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.
- 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
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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
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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
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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.
