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Welcome to the Broadcast and Cinema Studies LibGuide!
This guide is created to serve as a general and introductory guide for those who are interested, or are currently studying or researching in Broadcast and Cinema Studies. It contains selected resources curated by the librarians to get you started on the different topics in the discipline.
This LibGuide is structured as such: the selected resources are divided into separate sections of Books (including print and e-book) and eResources (includes e-Journals, online archives, websites, and other online databases). A link directly to the resources is included, and in the case of print materials, a link to our library catalog is included instead. Quick links to our library services and our contact details are featured here as well.
Other than the resources mentioned above, this guide also includes the page Student Works and Faculty Publications, which will show you how to browse and search our institutional repository to find past student works and our faculty publications.
Please bear in mind that this is not intended as a comprehensive guide.
If you have any questions or enquiries about this guide or the resources, please feel free to contact the librarians.
I want to thank Mark Emmons for describing the development of the literature of film and television so clearly and succinctly in his book: Film and Television: a guide to the reference literature Call no: Z5784.M9E54. I am reproducing the introduction here.
Film and television are now widely cited in academia as the defining arts of the twentieth century. This wasn’t always the case. As with all innovations, it took time before scholars adopted the media as a legitimate area of study. In the earliest days, when audiences flocked to nickelodeons, the only publications to take notice were newspapers interested in the new technology and alarmed decency censors bemoaning the state of society. As audiences grew and exhibitors began building movie palaces, fan magazines like Photoplay took notice with fawning tributes or nasty gossip about the stars. Popular magazines followed suits.
Filmmakers stopped relying exclusively on vaudeville and literary adaptations and begain producing original works that took full advantage of the medium of film. In the United States, the early producers moved to California and freedom and began to develop the studio and star systems. As war dampened the once-thriving European film industries, Hollywood prospered, pioneering sound, color, and new genres. People attended movies in record numbers and newspapers and magazines began to write reviews instead of relying on the publicity from studios.
Scholars from around the world became aware of motion pictures as an art form. They wrote articles in art journals and chapters in books. In the 1950s and 1960s, they began publishing scholarly journals devoted exclusively to the critical analysis of film. Libraries and archives began seriously collecting films. By the early 1970s, film schools were formed, reference book writers started to compile bibliographies and guides to the literature and book publishers launched 2 major film indexes.
Television got a later start, but followed a similar pattern. As the number of networks and stations expanded and television became pervasive in households, newspapers and popular magazines were the first to take notice. Then scholars began to write articles, chapters, and books about television. This time, much of the reference literature was folded into the existing structure for film or communication studies resources. Because of the more ephemeral nature of broadcasting, libraries and archives were slower to collect television shows.
Film and television scholarship is now a mature field. Scholars use film and television to understand the world in which we live. They use a full range of historical, theoretical and socio-cultural perspectives and a variety of approaches and theoretical frameworks. Scholars analyze individual films and television shows, looking at how narrative, form and technique make meaning. They study aesthetics, analyzing directing, cinematography, acting, and set and costume design to explain how the parts make the whole and send a message. They compare films and shows to the sources from which they are adapted, looking at author and auteur. They study themes and genres. They take semiotic or psychoanalytic approaches. They take ideological perspectives such as Marxism or feminism. They examine representation and identity with critical theories of gender, sex, race, ethnicity, national, post-colonial, and the “other”. They deconstruct or analyze from neoformalist, poststructural or postmodernist perspectives. They study how audiences receive and interpret media. They look at film and television as a business, considering production, marketing, distribution and exhibition. And they study how the media reflects and impacts on society.
When scholars working in colleges and universities are not asking their students to make films, they are most likely asking them to examine a single film or filmmaker or to analyze a national cinema, genre, theme, movement, or time period in the context of one of these theoretical frameworks or approaches.
As Mr Emmons so aptly described, literature in Broadcast & Cinema Studies span a wide range of literature depending on the discipline that the student or researcher is in. Visit the Resources and Guides sections for a quick glance at the type of resources available in NTU Library.
