Who’s That Girl?

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-214
Author(s):  
Landon Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Culture Wars ◽  
Illustrative Case ◽  
Star Image ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Film Cycles ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Star Images ◽  
Classical Hollywood

Chapter 5 examines Madonna’s film career from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Inspired by the star images of Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and Mae West, Madonna performed an interpretation of “Classical Hollywood” female glamour, attitude, and sexuality throughout the rise and peak of her music career. She sought to extend this image into distinct commercial film cycles of the 1980s and 1990s, including the downtown indie, the synergistic blockbuster, the sex thriller, and the prestige Oscar film. Madonna offers an illustrative case for the history of cinematic rock stardom at the end of the twentieth century. She pursued a screen career within arguably the final period in which stardom served as a central driving force in Hollywood’s economic logic, and this pursuit was manifested via her cinephilic interpretation of Hollywood’s legacy of platinum blonde sex symbols. At the same time, Madonna aspired to a cinematic star image during the apex of the music video’s economic and cultural power, seeking to translate her anti-censorship and pro-sex efforts established within the media realm into Hollywood filmmaking in the midst of the 1980s–1990s culture wars. Madonna’s film career epitomizes the issues driving this book, as it speaks to the discordance between older (studio-era Hollywood) and newer (the era of MTV and beyond) models of stardom.

scholarly journals «Strong Curtains» and «Dramatic Punches»: The Legacy of Playwriting in the Screenwriting Manuals of the Studio Era

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-122
Author(s):  
Raffaele Chiarulli
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Narrative Conventions ◽  
Classical Hollywood

The Hollywood Golden Age was a revolutionary moment in the history of cinema and is pivotal to understanding the historical passage of a peculiar new art form –screenwriting. This early film period, from the Tens to the Sixties, was determined by key interactions between the respective forms of cinema and stage. Together, these interactions form a wider screenwriting “discourse.” There are reoccurring disputes in film scholarship over the paternity of the conventions and techniques of screenwriting. One solution is that techniques of theatre playwriting persisted extensively in the production practices of classical Hollywood cinema. Whether or not its professionals were aware of this is at the heart of this dispute. It is possible to identify the contribution of screenwriting manuals from Hollywood’s Golden Age toward the standardization of screenwriting techniques. The article aims to examine in the screenwriting manuals of this period some statements by practitioners who document the normalization and codification of the narrative structures used in screenwriting over time –in particular, the three-act structure. The validity and origin of the three-act structure are constantly debated among screenwriters. While this formula was known to the early writers of the Silent Era due to its legacy throughout centuries of playwriting and literature, it reappeared in the Seventies in the guise of a new theory. This article attempts to fill in certain gaps in the history of the theorization of screenwriting practices by juxtaposing statements found in screenwriting manuals and the statements of scholars and educators of this field. Ultimately, narrative conventions belonging to the tradition of theatre, as well as technological exigencies were integral in shaping the cinema techniques in use today.

scholarly journals Introduction to M/C

M/C Journal ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. David Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Media ◽  
Research Unit ◽  
Place And Space ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
The University

This is a magazine that plays with the push/pull characteristics of the Web. We're writing, investigating, analysing, critiquing the meeting of media and culture. These are large concepts: we're working through the various refractive powers that media forms have on culture. Perceiving through a particular medium mediates the way in which we conceptualise the world; the approach we take to the transnational, nation, state, city, suburb, neighbourhood, etc. We are, of course, aware that any particular medium does not overdetermine actions in some transparent McLuhanesque way; rather we're working through the cultural power of media forms to conceptualise and to organise (or disorganise) our world-views. Naturally, we're operating from a place and space within these debates about the organisation of culture. This journal is arising from an institution within an institution, and thus is informed by certain approaches. It is an initiative of the Media and Cultural Studies Centre, a research unit in the Department of English at the University of Queensland, Australia. Although who writes for the journal may change, it is starting from a history of cultural studies, a postgraduate subject entitled "New Media Culture", and students and staff who are genuinely interested in embarking upon critical analyses of media and culture. You'll notice patterns in the writing, then, that indicate these origins to the cognoscenti. Each issue is organised around a theme. The first issue's theme is particularly appropriate for a birthing process, and the move from the apparent simplicity of beginnings to the complexity of sustaining life. We're looking at the concept of "New", and we're approaching it from a variety of angles and avenues. Most of the essays are short interventions. One essay for each issue will engage with the concept for a little bit longer. A couple of warning notes may be necessary for your first read. The journal has a slash in the title, which may be just another graphic pirouette, or it may be some awkward bow to the Internet aesthetic of cursors and schizophrenia. Without grounding its meaning (the dance of meaning is important to us) the slash "/" is to highlight that this is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic. It is attempting to engage with the 'popular', and integrate the work of 'scholarship' in media and cultural studies into our critical work. We take seriously the need to move ideas outward, so that our cultural debates may have some resonance with wider political and cultural interests. Also, in the interests of pulling, we want response and replies. Each issue will be followed in some way by a responding issue that integrates the variety of interventions received. Jump in. Yes, we have provided a pattern, but feel free to respond to our pattern. You can even respond by submitting for future issues. Of course, you can decide not to respond to us; but if you find something useful acknowledge us and provide links to our work -- we'll provide the same courtesy for what intrigues us. It is the courtesy of the gift of information, which through a slash becomes a form of knowledge. It's tempting to conclude with something that derives from the pure pop of television: "Engage" -- but we wouldn't do that. You make the links. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "Introduction to M/C." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/intro.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "Introduction to M/C," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/intro.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (1998) Introduction to M/C. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/intro.php> ([your date of access]).

Risk in the digital age: Comedian-activists and Trump’s cancel culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Symons
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Star Image ◽  
Personal Stories ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The Media ◽  
Star Images ◽  
The Way

This article contributes to the study of comedians as activists by examining the campaigns by some of America’s most influential figures – Seth Rogan, Jim Carrey, Dave Chapelle, Amy Schumer, Roseanne Barr and Kathy Griffin. To varying degrees, these comedians all use their star images and personal stories to influence public debates through their stand-up, television work, and content on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. By studying their activities in the media, their press coverage, and public reactions online, this article also presents an original examination of the way ‘Cancel Culture’ manifests, often hindering their activism. This includes identifying the polarizing influence of the ‘Canceller-in-Chief’ former president Donald J. Trump, and the risks suffered by comedian-activists in terms of their reputation, commercial prospects, and even their legality. Specifically, this article suggests that ‘Cancel Culture’ manifests as a spectrum of varying risk which can be shaped by the comedian’s star image and the degree of social transgression in their comedy.

Selfi es

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ramon Reichert
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Role Expectations ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Human Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Front Stage

The history of the human face is the history of its social coding and the media- conditions of its appearance. The best way to explain the »selfie«-practices of today’s digital culture is to understand such practices as both participative and commercialized cultural techniques that allow their users to fashion their selves in ways they consider relevant for their identities as individuals. Whereas they may put their image of themselves front stage with their selfies, such images for being socially shared have to match determinate role-expectations, body-norms and ideals of beauty. Against this backdrop, collectively shared repertoires of images of normalized subjectivity have developed and leave their mark on the culture of digital communication. In the critical and reflexive discourses that surround the exigencies of auto-medial self-thematization we find reactions that are critical of self-representation as such, and we find strategies of de-subjectification with reflexive awareness of their media conditions. Both strands of critical reactions however remain ambivalent as reactions of protest. The final part of the present article focuses on inter-discourses, in particular discourses that construe the phenomenon of selfies thoroughly as an expression of juvenile narcissism. The author shows how this commonly accepted reading which has precedents in the history of pictorial art reproduces resentment against women and tends to stylize adolescent persons into a homogenous »generation« lost in self-love

Methods of Communicative Intention Explication of the Phraseological Unit with Biblical Expression «Forbidden Fruit» (Diachronic Section)

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Olga Lomakina ◽  
Oksana Shkuran
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Communicative Intention ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Media Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Good And Evil

The article analyzes methods of explication of the traditional and widely used stable biblical expression «forbidden fruit». The study is based on a diachronic section – from the interpretation of the biblical text to the communicative intention of dialogue participants in the media space illustrating nuclear and peripheral meanings. The analysis includes biblical texts that realize the archetypal meaning of the biblical expression «forbidden fruit» in which it is called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The secularized interest in the kind of tree, on which forbidden fruits grew, is motivated by a realistic presentation of a sad history of the first people’s fall in the Book of Genesis. Scientific hypotheses have their origins since the Middle Ages, when artists recreated the author’s story of eating the forbidden fruit. For religion, the variety of the fruit is not of fundamental importance, however, visualization in the works of art has become an incentive for the further use of the biblical expression with a new semantic segment. Modern media texts actively represent the transformation of the biblical expression«forbidden fruit» for different purposes: in advertising texts for pragmatic one, in informative, educational, ideological texts for cognitive one, in entertaining textsfor communicative one, lowering the spiritual and semantic value register of the modern language. Therefore, the process of desemantization and profanization of the biblical expression results in the destruction of national stereotypes in Russian people’s worldview.

Torn, Burned, and Yet Dancing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Beeston
Keyword(s):  
Literary Text ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
In Series ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Classical Hollywood ◽  
Mode Of Production

This chapter discusses the collaborative and institutionalized mode of production in studio-era Hollywood through the lens of the two major projects that comprised the work of the final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life: the screenplay “Cosmopolitan” and the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. These texts modify the modernist literary trope of the woman-in-series in concert with classical Hollywood’s defining logic of substitution and repetition. Ultimately derived from the basic seriality of the photogrammatic track, this logic is incarnated by female characters in “Cosmopolitan” and The Last Tycoon who, in refusing to remain silent substitutes for other women, rupture the illusory conceits of seamless fictional narration in classical Hollywood—and its equally seamless discourse of femininity. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood writing thus confronts the gendered and racialized limits of the modernist literary field and, in the process, unravels the myth of the solitary author and the singular, stable literary text.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

Last Woman Standing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Star System ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Career Opportunities ◽  
American Myths ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Women’S Careers ◽  
The Media ◽  
Studio Era

Today, when the media puts studio-era Hollywood and feminism together, the answer is usually Katharine Hepburn. But during her career at RKO and MGM, she did not discuss women’s issues regarding equal pay, career opportunities, or political equality. However, she did state flatly in 1933, “I intend to speak my mind when I please, despite movie traditions,” setting her independence against the Hollywood establishment. She remained uninterested in working with other Hollywood women on-screen or in recognizing the advantages of promoting women’s careers through publicity networks off the set. Katharine Hepburn endures as a product of American myths about pioneering individualism, the Hollywood star system, and the studio-era film industry’s ambivalent investment in strong women. But if, as historian Nancy Cott has argued, “Pure individualism negates feminism because it removes the basis for women’s collective self-understanding or action,” then Hepburn was no feminist. This chapter unravels her myth.

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