Literature-film Quarterly最新文献

{"title":"Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time","authors":"Andrew M. Gordon","doi":"10.4324/9780429497391-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429497391-8","url":null,"abstract":"Star Wars, George Lucas' lavish space opera, is truly a fantasy for our times, this generation's Wizard of Oz. Nevertheless, whereas Lucas' film has been almost universally praised for its costuming, sets, technical perfection, and wondrous special effects, its plot has been largely dismissed as corny or hokey, strictly kids' stuff. \"The film's story is bad pulp, and so are the characters of hero Luke and heroine Leia,\" says Richard Corliss.1 \"I kept looking for an 'edge,' to peer around the corny, solemn comic-book strophes,\" writes Stanley Kauffmann.2 And Molly Haskell sums up the critics' objections: \"Star Wars is childish, even for a cartoon. \"3 Well, if Star Wars is childish, then so are The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings. Like Tolkien's Middle Earth series, Star Wars is a modern fairy tale, a pastiche which reworks a multitude of old stories, and yet creates a complete and self-sufficient world of its own, one populated with intentionally flat, archetypal characters: reluctant young hero, warrior-wizard, brave and beautiful princess, and monstrous black villain. I would argue that the movie's fundamental appeal to both young and old lies precisely in its deliberately old-fashioned plot, which has its roots deep in American popular fantasy, and, deeper yet, in the epic structure of what Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces calls \"the monomyth.\" In an era in which Americans have lost heroes in whom to believe, Lucas has created a myth for our times, fashioned out of bits and pieces of twentieth-century American popular mythologyold movies, science fiction, television, and comic books- but held together at its most basic level by the standard pattern of the adventures of a mythic hero. Star Wars is a masterpiece of synthesis, a triumph of American ingenuity and resourcefulness, demonstrating how the old may be made new again: Lucas has raided the junkyards of our popular culture and rigged a working myth out of scrap. Like the hotrods in his previous film, American Graffiti, Star Wars is an amalgam of pieces of mass culture customized and supercharged and run flat out. This essay will therefore have two parts: first, a look at the elements Lucas has lifed openly and lovingly from various popular culture genres; and second, an analysis of how this pastiche is unified by the underlying structure of the \"monomyth.\" George Lucas, who both wrote and directed, admits that his original models were the Flash Gordon movie serials and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series of books. \"I wanted to make an action movie- a movie in outer space like Flash Gordon used to be. ... I wanted to make a movie about an old man and a kid. . . . I also wanted the old man to be like a warrior. I wanted a princess, too, but I didn't want her to be a passive damsel in distress.\"5 In other words, he wanted to return to the sense of wonder and adventure that movies had given him as a child, but to update it for modern tastes and to take advan","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"2 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113942359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Screen Writings: “Outing” Edward, Outfitting Marlowe: Derek Jarman's Film of Edward II","authors":"Bert Cardullo","doi":"10.7135/UPO9781843313434.005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7135/UPO9781843313434.005","url":null,"abstract":"The reign of the English king Edward the Second (1307-1327) has long been a subject of study, discussion, and debate for scholars and artists alike. Indeed, there is much in what has become the legend of this sovereign to draw one's attention. Arguably one of the first clear historical cases of a regularly troubled regime, the reign of Edward has become an ideal subject for the exploration of the nature of power by historians and sociologists, as well as by novelists, poets, and dramatists. Their studies, however, have been regularly subject to complications and distractions due to the many potentially prurient aspects of this reign: multiple murders, a grossly unhappy marriage, revolutions, rebellions, and, especially, Edward's engagement in homosexual activity. While the importance of Edward's sexuality is obvious as a means to explore the nature and treatment of sexuality in early English history, it has almost invariably distracted from or colored discussions of the more central, political issues of his rule. The most significant artistic examination of Edward's reign has been subject to similarly skewed treatment. So resonant is Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II (1592) that it has become a veritable locus for cultural discourse on sexuality. Both in studies of the text and in performances of the play, the emphasis has been on questions of Edward's sexuality, whether through direct address of the subject or a conscious moral choice to avoid it. This is not surprising given that, historically, the drama is a form well suited to reinterpretation inspired by the whims of changing times and changing fashions. Accordingly, the treatment of Edward II throughout its critical and stage histories has almost always been based on prevailing opinions about sex and the dominant view of homosexuality. In fact, ever since the issue of sexuality became truly controversial in the fifteenth century, Edward in general, and Marlowe's play in particular (as well as Bertolt Brecht's adaptation of it, titled The life of Edward the Second of England [1924]), have been subjected to a legacy of misrepresentation. While it would be impossible, even absurd, to completely avoid the issue of sexuality in any consideration of Edward, a character for whom desire (sexual and otherwise) is an important character trait, most stagings of, and writings about, Edward II make two fundamental errors in their address of his sexual practices. First, the critical and performance histories of the play focus almost solely, even obsessively, on Edward's sexual practices in spite of Marlowe's conscious attempt in his text to suppress discussions or enactments of the King's sexuality. Second, the essays and books and productions have approached the subject of Edward's sexuality in a virtual historical vacuum, yoking the text to a contemporary conception of sexuality that is factually inaccurate and, perhaps more importantly, dramaturgically illegitimate. Both historically and in Marlowe","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125376947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen","authors":"L. Raw","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-3102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-3102","url":null,"abstract":"Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 288 pp., $80.00 hard cover; 273 pp., $24.99 paper. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen covers much the same ground as T he Literature /Film Reader, and even contains some of the same contributors (Brian MacFarlane, Sarah Cardwell). In many ways, however, it is a very different kind of book: the editors observe that, in view of the fact that Cambridge University Press has seen fit to publish it, adaptation studies has finally arrived as a \"suitable\" subject for academic debate (1). MacFarlane's and Timothy Corrigan's contributions provide useful surveys of theoretical developments in the field from the beginning of the last century to the present. While acknowledging the contributions made by George Bluestone (1957), both of them hope that the fidelity question can finally be laid to rest: greater attention should be paid to \"exploring the gap between disciplinarity and adaptation, between literature and film [. . .] adaptation studies necessarily trouble and open disciplinary boundaries\" (42). The following chapters focus on the shifting historical contexts of adaptation. Douglas Lanier's survey of Shakespeare on film begins in the late nineteenth century and culminates with Luhrmann's Romeo +Juliet (1996) and Shakespeare in Love (1998). He concludes that Shakespeare has been constructed in recent times as a filmmaker rather than a literary giant (73). Linda V Troost offers a comprehensive guide to Jane Austen adaptations, although I can't help but feel that she prefers Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice (2005) to all the previous versions of the novel, simply because it drags the text out of the prison-house of \"literature\" and transforms it into a teen-oriented romance. Martin Halliwell's and Peter Brooker's essays focus on the modernist and postmodern aspects of adaptation; both identify Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002) as a film containing both elements. I found both contributions invaluable in their determination to show what elements render an adaptation modernist or postmodern, while simultaneously showing how it can \"open out an alternative, underdeveloped, or suppressed trace\" in its source-material (115). This comment is strongly reminiscent of Tom Leitch's observation (made in his recent book Adaptation and its Discontents [2007]) that adaptations need to be treated as creative works in their own right. A further section \"Genre, Industry, Taste\" shows how adaptations are shaped by several criteria-institutional, and cinematic-as well as audience taste. Eckard Voigts-Virchow rehearses familiar arguments about \"Englishness\" and the heritage film, but provides an interesting sideline in his analysis of German television adaptations of Rosamund Pilcher's Mills and Boon novels, that create a Germaninspired view of Englishness. Imelda Whelehan's discussion of Now Voyager (1942) also follows a wel","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125398866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fans' Notes: The Horror Film Fanzine","authors":"David Sanjek","doi":"10.4324/9780203138618-25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203138618-25","url":null,"abstract":"The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. -Susan Sontag1 \"film buff\": that species who collect movies the way others collect stamps or butterflies, thereby depriving them of their contextual significance. -Robin Wood2 Slimetime, Grind, Trashola, The Gore Gazette. The titles reflect an unseemly juvenile fascination with unrespectable and illicit imagery, the domain of the horror film. For most adults horror films are the junk food of the imagination, trivially dispensable cultural artifacts undeserving of critical attention and devoid of artistic or intellectual sophistication. Even defenders of the genre, like Stephen King, admit that \"good horror movies operate most powerfully on this 'wanna-look-at-my-chewed-up-food?' level,\" a primitively childish consciousness \"sometimes also known as the Oh my God, was that gross!' factor.\"3 Sophisticated critics may speak of a typology of the monstrous or the genre's reflection of personal, social or mythic structures, but it is some undeniable, primitive, precritical instinct that compels successive generations willingly to pay good money to be made extremely uncomfortable and thereby answer \"an invitation to indulge in deviant, antisocial behavior by proxy-to commit gratuitous acts of violence, indulge our puerile dreams of power, to give in to our most craven fears.\"4 Among the willing participants in this sometimes unsavory process are the editors of horror film and video fanzines: independent, non-commercial, amateur publications compulsively produced by individuals who have fallen prey to what Stephen King call \"the siren song of crap.\" Either mimeographed or off-set printed, available only by mail and unpredictable in their publication, the fanzines are suffused with that juvenile fascination with grue and gore, most evident in their frequent inclusion of illustrations appealing to the lowest kind of prurient interest and guaranteed to offend: a policeman's severed head laid out on a kitchen table like some grisly hors d'oeuvre; ravenous zombies about to satisfy their appetites upon an unwilling victim. Connoisseurs of the badfilm, trash, and gore, the fanzine editors insist upon the pleasures to be found in the consumption of such raw, undiluted imagery. Their enthusiasm may seem to lack irony or finesse; however, at its source the fanzine perspective is \"such a deadly serious undertaking that its seriousness can never be openly acknowledged. The gross-out afficionado savors his sense of complicity when the values of a smug social stratum, from which he feels himself excluded, are systematically trashed and ridiculed.\"5 What may seem to some a sophomoric interest in putatively indefensible outrage for outrage's sake is to the fanzine editor a healthy interest in forms of expression that call into question soc","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1990-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126846333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Eric Rohmer and the Holy Grail","authors":"L. Williams","doi":"10.4324/9781315861951-27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315861951-27","url":null,"abstract":"Eric Rohmer and the Holy Grail Compared to the younger, more prolific, and often more radical directors of the French New Wave-Godard, Rivette, Resnals, Varda, Truffaut, Marker-Eric Rohmer, the senior member of this illustrious group, has often seemed a throwback to many of the values the New Wave once opposed. A moralist in the heyday of leftist political cinema, a literary sensibility in an age when the French film was finally freeing itself from the literary standards of the \"wellmade film,\" a Catholic in both his cinematic themes and his film criticism, Rohmer has always seemed an unmistakably original, but decidedly conservative, talent.1 His major work of the sixties and seventies, Six Contes Moraux, a loosely related cycle of six films dealing with the romantic and intellectual obsessions of mostly male, middle class heroes, is a visually static, television-style work in which characters endlessly debate the ethical and intellectual dimensions of erotic temptation: to spend a night at Maud's, to touch or not to touch Claire's knee. In these chaste, aggressively uncinematic films of temptation, James Monaco has gone so far as to observe the \"faintly glowing embers\" of the literary traditions of courtly love.2 Given these predilections, it was not surprising that Rohmer turned his attention to the filming of Chretien de Troves courtly medieval romance, Perceval le Gaulois. Here, finally, was a film in which Rohmer's Catholic and moral sensibilities, refined literary taste, even his interest in the archaic tradition of courtly love could happily converge. But what one was not prepared for in this adaptation was the uncommon beauty and originality of a film whose visual and narrative conception are like no other ever made. With Perceval, Eric Rohmer has outdone himself. The film's dazzlingly innovative narrative style and total re-thinking of filmic space are as radical for 1979 as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was in 1919. Yet these innovations derive from an adaptation of a twelfth-century literary source to which Rohmer, who himself wrote the modern French translation, is remarkably faithful. In the following analysis I hope to clarify the ways in which Rohmer's film adapts both the narrative form of Chretien's text and the spatial organization of medieval art to its own, peculiarly modernist, cinematic ends. Chretien's Text Modern readers of medieval literature encounter works of such profound religiosity as to seem almost inscrutable to our own more doubting sensibilities. Yet in these works we also encounter fragmented, digressive narratives, one dimensional characters and a total disregard of reality that seems very similar to the scrambled narratives and anti-realism of our own recent literature. Nowhere is this more true than in the Arthurian romances of the twelfth-century French poet Chretien de Troyes. In the gracefully rhymed, Old French couplets of Chretien's courtly romances, we encounter an emblematic world of obscure signs. In t","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1983-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115563677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“England made me”:","authors":"L. Keyser","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1vtz7kq.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1vtz7kq.7","url":null,"abstract":"England Made Me. published in 1935 in London and later released in the United States under the title The Shipwrecked, was one of Graham Greene's favorite novels. In this early work, Greene thought he \"let go\" for the first time as a storyteller treating the contemporary world.1 Greene was very consciously attempting to relate several key themes in his fiction to the social, economic, and political realities of contemporary life; England Made Me was his first truly political novel. Despite a carefully worded disclaimer that \"none of the characters in this book is intended to be that of a living person,\"2 most readers could see the parallels between Greene's portrait of an industrial giant, Erik Krogh, and the life of Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match manufacturer. In England Made Me, Greene was studying the milieu of capitalism and the shipwrecked souls who tied their fates to the rise of industrial dynasties. In barest outline, the novel is the tale of two twins: Anthony Farrant. a charming ne'er-do-well imbued with traditional English prep school values, and his sister, Kate, an efficient successful executive, who loves her brother and who feels responsible for his archaic and parochial value system. Kate, the mistress of the manipulative financier Erik Krogh, the archetypal internationalist and modern man, hopes she can salvage the man of her past, Anthony. England Made Me involves a perverse love triangle which encapsulates larger interactions: of past values and present realities, of nationalism and internationalism, of human tradition and industrial expedience. Greene, who became film critic for The Spectator the same year England Made Me was published, used a film-inspired epigram for his novel: \"All the world owes me a living.\" This small bit of wisdom from Walt Disney in The Grasshopper and the Ants offers a rather sardonic comment on the political and economic themes Greene treats. England Made Me is a study of the way people make a living and of the way they live; it is also a story of debts, short term and long term, financial and psychic. Greene is just as concerned in England Made Me with the psychology of his characters as he is with the realities of their environment. England Made Me is his only novel in which he periodically employs a stream of consciousness technique to force readers inside the mind of his protagonists. Early in the novel readers share with Anthony his dreams of \"old faces, faces hated, faces loved, alive or dead, sick or dying, a lot of junk in the brain after thirty years, the prow rising to the open sea, the lightship behind, and the gramophone playing\" (p. 11). Most of the junk in Anthony's brain involves his traditional English education, the merciless beatings which convinced him of the value of love, honor, and family; his musing also catalogues the long exile in the East where he tried to carry English ideals forward in his pursuit of elusive success. Tony Farrant had not always accepted the English traditi","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1974-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123365269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Christian Allegorical Structure of Platoon","authors":"A. Beck","doi":"10.4324/9780429497391-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429497391-5","url":null,"abstract":"In criticism on Platoon (1986), Oliver Stone's allegorical methods and sources have been commonly misunderstood. At best, the Christian motifs which distinguish Stone's narrative of war and personal growth are only passingly recognized. It is easily demonstrated that these borrowed motifs are not deeply hidden secrets which must be deduced or invented from vague hints. Stone gives clear identifications of them, both in the film itself and in its published screenplay. But we should not be surprised; Stone has said that the war was for him a \"religious\" experience.1 In his \"Foreword\" to the screenplay of Platoon, Stone identifies Chris, the main character, as autobiographical; he also calls Chris \"Ishmael,\" an \"observer, caught between those two giant forces\" Barnes and Elias. In addition to Melville's Moby Dick, Stone also declares mythic associations to Homeric myth and rock music; Barnes is an Ahab or Achilles, and Elias is a Jim Morrison (of The Doors) or Hector.2 But in fact, Melville, Homeric and pop music icons are left quite out of the substance of the story.3 Platoon's source is the Christian Bible, and, as it were, the lone \"observer\" is the movie's audience. Allegory is an ancient, respected sort of narrative, across which flicker tensions between \"fiction\" and \"reality.\" Modern manifestations of allegory are at least as various as T.S. Eliot's \"mythical method,\" Freud's and Jung's literary psychologies, the Marlboro Man, and William Manchester's battlefield seduction by a mythic \"Whore of Death.\"4 We simply note that Stone, bringing allegorical methods to bear upon the Vietnam War, is in good company, as critics like John Hellmann, Albert Auster and Leonard Quart have shown, and as Michael Herr and Michael Cimino reveal in their screenplay notes and annotations to Full Metal Jacket and The Deer Hunter.5 Certainly, \"realism\" is important, and a historical fiction like Platoon may rightly be lauded (or criticized) in terms of it. But realism is an uncertain concept and remains subordinate to storytelling or, in nonfiction settings, to the rationalized forms of historical narrative.6 For example, when among her praises for his powers of versimilitude, Pauline Kael complains of Stone's literary pretensions-\"too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity\"7-she understresses that Platoon, good or bad, likable or not, is necessarily popular art first, historical representation second. But a critique of the \"art\" in Platoon, as with any film, can easily fall prey to speculation and generalization; my primary purpose here is quite simply to document Stone's allegorical structure. The film begins with a title snipped from Ecclesiastes 11:9, \"REJOICE, O YOUNG MAN, IN THY YOUTH\" (11).8 Flooding the soundtrack is Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, stately and, as Tom O'Brien suggests, \"elegiac,\"9 setting an ironically contrasting tone. Stone does not complete the quoted verse, which ends \". . . for all the","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127660178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Films of Robert Wise","authors":"Dean R. Cooledge","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-3681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-3681","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132686852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film","authors":"Terence M. Ripmaster","doi":"10.5860/choice.28-5608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.28-5608","url":null,"abstract":"From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film Edited by Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. 387 pp. Illustrated. $45.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). I received this book on the day that the Persian Gulf War began, Operation Desert Storm, the war, according to President Bush, that will create a \"new world order.\" Dittmar and Michaud begin their introductory essay to this collection of essays about Vietnam War films, \"This book is about power. Implicitly, it is about the power to make war and to destroy lives. Explicitly, it is about the power to make images that may displace, distort, and destroy knowledge of the history in which those lives participated.\" It was both instructive and unnerving to read the twenty essays in this book while listening to American \"officials\" censoring and manipulating the words and images associated with the present war. Dittmar and Michaud also remind us that the title of their book \"is meant to draw attention to the process whereby aspects of that war [Vietnam] have been appropriated into particular modes of representation by sectors of the American cultural industry.\" The essays are arranged into four thematic categories: \"Wide Angles: History in the Remaking,\" \"Close-ups: Representation in Detail,\" \"Other Frames: Subtext and Difference,\" and \"Other Forms: Documenting the Vietnam War.\" The book includes two appendices, \"Chronology: The United States, Vietnam and American Film,\" and \"Selected Filmography: The Vietnam War on Film.\" While the essays vary in style and approach, they share a concern for the relationship between history and its representation in film. This collection of essays focuses on how films are, the editors state, \"bound by the commodity status of films produced under the conditions of capitalism.\" The Vietnam War and historical specificity have been influenced by American culture, ideology, world historical events, and the techniques of film production itself. These and other factors helped to shape every film about the Vietnam War from Green Berets (1968) to Full Metal Jacket (1987). The first essay, \"Historical Memory, Film and the Vietnam Era\" by Michael Klein points to how revisionism and reinterpretation take place in a historical era. He reminds the reader of how historical myths about the Civil War era were represented in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939). Keeping in mind that Hollywood did not produce many Vietnam movies until nearly a decade after America's involvement in the war, Klein and other authors explore how the nation's political and public atmospheres play a deciding role in the content and images included in Vietnam War films. Klein discusses how Hollywood encodes the generic melodramas with an \"eye to ideology.\" The Deer Hunter ( 1978) is \"pervaded by racist and Cold War stereotypes.\" Hollywood's demonological approach to Asians in general, and Vietnamese \"Communists\" in particular has","PeriodicalId":446167,"journal":{"name":"Literature-film Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130130791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}