My former PhD supervisor, Catherine Grant, has been doing all of us an invaluable service — all of us, that is, scholars and academics in film studies. Film Studies for Free is a blog that “comments on and links to online open-access film studies resources of note”. Katie explains that it
actively espouses the ethos of Open Access to digital scholarly material. It aims to promote good quality, online, film and moving-image studies resources by commenting on them, and by linking to them.
These resources will include freely-accessible, published scholarship or research in various forms: from film and media weblogs, through online peer-reviewed journals and film/video archives, to other forms of web-based scholarly writing, as well as online works of film/moving-image research by practice.
Check the amount of links to classical and new texts that she has made available and you rapidly conclude that this is not really for free. It takes the hard work of someone like Katie, someone attentive to the recent shift in the distribution of scholarly writings, to produce and maintain such a space. Thank you very much — and a personal thanks for my inclusion in the Online and Open-Access Film and Moving-Image Studies Writing of Note.
By the way, the author of Film Studies for Free is presenting a seminar tomorrow at the University of Cambridge titled “The Experience of Auteurism in Contemporary Film Culture”, in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, 17 Mill Lane, at 5pm. I shall be there.
