Contemporary American Cinema Research Articles

Feminist Film Theory: The Impact of Female Representation in Modern Movies

Abstract In contemporary American cinema, the representation of women remains disproportionately limited despite significant social movements advocating for diversity and equality. This study examines the depiction of women in top-grossing films of 2018, contrasting those directed by men with those directed by women, to understand the influence of gender dynamics on cinematic portrayal. Analyzing the top five highest-grossing live-action movies directed by each gender, this research utilizes critical mass and critical actor theories to evaluate the impact of female filmmakers on the representation of women both on and off-screen. Findings reveal that films directed by women feature higher percentages of female characters and crew members in key roles, yet face substantial budgetary and box office disparities compared to their male-directed counterparts. Despite some progress, the film industry continues to exhibit systemic biases, necessitating further structural changes to achieve genuine gender equality in cinematic storytelling. This study underscores the need for increased opportunities and resources for female filmmakers to foster a more inclusive and diverse cinematic landscape.

Challenging Stereotypes: Examining Arab Womanhood in “The Negotiator”

This article presents a participant-based film analysis of Brad Anderson’s The Negotiator (2018), a Netflix production. The objective of this study is to examine the prevalent portrayal of Arabs and Muslims as the primary antagonists in American (neo-Orientalist) cinema. By analyzing the development of Arab characters, the article delves into the construction of villainy and its function in juxtaposition to heroism within the film’s narrative. A particular focus is given to the marginalization of Arab women, who are deprived of agency and the opportunity to express themselves. To address this issue, the study includes perspectives from Arab female participants, allowing them to articulate their perceptions and connections to both the Arab and American characters in the film. The research explores the common depiction of Arab or Muslim women as inactive extras or silenced secondary characters in post-9/11 American films. Through this investigation, the article aims to shed light on the representation and portrayal of Arab and Muslim women in contemporary American cinema.

Tracing dental horror in contemporary American cinema

Tracing dental horror in contemporary American cinema

A Study of the Ethics of Contemporary American Women’s Cinema

Abstract As one of the essential mediums of global cultural communication, American films, especially those involving women’s themes, have played a key role in shaping and transmitting women’s images and ethical concepts. The diversity of women’s roles and deep-seated emotions in contemporary American films with women’s themes is reflected in changes in society’s understanding of women’s status and rights. This paper aims to examine the impact of ethical views presented in contemporary American female-themed films on society and the audience. By collecting and analyzing popular American female-themed films in recent years, it explores ethical issues and the portrayal of women in the movie. Of the 100 films studied, more than 60% present a strong ethical tendency towards female self-identification and autonomous choice, with 40% showing a clear tendency towards gender equality and anti-discrimination. We find that the images of resilience and independence shown by female characters in movies in the face of difficulties and challenges have positively impacted the values and behavioral patterns of predominantly female audiences. Contemporary American women’s films not only reflect the current social concern and exploration of women’s issues, but also promote the public’s awareness of gender equality and women’s rights through the portrayal of diversified and profound women’s images, and provide an essential perspective for the promotion of social progress and the development of cultural pluralism.

Melancholy, respectability, and credibility in Sean Baker’s Tangerine

ABSTRACT A complex cinematic history of trans characters precedes contemporary representations of trans people — one of normalizing trans identity through class, gender, and race. In the context of contemporary American cinema, Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) demonstrates alternative strategies for representing trans characters and marks a turning point in trans cinema. Tangerine presents a grittier version of transgender experience than was seen in mainstream trans films released during the mid-2010s. The film challenges victimization narratives and the pathologization of the trans body, appealing directly to trans audiences. Moreover, the film’s trans-affirmative casting advocates trans agency, while its depictions of state and individual violence systematically critique conventional trans tropes in earlier trans films. However, the film’s paratexts re-affirm some of the industrial patterns that continue to marginalise trans industry workers. Prominent reviews and interviews with the cast and crew spotlight the redirection of this trans film’s cultural and financial capital away from trans workers and toward industry elites. Ultimately, Tangerine signals a complex turning point in trans media, whereby media industries increasingly value trans performers and consultants for their capacity to legitimize trans media, but trans industry workers continue to remain vulnerable within these industries’ complex power dynamics.

Caetlin Benson-Allott, The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television

In The Stuff of Spectatorship, Caetlin Benson-Allott turns an expert eye on the material culture that embeds, situates and shapes popular media, its production and consumption. Material culture, with its broad and interdisciplinary understanding, allows the author to cast a wide net to examine the ways in which ‘the stuff around media’ inflects what is on-screen, how it got there, the framing of it, and viewer engagement towards a nuanced and holistic understanding of film and television, their history and culture. What drives the book is an interest in the messy and tangled ecosystem of contemporary American film and television. Focusing deliberately on the web of interconnections that shape and perpetuate the media system, and that affect creators, consumers and content, the book seeks to move beyond narrow medium- and genre-specific analysis to expand understandings of context for popular media and offer critique of existing scholarship. There exists a body of scholarship that addresses the infrastructure and hardware of cinema as well as exhibition spaces and settings, starting with early cinema and travelling exhibitors. Studies of film reception have also examined the physical and social spaces of cinema, actual audiences and the material cultures of cinemagoing. Yet Benson-Allott’s book does not locate itself within this scholarship; rather it distinguishes itself from studies of technology, apparatus and infrastructure, as well as scholarship on embodied engagement with media, or ‘specific sites of media consumption’ (p. 2).

Contemporary American Cinema: Thrills to Narratives and Back

This article is an introduction to the following essays pertaining to contemporary American cinema, summarizing the contents of those essays, as well as providing a brief outline of American cinema.

Quantifying the remake: A historical survey

American film remakes have enjoyed growing academic attention over the past 50 years. Together with prequels, sequels, reboots and spin-offs, they have been often viewed as exponents of contemporary recycling culture, symptomatic of Hollywood’s recent creative exhaustion and commercial risk aversion. In our article, we adopt a diachronic quantitative perspective to analyse and interpret the available metadata on 986 Hollywood remakes produced between 1915 and 2020. Our quantitative research shows the number of American remakes produced every year, their ratio in the total number of feature films produced annually, the percentage of remakes in the top most watched movies among the users of IMDb, as well as remake recency and percentage of remakes with titles recognizably linked to the original over the years. We find that popular convictions concerning the remarkable derivativity of contemporary American cinema stem from availability bias (accessibility of statistics concerning recent productions and relative neglect of historical data) and systemic differences in the function and prestige ascribed to feature film remakes by Old and New Hollywood filmmakers.

Overcoming Linguacultural Barriers in Screen Translation

The multilingual discourse practices distinctive of contemporary multicultural societies have assumed an increasingly prominent position in contemporary European and American multicultural films (cf. Bleichenbacher, 2008; Berghahn & Sternberg, 2010; Jacobsson, 2017), where code-switching (cf. Myers-Scotton, 1993; Auer, 1998; Gardner-Chloros, 2009; Bathia & Ritchie, 2014) stands out as a key conversational strategy when interethnic encounters are at stake. This ties issues of on-screen multilingualism to the field of audiovisual translation (cf. Corrius & Zabalbeascoa, 2011, 2019; Şerban, 2012; Zabalbeascoa & Voellmer, 2014; de Higes Andino, 2014), intended as a key vehicle of intercultural/interlinguistic mediation. This paper aims at looking contrastively and diachronically at how code-switching, implying the recurrent on-screen presence of L3s, has been dealt with in the original version and in the Italian dubbed versions of twenty European and American multicultural/multilingual films, belonging to different genres and released within a time span covering three decades, where interracial relationships are at centre stage; the main objective of this study is to verify whether specific translation, or non-translation, strategies are applied to the instances of language alternation either to faithfully re-create the original linguistic interplay for the Italian audience or to manipulate it in dubbing. Lay summary The multilingual discourse practices distinctive of contemporary multicultural societies have assumed an increasingly prominent position also in contemporary European and American multicultural films, where the alternation of different languages by bilingual/multilingual characters stands out as a key conversational strategy when interethnic encounters and cross-cultural romance are at stake. On-screen multilingualism thus results to be strictly tied to the field of audiovisual translation, nowadays intended as a crucial vehicle of intercultural/interlinguistic mediation worldwide. This paper aims at analyzing how different language alternation practices have been dealt with in the original version and in the Italian dubbed versions of twenty European and American multicultural/multilingual films, belonging to different genres and released within a time span of thirty years, where interracial relationships and love-stories are at centre stage. The main objective of this study is indeed to verify whether specific translation, or non-translation, strategies are applied to the instances of language alternation enacted throughout the film dialogues, either to faithfully re-create the original linguistic interplay for the Italian audience or to manipulate it through dubbing. All this primarily aims at pointing out what can be achieved by screen translation in terms of transcultural and translingual transmission, mediation and re-mediation when cross-cultural relations are at stake and at highlighting a series of translation (or non-translation) trends that increasingly favour affective bonds between Self and Other, liable to overcome cultural clashes as well as to cross linguistic bridges both on and off the screen.

Echoes of hysteria: Gender, affect and economic crisis in Blue Jasmine and Young Adult

This article analyses gendered representations of the 2008 financial crash in contemporary American cinema, focusing on films by Jason Reitman and Woody Allen. Scholars of the financial crisis on film have persuasively argued that the main impetus of indie global financial crisis cinema has been less to narrate the events than to make them intelligible through personification. I illustrate and modify this statement by suggesting that Reitman’s and Allen’s characters not only embody the financial crash but do so, importantly, along gender lines. What stands out the most, I propose, is the trope of female suffering. In both films, we witness female protagonists in the grip of monetary and mental crisis. I contend that this image of the distraught woman – with all the messiness and embarrassment of her feelings in full view – sheds new light on the affective pathologies of American capitalism. To make this point, I draw on cultural emblems of female hysteria, as well as on the work of political scientist Claudia Leeb on the expression of suffering and its transformative potential. Through their tormented heroines, Reitman and Allen provide a provocative view of US capitalism and its casualties after the global crash.

Race, Violence, and the City: Chicago’s Black Urbanity in Contemporary American Film and Literature

In this article we look at three recent films–Native Son (2019, dir. Rashid Johnson, based on Richard Wright’s 1940 novel), Widows (2018, dir. Steve McQueen, based on a 1983 TV series), and The Hate U Give (2018, dir. George Tillman Jr., based on a book by Angie Thomas)–by Black directors that showcase the interactions between Blacks and whites in an American urban milieu. We argue that the setting of two of these films–Native Son and Widows–in Chicago, with The Hate U Give being set in a fictional urban setting bearing a strong resemblance to the Windy City, serves to articulate the continuing racial divisions of American cities in the twenty-first century. The three films show that the fossilization of the divide between Black and white districts inevitably leads to outbreaks of racial violence.

Black Lives Matter on Screen: Trauma of Witnessing Police Brutality in Contemporary American Cinema

In the years following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, American cinema was looking for a way to appropriately address the issue of police brutality against people of color. Filmmakers, often inspired by real-life events, began developing stories focused on the trauma of witnessing lethal police violence. Three films released in 2018 – Blindspotting (dir. Carlos López Estrada), Monsters and Men (dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green) and The Hate U Give (dir. George Tillman Jr.)– emphasize how the aftermath of such experiences affects young people of color and their communities. This article aims to explore the role of witness testimony in trauma-centered narratives and examine how the contemporary American cinema visualizes racial trauma. To achieve that, the films will be analyzed within the context of trauma studies, including theories regarding both individual and cultural trauma. Moreover, studies focused on the socialization of Black children will help demonstrate the transgenerational impact of trauma. All three films share common motifs: they represent the psychosomatic aspects of trauma through similar cinematic techniques and see value in witness testimony, even if it requires personal sacrifices from the protagonists. They also portray parents’ worry about their children’s future within a prejudiced system and the struggle to prepare them for it. All these issues have been previously addressed in the public and academic discourse and are now being reflected in cinema. Film proves to be a suitable medium for representing trauma of witnessing police brutality and cinema will most likely remain a vital part of the debate about dismantling racist systems for years to come.

Authenticity and the Forest in Captain Fantastic (2016) and Leave No Trace (2018)

A number of recent productions would appear to suggest that American cinema in the 21st century has abandoned the traditional, culturally defined tropes of the American wilderness in favor of its portrayal as an alternative environment for the contemporary American man. This study focuses on the role of the forest as a specific form of the wilderness in two contemporary American films, Captain Fantastic (2016) and Leave No Trace (2018), analyzing how this background motivates and shapes the authentic representation of the main male protagonist. This form of authenticity, as the study suggests, reflects a more extensive cultural call for the authenticity of American masculinity in American cinema in the 21st century. The crucial aspect in relation to the contemporary representation of the American man in these two films is the father/child relationship that emphasizes the role of the setting in the process of regenerating man’s position in society, thereby reflecting the postfeminist characterization of the American man.

2008 and after

2008 and after

Making enemies: A theoretical approach to antagonism and emotion in the contemporary American action film

Conflict and adversity form an essential component of many American action films. Not only are these spectacular blockbuster films often grafted on forms of contemporary geopolitical warfare, moreover, the violent deaths of the film’s villains arguably form one of the genre’s key pleasures. Utilizing Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism, this article deconstructs how within the action film, discursive articulations of enemyhood attempt to structure heroic violence as just and the lives of villains as ungrievable. The action films Lone Survivor (2015) and London Has Fallen (2017) will operate as case studies in elucidating how antagonistic frontiers between the hero self and the enemy other are cinematically drawn and strengthened.

Exposing Flaws of Affirmative Consent through Contemporary American Teen Films

The discursive shift during the twenty-first century from “no means no” to “yes means yes” clearly had an impact on contemporary American teen films. While teen films of the 1970s and 1980s often epitomized rape culture, teen films of the 2010s and later adopted consent culture actively. Such films now routinely highlight how obtaining a girl’s “yes” is equally important to respecting her “no.” However, the framework of affirmative consent is not without its flaws. In this article, I highlight how recent teen movies expose some of these shortcomings, in particular how affirmative consent remains a highly gendered discourse that prioritizes verbal consent over desire.

СОПЕРНИЧЕСТВО ЦИВИЛИЗАЦИЙ ЗА ЛИДЕРСТВО В ИСТОРИИ: АМЕРИКА КАК ТИП ЦИВИЛИЗАЦИИ В ХХ ВЕКЕ (КУЛЬТУРОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АСПЕКТ)

The article is a fragment of a bigger work on the relationships of three civilizations – America, China and Russia – at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, based on the principle of the «Other». It focuses on the formation of America as aspecial type of civilization in the pace of the past century. It is recorded that in the twentieth century America ceased to be a mere part of the Old World and became an independent type of civilization, and, beginning with Hiroshima, claimed the status of a civilization-leader in geopolitics. The aim of this article is to give an answer to the cultural and philosophical question of where America stands during the early decades of the 20th century from a civilizational perspective. The author proposes a new methodological and conceptual way of reflection connected with shifting from the ideas of O. Spengler, who did not include America in the list of independent civilizations, and extrapolating E. Gibbon's conclusion with regard to the Roman civilization (which America is often compared with) that its fall began at the peak of its development. On the basis of representative empirical material of American cinema (F. F. Coppola's Apocalypse Now, A. Penn's Little Big Man) the author identifies and analyzes the intentions of American culture, showing its transition to the next stage of its history with such signs as the dramatic ideological confrontation between the images of the «empire of trust» and the «empire of evil», the degradation of personality and society affected by the imperial complex, the awareness of the apocalyptic genocide of the ancient Indian civilization. The study provides convincing evidence that contemporary American cinema is becoming a powerful means of both diagnosing the situation of America as it is today and de-mythologizing American «heroic» history. Thus, cinema brings Americans back from their own virtual history-simulacrum to reality, opening up the possibility of a deeper understanding of America both as a civilization type and as a specific collective identity of Americans. Understanding no longer from the point of view of its ruling elite, but simply of a human being. This fact gives hope for establishing deeper human relationships between America and other civilizations which it views as the «Others».

Representation of the Concept "School Violence" in the Mirror of Contemporary American Cinema (1992–2020)

Representation of the Concept "School Violence" in the Mirror of Contemporary American Cinema (1992–2020)

Framing Black Performance

Recent African American film scholarship has called for an attention to the structures of black representation on screen. This work echoes the calls made in the 1990s by black feminist film and cultural scholars to resist the allure of reading for racial realism and to develop more appropriate critical tools and terms to acknowledge black artistic innovations. This essay takes up and reiterates that call, drawing attention to the problems of film interpretation that attend to a version of historical analysis without an understanding of form and medium. Foregrounding film as a terrain of struggle, the essay mobilizes an analysis of the 2014 film Selma to illuminate the multiple resonances of the concept representation. Focusing on the film’s representation of women and girl characters, the essay argues that cinematic play with the terms and conditions of representation comment powerfully on the limitations of cinematic and historical discourses to speak about the black femme as a political subject. Analysis of Selma exposes the key problems of reception and criticism facing contemporary African American film. The film speaks to the failure of de jure representational regimes in post–civil rights movement America and offers up the cinematic terrain as an important twenty-first-century site of African American struggle.

Shared Scars

Shared Scars Abby Manzella (bio) I share a scar with my father and brother.Our abdomens marked as kin.My father's a slicing long and wide,a question how life was resewn.My brother's, he says, "like bullet wounds,"and mine just dots, bleached-out stains. The genetic, the hereditary,the failures of the bodypassed from one to the next,aim indiscriminate and true.Fathers to sons, not the only path.An inheritance evading primogeniture.The gall of the vitriol,a pain like fireworks of stone.But there's progression in the science,diminished harm with knowledge. I learned from them,but the doctors said they learned mnemonically.Four Fs they said:female, family, forty, and fat.No insult intended to the woman before them,who defied the categories wielded,except their definitions of family. I do not know what my father (or his grandfather) felt.I do not know when he grasped the source.I did not yet exist.For my brother, it took weeks,but he, I saw, [End Page 285] not quite adult,slapping the steering wheelto cut the ache,extracting himself from his carwith hand to roof rack,the wracking hurt so great,the displacement insufficient.Still I cooled his head and called for help.The organ must goto deplete yellow from skin,to drain the pain from his eyes. We can survive with much less. When my turn came,I knew the smack of the heelagainst my bathroom floor to quell the agony.I knew.My mirrored eyes were my brother's.I thanked him for this knowledge,if not all my ancestors for the pain.Still my scar and quick solutioncame through their suffering.Their detriment, my benefit. This is family. [End Page 286] Abby Manzella Abby Manzella has taught and written on contemporary American literature and film, particularly as they relate to issues of race and gender, at the University of Missouri, Yeshiva University, Centre College, Tufts University, and the University of Virginia. She has been published in Feminist Studies, Frontiers, Women's Review of Books, Ms., BUST, and Literary Hub. Her book, Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Migrations, was named a Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title. She can be reached at abbymanzella@hotmail.com. Copyright © 2020 Abby Manzella