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Full-Text Articles in Film and Media Studies

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer: The Alien Other And The Science Fiction Of Sexual Difference, Brooke M. Beloso Jan 2014

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer: The Alien Other And The Science Fiction Of Sexual Difference, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than …


Globalizing The Care Chain: Representations Of Latinas In Maid In America, Irune Del Rio Gabiola Jan 2013

Globalizing The Care Chain: Representations Of Latinas In Maid In America, Irune Del Rio Gabiola

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The article examines the portrayal of Latina women as housemaids in the U.S. as depicted in the documentary film "Maid in America" directed by Anayansi Prado. It discusses the social injustice and sacrifices undergone by the Latinas in order to survive in the host country. It also analyzes the image of the Latina as an ideal mother of both her native and host country.


Love In The Time Of Capitalism: A Marxist Feminist Reading Of Modern Times, Brooke M. Beloso Jan 2013

Love In The Time Of Capitalism: A Marxist Feminist Reading Of Modern Times, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Dr. Brooke Beloso's contribution to Marxism and the Movies: Critical Essays on Class Struggle in the Cinema, Ed. Kevin K. Durand and Mary K. Leigh, McFarland Publishers.


Still Hungover: Todd Phillips And Rape Culture, Terri Carney Aug 2011

Still Hungover: Todd Phillips And Rape Culture, Terri Carney

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

As a textual critic who came of age in the '90s, it is difficult for me to talk about authorial intention. Indeed, most academics today tell their students to avoid declaring "The message" of a text, encouraging them instead to respect the multivalence of meaning, the slipperiness of poetic discourse, and the freedom of the author to engage discursive play without being pinned down by an absolute interpretation. But I confess that, despite my training, after having watched The Hangover and read all over the Internet about it, I can't help but wonder if director Todd Phillips is a misogynistic …


From Here To InFinnerty: Tony Soprano And The American Way, Terri Carney Jun 2011

From Here To InFinnerty: Tony Soprano And The American Way, Terri Carney

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

As fellow critics have pointed out in a myriad of published studies on the series, The Sopranos challenges the traditional gangster genre formula and brings the mob closer to all of us: Tony and his gang inhabit a recognizable world of Starbucks, suburbia, and SUVs. They discuss issues of the day, the same ones we discuss when we turn off the TV after the episode. In short, they inhabit a quotidian reality that is continuous with our own, and we are prevented from drawing the neat lines that allow us a comfortable remove from the horror of the “criminal world,” …


A Wave Of The Magic Wand: Fairy Godmothers In Contemporary American Media, Jeana Jorgensen Jan 2007

A Wave Of The Magic Wand: Fairy Godmothers In Contemporary American Media, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The increased personification of fairy godmothers in contemporary American media corresponds to an aspect of the American worldview that emphasizes "magical" quick fixes and solutions. The two fairy-tale pastiche works informing this study are a novel, The Fairy Godmother, by fantasy author Mercedes Lackey, and a movie, Shrek 2. Both of these works feature fairy godmother characters that depart from canonical folktale and fairy-tale depictions. Associated with fate and wisdom, fairy godmothers act much as folklorists do by rewarding traditional behavior with gifts. Recent fairy godmother roles are hybrid and multivocal, illuminating ideologies and power structures in both society and …


Stratégies Pour L'Enseignement Du Cinéma Africain, Sylvie Vanbaelen Feb 2005

Stratégies Pour L'Enseignement Du Cinéma Africain, Sylvie Vanbaelen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Depuis plusieurs annees, les programmes de francais meme les plus "traditionnels" s'ouvrent au monde francophone, conscients de ses richesses et repondant ainsi aux exigences de la diversite culturelle. Les manuels d'enseignement du francais incluent des sections entieres sur les cultures et les litteratures des pays et des peuples francophones. Des cours specialises emergent, centres sur les productions culturelles et litteraires de l'Afrique, des Caraibes, de l'Amerique du Nord, de l'Asie et de l'Europe. Dans le large eventail des possibilites qui s'offrent aux enseignants, le cinema africain represente probablement l'une des moins aisees.


Rewriting Rendell: Pedro Almodóvar's "Carne Trémula", Linda M. Willem Jan 2002

Rewriting Rendell: Pedro Almodóvar's "Carne Trémula", Linda M. Willem

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The 1997 film Carne trémula has been lauded within as well as outside of Spain as one of Pedro Almodóvar's best works. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic also have noted that this film marks a departure from Almodóvar's previous style, not only because of its tighter plotline and greater psychological depth, but also because Almodóvar's treatment of his material is more serious, less self-indulgent, and openly political. Russell Smith has suggested that the film's narrative coherence may be attributed in part to Almodóvar's use of Ruth Rendell's novel, Live Flesh (1998), as the basis for his script. This …


Encircling Linearity In Carlos Saura's Peppermint Frappé, Linda M. Willem Jan 1999

Encircling Linearity In Carlos Saura's Peppermint Frappé, Linda M. Willem

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Spanish director Carlos Saura is internationally famous for creating films where the past, the present, and the future are fused together and intermixed with reality, fantasy, and dreams. Although this practice is generally recognized by critics as one of Saura's strategies for circumventing the repressive censorship operating during the Franco era, María Delgado points out that Saura's continued reliance on non-linear narratives in his post-Franco work "indicates that his style was determined as much by a desire to interrogate the possibilities of the medium as by censorship" (375). Indeed, in an interview with Antonio Castro, Saura has been quoted as …


Almodóvar On The Verge Of Cocteau's "La Voix Humaine", Linda M. Willem Jan 1998

Almodóvar On The Verge Of Cocteau's "La Voix Humaine", Linda M. Willem

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Jean Cocteau's one-act play, La Voix humaine [The Human Voice], consists entirely of a monologue by a woman engaged in a final phone conversation with her lover. Alone in her room, she desperately clings to the telephone as her only link to the man who has left her for someone else. Although this agonizing portrait of abandonment and despair bears little resemblance to Almodóvar's multi-charactered comedic romp through the streets of Madrid in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown], Cocteau's play has been named as the …


Text And Intertext: James Whale's Frankenstein In Víctor Erice's El Espíritu De La Colmena, Linda M. Willem Jan 1998

Text And Intertext: James Whale's Frankenstein In Víctor Erice's El Espíritu De La Colmena, Linda M. Willem

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Víctor Erice's use of clips from James Whale's Frankenstein as the basis for actions by his young protagonist, Ana, in El espíritu de la colmena has led critics to speculate on the symbolic meaning of the monster within that Spanish film. For Virginia Higginbotham the monster represents Franco's Spain, a country that has lost both its memory and its moral sense (116-20). For Marvin D'Lugo the monster stands for the mysterious, the unknown, the different, and the deviant, all of which Ana identifies with as she defines herself as an oppositional spirit (2862). Carmen Arocena sees Ana's rebellion as an …


Highlighting The Hidden: Visual Representation In Gutiérrez Aragón's Demonios En El Jardín, Linda M. Willem Jan 1997

Highlighting The Hidden: Visual Representation In Gutiérrez Aragón's Demonios En El Jardín, Linda M. Willem

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

According to Spanish film maker Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, there is an intimate relationship between the family and the state, with the traits of the family mirroring those of the state in which it exists: "la primera célula del Estado es la familia, y si el Estado, por definición, es opresivo, la familia es igualmente opresiva" (García Fernández 331). "Yo utilizo la familia en mis películas porque es muy real, muy testimonial. La familia repite fielmente la estructura social 0 estatal" (Payán and López 27). In Demonios en el jardín (1982) Gutiérrez Aragón uses the metaphor of the family not only …


Metafictional "Mise En Abyme" In Saura's "Carmen", Linda M. Willem Jan 1996

Metafictional "Mise En Abyme" In Saura's "Carmen", Linda M. Willem

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the 1983 film Carmen, Carlos Saura creatively refashions Mérimée's novella and Bizet's opera into an exciting new rendering of the Carmen myth. The foundation of this film rests on Mérimée's narrative, which Saura admires for having the ability to convey a passionate love that still seems as fresh and expressive as it was in its own day (52). Since Saura views the plot modification introduced in Bizet's opera as being a betrayal of Mérimée's novella (55), he ignores the opera's story line and concentrates instead on its music, which he describes as being very beautiful, truly inspired, and …