If motion pictures are going to press toward their own artistic maturity, all artificial barriers against their serious treatment of all areas of life must fall. (Author)

This article contains "recommendations concerning lighting, staging, cameras, film, and sound recording" for color film production. (Editor/AK)

Notes that independent films are being effectively used in many curriculum areas. A resource list is included of books, pamphlets, and periodicals which provide in-depth coverage of the independent filmmaker's contributions. (CMV)

Analyzes how Hollywood's journalism movie genre has portrayed the news media over the years. Suggests that the movies' relationship to the press reflects a fundamentally ambivalent relationship between the press and the broader culture and that Hollywood explicitly portrays institutional and cultural tensions within journalism which the news media…

Argues that visits by independent filmmakers to campus are exciting and intellectually invigorating for students and teachers, and these visits add to the cultural energy of the college. Notes that a commitment to independent cinema challenges the assumptions and the economics of conventional cinema. Discusses how much independent filmmakers are…

Discusses the 1955 Vladimir Nabokov novel "Lolita," and the central theme of "Lolita" being a prize in a struggle between two men. Examines some of the moments of sadomasochism in the novel and film, and the relationship between director Stanley Kubrick and the lead actor Peter Sellers. Concludes with an analysis of Kubrick's…

Argues that the dominant themes in Bigelow's "Blue Steel" are female subservience, masculine authority, sex as economic exchange and guilty pleasure, woman as threatening and domestic, and castration anxiety. Analyzes Jamie Lee Curtis's portrayal of the protagonist, Megan Turner, as being androgynous when in uniform, and as possessor of…

Explores the prevalence of the gunfighter as mythic hero. Compares the depictions of Clint Eastwood's characters from the beginning of Eastwood's career ("A Fistful of Dollars" and "Pale Rider") to "Unforgiven," finding similarities and differences in each character. (PA)

Media literacy has been posited as a cross-curricular necessity for twenty-first century students, but one of the challenges of infusing media literacy into any discipline is the lack of a consistent definition. This article argues that media literacy is best conceptualized as a thinking disposition that evaluates the construction of media form,…

One may be surprised to learn that the author's institution, a small state college in Massachusetts, has a significant alumni population in and around Los Angeles. In fact, while they do not have an alumni chapter in Boston, they do have one in Los Angeles. The reason is that one of their most popular majors is communications media. They pump out…

With its roots in ancient rhetoric and medieval liturgy, the term "trope" now refers to a figure of speech that organizes a set of complex ideas into a kind of linguistic shorthand. A trope is thus a phrase or image that conveys more than its literal meaning. In this article, two tropes are pertinent: the "pastoral" and the "fortunate fall." The…

The author first saw Trevor Fletcher's film on the cardioid as an undergraduate in 1959. When he saw Fletcher's cardioid film once again, the author was vividly reminded of his first experiences of animated mathematics nearly 50 years before. He discovered that the idea of using mental pictures to develop dynamic images came from work by the Swiss…

The question is not whether literacy practices are present in contemporary popular culture--it is hard not to find a movie or program without some representation of literacy in it. The more important and useful question is, How do we in the audience interpret the literacy practices we find in popular culture? What do such representations tell us…

In an era in which cartoon animation has experienced a renaissance of popularity with American audiences ranging from full-length animated motion pictures to successful television series and popular Japanese anime, it is important to remember the genre's origins and preserve those enduring examples of early comics and animation for each new…

This article described the methods of media education development of personality (including the audience's individual, "creative critical thinking" corresponding to "conceptual" (knowledge of media culture theory), "sensory" (intentional communication with mass media, orientational experience in genre and topical…