From: millennium film journal (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2008 - 05:55:19 PDT
I have been following the Ubuweb discussion with interest. Of course I
agree that artists have a right to control and compensation, and that
image quality is often of paramount importance. But I also believe
that works produced by independent film- and video-makers are of
enormous cultural significance. Many of the moving image works
celebrated in Frameworks should be as highly valued and readily
available, as central to our education and visual culture, as the
works of Van Gogh, Pollock, or Monet. On these grounds, there is
something positive about Ubuweb, or at least to the intentions behind
it . . .
I have been an editor of the Millennium Film Journal for a couple of
decades. We made the journal available on-line in the early days of
the web. The idea was that access to writings about art cinema is a
way of disseminating knowledge of the work. http://mfj-online.org
contains full texts of articles and indexes, but no images. The
website is always a few issues behind the printed version, and essays
on the site only go back to 1992, when we started receiving texts in
file form. The amount of traffic we get indicates that many people use
the site as a resource. The finances of the journal are never secure,
but we are willing to lose potential sales for the sake of making
scholarship about experimental cinema available . . .
I recently found that our articles are being offered for sale on-line:
http://www.highbeam.com/Millennium+Film+Journal/publications.aspx
It is the counterpoint to the Ubuweb problem. This outfit, High Beam,
is selling what we are trying to give away. Does anybody have any
ideas what we should do about this?
Grahame Weinbren
Editor
Millennium Film Journal
http://mfj-online.org
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.