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Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Stopping Up The Works: Weir’S The Plumber And Social Class Conflict, William Blick Nov 2017

Stopping Up The Works: Weir’S The Plumber And Social Class Conflict, William Blick

Publications and Research

The Plumber, an Australian film by director Peter Weir, is an exploration of different characters from diverse backgrounds thrown together in an awkward and challenging situation. It manages to play on audience’s biases about the working class. The director succeeds in is giving us is a Hitchcockian exploration of clashing socio-educational-economical forces, and straddles the line between value judgement and simple interpersonal experiment.


A Preservationist’S Guide To #100hardtruths-#Fakenews: One Fake News Preserve, Alexandra Juhasz Oct 2017

A Preservationist’S Guide To #100hardtruths-#Fakenews: One Fake News Preserve, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

The author created a media project, #100hardtruths-#fakenews, to collect and preserve media relating to fake news that was generated during the first 100 days of the U. S. Presidency of Donald J. Trump. Her resulting website chronicles fake news as well as the many media responses to it. This article describes the author’s construction of the site, characteristics of the posts, and ways in which she navigated the large volume of fake news and related posts. The project explores the complex issues that attend such a project. The goal was to induce energy and insight so that thoughtful professionals might …


L.A. Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema, Book Review, Peter Catapano Oct 2017

L.A. Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema, Book Review, Peter Catapano

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Of Stars And Solitude: Two Mexican Documentaries, Paul Julian Smith Sep 2017

Of Stars And Solitude: Two Mexican Documentaries, Paul Julian Smith

Publications and Research

By happy coincidence, Mexico in 2016 yielded two expert and moving documentaries on women, sex, and aging: María José Cuevas’s Bellas de noche (Beauties of the Night) and Maya Goded’s Plaza de la Soledad (Solitude Square). Both are first-time features by female directors. And both are attempts to reclaim previously neglected subjects: showgirls of the 1970s and sex workers in their seventies, respectively. Moreover, lengthy production processes in which the filmmakers cohabitated with their subjects have resulted in films that are clearly love letters to their protagonists.


On Variety: The Avant-Garde Between Pornography And Narrative, Kevin L. Ferguson Jul 2017

On Variety: The Avant-Garde Between Pornography And Narrative, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

This article analyzes Bette Gordon’s first feature film Variety (1983), reassessing how experimental novelist Kathy Acker’s contributions to the screenplay awkwardly positioned the film within contemporary cultural debates over pornography and the future of avant-garde filmmaking. While centered on an erotic thriller narrative concerning a woman’s entrée into the scuzzy world of New York City porno theaters, Gordon and Acker also take up in the film a series of three related representational problems for the 1980s: feminist approaches to pornography, narrative in an avant-garde tradition, and the role of speech and writing in film.


Affect Bleeds In Feminist Networks: An "Essay" In Six Parts, Alexandra Juhasz Jan 2017

Affect Bleeds In Feminist Networks: An "Essay" In Six Parts, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


The Limits Of Transparency: Data Brokers And Commodification, Matthew Crain Jan 2017

The Limits Of Transparency: Data Brokers And Commodification, Matthew Crain

Publications and Research

In the United States the prevailing public policy approach to mitigating the harms of internet surveillance is grounded in the liberal democratic value of transparency. While a laudable goal, transparency runs up against insurmountable structural constraints within the political economy of commercial surveillance. A case study of the data broker industry reveals the limits of transparency and shows that commodification of personal information is at the root of the power imbalances that transparency-based strategies of consumer empowerment seek to rectify. Despite significant challenges, privacy policy must be more centrally informed by a critical political economy of commercial surveillance.


Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios, Kevin L. Ferguson Jan 2017

Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

There are a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, but most of them only pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from the audiovisual text that is already legible to scholars. As an alternative, cinema and media studies should pursue a mostly-ignored "digital surrealism" that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. This article describes one such method using the z-projection function of the scientific image analysis software ImageJ to sum film frames in order to create new composite images. Working with the fifty-five feature-length films …