Rebecca M Gordon

This chapter argues that Leni’s first film with Universal Pictures, The Cat and the Canary, created a visual and aural iconography that was essential for its cinematic progeny: namely, its remake in 1939, and the broader trend of ‘old spooky house’ narratives in Hollywood filmmaking. An early instalment in the horror-comedy genre, Leni’s 1927 film would later lend formal and affective shape to what trade magazines of the 1920s and 1930s called the thriller-chiller-comedy. Interweaving concurrent film reviews and memos between industry executives, Gordon’s chapter details Leni’s so-called “German” or “European” influence in reference to the film’s visual style and the effect of that style on its viewers. This chapter takes the position that The Cat and the Canary’s stylistic innovations became identifiable as parts of a pattern (or, indeed, a genre) by the 1930s, and, further, that Leni himself was responsible for developing an entirely new formula for Hollywood filmmaking.

Film-Philosophy. Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615). Vol. 7 No. 26, September 2003. Rebecca M. Gordon. Waiting for Dawn to Break: On _Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_. _Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_. ...

In “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics,” Lori Merish argues that appreciating the cute—loving the “adorable” as culturally defined—entails a structure of identification, of “wanting to be like the cute, or wanting the cute to be like the self” (185). In the United States, cuteness tends to be racially and culturally aligned with whiteness, thus those who identify with whiteness—or who concede to mass culture’s presumption of identification—are in the best position, as consumers and spectators, to recognize and value the cute. Latino/a identity bears an ambiguous relation to the racialized and classed aesthetics of cute, however. Physiologically, most Latino/a bodies do not fit the cute aesthetic, being either sexualized (the hot Latin/a lover) or considered machines for labor (the bracero, the maid). Culturally, the central racial reality of Latino/a life is that everyone is mestizo—that is, ethnically and racially mixed; the resulting ambiguity has historically led to racialization of and discrimination against Latina/os in the United States. However, as the Latino/a demographic in the US becomes larger and increasingly powerful, culturally defined aesthetic norms shift, and majoritarian structures of identification crumble. Recently adapted to American broadcast television from Latin American telenovelas, the sitcoms Ugly Betty (2006-2010) and Jane the Virgin (2013-) take up the relationship of Latino/a identity to normative culture in order to good-naturedly skewer the latter, largely by using the aesthetic of cute against itself. Both programs use familiar tropes from sentimental melodrama, but the actresses who play the protagonists are themselves unconventionally cute, i.e., “cute in a Latina way,” and the programs’ sly assumption that audiences understand the cultural specificity of Latino/a identity, including Catholicism and commitment to family over self, further confuses the formalized emotional response of normative cuteness. Finally, according to Merish and others, cuteness tends to rely on a commercial structure of “feminine” consumer empathy that blurs identification and commodity desire; but in Jane the Virgin and Ugly Betty, there is nothing “worth having” in the heroines’ experiences other than the opportunity to identify with good people facing a struggle–which may be the programs’ most progressive undercutting of cute.

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UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Between thought and feeling: Affect, audience, and critical film history. by Gordon, Rebecca ...

Film-Philosophy. Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615). Vol. 7 No. 26, September 2003. Rebecca M. Gordon. Waiting for Dawn to Break: On _Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_. _Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_. ...

If you are familiar with Hello Kitty stamped on everything from bookbags to iPhones, or ever have been sent videos of kittens or other baby animals by friends for a bit of stress relief, or if you are aware of Zooey Deschanel not only as an actress and a singer but as a "type" of woman to emerge in the public sphere in the 21st century, then you know something about cuteness, not only as an attribute (things that are small, young, with large eyes and a fetching manner), but as a phenomenon in contemporary culture. We are interested in analyzing this phenomenon--not only in terms of analyzing the consumption of cute commodities, but also in terms of analyzing those who seek to enact, represent, or reference cuteness through personal presentation or behavior. For example, cute culture is a very active *practice* in Japanese youth culture and Korean pop music, and is increasingly popular in the US through cos-play and the furries phenomenon.

Our symposium participants will explore the cuteness phenomenon in terms of cultural critique: things that are "cute" are childlike, dependent, gentle, intimate, clumsy, and nonthreatening; such physical and behavioral features can trigger an attachment based on the desire to protect and take care of the cute object. The nature of how we respond to cuteness is highly pertinent to humanities and social science scholars, for cuteness is expressed through categories of difference such as gender, race, or class. Moreover, the explosion in cuteness as a phenomenon in the late 20th-early 21st centuries seems inextricable with our precarious economic times.