Showing papers in "Journal of Cinema and Media Studies in 2005"

The New Film History as Media Archaeology

Abstract: The article assesses the impact of digital technologies on our understanding of film history. While the “New Film History” has revitalized the study of the cinema’s “origins,” it has not yet proven itself equally successful in analyzing the subsequent turn-of-the-century multi-media conjuncture. Faced with this challenge, the essay makes a case for a new historiographical model, “Media Archaeology,” in order to overcome the opposition between “old” and “new” media, destabilized in today’s media practice. The field of audio-visual experience needs to be re-mapped, clarifying what is meant by embodiment, interface, narrative, diegesis, and providing new impulses also for the study of non-entertainment uses of the audio-visual dispositif.

The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive

Abstract: This article interrogates the rise of the "multiculti" action film and the casting of multiracial actors as Hollywood action film protagonists. These trends are examined in light of shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and youth-oriented popular culture.

Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television)

Abstract: N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000) studies television in relation to the history of spiritualism and tele-presence; Chon Noriega's Shot in America studies television within a larger history of Latino independent filmmaking and PBS; Jeffrey S. Miller's Something Completely Different: British Television and American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) studies the history of convergences between British and U.S. television; and Aniko Bodroghkozy (following Todd Gitlin's work on news) in Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001) studies entertainment television in the context of 1960s radical youth movements. 18. See, for example, Ellis, Seeing Things; John Corer, "Television 2000," in Critical Ideas in Television Studies (London: Oxford, 1999), 120-28. Paddy Scannell and Elihu Katz are currently preparing a conference/project on the idea that television has come to an end. We shall see. The title of my own recent coedited collection, Television after TV, suggests something less final, as does my introduction to that collection, which elaborates in more detail on some of the issues I have raised here. See Lynn Spigel, "Introduction," in Spigel and Olsson, eds., Television after TV, 1-34. 19. Phillip Drummond and Richard Paterson, eds., Television in Transition: Papersfrom the First International Television Studies Conference (London: British Film Institute, 1986). 20. Erik Bamouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Williams, Television, Technology, and Cultural Form; and John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).

Postfeminism from A to G

Abstract: Does postfeminism indicate (a) an attitude, (b) an optic, or (c) an object? In search of answers, I perused databases, surfed Web sites, pursued bibliographic leads, and queried friends, young and old. It seems the answer is (d) all of the above. I was surprised to see that while several books use the word (with Tania Modleski's 1991 Feminism without Women seminal), databases focused on media journals yield little on the topic. In hopes that my peregrinations will be of use to Cinema Journal readers, I shall provide an overview of how "postfeminism" and "postfeminist" have been used and by whom. I will then offer my "take" on which recent films may be labeled postfeminist. Finally, I will sketch where earlier postfeminist analyses will require updating and why, if they are to "fit" postmillennial media artifacts. As a noun, "postfeminism" has had at least three distinctly feminine faces. For me, these range from A to G: "academic," "chick," and "grrrl."l Since 1982, when the term first popped up in a New York Times magazine article featuring "Voices from the Postfeminist Generation," the most prevalent variant has been "C," or "chick," postfeminism. Periodically promoted in magazines, debated on talk shows, and paraded in newspapers, "chick" postfeminism entails a backlash against or a dismissal of the desirability for equality between women and men, in the workforce and in the family. "Chick" postfeminists are generally young; a few are middle-aged; none seem old (Botox helps). Many are hostile to the goals and gains of second-wave feminism; others simply take these gains and goals for granted. Some like to party, dress up, and step out, taking breaks from work to date or shop; others stay home, tending hearth, hubby, and kids. A second, "wilder," bunch of postfeminists knows both popular and academic haunts. Primarily American, these riot grrrls ("G" postfeminists, aka third-wave feminists) are politically engaged yet playful. They are happy to acknowledge the diversity among women that "chick" postfeminism ignores, and they are eager to carry on firstand second-wave feminist struggles. A third, smaller group of "A" (for "academic") postfeminists is steeped in French, British, and American postmodern, postcolonial, poststructural, queer, (etc.), theory. All three variants would seem tied to contemporary times, yet many commentators note that postfeminism is not new and that feminism is not "done" (e.g.,

The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future

Abstract: Applying the literature of passing to cyborg cinema makes visible the politics of cyborg representations and illuminates contemporary conceptions of mixed-race subjectivity and interpolations of mixed-race bodies. The passing narrative also reveals the constitutive role of melancholy and nostalgia both in creating cyborg cinema and in undermining its subversive potential

Postfeminism in the British Frame

Abstract: This article explores postfeminism and its impact upon British cultural politics and popular media. It was developed from a paper delivered at Interrogating Postfeminism, an international conference Ashby co-organised at UEA (2004), and was published as part of a special issue of Cinema Journal (edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra) to mark significant debates from that conference. It appears alongside companion pieces by leading American academics, Chris Holmlund and Linda Mizejewski, and path-breaking British feminist, Charlotte Brunsdon, examining different aspects of postfeminist culture. The article traces the ways in which feminist politics have been undercut by Blairite political and popular discourses in favour of a rebranded, 'cooler' postfeminist agenda which stresses more consensual, positive attitudes to identity politics and obscures on-going social conflicts. To illustrate this shift, it discusses the critically and commercially successfully British film Bend it Like Beckham within the contexts of 'Blair's babes', 'girl power' and 'Cool Britannia'.

TV's Next Season?

Abstract: For those of us who attended the Second International Television Studies Conference (ITSC) in London in 1986, the 2005 SCMS conference (held in the same building at the University of London Institute of Education) evoked an eerie wave of deja vu. Talking with friends I met at the ITSC, I recalled how formative that gathering was for TV and cultural studies. The sense of TV ghosts lurking at the 2005 SCMS conference was palpable. Although I admit to some personal nostalgia for that "Golden Age" of TV studies, I think the earlier moment of television scholarship did its work, and now there are different things to do. In one respect, television scholarship is changing because TV itself is so different from what it was in the past. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the increasing commercialization of public-service/state-run systems, the rise of multichannel cable and global satellite delivery, multinational conglomerates, Internet convergence, changes in regulatory policies and ownership rules, the advent of high-definition TV, technological changes in screen design, digital video recorders, and new forms of media competition-as well as new forms of programming (e.g., reality TV) and scheduling practices (e.g., year-long seasons or multiplexing)-have all transformed the practice we call watching TV. This does not mean all of television is suddenly unrecognizable-indeed, familiarity and habit continue to be central to the TV experience-but it does mean that television's past is recognizably distinct from its present. In the wake of these changes, much of the literature in television studies now seems out of sync with the object it aims to describe. When teaching the seminal books and essays of television studies, I often notice that my students object to aesthetic/cultural theories that were developed to explain terrestrial broadcast systems and pre-VCR TV sets. Although classic texts such as Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form still have great explanatory value, today's television systems demand new inquiries and theories.' To be sure, television studies in the humanities has always been a hybrid, interdisciplinary venture, drawing on fields of inquiry that often were at odds with one another. As it developed in the 1970s and 1980s in the Anglophone university and publishing industry, television studies drew upon at least five critical paradigms: (1) the "mass society" critique associated with the Frankfurt School and postwar intellectuals such as Dwight MacDonald; (2) a textual tradition (to borrow John Hartley's term2) associated with literary and film theory and, by the late 1970s, with feminist theories of spectatorship; (3) a journalistic tradition associated especially with theater criticism (in the United States, this tradition formed a canon of Golden Age programming); (4) quantitative and qualitative mass communications research on audiences and content; and (5) cultural studies approaches to media and their audiences. Although

Homologies of Space: Text and Spectatorship in All-Male Adult Theaters

Abstract: This article examines spectatorship in all-male adult theaters through an adaptation of the work of Siegfried Kracauer, a reading of Jerry Douglas's film The Back Row (1972), and ethnographic research on three prominent adult cinemas in the United States.

Cinema and the Civilizing Process: Rethinking Violence in the World War II Combat Film

Abstract: This essay proposes an alternative critical approach to the "violence" of the World War II combat film. Guiding this approach is the idea of a "civilizing process" that attends both to specific representations in war films and to the institutional role of cinema in socializing and regulating individual behavior. The theoretical grounding here is the sociological work of Norbert Elias, whose major study, The Civilizing Process, was first published in 1939.

The Bad Object: Television in the American Academy

Abstract: work, but there was something about sitting in the living room, knowing that something almost dangerous was taking place on the screen, that others sensed it too, and that they were reacting very differently. It was almost more important to feel that tension-while all present remained silent-for as long as possible. Television still has this power. I watch several hours of TV almost every night, almost always dramas, and find myself moved and enlightened, annoyed and disgusted, angered and delighted. In early March 2005, I turned to Sara Newcomb, who watches with me and whose judgment I trust implicitly, and said of an episode of Boston Legal, "That's the best episode of television I've seen in years and the best script by David E. Kelly I can remember in some time." She agreed and we began a conversation. It wasn't simply "an episode" we talked about, or even a program or a writer-producer. It was television. I am unconcerned with whether one writes about episodes or series, genres or schedules, industry or policy, TiVos or cable, European public-service broadcasts, or economic shifts. I am concerned that we ask questions that help explain to others why television continues to be so important. That is what I look for when I read new work. That is just about all I care about, and if I do not find those critical questions, I stop reading. I enjoy being able to help make choices that somehow address the larger social and cultural constructs that surround us. In today's richly shattered condition, it is very hard to conceive of a writing and teaching strategy that allows one to touch and tap all the intersecting forces that come into play in any given question related to television. It is harder still to pose the truly major questions. But that is certainly what we should do.

"Military Enlightenment" for the Masses: Generic and Cultural Intermixing in South Korea's Golden Age War Films

Abstract: Although officially categorized as "military enlightenment" and "anticommunist" by the Park Chung Hee regime, the war films directed by Yi Man-hŭi (Lee Man-hee)—one of the most important auteurs in South Korea's cinematic Golden Age of the 1960s—transcend formulaic genre constraints and deserve special attention for their humanistic approach to the Korean War.

Imagining and Promoting the Small-Town Theater

Abstract: This essay examines the small-town theater as business strategy, local institution, and culturally resonant myth in the early 1930s, focusing on trade press discourse and a series of stories published in the Saturday Evening Post that concern the operation of a movie theater in a small Indiana town.

In Focus: The Place of Television Studies

Abstract: This In Focus, on the current state of television and new media studies, was inspired by two recent landmarks in the history of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). The first was the second anniversary of the decision by the membership to change the organization's name to affirm its support for scholarship in radio, television, and digital media. The change marked the culmination of a long campaign among television scholars and others within SCMS to recognize its members' expanded intellectual terrain. Despite the name change, however, the organization's official publication, Cinema Journal, still receives relatively few manuscript submissions devoted to nonfilm topics. While there are probably many reasons for the low proportion of television-and new media-related submissions (some beyond the journal's control), the editors hoped that devoting an In Focus to television and new media would underscore the journal's commitment to providing a venue for the best emerging scholarship in the field. The second occasion for this In Focus section was the success of the 2005 SCMS conference, held at the University of London's Institute of Education. In addition to being the first SCMS conference convened outside North America, a record number of panels and papers addressed nonfilm topics. Furthermore, the London venue, which helped attract an unprecedented number of European scholars to the conference, also reinforced the international nature of television studies, old and new. As television studies emerged out of the 1980s cross-Atlantic confluence of film studies, political economy, feminism, and cultural studies, among the important venues for new scholarship were the four international television studies conferences organized between 1984 and 1991 by the British Film Institute and the University of London's Institute of Education. As Lynn Spigel notes in her essay here, that those conferences and the 2005 SCMS conference were held at the same venue prompted reflection on the past two decades of television studies and on the future of the field.

Restaging the War: The Deer Hunter and the Primal Scene of Violence

Abstract: The Deer Hunter's controversial representation of the Vietnam War reveals how violence figures an imaginary relationship between the American subject and its Oriental other. This article examines the film's reception and relationship to media images of the war, particularly Eddie Adams's photograph Saigon Execution.

"Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes": The Triangle Film Corporation and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture

Abstract: Genteel culture failed to provide an effective model for the development of the early American film industry. The history of the Triangle Film Corporation exemplifies the conflict between highbrow ideals and commercial necessity and shows how consumer values transformed the aesthetic and ethical standards of the genteel middle class.

Yongzheng Dynasty and Chinese Primetime Television Drama

Abstract: This essay contextualizes the phenomenal success, in the late 1990s, of the Chinese primetime television drama Yongzheng Dynasty. It provides a for- mal analysis of the show from a comparative perspective and discusses its role in cultivating Chinese primetime drama as an economically viable and a culturally signifi cant enterprise.

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies: Jane Campion's The Piano

Abstract: Jane Campion's film The Piano (1993) opens an uncanny space in mainstream movies where cinematic enunciation intersects with the linguistic and psychoanalytic innovations of the last half-century. This article presents a glimpse into the traces (semios) of FEMININITY as latent extra-Symbolic discourse in Campion's film.

Back Projection: Visualizing Past and Present Europe in Zentropa

Abstract: This article analyzes Lars von Trier's film Zentropa (1991), arguing that it uses cinematic space to articulate Europe's historical and geopolitical spaces. Of particular interest are the film's intertextuality, its layering of superimposed images, and the relationships that it suggests exist between East and West, postwar and post-Wall, Germany and Europe.

Some Like It Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity

Abstract: This essay employs psychoanalytic theory to identify a fetishistic imperative in the perfect crime that Walter Neff endeavors to commit in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. By favoring ongoing manipulation over goal attainment and satisfaction, Walter Neff engages in a virtuoso cover-up that represents a paradigmatic noir deception, inviting viewers to fantasize that there may always be "more than meets the eye."

Le bonimenteur « rouge » : Retour sur la question de l’oralité à propos du cas soviétique

Abstract: A partir de l’etude d’un cas (l’accompagnement oral des films dans les annees 1920 et 1930 en Union sovietique, a la campagne et dans les clubs ouvriers), l’article propose une reflexion sur la notion d’oralite au cinema. Le materiel presente permet egalement de penser l’articulation entre histoire du cinema et histoire sociale et politique. Enfin, ce cas permet de jeter un nouvel eclairage sur les pratiques culturelles des premieres annees du realisme socialiste.

Archéologie du cinéma : de l’histoire à l’épistémologie

Abstract: Dans les histoires du cinema, l’etude des dispositifs de vision est envisagee sous l’angle du « pre-cinema ». Or l’interrogation developpee ici tente de deplacer la perspective d’une histoire genealogique vers une epistemologie d’inspiration foucaldienne, accordant au cinema un role de modelisateur. Cette hypothese est confrontee a des travaux — principalement ceux de F. A. Kittler, M. Milner et J. Crary — qui abordent les dispositifs de vision, dont le cinematographe, a partir de presupposes theoriques comparables. Le dialogue avec ces auteurs conduira a redefinir la notion de « scheme epistemique », ou episteme, et montrera la necessite de combiner l’analyse des discours et celle des dispositifs dans la multiplicite des traits qui les caracterisent.

"Oh, I See.. . . ": The Birds and the Culmination of Hitchcock's Hyper-Romantic Vision

Abstract: This essay reads Alfred Hitchcock's thriller The Birds (1963) in the context of literary romanticism. The film reveals a debt to the romantic interest in a natural world that overpowers rational calculation and causality. Additionally, the film critiques educational practices that limit vision by imposing a false order on the sublime chaos of nature.

"Right and Wrong; That's [Not] All There Is to It!": Young Mr. Lincoln and American Law

Abstract: This essay draws on historiographic and anthropological models to explore the ways in which assumptions about the law may be deployed in works of mainstream cinema. Using Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) as an example, it argues that potentially conflicting legal paradigms can be reconciled through filmic narrative.

Itinéraires : le cinéma et la photographie à l’épreuve de l’histoire

Abstract: Sous le signe de l’ecriture de l’histoire, l’auteure revisite ici ses travaux successifs consacres au cinema. Elle evoque d’abord la question des usages cinematographiques du passe a travers le concept de « film palimpseste », puis revient sur deux axes structurants de l’un de ses ouvrages : les modes d’ecriture de l’histoire par les actualites filmees consacrees a la Liberation, et les enjeux de la migration et du reemploi des sequences d’archives tournees par les Allies lors de la liberation des camps nazis. Partant enfin de l’exemple de la photographie dite de la rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv, la derniere partie de l’article pose les jalons d’un nouveau chantier de recherche consacre a l’histoire des regards et des imaginaires collectifs.

Turn Off TV Studies

Abstract: Long before the emergence of televisual appliances and services, people engaged in the study of television by fantasizing about the transmission of image and sound across space. Richard Whittaker Hubbell made the point in 1942, when he published a book entitled 4000 Years of Television. Television even has its own patron saint, Clare of Assisi, a teen runaway from the thirteenth century who was canonized because of her bedridden vision of a midnight mass cast upon a wall. Centuries later (in 1958), Pius XII declared this to have been the first broadcast.1

Radical Sissies and Stereotyped Fairies in Laurie Lynd's The Fairy Who Didn't Want to Be a Fairy Anymore

Abstract: Laurie Lynd's fi lm The Fairy Who Didn't Want to Be a Fairy Anymore (1992) examines the cultural mechanisms of normalization and masculinization in contemporary heterocentrist society. This article compares Lynd's essentialist ap- proach to sexual identifi cation, camp subculture, and the economy of sissyness and body politics with Hans Christian Andersen's tragic story "The Little Mermaid" and with Tim Burton's romantic fantasy Edward Scissorhands (1990).