Seminars

In this presentation, Professor Gershenson draws on her forthcoming 38-chapter edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Film, to challenge the geographic and conceptual boundaries of Jewish cinema. For too long, the field has circled around a narrow set of places and stories, about immigration, assimilation, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Professor Gershenson proposes a broader, more capacious understanding of Jewish film—one that moves past the assumption that Jewishness on screen must be mimetic, historical, or tied to the U.S., Europe, and Israel. Highlighting new research on Jews on and off screen in India, Ethiopia, Turkey, Mexico, the Arab world, and beyond, she shows how Jewishness operates as a global interpretive mode rather than a fixed set of themes. This expanded lens reveals how Jewish frames of thinking, cultural practices, and historical experiences structure filmmaking and spectatorship across wildly diverse geographies and contexts. The result challenges old stereotypes and opens up a bigger, more complex world of Jewish film.

This presentation analyzes two historical features, Eight Men Out (Orion Pictures, 1988) and Hustle (ESPN, 2004), along with two documentaries, The Black Sox Scandal (PBS, 2024) and Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose (HBO, 2024), that offer important insights regarding the intersection of sports, gambling and media in American culture. Since the Supreme Court decision in 2018 to legalize sports gambling, it has become an important force in redefining the economic and social impact of sports media on players and fans. John Sayles’ movie Eight Men Out and Hustle, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, disprove the assumption that feature films have a lesser ability than documentaries to offer accurate and insightful historical commentary. This essay will show how, in fact, all four of these films arrive at two important conclusions about the synergy of sports, media and gambling: first that wagering on sports is not an effective response to the economic precarity of young gamblers and second that the tragic downfall of Pete Rose, one of the most accomplished players in the history of Major League Baseball, offers an important warning about the negative consequences of excessive sports betting.

Professor Wyatt’s presentation focuses on a specific element connected to Robert Altman’s film: black-and-white and color still images created during production. Some images became part of the film’s publicity and marketing campaign. Many other images—used for wardrobe, continuity, and behind-the-scenes coverage—remain part of Altman’s archive and have never been available before to the public. Professor Wyatt is interested in how the Nashville still images impact our understanding of the film’s narrative and development. As a key film in the New Hollywood era, Nashville has been the focus of much textual analysis celebrating Altman’s documentary-like style with the jagged little personal stories and insights focused on the large cast of characters. The film text does not live in a vacuum, however. Allied materials and artifacts, such as these stills, impact on how we process the film, acting as guides or filters to the primary text. In this way, the stills allow us to think about a contextual analysis of the film, multiplying the potential meanings from Altman’s film. The archival images also illuminate aspects of Altman’s filmmaking, particularly which characters and scenes are omitted from the final cut and how these decisions shaped the film and its design. The stills become a means to break open the film text and to consider alternate directions for the film and its reception. In this way, this lecture is speculative, designed to problematize accepted readings of the characters, their relationships, and the narrative.

During the height of the Hollywood Studio System, studio publicity departments utilized Native Americans to promote films, sometimes even films that did not feature Native themes. Publicity departments encouraged theater managers to feature Native Americans and “Indian Characters” to accompany and promote local screenings. Based on research from archival studio documents and trade publications, this presentation, part of a larger book project on Native Americans in historical film publicity, identifies key sites of Native American film history off-screen, from gala premieres to movie theater lobbies. Primarily examining strategies at Paramount and Warner Bros. in the 1920s and 30s, this paper argues that their promotional and exhibition strategies draw attention to the performative and heterogenous nature of the cinema event, allowing for interaction between Native American performers and audiences that informed and potentially altered an audience’s moviegoing experience.

The success of North by Northwest inspired a short-lived cycle of lighthearted romantic thrillers modeled on it (e.g. Charade; The Prize; Masquerade; Arabesque; A Man Could Get Killed; Blindfold; Bang! Bang! You’re Dead!). These films are unlike the popular James Bond thrillers and the many espionage capers inspired by the Bond phenomenon. Rather, the cycle, which is the basis of Cohan’s new book, features, not professional spies, but civilians: non-pros accidentally swept up in a conspiracy that undermines and destabilizes yet transforms their identities and at times challenges their sanity. Even more so than their equivocal innocence or guilt, what stands out are the heroes’ fragile identities and their shaky and unreliable perceptions of people and events. Domestic or foreign agents, or their sponsoring institutions, reveal themselves to be incompetent, indifferent, devious, manipulative, or corrupt, forcing the accidental hero to act on his own behalf. Here, the historical context is unmistakable, for after the botched attempt by the CIA to invade Cuba in 1961, its formerly authoritative and highly secretive image began to crack open domestically, fomenting doubt among Americans about the agency’s efficacy and ethics. Skepticism about real spying, about the CIA as an authoritative and legitimate force, is thus always the implied backdrop of these thrillers, most notably when the CIA or a surrogate is absent, forcing the hero to act independently in order to expose a conspiracy and bring it to justice. In addition to this deep-seated suspicion of international espionage, two additional historical contexts triangulate the critical perspective Professor Cohan brings to these films: the attractive political virility of JFK and his New Frontiersmen (although most often problematized by the foreign female costars and their substantial roles in the plots) and the trope of theater and performing as the ground in which identities are formed and experienced (as popularized by Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in a popular paperback in 1960). Finally, two variations of the basic template comprise this cycle, too, albeit as adjacent tracks: the heist film (e.g. Topkapi, Gambit, Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, Grand Slam) and the paranoid thriller (e.g. The Manchurian Candidate, Mirage, The President’s Analyst, The Chairman), with each also featuring accidental heroes. The cycle’s three iterations, in effect, triangulate Cohan’s account of the accidental hero in a second way, with the amateur spy thrillers deriving from North by Northwest forming a base and the heist films and paranoid thrillers each providing a sideview.

Moving away from the competing concepts of Quality TV and Complex TV, Professor Lombardi’s theorization of Plural TV stems from an application of Barthes’ concept of plurality to the differing and deferred reception of television drama once it travels across continents. Such plurality takes on greater relevance in the study and reception of non-Anglophone television series, screened with subtitles, which invoke estrangement due to a reception that places emphasis and strain on concurrent images, writing, and sound. It is this shift from complexity to plurality that motivates Professor Lombardi’s advocacy for the study of television in comparative frameworks. Serial drama, thanks to its multiple addressees, is the ideal plural text since its reception depends on the activation of cultural, semantic, or symbolic codes that may occur differently across time and space. And a study of such plurality necessarily occurs through close textual reading informed by a vast array of medium-specific theoretical tools.