American Film Research Articles

A Study of Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis: A Case of My People, My Country

In the context of globalization, audio-visual works produced by ever-evolving information technology provide a quick and convenient channel for bridging cultural divides and communicating with people from all over the world. People harness these productions not only to satisfy their own entertainment needs but also to gain information about other cultures. As manifold cultures and races become increasingly interconnected, the need for intercultural communication is particularly urgent, and with abundant European and American films and cultural productions taking over the world, the significance of subtitle translation cannot be understated. On the surface, subtitle translation transforms one language into another and puts it on screen at the same time. However, at a deeper level, subtitling involves a wide range of cultural and social contexts in both the source and target languages. Translators need to not only use their translation skills to select words and sentences, but also have a deep understanding of the social and cultural aspects of both languages. This is the only way to smoothly accomplish the language transfer and help the audience accurately make sense of the meaning of the words in the film. At the same time, China has entered a new era and is facing unprecedented changes in a century. Only by spreading its own culture, promoting the achievements of excellent Chinese civilization, and gaining widespread international recognition will it be able to stand firm and progress against the tide of globalization. However, even though Chinese film and television products are constantly being produced and innovated every year, there are certain shortcomings in the dissemination of film and television works and the study of subtitle translation. This thesis takes Professor Zhang Delu’s theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis as its perspective and selects the subtitle corpus of the film My People, My Country, which was released around National Day in 2019 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, as the object of study. Based on the integrated framework of multimodal discourse analysis, the author carefully selects typical examples from My People, My Country to analyze the effects of multimodal discourse analysis on subtitle translation at the cultural, contextual, content, and expression levels, and investigates how different modalities work together to vividly convey the meaning of the film’s discourse. In conclusion, multimodal discourse analysis theory has injected new momentum into the study of subtitle translation applications, breaking away from the traditional monomodal and symbolic studies and contributing to the international dissemination of more domestic audio-visual cultural products.

“Making-of”: Latin American Cinema Performs Itself

This essay reviews the following documentaries: Años luz. Dir. Manuel Abramovich. Prod. Rei Cine, El Deseo, Bananeira Filmes. Argentina-Spain-Brazil, 2017. 72 minutes. Distributed by Grasshopper Film. Como el cielo después de llover. Dir. Mercedes Gaviria. Prod. Gentil, Invasión Cine. Colombia-Argentina, 2020. 73 minutes. Distributed by Pragda. El Father como sí mismo. Dir. Mo Scarpelli. Prod. Ardimages, Rake Films, La Faena Films. Venezuela-Italy-United Kingdom-United States, 2020. 105 minutes. Distributed by Grasshopper Film. Rodaje. Dir. Samuel Moreno Álvarez. Prod. Monociclo Cine, Trópico Atómico Films. Colombia, 2023. 42 minutes.

Милиция/полиция в (пост)советской массовой культуре (к исторической иконографии власти)

The idea of the police as a “good order” from the Polizeiwissenschaft of absolutism was developed in the biopolitical model of caring for the population of the Modern era, engaged in ensuring safety and well-being. Being a product of mass society, the modern state has focused on influencing public opinion. In the XIX–XX centuries, there was a counter-movement of police supervision and art which gave rise to ‘police aesthetics’. Cinematography was an effective means of forming a desirable image of the Soviet militia in the post-war period of normalization of public life. By contributing to the Soviet myth of developed socialism, militia cinema contributed to a screen-to-life transfer of a new norm of trust between representatives of power and citizens. This constructivist cinema involved the viewer in the cinematic reality by likening them to the main character, a militiaman who acts as a moral guide. In addition to forming the image of the ‘familial militia’, intellectual militia cinema—with its focus on professionalism—is actively developing. The most popular version of the latter is militia cinema that thematizes the moral rightness of militia officers fighting crime in the name of Soviet citizens. Involvement in the cinematic reality through assimilation, novelty, memory, and imagination included the romanticization of the historical events of the revolution. Militia cinema was inverted during the years of the perestroika. It exploited the effect of novelty associated with the viewer's immersion in emerging market relations. The viewer's interest was focused on the wrong, criminal, side of public life. Crime is romanticized, the militia is stigmatized. From constructing the myth of cooperation between the government and the population, militia cinema moves on to deconstructing the myth, achieving an effect of denigration. The fashion for American cinema brings elements of action, thriller, horror. The viewer is no longer included in the imperious project of transforming reality; they are attracted by the illusion, the spectacle. The latest police cinema, overcoming total deconstructionism, is busy reconstructing the spirit of Soviet militia cinema in modern settings. Oscillating between the intention to generate positive images of the police and the demonstration of the “truth of life”, modern police cinema contains the natal shoots of a new cinema in which the image of the police is important for the normalization of public life.

Фонтан Наяд у кінострічці «Римські канікули» (1953, США)

The author develops the process of forming professionally oriented foreign language educational space in the university conditions through the prism of the film "Roman Holiday" (1953, USA), in this way focused attention on studying foreign language in higher school. This paper describes the Fountain of the Naiads located on the Republic Square in Rome. Remembered a movie Roman Holiday (1953) filmed entirely in Rome, becoming one of the first American films to be made in Italy. It is worth visiting the square, Rome, and indeed Italy that just to enjoy the architecture of the fountain. Presented the Naiads in Greek and Roman Mythology, Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, Homer's The Odyssey, the tale of Echo and Narcissus as one of the most famous in all of classical mythology and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Shown Naiads in Art and Music by composer Sibelius.

A Modern Peep at the South Seas: Melville s Presence in some Hollywood Films from 1920s to the 1940s

This paper will argue that alongside Melville’s literary reputation, Hollywood, and its associated industries (advertising, trade and journalistic press), produced a pop-culture image of him. It will analyze two movies, Last of the Pagans (MGM, 1935) and Omoo-Omoo the Shark God (Esla Pictures, 1949), which were publicized as adaptations of Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) respectively but have on the surface little or nothing to do, thematically or plotwise, with their purported source texts. They can be linked back to the novels through the use of a Melville meme that recreates pre-colonial life in the South Seas, situating viewers within a taxidermic viewing position. Overall, scholars have disregarded these movies as having little to offer Melville studies, but this article will consider them and their many forms of publicity to demonstrate that they can give scholars a glance at Melville’s popular reputation as adventurer and romancer, and it will suggest that, as a national figure, Melville was not the exclusive property of academia but a contested site for the construction of national ideals. The paper will adopt a combination of approaches from film history, fluid text theory, and adaptation studies to analyze Melville’s image across mass media outfits.

Monsters or Victims An Ecocritical Reading of Samson and Sally and Dot and the Whale, Retellings of Moby Dick

The paper aims to explore two animations, Samson and Sally (1984) and Dot and the Whale (1986), through the lens of zoocriticism (Huggan and Tiffin) and ecocinematic analysis to show how the directors have presented the alternative version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in order to showcase the crises of cetaceans like whale in the present scenario of the global warming, pollution and various anthropogenic damages. Unlike many popular Hollywood movies, these two animated films do not portray whales as monsters. In many popular Hollywood ventures, we can see the representations of vengeful bloodthirsty sea creatures like sharks and whales causing shipwrecks and killing humans, just like Moby Dick did in Melville. However, Samson and Sally and Dot and the Whale propose a different version of Moby Dick, where Moby Dick is portrayed as a saviour of the whale race under the threats of whaling, oil spills, and rising temperature. Samson and Sally is a bildungsroman as it depicts the journey of a young whale in search of the mythical Moby Dick who can only save his clan from whalers who have killed his mother and other relatives. Dot and the Whale, on the other hand, points such issues like the beaching of whales and their exploitation for oil and other resources. These two animations have presented an accurate picture where animals are not presented as monsters but rather victims of human greed. Although these animations are in the anthropomorphised version, they are created to raise human awareness to protect cetaceans and marine life.

Role of dysphemisms in the English-language film space

The topicality of undertaken research is determined by the constantly changing social norms in modern society, which are reflected in the cinematographic world. Cinematography provides a golden opportunity to consider and analyze a range of unique linguistic phenomena. The major purpose of the present paper is to study the phenomenon of dysphemisation in the English-speaking film space based on the set of the following films in English: Green Book by the American film director, Peter J. Farrelly, the screen adaptation of the autobiography 12 Years a Slave by Terrence S. McQueen, the well-known film The Help by Tate Taylor and the biographical drama Hidden Figures by Theodore Melfi. In the films the main storyline is generally based on the aspect of discrimination against persons of certain racial backgrounds and women, based on the policy of the United States of America during the infamous period of slavery (XVII–XIX centuries) and the historical era of segregation (XIX–XX centuries). During the study theoretical methods (analysis and synthesis) and empirical methods (observation and description) were used. As a result of the conducted study, the classification of dysphemistic lexical units was determined in terms of author’s intentions (dysphemisms with an emphasis on a different skin color; dysphemisms-comparisons with animals, plants and inanimate objects; dysphemisms-designations of social status; dysphemisms expressing gender discrimination), as well as their role and reason for use in the selected set of films – demonstration of a biased, cruel attitude towards recipients and also a reflection of the socio-cultural environment that encompassed US society during the historical time period under study.

When ‘atypical’ is the new typical: a critical analysis of the representation of virginity among neurodivergent men characters in TV series

ABSTRACT This article critically reflects on a television trend that remains poorly documented, namely that of representing male virginity as being caused by a form of neurodivergence. As part of an interdisciplinary research project on sexually inexperienced emerging adults (SIEA) in North American films and TV series, a textual analysis has been conducted for four TV series portraying sexually inexperienced men on the spectrum (The Good Doctor, Atypical, The Big Bang Theory, L’Heure bleue). Our research shows that this tendency to associate men’s sexual inexperience with autism is an important issue that reveals the persistence of gender and ableist norms in TV series. For instance, TV series contribute to the reproduction of the stereotype that a man on the spectrum is de facto sexually inexperienced, and then prioritize a “virginity loss” narrative. Characters also acquire maturity after their first sexual encounter, resulting in increased masculine capital. Considering that such series seek to represent neurodiversity, the lack of diversity when it comes to representing sexual inexperience is questioning. The fact that narratives invariably allow neurodivergent men to gain sexual experience seems to reinforce the cultural norm that sexual activity is mandatory, especially for adult men.

Cultural Solidification and Group Marginalization in Hollywood Films

Cultural Solidification and Group Marginalization in Hollywood Films

OVERLOOKING THE TRANSFORMATION OF VALUES THROUGH THE TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN REMAKES MOVIES

This study explores the transformation of values in transnational remake movies, focusing on their popularity and the incorporation of new elements to suit target audience preferences. An analysis of The Lake House, a remake of the Korean film Il Mare, reveals shifts in values and the integration of American cultural aspects. These changes stem from audience demands, business considerations, and Hollywood's global influence. Remakes require more than simply reproducing original content; they involve capturing cultural nuances from both versions. Utilizing Hall's representation approach and qualitative methods, the study assesses transnational remakes and their conveyed values. The research identifies shifts from South Korean values to those of the American target market, such as the transition from interdependence to self-reliance and a preference for directness, assertion, and rationality. The American film industry should carefully evaluate the suitability of movies for its audiences, recognizing changes in scenes and messages. The establishment of American values in remakes is influenced by the success of original films and their formulas. As transnational products, movies must be repackaged for target audiences. The industry faces complex processes to align the values of popular films with audience tastes while maintaining the essence of original works.

A taxonomy for human social perception: Data-driven modeling with cinematic stimuli.

Every day, humans encounter complex social situations that need to be encoded effectively to allow interaction with others. Yet, principles for organizing the perception of social features from the external world remain poorly characterized. In this large-scale study, we investigated the principles of social perception in dynamic scenes. In the primary data set, we presented 234 movie clips (41 min) containing various social situations to 1,140 participants and asked them to evaluate the presence of 138 social features in each clip. Analyses of the social feature ratings revealed that some features are perceived categorically (present or absent) and others continuously (intensity) and simple social features requiring immediate response are perceived most consistently across participants. To establish the low-dimensional perceptual organization for social features based on movies, we used principal coordinate analysis and consensus clustering for the feature ratings. These dimension reduction analyses revealed that the social perceptual structure can be modeled with eight main dimensions and that behaviorally relevant perceptual categories emerge from these main dimensions. This social perceptual structure generalized from the perception of unrelated Hollywood movie clips to the perception of a full Finnish movie (70 min) and to the perception of static images (n = 468) and across three independent sets of participants (n = 2,254). Based on the results, we propose eight basic dimensions of social perception as a model for rapid social perception where social situations are perceived along eight orthogonal perceptual dimensions (most importantly emotional valence, empathy vs. dominance, and cognitive vs. physical behavior). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Metabolic Cinema: From Hollywood to Socialist China

Drawing on Karl Marx’s ecological concepts of the “metabolic rift” and the “emancipation of senses”, this paper explores an alternative ecocinema that integrates the ecological with the social and the economic. Early Hollywood films, such as Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and The Good Earth (1937), represent the metabolic rift in human relationships as a byproduct of the metabolic rift with nature created in the process of urbanization; hence, they can be regarded as precursors to an alternative ecocinema, which I refer to as “metabolic cinema”. The Story of the Golden Bell (Jinling Zhuan), a comedy film produced during the Chinese Great Leap Forward in 1958, offers an intriguing case for socialist metabolic cinema as a multisensory medianature that participates in and facilitates the metabolic process between humans and nature, as well as the social metabolism among humans, despite the period’s notorious ecological record. The film not only consciously moves away from the visual-centric model associated with capitalist consumerism by using the aural to rectify the once-aberrant visual but also demonstrates how romantic love, as one of the human senses, must be emancipated along with other senses through denouncing utilitarianism and commercialism and, subsequently, returning to need-based labor as the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between humans and nature.

Preserving Female Agency in the Gaze: An Analysis of The Silence of the Lambs

Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published in 1975, has become a foundational text in cinema and feminist criticism. Mulvey introduces the concept of the “male gaze,” arguing that traditional Hollywood cinema is constructed from a patriarchal perspective that objectifies women. This camera gaze influences the portrayal of female characters and affects how audiences engage with narratives. Mulvey employs concepts from psychoanalysis, particularly from Freud and Lacan, to explain how films generate visual pleasure through identification and desire. She discusses how viewers, especially male viewers, derive pleasure from the visual representation of women, reinforcing patriarchal structures within narrative cinema.

Public History: Infrastructure, Climate Change, and Radical Action.

This essay reviews the 2022 American film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, examining its significance for historians of technology. The film highlights do-it-yourself technologies, the experiences of marginalized technology users, and the environmental consequences of infrastructures. Central to the discussion is the film's dystopian portrayal of infrastructure, which drives the characters to take extreme measures, such as the bombing of an oil pipeline, to raise awareness about climate change. While the film might seem to advocate for radical action, this review suggests that it offers historians an opportunity to engage with broader social issues and reflect on the methodological challenges within the history of technology.

Inne kobiety: lethal lesbians i lesbian chic – oblicza i ewolucje wizerunku homoseksualnych kobiet w hollywoodzkich thrillerach lat dziewięćdziesiątych

The article showcases different images and aspects of lesbian characters in 1990s, with special focus on the media landscapes and Hollywood neo-noir thrillers. Stereotypical themes like lethal lesbians and their impact in American cinema are tied with early 90s trends of media portrayal of lesbian chic. The author also highlights the various restrictions of lesbian characters in mainstream cinema, that allows only the visually attractive images of homosexual body to be shown on the screen. Whole article also depicts evolutions of homosexual’s images in 90s media and cinema, the role of male gaze and society fears after the previous homophobic decade in these cultural constructions.

Reconstruction of Gender Roles and Female Self-Identity: A Case Study of the Film Kill Bill

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill was released in North America in 2003. The storyline is relatively simple, revolving around Beatrix, a former professional assassin in the underworld, who, upon discovering her pregnancy, decides to abandon her past life of violence and bloodshed and settle down as the owner of a video store. Bill, her former lover and boss, dissatisfied with Beatrix's silent withdrawal from the "Vipers" organization, leads his criminal associates to massacre the wedding rehearsal, leaving no one alive except the protagonist. After miraculously surviving and lying in a hospital for four years, Beatrix embarks on a journey to exact revenge on her enemies. Undoubtedly, Kill Bill is often labeled as a revenge-driven and violent Hollywood film. However, beyond its violent exterior, the film reveals deeper feminist perspectives: it challenges traditional male authority, reflects women's resistance to the constraints on personal and emotional freedom, and highlights the awakening of modern female consciousness.

The Impact of Streaming Platforms on Hollywood Film Financing: A Financial and Data-Driven Analysis of Disruptions and Strategies in the New Media Landscape

The rapid rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+ has fundamentally disrupted traditional Hollywood film financing models. This paper examines the financial impacts of these platforms on Hollywood's established funding mechanisms, highlighting how they have reshaped revenue streams, investment patterns, and risk management strategies. By leveraging data analytics and financial modelling, this study explores how traditional studios and new media companies have adapted their financing strategies to align with the evolving digital landscape. Additionally, the paper delves into the implications of these shifts for future film production and distribution, offering insights into how data-driven decision-making increasingly influences investment choices in the entertainment industry. Through a comprehensive analysis, this research provides a deeper understanding of the interplay between technology and finance in shaping the future of Hollywood.

Directing treatment of the chase scenes in the American film

مثلت مشاهد الحركة احد المصادر الاساسية في صناعة الفيلم السينمائي لما تتضمنه من خصوصية في بناء اللقطات وطبيعة الانتقالات والربط المونتاجي وغيرها من مصادر الحركة داخل بنية اللقطة السينمائية، وهذا ما لفت انتباه الباحث في تحديد موضوعة البحث التي حملت عنوان: (المعالجة الاخراجية لمشاهد الحركة في الفيلم الروائي) ، الذي استند على مهاد تنظيري من خمسة فصول ، جأت بالنحو الاتي:تناول الفصل الاول (الاطار المنهجي للبحث) وقد اشتمل على عرض لموضوع مشكلة البحث المتمثلة بالسؤال الأتي : ما هي المعالجة الاخراجية لمشاهد الحركة في الفيلم الروائي؟ ووضعت اهمية الموضوع و الهدف الذي يسعى الى تحقيقه مع سعة الحدود التي يتحرك فيها و من ثم قام الباحث بتحديد المصطلحات.اما الفصل الثاني (الاطار النظري والدراسات السابقة) فتكون من مبحثين: المبحث الاول: مشاهد الحركة في الفيلم الروائي، اما المبحث الثاني: اشتغال العناصر الصورية و الصوتية في مشاهد الحركة، ثم استخراج نتائج ما اسفر عنه الاطار النظري من مؤشرات.الفصل الثالث: (اجراءات البحث): تعامل فيه الباحث مع العناصر الاتية: منهج البحث، أداة البحث، مجتمع البحث، وحدة التحليل، صدق الاداة، عينة البحث، ومن ثم خطوات تحليلها . ثم تحليل العينة.اما الفصل الرابع (النتائج والاستنتاجات): وقد قام الباحث فيه بكتابة النتائج والاستنتاجات اخيرا قائمة المصادر .

RACISM IN THE FREEDOM WRITERS MOVIE BY RICHARD LAGRAVENESE: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE

Abstract Racism is not the strange topic anymore for the people worldwide. The idea of racism is the exclusion of a group of individuals according to their race or ethnicity. One of the movies that raised this theme is The Freedom Writers. This movie is an American biographical drama movie written and directed by Richard LaGravenese in 2007. This study will identify racism using Van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis theory in the text dimension as reflected in The Freedom Writers movie. This study is a descriptive qualitative approach using Teun A. Van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis and only focus on text dimension (Macro Structure, Superstructure, and Microstructure). The main theme in the movie is the struggle against racism through education with the sub-theme of education as a tool of social change, highlighting Erin Gruwell's efforts to overcome racial divisions in her classroom through innovative teaching methods. The movie's structure begins with exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution that illustrate the challenges and successes in changing attitudes and promoting inclusivity in Erin's classroom. In this study, 11 texts in the scenes were found to contain elements of racism such as racial discrimination and systemic injustice, structural racism, negative stereotyping, and ignorance of context. Racism can cause traumatizing, violent effects on individuals, anger and irritation, and others. Keywords: Racism, Education, The Freedom Writers Movie, Van Dijk’s CDA

A psychosocial reading of teacher agency

ABSTRACT The concept of teacher agency has become increasingly prominent in academic, policy and media debates. In rethinking the concept, we are particularly interested in the tension between discourses presenting teachers as heroic agents of individual emancipation and social transformation, such as those found in recruitment campaigns and Hollywood films, and the erosion of spaces for agency brought about by the dominance of discourses and practices of standards and accountability. In this conceptual paper we explore these tensions, building on previous work advocating ecological perspectives on teacher agency. We draw on the conceptual resources of psychosocial theory, including Lacanian discourse theory and recent work in this field articulating agency as manifesting in multiple modalities. Our psychosocial reading of teacher agency makes a number of contributions. First, it provides a more expansive conceptual vocabulary, allowing us to talk about agency in broader, more nuanced ways. Second, it recognises that teacher agency is not always necessarily in pursuit of social good. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it enables us to see the ways in which some modes of teacher agency, rather than manifesting as scenes of heroic possibility, are in fact subordinated forms of agency illustrating the cruel optimism of contemporary neoliberalised education.