Culture Wars and Catharses

Unruly Cinema ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 101-140
Author(s):  
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta

This chapter focuses on a While the New Cinema movement of the 1960s and 1970s reinvigorated the medium to the excitement of a section of the educated middle-class, the Hindi mainstream industry in Bombay reoriented the national imaginary to focus on physical violence and cathartic revenge. This is the era that saw a clear bifurcation between two distinct cinemas – the popular commercial cinema and the new art cinema – existing in almost every Indian language.

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.


Author(s):  
Douglas M. Charles

Most Americans are familiar with the bromides of the so-called culture wars, particularly as public religious figures of the 1960s and 1970s decried the perceived decline of sexual decency and morality. In this chapter, Charles Douglas examines a lesser-known dimension of this topic: the FBI’s decades-long campaign against obscenity. Charles explains how as obscenity’s legal definition constantly evolved after 1957, leading to the growth and proliferation of both obscenity and pornography, the FBI perceived the two as fundamental threats to American morality and culture. Consequently J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI devoted substantial resources to counter these social changes through an educational campaign spearheaded through its Crime Records Division — the bureau’s public relations machinery. This chapter amplifies attention to how the moralism of the Hoover period motivated efforts to police public morality well into the 1970s and 1980s.


Author(s):  
Christopher T. Keaveney

Chapter 3 examines the long history of baseball films in Japan, a tradition nearly as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself. After a brief survey of the early history of cinema in Japan, a tradition whose history parallels that of the game of baseball chronologically, the study focuses on early shomingeki films and explores how baseball became an important marker of domesticity and middle class respectability in this genre of film in the 1930s. The chapter then examines several pivotal films in the postwar era, examining how baseball was used alternately to perpetuate a national hero in Suzuki Hideo’s Immortal Pitcher (1955) or to chart the corruption and greed surrounding professional baseball as in Kobayashi Masaki’s I Will Buy You (1956). In the 1960s and 1970s, as young filmmakers arose to challenge the dominance of the great postwar filmmakers and to produce often avant-garde and politically charged films that reflected an international challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood films, the baseball film was again adopted as a means to offer that challenge. Ōshima Nagisa’s Ceremonies, in a film that contests the very concept of the baseball film, uses baseball as a metaphor for the Japan’s abandonment of its citizens during the war. The recent splatter comedy baseball films of Yamaguchi Yūdai likewise play with the familiar tropes of Japanese baseball and of the baseball hero as antihero in problematizing the very concept of the baseball film.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
CASIS

The purpose of this analysis is to differentiate social movements. In this instance, we will be using the hippie/counterculture movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, and those that are occurring in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, this analysis distinguishes right-wing extremist movements in 2016 from groups like the Hippie Movement and the Black Panther Party Movement. Specific reference will be made to contrast the social movements of the twenty-first century that are non-political in nature but are identity-based, versus movements during the 60s and 70s that were political by design and intent. Due to the non-political nature of twenty-first century Violent Transnational Social Movements, they might be characterized as fifth generation warfare, which we identify as identity-based social movements in violent conflict with other identity based social movements, this violence may be soft or hard. ‘Soft violence damages the fabric of relationships between communities as entrenches or highlights the superiority of one group over another without kinetic impact. Soft violence is harmful activities to others which stops short of physical violence’. (Kelshall, 2019) Hard violence is then recognized as when soft violence tactics result in physical violence. Insurgencies are groups that challenge and/or resist the authority of the state. There are different levels of insurgencies; and on the extreme end, there is the resistance of systemic authority.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hutton

This chapter offers an analysis of the key forms of linguistic censorship found within common law jurisdictions and examines their legal rationale in terms of the distinction between speech and conduct. Case law domains examined include blasphemy, public order offences, obscenity and key literary trials, broadcasting, popular music, trademark law, and personal names. The culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s over censorship involved a two-way clash between the establishment and progressive activists. Today, issues such as hate speech, misogyny, and online trolling offer a challenge to notions of social liberation through the ending of taboo. Identity politics provides a framework for understanding the harm associated with certain forms of linguistic behaviour. While in many domains law has retreated from linguistic censorship, legal systems as well as global social media corporations continue to debate whether and how to control linguistic expression in different domains.


Author(s):  
Ray Hearne ◽  
Ryan Bramley

This chapter showcases some literary pieces centred around Rotherham, and are based on the authors' own experiences growing up in the area as well as observations on the socio-economic conditions of Rotherham. Some of the poetry articulates the smoke-choked experience of South Yorkshire of the 1960s and 1970s, and one sets the tone for life to be lived on the periphery: in a contested space between working-class pride, and middle-class aspiration; between belonging and rootlessness. The chapter also contains a prose piece detailing ‘Rotherham's hellish underworld’ which reveals the price paid by dint of economic survival. A song is also included alongside the poetry and prose pieces.


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