Product Description: Freeze Frame takes a penetrating, often humorous, look at how Eskimos have been portrayed in nearly a century of film, from the pioneering documentaries of missionaries and Arctic explorers to Eskimo Pie commercials of the 1990s. Some of these works are serious attempts to depict a culture; others are unabashed entertainment, featuring papier-maché igloos and zebra-skin parkas...read more

German film-goers flocked to see musicals and melodramas during the Nazi era. Although the Nazis seemed to require that every aspect of ordinary life advance the fascist project, even the most popular films depicted characters and desires that deviated from the politically correct ideal. Probing into the contradictory images of womanhood that surfaced in these films, Antje Ascheid shows how Nazi heroines negotiated the gender conflicts that confronted contemporary women.The careers of Kristina Soderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander speak to the Nazis' need to address and contain the woman question, to redirect female subjectivity and desires to self sacrifice for the common good (i.e., national socialism). Hollywood's new women and glamorous dames were out; the German wife and mother were in. The roles and star personas assigned to these actresses, though intended to entertain the public in a politically conformist way, point to the difficulty of yoking popular culture to ideology.

Product Description: This work shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the 20th century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

When teenagers began hanging out at the mall in the early 1980s, the movies followed. Multiplex theaters offered teens a wide array of perspectives on the coming-of-age experience, as well as an escape into the alternative worlds of science fiction and horror. Youth films remained a popular and profitable genre through the 1990s, offering teens a place to reflect on their evolving identities from adolescence to adulthood while simultaneously shaping and maintaining those identities.Drawing examples from hundreds of popular and lesser-known youth-themed films, Timothy Shary here offers a comprehensive examination of the representation of teenagers in American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. He focuses on five subgenres—school, delinquency, horror, science, and romance/sexuality—to explore how they represent teens and their concerns, how these representations change over time, and how youth movies both mirror and shape societal expectations and fears about teen identities and roles. He concludes that while some teen films continue to exploit various notions of youth sexuality and violence, most teen films of the past generation have shown an increasing diversity of adolescent experiences and have been sympathetic to the particular challenges that teens face.

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The bandido, the harlot, the male buffoon, the female clown, the Latin lover, and the dark lady - these have been the defining, and demeaning, images of Latinos in U.S. cinema for more than a century. In this book, Charles Ramirez Berg develops an innovative theory of stereotyping that accounts for the persistence of such images in U.S. popular culture. He also explores how Latino actors and filmmakers have actively subverted and resisted such stereotyping. In the first part of the book, Berg sets forth his theory of stereotyping, defines the classic stereotypes, and investigates how actors such as Raul Julia, Rosie Perez, Jose Ferrer, Lupe Velez, and Gilbert Roland have subverted stereotypical roles. In the second part, he analyses Hollywood's portrayal of Latinos in three genres: social problem films, John Ford westerns, and science fiction films. In the concluding section, Berg looks at Latino self-representation and anti-stereotyping in Mexican American border documentaries and in the feature films of Robert Rodriguez. He also presents an exclusive interview in which Rodriguez talks about his entire career, from Bedhead to Spy Kids, and comments on the role of a Latino filmmaker in Hollywood and how he tries to subvert the system. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Until Masculine Interests not much had been written about men "as men" in the cinema. Now Robert Lang considers how Hollywood articulates the eroticism that is intrinsic to identification between men. He considers masculinity in social and psychoanalytic terms, maintaining that a major function of the movies is to define different types of masculinity, and to either valorize or criticize these forms...read more

The focus on Native American characters gives a unique perspective for understanding stereotypes and the interplay of racism, sympathy, and empathy in the historical periods of narrative film. Hilger traces the portrayal of Native Americans, from the silents and early sound films through films of each decade, covering over 800 films. An introduction discusses the traditional images of the Noble Red Man and Savage. The final chapter discusses new images based on tribal identities in recent films such as Powwow Highway. Each of the historical chapters begins with detailed interpretations of representative films such as The Vanishing American, They Died With Their Boots On, Cheyenne Autumn, and Dances With Wolves. With a film title index. This book will be useful not only to students of film but also of history, popular culture, sociology, social work, education, and ethnic studies.

Argues that American cinema has become progressively more juvenile and examines various teenage genres

Full of insight and wit, this humorous take on Hollywood's principle archtype deconstructs various incarnations of the masculine myth, including cowboys, soldiers, and gangsters, from Brando to Edward G. Robinson. (view table of contents)

Chronicling the lives of Hollywood's revolutionary female filmmakers, a journalist looks at the movie industry's women power brokers--including Jodie Foster, Penny Marshall, Meryl Streep, Jane Campion, Sherry Lansing, Nora Ephron, Barbra Streisand, and other luminaries--and how they got where they are. Reprint. 30,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: From the Wizard of Oz to Lolita, from the Heathers to the Spice Girls, images of girlhood have been projected on the silver screen in myriad ways. Whether a girl is taught that "there is no place like home" or is seeking adventure on her own terms, whether she is a seductress or a nerd, a babysitter or a murderer, films have depicted society's problematic expectations of girls together with the dreams, anxieties, and tensions experience by girls themselves...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This innovative essay collection explores Asian American cinematic representations historically and socially, on and off screen, as they contribute to the definition of American character. The history of Asian Americans on movie screens, as outlined in Peter X Feng’s introduction, provides a context for the individual readings that follow...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The beginning of this century has brought with it a host of assumptions about the newness of our technologies, globalized economies, and transnational media practices. Our own time is a period marked by experiences of fragmentation, sensation, and shock...read more

Examines the struggles and successes of black performers in American movies and presents stills from major works

Product Description: At his peak, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Sam Peckinpah was hailed as one of the new masters of the Western film, while simultaneously becoming one of the most controversial American directors of the era. In a time of great social turmoil, Peckinpah's on-screen orchestration of physical and emotional violence drew adamant praise for what some considered fearless realism and vehement criticism for what others called tasteless gore and brutal misogyny...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this challenging and often humorous book, Louis Owens examines issues of Indian identity and relationship to the environment as depicted in literature and film and as embodied in his own mixedblood roots in family and land. Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe "Indian Territory" that will contain and neutralize Indians...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Off-White Hollywood investigates how the 'ethnicity' of white European-American actresses has played a key role in the mythology of American identity and nation building. Negra focuses on key stars of the silent - Colleen Moore and Pola Negri - classical - Sonja Henie and Hedy Lamarr - and post-classical eras - Marisa Tomei and Cher - to demonstrate how each star illuminates aspects of ethnicity, gender, consumerism, and class at work in American culture. (view table of contents)

And the Mirror Cracked explores the politics and pleasures of contemporary feminist cinema. Tracing the highly productive ways in which feminist directors create alternative film forms, Anneke Smelik highlights cinematic issues which are central to feminist films: authorship, point of view, metaphor, montage and the excessive image. In a continuous mirror game between theory and cinema, this study explains how these cinematic techniques are used to represent female subjectivity positively and affirmatively. Among the films considered are: A Question of Silence, Bagdad Cafe, Sweetie, and The Virgin Machine.

Product Description: Lehman brings together new work on masculinity in film by established film scholars, new academics, performance artists, and cultural critics. The essays analyze trends from the role of gay men in saving heterosexuality to the emergence of new queer cinema. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)