Frame still from the documentary film of the 1928 Olympic Games held in Amsterdam, Olympische Spelen, showing distance runners Paavo Nurmi, Ville Ritola and Edvin Wide, with innovative on-screen titles

Fascinated by the deathless prose demonstrated by this blog? Fancy reading more, only this time with footnotes? Well, if you go to my personal website you’ll find a growing number of my articles for scholarly journals which I’ve been able to put up online for free by kind permission of the publishers. There are two very welcome trends being demonstrated by journal publishers: one, they are offering increasing amounts of content online for free, though obviously in the hope of attracting subscribers to the greater amount of content that remains behind paywalls; and two, when you do write an essay for them, often they allow you to post a PDF (or a link to it) on a personal web page or departmental page, just so long as you acknowledge the source and link to the journal in question.

I raise this now because, just in time for 2012, I’ve just put up a new essay, ‘Rituals and Records: The Films of the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games‘, recently published in European Review, vol. 19 no. 4, 2011, by kind permission of Cambridge University Press. The link here is to my web page, so that readers see the full acknowledgment before finding the PDF.

Below, in reverse chronological order, are other essays of mine that currently are freely available, via one route or another (others are listed on my site that link to subscription-only sites):

• ‘”Only the Screen Was Silent”: Memories of children’s cinema-going in London before the First World War’, Film Studies issue 10, Spring 2007 (PDF, 273KB)
• ‘Diverting Time: London’s Cinemas and Their Audiences, 1906-1914’, The London Journal, vol. 32 no. 2, July 2007. Available for downloading by kind permission of Maney Publishing, publishers of The London Journal
• ‘Aufbruch in die Lüfte: Die Anfänge des Filmens und Fliegens’ [Taking to the Air: Early Film and Early Flight], in Die Kunst zu Fliegen in Film und Fotografie (Düsseldorf: NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, 2004) [Downloadable version in English (PDF, 67KB)]
• ‘Reconstructing the News: British newsreel documentation and the British Universities Newsreel Project’, Film History vol. 13 no. 2 (2001) [with Nicholas Hiley]
• ‘A Short History of Film Archiving’, AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies website (www.bftv.ac.uk/events/archhist.htm), April 2001
• ‘Just a Shop Girl from Brixton’, The Damfinos: The International Buster Keaton Society website (www.busterkeaton.com), October 2000
• ‘A History of the British Newsreels’, in booklet accompanying British Universities Newsreel Project Database CD-ROM (BUFVC, 2000)
• ‘Witnessing the Past’, in James Ballantyne (ed.), Researcher’s Guide to British Newsreels Vol. III (London: BUFVC, 1993)