Film & Video: Articles & film analyses

Visual and Media Arts

Film & Video databases: the top 9

To find film analyses, choose Databases and select one of the following titles. Note that you can choose to search all of these at once, except ProQuest Social Sciences, by clicking "Choose Databases."

To find the best articles, enter the title and/or other words, e.g.:

"citizen kane" (or jaws)
AND aesthetics OR production OR direction

moon AND duncan jones AND (motion picture* OR film* OR cinema*)

(creed NOT alice) AND (motion picture* OR film* OR cinema*)

rocky NOT (horror OR peabody)

Select Language = English
then use Refine Results options, e.g., academic or peer-reviewed or scholarly articles

Tips for Finding Articles

  • use "quotation marks" around phrases
  • truncate - shorten a word to its trunk or root to get alternate endings - with an asterisk * (shift 8), e.g., truncat* finds truncate, truncated, truncation
  • apply Boolean connector AND to combine unlike ideas, e.g., dance AND promotion
  • apply Boolean connector OR to connect synonyms, e.g., advertisements OR campaigns

Put it all together:

  • "hip hop dance" in one box
  • AND (promot* OR advertis* OR campaigns) in the next box
  • use parentheses in single-box searching - when you don't have another set of boxes, e.g.,:
  • "hip hop dance" AND (promot* OR advertis* OR campaigns)

Use the left or right menus to narrow your results, e.g., by language, date, subject, etc.

Databases have a citation (information about an article such as the title, author, name of the journal or magazine, volume and issue (which correspond to the date), date, and pages) and sometimes they will also contain an abstract, or summary, of the article.

Databases also often cite multiple types of resources - books, essays or chapters, government documents, etc.

Some databases will also have the complete item (called the full text): you should see a link to an HTML or PDF document. Or click on Get it @ GVSU - this will check the other library databases for the full text of the article.