Studying Movie Magazines and Fan Culture! Online Research and Methodology Resources. And LANTERN!

 A Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine by Tamar Jeffers McDonald with Catherine Grant (on shaky cam!).
With her customary wit and aplomb, Jeffers McDonald shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. See below for further information about the video, as well as for a discussion about how Jeffers McDonald used resources, like the one showcased in the video, in research for her new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom.

Today, Film Studies For Free presents a bumper entry on movie magazines and fan culture research! The entry boasts three main content clusters: 

1. A guide to using Lantern, the new search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched.
2. A nine minute video Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine (also embedded above), presented by film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, and an audio interview in which she expands on the fan magazine research she carried out for her new book on Doris Day's stardom.
3. Links to written studies and other essential online resources on, or using, movie magazine and fan culture research methodologies.

 1. LANTERN

Pages from Radio and Television Mirror, Jan-June 1949 (archived by the Internet Archive), as discussed by Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, in her report, below, on using Lantern, Media History Digital Library's search and visualisation platform.

Many readers at Film Studies For Free will already know of, and indeed be using, Lantern, the new, essential, search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched. The MHDL has digitized over 800,000 pages of out-of-copyright media publications for open access. Many of the rare magazines in the collection came from the Library of Congress Packard Campus (you can see the full list of contributing individuals and sponsors on the credits webpage). The MHDL's searchable collections now include:

Business Screen (1938-1973); Educational Screen (1922-1962); The Film Daily (1918-1948); International Photographer (1929-1941); International Projectionist  (1933-1965); Transactions of SMPE and Journal of SMPE (1915-1954); Motion Picture Magazine (1914-1941); Motography (1909-1918); Movie Classic (1931-1937); Movie Makers (1926-1953); Moving Picture World (1907-1919); The New Movie Magazine (1929-1935); Photoplay (1914-1943); Radio Annual and Television Yearbook (1938-1964); Radio Digest (1923-1933); Radio Mirror (1934-1963); Radio Broadcast (1922-1930); Sponsor (1946-1964); Talking Machine World (1906-1928); Variety (1905-1926 - production on the next twenty years is underway)

The great news is that we can search and access items from the collection platform at MHDL's brilliant Lantern site http://lantern.mediahist.org, or simply type your query into the searchbox of the existing MHDL site: http://mediahistoryproject.org. The site was developed designed and produced by Eric Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts, UW-Madison and Co-Director (with David Pierce), Media History Digital Library.

FSFF asked film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, whose fabulous work in this area is expanded on in the next section of this entry, to test Lantern as a highly seasoned user of offline archives. Here is her glowing account:

For me Lantern's utility lies not only in its stock of periodicals, freely accessible, fully searchable, available for my own research purposes but also the possibilities it offers as a teaching tool, bringing film history alive.

     My recent research has been on Doris Day. Trips to the British Library, the Library of Congress and the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles netted me over 1500 articles to peruse, but not the first article turned up by Lantern when I put in "Doris Day" as the search term, "That Day Girl/That Hope Fellow" from Radio and Television Mirror, May 1949. This is an early piece in which the new star herself purports to write about Bob Hope, the veteran entertainer on whose radio show Day appeared as songstress and sidekick. The article attempts to preserve the double-act nature of the pair's relationship by getting each to write about the other. The columns notionally penned by 'Day' - and there is no way at this distance that we can either prove or disprove her actual authorship - testify to what a great guy Hope is; his sections do the same, maintaining his comic persona as a narcissist. This confirms the piece's early date - 1949 - Day was already beginning to be spoken of as a major star and fan magazines would not allow space dedicated to her to boost another performer for much longer. By 1952 coverage of Day was saturating the movie magazines: she appeared on or in all twelve monthly issues of Movie Stars Parade and was featured in seventy-five other periodicals that year too. Finding this piece through Lantern is a valuable corrective, then, to the belief that Day became a star effortlessly, consistently receiving lead billing and attention in the magazines. While Motion Picture did hail her as the next big thing in August 1948 [see images below**], other publications obviously took longer to be convinced.

     In addition to its value for researching for individual stars or films, Lantern is also useful for more general searches for social history. Since the whole text of the issues is scanned and searchable, the advertising sections of the magazines can be viewed also, and provide fascinating social history data about the presentation of a variety of products. Typing in "pink toothbrush" recovers the history of Ipana, a toothpaste which boasted it could do away with gum disease; "Zonite" claimed it was the "solution to a woman's most intimate problem". Enter any product name to see the variety of methods used to sell it in the different periodicals, and different periods, covered: a search for "Lustre Creme shampoo" will bring up gorgeous full colour portraits of Hollywood stars as well as more utilitarian black and white ads featuring a more anonymous 'the Lustre-Creme Girl'.

     Lantern truly illuminates both the importance of fan and trade periodicals as cinema paratexts, and itself as an invaluable source for finding and searching them.

     (Note: For the first search, I simply put in Doris Day as the term, without inverted commas, with no specified date range and without altering the default Sort mode for results, By Relevance. Changing this to 'Sort by date' is the best option to capture the changing methods of presentation for product advertising).

Further great accounts of Lantern may be found at the links below:

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

• Eric Hoyt, 'Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern', Antenna, August 14, 2013
• David Bordwell, 'Magic, this lantern', Observations on Film Art, August 12, 2013

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

2. A Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine 

In the video embedded at the top of the entry, Tamar Jeffers McDonald presents a guide to studying a movie magazine. With her customary wit and aplomb, she shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. The above, somewhat impromptu (shaky cam!) resource came out of an interview with Jeffers McDonald carried out at the National Theatre, London, in October 2013 by Film Studies For Free. An audio recording of the interview is embedded below and online here at FSFF's new podcast site.

The  main topic of conversation was about Jeffers McDonald's new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom (London: I B Tauris, 2013). This book poses as a central question, amongst others, “Why do we assume Doris Day always plays a virgin?” In previous work (her PhD thesis, the edited collection Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, (Wayne State University Press, 2010), and an article on Rock Hudson from 2007 - see details here) Jeffers McDonald has examined what ‘playing a virgin’ might mean and consist of; now she turns her attention to how this dominant idea has been circulated, through studying the film fan periodicals which advanced and then froze Day’s stardom, a methodology she explores in detail in this video, and in the (12 minutes long) audio interview embedded below. [** See the foot of FSFF's entry for images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, to which Jeffers McDonald refers in the interview].

3. Online Resources on Movie Magazines and Fan Culture Research Methodologies

• Participations: A Journal of Audience and Reception Studies
• Transformative Works and Cultures
• Fan Studies Network
• Fan Sites Network website
• Henry Jenkins' website
• Anne Helen Petersen's blog Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style | Proto-Scholastic Musings on Star Studies. Also see:
  Scandals of Classic Hollywood, The Hairpin; “The Rules of the Game: A Century of Hollywood Publicity,” Virginia Quarterly Review; “There Are Things Of Which I May Not Speak,” The Toast; “The Hollywood Canteen,” Laptham’s Quarterly; “Decoding the Beyonce Tumblr,” Gawker; “Me, You, and Star Trek: The Next Generation,” The Awl; Various fan magazine finds at Slate’s The Vault; The “Remembering Lilith Fair” series at The Hairpin.

• Nancy Baym's Online Fandom website
• Karen Hellekson's website
• On classic era Chinese movie magazines at The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History

• Daniël Biltereyst, Kathleen Lotze, Philippe Meers, 'Triangulation in historical audience research: Reflections and experiences from a multi-methodological research project on cinema audiences in Flanders', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• Liam Burke, '‘Superman in Green’: An audience study of comic book film adaptations Thorand Green Lantern', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• Brigid S. G. Cherry., The female horror film audience : viewing pleasures and fan practices, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 1999 
• Pam Cook, 'Labours of Love: In Praise of Fan Websites', Frames, 1.1, 2012   
• Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, 'Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One):', Confessions of an Aca Fan, August 23, 2007
• Mark Duffett, 'Boosting Elvis: A Content Analysis of Editorial Stories from one Fan Club Magazine', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• 'Fan Labor', Wikipedia entry
• Ellen Hijmans, 'Reading YES. Interpretive Repertoires and Identity Construction in Dutch Teenage Magazines', Participations,1.2, 2004
• Matt Hills, 'Fiske's 'textual productivity' and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction?', Participations, 10.1, 2010
• Laura Hubner, 'Introduction: Valuing Films', in Hubner (ed.), Valuing Films: Shifting Perceptions of Worth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
• Pietari Kääpä and Guan Wenbo, 'Santa Claus in China and Wu xia in Finland: Translocal reception of transnational cinema in Finnish and Chinese film cultures', Participations, 8.2, 2011 
•  Paul Thébergé, 'Everyday Fandom: Fan Clubs, Blogging, and the Quotidian Rhythms of theInternet', Canadian Journal of Communication, 30.4, 2005
• Ed Wiltse, 'Fans, Geeks and Nerds, and the Politics of Online Communities', Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association Fifth Annual Convention 5 (2004)

**Below are images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, reproduced by kind permission of Tamar Jeffers McDonald, to which she refers in her audio interview embedded above.

Our Beautiful Wickedness: On Reading Films Queerly. In Memory of Alexander Doty

The Beautiful Wickedness of Queer Reading from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

An audiovisual collage made by Catherine Grant in memory of Alexander Doty, 

brilliant author of numerous key texts in LGBT and queer film and cultural studies, 

including the one quoted from in this video: Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon 

(London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

[C]lassic [film] texts and personalities actually can be more queer-suggestive than “openly” gay, lesbian, or bisexual texts. That is, the coding of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts and personalities can often yield a wider range of non-straight readings because certain sexual things could not be stated baldly—and still cannot or will not in most mainstream products—thus often making it more difficult to categorize the erotics of a film or a star. Of course, if you aren’t careful, this line of thought can begin to sound like an argument valorizing the closet, for understanding queerness as always something “connotated” or suggested (and never really there “denotatively”), for “subtexting,” and for “subcultural” readings. But since I don’t see queer readings as any less there, or any less real, than straight readings of classic or otherwise “mainstream” texts, I don’t think that what I do in this book is colluding with dominant representational or interpretive regimes that seek to make queerness “alternative” or “sub” straight. [Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics, pp. 1-2]

In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my “queer reception” love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses–largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add. [Alexander Doty,  in Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011]

Film Studies For Free was shocked and very saddened at the news, just over a week ago, of the untimely death of Alexander Doty, a truly trailblazing film and media scholar.

Doty, Indiana University Professor of Gender Studies and Communication and Culture (and chair of the latter department) was the author of two classic and highly enjoyable books in queer audiovisual cultural studies: Making Things Perfectly Queer (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000). He also co-edited, with Corey Creekmur, the hugely important collection Out in Culture: Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Continuum, 1995) and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas.

While Doty didn't claim to have invented queer cultural reading as a scholarly practice, he wowed us with the brilliance, daring and sincerity of his interpretations, ones often deeply rooted in his personal, affective experiences of the cultural forms he was studying. In so doing, he succeeded in showing countless other students of film and media texts why it is so vital to engage in these critical practices in public, why it is essential to be good at them, as well as what is seriously at stake in many identity or, indeed, existence-based scholar-fandoms, like those often engaged in by LGBT subjects.

If, as the Wizard of Oz tells us, 'A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others', the many tributes to Doty that have appeared in the last week prove, beyond any doubt, that he had an excellent heart. He certainly had a very courageous one. He, his unique voice, and the work he would have gone on to produce, had his life not been so cruelly cut short, will be hugely missed.

As well as putting together the video collage at the top of this entry, which introduces Doty's compelling justification for queer reading, if not the (possibly even more compelling) details of his actual queer reading of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), FSFF has also assembled a list of links in Doty's memory to online studies which perform queer readings of films and moving image culture, as well as openly accessible studies of some films that perform their own queer readings. Two further FSFF video essays are embedded--on Elizabeth Taylor and on "queer Hitchcock", both of which intersect with, and were partly inspired by Doty's own work on these and other themes.

That long list is preceded by a growing collection of links to the online tributes to Doty that have appeared since his death (this will be kept updated), as well as to his own, openly accessible, scholarly work online. FSFF's author very gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Anthony Bleach and the Facebook group Friends of Alexander Doty in assembling the first two of these three lists. Although she only knew Doty through his published work, she would like to convey her condolences for his loss to all those whose lives were graced, as so many evidently were, by knowing him personally.

Finally, at the very foot of today's entry is a call for contributions to a new website for the Global Queer Cinema project (to be launched in September). It will seek to live up to the high standards that Doty's work set for queer cultural critique as it aims to provide a new, openly accessible, internationalist resource for queer film and cultural studies. FSFF will update its readers about this exciting project in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, FSFF is sad that one of those who have most inspired LGBT film studies scholarship will not be around to witness his influence on this project.

Rest in queer peace, Alexander Doty.


Online tributes to Alexander Doty

• Corey Creekmur, 'Remembering Alexander Doty', FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Kyra Hunting, 'In Memoriam: Thanking Alexander Doty', Antenna, August 12, 2012 
• Taylor Cole Miller, 'A Star Was Born: The Inspiring Life and Work of Alexander Doty', Antenna, August 10, 2012
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 'SCMS Tribute to Alexander Doty', Society for Cinema and Media Studies website, August 8, 2012
• Camera Obscura Collective, 'Alexander Doty', Facebook, August 10, 2012 
• 'IU mourns passing of faculty member Alex Doty', Indiana University Newsroom, August 6, 2012  
• 'Pioneering queer studies scholar Alexander Doty dies...', University of Minnesota Press, August 6, 2012
• Lolachrome, 'You: A Glee multi/metavid', All Things Know, All Things Know, August 7, 2012
• Alex Doty - In Memoriam website
• Ceola Wilson, 'Tributes to "outstanding scholar and teacher"’, Royal Gazette Online, August 7, 2012

Online work by Alexander Doty 

• Alexander Doty, 'I Love Shari: My Queerly Feminist Life with TV', Republished in FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Alexander Doty, 'Modern Family, Glee, and the Limits of Television Liberalism', Republished by FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Alexander Doty, 'Hot in Cleveland: Everything Old is New Again?', Republished in FlowTV, August 7, 2012
• Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 28, 2011  
• Henry Jenkins et al, 'Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part Two)', Confessions of an Acafan, September 30, 2011 

Online studies, or performances, of queer reading

• John S. Bak, 'Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations - Tennessee Williams's 'Desire', Journal of Religion and Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2005
• John Bannister, 'Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, and Susan Sontag: Campaigners of Camp and the Carry On films', Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007
• Harry Benshoff, '[Review] of Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon by Alexander Doty', Scope, August 2001
• Jenna Bond, 'Homosexuality and the Italian Spaghetti Western', Offscreen, November 30, 2007
• Orla Juliette Borreye, 'The Significance Of The Queer And The Dog In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000): A Masculinity At War', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
• Michael Bronski, 'From The Celluloid Closet to Brokeback Mountain: The Changing Nature of Queer Film Criticism', Cineaste, 2008
• Vincent Brook and Allan Campbell, '“Pansies don't float”– gay representability, film noir, and The Man Who Wasn’t There', Jump Cut, 46, Summer 2003 
• Shannon Brownlee, 'Masculinity Between Animation and Live Action, or, SpongeBob v. Hasselhoff', Animation Studies Online Journal, Vol. 6, September 2011
  
• Kathy Burdette, 'Queer Film Theory - Bibliography'
• Alain Chouinard, 'Queering the Québécois and Canadian Child in Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo', Synoptique, 13, February 2009 
• Lesley Chow, 'The Double Standard: The Twins of Two-Faced Woman and Sylvia Scarlett,' Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 59, February 2008
• Douglas Crimp, 'Getting the Warhol we Deserve: Cultural Studies and Queer Culture', Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, 1999
• Zachary Dorsey, ' Slick Moves: Queer Fight Choreography in The Transporter', In Media Res, December 5, 2007
  
• Richard Dyer, 'Homosexuality in Film Noir', from Jump Cut, No. 16, 1977
• Brett Farmer and Stacy Wolf, 'Stage Door Jennies', Genders OnLine Journal, 38, 2003
• Jane Gaines, 'Dorothy Arzner's trousers', Jump Cut, 37, July 1992  
• Jane Gaines, 'Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Queering Feminist Film Theory', Jump Cut, 41, May 1997
• 'Gays, Lesbian, and Transgendered People in Motion Pictures: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library'
• David Gerstner, 'Queer Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetics of Vincente Minnelli', Modernity, Vol. 2, 2000
• David Greven, American Medusa: Bette Davis, Beyond the Forest, femininity, and Camp', Jump Cut, 46, Summer 2003
• Todd Haynes interviewed by Richard Dyer [audio recording from the Tate Modern], 'Double Indemnity: Todd Haynes/Edward Hopper' (4 June 2004)
• Peter Kemp, 'Bi-Polar Gender-Blender: Sylvia Scarlett,' Senses of Cinema 22, Sept-Oct 2002
• Ewan Kirkland, 'Romantic Comedy and the Construction of Heterosexuality', Scope Issue 9, 2007 
• Cheuk Yin Li, 'The Absence of Fan Activism in the Queer Fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong', edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10, 2012
• Dennis Lo, 'The Politics and Aesthetics of “Asian American” Sexuality in Ang Lee’s Cross-Cultural Family Dramas: A Case Study on The Wedding Banquet and The Ice Storm', Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol. 1, 2008
• Patricia MacCormack, 'Barbara Steele's Ephemeral Skin: Feminism, Fetishism, and Film', Senses of Cinema, September 2002
• James MacDowell, 'What Value is There in Gus Van Sant's Psycho?', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 7, 2005
• Stephen Maddison, 'Pedro Almodóvar and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: the Heterosocial Spectator and Misogyny', Chapter 4 of Fags, hags, and queer sisters : gender dissent and heterosocial bonds in gay culture (New York : St. Martin's, 2000)
• Joseph McBride, 'George Cukor: The Valor of Discretion', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 32, April 2001
• Deborah Mellamphy, 'The Paradox Of Transvestism In Tim Burton’s Ed Wood', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
• Matthew Ogonofski, 'Queering the Heterosexual Male in Canadian Cinema: An Analysis of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo', Synoptique, 13, February 2009
• Rebecca Panosky, 'Dorothy Arzner and Gender Representation.” In: “International Female Film Directors: Their Contributions to the Film Industry and Women's Roles in Society.” Chapter 4 of e-Thesis
• Susan Pelle and Catherine Fox, 'Queering Desire / Querying Consumption: Rereading Visual Images of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art', Third Space, Vol. 6 Issue 1, Summer 2006
• Ryan Powell, 'Putting on the Red Dress: Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,' Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007 
• Kate Rennebohm, 'Queering Childhood: An Examination of Claude Jutra’s Dreamspeaker', Synoptique, 13, Feburary 2009
• Elena del Rio, 'Performing the Narrative of Seduction: Claire Denis's Beau Travail', Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue 7, Spring 2003
• Julian Savage, 'The Conscious Collusion of the Stare: The Viewer Implicated in Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul,' Senses of Cinema, 16, Sept-Oct 2001
• Steven Jay Schneider, 'A Tale of Two Psychos', Senses of Cinema, 2000
• Ian Scott Todd, 'Outside/In: Abjection, Space, and Landscape in Brokeback Mountain', Scope13, February 2009
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, You're so paranoid, you probably think this introduction is about you', Novel gazing : queer readings in fiction / edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)
• Craig Snyder, 'Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain', Jump Cut, 53, Summer 2011
• Carter Soles, 'A stalker’s odyssey: arrested development, gay desire, and queer comedy in Chuck&Buck', Jump Cut, 49, 2007
• Carter Michael Soles, Falling Out of the Closet: Kevin Smith, Queerness, and Independent Film, e-Thesis University of Oregon, 2008
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Ang Lee's Cowboys', Offscreen Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 28, 2007) 
• K. E. Sullivan, 'Ed Gein and the Figure of the Transgendered Serial Killer', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 38-47
• Donato Totaro, 'Psycho Redux', Offscreen Journal, 2004
• Evangelos Tziallas, 'Looking Beneath the Skin: Reconfiguring Trauma and Sexuality', Stream: A Graduate Journal of Communication, Spring 2008 1(1)
• Stacy Wolf, 'Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body', S[&]F Online, 3.3 and 4.1, Fall 2005
• Amy Villarejo, 'Interview with Tish Pearlman for Out of Bounds/Cornell University' [about Queer film and queer film theory] RealPlayer file, 29 mins 30 seconds
• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 57, August 2007
• Nicholas de Villiers, '”The vanguard - and the most articulate audience”: Queer Camp, Jack Smith and John Waters', Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007

Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE by Catherine Grant


Skipping ROPE (with audio commentary) by Catherine Grant. First published in Frames, 1, 2012. Transcript available.



Call For Queer Reading/Writing Contributions 
to the new Global Queer Cinema website

Contributions are invited to the Global Queer Cinema website, hosted by the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, UK. The site will be launched in early September 2012. 

The website forms part of the Global Queer Cinema project, an international academic research network project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Sussex. The project is led by Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (University of Warwick). The network held its first event in May of this year.

The project website will be run in conjunction with Catherine Grant (University of Sussex and Film Studies For Free) and Laura Ellen Joyce, GQC Project Co-ordinator, and will continue beyond the length of the project, acting in part as an open access archive and news filter for project-generated material, and related queer film studies resources. 

We welcome contributions from researchers interested in queer (and queering) cinema, cultural studies, media, global studies, gender and sexuality, filmmakers, artists, writers and interdisciplinary scholars, or those with an interest in the practice, exploration and dissemination of film. The below list of topics and frameworks. 

• Queer frames
• Queer uncanny
• Queer sounds and music
• Queer illusions
• Queer film festivals
• Queer decades
• Queer directors
• Queer avant garde and DIY
• New Queer Cinema
• New releases
• Classic films
• Androgyny and pandrogyny
• Queer cosmetics and prosthetics
• In-depth essays on single films
• Short essays on single images

We therefore invite short takes of 250 - 300 words, or longer essays (MLA style) of around 1500-2000 words for more in-depth analysis. Multimedia work (non-copyright infringing - using fair use/fair dealing principles) is very welcome. The above list of topics is not exhaustive, and we invite contributions on any topic or theme which you feel would may (queerly) fit our general ethos. Please correspond with us about any proposals for content by email at GQCproject[at]gmail[dot]com, on Twitter at @g_q_c, and do please 'like' us on Facebook. Thank you.

Up, up, and away! Transformative Works and Fan Activism

May the Fourth Be With You published on May 4, 2012 by thehpalliance.

Read Henry Jenkins' and Ashley Hinck's articles about the Harry Potter Alliance.

Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts. Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement. [Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, 'Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism' [1.9], Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)]

Film Studies For Free is a very big fan of the open access journal of Transformative Works and Cultures, so it is delighted that there's a new issue out.

It's a themed collection of studies of transformative works and fan activism, edited by media studies superheroes Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. Links to abstracts of the articles (and from there to the articles themselves) are given below.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012): Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California. 

Editorial

• Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova

Theory

• Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and political participation  by Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova
• "Cultural acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance by Henry Jenkins
• Experiencing fan activism: Understanding the power of fan activist organizations through members' narratives by Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, Chris Tokuhama
• Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance by Ashley Hinck
• The German federal election of 2009: The challenge of participatory cultures in political campaigns by Andreas Jungherr
• Wonder Woman for a day: Affect, agency, and Amazons by Matt Yockey

Praxis

• Fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms in K-pop fandom by Sun Jung
• Being of service: "X-Files" fans and social engagement by Bethan Jones
• Fan action and political participation on "The Colbert Report" by Marcus Schulzke
• Even a monkey can understand fan activism: Political speech, artistic expression, and a public of the Japanese dôjin community by Alex Leavitt, Andrea Horbinski
• "Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses by Tanya R. Cochran
• Nerdfighters, "Paper Towns," and heterotopia by Lili Wilkinson
• The absence of fan activism in the queer fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong by Cheuk Yin Li
• Too fat to fly: A case study of unsuccessful fan mobilization by Tom Phillips

Symposium

• Of snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish play at the Wisconsin protests by Jonathan Gray
• On the ordinariness of participatory culture by Aswin Punathambekar
• Imagining No-place by Stephen Duncombe
• Fan activism for social mobilization: A critical review of the literature by Lucy Bennett
• Flash activism: How a Bollywood film catalyzed civic justice toward a murder trial by Ritesh Mehta

Review

• "Fan fiction and copyright: Outside works and intellectual property protection," by Aaron Schwabach: Review by Stacey Marie Lantagne

New Issue of MEDIASCAPE on Film and Media Space

Image montage from Lou Romano's wonderful Cinemosaic website of frame grabs from The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Read Bryan Wuest's article on space in this film.

The theme of our newest issue is “space,” which has spawned a range of approaches in cinema and media studies. “Space” is a nebulous concept, but the very difficulty in pinning down how a spatial discussion of media should proceed is why Mediascape thought this would be an appropriate discussion to tease out in our non-traditional format.['Introduction' by Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Katy Ralko, Co-Editors-in-Chief, Mediascape, Winter 2012 Issue]

Film Studies For Free is back from its trip to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston. You can watch videos of some of the conference highlights here. And you can read the live tweets and other reports from the conference from the conference via this page. 

FSFF had a truly wonderful time meeting old friends and new, including a whole bunch of talented people who are responsible for the new issue of one of its favourite online journals, the UCLA-produced Mediascape. And a great issue it is, too. Links to all contents may be found below.

Features:

• 'Watching the River: Mise en Scène and Safe Space in The Night of the Hunter'' By Bryan Wuest
• Disneyomatics: Media, Branding, and Urban Space in Post-Katrina New Orleans' By Helen Morgan Parmett
• 'War Games at Home, Home Games at War: Geography and Military First-Person Shooting Games' By Diana M. Pozo

Reviews:

• '"Between Heaven and Here": Inner-City Apartheid and Socio-Spatial Marginalization in '' By Ioana Literat
• The Driving Forces and Scope of The Mapping of Taiwan' By Jerome F. Keating

Columns:

• 'Christopher Nolan’s Inception: The Oneiric Intruder and the Architecturalism of Space' By Andrew Young
• 'Negotiating Utopia and Dystopia: Space and Architecture in Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)' By Annie Dell’Aria
• '"Is Space Political?": Oppositional Strategies in Treme' By Katie Moylan

META:

• 'Media Boundaries and Bullet Time: A Hard Boiled Fan Plays Stranglehold' By Harrison Gish
• 'Urban Metaphysics: Creating Game Layers on Top of the World' By Nettrice R. Gaskins
• 'Revenge of the (Angry Video Game) Nerd: James Rolfe and Web 2.0 Fandom' By Jim Fleury
• Video Games: The State of the Field - A Discussion with Steve Mamber, Peter Lunenfeld, and Eddo Stern (March 28, 2011). Moderated by David O’Grady

Memory Screens: New Issue of IMAGE AND NARRATIVE

Frame grab from 1975 (Shaun Wilson, version 1 (2005), DV as single channel DVD, colour, sound, 5mins). Visit Shaun Wilson's website here and read his article about 'home movies' here

The concept of memory screens is an overarching term exploring the relationship between forms of media, viewers, practitioners and memory. The notion of memory screens alludes to the ways in which memories become remembered, layered, forgotten and transformed. The range of articles in this volume reflects the relationship between memory and history, both public and personal. ['Thematic Cluster: Introduction' by Teresa Forde]

Film Studies For Free continues to be impressed by the excellence of the online journal Image and Narrative which has recently published a special issue entitled Memory Screens.

FSFF particularly appreciated film and video artist Shaun Wilson's essay on the art of vintage home movies, Jenny Chamarette's study of the dynamics of the ‘spectre’ or ‘spectral body’ of the auteurist figure of Agnès Varda, Peter Kravanja's exploration of narrative contingencies in Rohmer and Akerman and Teresa Forde and Erin Bell's discussions of memory and British television. But this is a very high quality issue throughout and, as always at I and N, particularly characterised by the thoughtful integration of close analysis and film and moving image theory.

Image and Narrative, Vol 12, No 2 (2011): Memory Screens

Table of Contents

• 'Thematic Cluster: Introduction' by Teresa Forde ABSTRACT PDF
• 'Remixing Memory through Home Movies' by Shaun Wilson ABSTRACT PDF
• 'Video Installation, Memory and Storytelling: the viewer as narrator' by Diane Charleson ABSTRACT PDF
• 'Spectral bodies, temporalised spaces: Agnès Varda's motile gestures of mourning and memorial' by Jenny Chamarette ABSTRACT PDF
• 'Television and memory: history programming and contemporary identities' by Erin Bell ABSTRACTPDF
• 'Television Dramas as Memory Screens' by Teresa Forde ABSTRACT PDF
• 'The Lives of Others: re-remembering the German Democratic Republic'  by Margaret Montgomerie and Anne- Kathrin Reck ABSTRACT PDF
• 'Nostalgic [re]remembering: film fan cultures and the affective reiteration of popular film histories' by Nathan Hunt ABSTRACT PDF

Various Articles

• 'Cinema, Contingencies, Metaphysics' by Peter Kravanja ABSTRACT PDF

Review Articles

• Hillary Chute's Ambivalent Idiom of Witness' by Charlotte Pylyser  ABSTRACT PDF
• 'Naissances de la bande dessinée de William Hogarth à Winsor McCay' by Pascal Lefèvre ABSTRACT PDF

On Spectatorship, Reception Studies, Fandom and Fan Studies: In Media Res and Flow

Picture from Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla via Flickr, used and altered under Creative Commons License permission.

Film Studies For Free wanted you to know you have to go with the new issue of Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture on Fandom and Fan Studies.  Oh, and then you can join the party already started at In Media Res on issues of spectatorship. The great contents of these worthy e-journals are directly linked to below:


In Media Res December 13-17, 2010 (Theme week organized by Ian Peters [Georgia State University])

• Sarah Sinwell (Northeastern University) presents: The Art of Seduction: Film Spectatorship in the Age of the Cell Phone

• Ross Melnick (Emory University) presents: BIG News from India: BIG Cinemas and Diasporic Indian Moviegoing in the United States

• Sarah Hamblin (Michigan State University) presents: Puzzling Spectatorship

• Daniel C. Faltesek (University of Iowa) presents: The 3D Machine: An Experiment With Aura, Television, and Installation

• Jesse Schlotterbeck (University of Iowa) presents: DVDs Like LPs: The Official Websites of Musical Biopics and the Contemporary Film Collector

Flow: A Critical Forumon Television and Media Culture

• "Fandom In/As the Academy" by Paul Booth A look at the specific pedagogical value of fandom as an activity and how it can be appropriated in a variety of educational contexts.

• "We Have Met the Fans, and They Are Us: In Defense of Aca-Fans and Scholars" by Catherine Coker and Candace Benefiel  Fans hold their objects of study to a higher standard. How can the critical study of any text succeed without the passionate and knowledgeable participation of the scholar?

• "The Gathering of the Juggalos and the Peculiar Sanctity of Fandom" by Michael Dwyer The Gathering of the Juggalos is the scene of questionable fan practices contrary to the noble portrait of fandom elaborated by several scholars.

• "'We are all together:' Fan Studies and Performance" by Jen Gunnels and M. Flourish Klink Gunnels and Klink argue that fan studies parallels performance studies in discerning tensions between researcher and subject.

• "Stop Being an Elitist, and Start Being an Elitist" by David Jenemann Given how Aca-fandom has created its own canon and looks down its nose at certain cultural forms like sports broadcasting, we could use a little of Adorno's elitism in the discipline today.

• "Telling Tastes: (Re)producing Distinction in Popular Media Studies" by Eve Ng What we study and how we learn to talk about it is productive of our identities along mostly covert dimensions of power. How do scholars distinguish themselves from the mainstream critics?

• "Embracing the 'Overly Confessional:' Scholar-Fandom and Approaches to Personal Research" by Tom Phillips A scholar argues that embracing an "overly confessional" approach to his academic writing is integral to the fidelity of his research.

• "Revisiting Fandom in Africa" by Olivier J. Tchouaffe The application of fandom and its resources is not the same in all cultures, and African fans might not be recognized as legitimate fans. The point of this piece is to demonstrate that there is a unifying figure of American domination of mass culture.

Lastingly good work on Ephemeral Media

The Psycho Shower Scene: A Reenactment: a YouTube fan video discussed by Barbara Klinger in her talk linked to below.

Today, Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass on details of some great freely accessible film and media studies research resources from the Institute of Film and Television at the University of Nottingham.

This summer, the Institute held two Arts and Humanities Research Council 'Beyond Text' workshops on ‘ephemeral media,’ focusing on the growth of the brief or ‘ephemeral’ texts that exist beyond, below and between the films, television programmes, and radio broadcasts more commonly isolated for analysis.

For those interested, the plenary sessions can be found as YouTube recordings and/or sound files on the Beyond Text website (following the photo and video gallery). Also see below.

The Ephemeral Media website has great resources links, too, so do please explore those.

1. The Promotional Surround: logos, promos, idents, trailers (Click here for the Abstracts)

• Charlie Mawer (Executive Creative Director, Red Bee Media) – Perspectives on media branding and TV design (this including a fascinating discussion of BBC idents and the branding of Dave, from a highly influential figure in media brand design) (YouTube)
  

• Professor William Uricchio (MIT) ‘The recurrent, the recombinatory, and the ephemeral: thoughts on a textual system in transition’ (YouTube)

• Professor John Caldwell (UCLA) - “The Insider’s Promotional Surround: Rationing Production Knowledge, Managing Unruly Machines, and Worker Buy” (MP3)

2. Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera (Click here for the Abstracts)

• Professor Barbara Klinger, ‘Reenactment: Fans Performing Movie Scenes from the Stage to Youtube’ (YouTube)
  

• Hugh Hancock (Strange Company) – Machinima (an overview from one of the pioneers of the genre) (YouTube)
  

• Professor Jon Dovey (UWE) –‘User-generated content: archeologies, economies and ecologies (YouTube)
  

• Rik Lander (U-soap Media) – Web drama (a practitioner’s perspective on the creative and business challenges of online drama) (MP3)
  

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