Screening Europe in Australasia

This book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as always having dominated global film culture through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century. Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, and brings it vividly to life. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.

Guillermo del Toro’s Political Fairy Tales

While critical attention has largely focused on Del Toro’s overt fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Del Toro’s Hollywood films similarly incorporate the mythic, moral and gothic qualities of classic fairy tales. His new fairy tales present vital contemporary lessons embedded in these archetypal journeys – and their audience’s memories. His free borrowings from fairy tales and popular culture deliberately connect the familiar to his uncanny worlds. This construction is most evident in his films Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and The Shape of Water (2017). The contemporary politics of race, sexuality, gender and environmentalism are embedded within these original Hollywood fairy tales. This essay focuses on the intersecting political messages woven into Hellboy II: The Golden Army and The Shape of Water, messages amplified not obscured by their fairy tale delivery. Through rich textual references, intersections, and hidden subtexts, Del Toro creates new gothic fairy tales, with original protagonists, emerging from the margins. By resisting previous patriarchal and racial boundaries, these films challenge their audiences to embrace new paradigms.

A Duet for Sailors and Pansies: Queer Archival Work and Male Same-Sex Dancing in Follow the Fleet (1936) and Other Depression-Era Films

This chapter explores a queer all-male dance lesson for partnered sailors in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936), using archival research (scripts, Production Code Administration records) and comparative textual and contextual analysis. It raises the queerness of Rogers and Astaire before exploring two intersecting axes. The association of sailors with queer behavior and effeminate “pansies” occurs in military scandals, paintings, and Depression-era Hollywood films, including Sailor’s Luck and Son of a Sailor (both 1933). The queerness of male same-sex dancing arises in ballet and in film, including Suicide Fleet (1931). Various institutions criticized or attempted to censor such representations, but they also found acceptance. The US Navy, for example, wanted the comical dance lesson removed from Fleet; instead, it was only rewritten, suggesting the inability to remove queerness from culture and its essential role in mass entertainment.

Lesbian Cinephilia and Digital Affordances

This chapter revisits critical work on the challenges and promises of lesbian cinema spectatorship in light of new media technologies that allow for citation of audiovisual images. Analog videos made by lesbians in the 1990s about the homoerotic pleasures of watching classical Hollywood films are compared with contemporary queer fan videos and community practices on the internet as well as with scholarly video essays. Close readings of these works speculate on the connections between the datedness of cinema as a medium in the digital era and uneasiness with the connotations of the term lesbian on the part of contemporary queer women. Carol, the 2016 film adaptation, by Phyllis Nagy and Todd Haynes, of the 1950s lesbian romance by Patricia Highsmith is an example of a work that appeals to contemporary viewers by engaging both lesbian and media history.

Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity—the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film—operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors' anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production. Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossoukh

US Foreign Policy and Iconization of A Terrorist Through Hollywood Films: A Content Analysis of Afghan and Iraq War in Pre & Post 9/11 Movies (1995 To 2015)

The study is about the cinematic representation of war on terror and explores the relationship between Hollywood productions and US foreign policy. It includes 14 Hollywood productions for cinema screen regarding Afghan and Iraq war during the era of 1995 to 2015. Content analysis of selected movies is done to find out how the ‘Other’ characters are presented on screen. The observation concludes that the Hollywood has hand in gloves with Washington to propagate the state agenda throughout the world. The image of enemy on cinematic screen is shaped and reshaped following the patterns which suit the US government as obvious in the case of Afghan and Iraq war. It is also found that the terrorist Middle Eastern and Afghan Muslim characters are mostly non-uniformed, covered head, armed, veiled, wearing upper/ jackets and wear in formal dresses. Moreover, they are iconized as animalistic, uncivilized, aggressor and have no family roles. On the contrary, the ‘Other’ characters which are supportive to American army are mostly presented as un-barbaric, civilized, defender and having family roles and they are mostly uniformed.

The World’s Hero: Gods and Archetypes in the Myth of the Superman

This study aims to demonstrate and document that the phenomenon of Superman, as a fictional character, is an amalgamation of the extra human attributes of the heroes and gods that are read and seen in ancient narratives. Specifically, it identifies the qualities of Superman as a superhero, determines the parallelism that exists between these qualities of Superman and those of mythological and biblical personae, and establishes the similarity between the scenes, situations, and events found in its mythos and those that are found in archetypal narratives to vividly delineate his image as the world’s superhero. A content analysis of the text was primarily conducted to draw the structural elements of its narrative. Since this study also assumes that literary texts may be viewed outside of their aesthetic merits, an archetypal analysis is subsequently implemented. Meanwhile, the theoretical foundation of this study is predicated on the theory of Archetypes which assumes that literary texts are based on and influenced by archaic structures manifested in the recurring motifs, mythological counterparts, and parallelisms embedded in the story. As stated in the results, it was determined that the mythos of Superman as a heroic character is a reimagination and manifestation of mythological stories as exemplified in the analyzed materials. Furthermore, it showed that he functions as a custodian of several archetypal figures and with this, can be used as a bridge in teaching traditional literature since he embodies a conglomeration of several mythological characters. The materials analyzed in this study were composed of eight graphic novels, six Hollywood films, and two animated movies.

Yma Sumac: The Extraordinary Peruvian Singer and Her Paradoxical Career

Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo (1922–2008), best known by her artistic name, Yma Sumac, startled the world with her unique voice, beauty, and exotic persona. The Peruvian singer became a legend and an icon, while her life and career were filled with controversy and paradox in and outside of her native country. She first emerged as an acclaimed folk singer in the midst of the development of Peruvian national identity in the early 1940s and soon became recognized for her folk art in Latin America. By the end of the decade and as part of a trio directed by her manager and husband, Moisés Vivanco, she started a career in the United States that would lead to radical changes in her musical style and to the creation of a series of fantasies about her origins and identity. A prodigious live performer, she traveled around the world tirelessly, her recordings reached far and wide, and her first album, The Voice of Xtabay, has never been out of print. Yma Sumac participated in two major Hollywood films in the 1950s, and in 1960 her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was unveiled. In 2016 Sumac was posthumously honored with a Google Doodle. One of the most internationally known Peruvians, she had a problematic relationship with her own country, but fortunately, two years before her death, she was properly honored and recognized by her native country. She had a long artistic career, performing into the 1990s, but her fame reached its peak in the 1950s when she became known as the “Queen of Exotica,” performing a style of music popular in the United States after World War II.