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"Picture Post (Magazine)"
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The March of Time in Britain and the International History of Documentary Film
This article explores the historical formation of news cinemagazines through the international production of the US series The March of Time. Established in 1935, the series quickly achieved success by dealing with current affairs through a blend of actual footage plus reenacted and dramatized scenes. The American producers set up an office in London with which John Grierson and other British filmmakers from the General Post Office (GPO) film unit were associated. To date, this key relationship in the history of documentary film remains underexplored. Here, I trace US and UK interactions between 1935 and 1946 in order to illuminate the institutionalization of documentary filmmaking across countries during a critical period.
Journal Article
Bruce Lee: A visual poetics of postwar Japanese manliness
Fist of Fury, starring Bruce Lee, debuted in Japan in 1974. Whilst its critical reception reflected its box-office success, a complex emotional reaction is nevertheless detectable towards the film's unsympathetic portrayal of the Japanese. This paper will explore this reaction and suggest that a post-colonial angst was piqued, one that betrayed fundamental shifts in current racial, erotic, cultural, moral, and historical understandings of Japanese manliness. At one level, the response to Lee is a hermeneutic cue into the manifold ways that this angst was constructed through contesting understandings of an emergent China and unresolved memories concerning failed imperial Japanese adventure. At another level, the phenomenon of Lee's Japanese reception points to longer-term shifts in the visual-cultural representation of masculinity: vulnerability as articulated in the cinema's ‘new man’, male nudity as ‘discovered’ in women's magazines, and most potently, modern Japanese manliness to challenge American neo-colonial hegemony. It is this panorama of masculinity that this paper seeks to open through an inter-disciplinary survey of a variety of media—film, pulp fiction, women's magazines, and homo porn; a panorama into which Bruce Lee exploded on screen, alerting us to the images and contradictory aspirations that script a visual poetry of Japanese manliness.
Journal Article
Has Akira Always Been a Cyberpunk Comic?
Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the cyberpunk genre peaked in the Western world, perhaps most evidently when Terminator 2: Judgment Day became the highest-grossing film of 1991. It has been argued that the translation of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira into several European languages at just that time (into English beginning in 1988, into French, Italian, and Spanish beginning in 1990, and into German beginning in 1991) was no coincidence. In hindsight, cyberpunk tropes are easily identified in Akira to the extent that it is nowadays widely regarded as a classic cyberpunk comic. But has this always been the case? When Akira was first published in America and Europe, did readers see it as part of a wave of cyberpunk fiction? Did they draw the connections to previous works of the cyberpunk genre across different media that today seem obvious? In this paper, magazine reviews of Akira in English and German from the time when it first came out in these languages will be analysed in order to gauge the past readers’ genre awareness. The attribution of the cyberpunk label to Akira competed with others such as the post-apocalyptic, or science fiction in general. Alternatively, Akira was sometimes regarded as an exceptional, novel work that transcended genre boundaries. In contrast, reviewers of the Akira anime adaptation, which was released at roughly the same time as the manga in the West (1989 in Germany and the United States), more readily drew comparisons to other cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner.
Journal Article
Beauty and the Internet: Old Wine in a New Bottle
In the consumer culture of late modernity, young women are obsessed with their physical appearance and attempt to conform to socially constructed beauty standards. Adolescent girls are surrounded by images of beauty through advertising, television, films, magazines and the recent beauty blogs that have burst forth on the worldwide web. This paper is on the use of beauty blogs by adolescent girls of the age group 15 to 19 years living in Kolkata, whereby depicting that there is no escape from feminine embodiment even in the digital world. The researcher has compiled the beauty/fashion blogs that adolescent girls regularly visit and hence has attempted to understand the girls' use of the blogs and what the blogs contain. This paper looks at the beauty culture associated with these blogs and traces the popularity of these online beauty resources to the renewed focus on the female body and visual appearance in consumer culture that is transnational. The beauty blogs are virtual feminized spaces created only for women and contain categories of homemade corrective treatments, personal grooming and images of array of beauty products that teach women how to \"do femininity\". The blogs promote the idea that beauty is an essential component of femininity and encourage women to take beauty as a serious thing to be achieved to satisfy themselves and not to be done for the male gaze. Termed as \"postfeminist sensibility\" the blogs depict women as heterosexual desiring subjects with independence and choice. Young women in turn constructed feminine beautification as an empowering as well as a pleasurable experience for them.
Journal Article
Healing the Soldier, Restoring the Nation: Representations of Shell Shock in the USA During and After the First World War
This article examines representations of shell shock in American culture during and after the First World War. It draws on the large historiography of First World War-era shell shock in Europe where shell shock came to represent the incurable wounds of the soldier and nation. Examining medical discussions, popular films, works of literature, magazines, and newspapers from 1915-40, this article asserts that in contrast to Europeans, Americans saw shell shock as a temporary, curable injury of war. This understanding uniquely framed the way Americans viewed not only returning veterans, but also US global positioning and responsibility immediately after the war. During the 1920s in the USA, the figure of the uncured shell-shocked veteran took on new meanings, as the wound of shell shock became part of larger debates over the nature of mental illness and the government's responsibility to care for its veterans. Specifically after the stock market crash of 1929, the term helped to create a new language deployed in connection with global economic hardship and governmental economic assistance.
Journal Article
Lynd Ward's Modernist “Novels in Woodcuts”: Graphic Narratives Lost Between Art History and Literature
Lynd Ward's “novels in woodcuts” — long-form narratives Ward pioneered in America between 1929 and 1937 and composed entirely in the medium of sequential wood engravings — have been widely neglected in both art historical and literary critical scholarship despite engaging crucial questions in American modernism and anticipating the contemporary rise of graphic narrative. Ward's oeuvre here is viewed through his sustained ambivalence toward the commercialization of the arts, both in his texts and his work as a publisher. His critical erasure is as much a function of modernist scholarship's continued irresolution toward the relationship between high art and popular culture as it is of the singularly hybrid status of his texts. Seen through the lens of comics studies, author/artists like Ward reside in a place at the intersection of literature and the fine arts, allowing us to reimagine many of the critical commonplaces of modernist scholarship.
Journal Article
Literature, Print Culture, and the Indian New Wave
This article explores the rise and fall of the Hindi literary film, circa 1969-1995. I discuss three hybrid genres that emerged from collaborations between modern Hindi writers and Indian New Wave filmmakers: lighthearted, middlebrow comedies about urban life; an avant-garde cinema characterized by a mofussil modernism; and an activist cinema concurrent with the Indian human rights movement. The article concludes by identifying the factors that pushed Hindi literature and cinema apart in the 1990s, with changes in state policies, the growth of private television channels, and the provincialization of Hindi literary culture.
Journal Article
Scouting Out Windmills: Don Quixote in Boy’s Life
[...]the initial motivation for the founding of the Boy Scouts in the United States was the impression left upon William D. Boyce by a British Boy Scout who helped him navigate the foggy streets of London. According to Hood, the magazine shifted focus from a periodical \"heavy in staff writing\" to one geared toward a readership that was \"more visually hip, trained by television to respond to big pictures, especially color ones\" (n.p.). [...]Don Quixote continues to be valued not simply as another great work of world literature, but as an artifact carrying with it information from a foreign country. [...]one can discern an apparent struggle within the Boy Scouts with regard to its definition of masculinity, and only recently policies were changed to allow openly homosexual boys and leaders to participate in scouting (though a religious exemption still permits certain troops from prohibiting leaders based on sexual orientation).9 One must consider this more complicated situation of the Boy Scouts when analyzing a graphic novel rendition of Don Quixote published in 1990.
Journal Article