Academic literature on the topic 'Early film discourse'

Following previous works by Patrick C. Loughney, Isabelle Raynauld, Steven Maras, Ian Macdonald, Alain Carou and Steven Price on screenwriting’s historical development in national frameworks, this article proposes to examine Portuguese screenwriting historical culture in relation to its major external influences: French, Italian and American cinema. If it is true that American mainstream cinema and its screenwriting models are now hegemonic and increasingly present in Portuguese film culture, it is also true that Portugal had (and continues to have) a strong ‘author-oriented’ film tradition, focused on artistic processes, clearly present in its screenwriting culture. Such characteristics developed first under the influence of French and Italian silent cinema, through the contribution of foreign film directors who worked in Portugal and established schools there. Also important were the cinematographic experiences (film and writing) made by modernist poets during the silent film period. Finally, the powerful influence of the French Politique des Auteurs (1950s) also helped to configure Portuguese screenwriting culture. To contextualize the Portuguese experience specifically, I explore the origins of screenwriting practice and discourse in Portugal, addressing the many political, historical and financial aspects that impacted the Portuguese perception of screenwriting craft from an early stage.

AbstractOCLC Online Computer Library Center In interwar Japan, urban middle-class audiences patronized Hollywood movies rather than domestic native films that should have appealed to them as native and culturally familiar. The rise of militant nationalism and cultural nativism fueled the growth of official movements that celebrated an indigenous Japanese essence and eschewed allegedly foreign, modern “contamination.” The alleged Americanizing influence of Hollywood cinema became an increasingly worrisome problem for Japanese officials beginning in the early 1930s. This article examines Japan's efforts to impose tighter restrictions on American films during the 1930s, culminating in a total ban on film imports following the onset of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

The extensive career of the British film director Ken Loach has been defined by his perceived commitment to portraying the lives of ordinary, everyday people on screen. The realist impulse underpinning this output can be determined from early television credits on the BBC's ‘Wednesday Play’ series to more recent films such as Jimmy's Hall (2014) and I, Daniel Blake (2016). It could be argued that this aesthetic tendency also continues to inform critical appropriations of Loach's work. This article considers Looking for Eric (2009) and The Angels' Share (2012) as two films which appear to challenge this established discourse. In Looking for Eric, the spectacle is manifold: the appearance of Eric Cantona, a well-known French actor and celebrity, is complicated by his fantasised role while The Angels' Share evokes the whimsical tradition of Ealing comedies. This study explores critical response to both films, finding a disruption of existing preconceptions attributed to Loach as a British film director, and also considers the potential wider impact of such discourse.

This article evaluates contemporary filmmaker Naomi Kawase’s (b. 1969–) status within Japan’s film industry as well as her place among women directors. Using Kawase’s three award winning features Suzaku (Moe no suzaku, 1997), Shara (Sharasōju, 2003), and Mogari (Mogari no mori, 2007) as the basis of my analysis, I examine the way in which these films illuminate the construction of Kawase’s female authorship in relation to a specific location. While Kawase has made a number of critically and commercially successful films since 2007, I limit my discussion to her early narrative works set in Nara, Japan in order to illuminate the significance of the international film festival apparatus in establishing and upholding the discourse of auteurism in relation to regional identity. Through my analysis I argue that Kawase successfully negotiates this discourse through a strategy of self-promotion that emphasizes a “cinema of place” within the broader context of international film festivals such as Cannes. Kawase’s “cinema of place” ultimately allows her to rearticulate the meaning of female authorship within an art cinema context by representing a new national cinema that challenges the structures and boundaries of Japan’s studio system.

In this article, David C. Gillespie explores the deliberate foregrounding of music and song in Soviet film. He begins with a discussion of the structural and organizing roles of music and song in early Soviet sound films, including tiiose by Sergei Eizenshtein, Grigorii Aleksandrov, Ivan Pyr'ev, and Aleksandr Ivanovskii. Gillespie then focuses on the emphasis on urban song in some of the most popular films of the stagnation years, such as The White Sun of the Desert (1969) and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1979), adding considerably to the appreciation of these films. To conclude, he analyzes folk music in films about village life, especially those directed by Vasilii Shukshin, and explores the role of music in constructing a mythical and nationalistic discourse.

Self-reflexivity is a significant characteristic of Austro-German cinema during the early sound film period, particular in films that revolve around musical topics. Many examples of self-reflexive cinematic instances are connected to music in one way or another. The various ways in which music is integrated in films can produce instances of intertextuality, inter- and transmediality, and self-referentiality. However, instead of relying solely on the analysis of the films in order to interrogate the conception of such scenes, this article examines several screenplays. They include musical instructions and motivations for diegetic musical performances. However, not only music itself, but also music as a subject matter can be found in these screenplays, as part of the dialogue or instructions for the mis-en-scène. The work of Austrian screenwriter and director Walter Reisch (1903–1983) will serve as a case study to discuss various forms of self-reflexivity in the context of genre studies, screenwriting studies and the early sound film. Different forms and categories of self-referential uses of music in Reisch’s work will be examined and contextualized within early sound cinema in Austria and Germany in the 1930s. The results of this investigation suggest that Reisch’s early screenplays demonstrate that the amount of self-reflexivity in early Austro-German music films is closely connected to music. Self-referential devices were closely connected to generic conventions during the formative years and particularly highlight characteristics of Reisch’s writing style. The relatively early emergence of self-reflexive and “self-conscious” moments of music in film already during the silent period provides a perfect starting point to advance discussions about the musical discourse in film, as well as the role and functions of screenplays and screenwriters in this context.

Analyzing Soviet films and film criticism from the late Stalin period, this article shows how Soviet cinematographers exploited gender discourse to produce Otherness. Cinematic representations of U.S. femininity, masculinity, love, sexuality, and marriage played an important role in constructing external and internal Enemies. Cinematography depicted the U.S. gender order as resulting from the unnatural social system in the United States and as contrary to both the Soviet order and human nature. In line with the notion of “two different Americas,” the films also created images of “good Americans” who aspired to satisfy gender norms of the Soviet way of life. The image of the American Other helped shape Soviet gender and political orders. Internal enemies’ “groveling before the West” on political matters was depicted as causing gender deviancy, and the breaking of Soviet gender norms was shown to lead to political crimes.

Abstract Although critics have repeatedly referenced the stagey or cinematic elements that characterize Passing’s (1929) narrative structure and occasionally observed its gothic aesthetics, thus far no critic has attempted to contextualize Nella Larsen’s novel within the American stage and film culture of the early twentieth century or the concurrent revitalization of America’s interest in the Gothic in film and theater. Situated primarily in New York and helmed by many of the same individuals, the Harlem and Gothic Renaissances of the interwar years cooperated to reframe racial and aesthetic discourses, as Harlem art absorbed and reimagined gothic art, culture, and slang and imbued Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its successors with covert racial commentary. This essay studies Nella Larsen’s Passing within this context, paying special attention to the influence of American racial discourse on Horace Liveright’s 1927 stage version of Dracula and its mutually influential relationship with black theater, art, and discourse. Melding contemporary archetypes of the Jazz Age vamp and gothic vampire to construct its liminal heroine, Clare Kendry, as a gothic figure in the vamp/vampire paradigm, Passing repurposes gothic elements to challenge racial binaries and to destabilize the racist status quo. This study suggests the significant extent to which Harlem Renaissance authors not only adapted the Gothic within their own literature but also reinvented and redefined it in the popular discourses of the twentieth century.

Her Own Fault is an instructional film produced by Ontario's Provincial Board of Health through its Division of Industrial Hygiene in 1921. In its attempt to influence Toronto's working women, the film suggests some of the challenges posed by the female factory worker in the early part of the century. This article will situate Her Own Fault in relation to othet contemporary discourse on women's work and leisure habits. The author will also consider the film's treatment of female factory workers and the ways in which this film might circumscribe net behaviour and net gaze.

Abstract The early features of Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg, Momentos and Señora de nadie, underscore the deployment of an ideology of motherhood in service of bourgeois social structure and military dictatorship. In these films, Bemberg posits the institution as balancing between containment and rebellion, her protagonists confronting the traditional ideological role of mother and asserting a stance against the repression of the waning dictatorship. Although entrenched in a conventional film discourse, these films set into motion the dynamics of diegetic radicalization which would define Bemberg’s subsequent work and would anticipate the redefinition of the social domain of the feminine for post-democracy Argentina.

This dissertation examines and writes the early history of distribution and exhibition of moving images in Southeast Asia by observing the intersection of transnational itinerant entertainment and colonialism. It is a cultural history of turn-of-the-century Southeast Asia, and focuses on the movement of films, people, and amusements across oceans and national borders. The starting point is two simultaneous and interrelated processes in the late 1800s, to which cinema contributed. One process, colonialism and imperialism, separated people into different classes of people, ruler and ruled, white and non-white, thereby creating and widening a colonial binary. The other process was bringing the world closer, through technology, trade, and migration, and compressing the notions of time and space. The study assesses the development of cinema in a colonial setting and how its development disrupted notions of racial hierarchies. The first decade of cinema in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore, is used as a point of reference from where issues such as imperialism, colonial discourse, nation-building, ethnicity, gender, and race is discussed. The development of film exhibition and distribution in Southeast Asia is tracked from travelling film exhibitors and agents to the opening of a regional Pathé Frères office and permanent film venues. By having a transnational perspective the interconnectedness of Southeast Asia is demonstrated, as well as its constructed national borders. Cinematic venues throughout Southeast Asia negotiated segregated, colonial racial politics by creating a common social space where people from different ethnic and social backgrounds gathered. Furthermore, this study analyses what kind of worldview the exhibited pictures had and how audiences reproduced their meanings.

This dissertation is a historical and theoretical study of a number of discourses examining colour and cinema during the period 1909 to 1935 (trade press, film reviews, publications on film technology, manuals, catalogues and theoretical texts from the era). In this study, colour in cinema is considered as producing a number of aesthetic and representational questions which are contextualised historically; problems and qualities specifically associated with colour film are examined in terms of an interrelationship between historical, technical, industrial, and stylistic factors, as well as specific contemporary conceptions of cinema. The first chapter examines notions concerning the technical, material, as well as perceptual, origins of colour in cinema, and questions concerning indexicality, iconicity, and colour reproduction, through focusing on the relationship between the photographic colour process Kinemacolor, as well as other similar processes, and the established non-photographic colour methods during the early 1910s, with an in-depth analysis of the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, published in 1912. The second chapter examines notions concerning the stylistic, formal and narrative functions of colour in cinema, featuring a survey of the recurring comparisons between colour and sound, found in the writing of film history, in discourses concerning early Technicolor sound films, film technology, experimental films and experiments on synaesthesia during the 1920s, as well as Eisenstein’s notions of the functions of colour in sound film montage. The third chapter examines the question of colour and meaning in cinema through considering the relationship between colours and objects in colour film images (polychrome and monochrome, photographic and non-photographic) during the time frame of this study.

Cette étude s’inspire de questionnements soulevés, dans le cadre de leur recherche, par deux spécialistes du cinéma. Une première piste de recherche concerne l’histoire du cinéma des premiers temps et les sources documentaires, que l’historien Jan Olsson a défini comme un « domaine discursif » (“discursive domaine”) à part entière. Une deuxième piste de recherche s’inspire d’une remarque du philosophe et théoricien Murray Smith à propos de la manière dont les spectateurs se représentent mentalement les films qu’ils ont vus comme un domaine de la recherche cinématographique inexploré (“unchartered territory”). Cette thèse se concentre sur la « conscience cinématographique », c’est-à-dire sur la capacité du spectateur à se représenter mentalement un objet filmique ou à penser cinématographiquement. Cette formulation désigne des phénomènes particuliers. Historiquement, cette « conscience » est une forme de « sensibilisation au cinéma » (« movement of consciousness »), phénomène dont on peut observer les effets dans les textes consacrés au cinéma dans les années 1907-1912. Cette « sensibilisation » se manifeste par un intérêt grandissant pour les films, par l’invention de termes et de notions permettant de parler de cinéma, par des études spécialisées, portant sur le spectatorat ou la critique, montrant que les contemporains avaient conscience de cette « sensibilisation » (« self consciousness »). Ce questionnement de fond sur les sources documentaires, en tant qu’elles sont le révélateur d’une « conscience cinématographique », a une implication historiographique et méthodologique importante. L’apparente naïveté des sources d’époque a conduit certains historiens à décrire les spectateurs de l’époque comme étant, eux aussi, naïfs. Or, en réalité, la perception des phénomènes filmiques par les contemporains était plus complexe et nuancée que ce que les sources ne laissent le dire. Cette approche, qui porte sur les mentalités de l’époque et l’impact du cinéma sur les spectateurs, conduit à chercher les traces de cette « sensibilisation » dans les textes d’époque, à prendre compte des champs lexicaux et de leur évolution dans le temps. Elle permet également, pour l’historien, de tenir compte de la subjectivité des textes d’époque plutôt que de ne s’attacher qu’à des sources objectives ou des témoignages. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, la formulation « conscience cinématographique », dont l’occurrence n’est pas rare dans la littérature consacrée à l’histoire du cinéma, désigne cette partie de la conscience qui est façonnée par le cinéma. Cette conscience a plusieurs fonctions qui correspondent, chacune, à diverses catégories de conscience cinématographique. Il s’agit de la « sensibilité à l’esthétique du film », la « sensibilité à la technicité du film », la « sensibilité à la culture cinématographique », la « sensibilité au cinéma en tant qu’objet de pensée » ainsi que d’autres éléments permettant à la conscience de s’exercer (le lieu de la mémoire où reposent les souvenirs de films, les moments de cinéma associés à une identité personnelle, la faculté d’être conscient de sa propre conscience filmique et la conscience filmique subjective, forme de conscience et de sensibilité liée à une grande connaissance du cinéma. Ces diverses catégories de « sensibilité » à la chose cinématographique forment un vaste champ d’étude permettant de prendre la mesure de la transformation des mentalités et de cartographier le territoire inexploré évoqué par Murray Smith. Chacune de ces catégories représente un domaine de recherche spécifique, avec ses questionnements et ses enjeux propres, mais prend place dans un champ plus vaste, celui de « conscience cinématographique ». Quand cette approche s’applique aux sources documentaires portant spécifiquement sur le cinéma et son évolution, il est possible de voir à quel point le cinéma transforme les mentalités.
This thesis attempts to follow through on two “calls for further research” from recognized film scholars. One line of research centers on early cinema and especially on early American film publications (from 1906 to 1913), which Jan Olsson has defined as a “discursive domain calling for analysis as a phenomenon in its own right,” as opposed to only being “source material” film historians use for writing about early cinema. Another line of research concerns the “relationship between consciousness and film” that Murray Smith argues is an “unchartered territory” in film studies. In this thesis, this relationship between “consciousness and film” is defined from the perspective of ‘film consciousness’, which is a formulation with several functions. In some contexts, it refers to a “movement of consciousness” that appears in early film publications over the course of several years (between 1907 and 1912) manifested in a growing recognition of the constructed, aesthetic nature of film, changes in terminologies for naming and defining the object of cinema, in particular activities showing an appreciation of the contextual meaning of films, and in self-consciousness, such as in the study of audiences and meta-criticism. These parallel lines of research have an important scientific and methodological implication, in that early film publications are sometimes implicitly seen as displaying a “naïve consciousness” that is transposable onto early spectators broadly. A “film consciousness” approach recognizes a more complex consciousness that is revealed in subtle changes in language-use and behaviour over a period of time. It also allows for the study of the subjectivity of the writers as well, which is often revealed indirectly to the film historian, as opposed to explicit descriptions of subjective film experience. The formulation ‘film consciousness’ – which is occasionally used in film discourse, though usually without an institutional definition – is also regarded in this thesis as presenting its own ontological nature in the way it brings two semantic fields (“consciousness” and “film”) into relation. From this formulation, several “categories of film consciousness” are constructed. These include “film aesthetic awareness,” “film production awareness,” “film culture awareness,” “ways of existing towards film,” and several “entities of consciousness” (an imagined place in consciousness assumed to contain past film experiences, conscious phenomena derived from film experiences that are seen as bound to personal identity, a faculty that determines the way reality is engaged with, and a particular kind of conscious experience, defined as “subjective film consciousness.”) These categories of film consciousness collectively constitute an imagined “field of film consciousness” that serves to conceptualize the “unchartered territory” Murray Smith defines. Each category represents an individual area of research with concomitant questions and criteria that nevertheless exist on a continuum that the key term ‘film consciousness’ brings into constant rhetorical relation. When this field is applied to a set of film-related data, such as early film discourse, a set of connections between different regions of film consciousness emerges, thus allowing for the description of film consciousness at various levels.

The Novel After Film examines how literary fiction has been redefined in response to the emergence of narrative film. It charts the institutional, stylistic, and conceptual relays that linked literary and cinematic cultures, and that fundamentally changed the nature and status of storytelling in the early twentieth century. In the cinema, a generation of modernist writers found a medium whose bad form was also laced with the glamour of the popular, and whose unfamiliar visual language seemed to harbor a future for innovative writing after modernism. As The Novel After Film demonstrates, this fascination with film was played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel’s respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement and high moral purpose, a range of authors, from Virginia Woolf and H. D. to Henry Green and Aldous Huxley, turned their attention to the cinema in search of alternative aesthetic histories. For authors working in modernism’s atmosphere of heightened formal sophistication, film’s violations of style took on a perverse attraction. In this way, film played a key role in changing the way that novelists addressed a transforming public culture which could seem at moments to be leaving the novel behind.

This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the United States through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, remediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological and aesthetic tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walter Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of VJing.

During the 1910s and early 1920s, some thirty known film adaptations of works by Henrik Ibsen were produced in a number of countries. Chapter 9 examines the four American silent film Ibsen adaptations still known to exist: The Pillars of Society (1911), Peer Gynt (1915), Ghosts (1915), and Pillars of Society (1916). Drawing on extant film material, contemporary film reviews, and trade press articles, it approaches these films, through their various adaptation strategies and their trade press reception, in terms of broader discourses about what is often characterized as the transitional period in US film history, focusing in particular on discussions throughout the 1910s concerning medium specificity and media borders. The essay emphasizes stylistic and narrative strategies in the four films, in particular those connected to space, narrative, and performance, as well as ethical and moral considerations associated with the Ibsen film, including their contemporaneous reception.

This book considers the impact that the new art of film had on the development of the emerging science fiction (SF) genre during the pre- and early post-World War II era, during the time that the genre was trying to locate an identity, develop its key themes, and even settle on a name. Focusing on the primary venue for early SF literature, the popular pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories, it traces this early film/literature relationship by examining four common features of the pulps: stories that involve film or the film industry; film-related advertising; editors’ commentaries and readers’ remarks on film; and cover and story illustrations. All these features demonstrate an interest and even a fascination with the movies, which, as many of SF’s readers, writers, and editors recognized, demonstrated a modernist agenda similar to that which characterized the literature. By surveying these haunting traces of another medium in early SF discourse, this book shows how that cinematic influence penetrated and, both consciously and unconsciously, helped shape the experience of SF, as well as the cultural idea of SF during this formative period.

Gunslinging justice explores American Westerns in a variety of media alongside the historical development of the American legal system to argue that Western shootouts are less overtly “anti-law” than has been previously assumed. While the genre’s climactic shootouts may look like a putatively masculine opposition to the codified and mediated American legal system, this gun violence is actually enshrined in the development of American laws regulating self-defense and gun possession. The climactic gun violence and stylized revenge drama of seminal Western texts then, seeks not to oppose "the law," but rather to expand its scope. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, which seeks to historicize and contextualize the iconographic tropes of the genre and its associated discourses across varied cultural and social forms, breaks from psychoanalytic perspectives which have long dominated studies of film and legal discourse and occluded historical contingencies integral to the work cultural forms do in the world. From nineteenth century texts like Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Reconstruction era dime novels, through early twentieth century works like The Virginian, to classic Westerns and more recent films like Unforgiven (1992), this book looks to the intersections between American law and various media that have enabled a cultural, social, and political acceptance of defensive gun violence that is still with us today.

French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema examines film music practices in France during a period of widespread artistic and creative experimentation: the transition from silent to synchronized sound film. While this period in Hollywood has been examined from a range of scholarly perspectives, the transition to sound in France—and the unique interactions between French sound cinema and French musical discourses—remains underexplored. In France, debates about sound cinema were fierce and widespread, and many filmmakers addressed theoretical questions about the potential of the new technology head-on, articulating their responses to these questions both in writing and in their films. Music played an integral role in the debate. Lewis argues that debates about sound film had a powerful effect on French musical culture of the early 1930s, and that diverse French musical styles and traditions—from Les Six, to the opera house, to the popular music-hall—played a crucial role in shaping the cinematic soundscape. Filmmakers experimented with music’s role in sound cinema within a range of genres, including avant-garde surrealist cinema (Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau), recorded theater (Marcel Pagnol), early poetic realism (Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo), and the film musical (René Clair). Lewis’s analysis of the experiments undertaken in these few important years in French cinematic history encourages readers to challenge commonly held assumptions of how genres, media, and artistic forms relate to one another, and how these relationships are renegotiated during moments of technological change.

This book reconsiders the history and study of women’s documentary filmmaking in the United States from 1920 to 1940, and during the long 1970s--when significant transformations in cinematic technologies coincided with major transformations in sociopolitical discourses surrounding gender and race. Rather than comprehensive, the approach is transhistorical, setting women’s cultural expression during these two periods into conversation, and thereby provoking a reconsideration of a number of key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary that have had lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. The book excavates a lost ethnographic history of women’s documentary production and investigates the political and aesthetic legacy of this early history in later, more deliberately feminist and yet equally misremembered periods, especially the 1970s. In particular, Subject to Reality asks how ethnographic thinking and seeing shaped the historical arc and aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments of women’s realist documentaries throughout the twentieth century. The shared interests of women in anthropology, academic film studies, and political feminism have long shaped the production and reception of documentary in the United States. Subject to Reality explores the consequences of this cross-pollination as it has shaped women’s documentaries, and especially the realist films that have been glossed over as “boring” “organizing tools” or merely “talking head films.”

This chapter begins by reviewing the importance of Michael Jackson’s early forays in music video, paying particular attention to the short film, “Michael Jackson’s Thriller” from 1983. Jackson’s monstrosity and Ola Ray’s victimization in this film are addressed. This chapter then turns to recent adaptations and performances of “Thriller,” arguing that as a choreography, “Thriller” became a privileged site for articulating a collective sense of belonging in the early twenty-first century. In an era that amplified American insecurity and paranoia, performances of “Thriller” circulating through social media show how performers used the choreography to embody monstrosity, domesticate fear, dissipate threat, form an American public outside nationalist discourses, and resignify public spaces rendered threatening by the “War on Terror.”

This chapter examines the delayed but still strong and lasting impression that Pearl White left on Czechoslovakia's critics, viewers, and avant-garde movement. Drawing on a series of articles in Czech periodicals from the late 1910s to the 1930s, it considers the issues presented by White and the American serial films regarding the international market, the need to come to terms with Hollywood's global reach, and the impact of glocalized Americana for local production. The chapter first looks at the sudden influx of American films in Czechoslovakia after World War I before discussing how America was perceived as a model of democracy and cultural modernity in the early years of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It then explores how White fueled the fantasies of the Czech populace as well as the ways that she was appropriated and re-imagined in the service of various discourses that spoke for the mental and physical well-being of the nation. It also analyzes White's Czech career within the context of larger issues related to spectatorship, film aesthetics, and the creation of star mythology.

This chapter examines how early film criticism evolved as a distinct branch of women’s interwar ‘film talk’ through writers such as Iris Barry and Dilys Powell, taking C. A. Lejeune as a central case study. It explores Lejeune’s early writing in her The Manchester Guardian column from 1922 to 1928 and early work for the Observer. The chapter looks at developments and trends in her writing, considering how her columns produced a journalistic mode of film talk coloured specifically by debates and concerns about gender. This is read through Lejeune’s specific discussions about notions of women’s cinema, women and stardom, and female spectatorship. Gender shaped and shadowed much of her critical discourse, not only through the gendered associations of the topics she discussed – especially stardom – but through her approach to negotiating her own gender identity as a professional film critic, and the experimentation she enacted with crafting and refining her journalistic voice as a distinctly film-based writer. The chapter explores the stylistic strategies of Lejeune’s column writing, examining her use of literary techniques and fictional frameworks as a way to turn her attention far more explicitly to the topic of women and cinema.

American film critics commonly deride Hollywood’s practice of remaking foreign films as an indication of the industry’s creative bankruptcy and imperialist tendencies. Such sentiments occur as early as the 1930s, just as Hollywood gained institutional cohesion and as various countries fostered their local “national” cinemas. This suggests that American critics have consistently held an ambivalent stance toward Hollywood, particularly when situated in relation to the world’s cinemas. Critics have participated in an enduring conflation of the “foreign” with artistic quality and Hollywood with crass commercialism and, concomitantly, reinforced simplistic notions about transnational cinematic flows. Yet within and alongside such reviews, American critics created a rhetorical space for a more nuanced approach to transnational cinema through their use of different critical keywords, points of analysis, and methods of evaluation. This chapter explores the historically changing criteria by which American film critics have evaluated Hollywood’s transnational film remakes as a means of uncovering how the “transnational” operated in popular American film discourse, even if it was not named as such.

Abstract: Film, Francesco Casetti argues, provided a common “field of convergence for different dimensions” of the popular imagination in the early twentieth century. We can see evidence of the extent of that “convergence” in the sort of discourse that unfolded in various other internal features of the pulps. Editorials, readers’ letters, and film reviews converge to demonstrate a sense of enthusiasm about the ability of films to supplement the work of SF by visualizing or realizing the genre’s ideas for reshaping the world and the self. That enthusiasm would bring repeated calls for the film industry to produce more SF-themed films, even to adapt favorite stories from the pulps. But as reviews of SF films began to proliferate in the pulps, particularly in the late 1930s, they would increasingly attest to a frustration or dissatisfaction with the sense of reality that was being achieved by the SF film and point to a rift beginning between the films and the world of SF literature.

Charlie Chaplin was a major figure in postwar film criticism, particularly in France, where critical luminaries such as André Bazin, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette all wrote on his work. Early in her career, Geraldine Chaplin inherited her father’s Parisian legacy, in both discourse on her public life in France (where she lived and worked early in her career) and also across a number of French films in which she played a central role. This chapter examines Geraldine’s work in France for filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, and Michel Deville in the context of French film culture’s fascination with her father, showing how Geraldine herself intervened in and redirected this critical legacy through her own performances.

This chapter assesses Shyam Benegal's seminal Ankur (The Seedling, 1972). The emergence of state-sponsored film-making in the late 1960s with Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969) laid the foundations for a new cinematic discourse, giving way to the next phase in the development of Indian art cinema, dubbed by many as ‘parallel cinema’. The work of film-maker Shyam Benegal forms a major part of the parallel cinema movement, and the rural trilogy of films characterising his early work not only sympathised with the oppressed underclass but also established an influential political precedent for many of the young film-makers emerging from the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India. The chapter looks at the origins and context of New Indian cinema, as well as the definitions of parallel cinema and its importance to the development of art cinema. It also considers Shyam Benegal's authorial status, key ideological strands, and the film's role in helping to politicise cinema in India.

This chapter delves into practical implementation of a cross-curricular unit of biology and literature. Through collaborative readings, lab work, film study, and structured academic discourse, two advanced placement (AP) classrooms collaborated over several classes fusing science and the humanities. The initial focus of DNA in AP Biology became an exploration of where the bounds of science should extend as AP Literature students joined to raise questions of how far the bounds of science should be allowed to progress. The culmination of the unit required students help bridge the gap between science and the humanities through a Socratic seminar, a structured student-led academic discussion. This chapter reviews the rationale for implantation; the unit plan, including subject-specific and collaborative lessons; results after implementation; student reflections; and recommendations for future implementation, both for teachers and administrators.