Film and Media Studies Commons^™

African American Youth-Identity, Invisible Powers & Hypnotic Blaxploitation-Themed Film Tropes: From Superfly & Drug Culture To Black Panther & Wakanda, Daniel Mitchell

Screenwriting and Film Studies Theses (MA/MFA)

This thesis project explores the most influential effect of the blaxploitation era. It is during a time shortly after the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, where black youth are still enduring identity issues. The point of departure for central discussion of this work revolves around the mesmerizing Hollywood blaxploitation film, Superfly. It arrived on the big screen in 1972. The hit movie and its soundtrack seemingly hypnotized countless young African American youth in urban areas to become drug dealers and users. This coincided with Nixon’s War on Drugs collusion with government agencies, and the secret COINTELPRO operation. They …

No Happy Endings: Anna May Wong’S American Film Roles From 1931-1942, Kayla G. O'Leary

CSB/SJU Distinguished Thesis

In the 1930s and ‘40s, shifting relations with China, Japan, and the United States drastically impacted American public sentiment towards these Asian countries. US films produced during these decades starring Anna May Wong illuminate how harmful stereotypes about Chinese culture and people were portrayed on screen. I analyze five of Wong’s films from this period to examine how the gendered and racial stereotypes within them provide a cultural lens of changing US-Chinese relations. The stereotypical archetypes of her characters, which include the formidable Dragon Lady, helpless American citizen, and Chinese war hero, demonstrate how American perceptions of China and Chinese …

The Making Of Everyday Hollywood: 1930s Film Influence On Everyday Women’S Fashion In Nebraska, Anna Naomi Kuhlman

Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research examines the influence of film fashions on middle-class, Nebraskan women’s dress during the Great Depression (1932-1940). The Great Depression challenged the middle class: while standards of living remained high, the economic means to achieve those standards diminished. Despite the crisis, women strove to keep up with current fashion trends. While previous literature has examined how Hollywood directly affected trends and styles of the 1930s in major American metropolitan contexts, the manifestation of trends in the dress of middle to lower socio-economic classes in Middle America remains under-examined. Against the backdrop of Depression-era hardships specific to Nebraska’s agricultural economy, …

Argo: Cia Influence And American Jingoism, Andrea De Oliveira

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

“Argo: CIA Influence and American Jingoism” focuses on the ways in which CIA involvement in the production and publicity of Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012) yielded a biased representation of the Iranian public. Throughout the film, Affleck pictures Iranians as aggressive and deindividualized, spreading the trope of the Middle Eastern fanatic to viewers worldwide. While villainizing the Iranian public, Argo undermines a fraught history of United States intervention in Iran. Although Affleck takes several liberties in cinematizing the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Argo masquerades as a historical authority, peppered with markers of authenticity such as newsreel footage. I argue that the film …

Rose-Colored Genocide: Hollywood, Harmonizing Narratives, And The Cinematic Legacy Of Anne Frank’S Diary In The United States, Nora Nunn

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Drawing from literary and cultural studies, this paper situates U.S. adaptations of Anne Frank’s diary in the 1950s within a lineage of other films about historical genocide, including Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda, and The Killing Fields. Analysis of these narrative adaptations matters because it helps us better understand the danger of what critic Dominick LaCapra calls “harmonizing narratives,” or stories that provide the viewer with an “unwarranted sense of spiritual uplift” (14). Tracing the metamorphosis of Frank’s own diary from play to film adaptation, this article builds on existing scholarship to focus on how, in the wake …

“Un-American” Hollywood: Politics And Film In The Blacklist Era, Natalie Jarosz

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

This is a review of “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, a 2007 volume edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield. It argues that the American Left was involved with creating films of true significance in the Hollywood system, in the context of post-war House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) blacklisting. There is also an examination of the Popular Front between liberals and communists before post-war tensions drew them further apart. There is a chapter about the “new” and “old” waves of the left in the context of 1960s and 1970s American cinema. …

Diversity And Democracy At War: Analyzing Race And Ethnicity In Squad Films From 1940-1960, Lara K. Jacobson

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

Both the Second World War and the Korean War presented Hollywood with the opportunity to produce combat films that roused patriotic spirit amongst the American people. The obvious choice was to continue making the popular squad films that portrayed a group of soldiers working together to overcome a common challenge posed by the war. However, in the wake of various racial and ethnic tensions consistently unfolding in the United States from 1940 to 1960, it became apparent to Hollywood that the nation needed pictures of unity more than ever, especially if America was going to win its wars. Using combat …

Did Hollywood Take Theatre "By Hook Or By Crook?", Catherine S. Wright

MSU Graduate Theses

Hollywood and Theatre have been partners in producing entertainment for over 100 years. The relationship was fruitful for both parties, but Hollywood moguls and playwrights battled over ownership of the work and crafting of its creative nucleus, story and character. Theatre was the dominant entertainment right before the rise of motion pictures. Once Hollywood’s talkies closed the curtain on silent films, playwrights had a high creative worth to movie makers. In the cinema, story and dialogue were essential for its survival and growth. Playwrights were courted by the Hollywood studio heads but were not offered equal partnership as they were …

End Of Paragraph, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Superhero Films: A Fascist National Complex Or Exemplars Of Moral Virtue?, Chris Yogerst

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper deals with the "why" regarding our collective desire for superhero narratives. My goal is to build on the many definitions of a superhero and find a framework that we as scholars can use to evaluate how superhero films present inspirational moral virtue and not zealous nationalism of any kind. In the process I want to address the problems with some of the scholarly work done on the connection to superheroes and heroism both historically and immediately after 9/11, particularly those who have argued that American superheroism is a fascist myth, and show how the recent evolution of the …

New York To Hollywood: Advertising, Narrative Formats, And Changing Televisual Space In The 1950'S, Peter Mccormack

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to the Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Hollywood’S Vietnam: How Critics And Audiences Responded To The Vietnam War Genre, Jennifer Freilach

History

This four part essay takes a comprehensive look at articles published in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times to determine how and why critics reviewed essential films about the Vietnam War. It thereby highlights the trends that emerged in their reaction to them. The first section analyzes critics’ response to Coming Home (1978). As the first major film with direct reference to Vietnam, Coming Home posed a unique problem for film critics. The second section analyzes the second major film about Vietnam, The Deer Hunter (1978). The majority of newspaper critics defended Cimino’s epic against negative claims that …

Introduction To "Independent Stardom: Freelance Women In The Hollywood Studio System", Emily Carman

Film and Media Arts Faculty Books and Book Chapters

During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar narrative of Hollywood stardom receives a long-overdue shakeup in Emily Carman’s new book. Far from passive victims of coercive seven-year contracts, a number of classic Hollywood’s best-known actresses worked on a freelance basis within the restrictive studio system. In leveraging their stardom to play an active role in shaping their careers, female stars including Irene Dunne, Janet Gaynor, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck challenged Hollywood’s patriarchal structure.

Through extensive, original archival research, Independent Stardom uncovers this …