Citizen Butler! Thank you for 20 great years of SCREEN-L!

Image from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), one of the films studied in the 1982 PhD thesis "Toward a Theory of Cinematic Style: The Remake" by Jeremy Butler at Northwestern University.

One of Film Studies For Free's heroes is Jeremy Butler, professor of television, film, and new media at the University of Alabama, and the founder of Screen-L (an e-mail discussion list for film/TV educators and students, founded in 1991), ScreenSite (a website to facilitate the teaching and research of film/TV/new media) and ScreenLex (a pronunciation guide for film/TV students of all ages).

The former two ventures are some of the earliest Internet resources for film and TV studies teachers and students. Jeremy also served as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ first information technology officer and was a co-founder of that organisation's website. And he also created a very cool website on Television Style.

Below is a message Jeremy sent out to members of the Screen-L list this week celebrating the remarkable 20 year anniversary of that email community. As well as setting out some essential issues for every scholar active in online publishing and research, he also thanks some people for Screen-L's success.

FSFF would like to join some of Screen-L's other subscribers in turning that gratitude right back at you, Jeremy! Thank you for everything you've done as one of the genuine innovators of the Film and TV Studies disciplines. It's been truly invaluable!

Twenty years ago, BEFORE THE WORLD WIDE WEB EXISTED, Screen-L was born. Its first  test message was launched out onto BITNET (the "Because It's Time" Network) on Friday, March 15, 1991, at 7:42 (and 11 seconds) pm, CST. It initially lived on UA1VM, the University of Alabama's #1 virtual machine--a mainframe computer... big iron!

1991 was the paleolithic era for networked computing. The Internet was not yet the standard platform for email delivery. (Anyone remember the horror that was cc:Mail?) The Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was principally used for services such as Gopher and file transferring via FTP). The World Wide Web had its public debut on August 6, 1991, but Web browsers that could handle images were still two years away.

So, in 1991, Screen-L was kinda cutting edge. I can remember leading workshops at the Society for Cinema Studies (before it added "Media" to its name) on how academics might use this new-fangled electronic mail thing for scholarly purposes.

One fun thing about Screen-L is that every message in its 20-year history is archived here:

http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html

The archive provides an interesting history of the field of media studies. And this archive makes me wonder: 20 years from now, will be able to look back at Facebook's and Twitter's data with the same ease? The short answer is, obviously not. Both of those services make it quite onerous to archive their material. And wouldn't it be interesting to have a crystal ball and see if such services will even exist 20 years hence?

A few thanks are in order:

I must thank the University of Alabama for hosting Screen-L since day one and thus making our longevity possible.

And thanks must also go to the hundreds of Screen-L subscribers over the years. As Screen-L's moderator, I've been grateful for the civility that (most) folks have shown.

On we go for another 20 years (and more?)!

Regards,

Jeremy Butler
Screen-L founder

Capturing in film criticism: Digital Poetics on frame grabs

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959): A Classic 'Frame Capture Film'?

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post. If you are a film studies teacher searching for more good ideas for student assignments, Film Studies For Free would like to recommend a little more weblog reading about classroom applications of film criticism exercises.

Today's gem is the 10/40/70 exercise invented by Nicholas Rombes (Chair and Professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy- also see here) at his great weblog Digital Poetics. What is the gen on 10/40/70? According to Rombes, it's

[a]n experiment in writing about film: select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case the 10 minute, 40 minute, and 70 minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as the guide to writing about the film. No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. What if, instead of freely choosing what parts of the film to address, one let the film determine this? Constraint as a form of freedom.

Rombes has posted three such experiments of his own to date (10 / 40 / 70 (Ocean's Twelve); 10 / 40 / 70 (The Conversation); (10 / 40 / 70): The Grudge and The Terror of Determinism). The results really show the benefits of the creative constraints involved: some rich and insightful writing is generated on the three very different films.

It strikes FSFF that this would be a very rewarding exercise to set for students.

For more on the practicalities, legalities, and methodological advantages and disadvantages of using frame captures in published or public work, see the following:

• Capturing Stills From Video, a great tutorial by Jeremy Butler for Television: Critical Methods and Applications
  
• Shot Logger: Frame Captures and Stats (Shot Logger logs shots from DVDs and other digital video sources. It stores a frame capture of each shot and records the time code of the start of the shot in the video. It also processes that time code to determine the length of individual shots, as well as calculating several statistics for those lengths — including average shot length and standard deviation.
  Shot Logger was original intended for film and television students/scholars who wish to analyze visual style in detail, and who might want to do some basic statistical analysis of editing. In the latter regard, it was inspired by CineMetrics. What Shot Logger adds to CineMetrics is the ability to attach images, frame captures, to the statistical data. Shot Logger relies on two other, open-source applications: Videolan VLC media player and Gallery. The VLC media player facilitates the capturing of frames and Gallery, a web-based photo album organizer, handles the uploading and organization of images.)
  
• Frame-Grab Tutorial (using VLC Media Player), also from Television: Critical Methods and Applications
  
• Film Educators No Longer Criminals by Kristin Thompson
  
• And for some deeply thoughtful and enlightening writing about the advantages and disadvantages of 'syntagmatic' and 'paradigmatic' forms of film criticism, a must read is Adrian Martin's remarkable piece Scanning Godard for Screening the Past