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Conclusion The public face of film translation history

Jean-François Cornu

Carol O’ (ed.)

in The Translation of Films, 1900-1950

This concluding chapter goes beyond summing up the main issues addressed in the volume. It emphasises how its methodology was designed to foster an awareness of the significant stakes of film ... More

This concluding chapter goes beyond summing up the main issues addressed in the volume. It emphasises how its methodology was designed to foster an awareness of the significant stakes of film translation history for film history in general. It provides further leads to expand and deepen our knowledge of translated films as essential elements of film history and the film-going experience. A core element of the volume, key archival issues include the accurate identification and cataloguing of prints of translated films: silent films with localised intertitles, dubbed and subtitled versions of talking films. The editors remind the readers how they intend the volume to be a first step in identifying the material aspect of film translation history, and sharing the findings and related excitement with the general public.Less

The Battle of the Crater in Recent Fiction

Stephen Cushman

in Cold Harbor To the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign

Stephen Cushman extends Levin’s coverage with an examination of the Crater in recent fiction and film. Using Charles Frazier’s best-selling Cold Mountain (1997), Anthony Minghella’s cinematic version ... More

Stephen Cushman extends Levin’s coverage with an examination of the Crater in recent fiction and film. Using Charles Frazier’s best-selling Cold Mountain (1997), Anthony Minghella’s cinematic version of the novel (2003), Duane Schultz’s Glory Enough for All (1993), and Richard Slotkin’s The Crater (1980), Cushman, who is a poet and a historian, explores stylistic choices, differences between written and spoken language in the 19th century, the challenge and potential reward of mining historical sources to create fictional treatments, and the importance of audience. Cushman’s discussion of Slotkin’s handling of black characters and interweaving of historical, literary, and political sensibilities has implications far beyond the topic and texts of the essay.Less

The Shanghai Painted Fan: Form, Format, and Function

Roberta Wue

in Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai

Addresses Shanghai painting through the fashionable painted fan. Often overlooked because of its modest size and ambitions, the fan’s identity as a mobile image and object of self-adornment boosted ... More

Addresses Shanghai painting through the fashionable painted fan. Often overlooked because of its modest size and ambitions, the fan’s identity as a mobile image and object of self-adornment boosted its popularity in late Qing Shanghai, appealing to consumer tastes for flamboyant display and conspicuous consumption. This chapter examines the ways in which the painted fan embodied Shanghai School painting through the use of popular subjects, dynamic styles and compositions, and its fusion of accessory and artwork. The fan is also examined as a fashionable and sought-after commodity, retailed and distributed through Shanghai’s glamorous fan and letter-paper shops, contributing to the growth of the city’s vigorous art market for an urban middle-class clientele.Less

‘Asking the Audience’: Quiz Shows and Their Viewers

Su Holmes

in The Quiz Show

Although quiz shows often encourage us to ‘play’ along, and they encode the participation of the audience into their textual form, there have been virtually no audience studies in this sphere. This ... More

Although quiz shows often encourage us to ‘play’ along, and they encode the participation of the audience into their textual form, there have been virtually no audience studies in this sphere. This chapter seeks to address this neglect. Moving from the early broadcast origins of the quiz show up until the advent of ‘interactive’ television, it considers the ways in which the viewer at home has been encouraged to participate. It then moves on to explore how fan cultures on the internet offer insights into audience interaction with the quiz show (and its cultural politics). But as such fans are also often contestants, the chapter returns to the questions of ‘performance’ and ‘authenticity’ examined in Chapter 5.Less

‘Desperately Seeking the Audience’: models of audience reception

Kristyn Gorton

in Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion

This chapter considers how we can understand the term 'audience' and critically outlines some of the ways in which the audience has been approached, theorised and researched. It argues that the ... More

This chapter considers how we can understand the term 'audience' and critically outlines some of the ways in which the audience has been approached, theorised and researched. It argues that the history of audience research is characterised by a division between powerful media and powerful viewers; that is, between understanding the media as capable of influencing and therefore affecting viewers and understanding viewers as capable of influencing and therefore affecting the media. This chapter also includes new developments in audience research.Less

Introduction

Claire Monk

in Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

The cusp of the 1980s and 1990s saw the crystallisation in the United Kingdom of a debate — or, more precisely, a critique — which rapidly came to dominate academic discussion of recent cinematic ... More

The cusp of the 1980s and 1990s saw the crystallisation in the United Kingdom of a debate — or, more precisely, a critique — which rapidly came to dominate academic discussion of recent cinematic representations of the past, particularly but not solely in the British context: the critique of so-called ‘heritage films’ or ‘heritage cinema’. This book explores, by empirical means, the scholarly lacuna around the audiences who watch and enjoy heritage films. The book's primary source for this purpose is the Heritage Audience Survey, a questionnaire-based study conducted in the late 1990s to generate an analysis of the demographic characteristics and social identities, film viewing habits, film tastes, and wider attitudes and pleasures of 92 members of the UK film audiences for period films.Less

The Heritage Audience Survey: Methodology and Issues

Claire Monk

in Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

This chapter investigates contemporary audiences for period films, specifically, the Heritage Audience Survey participants, in the United Kingdom from a range of perspectives. It describes the ... More

This chapter investigates contemporary audiences for period films, specifically, the Heritage Audience Survey participants, in the United Kingdom from a range of perspectives. It describes the development, design, methodological rationale and practicalities (and limitations) of the Heritage Audience Survey itself. In view of the centrality of class ideologies and matters of class culture, the wider components of identity and the formation of middle-brow ‘good taste’ to the heritage-film debate and its assumptions about film audiences, a defining feature of this book is that it is as interested in the ‘intertextual organisation’ of the audience members it studies as it is in their readings and uses of heritage films. The survey is simultaneously a study of respondents' current and recent film viewing habits, film tastes and attitudes in the late 1990s, but one which is able to situate these historically and contextually in relation to the cinematic and cultural-political context of the 1980s heritage debate, the late 1990s ‘present’ of the survey, and points in between.Less

Demographics and Identities: A Portrait of the Survey Respondents

Claire Monk

in Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

This chapter analyses the demographic backgrounds of respondents of the Heritage Audience Survey and a wider range of indicators of identity, with some comparative reference to the demographics of ... More

This chapter analyses the demographic backgrounds of respondents of the Heritage Audience Survey and a wider range of indicators of identity, with some comparative reference to the demographics of the wider cinema audience in the 1990s (and the thinner existing evidence on the demographics of film audiences in the United Kingdom for specific period films) as established in the limited publicly available industry sources. The chapter identifies the distinguishing features of the two subsamples, highlighting those most resonant in relation to the heritage-film debate, and those of likely relevance in interpreting and understanding respondents' particular tastes, orientations and attitudes in relation to period films. Mindful of the very specific links between class fraction, class identity and educational capital on the one hand, and ‘cultural capital’, cultural preferences and formation of film tastes on the other, this chapter takes an interest in a varied range of indicators of respondents' identities — from self-reported sexual orientation to minutiae of schooling, university types, literary adaptations and heritage films, and occupational cultures.Less

Respondents' Film Viewing Habit(u)s

Claire Monk

in Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

The critique of heritage cinema has demarcated ‘heritage films’ as institutionally and culturally distinct from the mainstream in particular ways that mark enjoyment of them as a taste, and a sphere ... More

The critique of heritage cinema has demarcated ‘heritage films’ as institutionally and culturally distinct from the mainstream in particular ways that mark enjoyment of them as a taste, and a sphere of consumption, characterised by a degree of (self-conscious) separation from commercial popular film/culture. This chapter examines the general contours of Heritage Audience Survey respondents' cinemagoing and film viewing habits — or more precisely, their film habitus, focusing on period films. It discusses respondents' frequency of cinemagoing and viewing of films in other media, the relative place of commercial and art cinema venues within their habitus — and, indeed, whether they saw films at the cinema at all (which a significant contingent of older respondents in the National Trust subsample did not).Less

Patterns of Film Taste: Period and Non-Period Films

Claire Monk

in Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

This chapter explores the specifics of Heritage Audience Survey respondents' tastes in films: both in general and with reference to period films. It looks at profoundly contrasting patterns between ... More

This chapter explores the specifics of Heritage Audience Survey respondents' tastes in films: both in general and with reference to period films. It looks at profoundly contrasting patterns between the Time Out and National Trust subsamples in terms of film familiarity, adventurousness of film viewing and film tastes. Notwithstanding their ostensibly ‘uncinematic’ characteristics, did some respondents enjoy heritage films in the context of popular cinema tastes, or as part of a more informed cinephilia by others? How many films (from lists presented in the questionnaire) they recalled seeing across both period and non-period films? The majority of listed films were placed into classificatory groups — not divulged to respondents — for the purpose of analysing film tastes. The chapter considers two final indicators of patterns of ‘heritage’ film taste: the numbers of films directed by James Ivory and seen by respondents and the numbers of listed benchmark 1980s to mid-1990s film and television adaptations from Jane Austen novels they had seen.Less

Audience Pleasures, Attitudes and Perspectives 1: Visual Pleasure and ‘Authenticity’, Engagement and Escape

Claire Monk

in Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

This chapter looks at Heritage Audience Survey respondents' self-worded testimonies to explore what these — and wider survey evidence — revealed about their viewing positions, film tastes, attitudes ... More

This chapter looks at Heritage Audience Survey respondents' self-worded testimonies to explore what these — and wider survey evidence — revealed about their viewing positions, film tastes, attitudes and expectations in relation to period films (including heritage films), as well as their dispositions and orientations in relation to a variety of critical questions around ‘heritage film’. Respondents were invited to express their views in their own words in response to open questions asking what they most enjoyed, or did not enjoy, about the period films they watched. This analysis also draws upon two multiple-choice elements in the survey questionnaire: a list of twenty-eight pre-suggested ‘pleasures’ (visual pleasures and pleasures of narrative), which respondents might hypothetically find in period films, and a list of seventy-four attitude statements, expressing a range of views, opinions or positions in relation to period films, ‘quality’ literary adaptations, and the suppositions of existing discourses around these. Finally, the chapter discusses the discourse of authenticity as well as pleasures of engagement and disengagement.Less

Audience Pleasures, Attitudes and Perspectives 2: ‘Quality’, Literary Pleasures, Adaptation and Cultural Value

Claire Monk

in Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

This chapter explores Heritage Audience Survey respondents' conceptions of ‘quality’ in relation to the period films they watched, and their positioning in relation to the ‘literary’ pleasures ... More

This chapter explores Heritage Audience Survey respondents' conceptions of ‘quality’ in relation to the period films they watched, and their positioning in relation to the ‘literary’ pleasures offered by many period films (including, but not solely with reference to, literary adaptations), as well as attitudes and expectations in relation to adaptation itself. The function of period films as a substitute for reading classic novels or factual history, or going to the theatre, was given as a (or the) primary reason why the respondent enjoyed them. In addition to the ‘British cinema’ attitude statement, the questionnaire had pre-suggested two pleasures: ‘seeing leading British actors/actresses at their best’ and ‘pride in seeing British cinema at its best’ — which conflated the notions of ‘quality’ with ‘Britishness’. Many respondents associated American cinema with an inauthenticity not confined to period detail. National Trust subsamples' self-worded replies confirmed that at least some of them did indeed believe that recent, particularly post-1980, British period films and television dramas were superior to those of earlier decades, centrally due to their scrupulous ‘authenticity’.Less

Conclusions: Period Film Audiences, the Heritage Film Debate and Audience Studies

Claire Monk

in Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

This chapter draws together the most significant points to emerge from an analysis of the ‘heritage film audiences’ — as represented by the two groups who participated in the Heritage Audience Survey ... More

This chapter draws together the most significant points to emerge from an analysis of the ‘heritage film audiences’ — as represented by the two groups who participated in the Heritage Audience Survey — and considers their implications for the debate around heritage cinema. These implications are centred around questions of the coherence and distinct(ive)ness of the ‘heritage film audience’ (or audiences); the related question of how far respondents exhibited a self-identity as period-film viewers; the question of respondents' levels of consciousness or self-consciousness in relation to the heritage-film debate itself; and the question of audience autonomy (that is, how far respondents were able to produce their own distinct audience discourses around period films). This book turns from a sociological focus on the composition and identities of period film audiences, via questions of cultural (pre-)disposition, film consumption practices, and film tastes, to a more interpretative reading of the ‘texts’ presented by ‘respondents’ views and attitudes and, ultimately, their cultural-political positioning in relation to period films.Less

Concluding Comments

James A. Gross

in Rights, Not Interests: Resolving Value Clashes under the National Labor Relations Act

The concluding chapter makes a number of points: the Act is not neutral, but is intended to promote and protect workers’ rights; the international community recognizes the freedom of association and ... More

The concluding chapter makes a number of points: the Act is not neutral, but is intended to promote and protect workers’ rights; the international community recognizes the freedom of association and collective bargaining as human rights; and calls for visionary thinking including elimination of employment at will, revamping law school education to connect with workplace realities, the Board to consider the perspectives of other legal systems around the world, consideration of the U.S. Constitution as a source of workers’ rights, and abandonment of the pluralist values which would transform workers’ rights into workers’ interests–self-interested, economic activity no different than business activity.Less

Ceremonial and Protocol

Rolf Strootman

in Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic Empires: The Near East After the Achaemenids, c. 330 to 30 BCE

Chapter 9, the first of three chapter on ritual and ceremonial, considers aspects of etiquette and protocol. The chapter focuses on the (1) ceremonial that regulated access to the person of the king, ... More

Chapter 9, the first of three chapter on ritual and ceremonial, considers aspects of etiquette and protocol. The chapter focuses on the (1) ceremonial that regulated access to the person of the king, and (2) on ceremonial that was instrumental in the creation of group cohesion among the philoi. Special attention is given to the ‘great events’ of the court: the festivities that attracted representatives of local and regional polities to the imperial centre. During festive occasions such as birth and wedding ceremonies, the household temporarily expanded to include an ‘outer court’—a ritualized contact zone that facilitated communication and negotiation between centre and periphery, and the (re)distribution of status, power, and wealth. The pivotal event of various festivities was the ritual banquet—presumably following sacrifice—which was the focal point for the distribution of honours and status gifts. The collective participation in aulic ceremonial by representatives of local elites furthermore augmented imperial integration. Monumentalized ritual spaces such as the Alexandrian palace district, or the processional way and sanctuaries at Pergamon, facilitated this kind of collective action.Less

Introduction

Andrew Talle

in Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century

The last several generations of scholars have made great progress in illuminating the mundane details of J. S. Bach’s working life. Our intense focus on this famous composer, however, has skewed our ... More

The last several generations of scholars have made great progress in illuminating the mundane details of J. S. Bach’s working life. Our intense focus on this famous composer, however, has skewed our understanding of his era. If we are to truly know the world Bach inhabited, we need to learn more about the musical lives of ordinary people. This book explores the musical culture of Bach’s Germany from the perspectives of those who lived in it. The protagonists are not famous composers but rather amateur and professional musicians, patrons, instrument builders, and audience members. They are treated here not as extras in the grand sweep of music history, but rather as stars in their own private dramas.Less

Defining Deviance

Erich Goode

in The Taming of New York's Washington Square: A Wild Civility

Deviance is defined by negative reactions enacted by audiences to behaviour, expressed beliefs, and/or the possession of undesirable characteristics. Audiences vary in their reactions; what’s ... More

Deviance is defined by negative reactions enacted by audiences to behaviour, expressed beliefs, and/or the possession of undesirable characteristics. Audiences vary in their reactions; what’s wrongful in one audience may be acceptable in another—hence, deviance is relative to audience, society, subgroup, context, and historical time. Typically, reactions express negative attitudes toward the violations of a strongly-held norm. Such reactions are varied, and include condemnation, withdrawing from the presence of the offender, and the unwillingness to join in interaction with the offending party or parties. Most members of the society can perform a mental experiment to picture what these reactions are likely to be for a range of audiences. The researcher conducted a survey among 60 park-goers to determine what is considered wrongful in the park. In the park, multiple parties put on performances of extremely eccentric or deviant behaviour. Felonious crime is very rare in the park; milder forms of deviance are common, however, including offensive staring and selling marijuana. Public gay sex, which used to be common, has all but disappeared there.Less

Persuasion and Power

Manduhai Buyandelger

in Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia

In Chapter 6 the author explores conventional and creative strategies for success by male shamans. Unlike female shamans who constantly push against the larger system, male shamans are gainfully ... More

In Chapter 6 the author explores conventional and creative strategies for success by male shamans. Unlike female shamans who constantly push against the larger system, male shamans are gainfully positioned in a male-dominated patriarchal system. Their shamanic strategies include demonstrating kinship affiliations with well-known (during their lifetime) ancestors; seeking international recognition through global travel and networking; and using everyday micro-tactics to recruit clients through casual conversations and impromptu encounters. These postsocialist shamans must also demonstrate their prowess in dealing with the influx of previously suppressed unidentifiable spirits who roam in search for human hosts. Some shamans construct tight-knit kinship enclosures from their origin spirits and block the stranger-spirits from pestering them. Others take the opposite route, adopting the orphaned spirits for various tasks. Economic success and spiritual power prove to be interdependent; material resources are necessary to support spiritual advancement. But this presents a delicate line for shamans to tread: though they display their economic success in order to prove that their spirits are potent, they must also downplay their material interests in order to persuade others of their spiritual power, thus maintaining their credibility and avoiding being labelled “business shamans.”Less