Showing papers on "Film genre published in 2014"

An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture

Abstract: Popular cinema - the Hollywood system popular cinema - Hollywood narrative and film genres the gangster film the horror film film noir popular television - citizenship, consumerism, and television in the UK the television audience popular televsion genres popular television and post-modernism.

Warriors: Cinematic ontologies of the Bosnian war

Abstract: This article analyses the British TV drama Warriors (1999), investigating military masculinities and their cinematic attachments to specific nationhoods (British, Serb, Muslim, Croat). The author’s main argument is that Warriors engages in a negotiation of ontological differences through production of military masculinities, situated within specific time–space coordinates. The story of the war is told using the classical war movie genre, underpinned by a tripartite gendered discourse that links feminization, victimhood and peace, on the one side, with two kinds of military masculinities, on the other side: first, the heroic-moral-military masculinity of the protector and defender (UK peacekeepers) and second, the vicious-ethnic-military masculinity of the ‘local’ men (Serb and Croat paramilitary forces). As the drama’s characters stand for the specific symbolic geographies and histories, we see different ontological worlds appearing. Among them Bosnia – represented through viciousness of local masculiniti...

Thinking the Everyday: Genre, Form, Fiction

Abstract: EVERYDAY LIFE”—“the everyday,” “the quotidian”—has emerged as one of the most productive categories in recent literary and cultural studies. The notion nevertheless remains stubbornly resistant to definition as theme, paradigm or conceptual scheme. The everyday is a boundary concept that makes visible the intersections of the literary field with other domains—specifically the relation of literature to modes of social scientific inquiry—while also confronting us with the question of the specificity of literature. How does literature, as literature, illuminate our understanding of daily life? Conversely, what does an emphasis on everydayness bring to our analysis of literature and literary thought? The current preoccupation with interdisciplinarity carries the danger of defending literature only insofar as it is really something else. If literature thinks the everyday by resembling anthropology, sociology or ethnography, then the literary dimension may be reduced to a mere aesthetic residue, or become an alibi for methodological imprecision. The appeal to the everyday leaves open the question of literary form, while implicitly favoring certain approaches to the real. The following pages aim to reassert the specificity of literary approaches to the everyday, while also acknowledging that the ethnographic impulse has reconfigured the realm of literary thought—at least in the French context—since the 1980s. My aim is not to draw firm disciplinary or generic boundaries, but rather to bring into focus the varied formal resources of literature for representing and evaluating various spheres of human activity. I will consider some key texts that fall into two main thematic categories: the public space of the metro and the private space of the home. Within this division, three axes of analysis emerge: the problem of the “ethnographic” gaze, the role of literary form, and the possibilities of fiction.

New Korean cinema: Mourning to regeneration

Abstract: The past two decades saw Korean cinema establishing itself as one of the most vibrant national cinemas in the world. Scholars have often sought clues in democratization in the early 1990s. Yet, the overall condition of Korean cinema had remained hardly promising until the late 1990s, which urges us to rethink the euphoria over democratization. In an effort to find a better account for its stunning and provocative revival, this dissertation challenges the custom of associating the resurgence of Korean cinema with democratization and contends that Korean cinema has gained its novelty and vitality, above all, by confronting the abortive nature of democratic transitions. The overarching concern of this study is thus elucidating the piquant tastes of the thematics and the styles Korean cinema has developed to articulate public discontents with recent historical changes. Chapter one revisits the New Wave era (the late 1980s to the early 1990s) and employs the notion of ssitkim (mourning) to probe how New Wave filmmakers maneuvered between legacies of the democracy movement and public/industrial demands and between historical trauma and rapid changes in the wake of democratization. Chapter two discusses Korean cinema’s reorientations in the second half of the 1990s through films by Lee Chang-dong and Hong Sang-soo. Lee’s investment in the non-linear time narrative offers a notable instance of renegotiations over national history at a time of troubled historical transition. Hong’s rediscovery of everyday life without good sense and depth presents an eloquent commentary on the post-epic milieu. Chapter three adopts Deleuze’s notion of the originary to explain how the revenge narrative and the theme of violence in Park Chan-wook’s films provide a significant critique of the democratized and neo-liberalizing milieu where the faculty of action becomes further frustrated. Chapter four looks to the Manchurian Western, a vernacular hybrid film genre, to investigate how the Western has been integral part of sociocultural formations in South Korea and thereby to demonstrate the need to step beyond restrictive frameworks such as historical and cultural authenticity for a greater understanding of the complex dynamic in transnational uses of popular genres.

Toward a science of science fiction: Applying quantitative methods to genre individuation

Abstract: What is a genre? What distinguishes a genre like science fiction from other genres? We convert texts to data and answer these questions by demonstrating a new method of quantitative literary analysis. We state and test directional hypotheses about contents of texts across the science fiction, mystery, and fantasy genres using psychometrically validated word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We also recruit the work of traditional genre theorists in order to test humanists’ interpretations of genre. Since Darko Suvin’s theory is among the few testable definitions of science fiction given by literary scholars, we operationalize and test it. Our project works toward developing a model of science fiction, and introduces a new method for the interdisciplinary study of literature in which interpretations of literary scholars can be put to the test.

Automatic Movie Posters Classification into Genres

Abstract: A person can quickly grasp the movie genre (drama, comedy, cartoons, etc.) from a poster, regardless of short observation time, clutter and variety of details. Bearing this in mind, it can be assumed that simple properties of a movie poster should play a significant role in automated detection of movie genres. Therefore, visual features based on colors and structural cues are extracted from poster images and used for poster classification into genres.

'Nothing but the Truth': Genre, Gender and Knowledge in the US Television Crime Drama 2005-2010

Abstract: Over the five year period 2005-2010 the crime drama became one of the most produced genres on American prime-time television and also one of the most routinely ignored academically. This particular cyclical genre influx was notable for the resurgence and reformulating of the amateur sleuth; this time remerging as the gifted police consultant, a figure capable of insights that the police could not manage. I term these new shows ‘consultant procedurals’. Consequently, the genre moved away from dealing with the ills of society and instead focused on the mystery of crime. Refocusing the genre gave rise to new issues. Questions are raised about how knowledge is gained and who has the right to it. With the individual consultant spearheading criminal investigation, without official standing, the genre is re-inflected with issues around legitimacy and power. The genre also reengages with age-old questions about the role gender plays in the performance of investigation. With the aim of answering these questions one of the jobs of this thesis is to find a way of analysing genre that accounts for both its larger cyclical, shifting nature and its simultaneously rigid construction of particular conventions. Building on the work of Jason Mittell this thesis sets out to engage with the way genres manage to lay claim to diversity while maintaining an ineffable quality of recognisability. In order to do this the thesis in the main is a case study of six different shows from across the genre: Bones, Lie to Me, The Mentalist, Psych, Ghost Whisperer and Medium. Through narrative textual analysis of both the shows and their ancillary and para-texts a case is made for additions to Mittell’s work. I posit a theory based on a continuum of graduated articulation. This is a way of mapping conventions prevalent in a genre without reducing them to a selection of identical aesthetic or narrative tropes. As part of this the method re-centralises narrative in the understanding of television genre.

Overlooking the Evidence: Gender, genre and the Woman Detective in Hollywood Film and Television

Abstract: The investigating woman, the female detective, or the lady crime solver has poses a productive problem throughout the history of Hollywood film and television Investigating women fundamentally disrupt the scopic and narrative regimes upon which Hollywood genre films depend I argue that the investigating woman changes the way that the detective genre operates in four distinct modalities: the Adventurer, the Avenger, the Comedic and the Affective Each mode articulates the figure through sometimes unlikely generic combinations And in each mode the investigator performs femininity with a different valence The female investigator thus becomes a space to explore gender’s transformative effect on genre, different kinds of looking, and gender as performance I examine what happens when films fail to evoke what Barry Langford calls the “generic unconscious” Genres only work if they are recognized as genres, if they exist with a productive feedback loop between producers, texts and audiences Films featuring women detectives do not activate the semantic and syntactic markers of the detective film They are burdened with the adjectival They are “women” detective films And the “woman” part moves these films, sometimes forcibly, into other generic terrains: the woman’s picture, melodrama, horror, comedy, romance, adventure Each chapter investigates a mode through close reading several transhistoric texts ranging from Sherlock, Jr to Zero Dark Thirty that serve to illustrate the possibilities held within the modality In my conclusion, I test my taxonomy in the laboratory of television where the figure moves through several modes in a single program, sometimes a single episode From 1957’s Decoy to Veronica Mars, this fluidity is both the strength of investigating women in a genre that is powered by novelty, and a sign of the abiding lack of ease a woman who looks creates manifested on the level of genre These modes do not solve the problem of the investigating woman in film, but rather make the problem explicit The modes serve to expose the contours of the problem through the films’ failed attempts to resolve it

Genres as Species and Spaces: Literary and Rhetorical Genre in The Anatomy of Melancholy

Abstract: Contemporary genre theory is dominated by metaphors of evolution and speciation; this article proposes alternate metaphors of spatiality and exchange. A spatial understanding of genre permits more productive interactions between literary and rhetorical genre theory. A reading of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy as a multigenred text suggests some of the potentials of this approach.

The Cultural Politics of Horror Film Criticism

Abstract: This article examines film criticism as a social practice. Specifically, it explores the institutional politics of horror film criticism and the various ways critics of the genre justify their own readings and interpretive discourse. It does so by way of positing a horror film “reading formation,” which serves a critical-institutional function within the film academy, namely, securing academic legitimacy for the genre while shoring up cultural and political distinctions specific to elite modes of analysis. Accordingly, the article argues that three intertextual mechanisms (canonical recycling, political auteurism, and symptomatic interpretation) both condition the appropriation of horror film texts as legitimate objects-to-be-read and work to sustain discursive power relations between scholastically credentialed and “nonexpert” reading subjects.

Genre Matters: A Comparative Study on the Entertainment Effects of 3D in Cinematic Contexts

Abstract: Built upon prior comparative studies of 3D and 2D films, the current project investigates the effects of 2D and 3D on viewers' perception of enjoyment, narrative engagement, presence, involvement, and flow across three movie genres (Action/fantasy vs. Drama vs. Documentary). Through a 2 by 3 mixed factorial design, participants (n = 102) were separated into two viewing conditions (2D and 3D) and watched three 15-min film segments. Result suggested both visual production methods are equally efficient in terms of eliciting people's enjoyment, narrative engagement, involvement, flow and presence, no effects of visual production method was found. In addition, through examining the genre effects in both 3D and 2D conditions, we found that 3D works better for action movies than documentaries in terms of eliciting viewers' perception of enjoyment and presence, similarly, it improves views' narrative engagement for documentaries than dramas substantially. Implications and limitations are discussed in detail.

The adventure screenplay in William Goldman: the playful and the ironic in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride

Abstract: William Goldman is a North American novelist and screenwriter with more than fifty years in his professional career. This article aims to identify Goldman’s personal writing traits by focusing on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, which can be considered the most comprehensive and complete of all his screenplays. Apart from their differences, both scripts reveal the influence of the adventure narrative on William Goldman’s work and reflect the writer’s interest in ironically revising some of the conventions of film genre.

Epic Encounters: The Modernist Long Poem Goes to the Movies

Abstract: Most discussions of modern poetry and cinema center on lyric and the avant-garde, but historical epic film offers rich possibilities for teaching the modernist long poem. Historical epic takes us beyond montage and other editing techniques to the DNA of the long poem — a more is more aesthetic that compiles allusions and expands scope. This essay draws on Vivian Sobchack’s poetics of the film genre and Franco Moretti’s analysis of modern literary epic to identify four tendencies in modern American long poems: urban epic ( The Waste Land ), everyday epic ( The Book of the Dead, Paterson ), romance epic ( Helen in Egypt ), and diasporic epic ( Omeros ). In addition to cross-media comparisons, the essay includes movie posters that undergraduate students made for these long poems.

Locating The Sapphires: transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of an Australian Indigenous musical film

Abstract: This essay discusses transnational dimensions of the Indigenous musical film The Sapphires, based on the true story of an Aboriginal all-girls soul band that entertained American troops in the Vietnam War It suggests that there are strong resonances between the film's story of four young Indigenous women who affirm their Indigenous identity while negotiating their way across national and cultural borders and contemporary Indigenous filmmakers operating in Australia's rapidly internationalizing mainstream screen industry It argues that while the original Sapphires' adopted the American musical genre of soul as a means of breaking free from colonial forms of social restriction and racism, The Sapphires appropriates the film genre of the musical to tell the story of this all-girls group in ways that transpose the musical into an Indigenous cultural realm

Sound Synthesis, Representation and Narrative Cinema in the Transition to Sound (1926-1935)

Abstract: Since the beginnings of western media culture, sound synthesis has played a major role in articulating cultural notions of the fantastic and the uncanny. As a counterpart to sound reproduction, sound synthesis operated in the interstices of the original/copy correspondence and prefigured the construction of a virtual reality through the generation of novel sounds apparently lacking any equivalent with the acoustic world. Experiments on synthetic sound crucially intersected cinema’s transition to synchronous sound in the late 1920s, thus configuring a particularly fertile scenario for the redefinition of narrative paradigms and the establishment of conventions for sound film production. Sound synthesis can thus be viewed as a structuring device of such film genres as horror and science fiction, whose codification depended on the constitution of synchronized sound film. More broadly, sound synthesis challenged the basic implications of realism based on the rendering of speech and the construction of cinematic soundscapes.

Searching for a Feminist Western: The Searchers, The Hired Hand, and The Missing

Abstract: The Western film genre as a whole has traditionally focused on the circumstances and actions directly related almost exclusively to White male protagonists. As a result, in this genre, women's actions are largely ignored by men and their voices are silenced or seemingly are without consequence. Drawing examples from two Alternative Westerns—The Hired Hand [1971] and The Missing [2003]—and the classic Western, The Searchers [1956], to support my argument, I suggest here that for a Western to be considered feminist the plot must constitute a subversion of and a challenge to a mainstream text; the actions of a female protagonist must drive the plot rather than simply provide a reason for actions of the male character or characters; the dialogue of one or more female protagonists must challenge and subvert masculine discourse, as well as convey agency; and meanings must be plural rather than singular.

Bollywood Goes to the Stadium: Gender, National Identity, and Sport Film in Hindi

Abstract: Bollywood gives cinematic substance, form, and historical context to the dream of the nation ...-Grant Farred (72)THE LAST TEN YEARS HAVE WITNESSED the phenomenal expansion of India's unique, Mumbai-based Hindi-language film industry, commonly referred to as Bollywood, Into hitherto-untapped world movie markets. Though popular throughout Asia and even in the Eastern bloc since the 1950s, only recently has Indian film achieved mass popularity in the West. Its recent hegemonic Internationalization can be attributed to a mutually beneficial feedback loop between changing strategies within Bombay's film industry to appeal to Indian diasporic communities abroad, coupled with Bollywood's increased exposure to non-diasporic audiences in Europe and North America (Bhaumik 191; Ganti 3-6; Gehlawat 139; Joshi 41). As Kaushik Bhaumik observes, "the recent twin successes of Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowarikar, 2002) and Devdas (Sanjay Lee la Bhansali, 2001) amongst a relatively substantial crossover audience in the West ensured that the presence of Bombay films has begun to get felt more palpably in the mainstream" (192). In addition to an increased presence on cinema screens, television broadcasts of Bollywood films on specialized channels in the United Kingdom and Canada, as well as the DVD market and Internet streaming services such as Netflix, have allowed access not only to South Asian diasporic audiences but also to Anglo-American viewers who have come to appreciate the sheer entertainment value of an inherently hybrid film genre that combines vibrant rhythmic and melodic music with lavishly choreographed dance numbers, filmed on a variety of studio and location sets, and that depicts exotic urban and rural locations, featuring the romance, adventure, history, and laughter of stunningly attractive and charismatic stars and an array of familiar character actors.Often dismissed precisely because of Its popular entertainment value, Bollywood film can simply no longer be ignored by Western critics; although the body of film scholarship published in English on the Bollywood phenomenon has grown exponentially in the past decade, It remains largely-as Bhaumik observes (192) and Ajay Gehlawat's review of the literature demonstrates (xi-xix, 1-26)-in the hands of Indian or diasporic Indian scholars working in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Mihir Bose argues in his history of Bollywood that whereas Hollywood has stopped growing, Bollywood will only continue to expand Into the Western and world markets (26-27). Not only because of the sheer numbers-the industry produces over a thousand films per year, for fourteen million spectators per day (Bose 26)-Western critics and scholars can no longer dismiss It as childish fantasy for a third world audience or as a throwback derivative of 1930s Flollywood musicals (see Bhaumik 188, 192; Gehlawat 6, 10, 30). The best of contemporary Bollywood, what Tejaswini Ganti calls Its "A-list" (27-28), offers a cultural product that couples visual artistry with self-conscious exploration of generic conventions, dealing with themes essential to an understanding of the postcolonial world.Although a rapidly growing and increasingly diverse audience has overcome the potential linguistic and cultural barriers to acknowledge the pleasures of this postmodern global film genre, film critics and scholars outside the Indian diaspora have only just begun to acknowledge-and analyze-its meanings. This article takes a step in that direction, focusing on a recently snowballing intersection between a genre largely identified with Hollywood-namely, the sport film-and Bollywood. In the following analysis, I examine how sport has been appropriated by filmmakers in Bombay and adapted to the conventions of Hindi film. After an overview documenting its growing presence in Bollywood, I offer a closer analysis of two sport films that feature female, rather than the usual male, sports heroes: ChakDe! …

Unhomely Cinema: Home and Place in Global Cinema

Abstract: Representations of troubled and inhospitable domestic places are a common feature of many cinematic narratives. 'Unhomely Cinema' explores how the unhomely nature of contemporary film narrative provides an insight into what it means to dwell in today's global societies. Providing analyses of a variety of film genres - from Michel Gondry's comedy 'Be Kind Rewind' to Laurent Cantet's eerie suspense thriller 'Time Out' - 'Unhomely Cinema' presents an engaging discussion of some of the most pertinent social and cultural issues involved in the question of 'making home' in contemporary societies.

Of enraged shirts, gyrating gangsters, and farting bullets: Salman Khan and the new Bollywood action film

Abstract: This paper explores a new genre of Bollywood action films spawned by action superstar Salman Khan, focusing specifically on his 2010 hit Dabangg [The Thug]. The paper argues that although touted as an action film, Dabangg plays with the generic conventions of the Bollywood action film, by introducing elements of the carnivalesque into its display of masculinity and violence. In doing so it reinvents the action film as the masti (or fun/playful) film. I begin with a brief history of the Bollywood action film, situating Dabangg both within this larger tradition and also analyzing its departure from it. Next, I argue that Dabangg parodies the fight sequence, a staple of the action film genre, by introducing elements of the carnivalesque – the image of the grotesque body, songs and dances, mimicry of serious rituals and the destabilization of the boundaries between art and life – into the ritualized performance of violence and masculinity, thereby transforming the latter into comedic spectacle. Following this...

Persuasive Visions: Film and Memory:

Abstract: This commentary takes a new look at law and film studies through the lens of film as memory. Instead of describing film as evidence and foreordaining its role in truth-seeking processes, it thinks instead of film as individual, institutional and cultural memory, placing it squarely within the realm of contestability. Paralleling film genres, the commentary imagines four forms of memory that film could embody: memorabilia (cinema verite), memoirs (autobiographical and biographical film), ceremonial memorials (narrative film monuments of a life, person or institution), and mythic memory (dramatic fictional film). Imagining film as memory resituates film’s role in law (procedural, substantive and cultural) as authoritative rhetoric that must be disputed and reappropriated to serve the specific goals of justice.

Saka and the abject: Masculine dominance, the mother and contemporary Malay horror films

Abstract: Malay horror films have made a comeback since the government of Malaysia in 2004 gradually relaxed the ban. Since then, Malaysian cinema has been flooded with horror films, and this causes concern among politicians as they argue that horror films can impede the growth of the mind, as the values perpetuated by horror films are seen to go against the government’s effort to promote scientific and critical thinking among Malaysians. We argue that understanding the current view that consigns this film genre to the feminine side of the binary system, hence, the irrational as opposed to the rational or masculine, is one of the reasons for such concern. Employing Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection in the tradition of feminist psychoanalysis as the theoretical framework, this paper looks at the mother character and her relationship with Saka in a contemporary Malay horror film to reveal the ideological work of such masculine ideology. Saka is a mystical figure that is “invited” into a family and is passed down through the matrilineal line from one generation to the next. We argue that even though Saka is used as an entrapment for female liberatory possibilities, it ironically mirrors the destabilization of masculine dominance. We do this by illustrating how female characters in the genre are typecast and Saka functions as a masculine substitute that reinforces this idea, which ultimately is used toinvestigate female sexuality; hence, playing the typical role of masculine ideological dominance.

Revising the Western Connecting Genre Rituals and American Western Revisionism in TV’s Sons of Anarchy

Abstract: In this article, I analyze the TV show Sons of Anarchy (SOA) and how the cable drama revisits and revises the American Western film genre. I survey ideological contexts and tropes that span Western...

Walk Hard: film parody, biopics and music

Abstract: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Jake Kasdan, 2007) is a parody film that mocks the musical biopic genre. It spoofs the genre through intertextuality and self-reflexivity, utilising elements including reflective music montage, musical integration, puns, stereotyping and running gags, which posits the film in the genres of comedy and musical biopic. This paper utilises the musical biopic structure, as outlined by Babington and Evans (1985), in order to reinforce that each narrative movement in Walk Hard mocks the genre. It is argued that music plays a crucial role in the film as Walk Hard lampoons not only the musical biopic genre but also the music industry at large.

American Genre Film in the French Banlieue: Luc Besson and Parkour

Abstract: This article analyzes the cultural politics of Luc Besson’s recent producing ventures. It argues that his EuropaCorp studio’s three parkour films, Yamakasi (2001), Banlieue 13 (2004), and Banlieue 13: Ultimatum (2009), offer ways to think about how Besson negotiates the competing pressures of Hollywood cinema, a globalizing commercial film industry, and traditionalist conceptions of French cinema. By locating his Cite du Cinema in the marginalized French suburbs and by setting some of its films there, Besson and other contemporary French filmmakers fuse French banlieue culture with American genre formulas to imagine what a commercially viable French popular cinema might look like.

"No Goin' Back": Modernity and the Film Western

Abstract: No Goin’ Back”: Modernity and the Film Western Julie Anne Kohler Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, BYU Master of Arts This thesis is inspired by an ending—that of a cowboy hero riding away, back turned, into the setting sun. That image, possibly the most evocative and most repeated in the Western, signifies both continuing adventure and ever westward motion as well as a restless lack of final resolution. This thesis examines the ambiguous endings and the conditions leading up to them in two film Westerns of the 1950s, George Steven’s Shane (1953) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Fascinatingly, the tension and uncertainty conveyed throughout these films is also characteristic of life in modernity, a connection which has previously gone overlooked. In my analysis, I study the ties between the postwar film Western and the philosophy of modernity to interpret these works in a new light, illuminating their generic context and their understudied philosophic dimensions. This reading highlights these films’ continued relevance, showing how they have enabled creators and audiences to reflect on experiences of modernity in the idiom of the celluloid century.

Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film, and the Articulation of An Ideology

Abstract: Author(s): Gomer, Justin Daniel | Advisor(s): Raiford, Leigh | Abstract: "Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film, and the Articulation of an Ideology," offers a political and cultural biography of the racial ideology of colorblindness from its emergence as a coherent racial ideology in the years after the civil rights movement to its dominant influence in social policy in the 1990s. Most importantly, the project reveals the manner in which colorblindness became the racial project of neoliberalism. This elaboration of colorblindness as an ideology and cultural form is best understood through an examination of film during the period of my study. Beginning in the second-half of the 1970s, Hollywood developed its own set of filmic aesthetics, narratives, and tropes that advocated colorblindness. Moreover, Hollywood was not only central to the articulation of the ideology, it also depended upon colorblindness in the New Hollywood era. In the post-civil rights era, then, colorblindness, neoliberalism, and film are constitutive of and inextricable from one another.The project illustrates three key themes. First, colorblindness is the racial project of neoliberalism. The 1970s were characterized by an anti-government ethos that extended across racial and political lines that neoconservatives used in the 1970s to attack issues like affirmative action and busing as part of a movement intent on dismantling of the welfare state. Out of these struggles emerged a neoliberal notion of "individual" colorblind freedom that neoconservatives, beginning in the mid-seventies, successfully sold as the antidote to the "reverse discrimination" of government mandated "group" rights. The growing popularity of neoliberal economics in the seventies was not merely the result of the seeming failures of Keynesianism to cure stagflation. Instead, the mounting opposition to the "overreach" of the federal government in busing and affirmative action was fundamental in building the appeal of a return to uncompromising laissez faire economics.Secondly, colorblindness, although post-racial in theory, has served as a tool for whites to realign and reconstitute white supremacy within a post-civil rights political correctness. Beginning in the late seventies, white Republicans and moderate Democrats alike used colorblindness to eliminate race-conscious programs intended to promote racial equality. These efforts have only exacerbated racial inequality.Lastly, my dissertation asserts that film served as a key battleground for the culture wars out of which the ideology of colorblindness formed. Yet just as colorblindness needed film to form its cultural cohesion, film needed colorblindness to reinvent itself in the desperate economic times of the post-Classical era. Beginning in the 1970s, movies capitalized upon the volatile racial, social, and economic struggles in the decades after the civil rights movement that shaped colorblindness and have continued to appeal to colorblind sentiments for profit. By the end of the 1980s, Hollywood was increasingly turning to historical dramas that imagined colorblind white heroes at the center of black freedom struggles--emancipation and the civil rights movement, specifically. And by the 1990s, entirely new colorblind film genres, most notably in what I term the "Teacher Film," had emerged.