Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn fan studies. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn fan studies. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Thứ Hai, 28 tháng 10, 2013

Studying Movie Magazines and Fan Culture! Online Research and Methodology Resources. And LANTERN!


 A Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine by Tamar Jeffers McDonald with Catherine Grant (on shaky cam!).
With her customary wit and aplomb, Jeffers McDonald shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. See below for further information about the video, as well as for a discussion about how Jeffers McDonald used resources, like the one showcased in the video, in research for her new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom.

Today, Film Studies For Free presents a bumper entry on movie magazines and fan culture research! The entry boasts three main content clusters: 
  1. A guide to using Lantern, the new search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched.
  2. A nine minute video Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine (also embedded above), presented by film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, and an audio interview in which she expands on the fan magazine research she carried out for her new book on Doris Day's stardom.
  3. Links to written studies and other essential online resources on, or using, movie magazine and fan culture research methodologies.

 1. LANTERN



Pages from Radio and Television Mirror, Jan-June 1949 (archived by the Internet Archive), as discussed by Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, in her report, below, on using Lantern, Media History Digital Library's search and visualisation platform.

Many readers at Film Studies For Free will already know of, and indeed be using, Lantern, the new, essential, search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched. The MHDL has digitized over 800,000 pages of out-of-copyright media publications for open access. Many of the rare magazines in the collection came from the Library of Congress Packard Campus (you can see the full list of contributing individuals and sponsors on the credits webpage). The MHDL's searchable collections now include:
Business Screen (1938-1973); Educational Screen (1922-1962); The Film Daily (1918-1948); International Photographer (1929-1941); International Projectionist  (1933-1965); Transactions of SMPE and Journal of SMPE (1915-1954); Motion Picture Magazine (1914-1941); Motography (1909-1918); Movie Classic (1931-1937); Movie Makers (1926-1953); Moving Picture World (1907-1919); The New Movie Magazine (1929-1935); Photoplay (1914-1943); Radio Annual and Television Yearbook (1938-1964); Radio Digest (1923-1933); Radio Mirror (1934-1963); Radio Broadcast (1922-1930); Sponsor (1946-1964); Talking Machine World (1906-1928); Variety (1905-1926 - production on the next twenty years is underway)
The great news is that we can search and access items from the collection platform at MHDL's brilliant Lantern site http://lantern.mediahist.org, or simply type your query into the searchbox of the existing MHDL site: http://mediahistoryproject.org. The site was developed designed and produced by Eric Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts, UW-Madison and Co-Director (with David Pierce), Media History Digital Library.

FSFF asked film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, whose fabulous work in this area is expanded on in the next section of this entry, to test Lantern as a highly seasoned user of offline archives. Here is her glowing account:
For me Lantern's utility lies not only in its stock of periodicals, freely accessible, fully searchable, available for my own research purposes but also the possibilities it offers as a teaching tool, bringing film history alive.
     My recent research has been on Doris Day. Trips to the British Library, the Library of Congress and the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles netted me over 1500 articles to peruse, but not the first article turned up by Lantern when I put in "Doris Day" as the search term, "That Day Girl/That Hope Fellow" from Radio and Television Mirror, May 1949. This is an early piece in which the new star herself purports to write about Bob Hope, the veteran entertainer on whose radio show Day appeared as songstress and sidekick. The article attempts to preserve the double-act nature of the pair's relationship by getting each to write about the other. The columns notionally penned by 'Day' - and there is no way at this distance that we can either prove or disprove her actual authorship - testify to what a great guy Hope is; his sections do the same, maintaining his comic persona as a narcissist. This confirms the piece's early date - 1949 - Day was already beginning to be spoken of as a major star and fan magazines would not allow space dedicated to her to boost another performer for much longer. By 1952 coverage of Day was saturating the movie magazines: she appeared on or in all twelve monthly issues of Movie Stars Parade and was featured in seventy-five other periodicals that year too. Finding this piece through Lantern is a valuable corrective, then, to the belief that Day became a star effortlessly, consistently receiving lead billing and attention in the magazines. While Motion Picture did hail her as the next big thing in August 1948 [see images below**], other publications obviously took longer to be convinced.
     In addition to its value for researching for individual stars or films, Lantern is also useful for more general searches for social history. Since the whole text of the issues is scanned and searchable, the advertising sections of the magazines can be viewed also, and provide fascinating social history data about the presentation of a variety of products. Typing in "pink toothbrush" recovers the history of Ipana, a toothpaste which boasted it could do away with gum disease; "Zonite" claimed it was the "solution to a woman's most intimate problem". Enter any product name to see the variety of methods used to sell it in the different periodicals, and different periods, covered: a search for "Lustre Creme shampoo" will bring up gorgeous full colour portraits of Hollywood stars as well as more utilitarian black and white ads featuring a more anonymous 'the Lustre-Creme Girl'.
     Lantern truly illuminates both the importance of fan and trade periodicals as cinema paratexts, and itself as an invaluable source for finding and searching them.
     (Note: For the first search, I simply put in Doris Day as the term, without inverted commas, with no specified date range and without altering the default Sort mode for results, By Relevance. Changing this to 'Sort by date' is the best option to capture the changing methods of presentation for product advertising).
Further great accounts of Lantern may be found at the links below:
Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf
Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf
In the video embedded at the top of the entry, Tamar Jeffers McDonald presents a guide to studying a movie magazine. With her customary wit and aplomb, she shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. The above, somewhat impromptu (shaky cam!) resource came out of an interview with Jeffers McDonald carried out at the National Theatre, London, in October 2013 by Film Studies For Free. An audio recording of the interview is embedded below and online here at FSFF's new podcast site.

The  main topic of conversation was about Jeffers McDonald's new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom (London: I B Tauris, 2013). This book poses as a central question, amongst others, “Why do we assume Doris Day always plays a virgin?” In previous work (her PhD thesis, the edited collection Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, (Wayne State University Press, 2010), and an article on Rock Hudson from 2007 - see details here) Jeffers McDonald has examined what ‘playing a virgin’ might mean and consist of; now she turns her attention to how this dominant idea has been circulated, through studying the film fan periodicals which advanced and then froze Day’s stardom, a methodology she explores in detail in this video, and in the (12 minutes long) audio interview embedded below. [** See the foot of FSFF's entry for images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, to which Jeffers McDonald refers in the interview].


3. Online Resources on Movie Magazines and Fan Culture Research Methodologies

**Below are images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, reproduced by kind permission of Tamar Jeffers McDonald, to which she refers in her audio interview embedded above.














    Thứ Ba, 2 tháng 7, 2013

    VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture: European Television Memories

    Screenshot from The Paradox of the Monarchy, an archive-film video collage (by Catherine Grant) exploring some of the psychological and mediatized components of the public's relationship with the UK monarchy. Read Hazel Collie's discussion of significant, gendered, televisual memories, such as those of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in "It's Just So Hard to Bring It to Mind": The Significance of ‘Wallpaper’ in the Gendering of Television Memory Work

    Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that EUscreen has presented issue 03 of VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture.

    The new issue treats the subject of 'European Television Memories', and it's full of wonderful discussions of 'dynamic memory practices that take place in the contemporary media landscape as an ongoing, active and performative engagement with the past', as the issue's editorial puts it. Such discussions are highly relevant to film scholars, too.

    The full table of contents is given below, with FSFF's congratulations to VIEW on an excellent issue.


    Editorial
    Discoveries
    Explorations
    VIEW is published by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in collaboration with Utrecht University, Maastricht University and Royal Holloway University of London. It is supported by the EUscreenXL project, the European Television History Network and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
    VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture is the first peer-reviewed, multi-media and open access e-journal in the field of European television history and culture. It offers an international platform for outstanding academic research and archival reflection on television as an important part of our European cultural heritage. The journal is proud to present its third issue: European Television Memories. It has been guest-edited by Jérôme Bourdon and Berber Hagedoorn and is freely available at: http://www.viewjournal.eu
    In the context of the fast development of media studies, the third issue of VIEW highlights debates around the moving borders of national memories, fostered by television in the context of European history. The articles in this issue focus on the contribution of European television researchers, covering all three areas of media studies: production, text and reception. We wish you a pleasant and inspiring journey through European Television Memories!
    www.viewjournal.eu - Twitter: @ViewjournalEU

    Thứ Năm, 13 tháng 6, 2013

    10th Anniversary Issue of PARTICIPATIONS on Fan Studies, and Audience Interaction and Participation

    Read more here: http://www.participations.org/Volume%2010/Issue%201/contents.htm
    Screenshot extract from 'Ten years old - and ready to try new things, an editorial by Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull in the the tenth anniversary issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception  Studies

    Film Studies For Free today wishes a very happy 10th year in online existence to the remarkable open access venture that is Participations. What a great achievement! The journal is stronger and more impressive than ever, as the below, very high quality (and enormous), latest issue -- on fan studies, and audience interaction and participation -- testifies

    FSFF somewhat cheekily embeds the above screenshot from the opening part of this issue's editorial, for its readers, as in it joint editors Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull raise some important matters concerning the long term viability and success of a journal like this. The editors are choosing to respond to these by 'recasting the journal' in a number of interesting ways - you can read about these at greater length here.

    If you are working in this area, now would be a really good time to consider what you would want from Participations in the years ahead. Feel free to post comments here, or contact the editors here.

    Here's to the next ten years, Participations! And thank you.


    Participations, Volume 10, Issue 1, (May 2013)
    Articles
    Special Section: The Fan Studies Network - new connections, new research
    FSN Forum Discussion
    Special Section: COST - audience interaction & participation
    Reviews

    Thứ Ba, 18 tháng 9, 2012

    New WORLD PICTURE on Distance: André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Barbara Hammer, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Phil Solomon, Yorgos Lanthimos, and much more


    Frame grab from Κυνόδοντας/Kynodontas/Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009). Read Eugene Brinkema's new essay on this film
    Distance suggests a standing apart—a separation, an opening or difference, a gap in space. And mirroring broader swaps of categories of time for categories of space, “distance” can also stand for remoteness on the level of time: James Phillips, for example, neatly summarizes this shift as “Odysseus longs for home; Proust is in search of lost time.”6 But neither this sense of a spatial gap or a temporal remove is precisely the sense in which distance is taken seriously in Dogtooth. For that, we require an older sense of the word. [Eugenie Brinkema, 'e.g., Dogtooth', World Picture 7, 2012]

    It's been busy, busy, busy round these parts, but today Film Studies For Free stirs itself from its travails to bring you the, as usual, wonderful news that World Picture, that most original of online humanities journals, has just published a new issue.

    The keyword for WP 7 is Distance, and it has activated a wide range of brilliant cultural and philosophical readings on that topic. FSFF particularly loved filmmaker Barbara Hammer's contributions to this issue here and here (see this earlier FSFF entry on her marvellous work), as well as Eugenie Brinkema on Dogtooth, Sam Ishii-Gonzales on Bergson, and  Domietta Torlasco on The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

    There is much more in WP of huge worth and interest, so please dip into the below contents.

    Oh, and also, please come, if you can, to the upcoming annual World Picture conference, held this year at the University of Sussex, November 2-3, 2012. A terribly excited FSFF will be in attendance!


    World Picture 7: Table of Contents

    Thứ Hai, 13 tháng 8, 2012

    Our Beautiful Wickedness: On Reading Films Queerly. In Memory of Alexander Doty

    An audiovisual collage made by Catherine Grant in memory of Alexander Doty, 
    brilliant author of numerous key texts in LGBT and queer film and cultural studies, 
    including the one quoted from in this video: Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon 
    (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

    [C]lassic [film] texts and personalities actually can be more queer-suggestive than “openly” gay, lesbian, or bisexual texts. That is, the coding of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts and personalities can often yield a wider range of non-straight readings because certain sexual things could not be stated baldly—and still cannot or will not in most mainstream products—thus often making it more difficult to categorize the erotics of a film or a star. Of course, if you aren’t careful, this line of thought can begin to sound like an argument valorizing the closet, for understanding queerness as always something “connotated” or suggested (and never really there “denotatively”), for “subtexting,” and for “subcultural” readings. But since I don’t see queer readings as any less there, or any less real, than straight readings of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts, I don’t think that what I do in this book is colluding with dominant representational or interpretive regimes that seek to make queerness “alternative” or “sub” straight. [Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics, pp. 1-2]
    In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my “queer reception” love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses–largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add. [Alexander Doty,  in Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011]

    Film Studies For Free was shocked and very saddened at the news, just over a week ago, of the untimely death of Alexander Doty, a truly trailblazing film and media scholar.

    Doty, Indiana University Professor of Gender Studies and Communication and Culture (and chair of the latter department) was the author of two classic and highly enjoyable books in queer audiovisual cultural studies: Making Things Perfectly Queer (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000). He also co-edited, with Corey Creekmur, the hugely important collection Out in Culture: Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Continuum, 1995) and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas.

    While Doty didn't claim to have invented queer cultural reading as a scholarly practice, he wowed us with the brilliance, daring and sincerity of his interpretations, ones often deeply rooted in his personal, affective experiences of the cultural forms he was studying. In so doing, he succeeded in showing countless other students of film and media texts why it is so vital to engage in these critical practices in public, why it is essential to be good at them, as well as what is seriously at stake in many identity or, indeed, existence-based scholar-fandoms, like those often engaged in by LGBT subjects.

    If, as the Wizard of Oz tells us, 'A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others', the many tributes to Doty that have appeared in the last week prove, beyond any doubt, that he had an excellent heart. He certainly had a very courageous one. He, his unique voice, and the work he would have gone on to produce, had his life not been so cruelly cut short, will be hugely missed.

    As well as putting together the video collage at the top of this entry, which introduces Doty's compelling justification for queer reading, if not the (possibly even more compelling) details of his actual queer reading of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), FSFF has also assembled a list of links in Doty's memory to online studies which perform queer readings of films and moving image culture, as well as openly accessible studies of some films that perform their own queer readings. Two further FSFF video essays are embedded--on Elizabeth Taylor and on "queer Hitchcock", both of which intersect with, and were partly inspired by Doty's own work on these and other themes.

    That long list is preceded by a growing collection of links to the online tributes to Doty that have appeared since his death (this will be kept updated), as well as to his own, openly accessible, scholarly work online. FSFF's author very gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Anthony Bleach and the Facebook group Friends of Alexander Doty in assembling the first two of these three lists. Although she only knew Doty through his published work, she would like to convey her condolences for his loss to all those whose lives were graced, as so many evidently were, by knowing him personally.

    Finally, at the very foot of today's entry is a call for contributions to a new website for the Global Queer Cinema project (to be launched in September). It will seek to live up to the high standards that Doty's work set for queer cultural critique as it aims to provide a new, openly accessible, internationalist resource for queer film and cultural studies. FSFF will update its readers about this exciting project in the coming weeks.

    In the meantime, FSFF is sad that one of those who have most inspired LGBT film studies scholarship will not be around to witness his influence on this project.

    Rest in queer peace, Alexander Doty.


    Online tributes to Alexander Doty
    Online work by Alexander Doty 
    Online studies, or performances, of queer reading

      Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE by Catherine Grant


      Skipping ROPE (with audio commentary) by Catherine Grant. First published in Frames, 1, 2012. Transcript available.



      Call For Queer Reading/Writing Contributions 
      to the new Global Queer Cinema website


      Contributions are invited to the Global Queer Cinema website, hosted by the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, UK. The site will be launched in early September 2012. 
      The website forms part of the Global Queer Cinema project, an international academic research network project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Sussex. The project is led by Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (University of Warwick). The network held its first event in May of this year.
      The project website will be run in conjunction with Catherine Grant (University of Sussex and Film Studies For Free) and Laura Ellen Joyce, GQC Project Co-ordinator, and will continue beyond the length of the project, acting in part as an open access archive and news filter for project-generated material, and related queer film studies resources. 
      We welcome contributions from researchers interested in queer (and queering) cinema, cultural studies, media, global studies, gender and sexuality, filmmakers, artists, writers and interdisciplinary scholars, or those with an interest in the practice, exploration and dissemination of film. The below list of topics and frameworks. 
      • Queer frames
      • Queer uncanny
      • Queer sounds and music
      • Queer illusions
      • Queer film festivals
      • Queer decades
      • Queer directors
      • Queer avant garde and DIY
      • New Queer Cinema
      • New releases
      • Classic films
      • Androgyny and pandrogyny
      • Queer cosmetics and prosthetics
      • In-depth essays on single films
      • Short essays on single images

      We therefore invite short takes of 250 - 300 words, or longer essays (MLA style) of around 1500-2000 words for more in-depth analysis. Multimedia work (non-copyright infringing - using fair use/fair dealing principles) is very welcome. The above list of topics is not exhaustive, and we invite contributions on any topic or theme which you feel would may (queerly) fit our general ethos. Please correspond with us about any proposals for content by email at GQCproject[at]gmail[dot]com, on Twitter at @g_q_c, and do please 'like' us on Facebook. Thank you.

      Thứ Bảy, 16 tháng 6, 2012

      Up, up, and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

      May the Fourth Be With You published on May 4, 2012 by
      Read Henry Jenkins' and Ashley Hinck's articles about the Harry Potter Alliance.
      Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts. Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement. [Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, 'Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism' [1.9], Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)]
      Film Studies For Free is a very big fan of the open access journal of Transformative Works and Cultures, so it is delighted that there's a new issue out.

      It's a themed collection of studies of transformative works and fan activism, edited by media studies superheroes Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. Links to abstracts of the articles (and from there to the articles themselves) are given below.

      Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012): Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California. 

      Thứ Ba, 28 tháng 6, 2011

      Memory Screens: New Issue of IMAGE AND NARRATIVE

      Frame grab from 1975 (Shaun Wilson, version 1 (2005), DV as single channel DVD, colour, sound, 5mins). Visit Shaun Wilson's website here and read his article about 'home movies' here
      The concept of memory screens is an overarching term exploring the relationship between forms of media, viewers, practitioners and memory. The notion of memory screens alludes to the ways in which memories become remembered, layered, forgotten and transformed. The range of articles in this volume reflects the relationship between memory and history, both public and personal. ['Thematic Cluster: Introduction' by Teresa Forde]

      Film Studies For Free continues to be impressed by the excellence of the online journal Image and Narrative which has recently published a special issue entitled Memory Screens.

      FSFF particularly appreciated film and video artist Shaun Wilson's essay on the art of vintage home movies, Jenny Chamarette's study of the dynamics of the ‘spectre’ or ‘spectral body’ of the auteurist figure of Agnès Varda, Peter Kravanja's exploration of narrative contingencies in Rohmer and Akerman and Teresa Forde and Erin Bell's discussions of memory and British television. But this is a very high quality issue throughout and, as always at I and N, particularly characterised by the thoughtful integration of close analysis and film and moving image theory.

      Image and Narrative, Vol 12, No 2 (2011): Memory Screens

      Table of Contents
      • 'Thematic Cluster: Introduction' by Teresa Forde ABSTRACT PDF
      • 'Remixing Memory through Home Movies' by Shaun Wilson ABSTRACT PDF
      • 'Video Installation, Memory and Storytelling: the viewer as narrator' by Diane Charleson ABSTRACT PDF
      • 'Spectral bodies, temporalised spaces: Agnès Varda's motile gestures of mourning and memorial' by Jenny Chamarette ABSTRACT PDF
      • 'Television and memory: history programming and contemporary identities' by Erin Bell ABSTRACTPDF
      • 'Television Dramas as Memory Screens' by Teresa Forde ABSTRACT PDF
      • 'The Lives of Others: re-remembering the German Democratic Republic'  by Margaret Montgomerie and Anne- Kathrin Reck ABSTRACT PDF
      • 'Nostalgic [re]remembering: film fan cultures and the affective reiteration of popular film histories' by Nathan Hunt ABSTRACT PDF
      Various Articles
      • 'Cinema, Contingencies, Metaphysics' by Peter Kravanja ABSTRACT PDF
      Review Articles
      • Hillary Chute's Ambivalent Idiom of Witness' by Charlotte Pylyser  ABSTRACT PDF
      • 'Naissances de la bande dessinée de William Hogarth à Winsor McCay' by Pascal Lefèvre ABSTRACT PDF