American Feature Films Research Articles

FILM TITLE AS UNIT OF TRANSLATION AND IMAGE-SENSE (BASED ON ENGLISH AND KOREAN)

Purpose. The article focuses on the study of film titles that we consider an integral part of cinema text from the point of view of its special sign nature. A film title gives the key to the subject matter of the film story line. The translator faces a number of challenges as it is essential to capture the semantic multidimensionality of the original title in order to transmit accurately the same vision, sense and tonality embodied in the original title.
 Methodology. The study is done in the light of the synergetic approach to film translation that emphasizes the dominant role of the image-sense and its influences on translation solutions. The polysemiotic nature of a film text should be taken into account while dealing with film title translations.
 Results. The image-sense is an integral unity that can be cognized only in the context of the whole as the essence of semiosis, unity of individual and general, creating an authentic image in a viewer’s mind. Image-sense is characterized by unpredictability and ambiguity that can be eliminated due to video image and the interaction of some semiotic systems in creating an integral entity. The research materials are film dialogues of Korean and American feature films.

Film dialogue and R-stylo

Abstract The dialogue of a large number of American feature films of the last 30 years is analysed with the stylometric tools contained in the R-stylo package. Various interesting results showing the capabilities and restrictions of this statistical package emerge.

The War that Ended in Nothing: the Korean Conflict in American Feature Films

Introduction. Today, interdisciplinary approaches blur the boundary between verbal and visual narratives, newsreels, photo and audio documents are actively used in historical research, theoretical and methodological issues of source analysis of audiovisual resources are discussed in historiography. Unlike documentaries, feature films capture and broadcast not so much historical realities as people’s attitudes towards them. Cinema is an actor of social processes: it not only reflects, but also creates historical ideas about a specific event, time, era, etc. The purpose of the work is to identify and demonstrate the relationship between the attitude of society to a local war and its image in feature cinema. Due to the specifics of the source in this study, the methods of historical analysis are supplemented by methods of visual research (structural-functional and semiotic analysis of films, analysis of reviews, film festivals, etc.). Results. Films about the Korean conflict, created in Hollywood from 1950 to 1981, served as the material. Their comparative analysis was carried out, the ideological background was determined, the main plots, themes, the system of characters, visual means were identified. All these aspects represent the attitude of American society towards the war in Korea. Discussion and Conclusion. Since cinema is not only an art, but also a media industry, it is associated with many social processes and has the ability to effectively influence people. It is a communication channel for the transmission, perception and active formation of value orientations, norms and public sentiments.

Cultural Mediation and Gatekeeping in Dubbing of American Feature Films on Iranian Television

ABSTRACT This qualitative study investigated mediation and censorship in the Persian dubbing of a sample of American feature films broadcast on Iranian national television to get insights into the details of these gatekeeping practices in recent years. The results revealed that many verbal and nonverbal instances relating to sexuality, Christian rituals and symbols, violence, insults and profanity, out of marriage relationships, and sensitive political references were identified inappropriate and edited out in the dubbed versions on account of religious, socio-cultural, and political considerations. The achieved results of the study have immediate pedagogical applications for dubbing practitioners, translators, students, and educators.

Civics at the Cineplex: How Americans Learn Democracy at the Movies A Theoretical Construct

American attitudes and preferences about their democratic institutions often arise from cultural socialization, including and especially American feature films. I outline my theories that explain how the stories, images and characters of these films create and validate central elements of political ideology in the minds of voters. I rely on my original film taxonomy and my years of teaching film and politics. My taxonomy categorizes familiar titles such as A Face in the Crowd, but it also includes Watchmen (2009) and early Westerns and the animated Despicable Me. Reading the Constitution may be a dull, labored chore for most Americans, especially undergraduates. However, James Cameron’s extravagant three-dimensional version of Avatar is a sensual feast that exhibits vital political lessons. Understanding the value of American films in political socialization is an occasion to measure independent judgment and the level of sophistication of the American viewer-voter.

Jak wyrwać się z nostalgii [dot. P. Włodek: Kres niewinności. Obraz i upamiętnienie ery Eisenhowera w amerykańskich filmach i serialach – pomiędzy reprezentacją, nostalgią a krytycznym retro

The article discussesa book by Patrycja Włodek entitled Kres niewinności. Obraz i upamiętnienie ery Eisenhowera w amerykańskich filmach i serialach – pomiędzy reprezentacją, nostalgią a krytycznym retro [The End of Innocence: The image and remembrance of the Eisenhower era in American feature films and television series – between representation, nostalgia, and critical retro style]. The author of the article positions her publication amongst other film studies research devoted to “nostalgic cinema” and enters into dialogue with concepts put forward by Włodek. The polemical pendants and glosses centre on searching for currents, titles, and readings both supporting Włodek’s considerations and transcending her interpretive framework relating to retro nostalgic (cinema of the 1980s) and retro classic (the most recent films and television series).

THE STRUCTURAL AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MODERN AMERICAN FEATURE FILMS’ SMALL SYNTAX IN TRANSLATION

The article is an in-depth research of the dubbed American feature films small syntax on the basis of the structural and comparative analysis of the original film texts and their Ukrainian translations. The paper considers the functioning of small syntax units with regard to their communicative intention, communicative reason and communicative validity. The author has proposed and described the structural classification of the English-speaking films small syntax models and their translation equivalents according to the morphological expression of the main word and the structure. The structural and comparative analysis of the small syntax of five American feature films and their Ukrainian equivalents has shown that the majority of word-combinations are simple, i.e. two-words (combination of two notional words or two notional words with the auxiliary part of speech) that is explained by film genres. The analysis presents also five types of formation of complex word-combinations and considers the productivity levels of film small syntax models. The article compares the main methods and techniques of the small syntax translation in the dubbed versions of American feature films and their frequency characteristics as well as introduces the reasons, varieties and conditions of the transformations usage. The results of the analysis have shown that audiovisual nature of the film text, differences in the rules of lexical-semantic and syntactic compatibility, various ways of expression traditional concepts, subjects and actions, the need for text synchronisation determined by the dubbed translation, defined the peculiarities of translation of the number of small syntax units.

Bacchanale (John Amero and Lem Amero, 1970)

ABSTRACTBacchanale (1970), an early American hardcore feature film, shows the genre taking shape at the dawn of the 1970s, but also reflects the queer influences of the gay brothers who made it, John and Lem Amero. This article uses Bacchanale as a window into both the pornographic careers of the Ameros and also the generally overlooked influence of queer filmmakers on the development of hetero hardcore cinema.

On Jordan's <em>From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film</em>

On Jordan's From Nuremberg to Hollywood:The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film Lawrence Baron From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film. By James Jordan. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2016. 245 pp., ISBN-10: 0853038740 (hc), US $89.95. In From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film, his pioneering survey of American Holocaust courtroom dramas, James Jordan traces how these films evolved from a reliance on "the once shocking, then iconic, but eventually overused black-and-white footage of liberation to the representation of the Holocaust through the use of oral testimony delivered by Jewish survivors from the witness box" (9). He attributes this shift to the evidentiary strategies employed by the prosecution teams in the trials that inspired such films and the growing awareness of the Holocaust in American public memory. At the International Military Tribunal (IMT) held in Nuremberg (1945–1946), the United States introduced five documentaries consisting of newsreel clips about Hitler's rise to power, his regime, and footage of the appalling sights encountered by Allied troops when they liberated concentration, death, and labor camps. These documentaries served as proof that the Nazi leaders in the docket were guilty of conspiring to wage aggressive war, and of implementing policies that resulted in such calculated carnage and cruelty to civilian populations and captured enemy soldiers. The devastating impression left by the liberation footage overshadowed the voluminous dossiers of incriminating documents and sparse survivor testimony [End Page 236] entered as evidence of German transgressions. In accordance with the charges leveled against the German defendants at Nuremberg, the persecution and slaughter of European Jewry were subsumed under the categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Consequently, the use of newsreel and liberation footage as authentic evidence of the barbarism and belligerent intent of Hitler and his henchmen often reappeared in feature films about the trials of Nazi officials and their collaborators. Moreover, the first scripted motion pictures dealing with this subject matter followed the Nuremberg precedent of marginalizing the Holocaust and the testimony of Jewish survivors in favor of focusing on the villainy of the Nazi perpetrators. Jordan begins his analysis of individual films with André de Toth's None Shall Escape (USA, 1944). Since President Roosevelt had announced in 1942 that the United Nations would convene postwar trials of the Nazi leaders, de Toth imagined the content and look of such proceedings. None Shall Escape revolves around the testimony of three eyewitnesses regarding whether the "crimes of murder, unlawful detention, degenerate atrocities, and common theft" enumerated by the chief justice were committed by Wilhelm Grimm, an ethnic German who returned to his hometown in Poland as the head of the German occupation during World War II. The town's priest, Grimm's anti-Nazi brother, and Grimm's former girlfriend recall his anger over Germany's defeat in World War I and the inclusion of the town within Poland's interwar borders; his immigration to Germany and enlistment in the Nazi Party; his imprisonment of his brother for subversive activities; and his role in exploiting Polish labor, persecuting Jews, and ultimately ordering their massacre when the local rabbi incites them to resist deportation. Their accounts segue into realistic flashbacks that trace Grimm's metamorphosis from an innocuous teacher of German into a callous tyrant. While Jordan appreciates that None Shall Escape is unique among Hollywood wartime films in its emphasis on the plight of the Jews, he faults the picture for lacking a Jewish witness, even though this obviously reflects the fact that none of the town's Jewish inhabitants survived to tell the story. However, the rabbi's impassioned call to arms—which leftist screenwriter Lester Cole culled from a rousing speech delivered by the communist Dolores Ibárruri during the Spanish Civil War—admirably fills this void.1 In chapter 2 Jordan examines how American feature films produced from 1946 until 1961 interjected familiar scenes or referents from the Nuremberg documentaries to indict Nazi characters who were being hunted down and [End Page 237] tried for their crimes, or to collectively blame the German people for tacitly condoning their country's...

Lo, the Poor Volunteer Manager: Hollywood’s Nonprofit Volunteer and Volunteer Manager

The literature of film studies has emerged in many academic fields as a relevant prism to examine the image of those professions in popular culture. Nonprofit management, though, has paid much less attention to film images. This article explores the cinematic image of the nonprofit volunteer and the volunteer manager in American feature films. It identified eight such movies, produced in 1953 through 2010. This universe is modest, but Hollywood’s extant nonprofit volunteer roughly mirrored the literature, with volunteers tending to be female and white and gaining emotional satisfaction through volunteering. By contrast, managers of nonprofit volunteers were depicted less often in Hollywood’s nonprofit sector, and the image was usually not flattering. We explore the implications of these findings, especially for the profession of managing volunteers in nonprofit organizations and conclude with a suggested agenda for research on the film image of volunteering, volunteer management, and nonprofit organizations.

3D UK? 3D History and the Absent British Pioneers

The recent television ‘rediscovery’ of a small cohort of 1950s British 3D films (and the producers who made them) has offered a new route into considering how the historical stories told about 3D film have focused almost exclusively on the American experience, eliding other national contexts. This article challenges both the partiality of existing academic histories of 3D and the specific popular media narratives that have been constructed around the British 3D pioneers. Offering a rebuttal of those narratives and an expansion of them based around primary archival research, the article considers how the British 3D company Stereo Techniques created a different business and production model based around non-fiction short 3D films that stand in contrast to the accepted view of 3D as an American feature film novelty. Through an exploration of the depiction (and absence) of these 3D pioneers from existing media histories, the article argues for a revision to both 3D studies and British cinema history.

A Changing Game: Ethnicity, Gender, and Nation in the US American Soccer Film

Both sport and film play a key role in contemporary US American popular culture. They are widely regarded as legitimate carriers and formative instances of social identities such as ethnicity, gender, or nationality, and they have capitalized upon one another with increasing success. Soccer and soccer films provide a case in point, as both the sport and its treatment in US American feature films are currently undergoing a change from a rather marginal position to a somewhat secure place within the cultural mainstream. This essay analyses five recent American soccer films with a particular focus on how they frame soccer as an ethnic, gendered, and ‘national’ game in a US context.

The shape of 1979

This article fills in the gap in my series of articles quantitatively surveying the stylistic changes in American feature films from 1939 to 1999, which have been previously published in the New Review of Film and Television Studies.

Америчка кинематографија о српском језику у Босни и Херцеговини

The paper focused on the linguistic analysis of two American feature films and on what they could confirm in the sociohistorical and cultural senses of the word. Those are the films Behind Enemy Lines (2001) and The Hunting Party (2007), which were distributed worldwide, and broadcast on various TV stations and their channels. The paper offers an analysis of modest film sections in Serb language, more precisely – in the language here selected to represent “Serbian“, in the way its speakers (actors) were instructed to represent the Serbs. Linguistic analysis indicates that the language represented in these films has served the purpose of the already habitual policy of the West towards the Serbs and the Serb language. Following its own geopolitical interests in the Balkans, that policy has always tended to minimise the Serb ethnic and linguistic area and limit it to Serbia, more precisely, to its central parts. Therefore the language of the actors playing Serbs in these Bosnian film stories was organised in such a way that they linguistically (ekavisms, da + present construction, etc.) and in every other sense represent newcomers, more exactly – the aggressors coming from Serbia, and not the Bosnia-Herzegovinian Serbs who have lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the first Serb settlements appeared in the Balkans.

The shape of 1939

This paper extends further backwards to 1939 the survey of stylistic changes in American feature films which I began with ‘The Shape of 1999’ and ‘The Shape of 1959’, previously published in the New Review of Film and Television Studies.

Selznick International Pictures and the Global Distribution of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938); or How Europe Didn’t Care a ‘Tinker's Cuss’

Hollywood producer David O. Selznick’s work has been much discussed in histories related to American feature film production. Less examined, however, has been the experience of Selznick International Pictures (SIP) in motion picture distribution. Using a case study of SIP’s difficulties in distributing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in Europe during the pre-World War II period, this paper argues that economic histories of international distribution patterns often fail to acknowledge the important role of individual agency within organizational structures. Greater attention to the conflicts, confusion and sheer frustration that characterized the day-to-day discourse between representatives of American distribution companies and contracted international representatives can assist in challenging assumptions about cultural imperialism, “Americanization” and the growing global media economy of the early twentieth-century.

Hollywood versus lokaliteit. Het (on)gelijke aanbod van Amerikaanse en Europese film in de jaren dertig in Gent

<strong>Hollywood versus locality. The (un-)equal availability of European and American films in Ghent in the 1930s</strong> In line with the international shift from film studies to new cinema history, in this article we rethink the acclaimed American dominance in film supply in the 1930s in the city of Ghent, Belgium. In the first part we briefly sketch the context of the varied film-showing and cinema-going culture in Ghent during the 1930s. The second, empirical part consists of an analysis of the findings derived from the showing and programming databases from 1933 to 1936. Particular attention is paid to the profile of the cinema theatres, and the trends in the distribution, prolongation and retakes of European and American film productions. The article shows the impact of the historical context of the theatre, the programming strategies used by the cinema management to target different audiences, the preferred trajectory of the American distributors, and the importance of the spoken language for the cinema experience. It reveals a more modest presence of the American feature film during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. They were successful in smaller district theatres rather than the central film palaces, which were oriented to European productions.

From Independence Day to Land of Plenty: Screening American Patriotism from German Émigré Perspectives before and after 9/11

Independence Day and Land of Plenty are two tropes referring to the basis of American national identity: the Declaration of Independence with its guarantee of equal and inalienable rights and the promise of an inexhaustible abundance of resources. Independence Day and Land of Plenty are also two American feature films directed by German émigrés, the first being a science fiction blockbuster from 1996 by Roland Emmerich, the second an independent road movie from 2003 by Wim Wenders. Both films confront the issue of American patriotism albeit from different angles and at different times. Independence Day wholeheartedly embraces the American founding myths and translates them into a science fiction scenario. Wenders manoeuvres into an artistic space producing what I call patriotism of dissent. The films engage in a kind of dialectic dialogue on American patriotism. This article takes a close look at émigré perspectives on American patriotism before and after 9/11. By turning to the four patterns which political theorist Samuel P. Huntington identified as possible responses to the discrepancy between principles and practices of American democracy, I will analyse Independence Day as a filmic strategy to deny democratic gaps and Land of Plenty as a representative example of a moralistic reaction to democratic gaps. In the discourse of screening American patriotism from German émigré perspectives before and after 9/11, the work of Emmerich and Wenders exemplifies the spectrum of approaches to negotiate the fantasy of, desire for, and experience of American culture in the medium of film.

Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films. Dir. and prod. by Arthur Dong. DeepFocus Productions, 2007. 89 mins. (http://www.deepfocusproductions.com/HollywoodChinese/index.html)

Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films. Dir. and prod. by Arthur Dong. DeepFocus Productions, 2007. 89 mins. (http://www.deepfocusproductions.com/HollywoodChinese/index.html)

The shape of 1959

When I wrote ‘The Shape of 1999’ (2004), I was aware that the comparison I made between the stylistics of my sample of American films from that year, and those of earlier times, was not as well supported as it might have been. Although I made reference to the general statistics for hundreds of American films which were given in my Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (1992), most of those were from the 1940s or earlier, and with only a few from the 1950s onwards. So to remedy that defect, this paper will use an expanded comparison of my 1999 sample with a sample of 20 films from 1959, to give a more absolute demonstration of the general stylistic changes of American feature films over the 40 years from 1959 to 1999. This time span is sometimes said to encompass major changes in film style, but just how true is that? In the process of investigating this last point, I will introduce one or two new stylistic measures to deal with shot to shot continuity.