Mainstream Hollywood Films Research Articles

Savage Desires: Afghanistan as a Site for Othering in Dharmatma and Khuda Gawah

This paper aims to explore how Afghanistan is represented in two mainstream Bollywood films from the pre-9/11 period using Orientalism as a theoretical framework. While much literature exists on Afghanistan being Orientalized in Hollywood films, Bollywood representations of Afghanistan have not been studied from similar critical lenses. With the recent takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban after a twenty-year-long war, it is more urgent than ever today to examine Bollywood representations of Afghanistan given the crucial importance of India as a key geopolitical entity in the region. The paper shall study two films from the pre-9/11 period in order to understand if Bollywood has Orientalized the region like mainstream Hollywood films. Bollywood films well known for taking their influences from Hollywood productions, make it likely to be the case.

The change of Chinese elements in Hollywood films from a cross-cultural perspective

As a kind of visual communication art, a movie is a product of the fusion of modern science and technology and art, as well as a medium for reflecting social phenomena and spreading multiculturalism. The mainstream Hollywood films naturally represent the ideological characteristics and value orientation of the field or country it belongs to. As a heterogeneous culture, Chinese elements in Hollywood movies have experienced a long and tortuous change, which is not only related to the enhancement of China's comprehensive national power and the change of international relations, but also inextricably linked to the Western core cultural values behind Hollywood. The overall change of the image of Chinese elements in Hollywood movies can be summarized as a shift from negative stereotypes to the inclusion of Chinese characteristic elements and the gradual export of Chinese stories and culture, showing a positive and diversified development trend, and behind this trend change is the refraction and effect of cross-cultural communication between Chinese and Western.

The Life and Legacy of Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

The Life and Legacy of Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

Communicating climate change in ‘Don't Look Up’

‘Don't Look Up’ makes no direct reference to climate change, yet functions as a climate communication film, satirising political and societal responses to the scientific evidence of climate change and to the lack of concerted global climate action. As a popular cultural story of climate inaction, ‘Don't Look Up’ importantly critiques existing values of late-capitalism in the form of speculative techno-fixes, extractive capitalism and celebrity commodity culture. Yet as a mainstream Hollywood film, it privileges global north perspectives. More diverse stories that go beyond apocalyptic imageries are required to more clearly centre climate justice within popular cultural imaginaries.

Fictionalized Accounts of African Migrant Mothers in And Breathe Normally and Anchor Baby

Representations and discourses about migrants have excluded the narratives of African migrant mothers. Often, discussions about these group of women tend to rely on stereotypes, which consequently trivializes the complexities and nuances that characterize the lives of these women. Adopting an intersectional approach, this article centers the African immigrant mother by exploring the narratives of African migrant mothers in two films. In this article, I explore how institutional systems combine to oppress African migrant mothers in their host nations. While And Breathe Normally (2018) challenges the notion of female passivity—which shapes numerous mainstream Hollywood films—Anchor Baby (2010) perpetuates some patriarchal norms associated with motherhood. However, both films demonstrate the multiple layers of oppression that African migrant mothers encounter in the host country. Through the individual narratives of all the female characters (black and white) in both films, we can see each one of them has personal battles imposed on them by their societies, thereby highlighting how interconnected the lives of women are.

Transitional Moments in Cinematic Virtual Reality

This video essay interrogates cinematic representations of immersive technologies in mainstream Hollywood films, through a comparative approach. In particular, it excavates the transitionary moment of each of the films - when the male protagonist traverses the real-to-virtual world boundary.

‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of <em>Snowden</em> and <em>The Fifth Estate</em>

‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of <em>Snowden</em> and <em>The Fifth Estate</em>

Passages of Light: Analogue and Digital Moving Image Installation.

Within a rapidly changing media landscape, light remains an intrinsic and potentially expressive aspect of moving imagery, regardless of the shape, form and resolution that specific capture and display devices might take. The practice of light in moving imagery is typically considered through an arrangement of sources, filters and modifiers that sculpt the aesthetic appearance of a two-dimensional frame and is often studied in relation to mainstream Hollywood films. This practice-research investigation seeks to compliment such discourse by extending the consideration of lighting practices beyond conventional cinematography to an installation context. Through the presentation of several artworks, this exposition reveals a distinction between the light ‘of’ an image and the light ‘within’ an image. It also explores the material considerations of a practitioner’s control of projected light. Each artwork seeks to create an interoperation between analogue and digital moving imagery, weaving together various technologies in order to reveal an array of textures and qualities of light. Drawing primarily on autoethnographic notation captured during the creation of these artworks, as well as discussion of a range of film and video texts, this exposition investigates material tensions of mediated illumination.

“Rise like two angels in the night:” Sexualized Violence against Queers in American Film

This essay discusses ways both mainstream Hollywood films and independent cinema have addressed sexualized violence against queers. I am looking at a number of significant films that refrain from stereotypically correlating queerness, sexuality, and violence, opting for a critical assessment of this conflation and offering alternative viewpoints, instead. First highlighting the controversies around prominent films such as Cruising and Boys Don’t Cry, I then look at lesser known, but noteworthy examples (e.g. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Skinny, Vacationland, and Mysterious Skin), films arising out the independent film movement known as New Queer Cinema. Focusing on the generic conventions, the narrative strategies and aesthetic means of these films, I probe into the ways they aim to affectively engage the audience and discuss their respective cinematic approaches of envisioning justice for people from the LGBTIQ* community who have experienced violence in sexualized contexts.

Promiscuous versus Romantic Lesbianism in Films

There is a lack of queer visibility in the mainstream Hollywood films because of the Production Code Administration in October 1961 that prohibited the presentation of “sexual perversion” on screen. However, the amendment of this code and gay liberation movements in 1970s, and the era of “new queer cinema” in the 1990s increased media representations of sexual minorities. Based on this context, the article critically analyzes the depiction of lesbian characters and their romance in the films The Killing of Sister George (1968) and Blue is the Warmest Color (2013). The Killing of Sister George depicts the life story of June Buckridge who loses her career and her relationship due to her sexuality, and Blue is the Warmest Color is a story about Adele, who explores her sexuality as a teenager. Whereas the former film depicts lesbianism from a promiscuous lens, the latter approaches this topic from a realistic and contemporary perspective. Thus, the films represent lesbian sexuality in unique ways that allows us to investigate the progression of queer depiction in the mainstream cinema. The similarities and differences between the queer representation in the films, as well as the way the film portrayal of lesbian romance relate to the current research literature are discussed.

Wang was missing: Rediscovering Wayne Wang’s independence

Abstract Wayne Wang (1949–present) occupies a unique position among Chinese American directors working in the United States as he has enjoyed a long and productive career spanning more than 30 years. Unlike most filmmakers, Wang has moved back and forth between independent filmmaking with experimental characteristics and mainstream commercial Hollywood productions. After early success with his pioneering Chinese American film Chan is Missing (Wang, 1982), audiences and film critics were wondering what happened to the ‘independent’ after a string of several commercial Hollywood films during the early 2000s. In 2007 and 2008, Wang returned to independent film production with A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2007) and even formal experimentation in The Princess of Nebraska (2008). Both films benefit from violations of mainstream Hollywood film form in the areas of editing, subtitling, camera, mise-en-scène and narrative. Wang could realize these projects through innovative financing using the strategy of shadow film and pioneering new approaches to distribution by premiering The Princess of Nebraska on YouTube.

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds

Screened Women

As this issue of Screen Bodies went into production, the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was concluding, and Vogue published a short online piece on Hillary Clinton’s sartorial choices for her acceptance speech. While Clinton had often worn brighter, bolder colors and styles for her major appearances, on this evening she donned an ivory suit—a simple canvas against which to continue painting an image of the woman behind the candidacy. At the same time, the Internet continued to disseminate more negative reviews of the rebooted Ghostbusters (2016)—starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones, directed by Paul Feig, written by Katie Dippold and Paul Feig. I think the film is (pace Lucille Ball) funny and brave. It hilariously reverses many sexist tropes and assumptions out of mainstream Hollywood films; it is crude and inappropriate in the best of ways; and responses to it—especially patriarchal, masculinist, heteronormative, and racist ones—continue to demonstrate the importance of critical comedic revisions for feminist interruptions of established paradigms.

Down South: Regional Exploitation Films, Southern Audiences, and Hillbilly Horror in Herschell Gordon Lewis's Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)

:This article analyzes Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), directed by “Godfather of Gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis, in the context of the history of 1960s independent exploitation film production. Lewis and Maniacs represent an important yet marginalized regional alternative—in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and audiences—to both the mainstream Hollywood film industry and the slightly larger-scale and more mainstream exploitation-style filmmakers of the era. Maniacs also importantly reveals the marginalized, rural, and predominantly Southern drive-in audiences that made up Lewis's primary market and to whom the film, in its representation of murderous rural Southerners, directly speaks in this historical moment of the Civil War centennial and the escalating civil rights movement. Furthermore, Maniacs establishes important precedents for the development of the horror film in terms of the introduction and mainstreaming of gore horror and its bloody effects as well as the “hillbilly horror” subgenre, which would be more broadly popularized on a larger scale in the 1970s.

Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era by Ellen C. Scott

Reviewed by: Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era by Ellen C. Scott Courtney Baker Ellen C. Scott.Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. 268pp. $29.95. In her book Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era, media scholar Ellen C. Scott provides a well-researched critical history of black repression in the American film industry during the first half of the twentieth century. The study is a welcome addition to important recent publications in African American television and film studies such as Sarah Torres’s Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton UP, 2003) and Allyson Nadia Field’s Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke UP, 2015). All of the projects provide a careful and thoroughgoing account of the visual media industry and its representations of black life. Scott’s book significantly advances our understanding of the conditions of film production by investigating the impact of censorship in the constitution of narratives and the framing of black bodies on screen. Cinema Civil Rights undertakes media studies as a material cultural studies project, referring readers to the cinematic objects while contextualizing and critiquing the material and social conditions for those objects’ construction. Scott’s work stands out among these other books for its study of mainstream Hollywood film—a genre that would seem not to provide as rich a terrain for the discussion of black representational politics. However, Scott’s canny readings reveal that an anxiety about black representation in the context of civil rights discourse in popular film has been, for more than one hundred years, a central and abiding organizing principle for studios and directors in the most powerful and longstanding film industry in the world. Scott’s analysis of “the structure of limitation” in the film industry during its Golden Age is rooted in an understanding of civil rights as a project of “equal citizenship” that compelled and confounded African Americans throughout the [End Page 289] twentieth century (1). By examining texts that document both repression and resistance, Scott exposes how censorship boards and industry complacency “ultimately failed to avoid the civil rights questions they repressed” (3). The first two chapters trace how some films resisted industry and state policies and codes that forbade, if not outright censored, cinematic suggestions of miscegenation and racial injustice. Chapter one focuses on self-regulation and censorship that Scott divides into five eras, each attached to three regulating boards—the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the Studio Relations Committee, and the Production Code Administration—and their changing leadership. Over the course of this period, extending from 1926 to 1961, Hollywood films struggled to remain topical—taking on such subjects as chain gangs, lynching, and interracial sex—while attempting at the same time not to offend Southern racist sentiment nor to foreground race—and in particular black-white relations—as sources of conflict and titillation. Analyzing works such as I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Imitation of Life (1934), Pinky (1949), The Burning Cross (1947), and several others in the context of correspondence between the regulating boards and studios as well as revisions to scripts and shooting drafts reveals a pattern of careful compromises that did not ban, but rather “muted and dampened” reference to black-white racial conflict and miscegenation (66). State standards were in many ways more restrictive and no less influential, “vitally shaping America’s system of film vetting” (67) as well as industry censorship-board standards. Scott’s concern in this chapter is on the local impact of censorship on spectatorship that, “through censored shots and banned scenes, worked to bend the racial trajectory of the cinema on important local American screens and in specific communities” (69). The chapter looks at the treatment of not only mainstream films, but also “foreign, B, and independent films” (107) by the censors in particular states—specifically, Ohio, Kansas, Maryland, and Virginia—at the height of their influence (1915 to 1952). While the selection of films and states discussed in this section appears...

Reclaiming Rio: Iconization and erasure of American English in the Brazilian Portuguese dubbing of an animated film

This article draws on Irvine and Gal’s semiotic processes of iconization and erasure of language differentiation to analyse and compare the English language original and Brazilian Portuguese dubbed version of the animated film Rio. Three scenes depicting cross-linguistic encounters between American English- and Brazilian Portuguese-speaking characters are studied to see how screen translators approach situations in which the linguistic other in a source text is portrayed by a language that coincides with the target language. The case study draws on translational strategies proposed by Zabalbeascoa and Corrius. Viewed from the perspective of semiotic processes of language differentiation, these strategies have a striking effect: whereas mainstream Hollywood films tend to portray multilingual situations and the non-English-speaking linguistic other by iconization and erasure, once the film is dubbed, it is American English identities that are iconized and later disappear from the screen.

Beyond The Chinese Connection : Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production by Crystal S. Anderson (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production by Crystal S. Anderson Edlie Wong (bio) Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production, by Crystal S. Anderson. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013. Vii + 222 pp. $55.00 hardback. ISBN 978-1-61703-755-9. Afro-Asian comparative racialization studies have begun to change how we think about race and its multiple and contradictory meanings across different periods of U.S. history. Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production contributes to this important trend in thinking about comparative constructions of race and cross-racial antagonisms and alliances. Earlier work on Afro-Asian comparative racialization such as Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (2001) and Bill Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism (2004) tended to emphasize the revolutionary—indeed, at times utopian—forms of anticolonial transpacific polyculturalism and political collaborations. Anderson’s volume explicitly builds upon and broadens this work. According to Anderson, Afro-Asian comparative racialization studies often favor anticapitalist critiques, taking the 1955 Bandung conference as the storied origins of the global alignment of the political struggles of African and Asian peoples. In contrast, her book offers a self-described cultural approach that emphasizes historical and ethnic specificity, disarticulating the homogenizing panethnicities implied in the term “Afro-Asian” to consider “the way the histories of individual ethnic groups may impact their interaction with one another” (37). There is perhaps no more fitting figure for this study than the martial arts film star Bruce Lee, whose cross-racial and cross-ethnic appeal transformed him into an Afro-Asian cultural icon in the 1970s. Anderson’s volume stages a series of encounters between Lee’s signature films—one for each of the four chapters—and a range of post-1990s novels, films, and popular culture revealing the complexities of inter- and intraethnic Afro-Asian interactions. Anderson begins with the film Way of the Dragon (1972) and charts Lee’s emergence as a transnational and cross-cultural phenomenon. “Lee’s legacy,” she argues, “functions as a framework to interrogate the contemporary landscape” (5). In chapter 2, Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973) facilitates an exploration of the limits and possibilities of interethnic male friendship in Frank Chin’s novel Gunga Din Highway (1994) and two mainstream Hollywood films, Rush Hour 2 (2001) and Unleashed (2005). In chapter 3, Lee’s The Chinese Connection (1972) allows Anderson to examine the theme of ethnic imperialism in Ishmael Reed’s satirical novel Japanese by Spring (1993) and the Japanese anime series Samurai Champloo (2004), while Lee’s The Big Boss (1971) frames the final chapter on intra- and interethnic conflict and solidarity in Paul Beatty’s novel White Boy Shuffle (1996) and the highly popular Matrix science fiction film trilogy (1999 (2003). These cultural case studies allow Anderson ample opportunity to engage in broader historical contextualization and considerations of Afro-Asian social dynamics. In the case of Rush Hour 2 and Unleashed, Anderson draws [End Page 107] attention away from film reception to explore the historical underpinnings of their plots and characterizations, from Rush Hour 2’s eroticization of Chinese women and the 1875 Page Act equating all Chinese women with prostitutes to the economic exploitation of the Chinese coolie reformulated in Unleashed’s plot of human trafficking. Anderson organizes these cultural readings according to how each work constructs Afro-Asian cross-cultural dynamics along a broad “continuum of intercultural interactions” (3). At one end of this spectrum lies what she identifies as “cultural emulsion.” A concept drawn from Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, cultural emulsion designates those instances where “cultures come together but do not mix in response to pressures to reinforce ethnic or national boundaries” (3). Against this more limited form of cultural distancing, Anderson counterpoises the concept of “cultural translation,” which “uses one ethnic culture to interpret another ethnic culture” and “recognizes more complex combinations of cultures” across national boundaries (35). This framework of emulsion and translation lends a somewhat static quality to Anderson’s detailed readings, and the most compelling of the case studies predictably land on the cultural translation end of the spectrum. For example, Anderson explores how Samurai Champloo’s uses...

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: REFRAMING AUDIENCE PERCEPTION OF JUSTICE IN BATMAN TRILOGY

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: REFRAMING AUDIENCE PERCEPTION OF JUSTICE IN BATMAN TRILOGY SUC VE CEZA: BATMAN UCLEMESI ADALETIN HEDEF KITLE ALGISI Assoc. Dr. Feryal CUBUKCU1 Dokuz Eylul University Abstract Film scholars debate whether mainstream Hollywood film industry creates social values or merely reflects social values, or even creates and then reflects social values, which leads to the fact that films inarguably resonate with their socio-historical-economic moment. Culture shapes media even as media shapes culture. The role of media in public perceptions and understandings of crime and justice issues cannot be underestimated. While films do not purport to be truthful, they seek to create a kind of reality that audiences will accept as credible and valid. This study aims at exploring primarily what the relationship is between law, language and film, with the emphasis on how crimes are constructed, how victimization is represented and how justice is treated in the comics especially the Batman series by Christopher Nolan.

Gays and Queers: From the Centering to the Decentering of Homosexuality in American Films

This article examines independent cinema's depictions of homosexuality from 1990 to 2000. Using mainstream Hollywood films of the 1990s as the context for their development, I show significant differences in how homosexuality is represented outside mainstream films. Specifically, I divide independent films into two types: gay and lesbian standpoint films, and queer cinema. Gay standpoint films are distinguished by their narrative focus on a gay and lesbian subculture, whereas queer cinema generally depicts representations of a character's sexuality as decentered. I suggest that if we understand gay and lesbian standpoint films as a response to mainstream Hollywood ones that exclude subcultural depictions, then queer cinema can be seen as a challenge to both gay and lesbian standpoint films, and mainstream Hollywood films that center and normalize homosexual identity.

Agency in Adaptation

Agency in Adaptation