scholarly journals Giving Voice to a Portrait: The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Law in Belle

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. WLS106-WLS125
Author(s):  
Kate Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Historical Record ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Historical Figure

The 2013 feature film Belle presents an account of the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804). Belle was the daughter of Sir John Lindsay, a British naval officer, and Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman, and she was raised in the home of her great uncle Lord Mansfield during his tenure as Chief Justice of England. The record of Belle’s life is thin, and her story might have been altogether forgotten had it not been for a 1779 portrait of her in which she was painted alongside her white cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. The film was inspired by the portrait. The paucity of available facts left the filmmakers much latitude for fictionalizing, but even so the film makes significant departures from the historical record, for example, in its representations of Belle’s eventual husband, and in its insertion of Belle into the unfolding of the Zong case, a case involving slavery that was decided by Lord Mansfield in 1783. In this paper, I consider the effectiveness and the ethical implications of the filmmakers’ use of law to give voice to this historical figure.

scholarly journals Who owns the news? The "right to be forgotten” and journalists’ conflicting principles

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Shapiro ◽  
Brian MacLeod Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Decision Making ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Right To Be Forgotten ◽  
Digital Journalism ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
The Right

“The right to be forgotten” (RTBF) is a relatively new concept in human-rights law, but it deals in root ethical issues familiar to news people and their sources. Editors must routinely weigh the news’ long-term role as a “historical record” against its potential negative impacts on individuals. In the digital-journalism era, publication is at the same time both more enduring and less static, creating new parameters and possibilities for ethical decision-making. Because news content may be seen by more people in more places for much longer, the potential to do lasting good or harm is greater, but, because digital publication is more retractable and redactible than legacy platforms, the possibility of correction, clarification and removal creates both new harm-reduction opportunities and new challenges to the historical record. Also known as a “right to erasure” or “right to oblivion,” the RTBF, now accepted in the European Union, recognizes that, even in the age of Google, people should retain some degree of control over information about themselves and their pasts. (Factsheet on the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ ruling (C131-12), n.d.; Manna, 2014; Rosen, 2012). This paper will explore both legal and ethical implications of the issue.

scholarly journals Das Bild von Herkus Monte in der deutschen und litauischen Literatur und Kultur

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-264
Author(s):  
Alina Kuzborska
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Proximity ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Historical Dramas ◽  
Literary Figure

This article focuses on the historical figure of the leader of the second uprising of the colonized Prussians against the Teutonic Order, Herkus Monte, who is presented here primarily as a literary figure. The increasing interest in Prussian history changed the written media, so that the order chronicle of the 13th century later turned into literary works, primarily historical novels and historical dramas in Germany. Because of the geographical proximity and linguistic relationship, the Lithuanians feel a strong affinity for the Prussians and their heroes. In the following, we analyze literary works by Lithuanian authors on the basis of which a feature film and an opera were created.

Reliving a crisis through a feature film: Corporate image from online user-generated versus official media perspectives

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Andrew Heavens ◽  
Victoria-Sophie Osburg ◽  
Vignesh Yoganathan
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
News Media ◽  
Corporate Reputation ◽  
Corporate Identity ◽  
Corporate Image ◽  
Reputation Management ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Media

A crisis presents a severe challenge for every company, particularly, when it has ethical implications. Previous research has shown how the presentation of a crisis in the media can negatively affect corporate image. After surviving such a crisis, its adverse connotations may resurface years later in the minds of stakeholders, for example, through a feature film. The consequences of how a crisis re-emergence affects corporate identity, especially in the digital age of media proliferation, is not yet sufficiently understood. Hence, this paper outlines how a crisis reemergence impacts on corporate image through a detailed literature review and the discussion of a case. This paper shows the need to appreciate differences between UGC (user generated content, outside company control), and official news media (potentially manipulable) in relation to corporate reputation management, and consequently, the importance of targeted image restoration in light of crisis re-emergence.

EVA'S MEN: GENDER AND POWER IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, 1652–74

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA C. WELLS
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
East India Company ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Feeding Station ◽  
Wide Range

Quite possibly, Eva, born Krotoa, is the most written about African woman in South African historiography. Her name fills the journals of the Dutch East India Company almost from the very start of their little feeding-station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. She is known as a Khoena girl taken into Dutch commander Jan Van Riebeeck's household from the age of about twelve, who later became a key interpreter for the Dutch, was baptised, married Danish surgeon, Pieter Van Meerhoff, but then died as a drunken prostitute after his death. Yet her persona remains an enigma. As Christina Landman put it, ‘Krotoa is a story-generator’.To conservative historians, Eva's life offers living proof that the Khoena were irredeemable savages. To black nationalist writers, such as Khoena historian, Yvette Abrahams, she personifies the widespread rape and abuse of black women by the invaders. Eva's chief biographer, V. C. Malherbe, forms a more neutral judgment by describing Eva as primarily ‘a woman in between’. Landman views her as an early synthesizer of African and Christian religious traditions. Carli Coetzee demonstrates how recent Afrikaans-speaking artists, poets and actors have constructed an image of Eva as the mother of the Afrikaner nation, a tamed African who acquiesced to Europeanness. She is often portrayed as yearning to return to her African roots, but without success.Virtually all of the representations of Eva construct her as a helpless victim of vicious culture clashes. Today's racial consciousness, laced with assumptions of inevitable African/European hostility, is often read back into the historical record. Frustratingly large gaps in that record leave room for a wide range of interpretations, depending heavily on the subjectivities of the historian. Virtually all previous writers, however, have judged Eva primarily by the tragic circumstances of her death, while minimizing the considerable achievements of her earlier years.

Cross-dressing and Transgressing: The Queer Body in Madame Satã

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
Marcus D. Welsh
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Film History ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Black Poor

In Karim Aïnouz’s debut feature film Madame Satã (2002), the protagonist yearns to be a cross-dressing performer. Based on the historical figure João Francisco dos Santos, the protagonist is black, poor, gay, and a criminal in the Brazil of the 1930s. An examination of his body as a nexus of these factors and the film’s portrayal of it in the context of queer theory, film history, and social discourses of gender, race, and class and in cinematic terms demonstrates that, while he is able to express his fluid gender identity temporarily through performance, the protagonist is unable to escape his social position as regulated by the intersectionality of his gender identity with other factors. En el primer largometraje de Karim Aïnouz, Madame Satã (2002), el protagonista anhela ser un artista travesti. Basado en la figura histórica de João Francisco dos Santos, dicho protagonista es negro, pobre, homosexual y criminal en el Brasil de la década de 1930. El artículo analiza su cuerpo como nexo entre estos factores y la manera en que es representado en la película a partir de una perspectiva teórica queer, de la historia del cine y los discursos sociales de género, raza y clase, así como de la técnica cinematográfica. Si por un lado el personaje es capaz de expresar su fluida identidad de género temporalmente a través de la interpretación, por otro es incapaz de escapar su posición social, la cual está regulada por la interseccionalidad entre su identidad de género y otros factores.

scholarly journals Who owns the news? The "right to be forgotten” and journalists’ conflicting principles

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Shapiro ◽  
Brian MacLeod Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Decision Making ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Right To Be Forgotten ◽  
Digital Journalism ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
The Right

“The right to be forgotten” (RTBF) is a relatively new concept in human-rights law, but it deals in root ethical issues familiar to news people and their sources. Editors must routinely weigh the news’ long-term role as a “historical record” against its potential negative impacts on individuals. In the digital-journalism era, publication is at the same time both more enduring and less static, creating new parameters and possibilities for ethical decision-making. Because news content may be seen by more people in more places for much longer, the potential to do lasting good or harm is greater, but, because digital publication is more retractable and redactible than legacy platforms, the possibility of correction, clarification and removal creates both new harm-reduction opportunities and new challenges to the historical record. Also known as a “right to erasure” or “right to oblivion,” the RTBF, now accepted in the European Union, recognizes that, even in the age of Google, people should retain some degree of control over information about themselves and their pasts. (Factsheet on the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ ruling (C131-12), n.d.; Manna, 2014; Rosen, 2012). This paper will explore both legal and ethical implications of the issue.

scholarly journals Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through someone else’s eyes: Prosthetic memory and Hotel Rwanda

2020 ◽  
pp. 175069802095981
Author(s):  
Nicki Hitchcott
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
False Memories ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The Real ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
Cultural Responses ◽  
Mediated Representation

Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ suggests that memories are not ‘owned’, that is they do not depend on lived experience, but rather they can occur as a result of an individual’s engagement with a mediated representation (e.g. a film, a museum, a TV series, a novel). One of the best-known mass cultural responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is Terry George’s 2004 feature film, Hotel Rwanda. While the film was a huge commercial success, Rwandan survivor testimonies paint a very different picture of what happened in the real ‘Hotel Rwanda’ (the Hôtel des Mille Collines in the Rwandan capital of Kigali). This article discusses the different versions of the ‘Hotel Rwanda’ story through the lens of prosthetic memory and considers the usefulness of Landsberg’s theory for analysing memory narratives from or about Rwanda. While Landsberg promotes prosthetic memories as ‘in the best cases’ capable of generating empathy and political alliances, I show that, when mass-mediated representations create revisionist false ‘memories’, this can have harmful consequences for survivors of trauma. After focusing on the ethical implications of what Landsberg describes as ‘seeing through someone else’s eyes’, I conclude that prosthetic memory is a concept that should be treated with caution.

The Vulnerable Spectator

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Amelie Hastie
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Female Author ◽  
The One ◽  
Female Director ◽  
The Uk

Adapted from the Lissa Evans novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, Their Finest (Lone Scherfig, 2016) is a fictional film based loosely on historical figures and circumstances, as it tells the story of the production of a feature film by the UK Ministry of Information (MOI) in 1940. What, Their Finest quietly asks, is real? What is fake? And what does it matter, if you are at the movies? Joy is real. Tears are real. And other things, too: the tea I sip, the arm of my companion next to me, the chattering women in the row below, the sighing man who has come to the movies alone. The light is real. The darkness, too. Hastie thinks through the implications of a female author of the original monograph, the female director of the current film, and the fictional composite female character Catrin Cole, the screenwriter in the film. The whole of Catrin Cole did and didn't exist before Their Finest. “Catrin Cole” is not a historical figure, hidden or otherwise. She is a composite of fact and fiction, the pieces stitched together to make a whole person. As asserted by producer Stephen Woolley, who initiated the project, Their Finest drew upon the lives of many women writers for the Film Division of the MOI, particularly that of Diana Morgan, the one woman in the Ealing Studios writers’ room.

Behavior in the Brain

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin M. Monti ◽  
Adrian M. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Motor Behavior ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Motor Output ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Brain Responses ◽  
Minimally Conscious ◽  
Brain Insults ◽  
Brain Behavior

Recent evidence has suggested that functional neuroimaging may play a crucial role in assessing residual cognition and awareness in brain injury survivors. In particular, brain insults that compromise the patient’s ability to produce motor output may render standard clinical testing ineffective. Indeed, if patients were aware but unable to signal so via motor behavior, they would be impossible to distinguish, at the bedside, from vegetative patients. Considering the alarming rate with which minimally conscious patients are misdiagnosed as vegetative, and the severe medical, legal, and ethical implications of such decisions, novel tools are urgently required to complement current clinical-assessment protocols. Functional neuroimaging may be particularly suited to this aim by providing a window on brain function without requiring patients to produce any motor output. Specifically, the possibility of detecting signs of willful behavior by directly observing brain activity (i.e., “brain behavior”), rather than motoric output, allows this approach to reach beyond what is observable at the bedside with standard clinical assessments. In addition, several neuroimaging studies have already highlighted neuroimaging protocols that can distinguish automatic brain responses from willful brain activity, making it possible to employ willful brain activations as an index of awareness. Certainly, neuroimaging in patient populations faces some theoretical and experimental difficulties, but willful, task-dependent, brain activation may be the only way to discriminate the conscious, but immobile, patient from the unconscious one.

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