Study guide for film final HUM3321 Meritocracy myth by McNamee Miller Their argument There s a gap between how people think the system works and how it actually works The system does not distribute resources wealth and income according to the merit of individuals Their point is that 1 the impact of merit on economic outcomes is vastly overestimated by the ideology of the American dream there are various non merit factors that suppress the effects of merit and create barriers to individual mobility 2 Belton How Hollywood makes a star a star is an actor whose persona transcends the sum total of his or her performances the public saw Hollywood as where royalty lived stars are not people They are celestial bodies Stars are bigger than the public but public chooses stars and can break them Studio system had a vested interest in constructing and exploiting stars Studios controlled stars contract system and their image and used them to sell their other films block booking A star s popularity enabled his or her studio to sell some of their other films in addition to the ones showing their star Stars also saved the studios during the Depression and began to realize their power over studios Belton stardom is a persona Stars consist of three personalities the star the actor and the actual person stars personalities can determine the roles they play but also feed into their personal lives Meuleners 3 steps towards approaching cultural diversity 1 recognition lack of information causes ignorance which causes trouble People will fill in the gaps of something they don t know using previous knowledge Ignorance also creates gear because people can be afraid of what they don t know tolerance the different people are accepted 2 3 celebration celebrate and appreciate diversity Marxism the destructive power of money humans become alienated and look at money as a material thing money makes man lost and dehumanized through the alien mediation caused by money man is independent from his will his activity and his relationship to others money drives greed if someone is ugly money repels the ugliness if a person is disgusting dishonorable and stupid money is honored and therefore so is its possessor sexual orientation the complexity of human sexual affectional and erotic attraction the 4 key issues of the new paradigm of sexual orientation 1 conceptualization of sexual orientations Sexuality Garnets Study guide for film final HUM3321 2 development of sexual orientations 3 new perspectives on gender and sexual orientations 4 convergences divergences and intersections of sexual orientation with other aspects of human diversity old paradigm put people into rigid categories of heterosexual vs homosexual It ignored or denied the existence of bisexuality new paradigm sexual orientation is a multidimensional conceptualization It sees sexual orientation as flexible complex and multifaceted Auteur s Theory directors are the principal authors of motion pictures and set forth a new era of filmmakers the directors are the authors of films Advertising in the film industry Belton major fan magazines of the time had wide circulation and revealed the off screen lives of movie stars which in turn supported these publications by heavily advertising the stars lives the star provides the studio with a tangible attraction an image that can advertised and marketed Youth films in the 60 s and 70 s Belton The civil rights movement the Vietnamese war and the feminist movement served to be the backgrounds of the films in the 60 s and 70 s the films of this time were inspired by the movements of the youth in terms of their resentment towards the war in Vietnam their protests against brutal police violence racism and the disempowerment and repression of women films were based off of the protest marches sit ins feminist uprisings and police violence staged by the youth of the time To commend or critique The question of religion and film studies Lyden films include religious symbolism films may project a world view which functions much like a religion in our culture films are a creation and a reflection of the popular culture which produces and sustains them religious scholars use these methods to study films 1 semiotics 2 textual or formatic studies 3 psychoanalytic methods 4 ideological or political critiques 5 reader response theories 6 genre and auteur studies To commend to seek to appreciate the values of popular film as a valid expression of the culture they mirror Understand and not label a particular groups viewpoint about social and political issues Critique to see and understand biased viewpoints and poor arguments Study guide for film final HUM3321 even though films are not produced by the people but by a technological industry they are produced for the people and out of response for what people believe in Lyden identifies two basic approaches that see film as exemplative of a popular religious tradition 185 1 Popular culture is seen as being as valid as any other culture and it expresses it own values through various media such as film i e those who commend popular film Such an approach seeks to identify the types of mythologies that films create in order to show how they contribute to the religion of popular culture 2 Films present popular culture as a form of hegemonic discourse which supports the status quo i e those who critique popular film Such an approach seeks to unmask this discourse in order to show how it acts as a negative influence on society Intersectionality the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression domination or discrimination a concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions racism sexism homophobia transphobia ableism xenophobia classism etc are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another We cannot just study one institution we must study all cultural issues and institutions together For example when studying gender it must be understood within the context of the intersecting domains of inequality Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society Examples of this include race gender class ability and ethnicity Gender Risman Gender is deeply embedded as a basis for stratification not just in our personalities our cultural rules or institutions but in all of these and in complicated ways The gender
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