Please help to develop JURN!

An unusual post at Film Studies For Free today, for which this blog begs your indulgence. FSFF's author has just pledged a sum of money in support of the project set out below. It would like you to read the information given and consider whether you believe that this is a project you can afford to support with at least a very small donation.

Obviously, it's not in support of disaster relief, a self-evidently essential cause for us all to find money for, especially at the moment. But it is for an important kind of solidarity, nonetheless, as you will see if you read the text below.

If you are a regular reader of Film Studies For Free it's a form of solidarity from which, FSFF hopes, you are already benefitting in some small way: the JURN search engine is one of this blog's main hunting grounds for Open Access scholarly material.

Anyway, here's the pledge link if you feel at all inspired by the up-to-now completely selfless (and continuing to be not-for-profit) work of JURN's creator.  It's a 'crowd-funding' project, so if the target amount isn't reached, pledged donations won't have to be paid. Thank you. 

JURN’s crowdfunding call – 12th March to 4th June 2011

My name is David Haden. In February of this year I celebrated two years of hand-crafting the best search engine possible for finding free open-access academic content in the arts and humanities. That's right, it only finds the free content.  You may have used Google Scholar, only to find page-after-page of links that lead only to requests for payment or passwords.  My JURN search-engine is different.  Almost every link you see in JURN should lead you to free full-text scholarly content, most of it from peer-reviewed journals.

Now I want to take JURN to the next stage.  I've already made a big start.  My JURN  search-engine has been intensively developed over the last two years.  I've put in thousands of hours of my own expert labour.  JURN is now a mature service that runs on the Google CSE platform, albeit one that's bursting at the seams to expand.

JURN is very easy to use, and among others it helps those who do not have access to expensive commercial academic databases. People in the developing world often only have minimal access to academic journals outside of the fields of healthcare and agriculture, even if they study at a university.  People like Yusrina Abu Bakar in Malaysia, a mature-student and mother of four who is undertaking a university degree.  She wrote of JURN in 2010...

"Wow, this is great... I can get articles in full - no more abstracts only, or the site asks us to subscribe.  Thank you."

Now I want your help to expand JURN, to provide an easy-to-use full-text search service worthy of the world's hungry minds.

I've already spent two years intensively building JURN, a comprehensive Google Custom search-engine for open scholarly journals in the arts and humanities.  I've tracked down and indexed over 4,000 scholarly and arts publications, a great many of which do not appear on any other index.  Now I want to break free of Google and run JURN on my own server and web harvester.  Thankfully the excellent mature search software SearchBlox became free in late 2010, and is perfect for the job.

SearchBlox will let me go beyond the limits that Google places on its free Custom Search Engines.  It will let me expand coverage beyond Google's 5,000 URL indexing limit.  It will let me fully index all relevant web content, and fully index every article found (Google limits the results a Google CSE can access, compared to the main Google Search). It will let me add many new features and refinements to the search results.

I now need a server that's capable of speedily running SearchBlox and making the substantial initial "document harvesting and indexing" run of about a million documents.  Sadly, that doesn't come cheap.  I also need to buy myself some hours each week so I can further develop and build this free non-profit service. JURN also needs to be regularly checked for link rot, which is aided by several semi-automated software packages - including some "dark side" SEO software that I've converted for more useful purposes.

If this project is funded, after initial setup I would hope to be able to add indexing of open-access business journals, expand into education and social science journals, and add academic papers that are self-archived on faculty Web pages, as well as expanding the existing arts and humanities coverage.  I want to make JURN the world's outstanding search-engine for free academic content in the arts, humanities and social sciences.  I also want to properly expand beyond content that's in the English language.  With your help, I can do it.  Please make a donation.  The minimum amount is just £3.

If you have any inquiries regarding this project, please contact me via Ulule or via the JURN blog.  If you just want to find out more about JURN, please take a look at the website at http://www.jurn.org/ and directory of English-language journals at http://www.jurn.org/directory/

Race and Ethnicity in Fandom - Transformative Works and Cultures' Call For Papers

FSFF ♥ Nyota Uhura, (Nyota meaning 'Star' & Uhura meaning 'Freedom') originally played by Nichelle Nichols, is a character in Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, the first six Star Trek films, and the 2009 film Star Trek.

Film Studies For Free likes to circulate calls for papers for online, Open Access, film and media studies related journals. So, here's a very worthwhile CFP for the very wonderful e-journal Transformative Works and Cultures. All relevant details are given below.

By the way, while putting together this post, FSFF came across another great, related, website: Fandom Research - very much worth exploring.

Race and Ethnicity in Fandom

Transformative Works and Cultures, an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011. Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.

In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.

The deadline for completed submissions is October 1, 2010.

The editors would like to encourage pre-proposal abstracts and drafts for early feedback by March 1, 2010.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.

Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.

Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially recuperative race readings (e.g., Randall's The Wind Done Gone, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea).

Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb Noire, and other panfannish and professional projects).

Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork, etc.).

Complete information available in PDF form here:

US letter paper:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-race-cfp-2009-04-30-us.p
df

A4 paper:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-race-cfp-2009-04-30-a4.p
df

The announcement on TWC's site is here:

http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/9

E-book Index: University of California Press Public Access Film Studies Books

Image of Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman) from Viaggio In Italia/Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
In honour of Peter Brunette's great book on Rossellini, now publicly acessible online via the University of California Press archives

Film Studies For Free regularly visits the brilliant online archive of the University of California Press to check out its range of public-access e-books. There are now more than thirty full-length, UC Press film-studies, or film and media-studies related, books openly accessible online now. So FSFF delightedly and painstakingly put together the list, below, of direct links to each and every last one of them. FSFF will keep you updated about future, film-related developments at the archive, too.

Thanks to UC Press and their book authors for their great attitude to publishing scholarly works online.

• Armbrust, Walter, editor. Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000 2000
• Bloch, R. Howard, and Frances Ferguson, editors Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989
• Brunette, Peter, Roberto Rossellini. University of California Press, c1996 1996
• Byg, Barton. Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Day, James. The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Flinn, Caryl. The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2004 2004
• Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Henderson, Brian, and Ann Martin, editors. Film Quarterly: Forty Years - A Selection. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999
• Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, c 1998 1998
• Iampolski, Mikhail. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Karlstrom, Paul J., editor On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996 1996
• Kenner, Hugh. Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings, Portraits of American Genius. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Matsumoto, Valerie J., and Blake Allmendinger, editors Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999
• McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991
• McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Murphy, Timothy S. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1997 1997
  
• Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991
  
• Pearson, Roberta E. Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992
• Riskin, Robert. Six Screen Plays by Robert Riskin. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995
• Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994
• Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Smoodin, Eric, and Ann Martin, editors. Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945-1957. Berkeley: University of California, c2002 2002
• Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, editor. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001
• Toepfer, Karl. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997
• Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
• Wees, William C. Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992
• Yeh, Wen-hsin, editor. Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000 2000
  
• Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999 1999

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35 Shots of Claire Denis (and more)

Image from Vendredi soir (Claire Denis, 2002)

Film Studies For Free's author is excitedly preparing to give a talk at the event 'Drifting: The Films of Claire Denis'. This is the first of an annual series of symposia on 'Modern Directors' to be held at the University of Sussex on May 2nd (programme here), and is organised by Rosalind Galt and Michael Lawrence.

Below are more than sixty links to freely-accessible, mostly scholarly (or otherwise top-notch) material about Denis's work that FSFF's author has found helpful for this and previous work on this filmmaker (HERE's a link to the text of her paper on Denis's 2002 film Vendredi soir). The lists will be added to (all suggestions welcome), so please bookmark this post (last updated June 1, 2009).

Audio and/or Visual Resources Online:

In English/or with subtitles:

• Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy, philosopher, author and writer, discussing and screening L'Intrus, her film based on his book, at the European Graduate School in 2007 - online at at YouTube
• Claire Denis at European Graduate School 2003 - 'Claire Denis, a director talking about the film making process...' at YouTube (also at Denis's EGS page)
• Dickon Hinchliffe's remarkable music from the score of Vendredi soir is currently available HERE (Click on 'Films & Discography' and scroll down to 'Vendredi soir' to listen to it, or to download it for free)
• At v2v you can download a video which contains the full recording of the wonderful 1.5 hours long 'Vienna Conversation' between Claire Denis and the Austrian film critics Michael Omasta and Isabella Reicher on Saturday, May 7th, 2005 (help on downloading the video is given here).
• NEW Via Filmbo's Chick Magnet, FSFF heard of two YouTube videos (part 1 and part 2) in which you can see excerpts of Claire Denis's film of Serge Daney interviewing Jacques Rivette on his early interest in filmmaking, his days with Cahiers du cinéma, and his first meetings with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer. A must watch for those who haven't yet seen Denis's Jacque Rivette, The Watchman. Thanks Filmbo!
  

In French:

• YouTube - 35 RHUMS itw de Claire Denis et Alex Descas, par Léa Rinaldi
• YouTube - Lilan Thuram par Claire Denis (Extrait de l'installation de Claire Denis pour l'exposition "Diaspora", musée du quai Branly)
• 'Où va le Cinéma?: L'auteur, le cinéaste, le collectif - Qui fait l'oeuvre?' round table event videoed at the Centre Pompidou, 4 December 2008, with Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Daniel Deshays, and Bruno Dumont (thanks to Screenville for the link - Merci, Harry!)
• 'Interview exclusive de Claire Denis à propos de son dernier film "L'Intrus"'- Entretien réalisé dans le cadre de la Mostra de Venise par Olivier Bombarda - Septembre 2004, Arte.TV (2 RealPlayer video files)
  

Scholarly Articles and Chapters:

• Aimé Ancian,'Making Contact: Claire Denis’ Vendredi soi', translated by Inge Pruks and William D. Routt, Senses of Cinema, No. 23, 2002
• Muriel Andrin,' The Intuition of the Body, Time, and the Sixth Sense - from Chantal Akerman to Contemporary Women Directors [including Claire Denis]', Zehar, n° 58, 2006, pp. 14-19 & 20-24
• Martine Beugnet, 'The Practice of Strangeness: L'Intrus - Claire Denis (2004) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)', Film-Philosophy, Volume 12, Issue No.1, 2008
• Samantha Dinning, 'Claire Denis [Great Directors Series]', Senses of Cinema, No. 50, 2009
• Lisa Downing, Re-viewing the Sexual Relation: Levinas and Film', Film-Philosophy, 11.2, August 2007
• Rosalind Galt, 'The Obviousness of Cinema [with reference to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis], World Picture Journal, 2, Autumn 2008
• Nikolaj Lübecker, 'The Dedramatization of Violence in Claire Denis's film I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil, 1994)', Paragraph, Vol. 30, July 2007
• Adrian Martin,'Claire Denis and the cinema of the body', Screening the past, 2006
• Todd McGowan, 'Resisting the lure of ultimate enjoyment: Claire Denis' J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1994)', Kinoeye, Vol 3, Issue 7, 9 June, 2003
• Laura McMahon, 'Deconstructing Community and Christianity: 'A-religion' in Nancy's Reading of Beau travail', Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008
• Philippe Met, 'Looking for trouble: The dialectics of lack and excess (Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, 2001), Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue, 7, 9 June, 2003
• Douglas Morrey, “Introduction: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008
• Douglas Morrey, 'Open Wounds: Body and Image in Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis', Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008
• Douglas Morrey, 'Textures of Terror: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day', Belphégor: Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique, Vol. 3, No. 2, April 2004
• Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Icon of Fury: Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, Film-Philosophy, 12.1, 2008
• Hilary Neroni, 'Lost in fields of interracial desire: Claire Denis' Chocolat (1988)' Kinoeye, Vol 3 Issue 7, 9 June, 2003
• Elena del Río, “Performing the narrative of seduction in Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)”, Kinoeye, vol. 3, no. 7, 9 June, 2003
• Wim Staat, 'The Other's Intrusion: Claire Denis's L'Intrus', Thamyris/Intersecting No. 19 (2008) 195–208
• Anja Streiter, 'The Community According to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis,' Film-Philosophy, 11.1, 2008
• R. Emmet Sweeney, 'The Hither Side of Solutions: Body and Landscape in L'Intrus', Senses of Cinema, April 2005
• NEW Justin Vicari, Colonial Fictions: Le Petit Soldat and its revisionist sequel, Beau Travail, Jump Cut, No. 50, Spring 2008
  
• Fiona A. Villella, 'A Postcolonial Reading of Claire Denis' Chocolat', Senses of Cinema, vol. 1, Dec 1999
• Emma Wilson, 'Contemporary French Women Filmmakers,' French Studies 2005 59(2):217-223

Relevant (and Informative) Book Reviews:

• Acquarello, 'Claire Denis by Judith Maine', Strictly Film School, January 16, 2006
  
• John Orr, 'Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet', Senses of Cinema, No. 37, 2005
• Saige Walton, 'Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression by Martine Beugnet, [Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007],' Senses of Cinema, No. 50, 2009
  

Excellent Items of Film Criticism:

• Joe Bowman, 'The Decade List: Trouble Every Day', Fin de Cinéma, 3 April 2009
  
• Joe Bowman, '[on L'Intrus]', Fin de Cinéma, 28 April 2006
  
• Adrian Danks, 'Travellin' Light [Vendredi soir], Senses of Cinema, No. 31, 2004
• Paul Grant, 'Jacques Rivette - Le veilleur', Senses of Cinema, No. 42, 2007
• Daniel Kasman, '35 Shots of Rum: In Honour of Changing the World', The Auteurs: Notebook, 13 September 2008
• Daniel Kasman, 'L'Intrus (The Intruder)', D+Kas, 20 December 2005
• Ryland Walker Knight, '35 Rhums on The Night Shift', The Auteurs: Notebook, 13 March 2009
• Travis Mackenzie Hoover, 'Rewriting Documentary: Claire Denis's Jacques Rivette, le veilleur', The House Next Door Online, April 3, 2007
• Travis Mackenzie Hoover, 'In the realm of Work and Play: Claire Denis's Vers Mathilde', The House Next Door Online, January 16, 2007
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Unsatisfied Men [on Beau Travail]] , JonathanRosenbaum.com, 6 May 2000 (also published in the Chicago Reader Online same date, with images)
• Diana Sandars, 'Chocolat', Senses of Cinema, No. 17, 2001
• Daniel Stuyck, 'ELETRIK ALCHEMY: Claire Denis Films Sonic Youth', Film Comment, January-February 2008
• Charles Taylor, 'Beau Travail', Salon.com, March 2000, p. 1
• Tamara Tracz, 'Beau travail', Senses of Cinema, No. 42, 2007

Enlightening Interviews in English:

• Aimé Ancian, “Claire Denis: An Interview”, translated by Inge Pruks, Senses of Cinema, No. 23, 2002
• Annett Busch, 'Claire Denis about Intrusions', (Interview, May 2005), Theory Kit, January 2006
• Chris Darke, 'Desire is violence' [Interview with Claire Denis] Sight and Sound Vol. 10 no. 7 July 2000. p. 16-18
• Robert Davis, 'Interview: Claire Denis on 35 Shots of Rum', Daily Plastic, March 10, 2009
• Robert Davis, 'Outtakes from Claire Denis Interview', Errata, 14 August, 2008
• Darren Hughes, 'Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis [about 35 Rhums]', Senses of Cinema, No. 50, 2009
• Kevin Lee, 'Spectacularly Intimate: An Interview with Claire Denis', The Auteurs: Notebook, 2 April 2009
• Craig Phillips, with Jonathan Marlow, '"Making Film is to Be Inside": a Talk with Claire Denis [on Vendredi Soir]', GreenCine, May 14, 2003 (Continues on Page 2 HERE)
• Mark A. Reid, 'Interview by Claire Denis', from Jump Cut, no. 40, March 1996, pp. 67-72
• Jonathan Romney, 'Claire Denis Interviewed', The Guardian Online, 28 June, 2000
• Gavin Smith, 'Claire Denis', Film Comment, January/February 2006
  
• Damon Smith, 'L’Intrus: An Interview with Claire Denis”, Senses of Cinema, No. 35 (April-June 2005), p. 2

Unmissable Articles, Criticism, and Interviews in French:

• Séverine Boularan, 'Un article sur le film "Vendredi Soir" réalisé par Claire Denis', www.cinema-poet.com, N. 4, 2008
• Saad Chakali, 'A Corps ouvert[s]', Cahiers du Cinéma (22 avril 2005)
• Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, '«L'Intrus» - Transférer la greffe', Atopia: The Polylogic E-Zine, 2009
  
• Jean-Luc Nancy, 'L'Intrus selon Claire Denis', remue.net, Spring Issue, 4 mai 2005
• Jean Luc Nancy, ‘L’Areligion (Beau travail de Claire Denis)’. Vacarme, n. 14, 2001
• Jean-Philippe Renouard & Lise Wajeman, '« ce poids d'ici-bas » Entretien avec Claire Denis', Vacarme, n. 14, 2001

Relevant Google Books Links (limited previews):

• Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis (Manchester: Manchester and New York University Press, 2004)
• Judith Mayne, Claire Denis (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005)
• Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)
  

Open Access campaigning note:
(Film Studies For Free's hobby horse...)
There are, of course, many further, excellent Denis resources available 'for free' if one is a student or member of faculty at an educational institution with a well-supplied library or with relevant online subscriptions. But the above list indicates, if nothing else, that truly openly accessible, high-quality, and, indeed, essential resources for researchers in and outside the academy are plentiful nowadays, especially on contemporary topics.

A big thanks, then, to the authors, artists, editors and publishers of the above works who helped to ensure that their writings, recordings, or videos about Claire Denis's films were freely available to any reader or viewer on the internet.

Jurn: Intute's experimental e-journal search tool

A snow-bound Film Studies For Free wanted to rush you the latest news from Intute: Arts and humanities' Blog. As FSFF has previously reported, Intute is a UK-based, JISC-funded, 'free online service providing you with access to the best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists'. In a post today, one of its contributors dhaden, aka artist-blogger extraordinaire D'Log (also of the e-Journal of Virtual Worlds Research), writes that

Since 1st January I’ve found and added 70 new records for full-text ejournals — mostly in art/media/film/literature/cultural studies, plus cultural history and design — and I still have a few more to add yet. Intute: Arts & Humanities now holds records for around 1000 academic ejournals in the arts and humanities.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to search the full contents held at all these URLs, via a single keyword box? Now you can. I’ve added all the relevant urls, plus a half-dozen selected urls found via Intute: Social Sciences, to a new Google ‘custom search engine’ I’ve titled Jurn.

It’s experimental, it’s quick (90 minutes), and it’s not perfect — it omits journals with extra-long urls and/or Flash-only websites (Google doesn’t play nicely with them) — but it offers all Google’s filtering options.

A great new tool and Film Studies For Free will add it to its box as it continues ever onwards on its noble quest to comment on and link to online, open-access, film studies resources of note.

On film-thinking: Daniel Frampton's Filmosophy

L’Enfant / The Child (Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2005)

For what are hopefully self-evident reasons, Film Studies For Free chooses very rarely to focus on papercentric (© Gary Hall) Film Studies. But today (The Day That UK Academia Stands Still) it opts for the purposeful casting of its beady e-eye on the digital and freely accessible manifestations and repercussions of just one such item.

The book of which FSFF speaks is by an author - Daniel Frampton - who is the true pioneer of Open-Access Film Studies, initially through his founding (in November 1996) of the magnificent, online salon-journal Film-Philosophy. Thanks to his Filmosophy, Frampton has also come to be of those (nowadays) very rare authors who have succeeded in founding a significant school of thought.

Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006) - Frampton's book - describes itself thus (hyperlinks added, as ever, by FSFF):

Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. The book coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of ‘film-thinking’, arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic ‘intent’ about the characters, spaces and events of film. With discussions of contemporary filmmakers such as Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke and the Dardenne brothers, this timely intervention into the study of film and philosophy will stir argument and discussion among both filmgoers and filmmakers alike.

As for his book's central concept of the 'filmmind', Frampton writes:

Film seems to be thinking right in front of us. Consider the empathetical framings of The Child, the questioning movements of Magnolia, the egalitarian images of Time of the Wolf. The point is that both the daytime chatshow and the video news report also involve this choice, this belief about what they show (or do not show, as in the lack of images from Helmand). If we begin to understand how film "thinks" we will start to
understand how moving images affect our life and being.

If you would like to know more about Filmosophy, or, if you already know more, but would like to read about it online for free, below are some hot, hot, hot filmosophical links:

Daniel Frampton's online writing about Filmosophy:

• The Filmosophy website
• Filmosophy on Google Books
• Daniel Frampton, 'A Filmosophy Of The Dardennes', Vertigo Magazine (Vol.3 No.3 - Autumn 2006)
• Daniel Frampton, 'The Way that Movements Speak [on Tarr & Pawlikowski]', Film-Philosophy, vol. 5 no. 10, March 2001
• Daniel Frampton, Lars von Trier x 6 (1993)
• Daniel Frampton, On Deleuze's Cinema (1991)
• Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy: Colour, in MacCabe & Petrie, eds, Working Papers from the BFI (London: BFI, 1996)
• Daniel Frampton, 'Moving images', The Guardian, Monday 23 October 2006

Open Access Articles Referring to Filmosophy:

• Daniel Yacavone, 'Towards a Theory of Film Worlds', Film-Philosophy, 12.2, 2008 ('Daniel Frampton has recently attempted to provide a less reductive account of film. worlds (as experienced by viewers) within his broader ‘filmosophy’. ...')
• Sarah Cooper, 'Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers', Film-Philosophy, 11.2, 2007 ('Frampton equates with the consciousness of the ‘filmmind’')
• Davina Quinlivan on Lars Von Trier, Film-Philosophy, 12. 1, 2008 ('Frampton’s envisioning of the ‘filmmind’ (Frampton, 2006, 147), a cinematic consciousness. whose form embodies the very ideology that it diegetically ...')

Open Access, English-language Reviews of Filmosophy:

• Review for Film-Philosophy by Philipp Schmerheim (12.2, 2008) ('Frampton wants to establish a terminology which redirects scholarly attention to the experience rather than analysis of film ... [H]is attempt to reform writing about film, away from what he conceives of as ‘technicist’ rhetoric to a more poetic way of writing, ultimately does not live up to its promises')
• Review of Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture by Sylvie Magerstädt (vol. 5 no. 3, September 2008).
• Review for Scope by Ils Huygen ('Filmosophy is about this mutually productive encounter between cinema and ... In filmosophy "film style is now seen to be the dramatic intention of the film')
• Review for Senses of Cinema by Tony McLibbin
• Review for Frieze Magazine by Roland Kapferer ('Filmosophy is representative of this Postmodernist dethroning. The neologism ‘filmosophy’ is in itself highly revelatory. Philosophy – philo-sophia...')

Also see:

• Mike Rot, The Filmosophy Manifesto, The Pagan Agenda, 18 August 2007
• Ted Striphas, Differences & Repetitions: Filmosophy®
• Kings College Conference on 'Emergent Encounters in Film Theory: Intersections Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy', 21 March 2009
• Ronald Rovers, Review of Filmosophy, De Filmkrant, no. 284, January 2007. [Dutch]
• Martin Marzidovšek, 'Filmski Biti', Ekran: Revija Za Film in Televizijo, vol. 32 letnik XLIV, April-Maj 2007. [Slovenian]
• Mohammad Shahbâ's Farsi translation of an early version of the Introduction to Filmosophy (2001)

Other citations listed on Filmosophy.org:

• Asbjørn Grønstad, 'Downcast Eyes: Michael Haneke and the Cinema of Intrusion', Nordicom Review 29 (2008) 1, pp. 133-144 here
• Ils Huygens, 'Deleuze and Cinema: Moving Images and Movements of Thought', Image & Narrative, Issue 18. Thinking Pictures, here
• Mark Goodall's text about 'Crash Cinema' here
• Mark Richardson, 'The Importance of Paracinema in the Cyberspace Era ', The Film Journal, here
• Richard Camilleri on Korean cinema, To Taste: Aesthetics, Politics, Bodies (November 7 2007) here
• Eric Henderson's text on Chris Marker for Slant Magazine here
• Owen Hatherley's text on cinema here
• Some Iranian texts here & here & here & here

Ahoy, Me Hearties! Pirate Philosophy by Gary Hall

Open Access publishing is not all that scary

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.

Tireless proponent and exponent of radical Open Access Professor Gary Hall gave his lecture -- 'Pirate Philosophy' -- as part of the Research in Progress Seminar Series at the School of Media and Film at the University of Sussex, a talk he had also delivered at his own institution, Coventry University. The Sussex event was chaired by Caroline Bassett, whose own writing on digital media is well worth checking out: click HERE for an online Open Access article by her on Web 2.0 and read about her new book, The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media (complete with its discussion of Gus Van Sant's film Elephant) HERE.

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.

The media gift that this Lecture focussed on was ‘Pirate Philosophy’. This project investigated some of the implications of internet pirate philosophy for the arts and humanities, particularly the latter’s ideas of authorship, the book, the academic journal, scholarly publishing, intellectual property, copyright law, content creation and cultural production. ‘Pirate Philosophy’ explores such ideas both philosophically and legally through the creation of an actual ‘pirate’ text.

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...)

All these debates are closely connected to ones about the spreadability of digital moving image materials as well as text-based ones. Interested FSFF readers should also check out Gary Hall's website together with Culture Machine, the online journal he co-founded and edits, which will have an upcoming issue on Pirate Philosophy. You should also visit and support CSeARCH, the pioneering Humanities online-archive he co-founded in 1999. Hall's latest book Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now is a highly compelling read, but you can get some sense of his detailed arguments from the following online conference proceedings piece: 'The Politics and Ethics of Electronic Archiving'; and from the following interview: ‘OA in the Humanities Badlands’.

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.

Free (and legal) Online Films

Film Studies For Free knows from tireless study of its visitor statistics that one of the internet search phrases that most often brings readers to this site is 'free online films'. So, for those (evidently numerous) folks who haven't yet discovered the very best gateway to and repository of thousands of free and legal online films, including many important feature-length films (like Fritz Lang's 1931 M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Moerder - see still images above; please click HERE for the online film with English subtitles), here is the link to the website of your search engine dreams: the Moving Images section at the Internet Archive (a site you should explore for lots of other reasons, too). All Internet Archive material is in the Public Domain, so it's a must-promote resource for an Open-Access advocacy website like Film Studies For Free.

So you can see the full scope of its rich offerings, below are the subsections that make up the Internet Archive Moving Images website area:

Animation & Cartoons Arts & Music Computers & Technology Cultural & Academic Films Ephemeral Films Movies News & Public Affairs Non-English Videos Open Source Movies Prelinger Archives Spirituality & Religion Sports Videos Video Games Vlogs Youth Media

Just click on the Internet Archive mantra below to link to its general search tool:

Film and Media Studies e-journals for free: online graduate-student work

Many of the writers on open-access research and scholarship have noted that there is a continuing reluctance among senior and established academics to publish in online scholarly journals. See, for instance, the excellent, detailed discussion of the academic unease around the 'legitimacy' of e-journals by Peta Mitchell ('The Politics of Open-Access Publishing: M/C Journal, Public Intellectualism, and Academic Discourses of Legitimacy' - link HERE). Mitchell notes that

[A]ll studies into online scholarship agree on this point—the authors of articles in open-access journals are, more often than not, comparatively young [...]. [W]hile “younger authors were more likely to be positive about the outcomes of OA [Open Access] publishing,” “older respondents were more likely to worry about the quality, for example, that papers will become less concise” ([Nicholas, David, Paul Huntington, and Ian Rowlands. “Open Access Journal Publishing: The Views of Some of the World’s Senior Authors.” Journal of Documentation 61.4 (2005): 497–519.] 512). [...]

Opinion is divided as to whether this situation has changed in recent years following the exponential growth of open-access publishing. Certainly, the abovementioned 2005 study indicates that most respondants did not see open-access publishing as “radical” or as having no career advantage (Nicholas, et al 507). However, this is tempered by the fact that authors from countries that had a “poor commitment to OA publishing”—notably Australia, North America, and Western Europe—"associated OA with ephemeral publishing, poor archiving and no career advantage” (517). Moreover, as the authors of the study note, “perhaps the biggest finding to emerge from the study is the general ignorance of OA publishing on the part of relatively senior scholarly authors” (515). [...]

The ongoing nature of the open-access debate reveals the core of the problematic facing open-access journals: that while it is now deemed safe to use online scholarship, it is still not entirely safe to produce it.

Despite these residual qualitative doubts, Mitchell notes that all 'stakeholders' in academic publishing have acknowledged that 'open-access journals are cheap, fast, and quantitatively sound'. It is precisely these qualities that can make them an ideal vehicle for those who need quickly to get their work out in public; indeed, e-publishing can provide an ideal 'shop window', akin to the giving of a good conference paper, for early career academics.

There are already quite a good number of open-access e-journal 'outlets' run primarily for and by established film and media studies academics. As well as linking to a large number of online film magazines in its listing of 'Online and Open Access Film-Studies Related Journals and Magazines, Film Studies For Free currently connects to the following active, fully peer-reviewed, and free-to-access e-journals ':

16:9 (Eng-lang articles in Danish Film Studies Journal); Americana (Hollywood) : the Journal of American Popular Culture; Consciousness, Literature and the Arts; CTheory.net; Culture Machine; Fibreculture Journal; Film-Philosophy; Framework [online sections]; Genders; Image [&] Narrative; Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media; International Journal of Žižek Studies; Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies; Journal of Moving Image Studies (archive online); Journal of Religion and Film; Jump Cut; M/C Journal: A journal of Media and Culture; Media History Monographs; Mediascape; Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (first issue 1 online); P.O.V (A Danish Journal of Film Studies - peer-reviewed since December 2007); Particip@tions; PsyArt; Scope: an on-line journal of film studies; Screening the Past; Senses of Cinema; Trama y Fondo (in Spanish); Transformative Works and Cultures; ; Vectors; Wide Screen (new journal calling for papers); World Picture Journal.

I hope to return to discuss issues of (and matters concerning) the above-listed journals on future occasions, but I wanted to focus, in what remains of today's blog entry, on profiling three of the best examples of e-journals that are produced primarily by Film and Media Studies graduate students. I think they are producing some of the most interesting models for online, Open-Access work in our discipline(s) (and all are linked-to by Film Studies For Free).

FlowTV
According to its website:

• 'Flow is an online journal of television and media studies launched in October 2004. Flow’s mission is to provide a space where researchers, teachers, students, and the public can read about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves. Flow is a project of the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Flow is coordinated and edited by graduate students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and is published bi-weekly.'

The site adds:

• 'Accompanying the challenge of publishing material at that demanding pace has been the related project of building and operating our own delivery system. With over 500 columns in our archive, representing the work of over 200 authors, ensuring the stability of this venture is one of our primary concerns.'

The main advantage of Flow is clearly its prodigious responsiveness. But there's another feature that I really like; while the journal seems not to be conventionally (or 'fully') peer-reviewed, its excellent comments feature means that the exchanges provoked by the journal are open and critical - work published there can be publically and thus very usefully challenged. For example, see Flow Journal, Vol. 8, Issue 7: this issue featured columns from Jane Feuer, Aaron Delwiche, Leigh Goldstein,and Alexander Cho. Flow staff writer Leigh Goldstein's great piece"Soft Selling Intergenerational Intimacy on the First Season of Mad Men" examined 'the unmasking [in that series] of society's discomfort with representations ofchildhood sexuality'. It sparked nine very well thought out comments which were reproduced on the same webpage, including a very interesting comment from the renowned film and TV studies academic and theorist Karen Lury, who has also contributed her own work to Flow (also see HERE), alongside another fascinating point posted by the great Julia Lesage. You can't get better, or more instant and transparent, review by your 'peers' (or, indeed, by your 'betters') than that! Flow is well worth a (free) subscription, in Film Studies For Free's humble opinion.

Synoptique

After a four year hiatus (of the kind that is sadly still all-too-common in the volatile world of academic e-publishing), SYNOPTIQUE: The Journal of Film and Film Studies, a film journal written and published by graduate Film Studies students at Concordia University in Montréal, is back.

Synoptique gives a dazzling account of its rationale, which should be read at length; but here's a little taster:

• [I]t is only with the frame of a film community that we can think about film. And its education. We wanted to create an online resource of student work at Concordia. For students at Concordia. To give expression to the intellectual character of M.A. Film Studies at this University by publishing what was rapidly becoming a lost history of ideas. Students work here for two years, take classes, write theses, go on their way, leave faint traces, might never take a stand or apportion an opinion. We wanted to discover what tradition we had inherited, what debates we were continuing, which debates we weren’t inventing.

The editors hope that Synoptique will be a 'quarterly, academically-oriented, online journal about film culture.' The latest articles (issue 11) have been 'exposed to a peer-editing system.'

While the articles do have a slight 'graduate flavour' in places, they are very well-written and edited, and are as compelling and interesting as you would hope any article in a film journal would be - some very nice essays, in particular, on childhood in avant-garde films, Lynch's Inland Empire and Potter's Orlando, among others (in English and French). Synoptique also has options for leaving public comments, although its traffic is not currently as lively as that of Flow. Film Studies For Free wishes it all the best: it deserves a long and garrulous life.

Cinephile
Another journal that has successfully relaunched recently is Cinephile (formerly UBCinephile). Cinephile is a free, (now) peer-reviewed journal of film studies edited by graduate students in the Film Studies program at the University of British Columbia. The journal

aims to provide a forum to discuss aspects of film theory, history, and criticism, and is intended to provide a platform to share research papers, book reviews, and reports that engage with debates appropriate to film, media, and cultural studies. As a peer-reviewed journal, Cinephile endeavors to promote the Film Studies portion of the program as an inclusive but discriminating environment which is dedicated to publishing work of the highest scholarly quality and appeal

The previous three volumes of (UB)Cinephile can still be accessed online and they are well worth checking out (see HERE or HERE). There are thoroughly stimulating, and highly original articles by (then) students honing their skills (and sharpening their talons), and UBC faculty --

e.g. Lindsay Steenberg - "Framing War: Commemoration, War & the Art Cinema"; Christine Evans - "'I am not a fascist, since I do not like shit. I am not a sadist, since I do not like kitsch': Sadism, Serial Killing, and Kitsch"; Brock Poulin - "Reading Against the Gore: Subversive Impulses in the Canadian Horror Film" ; Brenda Wilson - "Blurring the Boundaries: Auteurism & Kathryn Bigelow"; Jennie Carlsten - "Violence in the City of God: The Fantasy of the Omniscient Spectator"; Renee Penney - "Bloody Sunday: Classically Unified Trauma?"; Jennie Carlsten - "'Somehow the Hate has got Mislaid': Adaptation and The End of the Affair"; Christine Evans - "I'm in Love! I'm a Believer!: Structures of Belief in Jonathan Glazer's Birth"; R. Colin Tait - "'Jesus is Never Mad at Us if We Live with Him in Our Hearts': The Dialectical View of America in David O. Russell's I (Heart) Huckabees"; David Hauka - "Christ, that Hurts!": Rewriting the Jesus Narrative - Violence and the Language of Action Cinema in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ"; Katherine Pettit - "Metamorphic Death: Post-Mortem and Spirit Photography in Narrative Cinema"; Jennie Carlsten - "Containing Their Rage"; Andrew deWaard - "The Global Social Problem Film" ; Tara Kolton - "Representations of Western Tourism in Cinema" Brenda Cromb - "War Films Without War"; Christine Evans - "Medea’s Family Reunion"; R. Colin Tait - "(Zombie) Revolution at the Gates"

-- as well as by possibly even more redoubtable figures, such as Slavoj Žižek ( "The Family Myth in Hollywood"; see also HERE).

In the (re)launch issue of Cinephile (on a new website, equipped with an RSS feed to keep you updated, as well as with a comments facility), there are some wonderful articles by familiar names (both from previous issues of (UB)Cinephile, as well as those of such well-established luminaries as Barry Keith Grant). But there are also some very worthy pieces by some new(er) names (such as the timely and important 'Cinema from Attractions: Story and Synergy in Disney's Theme Park Movies' by my fellow blogger Andrew Nelson, a PhD student in Film at the University of Exeter). In any case, the result for Cinephile continues to be a stream of highly invigorating articles, written in a throroughly engaging, and occasionally even entertaining, way. Inspiring, indeed.

Also, look out for Tischfilmreview, to be launched later this year by the world-renowned Tisch School of Film and Television, NYU. Like Flow, Synoptique and Cinephile, its anchor in an educational institution of excellent repute would seem to be a great way of guaranteeing the ongoing archiving of the work it publishes, as well as of raising the profile of those whose work it will showcase online. We may go on to see the birth of literal-but-virtual 'Schools of Thought' in film and media studies (hmm: always remember Birmingham...). Maybe these newer, online ones are being forged in a more 'open and accessible' environment than was previously possible for participants in our disciplines, if only technologically.

Do, then, consider yourselves urged to visit the Cinephile, Flow, and Synoptique websites. And also, as (if not more) importantly, please think seriously about submitting your research 'outputs' to them for consideration for publication, as well as to the other e-journals mentioned earlier in my discussion, and permanently linked to by Film Studies For Free. It may seem a volatile 'marketplace' out there in cyberspace, as elsewhere. But do you really have anything to lose except your reluctance?

[If you know of any free film and media studies e-journals to which Film Studies For Free is not yet linking, please let me know and I'll check them out. Thanks]