Film History最新文献_第3页

Film History Pub Date : 2003-07-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.40-2072

J. Morong

引用次数: 10

Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness 银幕救世主:好莱坞白人小说

Film History Pub Date : 2003-07-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.40-6309

David Lancaster

{"title":"Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness","authors":"David Lancaster","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-6309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-6309","url":null,"abstract":"Hernan Vera & Andrew M. Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Rowan & Littlefield, 2003. 203 pages, $75.00. A Huge Subject Bizarre as it may seem, there is not that much difference between a creaky silent film like Birth of a Nation (1915) and a state of the art wonder like Black Hawk Down (2001). Both deal, in essence, with brave, upstanding, loyal white chaps fighting a savage and chaotic horde of people of African descent, and it is abundantly clear which group is the superior. The reason for this continuity is not just the baleful consistency of racism. Rather, it is the need for white maleness to define and assert itself against the idea of the proverbial \"other.\" Nonwhites in films exist only to prop up the unstable identity of the dominant American group, to act as a mirror reflecting back the supremacy of whiteness. This is, in a nutshell, the argument of Hernan Vera's and Andrew M. Gordon's provocative book. Each chapter takes a different aspect of what they term the \"sincere fictions\" of Caucasian superiority and shows how it operates in various films. Apart from old friends like Griffith's epic and Gone with the Wind, both of which are central to their idea of the \"divided white self,\" the authors examine the film convention whereby non-white races always need to be led to freedom and fulfillment by a Persil-bright messiah (Stargate, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom); they analyze the role of Tahitians in the drama of male authority that exists in different ways in the three versions of Mutiny on the Bounty; they follow the evolution of what might be called the Scarlett and Mammy complex in women's relationships in Imitation of Life (Stahl's and Sirk's) and in more recent productions like Passion Fish. There is plenty more besides. The general message is that, although the archetypes (or stereotypes) may vary according to different historical conditions and cultural pressures, certain concepts remain depressingly constant. Blackness and otherness is passive or savage, comic or servile; the lesser breeds, as Kipling would have put it, are capable only of nurturing whites through their neuroses or of being led by WASPish heroes. Even a righton New Age western like Dances With Wolves turns out to be a story of a white male crisis in which the Native Americans are subsidiary elements in Kevin Costner's psychodrama. It is, in short, a huge subject, but Vera and Gordon (they sound like a bad nightclub act) have not written a huge book. As a result, they suffer from trying to pack too much into the space. Matters are not helped by their use of examples from almost every conceivable non-white image, from African and Native Americans to Vietnamese in The Green Beret, and even the aliens in Men In Black. Because each of these groups raises slightly different contextual questions, the book finds itself skimming over problems or eliding issues that should be separate. For instance, there is a difference between white messiah","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"14 1","pages":"91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87754446","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: 58

The American War Film: History and Hollywood 美国战争电影:历史与好莱坞

Film History Pub Date : 2003-07-01 DOI: 10.5860/choice.40-3908

Michael S. Shull

{"title":"The American War Film: History and Hollywood","authors":"Michael S. Shull","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-3908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-3908","url":null,"abstract":"Frank McAdams. The American War Film: History and Hollywood. Praeger Publishers, 2002. 352 pages; $74.95. Thousands of Movies Frank McAdams, an adjunct professor in the USC Cinema/ TV Department and screenwriting instructor at UCLA, as well as an award-winning Hollywood screenwriter, also fancies himself an expert with regards to Hollywood's portrayal of war on film. The reader is immediately made aware of the magnitude of Mc Adams' lengthy labor of hubris via the frequent author/insider name dropping, idiosyncratic background factoids-the well known gory details of actress Carole Lombard's fatal air crash during a WWII bond selling tour, to name only one-and, most amazingly, the complete absence of any coherent definition of the genre that the author has chosen to engage. One cannot fault Mr. McAdams for attempting to write a work that encompasses the thousands of movies that represent the American film industry's century long effort at portraying war on celluloid. So far, this reviewer is aware of only one individual who has come close to scaling this Pike's Peak in film history scholarship-Dr. Larry Suid-whose seminal Guts & Glory was first published in 1978 and whose revised and extensively expanded edition of his classic appeared in 2002 (University Press of Kentucky). Needless to say, assuming he was even aware of the original publication, Mr. McAdams did not deem Suids' book worthy of inclusion in his bibliography. But why would he need to cite such a comparatively humble source, since McAdams has already informed the reader in his acknowledgments that he was able to consult, among others, such distinguished authorities on the subject as his tennis buddy, the \"acclaimed author\" of The Dirty Dozen (1967), and Stephen Peck, the retired combat officer son of actor Gregory Peck. After a 28-page whirlwind treatment of the first forty plus years of war films, Mr. McAdams plunges into World War II. Following a somewhat incongruous quote from none other than Winston Churchill, \"War is mainly a catalogue of blunders,\" the reader is regaled with several pages of historical contextualizing, including the cost of renting an apartment in December 1941 in New York City! But the absolute nadir is reached on pages 35-36 when the author provides his reader with an extended list of \"established actors... [who] decided to place their careers on hold to enlist\" - in addition to naming the many stars who did serve with distinction (Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power, Clark Gable, et al.), the list also gratuitously includes, Neville Brand, James Arness, Walter Matthau, Jack Valenti, Rock Hudson, Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon- to the best of this reviewer's knowledge none of these honored veterans in this catalogue of wonders had established acting careers before the war and some never would-most notably the longtime (since 1966) MPAA spokesman, Jack Valenti. One is also less than reassured re McAdams' basic historical knowledge when he notes that the twin-engined spec","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"28 1","pages":"87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72889284","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: 2

West Germany and unified German cinema's difficult encounter with the Holocaust. 西德和统一的德国电影与大屠杀的艰难相遇。

Film History Pub Date : 2002-01-01

Mark A Wolfgram

引用次数: 0

Holocaust iconography in American feature films about Neo-Nazis. 美国关于新纳粹的故事片中的大屠杀图像。

Film History Pub Date : 2002-01-01

Lawrence Baron

引用次数: 0

The Holocaust on film: the feature films. 电影中的大屠杀:故事片。

Film History Pub Date : 2002-01-01

Larry Wilcox