A film by the Coen brothers is easily recognizable. The Big Lebowski, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and the new Hail Caesar! – it does not matter which genres the directors mix together, they are unmistakably Coen brothers movies. But what is it exactly that makes them like that? And how do the two filmmakers succeed in creating complete caricatures of their characters but get away with it? VPRO radio reporter Emmie Kollau spoke with Film Faculty member Gerwin van der Pol, director Michiel ten Horn (Aanmodderfakker, De Ontmaagding van Eva van End) and his cameraman Joost Wolf to answer this question.

Listen to the full interview here (in Dutch).

Today, an interview with Film Faculty member Patricia Pisters has been published in Folia, the weekly magazine of the University of Amsterdam: ‘Film scholar Patricia Pisters investigates the intersection of film studies and neuroscience. The director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis coined the term neuro-thriller for a new type of thrillers which works directly on our brains.’

Read the full interview here.

Today a new essay by Film Faculty member Patricia Pisters has been published in Aeon, a digital magazine of ideas and culture. The essay is entitled ‘Neurothriller’ and deals with the question why and how horror films are nowadays much more scary than they were in the past.

Read the entire essay here.

The documentary Welcome to the Smiling Coast: Living in the Gambia Ghetto is selected for the Pan African Film Festival (PAFF), the largest black film festival in the United States. The film, produced by Film Studies faculty member Emiel Martens, receives its world premiere at the festival, which will be held from February 4-15 in Los Angeles.

Continue reading Welcome to the Smiling Coast on its way to Los Angeles →

Today, after five years or so in the making, the special issue on contemporary Caribbean cinema has been published in  the open access Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. The issue consists of a combination of interviews and critical essays that provides a diverse and necessarily eclectic glimpse into recent developments in Caribbean cinema.

Continue reading Special Issue on Caribbean Cinema Now Available →

The 8th issue of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies on ‘vintage’ is now online! The issue fearues a special section that is guest edited by Kim Knowles. You are able to read and download all contributions in Open Access at www.necsus-ejms.org.

Continue reading Vintage: 8th issue of Necsus now online →

Film Studies student Mashya Boon has won the Science in the City Award for her master’s thesis Cinematic Clones, Illusive Identities and Mercurial Memories (Master Film, UvA, 2015). The jury consisted of Erik Scherder, Liza Mügge (UvA) en Felix Rottenberg. 

Continue reading Film Studies student wins Science in the City Award →

By Bram Overbeeke and Nataša van de Laar, students at the Research Master in Media Studies.

Last Friday, November 20th, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) hosted American filmmaker Errol Morris for a masterclass in a fully packed Tuschinski theatre. The festival’s central guest discussed his work and his ideas on documentary film with moderator and prominent documentary scholar Bill Nichols. The dialogue focused mainly on the intersections between theory and practice of documentary filmmaking, in relation to the ground-breaking work of the director himself. Reality, truth, and their representations were recurring themes throughout the meandering discussion.

Continue reading Special guest Errol Morris at IDFA: “Reality is a collective hunch” →

Yesterday the first copies of Filming for the Future – The Work of Louis van Gasteren by Patricia Pisters were handed over to Van Gasteren and NFF director Willemien van Aalst at Paradiso in Amsterdam.

Continue reading First copy of Filming for the Future handed over to Van Gasteren →

Film Studies faculty member Dr. Charles Forceville will give a plenary lecture in October at the “International Conference on Communication Styles” Philological Faculty, Krosno State College, Krosno, Poland (org. Dorota Brzozowska & Władysław Chłopicki).

Departing from the “scientific image”, the three sessions of this semester will focus on the function of the image and its transformation as a resource in visualization, translation, control, manipulation and commodification. These functions, linked variably through history with knowledge production, expanded into fields as diverse as landscape painting, brain visualization, documentary film, and forensic television.

Starting in the first session with a focus on the scientific image’s multiple functions (data visualization, diagrammatization, on-screen  manipulation), the second and third sessions will look firstly at a genealogy of the conceptualization of the functions of the image across the fields mentioned above, while the final session will explore the crossmedial concretizations of these conceptualized functions including between film, television, photography, satellite imaging, etc.