Film and Media Studies

All Departments
7 Documents
8 Researchers

Primal Screen: Primitivism and American Silent Film Spectatorship

This dissertation uses early cinema as a case study through which to examine the political implications and cultural consequences of media effects discourse of the early twentieth century. By interrogating representations of spectatorship in film theory, censorship debates, journalism, advertisements, and films of the silent era, it demonstrates that early cinema’s boosters and detractors alike adopted a trope from the already popular colonialist discourse of American primitivism—the naive “primitive” spectator—to prove that the medium was radically new and possessed unprecedented powers of persuasion. In addition to exploring the political stakes expressed through turn-of-the-twentieth century popular culture, this work also suggests that we need to examine how ideas about any modern medium's newness and inherent power, for good or ill, are shaped through stories about its effects on individuals who, because of their race, class, gender, age, or region, are considered “primitive.”

Bookmark
Download

Review of Queer Screen edited by Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street

Bookmark
Download

Review of Hollywood Highbrow by Shyon Baumann.

Bookmark
Download

Paper Girls: Gender and Materiality in Turn-of-the-Century Outdoor Advertising

This essay presents a media history of outdoor advertising that focuses on the material dimensions of the controversial paper posters that proliferated in cities across the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Poster historians tend to describe these controversies as a matter of content and placement only. But the gendered cultural baggage associated with paper also informed debates about the public display of posters. I track the shifting status of paper across the nineteenth century from a scarce resource primarily associated with male public culture to an overproduced nuisance that littered city streets. Through close readings of debates about posters, their effects, and the litter they produced, this essay argues that paper posters, as much as the cinema and other media, helped transform public spaces in ways that allowed women unprecedented access to such spaces. By lending their likenesses to advertising posters, by taking charge of cleaning up paper litter in their communities, and by weighing in on debates about the morality and deleterious effects of certain posters, women found, in paper, a vehicle through which to launch interventions into public life at a time when they were still denied the vote. KEYWORDS censorship, media history, media infrastructure, poster history, public sphere.

Bookmark
Download

Contested Territory: American Film Spectatorship, Colonial Mimicry, and British Empire

This essay examines an account of cinema spectatorship in 1920s Jamaica as relayed by a British librarian’s treatise advocating for the extended use of film in education. He details how African Jamaican women attended mission churches dressed in the flapper style, mimicking the American movie stars they had seen at the local cinema. Like similar stories of ‘primitive’ spectatorship, this account of movie mimicry is meant to function as evidence of the relatively new medium’s unprecedented powers of persuasion over colonial subjects, children, women, and other individuals characterized as feeble-minded. As such, it seems to confirm the imperial fantasy of the superiority of the colonizing culture. But as I demonstrate, this instance of colonial mimicry also triggered anxieties about American cultural hegemony in the British Empire because the Jamaican women chose to mimic the American movie stars they saw on screen rather than the other, competing models of white femininity they were exposed to at the mission. I therefore argue these Jamaican women’s mimicry may be read as an appropriation of an American popular cultural form as resistance against British colonial hegemony and suggest how further study of similar stories will open up new avenues for thinking about what constitutes resistant spectatorship.

Bookmark
Download

Introduction to Negotiating Precarious Positions: Strategies for Working As and With Adjuncts

In 2001 sociologist Stanley Aronowitz called the tenured humanities professor “the last good job in America.” Since then, decades of neoliberal policy initiatives have undermined the job security, compensation, and autonomy of professions throughout the economy, including the vaunted professoriate. In 2016 the State College of Florida eliminated continuous tenure-track appointments in favor of one-year contracts for new faculty (Joselow). Due to Illinois’s rocky fiscal status and unreliable support for education, tenured professors in state colleges are leaving to take untenured positions, some at lower salaries and rank, in other states (Strahler). Though these are extreme versions of the undermining of higher education in neoliberal times, most of us work in universities that systematically deny job security, commensurate compensation, and academic freedom to adjuncts and non-tenure track contractual instructors. The resulting three-tier system in academia has diminished the professional prospects of a growing number of graduates and the future of academia. We are not alone. The deprofessionalization of academic labor and the widespread nature of contingent labor is a broad-ranging phenomenon both domestically and internationally. Other workers, blue collar and white collar, in the domestic or international labor market are underpaid, overworked, and underemployed. In academia, contingent faculty suffer the brunt of these practices. Thinking globally, and acting locally, what can we do to advance the working conditions of adjunct and other contingent faculty?

Bookmark
Download
- by Beth Corzo-Duchardt and +1
  Isabel Pinedo
- •
- 10
  Film Studies, Neoliberalism, Cinema, Film

The imaginary Other spectator: a paradigm for early cinema spectatorship

This paper offers a new take on an old story: the tale of first-time moviegoers, who, upon seeing a moving-image train barreling from background to foreground, ran screaming out of the theater for fear of being run over. The old debate among film historians has centered on whether this and similar stories are evidence of the radically novel perceptual experience that motion pictures entailed, or whether they corroborate the cinema of attractions thesis by demonstrating that audiences expected to be shocked and astonished at early film exhibitions. Missing from this debate are two things this paper addresses: First, close readings of the original newspaper articles that describe panicking audiences, and second, theorization of the affective function these stories served for those who wrote and consumed them. My close readings reveal profound power differentials between the narrators who observe audiences panicking (who were typically white men) and the individuals allegedly doing the panicking (who were invariably members of marginalized groups, such as women, Native Americans, or working class people). As such, I argue that we should understand the panicking spectator trope as an imaginary construction. I adapt Christian Metz’s concept of “partial identification” to a critical race theory framework and argue that the pleasures enabled by partial identification with the imaginary Other spectator depended on cultural and historical phenomena specific to the politics of American imperialism and white supremacy at the turn of the twentieth century.

Bookmark
Download

62.4 million researchers use this site every month. Ads help cover our server costs.

Film and Media Studies

Log In