British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Gateway highlights

For the last time this year, we present highlights from BUFVC Moving Image Gateway entries that we created or edited during the last week.

Arab Media Watch
This UK-based organisation represents the view that Arabs have long been misrepresented, under-represented and negatively stereotyped in Western media and film. Britain is no exception. They believe that the advent of the internet and satellite broadcasting provides a unique opportunity to educate and inform public opinion and that AMW has filled a vital niche in striving for objective British coverage of Arab issues, be they political, economic, cultural or social. Main activities include: – monitoring and analysing the British media (there is a BBC Watch group) as well as helping journalists and editors with research, information and interviews, and producing monitoring studies of coverage in newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and websites. The website also gives listings of relevant forthcoming and previously broadcast radio and television programmes.

Beyond the Score
This website is an integral part of a series of concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that seek to meld media and music as part of a dialectical discourse that seeks to explore how both aspects can work separately and together. Developed by the CSO’s creative director, Gerard McBurney, it is designed as an educational resource not only for aficionados, but also for newcomers looking to delve deeper into the world of classical music, the first half of each Beyond the Score program offers a multimedia examination of the selected score – its context in history, how it fits into the composer’s output of works, the details of a composer’s life that influenced its creation-sharing the illuminating stories found ‘inside’ the music. At present the site includes presentations of ‘The Planets’ by Gustav Holst, ‘La Mer’ by Claude Debussy, Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’, Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ as well as symphonies by Shostakovich, Sibelius, Prokofiev and others although not all of the programmes have the video presentations on the website yet.
Boulez on Beyond The Score by ChicagoSymphony

DVD-Subtitles.com
There are over 9 million people in the UK with a hearing difficulty who may be dependent on subtitles in order to enjoy DVDs. One of the primary aims of this website is to promote subtitled DVDs by ensuring that subtitle users are able to find subtitled DVDs that they want, and encouraging studios to release more subtitled DVDs. The site lists thousands of commercial DVD releases (both current and deleted) and users of the site have indicated to what extent they are subtitled (all content, main feature and some of the extras, main feature only, not subtitled, probably subtitled). Unfortunately, the the majority do not have any subtitles and these are featured in the ‘Hall of Shame’. A section of the site giving statistics on subtitling is listed as being under construction and there is a Speak your Mind section for users’ comments.

Hollywood Voices
The section of the growing BBC Archive resource includes 71 audio interviews with stars of the American cinema that were at their peak from the silent days up to the end of the studio system in the 1960s. These range from brief one-minute spippets to in-depth 100-minute interviews and were originally broadcasts between 1952 (Charlie Chaplin) and 2010 (Debbie Reynolds). Of particular note is a rare interview with reclusive star Doris Day and a discussion with composer Miklos Rozsa. There are also items dedicated to film directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, and Oscar-winning lyricist Sammy Cahn. The site is organised by interview date and also includes many stills of the stars at the BBC’s studios from the 1930s onwards.

Sounds Familiar? Accents and Dialects of the UK
The UK is a rich landscape of regional accents and dialects, each evidence of our society’ s continuity and change, our local history and our day-to-day lives. This site captures and celebrates the diversity of spoken English in the second half of the twentieth century. You can listen to 71 sound recordings and over 600 short audio clips chosen from two collections of the British Library Sound Archive: the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank. In separate sections of the site you can explore the differences that exist in spoken English as you move across the country; hear how English has changed in different parts of the country over the last fifty years; take an in-depth look at three specific varieties of contemporary English: – Received Pronunciation, Geordie Dialect, and English as spoken in the UK’s minority ethnic communities; contribute your own recordings and language investigations to the site.

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