Robert Wise Research Articles

Julie Andrews: from the myth of the androgyne to gender fluidity

ABSTRACT Julie Andrews’s character in The Sound of Music (Robert Wise 1965) is in many ways the embodiment of an androgynous ideal that can be found in the mythical origins of numerous traditions. This is evident in the actress’s childish and clumsy body movements, in her ambiguous anatomy, and in the dialogue she maintains with the Alpine landscape, which she engages with repeatedly in the film as if it were a kind of primordial environment for her. This article explores the evolution of the idea of androgyny over the course of Andrews’s career, culminating nearly twenty years after the release of The Sound of Music with Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards 1982), a film that foreshadows the contemporary notion of gender fluidity. Adopting a methodological discourse related to star studies and drawing on concepts from feminism and queer theory, this article dives into Andrews’s filmography in an effort to clarify this narrative line and its development on the basis of key elements of her performance, such as the use of her body, gestures and the gaze.

The motorcycle diaries of a topolect cinema

Autumn 1965: Steve McQueen travelled to Taiwan. On a brisk autumn day in 1965, the crew of The Sand Pebbles (Robert Wise, 1966), a 20th Century Fox high-budget production, travelled to Taiwan for what was originally scheduled to be a few weeks’ stay. Thanks to inclement weather and other miscellaneous factors, the crew ended up stranded on the island for more than four months. During this period of idleness, the film’s star Steve McQueen could be spotted roaming the Taipei streets on his motorcycle. Besides reporting on the shooting delays, newspapers and magazines included features on McQueen as an amateur motorcyclist, enjoying the pursuit of speed in and around the capital city. Having previously performed a spectacular stunt in a motorcycle chase-and-jump scene in The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963), McQueen had already earned a reputation as an adventurous, free-spirited biker, and would go on to reprise that image in On Any Sunday (Bruce Brown, 1971), a documentary about the sport of motorcycling and some of its famous racers. The press coverage in Taiwan recreated that persona, lauding the actor variously as a dare-devil rider of impeccable skill, a helpless motorcycle addict, and a rebel with a mania for speed.1 It was also reported that on receiving a Suzuki T20 racer bike, a world-champion motorcycle custom-made for him by the Japanese company, McQueen planned to mount this new vehicle and perform stunts for the local audience, in return for their affectionate attention.2

Making Space for Music

Max Steiner met Robert Wise, future director of West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), at RKO in the early 1930s. While Steiner served as composer and music director for films like Of Human Bondage (1934), The Gay Divorcee (1934), The Informer (1935), and Top Hat (1935), Wise helped manage the soundtrack as an assistant sound and music editor. After Steiner left RKO in early 1936, Wise stayed on at the studio to advance through the ranks of film editor and director before reuniting with Steiner at Warner Bros. for the melodrama So Big (1953) and sword-and-sandals epic Helen of Troy (1956). Drawing on original archival research, this article reconstructs a partnership that briefly flourished at different stages of their careers. At RKO, Wise learned the trade while observing Steiner’s ground-breaking efforts as a composer. By the 1950s Wise was rapidly growing in renown as a director, as signaled by his assignment to the generously budgeted Helen of Troy. In contrast, Steiner faced pay cuts and the termination of his contract at Warner Bros. Steiner’s two productions with Wise boosted Steiner’s lagging career while also illuminating the ways in which shifting aesthetics and production practices in Hollywood had left Steiner at a disadvantage. Whereas So Big represented a throwback to films like Cimarron, which Steiner had scored at RKO in 1931 (both based on Edna Ferber novels), Helen of Troy marked a new emphasis on visual and aural spectacle, with an epic narrative told through CinemaScope, stereophonic sound, and a cast of thousands. Writings on director-composer partnerships tend to emphasize the formation of a distinctive sonic style, in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann. Steiner and Wise, in contrast, were consummate studio employees, eager to serve productions that ranged widely in topic, genre, and budget. Studying their brief partnership in the 1950s reveals how two individuals well versed in the workings of the Hollywood studio system managed to help each other navigate its dismantling in the 1950s.

Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Interplanetary Emissary Klaatu Are Not Anti-Atomic: A Reassessment of the Filmic Evidence

Inspired by a 1940s short story by Harry Bates, scripted by Edmund H. North, and directed by Robert Wise, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is a science fiction cult classic. Of all its diverse interpretations, a commonly adopted reading influenced by the dawning of the Atomic Age parades it as an anti-nuclear exemplar starring alien emissary Klaatu visiting Earth with his robot companion Gort to (supposedly) suppress humanity’s atomic progress. However, upon a close forensic inspection of the film and commentator comments, this anti-atomic claim is resoundingly rejected. Utilizing humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens (i.e., looking inside not outside the frame), plus a selective review of the critical literature, it was demonstrated that: (a) there is a dearth of atomic iconography and dialogue, (b) there is no mention of banning atomic energy or weapons, (c) Earth’s atomics are nascent and not serious threats to the Federation, and (d) Klaatu is not anti-atomic but proudly pro-atomic. Overall, this SF film is strongly pro-nuclear in intention, word, and deed, which was frequently misinterpreted due to faulty film criticism, invented facts, and jumping to conclusions, and thus in need of academic correction. Further research into alien first-contact scenarios, robotic artificial intelligence, and the moral make-up of the SF universe is warranted and long overdue.

When Movies Get Sick

Stevens offers insights about the impact of COVID-19 on film industry It has suddenly unfastened the values that traditionally attach to proximity, particularly regarding human bodies, as vocabulary focusing on the distance between them- social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine- become part of our quotidian language Distance has become the sign of intimacy- of respect, care, concern, shared understanding of a shared world, a sense of belonging to a form of life Within discussions of film aesthetics, cinephiles tout the value of cinema for inviting audiences to attend to bodies in space, referring to the composition recorded by the camera and whose projection is offered up for our pleasure

La crisis del comando en el cine norteamericano de guerra submarina en los períodos de posguerra: los casos de Run Silent Run Deep (Robert Wise, 1958) y Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995)

The command crisis as a story line has been used in many references of the cinema war genre throughout years, but it is in the stories framed under the surface of the sea where it can reach its greatest destabilization capacity. The films of the subgenre suggested to exemplify this study are the North American Run Silent Run Deep (Robert Wise, 1958) and Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995). Both films were produced during a post-war era and narrate the rivalry of a commander and his executive officer in wartime submarines of the United States Navy. Commanding problems severely affect the ecosystem of the ships, creating a struggle for control during patrol. By means of observation, the relationship between History and these films will be analysed, as much as the strategy and narrative process with the objective of verifying keys in the use of the plot.

CHARACTER AND MORAL VALUE “IN THE SOUND OF MUSIC” BY ROBERT WISE

<p>The research aims to analyze the characters and moral values contained in the film "The<br />Sound of Music" by Robert Wise. Based on the theories of character and moral values, there are four primary points to analyze: 1) There are three kinds of characters that appear in the characters in "The Sound of Music" by Robert Wise based on Russel, those are the Protagonist, the main protagonist played by Maria and the Von Trapp Family and the sisters in the monastery, the Antagonist, played by The Baroness and Herr Zeller, and Foil character played by Rolfe and Franz, 2) There are seven types of moral values that appear in "The Sound of Music" by Robert Wise based on Borba, they are respect, kindness, conscience, self-control, justice, empathy and tolerance.<br />Keywords: content analysis; moral values; movie</p>

"The effect of exacerbation history on outcomes in the IMPACT trial." David M.G. Halpin, Mark T. Dransfield, MeiLan K. Han, C. Elaine Jones, Sally Kilbride, Peter Lange, David A. Lipson, David A. Lomas, Fernando J. Martinez, Steve Pascoe, Dave Singh, Robert Wise and Gerard J. Criner. Eur Respir J 2020; 55: 1901921.

"The effect of exacerbation history on outcomes in the IMPACT trial." David M.G. Halpin, Mark T. Dransfield, MeiLan K. Han, C. Elaine Jones, Sally Kilbride, Peter Lange, David A. Lipson, David A. Lomas, Fernando J. Martinez, Steve Pascoe, Dave Singh, Robert Wise and Gerard J. Criner. Eur Respir J 2020; 55: 1901921.

Brechtian Methodology in Wise’s The Sound of Music: Insights into Theatre in Education

Methods are problem solving devices for the benefit of education in society. When a method assumes regimental fixations, society suffers hackneyed bouts of limitation and contention necessitating flux. This paper examines issues of regimentalism as they affect society in Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, and the staccato notes of change inevitably mobilizing a Brechtian methodological reading amplifying social change, in a Theatre in Education performance. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1965), accomplished German director, playwright and theorist, mobilized theatre for social change by setting up Marxist dialectics in pursuit of retrenchment of total empathy; giving free reign to critical consciousness in theatrical productions. This paper has investigated analytically, the representations of this Brechtian methodology in The Sound of Music with the manifest result that the experiment in the movie has produced a healthier and better organized society than the German regimental machine.
 Key Words: Education, Theatre in Education, Brecht, Alienation Effect, Social Change, Family, Critical, Learning and Socialization

Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager

Reviewed by: Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager Eric Lott Jans B. Wager. Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir. Austin: U of Texas P, 2017. 163 pp. $24.95. Jans Wager works at the intersection of film soundtrack studies and racial analyses of cinema to offer an account of the way film noir deploys jazz to further its often racially fraught designs. In nine chapters that range mostly across what Wager calls “late classic film noir”—Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953), [End Page 340] Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957), Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)—the author suggests a “revolutionary, if short-lived, element” was to be found in the contexts jazz music and its composers brought to the productions (2). The music might enhance the drama, contrast with it, or operate in and as a separate dimension altogether; it might be diegetic (seen in a club or heard on a radio) or a nondiegetic set of codes and implications; it sometimes even came in the form of key figures themselves (Duke Ellington, Chico Hamilton), or actor-avatars meant to summon them. All of it provided an air or environment of significance for “dark” tales of predominantly white characters’ having fallen into various forms of moral corruption. If I dissent below from many of Wager’s conclusions, this takes nothing away from the painstaking study and the insights into noir soundscapes ably documented in Jazz and Cocktails. Much is pinned on what Wager terms the “Afromodernism” and (after Brecht) the “alienation effect” afforded by the appearance of jazz in noir. “Afromodernism allows a reading that focuses on black activism and the use of innovation and integration to achieve artistic goals in white Hollywood. The alienation effect suggests a more general understanding of the type of disruption within established codes that jazz offered to Hollywood soundtracks” (3). Though much of the analysis strains to demonstrate such activism and disruption, what Wager most often shows comes closer to her judicious early remark on noir’s use of jazz, that it “both served the Hollywood system’s stereotypes and provided a nuanced and expanded contribution to filmic meaning, just as it meant more to the musicians themselves” (15). In my view, noir enabled a commonsense racialism by which cinematic and musical “blackness” was used to convey whiteness gone wrong, which is to say that for all the genre’s interest in exposing white pathology, deceit, murder, and betrayal, it remained problematically invested in an untainted whiteness. Before moving to her various exhibits, Wager takes us randomly for a chapter to Ogden, Utah and its Porters and Waiters Club (Wager teaches at Utah Valley University), which she demonstrates hosted many jazz musicians (even Charlie Parker) on their way to the West Coast. It’s an understatement to say this chapter doesn’t further Wager’s argument in the slightest, but it is not without its interest. Wager’s turn to Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) mines its production details to show how conscious the studio (RKO) was of falling into various kinds of racist depiction but too ingenuously co-signs its liberal intentions, finding sequences clearly associating people of color with evil as “offering liberation and freedom” (45–46). This is the often unintentional problem of racial figuration in noir that I have argued elsewhere bedeviled whatever radical intentions this “Marxist cinema manqué ” (as Mike Davis calls it in City of Quartz) may have had—its relentless use of marginalized Black characters and racialized associations as backdrops, buttresses, and shadings for the moral degradations of white people. Wager’s book, in its sinuous explorations of such figuration, qualifies and looks for openings in it without producing a satisfying critique of it. As Wager puts it, the “representation [in Out of the Past] hints at the black activism implicit in bebop for an instant, suggests black life is as rich and sophisticated as white life for just...

Exorcising the Gothic House, Redeeming the Gothic Tyrant in Robert Wise's The Sound of Music

Exorcising the Gothic House, Redeeming the Gothic Tyrant in Robert Wise's <i>The Sound of Music</i>

Seeing the City

When West Side Story moved from stage to screen, the story became further enmeshed in the city of its setting. The filmmakers Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise used the cinematic elements of color, light, and camera angle to build a believable—but magical—place in which lovers sang and gang members danced. In the process, though, they also captured New York in the midst of urban renewal. The broad international distribution of the film spread an image of urban life that conveyed the abstract, aerial views of urban planners such as Robert Moses alongside the dynamic, street-level action of Jane Jacobs. While the filmmakers did not make pronouncements about urban theories, they visualized urban renewal in its grandeur and detail, animating cold concrete streets with dance and pitting vitality against human tragedy at the core of urban life.

Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (Part III)

ROBERT WISE'S THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL PART III: KLAATU'S HOLY ASSOCIATES AND RIVAL RELIGIOUS READINGS AbstractIn Part I, Anton Karl Kozlovic documented how the SF cult classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise), was traditionally perceived as a UFO film with political, A.I., police and philosophical dimensions, and then argued that it is best understood as a religious film. In Part II, Kozlovic explicated the complex subtextual construction of Klaatu as a Christ-figure in the alien Messiah mould. In this third and final instalment, the critical literature was again reviewed using textually-based, humanist film criticism as the analytical lens to explore how Klaatu's associates buttressed his christic construction and deepened its religious resonance. Rival religious readings of the film were also briefly canvassed. It was concluded that The Day the Earth Stood Still is even more profoundly religious than hitherto appreciated. Further...

Screened stages and turbulent collisions

Margaret Tedesco's performance of Cameo. Nights, and night is set with her standing before a screen onto which a feature length film is played with the sound turned off (the evening of the performance it was Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963)). The audience cannot see the screen. The performance unfolds as if narrated from a space of blank neutrality yet is tinged by Tedesco's own subjectivity. The turbulence of such encounters creates excess and stretches the dimensions between screen and stage. In Tedesco's performance, the seemingly stable boundary between film and performance becomes something unstable and in-between. This collision between cinema and performer alters both: the perception of ‘cinema’ and the status of ‘performance.’ This creates a turbulence that disrupts the fixity of both performance and the film text.At first glance it may seem that Tedesco performs the film. Instead, the opposite is true—the film performs Tedesco, transforming her into something other than actor. She becomes a human stand-in: a medium channeling the film that is unmistakably (despite its invisibility) the central “actor” of the performance. Her subjective responses to the film become a feedback look that changes the infinite ability for the film to repeat in the same way that the film is changes Tedesco's perception of her own presence and encounter in front of an audience. This encounter between reproducibility and the corporeal presence of the human body crosses the boundary between performance and film and creates a new moment somewhere between screen and stage, reproducibility and subjectivity. This moment changes spectators’ relationship to past and present and offers a new version of the future in which theatre and film are embedded within the other and in a constant feedback loop in which the turbulence between forms becomes the performance.

Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (Part II)

ROBERT WISE'S THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL PART II: KLAATU AS ALIEN MESSIAH AbstractIn Part I, the author had documented how the SF cult classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was traditionally perceived as a UFO film with Artificial Intelligence (AI), political, police and philosophical dimensions, and arguing that it is best understood as a profoundly religious film. In Part II, the critical literature was revisited and textually-based, humanist film criticism was again utilized as the guiding analytical lens to explicate the subtextual construction of Klaatu as an alien Messiah within an SF Passion picture. It is argued that Klaatu is the Christ-figure of 1950s science fiction cinema. IntroductionIn the Fall 2013 issue of Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, the author closely examined the classic black-and-white UFO film The Day the Earth Stood Still. He highlighted the film's anti-nuclear political theme, its...

�This is Our Turf!�: Puerto Rican youths in the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story

Abstract In 1961 directors Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise as well as screenwriter Ernest Lehman adapted the 1957 stage musical West Side Story into a film, and in the process engaged with the complex racial and ethnic discourses of Broadway and Hollywood. Thus, I explore how the depiction of the Puerto Rican characters grows out of significant trends onstage and in film. Furthermore, this article foregrounds adaptation by examining how the film portrays the Puerto Rican gang in relation to the so-called American gang and the Puerto Rican female characters in ways that both intersect with and make changes from the original stage production. Characterization through the music, lyrics, book and visuals all distinguish the different ethnic groups, in part through well-worn stereotypes. In fact, a tension in the representation of the Puerto Rican gang members results from the combination of highly problematic stereotyping and an attempt to give them more agency than in the original Broadway production. My analysis centres on three exemplary musical numbers, the Prologue, the �Mambo� and �America� in order to tease out various aspects of the film�s portrayal of Puerto Rican youths.

On Acevedo-Muñoz’s &lt;em&gt;West Side Story as Cinema&lt;/em&gt;

On Acevedo-Munoz's West Side Story as Cinema West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece. By Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. x + 204 pp., 978-0-7006-1921-4 (hc). US $29.95.Which titles deserve to be designated in the category of film? Those that are done in languages like Yiddish or Hebrew would easily make the cut, perhaps even if done by Hebrew-speaking Israeli Arab directors and scenarists. Documentaries of Jewish life would normally be included, but not those the Nazis produced depicting the Warsaw Ghetto or the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. To list The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City as a Jewish film would be grotesque. That also goes for movies made in the Third Reich, like Jud Suss (Veit Harlan, Germany, 1940), a deliberate rebuttal of the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, a Jewish refugee from Nazism. The taxonomy should make room, however, for the works of all sorts of Gentile directors who portray Jewish characters, whether Norman Jewison (Fiddler on the Roof; USA, 1971) or Ted Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; Canada, 1974). Special consideration might be given to films that might have directly engaged the Jewish condition but didn't. In The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, USA, 1937), for example, the letter J on a dossier, next to the name of Alfred Dreyfus, is the only hint of the genesis of the frame-up that would rock France.Perhaps the most intellectually intriguing subset would embrace films bereft of any overt or explicit Jewish content. But if the major creative figures in such cinematic endeavors are Jews, a distinctive sensibility might nevertheless be detected; a singular ethnic stance might somehow be fathomed. Here the strongest instance is Casablanca (USA, 1942), directed by Michael Curtiz (ne Kertesz Kaminer Mano) and written by Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch. The filmmakers informed the audience of the high price imposed on the United States for its policy of isolation, as a world war raged on three continents; and Michael Walsh's crafty novel, As Time Goes By (1998), by imagining the backstory to the film, clinches the case by making saloon-keeper Richard (Rick) Blaine Jewish. Another opportunity for inclusion as a Jewish film is West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, USA, 1961), the subject of this informative and engaging book, West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece.When the musical West Side Story opened on stage in New York City in 1957, the generalization offered later in Spamalot was validated: You just won't succeed on Broadway if you don't have any Jews. Jerome Robbins (ne Rabinowitz) conceived, directed, and choreographed the show. Arthur Laurents, who first achieved success with a play exposing bigotry (Home of the Brave), wrote the book of West Side Story. Its lyrics are credited to Stephen Sondheim, but composer Leonard Bernstein was his collaborator. (In a striking but characteristic gesture, Bernstein gave the twenty-seven-year-old Sondheim sole credit so that he could advance his own remarkable career.) It was hardly unusual for Jews like Harold Prince to co-produce a Broadway show. But even the first actor to play Tony, Larry Kert, was Jewish. Perhaps their commitment to a musical that portrays the high cost of hatred was not coincidental. Perhaps such a message had special meaning for Jews who had managed to live through the most devastating demographic-and cultural and moral-loss in the modern history of their people.Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz, who teaches film studies at the University of Colorado, is not especially attentive to the changes recorded in translating the play to the film, which was released four years later. He focuses more on structural and technical features of the movie rather than the interpretive issues it raises. Robbins signed on as co-director with Robert Wise (who was not Jewish), and the challenge they met was formal. …

“Raindrops on roses:” The Sound of Music and the political psyche of the Sixties

The Sound of Music is typically treated as a middlebrow cultural artifact of the Sixties. Within the British historiography its popularity is now taken to signify the conservatism of public taste, and hence to offer a corrective to claims of “cultural revolution.” The article interrogates this assertion, focusing principally on the Hollywood movie, but also encompassing related manifestations in other media, and introducing a British perspective to a hitherto US- or German-centric discussion. It surveys the critical literature, finding that contemporaries and later commentators dismissed the work as over-sentimental or irrelevant, and claimed it mythologized Austria’s Nazi past. However, other investigators have emphasized its semiotic diversity and liberating messages, exploring, inter alia, its countercultural imagery, its work as a lesbian text, its proto-feminist meanings, and its theme of female striving. The argument here is that the key to the film’s extraordinary reception lies in those scenes which bring emotional weight to the themes of child-rearing, discipline, and play, and the relationship between psychological health and the good society. This though is neither a psychoanalytic reading nor a claim that the film appealed to the collective unconscious of the audience. Rather it suggests that it both resonated with, and helped constitute, understandings of the self and society which were then current in intellectual and popular culture. The exposition begins by examining aspects of the political and personal lives of the librettist, Oscar Hammerstein, the director Robert Wise, and the leading lady Julie Andrews, to provide context for the subsequent interpretation. It draws on recent cultural histories that explore the influence of the popular musical and film, and also on biographical material, to emphasize the importance of internationalism, peace and tolerance to Hammerstein and to Wise. Andrews’ personal life at the time of filming, her journey into Freudian psychoanalysis, and her earlier friendship with the British analyst Masud Khan are also described. The central sections develop an argument which relates the film’s popularity to its handling of two issues. The first is its emphasis on the importance of emotional expression and play in child-rearing, expressed through Maria’s role as a surrogate mother, and her challenge to the authoritarianism of Captain von Trapp. These ideas were current in mothering manuals and the discussion traces the underlying psychoanalytic thought that influenced them, notably the work of John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott (with whom Masud Khan collaborated). The second issue is its explicit and allegorical treatment of Fascism. The work suggests a relationship between psychological health, inculcated by Maria’s love and encouragement of collective activity, and broader social health, in the family’s rejection of Nazism. Again this is related to postwar writings examining psychological development and political outcomes. While not positing necessary authorial intent on the part of creators, the argument turns on a case for audience recognition of these themes, and this is supported by reference to the literature on psychological subjectivity between the 1940s and 1960s. All this casts doubt on a simplistic treatment of the work as manifestation of conservative Sixties’ values.

Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still Part I: A Religious Film?

ROBERT WISE'S THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL Part I: A RELIGIOUS FILM? AbstractScience fiction (SF) films have frequently been the home for subtextual biblical characters, particularly Christ-figures. Crafting these sacred subtexts can make the difference between an ordinary film and an exceptional one. This investigation intends to explore the religious and other dimensions of the 1951 SF cult classic The Day the Earth Stood Still directed by Robert Wise. In Part 1 of this analytical triptych, the film's reception as a UFO film with political, artificial intelligence (AI), police and philosophical dimensions was canvassed. It was argued that Wise's film contains all of the above genre dimensions; however, it can be more fully appreciated as a profoundly religious film wrapped in contemporary scientific garb. The forthcoming parts will explore the factual elements of this proposition in far greater analytical detail. Introduction: SF and Sacred StorytellingHistorically speaking,...

Apontamentos iniciais para a semiótica de um gênero: o filme musical

This article applies certain indications of method, suggested by Yuri Lotman, concerning how the semiotic effects of a text introduced within another text can work in a movie genre especially prone to such phenomenon: the musical film. In order to study the incidence of said phenomenon, three musical filmes are analysed: South Pacific (Josha Logan, 1958), West Side story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961), and My fair lady (George Cukor, 1964). The analyses are made to show how varied can be the ways in which the hypotheses we derived from Lotman appear; these hypotheses speak of the forms to integrate, or contrarywise to clearly separate, the subtexts which in the film are acted, from those which are sung or danced.