What’s Whitney Got to Do with It: Black Female Triumph and Tragedy in the 2015 Lifetime Biopic Whitney

In 2015, the cable television network Lifetime broadcast the biopic Whitney, depicting the troubled life of the late superstar singer Whitney Houston. Whitney is the first film by director Angela Bassett, who, as actress, famously portraited Tina Turner in the biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It (Brian Gibson, 1993). In this article, I will first position Whitney within a larger tradition of the Hollywood biopic by making a comparison to earlier important biopics about black female entertainers, namely Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J. Furie, 1972), starring Diana Ross as Billie Holiday, and What’s Love Got to Do with It. Second, I will discuss how the narratives of these three biopics tend to reduce their female subjects to victims, emphasizing the tragedy in their personal lives, while assigning much more agency to the male partners of these black female entertainers. Third and finally, I will analyze the final scenes of these three biopics in detail, as each presents a grand finale musical performance that seems to resolve the contradictions of the triumph and tragedy in their subject’s lives, yet in significantly different ways.

The Effect of Sense of Movement in Audiovisual Media: A Study on Kineticism as a Formant of Expression in Globo News’ Institutional Motion Sequence Intolerância

This article analyzes the Brazilian cable television channel Globo News’ institutional motion sequence Intolerância. Israeli designer, Noma Bar, illustrated and directed Intolerância, which reveals in its discursive structures how the gaze of a Latin American country hegemonic media on the identity conflicts between West and East is aligned with Western powers. In the wake of Floch’s theoretical developments in plastic semiotics and Bergson’s postulations on the mechanism of the philosophy-centered filmmaking movement, this study aims to consider kineticism as a constitutive formant of visuality in audiovisual texts. The analyzed motion sequence is a notably exemplary object of establishing such hypothesis.

Evolution of Worldwide Cable Television and Rating Systems: A Case Study of Pakistan

All around the world, advertisers select a medium that has higher consumer reach and for this context television and cable, T.V is one of the top priorities. Since the advent of cable television globally, this medium has made this process much more convenient because it has vastly available in almost every household and offers content to all age groups and genders. It contains all sorts of information and entertainment genres such as cartoons for children, food, fashion, and entertainment for women, sports and news for men, and religious channels for people who are interested in religion. The ease of use in its operation and the subsequent rise in viewership have also made it a medium on which competition is stiff. Every channel using this medium is in the race to achieve the title of most-watched television broadcaster and to be in the limelight to attract and air the most amount of advertising which translates into higher income and place for advertisers for their products. This demand and supply have given rise to the TRP wars and start the race of No 1. This research paper discusses the worldwide evolution of television and cable TV, elaborates about TRP, deliberating the rating framework of Television channels especially in Pakistan, also about the institutions that award these ratings, also about People meter and its working.