Cinema Journal

Ethel Waters in Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949). 

(For a good study of Waters' work in this film see Brian Herrera's blogpost on the actress)

On and on and on it goes...


Film Studies For Free continues its dogged exploration of the legions of free sample issues of subscription only journals. Lots more posts on that coming up over the next weeks, months, years... 

But today's post flags up the online free sample issue of one of the best film studies journals in the world, the organ of the US based Society of Cinema and Media Studies

Cinema Journal is a periodical to which academics in many anglophone countries frequently have automatic access, that is, if they are lucky enough to be able to use well-funded university libraries, or to be individual members of SCMS (as FSFF's author is proud and fortunate enough to be).

This post, then, is dedicated to just about everyone else, in other words, to those who probably make up the majority of FSFF's international readership.

Cinema Journal

46, Number 1, Fall 2006 


CONTENTS

• John Nichols, Countering Censorship: Edgar Dale and the Film Appreciation Movement [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  Abstract:
  
  In 1933 Ohio State University education professor Edgar Dale published How to Appreciate Motion Pictures for use in high school film appreciation classes. Configuring the adolescent as a reformer, Dale's text offered an alternative to the Production Code's stark theory of film reception, which predicated censorship on immature film viewers.

• Margaret T. McGehee, Disturbing the Peace: Lost Boundaries, Pinky, and Censorship in Atlanta, Georgia, 1949-1952
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  Abstract:
  
  This article investigates the reasons behind Atlanta film censor Christine Smith's 1949 banning of Lost Boundaries (Alfred Werker) and her approval, with cuts, of Pinky (Elia Kazan), examining in particular the representations of segregation and integration in each film, the studio support behind the films, and the characterization of Pinky as a "woman's picture."

• John Sedgwick, Cinemagoing in Portsmouth during the 1930s
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  Abstract:
  
  This paper uses the recently discovered box-office ledger of the first-run cinema the Regent in Portsmouth, U.K., to test the POPSTAT methodology for measuring film popularity in the general absence of such data. In order to do this a dataset of the film programs of all twenty-one cinemas screening films in the city in 1934 has been constructed from which a clear picture of film distribution and popularity emerges.

• Melanie Williams,"The most explosive object to hit Britain since the V2!": The British Films of Hardy Kruger and Anglo-German Relations during the 1950s
  [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
  Abstract:
  
  
  This article investigates the brief British career of the German actor Hardy Kruger during the 1950s. It examines his popularity with British audiences, focusing on his appeal to younger cinemagoers, especially women. It also discusses how his star persona and screen performances reflected wider tensions in contemporary Anglo-German relations.

Studies of censorship and cinema: in solidarity with Jafar Panahi

Image from Dayereh/The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000)

Film Studies For Free brings you a list of direct links to valuable and noteworthy scholarly material on the frequently iniquitous, and certainly far from just academic, subject of censorship and the cinema. 

Today's list is brought to you in solidarity with Jafar Panahi, the Iranian filmmaker who, on March 1, was arrested and imprisoned (reportedly at present in solitary confinement) 'apparently while working on a film that, rightly or wrongly, the authorities understood to be “anti-state.”'

As Vadim Rizov wrote for the IFC website:

Panahi's brilliant series of films from 1995's "The White Balloon" (his first feature) onwards have steadily ramped up the contentiousness. After "Balloon" and "The Mirror," Panahi ditched children altogether (normally the standard way of avoiding censorship) and began focusing on adults -- specifically, those damaged and abused by society. "The Circle" and "Offside" focus on women (enough said), and "Crimson Gold" manages to indict an entire society through the desperation of one pizza-delivery guy. Observing from a chilly distance, Panahi gives the disenfranchised a voice in the traditional visual language of the contemporary arthouse film -- until, all of a sudden, he's in the same spot as the people he's filming. What makes Panahi brilliant (and dangerous to the regime) is that he's a visceral filmmaker above all, in his masterful feel for the hustle of urban Iran.

To find out more about the campaign to free Panahi and other political figures imprisoned in the aftermath of the Iranian elections, do follow the links in Jeffrey Overstreet's post for Filmwell; also check out the Free Jafar Panahi Facebook group; visit the Our Society Will Be a Free Society: Campaign to free imprisoned writers and journalists in Iran website; or explore the website for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. If you would like to donate money to support the aims of the latter organisation, a direct donation link is right here (thanks to the Self-Styled Siren for highlighting this link). You can also follow, as filmstudiesff does, the micro-bulletins (and blogs) of the brilliant US-based film and media studies academic Negar Mottahedeh via Twitter to keep up with events in Iran, along with academic and other responses to these.


FSFF also wanted to publicise a related call by the Index on Censorship for short film submissions on 'the subject of freedom of expression or censorship, dealing with issues or events from a unique perspective that is not often acknowledged'.  

The call is on behalf of Index on Censorship, one of Britain’s leading organisations promoting freedom of expression and protection of human rights. We are currently in the process of curating a series of monthly EPIC short film nights with a focus on freedom of expression and censorship, in conjunction with English PEN at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon, London. The launch night for the event will be in mid-May, kicking off with a night of short films made by the Go Group in Georgia. You can find more information about the night here. If you do have a short film or documentary that you would like to be screened at one of these nights, email intern1@indexoncensorship.org with a short 100 word summary of your film, or a link to your video online and details of any charities/organisations that you are affiliated with. As Index on Censorship is a non-profit charity, we cannot offer any payment for the artists, just a platform and opportunity for new filmmakers to screen their film to a large public audience.

• Charles Ambler, 'Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia', The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 1, February 2001
• Anonymous,'Unveiled: Art and Censorship in Iran', ARTICLE 19, London, 2006 (scroll to Ch 4 on Film)
• Caetlin Benson-Allott, ' Sex versus the small screen: home video censorship and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también', No. 51, Spring 2009
• Daniela Berghahn, 'Review of The BFI Companion to German Cinema by Thomas Elsaesser, Michael Wedel (eds.) London: BFI Publishing, 1999', gfl-journal, No. 2/2001
• Ina Bertrand, 'Review of Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: movies and censorship in early twentieth-century America. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006
• Daniel Biltereyst, 'Productive censorship. Revisiting recent research on the cultural meanings of film censorship, Politics and Culture: An International Review of Books, issue 4, 2008
• Gregory D Black, 'Introduction', The Catholic Crusade against the Movies, 1940-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Alice G Burgin, '“May you live in interesting times”: Cinema, Politics and Censorship at the 58th Melbourne International Film Festival', Senses of Cinema, Issue 52, 2009 
• Richard Butsch, 'The Celluloid Stage: Nickelodeon Audiences', From The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990 (excerpted in Stephen J Ross, Movies and American Society, 2002) plus documents
• J.M. Caparros-Lera and Sergio Alegre, 'Cinematic Contextual History of High Noon (1952, dir. Fred Zinnemann)', Film-Historia, VoI. VI, No.1 (1996): 37-61  
• Greg Dolgopolov, 'Imagining Iran: A Symposium on Iranian Cinema, November 18, 2005, School of Media, Film & Theatre, University of New South Wales', Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006
• David Eldridge, 'Hollywood Censors History', 49th Parallel, Vol.20 (Winter 2006-2007)
• M. Carmen Gil Ariza, 'A Case Study: Spain as a Dubbing Country', Translation Journal, Volume 8, No. 3, July 2004
• Saverio Giovacchini, 'Introduction: Taking Hollywood Seriously', Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal (Temple University Press, 2001) 
• Toh, Hai Leong, 'Sex in Asian Cinema', Kinema, Fall 2000
• Lotte Hoek, 'The mysterious whereabouts: dodging the film censors in Bangladesh', IAS Newsletter, #42, Autumn 2006 
• Rosa Holman, '“Caught Between Poetry and Censorship": The Influence of State Regulation and Sufi Poeticism on Contemporary Iranian Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006
• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Gunnar Iversen, 'Cutting Bordello Scenes and Dances: Local Regulation and Film Censorship in Norway before 1913', Film History, 17.1 (2005) 106-112 
• Tina Kaufman, 'It Can Happen Again: Urgent enquiry needed into Censorship', Senses of Cinema, Issue 4, 2000 
  
• Stephen Kline, ''Media Effects: Redux or Reductive?' - A Reply to the St Louis Court Brief', Particip@tions Volume 1, Issue 1 (November 2003)
• Searle Kochberg, 'Censorship and Classification', Jill Nelmes (ed), Introduction to Film Studies 4e (London: Routledge, 2005)
• Anton Karl Kozlovic , 'Religious Film Fears 1: Satanic Infusion, Graven Images and Iconographic Perversion', Quodlibet Journal: Volume 5 Number 2-3, July 2003
• Anton Karl Kozlovic, 'Religious Film Fears 2: Cinematic Sinfulness', Quodlibet Journal: Volume 5 Number 4, October 2003
• Anton Karl Kozlovic, 'Religious Film Fears 3: Being Sacrilegious, Criticising or Devaluing the Faith', Quodlibet Journal: Volume 7 Number 2, June 2005 
• Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw, 'Negotiating the Studio System: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Anti-Fascism in Cornered', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005) 
• Michelle Langford, 'Review of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh', Senses of Cinema, Issue 52, 2009 
• Michelle Langford, 'Negotiating the sacred body in Iranian cinema(s): National, physical and cinematic embodiment in Majid Majidi’s Baran (2002)', Negotiating the Sacred 2: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts, 2008 
• Joanne Laurier, 'Why are these women escaping? [on The Circle by Jafar Panahi]', World Socialist Website, October 2000
• Patricia MacCormack, 'Perversion - An Introduction', Senses of Cinema, Issue 30, 2004
• Richard Maltby , 'More Sinned Against than Sinning: The Fabrications of "Pre-Code Cinema"', Senses of Cinema, Issue 29, 2003 
• Raquel Merino and Rosa Rabadán, 'Censored Translations in Franco’s Spain: The TRACE Project —Theatre and Fiction (English-Spanish)', TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 15, n° 2, 2002, p. 125-152
• Tadeusz Miczka, 'Cinema under political pressure: A brief outline of authorial roles in Polish post-war feature film 1945-1995', Kinema,  Fall 1995
• Tadeusz Miczka, 'Cinema in the labyrinth of freedom: Polish feature film after 1989', Kinema, Spring 2008
• Anna Misiak, 'Aleksander Ford and Film Censorship in Poland', Kinema, Fall 2003
• Lawrence L. Murray, 'The film industry responds to the Cold War, 1945-1955: Monsters, spys, and subversives',from Jump Cut, no. 9, 1975, pp. 14-16 
• Shammi Nanda,'Censorship and Indian Cinema: The Case of War and Peace', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 38, November 2002   
• Steve Neale, 'Swashbucklers and Sitcoms, Cowboys and Crime, Nurses, Just Men and Defenders: Blacklisted Writers and TV in the 1950s and 1960s', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005) 
• Brian Neve, 'The Hollywood Left: Robert Rossen and Postwar Hollywood', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Elżbieta Ostrowska, 'Representations of Female Sexuality in Polish cinema after 1989', Kinema Spring 2005
• Particip@tions Volume 1, Issue 1 (November 2003): 'The St Louis Court Brief: Debating audience 'effects' in public' (also see Stephen Kline's reply)
• Latika Padgaonkar , 'Women, Islam and Cinema'', Kinema, Fall 2005
• Negotiating the Sacred 2: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts, 2008
• Nancy J. Rosenbloom, 'From Regulation to Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century', Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 3, No. 4, October 2004
• Fabian Schuppert, 'Andrzej Wajda's A Generation and Man of Marble from a political persective', Kinema, Spring 2006
• Ella Shohat, 'Egypt: Cinema and Revolution', Critical Arts, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1983 
• Jeff Smith, 'Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been A Christian?: The Strange History Of The Robe As Political Allegory', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Sarah J. Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids, (London: IB Tauris, 2005) Excerpt
• Robert Stam, 'Censorship in Brazil', from Jump Cut, no. 21, Nov. 1979, p. 20
• Jack Stevenson, 'Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 66, November 2009
• Paul Ugor, 'Censorship and the Content of Nigerian Home Video Films', Postcolonial Text, Vol 3, No 1 (2007) 
• Stephen Vaughn, 'Freedom and Entertainment - Rating the Movies in an Age of New Media ' Excerpt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• Sebastian Veg, 'Eliminating Disharmony: Recent Examples of Censorship in Chinese Writing and Cinema', China perspectives, n°2007/3, 2007, Online from September 1, 2010
• Brett Elizabeth Westbrook, 'Second Chances: The Remake of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour', Brights Lights Film Journal, Issue 29, July 2000 
• Jake Wilson, 'Distrusting Desire - A Review of The Money Shot: Sex, Cinema And Censorship by Jane Mills (Annandale: Pluto Press, 2001)', Senses of Cinema, Issue 17, 2001
• Ray Zone, 'Against Condemnation: New York and the Post-Censor Movie Culture', Editors Guild Magazine, 2005