Contemporary American Cinema Research Articles

Government on the Silver Screen: Contemporary American Cinema's Depiction of Bureaucrats, Police Officers, and Soldiers

AbstractMovies continue to be the most accessible art form to Americans and that reach allows films to have a tremendous effect on moviegoers. With more than a billion movie tickets sold annually in the United States, the ability of movies to influence the perceptions of moviegoers is pronounced. Frequently, the government is part of those depictions. Although film is routinely studied in a host of disciplines, a focus on the portrayal of government generally and government officials more specifically, remains elusive. Instead of using a case-study approach, we examine recent, popular films to investigate how government is portrayed generally and how individual governmental characters are depicted. For our sample, we use the top-10 box office grossing films from 2000 to 2009 to assess how government is depicted in the films most likely seen by the majority of movie-watching Americans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that films generally have a mixed view of government with more negative depictions than positive. However, in examining bureaucrats, police officers, soldiers, and politicians, we found a much more positive depiction of these individual government characters. Americans may view government negatively, but in film they see positive depictions of individual civil servants.

Book review: Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema

Book review: Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema

Techniques of the Invisible: Cinematic Images of being Addicted

Aims This study analyses how contemporary American films on “new”, behavioural addictions (sex, gambling and shopping) visualise the inner experience of being addicted. Design A close-reading of cinematic techniques (such as cinematography, editing, sound and colour) at the beginning of six films explores how the spectator is invited into an affective engagement with the film, and how being addicted can be visualised through these techniques. Results Despite genre differences and various types of addiction problems, the analysed films all employ expressive techniques that resonate with each other. Being addicted is imagined through confessional monologues which provide access into the anomalous inner experience, through a sensualising of the objects of addiction as both enticing and repelling, and through an aesthetics of disconnections and distance. While similar modes recur, the cinematic image of being addicted can also be subversive. Conclusion The affective modes of the films emphasise intimacy and exploration of the self, central to the modern strategies of managing addiction problems. However, the cinematic images also enable subversive affective registers of images of addiction as an inner experience.

Contemporary black American cinema: race, gender and sexuality at the movies

Contemporary black American cinema: race, gender and sexuality at the movies

Framing narratives: Opening sequences in contemporary American and British war films

This article analyses the function of opening sequences in war films. With reference to Erll’s studies on film and memory, the author suggests that, besides initiating processes of framing film worlds, opening sequences also activate a certain memory-making rhetoric that enables potential impacts on historical discourse and memory politics. He subdivides this last function into three rhetorical modes of cultural memory – an objectifying, subjective and reflexive approach. Subsequently, the author provides close readings of the opening sequences of various contemporary war films to exemplify and illustrate each function and rhetorical mode. In conclusion, the author connects a recent surge in films employing a subjective and reflexive rhetoric to changes in imaging technologies.

Carlo Lizzani's Il gobbo (1960): A cinematic exploration of socially 'engaged' post-war criminality

This article traces Carlo Lizzani's depiction of the changing nature of Italian society from the Second World War to the post-war era, his film Il gobbo/The Hunchback of Rome highlighting the different fates of individuals who attempt to integrate themselves within the evolving social structure. It will be argued that the director uses a range of emotional and intellectual strategies in the film, in particular the action and visual sensationalism that were typical of contemporary American cinema, to compel viewers into vividly experiencing the destiny of these individuals and to appreciate the socio-political implications of Lizzani's often disturbing cinematic representation of this historical context. Of importance in this regard are the techniques that the director uses to elicit identification and empathy on the part of viewers with the film's characters: this study will discuss Murray Smith's concepts of viewer alignment and allegiance in the context of criminal characters such as the Hunchback, the film's protagonist.

Visualities: perspectives on contemporary American Indian film and art

Visualities: perspectives on contemporary American Indian film and art

Masculinity and film performance: male angst in contemporary American cinema

Masculinity and Film Performance is a lively and engaging study of the complex relationship between masculinity and performance on and off screen, focusing on the performance of 'male angst' in American film and popular culture during the 1990s and 2000s. Building on theories of film acting, masculinity, performance, and cultural studies, this book establishes a framework for studying screen masculinity and provides close analysis of a range of performers and performance styles. It also examines the specific social, cultural, historical and political contexts that have shaped and affected the performance of masculinity on screen, such as the aging of the baby boom and the launch of Viagra onto the marketplace, the 'Iron John' and 'Wild Man' phenomenon, and the racially marked fatherhood crisis. Drawing from an array of illuminating film and actor case studies, including Bill Murray, Tom Cruise, Michael Douglas, Will Smith, William H. Macy, Denzel Washington, Broken Flowers, Far From Heaven, Pleasantville, Magnolia, and Wonder Boys, Masculinity and Film Performance offers a significant contribution to the emerging field of screen performance studies.

A certain age: Wes Anderson, Anjelica Huston and modern femininity

In the context of Wes Anderson's signature attention to age-related themes, this paper examines Anjelica Huston's characters and performances in three Anderson films, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited. Although often overlooked by critics and scholars, Huston's characters are, by Hollywood standards, uncharacteristically independent, attractive and fascinating, with a significant range of personalities and professions. Arguably, they are among the strongest and most sharply defined female characters of middle age portrayed in recent and contemporary American cinema. The Huston characters also provide productive points of contrast to the films' male protagonists, especially the middle-aged ones.

A Cinematic Alchemy: Lawrence Jordan and the Palimpsest of Cinema

A Cinematic Alchemy:Lawrence Jordan and the Palimpsest of Cinema Richard Deming (bio) In thinking of the cross-pollination of poetry and cinema, the work of Lawrence Jordan looms large indeed. Since the beginning of his career in the 1950s, this Bay Area filmmaker has maintained a deep interest in making poetry an important part of his filmic poetics. Jordan's work is distinctive in that poetry and poetics are not just analogues for discussing his films and his sense of structure, useful tropes to draw upon in thinking about the ways meaning is formed within and between the celluloid frames. Poems and poets serve not just as sources of inspiration for Jordan; they act as prominent aspects of his films, constructing conceptual frameworks and narrative centers, and they even provide the focus for the camera's points of view. In this way, poetry is actually part of the work itself. Indeed, the interdependency of poetry and film in Jordan's work presses against the distinctions between these two art forms in such a way that each medium recontextualizes the other. That interconnection—a version of overcoming divisions in thinking and being—points to the ways that Jordan's films reveal an underlying sense that is, at its core, mystical in nature—a sense that the world itself is a shared aesthetic experience and that art reveals the ways we imbue that experience, again and again, with meaning and significance. There can be little doubt that for the postwar generation of experimental filmmakers, particularly those living on the West Coast, mysticism was a galvanizing force; Jordan, born in 1934, is one of the most important, most productive, and most consistent artists continuing to work in this strain of contemporary American film. In a recent Artforum article discussing Jordan's oeuvre in light of the 2008 release by Facets Video of the Lawrence Jordan Album, a four-disc [End Page 360] selection of many of the filmmaker's most important movies, P. Adams Sitney points out, "The mask of the mystic or magus, a guise once prevalent in the American avant-garde cinema, is now worn by only three remaining filmmakers, all of whom happen to live and work in California: Jordan Belson, Kenneth Anger, and Lawrence Jordan."1 Jordan and these two contemporaries that Sitney names, as well as others of that generation, share with varying degrees of intensity a certain sense, in part inherited from (or at least authorized by) Maya Deren, that cinema's power lies in its ability to present the artist's interior vision in a public way.2 "If cinema is to take its place beside the others as a full-fledged art form," Deren insisted, "it must cease merely to record realities that owe nothing of their actual existence to the film instrument. Instead, it must create a total experience so much out of the very nature of the instrument so as to be inseparable from its means."3 This "total experience" offers a shared form of revelation and expression. From the beginning of his career, Jordan's name has been linked most often with Stan Brakhage, and rightfully so. The two first befriended one another in high school in Colorado, and both spent barely a year at Ivy League colleges— Brakhage at Dartmouth, Jordan at Harvard—before deciding to devote their lives to making films. Although perhaps overshadowed at first by Brakhage, who made his mark on cinema relatively quickly and very decisively, the baroque, meticulous intensity of Jordan and his films has established his lasting influence on avant-garde cinema. Continuing to test the possibilities of a visionary cinema, Jordan's work crosses a range of practices. While he is best known for his breathtaking animated movies such as Hamfat Asar (US, 1965), Carabosse (US, 1980), and The Visible Compendium (US, 1991), all of which utilize collage and cutout techniques involving such materials as colored medieval engravings, Victorian-era illustrations, and pop images, Jordan has also made "live-action," nonfiction movies that engage the life of the filmmaker and those he knows. These latter are not exactly diaristic films, despite the fact that they draw from images of daily experiences. These films...

Imitation and adaptation: A screenwriting pedagogy

Because originality is highly valued in all the arts, it initially appears counterproductive to teach screenwriting students the craft by encouraging them to imitate established genres or to adapt literature. This pedagogical method, however, teaches students genre-specific narrative structure and conventions, avoids the paralysis that sometimes comes with ‘complete’ artistic freedom and ultimately allows students to discern the qualities of their unique ‘voice’. Countless contemporary American films are adaptations, sequels, parodies or mashups, yet many fear that learning via imitation will cause students to write derivative or cliché scripts. By exploring the history of emulation in art and the fact that the value placed on originality is relatively new, the pedagogic push for originality starts to appear short-sighted. Further analysis reveals how reaching for ‘highly original’ may produce innovation but few screenplays of critical value. Identifying an example of ‘original’ within the genre boundaries of the horror screenplay demonstrates how a screenwriter can break new ground while still writing within the conventions of the genre. Fiction to Film Adaptations also prove to be highly innovative and original works, ultimately refining the definition of creativity, innovation and originality in screenplay writing.

Digital Cinema. Now.

Post-Cinematic Affect By Steven Shaviro Zero Books, 2010 200 pp./$19.95 (sb) Since releasing his groundbreaking 1993 book Cinematic Body: Theory Out of Bounds, which introduced a Deleuzian view on affective cinema spectatorship, Steven Shaviro has written on network society, postmodernity, and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. His most recent book, Post-Cinematic Affect (2010), once again engages with film. It offers an important commentary on the condition of contemporary cinema overtaken by digitization, which has irreversibly altered our understanding of what film is and affected its aesthetics to such a degree that the medium has received verdicts about its end. The book drills straight into questions about the new conditions of cinema: What is the role of cinema, an art form inseparable from modernity, as part of late modern digitized media culture? Zero Books aims at inspiring new paths of critical thought, and Post-Cinematic Affect succeeds in this. The book is defined by Shaviro's literary, rather than overtly academic, starting point, asking what it feels like to live in the twenty-first century. Shaviro analyzes the new stylistic sensibilities in contemporary American cinema using Grace Jones's music video Corporate Cannibal (2008, directed by Nick Hooker), Richard Kelly's dark science fiction drama Southland Tales (2006), and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's science fiction thriller Gamer (2009) as examples of the features of digitized moving image culture, and offers a more thematic exploration of the multinational global market economy in Olivier Assayas's thriller Boarding Gate (2007) and his neo-noir Demonlover (2002). The examples discussed in the book, which explore the endlessly mutating, interconnecting, inorganic rhythms and flows of business economy, are analyzed on both thematic and cinematic levels. These flows define post-cinema; the Fordist production of classical Hollywood is replaced by a post-Fordist economy incarnated in digital forms of fluidity and constant change. Shaviro's outlining of recent American cinema, or post-cinema, will be of great interest to scholars of film and new media aesthetics, and their discussion focuses neatly on the relationships between modernist humanist aesthetics and posthuman tendencies. The poetics of post-cinema, or the analysis of the ways in which contemporary producers of film and music videos embrace digitization, will also be of interest to artists working in new media and film. The book encourages readers to think about artistic possibilities for diagnosing the structures of global capitalism, gender, race, and nationality, as well as the role of media itself. Because of its easygoing style, the book is also accessible to more mainstream audiences interested in the whereabouts of contemporary American cinema. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Cinematic Body, Shaviro demonstrated an impressive ability to grasp the tissue of cinematic images, to seize the aesthetic qualities and effects of film, and to tie these tightly within a conceptual framework; this functions enchantingly in Post-Cinematic Affect as well. …

We'll Always Have Chengdu: East Meets West on the Silver Screen

AbstractFrom 2006 to 2008, Peter J. Vernezze served as a Peace Corps volunteer at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, taking a two-year leave of absence from his regular job as a philosophy professor. During this time he facilitated a film series for his Chinese undergraduate students which showed classic and contemporary American films – everything from Casablanca to the Marx brothers to Brokeback Mountain. The goal of the series was "to use film in order to shed light on and increase the understanding of American culture and values." This essay is a personal account of the discussions which took place after the screenings and what this American and these Chinese students may or may not have learned from each other about universalities and differences in cultures.

The Lord of the Rings as global phenomenon: a review of The Frodo Franchise, Watching the Lord of the Rings and Studying the Event Film

While Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy has been the subject of an enormous amount of publications, the three books discussed here are particularly interesting because they address from different methodological perspectives the topics at stake in state-of-the-art global research on contemporary American cinema. If Kristin Thompson (The Frodo Franchise, University of California Press) chose to closely follow the (post)production process, Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs (Watching the Lord of the Rings, Peter Lang) instead analysed the response of world audiences, and the research group led by Sean Cubitt, Harriet Margolis, Barry King and Thierry Jutel (Studying the Event Film, Manchester University Press) focused on the relationship between the films and the place where they were produced, New Zealand. Therefore, the complexity of the LOTR phenomenon is analysed in all its components. Thompson's book is the most documented of the three, providing relevant insights into the production process of the film; Barker and Mathijs address important issues about the reception of contemporary cinema, but their analyses are often arguable because of some theoretical and methodological weaknesses; finally, mixing both points of view, Cubitt's team seems to achieve a greater understanding of its subject. The need for an interdisciplinary and comparative approach is in fact the first important suggestion we can draw from their comparison. The adoption of a critical point of view, mostly evident in Studying the Event Film, proves to be necessary when discussing the political economy and the cultural significance of Hollywood blockbusters. The centrality of globalisation as a crucial category for contemporary film studies is revealed by all the books, which offer an American, a New Zealand and a global point of view on this worldwide successful saga.

Violent Female Action Characters in Contemporary American Cinema

This research is a content analysis of violent female action characters (“VFAC”) shown in American action films from 1991 through 2005. The analysis focused on three aspects of VFACs: (1) gender stereotypes, (2) demographics, and (3) quantity and type of violence. Findings showed that 58.6% of VFACs were portrayed in a submissive role to the male hero in the film, and 42% were romantically linked to him. The average VFAC was young, white, highly educated, and unmarried. VFACs engaged in masculine types of violence yet retained feminine stereotypes due to their submissive role and romantic involvement with a dominant male hero character. The findings suggest continued gender stereotypes set within a violent framework of contemporary American cinema.

True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity , and: Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity, and: Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture Geoff Hamilton Mark Seltzer. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. 288 pp. David Schmid. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Violent criminality, now more than ever, occupies a weirdly central and centralizing place in American cultural life. Blockbuster media—from cable news reports on school shootings, serial slaughters, and husbands-gone-wild, to the endlessly proliferating crime narratives that appear now on everything from Spike TV to the National Geographic Network to the Women’s Entertainment channel—bring mass audiences together in consideration of trauma and outrage. World War II press reports apparently coined the term “blockbuster bomb” for a device explosive enough to destroy whole neighbourhoods. Contemporary blockbusters, some of which you may take home from your local Blockbuster, offer a related sort of communal participation in annihilation and suffering, however vicarious. It is the public and public-making aspects of criminality, the criminal’s fame and the crime’s socializing function, that concern David Schmid in Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture and Mark Seltzer in True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. The authors join here a lively conversation about the cultural significance of violent transgression, drawing on and augmenting such important works as Joel Black’s Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991), Philip Jenkins’s Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (1994), Karen Haltunnen’s Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (1998), Seltzer’s own Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (1998), and Philip L. Simpson’s Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (2000). [End Page 279] For several decades now, the figure of the serial killer has been exceptionally prominent in American culture, with real and fictional examples—Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, Aileen Wuornos, BTK, et al.—achieving a level of name recognition and “brand” prominence to be envied by any Hollywood actor. As David Schmid contends in his excellent study, a pop-cultural environment largely indifferent to moral value as a condition of fame has transformed the serial killer into both the “ultimate deviant” (25), the worst sort of human one can imagine, and also the “exemplary modern celebrity” (4), an individual revered for being so horrible. The how and why of the serial killer’s amoral ascendance is explored thoroughly and convincingly by Schmid. His opening section deals, first, with the suggestively proleptic celebrity of two nineteenth-century serial killers, Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes, who prompted powerful public revulsion and fascination, thus “inaugurat[ing] the ongoing debate about whether famous serial killers are the consummate insiders or outsiders of American culture” (33) (the Ripper’s putative “Americanness,” see below, is discussed in detail). He then moves on to examine the history of the FBI’s relationship to serial killing, revealing how this organization “claim[ed] exclusive ownership of serial murder” and “[used] popular culture to both publicize and reinforce its reputation as the unquestioned source of expertise on serial crime” (67). From here, Schmid proceeds to his second section, investigating serial killers in Hollywood films, television crime dramas, and true-crime narratives. An epilogue considers the status of the serial killer after 9/11, with Schmid tracking its overlap with concerns about terrorism and concluding that the serial-killer figure has endured because of its oddly reassuring familiarity and usefulness in framing a more recent and still poorly understood menace. One of Schmid’s central arguments—cogently defended over the course of the book—is that the serial killer’s ascendance has been made possible by the myriad ways in which this particular sort of criminal can be exploited by diverse ideological agendas and commercial interests. Among the parties who have found serial killers expedient during the last three decades are the FBI (which needed to posit a threat large enough to justify its own expansion), tabloid news (which sought lurid content in order to compete for the attention of an increasingly fragmented...

Etiske lesninger i fiksjonens frirom

Ethical Readings in the Unbiassed Sphere of Fiction:This article defends an ethical criticism of fiction film. Drawing on the so-called »ethical turn« in philosophy and literary criticism, as well as perspectives from new tendencies in cognitive film theory, Gjelsvik argues that an ethical criticism is not just possible, but unavoidable.Using contemporary American fiction film and the depiction of violence as her main case-study, she aims to show that there is no such thing as a separate fictional realm beyond the scope of ethical evaluations. A central example in her discussion is Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, a movie which was regarded by the Norwegian film reviewers as a fairy-tale and »just for fun«; accordingly the movie’s depiction of violence was not subject to an ethical criticism. Gjelsvik points to several reasons why this position (close to »aestheticism« in art theory) is inadequate, and she proposes a moderate version of ethical criticism instead. She discusses the moderate position as formulated by Berys Gaut and Noël Carroll, both philosophers who also have worked extensively on film art, trying to transfer their perspectives on art onto popular culture.She argues that such an approach also needs to take into consideration the emotions evoked by the movie and by violent depictions in particular. Whereas cognitive film theorists have foregrounded the similarities between the viewers’ emotional response to film and their real-life emotions, Gjelsvik makes a case for the importance of considering the distinctive features of fiction and cinematic depictions.The overall argument is that, as the relation between moral and aesthetic values is complex, ethical criticism should not aim for categorical evaluation. On the contrary, the position should take into consideration the heterogeneousness of fiction film, for instance in the differences between different movies’ depiction of violence, and acknowledge the value of ambivalent reactions towards fiction as well.

Fear on the Footsteps of Comedy: Childhood and Paranoia in Contemporary American Cinema

Beginning in the 21st century the American conspiracy thriller, one of the most popular of contemporary genres, became preoccupied with scenarios of protagonists threatened with the loss of children. What had until recently been the subject of light-hearted family films, i.e., on the growing up of children and the growing down of adults, reappeared here as a reason for dread. Tracing the very gendered nature of this fear in the contemporary thriller, this paper contextualizes the phenomenon in the culture of a radicalized globalized capitalism and an outcome of the neo-liberal turn since the 1980s.

The Lighter Side of Grief: Loss in Contemporary American Cinema

This article focuses on the current trend towards the combination of grief and humor in American cinema. These representations reflect a society built upon capitalism, competitiveness, and success. But nowadays the American culture seeks to cope with loss of direction and identity. Psychology, sociology and film studies expose these filmic depictions as a social representation of a generation in American social structure rather than as narratives of grief. The question remains, why now? Why at this particular point in history is Hollywood accepting of such humorous films in place of many of the more seriously dramatic works?

“The More You Look, the Less You Really Know”: The Redemption of White Masculinity in Contemporary American and French Cinema

Through a reading of contemporary American and French films that privilege homosocial and father–son relations, this essay explores the ways in which narrative structures and formal strategies are employed to articulate white masculinity in crisis.