Browsing by Subject "Hollywood"
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Item Asking for it : girls' sexual subjectivity in contemporary U.S. cinema(2007-05) Blue, Morgan Genevieve; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-How might American narrative cinema shift from oppressive objectification to positive, healthy female sexual subjectivities in films addressing and depicting adolescent girls? As more women make films both within the Hollywood system and independently, the potential increases for greater creative energy to be devoted to re-imagining and legitimizing girls’ sexuality on film. Fighting Hollywood censors is a significant battle for women filmmakers, but making films independently is also a viable, even powerful, option. It is beneficial to fight both within patriarchal systems and outside them to effect change, and now, more than ever, women and girls have access to the technologies, skills, and understanding to alter public discourse about girls’ sexuality and take control of their own representations. This project aims to point out just a few examples from commercial Hollywood, independent and DIY cinemas in which women have worked to position girl characters as active and desiring rather than as passive and desirable. Through ideological and narrative analyses of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Smooth Talk, Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, and Coming Soon, coupled with discussions of their female directors’ struggles with Hollywood patriarchy and American society’s gendered double standard when it comes to youth sexualities, I hope to shed light on the need for women to make films that offer positive representations of girls’ sexual subjectivities.Item Behind the Sony scandal : the role of talent agencies in perpetuating inequality(2016-05) Simon, Samantha Jones; Williams, Christine L.; Glass, JenniferHollywood talent agencies are powerful organizations that act as gatekeepers to the industry and structure the labor market for actors, directors, and writers. This thesis applies Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s work on tokenization, Joan Acker’s theory of gendered organizations, and R.W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity to understand the organizational structures and narratives of success that privilege white men in talent agencies. Through interviews conducted with talent agents, I found that these organizations are defined by men’s monopoly of powerful positions, professional networks exclusive to men, a patrimonial system of mentorship, and discourses that prize certain masculine performances and disparage femininity. This thesis illuminates the exclusionary organizational structures and discourses operating within talent agencies that may help explain the white male domination of these spaces.Item Crafting digital cinema : cinematographers in contemporary Hollywood(2011-08) Lucas, Robert Christopher; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Strover, Sharon; Schiesari, Nancy; Hunt, Bruce; Hay, JamesIn the late 1990s, motion picture and television production began a process of rapid digitalization with profound implications for cinematographers in Hollywood, as new tools for “digital cinematography” became part of the traditional production process. This transition came in three waves, starting with a post-production technique, the digital intermediate, then the use of high-definition video and digital production cameras, and finally digital exhibition. This dissertation shows how cinematographers responded to the technical and aesthetic challenges presented by digital production tools as they replaced elements of the film-based, photochemical workflow. Using trade publications, mainstream press sources, and in-depth interviews with cinematographers and filmmakers, I chronicle this transition between 1998 and 2005, analyzing how cinematographers’ responded to and utilized these new digital technologies. I analyze demonstration texts, promotional videos, and feature films, including Pleasantville, O Brother Where Art Thou, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, The Anniversary Party, Personal Velocity, and Collateral, all of which played a role in establishing a discourse and practice of digital cinematography among cinematographers, producers and directors. The challenges presented by new collaborators such as the colorist and digital imaging technician are also examined. I discuss cinematographers’ work with standards-setting groups such as the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the studio consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives, describing it as an effort to protect “film-look” and establish look-management as a prominent feature of their craft practice. In an era when digitalization has made motion pictures more malleable and mobile than ever before, this study shows how cinematographers attempted to preserve their historical, craft-based sense of masterful cinematography and a structure of authority that privileges the cinematographer as “guardian of the image."Item The gossip industry : producing and distributing star images, celebrity gossip and entertainment news 1910-2010(2011-05) Petersen, Anne Helen; Staiger, JanetThis dissertation addresses the industrial history of American-based celebrity gossip over century, beginning with the first Hollywood stars in the 1910s and reaching into “celebrified” culture of the 2010s. Gossip, broadly defined as discourse about a public figure produced and distributed for profit, can operate within the star’s good graces or completely outside of the Hollywood machine; it can be published in “old media” print and broadcast forms or online and on a phone. Regardless of form, tone, and content, gossip remains a crucial component of the ways in which star images are produced and consumed. The dissertation thus asks: how has the relationship between the gossip industry and Hollywood in general changed over the last century? And what implications do those changes have for stars, those who exploit their images, and media industries at large?Item Prestige and prurience : the decline of the American art house and the emergence of sexploitation, 1957-1972(2010-05) Metz, Daniel Curran; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Berg, Charles R.“Prestige and Prurience: The Decline of the American Art House and the Emergence of Sexploitation, 1957-1972” presents a historical narrative of the art house theatre during the 1960s and its surrounding years, examining the ways in which art theatres transformed into adult theatres during the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in earnest in the immediate post-war period, art houses in America experienced a short period of growth before stagnating in the middle 1950s. With the release in 1957 of the erotically charged Brigitte Bardot film …And God Created Woman, a new era of art houses followed, one that is characterized by the emergence of sexualized advertising, content and stars. As the 1960s came, sex films like The Immoral Mr. Teas played on art film marketing strategies and even screened in many art houses. Gradually, sexploitation films began to dominate art house programs and replace European art films and Hollywood revivals. In this transitional period, however, sexploitation films used key strategies to emulate many art film characteristics, and likewise art films used sexploitation techniques in order to maintain marketability for American distribution and exhibition. By studying the promotion and programming used by art house theatres during this period, this thesis identifies and announces a number of key trends within the dynamic period for art houses. The period is distinguished by its convergence of practices related to prestigious and prurient signs, merging art and sex in ways unique to the era and to the circumstances by which sex films infiltrated art houses and art films pandered to salacious interests. It presents a new perspective on the history of art houses, art cinema, American exhibition, sexploitation films, hardcore pornography and censorship.Item Screening Insurrection: The Containment of Working-Class Rebellion in New Deal Era Hollywood Cinema(2014-03-28) Wilson, Galen JamesIn my dissertation I explore the ways in which New Deal era Hollywood cinema represented the growing spirit of collective action that defined the 1930s. Specifically, I examine the ways film redirected the collective impulse of the radical left by positioning a strengthened heteronormative family as the path to national economic renewal. Drawing upon archival sources as well as cultural historians such as Richard Pells and Michael Denning and scholars of masculinity such as Michael Kimmel and R.W. Connell, I contend that the cinema of this era reinforced the national myth of the couple as the ?proper? American path to economic renewal and represented collective action as being in direct conflict with the family. Beginning with Hollywood?s representation of radical collectives in the 1930s, I argue that the film industry vilified working-class collective action by equating it with mob justice and suggesting that masculine collectivity was inherently destructive to the heteronormative couple. Rather than reflecting the spirit of economic empowerment through collective action, these films, like the New Deal Administration itself, suggested that the proper path to national economic renewal was through a renewal of masculinity and the heteronormative family. I explore figures associated with subversive masculinity and collectivity during the New Deal era: the hobo and the outlaw, and explores the ways in which these figures? subversiveness was contained and assimilated to the New Deal capitalist state. Tramping, long associated with a radical break from industrial capitalism and heteronormativity, became redefined as a temporary right of passage during which the masculine individualist reestablished his manhood before restoring his economic fortunes and establishing a stable romantic couple. Similarly the outlaw figure shifted from the working-class gangster rebelling against capitalism to the aristocratic outlaw, seeking merely to restore the proper capitalist system. Finally, I examine the ultimate containment of the nascent working-class collectives of the 1930s and 1940s by analyzing Hollywood?s World War II era production. By looking at these films it is possible to see the ways in which the spirit of radical collective action was finally reincorporated into the capitalist hegemony to preserve rather than overthrow the system.