Screenshot extract from 'Ten years old - and ready to try new things, an editorial by Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull in the the tenth anniversary issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception  Studies

Film Studies For Free today wishes a very happy 10th year in online existence to the remarkable open access venture that is Participations. What a great achievement! The journal is stronger and more impressive than ever, as the below, very high quality (and enormous), latest issue -- on fan studies, and audience interaction and participation -- testifies

FSFF somewhat cheekily embeds the above screenshot from the opening part of this issue's editorial, for its readers, as in it joint editors Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull raise some important matters concerning the long term viability and success of a journal like this. The editors are choosing to respond to these by 'recasting the journal' in a number of interesting ways - you can read about these at greater length here.

If you are working in this area, now would be a really good time to consider what you would want from Participations in the years ahead. Feel free to post comments here, or contact the editors here.

Here's to the next ten years, Participations! And thank you.


Participations, Volume 10, Issue 1, (May 2013)

• Editorial by Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull (Joint Editors): 'Ten years old - and ready to try new things

Articles

• Bradby, Barbara: 'Our affair with Mila Kunis: A group ethnography of cinema-going and the 'male gaze'’ Haslop, Craig: '"I certainly wouldn't want to be portrayed as a boring straight person": Torchwood, meaning-making and the performance of gender and sexual identities'

Special Section: The Fan Studies Network - new connections, new research

• Bennett, Lucy & Tom Phillips: 'An introduction: The Fan Studies Network - new connections, new research'
• Booth, Paul & Peter Kelly: 'The changing faces of Doctor Who fandom: New fans, new technologies, old practices?'
• Busse, Kristina: 'Geek hierarchies, boundary policing, and the gendering of the good fan'
• Chin, Bertha & Lori Hitchcock Morimoto: 'Towards a theory of transcultural fandom'
• Ellison, Hannah: 'Submissives, Nekos and Futanaris: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Glee Kink Meme'
• Hills, Matt: 'Fiske's 'textual productivity' and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction?'
• Lamerichs, Nicolle: 'The cultural dynamic of doujinshi and cosplay: Local anime fandom in Japan, USA and Europe'
• Pett, Emma: '"Hey! Hey! I've seen this one, I've seen this one. It's a classic!": Nostalgia, repeat viewing and cult performance in Back to the Future'
• Proctor, William: '"Holy crap, more Star Wars! More Star Wars? What if they're crap?": Disney, Lucasfilm and Star Wars online fandom in the 21st century'
• Sandvoss, Cornel: 'Toward an understanding of political enthusiasm as media fandom: Blogging, fan productivity and affect in American politics'
• Whiteman, Natasha, Joanne Metivier: 'From post-object to "Zombie" fandoms: The "deaths" of online fan communities and what they say about us'

FSN Forum Discussion

• Bury, Rhiannon, Ruth Deller, Adam Greenwood & Bethan Jones: 'From Usenet to Tumblr: The changing role of social media'
• McCulloch, Richard, Virginia Crisp, Jon Hickman & Stephanie Janes: 'Of proprietors and poachers: Fandom as negotiated brand ownership'
• Freund, Katharina & Dianna Fielding: 'Research ethics in fan studies'
• Jones, Bethan & Lucy Bennett: 'Blurring boundaries, crossing divides: An interview with Will Brooker'
• Lozano Delmar, Javier, Victor Hernández-Santaolalla & Marina Ramos: 'Fandom generated content: An approach to the concept of 'fanadvertising''
• Sturm, Damion & Andrew McKinney: 'Affective hyper-consumption and immaterial labors of love: Theorizing sport fandom in the age of new media'

Special Section: COST - audience interaction & participation

• Damásio, Manuel José, Mélanie Bourdaa, Bozena I. Mierzejewska, Ana Milojević, José Manuel Noguera, Birgit Stark, Lucia Vesnić-Alujević & Igor Vobič: 'Editors' introduction: Stakeholder essays on audience interaction and participation'
• Stark, Birgit & Andy Kaltenbrunner: 'There is no such thing as a 'convergence continuum' aiming towards the perfect solution'
• Stark, Birgit & Ina von Holly: 'Social media is not a threat but a reward for companies!'
• Haas, Josefa: 'New tools and scenes for the media play'
• Nyirő, Nóra & Agnes Urban: 'Effects of audience participation in CSO communication'
• Marmino, Michele, Mario Petitto & Andrea Pinchera: 'CSOs' communication strategies and audience participation'
• Joye, Stijn & Philippe Henon: 'Activating the audience in times of compassion fatigue'
• Vozab, Dina, Eugen Jakovčić & Saša Šegrt: 'Croatian civil society and media from the perspective of two civil society organisations'
• Harrison, Teresa: 'The "audience" as participative, idea generating, decision making citizens: will they transform government?'
• Dahlgren, Peter: 'From public to civic intellectuals via online cultures'
• Harrington, Stephen, Tim Highfield & Axel Bruns: 'More than a backchannel: Twitter and television'
• García de Torres, Elvira: 'Audience territory'
• Scolari, Carlos: 'Lost in the borderlines between user-generated content and the cultural industry'
• Zamora, Rocío & Wayne Wanta: 'The influence of a mediating source – my friend – is now spreading the influence to others who may not have seen the news reports'
• Vobič, Igor: 'Rethinking social life of radio news: Slovenian public radio journalists' perceptions of audience interactivity'
• Krstić, Aleksandra: 'When the audience changes a journalist'
• Torres da Silva, Marisa: 'Professional views' on letters-to-the-editor as a means of audience participation'
• Vesnić-Alujević, Lucia: 'Online strategies of members of the European parliament'
• Hänska-Ahy, Maximillian, Claire Wardle & Malachy Browne: 'Social media & journalism: Reporting the world through user generated content'
• Milojević, Ana, Jelena Kleut & James Ball: 'Conversational style of journalism'
• Milojević, Ana & Steve Herrmannl: 'Journalism taking up a curatorial role'
• Maretić, Meri & Ante Babić: 'New political communication'
• Buchanan, Margot & Fiona Hyslop: 'Transforming audiences, transforming audience expectations?'
• Gallego, Manuel Javier Callejo & Convadonga Fernández: 'Producing information, producing and monitoring communication'

Reviews

• Benwell, Bethan, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (eds.): 'Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception’ (Reviewed by Pinar Sadar)
• Jacobs, Katrien: 'People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet’ (Reviewed by Giovanna Maina)
• Lang, Anouk (ed.): 'From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the turn of the twenty-first century’ (Reviewed by Julian McDougall)
• Rudolph, Jennifer Domino: 'Embodying Latino Masculinities: Producing Masculatinidad’ (Reviewed by Victoria Kearley)

Frame grab from Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902). Read Dan North's great blog entry about the audience-oriented 'attractionist aesthetic' of this film', and Frank Kessler's chapter on this film in the collection Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception

This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the 'effects' of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioral world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional 'box office' studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms. [Publisher's blurb for Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass on news of the publication of an open access version of a wonderful new book from Amsterdam University Press. Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception is an extremely high quality collection edited by Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History, at Birkbeck, University of London. This great tome has, of course, been added to FSFF's permanent listing of Open Access eBooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!


Since we're on the subject of audiences, it seems a brilliant moment to reproduce, below, links to the incredibly rich contents of the latest, just published, issue of PARTICIPATIONS, the excellent online journal of audience research. Not all items are directly film studies related, but they should be of interest to all researching issues of reception in film and media culture.

Film Studies For Free wishes you a very happy 2009, just a little later than hoped... Over the holidays it moved office into a lovely new blog-cabin, and since has been somewhat distracted both by its breathtaking new views of the Sussex countryside as well as the customary broadband-connection 'teething troubles' often attendant upon such moves.

FSFF will be back up to full speed (indeed, up to new and improved speed...) very soon. But in the meantime, on this, the thirteenth day of Christmas - were there such a thing - here are five gold links it wished it could have brought you just a tad earlier:

• Best film-blog discovery: Where the Stress Falls by M.S. Smith (check out two nice posts on the wonderful work of Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel - HERE and HERE)
• Best Harold Pinter film items to commemorate his death on 24 December: Kevin B. Lee's two brilliant posts (HERE and HERE, the latter a video essay by Lee and Dan Callahan) on one of FSFF's favourite films: The Go-Between (1970, scripted by Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey - see also Kimberley Lindbergs' great writing on Losey's films).
• Best new filmmaker online archive: the Carl Theodor Dreyer website set up by the Danish Film Institute (thanks to David Bordwell for the tip-off): check out, especially, the short and clips page.
• Best new issue of an Open Access film and media studies journal: Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, Volume 5, Issue 2 (November 2008).

Martin Barker, (Editor): 'Editorial Introduction' Selected Articles □ Barbara Klinger, : 'Say It Again, Sam: Movie Quotation, Performance and Masculinity' □ Yiu Fai Chow & Jeroen de Kloet: 'The Production of Locality in Global Pop - A comparative study of pop fans in the Netherlands and Hong Kong' □ Joost de Bruin: 'Young Soap Opera Viewers and Performances of the Self'

• Most interesting YouTube playlist discovery: Screening Room with Robert Gardner including clips from interviews with Jean Rouch (see below), Jonas Mekas, Hollis Frampton, Yvonne Rainer, Les Blank and Caroline Leaf

  Screening Room was a 1970s Boston television series that for almost ten years offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station. The series was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner (Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss), who was Chairman of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard for many years. This unique program dealt even-handedly with animation, documentary, and
  experimental film, welcoming such artists as Jan Lenica, John and Faith Hubley, Emile DeAntonio, Jean Rouch, Ricky Leacock, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Baillie, Yvonne Rainer and Michael Snow. Thirty episodes have been edited for release as DVDs. Visit Robert Gardner's personal website for further information: www.robertgardner.net)