The 71st Venice International Film Festival, organized by La Biennale di Venezia, opens today and runs through September 6th 2014, on the island of the Lido, Venice, Italy. Twenty films will be competing for the Golden Lion prize, and several dozen more will wrestle for the attention of critics and audiences.
The Venice Film Festival or Venice International Film Festival (Italian: Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia, “International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art of the Venice Biennale”) is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the “Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica”, the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island
For this year’s festival line-up, screening schedule and other information please visit Venice Film Festival official website.
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In the interim, Berghahn is delighted to present its own line-up of Film Studies titles:
THE JOURNEY OF G. MASTORNA
The Film Fellini Didn’t Make
Federico Fellini
With the collaboration of Dino Buzzati, Brunello Rondi, and Bernardino Zapponi
Translated with a commentary by Marcus Perryman
Federico Fellini’s script for perhaps the most famous unmade film in Italian cinema, The Journey of G. Mastorna (1965/6), is published here for the first time in full English translation. It offers the reader a remarkable insight into Fellini’s creative process and his fascination with human mortality and the great mystery of death. Written in collaboration with Dino Buzzati, Brunello Rondi, and Bernardino Zapponi, the project was ultimately abandoned for a number of reasons, including Fellini’s near death, although it continued to inhabit his creative imagination and the landscape of his films for the rest of his career.
Marcus Perryman has written two supporting essays which discuss the reasons why the film was never made, compare it to the two other films in the trilogy La Dolce Vita and 8½, and analyze the script in the light of It’s a Wonderful Life and Fredric Brown’s sci-fi novel What Mad Universe. In doing so he opens up an entire world of connections to Fellini’s other films, writers and collaborators. It should be essential reading for students and academics studying Fellini’s work.
THE EMERGENCE OF FILM CULTURE
Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-garde in Europe, 1919-1945
Malte Hagener
Volume 16, Film Europa Series
Between the two world wars, a distinct and vibrant film culture emerged in Europe. Film festivals and schools were established; film theory and history was written that took cinema seriously as an art form; and critical writing that created the film canon flourished. This scene was decidedly transnational and creative, overcoming traditional boundaries between theory and practice, and between national and linguistic borders. This new European film culture established film as a valid form of social expression, as an art form, and as a political force to be reckoned with. By examining the extraordinarily rich and creative uses of cinema in the interwar period, we can examine the roots of film culture as we know it today.
BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS
Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood
Ana Salzberg
As living subjects rather than static icons, studio-era Hollywood actresses actively negotiated a balance between their public personas, film roles, and corporeal presence. The contemporary audience’s engagement with the experience of these actresses unsettles the traditional model of narcissistic identification, which divides the off-screen spectator from his/her on-screen ideal. Exploring the fan’s desire for a material connection to the performer – as well as the star’s own dialogue between embodied experience and idealized image – Beyond the Looking Glass traces on- and off-screen representations of narcissistic femininity in classical Hollywood through studies of stars like Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner, and Marilyn Monroe. Merging historical and theoretical concerns, with particular attention to the resonance of golden-age Hollywood in new media, this book explores the movie screen as a medium of shared experience between spectator and star.
CINEMA AT THE EDGES
New Encounters with Julio Medem, Bigas Luna and José Luis Guerín
Abigail Loxham
The works of popular Spanish film directors Julio Medem, Juan José Bigas Luna, and José Luis Guerín are newly appraised in relation to their engagement with alternative national and cinematic subjectivities. Their films examine the limitations of the cinematic gaze, as the author shows, highlighting the ways in which these directors make recourse to hybridity, contact, and interface to overcome the binary power dynamic previously thought to be a feature of cinema. This book explores their status as solely “Spanish” filmmakers while focusing on their diverse and immensely creative output, offering new readings that engage with current debates in visual culture surrounding psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and theories of documentary practice.
SUBJECTIVE REALIST CINEMA
From Expressionism to Inception
Matthew Campora
Subjective Realist Cinema looks at the fragmented narratives and multiple realities of a wide range of films that depict subjective experience and employ “subjective realist” narration, including recent examples such as Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The author proposes that an understanding of the narrative structures of these films, particularly their use of mixed and multiple realities, enhances viewers’ enjoyment and comprehension of such films, and that such comprehension offers a key to understanding contemporary filmmaking.
THE DEMONS OF MODERNITY
Ingmar Bergman and European Cinema
John Orr
Ingmar Bergman’s films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe. This book contends that he should be put at the very center of European film history by chronologically comparing Bergman’s relationship to key European directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and also looks at Bergman’s critical relationship to key movements in film history such as the French New Wave. In so doing, it demonstrates how Ingmar Bergman’s films illustrate the demonic struggle in modernity between faith and secularity through “his intense preoccupation with the malaise of intimacy.”
NATIONALISM AND THE CINEMA IN FRANCE
Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995
Hugo Frey
It is often taken for granted that French cinema is intimately connected to the nation’s sense of identity and self-confidence. But what do we really know about that relationship? What are the nuances, insider codes, and hidden history of the alignment between cinema and nationalism? Hugo Frey suggests that the concepts of the ‘political myth’ and ‘the film event’ are the essential theoretical reference points for unlocking film history. Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers new arguments regarding those connections in the French case, examining national elitism, neo-colonialism, and other exclusionary discourses, as well as discussing for the first time the subculture of cinema around the extreme right Front National. Key works from directors such as Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, François Truffaut, and others provide a rich body of evidence.
For a complete list of Berghahn Film & Media studies titles click here.
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From Berghahn Journals:
Projections
The Journal for Movies and Mind
Published in association with The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and The Forum for Movies and Mind
Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that explores the way in which the mind experiences, understands, and interprets the audio-visual and narrative structures of cinema and other visual media. Recognizing cinema as an art form, the journal aims to integrate established traditions of analyzing media aesthetics with current research into perception, cognition and emotion, according to frameworks supplied by psychology, psychoanalysis, and the cognitive and neurosciences. Submissions are welcomed from a variety of scholarly methods within the humanities and the sciences, from aesthetic to empirical, theoretical, and historical approaches. The journal seeks to facilitate a dialogue between scholars in these disciplines and bring the study of moving image media to the forefront of contemporary intellectual debate.