The present volume is the latest addition to the well established Libraries Unlimited Reference Sources in the Humanities series, which deals with a range of subjects including children's literature, the performing arts, and American popular culture. The work is modelled on an earlier volume from the same publishers (Fisher, 1986). The author of the present work is a reference and instruction librarian with employment experience in the film industry and a passion for the subject.
Film and television are now finally regarded in academic circles as the defining arts of the twentieth century. However, it took time before scholars adopted the media as a legitimate area of study. In the earliest days when audiences flocked to the picture palaces the only publications to take notice were newspapers interested in the new technology and alarmed decency censors bemoaning the state of society. In time filmmakers stopped relying exclusively on vaudeville traditions and adaptations of literary works for their source material and began producing original works that took full advantage of the new medium of film. In the USA the early producers moved to California and began to develop the studio and star systems. As war dampened the once‐thriving European film industries Hollywood prospered, pioneering sound, colour, and new genres. People attended the cinema in record numbers, and newspapers and magazines began to write reviews instead of relying on publicity from the studios.
In time scholars 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 two major film indexes.
Television had a later start, but followed a similar pattern. As the number of broadcasting companies and channels 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. 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, looking at narrative, form, directing and acting techniques and the entire range of themes and genres. When academics are not asking their students to make films they are most likely asking them to examine a single film or filmmaker or to analyse a national cinema, genre, theme, movement, or time period in the context of one of these theoretical frameworks or approaches.
The present volume is intended to offer a starting point for interested researchers to access the reference literature. Students, teachers, librarians, budding filmmakers, and cinema enthusiasts may consult its pages for references to published literature and, increasingly nowadays, web sites. The focus is on cinema and television shows, how they are produced, the people who make and appear in them, their content, their distribution and exhibition, and how they were received by audiences, reviewers, critics and scholars. Although international in scope, references are restricted to English language publications and web sites. Similarly, general reference sources are excluded from the present work as well as specialist references to individual works or people. In his introduction the compiler points out that such information may easily be gleaned from library catalogues or from a search for online information.
Arrangement of the work is by topic. After general guides and dictionaries and encyclopedias, the book is divided roughly into filmographies, filmmakers, and filmmaking. Each source has been consulted, unless indicated otherwise, and includes a useful annotation of scope and coverage. Among the topics covered are works relating to the cinema of individual countries, albeit English language sources only. Other topics covered include detective films, films on the holocaust, sex films and soap opera productions. References to the latter, however, are without exception US publications. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of works and web sites cited throughout this work are of US origin. Among the works describing individual studios the only British one covered is the Ealing Studios. The work includes books published up to the end of 2004 and web sites available at the beginning of 2005. In an industry where changes in fashion and technology consign last year's productions to the archive shelves the work will require frequent updating to include the regular output of new material appearing in both printed and online format. Among the references to all‐time great films is, somewhat surprisingly, one published in 1967 (The Great Films), clearly of historical relevance only.
The work is completed with a detailed table of contents which is intended to help readers. There are also separate author/title and subject indexes together with appendices of the relevant sections of the Library of Congress classification schedules and subject headings as well as the Dewey Decimal Classification schedules relevant to film and television. Librarians may be forgiven perhaps for considering the latter somewhat superfluous. As more institutions offer courses in film and television studies the present work provides a useful compendium of sources on the subject. However, its usefulness is likely to be more limited outside the USA given the likelihood of many publications cited being unavailable in libraries in other countries. A useful inclusion, too, would have been an indication of the page sizes of items cited. With the obvious limitations mentioned above, the work offers a useful introduction to the maze of literature already produced in this field for both the serious student and the researcher.
