Tune in to Antenna

[Film Studies For Free will be sorry to say goodbye to Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker/Spider-Man...]

Film Studies For Free wanted to let its readers know about Antenna, a very stimulating blog from graduate students and faculty in the Media and Cultural Studies area of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Here's what this relatively new site says about itself:

Antenna is a collectively authored media and cultural studies blog committed to timely yet careful analysis of texts, news, and events from across the popular culture spectrum. The site regularly responds to new works and developments in television, film, music, gaming, digital video, the Internet, print, and the media industries.

Antenna is intended to address a broad public inside and outside the university walls. Within those walls, though, it further intends to bridge the gap between scholarly journals, which remain the paradigm for scholarly discourse but too often lack the ability to reply to issues and events in media with any immediacy, and single-author media scholar blogs, which support swift commentary but are limited in their reliance upon the effort and perspectives of individuals. Coordinated by a group of writers who draw on a variety of approaches and methodologies, Antenna, therefore, exists as a means to analyze media news and texts, both as they happen and from multiple perspectives.

Antenna is currently operated and edited by graduate students and faculty in the Media and Cultural Studies area of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Although, while in its current stage, the content published on the site is written largely by members of that program, Antenna is currently in the process of expanding our author team, and we hope eventually to include contributions and comments from a diverse collection of writers.

Antenna’s goal is to create a forum in which readers and contributors participate in active, open, and thoughtful debate about media and culture.

Antenna is designed to respond quickly to events, and thus rather than be published on a set, periodic schedule, Antenna updates its content continually. Because Antenna is interested in timely responses, we encourage short entries. Extensive presentation of evidence is not required, though supplementary links are encouraged.

With its extremely lively house style, and wide-ranging topics, FSFF thinks Antenna has a great future ahead of it. For examples of some good film-related posts, it recommends you check out the following to start with:  

• 'Smells Like an Ethnically Divided Teen Star System' by Mary Beltrán  

• 'THWIP!+CTRL+DEL (on the rebooting of the Spider-Man franchise)' by Derek Johnson    

• 'Egregious Product Placement: The Invention of Lying' By Erin Copple Smith

You can also follow Antenna's updates on Twitter.

On Avatar & Boss-zilla: a new issue of FlowTV

Sandra Bullock as Margaret Tate in The Proposal (Anne Fletcher, 2009). See '“Attack of Boss-zilla!” – Female Conflict and Generational Discord…' by Hannah Hamad

Film Studies For Free brings you glad tidings of the new issue of ever wonderful online journal Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture. In this latest offering there are some great film related items: Charles R. Acland on Avatar and the media language of revolutionary change; and Hannah Hamad on the film and media popularity of female characters as terrorizing figures. Links to all articles are given below:

• Amanda Ann Klein ,"Window Dressing: Spectactular Costuming in MTV's The City" (An examination of how costume trumps narrative in MTV's The City)
  

• Zoe Druick, "A Married Couple: Reality TV's Progenitor Turns 40"  (A re-examination of A Married Couple in light of the current proliferation of reality-based TV)
  

• James Bennett, "The BBC Presenter Pay Scandal: The Political Economy of Television Fame"  (A look at the recent pay scandal surrounding BBC?s Jonathan Ross ? and what it tells us about the economics of fame today)
  

• Hannah Hamad, "'Attack of Boss-zilla!' ? Female Conflict and Generational Discord in Postfeminism?s New Monstrous Feminine" (An examination of film and TV series? treatment of postfeminist identities, especially the popularity of women as terrorizing forces, or '-zillas.')
  

• Nina B. Huntemann, "Irreconcilable Differences: Gender and Labor in the Video Game Workplace"  (A look at the labor politics of the game industry )
  

• Charles R. Acland, "Avatar as Technological Tentpole" (Is James Cameron's Avatar a "game-changer," or business as usual?)
  

• Vanessa Au, "Twitter Revolution" (A consideration of the Iranian elections and the potentially revolutionary aspects of social media)

Brilliant online film and media studies resources from Critical Commons

Digital Humanities and the case for Critical Commons: "Yet another Downfall detournement with Bruno Ganz holding the line against digital scholarship and fair use." (posted at ironmanx28 channel at YouTube for Critical Commons)

This great video made the rather easily amused Film Studies For Free laugh uncontrollably... But, then, in the case of this blog it was very much preaching to the converted. Thanks a lot to Corey Doctorow at Boing Boing for drawing it to our attention.

Film Studies For Free has also ecstatically been exploring the Critical Commons website promoted by the video:

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.

FSFF can most highly recommend Critical Commons not only as an immensely important campaigning organisation --one very much after its own heart -- but also as a veritable cornucopia of online, Open Access, film and media studies resources. Just check out the brilliant lecture material from its site linked to below.

FSFF readers MUST explore the rest of this magnificent and worthy organisation's offerings tout de suite! Or else, FSFF won't be laughing any more... Nein, es wird nicht lachen...

• Deleuze and Cinema by Kara Keeling The following selection of film clips from films discussed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze were compiled in the Fall of 2009 by the participants in Professor Kara Keeling's Critical Studies graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture at the University of Southern California.

• The Transverberation scene in four films featuring the life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Sherry Velasco A comparison of the Transverberation scene in four films featuring the life of Saint Teresa of Avila

• Buffy vs. Twilight - Stalking Comparison by Jonathan McIntosh A comparison of stalking scenes in the 2008 film Twilight and in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

• Documentary Epistemology by Steve Anderson This lecture considers questions of epistemology in relation to documentary media, using the construction/reconstruction of historical events as a case-study

• Database Narrative by Steve Anderson This lecture outlines some basic properties of database narratives, referring to the debate between Lev Manovich and Marsha Kinder on the nature of selection and combination in narrative.

• Postmodernism lecture by Steve Anderson An illustrated lecture on postmodernism

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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