Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, And Method, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

Maureen Catbagan’s Dark Matter (2020) photography series invites us into sensing brownness. In these images of museum passages and stairwells, silhouettes of museum guards, and evocative shadows, Catbagan presents the landscape of the museum. However, this may not be immediately recognizable because the photographs draw focus to the parts of museums to which we rarely pay attention. In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards allows us to perceive dynamics of racialized and gendered labor and laborers who, in an echo of their architectural focus on minor, peripheral spaces and shadows, hover between the underrecognized and oft-neglected, thereby allowing …

Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia, Alaina Claire Feldman, Clayton Press, Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian

Publications and Research

Bilingual catalogue for the exhibition "Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery.

The Video Camera Spoiled My Ethnography: A Critical Approach, Katherine Gregory

Publications and Research

As videography and other media technologies are normalized in the field of qualitative methods for the purpose of data collection, there is a growing need to discuss the benefits and limitations of these data collection tools. This article chronicles an ethnographic video study focused on the experiences of Muslim adults living in the Netherlands, and why the author opted to end the project. Issues focus on reckoning with the imperial gaze of the camera, performative behavior of participants before the camera and interdisciplinary tensions the researcher faced from conflicting trainings as a qualitative methodologist and media practitioner.

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Direct Action Housing: Exploring The History Of Tenant-Led Housing Struggles—On Film—In Nyc, Arielle Lawson

Publications and Research

This independent research project dives into the history of tenant-led housing struggles in New York City with a particular focus on using film archives and documentaries to highlight key moments and case studies when housing activism opened up new political imaginations, intersections and possibilities in the city.

As outlined in the Direct Action Housing zine, I curated and hosted four public events in the spring of 2019 on different aspects of housing struggles documented through archival film records. This series of housing history films was a starting point and catalyst to think about the role of and for the home …

“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and …

Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

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.

The Invisibles: Becoming And Being A Reader In A Fan-Dominated Community, Lucia Cedeira Serantes

Publications and Research

The study of comics consumption has regularly focused on the study of teens and young people. However, the association between the fan experience and comics has colonized the experience of reading comics, especially in mainstream culture, leaving almost no room for the possibility of other recognizable experiences: if you are committed to reading comics, inevitably you are, will become, or are expected to be, a fan. However, Gabilliet (2010), Pustz (1999), Parsons (1991), and Barker (1989) point at the presence and need for more research about what they labelled as “casual readers,” or the bulk of the comics readership.

This …

Developing Media Literacy: Managing Fear And Moving Beyond, Katherine Fry

Publications and Research

One way to view the development of the media literacy movement is through the various different ways in which strains of media literacy education have been called on to allay fears that accompanying new media technologies. This article focuses on how one media literacy organization, The LAMP, deals with two very different arenas —the internet safety arena and the news literacy arena-where fear of digital media has created narrow pockets of concern seeking narrow solutions. As media literacy grows and develops the hope is that these fears subside, a perception of separateness dissolves, and a broader media literacy vision advances.

A Game Changer: Frederick Wiseman’S The Titicut Follies, William Blick

Publications and Research

It has become evident that film has the ability to invoke changes in a society. The social issue of the treatment of the mentally ill has always been the subject of films, although many films of past appear exploitative, sensationalist, crude, and ignorant of the realities of the issues being represented. In 1967, Frederick Wiseman’s film, The Titicut Follies, despite winning numerous awards, created such controversy that it became the only film to be banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity and national security until 1991. The film revealed gross mistreatment of the mentally ill …

Narratives Of Violence: The White Imagination And The Making Of Black Masculinity In “City Of God”, Jaime Alves

Publications and Research

The article explores the representation of young-black men in the 2002 film City of God. The film deploys “pathological scripts” of Black masculinity in Brazil as criminal and deviant. The controlling image of Black men’s bodies as a source of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian regime of racial domination, and the narratives of violence make explicit the ways in which the Brazilian nation is imagined though a racial underpinning. Blackness is consumed as an exotic commodity, yet is also understood as a threat to national harmony. The nation is, then, written and re-imagined as a racial paradise, but mostly by …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

American Indians In Feature Films: Beyond The Big Screen, Daisy V. Domínguez

Publications and Research

This article examines whether library collections represent the breadth of portrayals of American Indians in feature film and provides collection development resources for developing and strengthening feature film collections by and about American Indians.

Financial Markets And Online Advertising: Reevaluating The Dotcom Investment Bubble, Matthew Crain

Publications and Research

While the dotcom period is often dismissed as a false start in the history of the web’s commercial development, it is better conceived of as highly generative of modern structures of online advertising. Soaring investment markets and the developing online advertising sector entered into a pattern of mutual reinforcement that began in 1995 and intensified until the bubble collapsed in 2000, transforming the character of the web in the process. This article sketches the contours of this generative capacity, focusing on the production of demand for online advertising services. Taking the approach of critical political economy, this narrative is contextualized …

Meta-Radicalism: The Alternative Press By And For Activist Librarians, Alycia Sellie

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Murrow And Friendly’S Small World: Television Conversation At The Crossroads, Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

Small World

(1958–60), an Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly television production, brought together political and entertainment figures from around the world, boasting technological innovation and a high level of public affairs discourse. The author discusses critical reception, producers’ ideals, cultural and historical context, and relation-ships to evolving notions of public service broadcasting.

Media Services In North American Academic Libraries, Michael J. Miller

Publications and Research

Ongoing evolution of the Benjamin S. Rosenthal (BRL), Multimedia Commons was initially informed by a report from an internal task force and also by a four-year-long study of North American academic library media services units. A travel grant allowed for visits to the media service units of Barnard College, College of Staten Island - City University of New York, Columbia University, Georgetown University, New York University, University of Maryland - College Park, University of Massachusetts – Amherst, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, University of Texas – Austin. Visits have subsequently been made to the University of Washington – …

New York Placenames In Film Titles, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

From 1914 to 2006, 396 feature films with titles containing New York place names were released. This pattern emerged during the silent era, peaked from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, and then dropped off steadily before rebounding in the 1970s. This article discusses the cinematic representation of cities and urban life in the movies and the special place of New York as an “imagined city” and a cultural icon. New York’s associations in the popular imagination help explain the frequent occurrence of themes of negativity, violence, nightlife, and grandiosity (royalty or divinity) in these titles. The use of …

Out Of The Blue: Re-Evaluating Electra-Glide In Blue, William Blick

Publications and Research

The 1970s was a time of moral ambiguity for the cinema. The cult- favorite, Electra Glide in Blue demonstrates the polarization of ideologies in America at the time. In this film, there are several conflicting views of the Vietnam War, "Hippies", drugs, conservatism, communes, and the mistrust of authority that made up a zeitgeist of the time. This short article defines the film as a examination of the ambiguity of the 1970s.

Zines Straight From The Stacks: Self-Published Tracts From Library Workers, Alycia Sellie

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Three Film Reviews, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Reviews of Advertising Missionaries, directed by Chris Hilton and Gauthier Flauder; Chastie (Paradise), a film by Sergey Dvortsevoy; and Wilbert: Street Kid in Nicaragua, a video by Bent Erik Kroyer.