tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/us-movies-50994/articles
US movies – The Conversation
2023-06-08T16:28:34Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/204592
2023-06-08T16:28:34Z
2023-06-08T16:28:34Z
Jurassic Park at 30: how its CGI revolutionised the film industry
<p><em>You can also read this article <a href="https://theconversation.com/jurassic-park-yn-30-ar-chwyldro-effeithiau-arbennig-ddigwyddodd-yn-sgil-y-ffilm-207439">in Welsh</a>.</em></p>
<p>This month marks the 30th anniversary of a film that changed cinema forever. 1993’s Jurassic Park used pioneering computer-generated imagery (CGI) to bring dinosaurs to life in Steven Spielberg’s adaption of the novel of the same name. </p>
<p>The film quickly became a must-see event and audiences were left amazed by the spectacle of seeing believable dinosaurs grace the big screen for the first time. Jurassic Park not only <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=uWiWCwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT6&dq=jurassic+park+cgi&ots=2GhA2wlixw&sig=lhUvmRpL2KYrbQWDfE1fRizz7FE&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=jurassic%20park%20cgi&f=false">made giant leaps</a> in special-effects filmmaking, but it also paved the way for myriad subsequent productions that featured beasts of all shapes and sizes.</p>
<p>Jurassic Park originated in 1983 as a screenplay by Michael Crichton, whose previous foray into film as writer and director of Westworld (1973) featured an immersive amusement park where androids malfunctioned and caused havoc. But his dinosaur-themed story first found publication as the novel Jurassic Park, which was released in 1990 and became a bestseller. </p>
<p>That’s when it came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. By the early 1990s, Spielberg was no stranger to big-budget science-fiction filmmaking. The likes of Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) had demonstrated that he had a track record of making extremely successful effects-heavy but story-led films. That made Jurassic Park perfect for his next production.</p>
<p>Spielberg’s adaptation, written by Crichton and David Koepp, changed a number of aspects of the novel’s ending to provide a satisfactory conclusion to the film, yet leave enough loose ends for further exploration in the franchise.</p>
<p>Of course, Jurassic Park wasn’t the first time dinosaurs had been featured on the big screen. 1933’s King Kong is an early example of a film that pushed the boundaries of what was then possible by including sequences of the eponymous giant gorilla fighting with dinosaurs. </p>
<p>Creatures were brought to life for cinema goers by combining stop-motion animation with rear projection (where previously shot film is projected onto a backdrop and actors are recorded performing in front of it). Other feature films such as Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), The Lost World (1960) and The Land That Time Forgot (1974) had attempted alternative ways of bringing dinosaurs to the screen, including puppetry and even fitting live reptiles with prosthetics. </p>
<p>Of these methods, a combination of stop-motion animation for long shots and animatronic puppets for close ups were initially chosen by Spielberg for Jurassic Park.</p>
<h2>CGI and animation</h2>
<p>Stop-motion tests produced good results, especially in the development of go-motion, a technique which blurred models to provide a sense of movement similar to that of live action. But Spielberg and his team were still keen to go further with what was possible. Dennis Muren from the visual effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), provided an alternative approach by using CGI modelling and animation.</p>
<p>Off the back of pioneering CGI work in The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Muren and his team produced a test sequence of skeletal dinosaurs. Additional tests featuring a <em>Tyrannosaurus rex</em> with added skin further cemented the realisation that this was the way to go for the film. This technique built the model of the dinosaur from bones, added muscle and then finally, the skin. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rc_i5TKdmhs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The T. rex escapes its paddock.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It seemed the assembled stop-motion team had been made extinct by this innovative technology. However, the model makers and animators were the experts on dinosaurs and their movement, and they retrained as computer animators to continue to use their skills on the production.</p>
<p>Jurassic Park features 15 minutes of on-screen dinosaurs, of which approximately nine minutes feature Stan Winston’s animatronics and six minutes of ILM’s CGI animation. The success of this combination is seen in the iconic <em>T. rex</em> attack scene. A number of animatronic shots feature close-ups of the <em>T.rex</em> before the full-height shots provide the creature’s threat and power. </p>
<p>How Spielberg orchestrates the scene, from the atmospheric, tension building of the rain storm, through the initial reveal and reactions, the prolonged attack and subsequent escape, takes the audience through a range of emotions. Although the CGI sections are relatively short, they have a huge impact on the overall storytelling, not to mention the believability that the event is actually happening in front of us. It’s a true representation of the power of cinema. </p>
<h2>Impact</h2>
<p>On release, Jurassic Park became an instant box office success, becoming the highest-grossing film ever at that time. It also presented the perfect opportunity to develop and showcase the latest advances in CGI. The thrill of seeing the stampede of Gallimimus, the horror of the <em>T.rex</em> attack and the suspense of the Velociraptor hunt captivated audiences across the globe. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8hjB6UJ2kMU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">“They’re flocking this way” - Jurassic Park’s Gallimimus chase scene.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jurassic Park inspired a number of similarly themed movies such as Disney’s Dinosaur (2000) and the award-winning BBC television series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999). But more than that, it helped bring about a revolution in the use of CGI in filmmaking. </p>
<p>From those six minutes of animated dinosaurs, CGI has become so integrated into the industry to the extent that nearly all film and television productions feature some form of CGI practice. This can simply mean digitally cleaning up aspects of the filmed image with removals and replacements, set extensions, adding CGI set models or animated vehicles and props, to filming with green screen and compositing images, or merging actors within full CGI environments. </p>
<p>The film remains a significant point in the history of cinema that successfully announced that CGI creatures had arrived, paving the way for the following thirty years of fantasy filmmaking.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204592/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Hodges does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Jurassic Park was released on the big screen in June 1993 and changed cinema for good.
Peter Hodges, Lecturer in Contextual and Critical Studies for Visual Effects and Motion Graphics, University of South Wales
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/197859
2023-01-24T15:04:31Z
2023-01-24T15:04:31Z
‘The Whale’ is a horror film that taps into our fear of fatness
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505902/original/file-20230123-13-7h23y2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C14%2C2485%2C1642&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Over the course of 'The Whale,' Charlie's body gradually breaks down.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-1240w,f_auto,q_auto:best/rockcms/2022-12/221209-Brendan-Fraser-the-whale-ew-255p-cc959f.jpg">A24</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>I knew before seeing “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13833688/">The Whale</a>” that it was a movie about a man named Charlie who weighs over 600 pounds, is grief-stricken over the death of his partner, and is effectively trapped in his apartment due to his weight.</p>
<p>I also knew that “The Whale” had attracted a great deal of criticism, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/opinion/the-whale-film.html">provoking anger</a>, <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/the-whale-brendan-fraser-darren-aronofsky-review">disgust</a> and accusations of <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-whale-movie-review-2022">exploitation</a>. Despite the controversy, <a href="https://movieweb.com/best-actor-2022-brendan-fraser/">Brendan Fraser’s performance has been widely praised</a>, and he won <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/13/entertainment/brendan-fraser-oscars-best-actor/index.html">best actor</a> at the 95th Academy Awards.</p>
<p>But what I didn’t know was that this film would make me cry. As I left the theater, I found myself hyperaware of my own fat body moving through the parking lot, and I started to feel the way I often do when I see a reflection of myself in a mirror: monstrous.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-case-for-a-fat-love-story">In my research</a> on fat characters in popular culture, I point out how the fat character usually must lose weight in order to gain acceptance or to be loved. </p>
<p>In “The Whale,” however, Charlie does not lose weight; the transformation goes in the opposite direction: he gets bigger and bigger, suffering a slow and painful physical breakdown. As I watched the film, I started to understand, with a looming sense of dread, that “The Whale” had no plans to recuperate this character. The fatness was the subject and the point. </p>
<p>I began to realize that this movie was not a melodrama, nor an uplifting tale about redemption; to me, “The Whale” is a body horror film that exploits the fear and disgust people feel toward fatness.</p>
<h2>The body as a monster</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/best-body-horror-movies/">Body horror</a> is a subset of the horror film genre that depicts the destruction, degeneration or mutation of the human body. These films are designed to gross out viewers, and the protagonist often becomes the monster of the story as their body becomes more and more repulsive. </p>
<p>Director David Cronenberg made the subgenre famous <a href="https://bloody-disgusting.com/sponsored/3716683/body-horror-david-cronenberg/">in films such as</a> “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091064/">The Fly</a>,” “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073705/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Shivers</a>,” “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086541/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Videodrome</a>” and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076590/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3">Rabid</a>.” </p>
<p>“The Fly,” a remake of the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051622/">1958 film</a> of the same name, tells the story of a scientist named Seth Brundle who merges his DNA with that of a common housefly. Over the course of the film, he gradually degenerates into a disgusting creature nicknamed “<a href="https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Brundlefly">Brundlefly</a>.” Another particularly disturbing body horror film is “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3099498/">Tusk</a>,” in which a man obsessed with walruses ends up kidnapping a cruel podcaster and dismembers him in order to turn him into a walrus. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Split image of man on one side and hideous monster on the other." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505976/original/file-20230123-17-4gl88j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505976/original/file-20230123-17-4gl88j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=310&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505976/original/file-20230123-17-4gl88j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=310&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505976/original/file-20230123-17-4gl88j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=310&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505976/original/file-20230123-17-4gl88j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505976/original/file-20230123-17-4gl88j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505976/original/file-20230123-17-4gl88j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly’ is a standout of the body horror genre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.unilad.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/the-fly-35.jpg">20th Century Studios</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In body horror films, there is something viscerally disturbing about seeing the human body distorted, whether it’s due to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/">a parasitic alien</a>, a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073705/">mutated virus</a> or the sadistic compulsions of a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1467304/">mad scientist</a>. </p>
<p>“The Whale” suggests that although Charlie deserves pity, <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/the-whale-brendan-fraser-darren-aronofsky-review">he is nonetheless a monstrosity</a>.</p>
<p>Like Seth Brundle, who experiments on himself while drunk, Charlie regularly gorges on fried chicken, pizza and subs – the implication being that Charlie is directly responsible for his morbid obesity. </p>
<p>Seeing Charlie’s gradual physical disintegration is like watching a slow-motion car wreck; you cannot look away even though you know you should. He’s barely able to stand, and he loses the ability to perform the most basic of tasks, like picking up an object from the floor. In some scenes, the camera rests on Charlie’s distended gut, his swollen calves or his sweat-soaked clothes, inviting the audience to be repulsed. </p>
<p>In body horror, there is no return from being transformed; the damage is done. And although not every transformed body horror character dies, many do. </p>
<p>In the end, Charlie’s body ends up destroying him.</p>
<h2>Till flesh do us part</h2>
<p>Film <a href="https://www.cliffsnotes.com/tutors-problems/Writing/45763344-Film-critic-Robin-Wood-in-a-now-famous-essay-defined-the-true/">critic Robin Wood famously argued</a> that “the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses and oppresses.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.vox.com/22697168/body-positivity-image-millennials-gen-z-weight">In a thin-obsessed culture</a>, fatness has become its own kind of monster. Despite the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_positivity">body positivity</a> movement, fat people are still often viewed as unattractive and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866597/">abnormal</a>, and are more likely to be <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-03-15/weight-discrimination-remains-legal-in-most-of-the-u-s">discriminated against</a> at work, stigmatized by physicians and convicted by juries. </p>
<p>In 2012, <a href="https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2012.0035">sociologist Francis Ray White wrote that</a> “fatness is increasingly being figured as anti-social” – something that “must be eliminated in the name of a viable future.” White points out that when obesity is talked about as an “epidemic,” it reinforces the idea that fatness is an illness that must be cured, and that fat people are not people but carriers of a contagion. </p>
<p>In the final moments of “The Whale,” viewers witness Charlie’s life ending: He vividly remembers a time when he was blissfully happy, on a beach with his daughter and the love of his life. As he is dying, he levitates, at last free from the monstrous burden of flesh.</p>
<p>It is the only time in the film where he seems weightless; indeed, it is the only moment of freedom for this character.</p>
<p>But the monster itself – fatness – lives on.</p>
<p>Darren Aronofsky, the film’s director, has said that his film is “<a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/darren-aronofsky-the-whale-fat-suit-criticism-1235280523/">an exercise in empathy</a>.” </p>
<p>But if empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, why was I left with the idea of my own body as an irredeemable monstrosity? I’m not alone in this unease; critic <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/opinion/the-whale-film.html">Roxane Gay</a> called The Whale a “carnival sideshow,” and “emotionally devastating.” To Gay, “The Whale” depicts fatness as “something despicable, to be avoided at all costs.” </p>
<p>She could have been describing a monster. She could have been describing me.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197859/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beth Younger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In a thin-obsessed culture, fatness has become its own kind of monster.
Beth Younger, Associate Professor of English & Women's and Gender Studies, Drake University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/194506
2022-12-01T13:39:12Z
2022-12-01T13:39:12Z
Resounding success of ‘Black Panther’ franchise says little about the dubious state of Black film
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498066/original/file-20221129-20-p656p4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C8%2C2982%2C2029&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' is one of only three Black films since 2018 to have a production budget exceeding $100 million.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/in-this-handout-image-provided-by-disneyland-resort-in-news-photo/1244803203?phrase=black panther wakanda&adppopup=true">Christian Thompson/Disneyland Resort via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Marvel Studios released “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1825683">Black Panther</a>” in February 2018, it marked the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film to feature a Black superhero and star a predominantly Black cast. </p>
<p>Its estimated production budget was <a href="https://bamsmackpow.com/2018/02/14/black-panther-movie-budget/">US$200 million</a>, making it the first <a href="https://books.apple.com/us/book/entertainment-weekly-a-celebration-of-black-film/id1552725693">Black film</a> – conventionally defined as a film that is directed by a Black director, features a Black cast, and focuses on some aspect of the Black experience – ever to receive that level of financial support.</p>
<p>As a scholar of media and Black popular culture, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS5U4ax6Cu4">I was often asked</a> to respond to the resounding success of that first “Black Panther” film, which had shattered expectations of its box office performance. </p>
<p>Would it lead to more big-budget Black films? Was its popularity an indication that the global marketplace – the real <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2018/01/17/can-disney-possibly-succeed-with-black-panther-in-china/#3c8ad4727e8e">source of trepidation</a> about the film’s potential – was finally ready to embrace Black-cast films?</p>
<p>With the release of the <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/e2-80-98black-panther-wakanda-forever-e2-80-99-box-office-leaps-past-24400m-globally/ar-AA14fas6">massively successful</a> “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9114286">Black Panther: Wakanda Forever</a>” in November 2022, I expect those questions to reemerge. </p>
<p>Yet as I review the cinematic landscape between the original and its sequel, I am inclined to restate the answer I gave back in 2018: Assumptions should not be made about the state of Black film based on the success of the “Black Panther” franchise.</p>
<h2>Reason for optimism</h2>
<p>Prior to its release, the producers of <a href="https://deadline.com/2018/02/black-panther-african-american-films-foreign-box-office-1202286475/">“Black Panther” faced questions</a> about whether there was a market for a Black blockbuster film, even one ensconced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.</p>
<p>After all, since the Wesley Snipes-led “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120611/">Blade</a>” trilogy, which came out in the late-1990s and early 2000s, Black superhero films had experienced diminishing returns. There was one notable exception: the commercially successful, though heavily panned “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448157/">Hancock</a>” (2008), starring Will Smith. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498285/original/file-20221130-18-nzih42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Man with red sunglasses pumps his first in front of a movie poster." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498285/original/file-20221130-18-nzih42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498285/original/file-20221130-18-nzih42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498285/original/file-20221130-18-nzih42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498285/original/file-20221130-18-nzih42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498285/original/file-20221130-18-nzih42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1105&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498285/original/file-20221130-18-nzih42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1105&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498285/original/file-20221130-18-nzih42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1105&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wesley Snipes attends the premiere of ‘Blade 2’ in March 2002.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/actor-wesley-snipes-attends-the-premiere-of-the-film-blade-news-photo/705528?phrase=blade%20wesley%20snipes&adppopup=true">Vince Bucci/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Otherwise, Black superhero films such as “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327554/">Catwoman</a>” (2004) and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4573516/">Sleight</a>” (2016) either flopped or had a limited release.</p>
<p>Furthermore, until “Black Panther,” no Black film exceeded a $100 million budget, <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0611/why-movies-cost-so-much-to-make.aspx">the average benchmark</a> for modern Hollywood blockbusters. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, despite these early concerns, “Black Panther” earned the highest domestic gross, <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2992866817/">$700 million</a>, of all films released in 2018, while earning $1.3 billion in worldwide gross, second only to “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154756">Avengers: Infinity War</a>.”</p>
<p>“Black Panther” emerged at the tail end of what many industry experts considered to be a surprisingly <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/girls-trip-is-killing-it-right-now-why-that-matters">successful</a> run of Black films, which included the biopic “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340">Hidden Figures</a>” (2016) and the raunchy comedy “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3564472">Girls Trip</a>” (2017). Despite their modest budgets, they earned over $100 million apiece at the box office – <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt4846340">$235 million</a> and <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt3564472">$140 million</a>, respectively. </p>
<p>However, both films were mostly reliant on the domestic box office, especially the R-rated “Girls Trip,” which was only released in a handful of foreign markets. <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-black-movies-global-audience-myth-20170324-story.html">Conventional wisdom</a> has long held that Black films will fail abroad. International distributors and studios typically ignore them during the presale process or at film festivals and markets, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/are-black-movies-being-shut-by-global-buyers-1138916/">reasoning</a> that Black films are too culturally specific – not only in terms of their Blackness, but also their Americanness. </p>
<p>Films like “Black Panther” and the Oscar winning “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4975722">Moonlight</a>” (2016), <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt4975722">which earned more on the international market</a> than the domestic market, certainly challenged those assumptions. It has yet to upend them. </p>
<h2>Black films after ‘Black Panther’</h2>
<p>What do those Black films released in theaters in the nearly five years between “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” tell us about the former’s impact? </p>
<p>The simple answer is that the original “Black Panther” has had no discernible influence on industry practices whatsoever.</p>
<p>Since 2018, no other Black blockbuster has emerged, save for the sequel itself. Granted, Black filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s remake of “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1620680">A Wrinkle in Time</a>” (2018) reportedly cost an estimated $100 million; however, while Black actors portrayed the protagonist and a few other characters, the film features a multicultural ensemble cast – which, as scholars such as <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3661094">Mary Beltran</a> have pointed out, has become the primary strategy for achieving diversity in film. </p>
<p>Even if one were to include “A Wrinkle in Time,” the grand total of Black films with budgets exceeding $100 million is three, with the two “Black Panther” films being the others – all during an era in which there <a href="https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all">have been hundreds</a> of mainstream films with budgets exceeding $100 million.</p>
<p>Otherwise, most of the Black films released in theaters between 2018 and 2022 typically were low budget by Hollywood standards – $3 million to $20 million in most cases – with only a handful, such as the 2021 Aretha Franklin biopic “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2452150/">Respect</a>,” costing $50 million to 60 million.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most notable change has been the medium. Many Black films now appear on either cable networks that cater to a Black audience – namely Black Entertainment Television and, more recently, Lifetime – or on streaming services such as Netflix. Tyler Perry, the most popular and prolific Black filmmaker of the modern era, has released his latest films – “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14307536">A Jazzman’s Blues</a>” (2022), “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14813966">A Madea Homecoming</a>” (2022) and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11390036">A Fall from Grace</a>” (2020) – directly to Netflix.</p>
<p>Furthermore, no other Black film has approached the financial success of “Black Panther.” Granted, several Black films have fared well at the box office, especially relative to their production costs. Foremost among them is Jordan Peele’s “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6857112/">Us</a>” (2019), which cost an estimated $20 million, yet earned approximately $256 million worldwide despite its R rating and the fact that it was never released in China.</p>
<h2>Whither Black film</h2>
<p>Without question, large budgets and commercial success are not the only measures of a film’s value and significance. </p>
<p>As has historically been the case, Black film has managed to do more with less. The critical acclaim afforded to films such as “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7349662">BlackKlansman</a>” (2018), “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125860">If Beale Street Could Talk</a>” (2019) and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9620288">King Richard</a>” (2021) reflect this fact. All reflect trends in contemporary Black filmmaking – comedies, historical dramas and biopics abound, for instance – and were made for a fraction of the cost of both “Black Panther” films.</p>
<p>In truth, the zeal with which some cast “Black Panther” as a bellwether for Black films is part of continued haranguing over their viability, particularly after the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/movies/oscarssowhite-history.html">#OscarsSoWhite</a> movement that drew attention to the lack of diversity at the 2016 Academy Awards. </p>
<p>However, its positioning as a Disney property within Marvel’s transmedia storytelling effort makes it so atypical that its success — and that of its sequel — portends little about Black film.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194506/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Phillip Lamarr Cunningham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
After the first ‘Black Panther’ shattered box office expectations, some critics wondered if it marked the dawn of a new era of big-budget Black films.
Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, Assistant Professor, Media Studies, Wake Forest University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/184370
2022-06-13T19:28:04Z
2022-06-13T19:28:04Z
From ‘dada’ to Darth Vader – why the way we name fathers reminds us we spring from the same well
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468104/original/file-20220609-11759-gqb31p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C99%2C3679%2C2283&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Even supervillains need the odd day off.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/heavy-metal-fan-dressed-as-darth-vader-crowd-surfs-at-news-photo/1333946536?adppopup=true">Katja Ogrin/Redferns via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Movie legend has it that the identity of Luke Skywalker’s father was always hiding in plain sight – well, at least <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/11/28/did-german-speakers-understand-the-darth-vader-reveal-before-anyone-else/?sh=44e317f8605e">through a subtle naming clue</a>. “Darth Vader” does, after all, have a distinct paternal ring to it linguistically. Indeed, had the big reveal been “I am your fader” it would have made a nice play on the heavy-breathing villain’s name with a nod to an old Dutch term for “father.”</p>
<p>The true origin story of Vader’s moniker is <a href="https://screenrant.com/star-wars-darth-vader-dark-father-translation-myth/">not as cool as the myth</a>. But as someone who <a href="https://www.unr.edu/english/people/valerie-fridland">studies the origins of words</a>, I see the story providing an example of something that is real: the universality of the names used for fathers across all languages. </p>
<p>Considering that dads played a key part in populating the dawn of civilization, it is perhaps not that surprising that a label for the dude we call “dad” would emerge early in the development of languages. But, whether it’s “papa,” “dada” or “vater,” what is striking is the cross-cultural bias in the words used to describe him – and how the same names have stuck around over millennia.</p>
<h2>Why ‘pater’ is familiar</h2>
<p>Tracking the linguistic evolution of modern “father,” we find it <a href="https://www-oed-com.unr.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/68498">as far back as written English goes</a> – with references to “feadur” or “fadur” or “fædor” in Old English texts from the seventh to 11th centuries. In Old Dutch <a href="https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2013/02/05/episode-20-the-early-germanic-tribes/">there was “fader</a>”; in Old Icelandic we find “faðir”; <a href="https://oldenglishteaching.arts.gla.ac.uk/Units/3_Description_of_OE.html">in Old High German</a>, a precursor to modern German, it was “fater” – now “vater”; and, finally, in Old Danish, “fathær.”</p>
<p>This uniformity strongly suggests this word was found in the languages’ early Germanic parent – that is, the source language from which all these Germanic languages descended.</p>
<p>But the similarity in terms used for “father” doesn’t stop with this Germanic forefather. Related words are found across the entire <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/Indo-European_Languages/">Indo-European language tree</a> – a large group of distantly related languages that stretches over most of Europe and a good bit of Asia. For instance, we find closely matching terms in Latin with “pater,” Sanskrit’s “pitar” and in Greek with “patér” – all older languages that developed separately from the Germanic line.</p>
<p>This means that the word “father” likely came from a long-dead source language, <a href="https://www.archaeology.org/exclusives/articles/1302-proto-indo-european-schleichers-fable">estimated to date back some 6,000 years</a>. This single parent language – known as Proto Indo-European – spawned all these later languages and their shared word for paters.</p>
<p>But how did the “p” in “pater” morph into the “f” found in all the Germanic “father” words"?</p>
<p>Historical linguists have reconstructed the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-European-languages/The-parent-language-Proto-Indo-European">most likely sounds</a> that were used in <a href="https://www.ruf.rice.edu/%7Ekemmer/Words04/history/pie.html">this hypothesized parent language</a>. Since Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all have “p,” “t” and “k” sounds, their Indo-European source also probably had these, or closely related, sounds.</p>
<p>But as Germanic languages formed their own branch of the family tree, this “p” turned into an “f.” This explains why there is a “p” in Latin-based words like “Pisces,” “podiatry” and “patriarchy,” but “f” in the Germanic descended equivalents like “fish,” “foot” and father.“ This sound change was not random but followed what came to be called <a href="https://www.linguisticsonline.net/post/the-story-of-grimm-s-law-what-is-it">Grimm’s law</a>, named for the very same brother Grimm who brought us "Hansel and Gretel.”</p>
<p>Grimm noted a pattern of sound correspondences across Indo-European languages that suggested a series of regular changes must have occurred as Indo-European split into daughter languages. These changes likely started out as dialect variants that became more distinct as groups of speakers were separated and new languages evolved – with the shifted sounds. </p>
<h2>The ‘babas’ and the ‘papas’</h2>
<p>One might expect closely related languages to share words for fathers, but even across languages in which there is no known evidence of a common ancestry the words for “dad” sound strikingly familiar. </p>
<p>Languages as distinct as <a href="https://www.shh.mpg.de/1285923/sino-tibetan-origin">Sino-Tibetan Chinese</a> and <a href="https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/where-wasiw-spoken">Native American Washo</a> use “baba.” In Nilo-Saharan Maasai, spoken in Kenya and Tanzania, it’s “papa,” and, in <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/41603">the Semitic language Hebrew</a>, “abba.”</p>
<p>A similar bent is found in English, where children use the more intimate “papa,” “dad” or sometimes “daddy” as an alternative to the more formal “father,” especially when in trouble or getting bailed out of jail. </p>
<p><strong>‘Dad’ and ‘Daddy’ have grown in popular usage in recent decades:</strong></p>
<iframe name="ngram_chart" src="https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=Papa%2CDaddy%2CDad%2CFather%2CPa%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CPapa%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CDaddy%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CDad%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CFather%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CPa%3B%2Cc0" width="100%" height="250" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Google Ngram showing percentage of sample books (y-axis) that contain selected English words for ‘father’ since 1800.</span></figcaption></figure>
<p>This tendency toward similar vocabulary words suggests that something pretty universal must be driving it. And though at first “d” and “p” and “b” might not seem to be all that similar sounding, they are all part of a class of what are called “<a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/stop-consonant-phonetics-1691993">stop consonants</a>” in linguistics. Stop consonants are sounds made with a short but complete obstruction of air flow through the mouth during their articulation. </p>
<p>Why does this matter to pops everywhere? Because stop sounds, along with vowels, are the earliest and <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-do-kids-call-their-parents-mom-and-dad-137579">most frequent sounds babies tend to babble</a> – which means “pa,” “ta,” “ba” and “da” are all early infant vocalizations.</p>
<p>Also, repetition is a feature of both baby babble and what parents babble back. As a result, this specific babbling bent makes “dadas,” “babas” and “papas” – along with “apas” and “abas” – very popular things for little Carlos or Keisha to say while hanging out in the crib.</p>
<p>So, when dad happens by and hears what he interprets as his call sign, a celebratory first word commemoration commences, <a href="https://archive.org/details/roman-jakobson-why-mamaand-papa-1971">regardless of whether Junior actually intended it that way or not</a>.</p>
<h2>A universal papa</h2>
<p>And this circles back to the origin story for the word “father.” </p>
<p>Linguists theorize that, at some early point in the development of the Indo-European language, the sound sequence “pa” – babbled in early speech and wishfully interpreted as referring to good ol’ dad – was combined with a suffix such as “ter,” possibly <a href="https://archive.org/details/roman-jakobson-why-mamaand-papa-1971">denoting a kinship relationship</a>.</p>
<p>Looking at the evolution of language more generally, linguists can’t say with certainty whether modern languages inherited the word from an undiscovered original early human language – likely African – or if this process occurred <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/41603">several times over the course of language history</a>.</p>
<p>But what it does suggest is that dads have clearly been important enough throughout the history of humankind to merit special designation. And, unlike so many other words that have been shifted and reshaped or replaced over time by inherent linguistic pressures and language contact, the fondness for “dadas,” “dads,” “fathers” and “papas” seems to be unusually resistant to change. </p>
<p>So, whether you call him your papa, your baba or your abba, just be sure to call him, and let him know how well he, and his title, have stood the test of time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184370/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Valerie M. Fridland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A linguist explores the origin of the word ‘father’ – and why derivatives are common in languages across the globe.
Valerie M. Fridland, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nevada, Reno
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/170489
2021-10-22T18:51:35Z
2021-10-22T18:51:35Z
Hollywood’s love of guns increases the risk of shootings – both on and off the set
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428064/original/file-20211022-9823-1gc3wo9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C4%2C2991%2C1989&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Actor Alec Baldwin was involved in a tragic on-set accident.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/hamptons-international-film-festival-chairman-alec-baldwin-news-photo/1345530823?adppopup=true">Mark Sagliocco/Getty Images for National Geographic</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In what appears to be a tragic accident, actor Alec Baldwin shot dead a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/us/alec-baldwin-shooting-rust-movie.html">cinematographer</a> on Oct 21, 2021, while discharging a prop gun on set in New Mexico.</p>
<p>It is too early to speculate what went wrong during the filming of the Western movie “Rust.” But the incident, in which the film’s director was also injured, highlights a simple fact: Guns are <a href="https://features.hollywoodreporter.com/the-gun-industrys-lucrative-relationship-with-hollywood/">commonplace in Hollywood</a> films. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://u.osu.edu/bushman.20/">scholars of mass communication</a> and <a href="https://www.asc.upenn.edu/people/faculty/dan-romer-phd">risk behavior</a>, we have studied the growing prevalence of firearms on screen and believe that the more guns there are in movies, the more likely it is that a shooting will occur – both in the “reel” world and in the “real” world.</p>
<p>Gun violence in Hollywood movies has increased dramatically over time, especially in movies accessible to teens. Indeed, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2013-1600">our research</a> shows that acts of gun violence in PG-13 movies <a href="https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-2891">nearly tripled</a> over the 30 years between 1985 (the year after the rating was introduced) and 2015. Similar <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247780">trends</a> have been observed in popular TV dramas, with the rate of gun violence depicted in prime time dramas doubling between 2000 and 2018.</p>
<p><iframe id="XOiau" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/XOiau/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Of course, depictions of violence in the entertainment industry are nothing new. The use of guns in Hollywood films has a long tradition going back to the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/dillinger-era-gangster-films/">gangster movies of the 1930s</a>. Guns were also featured heavily in the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/pioneers-of-television/pioneering-programs/westerns/#:%7E:text=During%20the%20Golden%20Age%20of,were%20on%20the%20television%20schedule.">Western TV shows of the 1950s</a>.</p>
<p>The upsurge in the depiction of guns in movies and TV shows is likely related to the realization that <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130328091750.htm">violence draws audiences</a> and guns are an easy way to dramatize violence. And here filmmakers have a <a href="https://features.hollywoodreporter.com/the-gun-industrys-lucrative-relationship-with-hollywood/">willing accomplice in the gun industry</a>.</p>
<p>Media outlets are averse to allowing gun advertising on TV or mass-circulated magazines. But guns are amply displayed in top-grossing movies and popular TV dramas.</p>
<p>We know that the gun industry <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/how-hollywood-helps-gun-makers-sell-their-guns">pays production companies</a> to place its products in their movies. They are rewarded with frequent appearances on screen, so much so that in 2010 the firearm company Glock won a “<a href="https://www.iceworldwide.com/announcing-the-brandcameo-product-placement-award-winners-4/">lifetime achievement award for product placement</a>,” with a citation noting that Glocks appeared in 22 box office No. 1 films during that year.</p>
<p>The payoff for gun companies can be great – prominent placement in high-profile films can result in <a href="https://www.economist.com/prospero/2016/10/19/how-guns-get-into-films">a significant bump in sales</a> for gun models.</p>
<h2>Making guns ‘cool’</h2>
<p>But the potential harm caused by guns in Hollywood goes far beyond the occasional tragic accident on set. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317725419">Studies show</a> that simply seeing a gun can increase aggression in the viewer through what is called the “<a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1967-16673-001">weapons effect</a>.” </p>
<p>Violent movies and TV programs, which often contain guns, can likewise increase aggression and make viewers numb to the pain and suffering of others, <a href="https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/140/Supplement_2/S142">numerous studies show</a>.</p>
<p>And children might be especially vulnerable – which makes it all the more notable that the prevalence of guns in PG-13 movies has increased over the decades.</p>
<p>Younger viewers will often identify movie characters as being “cool” and want to imitate their behavior.</p>
<p>This was seen with smoking on screen: Children who see movie characters smoke cigarettes are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2011.585697">more likely to smoke themselves</a>. A similar effect was observed with children who <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014137">watched movie characters drink alcohol</a>.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.2229">study conducted</a> by one of us, pairs of children ages 8 to 12 were first randomly assigned to watch a PG-rated movie clip containing guns or the same movie clip with the guns edited out.</p>
<p>They were then put in a room that contained several toys and games, while being observed by a hidden camera.</p>
<p>A cabinet in the room contained a real, but disabled, 9mm handgun that had been modified with a digital counter to record the number of times children pulled the trigger.</p>
<p>Most children (72%) opened the drawer and found the gun. But children who watched the movie clip with guns in it held the handgun longer – on average 53.1 seconds compared with 11.1 seconds for those who watched a clip without guns. They also pulled the trigger more times – 2.8 times on average compared with 0.01 times for those who watched the movie clip without guns. </p>
<p>Some children engaged in very dangerous behaviors with the real gun, such as pulling the trigger while pointing the gun at themselves or their partner. One boy pointed the real gun out the laboratory window at people in the street.</p>
<p>The kind of gun violence featured in Hollywood movies tends to highlight <a href="https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/141/6/e20173491">the justified</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00260">use of those weapons</a>. When characters use guns to defend themselves or family, their use is seen as acceptable.</p>
<p>This has the result of encouraging viewers to think that using guns for the protection of self or others is virtuous.</p>
<h2>Reflecting or glamorizing violence?</h2>
<p>The United States is the most <a href="https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/sites/default/files/resources/SAS-BP-Civilian-Firearms-Numbers.pdf">heavily armed society</a> in the world. Although consisting of about 4% of the world’s population, U.S. citizens <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html">possess almost half</a> of the world’s guns. </p>
<p>In featuring guns so heavily, there is a danger that Hollywood is not merely reflecting society – it is encouraging firearm sales.</p>
<p>While incidents of actors and film production staff being injured or killed through accidental shootings are thankfully rare, the likelihood of fatal shootings – accidental or otherwise – in the real world goes up with every sale of the kinds of guns featured by Hollywood.</p>
<p>[<em>Over 110,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=100Ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/170489/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dan Romer has received funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brad Bushman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A tragic accident resulted in the shooting death of a cinematographer on the set of actor Alec Baldwin’s latest movie. The dangers of more guns on set extend to society, two scholars argue.
Brad Bushman, Professor of Communication and Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication, The Ohio State University
Dan Romer, Research Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/147535
2020-10-06T12:18:11Z
2020-10-06T12:18:11Z
Regal Cinemas’ decision to close its theaters is the latest blow to a film industry on life support
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/361720/original/file-20201005-18-1e1i67g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C106%2C5494%2C3707&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Most people are avoiding movie theaters, even as restrictions have eased.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/APTOPIXVirusOutbreakCalifornia/50bf49f19c274c71855daadc572a32e4/photo?Query=regal%20AND%20cinemas&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=11215&currentItemNo=2">AP Photo/Jae C. Hong</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A film industry <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/19/loss-of-jobs-income-film-industry-hollywood-coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19">in free fall</a> just suffered its latest blow. </p>
<p>Cineworld Group, the owner of Regal Cinemas, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/04/business/regal-cinemas-theater-shutdown/index.html">announced that it would suspend operations</a> at all of its locations in the U.S. and U.K. as crowded theaters continue to be seen as petri dishes for a virus that shows no sign of abating. </p>
<p>Studios are in no better shape. Familiar blockbuster franchises that Hollywood banks on to balance ledgers have been delayed, including the 25th James Bond film, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2382320/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">No Time to Die</a>,” “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9603212/">Mission: Impossible 7</a>,” and Marvel Universe’s “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3480822/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Black Widow</a>” and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7126948/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Wonder Woman 1984</a>.” The billions of dollars invested in producing and marketing these films alone are sums that could make or break the studios.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Apple TV <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53637305">have capitalized</a> on the trend of people’s <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/6/coronavirus-how-much-more-time-are-people-spending-at-home">spending more time in their homes</a>. </p>
<p>The motion picture industry has endured pandemics and the threat of home viewing before. But in each instance, the existing way of doing things was upended.</p>
<p>During the current crisis, it seems that shifts in the industry that have been going on for some time are accelerating. While the movie theater will likely survive, moviegoers can expect a change in what they can see on the big screen. </p>
<h2>The first time ‘flu bans’ upended the industry</h2>
<p>Before World War I, the American motion picture industry was a loose collection of independent film producers, distributors and approximately 20,000 theater owners. In the fall of 1918, <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/04/hollywood-coronavirus-impact-spanish-flu-history-lessons-william-mann-interview-1202899630/">the industry was rocked</a> by the emergence of the Spanish flu. As wave after wave of influenza deaths spread across the country, between 80% and 90% of theaters were closed off and on for months by public health decrees, described across the country as “flu bans.”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351406/original/file-20200805-493-16eryxz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A 1918 edition of the Motion Picture News announces the lifting of a 'flu ban.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351406/original/file-20200805-493-16eryxz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351406/original/file-20200805-493-16eryxz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351406/original/file-20200805-493-16eryxz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351406/original/file-20200805-493-16eryxz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351406/original/file-20200805-493-16eryxz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351406/original/file-20200805-493-16eryxz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351406/original/file-20200805-493-16eryxz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Theaters were forced to close off and on for months because of public health decrees.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Internet Archive</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Theaters that needed ticket sales to recoup advanced rental fees fought to stay open <a href="http://www.jstor.com/stable/3815547">using strategies</a> that are eerily familiar to our COVID-19 moment. Industry leaders lobbied governments to let them reopen. Theater owners denounced “flu hysteria” and handed out gauze masks to patrons. Some ejected sneezers or used staggered seating to socially distance audiences. The industry ran national public relations campaigns promoting hygiene and promising theater cleanings and new ventilation systems to help calm patrons’ fears of sitting shoulder to shoulder with someone who might cough. Even after “flu bans” were lifted, it took about a year and a half for skittish audiences to venture back. </p>
<p>As the pandemic ravaged the country, consolidation fever consumed the industry. Opportunists took advantage of the real victims of the flu bans: independent theaters. The big chains, armed with capital, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-1918-flu-halted-hollywood-1286640">bought out their hobbled competitors</a> while bigger distribution companies gobbled up smaller ones. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352357/original/file-20200811-16-1s8ccs1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A cartoon from the Exhibitor's Herald depicts Adolph Zukor assuming control over independent theater owners." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352357/original/file-20200811-16-1s8ccs1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352357/original/file-20200811-16-1s8ccs1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352357/original/file-20200811-16-1s8ccs1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352357/original/file-20200811-16-1s8ccs1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352357/original/file-20200811-16-1s8ccs1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352357/original/file-20200811-16-1s8ccs1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352357/original/file-20200811-16-1s8ccs1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adolph Zukor and his Wall Street backers sought to monopolize access to audiences.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://archive.org/details/exhibitorsherald10exhi_0/page/n1251/mode/2up">Internet Archive</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A new Hollywood studio system dominated by money and profits slowly started to take shape. Trailblazer <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pickford-adolph-zukor-1873-1976/">Adolph Zukor</a> used Wall Street financing to take control of the reeling Famous Players-Lasky company and merged it with Paramount distribution, creating a studio that cranked out films with Ford-like efficiency. With its soaring profits, it continued turning independent theaters into exclusive Paramount exhibitors across the country to monopolize access to audiences.</p>
<p>Other companies followed suit. Loews theaters, Metro pictures and Goldwyn distribution consolidated into MGM. Industry players desperate to recoup their pandemic losses traded their independence to be a part of the post-pandemic Hollywood, an <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015062577690">oligopoly of vertically integrated companies that only distributed and screened the films they produced</a>. </p>
<p>Audiences previously comfortable watching all variety of shorts quickly developed a taste for the studio system’s expensive, feature-length formulaic films. </p>
<h2>TV threatens the oligopoly</h2>
<p>In the 1950s, Hollywood faced a second destructive event of the 21st century: television, a new technology that could broadcast content directly into American homes. </p>
<p>On the television, the motion picture form shifted from standard feature-length films to serialized content similar to what people listened to on the radio.</p>
<p>The studio system felt the crunch. People who once went out to the movies multiple times a week now stayed home to watch TV. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Transforming_the_Screen_1950_1959/TEGl2Ele_XoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=television+in+the+1950s&pg=PA127&printsec=frontcover">By 1954, there were 233 commercial stations and 26 million homes with TVs</a>, and studio profits <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1224894?seq=1">dramatically declined</a>.</p>
<p>Yet Hollywood was able to adapt. The industry responded to the small-screen home viewing threat by going big. Aspect ratios jumped from 1.34:1 to a wider 1.85:1 or 2.25:1, and film studios added Technicolor and high-fidelity directional audio to their sensational features. </p>
<p>Big-budget epics like MGM’s “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043949/">Quo Vadis</a>,” musicals like 20th Century Fox’s “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042200/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Annie Get Your Gun</a>” and animated spectacles like Disney’s “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048280/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3">Lady and the Tramp</a>” ensured that theaters could provide an unrivaled experience, one that made watching TV seemed paltry by comparison.</p>
<p>In the end, home viewing and theatrical release managed to coexist.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<h2>The worst of times, the best of times</h2>
<p>In many ways, the current pandemic has been a tale of two movie industries. With theaters closed, streaming services have been cashing in. </p>
<p>Netflix, which has been laying <a href="https://theconversation.com/should-movie-studios-be-worried-about-netflixs-first-feature-film-47076">the groundwork for a direct-to-streaming world since 2015</a>, has added <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/16/netflix-subscriber-results-q2/">more than 10 million subscribers since March</a>. </p>
<p>Alarmed by the billions of dollars stuck in pandemic purgatory, some studios have started to change tacks. Tom Hanks’ new submarine film, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6048922/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Greyhound</a>,” steered its US$50 million budget directly to port on Apple TV+. Apple let financial markets know that the film’s opening, in terms of the number of people who watched, rivaled <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/07/tom-hanks-greyhound-apple-tv-opening-weekend-record-breaker-1202985492/">the best opening weekends</a>. Thirty percent of those viewers were new subscribers.</p>
<p>Yet rather than being extinguished, the theater model will likely continue to evolve. There is simply too much potential for return on investment in past, present and future blockbusters, and studios see the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/movies-used-to-be-an-escape-now-theyre-a-risk-reward-calculation/2020/05/12/858319fa-9151-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html">risk-reward ratio of theatrical release as a way to attract shareholders and keep them happy</a>. Audiences will still go out to be thrilled by big, CGI-driven spectacles with gut-rumbling surround sound. They’ve got a taste for it.</p>
<p>At the same time, major studios will likely continue to use their economic leverage to push into streaming in an attempt to maximize their potential for profit and control both modes of distribution. </p>
<p>It’s also possible that – with the winds of <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/zephyr-teachout-book-antitrust-monopolies-big-tech-facebook-amazon-google.html">antitrust sentiment starting to blow</a> – the industry will return to a theatrical distribution model more akin to the pre-Spanish flu era, when independent theaters could make deals with different distributors to show more than just blockbusters and use this flexibility to cultivate new or niche audiences. </p>
<p>If the lessons of the post-pandemic 1920s prove prophetic, we could be gearing up for a roaring decade with a rich diversity of films – in form, style and content – emerging to fit different modes of distribution. Think new series formats or even mini “<a href="https://medium.com/lightspeed-venture-partners/how-to-build-a-character-universe-15256046d289">character universes</a>” that rival Marvel’s on the small screen.</p>
<p>Seen this way, the 2020s could be a glorious period of experimentation and innovation.</p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of <a href="https://theconversation.com/movie-theaters-are-on-life-support-how-will-the-film-industry-adapt-143877">an article</a> originally published on Aug. 12, 2020.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/147535/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Jordan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The motion picture industry has endured a pandemic before. But the coronavirus may completely upend the old way of doing business.
Matthew Jordan, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Penn State
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/139735
2020-08-20T15:50:51Z
2020-08-20T15:50:51Z
A brief history of celebrity cameos, from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ to ‘Eurovision Song Contest’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350488/original/file-20200730-33-128wu4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C27%2C788%2C493&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The grotesque excesses of stardom in 'Sunset Boulevard' showed a truth captured by cameos: celebrities are best in small doses. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Paramount Pictures)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Exactly 70 years ago this month, <em>Sunset Boulevard</em>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043014/awards">the award-winning</a> <a href="https://screenprism.com/insights/article/why-was-sunset-boulevard-shot-in-black-and-white-when-color-was-an-option">classic</a>, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/billy-wilder-and-his-best-movies-a7521376.html">directed by Billy Wilder</a>, was released amid big changes in Hollywood. At the height of their powers, Hollywood studios had been self-contained, operating as monopolies <a href="http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2010/09/22/what-makes-hollywood-run/">where production, distribution and exhibition were all in-house,</a> and stars and directors were held by the studio under long-term, restrictive contracts. </p>
<p>The post-war breakup of movie studio monopolies meant a restructuring of the studio system, and the need for <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/ebook/9780520944749/hidden-talent">a new relationship with movie stars</a>. <em>Sunset Boulevard</em> shined a light on these changes by turning to the past and examining the aftermath of the last major shakeup in the movie industry, when <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/idols-of-modernity/9780813580104">silent stars had been quietly retired with the advent of sound in the late 1920s</a>.</p>
<p>At the centre of <em>Sunset Boulevard’s</em> nostalgic reflection was the character Norma Desmond, a silent star decaying in a fabulously appointed mansion, forgotten by the public and cast aside by the studios that in her heyday relied on her star power to make millions. In a bit of calculated casting, <em>Sunset Boulevard</em> featured Gloria Swanson, queen of the silent screen, in the starring role. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/06BUFeBkxpc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Male and Female,’ silent film (1919) starring Gloria Swanson.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Roles between fiction and reality</h2>
<p>Swanson had been the muse of directors like Cecil B. DeMille and Erich von Stroheim in epics and comedies, a countess by marriage and the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1987/03/22/the-kennedys-joe-sr-the-gloria-swanson-affair/177040b7-d53a-4365-a6e4-114db2046ce9/">rumoured lover of Joseph Kennedy</a>. But in the sound era, the extraordinarily famous Swanson was largely reduced to small parts. <em>Sunset Boulevard</em> was her 1950 comeback. The film’s story shows Swanson, as former star Norma, commissioning a script she’s sure will similarly put her back on screen.</p>
<p>Swanson and Norma become inseparable in the film because of their overlapping biographies. But filmmakers also relied on the same strategy of casting to fill other roles by casting <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-sunset-boulevard-1950">recognizable faces in bit parts</a>.</p>
<p>These cameos, where celebrities essentially play themselves in small parts, attest to real-life connections between the fictional Norma Desmond, the aging Gloria Swanson who played her — and a Hollywood populated by stars, many of whom were no longer big screen box-office draws. Some of these names had faded gracefully, while others were victims of past seismic shifts in the studio structure.</p>
<p>Slapstick comedian Buster Keaton, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Buster-Keaton">also a star of the silent screen,</a> drops in to play cards; director <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecil-B-DeMille">Cecil B. DeMille</a>, usually behind the scenes, politely turns down Norma’s story pitch. Cameos brought them out of the shadows and onto the screen. Certainly, for fans of silent film, Keaton, charismatic and well-known, seems to burst out of his jarringly small role. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350504/original/file-20200730-19-1ml4lla.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350504/original/file-20200730-19-1ml4lla.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350504/original/file-20200730-19-1ml4lla.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350504/original/file-20200730-19-1ml4lla.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350504/original/file-20200730-19-1ml4lla.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350504/original/file-20200730-19-1ml4lla.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350504/original/file-20200730-19-1ml4lla.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Holden plays Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter, commissioned by a wealthy and fading star eager to recapture attention, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in ‘Sunset Boulevard.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paramount Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Cameos always part of movie making</h2>
<p>Sunset Boulevard didn’t invent the cameo. As I trace in my book <em><a href="https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/stars-and-silhouettes">Stars and Silhouettes: The History of the Cameo Role in Hollywood</a></em>,
cameos have been part of moviemaking for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GErLVq8f-M">as long as there have been movie stars</a>. Cameos take advantage of our desire to watch our favourite stars again and again onscreen, allowing films to pack recognizable faces into small spaces in the narrative. </p>
<p>Trailers showing cameos seem full of the stars we want to see now. These cameos might not be recognizable to everyone — in <em>Sunset Boulevard</em>, Buster Keaton’s expressive eyes would stand out only to moviegoers of a certain age, and the face of even a name-brand director would be difficult to pick out of a crowd.
Unless you’ve been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/movies/silent-movies-buster-keaton.html">spending your lockdown developing an appreciation of silent movies</a>, these faces probably aren’t recognizable to a modern viewer either.</p>
<p>We want to see stars in the movies we watch, but we also want to be lost in stories. Too much star power can make it difficult for us to believe or invest in a world populated by famous people. Celebrity cameos solve this problem by working in small doses. Small parts and characters we might only see in a single shot take on the attributes of the actor and his roles. </p>
<h2>Outside the boundaries of film</h2>
<p>Cameos ask us to think outside the boundaries of the film we are watching and remember all of the details we know about the person we see onscreen. The cameo is disruptive, but it is also rewarding. </p>
<p>In Netflix’s recent <em>Eurovision Song Contest</em>, Will Ferrell’s latest comedy
which has undoubtedly provided <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/eurovision-song-contest-story-fire-saga-review/613567/">more accessible quarantine viewing</a> than century-old slapstick, viewers can test their knowledge of manufactured European pop hits as they see the singing competition’s <a href="https://variety.com/lists/netflix-eurovision-cameos-will-ferrell-rachel-mcadams/john-lundvik/">former contestants mingling in cameos at an afterparty</a>. </p>
<p>The cameo may take us out of the narrative if we recognize the cameoist, but it also invites us to participate in the film as we weigh our own memories of the actor against the current role. </p>
<h2>As movies change, so do cameos</h2>
<p>As how we watch movies has changed, so have cameos. In 1950, viewers couldn’t watch reruns on TV, and they certainly weren’t streaming videos on demand, checking up on the credits in IMDb or catching highlights on YouTube. </p>
<p>The cameos in <em>Sunset Boulevard</em> provided a nudge to remember, but the spiral of attention that cameos can now introduce are much more complex, spinning a web of remembrance and anticipation. Playing with reality and fiction, they make a game as we manage our expectations about how the celebrity will act based on past performances and real-world status. </p>
<p>Will they stand out as expected, as when former Eurovision contestant <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-44038316">Conchita Wurst</a> sings in a trademark beard in <em>Eurovision Song Contest</em>, or will they recede into the background for all but <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/beautiful-day-neighborhood-true-story-how-accurate-are-characters-1258012/item/abd-maryann-plunkett-1258022">those in the know</a>, like Mister Rogers’ widow in <em>A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood</em>? </p>
<p>Recognizing cameos makes us as viewers feel we have a part in creating the film’s story, as we confirm the place of both the actor and ourselves in pop culture.</p>
<p>You don’t need to know old Hollywood to appreciate <em>Sunset Boulevard</em> and its story of struggle in the face of changing economic realities. Nevertheless, a viewer with an eye for old faces is confronted with a playful jolt of recognition when she realizes these bit parts are no mere extras. </p>
<p>Cameos continue to be exciting to viewers today, rewarding us for our knowledge of the public world, whether it is gathered from gossip blogs, political news coverage or a lifetime of late-night movie watching.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139735/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joceline Andersen received funding for this project examining the cameo from SSHRC.</span></em></p>
Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic noir , ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ blurred boundaries between reality and fiction through casting. Recognizing cameos makes viewers feel we’re part of the film’s story.
Joceline Andersen, Assistant Teaching Professor in Communication and English, Thompson Rivers University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/141278
2020-06-23T07:53:26Z
2020-06-23T07:53:26Z
Vale Joel Schumacher – the Hollywood legend who brought us brat packs, teen vampires and Falling Down
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343431/original/file-20200623-188886-1pi70kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C6%2C1481%2C989&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA2NTQ0MTc1OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDY4NjYzNQ@@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1502,1000_AL_.jpg">Tigerland/IMDB</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001708/?ref_=rg_mv">Joel Schumacher</a>, <a href="https://variety.com/2020/film/news/joel-schumacher-dead-dies-batman-director-1234644961/">who has died aged 80 in New York</a>, never won an Oscar. </p>
<p>He <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=V0w_DQAAQBAJ&lpg=PT390&ots=SdAoh85IzT&dq=began%20drinking%20aged%20nine%20joel%20schumacher&pg=PT390#v=onepage&q=began%20drinking%20aged%20nine%20joel%20schumacher&f=false">began drinking</a> aged nine and spent the last years of his life apologising for having made <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118688/?ref_=nm_knf_t2">Batman and Robin</a> (1997). He was once described in <a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2000/10/03/falling-down/">The Village Voice</a> as a “well-oiled toxic-waste machine”. </p>
<p>And yet Schumacher’s body of work is profound, and his influence on contemporary Hollywood cinema indelible. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1275145885815627776"}"></div></p>
<h2>Hitmaker</h2>
<p>A glance at his back catalogue is testament to his talent, range, and his innate ability to spot a hit movie. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0155711/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_15">Flawless</a> (1999), he coaxed mighty performances from Robert de Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He introduced the world to Matthew McConaughey in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117913/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_18">A Time to Kill</a> (1996), Colin Farrell in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0170691/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Tigerland</a> (2000) and Joaquin Phoenix (previously credited as Leaf Phoenix) in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134273/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">8mm</a> (1999). </p>
<p>Cate Blanchett has rarely been better in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0312549/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_11">Veronica Guerin</a> (2003), nor Julia Roberts in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099582/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_26">Flatliners</a> (1990) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101787/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_25">Dying Young</a> (1991).</p>
<p>To understand Schumacher’s vast contribution, we need to go back to the start of his extraordinarily eclectic career, and his costume designs for Woody Allen’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070707/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Sleeper</a> (1973). </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/seams-dreams-the-hands-behind-classic-hollywood-costumes-34707">Seams, dreams: the hands behind classic Hollywood costumes</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>A sci-fi caper, in which Allen’s character awakens 200 years in the future and gets involved in bringing down a police state, is now largely overlooked, but Schumacher’s costumes remain unforgettable: inflatable onesies, the tuxedos topped with metal hats. </p>
<p>Here was someone with a sense of humour, sensitive to the camp excesses of genre cinema, and to how films might subvert and entertain in equal measure. This touch would serve Schumacher well – he went on to tap into longstanding entertainment trends like 70s disco, 80s Brat Pack and 90s “event” films.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343432/original/file-20200623-188911-1eiys12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343432/original/file-20200623-188911-1eiys12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343432/original/file-20200623-188911-1eiys12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343432/original/file-20200623-188911-1eiys12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343432/original/file-20200623-188911-1eiys12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343432/original/file-20200623-188911-1eiys12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343432/original/file-20200623-188911-1eiys12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343432/original/file-20200623-188911-1eiys12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Schumacher started out as a costume designer, working on Woody Allen’s Sleeper.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
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</figure>
<h2>Talent spotter</h2>
<p>He shifted to screenwriting, penning the blue-collar musical <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074281/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Car Wash</a> (1976) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078504/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_2">The Wiz</a> (1978), Sidney Lumet’s raucous Motown update of The Wizard of Oz, with Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow and Diana Ross as Dorothy. </p>
<p>It wasn’t long before he moved behind the camera, debuting <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082558/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1">The Incredible Shrinking Woman</a> (1981) with Lily Tomlin. It received a rave review from critic Roger Ebert, and kickstarted a two-decade string of commercial success.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘A woman who gave so much, and got so little.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>1985’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090060/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">St Elmo’s Fire</a> set down the template for American coming-of-age dramas, full of characters struggling to adapt to post-college lives of responsibility and conformity. </p>
<p>Schumacher tweaked that formula two years’ later in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093437/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Lost Boys</a>, another coming-of-age tale, only this time with vampires in sunny California. It is easy to forget the film’s immense cultural impact: it brought vampires into the Hollywood mainstream years before Buffy and the Twilight series. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Teen vampires, years before Buffy and Twilight.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The cast for the two hit films included Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. One of Schumacher’s most important contributions will remain his extraordinary ability to spot talent. </p>
<p>In the crowded early-80s film scene, stars were discovered via TV roles or moved westward from New York theatre and Schumacher’s casting nous was exemplary. Names like Keifer Sutherland, Ally Sheedy and Rob Lowe form the Rosetta Stone of 1980s American movie culture, and Schumacher fought hard to cast them all.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1275139392915402752"}"></div></p>
<h2>And then there was Batman</h2>
<p>Film history is full of directors who shuttled across assignments, content not to leave any discernable authorial “mark”, but simply just to work, to pay bills, to collaborate with fresh-faced actors, to explore new forms. Schumacher is part of that exalted company. </p>
<p>Tigerland was shot in less than four weeks, and is now regarded as one of the most searing depictions of the Vietnam War. Schumacher’s adaptations of John Grisham’s The Client (1994) and A Time to Kill (1996) are benchmarks of novel-to-film transitions and foregrounded his ability to weave complex, multi-character stories in a brisk, non-ostentatious manner. </p>
<p>Even later films, such as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293508/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Phantom of the Opera</a> (2004) and the Jim Carrey vehicle <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0481369/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Number 23</a> (2007) blend showmanship, schlock and glitz-and-glamour. Schumacher thus fits neatly alongside contemporaries such as Ivan Reitman and Rob Reiner. He flitted nimble from genre to genre, but he was no hack.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">He was really sorry. Really he was.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And then there is Batman. To look at <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112462/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Batman Forever</a> (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997) now is like peering through a cracked kaleidoscope. What were they thinking? </p>
<p>Nowadays, Batman is Christian Bale, broodingly directed by Christopher Nolan, weighed down with existential angst. But Schumacher’s versions – both enormous box-office hits at the time, despite the critical brickbats – arguably do something with the Batman extended universe that neither Tim Burton before, nor Nolan and Zack Snyder afterwards, were prepared to countenance: make them fun. </p>
<p>These are garish, hyperactive superhero films, full of fridge-magnet colour schemes and camp villains (Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face). Schumacher replicates the kapow-shazam goofiness of the 1960s Batman TV series in a knowing way. </p>
<p>Realising he had been hired by Warner Brothers to shift the franchise in a more child-friendly direction, Schumacher duly obliged, and spent the rest of his career <a href="https://screenrant.com/joel-schumacher-apologizes-batman-robin/">issuing mea culpas</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-jokers-origin-story-comes-at-a-perfect-moment-clowns-define-our-times-123009">The Joker’s origin story comes at a perfect moment: clowns define our times</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Roll credits</h2>
<p>There was the inevitable tailing off, as there always is with directors who become unwell, or who find themselves out of step with the financial demands of billionaire studio conglomerates. But still he kept working. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183649/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Phone Booth</a> (2002) was as high-concept as anything Hollywood commissioned at the time – what would you do if you were trapped in a street-corner telephone booth, with an assassin’s gun trained on you?</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘We stopped serving breakfast at 11.30.’ Oh no, they didn’t.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Perhaps it’s most fitting to remember him by reflecting on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Falling Down</a> (1993), with Michael Douglas as a recently fired defence worker who becomes a one-man vigilante after escaping a Los Angeles traffic jam. The film feels both of its time (Schumacher began filming the day the LA Riots broke out) and overwhelmingly modern. </p>
<p>Schumacher once <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/joel-schumacher-in-conversation.html">said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s very hard to realise you have a calling and realise you’re not gifted. I wanted to be a director all my life, and when I finally got the chance, I was so miserably untalented. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>When we reflect on his contribution to modern cinema, we see how wrong he was.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141278/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ben McCann does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Movie director Joel Schumacher’s body of work is profound, and his influence on contemporary Hollywood cinema indelible.
Ben McCann, Associate Professor of French Studies, University of Adelaide
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/134215
2020-03-20T15:23:18Z
2020-03-20T15:23:18Z
Coronavirus: five musicals chosen by a musicologist to keep you going during lockdown
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/321990/original/file-20200320-22606-jn84bp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C7%2C1187%2C765&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Romance on the High Seas.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Warner Bros</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the golden age of Hollywood, people turned to musicals for comfort and distraction. To watch and listen to Ann Miller or Doris Day perform Irving Berlin’s song Shakin’ the Blues Away in their respective appearances in Easter Parade (1948) or Love Me or Leave Me (1955) is to put our own cares and woes on hold – if just for a minute – while we respond to their charm and talent, as well as the sheer kinetic energy of their performances. </p>
<p>And whether it’s Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby duetting in High Society (1956) or the virtuosity of the Nicholas Brothers’ dance routine in Stormy Weather (1943), the movie musical has an enduring ability to soothe our minds and engage our brains. These were the brilliant products of the “Dream Factory” – as Hollywood was known during the studio era, when teams of composers, performers, choreographers, directors and designers were paid big salaries simply to produce several uplifting musicals a year.</p>
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<p>With the <a href="https://visionaryarts.org.uk/the-bfi-musical-film-season-why-we-need-musicals-now-more-than-ever/">resurgence of the movie musical</a> since Moulin Rouge! (2001) and the popularity of La La Land (2016) and The Greatest Showman (2017) showing that the musical is <a href="https://screenrant.com/highest-grossing-movie-musicals-box-office-mojo/">once more a viable commercial genre</a>, here are five older screen musicals you may not have come across before – mood-lifting classics with stars including Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire to keep us all engaged at a time of turmoil. </p>
<h2>I Love Melvin (1953)</h2>
<p>I was thrilled when the <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b6acef0da">BFI chose to screen</a> this little-known MGM movie during its recent “Musicals!” festival. Following the success of Singin’ in the Rain (1952), MGM brought two of its stars back together, but in a different configuration: this time, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor played the lovers. And from the beginning, it’s clear that this is no B-movie, even if few people have heard of it nowadays. </p>
<p>It’s partly filmed on location (including sequences in New York’s Central Park) and the production values are high. What I’ve always loved about the movie is the fact that it’s a heavily tongue-in-cheek satire of Hollywood, particularly of the musical. Look for example at the duet We Have Never Met (As Yet), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz77dZKhM-I">available on YouTube</a>, in which the writers lampoon the Hollywood “meet cute” by having Reynolds and O’Connor bump into each other while singing about how they haven’t yet met their true loves (when they actually have).</p>
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<p>The score, by Josef Myrow and Mack Gordon, is as charming as anything MGM produced – and Gene Kelly, who is not in the movie, nevertheless makes his presence felt when men in the chorus wear Kelly masks in a slightly surreal dance sequence.</p>
<h2>Roberta (1935)</h2>
<p>Fans of Astaire and Rogers who have never seen it should drop everything and watch Roberta immediately. It’s a liberal film adaptation of a successful Broadway musical of the same name, but the addition of the popular team of Fred and Ginger automatically impacted on the story and score. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.songhall.org/profile/Jerome_Kern">Jerome Kern’s</a> songs are top notch and include the standard Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which has been covered by everyone from Cher to Miles Davis. The famous dancers play former sweethearts and hilarity ensues when Fred discovers that Ginger is living in Paris, pretending to be a countess. </p>
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<p>The movie is almost as good as Top Hat, which was released the same year, and Fred and Ginger are at the top of their game – the movie deserves more attention. But there’s a good reason why it has never entered the canon: MGM bought the movie from RKO in the 1940s and remade it as the second-rate Lovely to Look At in 1952, suppressing the 1935 version for several decades. </p>
<h2>Romance on the High Seas (1948)</h2>
<p>Although her name continues to resonate through the years, Doris Day remains, for my money, the most underrated performer from the golden era of the movie musical. Indeed, it seems to me that her versatility has never been fully recognised: compare her gut-wrenching portrayal of distress at discovering her son has been kidnapped in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) to her lively turn singing The Deadwood Stage as Calamity Jane (1953) and you can instantly see that this is someone of unusual ability. </p>
<p>But for one of her sunniest performances, I recommend her debut movie Warner Bros’ Romance on the High Seas (released in the UK as It’s Magic – the title of one of the outstanding Jule Styne songs in the score). Day was working as a band singer when she was called in to audition for the movie, replacing the pregnant Betty Hutton, who was a well-established star.</p>
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<p>While she was an unknown compared to several other actors in the movie, who include Janis Paige, Jack Carson and Oscar Levant – not to mention popular character actors Eric Blore (Top Hat) and S. Z. Sakall – Day completely steals the show. Watch as a star is born right before your eyes.</p>
<h2>On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970)</h2>
<p>It’s not to everyone’s taste – and again it’s based on a Broadway show, so not technically an original movie musical – but I’ve always had a soft spot for Barbra Streisand’s third film, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, released by Paramount in 1970. It was <a href="https://variety.com/2011/legit/reviews/on-a-clear-day-you-can-see-forever-1117946735/">extensively rewritten for the screen</a> so that Streisand appears in almost every song, and the score by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner is full of catchy tunes and hilarious lyrics (Come Back to Me is a particular joy).</p>
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<p>Vocally at her early best, Streisand plays two characters: the present-day American Daisy Gamble and her 19th-century English alter ego, Lady Melinda Winifred Waine Tentrees. Daisy believes she is the reincarnation of Melinda and when she goes into psychoanalysis to try and rid herself of her nicotine addiction, her therapist discovers – and falls in love with – Melinda. </p>
<p>While the film is overlong (even after several songs were cut – and the film footage on those songs has apparently never been discovered), veteran director Vincente Minnelli, of An American in Paris and Meet Me in St Louis fame, offers some innovative sequences in this late-career movie. Watch out for a young Jack Nicholson, who plays Streisand’s stepbrother.</p>
<h2>Summer Stock (1950)</h2>
<p>No list of cheering musicals would be complete without Judy Garland – and Gene Kelly and MGM’s Summer Stock is the ideal climax to our survey. Garland’s ruthless treatment by MGM (as <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/judy-movie-fact-fiction-garland-biopic-historical-accuracy.html">depicted in the recent film Judy</a>) led to her becoming an <a href="http://www.thejudyroom.com/unfinished.html">unreliable figure in the late 1940s</a>. </p>
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<p>Due to exhaustion, she had to be replaced by Ginger Rogers in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), which had been designed as a follow-up to the Garland-Astaire classic Easter Parade (1948). She was also removed from the screen adaptation of Annie Get Your Gun after filming several numbers and pre-recording most of the soundtrack. </p>
<p>But don’t overlook her brilliance in Summer Stock (1950), in which she plays a farm owner who allows Gene Kelly and his troupe to rehearse on their property in return for completing chores. The dazzling score by Harry Warren – best known for 1930s classics such as 42nd Street – is supplemented by Harold Arlen’s Get Happy, in which Garland wears her iconic tuxedo costume. You get 109 minutes of happiness: what’s not to love?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/134215/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dominic McHugh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Nothing passes the time like a singalong to some classics from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Dominic McHugh, Professor, Department of Music, Personal Chair, Musicology, University of Sheffield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/131496
2020-02-17T12:28:38Z
2020-02-17T12:28:38Z
Bombshell: Hollywood’s lukewarm attempt to get to grips with #MeToo
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315687/original/file-20200217-11005-vfw4ne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C4384%2C3077&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lionsgate</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s a degree of irony in the fact that Bombshell, the movie about the fall of Fox News boss and serial sexual harasser Roger Ailes, was awarded an Oscar for make-up and hairstyling. One of the themes that runs through the movie is the objectification of Fox’s female employees, so giving the movie an award for the way its female stars look on screen feels a little jarring.</p>
<p>It’s certainly a superb cast and a stellar set of performances, starring three of Hollywood’s most bankable female stars, Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie. Kidman and Theron respectively play two of Fox News’s most recognisable former news anchors: Gretchen Carlson, the former Miss America and Stanford graduate; and Megyn Kelly, a former attorney whose nightly programme, The Kelly File, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tv-ratings-megyn-kelly-bests-819516">vied with that of Bill O’Reilly for popularity</a> during its run from 2013 to 2017. The film centres on Carlson’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/business/media/gretchen-carlson-fox-news-roger-ailes-sexual-harassment-lawsuit.html">2016 sexual harassment lawsuit</a> against Ailes, then chairman and CEO of Fox News. </p>
<p>Margot Robbie plays the fictitious Kayla – a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/12/fictions-bombshell-movie/603982/">composite character</a> comprised of other women who laid complaints at Fox. Styled along the lines of conservative political commentator Tomi Lahren as a young Trump-supporting evangelical, Kayla nonetheless embarks on a somewhat improbable friendly sexual encounter with Jess Carr – another composite Fox character who is a closet liberal and closet lesbian, played by Kate McKinnon. </p>
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<p>On the issue of sexual harassment, Bombshell shows how a culture of misogyny becomes embedded in workplace practices, where senior male figures abuse positions of power. Promises of promotion and threats of job loss or demotion are used to coerce and frighten women into accepting unwanted sexual advances. This culture of abuse comes from the outlandish and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/18/bombshell-review-charlize-theron-nicole-kidman-margot-robbie">almost pitiable figure of Ailes</a> (played by John Lithgow) whose motto is “to get ahead, you gotta give a little head”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315704/original/file-20200217-10991-f4ars6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315704/original/file-20200217-10991-f4ars6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315704/original/file-20200217-10991-f4ars6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315704/original/file-20200217-10991-f4ars6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315704/original/file-20200217-10991-f4ars6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315704/original/file-20200217-10991-f4ars6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315704/original/file-20200217-10991-f4ars6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Lithgow as Fox News boss Roger Ailes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lionsgate</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The film also speaks to the ways in which women who stay silent about their own experience of harassment can unwillingly or unwittingly perpetuate that culture by failing to call perpetrators to account. In one scene, Robbie’s fictional character Kayla chastises Kelly for failing to report Ailes, asking “did you think what your silence would mean?”. The film shows how reporting such violations as a lone individual is extremely difficult. Without – and sometimes even with – the weight of supporting testimony, they are often doomed to fail.</p>
<h2>Uncomfortable objectification</h2>
<p>Certainly, the culture of misogyny at Fox under Ailes is depicted as deep and entrenched. In one of the film’s quasi-documentary sequences, we learn that Ailes “pioneered” the visual objectification of female news anchors through <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/jan/17/bombshell-gets-fox-news-look-spot-on-say-former-anchors">an obsessive focus of cameras on their legs</a>. There follows a deeply uncomfortable scene where Ailes invites Kayla to his office, and as he salivates, asks her to raise her dress inch by inch, until we see a shot of her crotch. </p>
<p>As a viewer, I began to ask how this lingering shot of Robbie’s crotch about a third of the way into the movie, really served the interest of the film’s broader themes. The scriptwriter Charles Randolph has said the film was <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-12-19/bombshell-was-written-with-men-in-mind-says-charles-randolph">written for men</a> and that this scene was a way to “put a few men like me into the rooms where harassment happens”. </p>
<p>In another film, this shot might have been an attempt to place the viewer directly in the position of Ailes, to ask them to question their own complicity in the objectification of women. But Bombshell is not this film. From the outset, the film’s relationship to feminism is confused. </p>
<p>In an early scene, Megyn Kelly declares “I’m not a feminist, I’m a lawyer” while her assistant declares, “God, I’d love to be slut-shamed”, turning a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slut-shaming">concept</a> that was designed to highlight how women and girls are criticised and punished for their appearance or behaviour, into something desirable. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1COapDtAVWY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>While not all people react in the same way to sexual harassment, it can have devastating long-term emotional and professional consequences for women — something that the film’s triumphant coda regarding the <a href="https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/05/10/foxs-bill-roger-ailes-settlements-now-45-million/101515930/">multi-million-dollar settlement</a> does not make explicit.</p>
<h2>The first #MeToo movie?</h2>
<p>Bombshell has been described as the <a href="https://qz.com/work/1693558/bombshell-might-be-the-first-great-film-of-the-me-too-movement/">“first” #MeToo film</a>, and the <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bombshell-review-this-post-weinstein-movie-is-explosive-cq26wxqrt">“definitive” film</a> about the #MeToo movement – and there is much to admire about a group of women who take on a workplace riddled with sexual harassment, and win. Yet the film appears to view the women’s political ideologies and their fight against sexism as separate issues. The ideological individualism of Kelly and Carlson means they don’t see their struggle for freedom from sexual harassment as embedded in the fight for other rights.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315708/original/file-20200217-10991-1gz874z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315708/original/file-20200217-10991-1gz874z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315708/original/file-20200217-10991-1gz874z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315708/original/file-20200217-10991-1gz874z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315708/original/file-20200217-10991-1gz874z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315708/original/file-20200217-10991-1gz874z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315708/original/file-20200217-10991-1gz874z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Margot Robbie and Kate McKinnon as composite characters Kayla Pospisil and Jess Carr in Bombshell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lionsgate</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kelly, while critiquing what she calls Trump’s “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/06/donald-trump-misogyny-republican-debate-megyn-kelly">War on Women</a>”, does not appear to see how her work for Fox has made her a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/can-megyn-kelly-escape-her-past/513842/">soldier in the network’s war</a> – not just on women, but on racial and ethnic minorities, LGBT people, immigrants and other vulnerable populations as well. </p>
<p>The film also sees no contradiction in having Rupert Murdoch, whose newspaper and media empire has been notorious for its use of titillating pictures of women, arrive at the end of the film as a kind of <em>deus ex machina</em>, appearing suddenly at the end of the film, sons in tow, to fire Ailes and restore order to the Fox offices.</p>
<h2>Hollywood’s misogyny problem</h2>
<p>Ailes is an easy target: he is dead and can’t be libelled, and the workplace he presided over at Fox was an exceptionally egregious example of a misogynistic work environment: Bill O'Reilly, a major Fox anchor since 1996, has also been the subject of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/business/media/bill-oreilly-sexual-harassment-fox-news.html?auth=login-google">numerous sexual harassment claims</a>.</p>
<p>But Hollywood <a href="https://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/Dr_Stacy_L_Smith-Inequality_in_900_Popular_Films.pdf">has its own misogyny problem</a> to confront. This is still an industry where between 2007 and 2016 only 4.2% of the 900 top-grossing films were made by women and only 0.49% by women from racial and ethnic minority groups. </p>
<p>The proverbial elephant in the Hollywood green room is Harvey Weinstein, whose trial on five counts including rape, criminal sexual acts and predatory sexual assault <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/nyregion/harvey-weinstein-trial.html">continues</a>. As Ronan Farrow’s recent book Catch and Kill has shown, Weinstein used his leverage in the journalism and entertainment industries to try to <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2019/11/ronan-farrow-pursuing-harvey-weinstein-and-experiencing-halo-effect">cover up Farrow’s investigation</a>.</p>
<p>The question remains as to whether Hollywood will take on its own “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/opinion/weinstein-trial-metoo.html">monster</a>”. That’s a #MeToo story that may prove more difficult to tell, and more difficult still to be told with women both in front of <em>and</em> behind the camera.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131496/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maria Flood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The film misses an opportunity to highlight the broader problems of inequality and discrimination in the media.
Maria Flood, Lecturer in Film Studies, Keele University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/131075
2020-02-07T15:13:01Z
2020-02-07T15:13:01Z
Oscars 2020: Academy Awards struggling to become progressive in a changing world
<p>As the great and good of the movie world get ready to step out on the Oscars red carpet, old Hollywood glamour – and old Hollywood values – remain central to the night. The <a href="https://oscar.go.com/">Academy Awards</a> presentation is one of the most prestigious events in the film industry. And while the awards are the focus of limited academic research, they offer insight into Hollywood trends and the issues faced by the American film industry.</p>
<p>By assessing the Oscars’ current status, we can clearly see tension arising between the old guard of Hollywood and the newer values and practices of the industry. Debates around the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-can-we-get-to-the-bottom-of-hollywoods-diversity-problem-73309">diversity of nominees</a> – both in terms of gender and race – come at a time when the way that we interact with film is changing.</p>
<p>Online streaming services are offering easy access to movies. And although some streaming firms’ films have been recognised by the Academy Awards, movies are only eligible for nomination if they have had a theatrical release alongside their online debut.</p>
<p>In 2019, <a href="https://theconversation.com/roma-mexican-film-industry-blooms-with-oscar-nominations-a-century-after-its-origins-in-the-chihuahua-desert-110207">Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma</a> became the first Netflix film to be nominated for best picture. In 2020, an even more extensive slate of Netflix movies have been nominated for a <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/13/21063451/oscar-nominations-2020-academy-awards-joker-netflix-actors-movies">total of 24 awards</a>, including The Irishman (four including best actor, best picture and best director), The Two Popes (best actor, best supporting actor and best adapted screenplay) and Marriage Story (six including acting, directing and screenplay).</p>
<p>But despite Netflix’s seeming <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2020/01/netflix-dominates-oscar-nominations-for-the-first-time-beating-studios-1202202813/#!">dominance of this year’s Oscars</a>, the relationship between streaming services and the Academy has not been without controversy. Martin Scorsese <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/02/martin-scorsese-the-irishman-dont-watch-on-phone-netflix">has begged people</a> not to watch The Irishman on a phone screen. This seems odd coming from a director who is clearly benefiting from a service that offers its subscribers the ability to watch films anytime, anywhere. </p>
<p>In 2019 Steven Spielberg spoke in favour of the Academy only celebrating films that have <a href="https://variety.com/2019/film/awards/steven-spielberg-oscars-netflix-1203155528/">had a theatrical release</a> and one of the <a href="https://www.oscars.org/oscars/rules-eligibility">prize’s key rules</a> is that a film must have a “qualifying theatrical run of at least seven consecutive days, during which period screenings must occur at least three times daily”. </p>
<p>At least one of these screenings <a href="https://www.oscars.org/oscars/rules-eligibility">must be</a> between 6pm and 10pm in the evening and the theatrical run must be for “paid admission in a commercial motion picture theatre in Los Angeles County”. This is a potentially prohibitive rule for smaller-scale or streaming service-only productions. It also underlines the old-fashioned idea of LA being the one and only home of movies.</p>
<h2>New tensions, old values</h2>
<p>The Academy’s difficulty in keeping up with the times is also evident in the regular rows over diversity. Claims of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2016/feb/12/racism-sexism-ageism-homophobia-four-theatres-of-oscar-conflict">sexism and racism</a>, as well as ageism and homophobia, are frequently levelled at the Academy Awards. In <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-unmasking-oscar-academy-project-20120219-story.html">2012, a study by the LA Times</a> found that 94% of Oscar voters were white and 77% were male.</p>
<p>The Academy has attempted to improve these figures in recent years, breaking its own cap of 5,000 members in order to diversify its voters. A recent report revealed that the Academy had issued more than 900 invitations for extra voters as part of <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/new-academy-members-2018-revealed-1123069">a diversity initiative in 2018</a>. Nearly half (49%) of those invited were female and 38% were people of colour. Beyond that, however, the make-up of the Academy’s membership remains opaque.</p>
<p>Despite the push to improve the diversity of the Academy, the lack of women nominated for best director has become <a href="https://variety.com/2020/film/news/oscars-female-director-shutout-hollywood-reacts-1203465116/">a tiresome norm</a> for the Oscars – and 2020 is no exception. Likewise best actor and supporting actor nominees are all white, as are best supporting actress. In the best director category, only the presence of Bong Joon Ho for Korean movie Parasite mitigates against the once again deserved hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, while Cynthia Erivo is the lone woman of colour vying for best actress.</p>
<p>Such biases are exacerbated by the regulations regarding theatrical release. Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime offer opportunities to women and filmmakers of colour that are not available in the mainstream but these films tend to be overlooked at awards ceremonies. </p>
<p>For example, Lynne Ramsay’s 2017 film You Were Never Really Here, a film distributed by Amazon, was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/26/you-were-never-really-here-review-joaquin-phoenix-lynne-ramsay-cannes-2017">hailed by critics</a> but failed to receive a single nomination for the 2018 Oscars. Meanwhile directors such as Scorsese – whose names can justify the brief theatrical release required by the rules and who bring “prestige” (not to mention lots of viewers) to these services – tend to overshadow the less well-known names. </p>
<h2>I’ll catch it on Twitter</h2>
<p>Perhaps as a result of this, there’s been a <a href="https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/oscars-ratings-2019-1203144417/">downturn in interest in the Oscars broadcast</a> in recent years. The 2018 and 2019 Academy Awards achieved the <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/253743/academy-awards--number-of-viewers/">lowest ratings</a> ever for the ceremony. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314190/original/file-20200207-27538-1kigxuh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314190/original/file-20200207-27538-1kigxuh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314190/original/file-20200207-27538-1kigxuh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314190/original/file-20200207-27538-1kigxuh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314190/original/file-20200207-27538-1kigxuh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314190/original/file-20200207-27538-1kigxuh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314190/original/file-20200207-27538-1kigxuh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314190/original/file-20200207-27538-1kigxuh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Oscars broadcast ratings 2000 to 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Statista 2020</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Critics believe the Oscars have become <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-predictable-are-the-oscars-more-than-you-might-think-73191">increasingly predictable</a> in terms of who wins awards. The <a href="https://www.looper.com/112576/people-stopped-watching-oscars/">long speeches and problematic hosts</a> have also become offputting for viewers. Seth McFarlane’s sexist performance of We Saw Your Boobs at the 2013 ceremony was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2013/feb/25/seth-macfarlane-oscars-opening-boob">widely criticised as distasteful</a> and, in 2019, the awards ceremony was without a host after <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-46479017">Kevin Hart stepped down</a> following controversy around his homophobic humour and offensive tweets.</p>
<p>The broadcast is also struggling to adapt to changing viewing practices of both the ceremony and the films it highlights. While ratings for the televised ceremony fall, key events or scandals (remember when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/01/warren-beatty-oscars-president-should-publicly-clarify-best-picture-fiasco">announced the wrong winner</a> of best picture in 2017) are becoming the key talking points in the hours after the ceremony and tend to be consumed as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/24/a-brief-history-of-the-oscars-in-viral-moments-they-want-you-to-forget">clips via social media or YouTube</a>. </p>
<p>These viral Oscars “snippets” – <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/oscars-2019-most-viral-moments-memes-tweets">and their evident popularity</a> – suggest that today’s audiences are less interested in the prolonged celebration of traditional Hollywood and are more likely to want to pick and choose what aspects they engage with. So, if the way in which we interact with film is changing, can the Academy keep up?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131075/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Despite the efforts to expand the Academy, women and people of colour are once again conspicuous by their absence this year.
Claire Jenkins, Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of Leicester
Stevie Marsden, Research Associate, CAMEo Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, University of Leicester
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/130069
2020-01-17T16:30:47Z
2020-01-17T16:30:47Z
Cats: a box office bomb, but has anyone noticed the ethnic stereotyping?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310669/original/file-20200117-118347-jpz5ms.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C0%2C3585%2C1491&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Idris Elba and Francesca Hayward</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">2019 Universal Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://variety.com/2019/film/box-office/cats-box-office-losses-flop-1203453171/">US$100 million film version</a> of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash-hit musical Cats, currently in cinemas, has bombed at <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2020/12/30/cats-is-a-box-office-bomb-that-on-paper-looked-like-a-pretty-safe-bet/#2a076ed267f0">the box office</a>, <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/cats-review-round-up-film-new-adaptation-musical-andrew-lloyd-webber-1345293">been savaged by critics</a> and withdrawn from <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/cats-reviews-oscars-awards-box-office-cost-critics-universal-a9262156.html">Oscar consideration</a>. </p>
<p>Part of this failure relates to problems in adaptation. How should creators transpose animal characters from stage to screen? How do we view bodies differently in real and recorded formats? What kind of criteria should be used to judge a hybrid production? But one thing the media has hardly mentioned, that is a problem, is the racial bias that is embodied in the representation of the cats on screen.</p>
<p>Adapting a text or play for the screen can be a tricky business. We inherit certain expectations from source materials, and ask questions about “fidelity” and what’s been added and cut when a narrative is translated into film.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FtSd844cI7U?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>TS Eliot’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/old-possums-book-of-practical-cats-by-t-s-eliot?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6bHvmeDt5gIVirTtCh3O7Q5iEAAYAiAAEgIOSfD_BwE">original poems for children</a> were adapted to a stage show by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1981. The musical was hugely successful and went on to run for more than 20 years, grossing <a href="https://nypost.com/2012/11/21/how-cats-was-purrfected/">several billion dollars</a> and winning <a href="https://www.tonyawards.com/winners/?q=cats">seven Tony awards</a>.</p>
<p>Nearly four decades later, Universal Pictures adapted the show for the big screen and the resulting film was released in December 2019. The audience for this film is made up of musical theatre fans as well as other moviegoers who may not have the same expectations – and the film must make sense for both groups.</p>
<p>Much of the controversy over the Cats adaptation has focused on how bodies are represented and viewed. Cats as a stage show, with its 1980s unitards, was heavy on sex appeal – particularly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=63&v=ywFbpDjpZno&feature=emb_logo">Rum Tum Tugger</a>, whose hip-thrusting choreography conjured up animalistic hedonism. </p>
<p>Criticism of the movie has fixated on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/19/cats-the-kinkiest-film-to-ever-earn-a-u-certificate-tom-hooper-andrew-lloyd-webber">CGI choices</a>, the grafting of moving ears, tails and “digital fur”, and <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/jason-derulo-cats-penis-928006/">removal of human parts</a> in pursuit of the “U” rating. In a moment that may be an in-joke, the character Jennyanydots wonders if Rum Tum Tugger has been neutered.</p>
<h2>Uncanny valley</h2>
<p>In digital film, an effect recently described as “<a href="https://theconversation.com/uncanny-valley-why-we-find-human-like-robots-and-dolls-so-creepy-50268">uncanny valley</a>” – the slightly creepy effect created by use of technology to alter images – means that we find hybrid bodies disconcerting, as our expectations are confused. Are these human-like cats, or cat-like humans? Is the feline characterisation erotic or innocent? Is this a movie for adults or children?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/uncanny-valley-why-we-find-human-like-robots-and-dolls-so-creepy-50268">Uncanny valley: why we find human-like robots and dolls so creepy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>There’s also a big difference between the way music works on stage and on screen – and if you saw the musical, your expectations for the film might leave you disappointed. The director, Tom Hooper, chose quiet, up-close delivery, similar to the effect he chose for his 2012 musical film version of Les Misérables, prioritising intimate vocals over the projection needed in a stage show. An exception is made for Jennifer Hudson’s powerful voice (as Grizabella), which we are primed for by her fame as a singer and a preview of her big moment in the trailer.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310658/original/file-20200117-118319-1dd5fzx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310658/original/file-20200117-118319-1dd5fzx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310658/original/file-20200117-118319-1dd5fzx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310658/original/file-20200117-118319-1dd5fzx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310658/original/file-20200117-118319-1dd5fzx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310658/original/file-20200117-118319-1dd5fzx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310658/original/file-20200117-118319-1dd5fzx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tragic diva: Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">2019 Universal Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In fact, most of her big number, Memory, is almost spoken. Hushed vocals, made for film, contrast with large-scale, theatrical choreography (much borrowed from the stage show). This confuses our expectations of the screen versus the stage even further.</p>
<p>But none of these issues prepare us for the central problem with the 2019 Cats – the racial bias evident in characterisation.</p>
<h2>Racial bias</h2>
<p>Since black-face minstrelsy, musical theatre has had a fraught history with race. It could be argued that anthropomorphised animal characters have the potential to express racial bias at its most troubling. For example, American academic and theatre-maker <a href="https://www.montclair.edu/profilepages/view_profile.php?username=braterj">Jessica Brater</a> and her co-authors have noted (in Theatre Journal – not available online) how the character of Donkey in Shrek The Musical – an adaptation from Eddie Murphy’s voicing of the character from the animated film – embodies the lineage of minstrelsy in operation on the Broadway stage. </p>
<p>In the Cats movie, black actors portray marginalised characters. Macavity, the criminal – originally a ginger cat – is now Idris Elba, clad in rich brown digital fur. Grizabella the outcast is also a character of colour, played, as we have heard, by Jennifer Hudson. Grizabella’s saviour, Old Deuteronomy, comes in the distinctly white form of Judi Dench. This is doubly unfortunate given the history of the character on stage – played by several black actors including Ken Page on Broadway and Quentin Earl Darrington in the 2016 revival. </p>
<p>Jason Derulo recreates the oversexed Rum Tum Tugger bedecked in hip-hop apparel. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310676/original/file-20200117-118331-1bxsvhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310676/original/file-20200117-118331-1bxsvhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310676/original/file-20200117-118331-1bxsvhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310676/original/file-20200117-118331-1bxsvhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310676/original/file-20200117-118331-1bxsvhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310676/original/file-20200117-118331-1bxsvhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310676/original/file-20200117-118331-1bxsvhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Oversexed: Rum Tum Tugger played by Jason Derulo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">2019 Universal Pictures</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The central character, Victoria – the white cat, ballerina and ingenue – is played by a dancer of dual heritage, Francesca Hayward. But <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2019/07/19/real-cats-controversy-whitewashing-francesca-hayward/">it has been noted in the press</a> and by many commentators on Twitter, that only in her case is her original skin tone concealed, by digital whitewashing.</p>
<p>Overall, elements of casting, costume, cultural appropriation and aesthetics become more problematic on a cumulative basis, where actors who are visibly black are cast and costumed as the criminal, the Lothario and the outcast, while saviour and ingenue characters are made explicitly white.</p>
<p>But, apart from the apparent whitening of Hayward, this appears to have largely escaped the notice of the press. </p>
<p>The film seeks family appeal – and there is potentially a great deal of appeal in a tale of singing, dancing, CGI-enhanced cats to engage youngsters. But this huge budget spectacle frees itself from the obligation to take on the social responsibility that is assumed, for example, <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/site/diversity-inclusion-commissioning-guidelines-bbc-content.pdf">by BBC television productions</a> and other content created explicitly for children. </p>
<p>If there is a cult afterlife for Cats, as <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/worst-movies-2019-cats-cult-classic.html">some predict</a>, it is not raciness but racial bias embedded in the film that will frame it markedly within our current age – a time that really ought to know better.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130069/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Daniel has previously received funding from the AHRC, the Royal Musical Association and the Fund for Women Graduates. She is currently affiliated with the Labour Party. </span></em></p>
There are many reasons the movie version of Cats has flopped, not least the unfortunate way in which various characters have been assigned racial characteristics.
Jennifer Daniel, Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre, Edge Hill University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/127758
2019-11-26T10:04:26Z
2019-11-26T10:04:26Z
Watching the whistleblowers: two new spy films tailor-made for an age of paranoia
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303492/original/file-20191125-74603-1dx99fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1%2C1098%2C615&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Whistle-blower: Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nick Wall/IFC Films</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The revelations surrounding US president Donald Trump’s telephone conversation with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, are raising serious questions about attempts to solicit outside interference in US domestic affairs. The erupting impeachment scandal <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/20/politics/whistleblower-timeline-ukraine-team-trump/index.html">has placed whistleblowers</a> firmly back on the international agenda.</p>
<p>In a scene from director Gavin Hood’s 2019 film Official Secrets, journalist Martin Bright (Matt Smith) meets a source in an underground car park. “Very Deep Throat,” he comments drily, referencing the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/19/watergate-deep-throat-dies">famous source in the 1970s Watergate conspiracy</a> that brought down then US president, Richard Nixon. His informant holds up her mobile phone: “No signal,” she replies, indicating the real reason for her choice of location. </p>
<p>In a single moment, the film – which is set in 2003 – both acknowledges its generic heritage and positions itself in the technological context of early 21st-century spycraft. The pervasive fear of surveillance has been updated for the digital age.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/movies/official-secrets-review.html">Official Secrets</a> is the first of two films released in the UK in autumn 2019 that reflect on the events that took place in the lead up to, and aftermath of, the 2003 Iraq War. It follows the decision of 27-year-old GCHQ translator Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/02/iraq.unitednations1">leak a memo</a> that her employer received from the US National Security Agency (NSA) in January 2003. </p>
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<p>The memo asked the British listening station for its cooperation in a US “surge” against selected members of the UN Security Council. The aim was to gather material designed to influence voting intentions and secure a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36702957">second resolution</a> (ultimately unsuccessfully) in support of the Iraq War.</p>
<p>The film dramatises Gun’s journey from loyal civil servant to whistle
blower and court defendant, charting the personal and professional fall out of her actions as she finds herself pitted against the might of the British establishment – and its judicial wrath. In parallel, the film follows the painstaking processes of the investigative journalists (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/09/usa.iraq">Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy</a>) who broke the story.</p>
<p>Official Secrets offers a passionate and damning assessment of UK government collusion in a US dirty tricks campaign designed to sway international opinion in favour of the Iraq War. It champions the efforts of individuals who stand up for their moral principles, whether through whistleblowing, journalism, or legal activism. </p>
<p>While ostensibly commenting on these historical actions, the film also illuminates contemporary concerns about government secrecy, accountability, and factual manipulation.</p>
<p>In the UK, the alleged suppression of the Parliamentary Intelligence Security Committee (ISC) <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50366956">report into Russian covert activity</a> recently prompted suspicions about what (if anything) the British government is hiding about external meddling. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50482637">temporary brand switch</a> of the Conservative Party Press Office Twitter account to “FactCheckUK” during the a debate of party leaders in the run up to a December general election provoked complaints about an act of deliberate deception designed to muddy the (already murky) waters of online discourse. By fictionalising historical attempts by the British government to manipulate the court of public opinion, Official Secrets invites parallels to be drawn with the current erosion of trust in the political elite.</p>
<h2>Cover up</h2>
<p>The second film released in November to chronicle historical efforts to hold officialdom to account is Scott Burns’ <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/movies/the-report-review.html">The Report</a>. While also containing the near obligatory car park informant scene, The Report is an altogether darker, denser thriller. It follows US Senate assistant Dan Jones (Adam Driver) as he is assigned by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the CIA’s programme of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) during the post-9/11 War on Terror.</p>
<p>Enhanced interrogation, it is rapidly made clear, is a euphemism for torture. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation and cramped confinement (false burial) were among 16 techniques designed to break the resistance of terror suspects. With mounting intensity and moral purpose, Jones meticulously pieces together the stories of each of the 119 detainees, eventually producing a 6,700-page report (reduced to a 700-page executive summary).</p>
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<p>Interspersed with flashbacks of dehumanising violence, the film charts Jones’ increasingly obsessional pursuit of the truth. It is uncompromising in its denunciation of the CIA as perpetrators of torture, and of the US government for authorising its use and colluding in the cover up. </p>
<p>The criticism, however, is not restricted to the Bush-Cheney regime. Also in the firing line is the hypocrisy of the Obama presidency (represented in the film by John Hamm as the White House chief of staff) who, it is suggested, was only too happy to reap the benefits of CIA propaganda when it came to the 2012 re-election campaign.</p>
<h2>Real-life dramas</h2>
<p>In a similar way to Official Secrets, The Report both dramatises an historical event and offers an implicit commentary on the current political climate in the Anglo-American sphere. By showing a recording of the actual <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/John-Mccain-Speech-Senate-Republican-CIA-Torture-Report/383589/">speech given by the late John McCain</a> on publication of the report, the film drags the recent past firmly into the present. It provides a glaring contrast between the bipartisan values that motivated the Senate investigation and the wilful disinformation that continues to emerge from the Trump administration.</p>
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<p>In the present febrile political climate the tagline of The Report could be read as a clarion call to politicians on both sides of the pond: Truth Matters. If only they would listen.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127758/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Edwards does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Two new films feature the bravery and tenacity of government employees who risk everything to expose official wrongdoing.
Catherine Edwards, Doctoral Researcher, University of York
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/119130
2019-07-12T14:46:03Z
2019-07-12T14:46:03Z
Avengers: Endgame and the relentless march of Hollywood franchise movies
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/283856/original/file-20190712-173347-5cetv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2044%2C1076&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jeremy Renner and Robert Downey Jr. as Hawkeye and Iron Man </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures UK</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Avengers: Endgame <a href="https://variety.com/2019/film/news/avengers-endgame-box-office-records-2-1203199781/">smashed box office records</a> in the days following its release, becoming the quickest film ever to break the $2bn barrier and ranking as the second-highest grossing film in history after only 11 days. The Marvel epic is still creeping towards Avatar’s top spot and, with the <a href="https://comicbook.com/marvel/2019/06/19/avengers-endgame-theatrical-re-release-extra-footage-kevin-feige">recent announcement of a strategic theatrical re-release</a> including unseen footage, looks <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbean/2019/07/08/avengers-endgame-cuts-avatar-lead-to-under-16-million/">very likely to overtake it</a> any time now. </p>
<p>The culmination of the <a href="https://www.slashfilm.com/marvel-movie-marathon-infinity-saga/">22-film “Infinity Saga”</a>, Endgame represents an impressive accomplishment – not only for Marvel but also for the franchising trend in Hollywood, which shows no signs of slowing down either.</p>
<p>I’ve been researching how the landscape of Western cinema has been undeniably transformed by a shift towards the production of film sequels. Looking at the raw data, I found that box office takings of the most economically successful films of the past 17 years are a good way to understand the dominance of franchising on the film industry. </p>
<p>Of the 100 highest-grossing films worldwide since 2001, 86 are part of a cinematic franchise (all figures taken from <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/">Box Office Mojo</a>). Of this 86, eight were the first instalments of their respective franchises, meaning 78% of the most economically successful films since 2001 have been sequels, follow-ups or new instalments to existing series.</p>
<p>The number of franchises represented among these 86 films is 32, so each franchise has on average two or three episodes to its name within the top 100, though the Marvel Cinematic Universe boasts 12 films, the wizarding world of JK Rowling has nine (Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts) and Middle Earth has six (Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit).</p>
<p>Of the 14 non-franchise films within the top 100, three have sequels in planning or production (Avatar, Frozen and Maleficent), while two have had sequels rumoured (Zootopia and Coco). Three more of this 14 are remakes or live-action versions of existing films (Beauty and the Beast, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book).</p>
<p>This leaves just six of the 100 most successful films since 2001 that are entirely original and not being franchised, extended or added to – Inception, Gravity, 2012, Inside Out, Up and Bohemian Rhapsody.</p>
<h2>Look familiar?</h2>
<p>These statistics indicate the extent to which major film studios may have defaulted to repackaging existing films for their audiences, following the same recipes and changing only one or two ingredients, or extending successful film series by creating sequels, prequels, midquels (filling a chronological gap in a previous film) and paraquels (happening simultaneously to a previous film) to keep cinemas filling up. </p>
<p>The economic motivations behind the move to franchise productions are clear – the risks involved in creating, marketing and releasing another story within a familiar world, with well-loved characters and reliable narrative structures, are significantly smaller than those in the creation of new and unknown film stories. </p>
<p>Producer Lynda Obst places some of the onus on the <a href="https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/04/why-film-franchises-could-change-cinema-forever/">American writers’ strike</a>, recognising that “the new projects, the big action franchises that could sell worldwide, were studio-generated, not writer-generated”. But did this shift coincide with the writers strike or has it always been this way?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/280528/original/file-20190620-149835-1lg79l4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/280528/original/file-20190620-149835-1lg79l4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/280528/original/file-20190620-149835-1lg79l4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=311&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280528/original/file-20190620-149835-1lg79l4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=311&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280528/original/file-20190620-149835-1lg79l4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=311&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280528/original/file-20190620-149835-1lg79l4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280528/original/file-20190620-149835-1lg79l4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/280528/original/file-20190620-149835-1lg79l4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The flooding of the market with franchise films.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">All data from www.boxofficemojo.com and true at time of writing.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This graph shows the increasing success of franchise films over the past few decades. Looking at the 20 highest-grossing films worldwide each year since 1989, the graph shows two clear spikes and a gradual increase in franchise films since 2001. </p>
<p>Although series such as Star Wars were already being reinvigorated prior to 2001, with Phantom Menace hitting the big screen in 1999, the large gap between the two lines at 2001 displays the high number of franchises introduced in that year (eight), including most notably Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. </p>
<p>The increasing trend in the blue line in particular shows the gradual saturation of the market with sequels – peaking in 2011 when 18 of the 20 most successful films worldwide were part of a franchise. This 2011 spike may well be a delayed result of both the writers strike and financial crash of 2008, showing the studios’ increased reliance on franchise films for more secure revenue.</p>
<p>Clearly the global film industry, catered for predominantly by a closed group of powerful media conglomerates, has become dominated by the presence of tried-and-tested franchises. </p>
<h2>Is originality disappearing?</h2>
<p>In 2018 the failed introduction of a “Best Popular Film” Oscar showed an attempt to boost public interest after <a href="https://deadline.com/2019/02/oscars-ads-abc-ratings-concerns-threshold-guarantees-1202562868/">ratings for the Academy Awards night had dropped</a>, which may also indicate a <a href="https://qz.com/quartzy/1220500/the-last-box-office-hit-to-win-the-best-picture-oscar-was-14-years-ago/">reduction of public interest in award-winning films themselves</a>.</p>
<p>The more important question, though, is that of <em>why</em> we are going to the cinema. If we watched films in order to be challenged, moved or even confused, the Best Picture nominees would likely top the box office lists . But we don’t – we go to the movies to be reunited with friends, to return to places that feel like home, and to find out what happens next to Tony Stark and the gang.</p>
<p>In an era of increased social anxiety and political turmoil, is it any wonder that we might seek a sense of home and refuge in the film worlds we have grown to love and inhabit? The success of Endgame and the predominance of the film franchise is indicative of a shift in the mindset of the studios, but also in our minds as consumers. And if a 23rd Marvel film garners no critical acclaim, but provides a moment of joyful escape for its audiences, is that such a bad thing?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119130/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
As Marvel’s 22nd blockbuster looks set to become the most successful film of all time, is Hollywood running out of original ideas?
Daniel White, Assistant Lecturer in Music, University of Manchester
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/119616
2019-07-04T20:58:25Z
2019-07-04T20:58:25Z
Shaft: America’s race politics from Black Power to Black Lives Matter
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282649/original/file-20190704-51273-iakiwv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C0%2C1395%2C697&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Warner Bros</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>John Shaft, the African American private eye introduced by Ernest Tidyman in a novel of 1970, has proved surprisingly resilient as a character on the big screen. You might have thought that Samuel L. Jackson’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jun/19/news">second-generation Shaft</a> in 2000 – which followed the three 1970s films – would bring closure to the franchise. But now there’s a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/19/shaft-to-return-for-fifth-film-samuel-l-jackson">third-generation Shaft</a>, set in contemporary New York, which puts at the characters’ disposal computers and smartphones, rather than simply guns and Molotov cocktails. </p>
<p>This <a href="https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/shaft-review-samuel-l-jackson-1203240886/">latest version</a>, simply called Shaft, reflects current patterns of film exhibition, having had a brief run in US cinemas before being streamed globally by Netflix. The name “John Shaft” is, on this occasion, no one’s exclusive property, but actually shared by three of the male protagonists. Jackson appears again, but alongside two namesakes: his father (played by Richard Roundtree, who took the title role in the three films of the early 1970s) and his son (played by Jessie L. Usher and, to minimise confusion, usually referred to on screen as “JJ”).</p>
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<p>At the start of the new film, several montages take the viewer through recent decades of African American social and cultural history. Iconic figures and events flicker briefly on screen: OJ Simpson’s trial in 1995 gives way to Barack Obama’s inauguration as US president in 2009, while an image of rapper The Notorious B.I.G. is replaced by one of basketball superstar LeBron James.</p>
<p>The device is principally, of course, an orientation aid for the audience, given the film’s multi-generational plotting. More profoundly, however, the sense of time passing prompts us to ask what Shaft signified for black America in the early 1970s and again in 2000 – and what he might mean in this latest incarnation. </p>
<h2>Blaxploitation and Black Power</h2>
<p>The first three contributions to the Shaft series belong to the period in African American cinema awkwardly, yet indelibly, labelled “<a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-blaxploitation-movies">Blaxploitation</a>”. Although many Blaxploitation movies were crafted by white directors and producers, they are regarded by the <a href="https://cpb-ap-se2.wpmucdn.com/thinkspace.csu.edu.au/dist/5/1410/files/2015/10/Cinema-Studies-Key-Concepts-1-289afca.pdf">film scholar Susan Hayward</a> as representing “a positive moment in black cultural history”.</p>
<p>As Hayward writes: “Black audiences were given strong heroes who did not get dragged down but who actually escaped from the ghetto.” African American cinemagoers at last found stories “that both articulated their anger and gave it a positive outcome”.</p>
<p>Protagonists in Blaxploitation movies radically corrected the previous black imagery of submissiveness – and few screen presences were as confrontational or non-apologetic as Richard Roundtree’s Shaft. Recall his first appearance in the 1971 film. As the hi-hat cymbal pattern of <a href="http://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/ThemeFromShaft.pdf">Isaac Hayes’s Oscar-winning theme tune</a> is followed by a funky guitar’s wah-wah pedal, Shaft emerges from the New York subway. Immaculately cool in long leather jacket and turtleneck sweater, he passes with utmost confidence through the city traffic. </p>
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<p>The 1960s’ black star Sidney Poitier was, in <a href="https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1144&context=gs_rp>">Donald Bogle’s</a> words, a “hero for an integrationist age”, his dignified screen image aligned with Martin Luther King. Roundtree as Shaft, by contrast, is connected in his very look to militant ideas of Black Power, albeit as heroic loner going his own way.</p>
<h2>Shaft the man</h2>
<p>To watch the 2000 and 2019 adaptations in light of the 1970s films, however, is to witness Shaft’s political decline. Not even the presence as director of John Singleton, nine years after his incendiary Boyz n the Hood, could save the 2000 version from lapsing into action cinema sequences stripped of social urgency. True, the plot is centred upon a racist murder – but the theme of struggling for racial justice is very hard to keep in mind among all the gunfire.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282648/original/file-20190704-51253-1mcapul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282648/original/file-20190704-51253-1mcapul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282648/original/file-20190704-51253-1mcapul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282648/original/file-20190704-51253-1mcapul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282648/original/file-20190704-51253-1mcapul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282648/original/file-20190704-51253-1mcapul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282648/original/file-20190704-51253-1mcapul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282648/original/file-20190704-51253-1mcapul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Playing for laughs?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Warner Bros</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The newly released Shaft seems intent at first on critically revisiting its precursors and rejecting their model of black masculinity as outmoded. JJ is initially positioned as the opposite of his “old-school” father and grandfather – cerebral rather than physical, “anti-gun” rather than habituated to violence, and given to consensual rather than dominant relationships with women. </p>
<p>But sadly the film fails to sustain its investigation of alternative kinds of African American masculinity. It critiques machismo, yet ultimately reaffirms it. The geekish JJ is liberated by violence, abandoning his computer screen for guns to which he proves to be attracted after all. His aversion to fighting is soon discarded as impractical. </p>
<p>Shaft’s swaggering aggression, in 1971, represented a socially powerful intervention at a time when more polite expression of black demands in America seemed to be failing. But already the protagonist’s hypermasculinity was troubling.</p>
<p>So to reiterate the same gender coding in 2019 – a moment when <a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/">Black Lives Matter has questioned</a> the dependence of African American liberation movements on “heterosexual, cisgender men” and celebrated the contributions of “women, queer and transgender people” – seems to indicate that innovation has dried up. The evidence of this latest film suggests that, after a run of nearly 50 years, Shaft’s case files should now be closed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119616/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Dix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Fifty years after the original film, three generations of Shaft are loose on the streets of New York.
Andrew Dix, Lecturer in American Studies, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/114334
2019-03-29T09:54:52Z
2019-03-29T09:54:52Z
Jordan Peele’s Us: black horror movies and the American nightmare
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266340/original/file-20190328-139349-14x7gio.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C8%2C1495%2C988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lupita Nyong'o, Evan Alex, and Shahadi Wright Joseph in Jordan Peele's Us (2019).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Jordan Peele’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/nov/17/get-out-golden-globes-race-horror-comedy-documentary-jordan-peele">debut horror film, Get Out</a> (2017), pitched its black hero into a genteel white world in which lethal racist violence lurked behind every idyllic facade. In his second horror feature, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/movies/us-movie-theories-explained.html">recently released Us</a>, the cast of African American protagonists is extended and their object of terror modified. Here a middle-class family of parents and two children, on holiday in California, is suddenly drawn into a life-and-death struggle with horrifying doubles of themselves. </p>
<p>Us has opened to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/24/us-review-jordan-peele-lupita-nyongo">critical acclaim</a>, and is also proving highly popular with audiences. The numbers are appropriately monstrous: the film’s <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=untitledjordanpeele.htm">box office takings from March 22-26</a> alone amounted to more than four times its comparatively modest US$20m budget. Given the huge success of Get Out – together with his work as producer on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/26/blackkklansman-review-spike-lee-blistering-return-to-form">Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018)</a> – Us confirms Peele’s status as a significant player in contemporary Hollywood.</p>
<p>Peele’s two films to date as writer-director are, of course, not the first horror movies to achieve broad audience appeal. Think, for example, of precursors such as John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Nevertheless, with the success of Get Out and Us, the horror film has again become an object of mass consumption, rather than something enjoyed principally by niche demographics. Not quite fun for all the family, perhaps, but certainly entertainment for many spectators whose cinematic tastes may not normally extend to horror. </p>
<p>The mainstream success of these two films owes a good deal to their sheer polish. Rather than the relatively cheap look of, say, the <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/fast-track-fandom-beginners-guide-through-hammer-horror">British Hammer Horror titles</a> released between the late 1950s and 1970s, Peele’s films have high production values. They interweave terror with comedy in a winning combination. And Get Out and Us are tactful, too, in their renditions of violence. Peele’s camera moves on briskly from signs of bodily damage, avoiding the exploitation imagery to be found in other horror directors such as Rob Zombie (as in 2003’s <a href="https://www.empireonline.com/movies/house-1000-corpses/review/">House of 1000 Corpses</a>, with its crazed family mutilating teenagers at Halloween).</p>
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<p>Like Get Out, Us prompts us to think once more about the relationship between African Americans and horror films. The genre has proved attractive to black filmmakers in the US during the past 50 years. Why? </p>
<h2>American nightmare</h2>
<p>From the arrival of the first slave ships on the East Coast, African Americans have often fashioned their experiences into narratives of horror. Instead of reporting the enjoyment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they have testified to a Gothic fate of enslavement and violence.</p>
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<p>Little wonder, then, that in his speech <a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Epublic/civilrights/a0146.html">The Ballot or the Bullet (1964)</a>, the radical black activist Malcolm X said: “I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.” Or that in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/08/fiction.tonimorrison">her novel Beloved (1987)</a>, Toni Morrison paints a nightmarish picture of: “Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children.”</p>
<p>In the face of this grim historical record, horror is a compelling genre for African American artists. Far from appearing somewhat fantastical, the genre oddly holds out instead the promise of documentary accuracy. And just as novelists such as Morrison have found horror valuable as a means of reckoning with history, so too black filmmakers have exploited its power to move audiences to sombre reflection (as well as its marketable capacity to frighten them out of their skins). </p>
<h2>Villains and victims</h2>
<p>“The monster exists”, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Film_genre.html?id=w8lkAAAAMAAJ">Barry Langford</a>, a scholar of film genres, suggests, “to teach an object (social) lesson of some kind.” So it’s worth stopping to think about what we are taught by the figure of the monster in horror movies directed by African Americans.</p>
<p>The first lesson comes from a set of films that, at first sight, recycle racist tropes in presenting their monster as black. What is distinctive here, however, is a tendency to motivate the monster’s violent actions – instead of expressing mindless savagery, these are to be understood now as the inevitable outcome of racial injustice. </p>
<p>Examples of this cinema of black protest include <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blacula">William Crain’s Blacula (1972)</a>, in which an 18th-century African prince becomes a vampire in contemporary Los Angeles after his plea to abolish the slave trade is ignored. Or Bill Gunn’s <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/bradlands/bodies-off-ganja-hess-under-skin-flick">Ganja & Hess (1973)</a>, featuring a black anthropologist turned vampire and similarly adapting the shopworn Dracula plot to reflect on the legacy of white dominance. Both of these films date from a time when stylistically inventive and politically energised African American horror films flourished even in the face of restricted budgets.</p>
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<p>But elsewhere in black American horror cinema, the colour coding of the monster is adjusted. In these rather different scenarios of terrifying white threat, the African American protagonist takes on the role of the endangered. This subversive move is, of course, available to others besides black filmmakers. George Romero’s <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/night-living-dead-george-romero">Night of the Living Dead (1968)</a>, for example, shows a resourceful black protagonist menaced by the white undead. But there are many instances of this sort of plot within the black cinematic canon, extending from Crain’s <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dr_black_mr_hyde">Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976)</a> to Get Out itself.</p>
<p>To juxtapose Peele’s new film with Get Out is to see a further twist in the racial dynamics of the African American horror film. In Us, the central black characters are neither monsters nor victims in any simple sense, but actually both (as are their white equivalents). Monstrosity is in fact hard to locate here with any authority. The vulnerable black family we root for as it struggles against its terrifying doubles is after all itself vampiric, in its exploitation of those people less economically advantaged.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114334/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Dix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Peele’s films reflect the way many African-American directors have used the horror genre to reflect the black experience.
Andrew Dix, Lecturer in American Studies, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111561
2019-02-21T13:59:28Z
2019-02-21T13:59:28Z
Green Book highlights the problems of ‘driving while black’, both then and now
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259912/original/file-20190220-148513-jsn8dj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Patti Perret - © 2018 Universal Studios</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Early in the Oscar-winning movie Green Book, one of the main characters paraphrases the purpose of the titular guide book given to him for his new job. It’s for “travelling while black”, explains Tony Vallelonga to his incredulous wife, Dolores. Echoing a satirical jibe in circulation today – the “crime” of “driving while black” – the film immediately draws a continuum between the racial divisions of the past and their persistence into the present.</p>
<p>Set in 1962, the story centres on the relationship between cultured African American concert pianist, Dr Donald Shirley (Mahershala Ali), and white working-class bouncer, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, an Italian American (Viggo Mortensen). Hired by Shirley as a driver/bodyguard for a concert tour of America’s Deep South, Vallelonga is unrefined, quick-tempered and displays racist attitudes. The film suggests that these are a result of ignorance and constructed tribal loyalties, and thus ripe for challenge – though this is clunkily executed in places.</p>
<p>Long hours on the road in this interracial buddy movie lead the two men to confront each other’s prejudices on race and class. Together with situations they encounter on the trip, these experiences turn their initially distant relationship into a warmhearted and enduring friendship.</p>
<p>Like most historical dramas, the film has been met with questions about its accuracy. We’re told at the outset that it was inspired by a true story, and the screenplay was co-written by Vallelonga’s son Nick, a director and screenwriter, who <a href="http://time.com/5453443/true-story-behind-green-book-movie/">describes researching the story</a> with Shirley and his father. Shirley’s family, however, <a href="https://www.blackenterprise.com/don-shirley-the-green-book-family-blasts-movie/">dispute several aspects</a> of the film. </p>
<h2>Staying safe</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/history-green-book-african-american-travelers-180958506/">Green Book guide</a>, which was used from the mid-1930s to mid-1960s, was a vital aid for African Americans. Listing motels, shops, restaurants and other businesses across America – and later, other countries, too – its purpose was to mitigate the serious risk of racial violence and humiliation <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/01/life-or-death-for-black-travelers-how-fear-led-to-the-negro-motorist-green-book/?utm_term=.7122bf82a9fb">faced by black people while travelling</a>. </p>
<p>It covered states where officially sanctioned segregation – “Jim Crow” – operated in the American South. But the guide also <a href="http://time.com/5457827/green-book-history/">covered northern and other states in America</a>, anywhere de facto segregation and racism also presented risks for black Americans – a geographical reality which is fleetingly acknowledged but not made clear here, or in many other films, which similarly focus on the South. The Green Book also reflected the upwardly mobile attitude of the wider post-war thrust in America for social mobility and consumption, <a href="http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Casestudy/R_Casestudy3.htm">particularly car ownership</a>. For African Americans the book’s tagline: “Carry your Green Book with you … you may need it!”, only just hinted at the menace of racist encounters the guidebook was there to prevent.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259574/original/file-20190218-56243-138lbu6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259574/original/file-20190218-56243-138lbu6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259574/original/file-20190218-56243-138lbu6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259574/original/file-20190218-56243-138lbu6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259574/original/file-20190218-56243-138lbu6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259574/original/file-20190218-56243-138lbu6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259574/original/file-20190218-56243-138lbu6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">As the movie progresses, Vallelonga and Dr Shirley form a bond.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2018 Universal Pictures</span></span>
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<p>Vallelonga expects “problems” to arise on the trip, but has only a vague sense of the humiliating reality of life for many African Americans. Hailing from multicultural New York and part of an established Italian American community, the argument goes, Vallelonga appears to have been shielded from the significant jeopardy suffered by black Americans.</p>
<p>The film’s broad brush strokes – a more racially sophisticated North versus the backward South – belie the ubiquitous reality of <a href="https://theconversation.com/charlottesville-belies-racisms-deep-roots-in-the-north-101567">historic and present-day racism across the US</a>. But it succeeds in commenting here on the absence of awareness of large parts of White America – <a href="https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/10347165/One%20Year%20Later%20and%20the%20Myth%20of%20a%20PostRacial%20Society_DBR.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">then and now</a> – about the true levels of racism experienced by black Americans.</p>
<p>The Deep South presented a terrifying risk for African Americans. Between 1877 and 1950, there were more than <a href="https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore">4,000 racial lynchings</a> of men, women and children in southern states – a system of terror designed to keep black citizens subservient.</p>
<p>Green Book’s protagonists must drive further to locate hotels where Shirley can safely stay – and we observe several other humiliations he is forced to suffer. Mistakenly straying from the Green Book’s itinerary, the travellers also drive through a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/lweb07sundown.html">sundown town</a>”. These were municipalities and suburbs – an astonishing 10,000 of them across the US at one point – which had successfully “removed” their black populations. Any African Americans working or passing through them <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/01/26/feature/traveling-while-black-why-some-americans-are-afraid-to-explore-their-own-country/?utm_term=.1df8cf7105cd%22">had to leave by sunset</a>.</p>
<h2>Black stories, white directors</h2>
<p>White directors telling stories about race are often criticised for insensitivity and racially tone-deaf filmmaking. The charge – frequently justified – is that such stories are told from a white perspective, with black characters far from the centre of their own narratives, and often drawn in a fairly one-dimensional manner. Another criticism is the “white saviour” storyline, where a white hero “saves the day” in a narrative which shrinks the central role, story and agency of black characters.</p>
<p>These elements are present in Green Book, but the situation is more nuanced. The film, made by white director Peter Farrelly, foregrounds the white saviour issue by making it part of the narrative. Vallelonga is employed for the very purpose of protecting his boss from trouble. Shirley has exercised agency and choice in employing this protector – one who must also carry his bags and open doors. </p>
<p>The requirement for a white saviour on the trip is a wider indictment of White America, which allowed racial inequality and terror to persist. And while the film is anchored around Vallelonga – we meet his family, his character experiences a far greater evolution through the narrative – Shirley’s character is also explored. A complex and brave man, his life is situated in both a public and marginal space, at the intersection of several competing narratives of identity. </p>
<p>The film also seeks to emphasise that a cultural conditioning of white superiority underpins both the profound racism woven into the fabric of Jim Crow, and also the racial prejudice Vallelonga exhibits at a different end of the spectrum – something he initially refutes but comes to understand.</p>
<h2>Present imperfect</h2>
<p>Like other historical films, Green Book uses the past to speak to the present. Today, the disproportionate numbers of non-white, particularly black citizens in the US stopped by police for traffic violations has led to the satirical charge of widespread racial profiling – “<a href="https://www.aclu.org/report/driving-while-black-racial-profiling-our-nations-highways">driving while black</a>”.</p>
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<p>The practice of stopping and seizing African Americans on the public highway has long been used in America to intimidate and restrict black people, as <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/lpsyr24&id=131&men_tab=srchresults">far back as the 1600s</a>. Today, traffic stops can function as probable cause for further police investigation, and can <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/the-stop-race-police-traffic/">be humiliating, stoke fear</a> – and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/05/missouri-driving-while-black-st-louis">damage race relations</a>. Minorities often feel it sends a message that they “don’t belong” – a message that chimes with a recent <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41975573">resurgence in hate crime</a> and the visible rise in white power movements.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/embracing-the-silent-majority-donald-trump-brings-back-the-worst-of-1960s-america-58020">Embracing the 'silent majority' – Donald Trump brings back the worst of 1960s America</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Green Book is set in the early 1960s but its resonances with the present show that, when it comes to racial harmony and equality, today’s America still has some distance to travel.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111561/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Teresa Hagan receives funding from AHRC.</span></em></p>
Winner of the 2019 Oscar for best picture, Green Book highlights the history of racism in America and has lessons for today.
Teresa Hagan, Postgraduate researcher, University of East Anglia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/108098
2018-12-03T14:16:00Z
2018-12-03T14:16:00Z
Wizard of Oz: why this extraordinary movie has been so influential
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248436/original/file-20181203-194938-1i0a65g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C4%2C1370%2C961&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 1939 Warner Home Video.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Film director Joel Coen – one half of the famed Coen Brothers – <a href="https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/screenwriting-lessons-the-wizard-of-oz-a4014deac990?gi=62e931b340b1">once quipped</a> that “every movie ever made is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz” – and while, strictly speaking, there’s a bit of artistic licence in this statement, it seems that the tale of Dorothy’s adventure on the Yellow Brick Road can reasonably lay clam to being the most influential movie of all time. </p>
<p>At least, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/11/the-wizard-of-oz-influential-film-study">that’s the finding</a> of researchers in Turin, Italy, who took a database of 47,000 films and cross-referenced them to determine which film has had the greatest influence on the industry, based on the number of times it has been referenced in other films. The winner was the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.</p>
<p>Some members of the popular press seem surprised by this fact; but they really shouldn’t be. Indeed, the research – which was published in <a href="https://appliednetsci.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s41109-018-0105-0">Applied Network Science</a> – only seems to have looked for direct references to the film. But if you also took account of films that were influenced by The Wizard of Oz without directly referencing it, there would hundreds, if not thousands more titles to add to the list. </p>
<p>The Coen Brothers are not the only big names to pay homage to the Wizard of Oz (their films are full of sly references). Derek Jarman, who is about as far away from the Hollywood archetype as you can get, also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/mar/02/art">called it his favourite film</a>. For Joel Coen, the film’s brilliance probably lies in its elegant narrative structure – whereas for Jarman it has a lot to do with its design. But this is a testament to how good the film really is. Film is a highly collaborative art form and the contributions made by every department to this film – photography, set, costume, music, editing and cast – is immaculate. Indeed, to watch The Wizard of Oz is to watch the Hollywood studio machine working at the very peak of its efficiency.</p>
<h2>Dreams and reality</h2>
<p>As far as I am concerned, The Wizard of Oz has exerted the most profound influence on filmmakers around the world who refuse to see the cinema as a realist medium, but rather view it as the art form that comes closest to our dreams. In The Wizard of Oz, reality – as represented by Kansas – is literally colourless. What’s worse, it’s not the beautiful black and white one might expect from a Hollywood film of the period. Instead it’s doubly drab sepia. </p>
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<p>But once we enter the Land of Oz we are plunged into a world of vivid <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/technicolor-at-100/385039/">Technicolor</a> and extraordinary painted sets that make no attempt to hide their artifice. Even the cloyingly sentimental return to Kansas in the final few minutes cannot hide the true message: the imagination is far more interesting that reality can ever be. </p>
<p>In this celebration of the dream life, The Wizard of Oz is a truly surrealist work.</p>
<h2>Road movie tradition</h2>
<p>It should come as no surprise then that one of the finest riffs on the film comes from the doyen of American surrealist filmmakers, David Lynch. His 1991 Palm d’Or winner, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/19/movies/film-view-today-s-yellow-brick-road-leads-straight-to-hell.html">Wild at Heart</a>, belongs to the great American tradition of the road movie, a genre which Lynch (quite rightly) <a href="http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/intcbc.html">traces back</a> to The Wizard of Oz.</p>
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<p>But Lynch does not simply acknowledge the debt; rather he takes the plot of Barry Gifford’s short, spare and <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/12/01/still-weird-on-top/">ultimately realist novel</a> and litters it with references to the 1939 film. In Wild at Heart, characters say things like “too bad he can’t just visit that old Wizard of Oz and get some advice”, or “seems we sort of broke down on the yellow brick road”, without a hint of irony. They also have visions of the Wicked Witch of the West and get life lessons from Glenda the Good Witch. </p>
<p>There is more to these allusions than a mere doffing of the cap, however. The references to The Wizard of Oz serve as a reminder of how America has changed. Almost all of Lynch’s protagonists are innocents who find themselves in a strange and often perilous world – just like Dorothy. But while Dorothy is able to maintain her innocence, Sailor and Lula, the central couple in Wild at Heart, fail to do so in world that’s “wild at heart and weird on top”.</p>
<h2>Heaven and hell</h2>
<p>Perhaps the most extraordinary nod to The Wizard of Oz comes from closer to home. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/08/matter-life-death-review-re-release-powell-pressburger-david-niven-fighter-pilot">A Matter of Life and Death</a> was a fantasy film written, produced and directed by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1946. Commissioned during the final months of World War II to help mend the strained relationship between the British and their American allies, the film is set in two realms: Earth and heaven (which may or may not be a figment of a the imagination of a bomber pilot with brain trauma).</p>
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<p>Following the lead of The Wizard of Oz, Powell and Pressburger decided to distinguish between these two realms by shooting one in Technicolor and the other in monochrome (essentially black and white produced by undyed Technicolor film). The real stroke of genius, however, was to invert the early film’s pattern and to present the real world in colour and the imaginary one in monochrome. </p>
<p>Filmmakers, audiences and critics alike have generally accepted the paradox that the real world may be in colour, but on film black and white is more realistic – so by showing heaven in monochrome, Powell and Pressburger seem to be telling us that our imagination is more real than the real world. </p>
<p>Such a bold and subversive gesture would have been unthinkable, however, had the The Wizard of Oz not come before and showed filmmakers the imaginative possibilities of the medium.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108098/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brian Hoyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The 1939 classic has influenced more films than any other film before or since.
Brian Hoyle, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Dundee
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/107658
2018-11-27T16:58:26Z
2018-11-27T16:58:26Z
Nic Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci: giants of the 70s cinema trod dark new ground in sexual revolution
<p>Deaths in close proximity have a tendency to invite comparisons. We may look for connections between two otherwise unrelated figures whose passing in quick succession makes them final bedfellows. Often any such links are purely arbitrary, but with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/25/nicolas-roeg-obituary">Nicolas Roeg</a> (1928-2018) and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-46342644">Bernardo Bertolucci</a> (1941-2018), who died on November 23 and 26 respectively, there is a certain logic to putting them in harness, even though they never worked together. Cultural commentators have already <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/26/sex-factor-nicolas-roeg-and-bernardo-bertolucci-transgressive-legacy-metoo-ryan-gilbey">begun to do so</a>, and with good reason.</p>
<p>Both filmmakers had diverse careers stretching over half a century, but as directors they were giants of the 1970s. In particular, both were at the forefront of the liberalised depiction of sex following the relaxation of censorship restrictions in both the US and the UK. </p>
<p>Roeg’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/16/performance-i-still-dont-fully-understand-it-behind-the-scenes-photos-from-the-cult-classic">Performance</a> (1970, co-directed with Donald Cammell) and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/aug/15/artsfeatures.edinburghfilmfestival">Bad Timing</a> (1980) and Bertolucci’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/feb/22/bertolucci-the-conformistt">The Conformist</a> (1970) and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/04/archives/screen-1900-bertoluccis-marxist-saga.html">1900</a> (made in 1976), among others, all featured notably explicit sexuality – but their key works in this regard were released almost concurrently.</p>
<h2>Famous sex scenes</h2>
<p>A visitor to the West End of London in late 1973 could have found the directors’ seminal works playing first run in different cinemas, both with “X” ratings. Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) scandalised morality campaigners with its brutally casual passion between lovers (Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider) who don’t even know each other’s names. </p>
<p>Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) is a horror movie, but midway through there’s a tenderly sensual scene of lovemaking between husband and wife (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) so intense that it led many viewers to believe that the sex <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BtcBeOD3Ok">might have been</a> performed for real.</p>
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<p>That rumour has long since been put to bed (no pun intended). But Last Tango was different. The question of what actually happened on set was raised in a 2007 interview with Schneider, in which <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-469646/I-felt-raped-Brando.html">she claimed</a> to “have felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci”. Apparently intended metaphorically, this comment has since been taken literally.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/dec/04/last-tango-in-paris-director-says-maria-schneider-butter-scene-not-consensual">2013 interview</a> (not widely seen until 2016) the director admitted that he and Brando had together conspired to introduce butter as a lubricant in an act of simulated sodomy, without telling the actress until immediately beforehand in order to produce an authentic reaction on camera. In a passage often omitted from subsequent accounts of the incident, Schneider clarified that “even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears”. </p>
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<p>According to Schneider, it was Brando’s idea to use the butter, but it was Bertolucci she blamed for not telling her – she appeared to have forgiven the actor but not the director.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-we-should-no-longer-consider-last-tango-in-paris-a-classic-69874">Why we should no longer consider Last Tango in Paris 'a classic'</a>
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<p>In the age of #MeToo, this particular controversy has not abated and it is likely to blight Bertolucci’s memory. No such real-life scandal has attached itself to Roeg, despite the often-appalled reactions to some of his films, even by their own distributors. But there are other reasons to link these two filmmakers besides the obvious one of sexual representation.</p>
<h2>Odd men out</h2>
<p>Some years ago, attempting to explain Roeg’s creative inactivity (he made only one feature film after 1995), an industry professional earnestly told me that cinema is not a medium for intellectuals – at least not in its commercial form. That, it seems, was what made Roeg such an odd man out in British filmmaking after his 1970s heyday and why after a while he seemed almost unemployable unless he suppressed his individuality. Yet in several of his most characteristic films he married a dazzling visual surface and a self-consciously dense approach to storytelling with wide audience appeal.</p>
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<p>As a product of the so-called European “art” cinema, Bertolucci was virtually obliged to be an intellectual, a vocation he had no trouble in fulfilling. And yet, like Roeg, the Italian auteur was also able to cross over into the mainstream. Last Tango was financed and released by United Artists, a major Hollywood studio, and <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=lasttangoinparis.htm">proved a huge hit</a>. </p>
<p>Other US majors backed some of his later ventures in the hope of similar success. Bertolucci’s most conventionally prestigious film, the multi-Oscared <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/apr/15/the-last-emperor">The Last Emperor</a> (1987), is that rare beast, a cerebral epic.</p>
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<p>The Last Emperor was one of six pictures Bertolucci made with producer <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10705934/Jeremy-Thomas-Britains-auteur-film-producer.html">Jeremy Thomas</a>, whose white-bread family background (he was the son of “Doctor” series director Ralph Thomas and the nephew of “Carry On” helmsman Gerald Thomas) belies the offbeat, ambitious projects he has supported as an independent producer. </p>
<p>It’s no coincidence that Thomas also produced three films by Roeg, whom <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100524091710/http://www.berlinale-talentcampus.de/story/89/1789.html">he once called</a> “the greatest living British director”, beginning with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/aug/15/artsfeatures.edinburghfilmfestival">Bad Timing</a>. Bertolucci <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10705934/Jeremy-Thomas-Britains-auteur-film-producer.html">he called</a> one of “the most significant filmmakers that ever walked the Earth”.</p>
<p>Nicolas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci challenged the commonly drawn distinctions between mainstream and independent, art and commerce, accessibility and difficulty. It’s their achievement in reconciling these apparent opposites, and the sheer brilliance of their best work, that should survive them, not the controversies their work engendered – whether on or off the screen.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107658/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sheldon Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The pair never worked together, but their controversial depiction of sex links them in the minds of movie historians.
Sheldon Hall, Reader in Film and Television, Sheffield Hallam University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/107065
2018-11-27T13:08:09Z
2018-11-27T13:08:09Z
Steve McQueen’s Widows: heist movie feels like a strange move for this director – but it isn’t
<p>At first glance, Widows feels like a strange pick for a director like Steve McQueen. His first film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986233/">Hunger (2008)</a> was a sensitive drama about a hunger striker nearing the end of his life. He followed this with <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1723811/">Shame (2011)</a>, an equally sombre narrative of a man living with sex addiction in New York. Third in the sequence was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/movies/12-years-a-slave-holds-nothing-back-in-show-of-suffering.html">12 Years A Slave</a>, the celebrated account of a free African American taken into slavery which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2014. So what’s next for McQueen? A heist movie.</p>
<p>In Widows, McQueen adapts Lynda La Plante’s 1983 ITV series of the same name – much to the <a href="http://lyndalaplante.com/widows-to-be-made-into-a-movie/">surprise of La Plante herself</a>. The movie condenses the original series’ six hours into 129 minutes and relocates the action from a downbeat London to contemporary Chicago. </p>
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<p>Since McQueen is noted as a <a href="https://cinemaaxis.com/2016/03/14/the-auteurs-steve-mcqueen/">director of contemplative arthouse films</a>, his venture into an action mode such as the heist movie comes <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/widows-review-steve-mcqueen-outguns-scorsese-swaggering-supercharged/">initially as a shock</a>. It is as if James Joyce had followed up his fictional experiment in Ulysses by writing a thriller, or Henry James had topped off his complex novels of moral exploration with a western.</p>
<p>Some thought, however, discloses connections between Widows and McQueen’s earlier directorial work. To be sure, the new movie is louder, brasher and more densely plotted – but it’s possible to identify continuities, both formal and thematic, with his other films. </p>
<h2>McQueen as auteur</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.filminquiry.com/quick-guide-auteur-theory/">Auteur theory</a>, emerging in the 1950s during the “<a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-french-new-wave-films">New Wave</a>” of French cinema, proposes that film directors be considered as equivalent to literary creators. Just as authorship of Emma is ascribed to Jane Austen, so, broadly speaking, authorship of a film should be credited to its director. </p>
<p>And in the same way that Austen’s distinctive authorial personality is also to be observed in Pride and Prejudice, a given director’s particular practices and preoccupations bind together the films they have made. The Coen Brothers, for example, have made westerns, screwball comedies, gangster movies and film noirs. Unifying their work, however, are features such as stylised dialogue and playful experiment with genre conventions. </p>
<p>Viewed from this perspective, Widows is still recognisably “a Steve McQueen film” in having a rapport with his three previous features. Thematically, it is another in his series of explorations of characters who in various ways are on the edge. Here, four women find themselves not only bereaved following their husbands’ deaths in a heist gone wrong, but facing violence and ruin.</p>
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<p>Stylistically, too, some of McQueen’s signature strategies are apparent in Widows. Running counter to action cinema’s hectic movement, his camera here is sometimes still – as in the previous three features. Like Shame’s opening shot of its sexually addicted protagonist (played by Michael Fassbender), Widows begins silently in a bedroom of subdued colour. The static image again allows reflection on detail. A daring long take later in the film, featuring the mercenary politician Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), reveals American racial and class hierarchies as effectively as does the painfully sustained shot of the protagonist’s near-lynching in 12 Years a Slave. </p>
<h2>The filmmaker and the system</h2>
<p>On Armistice Day a small commemoration, important to cinema, took place. November 11 2018 marked the 60th anniversary of the death of the influential French film critic <a href="http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0006.xml">André Bazin</a>. Mentor to the young filmmakers of the “New Wave”, Bazin had also a tempering effect upon their wilder enthusiasms. In particular, he had sober things to say about film authorship that should prompt us to look again at McQueen’s Widows.</p>
<p>In his 1957 essay, <a href="http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/la-politique-des-auteurs-bazin.shtml">La politique des auteurs</a>, Bazin resists the cult of the director. He warns against assessing any new movie in terms of “the aesthetic portrait of the filmmaker deduced from his previous films”. What matters for Bazin is “not only the talent of this or that film-maker”, but the larger “tradition” or “system” within which their work takes its place. This is an insight spurring us to think less about the relationship between Widows and previous movies Hunger or Shame than about how it relates to the heist genre – not least the <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1137210/index.html">1983 TV series</a> it adapts. </p>
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<p>To watch La Plante’s original now is potentially to be lulled into nostalgia, with period details extending from new-fangled jacuzzis to pubs filled with cigarette smoke. But at the same time it is apparent that the template of the heist drama is being used in order to trace and evaluate social changes. Most important of these is the emergence of Thatcherism. The women at the centre of the series are not only feminist heroines, but Thatcherite examples of self-reliant entrepreneurs going their own way. </p>
<p>McQueen’s adaptation similarly finds in the heist narrative openings for social exploration. The African American neighbourhood where much of the action takes place resembles what sociologist <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604810801933776">Loïc Wacquant</a> calls “the hyperghetto”, characterised by a lack of economic opportunity and the decay of former moral centres (such as the black church). Similarly, Marcus, the son of the central figure in Widows Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis), is the victim of a police shooting – aligning the film with the timely and urgent concerns of #BlackLivesMatter. The women’s energy and power rebuke the sexist America of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein. </p>
<p>Observing such things in this recasting of Widows frees us from worrying narrowly about how it adds to the canon of McQueen’s films and permits us instead to think of it enriching a genre. Like La Plante and many others before him, McQueen raids the heist drama for political commentary as well as for dynamic action.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107065/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Dix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
McQueen’s choice of genre raised eyebrows in the movie establishment, but similar ideas run through all his films.
Andrew Dix, Lecturer in American Studies, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/103718
2018-09-25T13:45:05Z
2018-09-25T13:45:05Z
DM Thomas’s The White Hotel and why some novels are ‘unfilmable’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237893/original/file-20180925-149970-lg27kx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Babi Yar: the World War II atrocity is one of the themes of The White Hotel.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Babi-yar.jpg">GoldbergShalom</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There have been several attempts over the years to make a movie out of DM Thomas’s critically acclaimed 1981 novel, <a href="http://www.conceptualfiction.com/whitehotel.html">The White Hotel</a>. But despite the involvement of such giants of the screen as David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, Terrence Malik and David Cronenberg – who made a name for himself as a director <a href="https://litreactor.com/columns/behold-the-unfilmable-the-literary-adaptations-of-david-cronenberg">who can adapt</a> so-called “unfilmable books” – the novel has this far proved resistant to film adaptation. </p>
<p>In the absence of a film version, the book was recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/03/dennis-potter-adaptation-of-the-white-hotel-to-premiere-on-radio-4">adapted for radio by the BBC</a>, directed by Jon Amiel and based on a screenplay written by the late Dennis Potter in the 1980s. </p>
<p>DM Thomas himself wrote in 2004 about the tortuous and sometimes tortured battle over <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/aug/28/books.featuresreviews">screen rights for his novel</a>, but apart from the saga over rights – so familiar to any novelist whose work has pricked the attention of film-makers – what was it about the book itself that meant a radio adaptation succeeded when film adaptations have failed?</p>
<p>There are a number of media, cultural and economic conventions that can explain this. But, in general, books that have been called “unfilmable” are books that are hard to read: weighty, ponderous, abstract, complex, convoluted, labyrinthine, densely allusive and excessively long. Or books that treat terrifying, horrifying, revolting or repulsive subjects.</p>
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<span class="caption">One of the greatest books never filmed: The White Hotel.</span>
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<p>The White Hotel is a difficult read – for a start there’s the unreliable, psychologically disturbed, potentially hallucinating narrator, whose obscene and surreal narratives are followed by representations of horrific historical events and natural disasters. The book’s sections shift jarringly across textual forms and styles – rational, psychoanalytic case notes melt into mythological explorations of psychological symbols. Stories of strange mental states jolt into collective, realist histories. It’s a challenging read. </p>
<p>By contrast, mainstream film conventions require a clear narrative structure and a degree of temporo-spatial logic and continuity. They tend not to favour excessively “talky” screenplays, preferring to tell their stories through visuals and structure them via editing. </p>
<p>These and other reasons that books <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/louispeitzman/20-books-that-are-almost-impossible-to-adapt">have been considered unfilmable</a> have been widely discussed. They include historical sprawl (Gabriel Garciá Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude), multiple worlds (Stephen King’s Dark Tower series), too many characters (David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest), and multiple unreliable narrators who confuse the story (Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves). </p>
<p>Some novels are written with a stream of consciousness that keeps the story inside a character’s head (James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters); there may be lack of clear plot and dynamic action (Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), fantasies too elusive for film’s special effects (H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness), or a book may be too distressing or obscene to visualise realistically (Art Spiegelman’s Maus and The White Hotel).</p>
<h2>Satisfying the censors</h2>
<p>Censorship has also limited the number and scope of books that are allowed to be filmed – as films are more tightly controlled and censored than books. The reasons for this tighter control of visual images have ancient roots in Judaic, Islamic and Protestant Christian religions which represent the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/10/language-learning-for-religious-reasons">word as divine</a> and the <a href="https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=jstae">visual image as profane</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237902/original/file-20180925-149961-cvuul1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237902/original/file-20180925-149961-cvuul1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237902/original/file-20180925-149961-cvuul1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237902/original/file-20180925-149961-cvuul1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237902/original/file-20180925-149961-cvuul1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237902/original/file-20180925-149961-cvuul1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237902/original/file-20180925-149961-cvuul1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Babi Yar memorial in Kiev, Ukraine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Roland Geider</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their legacy persists in secular censorship practices. The <a href="https://www.ilianfilm.com/the-motion-picture-production-code.html">US Motion Picture Production Code (MPCC) of 1930</a> ruled that: “The latitude given to film material cannot … be as wide as the latitude given to book material,” because “a book reaches the mind through words merely; a film reaches the eyes and ears through the reproduction of actual events”. It concluded that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The mobility, popularity, accessibility, emotional appeal, vividness, straightforward presentation of fact in the films makes for intimate contact on a larger audience and greater emotional appeal. Hence the larger moral responsibilities of the motion pictures. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The MPCC advocated censoring films more stringently than books because film “reaches every class of society”, while other arts have their “grades for different classes”.</p>
<p>Even following the relaxation of the MPPC and similar censorship laws in other nations in the late 20th century, these considerations persist. When James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was made into a film <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/nov/19/ulysses-1967-film-review">by Joseph Strick in 1967</a>, it remained <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/after-33-years-censor-lets-irish-audiences-see-banned-ulysses-film-701740.html">banned in Ireland until 2000</a>, whereas the book was <a href="https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5s200743&chunk.id=d0e193&toc.id=&brand=ucpress">never officially banned</a> in Ireland.</p>
<h2>Million dollar question</h2>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6fxGrSmXvoI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>When David Cronenberg filmed William S. Burroughs’s so-called unfilmable Naked Lunch (1959) in 1991, and was criticised for not being faithful to the book, <a href="http://www.beatdom.com/naked-lunch-on-film-filming-bthe-unfilmable/">he retorted that</a> a “straightforward adaptation”, featuring all of the book’s far-flung locations and representing its most shocking scatological and sexual passages would “cost US$100m and be banned in every country in the world”. So the book could be filmed, but it could not be financed or pass film censorship laws.</p>
<p>Financing and censorship are interconnected: films have to reach a much larger audience than novels or radio plays to turn a profit, and must therefore appeal to the mainstream. BBC Radio 4 has a much smaller audience and can appeal to other demographics on other radio channels. </p>
<p>For all of these reasons, a word-only adaptation for the niche audience of BBC Radio 4, aired on a Saturday afternoon – a time when listener numbers are close to being the lowest of the week – clearly offered an economically viable and socially acceptable venue for transmitting this brilliant and challenging novel in another media form. For this, at least, we must be grateful.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103718/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kamilla Elliott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Everyone has a favourite novel that hasn’t made it to the screen. Here’s why.
Kamilla Elliott, Professor of Literature and Media, Lancaster University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/98675
2018-07-03T14:35:39Z
2018-07-03T14:35:39Z
Hollywood’s mega-monsters head back east
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225968/original/file-20180703-116132-1i1jz8t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4881806/">Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom</a>, Hollywood’s most recent creature feature, has taken <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=main&id=jurassicworldsequel.htm">more than US$900m</a> at the global box office in just a few weeks. August sees The Meg unleashed – based on <a href="https://www.stevealten.com/books/meg/">Steve Alten’s novel</a>, it’s a <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mega_shark_vs_giant_octopus/">big-budget mega-Jaws</a> featuring Jason Statham battling a 75ft megalodon. And from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1663662/?ref_=tt_rec_tt">Pacific Rim</a> (2013) to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0831387/?ref_=tt_rec_tt">Godzilla</a> (2014) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2231461/?ref_=tt_rec_tt">Rampage</a> (2018), these monster blockbusters can tell us a story about how Hollywood sits in global cinema, especially its power relationships with Asia.</p>
<p>It is widely believed that the giant monster movie is an import from Japan – often referred to by its Japanese name, <a href="https://reelrundown.com/movies/A-Beginners-Guide-To-Kaiju-Eiga"><em>kaiju eiga</em></a> (literally, strange beast films). In 1954, Gojira (Godzilla in English), in which a huge mutant dinosaur, awoken by nuclear tests, devastates Tokyo, <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/godzilla-meaning-monster-metaphors.html">set the template</a> for films that manifest the devastating effects of humanity’s destructive excesses in the form of giant city-smashing monsters.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aDCWRdS1olw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>This sci-fi sub-genre emerged from <a href="https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/1034">processes of cultural exchange</a>, which helps us to see how one culture borrows or recycles material from another. Gojira borrowed aspects from two key American films: <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024216/">King Kong</a> (1933) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045546/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms</a> (1953), both released in Japan not long before Gojira’s conception. Gojira’s name is a combination of the transliteration of gorilla, and the Japanese word for whale, kujira. The producer’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Atomic_Dreams_and_the_Nuclear_Nightmare.html?id=DpPxsgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">working title</a> was even The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. </p>
<p>Combined with the influence of <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2012/03/18/general/lucky-dragons-lethal-catch/#.WzI_2_Uo9hE">an incident</a> in which the Fukuryu Maru fishing boat was caught up in radiation from the Castle Bravo nuclear tests, we see a powerful demonstration of cultural exchange, where local and global ideas came together.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mTGMc-QPBlw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Cultural exchanges have continued for a long time in this genre. American companies worked with Japanese studios to produce new versions of Godzilla and other <em>kaiju</em> movies. Collaboration with Japanese producers helped guarantee a steady supply of content for exploitation cinemas, drive-ins and later television, including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKxQHhki_k8">Frankenstein Conquers the World</a> (1965), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUFlFD4Lvo">King Kong Escapes</a> (1967) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSpJXVP4agI">Yog: Monster from Space</a> (1970).</p>
<p><em>Kaiju eiga</em> were also produced across Asia, including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY-tnP3uJRM">Hong Kong</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwreEB6gvrs">South Korea</a>. The most notorious example is North Korea’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCKSR0JArUQ">Pulgasari</a> (1985), produced by Kim Jong-il and directed by Shin Sang-ok, once South Korea’s most successful film producer, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/03/kim-jong-il-kidnapped-director-films-north-korea-cinephile">who was kidnapped by the regime</a> and forced to improve their cinema.</p>
<h2>Hollywood’s recycling habit</h2>
<p>In Hollywood, global tropes are adopted and reworked – and their nostalgic (sometimes fetishised) referencing is rife at the moment. Pacific Rim called its monsters <em>kaiju</em> in homage to the genre’s Japanese roots – and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2557478/?ref_=nv_sr_1">its sequel’s</a> climactic showdown occurs in Tokyo. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) depicts a future dystopia where the populace has retreated into a pop culture saturated VR game. When one of its protagonists fights the evil corporate executive trying to take over <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBpgOIQR0sw">the game</a>, they take the forms, respectively, of anime robot <a href="https://mechabay.com/rx-78-2-gundam/">Gundam</a> and 1970s Godzilla enemy, <a href="https://wikizilla.org/wiki/Mechagodzilla">MechaGodzilla</a>, both icons of Japanese popular culture.</p>
<p>Rampage is an adaptation of a <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/rampage-the-most-faithful-video-game-adaptation-ever-made.html">1980s video game</a> in which giant monsters smash up cities. The largely plotless game spawned a film that critiques <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/rampage-what-makes-it-a-new-kind-monster-movie-1102661">the dangers of genetic experimentation</a>. Godzilla (2014) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3731562/">Kong: Skull Island</a> (2017) initiated a Marvel-style shared <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/MonsterVerse">MonsterVerse</a>. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3741700/">Godzilla: King of the Monsters</a> was teased in the end credits of Kong, and the two <em>kaiju</em> will face off <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5034838/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">in 2019</a>.</p>
<h2>Eastern appeal</h2>
<p>The Jurassic World films challenge similar cultural and political ideas. As cinema becomes more transnational, cultural exchange and a changing global marketplace challenge our understanding of traditional power relationships. Hence, there is a different reason why we should consider Jurassic World a <em>kaiju</em> movie: the ownership of its producers. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"958762606864384000"}"></div></p>
<p>If you’ve been watching <a href="https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/marketing/sponsorship/partners/wanda-group.html">the World Cup</a>, you’ll have seen hoardings advertising the Chinese company <a href="https://www.wanda-group.com/">Dalian Wanda</a>, one of China’s biggest conglomerates, who operate <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/chinas-wanda-group-merge-film-production-company-cinema-business/">the world’s largest cinema</a> holdings. In 2016, <a href="https://variety.com/2016/biz/asia/wanda-deal-with-legendary-1201676878/">it paid US$3.5 billion for Legendary Entertainment</a>, the production company behind the Jurassic World, Pacific Rim and Godzilla series. </p>
<p>An earlier deal with <a href="https://variety.com/2013/film/news/legendary-east-finds-key-partner-in-china-film-co-1200489836/">state-run China Film Group</a> had granted Legendary Entertainment unparalleled access to the Chinese market through co-production deals. The Meg is also <a href="https://variety.com/2016/film/asia/china-to-get-first-release-of-shark-thriller-meg-1201887432/">a Chinese co-production</a>.</p>
<p>Localised strategies have also appealed to Chinese audiences. Chinese star Jing Tian has appeared in several Legendary monster films – as a military leader in <em>kaiju</em> martial arts spectacular <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2034800/?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Great Wall</a> (2016), a biologist in Kong: Skull Island and a famous scientist in Pacific Rim: Uprising. Star casting has long been one of the key techniques used by Hollywood to appeal to local markets. Locations are also important – the action in The Meg has been relocated from Maui in the novel, to China. Its cast also includes <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0508356/">Li Bingbing</a>, a Chinese star who also appeared in the most recent Transformers movie.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225468/original/file-20180629-117422-xlaj8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225468/original/file-20180629-117422-xlaj8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225468/original/file-20180629-117422-xlaj8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225468/original/file-20180629-117422-xlaj8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225468/original/file-20180629-117422-xlaj8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1194&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225468/original/file-20180629-117422-xlaj8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1194&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225468/original/file-20180629-117422-xlaj8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1194&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Legendary’s films demonstrate the mixture of local and global features at work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Legendary East and China Film Group</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Several monster movies have recently <a href="http://chinafilminsider.com/hollywood-blockbusters-better-china-u-s-recent-weeks/">grossed more in China</a> than domestically in the US. Pacific Rim: Uprising grossed almost twice as much, and Rampage over 50% more. By contrast, Star Wars films make negligible impact at the Chinese box office – clearly <a href="https://variety.com/2018/film/asia/monster-hunt-2-190-million-china-enjoys-half-billion-dollar-weekend-1202703946/">monster content</a> is more appealing to Chinese audiences.</p>
<p>This cycle of giant monster movies is currently the most prominent example of Hollywood’s globalised business. Its embrace of international material, familiar recycling and relationships with Asia are most strongly evidenced in these films. That’s not to say that all of this is new or one-way traffic: Legendary’s success with Godzilla inspired Toho studios to develop <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4262980/">not one</a> but <a href="https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80180373">two new series</a> with the beloved national icon.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98675/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steve Rawle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Monster movies are currently rampaging across the globe. Their popularity shows us how Hollywood’s place in world cinema is changing.
Steve Rawle, Associate Professor in Media Production, York St John University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/93297
2018-03-20T11:37:05Z
2018-03-20T11:37:05Z
The Outsider: your average Yakuza wouldn’t recognise himself in this movie
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210280/original/file-20180314-113482-5xz2l8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=86%2C0%2C833%2C496&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Netflix movie The Outsider has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/08/the-outsider-review-jared-leto-joins-the-yakuza-in-crass-netflix-thriller">widely criticised</a> for a variety of reasons. The <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2011311/">film centres</a> on Nick Lowell (Jared Leto) – an American former prisoner of war who becomes a member of a Yakuza clan in 1950s Osaka. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/08/the-outsider-review-jared-leto-joins-the-yakuza-in-crass-netflix-thriller">The Guardian dismissed the film</a> as having “a fetishistic relationship to Japanese elements that could have only come from someone who sees them as exotic, rather than intuitively understanding their place in society”. </p>
<p>I was intrigued to see it for myself, having interviewed at least 30 members of a Yakuza family during two intense weeks in 2015 when I was researching the <a href="https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/news/2017/unique-glimpse-into-the-culture-of-the-japanese-mafia/">meaning of symbols in their tattoos</a>. From my observations there are a number of problems with the way the Yakuza is represented in the film.</p>
<h2>A <em>gaijin</em> in the organisation?</h2>
<p>Straight away, the strangest thing is that a foreigner – a <em>gaijin</em> – gets to become a member of a Yakuza family. Not only that, but Lowell quickly rises to become a member with key responsibilities – at one point he becomes the main boss’s bodyguard. This is pretty unlikely – certainly at the speed with which our hero achieves this distinction in the film. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H9kiXtandb8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Yakuza organisations tend to have a clear structure with several bosses on many different levels. In this case Lowell performs his initiation rite (<em>sakazuki</em>) with the main boss of the family. In reality it might take years for a new member to get such a privilege – a new member might even work under several bosses before he gets to perform the initiation rite. And even then it’s unlikely he’d be initiated by the main boss of the organisation.</p>
<h2>Finger cutting, tattoos and suits</h2>
<p>It is a typical gangster movie, but the context does not feel unique to Japan. It seems that Yakuza symbols are used to enhance the feeling that the main character is simply entering another world. </p>
<p>Before being accepted into the Yakuza family, Lowell performs the traditional finger-cutting ritual known as <em>yubitsume</em>. In this ritual the Yakuza member cuts off a part of his finger and hands it over to the boss – in Lowell’s case two of his fingertips, which he presents to the boss. But the scene lacks context and explanation – in the film the boss sends Lowell’s and another member’s fingers to a rival boss. In real life, I know of one instance where a Yakuza boss cut off his own finger and sent it to a rival boss to apologise for one of his clan’s behaviour. In the film we appear to get a combination of popular scenarios depicting this ritual, and it really doesn’t ring true. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210310/original/file-20180314-113482-1q3c9yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210310/original/file-20180314-113482-1q3c9yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210310/original/file-20180314-113482-1q3c9yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210310/original/file-20180314-113482-1q3c9yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210310/original/file-20180314-113482-1q3c9yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210310/original/file-20180314-113482-1q3c9yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210310/original/file-20180314-113482-1q3c9yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A real yakuza member showing his cut off finger.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andreas Johansson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lowell also gets a traditional Japanese tattoo. He is tattooed with a koi carp – a famous symbol for Japanese gangsters. Yakuza members I have talked with say the koi fish represents a wish to climb the hierarchy of their organisations, which Lowell certainly does. But again, there is very little context for this tattoo. In fact, Yakuza tend not to refer to them as tattoos, but <em>irezumi</em> – which have a <a href="http://www.irezumiart.co.uk/irezumi-symbology/">deeper spiritual meaning</a> than is evident in the film. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210284/original/file-20180314-113462-1sdzdlx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210284/original/file-20180314-113462-1sdzdlx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210284/original/file-20180314-113462-1sdzdlx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210284/original/file-20180314-113462-1sdzdlx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210284/original/file-20180314-113462-1sdzdlx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210284/original/file-20180314-113462-1sdzdlx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210284/original/file-20180314-113462-1sdzdlx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Some Yakuza tattoos take up to 200 hours to execute.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If you are following the traditional ways, the <em>irezumi</em> master would interview you too see that your <em>irezumi</em> fits your personality best. It’s a significant physical and spiritual commitment – a traditional <em>irezumi</em> might take more than 200 hours to complete and the content of the tattoo could be very personal. Again this commitment doesn’t come across in the film.</p>
<p>These Yakuza are also very smartly dressed – they all seem to prefer to wear suits – and Lowell is accordingly dressed in a suit when he is initiated into the Yakuza family. But that’s not really the case – they tend to wear what they like. It feels a little like the suits are there to give the film a bit of a old-fashioned mobster feel, which doesn’t really work.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210311/original/file-20180314-113458-dv924k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210311/original/file-20180314-113458-dv924k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210311/original/file-20180314-113458-dv924k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210311/original/file-20180314-113458-dv924k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210311/original/file-20180314-113458-dv924k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=647&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210311/original/file-20180314-113458-dv924k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=647&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210311/original/file-20180314-113458-dv924k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=647&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Dress down day for gangsters? Yakuza members in the streets of Yokohama.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andreas Johansson</span></span>
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</figure>
<h2>Mobster as modern-day Samurai</h2>
<p>What does ring true is the overall picture of the Yakuza as living to a certain code, or nobility. In the early part of the movie, Lowell is beaten up in jail by prison guards for saving a Yakuza member’s life. The Yakuza member then swears an oath that he will get his members to pick Lowell up from prison when he gets out, which they do.</p>
<p>To explain this perception of the noble gangster you have to delve into the Yakuza’s long history. Exactly how Yakuza organisations came into existence is open to debate – but there is a recurring image in both popular culture and academia of the Yakuza as <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/105756779200200103">descended from the Samurai</a>, protecting the poor against the evil shoguns is widespread. But the jury is out – and in fact in more recent times Yakuza organisations have <a href="https://apjjf.org/2012/10/7/Andrew-Rankin/3688/article.html">worked with the police</a> (when the US president, Dwight D Eisenhower, scheduled a visit to Japan in 1960 they were <a href="https://apjjf.org/2012/10/7/Andrew-Rankin/3688/article.html">asked to help protect him</a> from street demonstrations). They have also been used by company bosses to intimidate labour unions..</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210285/original/file-20180314-113455-ij2x2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210285/original/file-20180314-113455-ij2x2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210285/original/file-20180314-113455-ij2x2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210285/original/file-20180314-113455-ij2x2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210285/original/file-20180314-113455-ij2x2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210285/original/file-20180314-113455-ij2x2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210285/original/file-20180314-113455-ij2x2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Snappy dressers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span>
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<p>But the Yakuza’s murky origins are far more likely to be mixed up with the criminal underworld and illegal gambling and street peddling in the 1800s.</p>
<p>Having said that, in their own worldview Yakuza members <a href="https://www.c3.co/blog/interview-with-yakuza-reporter-jake-adelstein-about-the-mafia-magazine-they-dont-see-themselves-as-bad-guys/">do not see themselves as bad guys</a>. They frequently call themselves <em>ninkyo dantai</em> (honourable organisations) which follow the Samurai code, the <em>bushido</em>, a set of rules and moral values. The Outsider leans heavily on these mythological narratives – at one point showing Yakuza members fighting with Samurai swords.</p>
<p>So the critics are right in the main. The Outsider is filled with romantic cliches and decontextualised symbols. But it does get one thing right – being a Yakuza is likely to mean a life of fragile, shifting alliances with the risk of a fast and painful death.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93297/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andreas Johansson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Swedish researcher Andreas Johansson interviewed 30 members of a Japanese Yakuza clan in 2015.
Andreas Johansson, Director of Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET), Lund University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/92629
2018-03-13T09:01:38Z
2018-03-13T09:01:38Z
Lara Croft is back with a bang – but there are real tomb raiders out there
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209908/original/file-20180312-30965-nd7wou.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ilze Kitshoff/Warner Bros</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Seventeen years since Angelina Jolie appeared on screens as the avatar-turned-adventurer and an astounding 22 years since the release of the original video game, Swedish actress Alicia Vikander is continuing the franchise in the blockbuster reboot of Tomb Raider. </p>
<p>The latest reincarnation of Croft is intelligent, athletic and primed for action. However, this time around filmmakers have thankfully ditched her previous shorts and crop-top for utilitarian trousers. It’s a welcome change, especially in light of the claims of <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/jumanji-2-dwayne-johnson-tries-and-fails-to-calm-sexism-outcry-over-karen-gillans-skimpy-outfit-a7320456.html">over-sexualisation of Karen Gillan’s character</a> in the recent Jumanji 2.</p>
<p>As the original “tomb raider”, Lara’s relationship with archaeology is just about as precarious as the many situations in which she finds herself. Over the decades, in various film and game adaptations, Croft has either been an archaeologist in her own right or has been charged with continuing a quest left to her by a male archaeologist relative – this time her deceased father (played by Dominic West). The film’s action begins with the opening of his tomb – Croft entering a hard-won code to gain entry into what reveals itself to be her father’s secret study, a space resplendent with pseudo-archaeological figurines and antiquarian-style boxes.</p>
<p>In a recent interview, Vikander talked of “mystical doors being opened” in the remake. Certainly the trailer itself is packed full of cryptograms which Croft must crack in order to find out about her late father’s legacy. Yet there is little digging, data or discourse in a franchise which centres around a character who is frequently referred to as an “adventurer-archaeologist”, shooting and sparring against the backdrop of Indiana Jones-esque ancient tombs.</p>
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<p>However, although “raiding” is very much outside the rhetoric of recent practice, archaeologists have more in common with the world of Croft than it might initially appear. Tombs are often sites of contention and conflict and practising archaeology in areas where local populations may be hostile towards the intervention of foreign or official parties can still be disconcerting and indeed dangerous.</p>
<h2>Thrill of the chase</h2>
<p>British archaeologist <a href="https://www.brh.org.uk/site/contributors/dr-lucy-goodison/">Lucy Goodison</a> remembers instances during which locating and cataloguing the rural tomb sites of prehistoric Crete turned nasty. One incident in the early 2000s involved following a dilapidated car down a dirt track at breakneck speed, driven by people who it transpired intended to loot the tomb. Another was being denied help locating a tomb because of Elgin’s theft of the Parthenon Marbles. This unfortunately echoed an incident in which Greek archaeologist <a href="https://interactive.archaeology.org/zominthos/meet-the-team/">Yannis Sakellarakis</a> was shot at by looters caught red-handed while he was approaching the Cretan tomb of Ayia Kyriaki in 1965.</p>
<p>While situations in which archaeologists and real “tomb raiders” come into conflict do not always escalate to the point of shooting, they can take the form of sabotage. Excavators working in Narce, Italy in 2012 experienced instances of slashed tyres and the purposeful vandalism of surveillance cameras erected to discourage trespassing at the tomb sites. This accompanied some destructive episodes of illicit digging under the cover of night, which the excavation director <a href="https://iicdublino.esteri.it/iic_dublino/en/gli_eventi/calendario/2017/03/the-lullaby-of-the-tomb-looters.html">Jacopo Tabolli rather romantically called</a> “the lullaby of the looters”.</p>
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<p>Is Lara a looter? She’s certainly not asking anyone permission, but what this remake of Tomb Raider should remind us of is questions of motivation and ownership. “Close the tomb once and for all”, West booms over scenes of Vikander escaping the clutches of sinister rival organisation Trinity, who seek to open it and “start a global genocide”.</p>
<p>Yet strip away the shooting, explosions and stunts and the conflict essentially arises from two opposed groups laying claim to a place of ancient importance, with the tomb existing as a site of contested access and control – an all-too familiar situation for archaeologists working in areas where looting and the subsequent sale of artefacts is a genuine source of livelihood for the local population.</p>
<h2>Understanding looting</h2>
<p>It remains to be seen – however doubtful – whether Croft manages to have a measured conversation with her competitors, but this is where the archaeological discipline differs. The <a href="http://followthepotsproject.org/">Follow the Pots project</a> seeks to understand the motivations and ideological underpinning of tomb looting in the southern Ghor – a region of Jordan – where the site of <a href="https://www.archaeological.org/sites/default/files/files/HCA_FutureofthePast-AIAJuly2016.pdf">Fifa</a> has been left resembling a “moonscape”, scarred by the innumerable holes dug in search of saleable artefacts.</p>
<p>By listening to – and learning from – the narratives of those involved in the illicit removal and sale of antiquities, the project urges archaeologists to “rethink their privileged position of controlling how people value and use the past”. This incorporation of alternative dialogues and ideologies into archaeological practice highlights that, unlike Croft’s new origin story, real “tomb raiding” is not a clear cut case of good versus bad, hero versus villain, but rather a difference in the way in which stakeholders choose to use the material remains of the past.</p>
<p>Audiences worldwide will soon watch Croft desperately trying to close the tomb ominously named the “Mother of Death”. Yet as archaeologists we should aim for the opposite. It is our job to open sites to thorough investigation, public engagement and debate but, more importantly, to enact and perpetuate openness in an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of claims to archaeological heritage. Now that really would be an adventure.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92629/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ellen Finn receives funding from the Irish Research Council and the Irish Department of Education. </span></em></p>
Looting of antiquities is a serious problem, but looters are not always just motivated by greed.
Ellen Finn, PhD Researcher in Classics, Trinity College Dublin
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.