... 8 David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film St... more ... 8 David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985). ... 812. ↵18 Andrew Britton, Ian Cameron, VF Perkins, Douglas Pye and Michael ... Karen Lury, UK. Jackie Stacey, UK. ...
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As Leo Braudy has written, "Genre films essentially ask the audience,... more [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As Leo Braudy has written, "Genre films essentially ask the audience, 'Do you still want to believe this?' Popularity is the audience answering 'Yes.' Change in genres occurs when the audience says, 'That's too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated.'" (Braudy 1977: 179) In this essay, I want to examine the ideology of gender that informs the western, the genre Andre Bazin famously referred to as "the American cinema par excellence," and then focus on Maggie Greenwald's exemplary intervention in the genre, The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). Jim Kitses (1998) already has provided an insightful analysis of the film as a postmodern western, in part featuring a subversive treatment of gender, but I want to push this idea further, looking at the film's style as well as its content. To do so, I will begin by contextualizing the film's accomplishment within two waves of such significant change in the genre system, both of which inform the success of The Ballad of Little Jo as a feminist western. The first of these major transformations in the genre system occurred in the 1970s, during the period known as the New Hollywood, although its beginnings can be traced to developments in postwar film culture to the rise of auteurism. Attacking the cult of auteurism that had developed in his own magazine, Cahiers du cinema, Andre Bazin said "This does not mean that one has to deny the role of the auteur, but simply give him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept. Auteur, yes, but what of?" (Bazin 1968: 155) Bazin was referring here to what he called "the genius" of the studio so dependable throughout the era of classic Hollywood. But after World War 2, the studios, reeling from the impact of the 1948 Paramount Decision, (1) faced challenges on a number of fronts, including growing competition from the new medium of television; the emergence of stars as producers, shifting demographics with a new and increasingly dominant youth audience; the dissolution of the Production Code, which, gradually eroded since the early 1950s, was finally replaced by an official ratings system in 1968; and the popular acceptance of the auteur theory. Introduced to English-speaking film culture in 1962 with the British journal Movie, auteur theory, as Andrew Sarris translated Francois Truffaut's "la politique des auteurs," was popularized more than anyone else in North America by Sarris, a contributor to Film Culture, Jonas Mekas' journal devoted mostly to experimental film, and then as chief film critic for New York's Village Voice, a weekly publication that was distributed nationally in the United States. (2) The publication in 1968 of Sarris's monumental book The American Cinema: Directors atid Directions, 1929-1968, was singularly influential in solidifying the discourse of classic auteurism. Sarris provided filmographies and short auteurist essays on most American directors and ranked them according to their success at stamping their personality on their work, with the "pantheon" reserved only for the greatest of auteurs. The book was indispensable for cineastes in an era before home video, giving a conceptual framework for grasping American film history that continues to hold sway with critical and popular opinion today. Auteurism not only changed the way people thought about movies, it also empowered aspiring directors. The group of young directors collectively known as the movie brats rode this wave of early auteurist enthusiasm to commercial success. The group included Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, and Francis Coppola, the film-makers whose work came to largely define the New Hollywood of the 1970s. With the exception of De Palma, they all had attended university programs in the new academic discipline of film studies, where they learned film history as well as production. Their films offered proof, as Jean-Luc Godard said, that "as soon as you can make films, you can no longer make films like the ones that made you want to make them. …
... Daughter Rite (1980) or Marlon Rigg s Tongues Untied (1990). ... Michael Moore adopted a sati... more ... Daughter Rite (1980) or Marlon Rigg s Tongues Untied (1990). ... Michael Moore adopted a satiric tone, seen for example in the anti-war The Atomic Cafe (1982 Jayne Loader and Kevin and PierceRafferty), for Roger and Me (1987), an attack on deindustrialisation in the USA. ...
A major figure in American documentary cinema, Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930) began making his extra... more A major figure in American documentary cinema, Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930) began making his extraordinary series of films during the Direct Cinema movement of the 1960s. From the beginning of his impressive and prolific forty-year career, Wiseman developed a distinctive style and approach that set his work apart from that of his contemporaries. Wiseman’s films focus on institutions of various kinds, ranging from those concentrated within individual buildings (High School, 1968) to those international in scope (Sinai Field Mission, 1978), from institutions set up and maintained by government (Juvenile Court, 1973, Public Housing, 1997) to those less tangible ones organized by principles of ideology and culture (Canal Zone, 1977, Model, 1980). Many of his films ferret out the gaps between institutional theory and practice, demonstrating the shaping force of institutions themselves, which dictate to, as much as they serve, both clients and administrators. Wiseman is also interested in ...
This article examines the construction of alien visitations in The Man Who Fell to Earth and refl... more This article examines the construction of alien visitations in The Man Who Fell to Earth and reflects theologically upon the implicit and explicit religious themes in the novel and film. Gerard Loughlin explores the christic identity of the central character, Newton, and the queering of his ...
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films.... more This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by...
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films.... more This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by...
... 8 David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film St... more ... 8 David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985). ... 812. ↵18 Andrew Britton, Ian Cameron, VF Perkins, Douglas Pye and Michael ... Karen Lury, UK. Jackie Stacey, UK. ...
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As Leo Braudy has written, "Genre films essentially ask the audience,... more [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As Leo Braudy has written, "Genre films essentially ask the audience, 'Do you still want to believe this?' Popularity is the audience answering 'Yes.' Change in genres occurs when the audience says, 'That's too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated.'" (Braudy 1977: 179) In this essay, I want to examine the ideology of gender that informs the western, the genre Andre Bazin famously referred to as "the American cinema par excellence," and then focus on Maggie Greenwald's exemplary intervention in the genre, The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). Jim Kitses (1998) already has provided an insightful analysis of the film as a postmodern western, in part featuring a subversive treatment of gender, but I want to push this idea further, looking at the film's style as well as its content. To do so, I will begin by contextualizing the film's accomplishment within two waves of such significant change in the genre system, both of which inform the success of The Ballad of Little Jo as a feminist western. The first of these major transformations in the genre system occurred in the 1970s, during the period known as the New Hollywood, although its beginnings can be traced to developments in postwar film culture to the rise of auteurism. Attacking the cult of auteurism that had developed in his own magazine, Cahiers du cinema, Andre Bazin said "This does not mean that one has to deny the role of the auteur, but simply give him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept. Auteur, yes, but what of?" (Bazin 1968: 155) Bazin was referring here to what he called "the genius" of the studio so dependable throughout the era of classic Hollywood. But after World War 2, the studios, reeling from the impact of the 1948 Paramount Decision, (1) faced challenges on a number of fronts, including growing competition from the new medium of television; the emergence of stars as producers, shifting demographics with a new and increasingly dominant youth audience; the dissolution of the Production Code, which, gradually eroded since the early 1950s, was finally replaced by an official ratings system in 1968; and the popular acceptance of the auteur theory. Introduced to English-speaking film culture in 1962 with the British journal Movie, auteur theory, as Andrew Sarris translated Francois Truffaut's "la politique des auteurs," was popularized more than anyone else in North America by Sarris, a contributor to Film Culture, Jonas Mekas' journal devoted mostly to experimental film, and then as chief film critic for New York's Village Voice, a weekly publication that was distributed nationally in the United States. (2) The publication in 1968 of Sarris's monumental book The American Cinema: Directors atid Directions, 1929-1968, was singularly influential in solidifying the discourse of classic auteurism. Sarris provided filmographies and short auteurist essays on most American directors and ranked them according to their success at stamping their personality on their work, with the "pantheon" reserved only for the greatest of auteurs. The book was indispensable for cineastes in an era before home video, giving a conceptual framework for grasping American film history that continues to hold sway with critical and popular opinion today. Auteurism not only changed the way people thought about movies, it also empowered aspiring directors. The group of young directors collectively known as the movie brats rode this wave of early auteurist enthusiasm to commercial success. The group included Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, and Francis Coppola, the film-makers whose work came to largely define the New Hollywood of the 1970s. With the exception of De Palma, they all had attended university programs in the new academic discipline of film studies, where they learned film history as well as production. Their films offered proof, as Jean-Luc Godard said, that "as soon as you can make films, you can no longer make films like the ones that made you want to make them. …
... Daughter Rite (1980) or Marlon Rigg s Tongues Untied (1990). ... Michael Moore adopted a sati... more ... Daughter Rite (1980) or Marlon Rigg s Tongues Untied (1990). ... Michael Moore adopted a satiric tone, seen for example in the anti-war The Atomic Cafe (1982 Jayne Loader and Kevin and PierceRafferty), for Roger and Me (1987), an attack on deindustrialisation in the USA. ...
A major figure in American documentary cinema, Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930) began making his extra... more A major figure in American documentary cinema, Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930) began making his extraordinary series of films during the Direct Cinema movement of the 1960s. From the beginning of his impressive and prolific forty-year career, Wiseman developed a distinctive style and approach that set his work apart from that of his contemporaries. Wiseman’s films focus on institutions of various kinds, ranging from those concentrated within individual buildings (High School, 1968) to those international in scope (Sinai Field Mission, 1978), from institutions set up and maintained by government (Juvenile Court, 1973, Public Housing, 1997) to those less tangible ones organized by principles of ideology and culture (Canal Zone, 1977, Model, 1980). Many of his films ferret out the gaps between institutional theory and practice, demonstrating the shaping force of institutions themselves, which dictate to, as much as they serve, both clients and administrators. Wiseman is also interested in ...
This article examines the construction of alien visitations in The Man Who Fell to Earth and refl... more This article examines the construction of alien visitations in The Man Who Fell to Earth and reflects theologically upon the implicit and explicit religious themes in the novel and film. Gerard Loughlin explores the christic identity of the central character, Newton, and the queering of his ...
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films.... more This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by...
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films.... more This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by...
Uploads
Papers by Barry Grant