Velvet Light Trap articles from March 2000

Velvet Light Trap archives from March 2000

Introduction: images and interpretations of the real.
March 22, 2000... One is curious to know what this peculiar quality is which allows us to distinguish as "uncanny" certain things within the boundaries of what is "fearful"... The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not...

Icon of real war: A Harvest of Death and American war photography.
March 22, 2000... On the morning of July 5, 1863, three professional photographers arrived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to record the aftermath of the two-day battle that had just occurred. Traces of the fighting were everywhere around them: Robert E. Lee had...

"Everything's coming up Rosie": empower America, Rosie O'Donnell, and the construction of daytime reality.
March 22, 2000... On December 10, 1996, the National Enquirer published a special five-page insert with its latest weekly edition. Entitled "Exposed! Women of Daytime TV," this tabloid claimed to reveal the secrets that daytime's talk show women had kept from...

Narrative control and visual polysemy: Fox surveillance specials and the limits of legitimation.
March 22, 2000... In theory, the observation of public spaces by powerful forces and the translation of that observation into material consequences is one way social control is maintained and order is enforced. In practice, surveillance is deeply, perhaps...

Media whores and perverse media: documentary film meets tabloid TV in Nick Broomfield's Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.
March 22, 2000... A survey of recent literature on documentary film yields the rather confusing conclusion that the medium is simultaneously flourishing and experiencing a serious challenge to its continued existence. In the introduction to his 1994 book,...

True fictions: women's narratives and historical trauma.
March 22, 2000... When history separated itself from story, it started indulging in accumulation and facts. Or it thought it could... Story-writing becomes history-writing, and history quickly sets itself apart, consigning story to the realm of tale, legend,...

The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music.
March 22, 2000... by Jeff Smith The experience of film seems to privilege its visuality--indeed, film at its very inception was a "silent" medium in which entertainment was derived from its visual and photographic representation of reality. While it is...

Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity.
March 22, 2000... by Joshua Gamson Joshua Gamson could never be accused of essentialism. In Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity, Gamson describes sexual and gender nonconformists as (among other descriptors) gay militants, lipstick...

Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood Cinema.
March 22, 2000... by Wheeler Winston Dixon In Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood Cinema, Wheeler Winston Dixon investigates the forces of commercialism, repetition, and spectacle that currently shape mainstream Hollywood...