Back from its wee break, Film Studies For Free was saddened to hear of the passing of one of the DIY geniuses responsible for its author’s early fascination with the world of filmmaking: Oliver Postgate, co-creator (with Peter Firmin) of numerous magical Small Films shown on television (Bagpuss, Clangers, Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, Pogles, Pingwings), died peacefully in Broadstairs on the Kent coast on 8 December 2008.
In Film Studies For Free‘s humble opinion, one of the most exciting online areas for potential Film Studies‘ development is rapidly emerging from the already hugely popular Web 2.0 practice of video-sharing. It has never been easier to publically display work in which moving (and still) image-tracks, created by others, can be ‘overlaid’ with one’s own recorded words/sounds/text, to create web ‘video-essays’ or online ‘audio-commentaries’.
The practical/technical side of this activity should provide few challenges for the YouTube generation: the main issue to consider in relation to the educational uses of such ‘user-generated’ resources is, as ever, that of the quality of content. But there are plenty of noteworthy models around, from which Film Studies teachers and students can gain insight and inspiration, such as Susana Medina‘s excellent video essay on fetishism in the work of Luis Buñuel, embedded above (and also available on MySpace and at the Internet Archive).
Yesterday, Film Studies For Free‘s author attended a very stimulating talk on a subject dear to this blog’s heart: Open Access publishing in the Humanities.
A description of the earlier version of Gary Hall’s talk, available online, reads as follows (with the odd hyperlink added, as usual, by FSFF):
This Lecture presented a series of performative media projects or ‘media gifts’. Operating at the intersection of art, media and philosophy, these projects – which include an open access archive and a ‘liquid book’ – are gifts in that they are part of the ‘academic gift economy’ which circulates research for free rather than as market commodities. They are performative in that they are instances of media that produce the things of which they speak and are engaged primarily through their performance.
Hall’s lecture richly explored all sorts of different models for Open Access as well as, very engagingly, the current relevance to these matters of the work of a variety of cultural theorists (most prominently Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman, and the gift-economics of Marcel Mauss — ‘gifts are never free’, but instead often give rise to reciprocal exchange).
The question session at the end of the seminar showed that many of those attending were, in part, inspired by Hall’s call to piracy/self-piracy, but were residually anxious in the ways that academics employed (or working towards being employed) by the current system so often are about the challenges to conventional systems of academic, and other, authorship that Web 2.0 has raised, and that Web 3.0 will take even further. Hall’s tactical refusal to assuage those anxieties was well met by this attendee, though. A little pirate heartiness will indeed be necessary if the lockdown culture of Western Academia is truly to change. (But that’s easy for this blogger to say…)
If you’ve got as far as this point in this post, ye verily deserve today’s final, ‘piratical’ gift: a video of Hall’s lecture as given at Coventry University on September 29, 2008:
Film Studies For Free‘s author promises to return to the fascinating questions about authorship, online and otherwise, raised by Hall’s work in a future post for her research blog Directing Cinema.
This is obviously a very ‘technology-positive’, not to say ‘technologically-triumphalist’, take on Hollywood/California history; for much more nuanced views readers should take a look at Henry Jenkins‘s work, including his blog. But Film Studies For Free thinks that this free video is well worth a watch and certainly serves as a particularly good and lively introduction to film technology history for those who are fairly new to the topic.
Anyhow, on the occasion of this mousepicious anniversary, the ever event-driven Film Studies For Free decided to gather together in one place (below) all its current animation online-resource links (to archives, online films, weblogs, e-journals and noteworthy articles, e-zines, discussion and research groups, and podcasts):
Here are direct links to the other articles in the issue: Giannalberto Bendazzi: African cinema Animation; Joanna Bouldin: Criminal Realism: Virtual Child Pornography, Photorealism and the Legislation of the Virtual Animated Body; David Surman: Animated Caricature: Notes on Superman, 1941-1943; Suzanne Buchan: Animation Spectatorship: The Quay Brothers’ Animated “Worlds”; Michael Nottingham: Downing the Folk-festive: Menacing Meals in the Films of Jan Svankmajer; Thomas Lamarre: An Introduction to Otaku Movement; George Griffin: Willful Ignorance: Making Flying Fur; Sarah Bowen: Mindscapes and Landscapes: Pixillation and Live-Action in the Making of Daze; Penn Stevens: Making Tied Down; Richard O’Connor: Three Ways of Avoiding Animation.
Today, Film Studies For Free brings you news of some more cinema-related items from the Internet Archive. The following are links to out of copyright or otherwise legally scannable books that have been collected and archived by the IA. They may be accessed in various formats (PDF, DjVu, Full Text) and can take a while to download, but it’s great that they’re available online. There are quite a few film books archived (of variable quality) — check out the IA search tool HERE — but Film Studies For Free especially likes these classic tomes:
By the way, if you want to know more about these or any other books then Film Studies For Free recommends you look no further than the wonderful Open Library site. The Open Library promises ‘one web page [full of information] for every book ever published’:
To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now [and there are 1,064,822 so far with full-text]), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.
The Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. It needs volunteers (like all wiki-type projects) so, to find out more about participating, please click HERE, or just start browsing around and add some book information.
Film Studies For Free proudly presents, in the post below this one, its current listing of ‘Individual Authors’ Online (and Open Access) Writing Of Note’ (in the English language). List entries come in two forms: weblinks to particular articles or e-books (or online theses) by the named authors; and weblinks to the authors’ own live links lists to their collected works online. These links, like all the others on FSFF, are permanently accessible via the numerous and copious lists to be found on the right-hand side of the blog – just scroll (almost) endlessly down to find the various categories.
The taxonomy of authorship is always a funny business. Academics often try to work in a spirit of disinterested enquiry and so a system of credit on the basis of names and reputations can have obvious drawbacks. Nonetheless, name recognition functions as effectively in academia as it does elsewhere; and lists of work organised by author name have very obvious uses, beyond that of propping up academic star systems.
Film Studies For Free‘s author list, like all its other selections, is inevitably partial. Many of those named in the post below are personally known to this blog’s author, or associated with academic departments with which she is familiar (though, to be fair, there are many such departments and many such academics as she has been around rather a long time). Other name entries reflect, on occasion, this third-person‘s own (broad) research interests. But the list also represents a pretty good cross-section of the kinds of Open Access, academic, film and moving image studies work online at the moment, and is fairly international in focus, to boot. So, FSFF offers it up in its usual ‘treasure-trove’ spirit and hopes you find it useful and spreadable, too.
Any recommendations (by commenting or by email) for additions to the list — especially for authors’ ‘collected online works’ listings — will be ever so gratefully received, as will notifications of any corrections or dead links.And the list in the post will be updated as necessary whenever new items come to FSFF‘s notice. So please keep your undoubtedly beady, Film and Moving Image Studies’ eyes on it, from time to time. Thank you.
