Subversive Sound: Gender, Technology and the Science Fiction Blockbuster

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Space Technology ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
War Films ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
American Films

This chapter considers the representation of gender in the late 1970s and 1980s in the so-called blockbuster era, focusing specifically on the science fiction genre. The aural dimension of these types of films immediately conjures up ideas of space, technology and other worlds and thus potentially appear as acoustically distinct from the experimental or avant-garde nature of New Hollywood or the loud, pervasive sounds of weaponry, shouting and male camaraderie in war films, which, as previously discussed, explored alternative representations of masculinity in mainstream US cinema. Financially, the most successful American films to emerge in the post-New Hollywood era were Hollywood blockbusters. These films, which were popular from the late 1970s onwards, saw a return to classical movie formulas and genres which, according to some scholars, also saw the re-emergence of strong male heroes and passive female characters and thus a noticeable return to binary representations of gender.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

Troubling Masculinities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen Donnar
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
American History ◽  
War Films ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Media And Politics ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Genre Study

The association of the attacks of 9/11 with Hollywood science fiction and disaster spectacle was immediate and pervasive. Succeeding calls in media and politics for the reassuring return of ‘strong’ masculine types—predominantly drawn from Hollywood westerns, action and war films—were widespread, revealing renewed cultural fears of threats to America from both within and without.Troubling Masculinities is the first dedicated multi-genre study of representations of masculinity in encounters with terror in post-9/11 American cinema. The book examines the impact of “terror-Others”, from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, across a broad range of sub-genres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, post-apocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and ‘home invasion’ horror, action-thrillers and ‘frontier’ westerns—especially in relation to cinematic representations of masculinity in previous periods of national turmoil. The book demonstrates that the supposed reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Engaging critical arguments about how Hollywood cinema attempts to resolve male crisis in part through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this unraveling reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they encounter. The book concludes by showing how interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nation continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, Troubling Masculinities offers an important counternarrative in this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

Hollywood Can’t Wait: Elaine May and the Delusions of 1970s American Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Maya Montañez Smukler
Keyword(s):  
Women Directors ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Made In

Elaine May began her career as a filmmaker during the 1970s when the mythology of the New Hollywood male auteur defined the decade; and the number of women directors, boosted by second wave feminism, increased for the first time in forty years. May’s interest in misfit characters, as socially awkward as they were delusional, and her ability to seamlessly move them between comedy and drama, typified the New Hollywood protagonist who captured America’s uneasy transition from the hopeful rebellion of the 1960s into the narcissistic angst of the 1970s. However, the filmmaker’s reception, which culminated in the critical lambast of her comeback film Ishtar in 1987, was uneven: her battles with studio executives are legendary; feminist film critics railed against her depiction of female characters; and a former assistant claimed she set back women directors by her inability to meet deadlines. This chapter investigates Elaine May’s career within the lore 1970s Hollywood to understand the industrial and cultural circumstances that contributed to the emergence of her influential body of work; and the significant contributions to cinema she made in spite of, and perhaps because of, the conflicts in which she was faced.

Transhumanism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pilsch
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
History Of

This book argues that transhumanism should be taken more seriously as a Utopian force in the present. Combatting the widespread idea that transhumanism is a naive and dangerous reframing of the most excessive forms humanist thought, this book situates the contemporary transhumanist movement within the longer history of a rhetorical mode Pilsch calls "evolutionary futurism." Evolutionary futurism is a way of arguing about technology that suggests that global telecommunications technologies, in expanding the geographic range of human thought, radically reshape the future of the human species. Evolutionary futurist argumentation makes the case that we, as a species, are on the cusp of a radical explosion in cognitive, physical, and cultural intelligence. Transhumanism surveys the varying uses of evolutionary futurism throughout the 20th century, as it appears in a wide array of fields. This book unearths evolutionary futurist argumentation in modernist avant-garde poetry, theosophy, science fiction, post-structural philosophy, Christian mysticism, media theory, conceptual art, and online media culture. Ultimately, the book suggests that evolutionary futurism, in the age of the collapse of the state as a unit for imagining Utopia, works by highlighting the human as the limit that must be overcome if we are to imagine new futures for our culture, our planet, and ourselves.

City Space, Technology, Popular Culture: The Modernism of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUAN A. SUÁREZ
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Suspension Bridges ◽  
Space Technology ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
High Rise ◽  
City Space ◽  
Charles Sheeler ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Reputedly, painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand's Manhatta is the first significant title in the history of American avant-garde cinema. It is a seven-minute portrait of New York City and focuses on those features which make the city a modern megalopolis – the traffic, the crowds, the high-rise buildings, the engineering wonders, and the speed and dynamism of street life. The film strives to capture rhythmic and graphic patterns in the movements and shapes of cranes, trains, automobiles, boats, steam shovels, suspension bridges, and skyscrapers. Due to the dominance of technology, the entire urban landscape appears in the film as a machine-like aggregate of static and moving parts independent from human intention.

scholarly journals Escapism and the Feminist Agenda in ChimamandaNgoziAdichie’s Purple Bibiscus

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Shija TERHEMBA
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Male Domination ◽  
Avant Garde

<p>Despite the well-known approach among avant-garde feminist novelists in Nigeria of creating agile and assertive female characters to challenge male-domination, Chimamada Ngozi Adichie in Purple Hibiscus creates docile female characters who readily escape into their cocoon to avoid encounters with patriarchy. Her novel however, manages to impact on the feminist agenda by her ingenious depiction of the harsh and unreasonable male hegemony on a mission of self-destruct.</p>

scholarly journals Ibsen in Dutch theatres and the sustainability of Nora

Nordlit ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 445
Author(s):  
Janke Klok
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Women Directors ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
New Era ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New Women ◽  
New Ideas

<p align="JUSTIFY"><span lang="en-GB">In this article I reflect on Ibsen's laborious road to the Dutch stages to display the reciprocal influence between innovating theatre plays and the process of a modernizing society. In doing this I take into account insights from translation theory and the thinking on cultural mediation, whereby cultural transmission is seen as a way of interacting: the receiving culture’s receptivity towards new ideas and new forms is crucial for the space available for innovative literature from abroad. </span></p><p align="JUSTIFY"><span lang="en-GB">Tracking Ibsen on the Dutch stages shows a wavelike movement. Research into the reception of Ibsen supports the claim by the Dutch author Ina Boudier-Bakker (1875-1966) who used the late first staging of Ibsen's </span><span lang="en-GB"><em>A Doll's House</em></span><span lang="en-GB"> (1889) to illustrate the Amsterdam and Dutch conservatism with regard to gender roles and avant-garde art. Prior to 1890 the Netherlands lagged behind other European countries. With the Dutch production of </span><span lang="en-GB"><em>A Doll</em></span><span lang="en-GB">’</span><span lang="en-GB"><em>s House </em></span><span lang="en-GB">a new era arrives.</span><span lang="en-GB">After a flying start and a growing appreciation for Ibsen as a social reformer, particularly concerning entrenched (gender) conventions, Dutch critics in the period 1930-1970, do not seem to be able to place Ibsen’s plays. A qualitative analysis of the revival by way of the jubilee performance </span><span lang="en-GB"><em>Ghosts</em></span><span lang="en-GB"> in 1956, shows that Dutch audiences hold off a contemporary debate by focusing on geographical and ethnographical distance. It indicates that in the fifties this audience was intellectually and artistically conservative. Tracking Ibsen on the stages after 1970 shows us the current multicultural society; it shows us a renewed interest in his female characters, which culminates with Nora. It shows us an increasing number of women directors in Dutch theatres, also in advanced theatre school performances. Present-day Dutch theatres and their audiences seem to be mostly interested in Ibsen’s theatre women, be it his female characters or the relatively new phenomenon of women directing his plays. Their experiments with his texts are highly appreciated and show a renewed interest in public debate, re-establishing the discussion that was aroused in the first period of staging Ibsen in the Netherlands. The experiments with Ibsen’s “old” female characters by his “new” women directors form a most important ingredient of his modernity and sustainability, both where content (feminism = noraism) and where form are concerned. It is these women who confirm Ibsen’s position as an author of today’s world. </span></p>

scholarly journals Una creadora olvidada: Irène Hillel-Erlanger, entre el simbolismo y las vanguardias

Çédille ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 313-332
Author(s):  
Isabel González Gil ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Main Work ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

"This article is about an unknown author of the French avant-garde, Irène Hillel-Erlanger, and her main work, Voyages en kaléidoscope, an unusual poetic novel, published in 1919, belonging to the genre of the “Scientific-marvellous”, the proto-science-fiction developed in France between 1900 and 1930. As a result of the hybridisation of the languages of symbolism and avant-garde experimentalism, the novel shows the tensions between these two movements, which will be studied through the analysis of thematic and formal aspects, such as allegory, hermeticism, fragmentarism, or visuality, as well as textual and discursive plurality. Finally, we will address the poetics of the gaze underlying the utopian invention of the kaleidoscope, in the context of the end of the First World War. "

scholarly journals Inventando la Heroína de las Mil Caras: una propuesta didáctica de creación literaria. Inventing the Heroine of a Thousand Faces: a Literary Creation Didactic Proposal

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 18-29
Author(s):  
Catalina Millán Scheiding
Keyword(s):  
Creative Writing ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Escritura Creativa ◽  
Ideological Context

Esta propuesta didáctica ejemplifica el uso de la escritura creativa como una forma de acercarse al discurso de género, a través de la generación de un héroe o heroína de fantasía. Se ofrece una actividad en la que se trabaja el conflicto aparente y el conflicto subyacente, donde los roles de género pueden ofrecer respuestas diferentes y redefinir las estructuras narratológicas. El alumnado trabaja sobre su propia creación literaria para definir sus expectativas literarias y los conflictos hegemónicos que se presentan en las historias de fantasía y ficción de su contexto social e ideológico. El contraste de los textos de creación propia con el análisis de textos y ejemplos audiovisuales de fantasía y ciencia ficción de creadoras literarias y de personajes femeninos, presenta una oportunidad para generar un espacio contrastivo y constructivo, a la vez que enlaza con competencias educativas y facilita un acercamiento comparativo a la critica literaria. This didactic proposal exemplifies the use of creative writing as a way to approach gender studies, through the creation of a fantasy hero. The activity offers the possibility of working both the apparent and underlaying conflicts, where gender roles can offer different answers and redefine narratological structures. The students work on their own literary creation to define their literary expectations and the predominant conflicts that appear in fantasy and fiction stories in their social and ideological context. The contrast of their own textual creations with the analyses of textual and audiovisual examples from fantasy and science fiction by female authors and including female characters offers the possibility of generating a contrastive and constructivespace, which also links to educational competences and facilitates a comparatist approach to literary criticism.

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