{"title":"Offshoring & leaking: Cristiano Ronaldo’s tax evasion, and celebrity in neoliberal times","authors":"Ana Jorge, M. Oliva, Luis L. M. Aguiar","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2021.1913491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2021.1913491","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines how the news media framed the allegations made in 2016 against Cristiano Ronaldo for evading taxes through offshores, and how audiences discussed this online, in Portugal, where he is originally from, and Spain, where he played football at the time. These countries were amidst an “austerity culture” justifying welfare cuts, promoting entrepreneurialism as “success”, and presenting neoliberal policies as “common sense”. Our analysis reveals Ronaldo portrayed as a member of the economic elite criticized for the high earnings of football players and celebrity tax privileges; as an ungrateful immigrant who does not contribute enough to society; and as “one like us” maneuvering to evade taxes. The comparative analysis shows audiences had double standards based on their feelings toward the celebrity, and they interpreted this case positively or negatively in relation to the inefficiency of the fiscal and justice systems in Southern Europe.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"178 - 192"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2021.1913491","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46147884","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":"Emo: how fans defined a subculture","authors":"Margaret A. Murray","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2021.1913495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2021.1913495","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"325 - 327"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2021.1913495","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41990459","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":"Micro-celebrity practices in Muslim-majority states in Southeast Asia","authors":"Siti Mazidah Mohamad","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2021.1913492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2021.1913492","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT We have witnessed the growth and spread of celebrity culture worldwide, from A-list celebrities to ordinary individuals turned micro-celebrities. However, celebrity studies are still lacking in exploring celebrity culture in the global South that has recently seen growth in their micro-celebrities afforded by rising individualism, commodification, and social media penetration. This paper aims to address this gap by examining micro-celebrity practices in three Muslim-majority states in Southeast Asia, namely Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This paper reveals that celebrification and celebritization processes in these societies demonstrate context appropriation, adaptation, localization, and transcultural flow of celebrity culture. Through the examination of contextualized socio-cultural configurations brought by the micro-celebrities – namely rising local consciousness, development of new subjectivities, and young people’s self-mobilities – this paper contributes to the celebritization process, which goes beyond the individual celebrity to consider the nature of celebrity and its social and cultural embedding in the Muslim-majority Southeast Asian societies.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"235 - 249"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2021.1913492","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41810988","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 transpositions of a filmmaker—Ingmar Bergman at home and abroad","authors":"Birgitta Steene","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2020.1834110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2020.1834110","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ingmar Bergman’s cinema has been distributed around the world to varied, constantly evolving public response. In this 1998 essay, Birgitta Steene assesses data collected from film viewers in five countries – Brazil, France, India, Sweden, and the United States – to ultimately illuminate a complex transcultural circulation process comprised of three stages that are discussed at length: transmittance, annexation, and assimilation. Through this process, distributors and marketers frame work for audiences who claim it according to perceived differences and familiarities before finally assimilating it into their particular, individual world views. This study exemplifies a practicable approach not just to Bergman Studies but the transnational dissemination of art and media generally.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"80 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2020.1834110","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46841817","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":"Situating Ingmar Bergman and world cinema","authors":"Hamish Ford, Daniel Humphrey","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2020.1868047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2020.1868047","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Introducing four essays and a stage play that make up the “Bergman World” special issue of Popular Communication, the authors argue for an expanded understanding of world cinema, one that attends to critical and scholarly voices beyond the hegemon of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western continental Europe, one that, indeed, attends to “their” (the non-West’s) perspective on “us” (Western filmmakers, film scholars, and films) as much as what “we” think of “them.” More specifically, the article asserts the profound global impact of the work of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman outside North America and Western Europe.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"66 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2020.1868047","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48165567","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}
Johan Göransson, Maaret Koskinen, Magnus Rosborn, Louise Wallenberg, F. Gustafsson, L. Ullmann, Inger Söderdahl, Kerstin Kalström, Emma Gray Munthe, P. Burkhart, Christian A. Christensen, P. Ganapathy, Anna Hanchett, Linn Lönroth, Birgitta Steene, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, M. Bergman, Marc Francis, Erik Hedling, Léon Garcia Jordan, Stefan Nylén
{"title":"Acknowledgments","authors":"Johan Göransson, Maaret Koskinen, Magnus Rosborn, Louise Wallenberg, F. Gustafsson, L. Ullmann, Inger Söderdahl, Kerstin Kalström, Emma Gray Munthe, P. Burkhart, Christian A. Christensen, P. Ganapathy, Anna Hanchett, Linn Lönroth, Birgitta Steene, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, M. Bergman, Marc Francis, Erik Hedling, Léon Garcia Jordan, Stefan Nylén","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2021.1872873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2021.1872873","url":null,"abstract":"The editors would like to acknowledge the following people for their help in enabling this special issue of Popular Communication to emerge. We thank Jan Göransson, Maaret Koskinen, Magnus Rosborn, Louise Wallenberg, and Fredrik Gustafsson from the University of Stockholm and Swedish Film Institute for their warm welcome, collegiality, and encouragement upon the occasion of our 2019 presentation of this project (the latter we thank also for additional research assistance). For our preceding research stay on Fårö, from the Bergman Estate we owe special thanks to Linn Ullmann, Inger Söderdahl, Kerstin Kalström, and Kerstin Brunnberg, and also Emma Gray Munthe at Bergman Center. At Popular Communication we thank the following for their support and good will throughout our work: Patrick Burkhart, Christian Christensen, Premila Ganapathy, Anna Hanchett, Linn Lönroth, and Chafic Najem. At the University of Washington, we thank Birgitta Steene, Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adam, and Amanda Doxtater. Closer to home, we thank Mindy Bergman and Pamela Matthews at Texas A&M University, and Catharine Coleborne and Miriam Burgess at the University of Newcastle. We would also like to thank Marc Francis, Erik Hedling, Leon Garcia Jordan, Stefan Nylén, and Lina Scheynius. Finally, we warmly thank the marvelous contributors to this volume for their fecund scholarship, patience, and enthusiasm. This special issue is dedicated to Birgitta Steene.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"65 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2021.1872873","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45312606","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":"“I’m just here to enjoy the Ponies”: My Little Pony, Bronies and the limits of feminist intent","authors":"Kyra Hunting, Rebecca C. Hains","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2021.1892691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2021.1892691","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The unexpected adult, primarily male, audience of the children’s series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, known as Bronies, has been the subject of extensive commentary for their apparent violation of gender norms. Drawing from a qualitative survey of a 2915 Bronies we argue that the fandom is deceptively heterogenous. In particular, we explore the attitudes of members of the Brony Fandom to the feminist messages of the series, the feminism of series’ creator Lauren Faust, and whether these messages are perceived as impactful. Our paper argues that even within distinctive, close-knit fan communities interpretations interpretive and ideological responses to a media text and context vary significantly. Further, we argue that interpretations of fan objects appears primarily determined by preexisting attitudes. Ultimately, we find that fans utilize a number of rhetorical techniques to reframe media text’s messages, producer’s intent, and other audience member’s responses to fit their preexisting belief systems.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"20 1","pages":"138 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2021.1892691","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43421498","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 “absent circus master”: the “arrival” of Ingmar Bergman in Australia","authors":"A. Danks","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2021.1873996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2021.1873996","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT By exploring the critical, journalistic and popular reception of Ingmar Bergman’s films in Australia in the late 1950s and ’60s, as well as tracing their patterns of exhibition and distribution, this essay examines how particular discourses and approaches to Bergman were already well and truly in place by the early ’60s and prior to the arrival of most of the director’s films in the country. The critical response to and release of Bergman’s work in Australia does reveal minor antipodean variations and is an important staging ground for an emerging and quickly evolving screen culture, as well as debates around film as “art”. But it is also highly referential and reverential to received opinion from overseas and evidences the truly global reach of Bergman’s cinema and reputation during this period. This essay will examine the appearance of a range of Bergman films in Australia starting with Smiles of a Summer Night in 1957 and concluding with the controversial release of the heavily censored The Silence in 1965, fashioning evidence for a boom in “Bergmania” that reaches a peak in 1961–62 and provides an important test case for the rise of “foreign” film distribution in Australia.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"112 - 124"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2021.1873996","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47514901","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":"Could it happen there? Ingmar Bergman, postwar Czechoslovakia, and delayed distribution","authors":"M. Misur","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2021.1873995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2021.1873995","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyses the distribution and reception of Ingmar Bergman’s films using the example of Czechoslovakia, within the Soviet sphere of influence, during the twenty-five years following World War II. First, it aims to examine the forms of distribution of Bergman’s films in Czechoslovakia. The article then shifts to the critical as well as cultural-political reception of two particular films: High Tension (1950) and The Silence (1963). Bergman had an ambivalent reputation in socialist Czechoslovakia, and this article seeks to examine the specific nature of this local discourse. Bergman’s cinema entered Czechoslovakia slowly. Screenings of his films were regularly delayed, emerging, when they did, both long after the Swedish premieres and those of other foreign states. This established a tendency I call “delayed distribution”. This practice, comprising different variations, reflected a complex cultural-political context and negotiations encompassing strict distribution approval processes, contractual obligations, and one-time festival screenings. The interplay of these aspects lead to a level of unpredictability and, at times, surprising distribution solutions.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"125 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2021.1873995","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46731223","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":"Tracing Bergman in Contemporary Indian Cinema: Philosophical Cross-Connections in Through a Glass Darkly, Ship of Theseus and Dear Molly","authors":"A. Devasundaram","doi":"10.1080/15405702.2020.1868046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2020.1868046","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ingmar Bergman’s cinema has most often been framed within strictures of a Eurocentric scholarly template and structuralist or modernist philosophical approaches. Meanwhile, the filmmaker’s monumental influence on and relevance to global cinema beyond the West has often been overlooked or elided in Anglophone writing. Against the canvas of this gap in scholarship, this article ultimately discloses how Bergman’s fairly well-known filmic influence on Indian Bengali arthouse auteur Satyajit Ray was not an arbitrarily evanescent one-off. The trace of Bergman’s cinematic imprimatur – particularly, I will argue, Through a Glass Darkly – is also legible in India’s new independent cinema, exemplified by two films analyzed ahead: Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus and Gajendra Ahire’s Dear Molly. These films’ translocation of storyline segments to Sweden and portrayals of the Scandinavian landscape testify to the trace of Bergman that haunts such Indian film narratives. Through comparative close textual analyses, this study maps intertwining threads of existential and nihilism-engaged philosophies combined with esthetic aspects connecting the three films, to demonstrate the enduring cinematic impact and resonance of Bergman’s cinema beyond the Western sphere.","PeriodicalId":45584,"journal":{"name":"Popular Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"96 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15405702.2020.1868046","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49424137","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}