Announcing the launch of MEDIA INDUSTRIES! A new international Open Access Journal

After a hiatus due to some rather pressing research deadlines (and a little holiday), Film Studies For Free pokes its head fleetingly above the e-parapet to announce the exciting launch of a wonderful new open access journal: Media Industries online at http://mediaindustriesjournal.org.

Media Industries is a new peer-reviewed, multi-media, open-access online journal that supports critical studies of media industries and institutions worldwide. The first issue is now online and the journal is also now accepting submissions for future issues.

Issue 1 is the first in a series of three issues to be published over the summer that features essays authored by the journal's highly esteemed editorial board. Each of the board essays discusses the state of the field of media industries studies.


FSFF wishes Media Industries all the very best for a highly industrious open access future.

1.1 Table of Contents (visit the journal for live links)

• “Welcome to Media Industries” - written by the Editorial Collective: Amelia Arsenault, Stuart Cunningham, Michael Curtin, Terry Flew, Anthony Fung, Jennifer Holt, Paul McDonald, Brian McNair, Alisa Perren, and Kevin Sanson.
• “Dirt Research For Media Industries” - Charles R. Acland
• “Media Policy Research and the Media Industries” - Des Freedman
• “The Value of Ethnography” - Tejaswini Ganti
• “The Menace of Instrumentalism in Media Industries Research and Education” – David Hesmondhalgh
• “Placing International Media Production” - Aphra Kerr
• “On Automation in Media Industries: Integrating Algorithmic Media Production Into Media Industries Scholarship” - Philip Napoli
• “Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Industry Studies” - Thomas Schatz
• “Selling Television: Addressing Transformations in the International Distribution of Television Content” - Jeanette Steemers
• “There Is No Music Industry” – Jonathan Sterne
• “Globalization Through the Eyes of Runners: Student Interns as Ethnographers on Runaway Productions in Prague” – Petr Szczepanik
• “The Case for Studying In-Store Media” - Joseph Turow
• “Industry Proximity” – Patrick Vonderau

Call for Papers
Media Industries invites contributions that range across the full spectrum of media industries, including film, television, internet, radio, music, publishing, electronic games, advertising, and mobile communications. Submissions may explore these industries individually or examine inter-medial relations between industrial sectors. We encourage both contemporary and historical studies, and are especially interested in contributions that draw attention to global and international perspectives, and use innovative methodologies, imaginative theoretical approaches, and new research directions.

More About Media Industries
The journal is maintained by a managing Editorial Collective and Editorial Board comprised of an international group of media industries scholars. For additional information about the Board and Collective, as well as a list of forthcoming essays from Board members, please visit:
Media Industries

Website: http://mediaindustriesjournal.org
Email: mediaindjournal@gmail.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/mediaindustriesjournal
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mediaindjournal

Performing/Representing Male Bonds: Issue 2 of INMEDIA

Screencap from The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). Read Marianne Kac-Vergne 's article Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction Films on the images of masculinity offered up by this and other scifi films.

Film Studies for Free let its readers know, early last year, of InMedia, a great online French Journal, in English, of Media and Media Representations in the English-Speaking World. Its first issue treated  Global Film and Television Industries Today.

Issue 2 on Performing/Representing Male Bonds has also been published recently and its contents, many of which are film related, are linked to below.

InMedia, Issue 2, 2012: Performing/Representing Male Bonds
Edited by Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

• Performing/Representing Male Bonds Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin
• Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction Films Marianne Kac-Vergne
• The Reluctant Patriarch: The Emergence of Lads and Lad Mags in the 1990s Nick Growse
• Seducing Women to Assess Each Other: Male Hierarchies within the Seduction Community Mélanie Gourarier
• Midlife Pop Masculinities in the Here and Now Chris Tinker

Varia

• British Party Election Broadcasts (2001, 2005 and 2010): Ideological Framing, Storytelling, Individualisation David Haigron

Bibliographical Essay

• ‘Locus of Control’: A Selective Review of Disney Theme Parks Thibaut Clément

Interview

• At the Crossroads of Media, Media Critique, and the Critique of Media critics – An Interview with Serge Halimi, Editor-in-Chief of Le Monde Diplomatique Serge Halimi and Christine Larrazet

Critical Perspective

• Social Cognition Divina Frau-Meigs

Conference and Seminar Reviews

• Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television Oliver Haag
• The Translation and Reception of Multilingual Films Samuel Bréan and Jean-François Cornu
• Contemporary Screen Narratives Fabrice Lyczba
• Internet Studies in Europe Mathieu O'Neil
• Cinema and the Crossing of Frontiers, 16th SERCIA Conference Julie Assouly and Marianne Kac-Vergne

Book Reviews

• Delphine Letort Violaine Roussel, Art vs War : les Artistes américains contre la guerre en Irak Paris : Presses de Sciences Po, 2011, 314 p.
• Elsa Grassy Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan (eds), Major Problems in American Popular Culture
• Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011, 496 p.
• Estelle Epinoux Carol MacKeogh, Díóg O’Connell, Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland since the 1990s Cork: Cork University Press, 2012, 176 p.
• Delphine Letort Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 New York & London: New York University Press, 2010, 221 p.

Index by author
Index by keyword

AUDIENCES - a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press and a bumper new issue of PARTICIPATIONS!

Frame grab from Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902). Read Dan North's great blog entry about the audience-oriented 'attractionist aesthetic' of this film', and Frank Kessler's chapter on this film in the collection Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception

This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the 'effects' of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioral world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional 'box office' studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms. [Publisher's blurb for Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass on news of the publication of an open access version of a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press. Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception is an extremely high quality collection edited by Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History, at Birkbeck, University of London. This great tome has, of course, been added to FSFF's permanent listing of Open Access eBooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!


Since we're on the subject of audiences, it seems a brilliant moment to reproduce, below, links to the incredibly rich contents of the latest, just published, issue of PARTICIPATIONS, the excellent online journal of audience research. Not all items are directly film studies related, but they should be of interest to all researching issues of reception in film and media culture.

Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)

CONTENTS

• Editorial; Acknowledgments
• Introduction: In Search of Audiences Ian Christie

PART I: Reassessing Historic Audiences

• “At the Picture Palace”: The British Cinema Audience, 1895-1920 25 by Nicholas Hiley
• The Gentleman in the Stalls: Georges Méliès and Spectatorship in Early Cinema by Frank Kessler
• Beyond the Nickelodeon: Cinemagoing, Everyday Life and Identity Politics by Judith Thissen
• Cinema in the Colonial City: Early Film Audiences in Calcutta by Ranita Chatterjee
• Locating Early Non-Theatrical Audiences by Gregory A. Waller
• Understanding Audience Behavior Through Statistical Evidence: London and Amsterdam in the Mid-1930s byJohn Sedgwick and Clara Pafort-Overduin

PART II: New Frontiers in Audience Research

• The Aesthetics and Viewing Regimes of Cinema and Television, and Their Dialectics by Annie van den Oever
• Tapping into Our Tribal Heritage: The Lord of the Rings and Brain Evolution by Torben Grodal
• Cinephilia in the Digital Age by Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto
• Spectator, Film and the Mobile Phone by Roger Odin
• Exploring Inner Worlds: Where Cognitive Psychology May Take Us by A dialogue between Tim J. Smith and Ian Christie

PART III: Once and Future Audiences

• Crossing Out the Audience by Martin Barker
• The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory by Raymond Bellour
• Operatic Cinematics: A New View from the Stalls by Kay Armatage
• What Do We Really Know About Film Audiences? by Ian Christie

• Notes; General Bibliography; Notes on Contributors; Index of Names; Index of Film Titles; Index of Subjects

PARTICIPATIONS, 9.2, 2012

Contents

• Editorial - Turnbull, Sue (Joint Editor): 'Editorial introduction'

Articles

• Bore, Inger-Lise Kalviknes:'Focus Group Research and TV Comedy Audiences’
• George, Kelly C.:'Self-Help as Women's Popular Culture in Suburban New Jersey: an Ethnographic Perspective'
• Redfern, Nick:‘Correspondence Analysis of Genre Preferences in UK Film Audiences’

Special Section: Comic-Book Audiences

• Sabin, Roger:'Special Section Introduction’
• Barker, Martin:'The Reception of Joe Sacco's Palestine’
• Berenstein, Ofer:'Comic-Book Fans' Recommendations Ceremony: A Look at the Inter-personal Communication Patterns of a Unique Readers/Speakers Community'
• Burke, Liam:‘"Superman in Green": An Audience Study of Comic-Book Film Adaptations Thor and Green Lantern’
• Gordon, Ian:‘Writing to Superman: Towards an Understanding of the Social Networks of Comic Book Fans’
• Patrick, Kevin:‘"Phans", not "Fans": The Phantom and Australian Comic-Book Fandom’
• Sabeti, Shari:‘"Arts of Time and Space": the Perspectives of a Teenage Audience on Reading Novels and Graphic Novels’
• Woo, Benjamin:‘Understanding Understandings of Comics: Reading and Collecting as Media-Oriented Practices’

Special Section: Music Audiences

• Bennett, Lucy:'Special Section Introduction’
• Anderson, Lauren:'"That's how it's supposed to make you feel": Talking with Audiences about 'Both Sides Now' and Love Actually’
• Anderson, Tonya:'Still Kissing Their Posters Goodnight: Female Fandom and the Politics of Popular Music'
• Avdeeff, Melissa:‘Technological Engagement and Musical Eclecticism: An Examination of Contemporary Listening Practices’
• Baym, Nancy K.:‘Fans or Friends? Seeing Social Media As Musicians Do’
• Duffett, Mark:‘Boosting Elvis: a Content Analysis of Editorial Stories from One Fan Club Magazine’
• Kaun, Anne & Fredrik Stiernstedt:‘Media Memories: The Case of Youth Radio DT64’
• Potts, Liza:‘Amanda Palmer and the #LOFNOTC: How Online Fan Participation is Rewriting Music Labels’
• Zaborowski, Rafal:‘Simple Unchanging Stories about Things We Already Know’: Japanese youth and popular songs’

Special Section: Audience Involvement and New Production Paradigms [COST Action]

• Noguera, José-Manuel, Francesca Pasquali & Mélanie Bourdaa:'Special Section Introduction’
• Hills, Matt:‘Torchwood's Trans-transmedia: Media Tie-ins and Brand “Fanagement”’
• García-Avilés, José Alberto:‘Roles of Audience Participation in Multiplatform Television: from Fans and Consumers, to Collaborators and Activists’
• Boccia Artieri, Giovanni:'Productive Publics and Transmedia Participation’
• Vobic, Igor & Ana Milojevic:‘Societal Roles of Online Journalists in Slovenia and Serbia: Self-Perceptions in Relation to the Audience and Print Journalists’
• Cordeiro, Paula:‘Radio becoming R@dio: Convergence, Interactivity and Broadcasting Trends in Perspective’’
• Bennett, Lucy:'Transformations through Twitter: The England Riots, Television Viewership and Negotiations of Power through Media Convergence'
• Horváth, Dóra, Tamás Csordás & Nóra Nyiro:‘Re-written by Machine and New Technology: Did the Internet Kill the Video Star?’
• Grandío, María del Mar & Joseba Bonaut:'Transmedia Audiences and Television Fiction: a Comparative Approach between Skins (UK) and El Barco (Spain)’
• Berriman, Liam:‘Negotiating Proximity: The Co-Existence of Habbo and its Fansites’
• Lin, Yu-Wei:‘The Emergence of the Techno Elite Audience and Free/Open Source Content: A Case Study on BBC Backstage’
• Villi, Mikko:‘Social Curation in Audience Communities: UDC (User-distributed Content) in the Networked Media Ecosystem’

Special Section: Multi-Method Audience Research [COST Action]

• Schrøder, Kim Christian, Uwe Hasebrink, Sascha Hölig and Martin Barker:'Special Section Introduction’
• Aveyard, Karina:'Observer, Mediator and Empiricist: an Account of Methodological Fusion in the Study of Rural Cinema Audiences in Australia’
• Barker, Martin & Ernest Mathijs:'Researching World Audiences: the Experience of a Complex Methodology'
• Biltereyst, Daniël, Kathleen Lotze & Philippe Meers:‘Triangulation in Historical Audience Research: Reflections and Experiences from a Multi-Methodological Research Project on Cinema Audiences in Flanders’
• Courtois, Cédric:‘When Two Worlds Meet: an Inter-Paradigmatic Mixed Method Approach to Convergent Audiovisual Media Consumption’
• Dhoest, Alexander:‘Mixed Methods, Bifocal Vision: Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Data to Assess Public Service Performance’
• Hasebrink, Uwe &Hanna Domeyer:'Media Repertoires as patterns of behaviour and as Meaningful Practices: a Multimethod Approach to Media Use in Converging Media Environments’
• Nyiro, Nóra:‘Nested Analysis-based Mixed Method Research of Television and Video-recording Audiences’
• Schrøder, Kim Christian:‘Methodological Pluralism as a Vehicle of Qualitative Generalization’

Reviews

• Gelly, Christophe & David Roche (eds.):'Approaches to Film and Reception Theories / Cinéma et Théories de la Réception’ (Reviewed by Martin Barker)
• Miller, Daniel:'The Comfort of Things, and Stuff' (Reviewed by Phil Ramsey)
• Thumim, Nancy:‘Self-Representation and Digital Culture' (Reviewed by Justin Battin)

On fans and fantasy: Matt Hills online

Ana Torrent as Ángela in Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, Spain, 1996)

While Film Studies For Free was researching material for its last post - In-between-isms: Winnicottian film, media, and cultural studies - in which the work of media theorist Matt Hills figured strongly, it came across quite a few other freely-acessible, scholarly essays by and interviews with Hills, the links to which had not yet been collected in an online webliography.

So, below you can find a follow up links-list that does just that. Hopefully, it will be of use to those of us who appreciate Hills' unusual (these days) combination of film and media studies approaches in his work, which brilliantly draws both on psychoanalytic and sociological theories to explore audience or consumer attachments to popular media.

Online works by

• Matt Hills, ‘Gothic’ Body Parts in a ‘Postmodern’ Body of Work? The Hinchcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975-77)', Intensities Four, December 2007

• Matt Hills, 'Essential Tensions: Winnicottian Object-Relations In The Media Sociology of Roger Silverstone', International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), Feature 37-48

• Matt Hills, Whose "postmodern" horror? Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis (Thesis, 1996)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 5, 10 May 2003

• Matt Hills, 'Review of Lawrence Grossberg (2005) Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers)', Culture Machine, 2006

• Matt Hills 'Recognition in the eyes of the relevant beholder: Representing ‘subcultural celebrity’ and cult TV fan cultures', Mediactive, Issue 2, 2003 (scroll down to p. 59)

• Matt Hills, 'Review of Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy, Daniel Shaw, ed., (2001)', Aesthetics Online, 2002

Interviews with

• Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, 'Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One):', Confessions of an Aca Fan, August 23, 2007

• Henry Jenkins, 'Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills', Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 28, 2006

• Henry Jenkins, 'Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview With Matt Hills', Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 29, 2006

• Matt Hills, 'Intensities interviews Henry Jenkins @Console-ing Passions, University of Bristol, July 7th, 2001', Intensities Two,

So you want to study television? Free sample introductions to TV and 'Small Screen' studies

As a follow up to yesterday's post on online introductions to film studies (and to a positive flurry of email responses to it), Film Studies For Free (a veritable addict of screens of all sizes) brings you a list of links to exemplary, freely-available, online essays, sample book chapters, and other resources, all of which give a very rich sense indeed of what it is like to study different kinds of television and related media at university or college. The list begins with the most accessible resources.

• Museum of Broadcast Communications - 'Television Studies' Guide
• Jason Mittell, ' Introduction: Why Television?', Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Companion Website/Resource Center. See Mittell's blog Just TV HERE; and also see Henry Jenkins' great interview with Mittell part one HERE and part two HERE.
  
• Glen Creeber, Toby Miller and John Tulloch (eds), The Television Genre Book (BFI/ Palgrave Macmillan, 2e, 2009): Chapter on DRAMA (including Studying Television Drama (G.W.Brandt/J.Tulloch) – Robin Nelson; The Single Play (The Wednesday Play/Play for Today) – Glen Creeber; The Western (Alias Smith and Jones) – William Boddy (Deadwood– Glen Creeber); The Action Series (Man from UNCLE/Avengers) –Toby Miller (24– Glen Creeber); The Crime Series (Hill Street Blues) – Lez Cooke (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) (The Sopranos– Glen Creeber) ; Hospital Drama (ER) – Jason Jacobs; Science Fiction (Star Trek) – Luke Hockley(The X-Files– Catherine Johnson),(Doctor Who– Matt Hills); Drama–Documentary (Cathy Come Home/The Day After) – John Corner; The Mini-Series (Roots/The Singing Detective) – Glen Creeber; Costume Drama (Jane Austen Adaptations) – Robin Nelson; The Teen Series – Rachel Moseley (Buffy the Vampire Slayer– Cathy Johnson); Postmodern Drama (Twin Peaks) – Adrian Page (Ally McBeal – Robin Nelson),(Heroes– Glen Creeber) note: a large file so slow to download but well worth the wait)
• Jeremy G. Butler, 'Chapter 13: Television Studies: Alternatives to Empirical Approaches', Television: Critical Methods and Applications, 3rd Edition (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, September 2006) and Companion Website
• Paul Bowman,'Introduction: Deconstructing "the Popular"’, Deconstructing ‘the Popular' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
• Critical Studies in Television: Scholarly Studies For Small Screen Fictions - Resources Website
• John Caldwell, 'Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the culture of conglomeration (excerpt) from Lyn Spigel and Jan Olson (eds), Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Duke University Press, 2004)
• Susan Holmes, "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). 11 May. 2009
• Maire Messenger Davies, 'Chapter 1: Children and Broadcasting in the 1990s', 'Dear BBC' Children, Television Storytelling and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
• Tania Modleski, 'The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas - Notes on a feminine narrative form' from Charlotte Brunsdon and Lyn Spigel (eds), Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader (Open University Press/McGraw Hill, 2007)
• Nitesh Rohit, 'Cinema/Television in India- a story of images', IndianAuteur.com - Winds from theEast, November 30, 2008
  

If there any other relevant websites or sample introductory book chapters out there that FSFF has inadvertently omitted from this list, please feel free to email with information. (last updated May 12 2009)