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habits, while traditional 'box office' studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations.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.

Framegrab of Rooney Mara as 'final girl' Nancy Holbrook in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010). Read Kyle Christensen's article on this film's source text ('The Final Girl versus Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema'), and also check out Film Studies For Free's entry of links to 'Final Girl' Studies

Below, Film Studies For Free links to the entire online contents, to date, of the excellent Open Access journal Studies in Popular Culture: a list of more than 60 great articles on film, television and media studies. 

The journal of the US Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in the South, SPC dates back, in its offline, print version, to 1977, making it one of the oldest, continuously published academic journals to treat audiovisual media.  

SPC has been online since 2006 and is a wonderful example of how an online presence indicates no necessary lowering of the quality bar for a properly peer-reviewed journal. 


29.1 October 2006 [Go here for an online table of contents)

• "Reinventing the Hero: Gardner's Grendel and the Shifting Face of Beowulf in Popular Culture" -- Michael Livingston and John William Sutton 
• "Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Loria Pestewa, and the Great American Makeover." -- Gioia Woods
• "Artistic Schizophrenia: How Fight Club's Message is Subverted by its Own Nature" -- Kyle Bishop
• "Michael, Are You Okay? You've Been Hit By a Smooth Criminal: Racism, Contraversy, and Parody in the Video Clips "Smooth Criminal" and "You Rock My World." -- Elenda Oliete
• "'Sigmund Freud, Analyze This': How Madonna Situates "Die Another Day" Beyond the Pleasure Principle" -- David Sigler 

30.2 Spring 2008 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• Little America: R.E.M., Howard Finster, and the Southern "Outsider Art" Aesthetic -- Matthew Sutton
• Brokeback Mountain: Masculinity and Manhood -- James R. Keller and Anne Goodwyn Jones
• Race, Crime, and Motherhood in George Pelecanos's Soul Circus -- Alexander Pitofsky
• The Politics of Talk: The Oprah Interview as Narrative -- Sarah Henstra
• Survival of the Stereotypical: A Study of Personal Characteristics and Order of Elimination on Reality Television -- Bryan E. Denham and Richelle N. Jones
• A Car of Her Own: Volvo's "Your Concept Car" as a Vehicle for Feminism? -- Roy Schwartzman and Merci Decker
• Trainspotting, High Fidelity, and the Diction of Addiction -- Scott Stalcup 

31.1 Fall 2008 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Culture of the Past 
• From Apicius to Gastroporn: Form, Function, and Ideology in the History of Cookery Books -- Abigail Dennis
• Queer Investigations: Foxy Ladies and Dandy Detectives in American Dime Novels -- Pamela Bedore
• Literary Art in an Age of Formula Fiction and Mass Consumption: Double Coding in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle” -- Nils Clausson 
• Lost Girl: Diminishing Dorothy of Oz -- SydneyDuncan
• The Protean Character of Jello, Icon of Food and Identity -- Susan Grove Hall
• Gazing on Fu-Manchu: Obscurity and Imperial Crisis in the Work of Sax Rohmer -- Rebecca Wingfield
• “To Renew the Old World”: Record Collecting as Cultural Production -- Kevin Moist 

31.2 Spring 2009 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Culture's "Material and Conceptual Conditions 
• Fast Food Frontiers: I've Got a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore -- Minjoo Oh
• Sexed Appeals: Network Marketing and Adult Home Novelty Parties -- Dawn Heinecken 
• Popularizing HIgh Culture: Zemeckis's Beowulf -- Kathleen Forni
• Fear and Loathing in Knoxvegas: Representations of the "Other" in the Official Press Before and During the 1982 Knoxville World's Fair -- Stephen Bales and Charlie Gee
• Paul Reveres of Early Radio: The Boy Scouts and the Origin of Broadcasting -- Noah Arceneaux 
• The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive on the Political Left in Literature, Song, and Film -- Ron BrileyTamenicia or Tammy; James or Jim Bob; Bessie or Heather: Patterns and Significance of Choosing Names for American Babies -- Claude J. Smith, Jr. 

32.1 Fall 2009 [Go here to find a PDF of the Entire Issue]

• From the Editor: Moral Choices in the Art of Popular Culture
• "Spiritual Warfare" and Intolerance in Popular Culture: The Left Behind Franchise, the Commodification of Belief, and the Consequences for Imagination -- Marnie Jones
• The Narcissism of Bipartisanship: Accessing Ann Coulter on the Internet -- Lindsey Ives
• "Not Like Other Men"?: The Vampire Body in Joss Whedon's Angel -- Lorna Jowett
• "...long before the stars were torn down ...": Sam Shepard and Bob Dylan's "Brownsville Girl" -- Katherine Weiss 
• Death and Magic in Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions: A Terror Management Perspective -- Jonathan Bassett
• Disneyfying Dickens: Oliver and Company and The Muppet Christmas Carol as Dickensian Musicals -- Marc Napolitano 
• Even a Tramp Can Dream: An Examination of the Clash Between "High Art" and "Low Art" in the Films of Charlie Chaplin -- Richard Ward 

32.2 Spring 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: No Monoliths Here
• Striking Back Without Missing a Beat: Radical Responses to Domestic Violence in Country Music’s The Dixie Chicks and Salsa’s Celia Cruz -- Delia Poey
• “But This Is the South”: Ambivalent Regionalism in Jan Karon’s Mitford Novels -- Eleanor Hersey Nickel
• Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation -- Karolina Kazimierczak
• The Jesus Fish: Evolution of a Cultural Icon -- Todd Edmondson
• The Politics of the "Open" Self: America in the Cinemas of King Vidor and Robert Altman -- Margaret Hrezo and William E. Hrezo
• Like a “Whopper Virgin”: Anthropological Reflections on Burger King’s Controversial Ad Campaign -- Ty Matejowsky 
• The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television: A Replication of the Mastro and Greenberg Study a Decade Later -- Elizabeth Monk-Turner, Mary Heiserman, Crystle Johnson, Vanity Cotton, and Manny Jackson 

33.1 Fall 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Theory and Practice
• What's Entertainment? Notes Toward a Definition -- Stephen Bates and Anthony J. Ferri 
• Popular Fiction Studies: The Advantages of a New Field -- Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
• Interpretive Methodology from Literary Criticism: Carnivalesque Analysis of Popular Culture: Jackass, South Park, and ‘Everyday’ Life -- Gulnara Karimova
• The Cinematic and Historic Weight of Stone of Destiny -- Lynnette Porter
• Ken Follett and the Scribbler's Trade: A Midnight Train to Somewhere -- Carlos Ramet
• The “Aquatic Zionist” in The Yiddish Policemen's Union -- Bennett Kravitz
• “Tons of Useful Stuff”: Defining Wellness in Popular Magazines -- Carol-Ann Farkas 

33.2 Spring 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Cultural Fragments, Cultural Flowers
• My Vampire Boyfriend: Postfeminism, “Perfect” Masculinity, and the Contemporary Appeal of Paranormal Romance -- Ananya Mukherjea
• “Thou Shalt Not Crave Thy Neighbor” : True Blood, Abjection, and Otherness -- Sabrina Boyer
• Mad Men's Color Schemes: A Changing Palette of Working Women -- Katherine Gantz
• The Revolution Will Be Soooo Cute: YouTube “Hauls” and the Voice of Young Female Consumers -- Laura Jeffries
• Outsider Nostalgia in Dazed and Confused and Detroit Rock City -- Carey L. Martin
• The Beatles and the Art of the Tambourine -- Steven Hamelman
• Outsourced: Crime Stories, New World Horrors, and Genre -- Jonathan L. Crane 

34.1 Fall 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Art for Someone Else's Sake
• Protecting a City’s Image: The Death of Las Vegas Beat, 1961 -- Larry Dale Gragg
• The Final Girl versus Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema -- Kyle Christensen
• “And I Started Wondering . . .”: Voiceover and Conversation in Sex and the City -- Ashli Dykes
• Refrigerator Design and Masculinity in Postwar Media, 1946-1960 -- Paul Gansky
• Pop Culture, Politics, and America's Favorite Animated Family: Partisan Bias in The Simpsons? -- Kenneth Michael White and Mirya Holman
• Evaluating the Presence of Social Strain in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV -- Patrick Osborne

A (bordering on) recursive Film Studies For Free screengrab

It is Film Studies For Free's 3rd birthday today. So, time for a little self-indulgent reflection and celebration...

A lot has changed in the last year, most notably that this blog has had to vie with a Film Studies For Pay job for its author's attention... Entries have indeed slowed a little. But, despite this, FSFF's readership has continued to grow rather astonishingly, with 'unique visits' exceeding 300,000, and 'page views' just about to reach half a million. Thank you, dear readers!

While there will be big developments at this blog in the coming year -- some of those linked to an exciting new, MA in Film Studies course its author will teach on Curating Film Culture next Spring -- its essential mission and qualities won't change: viva Open Access!

Onwards and upwards, but please remember you can follow FSFF in its various incarnations at Twitter, at Facebook, and at Vimeo, and you can keep up with its videographic film studies curations at Audiovisualcy (also on Twitter and Facebook).

Film Studies at the University of Sussex has been such a welcoming, fruitful and stimulating workplace for this blog's author. So, today's entry gratefully gathers links to openly accessible, online, film and moving image studies research and scholarship produced by the very wonderful staff and doctoral students/graduates at that rather venerable (50 years old, itself, next month) and pretty cool institution (as well as by FSFF's own scrivener).

• Thomas Austin, "Seeing, feeling, knowing: a case study of audience perspectives on screen documentary" Participations, 2:1, August 2005
• 'Review of Contemporary Hollywood Cinema By Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.)', Scope, 2000
• Caroline Bassett, 'Up the Garden Path: Or How to Get Smart in Public', Second Nature, Issue No.2, November 2009
• Jimmy Billingham, 'Indeterminate Film Thinking and Interpretation,' in Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA PGN (Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association Postgraduate Association), vol. 2, no. 1, 2009 
• Sam Cooper, 'Sex and the Situs', World Picture, 4, 2010
• Martin Paul Eve, The Time That Remains: Elia Suleiman and the London Palestinian Film Festival 2010', Excursions, 1 (1), (2010) pp. 146-151
• Rosalind Galt, '“It’s so cold in Alaska”: Evoking Exploration Between Bazin and The Forbidden Quest', Discourse, 28.1, (Winter, 2006), pp. 53–71
• 'Mapping Catalonia in 1967: the Barcelona School in global context,' Senses of Cinema, Oct-Dec 2006
• 'The Obviousness of Cinema', World Picture, 2, Autumn 2009
• ' Perverse Aesthetics: Maria Beatty, Masochism, and the Cinematic', World Picture, 4, Spring 2010
• Catherine Grant, 'Home Movies: The Curious Cinematic Collaboration of Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard', in For Ever Godard (eds) Temple, Williams, Witt (London: Black Dog Press, 2004), pp. 100-117 (preprint)
• ''Still Moving Images: Photographs of the Disappeared in Films about the Dirty War in Argentina', Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, ed. Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003) (preprint)
• 'Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist "Free" Adaptation', Screen Vol. 43, No. 1, 2002, pp. 57-73
• 'The "Author Function" in Transnational Film Adaptation: the Case of El lugar sin límites (Ripstein, Puig, Donoso' - English language translation of ''La función de "los autores": la adaptación cinematográfica transnacional de El lugar sin límites', Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXVIII, Núm, 199, Abril-Junio 2002, pp. 253-268
• 'Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women's Film Authorship', Feminist Theory Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2001, pp. 113-130 (preprint)
• 'Intimista Transformations: María Luisa Bemberg's First Feature Films', An Argentine Passion: The Films of María Luisa Bemberg ed. John King, Sheila Whittaker and Rosa Bosch (London: Verso, 2000) (preprint)
• 'Giving up Ghosts: Eliseo Subiela's Hombre mirando al sudeste and No te mueras sin decirme a dónde vas', Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds, ed. Rob Rix and Roberto Rodríguez-Saona (Leeds: Leeds Iberian Papers - Trinity and All Saints/University of Leeds, 1997), pp. 89-120
• Video essays: 
• 'Unsentimental Education: on Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes', FSFF, June 2009
• 'True Likeness: on Peeping Tom and Code Unknown', Filmanalytical, June 2010
• 'Establishing Split: on Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream', Filmanalytical, November 2010
• 'Video Primer: Refashioning the Femme Fatale? Gilda in Motion', Film Studies For Free', February 2011;
• 'Video Primer: Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor as 'Helen Burns' in Jane Eyre', Film Studies For Free, April 2011
• Ed Hughes and Aitor Antepara Zuza, (2007) Battleship Potemkin: A Contemporary Score. Tartan Video, London, UK, 2007
• Mary Agnes Krell, 'Investigating Imaginary Evidence', Vectors, Issue 1, 2005 
• Kate Lacey, 'Home, Work and Everyday Life: Roger Silverstone at Sussex', International Journal of Communication 1 (2007)
• Michael Lawrence '“Carefully Posed Thighs”: The Garden of Eden in 1966', World Picture, 4, 2010
• Simon Paul Mussell, Constellations of Adornian theory and film: readings of Adorno with Tarkovsky and Haneke. Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2011
• Kate O'Riordan,  'Playing with Lara in Virtual Space' in Sally Munt (ed.), Technospaces: inside the new media (London: Continuum, 2001)
• 'Caroline Bassett (2007) The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media', Culture Machine, 130, July 2008
• Graeme G. Pedlingham, The (un)scene of memory: energetic theory and representation in theatre and film, Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2011 
• Roberta Piazza, The representation of conflict in the discourse of Italian melodrama. Journal of Pragmatics, 38 (12), 2006, pp. 2087-2104
• John David Rhodes, "Concentrated Ground": Grey Gardens and the Cinema of the Domestic', Framework, 47.1, Spring 2006
• 'Location, Location, Location', Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 129-131
• 'Peggy Ahwesh', Senses of Cinema, 29, 2003 
• 'Notes on Cinematic Desire (for Louis)', World Picture, 4, Spring 2010
• 'Easy Living: The Modernist House and Cinematic Space', Talk at the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image University of Kent, 2010 (mp3)
• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, 2006
• Neil Graham Slack, A cinema of white masculine crisis: race and gender in contemporary British film. Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2010
• Sue Thornham, 'Starting to Feel Like a Chick: Re-visioning romance in In the Cut', Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2007
• Lizzie Thynne, 'Ethics, politics and representation in Child of Mine, a television documentary on lesbian parenting', Jump Cut, No. 53, 2011
• Dolores Tierney, 'The Appeal of the Real in Snuff: Alejandro Amenabar's Thesis', Spectator, 22.2, 2002
• 'Alejandro González Iñárritu: director without borders', New Cinemas, 2009
• 'Emilio Fernandez 'in Hollywood': Mexico's Postwar Inter-American Cinema, La perla/The Pearl (1946) and The Fugitive (1948)', originally in Studies in Hispanic Cinema, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2010
• 'Gender Relations and Mexican Cultural Nationalism in Emilio Fernández's Enamorada/Woman in Love', originally in QRFV, 20:3, 2010
• 'Lights and shadows: new perspectives on Cuban cinema', The International Journal of Cuban Studies, Issue 2, December 2008
• El terror en El beso de la mujer araña', Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXVIII, Núm. 199, Abril-Junio 2002, 355-365
• Glenn Ward, Journeys into perversion: vision, desire and economies of transgression in the films of Jess Franco, Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2011
• Neelam Sidhar Wright, Bollywood eclipsed : the postmodern aesthetics, scholarly appeal, and remaking of contemporary popular Indian cinema, Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2010
• '"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake', Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited buy Iain Robert Smith, Scope, Issue 15, 2010