Film History最新文献_第2页

The American Jewish Story through Cinema 电影中的美国犹太人故事

Film History Pub Date : 2015-01-01 DOI: 10.7560/744301

Oscar Winberg

{"title":"The American Jewish Story through Cinema","authors":"Oscar Winberg","doi":"10.7560/744301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/744301","url":null,"abstract":"The American Jewish Story through Cinema Eric A. Goldman, Texas: The University of Texas Press, 2013. $55 hardcover, $25 paperback, 264 pages.In his new book, The American Jewish Story through Cinema, Eric A. Goldman attempts to explore the American Jewish story by looking at film. Note the word story: not history, not experience, but story. This is of central importance for the work since it is this point that makes an assessment of it so difficult. The scholarship on American Jews and film is and has been rather strong at least since the 1980s. At first glance, Goldman's book seems to be another addition to this scholarship of which Patricia Erens' The Jew in American Cinema (Indiana, 1985) is perhaps the most noteworthy. Goldman has, however, carved out a niche for himself, looking at the collective Jewish story not on film but through film, essentially making movies the building blocks for his narrative. It is an intriguing and engaging narrative. In some ways Goldman's book reads like a lecture - in a good sense, as he is able to write engagingly and has a talent for weaving a narrative.The main problem with Goldman's book is his explicit goal to use \"the medium of cinema to provide an understanding of the changing situation of the American Jew over the last century\" (ix). Goldman makes it clear that he is not looking to tell the story of how Jews are presented on the silver screen over the 20th century, nor is he seemingly interested in writing the history of the Jewish community in America in the 20th century while incorporating cinema in his analysis. Rather, he goes to great lengths to separate his work from these alternatives by arguing that he is telling the story of the collective Jewish experience in 20th century America with the help of film representations, in a way making the movies themselves nothing more than illustrations of the themes and attitudes he is trying to portray. As he puts it, cinema is \"a way of telling the story, a Haggadah of what has transpired for Jews in America\" (xii). As Goldman earlier defines Haggadah as the \"traditional 'telling' of the story\" (ix) one is left with the sense that he is not writing an academic history but rather a story. In fact, the reason the book reads like a lecture is that the analysis is informal: Goldman seems more interested in presenting a point with movie clips than in actually exploring a scholarly question in an open and methodologically sound way. Nevertheless, it is clear that Goldman possesses a deep understanding of the subject matter and the book is inarguably well written.Goldman chooses nine films for his analysis, each either individually or in pairs representing a certain decade, or period. While his selections are intriguing, he offers little insight into his criteria of selection, stating only that \"I have chosen select films that I consider representative of specific historical periods\" (xii). As a result, the nine films are a motley crew, including some of the most","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"119 1","pages":"65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77375153","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}

引用次数: 0

Directory of World Cinema: Turkey 世界电影目录:土耳其

Film History Pub Date : 2015-01-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.51-2557

María Gil Poisa

引用次数: 0

J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Gold War j·埃德加·胡佛去看电影:联邦调查局和好莱坞黄金战争的起源

Film History Pub Date : 2013-10-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.50-0770

T. Osborne

{"title":"J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Gold War","authors":"T. Osborne","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-0770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-0770","url":null,"abstract":"John Sbardellati J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Gold War Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012. 256 pp. Hard CoverIf once-secret FBI files are any gauge, Hollywood's propagation of Communist doctrine was more cunning and pervasive than imagined. Vigilant FBI agents and informants detected the taint of Communism everywhere-in such disparate pictures as Warner Brothers' Pride of the Marines (1945), Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Paramount's Roman Holiday (1953). But the FBI found few pictures more insidiously Marxist than Universal's Buck Privates Gome Home (1947). While the Abbott and Costello vehicle seemed a \"rather inoculous [sic] film,\" its true intent, the surveillance report stated, was to raise the specter of \"class consciousness.\" This sinister purpose, explained the report, was effected by crosscutting between a general's party and a buck private on KP duty. In such fashion did FBI surveillance merge into film theory and criticism.As John Sbardellati's J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies details, the Bureau unwittingly began nibbling at the edges of media theory in the silent era while monitoring movies for \"radicalism.\" Although that first Red Scare faded, J. Edgar's Hoover's fears never abated. Rather, they so intensified during World War II that Hoover launched a sweeping secret investigation of Hollywood that lasted from 1942 to 1958. J. Edgar Hoover documents the severity and extent of the FBI's unilateral covert operation. Had people in the 1950s known what the Bureau's files contained, asserts one historian, McCarthyism would most likely have been called Hooverism. Making excellent use of FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Sbardellati, a historian at the University of Waterloo (Ontario), has fashioned a brisk, multi-faceted narrative of historical and cultural significance.On one level, J. Edgar Hoover is a paean to cinema. Like their Soviet counterparts, American police agencies and politicians were quick to recognize film's power, which only intensified as the industry developed. The secret October 1943 report to Hoover (from a special agent in Los Angles) called the motion picture industry the greatest '\"influence upon the minds and culture, not only of the people of the United States, but of the entire world.'\" Thus, concludes Sbardellati, the FBI grasped the truth of Benedict Anderson's concept of \"imagined\" communities \"years before\" those scholars who would argue that national cinemas-and their surrounding discourses-are vital to the fabrication of national identities.The October 1943 report states that Moscow had ini 935 directed the Communist Party USA to infiltrate Hollywood labor unions and \"'the so-called cultural and creative fields' in order to 'determine the type of propaganda to be injected into the motion pictures.'\" The report further delineates an eight-pronged attack. However, says the author, the Bureau failed to d","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"60 5 1","pages":"83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89783933","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}

引用次数: 0

Charlene Regester, African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900––1960 Charlene register，非裔美国女演员:争取知名度的斗争，1900 - 1960

Film History Pub Date : 2011-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/FILMHISTORY.23.2.242

Johnson

引用次数: 0

The Moving Earth 移动的地球

Film History Pub Date : 2010-03-22 DOI: 10.1017/9781108225205.007

Stephen Rust

引用次数: 0

George Gallup in Hollywood 乔治·盖洛普在好莱坞

Film History Pub Date : 2007-01-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.44-6144

R. Briley

引用次数: 11

Reality TV: Realism and Revelation 真人秀电视:现实主义和启示

Film History Pub Date : 2006-07-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.43-3461

J. Taddeo

{"title":"Reality TV: Realism and Revelation","authors":"J. Taddeo","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-3461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-3461","url":null,"abstract":"Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn. Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. Wallflower Press, 2005. 183 pages; $22.50. Therapeutic Culture In Reality TV: Realism and Revelation, Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn discuss the cultural significance of reality TV programming in Britain. Using several case studies, the authors demonstrate how this genre (which includes talk and game shows, law and order programming, 24/7 formats, and dramatic reconstruction) has changed viewers' expectations, the definition of celebrity, and, most importantly, the representation of the \"truth.\" Each chapter reads like a separate essay, but uniting such topics as the documentaries of Errol Morris, re-enactments like The Trench, and the televised death-defying stunts of illusionist David Blaine is the relationship between subjectivity and performance. Further, the emphasis on confession and exhibitionism indicates how pervasive \"therapeutic discourse\" and \"the revelation of trauma\" have become in popular culture (7). The initial chapters describe various examples of the observational documentary in order to trace how reality TV programs, with their focus on \"ordinary\" (i.e. working and middle class citizens) have borrowed from this format. What has been lost, for better or worse, however, is the political, left-leaning agenda of the documentary. State-funded films of the '30s and '40s, for instance, examined the lives of the working class and advocated change, while docudramas (films that used fictional characters to treat real social issues), like Cathy Come Home by director Ken Loach, gave viewers access to tenements and caravans, satisfying voyeuristic curiosity but also exposing the failure of the welfare state to abolish the class barrier in Britain. Yet as film and TV began to focus more and more on narratives of personal trauma, the goal of political advocacy took a back seat to the focus on domestic drama and \"narrative-fuelled entertainment\" (84). Reality TV programming is both a product of and fuelled by what Biressi and Nunn call a \"therapeutic culture,\" with its dominance of subjective experience and the eroding boundary between public and private. One of the most disturbing examples of the media's and viewing public's fascination with the revelation of personal trauma was the British Everyman documentary series on Court TV, Our Father the Serial Killer. Biressi and Nunn make excellent use of this strange program in which a brother and sister, convinced that their now elderly and harmless-looking father committed a series of grisly murders, retrace the scenes of his alleged crimes. Though the program never proves or disproves the father's guilt, it becomes clear that the siblings were victims of abuse at his hands. That such a trauma-based narrative would attract a large viewing audience and serve as \"entertainment\" is a topic worthy of its own book. Perhaps the weakest part of Reality TV: Realism and Revelation is its cursory attention to the larger historical context","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"71 1","pages":"61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76843398","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}

引用次数: 76

The War Film 战争电影

Film History Pub Date : 2006-07-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.42-4549

Michael S. Shull

{"title":"The War Film","authors":"Michael S. Shull","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-4549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-4549","url":null,"abstract":"Robert Eberwein, editor. The War Film. Rutgers University Press, 2004. 236 pages; $22.95. Fundamental Elements Why we fight, or, more precisely, how we are and have been projected as a warring nation on film, is the subject of this edited book on American war films. Only a few classic foreign-made works are mentioned in passing. What should also be noted is that this book is largely concerned with the fictional combat or pseudo combat film as opposed to war dramas and/or various generic hybrids, such as training and POW films. In an otherwise thoughtful and informative introduction, this crucial distinction is never clearly engaged. Instead, the extended analytical introduction focuses on the most fundamental elements of the war film genre: documenting, re-enacting, and/or creating narratives concerning the experience of war-most particularly World War II and the Vietnam War-and then outlines the four predictable thematic sections of the book: Genre, Race, Gender, History. The War Film is thereafter comprised of a series of previously published articles and excerpts from books originally appearing in print between the mid 1980s and 2003. But, unfortunately, none have been revised in any way so that simple, but basic, factual errors remain. For instance: the wrong release date for John Ford's The Lost Patrol ( 1934) in the contribution from Jeanine Basinger 's seminal 1986 book, The World War II Combat Film. Though initially intended primarily for an academic audience, the selections are mostly jargon free and engage films that are easily accessible on DVD-a plus for using this book as a classroom text. A minus concerns its limiting dependence upon the list of usual suspects. An outstanding exception is Tania Modeleski's discussion of Dogfight (1991). After pointing out the misogyny in many Vietnam War-oriented films, she focuses on this comparatively obscure female-directed film starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. Presented as a 1966 flashback on personal events that took place in San Francisco in November 1963, Dogfight creates an interesting take on the collective psychology of America on the eve of its entrance into that prolonged conflict - through the eyes of an awkward young woman who has a less than traditional romantic encounter with a young soldier. Though definitely from a feminist perspective, neither the film nor Modeleski's close reading of it are didactic. The short contribution on All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) seems to be included for no other reason than that the film is part of the hoary canon of antiwar films. It is a weakly developed attempt to highlight the basic components of the antiwar subgenre that has not improved with age since its original publication in 1998. Moreover, it displays a superficial historical knowledge about that horrific 20th century global conflict and utterly fails to contextually establish why such antiwar statements were made, their impact, if any, and upon whom. There is an extended extra","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"64 1","pages":"63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90005449","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}

引用次数: 8

Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History with Illustrations 经典画册:配有插图的文化史

Film History Pub Date : 2004-01-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.39-6242

Robert J. Fyne

{"title":"Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History with Illustrations","authors":"Robert J. Fyne","doi":"10.5860/choice.39-6242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.39-6242","url":null,"abstract":"William B. Jones, Jr. Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History with Illustrations. McFarland, 2002. 287 pages; $55.00. Postwar Period From approximately 1945 until 1955 another generation of American teenagers emerged onto the adolescent stage. Here, during these formative years, the youngsters played fast-moving neighborhood games such as Johnny-rides-a-pony, ringalevio, and spud, helped their mothers operate those ringer washing machines, while off to the side, eyed their fathers slap another patch on a tire's inner tube. In the schoolroom, they sang \"The Arkansas Traveler,\" \"Stout-Hearted Men,\" and \"Tit Willow\" while their teachers reminded them that \"the proof of the pudding is in the eating\" or warned about the dangers of being \"out of kilter.\" Back in the house, these kids screwed flashbulbs into cameras, threw coal into the furnace (later, they would remove the ashes), and, when feeling mischievous, listened to some neighbor \"chew the fat\" on those party line telephone connections. Sometimes, they watched an older sister (or an unmarried aunt) get \"dolled up\" for a Saturday night dance or envied an older brother who strolled into a diner and ordered a blue plate special. In their kitchens, these adolescents wolfed down bowls of Kellogg's Pep (Superman's official cereal), gulped glasses of Ovaltine (Captain Midnight's favorite drink), and watched their mothers toss a generous spoonful of Crisco into a frying pan, while in the background the radio adventures of Boston Blackie (\"friend to those who had no friends\"), The Fat Man (\"Weight: 237 pounds; fortune: danger\"), The Shadow (\"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?\"), We the People (Gabriel Heatter's reassuring \"Ah, there's good news tonight\"), and, of course, The Lone Ranger (\"Who was that masked man?\") emanated from the front room. At the neighborhood shows, the youngsters cheered their favorite cowboy heroes-Johnny Mack Brown, Lash LaRue, Red Barry, Hopalong Cassidy-galloping across the plains blasting those unsavory, mustachioed villains trying to steal some widow's ranch while over in the combat zone John Wayne, Dennis Morgan, and John Garfield repeatedly routed America's Axis foes. Since the postwar period was in its incipient stages, many of the youngsters remembered those blackout shades their parents installed, the postage-stamp-sized points necessary to buy rationed food, the backyard victory gardens, those war bonds sold almost everywhere, and the Memorial Day parades, where polite spectators quietly demurred when the Gold Star mothers-sitting collectively in their convertible automobiles-passed in review. For literary pursuits, every teenager stocked his own stash of comic books, those ten-cent purchases that provided untold enjoyment and faraway dreaming. Here in the fantasy world of Red Ryder, Little Lulu, Mandrake the Magician, Bucky Bug, L'il Abner, Smilin ' Jack, Terry and the Pirates, The Little King, and Dick Tracy, these adolescents reveled in the fun and fanc","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"74 1","pages":"81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88570447","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}

引用次数: 3

H.G. Wells on Film: The Utopian Nightmare h·g·威尔斯谈电影:乌托邦式的噩梦

Film History Pub Date : 2003-07-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.40-3180

Elun T. Gabriel

{"title":"H.G. Wells on Film: The Utopian Nightmare","authors":"Elun T. Gabriel","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-3180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-3180","url":null,"abstract":"Don G. Smith. H.G. Wells on Film: The Utopian Nightmare. McFarland, 2002. 205 pages; $39.95. Widening Gulf Don G. Smith's H.G. Wells on Film is a reference work covering \"every theatrically released film from 1909 to 1997 (both credited and unaccredited) based on the writings of H.G. Wells\" (2). By casting his net so broadly, Smith reveals how frequently filmmakers have drawn on Wells' ideas over the last century (the book covers over forty films). At the same time, only a few of these motion picture adaptations actually addressed any of the stories' central concerns. This book is organized chronologically by the publication date of the original Wells stories. Smith offers a brief background and concise plot summary for each story, followed by full discussions of every cinematic incarnation. Each film's entry includes a synopsis, a comparison to the story that inspired it, an in-depth account of its production and marketing, an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, and lastly a numerical rating. The organizational scheme of H. G. Wells on Film allows the reader to easily find information on a particular film or to see the different ways a specific story was adapted for the screen. Smith has a knack for clear and vivid plot summary, and has amassed an impressive amount of information (including some interesting trivia) about the making of each film, including those that no longer survive. The nature of the information provided varies by film, but his broad purview covers production, direction, screenwriting, cinematography, and acting. Numerous illustrations-from movie posters, stills, and lobby cards-supplement the text. Smith's prose is easy to read, if a bit chatty and prone to irrelevant asides (such as how he would improve certain films' plots). Though this book is not intended as a contribution to Wells scholarship or to intellectual history, it is nevertheless disappointing that Smith sometimes offers misleading interpretations of Wells' ideas. This is especially noticeable in his sections on The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau. He describes the former novel's central question as follows: \"what will happen if the intellectuals and captains of industry fail to subdue labor, and how can the necessary subduing be achieved?\" (11). In actuality, the text addresses a rather different concern, namely the widening gulf between the ruling class and the workers, which Wells feared would lead to humanity's eventual degeneration. He called not for labor's subduing but rather for the reintegration of society's two diverging classes. …","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"60 1","pages":"86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89482665","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}

引用次数: 1