Participations: screen dance, moviegoing in the 1930s and 40s, and the reception of gay films

Image from 3 Idiots (Rajkumar Hirani, 2009), a film referred to in Ann David's article 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'

Film Studies For Free is happy to announce that a new issue of Participations, a journal devoted to developing the broad field of study of cultural and media audiences, is now available online.

The table of contents is reproduced below. The issue includes an excellent selection of articles devoted to the topic of audience responses to screen dance, but there are also notable essays, among others, on moviegoing in the USA in the 1930s and 40s, 'bad films', and the reception of 'gay movies' in Sydney.

Particip@tions: Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010)


Special Edition: Screen Dance Audiences – why now?

• Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds (Guest Editors - Special Edition): 'Special Issue Introduction'
• Harmony Bench: 'Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media'
• Ann David: 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'
• Karen Pearlman: 'If a dancing figure falls in the forest and nobody see her...'
• Matthew Reason: 'Thinking about Audiences: a dance film-maker's perspective.  An interview with Alex Reuben'
• Karen Wood: 'An investigation into audiences' televisual experience of Strictly Come Dancing'

Articles

• Mike Chopra-Gant: 'Dirty movies, or: why film scholars should stop worrying about Citizen Kane and learn to love bad films'
• Anouk Lang: '"A Dirty Little Secret": Taste Hierarchies and Richard and Judy's Book Club'
• Scott McKinnon: 'Taking the Word 'Out' West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces'
• Jennifer Radbourne, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow: Empowering Audiences to Measure Quality'
• Becky Walter: The L Word fan fiction reimagining intimate partner violence'

Reviews

• Sarah D. Goode: Understanding and Addressing Sexual Attraction to Children: A Study of Paedophiles in Contemporary Society.  Routledge (2010).
• Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vondreau (eds.): The Youtube Reader.  National Library of Sweden (2009)

Routledge Film Studies free online: Celebrity and Stardom; European Cinema; Race and Film; and Audience and Spectatorship

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.

Cate Blanchett as Galadriel in the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

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.

• Daniel Allington, '“How Come Most People Don't See It?”: Slashing the Lord of the Rings', Social Semiotics, 17: 1, 2007: 43 — 62

• Matthias De Groof, 'Black Film Label: Negritude and Cinema', Third Text, 24: 2, 2010: 249 — 262

• Chris Holmlund, (2010) 'Celebrity, ageing and Jackie Chan: middle-aged Asian in transnational action', Celebrity Studies, 1: 1, 2010: 96 — 112

• Luke McKernan, 'A fury for seeing: Cinema, audience and leisure in London in 1913', Early Popular Visual Culture, 6: 3, 2008: 271 — 280

• Andrew L. Mendelson, 'On the function of the United States paparazzi: mosquito swarm or watchdogs of celebrity image control and power', Visual Studies, 22: 2, 2007: 169 — 183

• Dorota Ostrowska, 'Languages and Identities in the Contemporary European Cinema', Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 15: 1, 2007: 55 — 65

• Stephen Sharot, 'The ‘New Woman’, star personas, and cross-class romance films in 1920s America', Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2010, 73–86'

• Darko Štrajn, 'Identity in a notion of the Eastern and Western European cinema', New Review of Film and Television Studies, 6: 1, 2008: 41 — 50

• Keyan G. Tomaselli, 'Class and Ideology: Reflections in South African Cinema', Critical Arts, 1: 1, 1980: 1 — 13

Participations 7.1: on Slumdog Millionaire, The Wire, and The Sopranos

 

Image from Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

Film Studies For Free is happy to announce that the May 2010 edition of the Open Access e-journal Participations: online journal of audience and reception studies is now online

This edition contains Martin Barker's 'Editorial Introduction', as well as the following articles, not all of which situate themselves within film and television studies, but each of which is relevant to audience and reception studies in those disciplinary areas.

• Shakuntala Banaji:  'Seduced 'Outsiders' versus Sceptical 'Insiders'?  Slumdog Millionaire Through its Re/Viewers'

• Richard Butsch: 'Crowds, Publics and Consumers: Representing English Theatre Audiences from the Globe to the OP Riots' [how people thought and worried about theatre audiences in Britain from Shakespeare’s time onward]

• Nathalie Claessens & Alexander Dhoest: 'Comedy Taste: Highbrow/Lowbrow Comedy and Cultural Capital' [on Flemish TV audiences]

• Julian McDougall: 'Wiring the Audience' [on The Wire]

• Jeanette Monaco:  'Memory Work, Autoethnography and the Construction of a Fan-Ethnography' [in TV studies research, including on The Sopranos]

• Esteban del Río:  'Consuming and Contesting Latinidad: Audience Research and Cultural Capital' [on the reception of the Americanos exhibit which toured from the Smithsonian to Los Angeles]

Five Gold Links

Film Studies For Free wishes you a very happy 2009, just a little later than hoped... Over the holidays it moved office into a lovely new blog-cabin, and since has been somewhat distracted both by its breathtaking new views of the Sussex countryside as well as the customary broadband-connection 'teething troubles' often attendant upon such moves.

FSFF will be back up to full speed (indeed, up to new and improved speed...) very soon. But in the meantime, on this, the thirteenth day of Christmas - were there such a thing - here are five gold links it wished it could have brought you just a tad earlier:

• Best film-blog discovery: Where the Stress Falls by M.S. Smith (check out two nice posts on the wonderful work of Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel - HERE and HERE)
• Best Harold Pinter film items to commemorate his death on 24 December: Kevin B. Lee's two brilliant posts (HERE and HERE, the latter a video essay by Lee and Dan Callahan) on one of FSFF's favourite films: The Go-Between (1970, scripted by Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey - see also Kimberley Lindbergs' great writing on Losey's films).
• Best new filmmaker online archive: the Carl Theodor Dreyer website set up by the Danish Film Institute (thanks to David Bordwell for the tip-off): check out, especially, the short and clips page.
• Best new issue of an Open Access film and media studies journal: Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, Volume 5, Issue 2 (November 2008).

Martin Barker, (Editor): 'Editorial Introduction' Selected Articles □ Barbara Klinger, : 'Say It Again, Sam: Movie Quotation, Performance and Masculinity' □ Yiu Fai Chow & Jeroen de Kloet: 'The Production of Locality in Global Pop - A comparative study of pop fans in the Netherlands and Hong Kong' □ Joost de Bruin: 'Young Soap Opera Viewers and Performances of the Self'

• Most interesting YouTube playlist discovery: Screening Room with Robert Gardner including clips from interviews with Jean Rouch (see below), Jonas Mekas, Hollis Frampton, Yvonne Rainer, Les Blank and Caroline Leaf

  Screening Room was a 1970s Boston television series that for almost ten years offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station. The series was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner (Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss), who was Chairman of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard for many years. This unique program dealt even-handedly with animation, documentary, and
  experimental film, welcoming such artists as Jan Lenica, John and Faith Hubley, Emile DeAntonio, Jean Rouch, Ricky Leacock, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Baillie, Yvonne Rainer and Michael Snow. Thirty episodes have been edited for release as DVDs. Visit Robert Gardner's personal website for further information: www.robertgardner.net)