American Motion Picture Research Articles

Roma y Netflix: ganando premios y rompiendo reglas.

Five years after his International consecration in the 86th American Motion Picture Academy awards, in which his film ‘Gravity’ rose with 7 Oscar awards, Mexican filmaker Alfonso Cuarón keeps gaining atention and winning prizes with his new movie ‘Roma’.Shooted entirely in Mexico, the 8th movie of this Mexico City born and raised filmaker is much more that a return to his homeland, it has become an innovative case, critic and distribution wise, that deserves analysis.Heightened within a context in which cinema produced in Mexico has a complicated distribution and a nearly impossible exhibition conditions (only half of the over 150 local industry produced pictures are shown in theatres), Roma commercial release has been, to say the less, successful, a paradox and certainly unique, being on Netflix as its main distribution platform. Winner of three Oscar awards this past February (Best Foreign Language film, Best Director, Best cinematography) with 10 nominations, and winner of Best Picture at the British BAFTA awards, and laurate of prestigious film festivals as Venice, Roma is financed by Netflix and with a distribution contract on this streaming platform, that has confronted two business models that is changing the industry irretrievably.

New York Yankees and Hollywood Anglos: The persistence of Anglo‐conformity in the American motion picture industry

AbstractIdeal types have received less attention than membership criteria in the ethnicity and nationalism literature. This article uses crowdsourced genealogical data and onomastics software to show that British Isles surnames and ancestry remain over‐represented among American actors, especially in roles connected with the national narrative. Conformity to the WASP ideal type persists despite the fact American actors are disproportionately born in Los Angeles, New York, and other large cities, where British ancestry is rare. Jewish actors are over‐represented, yet many have Anglo surnames. Compared to athletes and politicians, actors are significantly more likely to have Anglo surnames, especially those in genres depicting the nation. After declining among cohorts of stars born between the 1800s and 1961, the share of British Isles surnames has stabilised and remains in the majority. We argue that despite rising diversity, this reflects the continuing importance of the Anglo‐Protestant ethnic imago for American national identity.

The University Archive: Early Motion Picture Collecting in the United States and the Efforts to Develop the National Film Negative Library

The University ArchiveEarly Motion Picture Collecting in the United States and the Efforts to Develop the National Film Negative Library Alexander Kupfer (bio) Well before the National Archives or Library of Congress began collecting motion pictures, a December 1910 article in the Olean [N.Y.] Evening Times proposed that famed itinerant lecturer and exhibitor Lyman H. Howe establish a National Film Library. The author was impressed by the positive press and enthusiastic public reception to Howe’s moving pictures of the funeral of England’s King Edward. The Evening Times’s suggestion to create a film library was also an attempt to legitimate Howe’s pictures as important historical documents worthy of long-term safekeeping. The author proclaimed, “Think of what it would be if we could see the funeral of Julius Caesar, a gladiatorial contest, the maneuvers of the Spanish Armada, the street life of ancient Athens or even a simple Babylonian or Egyptian walking to his business.”1 [End Page 1] Howe never established a motion picture library. However, throughout the 1910s, the idea of forming a collection of significant American films was still frequently raised. Perhaps recognizing the magnitude of this mission, film industry leaders often sought to involve the federal government in the efforts to save early movies. In a widely reprinted interview in 1919, Thomas Edison suggested that the government build a library of educational and industrial motion pictures in Washington, D.C., to provide access to “all institutions in the United States, even to the most rural schoolhouses.”2 Industry support for a film library continued with Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). Shortly after he was hired in 1922, Hays began lobbying for a government-funded archive of motion pictures produced by Hollywood studios. Hays discussed with Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover plans to construct a nitrate vault in the basement of the White House to preserve historically important movies of “national cultural value.”3 Will Hays’s lobbying efforts have been singled out by historians of the film preservation movement in the United States as illustrative of the first wave of efforts to create a federal motion picture collection through an appeal to nationalistic discourse. Individuals outside the film industry were likewise interested in forming a national collection of American motion pictures. Scholars interested in the early history of film preservation have particularly focused on the efforts of the federal government. As a result, Janna Jones explains, the history of archiving has been primarily defined by the efforts of the National Archives and the Library of Congress to build a national film library for the purpose of enhancing the reputation of the United States at home and abroad.4 This focus on the federal government’s role in film preservation has meant that the history and importance of university collections of educational, industrial, and sponsored motion pictures have been largely overlooked. Film collections in universities preceded these other archives by decades, as numerous colleges started acquiring motion pictures in the 1910s. The largest collections, both in terms of number of reels of film and audience size, were operated by university extension divisions that established visual instruction programs to distribute educational films and media to schools and off-campus groups. The circulating libraries at institutions including the Universities of Indiana, Wisconsin, California, and Texas were headed by largely unknown administrators who were not archivists or cinephiles but rather valued cinema for its utility as an educational tool. Although contemporary scholars, particularly ones interested in the history of educational and nontheatrical cinema, have explored cinema’s incorporation in university curricula beginning in the mid-1910s, the importance of these early [End Page 2] collections to the history of motion picture preservation in the United States requires further exploration. University film collections offer an alternative site from which to consider the origins of motion picture preservation. In 1920, two years before Hays was hired by the MPPDA, administrators of visual instruction programs proposed the establishment of a National Film Negative Library (NFNL) in Washington, D.C. They sought to connect the goals of long-term film preservation to the more established project of visual education. The library...

Islam and ideology at the movies: Prototypes, stereotypes, and the political economy

Marketing controversial Islamic images in Western settings led recently to several deaths. Consumer researchers should examine the societal impact of such ideologically laden commercial representations. Our research analyses and interprets the stereotypes applied to Muslims in American motion pictures, within a political economic framework that incorporates notions of historic Western colonial/postcolonial perspectives.

Francis Bannerman Sons Archive

The late-nineteenth-century theatre and other forms of popular performance are linked to first decades of the American motion picture industry through their mutual commercial supplier: Francis Bannerman Sons. The Bannerman family, founding the nation's first military surplus store, from the 1870s through the 1930s supplied weaponry from small arms to cannons, blank ammunition, costumes, uniforms, saddlery, and miscellaneous accoutrements to theatre companies, wild west shows, and vaudevillians, later supplying similar items to recently-formed motion picture studios. The Bannerman archive is a major, but untouched, source for studying American entertainments through this span of time.

The Tendencies of Technological Political Culture of the Depression Era in the Movie “The Wizard of Oz”

The attitude towards the technological progress in the United States throughout history varied from the euphoria to the paranoia. In the 1930s, when the Depression put the majority of the American industries into the financial hole, with the percentage of unemployment close to 1/3 of the nation`s population, technological progress seemed to be the recovery option, and at the same time the dangerous reason of surrogating the personal with “soulless” machinery. In the meanwhile the great industry of film making was gaining more and more cultural weight throughout the nation. Never before had the American motion pictures such an influence in the developing and exposing the American identity and culture. It provided and mirrored the ideas of new social structure and values, together with the images of the criticism and optimistic viewpoint, during the harsh days of the Great Depression. In 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer brought to screen, at first glance a very far from the technological tendencies, children story, in the innovative Technicolor, “The Wizard of Oz”. Nevertheless besides the Technicolor, which on its due showed the advancement of the U.S. technological development, the whole idea of the “world of Oz” represents the desire of the nation to get away from the realms of the Depression, into the colorful world of joy and happiness. The film`s core idea is the choice of coming back home from the world of the technological utopia: back to the hard, not colorful but, at the same time, true reality. In this essay I will analyze the both cultural-political tendencies: technological social alienation and critical reality, on the case of the movie “The Wizard of Oz”, reconnecting it with the historical-material relationship with the Depression era.

Black Male Literary Scholarship and African American Children's Literature: An Interview with Dr. Neal A. Lester of Arizona State University

Black Male Literary Scholarship and African American Children’s Literature:An Interview with Dr. Neal A. Lester of Arizona State University Joseph Kitchen In this issue’s multimedia feature, a scholar foregrounds his work in English and literature, reflecting on what it means to be a Black man in the academy and his experience navigating his identity in terms of research, service, and teaching in his fields of expertise. Dr. Neal A. Lester is Professor of English and Director of Project Humanities at Arizona State University. An acclaimed Black male scholar, his work centers identity, gender, sexuality, and race, exploring the roles and portrayal of African Americans and Black masculinity across a range of media, including topics such as African American children’s literature, Black folklore, and Black images in American motion pictures. The video interview features Lester discussing his personal discovery of his passion for African American literature as well as the intricacies of navigating his identity as a scholar who is both Black and male in areas of scholarship typically led by Black women. Lester delves deeply into the emergence (and absence) of African Americans in children’s literature; how the values, beliefs, and norms of adults are reflected in children’s literature and illustrations; and the impact of Black children’s literature on identity development for Black boys and girls. The video can be viewed on our Vimeo channel at http://go.osu.edu/SpectrumMultimedia. [End Page 129] Copyright © 2014 Trustees of Indiana University and the Ohio State University

Written to be read: Apersonal reflection on screenwriting research, thenand now

Abstract Having been identified as an early contributor to the intensifying academic study of the (American) screenplay and screenwriting, the author presents a personal account of the circumstances which led to her own research in the 1990s and the publication of Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text in 1997. Additionally, she offers some reflections on the consolidation and institutionalization of screenwriting research and sketches a number of possibilities for future work in the field.

Poéticas da responsabilidade no audiovisual latino-americano (1990-2011)

Os processos de produção, distribuição e exibição de filmes latino-americanos nos últimos 25 anos na região e a impossibilidade de se pensar uma teoria do cinema sem nos reportar a uma teoria do cinema como produção social resultaram na denominação poéticas da responsabilidade. A noção enseja dar conta das forças políticas e econômicas que permeiam os regimes estéticos do audiovisual a partir da implementação do Consenso de Washington, o programa neoliberal que orientou o formato social na América Latina nos anos 1990 e 2000. No plano da representação e da mimese, por exemplo, a circunstância significou uma redução do repertório retórico (figuras etc.) e parece haver acentuado a dependência simbólica de audiovisualidades hegemônicas.

Devils and Contenders: Portrayals of Professional Women in North American Motion Pictures

Drawing on tenets from social role, social cognitive, and stereotype threat theories, this paper sought to thematically explore the portrayal of professional women in North American films released since the late seventies. Our study analyzed professional women and women attempting to succeed professionally across 108 characters in 103 films. We analyzed personal representations of the women as individuals, professional representations of their work, professionalism, career growth, and barriers to advancement, and relational depictions of their career success in relation to intimate relationships and family. We find that while personal representations vary such as the female protagonists span the range of age, achievement, attractiveness, and femininity versus masculinity, professional and relational depictions converge more closely to conform to the stereotype of the professional woman as a mean, conniving, and dishonest individual with difficulties finding or keeping love and balancing career with family. Given the lingering issue of the glass ceiling, we fear such portrayals will deter rather than encourage young women from exercising the ambitious aspirations that they can now afford given their unprecedented educational accomplishments and increasingly liberal social mores. Study implications, limitations, and recommendations are presented.

Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (review)

Driven to Darkness: Jewish Emigre Directors and the Rise of Film Noir, by Vincent Brook. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. 285 pp. $26.95. Toward the end of World War Two and shortly after it, film critics in the United States and France respectively discerned darker visual styles and themes in recent American motion pictures than were typical for Hollywood productions. French critics dubbed this trend film noir. It denoted a cycle of movies beginning in the late 1930s and eventually extending into the 1950s. This series of moving pictures was characterized by amoral or deranged male leads, diabolical femme fatales, menacing urban exterior shots, oblique and vertical lines segmenting visual planes, a shrouding of images in nighttime shadows, and intricate schemes of betrayal, fraud, or murder. The characters populating such movies were dominated by their psychological impulses and corrupted by the crime-ridden metropolitan environments in which they resided. Scholars have identified a number of factors to account for the qualities film noir exhibited. Most concur that its style and subject matter drew on both the German Expressionist films of the 1920s and the French poetic realist ones of the 1930s. Others trace its low-key lighting to the wartime policies of blackouts and rationing. The hard-boiled interwar American novels revolving around the exploits of amoral tough guys, usually adventurers or detectives, inspired cinematic adaptations or served as templates for many film noir characters. Some scholars perceive the cynicism, paranoia, ruthlessness, and violence such anti-heroes manifest as expressions of the discomforting zeitgeist engendered sequentially by the economic despair of the Depression, the rise of fascism, the unprecedented destructiveness of World War Two, the post war congressional investigations of communist infiltration in the film industry, the ominous potential for nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, and the vacuous veneer of conformity and prosperity in peacetime American society. Finally, the disproportionate contribution of German expatriate directors to the corpus of film noir has been cited to explain its heightened sense of vulnerability, pervasive pessimism, and use of European cinematic styles. Vincent Brook delves deeper into the emigre nexus by focusing on German Jewish emigre directors who fled to the United States to escape persecution in the 1930s. These include Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Willy Wilder (who arrived in America in the 1920s but did not make films until the 1940s), Otto Preminger, Edgar Ulmer, Curtis Bernhardt, Max Ophuls, John Brahm, Anatole Litvak (a Ukrainian Jew who honed his filmmaking skills in Weimar Germany before resettling in the United States on the eve of Hitler's accession to power), and Fred Zinnemann. Brook persuasively demonstrates that this wave of Jewish emigre directors exerted a profound quantitative and qualitative impact on American film noir. He contends that the deep cultural and psychological wounds inflicted on this cohort of directors when their homelands disenfranchised and persecuted Jews rendered them more receptive to film noir's gloomy sensibilities. A majority of them had been involved in the production of German Expressionist films, and some, like Bernhardt and Siodmak, transmitted a similar aesthetic into the films they made in France before coming to the United States. Moreover, they were acutely aware of the plight of their friends and relatives who remained in Europe. Finding sanctuary in the United States did not necessarily diminish the insecurities these directors' projected in their films. American antisemitism and nativism intensified during the Depression. The ambivalence Jewish emigre directors felt towards their Hollywood haven also emerged from the humiliating role reversal they experienced in the film industry. …

Cold war consumer diplomacy and movie-induced Roman holidays

In the 1950s the US government encouraged American vacation travel to western Europe as a means of bolstering European economies and fighting the cold war through consumer diplomacy.Astrong dollar and new airline classification systems with reduced fares made European tourism accessible for the middle class for the first time, which resulted in record numbers of Americans enjoying European holidays. This essay demonstrates how American motion pictures became part of a cluster of inducements for such travel during the 1950s and early 1960s as a weakened Hollywood film industry found financial reward in producing movies in Europe. Concentrating on the figure of the single woman traveler to Rome, five films released between 1953 and 1961 with female protagonists are analyzed to illustrate how popular culture contributed to the rhetoric of Roman holidays as the site of cultural enrichment and consumer diplomacy for American women.

"A Particularly Effective Argument": Land of Liberty (1939) and the Hollywood Image (Crisis)

Henry James, American author who lived in an English village, was criticized for ignoring... the most important event of his lifetime - rise of United States of No such broad accusation, of course, can be leveled against our industry[.] Cecil B. DeMille1 Industry has redeemed itself. Review of Land of Liberty (Richmond News Leader)2 On July 15, 1938, an important announcement circulated offices of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). It declared that 'Cavalcade of America/ a film panorama of highlights of American history will be prepared by [MPPDA] and will be presented at World's Fair of 1939. 3 Cavalcade, collective effort of American motion picture would tell formative history of United States through assemblage of over 120 Hollywood-produced films.4 venerated authorial hand of Cecil B. DeMiIIe would edit project, while Columbia University history professor James T. Shotwell, self-defined first scholar to recognize power and [pedagogical value] of movies,5 was hired as historical consultant. On June 14, 1939, Cavalcade, whose title had by then been changed to Land of Liberty, premiered in Federal Building of World's Fair for a select audience of invited guests.6 next day, two-and-a-half hour long compilation film was screened twice daily for Fair's general public.7 In 1941, film was re-released theatrically for an America on brink of war.8 Justly regarded as a banner year for American cinema, 1939 witnessed releases of Gone with Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wizard of Oz, Ninotchka, and Women.9 That year's slate of remarkable productions, however, has diverted critical attention from commotion and trepidation that characterized Hollywood's corporate climate at end of 1930s. American film at time, was in a delicate state both at home and abroad. As Thomas Schatz has pointed out, the domestic market was. ..mired in a late-Depression recovery mode, while, at same time, war in Europe nearly blighted Hollywood's market overseas.10 Hollywood was also experiencing growing legal pressure towards its monopolistic business practices. National Recovery Agency's (NRA) 1939 Report for Code of Fair Competition instigated legal scrutiny of studio policy. That report framed acquisitive capitalism of Hollywood as anathema to cooperative spirit of New Deal America. The film industry functioned within a regime of competition that is symptomatic of natural monopolistic tendency of industry, NRA concluded.11 NRA's verdict precipitated fateful Antitrust Motion Picture Cases, which only intensified ideological tension between Hollywood studios and New Deal ethos. Giuliana Muscio has observed how the scrutiny of studio system... [was a testing ground] on which New Deal measured its economic theories and interpretations, carried out through a series of investigations, committee hearings, and trials culminating in Paramount case.12 growing awareness of Hollywood's cutthroat business strategies compelled industry to transform its public image. This essay demonstrates how Hollywood adopted cooperative rhetoric of New Deal state in order to deflect negative publicity that accompanied mounting legal accusations of unfair competition. Ultimately, Land of Liberty - a film that is nearly forgotten today - came to symbolize populist self-fashioning of Depression-era Hollywood. philosophical ideals of World's Fair - a hybrid of FDR-inspired good will and progressive technological utopianism - shaped formal design and thematic structure of Land of Liberty. Franklin Delano Roosevelt kicked off both Fair and film.13 On opening day, president welcomed eager patrons as they entered Flushing Meadows fairgrounds of Queens, New York. …

Hollywood's ‘New’ Orientalism: The case of Tokyo File 212 (1951)

Tokyo File 212 (1951) is an intriguing film. Staged in Japan during the heyday of the Korean War, it portrays an American undercover agent's efforts to thwart a communist uprising in the busy comme...

Anywhere But the Home: The Promiscuous Afterlife of Super 8

Anywhere But the Home: The Promiscuous Afterlife of Super 8

Never Coming to a Theatre near You: Recut Film Trailers

In the lead-up to the release of some feature films, fake and fan trailers are created by users and uploaded to YouTube and other Web sites. These trailers demonstrate that users are literate not only in the form of the trailer itself, but also in the Hollywood system and how it markets products to audiences. Circulating in a networked environment online, these texts, which play with the form of the trailer, perform and embody users' and fans' desire to see not just the feature film but also the official trailer itself. I discuss these fake and fan trailers in relation to cinematic anticipation and describe how they navigate both spatial and temporal bounds. Using the architectural concept of the desire line, I argue that spatial frameworks can be usefully employed to consider how users navigate online spaces, media, and concepts through the form of the trailer.

Portraying language diversity through a monolingual lens

This article discusses ways in which languages other than English are represented in recent American film. Referring to ten movies wherein realistic characterisations would call for some or all of the storyline to take place in Spanish, it is observed that background Spanish and accented English are used with greater frequency than actual lines of dialogue in Spanish. The article argues that these techniques result in language diversity being portrayed through a ‘monolingual lens’ which prioritises English and sidelines or ignores other languages. The unbalanced representation of languages can be interpreted in two ways: (i) as the filmmaker’s artistic licence to choose one language as opposed to another as the vehicle by which to tell a cinematic story or (ii) as a representation of a well-established monolingual mindset promoted by the American motion picture industry, which implies that movies worthy of production should be in English. The article then goes on to explore these two interpretations.

Motion pictures' greatest year (1938): public relations and the American film industry

In an effort to combat declining attendance, perceived public disinterest, and the threat of government antitrust action, the exhibition and distribution arms of the American motion picture industry organized the ‘Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year’ public relations campaign in 1938. The focal point of the campaign was a heavily-promoted quiz contest which required entrants to attend 30 feature films at participating theaters. Despite initial enthusiasm, the campaign fell short of its goals due to structural inequities in the distribution system, friction between independent theater owners and those affiliated with the major producer-distributors, and poor films.

Japan's hollywood boycott movement of 1924

On July 1, 1924, major movie exhibitors in Japan initiated a boycott of Hollywood films. This boycott was one of the manifestations of the anti-American movement, triggered in response to the 1924 ...

Hollywood ambitions: celebrity in the movie age

Working with a varied and untraditional cast of characters-Wyatt Earp, Jack London, Clara Bow, Gertrude Stein, and Ida Lupino-author Marsha Orgeron examines the Hollywood ambitions of a fading western legend, a successful popular author, a poor Brooklyn girl turned flapper icon, a self-proclaimed avant-garde genius, and a frustrated actress on her way to becoming a director. Investigating their separate involvements with the expanding film industry, Orgeron illustrates the implications of film celebrity during the era in which cinema's impact was first felt. The aspirations of these individuals demonstrate the unifying role that the American motion picture capital played in shaping cultural notions of reputation, success, glamour, and visibility. Through extensive and unprecedented primary research and illuminating analyses of films, texts, and personal writings, each chapter provides new insight into its subject's dealings in the mythic city. Hollywood Ambitions affords a unique understanding of the tremendous diversity of the Hollywood experience and its allure in the first half of the cinematic century.