Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Pleasure Of The Blog: The Early Novel, The Serial, And The Narrative Archive, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Blogs have in the last couple of years loomed large in the western imagination, but the ideas about blogs that have circulated both through the mainstream (particularly U.S.) media and through academic circles have been extremely limited in scope. In the first place, there is a common distinction at work in the U.S. imaginary between "blogs," which are assumed on some level to be doing public work, whether political, technical, academic, or journalistic, and "online diaries," which are primarily personal, if not exactly private. The personal blogs often mistakenly labeled "online diaries," as well as the more apparently diaristic forms …

Introducing Mediacommons, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

At the moment, we imagine MediaCommons as a wide-ranging network with a relatively static point of entry that brings the participant into the MediaCommons community and makes apparent the wealth of different resources at his or her disposal. On this front page will be different modules highlighting what's happening in various nodes ("today in the blogs"; active forum topics; "just posted" texts from journals; featured projects). One module on this front page might be made customizable ("My MediaCommons"), such that participants can in some fashion design their own interfaces with the network, tracking the conversations and texts in which they …

Too Many Options Dilute Shared Experience, David E. Drew, Hedley Burrell

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Despite the red carpet glitter of the Oscars, it is no secret that Hollywood has had a far from perfect year at the box office.

And unfortunately for Tinsel Town, its problems go beyond the obvious need for more successful films.

The way we experience both movies and television has evolved. We don't do things together the way we once did. We rent movies and watch them at home rather than going to a local movie theater with family and friends. Box office returns suffer and the centrality of film in our lives is weakened.

The same fragmentation is true …

Book Review: Artists In The Audience, James Morrison

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Film Review: The House Of Mirth, James Morrison

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Catharsis, said Aristotle, is the goal of drama. You'd never know it from The House of Mirth, an adaptation of Edit Wharton's 1905 novel by the great British filmmaker Terence Davies. Its intensity is distilled in its uncompromising restraint, and though there are passing moments of anger in the film, and rare, sudden swellings of grief, there's not a second of real release in this grim anatomy of a socialite's inexorable decline. Yet the film's relentlessness does not feel cruel. It feels like the piercing expression of a boundless pity.

Book Review: Hitchcock's Notebooks, James Morrison

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Everyone knows movies are collaborative, polyvalent, and multiform; it's only in our stubbornly powerful experiences of them that they can seem autonomous, homeostatic, or singly begotten. Hitchcock's Notebooks—a tantalizing, frustrating glimpse through a narrow chink in the thick door of a hallowed vault—will not doom the myths of the auteur to their final resting place, but the book tellingly reveals the many negotiations, improvisations, sleights-of-hand, and slipknots that went into the crafting of Hitchcock's exacting, austerely precisionist films. To that extent, it contributes some compelling new information to both he meanings of the films and the image of …

Images Of/And The Postmodern. Review Of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing And The Politics Of Seeing By Josh Cohen, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Josh Cohen, in his new book Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing, argues that postmodern American novelists ranging from Norman Mailer to Joan Didion, Robert Coover to James Ellroy, do not merely fall into accord with this critique -text good; image bad- but are in fact using the allegorical nature of their encounters with and representations of visual culture as a means of reintroducing the image to history, an attempt to construct a new critical politics of visuality. The possibility of a critical visual agency is raised for Cohen in these writers’ gendered representations of the …

Film Review: The Thin Red Line, James Morrison

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In Malick's new film, his first in 20 years, this tension is gone. The Thin Red Line, based on James Jones' 1962 novel of World War II, pursues the strains of ardent feeling of the director's earlier work but, without seeming to renounce it, forsakes the irony. The core of the film follows an American battalion's fight against the Japanese for a hill at Guadalcanal, and although this core provides dramatic grounding for the movie, it is flanked at both ends, beginning and end, by stretches of storytelling so fragmentary, so mercurial, they're nearly abstract.

Deslanting The Lens, Lui Amador

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Deslanting the Lens examines the historical and sociological implications of how Asian men have been represented in popular American film. From the early days of “yellowface” to caricatures like Long Duck Dong, Asian men have been relegated to perpetual foreigner status in American cinema. This paper will explore why the portrayal of Asian men has been limited to very specific ideas about Asian and Asian Americans are in society. This analysis will also include how socio/political events have shaped and influence popular perceptions about Asians, that inform how Asian men continue to be depicted in film.

Film Review: Cop Land, James Morrison

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

On the strength of Heavy and his new film, Mangold appears to be striving to forge an authentically ascetic style within the decidedly inhospitable climate of contemporary Hollywood. His decision to follow the anomalously quiet Heavy with a police-procedural that appears at least superficially to be in the up-tothe- minute blockbuster mode feels a bit like an exercise, an experiment in spiritual temptation-andresistance, and the news here is that Mangold has not sold out, as so many young filmmakers do after a first independent hit.

Deleuze And Film Semiotics, James Morrison

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

On first reflection, none of the usual categories seem to apply to Gilles Deleuze's work in film theory. In fact, Deleuze's texts appear willfully to frustrate the expected set of questions: What is the relation of Deleuze's texts to film theory? What is their relation to semiotics, to the taxonomy and methodology of semiotics as it has been rehearsed by post-structuralist film theoreticians?

Book Review: Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, And Film, James Morrison

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

...Subversive Pleasures implicitly critiques the dominant parochialism of contemporary film study with the bracing electicism of its method. Both for its basic enterprise of installing Bakhtin as a touchstone fro film scholars and for its rangy, intellectually restless methodological alternative to the constricting specializing of current film theory, Stam's book is among the most important recent contributions to film study.