Academic literature on the topic 'Elvis! Elvis! (film : 1977)'

As recently as December, 2002, the New York Times' Elvis Mitchell referred to the "wreckage"of Showgirls (1995). Yet the Film Quarterly editorial board had just been galvanized by a discussion of the same film. Apparently there exists a number of secret and not-so-secret devotees of the film. Showgirls has, perhaps unexpectedly, served to stimulate scholarly thought around issues of camp, satire, class, gender, the fallen woman, showgirl musicals, trash cinema,sexploitation films, hedonistic criticism, and reading and teaching the film. Noëël Burch, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Chon Noriega, Ara Osterweil, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, and Linda Williams have contributed to this discussion of the film. Perhaps Showgirls can still be rescued from the wreckage?

ABSTRACT Although the Icelandic author Halldór Laxness frequently highlighted his debt to American literature and spent several formative years in the United States during the 1920s, few Americanists have investigated his literary and political relationship with the United States. This essay delineates Laxness’s American years through archival sources by mapping his first failed venture to Ellis Island in 1922 through boat records and by tracking his second trip, from 1927 to 1929, through letters, newspapers, and other documents, including a film pitch written in English. Laxness’s biographical experiences in the United States during the 1920s shed light on immigration policy and illuminate some of the struggles that novelists in Hollywood faced while attempting to navigate a cinematic marketplace. His unsuccessful film pitch became the basis for Salka Valka, an epic novel influenced by American writers, most notably, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis.

Oksana Bulgakowa is a researcher of visual culture, a film critic, a screenwriter, a director, and a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She has taught at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Leipzig Graduate School of Music and Theater, the Free University of Berlin, Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley. Author of the books “FEKS: Die Fabrik des exzentrischen Schauspielers” (1996), “Sergei Eisenstein – drei Utopien. Architekturentwürfe zur Filmtheorie” (1996), “Sergej Eisenstein. Eine Biographie” (1998), “The Gesture Factory” (2005, a renewed edition to be published by NLO publishing house in 2021), “The Soviet hearing eye: cinema and its sensory organs” (2010), “The Voice as a cultural phenomenon”(2015), “SINNFABRIK/FABRIK DER SINNE” (2015), “The Fate of the Battleship: The Biography of Sergei Eisenstein” (2017). Author of the network projects “The Visual Universe of Sergei Eisenstein” (2005), “Sergei Eisenstein: My Art in Life. Google Arts and Culture” (in collaboration with Dietmar Hochmuth, 2017–2018), and the films “Stalin – eine Mosfilmproduktion” (in collaboration with Enno Patalas, 1993), “Different Faces of Sergei Eisenstein” (in collaboration with Dietmar Hochmuth, 1997). In this issue of P&I, Oksana Bulgakowa talks about medial giants and midgets, obscene gestures of Elvis Presley, “voice-over discourse” of TV presenters, and the birth of Eisenstein’s “Method” from psychosis and neurosis. Interview by Ekaterina Maksimova. Photo by Dietmar Hochmuth.

This study unearths 20th-century U.S. music histories to demonstrate that racism accompanied the entry of yoga into American “belonging” and domestication, while “Indians” were excluded. There are three yoga song sites in this study; each presents a composite of racial constructions that utilize Othering tropes long deployed to affirm White supremacy and legitimize colonial power. I analyze the sound world, lyrics, and films of (1) the 1941 popular song “The Yogi Who Lost His Will Power,” by Orrin Tucker and His Orchestra; (2) the 1960 chart-topper “Yogi,” which catapulted the Ivy Three to one-hit-wonder status; and, (3) the 1967 Elvis Presley song “Yoga Is as Yoga Does, ” from the movie Easy Come, Easy Go. Questions that guide this study include: How does racist displacement appear in historic contexts of sonic productions and U.S. proliferation in yoga? What racial stereotypes accompanied yoga’s entry into American cultural discourse? I argue the evidence supports three key findings: (1) yoga’s movement into American popular culture is inextricably tied to racism and Othering; (2) widely circulating stereotypes of Indians, yoga, and yogis in American popular music include classic racist tropes, such as the grinning Sambo, and (3) the logic of elimination operates to hide U.S. music histories of racialized yoga. I conclude that U.S. yoga and its musical and cultural productions, branded as peaceful and flexible, camouflage the settler nation and White supremacy. The article concludes with a forecast for the importance of music studies to the nascent field of critical yoga studies.

2017, in conjunction with celebrations of 150 years of Canadian Confederation and with funding from government programs, young people from across Cape Breton Island were invited to participate in a performance creation project to explore narratives and experiences of migration and encounter. Youth (ranging in age from seven to nineteen) from disparate places, including Membertou First Nation (a reserve), Chéticamp (an Acadian, francophone town), Étoile de l’Acadie (a francophone school and community centre in Sydney), and Whitney Pier (a district of Sydney that is home to diverse immigrant cultures, primarily from Barbados, Italy, Newfoundland, Poland, Croatia and Ukraine) all met in their own communities. They listened to elders discuss their own experiences of migration and encounter, and responded by creating new performance pieces grounded in song, dance, film (including new technologies such as virtual reality and 360-degree cameras), spoken word and story. They came together on 22 October 2017 to share their creative work with one another and with public audiences. We examine issues that arose during the creative process and of young participants’ post-process reflections, according to each of the ways in which Vertovec (“Conceiving”) has identified transnationalism. Interpretations of the Cape Breton youths’ own senses of rooted place are positioned in relation to transnational experiences present within their communities. These young people’s expressions of the local (for example, Acadian step dance and Mi’kmaq traditional drumming) morph into expressions of the transnational (for example, hip hop and pop music production); musical expressions use so-called traditional instruments (bagpipes or hand drums), DJ mixing techniques, djembe, Acadian folk music, and Elvis. Problematizing assumptions about what it is to be a Cape Bretoner, and interrogating how migration and resulting encounters have shaped how these young people choose to express themselves, this paper examines how they simultaneously express and contest transnationalism.

Are male porn stars full-fledged citizens? Recent political developments make this question more than rhetorical. The Bush Justice Department, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, has targeted the porn industry, beginning with its prosecution of Extreme Associates. More recently, the President requested an increase in the FBI’s 2005 budget for prosecuting obscenity, one of the few budget increases for the Bureau outside of its anti-terrorism program (Schmitt A1). To be sure, the concept of “citizen” is itself vexed. Citizenship, when obtained or granted, ostensibly legitimates a subject and opens up pathways to privilege: social, political, economic, etc. Yet all citizens do not seem to be created equal. “There is, in the operation of state-defined rules and in common practices an assumption of moral worth in which de facto as opposed to de jure rights of citizenship are defined as open to those who are deserving or who are capable of acting responsibly,” asserts feminist critic Linda McDowell. “The less deserving and the less responsible are defined as unworthy of or unfitted for the privileges of full citizenship” (150). Under this rubric, a citizen must measure up to a standard of “moral worth”—an individual is not a full-fledged citizen merely on the basis of birth or geographical placement. As McDowell concludes, “citizenship is not an inclusive but an exclusive concept” (150). Thus, in figuring out how male porn stars stand in regard to the question of citizenship, we must ask who determines “moral worth,” who distinguishes the less from the more deserving, and how people have come to agree on the “common practices” of citizenship. Many critics writing about citizenship, including McDowell, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Robyn Wiegman, Michael Moon, and Cathy Davidson (to name only a few) have located the nexus of “moral worth” in the body. In particular, the ability to make the body abstract, invisible, and non-identifiable has been the most desirable quality for a citizen to possess. White men seem ideally situated for such acts of “decorporealization,” and the white male body has been installed as the norm for citizenship. Conversely, women, people of color, and the ill and disabled, groups that are frequently defined by their very embodiment, find themselves more often subject to regulation. If the white male body is the standard, however, for “moral worth,” the white male porn star would seem to disrupt such calculations. Clearly, the profession demands that these men put their bodies very much in evidence, and the most famous porn stars, like John C. Holmes and Ron Jeremy, derive much of their popularity from their bodily excess. Jeremy’s struggle for “legitimacy,” and the tenuous position of men in the porn industry in general, demonstrate that even white males, when they cannot or will not aspire to abstraction and invisibility, will lose the privileges of citizenship. The right’s attack on pornography can thus be seen as yet another attempt to regulate and restrict citizenship, an effort that forces Jeremy and the industry that made him famous struggle for strategies of invisibility that will permit some mainstream acceptance. In American Anatomies, Robyn Wiegman points out that the idea of democratic citizenship rested on a distinct sense of the abstract and non-particular. The more “particular” an individual was, however, the less likely s/he could pass into the realm of citizen. “For those trapped by the discipline of the particular (women, slaves, the poor),” Wiegman writes, “the unmarked and universalized particularity of the white masculine prohibited their entrance into the abstraction of personhood that democratic equality supposedly entailed” (49). The norm of the “white masculine” caused others to signify “an incontrovertible difference” (49), so people who were visibly different (or perceived as visibly different) could be tyrannized over and regulated to ensure the purity of the norm. Like Wiegman, Lauren Berlant has written extensively about the ways in which the nation recognizes only one “official” body: “The white, male body is the relay to legitimation, but even more than that, the power to suppress that body, to cover its tracks and its traces, is the sign of real authority, according to constitutional fashion” (113). Berlant notes that “problem citizens”—most notably women of color—struggle with the problem of “surplus embodiment.” They cannot easily suppress their bodies, so they are subjected to the regulatory power of a law that defines them and consequently opens their bodies up to violation. To escape their “surplus embodiment,” those who can seek abstraction and invisibility because “sometimes a person doesn’t want to seek the dignity of an always-already-violated body, and wants to cast hers off, either for nothingness, or in a trade for some other, better model” (114). The question of “surplus embodiment” certainly has resonance for male porn stars. Peter Lehman has argued that hardcore pornography relies on images of large penises as signifiers of strength and virility. “The genre cannot tolerate a small, unerect penis,” Lehman asserts, “because the sight of the organ must convey the symbolic weight of the phallus” (175). The “power” of male porn stars derives from their visibility, from “meat shots” and “money shots.” Far from being abstract, decorporealized “persons,” male porn stars are fully embodied. In fact, the more “surplus embodiment” they possess, the more famous they become. Yet the very display that makes white male porn stars famous also seemingly disqualifies them from the “legitimacy” afforded the white male body. In the industry itself, male stars are losing authority to the “box-cover girls” who sell the product. One’s “surplus embodiment” might be a necessity for working in the industry, but, as Susan Faludi notes, “by choosing an erection as the proof of male utility, the male performer has hung his usefulness, as porn actor Jonathan Morgan observed, on ‘the one muscle on our body we can’t flex’” (547). When that muscle doesn’t work, a male porn star doesn’t become an abstraction—he becomes “other,” a joke, swept aside and deemed useless. Documentary filmmaker Scott J. Gill recognizes the tenuousness of the “citizenship” of male porn stars in his treatment of Ron Jeremy, “America’s most famous porn star.” The film, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (2001), opens with a clear acknowledgment of Jeremy’s body, as one voiceover explains how his nickname, “the Hedgehog,” derives from the fact that Jeremy is “small, fat, and very hairy.” Then, Gill intercuts the comments of various Jeremy fans: “An idol to an entire generation,” one young man opines; “One of the greatest men this country has ever seen,” suggests another. This opening scene concludes with an image of Jeremy, smirking and dressed in a warm-up suit with a large dollar sign necklace, standing in front of an American flag (an image repeated at the end of the film). This opening few minutes posit the Hedgehog as super-citizen, embraced as few Americans are. “Everyone wants to be Ron Jeremy,” another young fan proclaims. “They want his life.” Gill also juxtaposes “constitutional” forms of legitimacy that seemingly celebrate Jeremy’s bodily excess with the resultant discrimination that body actually engenders. In one clip, Jeremy exposes himself to comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who then sardonically comments, “All men are created equal—what bullshit!” Later, Gill employs a clip of a film in which Jeremy is dressed like Ben Franklin while in a voiceover porn director/historian Bill Margold notes that the Freeman decision “gave a birth certificate to a bastard industry—it legitimized us.” The juxtaposition thus posits Jeremy as a “founding father” of sorts, the most recognizable participant in an industry now going mainstream. Gill, however, emphasizes the double-edged nature of Jeremy’s fame and the price of his display. Immediately after the plaudits of the opening sequence, Gill includes clips from various Jeremy talk show appearances in which he is denounced as “scum” and told “You should go to jail just for all the things that you’ve helped make worse in this country” and “You should be shot.” Gill also shows a clearly dazed Jeremy in close-up confessing, “I hate myself. I want to find a knife and slit my wrists.” Though Jeremy does not seem serious, this comment comes into better focus as the film unfolds. Jeremy’s efforts to go “legit,” to break into mainstream film and leave his porn life behind, keep going off the tracks. In the meantime, Jeremy must fulfill his obligations to his current profession, including getting a monthly HIV test. “There’ll be one good thing about eventually getting out of the porn business,” he confesses as Gill shows scenes of a clearly nervous Jeremy awaiting results in a clinic waiting room, “to be able to stop taking these things every fucking month.” Gill shows that the life so many others would love to have requires an abuse of the body that fans never see. Jeremy is seeking to cast off that life, “either for nothingness, or in a trade for some other, better model.” Behind this “legend” is unseen pain and longing. Gill emphasizes the dichotomy between Jeremy (illegitimate) and “citizens” in his own designations. Adam Rifkin, director of Detroit Rock City, in which Jeremy has a small part, and Troy Duffy, another Jeremy pal, are referred to as “mainstream film directors.” When Jeremy returns to his home in Queens to visit his father, Arnold Hyatt is designated “physicist.” In fact, Jeremy’s father forbids his son from using the family name in his porn career. “I don’t want any confusion between myself and his line of work,” Hyatt confesses, “because I’m retired.” Denied his patronym, Jeremy is truly “illegitimate.” Despite his father’s understanding and support, Jeremy is on his own in the business he has chosen. Jeremy’s reputation also gets in the way of his mainstream dreams. “Sometimes all this fame can hurt you,” Jeremy himself notes. Rifkin admits that “People recognize Ron as a porn actor and immediately will ask me to remove him from the final cut.” Duffy concurs that Jeremy’s porn career has made him a pariah for some mainstream producers: “Stigma attached to him, and that’s all anybody’s ever gonna see.” Jeremy’s visibility, the “stigma” that people have “seen,” namely, his large penis and fat, hairy body, denies him the abstract personhood he needs to go “legitimate.” Thus, whether through the concerted efforts of the Justice Department or the informal, personal angst of a producer fearing a backlash against a film, Jeremy, as a representative of an immoral industry, finds himself subject to regulation. Indeed, as his “legitimate” filmography indicates, Jeremy has been cut out of more than half the films he has appeared in. The issue of “visibility” as the basis for regulation of hardcore pornography has its clearest articulation in Potter Stewart’s famous proclamation “I know it when I see it.” But as Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong report in The Brethren, Stewart was not the only Justice who used visibility as a standard. Byron White’s personal definition was “no erect penises, no intercourse, no oral or anal sodomy” (193). William Brennan, too, had what his clerks called “the limp dick standard” (194). Erection, what Lehman has identified as the conveyance of the phallus, now became the point of departure for regulation, transferring, once again, the phallus to the “law.” When such governmental regulation failed First Amendment ratification, other forms of societal regulation kicked in. The porn industry has accommodated itself to this regulation, as Faludi observes, in its emphasis on “soft” versions of product for distribution to “legitimate” outlets like cable and hotels. “The version recut for TV would have to be entirely ‘soft,’” Faludi notes, “which meant, among other things, no erect penises and no semen” (547). The work of competent “woodsmen” like Jeremy now had to be made invisible to pass muster. Thus, even the penis could be conveyed to the viewer, a “fantasy penis,” as Katherine Frank has called it, that can be made to correlate to that viewer’s “fantasized identity” of himself (133-4). At the beginning of Porn Star, during the various homages paid to Jeremy, one fan draws a curious comparison: “There’s Elvis, and then there’s Ron.” Elvis’s early career had certainly been plagued by criticism related to his bodily excess. Musicologist Robert Fink has recently compared Presley’s July 2, 1956, recording of “Hound Dog” to music for strip tease, suggesting that Elvis used such subtle variations to challenge the law that was constantly impinging on his performances: “The Gray Lady was sensitive to the presence of quite traditional musical erotics—formal devices that cued the performer and audience to experience their bodies sexually—but not quite hep enough to accept a male performer recycling these musical signifiers of sex back to a female audience” (99). Eventually, though, Elvis stopped rebelling and sought respectability. Writing to President Nixon on December 21, 1970, Presley offered his services to help combat what he perceived to be a growing cultural insurgency. “The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc., do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it, The Establishment,” Presley confided. “I call it America and I love it” (Carroll 266). In short, Elvis wanted to use his icon status to help reinstate law and order, in the process demonstrating his own patriotism, his value and worth as a citizen. At the end of Porn Star, Jeremy, too, craves legitimacy. Whereas Elvis appealed to Nixon, Jeremy concludes by appealing to Steven Spielberg. Elvis received a badge from Nixon designating him as “special assistant” for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Presumably Jeremy invests his legitimacy in a SAG card. Kenny Dollar, a Jeremy friend, unironically summarizes the final step the Hedgehog must take: “It’s time for Ron to go on and reach his full potential. Let him retire his dick.” That Jeremy must do the latter before having a chance for the former illustrates how “surplus embodiment” and “citizenship” remain inextricably entangled and mutually exclusive. References Berlant, Lauren. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991: 110-140. Carroll, Andrew, ed. Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Castronovo, Russ and Nelson, Dana D., eds. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999. Fink, Robert. “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.” Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture. Eds. Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002: 60-109. Frank, Katherine. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Gill, Scott J., dir. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. New Video Group, 2001. Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Moon, Michael and Davidson, Cathy N., eds. Subjects and Citizens: From Oroonoko to Anita Hill. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Schmitt, Richard B. “U. S. Plans to Escalate Porn Fight.” The Los Angeles Times 14 February 2004. A1. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Woodward, Bob and Armstrong, Scott. The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. MLA Style Russell, David. "The Tumescent Citizen: The Legend of Ron Jeremy." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/01_citizen.php>. APA Style Russell, D. (2004 Oct 11). The Tumescent Citizen: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/01_citizen.php>

The study compares the responses of an artist, a common man and an American president to the times by analyzing the content of three documentary films: Will Rogers’ 1920s: A Cowboy’s Guide to the Times, An American Family (1973) and The War Room (1993) from the twentieth century. Will Rogers’1920s gives an insight into the simple life of a jongleur and a troubadour, cowboy cum actor, Will Rogers who was famous for topical humor in 1920s and whose life size sculpture occupies space in the American White House to keep an eye on the deeds of the greatest world leaders. An American Family, the world’s first ever reality show, documents real life events of seven members of a common American family and provide a contrast to the perfect Hollywood family portrait in 12 episodes. The War Room focuses on the president Clinton’s political agenda during his 1992 election campaign. The authors reviewed literature on the said documentaries and history of documentary film, American institutions and movements by Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, Jeffrey Ruoff, Peter C. Rollins, Peter Ian Crawford, Klin Richard, Chris Hegedus, Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles. The study finds that Will Rogers learned to share his inherent happiness with the American audience by mollifying and disciplining many of their anxieties in the context of industrialization and the world war in 1920s. An American family is disturbing yet hilarious and presents a real portrait of the American family against 70s “culturally polyglot confluence backdrops” (Ellis and McLane 254). Pat Loud divorces her husband on air and their son Lance Loud becomes the first gay icon of the ‘gay decade,’ as several feminist, gay/lesbian, and civil rights, antiwar, ecology, and environmental protection movements takeover America. An American Family shows the mundane truth of everyday life in its social context. Its controlled realism reflects the filmmaker’s social conscience for audience’s identification and political action. The War Room celebrates the ideology of war during the president Clinton’s election campaign.

In the novel Elvis Plays Texas, which is my Thesis project to meet the requirements for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Fiction, a little town in far, far West Texas and its people are having a very difficult time and facing what promises to be a bleak future—a long, long drought has exhausted their water supply, oil has peaked and turned down, “fracking” threatens their way of life, friends and family and neighbors are loading up and leaving town. Then, Elvis Presley shows up. It’s the 40th anniversary of the day he died, August 16, 1977, and he, spiritually though appearing in every way to be flesh and blood, is visiting those who’ve continued believing in him and to whom he had been particularly important during their younger lives. My own long history in that part of the country has played its considerable role in informing the setting, the tone, the atmosphere. These are the kinds of characters—strange birds all—I grew up with. The country is the southwestern desert, hot, dry, empty, big sky—the kind of neighborhood that lends itself to oddities like Elvis throwing a benefit concert to help them out of the economic ditch.

Questo lavoro intende dimostrare in quali modi e tramite quali strumenti la produzione di videoclip sia cambiata nel corso degli anni attraverso le sue trasformazioni nei campi della distribuzione, della legislazione e dei finanziamenti al videoclip. Comprendere cosa voglia dire oggi produrre un videoclip significa constatare come questi tre macro-argomenti abbiano influenzato, secondo diverse sfaccettature, i budget e gli investimenti monetari da parte delle case discografiche. Inoltre, non si vuole dare un giudizio sulla natura stilistica dei videoclip o fare una critica su quelli che stilisticamente si avvicinano a una bellezza cinematografica, ma affermare che una buona produzione e un discreto budget, uniti a una buona collocazione distributiva e l’uso di finanziamenti pubblici e privati, può far sì che il videoclip sia ancora un mezzo remunerativo, sia a livello economico sia a livello di immagine dell’artista. L’obiettivo principale, quindi, del videoclip è riferito alla sua funzione sociale e non alla finalità economica; l’engagement tra artista e audiece non comporta un ritorno ecnomico, ma un guadagno sociale, di immagine e di fidelizzazione perché un’artista, che sia un cantante, un attore o un qualsiasi performer nell’industria dell’entertainment, è possibile assimilarlo a un brand, a un’azienda che ha bisogno di “fedeli seguaci” che supportino il prodotto, il quale, in questi casi, coincide con la persona stessa.

AbstractContemporary visual and literary culture has seen a proliferation of quasi-biographical texts that blur the lines between fact and fiction and often imply that by subverting or questioning the dominant portrayal of a given historical figure they offer a “true” version that had hitherto been suppressed. These so called “biofictions” (e.g. Netflix series The Crown, or Baz Luhrman’s feature film Elvis) are hybrids of biography and pure conjecture, but despite their essentially fictitious nature, they make claims to authenticity, often implying that the sensationalised versions of the famous lives are the “authentic” ones.This chapter seeks to analyse the recent critically acclaimed television series The Great (season 1: 2020, season 2: 2022), created by Tony McNamara, starring Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, against the backdrop of recent trends in biofiction and costume drama. In particular, the chapter focuses on the interplay between the conventions of historical biofiction and biopic (and in particular of the “queen pic”—a biographical film about a female royal) and the series’ progressive and presentist agenda, and it aims to position the case study of The Great within the broader discussion of attitudes towards the past in modern popular culture.

Curtiz returned to Warner Bros. for The Helen Morgan Story (1957).The film, starring Paul Newman and Ann Blyth,wasa flop and turned out to be the director’s final picture for Jack Warner. He fathered a daughter with Jill Gerrard, whom he maintainedat arm’s length to prevent any interference with his film career, which was entering twilight. Sam Goldwyn Jr. hired him to film The Proud Rebel. The film was delayed because of Curtiz’s appendectomy, but it became a heartwarming success starring Alan Ladd and Olivia de Havilland.Hal Wallis tapped him to direct Elvis Presley in King Creole (1958).Taking a conciliatory approach, Curtiz coaxed a superior performance from Presley that the pop music star came to regard as his best in any film. Curtiz directed a pair of desultory pictures,The Man in the Net and A Breath of Scandal, as age and illness began to impair his ability to work effectively.A handsome but antiseptic version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for Sam Goldwyn Jr. closed out Curtiz’s films during the 1950s.

Chapter 1 offers a case study that illuminates how norms of studio-era film production came to be negotiated with the multimedia context of the 1950s and early 1960s. In exploring the production of “Elvis movies” from 1956 to 1961, this chapter examines how Hollywood transformed Presley the rock ’n’ roll star into a singular screen attraction. Producer Hal Wallis, a veteran of the studio era, sought a balance between the cyclical, generic structure of the former star system with the new opportunities for cross-platform promotion portended by the media landscape of the 1950s. Presley’s rebel-oriented 1950s films put on display what modern media fame meant in the second half of the 1950s and suggest a hierarchical relationship between television and film. Subsequently, Presley’s 1960s work enacted an assembly-line integration of feature film and LP record production, demonstrating how Wallis’s star-making formula during the studio era translated to a cross-platform context. In this way, Hollywood adapted to the “electronic age” of the 1950s while maintaining strict control over the output of a star’s labor, reconfiguring the power structures of the star system by aligning media industries into the synchronous production of a multimedia star image.

Abstract In the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (2002), twenty-two usage citations include the name of Elvis Presley. The two earliest citations, from 1956, show the terms “rock and roll “ and “rockin ‘ “ in context. A more recent citation, from a 1981 issue of the British magazine The Listener, demonstrates the usage of the word “docudrama “: “In the excellent docudrama film, This Is Elvis, there is a painful sequence . . . where Elvis . . . attempts to sing ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight? ‘ “ (The ellipses arethe OED ‘s.) This Is Elvis warrants the term “docudrama “ because it uses professional actors to re-enact scenes from Elvis ‘s childhood and prefame youth. But most of the film is straight documentary. The “painful sequence “ cited by The Listener and the OED is an actual concert performance, occurring late in the film and in Elvis ‘s life. It remains painful to watch: Elvis, his face puffy and wet with sweat or tears or both, his elaborate jumpsuit bulging at the seams, struggles with one of his most popular songs. He repeatedly forgets words and whole lines of the lyrics, replacing them with crudely self-abnegating jokes.

O presente trabalho parte do pressuposto que os nossos alunos de língua inglesa, mesmo em nível avançado, cometem muitos erros em suas escritas. Algumas pesquisas vêm surgindo, no campo do ensino, a fim de comprovarem que os erros causados por esses alunos adultos em nível avançado são, em sua maioria, provenientes da própria aprendizagem da L2, a exemplo de Dulay (1982), Ellis (2003), Richards (1970, 1995) e Figueiredo (2007). Porém, temos visto que é possível encontrar em escritas erros que parecem ser provenientes da interferência da L1. Diante disso, essa pesquisa tem como finalidade analisar se a interferência da L1 também ocorre nos níveis avançados, ou seja, se essa ocorrência de erros, chamados de interlinguais, independe do nível de proficiência linguística do aluno. Apresentaremos um panorama das principais teorias de aprendizagem, desde o behaviorismo até o sociointeracionismo, no qual citamos teóricos como Ellis (2003), Pinker (2004), Littlewood (2006), Beaugrande (1997), Tomasello (2003) e Krashen (1987). Faremos uma análise sobre como os erros são vistos pelas teorias e analisaremos o corpus à luz das duas perspectivas relacionadas a erros: a Análise de Erros e a Análise Contrastiva, tomando por base teóricos como Ellis (2003), Richards (1995), Silva (2000), Santos (2005), Slama-Cazacu (1979), bem como discutiremos como a escrita é vista pelas teorias de aprendizagem, tendo como respaldo Kato (1986). O corpus desta pesquisa é composto de duas composições escritas por alunos de uma escola de línguas em Campina Grande, PB. Os resultados obtidos após a análise das redações, confirmam nossa hipótese de que mesmo em nível avançado, a L1 interfere nas escritas dos alunos, além da própria L2.

Chapter Three: “Hound Dog,” Take One: Big Mama Thornton. Big Mama Thornton, Black Alabama blues singer of what we these days call female masculinity, recorded “Hound Dog,” written by white Jewish songwriters, with a band led by a Greek-American who considered himself Black, for release on a Black-owned record label whose boss took the profits. This chapter considers the idea that Thornton nonetheless authored “Hound Dog”; her performance style inflected it, not through raw power but as literary, auteurist musicking. The challenge is to see in Thornton's rocking a model for Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley, too; for later Thornton coverer Janis Joplin; and most recently for Doja Cat, whose “Vegas” in the film Elvis has Thornton sampled in the background, proving once again that there is no Elvis without her.

One of the typical social problems of the 21st century - procrastination - is defined as irrational postponement of desired goals indefinitely, even when aware of the negative consequences of this delay (Lay, 1997). Although possible causes of procrastination have long been cited, such as irrational beliefs (Ellis, Knaus, 1977), low self-esteem, and fear of failure (Burka, Yuen, 1983), cognitive predictors of procrastination have not been studied holistically as a system. Moreover, it remains unclear which cognitive mechanisms are involved in different types of procrastination. This study seeks to partially fill this gap by finding cognitive features of people prone to procrastination.The results of the study (N = 311) revealed differences in most of the diagnosed cognitive indicators, which suggests an important role of cognitive processes in the shaping of a procrastination tendency. Comparison of cognitive scores in the high and low procrastination groups showed that procrastinators had higher rates of cognitive closure, namely higher scores on the scales of order (p = 0.000), predictability (p = 0.052), decisiveness (p = 0.000), aspiration to cognitive closure (p = 0.000). Cognitive closure means motivation to receive an unambiguous response and cut off unnecessary, contradictory and interfering information. This is consistent with the data on higher stiffness in procrastinators (p = 0.05).Besides, procrastinators have a more pronounced frustational tolerance (p = 0.000), and a sense of self-improvement (p = 0.001). They have less vigilance (p = 0.000), but more overindulgence (p = 0.000), as well as more avoidance in decision-making (p = 0.000). Differences are also found on the temporal focus scale: people prone to procrastination are less focused not only on the future (p = 0, 000), but also on the present (p = 0, 000). Predictably, procrastinators had significantly lower levels of claims (p = 0.004) and self-esteem (p = 0.01). Procrastinators showed lower indicators of self-organization of activities: consistency (p = 0.000), purposefulness (p = 0.000), perseverance (p = 0.024), fixation (p = 0.000), self-organization (p = 0.000), orientation to the present (p = 0.000). At the same time, they have more pronounced cognitive copying strategies: avoiding behavior (p = 0.000), anxiety (p = 0.000), cognitive overestimation (p = 0.000), intolerance to stress situations (p = 0.000).The results of discriminant analysis made it possible to determine the indicators that have the greatest influence on inclusion in the group procrastinators. These are low orientation towards the present, avoidance in decision-making, vigilance, pursuit of cognitive closure, low tolerance of frustration, and low self-organization of activities. The study thus expands the understanding of the cognitive nature of procrastination. The results suggest that cognitive features such as a weak focus on the events of the present, a habit of avoiding decision-making, weakened vigilance, an increased desire for cognitive closure, low tolerance to frustration, and a low level of self-organization of activities are important predictors of procrastination.

Abstract There has been a steadily increasing global market for Additively Manufactured (AM) products, with a growth forecast of USD 23.75 billion by 2027. Of the various industrial sectors applying AM, the automotive/motor vehicles market takes up approximately 18% share. Saying AM is being widely used in the automotive sector with rapidly growing application avenues is not an overstatement. One such section of the automotive industry is the classic cars. Classic cars are 20 years or more older cars no longer in regular production, preserved and restored for their historical value. Classic cars face a huge problem of spare parts. The non-availability of the spare part leads to the break-down of the car, leaving them as display pieces or eventual scrapping. It is not economically viable to manufacture the spare parts in small volume due to challenges such as high cost of tooling, and indefinite storage time. Additive manufacturing offers attractive solutions to problems precisely such as these as it requires no additional tooling and can produce functional parts in small batches on-demand, provided accurate three-dimensional model data is available. This 3D model data is converted to one of the AM compatible file formats such as STL, AMF, 3MF etc. and then is processed using a Slicer Software. The slicer software converts three-dimensional (3-D) model data to two-dimensional (2-D) layer information that will be printed by the AM machine. Obtaining drawings or 3-D model information for classic car parts is a daunting challenge in itself, often deemed impossible. However, with the advances in imaging and scanning combined with computer aided design technologies, it is shown to be possible to generate the 3-D model data from even partial or broken parts. Now, producing spare parts using AM is not just feasible but has been successfully applied. Few notable examples include restoration of Elvis Presley’s BMW 507, originally released in 1957, which took two years to complete, Jaguar’s XK120 SE restored in 2017, 2019 restorations of Volkswagens iconic 1962 minivan, Bentley’s 1929 Blowers and Bugatti’s 1926 Bugatti Baby. Not just car manufacturers, but hobbyist collectors also found success in producing spare parts for their classic cars. This paper discusses various types of additive manufacturing technologies used to manufacture classic car parts and the strategic impact after implementing them using the examples of famous restored classic cars. The discussion further includes commercialization of these technologies, challenges, material selection and availability. Additionally, the economic implications and, the future are explored.