Bernard Herrmann

Bernard Herrmann (b. 1911–d. 1975) was a prolific American composer and conductor, known primarily for his work in film. He was also active, however, as a composer for radio and television, had written music for the concert and operatic stage, and had a prodigious conducting career later in his life. The majority of the current research on his oeuvre focuses on his film scoring and his collaborations with film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, François Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma. He started producing scores for films in 1941, with Welles for the film Citizen Kane, and died just after completing his work for Taxi Driver (dir. Scorsese, 1976). Prior to his experience in cinema, Herrmann wrote music for hundreds of radio dramas starting in the 1930s and continuing until the 1950s, which he credited for his ability to compose so readily for cinema. Herrmann’s most famous collaboration was with Hitchcock, which began with the film The Trouble with Harry (1955) and ended with Marnie (1964). The director-composer duo had a falling out in 1966 over Herrmann’s score to Torn Curtain, which Hitchcock refused to use; the director instead hired John Addison to replace Herrmann. Herrmann went on to compose scores for films by Truffaut, Scorsese, and De Palma in the 1960s and 1970s. While composing for cinema, Herrmann also wrote stock music for television, mainly for CBS, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Herrmann also conducted concert and film music on several recordings released from 1966 through 1976, including some of his own concert works. In addition to an extraordinary output for film, radio, television, and recording, Herrmann also wrote concert music, some of which he considered most dear. He composed orchestral, ballet, and vocal music throughout his life, starting in his teens and until his death. His opera Wuthering Heights (1951) was especially important to him. In interviews, especially later in life, Herrmann emphasized that he was a composer of music—not one restricted to only film music—and even then, he regarded film music to be equal to that for the concert stage.

Fritz Lang

A visual artist who studied architecture, Viennese-born Fritz Lang (b. 1890–d. 1976) began his career as a scenarist for UFA before moving into directing scripts cowritten with his eventual wife, Thea von Harbou. During this period, Lang made several masterpieces of Weimar cinema, including Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), The Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), and his first sound film, M (1931). The second major period of Lang’s career was during the golden age of Hollywood. Lang had a tendency to self-mythologize and told many versions of a story in which Joseph Goebbels invited him to be the head filmmaker for the Nazi regime. Lang claimed he fled Germany the same night. While this narrative is largely disproven, Lang (whose mother was Jewish) did leave Germany in 1933, a departure that severed both his marriage and professional relationship with Harbou. Lang journeyed to Hollywood, where he would spend the next twenty years working studio to studio, directing twenty-two films with intermittent critical and commercial success. His first film there, Fury (1936), dealt with themes of law and justice, which carried through to his final film in Hollywood, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). Perhaps his greatest contributions in Hollywood are his films noir, such as The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Big Heat (1953). Lang’s Hollywood period has been the subject of major critical debate. In the 1950s and after, French critics (both in Cahiers du Cinéma and elsewhere) argued for his status as an unappreciated auteur working in the Hollywood system, whereas other critics had argued that the quality of Lang’s output dramatically dropped after he left Germany. The New Wave filmmakers’ love of Lang perhaps reached its apogee in his being cast as a character called Fritz Lang in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963). These critical reappraisals resulted in attempts to link Lang’s Weimar and Hollywood periods. He would return to Germany in the late 1950s to direct his final three films, all of which were related to his earlier Weimar-era work. Although Lang is now regarded by many as an auteur in the same vein as Alfred Hitchcock, until more recently he received considerably less (in quality) scholarly analysis than the British director. Lang continued granting interviews and sharing his own thoughts on his work and career until his death in 1976.

Virtual Reality

The early 20th century saw the coalescence of several representation technologies: moving-image photography, audio recording, stereoscopy, and color imaging. Many technologists, particularly filmmakers, imagined these technologies would one day provide an exact replica of the world as we experience it. This possibility was articulated in Henry Weinbaum’s 1932 short story Pygmalion’s Spectacles that accurately predicted later virtual reality (VR) headsets through his description of goggles that transport the user to another world. A few decades later, in the 1960s, Ivan Sutherland and Morton Heilig produced working head-mounted displays that immersed users in, albeit primitive, computer-generated environments. Experiments in the following decades provided numerous industrial applications from medical imaging and military training to flight simulation and automobile design. At the same time, this technology became more widely known in the public imagination through cyberpunk novels such as Neuromancer (1980) and feature films such as The Lawnmower Man (1992). Although VR was most closely associated with immersive headsets, other hardware such as CAVE displays produced VR environments. In 1987 John Larnier popularized the term “virtual reality” to best describe both the emerging hardware and wider assumptions around virtual world building. Widespread press and academic publications appeared throughout the late 1980s and 1990s as interest in this area grew. However, the 1980s/1990s VR boom never reached full public acceptance and experiments with this technology remained peripheral throughout the first decade and a half of the 21st century. This changed in 2016 when a range of consumer-ready headsets came to market, and new applications for VR as well as industrial and consumer markets sprung up. For the first time, 360-degree film and video became commonly available for consumer headsets and were categorized as a VR application. Since then, there has been renewed academic attention, leading to a range of publications that address current VR systems as well as their past manifestations and future possibilities. VR has such far-reaching applications that it is difficult to condense the wide variety of scholarship connected to this technology. Indeed, the study and application of VR systems crosses many subject disciplines, with VR emerging as a subdiscipline in numerous subjects such as computer engineering, creative and performing arts, architecture, cultural studies, and design. Nonetheless, certain themes have been repeated such as VR’s ability to transport users to different worlds and its interaction with other media formats. The focus here is not on the numerous technical articles and papers related to the particularities of VR hardware and software but rather the books, chapters, and articles that describe and interrogate the holistic function of VR, how VR has shifted over recent decades, and the social-cultural and philosophical debates that surround this technology.

Hayao Miyazaki

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1942) is arguably the most admired figure of Japan’s postwar animation industry (commonly known as anime). Deeply moved in his youth by his country’s first color feature-length animated film Hakujaden (Panda and the Magic Serpent, 1958, directed by Taiji Yabushita), Miyazaki decided to seek a career in animation after receiving his BA degree in politics and economy. Most of his output during the first sixteen years of his work as an animator consisted of working on other directors’ films and television shows. Miyazaki made his directorial debut, sharing credit and duties with his colleague Isao Takahata, on the television series Rupan Sansei (Lupin the Third, 1971–1972), an adaptation of a popular manga (comics) series about the exploits of a daring thief. The year 1979 saw the release of Miyazaki’s feature-length debut Rupan Sansei: Kariosuturo no Shiro (Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro), a spin-off of the television series, which gained attention for its spectacular action sequences. His second feature, Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984), a theatrical feature adaptation of his own long-running manga series about the quest of a pacifist princess to save a war-torn world destroyed in an environmental apocalypse, hailed for its beautiful animation, design, and environmental subtext. The success of Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind led to the foundation of Studio Ghibli, under the creative management of Miyazaki and Takahata. A string of critically acclaimed works solidified his position as a leading director in Japan’s animation industry: the Victorian-flavored adventure Tenkū no Shiro Rapyuta (Castle in the Sky, 1986), the nostalgic children’s fantasy Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro, 1988), the coming-of-age fantasy Majo no Takkyūbin (Kiki’s Delivery Service, 1989) and the historical comedy-adventure Kurenai no Buta (Porco Rosso, 1992). At the turn of the century, Miyazaki directed the acclaimed historical fantasy Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997) and the modern-day fantasy Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001), and each became the highest-grossing film in the history of Japanese cinema, an evidence of the important position that Miyazaki has achieved in Japan’s postwar culture. Spirited Away also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2002. Miyazaki’s later films in the 21st century met with a more mixed reception. Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004), Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo, 2008), and Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises, 2013) were praised for their visuals, but came under criticism for their narrative qualities. The ongoing debate as to who is going to be Miyazaki’s successor as Japan’s leading animator demonstrates the deep cultural influence that his work continues to have on other animators and filmmakers.

Mad Men

Once or twice a decade, a new television program comes along to capture and express the zeitgeist. Mad Men (2007–2015) was that show in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Soon after premiering on the 19 July 2007 on AMC (formerly American Movie Classics from 1984 to 2003), Mad Men evolved from being that little program that nobody watched on an also-ran basic cable channel to the most celebrated scripted drama of its era. Mad Men set the creative standard for dramatic series over the span of its initial run. It was recognized by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as the Best Television Drama of 2007, 2008, and 2009; the British Academy of Film and Television as Best International Show of 2009 and 2010; and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences as the Outstanding Drama Series of 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, being the first basic cable series ever to win this award. Overall, Mad Men won five Golden Globes, sixteen Emmys, and fifty other major awards, including honors from all of the major Hollywood guilds, as well as receiving a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. In retrospect, AMC executives adopted what they referred to as “the HBO formula” of developing their own edgy, sophisticated, passion project by a proven writer-producer, Matthew Weiner, who just happened to have a pedigree that included The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007). What resulted was the gradual emergence of Mad Men as AMC’s first original hit series, generating unprecedented word-of-mouth, and rebranding the channel as a hipper, more discriminating, alternative cable-and-satellite network. In turn, Mad Men broke the glass ceiling for basic cable in much the same way that The Sopranos had done for pay TV some eight-and-a-half years earlier. Mad Men also benefited greatly from the emergence of multiplatform reception. Even though Mad Men’s impact on AMC was immediate and transformative, the show was at first more a cultural phenomenon than a breakout hit. Nevertheless, its first-season audience average of 900,000 on AMC in 2007 eventually grew to 2.5 million by Season 6. Moreover, Mad Men’s total viewership relied heavily on syndication, DVDs, and streaming to digital devices, translating into an estimated 30 million unduplicated viewers per episode in North America alone. By the time of its finale on 17 May 2015, Mad Men was being syndicated in over fifty countries and was available 24/7 through online streaming globally.

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is an American television crime dramatic series created and developed by Vince Gilligan. The series aired on AMC cable channel from 20 January 2008 to 29 September 2013 and reflected American middle-class anxieties during the period of the Great Recession (2007–2009). Many TV critics consider Breaking Bad to be one of the best television series of all time. Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a put-upon, underpaid high school chemistry teacher, who upon learning that he has stage 3 lung cancer decides to begin making and selling crystal methamphetamine with Jesse Pinkman, a former student, to secure his (White’s) family’s financial future. The series title is derived from a southern US colloquialism, “breaking bad,” which signifies a person who has decided to follow a life of crime or immorality. Gilligan has described White’s character transformation as being from the reserved schoolteacher Mr. Chips to the brutal drug lord Scarface. The series is set in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The program’s recurrent images of wide-open western vistas, deserts, and rugged outlaws have led some critics to label the series a modern neo-western. The show has fostered a strong audience following that has allowed Gilligan and AMC to produce the spin-off, prequel series Better Call Saul in 2015 and a sequel film, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, released on Netflix and select theaters in 2019. Sony Entertainment Television produced a Spanish-language version of the series, titled Metástasis, in 2014. Breaking Bad has served as fodder for important scholarship in media studies, cultural studies, and film and television studies. Scholars have focused their work on a range of topics, including Disability and Impairment, Economics and Social Class, Gender, Genre and Narrative, Pedagogy, Production Culture, Race and Ethnicity, and Science.

Lee Chang-dong

Lee Chang-dong, born in 1954 in Daegu, South Korea, came to the cinema after a career writing fiction, wanting to reach a large audience with his work and believing this was no longer possible using the written word. He began by working on two scripts for Korean New Wave director Park Kwang-su: Geu seome gago shibda (To the Starry Island) (1993) and Jeon Tae-il (A Single Spark) (1995). Soon, he would go on to make his first film as a writer-director, Chorok Mulgogi (Green Fish) (1997), part of a whole cohort of filmmakers (Hong Sang-soo, Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho) who would remake the Korean film industry over the upcoming decades. Lee’s work is both distinctive among his Korean contemporaries, tending more toward realism in style even as he deals with the melodramatic plots required of mainstream cinema, while being more continuous with western art cinema humanism than cultish genre directors like Park and Bong or more minimalist stylists like Hong. His next film, Bakha Satang (Peppermint Candy) (1999), would establish Lee as an important voice, and although he would work slowly over the next coming decades, each new Lee film would mark an important event both in Korean cinema and, increasingly, in the global market as well. It was also at this time that western scholarly interest in Korean film begins to widely expand, and Lee’s movies were often an important touchstone for this work. In 2002, he released Oasis (2002), which competed at the Venice Film Festival, and then he made another change in his career direction, becoming the Minister of Culture and Tourism under the left-wing government of Roh Moo-hyun from 2003 to 2004. He returned to filmmaking in 2007 with his first literary adaptation, Milyang (Secret Sunshine), which won a Best Actress award for Jeon Do-yeon at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, Shi (Poetry), was almost universally acclaimed and won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, but then Lee took another sustained break from directing, although he did help produce some important films, such as July Jang’s Dohee-ya (A Girl at My Door) (2012) and Yoon Ga-eun’s Woori-deul (The World of Us) (2016). In 2018, he returned with his most unusual film to date, Burning, a (relatively) big-budget adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami. It won the International Critics Prize at Cannes and re-established Lee as one of the modern cinema’s master filmmakers.

Critical Media Theory

Critical media theory can be traced back to the development of critical theory by thinkers associated with the so-called Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School was generally neo-Marxist and Hegelian, and established powerful critiques of positivist, mainstream forms of social science and philosophy. The Frankfurt School’s approach to theorizing the emergent 20th century “mass media” therefore founded a powerful critique of mainstream, positivist, “administrative” mass communication research that became dominant in the early decades of the discipline. Arguably the most direct theoretical descendants of Frankfurt School critical theory (via the latter’s critique of industrialized culture) are the forms of political economy of the media that emerged in their wake. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, competing Marxist analyses began to challenge what they took to be the economism, reductionism, and determinism of Frankfurt School and political economy approaches. The most important movement in these respects came out of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The so-called Birmingham School developed forms of structural and cultural Marxism that drew heavily on the work of Althusser and Gramsci in particular. Additionally, the CCCS developed semiotic and ethnographic approaches to critical media studies that drew upon thinkers such as Barthes and Geertz, and thus gave rise to theories of media audiences that differed sharply from those of the Frankfurt School and political economists. During the late-1970s and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the critical media theory of the Birmingham School engaged closely with feminist theory and politics, and with critical race theory; it also engaged in dialogues and debates with poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism and postcolonialism, and spread internationally under the stripped-down heading of “Cultural Studies.” Though not unrelated, critical media theory can be differentiated from film theory: many film theorists reject the characterization of cinema as a “communication medium,” and equally rejected (for many years, at least) the engagement with television that spurred the development of a great deal of critical media theory and that helped give rise to the field of television studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical media theory in general, and television studies in particular, have incorporated some forms of psychoanalysis to one degree or another, but neither has been anywhere near as absorbed by psychoanalytic approaches as film theory was for many years (arguably as primarily a consequence of the specificity of the cinematic apparatus). In more recent years, new media theory in particular has been central to the continuing development and concerns of critical media theory more generally.

Saturday Night Live

Since the 1970s, Saturday Night Live has proven itself to be one of television’s most influential programs. Lorne Michaels created the show and served as executive producer from 1975 to 1980, then again from 1985 until the present; during his absence, Jean Doumanian oversaw the 1980–1981 season and Dick Ebersol produced the show from 1981 until Michaels’ return. Drawing on the variety format, Saturday Night Live provides a unique window into contemporary US culture with its popular guest hosts and musical guests, topical humor, and live presentation. Its wealth of characters and catchphrases has made its way into the popular lexicon, while its impact can be detected in live comedy performances, film, and new media, as well as other television programs. This bibliography loosely organizes the major critical works of Saturday Night Live scholarship and journalism into seven categories: studies of the show’s structure and style; critiques of how it has represented various identities; firsthand accounts by former performers and writers; historical analyses of the show’s development, production, and place within the television industry; examinations of its response to and influence on the news media; critical studies of key performers during the show’s run; and, finally, discussions of the show’s effect on US political discourse. The scholarship in this bibliography crosses many areas within communication and media studies, revealing the ongoing importance of the show to our understanding of comedy, politics, and television. Using satire and sketch comedy to both scrutinize and send up American society and culture, the show remains an enduring institution.

Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti (b. 1906–d. 1976) was one of Italy’s foremost directors of cinema, theater, and opera. A cultural figurehead of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Visconti was seen as a major cinematic interpreter of the Italian Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. To this political affiliation, one can also attach his upbringing as a Milanese nobleman and background as a gay man that would also influence interpretations of his films. Following a tutelage under French director Jean Renoir on films Une partie de campagne (1936) and Tosca (1940), Visconti inaugurated his own career in cinema with Ossessione (1942), the presumptive first film of Italian neorealism when directors in Italy turned their attention to the plight of the commoner, struggling in the wake of the Fascist dictatorship and the Second World War. Ossessione was followed by neorealist landmarks La terra trema (1948) and Bellissima (1951), and a few years later, the neorealist-inspired Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960). These films introduced the conflux of realism, formalism, and melodrama for which Visconti’s cinema would be subsequently associated. Such characteristics were also evident in his parallel career on the Italian stage, where Visconti established himself as one of the nation’s pre-eminent directors of prose theater and opera. This activity on stage would contribute to Visconti’s reputation for working across media. In his cinema, structures from and allusions to theater, painting, and literature abound. Twelve of his eighteen films were based on one or more literary works, with Morte a Venezia (1971) celebrated as a groundbreaking chapter in European literary adaptation. His 1967 film, Lo straniero (1967), on the other hand, was panned for its slavish illustration of Camus’s book. To these and other literary-inspired works, Visconti added a few documentaries and numerous films set in contemporary Italy (episodes of Anna Magnani [1953] and Il lavoro [1961]; Le notti bianche [1957]; Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa [1965]) together with some of the largest-scale historical films in postwar European cinema. Senso (1954) and Il Gattopardo (1963) instantiate historiographically-rich analyses of Italian independence in the late 19th century. The biopic Ludwig (1974) is set in Bavaria during the same period, while La caduta degli dei (1969) pictures the rise of Nazism in Germany of the 1930s. During the filming of Ludwig, Visconti suffered a stroke that would cast a pall over Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (1974) and the posthumous L’Innocente (1976), an ornate tragedy based on a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio.