front cover of Yankee Doodle Dandy
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Edited by Patrick McGilligan; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1981

The 1942 smash musical hit Yankee Doodle Dandy has long remained a favorite among audiences and film buffs. Ostensibly the story of "Mr. Broadway"—George M. Cohan— the movie evolved in its making into one of Warners' trademark "biopics" and a showcase for the singing and dancing talents of James Cagney.

This book includes the complete screenplay.

[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Yellow Future
Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema
Jane Chi Hyun Park
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Yellow Future examines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style.

Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in Blade Runner and the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in Rush Hour and the mixed-race hero in The Matrix. Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility.
 
Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood, Yellow Future centers on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed as style in the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Your History with Me
The Films of Penny Siopis
Sarah Nuttall, editor
Duke University Press, 2024
Penny Siopis is internationally acclaimed for her pathbreaking paintings and installations. Your History with Me is a comprehensive study of her short films, which have put her at the front ranks of contemporary artist-filmmakers. Siopis uses found footage to create short video essays that function as densely encrypted accounts of historical time and memory that touch on the cryptic and visceral elements of gender and power. The critics, scholars, curators, artists, and filmmakers in this volume examine her films in relation to subjects ranging from the history of Greeks in South Africa, trauma and cultural memory, and her relationship with the French New Wave to her feminist-inflected articulations of form and content and how her films comment on apartheid. They also highlight her global South perspective to articulate a mode of filmmaking highly responsive to histories of violence, displacement, migration as well as pleasure, joy, and renewal. The essays, which are paired with vivid stills from Siopis’s films throughout, collectively widen the understanding of Siopis’s oeuvre. Opening new vocabularies of thought for engaging with her films, this volume outlines how her work remakes the possibilities of film as a mode of experimentation and intervention.

Contributors. John Akomfrah, Sinazo Chiya, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Katerina Gregos, Brenda Hollweg, William Kentridge, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Griselda Pollock, Laura Rascaroli, Zineb Sedira, Penny Siopis, Hedley Twidle, Zoé Whitley
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
You're Only Young Twice
Children's Literature and Film
Tim Morris
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Original and thought-provoking, You're Only Young Twice reveals the complexities that underlie even the sparest picture book text and the lessons that reside in even the most familiar family movie plots.
 
Moving from classic texts (The Secret Garden, Goodnight Moon) to ephemera (the Hardy Boys, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter series), from the printed page to the silver screen (Willie Wonka, Jumanji, 101 Dalmatians, Beethoven), Tim Morris employs his experience as a parent and teacher to interrogate children's culture and reveal its conflicting messages.
 
Books and films for children--favorites accepted as wholesome fare for impressionable young minds --do not always teach straightforward lessons. Instead, they reflect the anxieties of the times and the desires of adults. At the heart of many a children's classic lies power, often expressed through racism, sexism, or violence. Under Morris's gaze, revered animal stories like Black Beauty turn into litanies of abuse; fantasies of childhood like Big are revealed as patriarchal struggles.
 
You're Only Young Twice redirects the focus on children's literature, asking not "What messages should children receive?" but "What messages do adults actually send?" For example, Morris recounts his own childhood confusion upon viewing Peter Pan, with its queenish, inept pirate and a grown woman (Mary Martin) in tights who pretends to be a crowing boy.
Morris shatters our long-held assumptions and challenges our best intentions, demonstrating how children's literature and films lay bare a troubled and troubling worldview.
 
 
 
 
 
[more]

front cover of Youth Culture in Global Cinema
Youth Culture in Global Cinema
Edited by Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel
University of Texas Press, 2006

Coming of age is a pivotal experience for everyone. So it is no surprise that filmmakers around the globe explore the experiences of growing up in their work. From blockbuster U.S. movies such as the Harry Potter series to thought-provoking foreign films such as Bend It Like Beckham and Whale Rider, films about youth delve into young people's attitudes, styles, sexuality, race, families, cultures, class, psychology, and ideas. These cinematic representations of youth also reflect perceptions about youth in their respective cultures, as well as young people's worth to the larger society. Indeed, as the contributors to this volume make plain, films about young people open a very revealing window on the attitudes and values of cultures across the globe.

Youth Culture in Global Cinema offers the first comprehensive investigation of how young people are portrayed in film around the world. Eighteen established film scholars from eleven different national backgrounds discuss a wide range of films that illuminate the varied conditions in which youth live. The essays are grouped thematically around the issues of youthful resistance and rebellion; cultural and national identity, including religion and politics; and sexual maturation, including gender distinctions and coming-of-age queer. Some essays engage in close readings of films, while others examine the advertising and reception of films or investigate psychological issues. The volume concludes with filmographies of over 700 youth-related titles arranged by nation and theme.

[more]

logo for Amsterdam University Press
Yugoslav Black Wave
Polemical Cinema in Socialist Yugoslavia (1963–1972)
Greg de Cuir Jr.
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The Yugoslav Black Wave was a controversial and highly contested movement of filmmakers in the 1960s in socialist Yugoslavia—a country situated at the time in a political, cultural, and social middle ground between the communist East and the capitalist West. It remains controversial today, its most provocative films shelved and forgotten—and, in this new era, ripe for rediscovery. This book is the first in English on the Yugoslav Black Wave, and it offers an analysis of the movement, its key players, its sociopolitical engagement, and its place in the larger story of European modernism.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter