Participations 7.1: on Slumdog Millionaire, The Wire, and The Sopranos

 

Image from Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

Film Studies For Free is happy to announce that the May 2010 edition of the Open Access e-journal Participations: online journal of audience and reception studies is now online

This edition contains Martin Barker's 'Editorial Introduction', as well as the following articles, not all of which situate themselves within film and television studies, but each of which is relevant to audience and reception studies in those disciplinary areas.

• Shakuntala Banaji:  'Seduced 'Outsiders' versus Sceptical 'Insiders'?  Slumdog Millionaire Through its Re/Viewers'

• Richard Butsch: 'Crowds, Publics and Consumers: Representing English Theatre Audiences from the Globe to the OP Riots' [how people thought and worried about theatre audiences in Britain from Shakespeare’s time onward]

• Nathalie Claessens & Alexander Dhoest: 'Comedy Taste: Highbrow/Lowbrow Comedy and Cultural Capital' [on Flemish TV audiences]

• Julian McDougall: 'Wiring the Audience' [on The Wire]

• Jeanette Monaco:  'Memory Work, Autoethnography and the Construction of a Fan-Ethnography' [in TV studies research, including on The Sopranos]

• Esteban del Río:  'Consuming and Contesting Latinidad: Audience Research and Cultural Capital' [on the reception of the Americanos exhibit which toured from the Smithsonian to Los Angeles]

Oh Danny Boyle

From his earliest work as producer on Alan Clarke's hugely influential 1989 film Elephant onwards, Danny Boyle has never failed to stir up the oftentimes deadeningly dull world of British film drama, usually with his flamboyant visual and sonoric inventiveness. So, after all the digital and other ink spilled on his latest 'rags to riches' movie Slumdog Millionaire, Film Studies For Free keenly felt its duty to set out a little list of its favourite online studies of the storytelling techniques and filmmaking context of the ebulliently multicultural, but also very (Northern-)English director Boyle:

• David Bordwell, 'Slumdogged by the past', Observations of film art and FILM ART, February 1, 2009


• Bert Cardullo, 'Fiction into film, or bringing Welsh to a Boyle', Literature/Film Quarterly, 1997


• Peet Gelderblom, 'Sunshine and the Cinematic Experience', The House Next Door, May 16, 2007


• Miguel Mera, 'Reap What You Sow: "Perfect Day" [Lou Reed, 1973] / Trainspotting [Danny Boyle, in Matthew Caley and Steve Lannin (eds), Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005) Limited Preview on Google Books


• Alexander Linklater, 'Danny Boyle Profile', The Observer, Sunday 4 January 2009 (includes 'In the Director's Chair - Danny Boyle talks to Jason Solomons' video interview - 9min 41sec)
• Hannah Rothschild, 'Labour of Love' [on Boyle's debt to Film4], excerpt from the book Channel 4 at 25 (BFI, 2008)


• Murray Smith, 'The Sound of Sentiment: Popular Music, Film, and Emotion', [primarily on music in Trainspotting], 16:9, November 2006


• Karina M. Totah, 'Trainspotting's Playlist: A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles', Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2004 Issue 44


• Rachel Whitaker, 'Danny Boyle’s Daylight Dream [on Slumdog Millionaire]', The Oxonian Review, Issue 8.2, 2 February, 2009
• Also see: Danny Boyle biography and credits at the British Film Institute's Screenonline website.
• And Alan Bacchus's very useful career overview, 'The Cinema of Danny Boyle' (illustrated with lots of video clips) at the Daily Film Dose blog (November 16, 2008)