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This study argues that the popular comedy cinema of late Francoism (roughly 1960-75), known as comedia sexy, comedia celtibérica, or simply landismo, aimed to shift the international perception of Spain away from racialized stereotypes of the nation’s Africanness in order to move it closer to a white European identity. Troubled by the reputation of Francoism as anachronistic in a context of global decolonization, civil rights in the U.S., and rapid social and economic change within Spain, the regime used the popular cinema industry, which was closely aligned with it ideologically, to portray Spain as upwardly mobile on a geopolitical hierarchy that was imagined as a black/white racial paradigm. Specifically, by intertwining the macho ibérico/sueca narrative trope with racist caricatures of blacks, this cinema aimed to accentuate Spain’s upward geopolitical and racial mobility by contrasting it with the fixity of racial others, while simultaneously retaining a deracialized, commodifiable “difference” as a competitive advantage on the world stage.

Copyright of ARTS: Artuklu Journal of Art & Humanities is the property of Mardin Artuklu University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyses how the medium of film stages and reflects on populist political practices and on the main figures and ways of appearing, acting and relating they involve to create public resonance. In analysing two sample films – one ('Meet John Doe', Frank Capra 1941) released in the United States in the early 1940s and the other ('Chez Nous',Lucas Belvaux 2016) made in Europe in the 2010s – it shows in detail how populist leaders embody the role of a central iconic figure, the ‘everybody’, in addressing the audience as ‘people’ in opposition to an ‘elite’. The central characteristics of such a figure and its functions in political discourses as well as the effects of its public performances and the stages it uses are disclosed. In addition, the article gives an insight into the genealogy and iconology of this figure. In this respect, it shows that for contemporary populism, the link of everybodies to the political myth of ‘the people’ re-emerging with the popular revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is most important. In comparing the two sample films, the article discusses various concepts that are used in political theory to grasp the phenomenon of populism. By relating these concepts to the lived practices of populism depicted in the films, the key stylistic and performative features of populism are highlighted and the patterns of collective myths associated with it are revealed. At the same time, however, the change in populist political mobilisation from modernity to late modernity is also discussed. In this reading, popular film appears as a medium that does not represent an escape from social and political life but that leads us towards it and is able to vividly reflect upon how processes of political mediation work.

Hollywood film has been positioned as a form of public pedagogy – a site of efficacious informal learning. Acknowledging this educative potential, this article examines the ways in which faculty and students perceive and respond to representations of higher education offered by popular film. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with 22 participants, we discuss the key themes about teaching and learning that faculty and students observed in filmic representations – including an emphasis on genius, the presence or absence of effort, and a prevalence of extreme faculty-student relationships – and consider the extent to which these lessons shape viewers' understanding and experiences of teaching, learning, and universities. While many participants suggested these representations are 'just entertainment' and thus have limited impact, their comments nonetheless indicate ways in which films shape their own and others' experiences and perceptions of the university, underscoring the need for further research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Themes of surveillance in popular cinema raise critical questions about the apparatus of spectatorship and the overlap between film technology and real governmental and corporate spying. This paper argues that, since about 1998, what critics have called 'surveillance cinema' evolves a new type of 'hypernarrative' viewpoint that alters the political significance of surveillance in film, displacing the 'metanarrative' suture between a viewer's position and the spying camera. Science-fictional or fantastical camera movements and actions – 'impossible' in earlier surveillance cinema because they contravene the realism through which spying is connected to actual-world politics – are now themselves naturalised and made 'realistic'. A capacity to roam freely over space and time, as well as to surveil both factual and counterfactual 'lines' of plot, becomes standard in the spectator's repertoire – surveillance is something we freely do rather than problematically observe. In what I call 'time travel surveillance cinema', the politics of surveillance is thus displaced and devalued but not altogether abolished. Politics resurfaces, in line with general tendencies of genre cinema, through anodyne individual reactions to 'time travel surveillance', especially in the guise of inapt happy endings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2011, Western eyes were fixed on Egypt. Many were astounded when Hosni Mubarack, who had presented himself as the anti-colonial hero who nationalized the Suez Canal, was ousted by a popular uprising after thirty years of authoritarian rule. The subsequent waves of political protests sweeping over the Arab world put in evidence the complexities of the historical background, and brought attention to the long shadows of a not-so-distant violent past. For Europe and North America, there was something else about Egypt. Culturally, the West had absorbed Egypt onto its collective memory as the gate to the Near East since the nineteenth century. Casablanca and Hong Kong had been pied a terres, but Cairo, in a way that not even Byzantium had ever managed, was home. Egypt has been embedded in Western consciousness for the last two centuries, and its ancient, pharaonic past has reinvigorated the store of myth of Europe and North America to an immeasurable extent. The present essay is concerned with the discreet but powerful interventions of Western popular culture in translating Egypt for Western consumption, both building and resisting stereotypes. The essay considers Bram Stoker's novel of 1903, The Jewel of Seven Stars, which solidified many of those stereotypes, and goes on to discuss three popular renderings of Egypt produced around a hundred years later, which rewrite those stereotypes from within: the film The Jewel of the Nile (1985), the novel The Map of Love (1999), and the documentary The Hidden History of Egypt (2002). All four works are particularly interested in 'looking' as a form of 'knowing', and the essay investigates how they all articulate what we may call an 'active witnessing'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of popular film as an experiential teaching tool in multicultural counselor education has been well documented. However, existing research has been limited. The purpose of this study is to implement a unique pedagogic intervention using popular films and to study how counseling students experience the activity as part of their multicultural counseling training. The researchers utilized the popular films Crash and Precious to stimulate student dialogue and reflection on topics pertaining to race, culture, privilege, and social justice. The findings indicate that popular films, when implemented in conjunction with reflective learning activities, are effective in promoting students’ multicultural and social justice counseling competencies. Participants reported that the pedagogic activity was effective in bringing to life the multicultural course concepts and stimulating difficult but necessary conversations about race, ethnicity, privilege, and power. Finally, implications of this study could further inform the field of multicultural counselor education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructions of teaching, learning, and the university within popular culture can exert an important influence on public understandings of higher education, including those held by faculty and students. As such, they constitute a rich site of inquiry for the scholarship of teaching and learning. Drawing on the notion of film as 'public pedagogy,' this article analyses representations of higher education within 11 top grossing and/or critically acclaimed films released in 2014. We identify three broad themes across these texts--the purpose of higher education, relationships between students and professors, and the creation of academic identities--and consider the implications and functions of these representational patterns for teaching, learning, and SoTL. Particular attention is given to the difference between the framing of science and arts and humanities disciplines, and to how this might resonate with the contemporary 'crisis of the humanities'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the reproduction of rural anti-idyllic representations in audiovisual popular culture through an analysis of the Finnish film Kuutamosonaatti (The moonlight sonata, 1988). We examine how the divide between rural and urban people, as well as their living environments and gender roles, has been constructed in the film. We also show how the film mixes features of Hollywood hillbilly characters with a Finnish negative stereotyping of rural men. Moreover, both in Finland and the United States, the negative stereotyping of rural men had begun before the era of modern film. This paper claims that the representations of rural otherness in popular film mirror the development of the Finnish society toward a modern, urban way of life, which becomes dominant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how specific groups are politicizing Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver to counter gentrification and urban renewal in New York City. Using current cultural references, I argue that the visual snapshot of New York's past that is captured on film is what has become Taxi Driver's most romanticized feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Culture & Communication / Kültür ve İletişim is the property of Imge Publishing House and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Virtually nothing has been written about Hungary's three pioneering women film directors in English or Hungarian. The only mentions of the three directors and their films are found in throwaway comments in Hungarian works of film history, in an incorrect entry in a national filmography published in 1999 by the Hungarian Film Institute, and in a dismissive article of 1985, which ignores one of the three films altogether. This article seeks to make up for this critical and historiographical oversight. This article asks why did these filmmakers succeed; and why and how did they succeed in an industry so utterly dominated by men? The other aim of this article is to move beyond discovery, and read the films in their context to assess the contribution they made to national cinema and the dominant nationalist discourse in interwar and wartime Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses selected motifs from the James Bond series, especially those motifs that refer to the organization Spectre. Kurz shows the workings and mechanisms of popular culture as they undergo a particular condensation in this series that has continued for over fifty years (1962-2015). Bond is chased by the ‘spectre of convention' on the one hand and by the ‘spectre of failure’ on the other. Treating the popular films as mirrors of the collective imagination, we can identify contemporary viewers' fears and anxieties. In this perspective the series becomes a lesson in hauntology. It confirms the critical diagnoses of Giorgio Agamben, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Jacques Derrida, who have foretold the end of man while pointing out the contemporary reality is a complex of apparitions and spectres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will examine the issue of the little-known multiple version production system which is an essential part of the European languages question. In this system a picture is filmed several times with actors from different countries playing in their native language. This process was first developed in the 1930’s with the advent of talkies. The fact that continental European audiences did not want to see English-only talking movies coupled with a political and economic anti-americanism help to explain these productions. To meet this challenge Paramount set up studios in Paris to shoot European versions of its films. But the most successful movies were the European productions themselves. From the Neubabelsberg studios in Berlin came the sound of operettas and comedy thrillers. Many famous actors, actresses, directors or scriptwriters received their training in these multiple versions (Pagnol, Gabin, Fernandel, Annabella) which stopped production during WW2. This article will then go on to study multilingual film versions from the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed the European co-productions facilitated the return of these films. One of the actors or actresses changes according to his/her fame in his/her country. These new multiple versions mix retakes (with different actors) and dubbing. Up until the end of the 1960s these films still existed and were made by filmmakers like Jacques Deray, Jacques Demy or Orson Welles.

Copyright of Anthropology Magazine is the property of University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The reluctance to introduce popular films in teacher education has often focused on the generic and stereotypical aspects of school movies. Stereotypes of education are said to misrepresent teaching and learning and are the basis for critical discussions in classes for preservice teachers. Rather than reject them, a narrative analysis will engage with these recurring patterns. School films can be described as equipment for living (Burke) and a company we keep (Booth) and provide narrative schemata. The British school film The History Boys is analyzed as a narrative that responds to a cultural tradition of representing teachers using stereotypes of different pedagogies, literature teaching, and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]