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Yunis, Alia, and Gaelle Picherit-Duthler. "Tramps vs. Sweethearts: Changing Images of Arab and American Women in Hollywood Films." Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 4, no. 2 (2011): 225–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187398611x571382.
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AbstractThe portrayal of Arab women in Hollywood from the silent movies to today stands in sharp contrast to the portrayal of American women over the same time period and can be defined by off screen politics. By examining important American films over nearly 100 years, this article describes Arab and American women characters through five political-historical phases of US international relations that define their Hollywood images: 1) pre-World War II, 2) from World War II to the 1960s, 3) the 1970s, 4) the 1980s to 11 September 2001 and 5) post-9/11. The analysis reveals a variety of archetypes for both Arab and American women, but the main finding suggests a limited role for American women and the near absence of Arab women in Hollywood movies. Independent filmmakers and upcoming Arab-American movie makers may yet be able to fill this void.
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Parvulescu, Constantin, and Emanuel Copilaş. "Hollywood Peeks." East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 27, no. 2 (2012): 241–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325412467054.
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In socialist Romania of the mid-1980s, workers’ clubs, theaters, student centers, opera houses, and even philharmonics used the new medium of the videocassette to organize film-viewing venues exhibiting pirated cinematic material. They were called videotheques and sold tens of thousands of admission tickets to an audience hungry for Western commercial films. This article studies the development of this quasi-legal and hybrid economic experiment. It describes its operation, analyzes its spectatorship, the alternative public spheres and patterns of resistance it produced, and the reaction of the Communist authorities, revealing the politically subversive dimension of entertainment consumption in socialist economies.
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Dwyer, Michael D. "The same old songs in Reagan-era teen film." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 3 (August 8, 2012): 5–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.3.01.
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This article examines the recontextualization of 1950s rock in the form of “Oldies” in teen films of the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, the article highlights the peculiar phenomenon of scenes featuring teenagers lip-synching to oldies songs in films like Risky Business (1983), Pretty in Pink (1986), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), and Adventures in Babysitting (1987).In these scenes, like in the cover versions of rhythm and blues records popularized by white artists in the fifties, white teens embody black cultural forms, “covering” over the racial and sexual politics that characterized rock and roll's emergence. The transformation of rock 'n' roll from “race music” to the safe alternative for white bourgeois males in the face of new wave, punk, disco and hip hop, reflected in the establishment of oldies radio formats and revival tours, was aided and abetted by oldies soundtracks to Hollywood film.
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Rasmus, Agnieszka. "Hollywood remakes of British films: A case of cross-pollination." Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 14, no. 1 (2021): 53–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00042_1.
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This article is an attempt at analysing Hollywood remakes and their British originals in terms of constructing and articulating their shared identity and their difference. Although the source films are considered British, they are often UK/US co-productions, made at the time of Hollywood’s active involvement in the domestic film scene during the so-called ‘Hollywood England’. This complicates neat labels not only in terms of nationality and geography but also original versus copy and points to the existence of transnational and transcultural flows already in evidence in the original works. The article focuses on genre and casting in a selection of British films from the 1960s/70s and then their Hollywood remakes in the new millennium as an example of such cross-pollination with remakes and their originals seen as hybrid works existing between two cultures and film traditions that can be accessed from both directions.
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Gergely, Gábor. "Sonority, Difference and the Schwarzenegger Star Body." Film-Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2019): 137–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/film.2019.0106.
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Discussions of the exilic body in Hollywood cinema have tended to focus on the personal trajectories of émigré actors in the context of the broader history of the industry in which they achieved star status. Significant work has been done in particular on the fate of European women stars in Hollywood but what has been rarely addressed, however, is the way in which Hollywood films imagine the exilic experience via the narratives built around specific stars. This article focuses on Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the dominant stars of the 1980s–1990s, whose foreignness, accent and body are used in a remarkably consistent set of aesthetic, generic and narrative practices. The article uses Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of sonority to argue that the sonorous presence of the foreign other in the “host” space produces a new space; it produces the space of the host anew as one in which the foreign other is present despite the discursive denial of the possibility of that presence whilst at the same time producing a new self as distinct from the self before displacement. The article's aim is to highlight the ways in which Hollywood films produce and reproduce foreignness as an impossibility, a presence that cannot be. The use of the foreign star, I argue, is to perform the permeability of the boundary between outside and inside, while also policing it.
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Gallagher, Richard. "The Troubles crime thriller and the future of films about Northern Ireland." On the Cultural Circulation of Contemporary European Crime Cinema, no. 22 (March 2, 2022): 42–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.22.03.
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Troubles-based crime thrillers were once a staple of Hollywood cinema in the 1990s. However, these types of films have become something of a subgenre of European crime films in the last few decades given that films produced over the period have all been produced and financed by either the United Kingdom, Ireland, France or Germany. Owing to both the financial and critical success of these films, relative to other types of films about Northern Ireland, and the more market-driven approach adopted by policymakers, the crime thriller genre has also become the primary way that audiences engage with cinema about Northern Ireland. Although some encouraging developments have come with this transition away from, at times, exploitative Hollywood-produced films, continued reliance on genre in this new dispensation—specifically the crime thriller—is still a development that is not without problems. The type of films about the conflict produced today also contrasts significantly with those produced during the “first wave” of Irish cinema in the 1980s.
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Staudt, Kathleen. "Bordering the Future? The ‘Male Gaze’ in the Blade Runner Films and Originating Novel." Borders in Globalization Review 1, no. 1 (2019): 22–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/bigr11201919244.
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Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), author of numerous science fiction narratives from the 1950s-1980s, some of which Hollywood made into films, grappled with the nature of reality, the meaning of humanness, and border crossing between humans and androids (called ‘replicants’ in the films). The socially constructed female and male protagonists in these narratives have yet to be analyzed with a gender gaze that draws on border studies. This paper analyzes two Blade Runner films, compares them to the Philip K. Dick (PKD) narrative, and applies gender, feminist, and border concepts, particularly border crossings from human to sentient beings and androids. In this paper, I argue that the men who wrote and directed the films established and crossed multiple metaphoric borders, but wore gender blinders that thereby reinforced gendered borders as visualized and viewed in the U.S. and global film markets yet never addressed the profoundly radical border crossing notions from PKD.
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Bakina, T. V. "The Birth of a Hollywood Spectacle: Visual Expression and Narrative Functions of Costumes in Cecil B. DeMille’s Silent Films." Art & Culture Studies, no. 2 (June 2021): 252–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.51678/2226-0072-2021-2-252-285.
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The article explores the functions of film costumes in the works of Cecil B. DeMille, the American film director, whose pictures of the late 1910s and early 1920s are notable for their artistic achievements in the field of set and costume design. On the material of certain films from his “matrimonial cycle”, the author analyses the narrative and spectacular functions of costumes, while making an emphasis on the director’s role in the development of the artistic uniqueness and visual extravagance of Hollywood films of this period. The films of this cycle display some key strategies in film costume function- ing and design methods that would be adopted by the Hollywood film industry to become the new production standard in this field.
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Chard, Holly. "Give People What They Expect: John Hughes Family Films and Seriality in 1990s Hollywood." Film Studies 17, no. 1 (2017): 111–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/fs.17.0007.
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This article explores serial production strategies and textual seriality in Hollywood cinema during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Focusing on John Hughes‘ high concept family comedies, it examines how Hughes exploited the commercial opportunities offered by serial approaches to both production and film narrative. This article first considers why Hughes‘ production set-up enabled him to standardise his movies and respond quickly to audience demand. The analysis then explores how the Home Alone films (1990–97), Dennis the Menace (1993) and Baby‘s Day Out (1994) balanced demands for textual repetition and novelty.
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Stratton, J. "Not really white - again: performing Jewish difference in Hollywood films since the 1980s." Screen 42, no. 2 (2001): 142–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/screen/42.2.142.
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Haina, Jin. "Intertitle translation of Chinese silent films." APTIF 9 - Reality vs. Illusion 66, no. 4-5 (2020): 719–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/babel.00183.jin.
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Abstract There is a misconception that film translation did not exist in China before 1949. The paper argues that the translation of Chinese silent films was vibrant in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Most of the extant copies of Chinese films from that period have bilingual intertitles. Chinese film companies have two purposes in translating their productions: the potential profit obtained from international audiences, and the desire to change the negative image of Chinese people portrayed in Hollywood films and project a positive image of China. Driven by these two objectives, Chinese film companies placed considerable emphasis on translation quality and hired both Chinese translators and foreign translators to translate their productions.
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Tosaka, Yuji. "The Discourse of Anti-Americanism and Hollywood Movies: Film Import Controls in Japan, 1937–1941." Journal of American-East Asian Relations 12, no. 1-2 (2003): 59–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187656103793645397.
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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.
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Higgins, Scott. "Seriality's Ludic Promise: Film Serials and the Pre-History of Digital Gaming." Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 8, no. 1 (2014): 101–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/23.6158.
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This essay explores the American Sound Serial film as part of a continuum to which digital gaming may also belong. By drawing on concepts derived from the study of video games, this study broadens our understanding of youth-oriented films produced in Hollywood from the 1930s to the mid 1950s. In turn, this provides a new vantage on continuities between old and new serial forms, and sheds light on digital gaming’s pre-history.
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Krämer, Peter. "The politics of independence." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 6 (December 19, 2013): 89–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.6.06.
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This article draws, among other things, on press clippings files and scripts found in various archives to reconstruct the complex production history, the marketing and the critical reception of the nuclear thriller The China Syndrome (1979). It shows that with this project, several politically motivated filmmakers, most notably Jane Fonda, who starred in the film and whose company IPC Films produced it, managed to inject their antinuclear stance into Hollywood entertainment. Helped by the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant two weeks into the film’s release, The China Syndrome gained a high profile in public debates about nuclear energy in the U.S. Jane Fonda, together with her then husband Tom Hayden, a founding member of the 1960s “New Left” who had entered mainstream politics in the California Democratic Party by the late 1970s, complemented her involvement in the film with activities aimed at grass roots mobilisation against nuclear power.
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Carnicé Mur, Margarida. "Divismo, maturità e politica sessuale negli "Hollywood film" di Anna Magnani." Schermi. Storie e culture del cinema e dei media in Italia 6, no. 10 (2021): 33–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.54103/2532-2486/16462.
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In the 1950s Anna Magnani played an important role in the internationalization of European stardom, becoming the first Italian actress to win an Oscar in 1955. She was 46 years old and had reached international success at the age of 37. Related to the aesthetical concerns of Italian Neorealism, and considered a pioneer in modern representation of female psychology and desire, Magnani’s case puts into question the idea that, according to Edgar Morin, grace, beauty and youth are sine qua non conditions to become a star. Between 1955 and 1960 the actress participated in three Hollywood movies along with mentoring figures such as Tennessee Williams and producer Hal B. Wallis: The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955), Wild is the Wind (George Cukor, 1957) and The Fugitive Kind (Sidney Lumet, 1959). Magnani’s Hollywood films suggest a kind of tailor-made melodrama, concerned in documenting her unique performative style while Hollywood experiences a great renewal of dramatic patterns and acting models. These titles also share a common subject: a passionate mature woman in crisis who, attracted to a younger man, experiences a personal rebirth closely linked to the raise of her sexuality and desire. Through the analysis of these films and how they relate to Magnani’s stardom construction in the Italian postwar, this article investigates the role of the actress in the transit of the 1950s to the 1960s. A season of great transformations in world cinema in which Hollywood, apparently interested in documenting Magnani’s uniqueness, has probably ended up discussing some of the greatest taboos in classic movies: aging over women’s bodies, erotism between mature femininity and young masculinity, or the experience of sex and passion according to a female character who remains the subject of its own desire.
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Menendez-Otero, Carlos. "Cowboys and kings: The coming of age film in 1990s Irish cinema." CINEJ Cinema Journal 5, no. 1 (2016): 5–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2015.123.
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The article explores why in the 1990s many Irish filmmakers chose precisely a coming of age narrative to attempt to take the international box office by storm, and assesses some of the films that resulted from the attempt. First, it discusses the cultural roots and generic conventions of the Hollywood teen film, especially the rites of passage it has reified and its idealization of small-town, mid-century America. Second, it studies the economic and cultural reasons behind the (over)production of coming of age films in Ireland over the 1990s. Finally, we tackle how these films alternatively deviate from and rely on the conventions of the Hollywood coming of age film to meet investor demands and engage global audiences with Irish concerns.
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Beadling, Laura L. "Cherokee film as Cherokee storytelling: Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001) as filmic Deer Woman story." New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 18, no. 1 (2020): 3–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00018_1.
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Rather than the stereotypical nineteenth-century leathers-and-feathers warriors familiar from countless Hollywood Westerns, many Native filmmakers focus their films on contemporary Native communities. In contrast, Native filmmakers create very different representations of Native life and especially Native masculinity. Along with the foundational Smoke Signals (Eyre 1998), Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001) was one of the first Native-created films that helped initiate a cluster of Native American films that centre on masculinity and male‐male relationships. Indigenous masculinity is often a site of struggle of rejecting colonialist impositions and finding one’s own identity, and it is in part such a journey that propels Redroad’s film. The Doe Boy responds to not only Hollywood misrepresentations but also Eyre’s earlier film that established masculinity and father‐son relationships as a crucial topic. The Doe Boy focuses on Hunter (James Duval), a mixed-blood Cherokee youth, who must navigate between his White father and Cherokee grandfather and their differing practices of masculinity despite his bodily vulnerability from haemophilia, a strained and sometimes violent relationship with his father and a devastating mistake during an early deer hunt. Not only is Redroad’s film a Cherokee coming-of-age film and period piece (it is set during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s), but it can also be read as a Deer Woman story, albeit a filmic and non-traditional one. Unlike Smoke Signals, which takes the road movie as its genre, The Doe Boy has its foundations in a specific tribal culture. A crucial task in undoing to previous filmic misrepresentations of Hollywood, which lacked any specificity about Native characters, is to take Native filmmakers’ cultural context into careful consideration. Redroad’s film can be seen as a Deer Woman story that depicts Hunter’s struggles as he navigates his way to a mixed-blood manhood.
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Akser, Murat. "Editorial." CINEJ Cinema Journal 3, no. 2 (2014): 1–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2014.116.
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This issue of CINEJ focuses on a varity of topics: American tourism to Mexico and 1950s Hollywood film, cinematic pedagogy of Gilles Deleuze and Manoel de Oliveira, United Arab Emirates building a national cinema, crowdfunding in documentaries, flying scenes in Steven Spielberg's films, Rudaali in film narrative, a brief history of motorcycle in cinema, romantic relief in the Hollywood Blockbuster, filmosphy of Turkish cinema and flash animation as a counter cultural tool.
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Carstensen, Thorsten. "After the Fall: Hollywood Cinema and the Redefinition of America in the 1970s." Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 4, no. 2 (2019): 95–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2019-0093.
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Abstract This manuscript traces Hollywood's response to the disintegration of U.S. national consensus in the 1970s under the spell of Vietnam and Watergate, with a strong focus on the representation of masculinity. In my comparative reading of several canonized movies of the 1970s (The Deer Hunter, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Rocky), I demonstrate how Hollywood cinema, amid America's struggle to redefine its shared values and regain its self-confidence, advocated a return to myths of the past in order for the country to rewrite what historians have called the narrative of “victory culture.” As it is, arguably, in popular culture where societal changes manifest themselves most readily, I look at these films in the wider context of 1970s television, demonstrating connections with TV dramas such as Bonanza and The Waltons. I conclude with an outlook on the Reagan presidency and the rise to prominence of right-wing sequels such as Rambo II and Rocky IV as the seemingly inevitable consequences of 1970s disintegration.
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HESS, CAROL A. "Competing Utopias? Musical Ideologies in the 1930s and Two Spanish Civil War Films." Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 3 (2008): 319–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196308080103.
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AbstractAlthough literature inspired by the Spanish Civil War has been widely studied, music so inspired has received far less scholarly attention, and film music even less so. Musical ideologies of the 1930s, including the utopian thinking of many artists and intellectuals, emerge in some surprising ways when we consider two films of the era. Both The Spanish Earth (1937), an independent documentary, and Blockade (1938), produced in Hollywood, were intended to awaken Loyalist sympathies. The music for the former, consisting of recorded excerpts chosen by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson and widely understood as folkloric, embodies leftist composers' idealization of folk music. Werner Janssen's score for Blockade relies on many stock Hollywood gestures, granting it the status of a commodity. This article explores both films in light of Michael Denning's reflections of the relationship between the “cultural front” and the “culture industry,” along with Fredric Jameson's advocacy of the Utopian principle as a hermeneutic tool. It argues that the music for The Spanish Earth unwittingly subverts the Loyalist cause, whereas the score of Blockade, with its manipulation of Hollywood codes, is far more persuasive than the political whitewashing of its plot would seem to suggest.
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Falkof, Nicky. "Hard bodies and sidelong looks: Spectacle and fetish in 1980s action cinema." Excursions Journal 1, no. 1 (2010): 17–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.20919/exs.1.2010.121.
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From Stallone and Schwarzenegger to Gibson and Willis, the Hollywood action star of the 1980s was a hard-bodied hero with an attitude to match. But more than this, the action hero was an ideological construct; referenced by the president, ubiquitous in popular cultural production and reception of the time, his excessive muscularity forms a complex and problematic textual canvas for reading the hegemonic desires of Reaganite America. I this paper I consider cinematic relations to the heroic body through the dual prism of Freud’s conception of fetishism and De Bord’s formulation of the spectacle. Using the work of film theorists like Metz and Mulvey, cultural historians Susan Jeffords and Yvonne Tasker and psychoanalyst Kaja Silverman, I illustrate that the hero’s spectacular body operates as a fetish for the viewer, and thus that spectacle is fetish. Films to be considered include Rambo, Terminator and the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series.
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Cesarino Costa, Flávia, and John Gibbs. "Chanchadas and intermediality." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 19 (July 23, 2020): 28–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.19.03.
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This audiovisual essay investigates the intermedial nature of Brazilian film comedies produced during the 1940s and 50s by exploring the musical numbers of Aviso aos navegantes (Calling All Sailors, Watson Macedo, 1950). Brazilian cinema of this period is a privileged arena of different media strategies. Its “mixed” style is informed by Hollywood cinema but also by the domestic influence of radio, Carnival, and by the local forms of comic staging of the teatro de revista (the Brazilian equivalent of music hall or vaudeville). Of particular interest in this regard are the chanchadas, a body of films made between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, that presented musical performances intertwined with comic situations, slender narrative lines and strong connections with the world of Carnival. Our aim is to show how the relationships between the different forms of cultural production in 1950s Brazil can be identified in a specific chanchada, opening a dialogue between musical performances on stage, over the radio, at Carnival and on screen. The essay also examines similarities and differences between chanchadas and the Hollywood musical comedy tradition. One area explored is integration, both in the sense in which it is often used in film studies, to discuss the relationship between the numbers and the narrative, and in reflecting on whether the different elements which feed into the numbers of Aviso aos navegantes are seamlessly combined in the film. Despite the huge popular success of his films, Watson Macedo was considered by many as the most “Americanised” of the directors of that period, adhering less to the critical mechanisms of parody than was the case with his contemporaries. However, if we pay attention to Macedo’s musical numbers, it is evident that these performances are not imperfect copies of Hollywood originals, but have a logic of their own. This audiovisual essay complements Flávia Cesarino Costa’s other contribution to this issue of Alphaville, the article “Building an Integrated History of Musical Numbers in Brazilian Chanchadas”, by exploring related ideas in the context of a single film. As well as the interest of the video essay’s own exploration and argument, the pairing of essays—traditional and videographic—enables readers of this issue to pursue their thinking about chanchadas and intermediality with specific audiovisual material in front of them
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Reck Miranda, Suzana. "Background musicians and their (in)visibilities." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 19 (July 23, 2020): 31–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.19.04.
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This article focuses on the career of Brazilian tambourine player Russo do Pandeiro, who participated as a background musician in musical numbers of Brazilian and Hollywood films from the 1930s to the 1950s, yet his work remains mostly uncredited. Although these background musicians consistently appear throughout the films in which they starred, they still constitute a largely unexplored object of research. I aim to revive this Brazilian tambourine player from a marginalised setting and invest in an understanding of his contribution to cinema through an intermedial perspective rather than privilege films as exclusive objects of reflection. My hypothesis for this intermedial approach will argue that the trajectory of Brazilian supporting musicians, if observed closely, reveals significant and previously unexplored aspects of the Brazilian cinematographic universe in the first decades of sound cinema.
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Wallin, Zoë, and Nicholas Godfrey. "‘The Boys Can Kill’." Film Studies 20, no. 1 (2019): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/fs.20.0001.
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In the late 1960s, Hollywood had the youth demographic in its sights. In 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid proved that Westerns could appeal to this market, and sparked a cycle of youth Westerns. The cycle framework provides a new lens to refocus this group of Westerns. When the films are situated alongside the other production trends and cycles of the period, as they were in the contemporary trade discourses, they emerge as part of a short-lived strategy for financing Western films that targeted the youth market. An industrial and discursive analysis of the marketing and reception of the youth Western cycle contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the New Hollywood period.
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Banner, Lois. "“The Mystery Woman of Hollywood”." Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 4 (2016): 84–115. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2016.2.4.84.
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“‘The Mystery Woman of Hollywood’: Greta Garbo, Feminism, and Stardom” analyzes feminism as manifested in Greta Garbo's life and career. It focuses on her European background; the media discourse on her; feminism in her films and in the United States in the 1920s; and Garbo's rebellion against Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, the heads of her studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). It also deals with her dress reform stance, her masculine femininity, the nature of her fans (especially the “Garbomaniacs”), and her friendships with the screenwriters Salka Viertel and Mercedes de Acosta. It concludes with an analysis of the 1933 film Queen Christina, characterizing it as the culmination of Garbo's feminism.
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Shehadeh, Michel. "Reel Bad Arabs." American Journal of Islam and Society 19, no. 4 (2002): 139–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v19i4.1906.
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When it comes to Arab characters in movies, Hollywood has only one kind:Bad Arabs. So argues Jack Shaheen, professor emeritus of mass communications at Southern Illinois University and a fonner CBS News consultant onMiddle East affairs in his new book,Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifiesa People.In this groundbreaking study, Shaheen provides long-awaited evidencethat since "cameras started cranking to the present," Hollywood, for morethan a century, has targeted Arabs. It has portrayed them, knowingly orunknowingly, as "uncivilized religious fanatics and money-mad cultural·others'." He convincingly makes the case that filmmakers must not be pardonedfor distorting and sacrificing the truth under the false pretext of artisticlicense.The book is divided into two main parts. Most important, perhaps, is theintroduction. The second part reviews films from A to Z. The book containsnotes, appendices, a glossary, an index of films, and lists and discusses, inalphabetical order, more than 900 feature films containing Arab characters.The overwhelming majority of them, such as Prisoner in the Middle East,Wanted Dead or Alive, The Delta Force, and EYecutive Decision negativelystereotype Arabs. Only a handful of scenarios that surfaced in the 1980s and1990s featured Arab characters as heroes. The Lion of the Desert and The13"' Warrior come to mind.Shaheen eloquently describes the links between the ability to create fictionalnarratives and images and the power to fonn social attitudes, shapethoughts and beliefs, and construct prisms through which people view theworld, themselves, and other peoples. Over time and through repetition, thesestereotypes become self-perpetuating, enduring, and hard to eliminate.Part One consists of 12 sections, which enables the reader to navigateeasily what otherwise could have been complicated issues and concepts.The first section, "The Genesis," discusses the negative stereotyping ofArabs in American pop culture. After this, he introduces "Real Arabs" ashe has known them: his family, friends and colleagues, and people he hasmet and experienced throughout his life. Another part, "The Stereotype'sEntry," deals with how stereotypical Arab images entered American popular culture. Here he argues that American image-makers did not invent ...
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PLATTE, NATHAN. "BeforeKongWas King: Competing Methods in Hollywood Underscore." Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 3 (2014): 311–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196314000224.
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AbstractIn many histories of American film music, Max Steiner's score forKing Kong(1933) marks a new era by establishing norms in original, symphonic underscoring that would dominate Hollywood for decades.Kong's reign, however, eclipses diverse approaches to underscoring practiced at studios before and after its release. In this study, I compare the methods of Max Steiner at RKO and Nathaniel Finston at Paramount to show how both influenced film music implementation and discourse in the years leading up toKong. Steeped in the practices of silent cinema, Finston championed collaborative scoring and the use of preexistent music in films likeFighting Caravans(1931). Steiner preferred to compose alone and placed music strategically to delineate narrative space in films, as inSymphony of Six Million(1932), a technique he adapted for mediating exotic encounters in island adventure films precedingKong. Although press accounts and production materials show that Steiner and Finston's methods proved resilient in subsequent years,Kong's canonic status has marginalized Finston's role and threatens to misdirect appraisals of Steiner's other work. Considering Finston's practices at Paramount alongside Steiner's pre-Kongscores at RKO illuminates the limitations of using onlyKongas a model, and shows that Finston's perspective on film scoring in the early 1930s provides a corrective balance for understanding film musicians’ work before and afterKong.
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Wielde, Beth A., and David Schultz. "Wonks and Warriors: Depictions of Government Professionals in Popular Film." Public Voices 9, no. 2 (2017): 61. http://dx.doi.org/10.22140/pv.217.
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The importance of studying public service portrayals in popular film lies in theimportance of popular culture itself. Popular culture defines generations, both creating and reflecting trends. It provides a window to worlds that may otherwise be a mystery. Popular film messages merge with other media and environmental factors to form a perceived reality for many (Kelly and Elliott 2000).This article examines the depiction of non-elected public servants in movies. It seeks to identify how these individuals are depicted in film and to determine if there are any specific stereotypes or patterns that emerge regarding how Hollywood describes nonelected government officials. It will do this by undertaking a content analysis of a small sample of recent government-themed feature films, ones that have entered into the popular culture mainstream since the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as certain earlier films that have entrenched themselves into the popular culture vernacular.
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Khor, Denise. "“Filipinos are the Dandies of the Foreign Colonies”: Race, Labor Struggles, and the Transpacific Routes of Hollywood and Philippine Films, 1924–1948." Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 3 (2012): 371–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/phr.2012.81.3.371.
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In the 1930s and 1940s Filipino laborers, many of whom were en route to agricultural hubs on the Pacific Coast, packed into movie theaters owned by Japanese immigrants to view Hollywood and Philippine-produced films. These cultural encounters formed an urban public sphere that connected both sides of the Pacific. Filipino patrons remade their public identities and communities through their consumption of film and urban leisure in the western city. This article traces this localized history of spectatorship and exhibition in order to reconsider prevailing understandings of the history of the U.S. West and the rise of cinema and mass commercial culture in the early twentieth century.
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Fuller, Stephanie. "Pan-American Highways: American Tourism to Mexico and 1950s Hollywood film." CINEJ Cinema Journal 3, no. 2 (2014): 5–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2014.92.
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This article examines American films from the early 1950s which feature journeys to Mexico. Movies such as Where Danger Lives (John Farrow, 1950), Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) and Wetbacks (Hank McCune, 1954) present journeys to Mexico as escapes from American life in which romanticised freedom is closely connected to mobility and automobiles. The article explores the connection between the films’ cinematic vistas of Mexican landscapes and American tourism to Mexico in this period. Through their journeys to and across the border, these films call the wider relationship between the US and Mexico into question as national identities are constructed through travel, landscape and touristic encounters.
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Snelson, Tim. "Old Horror, New Hollywood and the 1960s True Crime Cycle." Film Studies 19, no. 1 (2018): 58–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/fs.19.0005.
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This article focuses on a cycle of late 1960s true crime films depicting topical mass/serial murders. It argues that the conjoined ethical and aesthetic approaches of these films were shaped within and by a complex climate of contestation as they moved from newspaper headlines to best-sellers lists to cinema screens. While this cycle was central to critical debates about screen violence during this key moment of institutional, regulatory and aesthetic transition, they have been almost entirely neglected or, at best, misunderstood. Meeting at the intersection of, and therefore falling between the gaps, of scholarship on the Gothic horror revival and New Hollywood’s violent revisionism, this cycle reversed the generational critical divisions that instigated a new era in filmmaking and criticism. Adopting a historical reception studies approach, this article challenges dominant understandings of the depiction and reception of violence and horror in this defining period.
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Wang, Oliver. "Choosing to be the Hero, the Joker, the Villain: An Interview with Arthur Dong." Film Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2020): 41–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.73.3.41.
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Oliver Wang interviews documentary filmmaker Arthur Dong. Originally from San Francisco, Dong began his career as a student filmmaker in the 1970s before releasing the Oscar-nominated short film, Sewing Woman in 1982. Since then, his films have focused on the role of Chinese and Asian Americans in entertainment industries as well as on anti-LGBQ discrimination. In the interview, Wang and Dong discuss Dong's beginnings as a high school filmmaker, his decision to turn the story of his seamstress mother into Sewing Woman, his struggle to bring together the Asian American and queer film communities and his recent experience in staging a “Hollywood Chinese” exhibit inside a renovated bar in West Hollywood.
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Nunn, Nora. "Rose-Colored Genocide: Hollywood, Harmonizing Narratives, and the Cinematic Legacy of Anne Frank’s Diary in the United States." Genocide Studies and Prevention 14, no. 2 (2020): 65–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.14.2.1715.
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Drawing from literary and cultural studies, this paper situates U.S. adaptations of Anne Frank’s diary in the 1950s within a lineage of other films about historical genocide, including Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda, and The Killing Fields. Analysis of these narrative adaptations matters because it helps us better understand the danger of what critic Dominick LaCapra calls “harmonizing narratives,” or stories that provide the viewer with an “unwarranted sense of spiritual uplift” (14). Tracing the metamorphosis of Frank’s own diary from play to film adaptation, this article builds on existing scholarship to focus on how, in the wake of what has become known as the Holocaust, Hollywood began to construct popular and simplified understandings of complex genocidal crimes—all in the name of celebrating globalized humanity. In the first part of the article, I take a longer view of these adaptations by situating U.S. interpretations of Frank’s diary within a lineage of other Hollywood versions of historical genocide, including The Killing Fields, Schindler’s List, and Hotel Rwanda. I argue that in making Anne Frank’s story morally simplifying and ultimately uplifting for U.S. audiences—in other words, shaping it into what critic Dominick LaCapra calls a “harmonizing narrative”—these Broadway and Hollywood adaptations privileged rose-colored narratology for that would influence future mainstream cinematic representations in dangerous ways. The second part of the paper then considers cinematic alternatives from outside of Hollywood (such as Canada, Rwanda, and Spain) that challenge these harmonizing narratives by enlisting a mise en abyme structure—in other words, the nesting of stories within stories—that ultimately suggest the full representation of genocide is impossible. By making false promises of harmony, Hollywood’s interpretation of Frank’s story has, in turn, limited our understanding of subsequent genocides. On the other hand, alternative modes of cinematic storytelling—most notably, ones such as Ararat that fracture a coherent narrative—compel the audience to grapple with questions of spectatorship, agency, and above all, the problems of representation.
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Cieslik-Miskimen, Caitlin. "Hollywood in the Hinterland: Newspapers, Itinerant Films and Community Identity in the 1920s." Communication, Culture and Critique 12, no. 3 (2019): 378–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz016.
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Abstract Itinerant films represented a substantial media and cultural phenomenon during the first half of the 20th century, and provided a localized form of a mass culture product. Through an analysis of archival materials and newspaper accounts related to the production of 11 itinerant movies filmed in the Midwestern United States in the 1920s, this article examines the relationship between the itinerant films and community newspapers. By supporting these productions, these newspapers used a relatively new communication technology as a way to solidify their civic position. They helped create an intensely local product featuring recognizable landmarks, businesses and people that offered readers a way to combat the loss of community and place in an increasingly networked society.
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Chapman, Llewella. "‘They wanted a bigger, more ambitious film’: Film Finances and the American ‘Runaways’ That Ran Away." Journal of British Cinema and Television 18, no. 2 (2021): 176–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2021.0565.
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From the early 1960s, the British film industry was increasingly reliant on American studio financed ‘runaway’ productions. Alexander Walker identifies United Artists and Universal Pictures as two of the major players in the trend he dubbed ‘Hollywood England’. This article offers a close examination of the role of two studios in the financing of British film production by making extensive use of the Film Finances Archive. It focuses on two case studies: Tom Jones (1963) and Isadora (1968), both of which had completion guarantees from Film Finances, and will argue that Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, two of the key British New Wave directors, lost their previous ability to direct films to budget and within schedule when they had the financial resources of American studios behind them. It will analyse how, due to a combination of ‘artistic’ intent and Hollywood money, Richardson and Reisz separately created two of the most notorious ‘runaways’ that ran away during the 1960s.
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James, David E. "Soul of the Cypress: The First Postmodernist Film?" Film Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2003): 25–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2003.56.3.25.
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In the late 1920s, European expatriates in Hollywood made a number of independent experimental films influenced by avant-garde cultural movements. But these were preceded by three short experimental films made in 1920 by an American, Dudley Murphy, of which one, Soul of the Cypress, survives. Influenced by California Pictorialist photography of the preceding decades, it was in its own day recognized as an avant-garde film, but nevertheless it secured successful commercial distribution. The surviving print of the film, however, was drastically framed by the later addition of a pornographic coda that radically transformed its erotic theme and its social function.
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Bono, Francesco. "In the Steps of Operetta: Austrian Cinema’s Relation to History." European Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies 4, no. 1 (2019): 80. http://dx.doi.org/10.26417/ejms-2019.v4i1-531.
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This essay intends to investigate some aspects of the multifaceted relationship between the Viennese operetta and Austrian film in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. In particular, the essay will try to trace the influence of the operetta on the way in which Austrian films depicted the country’s history. Focusing on some of the most popular Austrian films of the period, including Willi Forst’s Operette (1940), Wiener Blut (1942) and Wiener Mädeln (1944-49), as well as Ernst Marischka’s trilogy from the late 1950s about the Austrian empress “Sissi”, the essay will critically discuss Austrian cinema’s penchant for the past, investigating the affinity of the Austrian (musical) film to the Viennese operetta, which served as its ideological and aesthetic model. In its affection for the past, Austrian cinema followed in the steps of the Viennese operetta. In contrast with the Hollywood musical genre or German musical films like Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930) or Hallo Janine (1939), to mention just two of the most famous ones from the pre-war era, history was a key component of the Austrian Musikfilm. In Austria, the musical film overlapped with the historical genre, and it strongly influenced the country’s memory of its past. By investigating the connection between the Viennese operetta and Austrian cinema, this essay aims to provide a better understanding of Austrian films in the cultural, political and historical context in which they saw the light of day.
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Gao, Yunxiang. "Soo Yong (1903-1984): Hollywood Celebrity and Cultural Interpreter." Journal of American-East Asian Relations 17, no. 4 (2010): 372–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187656111x564315.
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AbstractFollowing Broadway roles in the 1920s and serving as cultural translator for Mei Lanfang's Peking Opera tour of North America in 1930, Soo Yong (1903-84) acted in twenty-three Hollywood films and numerous television shows. Born in Hawaii to Chinese immigrant parents who were supporters of Sun Yat-sen and educated at Columbia Teachers College, Soo Yong combined Chinese and Western values without becoming the type of Westernized "Modern Girl" represented by Anna May Wong. Her roles present a softer Orientalism that allowed ethnic dignity and did not offend her Chinese-American audiences or her Nationalist friends in China. In contrast to the two-year younger Anna May Wong, she was able to balance several worlds and to sustain a position as an off-screen, cultural translator.
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Redfern, Nick. "The impact of sound technology on the distribution of shot lengths in Hollywood cinema, 1920 to 1933." CINEJ Cinema Journal 2, no. 1 (2012): 77–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2012.50.
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The impact of sound technology on Hollywood is analysed through looking at the median shot lengths of silent films from the 1920s (n = 54) and early sound films (n = 106). The results show a large increase in the median shot lengths with the introduction of sound (Mann Whitney U = 554.0, Z = -8.33, p = <0.01, PS = 0.0968), estimated to be 2.0s (95% CI: 1.6, 2.4). The dispersion of shot lengths measured using the robust estimator Qn shows a similarly large increase in the dispersion of shot lengths with the transition to sound (Mann Whitney U = 319.0, Z = -9.18, p = <0.01, PS = 0.0557), estimated to be 2.0s (95% CI: 1.7, 2.4).
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Watkins, Liz. "The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive." Comparative Cinema 9, no. 17 (2021): 123–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.31009/cc.2021.v9.i17.07.
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Colorization describes the digitization and retrospective addition of color to photographic and film materials (celluloid nitrate, glass negatives) initially made and circulated in a black-and-white format. Revisiting the controversial 1980s colorization of 24 classic Hollywood studio titles, which incited debate over questions of copyright, authorship and artistic expression, this essay examines the use of colorization to interpret museum collections for new audiences. The aesthetics of colorization have been criticized for prioritizing image content over the history of film technologies, practices and exhibition. An examination of They Shall Not Grow Old (Jackson, 2018) finds a use of digital editing and coloring techniques in the colorization of First World War film footage held in the Imperial War Museum archives that is familiar to the director’s fiction films. Jackson’s film is a commemorative project, yet the “holistic unity” of authorial technique operates across fragments of archive film and photographs to imbricate of fiction and nonfiction, signaling vital questions around the ethics and ideologies of “natural color”, historiography, and the authenticity of materials and spectator experience.
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BOMBOLA, GINA. "FromThere's Magic in MusictoThe Hard-Boiled Canary: Promoting “Good Music” in Prewar Musical Films." Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 2 (2018): 151–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196318000068.
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AbstractIn 1941, Paramount releasedThere's Magic in Music, a film about a soprano who sings opera in burlesque and wins a scholarship to attend Interlochen. The movie's utopian view of art music, however, caused difficulties for the studio in regard to marketing, leading to a studio-wide debate over the film's title. Archival documents positionThere's Magic in Musicas a valuable case study for investigating the transitional period of musical film production between the Great Depression and the onset of World War II, particularly with respect to operatic musicals. Just prior to the United States’ entry into the war, Hollywood moved away from the escapist fantasy of 1930s cinema toward the realism that would mark the 1940s. To reboot fading interest in musicals, studios toyed with the formula of the backstage musical to focus more on dramatic narratives and star power.There's Magic in Musicthus serves as a lens through which we might examine changes both in musical film production and in notions of “good music” at the eve of World War II.
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Bakina, Tatiana V. "FROM THE 1930S TO THE 1910S: FUNCTIONS OF COSTUMES IN CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD FILMS SET IN THE RECENT PAST." Articult, no. 2 (2020): 87–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.28995/2227-6165-2020-2-87-96.
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Stilwell, Robynn J. "Black Voices, White Women's Tears, and the Civil War in Classical Hollywood Movies." 19th-Century Music 40, no. 1 (2016): 56–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2016.40.1.56.
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Two musical trends of the 1930s—the development of a practice for scoring sound films, and the increasing concertization of the spiritual in both solo and choral form—help shape the soundscape of films based in the South and/or on Civil War themes in early sound-era Hollywood. The tremendous success of the Broadway musical Show Boat (1927), which was made into films twice within seven years (1929, 1936), provided a model of chorus and solo singing, and films like the 1929 Mary Pickford vehicle Coquette and the 1930 musical Dixiana blend this theatrical practice with a nuanced syntax that logically carries the voices from outdoors to indoors to the interior life of a character, usually a white woman. Director D. W. Griffith expands this use of diegetic singing in ways that will later be the province of nondiegetic underscore in his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930). Shirley Temple's Civil War–set films (The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel [both 1935] and Dimples [1936]) strongly replicate the use of the voices of enslaved characters—most of whom are onscreen only to provide justification for the source of the music—to mourn for white women. Jezebel, the 1938 antebellum melodrama, expands musicodramatic syntax that had been developed in single scenes or sequences over the entire second act and a white woman's fall and attempted redemption. Gone with the Wind (1939) both plays on convention and offers a moment of transgression for Prissy, who takes her voice for her own pleasure in defiance of Scarlett O'Hara. The detachment of the spiritual from the everyday experience of African Americans led to a recognition of the artistry of the music and the singers on the concert stage. In film, however, the bodies of black singers are marginalized and set in service of white characters and white audiences.
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Howson, Richard, and Brian Yecies. "The Role of Hegemonic Masculinity and Hollywood in the New Korea." Masculinities & Social Change 5, no. 1 (2016): 52. http://dx.doi.org/10.17583/mcs.2016.1047.
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We argue that during the 1940s Hollywood films had an important role to play in the creation of a postwar South Korean society based on the new global U.S. hegemony. The connections between political and economic change in South Korea and socio-cultural factors have hitherto scarcely been explored and, in this context, we argue that one of the key socio-cultural mechanisms that supported and even drove social change in the immediate post-war period was the Korean film industry and its re-presentation of masculinity. The groundbreaking work of Antonio Gramsci on hegemony is drawn on – in particular, his understanding of the relationship between “commonsense” and “good sense” – as well as Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity. The character of Rick in the 1941 Hollywood classic Casablanca is used to illustrate the kind of hegemonic masculinity favoured by the U.S. Occupation authorities in moulding cultural and political attitudes in the new Korea.
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Patell, Cyrus R. K. "Baseball and the Cultural Logic of American Individualism." Prospects 18 (October 1993): 401–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300004968.
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The 1980s were tumultuous years for the sport that many Americans still call the “national game” or the “national pastime.” For major league baseball, it was a decade marked by increasingly hostile relations between labor and management, resulting in three strikes, including one that interrupted the 1981 season and lasted for fifty days, causing the season to be shortened and many of the year's records to be marked with an asterisk. In 1984, Peter Ueberroth, the man who miraculously made the Los Angeles Olympics turn a profit, was hired as Commissioner of Baseball, and he soon led the owners in a conspiracy to restrict the free-agent market in order to keep players' salaries down. There were a variety of lawsuits brought against major league baseball, not only because of the owners' collusive actions but also because of ostensible racial and gender-based discrimination. And there were scandals over the drug use, sexual misadventures, and gambling habits of prominent players and managers. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, owners' profits were up, players' salaries were up, and attendance at ball games was up. Baseball's prominence in the national imagination was further bolstered by the success of the film version of The Natural (1984), which put an end to the conventional Hollywood wisdom that baseball films are box-office poison and paved the way for a spate of baseball films toward the end of the 1980s, including Bull Durham (1988), Eight Men Out (1988), Stealing Home (1988), Major League (1989), and Field of Dreams (1989). The 1980s gave new meaning to Jacques Barzun's oft-quoted declaration that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.” In his book Take Time for Paradise, A. Bartlett Giamatti, who succeeded Ueberroth as Commissioner of Baseball, rephrased Barzun's insight with double-edged puns that captured the ambivalences of the decade. “I believe that thinking about baseball will tell us a lot about ourselves as a people,” he wrote: “Baseball is part of America's plot, part of America's mysterious, underlying design — the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life.”
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Harsia, Siti, and Ida Rochani Adi. "COMMODIFICATION OF VALUES IN AMERICAN POPULAR FAMILY MOVIES IN 1990S." Rubikon : Journal of Transnational American Studies 7, no. 1 (2020): 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.22146/rubikon.v7i1.62507.
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This thesis investigates the American popular family films from the 1950s to the 2000s by using Interdisciplinary approach. This approach is intended to explore the object of research from the history, sociology, and cultural background. The theory of representation and commodification are used together to examine how the films represent American family life and how the film industry commercializes American family values. By focusing on family roles that include the division of roles between husband and wife, interactions between family members, and the values adopted by children as a result of parenting practice, it was found that the family concept shown in films from the 1950s to the 2000s represented the reality of the dynamics of family life in every decade. Besides, in popular films of the 1990s, 'Hollywood Family Entertainment' commercialized the patriarchal issues contained in the 'traditional family' concept. There is an ideology of 'ideal woman' strictly as a housewife which was commodified through these films. Optimistic value in the family was also commodified through the child character consistently, shown by the emergence of child character who tends to be positive towards the future, focus on goals, strives for success and happiness and free in making choices.
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Zanotti, Pierantonio. "Playing the (International) Movie: Intermediality and the Appropriation of Symbolic Capital in Final Fight and the Beat ’em up Genre." Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 9, no. 1 (2018): 47–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/23.6165.
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Final Fight (Capcom 1989) is a famous example of a video game genre generally known as “beat ’em up” or “brawler,” a type of action game where the player character must fight a large number of enemies in unarmed combat or with melee weapons. The side-scrolling beat ’em up genre reached the peak of its global popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period sometimes referred to as the genre’s “golden age.” Set in a contemporary, urban setting, Final Fight has a storyline that revolves around three playable heroes who attempt to rescue a young woman from the clutches of a criminal gang. Although likely the most influential and among the best games in this genre, Final Fight did not found the beat ’em up genre by itself: it was produced within the context of a specific, albeit recent, textual tradition and canon. This canon consisted of texts produced within the same medium (i.e. other video games, mostly of Japanese production) but also drew from an intermedial corpus. In its design and narrative tropes, Final Fight inherited and incorporated a number of elements from Hollywood action cinema that had been translated into the newer digital medium of video game. To trace a history of the beat ’em up genre from its origins to Final Fight, I address in this paper questions on three levels. On the intertextual level, what are the textual antecedents of Final Fight? What were the formal and stylistic conditions of possibility for this game within the history of the genre and the medium? What are the game’s intermedial connections, especially with films? To answer these questions, I trace a tentative genealogy, focusing on the narrative and representational elements of the game. Specifically, I examine storylines, characters and settings and their relationship with the structural properties of beat ’em up gameplay. On the “(v)ideological” (Gottschalk 1995) level, what value systems are put into play in a classic beat ’em up game? In what ways are the player’s choices axiologised? What conduct is rewarded or sanctioned? Which actions can the player’s avatar perform, and for which purposes? In what contemporary discursive formations did Final Fight participate as a textual device for the actualisation of ideologically non-neutral fictional conduct? I attempt to map the value system inscribed in this video game genre that, in turn, articulates it as a game (i.e. as a system of stakes, rules, sanctions, and rewards). On the historical level, what were the industrial and commercial conditions entailed in the production of a game such as Final Fight? To the (actual or virtual) satisfaction of what demands, both material and symbolic, was it designed? Answering these questions calls for an analysis of the so-called “context,” which I consider to be a historical and social meta-narrative. In this respect, my research mostly focuses geographically and historically on the Japanese video game market of the 1980s and its transnational connections. Starting with the (mainly cinematic) dissemination of transnational imaginaries of “street violence” and “vigilantism” against the background of large, modern American cities during the 1970s and 1980s, I attempt to show that Final Fight is an instance of the incorporation of these imaginaries into video games. More generally, I argue that, with various degrees of success, the classic beat ’em up games produced in Japan carried out a function of symbolic appropriation and redistribution at a local level as they remediated a cinematic textual canon (which was, for a significant part, of foreign origin) into the video game medium. As video games, these texts shifted the focus of this appropriation from spectatorship to the forms of active agency prescribed in gameplay. The player thus appropriated control not only on a character in a game but also of an entire cinematic canon which, in the Japanese context, appeared rich in symbolic capital and marked by “American-ness.” The movies that inspired the classic beat ’em up came from Hollywood, one of the “Greenwich Meridians” (Casanova 2004) in the global cultural industry during the 1970s and 1980s, likely the last decades of what some scholars have called “the era of high Americanization” (Iwabuchi 2002). Video games were, in other words, the means by which a portion of the Japanese cultural industry could so successfully appropriate the symbolic capital of Hollywood products that these Japanese games transcended the borders of the Japanese national market and became big hits in the “West.”
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Gan, Wendy. "Tropical Hong Kong: Narratives of absence and presence in Hollywood and Hong Kong films of the 1950s and 1960s." Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29, no. 1 (2008): 8–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00316.x.
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Blom, Ivo. "Of Artists and Models. Italian Silent Cinema between Narrative Convention and Artistic Practice." Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2013): 97–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2014-0017.
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Abstract The paper presents the author’s research on the representation of painters and sculptors, their models and their art works in Italian silent cinema of the 1910s and early 1920s. This research deals with both the combination of optical (painterly) vs. haptical (sculptural) cinema. It also problematizes art versus the real, as well as art conceived from cinema’s own perspective, that is within the conventions of European and American cinema. In addition to research in these filmic conventions the author compares how the theme manifests itself within different genres, such as comedy, crime and adventure films, diva films and strong men films. Examples are : Il trionfo della forza (The Triumph of Strength, 1913), La signora Fricot è gelosa (Madam Fricot is Jelous, 1913), Il fuoco (The Fire, Giovanni Pastrone, 1915), Il fauno (The Faun, Febo Mari, 1917), Il processo Clemenceau (The Clemenceau Affair, Alfredo De Antoni, 1917) and L’atleta fantasma (The Ghost Athlete, Raimondo Scotti, 1919). I will relate this pioneering study to recent studies on the representation of art and artists in Hollywood cinema, such as Katharina Sykora’s As You Desire me. Das Bildnis im Film (2003), Susan Felleman’s Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006) and Steven Jacobs’s Framing Pictures. Film and the Visual Arts (2011), and older studies by Thomas Elsaesser, Angela Dalle Vacche, Felleman and the author.
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Lowndes, Joseph E. "Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy. By Shane Hamilton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 344p. $29.95." Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 2 (2009): 377–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1537592709090884.
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In this timely new book, Shane Hamilton offers a compelling account of the politics of long-haul trucking in the postwar United States and, in particular, its contribution to the rise of economic conservatism by the end of the 1970s. This work, exhaustive in its research, explains a range of critical developments in twentieth-century political economy from the perspective of trucking: from the struggles within and between various federal agencies over farm, labor and consumption policies; to advances in truck design, highway construction, refrigeration, and food packaging technologies; to the cultural development of a trucking genre within country music and Hollywood films.