University Scholar Series: Alison McKee

The Woman’s Film of the 1940s: Gender, Narrative, and History On February 25, 2015, Dr. Alison L. McKee spoke in the University Scholar Series hosted by Provost Andy Feinstein at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Dr. McKee discussed her recent book, The Woman’s Film of the 1940s: Gender, Narrative, and History, which addresses the terrain between official public histories and private experiences of love, desire, and loss against the backdrop of World War II. McKee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Television, Radio, Film, and Theatre Arts at SJSU. She specializes in film history, theory and criticism, and gender issues. In particular, her interests include how gender and sexuality shape and inform narratives across different media.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1021/thumbnail.jp

From movies to games: how film policy is changing

While the expansion of film industry activities film to other media has a long history, media convergence has intensified this trend in recent years. Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, offers an interesting European case-study of how film policy is responding

Documentary film

Short history of the development of the film documentar

African History Month Film & Dialogue Series 2015

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/chc_flyers/1004/thumbnail.jp

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

Canada’s Great War on Film: \u3cem\u3eLest We Forget\u3c/em\u3e (1935)

Lest We Forget was Canada’s official Great War film. It sparked controversy when it was shown across the country in 1935, during the midst of the worst depression in Canadian history, and with a growing anxiety over the increased aggression of international dictators. The film provided a contested venue for what the Great War had meant to a generation of Canadians. But this was no ordinary war film. Officially sanctioned and constructed from archival footage, the story of Canada’s war was told in 100 minutes, from the opening phases through to the grim fighting on the Western Front, and including those who supported the soldiers from home. Many journalists, politicians, and veterans called Lest We Forget the most authentic film to have appeared since the end of the war, especially in contrast to Hollywood fictional productions. This article examines the conflicting discourse surrounding Lest We Forget. While the official film, what we would now call a documentary, provided important insight into the war, and how it would be remembered, it probably tells us more about the 1930s than the period from 1914 to 1918. But this is only one part of the story. Canada’s Great War film history remains largely unexplored. Where did this film footage come from? Who filmed these Canadians on the battlefield? How did these cameramen work within the deadly environment of shrapnel, snipers, and poison gas? How was the film footage received during and after the war? To better the importance of Lest We Forget, it is not just the film and the public’s reaction to it, but also the footage that was used to underpin the narrative

Fiduciary Breach, Once Removed

This essay argues for the importance of an intersubjective and impure film theory in which the signal and the signaletic is considered as figures for approaching film. This in order to make the argument that the signaletic mode indeed enables a novel perspective on moving image history. The aesthetics of the signaletic has thus a history preceding that of electronic media, in particular when it comes to animation and experimental film. When constructing such an archaeology, however, dichotomies into sign and signal should be avoided; otherwise, the complexity of many of the films is reduced. In order to illuminate the latter point, four films by Gunvor Nelson is analyzed (both analog and digital), showing not only how both sign and signal interact but also how the aesthetics of the signal and the signaletic material is not dependant on the electronic as such

Australian Legends: historical explorations of Australian masculinity and film 1970-1995.

The twin purpose of this research is to explore films as historically specific cultural texts, rather than representations of one historical moment, and to engage with historiographical debates surrounding representations of masculinity in Australian history. I do this to create a way of engaging with film and history where film is culturally representative of the past, not simply a depiction of a specific point in time. This study considers two films, George Miller's Mad Max (1979) and Stephan Elliot's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) to explore the relationship over time between violence, masking and landscape with the representation of performative masculinity in an Australian context

Shooting the War: The Canadian Army Film Unit in the Second World War

Very little has been written about the Canadian Army Film Unit (CAFU) since the end of the Second World War, despite Jon Farrell’s postulation. There have been a few short newspaper articles related to teh Film Unit and the D-Day footage that made it famous, but there has been no scholarly study by either military or film historians. The purpose of the CAFU was to create an official audio-visual record of Canada’s Army, just as the official historians, war artists, and photographers were documenting other aspects of the war. The Film Unit started as only a few men, but expanded substantially throughout the war, increasing the scope and breadth of its productions. The men and women of the CAFU who operated the cameras, edited the film, and then distributed the finished products were different from the civilian war correspondents and commercial newsreel cameramen who were also creating a visual record of the war. The CAFU attached cameramen to military units and they shot real-time footage of Canadians in battle. This footage was then used to create the CAFU films, and formed the basis of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and commercial newsreel company productions. Most of the existing scholarship exploring Canadian film and the Second World War focuses on the NFB and John Grierson, the father of the documentary in Canada and the NFB’s first film commissioner. The historiography suggests that NFB was, for all practical purposes, the main film institution creating Canadian motion pictures. This was true, but much of its wartime film footage came from the cameras of the CAFU—footage that was shot in harm’s way. Despite this neglect by historians, the CAFU played an essential role in the history of Canadian film. Much of what subsequent generations have seen or know about the Second World War comes from footage shot by the Film Unit. Yet it is a difficult story to tell since it must be pieced together using primary sources, both textual and audio-visual. The Film Unit will receive the credit that it deserves and will find its place again in the history of the Second World War