Colonial Film Spectatorship: Nationalist Enough?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Hoon Kim
Keyword(s):  
Film Culture ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
American Films ◽  
Film Spectatorship ◽  
Film Viewing

In the last two chapters, my critical and historiographical concerns draw on theories of film spectatorship and reception in order to further extend the topography of Joseon cinema. The forth chapter considers film-viewing as a political domain in which various forms of colonial tensions were represented and mediated. Taking the dearth of local productions and the predominance of Hollywood productions into consideration, the author argues any attempt to limit Korean spectators’ movie-going and film-viewing patterns only to Joseon films is bound to be a reductionist understanding of Joseon film culture. Thus, the chapter explores the issues in colonial spectatorship in relation to not only local but imported films. It focuses particularly on how Korean spectators’ engagement with American films emerged as the main subject of political tensions and hegemonic struggles with regard to the colonial situation, detailing a variety of receptions and interpretations of the dominance of Hollywood film in the Joseon film.

Film Spectatorship and the Tensions of Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Hoon Kim
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Film History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Film Spectatorship ◽  
Film Viewing

The interrogation of film spectatorship and reception continues in the last chapter, expanding the scope of the inquiry. While the colonial experience was one of many historical factors that affected Korea’s modern experiences, Korea’s colonialized status was not the sole force that directed the development of Joseon film culture. Preoccupied with the cinema’s relation to the subjects of colonial exploitation, nationalism, and national identity, however, few scholars acknowledge that colonial film-viewing was a much more compound activity marked by a range of political, cultural, and historical components that defined Korea’s overall modern experiences. In particular, in standard film history, the fascination film fans had with the cinema has yet to find its place. However, the novelty of the cinema, the pleasure of film-viewing, and the liberating effect the cinema could offer were crucial in generating varied social perceptions and debates surrounding the prominent modern culture. This chapter, therefore, explores the manner in which film spectatorship mediated and represented Korea’s complex modern experiences, focusing primarily on the association between the cinema and politics in gender and sexuality, the issue subjected to the most intense form of social discussions in relation to movie-going throughout the colonial period.

scholarly journals Pan-American Highways: American Tourism to Mexico and 1950s Hollywood film

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Stephanie Fuller
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
American Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Films ◽  
The Us ◽  
Pan American

This article examines American films from the early 1950s which feature journeys to Mexico.  Movies such as Where Danger Lives (John Farrow, 1950), Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) and Wetbacks (Hank McCune, 1954) present journeys to Mexico as escapes from American life in which romanticised freedom is closely connected to mobility and automobiles.  The article explores the connection between the films’ cinematic vistas of Mexican landscapes and American tourism to Mexico in this period.  Through their journeys to and across the border, these films call the wider relationship between the US and Mexico into question as national identities are constructed through travel, landscape and touristic encounters.

Charlie Chan’s Last Mystery, or the Transcultural Disappearance of Warner Oland

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
Kim Khavar Fahlstedt
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Abuse ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Film Stars ◽  
Transnational Film ◽  
Geographical Locations

This chapter investigates the transnational film persona of Warner Oland. Alongside Anna Q. Nilsson and Greta Garbo, Oland was one of Sweden’s first, and internationally most beloved, Hollywood film stars. During the 1920s and 30s, Oland gained global popularity for roles as Orientalist characters such as Dr. Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. This case study probes into the last two years of Oland’s life, in which his fame rose to a career high while he was also struggling in his personal life from years of alcohol abuse. It investigates how a range of fleeting conceptualizations of national and ethnic identifiers, such as “Swedishness” and Orientalism, were utilized as heuristic tools to make sense of Oland's public disintegration. In the present study, Oland’s racialized and ethnic personae were reproduced and renegotiated within three geographical locations (Hollywood, Europe, and China) of that period’s transnational film culture.

Film Policy in the UK: 1920s–1979

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Government Intervention ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Policy Intervention ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Film Market ◽  
Cultural Role ◽  
Film Policy

This chapter traces the key moments that have shaped UK film policy from the 1920s through to the end of the 1970s. It outlines the culture and commerce dichotomy that has informed government intervention in to the film market in the UK. It also documents the economic and cultural role that the Hollywood film industry has had in shaping the development of industrial film culture in the UK. The chapter analyses the sporadic and uneven policy intervention of successive UK governments up until the election of the Thatcher Conservative government in 1979.

‘The shit just got real’: Parody and National Film Culture inThe StrikeandHot Fuzz

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-60
Author(s):  
Neil Archer
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Important Approach ◽  
Productive Function ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Film Viewing

This article argues for the productive function of parody within British film-making, both as an aesthetic strategy for wider distribution, but also as an important approach to the depiction and construction of a national film culture. Going against the conception that parody in the British context negatively signifies what British film is not (in this case, Hollywood), and implicitly asserts a more authentic model for a national cinema (typically, realism), the article argues for parody's value as a mode of representation, particularly within the broader contexts of globalisation. Using the Channel 4 film The Strike (1988) and Working Title's Hot Fuzz (2007) as case studies, it shows parody as responding in specific ways to distinct and changing circumstances of film production, film viewing and British film culture's relationship to Hollywood. The article argues that The Strike's negative uses of parody, while seemingly aligned with an anti-Hollywood discourse pertinent to its contexts, disavows both its own resistance to realism and its own playful use of popular generic modes. Meanwhile, Hot Fuzz, though superficially employing the same approach, can be seen to offer a more nuanced reflection on the limitations and possibilities of ‘national film’ in the early twenty-first century, both as discourse and product. As the article concludes, uses of parody in both texts bring into focus ways of reconciling industrial and cultural frameworks for national cinemas, especially within an increasingly globalised economy.

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