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.

Anime is a visual enigma. Its otherworldly allure and burgeoning popularity across the globe highlights its unique ability to be more than just another type of animation. Originally a novelty export from post-war Japan, anime has now become a subtle yet important part of Western popular culture. Furthermore, it remains a key area of audience and fan research that crosses all generations – children, teenagers, and adults. From Osamu Tezuka to Hayao Miyazaki, Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988) to Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), anime’s extraordinary characters and oneiric content still enable it to be regarded as one of the most awe-inspiring visual spectacles going into and during the twenty-first century.
    Keenly aware of anime’s rich history, cultural and global context, and increasing presence and influence on Western art, literature and film, the theme of this issue of Cinephile is ‘Reassessing Anime.’ The six articles included herein aim to address and tackle some of the overlooked aspects of anime. Such a reassessment by each author hopes to encourage future academic scholarship into the evolution and value of anime and, moreover, its impact not only on film but also on TV, comic books, video games, music videos, and corporate marketing strategies. [Jonathan A. Cannon, Editor's Note, Cinephile, 'Reassessing Anime', 7.1, 2011. FSFF's hyperlinks]

Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the Spring 2011 issue of Cinephile, the excellent film journal edited out of the University of British Columbia, Canada, has just been made available for download for free as a single PDF file.

As signalled above, this issue is dedicated to "Reassessing Anime" and it features great, original articles by internationally renowned animation scholars Paul Wells and Philip Brophy, as well as illustrations by Vancouver-based artist Chloe Chan.

The issue's table of contents is given below, and below that, FSFF has also provided a handy, clickable index of its own popular posts on anime and Japanese cinema.

The latest issue of Cinephile, available for purchase now, is on Contemporary Realism. It features original articles by Ivone Margulies and Richard Rushton. There is also a call for papers on "The Voice Over".

• 'Playing the Kon Trick: Between Dates, Dimensions and Daring in the films of Satoshi Kon' by Paul Wells
• 'The Sound of an Android’s Soul: Music, Muzak and MIDI in Time of Eve' by Philip Brophy
• 'Beyond Maids and Meganekko: Examining the Moe Phenomenon' by Michael R. Bowman
• 'Reviewing the ‘Japaneseness’ of Japanese Animation: Genre Theory and Fan Spectatorship' by Jane Leong
• 'The Higurashi Code: Algorithm and Adaptation in the Otaku Industry and Beyond' by John Wheeler
• 'Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence: Thinking Before the Act' by Frédéric Clément 

Film Studies For Free on Anime and Japanese Cinema

• On Japanese Cinema July 27, 2010
• Dreaming Movies: RIP Satoshi Kon (1963-2010) August 25, 2010
• 'Imaginary and Fantastic': Hayao Miyazaki Studies November 25, 2009
• Animation Studies: Three Fabulous Online Resources November 14, 2011
• Mickey Mouse and Animation Links November 18, 2008 
• War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction December 6, 2010

Frame grab from A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971). You can read about audience responses to this film in Peter Krämer's excellent article '‘Movies that make people sick’: Audience Responses to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971/72'

Film Studies For Free takes to the blogwaves today to shout out about a truly excellent issue of the Open Access, and openly refereed, international audience research journal Participations.

It's a bumper issue with 27 articles - an advantage of an online journal format over its offline, paper-bound relatives, as editor Martin Barker outlines in his interesting introduction to this issue.

FSFF particularly appreciated the section on international film audiences, and also especially enjoyed Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore's study 'Reviewing Romcom: (100) IMDb Users and (500) Days of Summer' and also Anne Collins Smith and Owen M. Smith's article on 'Pragmatism and Meaning: Assessing the Message of Star Trek: The Original Series'.

Special Edition Contents

Editorial

• Martin Barker (Joint Editor): 'Editorial Introduction: A Small Diatribe, and a Serious Challenge to Other Journals'

Articles

• Adrian Athique: 'Diasporic Audiences and Non-Resident Media: The Cast of Indian Films' 
• 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' 
• Tonny Krijnen: 'Engaging the Moral Imagination by Watching Television: Different Modes of Moral Reflection' 
• Kim Trager Bohley: '“Browsing Madness” and Global Sponsors of Literacy: The Politics and Discourse of Deterritorialized Reading Practices and Space in Singapore' 
• Anne Collins Smith and Owen M. Smith: 'Pragmatism and Meaning: Assessing the Message of Star Trek: The Original Series' :

Special Section: Comedy Audiences

• Sam Friedman, Brett Mills and Tom Phillips (Guest Editors - Special Section): 'Editorial Introduction' 
• Lesley Harbidge: 'Audienceship and (Non)Laughter in the Stand-up Comedy of Steve Martin' 
• Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore: 'Reviewing Romcom: (100) IMDb Users and (500) Days of Summer' 
• Sharon Lockyer and Lynn Myers: '‘It’s About Expecting the Unexpected’: Live Stand-up Comedy from the Audiences’ Perspective' 
• Richard McCulloch: '‘Most People Bring Their Own Spoons’: The Room’s participatory audiences as comedy mediators' 
• Sophie Quirk: 'Containing the Audience: The ‘Room’ in Stand-Up Comedy' 
• Eve Smith: 'Selling Terry Pratchett's Discworld: Merchandising and the Cultural Economy of Fandom' 
• Simon Weaver: 'Definitions of the humorous in Chris Rock and Russell Peters fan blogs: A discussion of the problem of incongruity' 
• Nathan A. Wilson: 'Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power'

Special Section: International Film Audiences Conference

• Ailsa Hollinshead (Guest Editor - Special Section): 'Editorial Introduction' 
• Karina Aveyard: 'The Place of Cinema and Film in Contemporary Rural Australia' 
• Jacqui Cochrane: '16 Years of Alcohol: An Allegory of a Nation ' 
• Elizabeth Jane Evans: 'Superman vs Shrödinger’s Cat: Taste, Etiquette and Independent Cinema Audiences as Indirect Communities' 
• Roberta Gregoli: 'Transnational Reception of City of God and Elite Squad' 
• Amy Hardie:  'Symbolic Cinema and Audience Engagement' 
• Ailsa Hollinshead: '“And I felt quite posh!” Art-house cinema and the absent audience – the exclusions of choice' 
• Peter Krämer: '‘Movies that make people sick’: Audience Responses to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971/72' 
• Claire Monk: 'Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: period film audiences and online film cultures' 
• Tom Phillips: 'When Film Fans Become Fan Family: Kevin Smith Fandom and Communal Experience' 
• Pavel Skopal: '"It is not enough we have lost the war – now we have to watch it!" Cinemagoers' attitudes in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (a case study from Leipzig)'

Special Section: Approaching the Online Audience: New Practices, New Thinking

• Craig Hight, Ann Hardy, Carolyn Michelle and Adrian Athique (Guest Editors - Special Section):'Editorial Introduction' 
• Charles H. Davis and Carolyn Michelle: 'Q methodology in audience research: bridging the qualitative/quantitative ‘divide’?' 
• Luke Goode, Alexis McCullough and Gelise O'Hare: 'Unruly publics and the fourth estate on YouTube' 
• Ann Hardy, Craig Hight and Carolyn Michelle: 'Reservoir Hill and audiences for online interactive drama' 
• Bevin Yeatman: 'Still seeking the audience' 
• Ruth Zanker: 'Child audiences becoming interactive ‘viewsers’: New Zealand children’s responses to websites attached to local children’s television programmes'

Reviews

• Samantha Holland:Pole Dancing, Empowerment and Embodiment (Elke Weismann) 
• Michael V. Tueth: Laughter in the Living Room: Television Comedy and the American Home Audience (Tom Phillips) 
• Graeme Turner:  Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn (Simon Cross) 
• Richard O. Young: How Audiences Decide: a Cognitive Approach to Business Communication (Martin Barker)

• The tracks of Sully’s tears: disability in James Cameron’s Avatar by Dana Fore
  Examining disability issues in Cameron's futuristic fairy tale reveals more complex and potentially sinister ideas at work.
• The Social Network: the contemporary pursuit of
  happiness through social connections by Robert Alpert
  The Social Network reenacts the U.S success myth and places it in the contemporary context of virtual realities in which connections are monetized and each person is emotionally detached from the next. 
• Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: when excess isn’t parody  by Stephen Papson
  Parody, excess and mythology intermix, producing contradictory readings of Luhrmann’s Australia.
• Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain by Craig Snyder
  A gay love story for the ages? Let's hope not. A textual analysis of how homosexual desire is disciplined within Brokeback Mountain.
• There's a sucker born every minute. Audiences blog about Sucker Punch. by Chuck Kleinhans
  A search for the film Sucker Punch on the microblog Tumblr provides a rich data collection to study commonplace audience discourse about a commercial entertainment film and New Media as an example of phatic communication.

• Decay of the aura: modern art in classical cinema by Susan Felleman
  A study of real works of art—including figural sculpture, “Entartete Kunst” (works of modern art deemed “degenerate by the Nazi regime), and abstract painting—as incorporated into three popular fiction films of the classic period (The Song of Songs, 1933; Venus vor Gericht, 1941; and The Trouble with Harry, 1955), reveals that when an art object becomes part of a fiction film, it enters a space of its own symbolic appropriation; aura is replaced by (unstable) signification.
• Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”:
  the myth of interdependence in oil drilling films by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
  Louisiana Story (1948), Thunder Bay (1953), Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992), Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2009), and Crude (2009) draw on a mythology that suggests the oil and fishing industries can work interdependently once appropriate safety precautions are in place.
• American Medusa: Bette Davis, Beyond the Forest, femininity, and Camp  by David Greven
  King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest allows us to consider the feminist and queer relevance of the theme of female transformation in Bette Davis films and to revisit and challenge the category of the Camp Classic.
• Taken by Muslims: captivity narratives in
  The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Prisoner of the Mountains by Claudia Springer
  A 1935 Hollywood film's vilification of Muslims is countered by a nuanced Russian film from 1996, with both revolving around the abduction of non-Muslims by Muslims.
• A question of audience: revisiting Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come by Ulrick Casimir
  A modern attempt to unpack Henzell's iconic film, analyzing the complex relations between British and U.S. conceptualizations of the Caribbean and the film itself.

• At the global market: Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé
  and the economics of women’s rights by Amy E. Borden
  As both a tool used by contemporary activists, such as Tostan, and within its plot, Ousmane Sembène’s final film Moolaadé demonstrates how West African women may gain collective access to juridical and political power by using local cultural customs to resist the practice of female genital cutting.
• Serbian cutting: assemblage and the archival impulse
  in the films of Dušan Makavejev by Greg DeCuir, Jr.
  "If Serbs are fond of slaughtering people, there must be a method of film cutting that corresponds."
• Global capital’s false choices in the films of Laurent Cantet by Jessica Livingston
  By looking at the four major films of French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, we receive a valuable window through which to view the false choices offered by the contemporary neoliberal economy.
• Narrating topography: Still Life and the cinema of Jia Zhangke by Eric Dalle
  Jia Zhangke’s environmental fiction film, Still Life, explores the effects of the Three Gorges Dam on the emotional lives of individuals from different social strata.
• Redeeming the woman from Maoist China in China Cry: A True Story by Jing Yang
  This 1990 filmic narrative of the Christian redemption of a Chinese woman from Maoist political frenzy exemplifies residual U.S. Cold War thinking that serves to contain the ideological other.
• Let’s get lost: unmapping history and Reformasi in the Indonesian film Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya by Dag Yngvesson
  Riri Riza's deceptively lazy 2007 Javanese Road Movie attempts to disorient itself from the pervasive sociopolitical apathy of contemporary Indonesian youth by slowly eviscerating the ubiquitous formal, narrative and cultural structures that have imbued the problems of recent history and resulting status quo with a nostalgic, translucent sheen.
• The Nakba and the construction of identity in Palestinian film by Inez Hedges
  Performative memory serves as the counterweight to dispossession from the land.

• Capital limits on creativity: Neoliberalism and its uses of art by Jyotsna Kapur:
  Why the “creative economy” is a capitalistic invention, hostile to art and ultimately to human creativity.
• “Creative Industries,” neoliberal fantasies, and the cold, hard facts
  of global recession: some basic lessons by Chuck Kleinhans
  The international financial crisis provides the ultimate stress test for myths about today’s media culture.
• Media art and economics: resources Annotated bibliography by Chuck Kleinhans
  

• Woman with the movie camera redux: revisiting the position of women in the production classroom by Jennifer Proctor, River E. Branch, Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson
  A call and template for a responsive pedagogy addressing the pervasive violent representations of women in student films and the continuing under-representation of women the culture of production — a critical echo of and expansion upon Michelle Citron’s and Ellen Seiter’s call in 1981.
• Digital distribution, participatory culture, and the transmedia documentary by Chuck Tryon
  Explores the role of digital media reshaping the distribution, exhibition, and reception of documentary films.
• Claims to be heard: young self-expressivity, social change, and the Educational Video Center by Stephen Michael Charbonneau
  A historical and critical overview of New York-based Educational Video Center, a leading youth media organization, and its auto-ethnographic work with disadvantaged communities.
• Ethics, politics and representation in Child of Mine, a television documentary on lesbian parenting by Lizzie Thynne
  Re-interviewing her main character from a documentary on lesbian custody she made for UK Channel 4, Lizzie Thynne explores the ethics and politics of filming one's own community for broadcast.

• Clips, clicks and climax: notes on the relocation and remediation of pornography by Julian Hanich
  Moving-image pornography on the Internet has facilitated and intensified the masturbatory experience due to a double tendency toward privatization and individualization. This becomes particularly obvious when compared to the time when porn films were projected in theaters and consumed with other, mostly anonymous viewers.
• The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich by Magnus Ullén
  Considering the relation between pornography and different media is important, yes; but it will be difficult to historicize pornography without first historicizing the mode of reading that gave rise to the concept of porn in the nineteenth century.
• Back to the Golden Age by Thomas Waugh
  This brief intervention in the current conversation about porn contextualizes the debate within the history of porn studies and Jump Cut’s contribution since the 1970s to a materialist-feminist understanding of sexual representation.
• Porn: it’s not just about sex anymore by Nina K. Martin
  Porn's shift to online and mobile device mediums has de-stigmatized the term to the point of banality, linking "porn" to non-sexualized notions of excess.
• Beyond porno chic by Jose B. Capino
  Internet porn viewing and spectatorship at adult video arcades are more similar than we imagine.
• Pornography, technology, and masturbation: response to Julian Hanich by Peter Lehman
  Society hysterically fears the dangers of pornography and masturbation while academia represses it, and that aspect of the historically complex interaction between media, technology and porn is lost in the process.

• Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary  by Thomas Waugh
  Far from Vietnam, the collective French film of 1967, produced in solidarity with the Vietnamese people under U.S. attack, is explored in relation to its historical context on three continents, to its coalitional politics and the solidarity genre in general, and to the forum it provided to one contributor, veteran communist filmmaker Joris Ivens.
• Re-conceiving Misconception: birth as a site of filmic experimentation by Roxanne Samer
  This cultural history of Marjorie Keller's birth film Misconception (1977) seeks to release the film from past dichotomizing interpretative binds with the hope of opening it up to further future interpretations, re-looking and better appreciation.

• Archaeology of flesh: history and body-memory in Taxidermia by Laszlo Strausz
  As a grotesque body film with comic corporeal exaggerations, Taxidermia outlines a complex argument about 20th-century Hungarian history and historical memory.
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning: a cultural critique of the Bush-Cheney Administration by Rod Buxton
  Through a dark poetics of brutality and mayhem, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning explores the militarism and economic fallout that resulted from the political policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration.
• It takes a child to raze a village: demonizing youth rebellion by Andrew Scahill
  When children attack! The child collective horror film presents a nightmare scenario of childhood in revolt — a revolution against systems of surveillance, control, and heterosexual kinship.

• Books on film sound review by Michael Chanan
  Two books about film sound come at their subject from completely different angles.
  • Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), Cinema in the Digital Sound Age
  • Andy Birtwistle, Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video
• Iranian film opposing regimes of voyeurism review by Jyotika Virdi
  Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh
  Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is seen as a dynamic alternative to Hollywood's dominant voyeurism codes, while its narratives are displaced allegories that circumvent the state's modesty laws.
• Darwin at the movies by David Andrews and Christine Andrews
  This review of Barbara Creed's book Darwin's Screens also examines the use of evolutionary ideas in the field of film studies.
• Star Trek’s allegorical monomyth review by Elspeth kydd
  David Greven in Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films tackles complex issues within this large and elusive monomyth.
• Nobody’s baby review by Kirsten Pike
  Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell
  The book examines girls’ domestic labor in the U.S. and also offers significant insight into the contradictory ways that girls are imagined, debated, and targeted by experts, advisors, and creators of popular culture.
• Sexual innocence and film: a look at scholarship on virginity review by Susan Ericsson
  Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald
  How can virginity be depicted in fiction film and television beyond dialogue or narrative moments when the condition of virginity ends?
• Documentary studies: news from the front line review by Russell Campbell
  Sociopolitical documentary comes under intensive scrutiny in a cluster of new books.
  • Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation by John Ellis
  • Recording Reality, Desiring the Real by Elizabeth Cowie
  • The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
  • Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
  • The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film by Thomas Waugh
• Documentary: intelligence and/or emotion? review by Chuck Kleinhans
  • The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
  • Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana

• Crisis politics On crises and drastic neoliberal economic makeovers by the editors

Image from 3 Idiots (Rajkumar Hirani, 2009), a film referred to in Ann David's article 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'

Film Studies For Free is happy to announce that a new issue of Participations, a journal devoted to developing the broad field of study of cultural and media audiences, is now available online.

The table of contents is reproduced below. The issue includes an excellent selection of articles devoted to the topic of audience responses to screen dance, but there are also notable essays, among others, on moviegoing in the USA in the 1930s and 40s, 'bad films', and the reception of 'gay movies' in Sydney.

Particip@tions: Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010)


Special Edition: Screen Dance Audiences – why now?

• Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds (Guest Editors - Special Edition): 'Special Issue Introduction'
• Harmony Bench: 'Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media'
• Ann David: 'Dancing the diasporic dream?  Embodied desires and the changing audiences for Bollywood film dance'
• Karen Pearlman: 'If a dancing figure falls in the forest and nobody see her...'
• Matthew Reason: 'Thinking about Audiences: a dance film-maker's perspective.  An interview with Alex Reuben'
• Karen Wood: 'An investigation into audiences' televisual experience of Strictly Come Dancing'

Articles

• Mike Chopra-Gant: 'Dirty movies, or: why film scholars should stop worrying about Citizen Kane and learn to love bad films'
• Anouk Lang: '"A Dirty Little Secret": Taste Hierarchies and Richard and Judy's Book Club'
• Scott McKinnon: 'Taking the Word 'Out' West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces'
• Jennifer Radbourne, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow: Empowering Audiences to Measure Quality'
• Becky Walter: The L Word fan fiction reimagining intimate partner violence'

Reviews

• Sarah D. Goode: Understanding and Addressing Sexual Attraction to Children: A Study of Paedophiles in Contemporary Society.  Routledge (2010).
• Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vondreau (eds.): The Youtube Reader.  National Library of Sweden (2009)