After Death: Public Mourning, Discourse, and Myth in the Afterlife Representations of a Tanzanian Movie Star

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
Claudia Böhme
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Kuisel

This chapter details the rise of anti-Americanism in France, in particular French socialist minister of culture Jack Lang's attack against American popular culture. Lang began by refusing to attend the American film festival at Deauville in September 1981; several months later he gave a notorious address denouncing American cultural imperialism at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City; and then he tried to organize a global “crusade” to combat cultural imports from the United States. Lang was a flamboyant young politician whose movie-star good looks, iconic pink jacket, dramatic initiatives, and hyperactive ways won him both admiration and ridicule. He presided over the Ministry of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993.


2020 ◽  
pp. 167-181
Author(s):  
Zachary Michael Jack

This chapter narrates the author's experience during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Field of Dreams film. The celebration, timed to coincide with Father's Day, represented a chance for the movie's disciples and defenders — the fellowship of the Field — to experience communally the spiritual satisfactions of an intensely personal cinematic experience. For the moment they do not care about the film's many detractors, movie snobs who find it too allegorical, too Midwestern, or simply too corny. They came to nourish their souls in the company of others who have likewise come to associate the film with peace and renewal: the crisp clapboard house with its long curving verandah, the upright picket fence, the Eastergreen grass, the handsome boy-next-door movie star who might as well be Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant, and the storyline and setting that is so powerfully elemental. On that night, the Field's devoted followers, seek paradox: achieving personal salvation together.


Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Leonard Burkat

The virtuoso orchestra and its virtuoso conductor are the most popular musicians in America today. They are the successors of the violin recitalist who toured the country playing to audiences of adoring women; to the coloratura soprano who was a thousand times more admired for the sounds she could make than for the relevance of the sounds to the music (such as it was) on her programme. They are the musical equivalent of the ballerina from whose slipper champagne is sipped, of the radio crooner with his following of swooning adolescent females, of the movie star who collects fans.


Prospects ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 627-638
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Gray

When Walter Benjamin wrote this sentence in the 1930s, he had in mind both the new directions of the press, which was opening more and more spaces in which its readers could write, and the new films and newsreels, where “any man today can lay claim to being filmed” (“Work of Art,” 233) and where, rather than actors, “people … portray themselves” (234; emphasis Benjamin's). Benjamin's attitude toward this collapse of the distinction between author and public was ambivalent. Phrases such as “the phony spell of a commodity” (233), to describe the cult of the movie star, suggest his nostalgia for a time when the aura of the “original” work of art had not yet begun to decay. On the other hand, his idea that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (226) pointed enthusiastically to the new technologies as part of a liberationist meta-narrative.


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