From now through April, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival will present "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.
Week Six: Personal Obsessions
The widespread accessibility of online video creation and sharing allows us to explore and indulge our fascinations with films in unprecedented ways, as seen in these four examples: a close scrutinizing of a seemingly throwaway moment in Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder;” extended, heartfelt contempt for the Star Wars prequel; a fixation on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and the “spectacular improbabilty of its plot;” the sensation of sleeplessly watching Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” after days of “Occupy Wall Street.” Immersed in distinctly personal perspectives, these videos make explicit what is implicit in all the videos presented in this series: that subjective engagement is what brings flavor and fire to our analytical endeavors.
Today's selection:
Star Wars the Phantom Menace
Redlettermedia (2009)
A viral sensation, this fanboy parody uses a multi-layered arsenal of disarming rhetoric, satirizing film geek analysis as a way to make its underlying film geek analysis palatable to a wide audience.
View all Motion Studies video selections.
Volker Pantenburg is assistant professor for moving images at the media faculty of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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