scholarly journals THE CONCEPT OF MYSTIC IN MODERN AMERICAN FILMS OF HORROW

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-41
Author(s):  
Zabolotska O.O.
Keyword(s):  
American Films

The Negro in American Films: Some Recent Works

1965 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-30
Author(s):  
Albert Johnson
Keyword(s):  
American Films

Movies Without Mercy: Race, War, and Images of Japanese People in American Films, 1942-1945

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Wang Xiaofei
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
Japanese People ◽  
Governmental Agencies ◽  
American Films ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Complex Approach ◽  
Film Studios ◽  
Race War

AbstractHistorian John Dower titles his book War Without Mercy. Similarly, wartime Hollywood showed no mercy when depicting Japanese. Negative portrayals were often based on actual atrocities, but it was racism to demonize an entire people and culture. The story of how politics in Hollywood and Washington, the conduct of war, and international relations shaped and changed film racism involves a much more complex approach than has been practiced to date. Using archives of film studios, the Production Code Administration (PCA), and governmental agencies such as the Office of War Information (OWI), this article traces the power struggle among them and a new racism which emerged after 1941. Filmmakers now projected favorable images of Chinese to distinguish their new allies from the Japanese enemy. OWI struggled to promote a liberal agenda which saw the enemy as world fascism, not the Japanese people. The article analyzes more than two dozen films to trace the complications in three types of wartime screen racism: (1) "Verbal racism," such as derogating words like "Jap." (2) "Physical racism," which dramatized and ridiculed physical characteristics of Japanese people. (3) "Psychological racism," which saw all Japanese people as cruel and treacherous.

scholarly journals New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Transnational Cinema ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
The Road ◽  
American Films ◽  
On The Road ◽  
New Perspective

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Latin American films Amores perros, Diarios de motocicleta, El hijo de la novia, Y tu mamá también, and Cidade de Deus enjoyed unprecedented critical and commercial success in global markets. Benefiting from external financial and/or creative input, these films were considered examples of transnational cinema. This book examines the six transnational directors (Iñárritu, Cuarón, del Toro, Meirelles, Salles and Campanella), who made these and the subsequent commercially successful and mostly ‘deterritorialized’ films (21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, El espinazo del Diablo, El laberinto del fauno, Blindness, The Constant Gardener, Children of Men, On the Road, El secreto de sus ojos). Arguing against criticism in which these films’ commercial (Hollywood) and transnational features efface the authorial sensibilities of these directors and make them irrelevant to Latin American trends and politics, this book shows how they engage with national, continental and hemispheric politics and identity. Bringing a new perspective to the transnational films of Latin America’s transnational auteurs, including the recent Gravity, The Revenant, Birdman, and Crimson Peak, this book facilitates understanding how different genres function across cultures.

scholarly journals Electronic Screens in Film Diegesis: Modality Modes and Qualifying Aspects of a Formation Enhanced by the Post-digital Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-173
Author(s):  
Andrea Virginás
Keyword(s):  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Precise Description ◽  
Systematic Description ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
American Films ◽  
Narrative Method

Abstract The proliferation of television screens, video monitors and computer or mobile screens in film diegetic worlds is an apparently simple numeric increase of certain objects within the filmed space, conditioned by, and thus mirroring, contemporary technological changes. However, one should consider this intermediary screenic formation as a complex and versatile audiovisual and narrative method that could have emerged in this frequency only in our current post-digital era. This chapter argues that fine-tuning the model of media functioning presented in Elleström’s “The Modalities of Media” for this specific phenomenon enables a more precise description of the process along which the three presemiotic media modalities morph into the semiotic one. By presenting a systematic description of electronic screens in film diegetic worlds, and a general assessment of the intermedial processes at work, the chapter examines Euro-American films influenced by the video, respectively, the digital era and technology.

Responding to Realities or Telling the Same Old Story? Mixing Real-world and Mythic Resonances in The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff King
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Real World ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
American Film ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Historical Landscape ◽  
American Films ◽  
Cultural Force

In Chapter Two "Responding to realities or telling the same old story? Mixing real-world and mythic resonances in The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012)" Geoff King also explores the specificity of post-9/11 American film by situating his two case studies in a rich cultural and historical landscape. As he argued in his seminal Spectacular Visions: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (2000), King maintains than many American films can be read as simultaneously of their time and as a part of the American mythological tradition. While the Western genre is long gone as a cultural force, traces of its DNA remains embodied in many contemporary American films, and both The Kingdom and Zero Dark Thirty demonstrate the efficacy of the cinematic medium to embody cultural understandings of the 'War on Terror' era at the same time as they evoke the tropes of the American frontier narrative, despite being set very firmly in the contemporary Middle East. Like American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty proved to be one of the most culturally resonant films of the period, but King largely sidesteps the well-travelled debate about whether the film endorses torture or not in favour of a detailed reading of how Bigelow's affectual drama (and also Peter Berg's The Kingdom) imposes fictional or mythic-ideological frameworks onto their real-world narratives (see Westwell, McSweeney, Chaudhuri).

The Chinese Cinematic Remake as Transnational Appeal: Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Chan
Keyword(s):  
Original Film ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Chinese Version ◽  
Chinese Cinema ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Films ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Transnational Film ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

The past two decades have witnessed the resurgence of Chinese cinemas on the global stage. As Chinese directors confront the notion of remaking American films, they do so with the assurance that there is a potential global market for their product, which in turn might foster a more creative reimagining of a Chinese version that can stand on its own artistic merits as transnational Chinese cinema. This chapter undertakes a close analysis of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (Zhang Yimou 2009) as a transnational film remake to demonstrate how the film confidently reinvents the Coen Brothers’ original film, Blood Simple (1984) as an original in its own right. The analysis demonstrates the way in which the remake is infused with Zhang Yimou’s brand of cinematic pragmatism and the way in which the cooption of a transgressive politics of gender and postcoloniality becomes a route toward transnational appeal.

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