Arts and Humanities Commons^™

‘Big’ And ‘Little’ Quo Vadis? In The United States, 1913–1916: Using Gis To Map Rival Modes Of Feature Cinema During The Transitional Era, Jeffrey Klenotic

Faculty Publications

This article emanates from a geospatial database of over 600 premieres of the Cines company’s Quo Vadis? (1913), an eight-reel film distributed by George Kleine, and nearly 250 premieres of the Quo Vadis Film Company’s Quo Vadis? (1913), a three-reel film of ambiguous origins distributed by Paul De Outo. By mapping local premieres of both films across the United States from 1913 through 1916, the data show with spatiotemporal precision the spread of Quo Vadis? as one of cinema’s early blockbuster titles. Yet within this national phenomenon, the two films’ footprints reveal differing cultural geographies served by competing efforts to …

Dark Shadows: Monster Culture On Daytime Television, Bill Svitavsky

Faculty Publications

The soap opera Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–71) gradually took on elements from horror movies, including an immensely popular vampire character. This article examines how the mixing of genre elements took place and how it changed the show’s audience and messaging.

Mapping Flat, Deep, And Slow: On The 'Spirit Of Place' In New Cinema History, Jeffrey Klenotic

Faculty Publications

This essay engages in a creative, heuristic, and reflexive consideration of the ‘localities’ of cinema audiences by exploring New Cinema History as a place. New Cinema History is conceptualised as a place continually produced in and through its interactions with the heterogeneous multiplicities of situated audiences and experiences of cinema that form the topoi of its landscape of inquiry. In reflecting on how this placialised landscape has been and might be represented, I argue that New Cinema History’s ‘spirit of place’ is most productive when rendered within a ‘splatial’ framework that draws upon practices of flat, deep, and slow mapping …

Life Lessons With Atreus And Chloe: Mature Video Games As Opportunity Spaces For Family Conversations, Angela Vanden Elzen, Adam L. Vanden Elzen

Faculty Publications

The effects of childhood and adolescent exposure to mature video games has been a recurring topic in popular culture as well as academic research for many years. While many studies have been conducted, a consensus has not been reached. Video games have been shown,however,to play a positive role in family togetherness and act as an opportunity space to encourage family discussion. Through a review of the literature, this article argues that mature video games can serve as opportunity spaces for families with older children and teens. A case study in which the M-rated video games,Life is Strange: Before the Storm …

Into Great Silence: Presence, Absence, And The Edge Of Documentary, Steven Schoen

Faculty Publications

Thus, the filmic depiction of monastic austerity found in Into Great Silence might be said to offer a kind of hint at the insights of monastic practice, at the stark limits of the physical world experienced bodily in a life of ascetic deprivation, prayer, silence, and isolation. The monks’ path to the edge of that world and the boundary of transcendence is instead constituted for viewers as profoundly real through an experience of austerity via the film. As the temporal conventions and narrative forms of documentary are ruptured, viewers are left to study the edge of its surfaces for its …

'Mary Poppins' And A Nanny's Shameful Flirting With Blackface, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this piece originally published in the New York Times, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner discusses problematic racist imagery in both the 1964 and 2018 Mary Poppins films and argues that minstrelsy has long been Disney's mode of expressing topsy-turvy fun.

Identity And Scene: Alterity And Authenticity In Taxicab Confessions, Steven W. Schoen

Faculty Publications

This essay examines the visual rhetoric of HBOs reality TV program Taxicab Confessions, New York, New York (2005). Drawing on Burke’s rhetorical understanding of scene and Straw’s approach to scene as a category for the analysis of urban culture, I argue that the taxicab interior and nighttime street images of New York City structure a scene of indeterminacy, intimacy, and “reality,” thus framing the passengers’ self-presentations within a context of “authenticity.” The program’s visual structure locates passengers simultaneously outside of and within social norms and reinforces hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Passengers are situated within a scene that …

Infancia (In)Visible: La Subjetividad De La Niñez Como Transgresión A La Marginalidad En Las Películas Conducta Y Pelo Malo, Tania Carrasquillo Hernández

Faculty Publications

Tania Carrasquillo Hernández's research on race, gender, and sexuality has led her to develop a more specific interest in the study of childhood and sexuality in literature and cinema. This article, based on a presentation given at the Hispanic Literatures Across Cultures Conference (October 6–8, 2016 at Fresno Pacific University), analyzes the representation of boyhood and masculinity in contemporary Cuban and Venezuelan cinema via the films Conducta (2014, directed by Ernesto Daranas) and Pelo Malo (2013, directed by Mariana Rondón).

In the case of Chala (Armando Valdes Freire, Conducta), Carrasquillo Hernández explores how his masculinity is related to the …

The Double Abcx Model, Family Stress Theory, Risk, Protection, And Resilience In The Movie “Precious”, Cassandra Chaney Phd

Faculty Publications

The critically acclaimed movie Precious [1] highlights the multiple stressors and crises experienced by an abused Black teen female living in poverty. Given its introduction to the screen, scholars have yet to make critical connections between the family dynamics portrayed in this movie and a particular family theory. The purpose of this paper is to help scholars who teach family stress courses apply the experiences of this young woman and her family to McCubbin and Patterson’s [2] Double ABCX Model. Furthermore, this paper will examine the risk factors, the protective factors, and the resilience demonstrated by the movie’s protagonist, Claireece …

Style, Affect, And Subjectivity: An Introduction To" Readings Of The Romanian New Wave", Alina Haliliuc, Jesse Schlotterbeck

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lin-Manuel Meets Moana, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this article originally published in Public Books, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wonders whether a Disney musical and a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical want the same thing.

Blackfish-Ing For Buzz: The Rhetoric Of The Real In Theme Parks And Documentary, Steven W. Schoen

Faculty Publications

In 2014, a year of record tourism in the state of Florida, SeaWorld saw a drop of one million visitors to its theme park in Orlando. The decline followed Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which presented the circumstances of orcas, or “killer whales,” held in captivity at parks like SeaWorld as cruel to the animals and dangerous to their trainers. In 2016, SeaWorld announced it will stop breeding orcas, and phase out its orca theatrical shows by 2019, a move widely attributed in the press to the impact of Cowperthwaite’s film. This article examines the film Blackfish as a …

#Iftheygunnedmedown: Postmodern Media Criticism In A Post-Racial World, Christopher P. Campbell

Faculty Publications

After the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African American man, by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, some news organizations included in their immediate coverage a photo of Brown taken from his Facebook page. In a now iconic image, Brown stands in a Nike tank top, unsmiling, and flashing a peace sign (misidentified by some news organizations as a gang sign). Later, less incendiary photos from Brown’s Facebook page surfaced. Within a few days of Brown’s death, the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown appeared on social media. Young African Americans posted two photos of themselves, representing positive and …

A Prison For Others—A Burden To One's Self, Anne Collins Smith, Owen M. Smith

Faculty Publications

Women have come a long way since the mid-1960's, both in the real world and in the world of philosophy. Given the advances in society and the developments within feminism that took place between that decade and the first decade of the 21st century, we might reasonably expect the new Prisonerseries to present a more contemporary perspective on women than the original. Such is most emphatically not the case. If we compare the original Village to the new one, it looks as if those pennyfarthing wheels are spinning backwards instead of forwards.

Goldfield Studies, Dawn Roe

Faculty Publications

The dialogue within this essay serves as a response to the series, Goldfield Studies, a work itself prompted by the history and landscape of this eponymous region of Victoria, Australia. The imagery produced takes the form of paired and multiple still photographs and a digital video sequence, displayed in triple-projection. The discussion is framed by the artist’s introduction, which defines the project as a critical consideration of cultural memory in relation to the opposing perspectives of indigenous and colonial settler narratives, pastoral landscape representations, folklore and myth. A collaborative dialogue between an artist and art historian who share common research …

Dream On, Joe Wilkins

Faculty Publications

In this essay, Joe Wilkins describes what he believes are the essential elements of Western films.

A Photographic Journey Along El Camino Real De Los Tejas, Christopher K. Talbot

Faculty Publications

This is a photographic traveling exhibit in conjunction with the National Park Service. The exhibit was made possible through the Challenge Cost Share Program in cooperation with Stephen F. Austin State University. This matching fund program allows the National Park Service and partners to work together to preserve and improve resources on national trails. To view selected images from the project visit El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail.

American Myth-Busting, Joe Wilkins

Faculty Publications

In this essay, Joe Wilkins discusses the new breed of western films.

Marked Woman (1937) And The Dialectics Of Art Deco In The Classical Gangster Genre, Drew Todd

Faculty Publications

In this article, I analyse the function of Art Deco designs in the 1930s gangster genre and, in particular, Warner Brothers' Marked Woman (Bacon, 1937). Like many gangster films of the period, it associates high-style Art Deco with excess and the criminal underworld. My findings, however, reveal a tension between the film's moralist stance and its visual excess. Compelling visual signifiers of leisure, style and social mobility, the modern designs are free to circumvent the film's critical message and reinforce American capitalist ideologies. My analyses underscore Art Deco as an emblematic style of commercial modernity. Marked Woman and other gangster …

Documenting Horror: The Use Of Sound In Non-Fiction 9/11 Films, Jesse Schlotterbeck

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary In Contemporary Bollywood Cinema, Vidhu Aggarwal

Faculty Publications

In her article "The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema" Vidhu Aggarwal discusses several contemporary films including Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's Rang de Basanti with focus on the figure of the revolutionary hero. The Bollywood film is a cultural form that combines several aesthetic styles, from within India and from the outside. With its formal heterogeneity and as a product of one of India's largest cities, Mumbai Bollywood has had an ongoing fascination with "arrival," that is, with India's status as a contemporary nation-state. While some Bollywood films seem to celebrate fantasy scenarios of India's arrival on the global scene, at …

Memories Cloaked In Magic: Memory And Identity In Tin Man, Anne Collins Smith

Faculty Publications

In Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995], J. P. Telotte argues that "through its long history, one that dates back to the very origins of film, this genre [science fiction] has focused its attention on the problematic nature of human being and the difficult task of being human." [1-2] The thesis of the book, he states, is "relatively simple—that the image of human artifice ... is the single most important one in the genre. [...] Through this image of artifice, our films have sought to reframe the human image …

"Life Is Beautiful, Or Is It?" Asked Jakob The Liar, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

In 1999 the 71st Academy Awards ceremony awarded to the film The Last Days the prize for Best Documentary Feature. Underwritten by Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, this documentary depicts in a compelling, historically objective fashion what the Nazi regime called the "Endlösung" ["Final Solution"]: the effort to annihilate all of European Jewry. In the film, five Hungarian survivors are interviews with honesty and compassion. Their answers record history as it unwound. Clearly, the intent of the interviews is to assure that historical facts are not falsified, nor taken for granted. Documentaries of this kind can …

Review Of The Frodo Franchise: The Lord Of The Rings And Modern Hollywood, By Kristin Thompson, Carol A. Leibiger

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Non-Urban Noirs: Rural Space In Moonrise, On Dangerous Ground, Thieves’ Highway, And They Live By Night, Jesse Schlotterbeck

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Children's Film As Social Practice, Joseph L. Zornado

Faculty Publications

In his paper "Children's Film as Social Practice," J. Zornado argues that the animated feature is a genre distinct in its own right, and, although overlooked by film criticism up to now, deserves rigorous, scholarly attention. Zornado employs the term "iconology" to develop a foundation for a critical methodology indebted to Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan as well as contemporary film criticism. Iconology of the animated feature film is the study of the meaning systems of the dominant culture and the ways in which such systems are inscribed into all kinds of social practice geared, specifically, to seduce and inform the …

Locating The Bard: Adaptation And Authority In Michael Radford's The Merchant Of Venice

Faculty Publications

Michael Radford’s adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (2004) starring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons returns feature film Shakespeare to period setting and costuming after roughly a decade of radicalized adaptative strategies such as those of Baz Luhrmann, Michael Almereyda, and Julie Taymor, strategies that threatened to overshadow the Kenneth Branagh approach to Shakespeare’s textual and cultural authority. Radford underscores this return to “authentic” Shakespeare with a heavy directorial hand that begins the film with superimposed text recounting the sixteenth-century Venetian context of the original play setting. The watery landscape of Venice, the brothels and courtesans that entertain the Christian …

Cinema/History/Feminism, Joan C. Dagle

Faculty Publications

Margarethe von Trotta's 1986 film Rosa Luxemburg offers a cinematic portrait of a historically significant female revolutionary, one of the central figures of 20th century socialism. The film attempts to reclaim this figure as historical subject, as feminist subject, and as a cinematic subject for contemporary audiences for whom socialist and feminist history has been lost or suppressed and for whom cinema is articulated within mainstream conventions.

Smith On Hanley, 'The Metaphysics Of Star Trek, Anne Collins Smith

Faculty Publications

Review by Anne Collins Smith on the H-PCAACA mailing list, June 1998.

The Metaphysics of Star Trek by Richard Hanley. New York: Basic Books, 1997. xviii + 253 pp. $18.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-09124-9.

Richard Hanley's The Metaphysics of Star Trek is an engaging examination of certain philosophical issues raised within the Star Trek universe. Its title, however, is overly broad; it would be more correctly titled, The Twentieth-Century Applied Metaphysics of Star Trek. The earliest reference in the bibliography is an article written in 1950; the next earliest, 1960. The vast majority of sources are from the 1980's and …

Smith On Jenkins, 'Textual Poachers: Television Fans And Participatory Culture', Anne Collins Smith

Faculty Publications

Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins. New York: Routledge, 1992. viii + 343 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-90571-8; $38.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-90572-5.

In Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins examines the underground world of the media fandom, people who create fiction, artwork, and other forms of expression based on television shows. Drawing on a rich theoretical background with sources ranging from feminist literary criticism to cultural anthropology, Jenkins applies and adapts Michel de Certeau's model of "poaching," in which an audience appropriates a text for itself. Taking a stand against the stereotypical portrayal of fans as obsessive …