‘Battleship Femininity’ deconstructed: Unmasking the myth of Eva Dahlbeck and Ingmar Bergman

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saki Kobayashi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Star Image ◽  
The Press ◽  
Media Construction ◽  
Ingmar Bergman ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Media Texts ◽  
Post War

The Swedish film star Eva Dahlbeck (1920–2008) is now remembered mainly for her contributions to Ingmar Bergman’s comedies in the 1950s. The epithet ‘Pansarskeppet kvinnligheten’ (‘Battleship Femininity’), allegedly given to her by the director, has integrated her stardom into the myth-making process driven by Bergman and the press. This can erroneously give him sole credit for Dahlbeck’s fame despite her already established star status. To reconsider such an auteurist misconception, this article examines Dahlbeck’s stardom from 1946 to 1956, drawing on Richard Dyer’s seminal theorization of a film star as a media construction. By analysing Dahlbeck’s star image and its relationship to three characters she plays in Bergman’s films, the article situates these films in the dynamics formed by diverse media texts and elucidates their historical and cultural context while also providing a case study of film stardom in post-war Sweden.

Voicing the Soviet Experience

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Hodgson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Personal Integrity ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Conflicting Discourses ◽  
Soviet Experience

This book is an examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol′ga Berggol′ts (1910–1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This book addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity. Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as ‘official’ figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol′ts's work shows that the borders between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. The text discusses how Berggol′ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol′ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion that connects texts of different genres, ‘official’ as well as ‘unofficial’ writing.

scholarly journals Ghanaian highlife sound recordings of the 1970s: the legacy of Francis Kwakye and the Ghana Film Studio

Popular Music ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Ernest Owusu-Poku
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Recording Technology ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Culturally Influenced ◽  
Document Review ◽  
Vinyl Records

Abstract There is a striking variance between the sounds of highlife music recorded in the 1950s and 1960s and that of the 1970s. This difference can be attributed partly to the advancement of recording technology, a shift from shellac to vinyl records as well as the advent of multi-track tape recorders in Ghana. The 1970s had a unique highlife sound that can be situated within and explained by the socio-cultural context of recording approaches embraced by studio engineers. This paper investigates the technological approaches to the production of highlife songs at the Ghana Film Studio (GFS) and how they reshaped the highlife soundscape in the 1970s. It also draws attention to the influence of Francis Kwakye, the then resident recording engineer of GFS as a case study to explore highlife sound on records within this period. Employing document review, audio review, observations and interview for data collection, the paper reveals that the engineering techniques and tools employed on the recordings were socio-culturally influenced and constructed to resonate with the Ghanaian identity of the time. It further argues that the recording activities have been guided largely by a new imagination of the highlife sound recordings framed within a certain Ghanaian nationalistic context. The paper concludes that the methods employed to record highlife music of the 1970s were masterminded essentially from a Ghanaian socio-cultural sound perspective.

Tanaka and Mizoguchi: Politics and Rebellion in the Early Post-war Era

Tanaka Kinuyo ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 82-103
Author(s):  
Michael Smith
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
Star Image ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Traditional Femininity ◽  
Creative Partnership

Smith’s chapter uses My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1949) as a case-study for an analysis of Tanaka’s embodiment of feminine subjectivity. Grounded by an examination of the postwar gender reforms and their application, he argues that Tanaka and Mizoguchi’s creative partnership is complex to define politically, often expressing conflicting ideas on gender equality which in turn reflected the moral, social and practical paradigms which underpinned gender politics in Japan. Although produced in the postwar period, the film’s plot is set in the Meiji era and the chapter bridges these crucial periods in the history of Japanese women, using Tanaka’s star image to illuminate ideological connotations within both settings. The close reading of Tanaka’s feminist character in the film complicates the critical conception of her star persona as being tied to the Japanese stereotype of yamato nadeshiko - a type of conservative, restrained, traditional femininity.

Culture and the plasticity of perception

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lifshitz ◽  
T. M. Luhrmann
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
The World

Abstract Culture shapes our basic sensory experience of the world. This is particularly striking in the study of religion and psychosis, where we and others have shown that cultural context determines both the structure and content of hallucination-like events. The cultural shaping of hallucinations may provide a rich case-study for linking cultural learning with emerging prediction-based models of perception.

Social science and the press: A case study and its implications.

1981 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 480-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell H. Weigel ◽  
Jeffrey J. Pappas
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
The Press

Cristóbal Balenciaga. Explorations in Traditional Spanish Aesthetics

Costume ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Ana Balda Arana
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Country Of Origin ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Religious Iconography

This article investigates how the traditional attire and religious iconography of Cristóbal Balenciaga's (1895–1972) country of origin inspired his designs. The arguments presented here build on what has already been established on the subject, provide new data regarding the cultural context that informed the couturier's creative process (with which the Anglo-Saxon world is less familiar) and conclude by investigating the reasons and timing of his exploration of these fields. They suggest why this Spanish influence is present in his innovations in the 1950s and 1960s and go beyond clichéd interpretations of the ruffles of flamenco dress and bullfighters’ jackets. The findings derive from research for the author's doctoral thesis and her curatorial contribution to the exhibition Coal and Velvet. Balenciaga and Ortiz Echagüe. Views on the Popular Costume (Balenciaga Museum, Getaria, Spain, 7 October 2016–7 May 2017).

Somethin’ about Scandinavia: Danish Shorts on the Post-war International Scene

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Collaboration ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
The Third ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Post War ◽  
Nordic Cooperation

Building on the picture of post-war Anglo-Danish documentary collaboration established in the previous chapter, this chapter examines three cases of international collaboration in which Dansk Kulturfilm and Ministeriernes Filmudvalg were involved in the late 1940s and 1950s. They Guide You Across (Ingolf Boisen, 1949) was commissioned to showcase Scandinavian cooperation in the realm of aviation (SAS) and was adopted by the newly-established United Nations Film Board. The complexities of this film’s production, funding and distribution are illustrative of the activities of the UN Film Board in its first years of operation. The second case study considers Alle mine Skibe (All My Ships, Theodor Christensen, 1951) as an example of a film commissioned and funded under the auspices of the Marshall Plan. This US initiative sponsored informational films across Europe, emphasising national solutions to post-war reconstruction. The third case study, Bent Barfod’s animated film Noget om Norden (Somethin’ about Scandinavia, 1956) explains Nordic cooperation for an international audience, but ironically exposed some gaps in inter-Nordic collaboration in the realm of film.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay
Keyword(s):  
International Politics ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
International Dimension ◽  
International Policies ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War

In examining the practice of socialist internationalism, this book has sought to combine three fields of historical scholarship (socialism, internationalism, and international politics) in the aim of contributing to each one. The contribution to the first area, socialism, is perhaps the most obvious. Contrary to numerous claims, socialist internationalism did not die in August 1914 but survived the outbreak of war and afterwards even flourished at times. Indeed, during the two post-war periods, European socialists worked closely together on a variety of pressing issues, endowing the policymaking of the British, French, and German parties with an important international dimension. This international dimension was never all-important: it rarely, if ever, trumped the domestic political and intra-party dimensions of policymaking. But its existence means that the international policies of any one socialist party cannot be fully understood in isolation from the policies of other parties. The practice of socialist internationalism was rarely easy: contention was present and sometimes rife. Equally pertinent, idealism could be in short supply. Often enough, European socialists instrumentalized internationalism for their own ends, whether it was Ramsay MacDonald with the Geneva Protocol during the 1920s or Guy Mollet, who hoped to discredit internal party critics of his Algerian policy during the 1950s. Nevertheless, the attempts to instrumentalize socialist internationalism underscore the latter’s significance. After all, such attempts would be inconceivable unless socialist internationalism meant something to European socialists....

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