Hernan Vera & Andrew M. Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Rowan & Littlefield, 2003. 203 pages, $75.00. A Huge Subject Bizarre as it may seem, there is not that much difference between a creaky silent film like Birth of a Nation (1915) and a state of the art wonder like Black Hawk Down (2001). Both deal, in essence, with brave, upstanding, loyal white chaps fighting a savage and chaotic horde of people of African descent, and it is abundantly clear which group is the superior. The reason for this continuity is not just the baleful consistency of racism. Rather, it is the need for white maleness to define and assert itself against the idea of the proverbial "other." Nonwhites in films exist only to prop up the unstable identity of the dominant American group, to act as a mirror reflecting back the supremacy of whiteness. This is, in a nutshell, the argument of Hernan Vera's and Andrew M. Gordon's provocative book. Each chapter takes a different aspect of what they term the "sincere fictions" of Caucasian superiority and shows how it operates in various films. Apart from old friends like Griffith's epic and Gone with the Wind, both of which are central to their idea of the "divided white self," the authors examine the film convention whereby non-white races always need to be led to freedom and fulfillment by a Persil-bright messiah (Stargate, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom); they analyze the role of Tahitians in the drama of male authority that exists in different ways in the three versions of Mutiny on the Bounty; they follow the evolution of what might be called the Scarlett and Mammy complex in women's relationships in Imitation of Life (Stahl's and Sirk's) and in more recent productions like Passion Fish. There is plenty more besides. The general message is that, although the archetypes (or stereotypes) may vary according to different historical conditions and cultural pressures, certain concepts remain depressingly constant. Blackness and otherness is passive or savage, comic or servile; the lesser breeds, as Kipling would have put it, are capable only of nurturing whites through their neuroses or of being led by WASPish heroes. Even a righton New Age western like Dances With Wolves turns out to be a story of a white male crisis in which the Native Americans are subsidiary elements in Kevin Costner's psychodrama. It is, in short, a huge subject, but Vera and Gordon (they sound like a bad nightclub act) have not written a huge book. As a result, they suffer from trying to pack too much into the space. Matters are not helped by their use of examples from almost every conceivable non-white image, from African and Native Americans to Vietnamese in The Green Beret, and even the aliens in Men In Black. Because each of these groups raises slightly different contextual questions, the book finds itself skimming over problems or eliding issues that should be separate. For instance, there is a difference between white messiah
Hernan Vera & Andrew M. Gordon。银幕救世主:好莱坞白人小说。Rowan & Littlefield, 2003。203页，75美元。虽然看起来很奇怪，但像《一个国家的诞生》(1915)这样的老旧默片和《黑鹰坠落》(2001)这样的艺术奇迹之间并没有太大的区别。从本质上讲，两者都讲述了勇敢、正直、忠诚的白人与一群野蛮、混乱的非洲人后裔的战斗，而且很明显哪一群人更优秀。这种连续性的原因不仅仅是种族主义的恶毒一致性。相反，白人男性需要定义和维护自己，反对众所周知的“他者”概念。电影中的非白人存在只是为了支撑占主导地位的美国群体的不稳定身份，作为反映白人至上的一面镜子。简而言之，这就是Hernan Vera和Andrew M. Gordon这本颇具煽动性的书中的观点。每一章都从不同的角度来描述他们所谓的白人优越感的“真实虚构”，并展示它在不同的电影中是如何运作的。除了格里菲斯(Griffith)的史诗和《乱世谍影》(Gone with the Wind)这样的老朋友——这两部电影都是他们“分裂的白人自我”观念的核心——外，作者还审视了电影惯例，即非白人种族总是需要由一个明亮的弥赛亚(《星际之门》、《夺宝奇兵》和《末日神庙》)引领走向自由和实现;他们分析了塔希提人在《赏金号》三个版本中以不同方式存在的男性权威戏剧中的作用;它们遵循了在《模仿生活》(Stahl's和Sirk's)以及最近的作品《激情鱼》(Passion Fish)中女性关系中所谓的“斯嘉丽和嬷嬷情结”的演变。除此之外还有很多。总的信息是，尽管原型(或刻板印象)可能根据不同的历史条件和文化压力而变化，但某些概念仍然令人沮丧地保持不变。黑色和他性是被动的或野蛮的，滑稽的或卑贱的;正如吉卜林所说的那样，较低级别的品种只能通过白人的神经症或由wasp英雄领导来培养白人。即使是像《与狼共舞》这样的新时代西部片，结果也是一个白人男性危机的故事，在凯文·科斯特纳(Kevin Costner)的心理剧中，印第安人只是次要的元素。简而言之，这是一个宏大的主题，但维拉和戈登(他们听起来像一个糟糕的夜总会表演)并没有写出一本巨著。因此，他们会因为试图在空间里塞太多东西而受苦。他们使用了几乎所有能想到的非白人形象的例子，从非洲人和印第安人到《绿色贝雷帽》中的越南人，甚至是《黑衣人》中的外星人，这对事情没有帮助。由于每一组都提出了略有不同的背景问题，本书发现自己忽略了问题或省略了应该分开的问题。例如，在自己国家活动的白人弥赛亚(《杀死一只知更鸟》)和在国外传播他们的善行的白人弥赛亚(《将成为国王的人》)是有区别的。．..
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Frank McAdams. The American War Film: History and Hollywood. Praeger Publishers, 2002. 352 pages; $74.95. Thousands of Movies Frank McAdams, an adjunct professor in the USC Cinema/ TV Department and screenwriting instructor at UCLA, as well as an award-winning Hollywood screenwriter, also fancies himself an expert with regards to Hollywood's portrayal of war on film. The reader is immediately made aware of the magnitude of Mc Adams' lengthy labor of hubris via the frequent author/insider name dropping, idiosyncratic background factoids-the well known gory details of actress Carole Lombard's fatal air crash during a WWII bond selling tour, to name only one-and, most amazingly, the complete absence of any coherent definition of the genre that the author has chosen to engage. One cannot fault Mr. McAdams for attempting to write a work that encompasses the thousands of movies that represent the American film industry's century long effort at portraying war on celluloid. So far, this reviewer is aware of only one individual who has come close to scaling this Pike's Peak in film history scholarship-Dr. Larry Suid-whose seminal Guts & Glory was first published in 1978 and whose revised and extensively expanded edition of his classic appeared in 2002 (University Press of Kentucky). Needless to say, assuming he was even aware of the original publication, Mr. McAdams did not deem Suids' book worthy of inclusion in his bibliography. But why would he need to cite such a comparatively humble source, since McAdams has already informed the reader in his acknowledgments that he was able to consult, among others, such distinguished authorities on the subject as his tennis buddy, the "acclaimed author" of The Dirty Dozen (1967), and Stephen Peck, the retired combat officer son of actor Gregory Peck. After a 28-page whirlwind treatment of the first forty plus years of war films, Mr. McAdams plunges into World War II. Following a somewhat incongruous quote from none other than Winston Churchill, "War is mainly a catalogue of blunders," the reader is regaled with several pages of historical contextualizing, including the cost of renting an apartment in December 1941 in New York City! But the absolute nadir is reached on pages 35-36 when the author provides his reader with an extended list of "established actors... [who] decided to place their careers on hold to enlist" - in addition to naming the many stars who did serve with distinction (Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power, Clark Gable, et al.), the list also gratuitously includes, Neville Brand, James Arness, Walter Matthau, Jack Valenti, Rock Hudson, Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon- to the best of this reviewer's knowledge none of these honored veterans in this catalogue of wonders had established acting careers before the war and some never would-most notably the longtime (since 1966) MPAA spokesman, Jack Valenti. One is also less than reassured re McAdams' basic historical knowledge when he notes that the twin-engined spec
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{"title":"West Germany and unified German cinema's difficult encounter with the Holocaust.","authors":"Mark A Wolfgram","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"32 2","pages":"24-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"24026297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Holocaust iconography in American feature films about Neo-Nazis.","authors":"Lawrence Baron","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"32 2","pages":"38-47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"24026298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theodor Kotulla's excerpts from a german life.","authors":"Christine Haase","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"32 2","pages":"48-61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"24026300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"To the world the world we show\": early travelogues as filmed ethnography.","authors":"A Griffiths","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"11 3","pages":"282-307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1999-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"29039281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The production of George Stoney's film All My Babies: a midwife's own story (1952).","authors":"L Jackson","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51888,"journal":{"name":"Film History","volume":"1 4","pages":"367-92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1987-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"22497284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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