Suzanne Keen is the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University

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Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions

Consumers have an increasingly wide variety of options available to entertain themselves. This poses a challenge for content aggregators who want to effectively promote their video content online through original trailers of movies, sitcoms, and video games. Marketers are now trying to produce much shorter video clips to promote their content on a variety of digital channels. This research is the first to propose an approach to produce such clips and to study their effectiveness, focusing on comedy movies as an application. Web-based facial-expression tracking is used to study viewers’ real-time emotional responses when watching comedy movie trailers online. These data are used to predict both viewers’ intentions to watch the movie and the movie’s box office success. The authors then propose an optimization procedure for cutting scenes from trailers to produce clips and test it in an online experiment and in a field experiment. The results provide evidence that the production of short clips using ...

Video Content Marketing: The Making of Clips

Increased visual attention, such as during computer use leads to less blinking, which can cause dry eyes—the leading cause of computer vision syndrome. As people spend more time looking at screens on mobile and desktop devices, computer vision syndrome is becoming epidemic in today's population, leading to blurry vision, fatigue, and a reduced quality of life.One way to alleviate dry eyes is increased blinking. In this paper, we present a series of glasses-mounted devices that track the wearer's blink rate and, upon absent blinks, trigger blinks through actuation: light flashes, physical taps, and small puffs of air near the eye. We conducted a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of our devices and found that air puff and physical tap actuations result in a 36% increase in participants’ average blink rate. Air puff thereby struck the best compromise between effective blink actuations and low distraction ratings from participants. In a follow-up study, we found that high intensity, short puffs near the eye were most effective in triggering blinks while receiving only low-rated distraction and invasiveness ratings from participants. We conclude this paper with two miniaturized and self-contained DualBlink prototypes, one integrated into the frame of a pair of glasses and the other one as a clip-on for existing glasses. We believe that DualBlink can serve as an always-available and viable option to treat computer vision syndrome in the future.

/pdf/dualblink-a-wearable-device-to-continuously-detect-track-and-hvxq3foqm7.pdf

DualBlink: A Wearable Device to Continuously Detect, Track, and Actuate Blinking For Alleviating Dry Eyes and Computer Vision Syndrome

Aller Anfang. Zur Initialphase des Spielfilms

Even during the Depression and World War II, the use of electric light by domestic consumers and industry was growing, and it rose sharply in the postwar years Yet this brightly lit historical period produced a set of films famous for darkness: the film noir This essay examines General Electric’s own publications to show how the electricity industry had developed an optimistic new iconography of artificial light, endowing illumination technologies with connotations of progress, science, and glamour—cultural meanings that noirs like Call Northside 777, The Set-Up , and The Asphalt Jungle would adopt, reshape, and invert

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.27.1.58

Film Noir and the Culture of Electric Light

Coming Attractions: reading American movie trailers

Challenging conventional scholarship placing the origins of film noir in postwar Hollywood, Sheri Chinen Biesen finds the genre's roots firmly planted in the political, social, and material conditions of Hollywood during the war. After Pearl Harbor, America and Hollywood experienced a sharp cultural transformation that made horror, shock, and violence not only palatable but preferable. Hard times necessitated cheaper sets, fewer lights, and fresh talent; censors as well as the movie-going public showed a new tolerance for sex and violence; and female producers experienced newfound prominence in the industry. Biesen brings prodigious archival research, accessible prose, and imaginative insights to both well-known films noir of the wartime period- The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Double Indemnity-and others often overlooked or underrated- Scarlet Street, Ministry of Fear, Phantom Lady, and Stranger on the Third Floor.

Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir

Hollywood on Location: An Industry History

James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, like Double Indemnity, was just one example of a 1930s novel that the Production Code Administration (PCA) would not touch but later endorsed during World War II when conditions were more appropriate. These potentially scandalous stories were reactivated as a cycle of dark film adaptations when it was institutionally viable and profitable. But while censorial resistance finally subsided, the film cycle itself caused controversy. For example, The Postman Always Rings Twice could not be produced in the same way as Double Indemnity-MGM had to "lighten it up," "white wash" and sanitize it. Nonetheless, both films were indicative of Hollywood's new wartime tendency toward a dark stylistic practice known as film noir which developed in relation to industry censorship during the 1940s. Paradoxically, film noir both complied with, yet undermined, Production Code censorship. Of course, the term film noir was coined after-the-fact by postwar French critics to describe earlier wartime American films, but what were Hollywood filmmakers trying to achieve in these films? In examining film noir, censorship, and how controversial material got approved by Production Code censors, it is crucial to consider wartime production trends and how the industrial environment during World War II actually advanced film noir style. Within Hollywood's wartime studio system institutional setting, the adaptation of James M. Cain's hard-boiled fiction was significant in the transitional move toward non-war-related subject matter which cultivated racier "red meat" stories. In fact, wartime circumstances undermined the Code and allowed previously unacceptable material to be produced on screen. Many scholars refer to this noir tradition as a decidedly postwar phenomenon. Yet, given this industrial context, film noir was significantly ` jump started" by the war. Paul Schrader explains that prototypes for noir films began appearing before the war. In fact, Schrader considers this dark tradition in relation to censorship and speculates that "were it not for the war, film noir would have been at full steam by the early forties. The need to produce allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home blunted the fledging moves toward a dark cinema . . . film noir thrashed about in the studio system, not quite able to come into full prominence" (Schrader 8-9). However, certain wartime industrial circumstances actually compromised the strictures of the PCA s censorial enforcement. Presumed morally uplifting patriotic propaganda actually paved the way for increasingly sanctioned depictions of violence which functioned as a kind of cinematic precedent allowing racier narratives involving crime to be produced, such as Cain's graphic novels. Crime, Passion & Cain The screen adaptation of Cain's hard-boiled fiction was indeed seminal to the relationship between censorship and wartime film noir production in Hollywood. Frank Krutnik notes that Cain's literary "properties were secured by the studios because of their success," yet the industry had to wait until the "representational context" was "favourable" to produce these films (36). In The Dame in the Kimono, Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons provide a lucid analysis of the adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, arguing that studios "could never resist a potential blockbuster, much less one that smelled of scandal," and thus MGM chief executive Louis B. Mayer "sensed the wind shifting in Hollywood" and decided to produce Cain's story in October 1944 by submitting a new outline to the PCA (130). While a darker, starker wartime economic and cultural environment informed the production context of this influential film noir, Cain's provocative crime-and-passion tale, banned by censors since its sale to MGM in 1934, did not just suddenly and metaphysically "spring up" as an "appropriate" Hollywood adaptation by this grand and arguably conservative studio. …

Raising Cain with the Censors, Again: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Insanity, paranoia, and psychology have long been a staple of American film noir thrillers. These motion pictures provide insight into an evolving American popular culture landscape from World War II through the postwar era and function as cultural, industrial, and aesthetic products of Hollywood's classical studio system during a fascinating period of the American film industry. By the 1940s, American cinema such as films noir and Alfred Hitchcock's gothic thrillers were renowned for their depictions of psychology and crime. These films reflected the fears and cultural tensions arising from World War II and postwar American society, as well as a growing awareness of psychology and trauma in the aftermath of the war.The onset of World War II transformed American culture and Hollywood cinema as masters of suspense like directors Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger cultivated brooding, shadowy noir films such as Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Spellbound (1945), The Lost Weekend (1945), Whirlpool (1949), and Sunset Blvd. (1950). In this essay, I will examine the depiction and promotion of psychology, mental illness, psychologists, and psychiatrists in American film noir crime thrillers such as Hitchcock's Spellbound, Wilder's The Lost Weekend, and Preminger's Whirlpool, and I will analyze how these psychological noir film narratives related to a changing 1940s American culture in the World War II and postwar eras.By the late 1930s and 1940s, as World War II began and talented European and Jewish emigres fled the war, facism, and the Nazis, flocking to Hollywood, a darker psychological mood informed many American crime pictures. These emigres brought a brooding style to American cinema. Further, psychoanalysis gained popularity in 1940s America and in the film industry itself. The cinematic depiction of psychoanalysis and psychological mental illness was especially pronounced in American film noir crime narratives. Moreover, many Hollywood filmmakers, including emigre talent, were seeing psychoanalysts when making these American noir films.As evident in such pictures as Blind Alley (1939), Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), This Gun For Hire (1942), Double Indemnity, Laura, Spellbound, The Lost Weekend, Behind Locked Doors (1948), and Whirlpool, noir films fused subjective, psychological point of view with artistic experimentation influenced by expressionism, surrealism, and documentary realism. Blind Alley, Spellbound, The Lost Weekend, Behind Locked Doors, and Whirlpool are particularly noteworthy because they deal with psychoanalysts and protagonists battling psychological instability. These people are also engaged in criminal activity and, in some instances, sent to psychiatric wards or insane asylums. Indeed, film noir was known for its psychological point of view and elaborate montages revealing the central character's conflicted subjective inner psyche. Flawed, tormented noir protagonists grappled with volatile moods, psychological demons, and mental illness, trapped by traumatic fears, violent obsessions, constrained or imprisoned in claustrophobic environments or sanitariums.Like the moody psychological montages in film noir, Hitchcock's noir-styled Spellbound and gothic suspense thrillers depicted psychology, voyeurism, dreams, and nightmares as psychologists clinically treated (or became) patients. Moreover, as in film noir, Hitchcock's noir female gothic cycle included psychic trauma, insanity, a tormented protagonist's quest for psychological identity, elaborate flashbacks of haunting surreal nightmare memories, and stylized, subjective point of view as seen in Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which influenced the noir style of Spellbound and Notorious (1946). For example, Hitchcock's Oscar-winning Best Picture Rebecca opens with voiceover narration by Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) who describes a haunting recurring nightmare: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. …

Sheri Chinen Biesen

Papers

Coming Attractions: reading American movie trailers

Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir

Hollywood on Location: An Industry History

Raising Cain with the Censors, Again: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Psychology in American Film Noir and Hitchcock's Gothic Thrillers