Velvet Light Trap articles from March 2005

Velvet Light Trap archives from March 2005

Introduction.(THE EDITORS)(Editorial)
March 22, 2005... In contemporary discourse, "American" film and the "American" experience are often conceptually limited to Hollywood and the United States. While we include this version of America in this issue, we were particularly interested in highlighting...

Film noir and the American Dream: the dark side of enlightenment.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... This essay argues that light in post-World War II American films noir is not only an aesthetic feature but a thematic and ideological one as well. These films use Enlightenment conceptions of light to explore postwar subjectivity in ambivalent...

Spitfire: Lupe Velez and the ambivalent pleasures of ethnic masquerade.
March 22, 2005... Lupe Velez is best remembered for her suicide. It is perhaps the most vivid story in Kenneth Anger's sensational compendium of film scandals, Hollywood Babylon. In 1944, at the age of thirty-six, Velez found herself pregnant and jilted by the...

An interview with Lourdes Portillo.(Interview)
March 22, 2005... Jean Lauer arranged an interview with Lourdes Portillo, a Mexican American independent filmmaker based in San Francisco, and helped draft a list of questions. When I learned I was going to be in the Bay Area at about the time that Ms. Portillo...

The PBS and NAATA connection: comparing the public spheres of Asian American film and video.
March 22, 2005... Public television has been a significant exhibition and broadcast outlet for many American independent minority films in recent years. An examination of the history of noteworthy documentaries such as Who Killed Vincent Chin? (Tajima-Pena and...

Frozen but always in motion: Arctic film, video, and broadcast.
March 22, 2005... Although scholars have devoted considerable discussion to the development of a pan-American media consciousness in terms of production in Mexico and South America, the very exciting work being done at the northern end of the continent has not...

Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. by Charles R. Acland In Screen Traffic Charles R. Acland undertakes a detailed investigation of the manner in which the film industry has developed a particular understanding of the...

Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South by Tara McPherson In Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South Tara McPherson employs a metaphor wherein she casts the South as a kind of...

We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World by Manthia Diawara In his latest book, We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (2003), Manthia Diawara provides a multifaceted assessment of African modernity, a theme at the forefront of...