Resources on campus
On campus, the World Cinema Forum each year brings international guest speakers and visiting artists to campus. In 2012, for example, we hosted a week-long visit from the world-famous British-Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah, founder of the Black Audio Film Collective. Other campus events of relevance to Film Studies include the annual New Sun Conference, where promotion of contemporary First Nations art and artists includes film, video and other moving-image media. The Carleton University Art Gallery also incorporates film and video into its programming, as in the recent screenings of work by acclaimed First Nations filmmakers Kent Monkman and Rebecca Belmore, and by the dynamic young team of Daniel Young and Christian Giroux. A major asset with respect to film culture on campus is the new River Building Theatre: a state-of-the-art movie theatre that doubles as a classroom.
Film Research Collections
The Film Studies program has a substantial research collection that was donated by individuals and institutions, specifically by the late Prof. Peter Harcourt (Emeritus) and the National Film Archives and the National Film Board Reference Library. It is available for on-site consultation to graduate students and faculty in the Graduate Study Room on the fourth floor of the St. Patrick’s Building. It consists of a wide range of printed materials, such as film journals, periodicals, trade publications and newsletters, reference books, industry indexes, guides to resources and books, in addition to catalogues of the major Canadian film festivals.
Very valuable to this collection are the full runs of Canadian publications like Motion, The Canadian Cinematographer Newsletter, Cinema Canada, Séquences, Cinéma Québec, New Canadian Cinema/Nouveau Cinéma Canadien and the first Take One. Large sets of international publications are also available. They include, among others, Screen, Educational Screen, Sight and Sound, Films Criticism, Films and Filming from Great Britain; Media International and Cinema Papers from Australia; American Radio and Television, Velvet Light Trap and Wide Angle from the United States; Cahiers du Cinéma, Cahiers de la Cinématheque and Film Francais from France.
Carleton’s MacOdrum Library
The University’s main library, the MacOdrum, has over 7,000 books and over 200 hundred periodicals in its collections related to the study of cinema. The collections are strong in holdings of film criticism, theory and aesthetics, national cinemas, film scripts, and in material by and about individual filmmakers. The library has film-specific monographs and journals in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Russian. There are excellent inter-library loan services.