Korea feature programs of professionals playing Starcraft (1998)? I assure you it is not for the game's reliance on gesture.
The final category of Jenkins' essay I would like to grapple with in relation to DK intersects with this notion of play as performance, "expressive amplification." Drawing off David Bordwell's work on Hong Kong action films, Jenkins describes expressive amplification as the "various aesthetic devices [that] can intensify and exaggerate the impact of such actions, making them both more legible and more intense than their real-world counterparts." Jenkins notes how camera angles, sound effects, and other devices can be utilized by the programmer to turn an action from just an executable outcome to an element of style. While expressive amplification can inspire a kinesthetic response and perhaps a form of gestural play, the definition Jenkins proposes ties this spectator response to the aesthetics of game play, not the interface. This category becomes difficult to relate to DK for the obvious reason of technological limitation. Due to the technology available at the time, there is only one camera angle in DK: a static establishing shot of the entire platform structure that only tilts upwards upon the completion of each level. The music is more advanced, with the tempo forecasting the speed of the level and sound effects responding to the player's actions (jumping over a barrel, hitting a barrel with a hammer, and reaching Princess Peach at the top of the platform). How many aesthetic characteristics or to what intensity do they need to be programmed to provide the player with this sense of expressive amplification or a kinesthetic reaction? Judging from this formal analysis, DK would appear to get the player halfway there. The music and sound effects, responding to their individual actions, no doubt provides expressive amplification, but the aesthetic experience of DK as a whole does not provide enough to evoke a kinesthetic reaction. Again, DK is not a game that produces a performance space from the player's gestures but from their more intellectual capabilities.
This brings us back to the question begged at the beginning of this venture: "What makes Donkey Kong fun today?" I have tabled the issue of nostalgia because while it no doubt plays a factor in the appeal of the game, it becomes incredibly difficult to analyze. I will admit that I was not drawn to the game by a particular longing as it was not one of the games I regularly played growing up (Sonic the Hedgehog fulfills that nostalgia). Yet, there are gamers both old and young who are drawn to DK for the game itself and not the cultural capital it carries and it is no doubt fun to them. After all, applying the form of the game to Jenkins' three aesthetic categories, DK does provide memorable moments, play as a means of performance, and even a rudimentary form of expressive amplification. This said DK seems unlike many contemporary titles, particularly on its strong reliance on random elements to provide a form of tension to the player. Most games today seem to make it easier and easier for a player to beat a game and feel fulfilled (via difficulty settings, saved games, continues, or even in the provision of more and more "health" items) whereas DK is much more of a one-size fits all type of game. What makes DK a miserable experience for me personally is this one-size fits all mentality. Perhaps the learning curve is too steep, perhaps contemporary design practices have softened my abilities, but more likely is the fact that I was unable to experience fully what Jenkins describes as a memorable moment from a form of game play that ties into what game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe as "meaningful play." To Jenkins, Salen, and Zimmerman, a player will find a game rewarding when a player recognizes that "the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game." The random elements of DK masked this relationship from me, kept the game from providing me with a feeling of meaningful play, and thus were not a fun or rewarding experience with regard to gaming, but my game play was fruitful as an intellectual pursuit.
There's a kill screen in Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981)? After playing the Game Boy Advance copy of the game on a Nintendo DS for several hours, I had yet to advance past the second stage and, frustrated by my lack of progress, I could not help but ask myself if I was having a good time. However, my ill will towards the game was not as simplistic as it would seem. After all, I did not hate Donkey Kong; I just felt it did not fulfill one point of ludologist Jesper Juul's definition of a game, namely that "the player feels attached to the outcome." My own attachment to the outcome of Donkey Kong had devolved from setting out to conquer that damn dirty ape and his barrels to livid frustration with the game over screen to apathy each time I lost my three lives. My shifting relationship to the game's outcome led me to ask myself "What makes Donkey Kong fun?" Why do players like Brian Kuh keep returning to the title? While I assume there is a certain degree of nostalgia inherent it such a consideration, I would to apply the formal characteristics of DK to Henry Jenkins' article "Games, the New Lively Art" to better understand what makes retro gaming rewarding to players.
In the essay, Jenkins, utilizing the work of Gilbert Seldes, outlines several aesthetic characteristics that can be used to describe games as an art form. The three I would like to focus on are memorable moments, play as performance, and expressive amplification. The first characteristic, memorable moments, is not to be equated with spectacle. Jenkins writes, "Spectacle refers to something that stops you dead in your tracks, forces you to stand and look. Game play becomes memorable when it creates the opposite effect-when it makes you want to move, when it convinces you that you really are in charge of what's happening in the game, when the computer seems to be totally responsive." While this category may seem to run contrary to the fact that I was engaging with a game that is nearly thirty years old and whose graphics are elementary when compared to a contemporary title like Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), I did experience what Jenkins describes as memorable moments in DK. These moments came upon the unveiling of each new level. My memory of the game was based around images of iron girding, ladders, and an ape and princess at the top, which turned out to be an apt description of the first level except for the fact that I had forgotten about the almighty hammer. Yet, when I reached the second stage, I was amazed to find platforms that went up and down. I wasted a few thousand bonus points trying to mentally map the space before setting out onto the first elevating platform.
While I experienced what Jenkins would describe as a memorable moment in a game, the luster of the sensation was temporary. As I attempted to map the space, I came to the realization that I did not want to move because I was not in charge of what was happening in the game. In Brian Kuh's epigraph, he speaks of "random elements" in DK and, as the game progressed, I quickly grew frustrated with them because the memorable moment did not reveal some sort of logic to the game. For instance, does a barrel rolling down the platforms descend the first ladder it encounters? Not necessarily. Despite this illogical behavior on behalf of the barrels, I noticed as I played (and watched others do so as well) that to win at DK is to essentially condition yourself to a set rhythm via the game's reliance on time to trigger events. This struck me as being a fundamentally different mode of interaction than the majority of contemporary games employs. For instance, in a game such as Resident Evil 5 (2009), a player's spatial location will trigger an obstacle. If a zombie can see you, he will attack you. The obstacles of Resident Evil 5 are not triggered by a set time but are motivated by the player's action. With this noted, DK only partially fulfilled the aesthetic characteristic of a memorable moment for me. I felt a burst of interactive inspiration upon the reveal of each new stage but, as I progressed, I began to doubt my own capacity to affect the outcome due to the game's random elements.
Jenkins' second characteristic, play as performance, has two facets. First, the player needs to "feel as if they are in control of the situation at all times, even though their gameplay and emotional experience are significantly sculpted by the designer." I've already addressed this to a degree, but it should be noted that Jenkins speaks explicitly about DK game designer Shigeru Miyamoto as being a designer who "designs his games around verbs, that is, around the actions the game enables players to perform...he designs a playing space that both facilitates and thwarts our ability to carry out that action and thus creates a dramatic context in which the action takes aesthetic shape and narrative significance." While Miyamoto's use of random elements no doubt creates a dramatic context, my game play experience made me begin to question if, perhaps, random elements were too often employed. In fact, over Miyamoto's career, I would argue that he began to find a more fruitful mix of random elements and patterns that the player can recognize in games such as Super Mario Brothers (1985) and Super Mario Brothers 3 (1988). Within these particular games, timing and patterns became the essence of the game's formal logic, hence many of the YouTube videos where players are able to complete these games without losing any lives whatsoever. Once you recognize the pattern and perfect your knowledge, you can perfect your playing of the game.
Jenkins continues to describe play as performance as a means of rendering domestic space or arcade space into a performance space. While he writes that this is a characteristic of many "contemporary games" and explicitly references Dance Dance Revolution (1998), I would argue that this would apply to a DK as well. While my experiences in arcades during the 1990s did not include DK, the arcade atmosphere is most nurturing to this type of performance and almost begs the question: is it the game or the environment that makes a game performance based? I would argue that it is both, although I would tend to emphasize the environment. For instance, DK is a completely different game space and interface than Wii Sports (2006). In fact, DK would appear to go directly against the performance or, what my colleagues and I have called "gestural play," a form of play in which a player re-enacts physical gestures with the help of a proper interface as key part of game play or perhaps even the core mechanic (which would firmly fall within Jenkin's category of "play as performance"). The game play and interface of DK does not encourage gestural play. Players do not jump up and down as they grab a hammer or leap over a flaming barrel nor do they mimic climbing a ladder. While DK does not encourage gestural play, playing it in a proper venue would have the potential to turn play into performance. This form of performance is it does encourage a space for performance that is perhaps magnified by the "random elements" of the game play. Watching Steve Wiebe break the world's highest score in King of Kong may not be a physically impressive feat, as a player conquering the Guns-N-Roses song "Shackler's Revenge" on a hard difficulty on the Rock Band (2007) drum set might be, but it would be an impressive feat of the intellect, of response time, and mastery of a text. After all, why do television stations in South Korea feature programs of professionals playing Starcraft (1998)? I assure you it is not for the game's reliance on gesture.
The final category of Jenkins' essay I would like to grapple with in relation to DK intersects with this notion of play as performance, "expressive amplification." Drawing off David Bordwell's work on Hong Kong action films, Jenkins describes expressive amplification as the "various aesthetic devices [that] can intensify and exaggerate the impact of such actions, making them both more legible and more intense than their real-world counterparts." Jenkins notes how camera angles, sound effects, and other devices can be utilized by the programmer to turn an action from just an executable outcome to an element of style. While expressive amplification can inspire a kinesthetic response and perhaps a form of gestural play, the definition Jenkins proposes ties this spectator response to the aesthetics of game play, not the interface. This category becomes difficult to relate to DK for the obvious reason of technological limitation. Due to the technology available at the time, there is only one camera angle in DK: a static establishing shot of the entire platform structure that only tilts upwards upon the completion of each level. The music is more advanced, with the tempo forecasting the speed of the level and sound effects responding to the player's actions (jumping over a barrel, hitting a barrel with a hammer, and reaching Princess Peach at the top of the platform). How many aesthetic characteristics or to what intensity do they need to be programmed to provide the player with this sense of expressive amplification or a kinesthetic reaction? Judging from this formal analysis, DK would appear to get the player halfway there. The music and sound effects, responding to their individual actions, no doubt provides expressive amplification, but the aesthetic experience of DK as a whole does not provide enough to evoke a kinesthetic reaction. Again, DK is not a game that produces a performance space from the player's gestures but from their more intellectual capabilities.
This brings us back to the question begged at the beginning of this venture: "What makes Donkey Kong fun today?" I have tabled the issue of nostalgia because while it no doubt plays a factor in the appeal of the game, it becomes incredibly difficult to analyze. I will admit that I was not drawn to the game by a particular longing as it was not one of the games I regularly played growing up (Sonic the Hedgehog fulfills that nostalgia). Yet, there are gamers both old and young who are drawn to DK for the game itself and not the cultural capital it carries and it is no doubt fun to them. After all, applying the form of the game to Jenkins' three aesthetic categories, DK does provide memorable moments, play as a means of performance, and even a rudimentary form of expressive amplification. This said DK seems unlike many contemporary titles, particularly on its strong reliance on random elements to provide a form of tension to the player. Most games today seem to make it easier and easier for a player to beat a game and feel fulfilled (via difficulty settings, saved games, continues, or even in the provision of more and more "health" items) whereas DK is much more of a one-size fits all type of game. What makes DK a miserable experience for me personally is this one-size fits all mentality. Perhaps the learning curve is too steep, perhaps contemporary design practices have softened my abilities, but more likely is the fact that I was unable to experience fully what Jenkins describes as a memorable moment from a form of game play that ties into what game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe as "meaningful play." To Jenkins, Salen, and Zimmerman, a player will find a game rewarding when a player recognizes that "the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game." The random elements of DK masked this relationship from me, kept the game from providing me with a feeling of meaningful play, and thus were not a fun or rewarding experience with regard to gaming, but my game play was fruitful as an intellectual pursuit.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Disney's recycled scenes
Has anyone seen this? It is quite bizarre!
I first read about it today in an article on TimesOnline. It is quite short, so I thought I'd might as well copy and paste it here:
I had heard of rotoscoping, albeit not "video referencing", but in any case I think the relevance of these techniques as brought up in the article is a bit misguided. Techniques of tracing, such as rotoscoping, are used for specific purposes, such as added realism, cost savings etc, and I see nothing wrong with that. The article brings up these techniques with the implicit charge that it is dishonest to use them, with which I soundly disagree. The travesty of these recycled scenes is not of technique but of integrity: that Disney uses the same movements, the same choreography, the same composition, even the same gags and set-ups for disparate films from which, each being a new work, we expect original material. It is a bit like plagiarising oneself - technically it is not an offence (in the sense of copyright infringement; certainly under the auspices of academia it must and should be one), but it should be thought of very poorly and it compromises one's academic integrity. Ergo, this is an issue of honesty.
Anyway, kudos to this Swedish teenager for making the video - ah, the time and leisure of teenage-hood!
Best
Jenna
I first read about it today in an article on TimesOnline. It is quite short, so I thought I'd might as well copy and paste it here:
April 21, 2009
Disney fans surprised by recycled scenes
Veronica Schmidt
They might be considered classics but a web-savvy film buff has found another reason why hit Disney films look so familiar – recycled scenes.
The Swedish teenager, known only as Wetrox, has become a YouTube hit after he spliced together scenes from Disney classics, including Robin Hood and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to show that the movie giant often used the same scenes in different films.
The technique, known as “video referencing”, saves the studio money as a character’s animation can be traced from another film, skipping the phase of painstakingly copying human movement.
Marked similarities can be found between Winnie The Pooh and The Jungle Book and Robin Hood and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
A Disney spokeswoman refused to confirm that the movie giant used the technique today, telling Times Online that “it’s not something that we comment on”, but the company is thought to have used the tracing technique for decades.
Rotoscoping was invented in 1915 and originally used to trace real human movement to the screen, later being employed to trace existing films.
But the technique came as a surprise to most of the 60,000 Disney fans who rushed to view the YouTube clip.
“I feel so ripped off now. All the money I spend on this crap, they could at least come up with some original scenes,” wrote one viewer.
“Our childhoods were based on a lie,” said another.
But others were more understanding. “Considering the extreme amount of work needed to make those movies I'm not surprised if they cut some corners and work with existing templates to speed up the process.”
I had heard of rotoscoping, albeit not "video referencing", but in any case I think the relevance of these techniques as brought up in the article is a bit misguided. Techniques of tracing, such as rotoscoping, are used for specific purposes, such as added realism, cost savings etc, and I see nothing wrong with that. The article brings up these techniques with the implicit charge that it is dishonest to use them, with which I soundly disagree. The travesty of these recycled scenes is not of technique but of integrity: that Disney uses the same movements, the same choreography, the same composition, even the same gags and set-ups for disparate films from which, each being a new work, we expect original material. It is a bit like plagiarising oneself - technically it is not an offence (in the sense of copyright infringement; certainly under the auspices of academia it must and should be one), but it should be thought of very poorly and it compromises one's academic integrity. Ergo, this is an issue of honesty.
Anyway, kudos to this Swedish teenager for making the video - ah, the time and leisure of teenage-hood!
Best
Jenna
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