bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ethics
Authors: Sponsel Leslie E.
Published: February 2012

Professional ethics in anthropology reflects general moral principles regarding what one should not do and what one should do. However, in practice the emphasis is mostly on the negative; trying to avoid causing harm, and most of all to research subjects. Often concern with ethics within anthropology is more reactive than proactive. Also, it tends to be more a matter of defensive maneuvering to save face in public for the individuals and organizations involved, rather than grappling with issues let alone resolving them constructively and conclusively. Ethical concerns intensify during periods when scandals and/or controversies erupt, especially if they reach the general public to embarrass the profession. In the history of anthropology during the twentieth century into the present, many of the ethical controversies erupted about research associated with war, especially secret and/or clandestine activities. Politics is usually involved too, aggravating the difficulty and heat. However, there are also numerous and diverse cases beyond war because ethical challenges, dilemmas, and choices are inevitable. Yet when all is said and done, the ethical conduct of an anthropologist ultimately remains mostly a matter of personal morality, conscience, and integrity as well as adherence to ethical codes. Whole courses on professional ethics are rarely offered in departments of anthropology at universities and colleges for undergraduate or even for graduate majors as an elective, let alone requirement. Yet an abundance of literature and ethics codes are readily available for individuals to read, contemplate, discuss, and debate. Since the 1990s, and especially during the 2000s, there has been a marked increase in attention to professional ethics in anthropology. Much of this is one of the positive results of the controversy ignited by investigative journalist Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado, although there were also many negative consequences. Subsequently, the Human Terrain System, wherein anthropologists were embedded with the US military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ignited further controversy. This article focuses on professional ethics in cultural anthropology in the United States because of limited space. The emphasis is on books, rather than on journal articles, because the accumulating literature is enormous and books contain bibliographies for further research. Also, for journal articles and other sources, search Abstracts in Anthropology, Academic Search Complete, Annual Review of Anthropology, Anthropology Index Online, AnthroSource, Google Scholar, JSTOR, and ProQuest.
Legal Anthropology
Authors: Kelly Tobias
Published: February 2012

Legal practices, processes, and claims are among the most powerful forces that shape our lives. Legal anthropology has historically tried to understand the relationship between legal processes and other aspects of social, cultural, economic, and political life as well as the meanings and implications of legal practices on their own terms. It is arguable that, at its 19th-century origins, anthropology was the product of legal concerns, as scholars tried to understand what made 19th-century Europe and North America seemingly so different from other times and other places. For many of these scholars, law was a key point of difference. Yet, much anthropology in the 20th century implicitly challenged such rigid and implicitly evolutionary distinctions. In particular, anthropologists tried to show how other cultures had “lawlike” institutions that were as complex and reasonable as those of Western law. In the mid-20th century, in the search for lawlike processes, anthropology settled on disputes as the basic unit of comparison. This move saw a relative decline in wider interest in legal anthropology, as the analysis tended to produce endless studies of small-scale decision making. In the late 1980s, however, a general resurgence in legal anthropology occurred. This was marked, in large measure, by a shift from studying processes that seemed lawlike to a focus on self-consciously legal procedures. That shift can broadly be understand as a move from legal anthropology to the anthropology of law, in which the object of study is those institutions, processes, and concepts that have their roots in (but are not limited to) “Western liberal law.” Anthropologists have therefore increasingly turned their attention to issues such as human rights, property, and citizenship. This, of course, has not ruled out the analysis of alternative legal orders—for example, what is taken to be Islamic law—but these are not usually studied as isolated cultural processes.
Lewis Henry Morgan
Authors: Launay Robert
Published: February 2012

Lewis Henry Morgan (b. 1818–d. 1881) is considered one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. As a young lawyer in Rochester, New York, he founded a local club, The Grand Order of the Iroquois, whose members championed Iroquois rights to their land, claimed by the Ogden Company. In the process, he acquired a more systematic interest in Iroquois culture. His researches among them led to the publication of a book-length study. His later discovery that patterns of kinship terminology in other, even unrelated, Indian cultures were very similar to those of the Iroquois launched a systematic survey of kinship nomenclature that provided a template for modern studies of kinship in anthropology. While he was working on kinship terminology, he also conducted an extensive, pioneering field study of the activities of beavers. Toward the end of his life, he formulated a grand scheme of social evolution focusing on progress in the domains of technology, government, family, and property. His work attracted the favorable attention of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but it was sharply criticized by a subsequent generation of anthropologists, especially followers of Franz Boas in the United States, who were skeptical of grand evolutionary schemes. Nonetheless, his work remains an enduring influence in the discipline.
Argentinian Literature
Authors: Montaldo Graciela
Published: February 2012

This entry is focused on Argentinean literature. Because of its historical context, Argentinean literature is more than poetry, fictions, or experimentations with writing; it is a political practice that involves writers, intellectuals, audiences, and the culture industry. Although Spanish is the main language there are some works that take part of the Argentinean corpus and use other languages (French, Poland, English, Yiddish mainly). In just two centuries of existence (the Argentinean Republic was created in 1810, after the independence from the Spanish Empire) this literature has built a strong tradition, which it uses to rewrite itself. Most of the intellectual generations in Argentina discussed and polemicized their antecessor and tradition. Narratives on national identity played a key role in Argentinian history alongside with innovations. Authors came back to the past to rewrite and reinterpret the master narratives. “Civilization and barbarism,” for instance, was a successful motto that Domingo F. Samiento established in 1845. In spite of the different interpretation of the terms, it was and it is a way of read Argentinian reality. When someone uses it, the motto is charged with all its history. Since the beginning, it has been not just an elite practice with a sophisticated and Eurocentric tradition but also a practice that involves a native and noncanonical set of knowledge and forms.
The New Left in Latin America
Authors: Aviña Alex
Published: February 2012

In the midst of an intensified Cold War during the 1950s, something qualitatively changed within and without the Latin American Old Left. After a brief “democratic spring” immediately after World War II that witnessed the resurgence of labor unions, socialist and Communist parties, and Popular Front–like coalitions across the region, a violently authoritarian conservatism (aided by local militaries and US diplomatic and other actors) reemerged to repress a nascent Latin American social democracy. While the 1947 military coups in Peru and Venezuela marked the beginning of this reactionary process, the US-supported overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 completed a region-wide turn to authoritarian governance. Even exceptions such as Mexico experienced an intensified anti-Communism melded to one-party political rule and an inequitable political economy favorable to capital. Across the region, socialist and Communist parties, along with labor unions, faced persecution and, depending on the locale, adopted an underground, semiclandestine, and/or co-opted existence. Internal conflict and turmoil afflicted these Old Left organizations as they debated ideological orthodoxy and strategy. As the internal debates regarding reform or revolution continued throughout the 1950s, state violence and persecution—along with US intervention in Latin America—radicalized an entire generation of people (young and old) regardless of whether they were connected to Old Left institutions and politics. The 1959 Cuban Revolution politically evinced for some that the manifestation of utopian revolution (the impossible) via direct action and armed struggle proved possible. For others the utopian impulses emerged culturally in the realms of gender, sexuality, race, education, religion, fashion, family, economics, music, film, literature, and countercultural practices. Rather than articulate an argument for immediate mimesis, the Cuban Revolution helped crystallize the beginnings of an elastic, diverse, and tension-filled New Left that generally advocated direct action, confrontation with state power, antiauthoritarianism, direct democracy, and/or the undermining of traditional patriarchal norms. Such emergent New Left demands found expression through a variety of means—from guerrilla warfare to Cinema Novo and rocanrol—a variety that suggests the contradictory yet interrelated composition of the Latin American New Left. Overall, the corpus of literature reviewed here suggests the need to formulate a wide-ranging and transnational definition of the Latin American New Left that emerged during the early Cold War decades. As a relatively new and bourgeoning field of study, this intervention is timely in order to promote a research agenda that captures the historical heterogeneity of the New Left.
Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas
Authors: Harvey Neil
Published: February 2012

The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas drew widespread attention to the plight of indigenous peoples in Mexico’s second-poorest state. On 1 January 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) (cited under Primary Sources and Translations) took possession of six towns in central and eastern Chiapas, including the former colonial seat of power, San Cristóbal de Las Casas. More than 3,000 indigenous people participated in the uprising, which was timed to coincide with the taking effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Denouncing NAFTA as a “death sentence for indigenous peoples,” the principal spokesperson for the EZLN, Subcomandante Marcos, argued that the privatization of collectively held lands and the implementation of neoliberal economic policy would undermine small producers (campesinos) and make the country more dependent on imported crops and other commodities. The Zapatistas issued a call for all Mexicans to mobilize against then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a principal architect of neoliberal reforms who had claimed victory in the 1988 presidential elections despite widespread evidence of fraud. The government responded with a military offensive, but large-scale protests were effective in ensuring that peace talks would begin in late February 1994. Negotiations did not lead to a peaceful solution. By 1996 only one set of accords had been signed, relating to indigenous rights, but these have not been implemented. As a result, the Zapatistas have attempted to build alternative community structures and promote autonomous projects on the lands that were occupied during the early stages of the rebellion. Scholarship on the Zapatistas is large and covers many different aspects of this movement. While some scholars celebrate the novel qualities of the EZLN (for example, its desire not to seek power and its promotion of decentralized autonomous bases of support), others claim that outside activists have sought to mobilize local grievances to support their own political agendas. Earlier studies of the EZLN tended to highlight the movement’s public statements, speeches, and communiqués. More recent work has been able to provide more-detailed analyses of the local-level impacts of the rebellion, including greater attention to the participation of indigenous women.
Getúlio Vargas
Authors: Wolfe Joel
Published: February 2012

Getúlio Dornelles Vargas (b. 1882–d. 1954) was perhaps the single most dominant figure in 20th-century Brazilian politics. Vargas was a product of the machine politics of the Republican Party of his home state, Rio Grande do Sul, where he served as governor from 1928 to 1930. He had previously served in the state legislature and federal chamber of deputies. He also served as the federal minister of finance, 1926–1928, during the presidency of Washington Luís (1926–1930), who had been the governor of São Paulo before becoming president. Vargas ran for the presidency of Brazil in 1930 against Washington Luís’s political protégé, the governor of the state of São Paulo, Júlio Prestes. Although Prestes won the vote, leaders from other states were dissatisfied with the domination of São Paulo in national politics and backed Vargas in the Revolution of 1930. Vargas gained power on 24 October 1930 and served as the provisional president of Brazil. He promised to hold national elections and proceeded to rule while Brazil wrote a new constitution in 1934 that granted women the right to vote, provided for a national minimum wage, and guaranteed certain protections for working people, as well as other social and political changes. Vargas created a new Ministry of Labor, Industry, and Commerce to regulate industrial relations and promote industrial development. Rather than hold elections, however, Vargas declared himself the nation’s dictator and established the New State (Estado Novo) regime on 10 November 1937. The Estado Novo had certain fascist features. Vargas developed a close alliance with the United States at this time and even committed troops to fight under Allied command in Europe. Although the military had long supported him, the most-senior generals in the army removed Vargas from power on 29 October 1945, in a bloodless coup. In the congressional elections of 1946, Vargas was elected a senator from both the state of Rio de Janeiro and from Rio Grande do Sul. He served from his home state and again ran for president in 1950. He easily won but faced a number of intractable challenges and committed suicide in his bedroom in the presidential palace on 24 August 1954. Vargas’s political heirs dominated politics until the 1964 military coup.
Immigration in Latin America
Authors: Moya Jose C.
Published: February 2012

Immigration is arguably the most distinguishing historical feature of Latin America, and of the Western Hemisphere in general. Although it can be said that every region of the planet outside of East Africa—the cradle of Homo sapiens—is a region of immigrants, that label applies to the Americas in a particular way. The American continent/s (it is perceived as a single continent in Latin America and as two in the United States) has functioned as a receptacle for the population of every other continent. Its aboriginal population could be described as the first (Asian) immigrants, since they arrived not from humanity’s cradle but from northeast Asia, and did so twenty thousand years after much of the rest of the planet had been settled. The Americas are a New World not only in the usage of the term associated with the Eurocentric notion of “discovery” but also in relation to the history of humanity. The other immigrants arrived even more recently. Sixty million Europeans, eleven million Africans, and five million Asians arrived in the Western Hemisphere after 1492, with close to one-third of the Europeans (or 18.5 million), half of the Africans, and one-sixth of the Asians going to Latin America. These transcontinental migrations shaped the ethnic geography of the Americas. The first migrants from Asia settled mainly on the highlands that run along the western side of the hemisphere, particularly what has been called “nuclear America,” or Mesoamerica and the central Andes. These regions contained the vast majority of the Amerindian population before the conquest and continue to do so today. Africans were taken mainly to the tropical and semitropical islands and coastal lowlands of the Americas. Europeans dispersed to a greater degree but nonetheless concentrated, particularly during the postcolonial period, in the temperate regions on the northern and southern ends of the hemisphere. Since other articles in this collection treat the Amerindian and African population, this article will center on immigration from Europe and Asia and on international migrations within Latin America.
Gender
Authors: Audring Jenny
Published: February 2012

Grammatical gender is a feature of nouns, reflected on elements that agree with them. In nouns, gender is an invariable lexical feature that may or may not be overtly marked. The determining criterion for gender is agreement, that is, “the behavior of associated words” (Hockett 1958, p. 231, cited under Foundational Works). Typical agreeing elements are articles, adjectives, verbs, and pronouns, but gender may also be reflected on more unusual targets, such as adverbs, adpositions, or complementizers. Grammatical gender is widespread in Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian, and Khoisan as well as among the languages of New Guinea. Many language families of Asia and America, however, lack grammatical gender. In some linguistic traditions, the term “noun class” is used instead of “gender.” Gender systems differ in elaborateness and complexity. Some languages have two gender values, others up to twenty. Languages also differ in whether or not the semantics of the system has sex as a component—animate/inanimate and human/nonhuman are other common distinctions. Gender is of theoretical interest for typology, morphology, and syntax as well as for theories of the lexicon. It is a classic topic in historical linguistics, particularly in the Indo-Europeanist tradition. More recently, evidence from the processing of gender in production and comprehension is collected in experimental settings. Related topics, which figure only marginally in this article, are classifier systems, which are considered to be different from gender systems, and gender in relation to sociology and language planning (though see Edited Collections).
Communications, French Revolution to the Present
Authors: Winkler Jonathan Reed
Published: February 2012

Over the past two centuries, communications has become a critical element of military affairs. Without an understanding of how information could, did, or did not move at every level from the technical/tactical to the strategic, it is impossible to evaluate what was possible and not possible for armed forces to do in war and peace. Despite this, the subject has received comparatively less attention from historians than other subjects until very recently. Historians have approached the subject by country, military service, level (tactical through strategic), time period, or any combination of these. Until the mid-nineteenth century and the dawn of the electrical age, military communications worked largely as they had for millennia. Information moved as fast as a horse could ride, a pigeon could fly, a ship could sail, sound could travel, and the eye could perceive. The electrical telegraph added a new dimension to this at the strategic and operational levels, as seen in the Crimean War, US Civil War, and the Wars of German Unification, but the older methods of signaling, such as couriers or flags, remained important. To this was added wireless by the early twentieth century, its importance made manifest during World War I. A third phase, that of electronic communications (based on vacuum tubes and then transistors), emerged from the 1920s to 1940s. This laid the foundations for the computer-based military communications utilized today. The subject is a complex one for historians because of the need to understand the technical details of the different technologies, the ways in which these technologies solved certain military problems (and created others), and the organization structures necessary to handle the flow of information. At the same time, the topic has broadened to include consideration of developments in detection, navigation, weapons control (artillery spotting, missile and bomb guidance), attempts to intercept others’ communications (signals or electronic intelligence), disrupt others’ communications (electronic warfare), and enhance the ability to command and control military forces at great distances. Though historians have recognized the importance of the subject, there has been remarkably little written in English about military communications in the non-Western world (which we might describe as Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Though some of the descriptions of various texts are brief (a consequence of an eponymous title or the great complexity of the subject), those interested in the topic will find this to be the most comprehensive guide to the literature available in English. There remains much to be explored in the field of military communications, the importance of which grows more every year.
Irish Civil War, 1922–1923
Authors: Kissane Bill
Published: February 2012

The Irish civil war of 1922–1923 has generated two types of literature. On the one hand, as the defining moment in the formation of the independent Irish state, it has been studied essentially as a political conflict fought within the territory of this new state, by a nationalist elite divided over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921. More recently the stress on elite politics has receded, and the civil war’s complexity has been borne out by less conventional studies. Local histories, taking the county as the unit of analysis, stress the importance of local, factional, and personal divisions in shaping responses to the treaty. Others point out the connection between events south of the border and violence in the first few years of Northern Ireland’s existence. The place of the civil war within the course of the Irish War of Independence begun in 1919 is also important, while the social dimension to the civil war has begun to be studied only recently. Some interesting comparative studies have been done. In general, the more recent the study, the more likely is the work to depart from the elite politics approach. This reflection is even more true for the last fifteen years, which has seen the emergence of an increasingly diverse set of sources and perspectives.
Russian Civil War, 1918–1921
Authors: Reese Roger
Published: February 2012

The Russian civil war raged from 1918 to 1921, though some date its origins to the October Revolution in 1917 and others date its end in 1922 with the final crushing of peasant revolts and reconquest of the Caucasus; still others see its end as late as 1932 when Stalin finally consolidated his power. In general, the civil war was characterized by the struggle between the Bolsheviks and the right-wing Whites, former nobles, the propertied, and military officers. The left, represented by the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) and anarchists (Greens) and the Mensheviks, also actively and often violently opposed the Bolshevik seizure and consolidation of power. The Bolsheviks were lucky to face a divided opposition because the anti-Bolshevik left would not unite with the anti-Bolshevik right. The intervention by the Western Allies in Russia and their minor role in the civil war has also generated controversy, probably much more than warranted. The Russian civil war has often been a contentious subject for historians, participants, and the reading public because of the ideological ramifications of its outcome that reverberated throughout the course of the Soviet Union’s brief seventy-four-year history. Cold War tensions seeped into the scholarship and popular writing that colored many an interpretation and clouded objective analysis. In the first decades after the end of the civil war, Western history mainly followed the line of the “White” anti-Bolshevik émigrés who lamented the failure of their movement and Allied intervention. The civil war continues to be a field of active research and has become more objective and more solidly based on archival sources since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nearly a quarter of all entries in this article have been written since the year 2000.
Zulu Wars
Authors: Laband John
Published: February 2012

The term “Zulu Wars” is an imprecise one, because there is no single, generally accepted understanding of what it encompasses. Most often it is applied to the Anglo–Zulu War of 1879, but this approach ignores the other wars the Zulu fought in the course of the 19th century against the aggressively advancing forces of European imperialism. Consequently, in this article the term is applied to the determined resistance the highly organized armies of the Zulu kingdom mounted, first in 1838 against the migrating Dutch-speaking Voortrekkers (Boers) from the Cape Colony who were intent on settling in Zululand, and then again in 1879 against invading British imperial and colonial forces bent on eliminating what they perceived as the Zulu military threat to neighboring British possessions. The crushing British victory in 1879 and the consequent fall of the Zulu monarchy triggered civil war in the fragmented kingdom between 1883 and 1884 and led to a fresh round of British and Boer military interventions, which culminated in their dividing Zululand between them in 1886–1887. In 1888 the uSuthu (the adherents of the deposed royal Zulu house) rebelled against the new British colonial administration. British forces vigorously suppressed the revolt and extinguished the last embers of an independent Zululand. Much primary material relating to the Zulu Wars as defined here is available in printed collections and in reissued contemporary books and articles. The secondary literature on the Zulu Wars is considerable, although by far the greater part of it is devoted to the Anglo–Zulu War of 1879.
Agnès Varda
Authors: Cooper Sarah
Published: February 2012

Agnès Varda (b. 1928, Ixelles, Belgium–d. 2019, Paris, France) is without doubt the most significant woman director in the history of French cinema. Known affectionately as the mother and then grandmother of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), her filmmaking career spans seven decades, and her more recent work is as innovative and critically acclaimed as was her groundbreaking debut, La Pointe Courte (1954). She was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 and was the first woman to receive this prestigious prize. This accolade was followed two years later with an honorary Oscar at the 2017 Academy Awards. The majority of her works emerged on the margins of official production and distribution, and she produced most of her films through her own company, Ciné-Tamaris. She made a wide variety of documentaries, fictions, shorts, and features, along with a number that lie between in style and length. All her films testify to her creativity as an artist, as does her written work throughout her career. Her move into installation art in the twenty-first century reflects her continued capacity for experimental innovation. This article charts the different facets of her work as filmmaker, writer, and installation artist, and also the relation her work bears to painting and photography.
Australian Cinema
Authors: Rayner Jonathan
Published: February 2012

The cinema of Australia has been the subject of continual, complex, and interdisciplinary scrutiny since the revival of feature film production in that country in the 1970s. Although limited academic and populist writing on Australian cinema predated the film revival, a wealth of contemporary and retrospective studies have appeared since the reemergence of Australian filmmaking on the national and international stages. Frequently, such works have been inflected with film, cultural, and media studies agendas quite apart from or in addition to the discourses of national cinema, identity, and representation that energized the filmmaking in the first place. Equally frequently, the output of Australian cinema has been studied in parallel with television, as well as with the cinema of New Zealand. The initial crop of industry-based analyses, thematically unified readings of film production, and the monograph concentration on outstanding director figures (as the currency of auteurism and the gold standard of national cinemas) has been complemented (and complicated) more recently by focused studies on issues of gender, ethnicity, Aboriginality, sexuality, and diasporic representation. These works have redressed the critical concentration on history, nation, and identity by encompassing and acknowledging an appropriate plurality of histories, nations, and identities on show in Australia’s filmmaking. Since 2000, increasing emphasis in academic treatments has been placed on diversity of representations and practitioners, and on the contemporary transnational context in which Australian films strive to make a commercial and cultural impact. Expanding consciousness of Indigenous cultural representation, and the critical recognition of Indigenous filmmakers, has significantly and necessarily reoriented debates around national identity and representation in the film industry and its products.
British Cinema
Authors: Sargeant Amy
Published: February 2012

Before the 1960s, much historical and critical writing on British cinema was generated outside of the academy—for instance, a multivolume, largely economic history of the silent period, subsequently republished in the 1990s, was commissioned by the British Film Institute and sought extant personnel as consultants. With the introduction of film courses to British universities came an unfortunate prejudice against the homegrown product, largely inherited from European commentators. A small contingent of trailblazers then led a group of writers, teachers, and disciples who did not affect to despise British films and who found British cinema a worthwhile subject of study and analysis. British cinema became no longer “an unknown continent.” The number of designated courses has proliferated alongside the publication of increasingly specialized and focused monographs and edited collections, devoted to specific periods, genres, themes, individual directors, individual films, and individual stars and actors (a distinction recurrently made in British cinema discourse). In recent years, attention has broadened from discussions of British cinema as narrowly “national” (something possibly peculiar and insular) to a just appreciation of demonstrable transnational exchanges in historical and contemporary contexts. Coverage has correspondingly deepened, with volumes devoted to particular roles in production: cinematography, composition, editing, and set and costume design. It has also extended to “cult” and “alternative” areas of production and reception, addressing not only films that fall into these provisional categories but also their audiences. Fandom itself has become a topic of investigation. Furthermore, a trend toward “bottom-up” history and a reevaluation of personal and collective memory as the basis for the writing of history have encouraged both investigation of the cinema in Britain as a social space and a broader investigation of mainstream and underground film culture.
Canadian Cinema
Authors: Thain Alanna
Published: February 2012

Canadian cinema began with the June 1896 screenings of the Lumière Cinematograph in Montreal. Early cinema was marked by an uneven balance between Canadian pioneers—for example, Nell Shipman, actress, director, producer, and writer of hits such as Back to God’s Country; or Léo-Ernest Ouimet, producer of hundreds of short films and founder of one of the world’s first motion picture theaters—and the dominance of production and distribution by foreign interests, above all American. The “quota quickies” of the 1930s, American films shot in Canada with no substantive Canadian content, and the Canadian Cooperation Agreement, in which the government agreed to refrain from developing a feature film industry in exchange for Canadian-based American productions, hamstrung an emerging indigenous industry. In 1939, John Grierson founded the National Film Board of Canada, a major center for film production, in particular animation and documentary. There, in the late 1950s, filmmakers like Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx launched the “cinéma direct” movement, a major influence on both documentary worldwide and the realist aesthetic and hybrid form of fiction film in Canada. In 1967, the Canadian Film Development Corporation (later Telefilm) was launched to provide funding for Canadian feature-film production. The films of “cultural value” it produced went largely unwatched by the Canadian public, however, and the absence of a substantial national audience for Canadian cinema (with the exception of Quebec) remains a challenge. The “tax shelter films” of the 1970s took advantage of changes in film funding opportunities and relaxed censorship laws to produce commercial genre films (“Canuxploitation”), an uneasy counterpart to the auteurist cinema generally associated with Canadian film. The 1980s saw the emergence of the Ontario New Wave and international successes like Denis Arcand’s Decline of the American Empire. Increasingly, Canadian films began to tell stories reflecting the diversity of Canadian experiences beyond the “two nations” of English Canada and Quebec, while Quebec cinema has experienced continued growth and popular success and is now considered on its own terms. Today, First Nations filmmaking has embraced the potential of digital cinema to tell ancient stories in new forms, and “Hollywood North” (large-scale American production in Canada) has both challenged and developed Canadian production. A diverse and often-exciting body of work, Canadian cinema has often been a minor player in its own national context, and questions of the relation between cinema and Canadian nationality have dominated film studies in Canada.
Costume and Fashion
Authors: Friedland Nancy E.
Published: February 2012

Costume is an essential element of the overall design of a film. Working within the director’s vision for the film, costume designers try to replicate clothing by investigating the dress and fashion of the time, or historical period, and essentially dress actors to look (or more fully become) their characters. A costume can be tailor made, purchased, or rented. In the earliest days of cinema, actors wore their own clothing, but this would change with the advent of feature-length narrative films. The costume designer soon became an important part of the production design team. During the studio era in Hollywood, the costume designer helped to establish a symbiotic relationship with the fashion world, and helped to galvanize cinema’s influence on fashion trends and interest around the world. Costume design research can be challenging. During the silent era, there were no screen credits. In the United States, by the 1950s, the studios disposed of many of the records related to costume design. Preservation of film and related documents was not much better elsewhere in the world. Beginning in the 1970s, several interesting histories of Hollywood helped to define the work of the costume designer and the importance of costume to the film. Much less has been written on costume design in the international film world. In the last several decades, scholarly discussion of costume and fashion in relation to film has emerged from multiple disciplines, including the study of costume, fashion and dress, gender and feminist theories, cultural studies, and the longer history of the study of clothing and material culture.
French Cinema
Authors: Vincendeau Ginette
Published: February 2012

As befits the country of the cinema’s official “birth,” France boasts a long tradition of writing on film. In the 1920s, avant-garde filmmakers such as Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein started theorizing cinema’s specificity as a medium, while in the 1930s debates turned political. During that decade critics and historians, such as Georges Sadoul, began also to reflect on film history. Major works on French cinema, however, started to appear only after World War II. A first wave emerged from the postwar cultural effervescence and the rise of cinephilia, with new journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. Film critic André Bazin and his disciples (among them future New Wave filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) developed the politique des auteurs and wrote the first “serious” monographs about filmmakers—mostly American and French. In their wake auteurist works took off in the 1960s, as well as reflections on movements such as the New Wave and French cinema as a whole. A second wave followed the rise of academic film studies in the 1970s, initially with the accent on theory, and saw the internationalization of French cinema studies. In the 1980s and 1990s a “historical turn” generated influential studies—survey histories, anthologies, and accounts of specific periods and movements—in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. Echoing the continuing spread of film studies courses and the buoyancy of French cinema, a third wave followed, with a discernible shift toward cultural and ideological approaches. In particular, issues of gender, ethnic, and cultural identity came to the fore, as well as film and philosophy, together with a marked interest in contemporary cinema. The enduring strength of auteurism means that some areas, notably popular genres, are still underexplored. Nevertheless, French cinema is now remarkably well mapped out.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Cinema
Authors: Richardson Niall , Nash Jackson
Published: February 2012

Mainstream cinema’s dominant subject has always been heterosexuality. Whether explicit, as in the romance genre, or simply implied, as in other genres, heterosexuality has been the foundation of mainstream cinematic representations. Queer characters, however, have been represented since cinema began, although only recently could they be labeled as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Until the 1970s, queer characters in cinema were coded through a conflation of gender transitivity with sexuality. For example, gay men were coded as effeminate—the stereotype of the sissy—while lesbians were represented as butch. Arguably, the spectator did not always read the character as queer and simply responded to the violation of gender propriety. No matter how spectators read specific characters, people identified as queer have always appeared in cinema and television. Often sources of humor or horror, queer characters have appealed to audiences for generations. One of the main concerns for queer activism has been how representations have colored public perception of queer minorities. Given that, until fairly recently, many spectators may not have known someone who was identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ), the cinematic representations could fuel further homophobia or prejudice. And many young people growing up in relative isolation with questioning their gender have first identified with a queer character on screen. Arguably, negative stereotypes promote self-loathing in the queer spectator. It is for this reason that the study of LGBTQ issues in film and media has been a politically important area of scholarship— interrogating representations and readings and also considering films made by LGBTQ-identified directors. This scholarship grew from the earliest writings that attempted to theorize camp as well as from an underground concern with rewriting the history of film with a place for gay people. More recently, academic scholarship has debated how LGBTQ characters were represented in films (lesbian and gay criticism); how queer-identified spectators reread or negotiated the meaning of mainstream cinema (queer readings); or how LGBTQ people have represented themselves (queer cinema).
German Cinema
Authors: Flinn Caryl
Published: February 2012

German film has had a uniquely prolific and diverse history. Its output ranges from experimental efforts during the Weimar era, including its renowned Expressionist films; to a heavily controlled nationalized cinema under the Third Reich; to unadventurous but popular genre films from “Western” and “Eastern” industries in the 1950s; to the inquisitive Neue Deutsche Film (New German Cinema) in the late 1960s through the early 1980s; to post-unification fiction films exploring German themes in transnational, multiethnic contexts. Throughout its history, this compelling national cinema has attracted an active group of intellectuals, from cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in the Weimar era to a wide range of contemporary film historians across the globe. It attracts feminist and queer scholars and transnational and ethnic studies scholars. Germany’s two art film movements, Expressionism and the New German Cinema, have generated considerable scholarly discussion, but more recently, popular and even disparaged forms and periods (e.g., the sentimental Heimat film, Nazi cinema, etc.) have received more attention.
Greek Cinema
Authors: Georgakas Dan
Published: February 2012

Greek film studies have followed in the wake of the erratic history of Greek cinema. From 1900 through the end of World War II, Greek cinema was, at best, a cottage industry, and at times it all but ceased to exist. The first Greek-language sound films were made in the United States, and during the 1930s, most Greek films had to have final production done in other nations, often Egypt. Film commentary during this period was largely limited to tabloids. At the conclusion of World War II, Greece entered into the fertile studio period in which some two thousand films were made over two decades. Film criticism was again mainly limited to the popular press. Following the fall of the Greek junta in 1974, Greece entered a new period of filmmaking. State funding was established and scholarly works began to appear. Although the rising tide of Greek film studies has remained spotty in many ways, its discourse increasingly parallels that of other nations. Greek film studies are enhanced by the contributions of numerous scholars in the Greek diaspora, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. Although scholarly momentum has been building and is taken seriously by scholars in other disciplines, Greece still has only one university film program, and that program is mainly oriented to production. Among the issues surrounding Greek film scholarship is the question of what specifically constitutes Greek cinema. This concern arises because the boundaries of the Greek state have shifted dramatically since the early 20th century, and because numerous filmmakers of Greek origin work in various nations. Generally speaking, Greek-language films are considered Greek films, while films made by Greeks in the diaspora are not so considered unless there is some continuing connection with Greek-language cinema. Expatriates who make films in Greece, such as Jules Dassin, and individuals who make films in more than one language, such as Nikos Papatakis and Michael Cacoyannis, are seen as special cases and treated accordingly. More so than film scholarship in other nations, scholars of Greek film often seek to relate cinema to the dynamics of Greek culture. Nevertheless, they increasingly blend such considerations with the wider issues in film criticism and the relationship of Greek cinema to international and regional filmmaking.
Music and Cinema, Global Practices
Authors: Kalinak Kathryn
Published: February 2012

Film music has always been a global phenomenon, but until recently scholarship on film music has tended to focus on the United States. Moving images and music were paired from the outset in the United States, France, and Germany, but musical accompaniment materialized at screenings of moving pictures all over the world, if not initially, then within days, weeks, or months of film’s arrival. As an institutional practice, film music is a global phenomenon that developed in different ways across a variety of national cinemas. The citations in this article in some way reflect this perspective: some are devoted exclusively to a film music practice outside the United States; some consider film music as a global phenomenon drawing examples from a variety of national cinemas; and some are simply not limited to examples drawn exclusively from Hollywood film. Separate bibliographies have been prepared for musicals (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Musicals”) and for film music in the largest and most powerful film industry in the United States: Hollywood (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Music and Cinema, Classical Hollywood”). And although music plays an important role in television and in other forms of audiovisual entertainment, such as music videos and computer gaming, this article focuses on music and cinema.
Philosophy and Film
Authors: Plantinga Carl
Published: February 2012

Although the philosophy of film dates as far back as Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg’s 1916 The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, the philosophy of film has only recently become a part of mainstream aesthetics and philosophy generally. Early film theorists such as André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Rudolph Arnheim, though not professional philosophers, engaged in examinations of the film medium that are clearly philosophical. Many film theorists have been trained in philosophy, and much of their work can be deemed philosophical as well. However, although a few professional philosophers made the study of film a major element of their work before the 1980s (Stanley Cavell, for example), it was not until that decade that academic philosophers began to train their attention on film in greater numbers. Since that time, the philosophy of film has become alive with debate, research, and excellent publications, with contributions by well-known aestheticians such as Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, Cynthia Freeland, and George Wilson. We might also note the rise in the number of courses on the philosophy of film. One cannot draw a clear or concise line between film theory and philosophy; both aim at the general understanding of the film medium and its implications. The claim that only professional philosophers engage in the philosophy of film defines the field too narrowly; many film theorists are also trained in philosophy and employ philosophical methodologies. One might say, then, that the philosophy of film is more likely than film theory to draw on philosophical methodologies, to consult the work of philosophers, or to be written by professional philosophers. Yet much of the philosophy of film is also film theory, and vice versa. Given that there exists a separate Oxford Bibliographies Online entry on “Film Theory,” the idea of the philosophy of film will be more narrowly construed here than it might be otherwise. The relationship between philosophy and film extends beyond the philosophy of film. Recently there has been a flurry of scholarly examinations of the possibility, at one extreme, that films can “think” or “do” philosophy, ranging to more modest claims that films are philosophical in some sense, or that they can serve as prompts or aids in philosophical investigation.