Update at 14.33 BST: The PDF files linked to here are currently not working. Will sort out and update as soon as possible. Apologies for any inconvenience.
While it is often the emergence of exceptions that proves rules, the very existence of Film Studies For Free shows that there might occasionally be such a thing as a free lunch.
At the same time, this wily blog is certainly no purist when it comes to campaigning for Open Access in scholarly publishing. FSFF's inbuilt pragmatism means that it is always very happy to pass on news of the experiments of otherwise 'closed' or 'subscription only' academic publishers with marketing strategies involving limited free online access to their scholarly publications.
While there is, as yet, no challenger on the horizon to Intellect's extensive championing of the Film Studies freebie, publishing giant Routledge is currently offering up occasional free 'article collections' for particular subjects. Their Film Studies collection is focused on the following four key themes: Celebrity and Stardom; European Cinema; Race and Film; and Audience and Spectatorship.
Free access to the below articles in their current collection will last until December 31, 2010, so do be sure to download them before then.
Film Studies For Free is always happy to post Open-Access related, Film and Media Studies calls for papers. Below is one such call for an OA journal that FSFF has profiled and linked to before: Wide Screen, a peer-reviewed open access academic journal of screen studies that encompasses a multi-disciplinary approach and is devoted to the critical study of cinema and television from historical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic perspectives.
European Producers and Production: Contemporary practices in film, television and multimedia environments
Edited by Professor Graham Roberts (Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University) and Dr Dorota Ostrowska (School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck, University of London)
About the Special Issue
This issue of Wide Screen is interested in the ways in which the contemporary media environment has changed the role and function of a producer. We would like to understand new models of production emerging as a result of new media environments (multimedia, game industry, internet). Does the multimedia environment lead to a greater specialisation on the part of particular producers in relation to the content they deliver, or does it result in producers extending their activity into a wider range of media and content? How do the profession, work, role and function of a producer differ depending on the national context in which they function? What is the impact of EU-wide policies on production practices in Europe?
Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Wide Screen invites articles on individual producers focusing on one of the following themes: co-productions, festival circuits (film, television and computer games markets), EU funding programmes and policies, education and training, freelancers vs in-house producers, networking, contracts, creativity, risk-taking, types of producers (creative, executive, line-producers), contracts, relationship with talent (directors, writers, actors), DVD releases (in particular special collectors editions)/DVD companies; production companies; awards and prizes; relationship with distribution and exhibition sector; producers of shorts, documentaries, fiction; sourcing content (book fairs, theatre productions); content ownership; piracy; private funding, sponsorship, equity versus public funding;
Deadline
Deadline for submission of full papers: 10 November, 2009
Film Studies For Free (returning after a short unplanned break filled with unfortunate technical hitches of the sick computer kind) is happy to bring its loyal readers news of a wonderful weblog devoted to studying
the ways in which Latin America has figured in Hollywood and European cinema. Rather than lamenting the distance between stereotype and reality, it is interested in the functions served by the innumerable projections of fantasized Latin Americas onto the silver screen.
Projections' project is to write about Hollywood and European movies 'in which Latin America plays a part, however small'. Beasley-Murray asks: 'Is there some shared element beyond the contingent commonality of location or theme? My wager is that there is, and that it's something worth writing about. Indeed, my suspicion is that when Hollywood goes Latin, it reveals something essential about cinema tout court.' The index by title of the many films so far examined can be found by clicking HERE.
The idea is in large part to get beyond the ghetto of closed, proprietary educational software (WebCT and the like), to give students a sense that they are producing research on a public stage, and to integrate their learning with their own real world experience of the internet.
Important work, indeed. To conclude its celebration of the achievement of Projections, Film Studies For Free decided to drill down and produce an extensive series of high-quality, online-resource links pertaining to one of the films studied on that blog (and a great favourite of this blogger, too): Orson Welles's 1958 Touch of Evil. The list is headed by Projections's great entry on this film. Online analyses of and information about Touch of Evil:
Also see the wonderful Wellesnet, the Orson Welles Web Resource, together with its sister project The Museum of Orson Welles which continues to 'compile and present the available radio and recorded works of Orson Welles'.
