American Film Studies Commons^™

From Shtetl To Stardom: Jews And Hollywood, Vincent Brook, Michael Renov

Purdue University Press Book Previews

The outsized influence of Jews in American entertainment from the early days of Hollywood to the present has proved an endlessly fascinating and controversial topic, for Jews and non-Jews alike. From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood takes an exciting and innovative approach to this rich and complex material. Exploring the subject from a scholarly perspective as well as up close and personal, the book combines historical and theoretical analysis by leading academics in the field with inside information from prominent entertainment professionals. Essays range from Vincent Brook’s survey of the stubbornly persistent canard of Jewish industry “control” to Lawrence …

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.

Hold Them Down: Oppression Of Film Noir's Working Woman, Shaire Blythe

Undergraduate Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture

Introductory Paragraph:

The struggle for women’s rights and roles in society has been an ongoing battle, since the beginning, with Adam and Eve. The subjugation that was presented upon Eve, because of her fault and easiness to be deceived, has trailed behind mankind, and film noir would not be excluded. The femme fatale seems to play the role of what Eve started, seducing men with her sexuality to carry out wicked schemes and being the downfall of all men. Thus, men began to identify women as a threat to their very essence but, yet, still cannot resist the temptation women …

From Recovery To Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction And (Re)Creating The Future, Daoine S. Bachran

English Language and Literature ETDs

My project assesses how science fiction by writers of color challenges the scientific racism embedded in genetics, nuclear development, digital technology, and molecular biology, demonstrating how these fields are deployed disproportionately against people of color. By contextualizing current scientific development with its often overlooked history and exposing the full life cycle of scientific practices and technological changes, ethnic science fiction authors challenge science’s purported objectivity and make room for alternative scientific methods steeped in Indigenous epistemologies. The first chapter argues that genetics is deployed disproportionally against black Americans, from the pseudo-scientific racial classifications of the nineteenth century and earlier through …

Indigenous Helpers And Renegade Invaders: Ambivalent Characters In Biblical And Cinematic Conquest Narratives, L. Daniel Hawk

Journal of Religion & Film

This article compares the role of ambiguous character types in the national narratives of biblical Israel and modern America, two nations that ground their identities in myths of conquest. The types embody the tensions and ambivalence conquest myths generate by combining the invader/indigenous binary in complementary ways. The Indigenous Helper assists the invaders and signifies the land’s acquiescence to conquest. The Renegade Invader identifies with the indigenous peoples and manifests anxiety about the threat of indigenous difference. A discussion of these types in the book of Joshua, through the stories of Rahab and Achan, establishes a point of reference by …

The Author As The Novel Self: Shirley Lim’S Sister Swing, Denise B. Dillon

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

While authorial omniscience is denied the biographer, I argue that Lim as novelist takes this advantage in Sister Swing as a tool through which to explore the development of self-identity through characterizations of three sisters that in combination form the tripartite self as proposed by Freud. Autobiographical memories of familial, social and cultural life experiences are the source from which Lim draws and fleshes out, in her novel, portrayals of family members seeking freedom through different ways and means. As a self-analyst probing deep within the psyche, Lim employs linguistic stylizations to express contrastive and yet complementary points of view …

Movement And Mobility: Representing Trauma Through Graphic Narratives, Stella Oh

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

The formal and stylistic movements found within the comic architecture of From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride interrogate the ways in which the visual and textual narrative can represent the emotional landscape of trauma and displacement through comics language. Engaging in a visual and textual critique of the global economy that trades in feminine identities, these graphic narratives interrogate the mobility and visibility of those who are trafficked. In these works, transnationalism is artistically embedded in consumptive practices of reading and seeing that reinforce or challenge Orientalist cultural assumptions about the Asian female body. Geographical movements of …

On Such A Full Sea Of Novels: An Interview With Chang-Rae Lee, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview with author Chang-rae Lee.

Volume 7 Cover, David Burnett

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Volume Seven: Confessing Racial Schizophrenia, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A short meditation on teaching ethnic American literature in 2016, acknowledgments, and a summary of this volume's contents.

Differentiating The Transnational From The National In A Multicultural Setting: Identity In Persepolis And Rush Hour, Laura A. Kasper

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

This essay explores the differences between transnational identities and national identities in a multicultural setting by juxtaposing the films Persepolis and Rush Hour. Furthermore, it examines the characteristics of both transnational and national identities and how they are represented in film. In an increasingly globalized world, it is important to distinguish these two types of identity and consider how these individuals interact with today’s society; thus, this essay asks readers to think about the influence that the commingling of transnational and national identities has on the modern world.

Loving The Unlovable Body In Yamanaka's Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by expicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the …

"Everyone Has Thought About Killing Someone - One Way Or Another": Cannibalism And The Question Of Morality In Bryan Fuller's Hannibal, Kristi Michelle Pierse

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Popular criticism insists that violence in the media perpetuates violence in the real world. This is an especially relevant argument today as we witness on a daily basis the violence that is occurring in the United States through mass shootings, police brutality, and countless other forms of aggressive actions. While studies do show a correlation between violent media and real-world violence, there is no absolute conclusion that proves such. My thesis addresses the moral lessons that can be learned through violence on television, particularly through the creative adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series as reimagined by Bryan Fuller in …

Mccarthyism And The Id: "Forbidden Planet" (1956) As A Veiled Criticism Of Mccarthyism In 1950s America, William Lorenzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many American science fiction films of the 1950s served as political allegories commenting on the post-war fears of the nation. One major fear was the fear of communist infiltration: the Red Scare. In films of this era, the enemy walks as one of us. In most of these films, the alien other, the monster from without, takes on a familiar form. But at the height of all these fears comes the fear of the enemy from within, an enemy that winds up destroying us from the inside out, as can be seen in Forbidden Planet (1956). In this film, a …

A Family Of One's Own: Reconstructing Queer Families Of Color In Film, David F. Stephens

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

I will focus on the resistance to white heteronormative depictions of the American family occurring within two contemporary films directed by gay black men—The Skinny, directed by Patrik-Ian Polk, and The Happy Sad, directed by Rodney Evans. These movies complicate understandings of black gay male relationships by humanizing the characters and providing clarity about the motivations behind the decisions these characters make. As opposed to simply associating their queerness and immorality, the directors of these films explore what brings people to the various social positions they occupy. In this way, these directors resist the tendency to pathologize …

The Turning Point Of Who Shall Be Master: Killer Of Sheep, Naming, Gender, And The Gaze Of African American Women, Sean Davis Watkins

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Charles Burnett’s 1978 award-winning film Killer of Sheep directly responded to the then-popular Blaxploitation genre, holding a mirror up to post-Watts, 1970s America, while exposing and exploring gender and race issues. Moreover, intentionally or not, Burnett, with this film, effectively demonstrated the lack of recognition that Black women faced in domestic, activist, and employment spheres; simultaneously, Burnett conspicuously reified the relegation of women into that silent, domestic sphere while challenging stereotypes of Black men, elevating them and establishing them as humans, capable of hubris, humanity, and vulnerability. This neo-realistic film masterfully rebirthed the African American male identity; unfortunately, though, neglected …

Transforming The Mundane: Juxtaposing Maria Friedman’S "High Society" With George Cukor’S "The Philadelphia Story" As An Emphasis On The Importance Of Theatre, Dana T. Speight Ms.

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The subjects of film and theatre belong to an extensive hierarchical debate that has remained prominent within the realm of performing arts since the introduction of cinema in the late nineteenth century. A plethora of scholars choose to argue in favor of the former, suggesting that film surpasses theatre as superior in both aesthetics and overall execution of naturalism; however, the argument is purely subjective and cannot be applied to all films and their corresponding plays. As a counterclaim, theatre continues to thrive as a prominent source of artistic entertainment globally, not only offering a contemporary twist to preexisting texts, …

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 …

Gi Jane Versus Sergeant Jane Doe: How Women’S Images In War Movies Contribute To Conflicting Expectations Of Women In Combat, Sawyer Marie L. Alberi

All Theses And Dissertations

Research on women’s portrayal in media generally suggests that women continue to be sexualized and objectified as war trophies in the classic Hollywood warrior culture film. The age old question of whether life imitates art or vice versa is important to consider when examining the question of how this popular culture medium contributes to the conflicting expectations of today’s women in combat roles. What is the reality of women’s roles in the US Military compared to the roles portrayed by warrior film media? History tells us that women have been on the battlefield in one way or another since there …

The Birth Of The Mpdg 2.0: The Potential For The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Trope In Independent Film, Brenna Elizabeth Sherrill

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This project chronicles an in-depth character study on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope in film. The term was coined in 2007 by a film critic about a very specific kind of female character—one who exists “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” The MPDG has often been written off as nothing more than a stereotype or sexist characterization of a woman, but I argue that the MPDG can be much more than a flat character, as evidenced by the increasingly complex characterization of …

An Unchained Analysis Of Racial Tension In America, Moriah Angott

Honors Projects

Modern race issues stem not only from the past but also from a lack of understanding and empathy for each other. How we talk about race will not only inform how we are able to move forward as a society, but it will also say a great deal about how we are evolving as human beings. It is important, and has been recognized as such, that black Americans have the freedom to grapple with that past, to understand it, and to feel connected to those ancestors who suffered in order for the foundation of this country to be built. Is …

The Art Of Death: Murder According To Poe, Hitchcock, And De Quincey, Jeanine Bee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper examines the works of both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock in light of Thomas De Quincey’s series of essays entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In his essays, De Quincey presents murder as an art form that can be criticized and appreciated just as any other fine art. While De Quincey’s essays faced some negative reaction when they were originally published, both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock seem to have found something worthwhile in De Quincey’s ideas about the art of murder; Poe and Hitchcock both present murder as an art form …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Ex Machina: Notes For Viewing, Bob De Smith

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"The film is engaging and disconcerting, and looks at what it means to be human in an age of the machine."

Posting about questions raised in the movie Ex Machina from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/ex-machina-notes-for-viewing/

Graverobber, Individualized Chorus: The Greek Chorus Reinterpreted In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Grace Markulin

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

The rock opera film Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) provides its audience with details regarding the film’s setting and perspectives on the morality of the film’s plot through the character Graverobber, whose sung dialogue expresses this information. Graverobber’s penchant for scene-setting and moralizing within the film classifies the character as a Greek chorus according to the parameters of the Greek chorus in antiquity and modern interpretations of the chorus in twentieth-century musical theater, but the character’s visual distinctiveness, preexisting relationship with an established character, and prominent use of solo vocal lines throughout his sung dialogue demonstrates a degree of individuation …

Mountain Men On Film, Kenneth Estes Hall

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: The mountain man of American folklore and history is a man between cultures. Like Janus, the doorkeeper god of the Romans, he is bifrontal, looking back at European, white civilization, and forward toward Indian civilization and culture.

Marilyn Monroe’S Star Canon: Postwar American Culture And The Semiotics Of Stardom, Amanda Konkle

Theses and Dissertations--English

Although Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous American film stars, and a monumental cultural figure, her film work has been studied far less than her biography. Applying C.S. Peirce’s semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol, this research explains how Monroe acquired meaning as an actress: Monroe was a powerful, but simplified, public image (an icon); an indicator of a particular historical and social context (an index); and an embodiment of significant cultural debates (a symbol).

Analyzing Monroe as an icon reveals how her personal life, which contradicted her official publicity story, generated public sympathy and led to …

Female Anti-Heroes In Contemporary Literature, Film, And Television, Sara A. Amato

Masters Theses

The anti-hero character has steadily become more popular in contemporary literature, film, and television. Part of this popularity is due to the character's appeal to the audience. This character type often commits acts that challenge the regulations of society. These acts, however, can become wish fulfillment for some audience members, making the acts of the character a vicarious experience as well as making the character more relatable because of the character's flawed nature.

This study will trace some of the evolution of the female anti-hero by discussing an ancestral character of the female anti-hero—Hester Prynne the protagonist of Nathanial Hawthorne's …

Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …

Strong, Independent, And In Love: Fighting Female Fantasies In Popular Culture, Allison P. Palumbo

Theses and Dissertations--English

During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics like Janice Radway began to reconsider so-called women’s genres, like romance novels and soap operas and melodramas, in order to address the forms of subversion and expressions of agency they provided female audiences. However, in spite of greater willingness to consider the progressive potential in romance narratives, there has been little such consideration given to stories of romance for the fighting female character—defined as a protagonist who uses violence, via her body or weapons, to save herself and others. The fighting female has received a good deal of attention from critics like …