Academic literature on the topic 'Sex in motion pictures – Fiction'

Fitzgerald imports cross-stylistic features from the spheres of dance and music into his fiction, and this chapter shows how he also employs filmic technique in his short stories. Joseph Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus was central to Fitzgerald’s fiction-writing credo, encouraging him to make his readers hear, feel, and see. His popular culture references lend themselves to this approach, but nowhere more so than in his references to film. This chapter uses ‘Magnetism’ as a case study, analysing the use of filmic techniques such as close-up, dream sequence, and soundtracking, and offers a reading of George Hannaford as a satiric metaphor for the motion picture industry, reflecting Fitzgerald’s own conflicted relationship with Hollywood. This relationship is also visible in the Pat Hobby stories, which have often been noted for their markedly different style. It is argued that this compressed style metafictively satirises Hobby’s voice, bringing to life the lackadaisical reticence of the industry veteran. This chapter argues that in the Pat Hobby stories Fitzgerald explores, through parody, the shortcomings and inherent potential of the film industry to combine artistic merit and commercial success, using it as a vehicle critically to explore leisure pursuits of the interwar period.

This chapter discusses the use of complex characterisation in sexploitation cinema – arguing that the character motivation and narrative causality is often more conservative than many might assume. A comparison is also made to the concurrent evolution of the sexual dynamics that begin to creep into Hollywood cinema via such notable motion pictures as ‘Last Tango in Paris’. This chapter argues that often the ‘underground’ sex films of the period featured more interesting and radical female portrayals.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, police censorship of motion pictures was a significant and always controversial index of the expansion of law enforcement agencies to include activities that many Americans deemed unbecoming of cops. As such, it offers considerable insight into contemporary debates over the scope of police power in the United States. Today’s arguments have deep roots, including in a practice that was far more prevalent—and far more contentious—than conventional histories allow. When it came to vetting motion pictures, the methods of municipal police departments varied widely. But they often illuminated broader problems: Detroit police officers who voted to ban anti-Nazi films were themselves outspoken white supremacists; Chicago cops who balked at cinema’s suggestions of eroticism were also, outside of departmental screening rooms, aggressively targeting sex workers; and Southern lawmen who sought to eliminate intimations of racial equality were known for their brutal treatment of Black residents. Police censorship of motion pictures took place not in a vacuum but within the ever-widening ambit of law enforcement, and it merits scrutiny as a measure of the authority, influence, and cultural identities of municipal cops.

Almost a decade ago we sat down to watch some pure home video entertainment: Clambake, starring Elvis Presley. Halfway through the movie, to our complete surprise, Elvis turned into a chemist! You might say this book began at that moment. In the following pages, we examine the presence of chemistry in one of the most accessible of all cultural products: movies. It has been noted repeatedly in recent years that chemistry is one of the least popularized areas of the hard sciences. When the term “science” is used in popular culture and the media, it often refers to medicine, physics, and biology. Monsters and superheroes, mad scientists and geniuses, aliens and mutants—all spring with ease from these realms. The discipline of chemistry seems by comparison to be underrepresented in cultural depictions, with an appearance harder to trace and an impact less openly acknowledged. Is this perception truly accurate? One need only name names—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—to see that this can hardly be the case. From the silent era through today, it is clear that chemistry has always been in the movies. In fact, chemical themes and characters have been capturing the imaginations of audiences for more than a century. They appear in surprising and significant ways and have generated some of the most enduring fictions and motifs in movie history, and thus in the culture at large. In its starring role, chemistry, the transformative science, has been moving us as it changes with the times. More than 1,200 motion pictures were compiled, analyzed, and categorized for this project. The sheer quantity of movies containing some aspect of chemistry was eye-opening. What started out as an exercise in curiosity, casually noting the appearance of chemistry themes through random movie viewing, quickly turned into serious study as the numbers kept rising. Inspired by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “Science in Cinema” film series, we started making a list. Every summer since 1998 (Zurer 1998), the NIH has screened six films, each dealing with a different medical theme, followed by a short scientific analysis from an NIH researcher working in a relevant field.

This chapter examines the cases in which individuals used a right to privacy to claim ownership over their life stories, when appropriated by film studios for fiction films. It tracks the move of industrial image making from the East Coast to the West coast of the United States in the 1910s and compares the different contexts of New York’s privacy laws with California’s, informed as they were by a utopian “pursuit of happiness” guaranteed by the Californian Constitution. This chapter also examines the right of privacy in relation to the censorship demands of the Hays Code and considers the onscreen celebration of men’s heroic “public” lives compared to the shaming of women’s “private” lives. It discusses the motion pictures CDQ or Saved by Wireless (1911), The Red Kimono (1925), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1944) and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). Whereas female plaintiffs took issue with being condemned or marginalized by films because of their sexuality (their status as hookers or divorcees), men protested the implications of being publicly celebrated for their professional deeds or achievements.