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White slave films, dramas documenting sex scandals, filmed prize fights featuring the controversial African-American boxer Jack Johnson, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—all became objects of public concern after 1906, when the proliferation of nickelodeons brought moving pictures to a broad mass public. Lee Grieveson draws on extensive original research to examine the controversies over these films and over cinema more generally. He situates these contestations in the context of regulatory concerns about populations and governance in an early-twentieth-century America grappling with the powerful forces of modernity, in particular, immigration, class formation and conflict, and chan...
From Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy, to sharp-suited gangsters in Tarantino movies, clothing is central to film. In Undressing Cinema, Stella Bruzzi explores how far from being mere accessories, clothes are key elements in the construction of cinematic identities, and she proposes new and dynamic links between cinema, fashion and costume history, gender, queer theory and psychoanalysis. Bruzzi uses case studies drawn from contemporary popular cinema to reassess established ideas about costume and fashion in cinema, and to challenge conventional interpretations of how masculinity and femininity are constructed through clothing. Her wide-ranging study encompasses: * haute couture in film and the r...
New view of the crucial role of fashion discourse and practice in Weimar Germany and its significance for women.
With actress Pam Grier's breakthrough in Coffy and Foxy Brown, women entered action, science fiction, war, westerns and martial arts films--genres that had previously been considered the domain of male protagonists. This ground-breaking cinema, however, was--and still is--viewed with ambivalence. While women were cast in new and exciting roles, they did not always arrive with their femininity intact, often functioning both as a sexualized spectacle and as a new female hero rather than female character. This volume contains an in-depth critical analysis and study of the female hero in popular film from 1970 to 2006. It examines five female archetypes: the dominatrix, the Amazon, the daughter, the mother and the rape-avenger. The entrance of the female hero into films written by, produced by and made for men is viewed through the lens of feminism and post-feminism arguments. Analyzed works include films with actors Michelle Yeoh and Meiko Kaji, the Alien films, the Lara Croft franchise, Charlie's Angels, and television productions such as Xena: Warrior Princess and Alias.
"This anthology makes it abundantly clear that feminist film criticism is flourishing and has developed dramatically since its inception in the early 1970s." —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Erens brings together a wide variety of writings and methodologies by U.S. and British feminist film scholars. The twenty-seven essays represent some of the most influential work on Hollywood film, women's cinema, and documentary filmmaking to appear during the past decade and beyond. Contributors include Lucie Arbuthnot, Linda Artel, Pam Cook, Teresa de Lauretis, Mary Ann Doane, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Mary C. Gentile, Bette Gordon, Florence Jacobowitz, Claire Johnston, E. Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, Sonya Michel, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, Gail Seneca, Kaja Silverman, Lori Spring, Jackie Stacey, Maureen Turim, Diane Waldman, Susan Wengraf, Linda Williams, and Robin Wood.
In recent years, geeks have become chic, and the fashion and beauty industries have responded to this trend with a plethora of fashion-forward merchandise aimed at the increasingly lucrative fan demographic. This mainstreaming of fan identity is reflected in the glut of pop culture T-shirts lining the aisles of big box retailers as well as the proliferation of fan-focused lifestyle brands and digital retailers over the past decade. While fashion and beauty have long been integrated into the media industry with tie-in lines, franchise products, and other forms of merchandise, there has been limited study of fans’ relationship to these items and industries. Sartorial Fandom shines a spotligh...
A Volume in the Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series, edited by Adrienne L. McLean and Murray Pomerance --Book Jacket.
In recent years, body studies has expanded rapidly, becoming an increasingly popular field of study within anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. This groundbreaking textbook takes the topics and theories from these disciplines, and combines them into one single, easily accessible text for students. Body Studies is a comprehensive textbook on the social and cultural uses and meanings of the body, for use in undergraduate college courses. Its clear, accessible chapters explore, among other things: the measurement and classification of the human body illness and healing the racialized body the gendered body cultural perceptions of beauty new bodily technologies. This book investigates ...
Fashion on Television provides a comprehensive critical examination of the intersection between fashion, television and celebrity culture. The book brings together theoretical approaches to the symbolic force of television and fashion-forward programming on a global scale. Examining case studies such as Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, Ugly Betty and Mad Men, the book examines how TV has made style icons out of leading actresses and fashion-conscious consumers out of audiences. Using a varied methodology, including textual and contextual analysis, this study explores the cultural uses of onscreen fashion at the level of industry, text and intertext. Fashion on Television is essential reading for those seeking to understand the cultural function of costume in a television context. Written accessibly with a multi-disciplinary approach, it will appeal to students and scholars from film and media, fashion and cultural studies, to sociology and women's studies.
Aggressive product placement and retail tie-ins are as much a part of moviemaking today as high-concept scripts and computer-generated special effects, but this phenomenon is hardly recent. Since the silent era, Hollywood studios have proved remarkably adept at advertising both their own products and a bewildering variety of consumer commodities, successfully promoting the idea of consumption itself. Hollywood Goes Shopping brings together leading film studies scholars to explore the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between American cinema and consumer culture, providing an innovative reading of both film history and the evolution of consumerism in the twentieth century.