Film Studies: Primary sources
Subject guide to library resources for Film Studies
Which primary sources are useful for Film Studies?
Films are the main primary source you will use in Film Studies. However there are other sources such as adverts, reviews of films, interviews with directors and articles from magazines and newspapers that can provide context giving you an insight into attitudes or cultural issues at the time a film was released.
You may need to know the historical or cultural context of films
- Media history digital library provides access to digitised collections of classic media periodicals
- Current newspapers and historical newspaper archives are useful for reviews of films and to give an insight into cultural and social issues
- Film Index International includes production information, citations for reviews and information on cinema workers.
- You can find images from Flickr: The Commons.
- To view old movie posters The Harry Ransom Center - Movie Posters Collection IMBD and CineFiles are good.
- Stills from historic film clips can be found browsing the British Pathé Galleries
Other digital archives
- Defining Gender 1450-1910 This link opens in a new windowexplores the study and analysis of gender. Primary sources from the fifteenth to early twentieth century provide an insight into both traditional models of gender and contemporary perceptions
- Gender: Identity and Social Change This link opens in a new windowprimary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present.
- The John Johnson Collection: an archive of printed ephemera This link opens in a new windowfully searchable colour images of 65,000 items from the Bodleian Library's John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries
- Mass Observation Online This link opens in a new windowThe Mass Observation Archive is a huge database of diaries, directives, surveys, photographs and reports collected in the UK from 1937-1992
- The Making of the Modern World This link opens in a new windowcontains over 61,000 primary source documents and books essential to the understanding of the social, political and economic development of the western world, from the mid-15th to the mid-19th century
