Velvet Light Trap articles from September 1999

Velvet Light Trap archives from September 1999

Introduction: race and ethnicity in the media.
September 22, 1999... Few topics in media studies seem more pertinent and pressing today than the analysis of race and ethnicity in film and television. Throughout the history of these media, racially questionable texts have played a vital role. From the cinema's...

Screening race: responses to theater violence at New Jack City and Boyz N the Hood.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... 1991 was supposed to be, as one journalist coined it, the "year of triumph" for black Hollywood (Leland 48). The commercial film industry, having rediscovered the lucrative possibilities of making films about the black ghetto, began to finance...

Living room levantine: immigration, ethnicity, and the border in early Israeli television.
September 22, 1999... On 1952, David Sarnoff, president of NBC, sent word to David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the four-year-old nation of Israel, offering to help the new Jewish homeland--and, in particular, its army--establish its own television...

Using strange texts to teach race, ethnicity, and the media.
September 22, 1999... Spectators are not the dupes of the media theater, but they refuse to say so. --Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural When teachers begin classes on race, ethnicity, and the media, we usually find that our students know...

Shipwrecked spectators: Italy's immigrants at the movies in New York, 1906-1916.
September 22, 1999... Vous etes embarque. --Blaise Pascal Traditional early cinema historiography has long claimed that the nickelodeons, the small, storefront movie theaters that were quite popular in Manhattan between 1906-07 and the early 1910s,...

From the cozy to the carceral: trans-formations of ethnic space in The Goldbergs and Seinfeld.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am for myself only, who am I? If not now, when? --Rabbi Hillel, in the Talmud In this comparative analysis of The Goldbergs (1949-56) and Seinfield (1989-98), theoretical notions of...

"But things is changin' nowadays an' Mammy's gettin' bored": Hattie McDaniel and the Culture of Dissemblance.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double-consciousness, or "twoness," has been the reigning critical model for many fruitful analyses of blackness on screen and in spectatorship, notably in Jane Gaines's "Fire and Desire," J. Ronald Green's...

Form and function: superstardom and aesthetics in the music videos of Michael and Janet Jackson.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... I want to try and defend the medium of music videos for a second. Let's be honest... most music videos aren't very good. I've certainly made a few crappy ones myself. But the very best music videos, the cream of the crop--say...

Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America.
September 22, 1999... by Steven J. Ross Although the successful assertion of both historical and historiographic arguments in a single work is a rarity, Steven J. Ross accomplishes precisely this in his Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of...

The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music.
September 22, 1999... by Jeff Smith There is a scarcity of scholarship on film music, and most existing texts focus mainly on classical symphonic scores, often confining their analyses to theoretical concerns and aesthetic principles. Even less is written on...

The Thing by Anne Billson, The Exorcist by Mark Kermode, and Independence Day by Michael Rogin.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... The Thing by Anne Billson, the Exorcist by Mark Kermode, and Independence Day by Michael Rogin After a decade of often acrimonious debate within arts academia about "cultural literacy" and the wisdom of consecrating a medium's "essential"...