Cinematic Segregation

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-167
Author(s):  
Hannah Durkin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
World War ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Stormy Weather ◽  
Studio Era

This chapter examines Dunham’s interventions in World War II-era U.S. cinema. Focusing on three of Dunham’s Hollywood films, Carnival of Rhythm (1941), Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), and Stormy Weather (1943), the chapter recovers Dunham’s groundbreaking contribution as a Black woman choreographer to midcentury U.S. cinema. Establishing that Dunham was the first Black choreographer to gain onscreen credit for her work in Hollywood, it shows how her performances represented a negotiation of studio-era racial codes but also how she mediated such codes and was able to assert her authorship by presenting a vision of Black dancing womanhood in Hollywood that was pioneering its open engagement with sensuality, cultural diversity, and choreographic allusions to ballet and modern dance.

Henry Cowell and the West Coast Dance Scene

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arnold Schoenberg ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Henry Cowell

Modern dance and music for percussion are linked through the works of musicians who studied with the iconoclastic composer Henry Cowell. This chapter highlights the work of numerous artists who were involved in the dance and music scene along the West Coast of the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Cowell’s early publishing venture New Music helped launch the careers of composers Johanna Beyer, William Russell, Lou Harrison, John Cage, and others. The latter two composers, Harrison and Cage, also studied with the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg whose use of the twelve-tone technique became central to the music of the twentieth century. The chapter ends with a summary of percussion music’s development from the decades before World War I to the compositional hiatus caused by World War II.

scholarly journals Returning Chernivtsi to the Cultural Map of Europe: The Meridian Czernowitz International Poetry Festival

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 238-256
Author(s):  
Niklas Bernsand
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
City Branding ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Strategy ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and ‘ethnic unmixing’, guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger. Drawing on tropes, stories, and symbols emanating from lost layers of urban cultural diversity has been an important resource in post-socialist city branding in many cities in Eastern and Central Europe that saw significant ethno-demographic changes in connection with World War II. In Chernivtsi, this is usually framed by narratives emphasizing tolerance, cultural diversity, and Europeanness, notions that are prominent in myths about the city in German-speaking Central Europe. A common strategy here, found in municipal city branding and in commercial efforts to draw on the multiethnic past in restaurants and cafés, is to deemphasize difficult questions about what actually happened to the celebrated cultural diversity and soften or ignore the temporal break. The article analyses how the International Poetry Festival Meridian Czernowitz, that has taken place in Chernivtsi since 2010, works with the city’s culturally diverse past and its literary dimensions, drawing on tropes from both local multiculturalist narratives and on the Bukowina-Mythos popularised by intellectuals from German-speaking countries. Although the festival is not a venue for working through traumas, locating events in symbolically charged places such as the Jewish cemetery and highlighting Holocaust themes in poetry readings opens up for difficult questions where the lost cultural diversity might become something more than only a resource.

Projections of Passing

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Megan Kelley
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American History ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Racial Ambiguity ◽  
Hollywood Movies

A key concern in postwar America was “who's passing for whom?” Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa). Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. This book shows that these films transcend genre. Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity. This book broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history.

Moving with the Times: The Wellington New Dance Group

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (S1) ◽  
pp. 179-185
Author(s):  
Marianne Schultz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Physical Education ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Art Music ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Times ◽  
Radical Ideas

This paper explores the founding of the New Dance Group in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1945. The New Dance Group introduced radical ideas about dance, art, music, politics, and physical education to New Zealand. This paper examines the influence that American and European dance and physical education had on New Zealand's physical and artistic expression and places the introduction of modern dance within the social and cultural landscape of immediate the post—World War II period in New Zealand.

Germany’s Great Love vs. the American Fortress: Home Front Melodrama

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Heins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Great Love

This chapter compares Hollywood and Nazi uses of melodrama during World War II and demonstrates that the American home front film portrayed the war effort as a defense of middle-class domesticity, while the Nazi home front melodrama suggested that war provided a means to intensified erotic experience. Home front melodramas featuring female main protagonists, contemporary settings, and a thematization of the war were produced in Hollywood and in Babelsberg, but the form and extent of this treatment was not identical in the two cinemas. The chapter considers the approaches to cinematic propaganda advocated by the leadership of both sides, by looking at the paradigmatic Hollywood home front films Mrs. Miniver and Since You Went Away (1944) in detail. It then examines Nazi home front melodramas in relation to conventions established by these Hollywood films.

Barrett, Cynthia (1921–2006)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Mehra Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Ballet Dancer ◽  
World War

Choreographer, teacher, and dance artist Cynthia Barrett was a modern dance artist who established her own company in Toronto. For a short while she directed the Neo Dance Theatre (later to become the New Dance Theatre under Nancy Lima Dent), for which she choreographed Song of David, which was performed at the Second Canadian Ballet Festival in 1949. While a self-professed ballet dancer, she looked toward modern themes, music, and aesthetics for inspiration. In 1944 she explored the plight of the Jewish peoples during and since World War II in Child Refugee: I Don’t See No Butterflies (1944), and considered local social histories in Canadiana (1946) and Eskimo Dances (1946). During the mid-1960s, she began using a group of dancers including Peter Randazzo, David Earle, and Patricia Beatty, who would eventually become the founders of Toronto Dance Theatre.

Tramps vs. Sweethearts: Changing Images of Arab and American Women in Hollywood Films

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alia Yunis ◽  
Gaelle Picherit-Duthler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
World War ◽  
American Women ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThe portrayal of Arab women in Hollywood from the silent movies to today stands in sharp contrast to the portrayal of American women over the same time period and can be defined by off screen politics. By examining important American films over nearly 100 years, this article describes Arab and American women characters through five political-historical phases of US international relations that define their Hollywood images: 1) pre-World War II, 2) from World War II to the 1960s, 3) the 1970s, 4) the 1980s to 11 September 2001 and 5) post-9/11. The analysis reveals a variety of archetypes for both Arab and American women, but the main finding suggests a limited role for American women and the near absence of Arab women in Hollywood movies. Independent filmmakers and upcoming Arab-American movie makers may yet be able to fill this void.

Staging Ethnologic Dance

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-119
Author(s):  
Rebekah J. Kowal
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Latin American ◽  
York City ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The One

Chapter 2 examines La Meri’s controversial legacy in American concert dance. An Anglo-American dance artist who specialized in Asian and Latin American dance practices, La Meri fashioned herself as a dance polyglot, having studied with instructors at stops along the way of her worldwide performance tours in the 1920s and 1930s. When World War II commenced in Europe, La Meri settled in New York City in 1940 and established herself as one of the world’s foremost ethnologic performers. This chapter investigates debates that surrounded La Meri in the 1940s to illuminate the tensions that developed between so-called ethnic dance and modern dance, on the one hand, and cultural formations of whiteness, on the other.

Singing Sayonara

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-275
Author(s):  
W. Anthony Sheppard
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Original Music ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
World War ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Japanese Music ◽  
Performing Art

Postwar Hollywood films offered the most sustained exposure American audiences have ever had to the Japanese performing arts. Following World War II, Hollywood created a new image of Japan, one that replaced the racism it had nourished during the war with depictions emphasizing the cultural refinements of the exotic Japanese. Music was central to this transformation. The primary example is the 1957 Sayonara. Multiple forms of “Japanese” music are heard in this film, creating a complex and contradictory musical portrait. Franz Waxman’s score employs Irving Berlin’s “Sayonara” and numerous folk tunes and includes original music composed for Japanese instruments. Several traditional Japanese performing art forms are encountered as well as Takarazuka theater. Sayonara is but one of the multiple films from the late 1950s and early 60s discussed: Three Stripes in the Sun, Cry for Happy, The Barbarian and the Geisha, Teahouse of the August Moon, The Crimson Kimono.

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