The Presence of the Past

In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.

Radio, Memory, and the Past in the Nostalgia Film

Several prominent New Hollywood filmmakers experimented with limiting their soundtracks to ostensibly diegetic source music. In particular, two films associated with a trend of fifties nostalgia use the compiled pop scoring and the medium of radio to articulate complex sensibilities of the past. Both films experiment with the aesthetic flow of radio broadcasting, while adopting the image of the radio signal itself as a technological-aesthetic metaphor for melancholy temporal distance. In The Last Picture Show, radio conveys a sense of entrapment in the film’s world, and a sense of the fragility of the connections linking past and present. In American Graffiti, radio broadcast cultivates a precious, yet melancholy sense of communal identity. In this way, both films articulate a paradoxical attitude toward the past, a nostalgic desire to conjure what has been lost to time, which coexists with an awareness of the impossibility of this recovery outside of imagined experience.

The Last Picture Show: Reconsidering Nostalgia, Desire and the Real

Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece The Last Picture Show (1971) remains a highly influential example of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. Yet it has largely escaped the sustained critical attention enjoyed by many of its contemporaries. This article seeks to revisit the status of the film and its critical reputation. Amongst the critics who have appraised this unique film, opinion is split. On the one hand, it remains an influential example of the “post-western” impulse in the American New Wave. On the other hand, it has been critically maligned as a “nostalgia film.” This article revisits these perspectives and argues that a holistic understanding of the inner dynamics of the film must necessarily take both perspectives into account. It examines how these dynamics are organized around a central formal tension between the cinematic codes of the western and those of social realism. Finally, it argues that the pejorative critical categorization of The Last Picture Show as a “nostalgia film” does not adequately grasp its rich, complex and contradictory affects. Instead, it proposes that the sense of loss, nostalgia and disappointment that Bogdanovich articulates can be read as an expression of that confrontation between “Desire” and the “Real” that the Marxian critic Fredric Jameson theorized was central to the “political unconscious.”

Can I Be Frank with You?

When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)

Terrence Malick’s Badlands has long been appreciated as an important contribution to New Hollywood filmmaking. Its disaffected characters and unconventional narrative structure challenged classical studio filmmaking paradigms and quickly garnered Malick a reputation as a countercultural or auteur filmmaker. For all the scholarship that this film has generated, however, comparatively very little has been said about the film’s equally transgressive soundtrack. Malick engaged the services of a composer but severely limited his duties, choosing instead to score most of the film himself with pre-existing recordings. Where nostalgic films from the period like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show used compilations of rock and popular, Malick used a strikingly eclectic compilation of pop and classical music, from Nat King Cole to Carl Orff and Erik Satie. Although this range of styles is at odds with the 1950s world of the film, the soundtrack closely reflects the radical changes happening to listening practices among counterculture youth in the late 1960s.

Our stories, our selves: Star Wars fanfictions as feminist counterpublic discourses in digital imaginaria

Fanfiction has a long and varied history in the Star Wars franchise since it began in 1977 with the debut of the first film, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The decade of the 1970s created new possibilities for science fiction multiverses and metanarratives; science fiction became an adaptive film genre that could be reimagined with seemingly infinite narrational results. The myriad of genre films that were released in the mid-to-late 1970s revealed dynamic syntheses with horror (e.g. Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), franchises that previously had existed solely on television (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and musical theatre (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Cinematic audiences became increasingly accustomed to science fiction tropes and themes in film; audience participation in the theatre (e.g. The Rocky Horror Picture Show) expanded to print zines (often with fanfiction) for multiple franchises as well as fan conventions. Fanfiction’s beginnings as an analogue culture dramatically changed with the advent of the internet and the evolution of fandoms as digital cultures. Web-based platforms such as FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3) host sundry fan communities’ creative outputs including podcasts, art and, most frequently, fanfiction stories. The release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 immediately captured the fandom’s imagination; the animosity and tension between the new villain Kylo Ren (Ben Solo) and protagonist Rey of Jakku particularly fascinated the young adult fans who were lately converted to the Star Wars fandom due to this pairing (known as Reylo within the fandom and within cinematic circles). The newest generations of fans were acclimated to audience participation and paratextual interactions due to their positions as digital natives. The Reylo fan phenomenon particularly erupted into fanfictions as critical data artefacts, even predicting Reylo as a romantic pairing years before the second and third films in the franchise trilogy Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The Reylo pairing is just one example of how online Star Wars fanfiction communities expand audience participation to autonomous collective identity formation. This article examines feminist fanfictions in the Star Wars fandom as gendered critical data artefacts, as collaborative communities of practice, and as counterpublic discourses that apply feminist critiques to conventional gender roles within the most recent film trilogy and the fandom itself.

Picturing Peter Bogdanovich

Drawn from interviews conducted from 2003 to 2019, Picturing Peter Bogdanovich is a unique double portrait of a filmmaker and a fan. As the director of such New Hollywood classics as The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich is considered one of the first superstar directors of the 1970s, whose celebrity equaled that of many movie stars of the era. Growing up as an admirer of Bogdanovich’s films, film critic and journalist Peter Tonguette first had the chance to interview Bogdanovich for an online magazine piece in 2003—kicking off what became a decade-and-a-half series of conversations about his life and his films. The first part of the book features Tonguette’s exhaustive, film-by-film survey of Bogdanovich’s career and personal account of getting to know Bogdanovich; the second features a Q&A drawn from sixteen years’ worth of interviews, encompassing all of his film and TV projects, his background, his triumphs, his tragedies. The result is a film book like few others in its depth and detail.

Using Feature Extraction and Classification Methods of Movie Opinions Predication

Film rankings and analysis at sites like IMDb (Internet Movie Database) square measure ordinarily employed by picture show goers to make your mind up that movie to look at or obtain next. Currently, picture show goers base their choices on that movie to look at by staring at the ratings of films in addition as reading a number of the reviews at IMDB. Sentiment analysis could be a different field of different opinion where the methods of analysis are targeted on feature extraction and selection technique of emotions and opinions of the individual’s audience towards selected methods from semi-structured, structured or unstructured matter information. This paper, we focus on our techniques of sentimental analysis on IMDB picture show review information. To survey the sentimental words method to classify the polarity of the picture show review on a scale of highly dislikes highly liking and performing different extraction feature and positioning of reviews. It uses these options to train our multilable classifier to classify the picture show review into its correctable.