Tuesday, 1 May 2012

INMEDIA on Jarmusch, US 'Britcom' remakes, global and local cinema, contemporary Hollywood and US Independent films

Framegrab from the Limits of Control (Jim Jarnusch, ) Read Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay on this film, and also a new essay on it by Céline Murillo

The aim of InMedia is to study the media and media representations in the English-speaking world. The journal focuses on the press, photography, painting, cinema, television, video games, music, radio and the Internet among other fields of study. It provides a multidisciplinary approach and comparative perspectives. Contributions are welcome from many research areas, including history, economics, political sciences, sociology, aesthetics, anthropology or science and communication studies.

Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass onto its readers news of the birth of InMedia, an online French Journal, in English, of Media and Media Representations in the English-Speaking World.

This is a very welcome developement: as François Cusset puts it in his great contribution to the journal -- 'Media Studies: A French Blind Spot'

Not only has French publishing started to translate the best of non-French theory which it had refused to import for so long (even if media theorists are still quite rare in French catalogs), and not only have issues of minority representation and reception theory started to be raised within the French media world (even if they have not yet been raised in more academic circles), but the French university system has come to acknowledge its belatedness with regards to the major theoretical debates of the globalized academic scene–and to half-open its doors to initial experiments in this direction, as with Gender Studies or with a serious approach to popular culture. Let us only hope that we won’t have to wait for French media to improve its own standards of accuracy and professional rigor, and to become more hospitable to minorities and alternative views, before we finally see Media Studies taught in French universities. Because that might still take a long time.

This blog wishes a good and hearty online life to InMedia. Its excellent contents are linked to below.

Finally, for today, with reference to Cusset's important point about the increasing translation into French of non-Francophone film and media theory, FSFF would very much recommend to its French-speaking/reading visitors the remarkable online, open access journal débordements
which is doing just that (see its versions of Screening Sex, Linda Williams [Les orgasmes de Jane Fonda]; Plaisir visuel et cinéma narratif, Laura Mulvey (première partie); Plaisir visuel et cinéma narratif, Laura Mulvey [seconde partie]).