Brilliant online film and media studies resources from Critical Commons

Digital Humanities and the case for Critical Commons: "Yet another Downfall detournement with Bruno Ganz holding the line against digital scholarship and fair use." (posted at ironmanx28 channel at YouTube for Critical Commons)

This great video made the rather easily amused Film Studies For Free laugh uncontrollably... But, then, in the case of this blog it was very much preaching to the converted. Thanks a lot to Corey Doctorow at Boing Boing for drawing it to our attention.

Film Studies For Free has also ecstatically been exploring the Critical Commons website promoted by the video:

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.

FSFF can most highly recommend Critical Commons not only as an immensely important campaigning organisation --one very much after its own heart -- but also as a veritable cornucopia of online, Open Access, film and media studies resources. Just check out the brilliant lecture material from its site linked to below.

FSFF readers MUST explore the rest of this magnificent and worthy organisation's offerings tout de suite! Or else, FSFF won't be laughing any more... Nein, es wird nicht lachen...

• Deleuze and Cinema by Kara Keeling The following selection of film clips from films discussed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze were compiled in the Fall of 2009 by the participants in Professor Kara Keeling's Critical Studies graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture at the University of Southern California.

• The Transverberation scene in four films featuring the life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Sherry Velasco A comparison of the Transverberation scene in four films featuring the life of Saint Teresa of Avila

• Buffy vs. Twilight - Stalking Comparison by Jonathan McIntosh A comparison of stalking scenes in the 2008 film Twilight and in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

• Documentary Epistemology by Steve Anderson This lecture considers questions of epistemology in relation to documentary media, using the construction/reconstruction of historical events as a case-study

• Database Narrative by Steve Anderson This lecture outlines some basic properties of database narratives, referring to the debate between Lev Manovich and Marsha Kinder on the nature of selection and combination in narrative.

• Postmodernism lecture by Steve Anderson An illustrated lecture on postmodernism