The Politics of American Media

Booker, K., From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film Account

• p160 ‘tendency in the american national pysche towards violent and hatred of the other’
• Americans as ‘saviours of the vietnamese people’
• The Green Beret ‘depicts the war in Vietnam as a simple, good vs evil struggle of good guy Americans against bad-guy Americans’
• p161 ‘Films made after the end of the war had come to grips with the fact that this American victory did not occur’
• ‘most American films had… glorified war’

Dimaggio, A. When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, public opinion and the limits of dissent

• p12 New York Times committed to “ democracy protection”
• p165 ‘opposition to the United States is common in the Muslim world’
• p166 ‘ the field of media stdies focuses too heavily on the United States and Europe
• p168 ‘ corporate media ownership is inherently undemocratic
• p171 ‘western corporations are assaulting the cultural autonomy of poorer states

Kellner, D.,  Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan*(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)

• p1 ‘the rise and decline of 60s radicalism, the failure of liberalism, and the rise of the New Right in the 1970s; and the triumph and hegemony of the right in the 1980s’
• 1960s ‘film transcoded the discourse of the anti war, new left students’
• “New Hollywood” eg Bonnie and Clyde
• ‘Hollywood film, like U.S Society, should be seen as a contested terrain… struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday life’
• Conservative films: star wars, rocky, superman, close encounters of the third kind

Kellner D., Media Spectacle http://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/MEDIA118/celebrity+culture/Book_media+spectacle_douglas+kellner.pdf

• p vii ‘Media culture excels in creating Megaspectacles of sporting events, world conflicts, entertainement breaking news,’
• p3 ‘capitalist society seperates ’art from life’

From 'Feminist Film Studies'

• 'Acentral imaging' understanding character and situation represented and reacting to the thought of it
• 'Central imaging' adopting view and mental state of character

Women's Film

• Doane divides women's film into maternal melodrama (seperation and return), love story (female desire recognised then thwarted), paranoid gothic film (associate female spectator with fear) and medical discourse film (female body as site of disease, submission to male medical control) - all constructing masochistic female spectator
• Basinger - films can be double-voiced, provide female viewres with escape/release then say they shouldn't want it and that its wrong,  but can also offer temporary sense of liberation
• Linda williams sees three body genres - sex/porn, violence/horror, emotion/women's film
• Female friendship films - nearly also positvie about relationship but stopped after Thelma and Louise - had been sentimental portrayals of woman adjusting to fit existing social structure
• Normally produced by men, but was inspired by feminist notions of sisterhood
• Literary adaptation of female novelists helped - often focused on sisterly relations of the past
• Chick flick core elements: femaale empowerment, solidarity amongst women, consumerism, fairy tale elements, old fashioned sentimentality
• Convey notion that women can have it all but renewed acceptance of traditional feminity
• most fall into makeover catergory - change identity and self confidence and enables romance
• Sexual reawakening of women in middle age
• show women's triumph over patriarchy whilst retaining their traditional femininity
• Don't address gender roles, complexities of real women's lives

Lesbian Film Theory and Criticism

• Link between portrayals of lesbians and female bonding - Jackie Stacey - homoerotic component to films about woman's obsession with other women
• Homoerotically charged relationships in films reflect that between female viewer and female star
• Fascination with the idealized other
• female spectator positioned in regard to female bonding which represents intimacy involves both identification and desire

Avant Garde and Documentary making

• In 1970s feminist avant-garde separate form previous male one started
• Early avante-garde filmmakers were all male apart from Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren
• Became seen as a place where women could challenge mainstream images but many male avant-garde films were misogynistic eg un chien andalou
• women seldom reach highest level of directorial pantheon
• Female experimentalist work often challenge avant-garde traditions
• Caught between radical aestithicism and allegiance to women's movements demands for realistic portrayals of women's activities and activism
• realism creates passive spectators from a modernist perspective as it presents a story as truth or reality
• make female characters more than an element of plot space
• often interrogate female body as a cultural and linguistic sign - not just visual image but a subject of inquiry
• destroting pleasure derived from identification, narrative involvement and eroticization of femininity
• 
  

The Actress

• star actress 'construction, a product of culture... prefabricated by men' Gaines
• Denigrate female star's acting ability in contrast to male stars
• work actress puts into her appearance never seen as a skill
• men more likely to be seen as highly trained or skilled rather than succeeding because of their natural talent or physical attractiveness
• emphasis on training and professionalism for men helps them retain roles as grow older - harder for women to transfer from acting to directing and producing
• female stars often shown as having careers managed or launched by powerful male directors or producers
• female actresses more commonly seen as celebrities
• celebrity status allows to continue despite bad performances or lower box office

Feminist Film Studies and Race:

• Classical feminism criticised for ignoring African American and Third World Women - prompted many post colonial critics many of whom were white feminists
• psychoanalysis prompted focus on one kind of oppression - also Freud's theories are not necessarily universal
• Much of postcolonial criticism has been male-dominated so doesn't focus on women's experience of it
• black men led to accept idealized images of their oppressors and to internalize racist notions of their own superiority
• Edward Said's notion of Orientalism - West thinks of the east as th antithesis of everything western men like to think that they are
• Eastern men characterized as weak feminized inferior and welcoming of western domination - Homi K. Bhabba explored how inferiorizing stereotypes used to justify western conquest and domination of the third world
• White racism structuring colonized people's experience of themselves
• Women of colour might see white western women as complicit in their oppression
• Women of colour may feel patriarchy is another learned behaviour from their White male oppressors not natural to their community - challenge to the concept of universal patriarchy
• Doane - white women and black men both embody castration for white male and black female is double threat so is virtually eliminated from the screen or with promiscuous hyper-sexual primitiveness that connects her to natural landscape
• Modleski - WoC shown in stereotypical images that reduce them to their biological functions or as surrogates for white women
• Kaplan - western imperialist gaze, unquestioned sense of white male superiority
• bell hooks - during slavery black people forbidden to look, black male gaze adopts white male structures and takes as its object white women. Black female spectatorship is more subversive due to the erasure of black womanhood from screen, black women not allowed to look or to be looked at, only serving to validate white supremacy
• Lola Young - using pychoanalsis to look at how issues of power control and subjugation have been mapped onto the black female body, white feminists' advocation of abortion and deconstruction of family unit ignores that Black women see family as a source of strength in a hostile world
• Trinh T Minh-Ha - there isn't an authentic postcolonial identity because third world women's sense of self is sahped by fragmentation, hybridity and in-betweeness

The Woman Auteur

• Pantheon of great directors doesn't have any women
• Alice Guy-Blanche directed the first feature film

Timeline Of The History of Animation

1906:
Humourous Phases of Funny Phases

1908:
Fantasmagorie (First short of solely animated images)

1908:
Humpty Dumpty Circus (first stop motion)

1914:
Earl Hurd invents Cel Animation

1914:
Gertie the Dinosaur

1917:
El Apostol (first full length feature film)

1919:
Felix the cat

1920:
The Debut of Thomas Cat (first colour cartoon)

1922:
Walt Disney's first animated short Little Red Riding Hood

1928:
Mickey Mouse's debut in Plane Crazy

1929:
Silly Symphonies starts with The Skeleton Dance

1930
Betty Boop debuts in Dizzy Dishes

1930:
Looney Tunes debuts with Sinkin' in the Bathtub

1931:
Peludopolis (first sound used within a feture length film.

1932:
The first full colour, three strip Technicolour animated short Flowers and Trees

1933:

King Kong (several stop motion characters)

1933:

Popeye debuts in Popeye the sailor

1933:

Multiplane camera invented allowing sanimators to ctreat a 3D effect within 2D cartoons

1935:

Russian Film The New Gulliver is first full length feature film too employ a stop morion animator for the bulk of its running time.