Martin F. Norden

Through dozens of interviews, a detailed chronology and filmography, and a selection of Dorothy Arzner’s own writings—including her unfinished autobiography—Dorothy Arzner: Interviews offers major insights into and an in-depth examination of the life and career of one of the few women to direct films during Hollywood’s Golden Age. A key figure in Hollywood for decades, she directed more studio films than any other woman in history. Her movies often focused on courageous women who must make difficult decisions to remain true to themselves—women not unlike Arzner herself, who once said that “all we can ever do in our work is write our own biography.” Dorothy Arzner (1897–1979) began her film career in 1919 as a script typist for the Famous Players-Lasky company, which later became Paramount Pictures. She quickly rose through the ranks to become a script supervisor, screenwriter, and editor before directing her first film, Fashions for Women, in 1927. After the release of her final Hollywood film, First Comes Courage, in 1943, Arzner changed directions in her professional life. She made several training films for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II and directed many television commercials for Pepsi-Cola in the 1950s. She concluded her career by serving as a filmmaking instructor at the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts and UCLA, where she helped launch the first wave of college-trained moviemakers.

Interviews

Dorothy Arzner

The popular media of film and television surround us daily with images of evil - images that have often gone critically unexamined. In the belief that people in ever-increasing numbers are turning to the media for their understanding of evil, this lively and provocative collection of essays addresses the changing representation of evil in a broad spectrum of films and television programmes. Written in refreshingly accessible and de-jargonised prose, the essays bring to bear a variety of philosophical and critical perspectives on works ranging from the cinema of famed director Alfred Hitchcock and the preternatural horror films Halloween and Friday the 13th to the understated documentary Human Remains and the television coverage of the immediate post-9/11 period. The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television is for anyone interested in the moving-image representation of that pervasive yet highly misunderstood thing we call evil.ContentsMartin F. NORDEN: Introduction Matthew SOAR: The Bite at the Beginning: Encoding Evil Through Film Title Design Linda BRADLEY SALAMON: Screening Evil in History: Rope, Compulsion, Scarface, Richard III Mike FRANK: The Radical Monism of Alfred Hitchcock Cynthia FREELAND: Natural Evil in the Horror Film: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds Matt HILLS and Steven Jay SCHNEIDER: ?The Devil Made Me Do It!?: Representing Evil and Disarticulating Mind/Body in the Supernatural Serial Killer Film Thomas HIBBS: Virtue, Vice, and the Harry Potter UniverseRobin R. MEANS COLEMAN and Jasmine Nicole COBB: Training Day and The Shield: Evil Cops and the Taint of Blackness Martin F. NORDEN: The ?Uncanny? Relationship of Disability and Evil in Film and Television Carlo CELLI: Comedy and the Holocaust in Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful/La vita e bella Garnet C. BUTCHART:. On the Void: The Fascinating Object of Evil in Human RemainsJohn F. STONE:. The Perfidious President and ?The Beast?: Evil in Oliver Stone's NixonGary R. EDGERTON, William B. HART, and Frances HASSENCAHL: Televising 9/11 and Its Aftermath: The Framing of George W. Bush's Faith-Based Politics of Good and Evil Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television

Mark Bould

Alex Woloch

Cynthia Baron

Maureen Turim

Greg M. Smith

Susan Felleman

Klaus Rieser

Rebecca M. Gordon

Laura Barrett

Hamilton Carroll

Mika Turim-Nygren

The first collection of original essays on the work of writer-director John Sayles, this book addresses the full range of his films from a variety of critical viewpoints.

New Perspectives on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles

Sayles Talk

Lois Weber (1879-1939) was one of early Hollywood's most successful screenwriter-directors. A one-time Church Army worker who preached from street corners, Weber began working in the American film industry as an actress around 1908 but quickly ascended to the positions of screenwriter and director. She wrote, directed, starred in, edited, and titled hundreds of movies during her career and is believed to be the first woman to direct a feature film. At the height of her influence, Weber used her medium to address pressing social issues such as birth control, abortion, capital punishment, poverty, and drug abuse. She gained international fame in 1915 with her controversial Hypocrites, a complex film that featured full female nudity as part of its important moral lesson. Her most famous film, Where Are My Children?, was the Universal studio's biggest box-office hit the following year and played to enthusiastic audiences around the globe. These productions and many others contributed to her standing as a truly world-class filmmaker. Despite her many successes, Weber was pushed out of the business in the 1930s as a result of Hollywood's institutionalized sexism. Shoved into the corners of film history, she remained a largely forgotten figure for decades. Lois Weber: Interviews restores her long-muted voice by reprinting more than sixty items in which she expressed her views on a range of filmic subjects. The volume includes interviews, articles that Weber wrote, the text of a speech she gave, and reconstructed conversations with her Hollywood coworkers. Lois Weber: Interviews provides key insights into one of our first great writer-directors, her many films, and the changing business in which she worked.

Lois Weber

Filmmakers have often encouraged us to regard people with physical disabilities in terms of pity, awe, humor, or fearas "Others" who somehow deserve to be isolated from the rest of society. In this first history of the portrayal of physical disability in the movies, Martin Norden examines hundreds of Hollywood movies (and notable international ones), finds their place within mainstream society, and uncovers the movie industry's practices for maintaining the status quokeeping people with disabilities dependent and "in their place." Norden offers a dazzling array of physically disabled characters who embody or break out of the stereotypes that have both influenced and been symptomatic of societys fluctuating relationship with its physically disabled minority. He shows us "sweet innocents" like Tiny Tim, "obsessive avengers" like Quasimodo, variations on the disabled veteran, and many others. He observes the arrival of a new set of stereotypes tied to the growth of science and technology in the 1970s and 1980s, and underscores movies like My Left Foot and The Waterdance that display a newfound sensitivity. Nordens in-depth knowledge of disability history makes for a particularly intelligent and sensitive approach to this long-overlooked issue in media studies.

A History of Physical Disability in the Movies

The Cinema of Isolation

Robert E. Weir

We immerse ourselves daily in expressions of popular culture—YouTube videos, hip hop music, movies, adverts, greeting cards, videogames, and comics, to name just a few possibilities—and far too often we pay only scant critical attention to them. The essays in this collection redress this situation by probing a wide range of topics within the field of popular culture studies. Written in engaging and jargon-free prose, contributions critically examine various offerings in film, television, social media, music, literature, sports, and related areas. Moreover, they often pay special attention to the ways in which these pop culture artefacts intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ability. Providing a rich mixture of broad perspectives and intriguing case studies, the essays form a compelling mosaic of findings and viewpoints on popular culture. Exploring everything from toxic masculinity in twenty-first century television programmes to gendered greeting cards and adult colouring books, this provocative volume is essential reading for anyone interested in that fabricated and all-pervasive environment we call popular culture.

Martin F. Norden

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