American Film Studies Commons^™

The Meaning Of The Soldier: In The Year Of The Pig And Hearts And Minds, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Hearts and Minds (1974)—the first an Academy Award nominee, the second an Academy Award winner—are the two best-known Vietnam War documentaries of their time. They are works that could hardly be more different—one a cool, intellectual take on the origins and then-current state of the war, and the second a highly emotional appeal to end the war. By viewing them together it is possible not only to connect the dots between the contrasting intellectual and filmic traditions from which each emerged, but also to see, through the viewpoints of each film, how …

‘The Future’S Not Ours To See’: How Children And Young Adults Reflect The Anxiety Of Lost Innocence In Alfred Hitchcock’S American Movies., Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

Introduction:

In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the Ambassador, while plotting to kill the Prime Minister, orders the kidnapped American child Hank McKenna killed, telling his would-be gunman, Edward Drayton: “Don’t you realize that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Earlier in the movie, Jo McKenna entertains her son and husband by singing “Que Sera Sera,” and its playfulness becomes darkly ironic when she sings “the future’s not ours to see” on the eve of her son’s kidnapping.
The movie unfolds as a cat-and-mouse game in which the McKennas desperately try to locate and save their kidnapped son, …

Atanarjuat And The Ideological Work Of Contemporary Indigenous Filmmaking, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Ilanaaq is the latest North American example of “playing Indian” (Deloria 1998), a practice with vast historical precedent. With ilanaaq, Canada joins a host of nations who have turned to symbols of local indigeneity to assert their national distinctiveness. Such appropriation presents indigenous artists with a dilemma. The current flowering of indigenous letters, art and cinema in North America is generally taken as evidence that Canada and the United States, as thriving multiculturalist democracies, have broken with an earlier history of the expropriation and displacement of the Americas’ indigenous peoples. The art bears witness to a new historical period, in …

The Novel-To-Film Translatability Of Satire In The The Day Of The Locust And Wise Blood, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

It comes as no surprise that the critical work focusing on Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1933) and Flannery O' Connor's Wise Blood (1952) sheds much light on the motifs satirical and otherwise at work in the novels. However, the film versions of the novels, those by legendary directors John Schlesinger (1969's Midnight Cowboy) and John Huston (1941's The Maltese Falcon), respectively, remain open to investigating how satire works within them. On the one hand, for instance, the popular vein of criticism regarding West and his Hollywood novel seems focused by the Frankfurt school of thought-mostly Adorno, and …

Racial Etiquette And The (White) Plot Of Passing:(Re) Inscribing" Place" In John Stahl's Imitation Of Life, Adrienne Gosselin

English Faculty Publications

Examines the machinations of racial etiquette and ways in which John Stahl's 1934 film `Imitation of Life' enforces the politics of the white plot of passing and place. Passing plot as utilized by American white and black writers of the period; Antimiscegenation film.