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188 DIFFERENTIAL CHANGES IN YOUTH TOBACCO USE BEFORE AND AFTER IMPLEMENTATION OF MASSACHUSETTS’ STATEWIDE FLAVOR RESTRICTION POLICY
- Part of
- Jill M. Singer, Megan E. Roberts
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- Journal:
- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science / Volume 8 / Issue s1 / April 2024
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 03 April 2024, p. 57
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OBJECTIVES/GOALS: This study examined youth tobacco use, disaggregated by sexual and gender minority (SGM) identity and race, in Massachusetts before and after the state implemented a flavored tobacco restriction. We assessed if the policy differentially impacted groups that have had higher rates of flavored tobacco use (i.e., SGM and African Americans [AAs]). METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Data for this analysis came from the 2019 and 2021 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), a biennial, national survey conducted among high school students, provided by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Changes in current use of cigarettes and e-cigarettes between 2019 and 2021 were examined for the entire sample and by SGM identity and race/ethnicity. Current cigarette use and current e-cigarette use were defined as reporting any use of the product in the past 30 days. We received confirmation from the IRB that because the data are de-identified and available to the public, this research is considered Not Human Subjects Research. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Between 2019 and 2021, current cigarette use and current e-cigarette use decreased for the entire sample (3.78% to 2.79% and 27.69% to 15.74%, respectively). Decreases were also observed after disaggregating results, but smaller changes were observed among minoritized groups (i.e., SGM and AAs), particularly for e-cigarettes. Current e-cigarette use decreased 25.56% among individuals identifying as SGM (28.14% to 20.95%) compared to a 49.33% decrease among non-SGM individuals (27.63% to 14.0%). Among all races, AAs had the lowest prevalence of current e-cigarette use in 2019 (15.10%), but also saw the lowest percentage decrease (17.68%). Among whites, current e-cigarette use decreased 45.75% from 32.33% in 2019 to 17.54% in 2021. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: After implementation of Massachusetts’ flavored tobacco restriction, current cigarette and e-cigarette use declined among Massachusetts youth overall and among groups that have been most affected by flavored tobacco. However, minoritized groups (i.e., SGMs, AAs) had lower percentage decreases compared to non-minoritized groups.
Association of COVID-19 coinfection with increased mortality among patients with Pseudomonas aeruginosa bloodstream infection in the Veterans Health Administration system
- Leila S. Hojat, Brigid M. Wilson, Federico Perez, Maria F. Mojica, Mendel E. Singer, Robert A. Bonomo, Lauren H. Epstein
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- Journal:
- Antimicrobial Stewardship & Healthcare Epidemiology / Volume 3 / Issue 1 / 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 15 December 2023, e237
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Objective:
Pseudomonas aeruginosa bloodstream infection (PA-BSI) and COVID-19 are independently associated with high mortality. We sought to demonstrate the impact of COVID-19 coinfection on patients with PA-BSI.
Design:Retrospective cohort study.
Setting:Veterans Health Administration.
Patients:Hospitalized patients with PA-BSI in pre-COVID-19 (January 2009 to December 2019) and COVID-19 (January 2020 to June 2022) periods. Patients in the COVID-19 period were further stratified by the presence or absence of concomitant COVID-19 infection.
Methods:We characterized trends in resistance, treatment, and mortality over the study period. Multivariable logistic regression and modified Poisson analyses were used to determine the association between COVID-19 and mortality among patients with PA-BSI. Additional predictors included demographics, comorbidities, disease severity, antimicrobial susceptibility, and treatment.
Results:A total of 6,714 patients with PA-BSI were identified. Throughout the study period, PA resistance rates decreased. Mortality decreased during the pre-COVID-19 period and increased during the COVID-19 period. Mortality was not significantly different between pre-COVID-19 (24.5%, 95% confidence interval [CI] 23.3–28.6) and COVID-19 period/COVID-negative (26.0%, 95% CI 23.5–28.6) patients, but it was significantly higher in COVID-19 period/COVID-positive patients (47.2%, 35.3–59.3). In the modified Poisson analysis, COVID-19 coinfection was associated with higher mortality (relative risk 1.44, 95% CI 1.01–2.06). Higher Charlson Comorbidity Index, higher modified Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation score, and no targeted PA-BSI treatment within 48 h were also predictors of higher mortality.
Conclusions:Higher mortality was observed in patients with COVID-19 coinfection among patients with PA-BSI. Future studies should explore this relationship in other settings and investigate potential SARS-CoV-2 and PA synergy.
11 - A Fox in the Wild: Ramar of the Jungle and the Crisis of Representation
- Edited by Gary D. Rhodes, Oklahoma Baptist University, Joanna Hearne
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- Book:
- ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 26 October 2023
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- 31 July 2022, pp 235-252
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Summary
“You get the lion, or the lion gets you”
Robert RuarkWhen it comes to representing minority cultures, whether expressed in linguistically challenged utterances of fragmented English or in moments of stereotypically déclassé behavior, the postwar media frequently displayed a qualified perspective, an ontological image of race, class, and gender; various representations were calculated, affective factors sustaining the plot and overall continuity of illusion in countless comedic or dramatic narratives, and many were recurrent images of sociological others as entertainment spectacles. Those productions, in particular, director Wallace Fox’s episodes of television’s jungle-fantasy, Ramar of the Jungle (1953–1954), are potentially classified as ideologically circumscribed narratives. It is my contention that Fox’s Ramar episodes are not markedly racist and merit reassessment. National and international media productions from the postwar era invite intergeneric, alternative readings of the socio-political matter, while acknowledging obvious controversies. These are problematic, not superficial, narratives. The postwar media was ripe with such illustrative material, and this chapter examines, in an intertextual capacity, the eleven episodes of Ramar of the Jungle directed by Wallace Fox, especially as they recall and renew Western narratives in the sustained imaginative framing of Africa-African images.
One notably transgressive practice involves the recycled racial images and representative patterns of social alterity produced as entertainment spectacles in the postwar American and European media, especially in film and television productions which depict Africa, Africans, and related Western cultural myths associated with progress and civilization. Despite the preponderant number of these media spectacles, many significant exceptions to the culture of misrepresentation did exist, albeit on the edges of industrial marketing, as “B” productions. Multiple literary and film productions, produced during the rise of the postwar, nuclear era, reveal substantial issues associated with the eroticized, demeaned, or ignored sociological other; these racially charged images saturate popular national and international cultures as signifying spectacles, in notable dialogue with a controlling ideology.
Commenting on this postwar trend in media narrative, and specifically referring to Ramar of the Jungle, Wheeler Winston Dixon has concluded that, “The world of Ramar of the Jungle is a dark and complicated social terrain, marked on the one side by the dying inequities of colonialism and on the other, by the rule of violence and reprisal.”
2 - Narrative
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Book:
- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp 36-61
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Summary
Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine in 1987, the same year that Full Metal Jacket was released, director Stanley Kubrick enthused about the artistry of television commercials:
[In a series of TV commercials for Michelob produced in 1986], the editing, the photography, was some of the most brilliant work I’ve ever seen. Forget what they’re doing—selling beer—and it's visual poetry. Incredible eight-frame cuts. And you realize that in thirty seconds they’ve created an impression of something rather complex. If you could ever tell a story, something with some content, using that kind of visual poetry, you could handle vastly more complex and subtle material.
Whether the storyline Kubrick alludes to is historical, fantastic, nonlinear, realistic, or documentary, narrative may be conceived and contextualized as, for example, a short story, novel, or feature-film release, and as an intertextually reified critical concept, as part of an unfolding whole of intergeneric potentialities.
In particular, television commercials may be categorized as short-film narratives as one examines comparative industrial practices and artistic accomplishments with feature-length film. Essentially, how do commerical narratives generate a reactive desire to consume, whether cereal flakes or sports cars, in the space and time afforded by the thirty-, sixty-, or 120-second format on the television screen? One notes the presence of familiar generic forms and recurring thematic and visual tropes, including stylizations and practices associated with horror, comedy, musical, documentary, and other forms of exposition, that are endemic to both fulllength and short-film narratives. The TV commercial strategizes, informs, affects, and directs our overall range of perception in order to identify with objects, making them into subjects, and to stimulate a nascent desire to consume. We watch—we want.
In Pleasure of the Text and S/Z, Roland Barthes distinguished between two forms of narrative experience that we, as readers and viewers, encounter per text and among texts: the readerly and the writerly. Overall, a readerly text, such as Charles Dickens's nineteenth-century prose and filmmaker John Ford's Fort Apache (1948), does not challenge its audience's ideological preconceptions; the struggle for meaning and narrative clarity is passively resolved, in a familiar, settled world.
Index
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Book:
- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp 183-196
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Consuming Images
- Film Art and the American Television Commercial
- Gary D. Rhodes, Singer Robert
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- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 15 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2020
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Analysing key commercials over the decades that feature new technologies and film aesthetics that were subsequently adopted by feature filmmakers, the book establishes the television commercial as a vital form of film art.
Conclusion
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Book:
- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp 178-182
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Summary
In this book, we have sought to reimagine the historical and aesthetic parameters of the television commercial, to be placed now within the broader context of Film Studies. The intertextual framework we suggest indicates an ongoing, dynamic interrelationship among narrative media, and whether thirty or sixty seconds in length, multiple examples of the historical and contemporary advertising commercial demonstrate that each is, in fact, a short-film narrative, informed by ideologies and technologies of the past and present cultural time. In TV By Design (2008), media critic Lynn Spigel cites Art Direction columnist Ralph Porter's comments made in 1962 concerning standard and experimental cinematic praxis, as evident in commercial productions made for television. Interestingly, Porter focuses on one example to illustrate his point that is especially germane to this study: “Jerry Schnitzer's TV commercial for Clairol Hair Color was a contemporary version of Eisenstein's techniques … essentially an analytical study of a woman's hairdo rendered with a montagetype photographic layout of a female head.” In this advertisement, entitled Silk & Silver, a controlling, male voiceover excitedly describes this transformative hair-dye product in glowing terms: “hairdressers love the magic of it … your family will love it.” Schnitzer's stylized black-and-white commercial targets a maturing female audience. The product transforms their hair from “mousy gray” into a “silky, gleaming, glimmering” silver. Cinematography focuses on heads and hair, with the commercial likening the same to bright, blinking lights.
A year earlier, Schnitzer directed an episode of the popular television show, Lassie, entitled Lassie and the Greyhound, which featured a family, a farm, a dog, and a guaranteed resolution for every heart-warming event, however dangerous or absurd. In this case, a dog “desires” a bejeweled collar owned by Lassie, and a poor bet is made that results in its loss: another tenuous postwar fantasy narrative for unencumbered consumption. While not stylistically identifiable as a Schnitzer film, this Lassie episode suggests that the relationship between network productions and television commercials merits critical analyses and additional research. The impact of TV commercials on the medium of television is another area of untilled promise.
6 - Sound
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp 154-177
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Summary
America believes in Coke. In 1979, Martin Esslin noted the dynamic function of music in the television commercial as he focused on one spectacular, effervescent example:
It is significant [in some cases] that the more abstract the imagery of the TV commercial becomes the more extensively it relies on music: around the giant soft drink bottle revolves a chorus of dancing singers; the mountain range of a trademark is surrounded by a choir of devoted singing worshippers. The higher the degree of abstraction and pure symbolism, the nearer the spectacle approaches ritual forms. This intriguing observation and description refers to an especially significant short film narrative.
In 1971, a new Coca-Cola commercial begins to air on the networks: a young lady starts singing a cappella, “I’d like to buy the world a home, and furnish it with love,” as the camera encircles her in closeup. The camera pulls back to reveal another young lady and a young man, who join the first in song (Fig. 6.1). The young man holds an open bottle of Coca-Cola. Dissolves lead to Shots 2 and 3, the camera moving from screen right to left across a line of many young adults from around the world. All sing, and many enthusiastically hold opened Coke bottles. A dissolve to Shot 4 reveals that there is a second and third line of singers behind the first. In Shot 6, we see the first camera move from right to left, which concentrates on hands and the bottles they hold; in Shot 7, a caroling face is seen in closeup. It is then superimposed over an aerial shot of the engaged, singing crowd. The face disappears, but the aerial image remains. Scrolling text explains, “On a hilltop in Italy/We assembled young people/From all over the world … /To bring you this message/From Coca-Cola Bottlers/ All over the world.” There is an engaging, nearly communal (religious?), and mysteriously vital experience watching and, especially, listening to this song of buoyant youth. Coke is celebrated in a song of utopian terms in this incredible, visionary landscape that usually exists only as an escape plan for the decommissioned audience.
Thus, director Roberto Malenotti's sixty-second musical Hilltop (1971, aka I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing) concludes, produced by McCann–Erickson for Coca-Cola, and using a melody written by Cook and Greenaway.
5 - Editing
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp 129-153
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Summary
In The Handbook of TV and Film Technique (1953), an industrial publication intended for future television commercial productions, Charles W. Curran wrote that commercials
must be exactly 60 seconds in length, followed by 2 seconds of black. This means on 16mm film, picture portion is 36 feet; 1 foot, 8 frames in black—on 35mm the picture portion is 90 feet; 3 feet is [sic] black. All films must be supplied with SMPTE leader at head, the sound track must be 59 seconds in length, and sound track and picture must be physically printed side by side at first frame of the picture.
Curran repeated the same durations and specifications in a revised 1958 manual. By 1968, the thirty-second spot became increasingly common, in part to make television exposure more affordable to sponsors; as of 1972, the half-minute ad had “all but taken over.” In the mid-1980s, the fifteen-second commercial was born. In the internet age, commercials are sometimes as short as five or ten seconds. Historically, some commercials span these lengths, meaning variations cut at more than one running time, the shorter version usually broadcast once the longer version becomes well known. This is all in addition to experiments with subliminal cuts in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as time compression editing in the 1970s, the latter being commercials sped up by 20 or 25 percent to squeeze more information into the final running time.
The accelerated continuity and relative velocity of television commercials have resulted in the use of various editing techniques, most borrowed from Classical Hollywood filmmaking. In 1954, Sponsor questioned whether optical effects like dissolves and wipes were being overused as transitions in TV spots. In other cases, though, editing techniques in TV commercials have been at the vanguard of the American film industry.
In 1985, a thirty-second commercial promoting Honda Scooters, directed by Steve Horn and edited by Larry Bridges for Wieden+Kennedy, not only relied on swish pans and jump cuts, but innovatively used film leader tape, flashes of white screen, and even a frame going overexposed as transitional devices (Fig. 5.1). This commercial possesses an abstract, raw quality, invoking many stylistic practices of postwar American avant-garde film production. The Honda ad was credibly marketed for a younger, ‘hip,” and mostly urban audience, with its shots of an out-of-focus New York City and its disaffected inhabitants traversing pregentrified lonely streets.
3 - Mise-en-scène
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp 62-91
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Summary
In David Shane's sixty-second Esurance commercial It's Surprisingly Painless (2018), American actor Dennis Quaid speaks directly into the camera and addresses the audience, explicitly telling them, “This is a commercial about insurance” (Fig. 3.1). Quaid's self-reflexive performance as narrator– actor shifts between two standpoints as he continues speaking with the audience and (with various in-character performers) operating within numerous set designs. The camera follows Quaid throughout the narrative, panning along with him or centering him in the shot: this is his film. Evident throughout the commercial is a marketing strategy that depends upon an audience familiarity with Quaid's “nice guy” screen persona. One character even tells us, “I like Dennis Quaid.” The audience can trust the imagery and messaging.
The staging of this Esurance commercial is notably cinematic. There are ten shot sequences, each with an effectively rendered mise-en-scène: multiple characters passively and interactively move across the screen; the lighting per sequence is realistic and only backlit when appropriate; the blocking follows the physical space and time of the respective indoor– outdoor setting; and camera angles, movement, and placement establish an overall sense of familiarity and humor.
One especially noteworthy shot sequence involves a cut from one set (the sound stage of a city street) into a slovenly male viewer's living room. Here is a mise-en-abyme shot, in which Quaid on the city street appears on the man's TV. After another cut, we see the face of the incredulous man, who mouths the dialogue “I don't want to hear about insurance” while we hear Quaid speaking the same words. Thanks to a pan to the right, we see Quaid sitting on the man's couch. The commercial then cuts to the same city street staging prior to this sequence. Quaid never stops talking to the audience or to other potential customers he meets in the dynamic set of unfolding, obvious, make-believe situations.
The camera work in this commercial is visually compelling and includes medium closeup and wide shots, an over-the-shoulder shot, a handheld shot, high-angle placement, eyeline matching, camera pans, camera flare, and more. Perhaps most noteworthy about this commercial is its seamless, overall mise-en-scène: a humorous self-awareness. Quaid even tries to eat a “prop apple.” There is an overall feeling that we, the audience, know this is a pleasant make-believe moment about buying insurance, but it still pleases the eye and mind.
Contents
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp v-v
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1 - Origins
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp 16-35
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Summary
American television commercials of the 1940s and early 1950s were often simple and presentational. Spokespersons sometimes held up or demonstrated a given product, instructing the audience to purchase the same. Surviving kinescopes reveal that many of these commercials gave limited consideration to mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing. Many were performed live, an approach that Sponsor magazine endorsed in 1948, believing them to have a lower “fatigue” factor on viewers than repetitions of a filmed commercial. Not unexpectedly, though, live commercials resulted at times in various snafus, as famously parodied on the television sitcom I Love Lucy in 1952, in which the inebriated title character (played by Lucille Ball) touts “Vitameatavegamin” to her broadcast audience.
William F. Baker and George Dessart have noted,
For nearly a decade there would be no way to produce a broadcast-quality recording. Commercials had to be made live. Unable to summon up the grandeur of the Rockies, the allure of Paris, or the kinesthetic of water sports, advertisers were forced to rely on the product and its spokesperson, one of the most notable being Betty Furness.
Many examples could be given, including the 1955 commercial for S.O.S. scouring pads. It consisted of one single shot lasting 148 seconds, during which 269 words were spoken and sung. Looking back on such ads, the Los Angeles Times described them as “absurd product demonstrations.”
In fairness, these comments were hasty generalizations. From the late 1940s, a number of directors shot television commercials on 35mm film; as early as 1947, for example, Filmack of Chicago produced a film commercial for Dodge. Such technology allowed directors to adopt the same possibilities as those employed by feature filmmakers, including the common usage of animation and/or various optical and special effects, ranging from wipe transitions to stop-motion. The trend towards film gained greater momentum as the 1950s progressed. Lincoln Diamant observed:
Once TV commercials became more creatively complicated, the filmed commercial took center stage. With a film camera, your studio was the world. Commercial scenarios were limited only by the copywriter's or art director's imagination.
… The 50s firmly established the era of the film commercial. Its keynote was not low cost, but simplicity, versatility, and control.
Acknowledgments
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Book:
- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp ix-x
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Frontmatter
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp i-iv
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4 - Cinematography
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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- 28 May 2020, pp 92-128
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Summary
In 1964, film director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg remarked that “you make the movie through the cinematography—it sounds like a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.” That same year, Roeg worked as a cinematographer on The Masque of the Red Death, director Roger Corman's adaptation of Poe's 1842 short story. In his article, “The Phosphorescence of Edgar Allan Poe on Film: Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death,” Mário Jorge Torres notes that Roeg's cinematography artistically achieves a “deep sense of richness and texture,” especially as it facilitates the Poe narrative's “depths and ambiguities” of images and meaning:
Poe's spirit and pervading beauty are omnipresent in the labyrinthine succession of the seven colored rooms, in the voluptuous way the camera follows this self-contained space with breathtaking tracking shots … One final effect adds up to Corman's phosphorescent vision: the Red Death unmasked has Vincent Price's face, in a terrifying construction of a doppelgänger reminiscent of German Expressionism.
Dynamic cinematography may similarly be located in disparate horror narratives also produced in 1964, including Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (directed by Robert Aldrich, shot by Joseph F. Biroc), The Strangler (directed by Burt Topper, shot by Jacques R. Marquette), and Devil Doll (directed by Lindsay Shonteff, shot by Gerald Gibb), as well as in other popular film genres: these include Robert Burks's use of the colored lens to instill mood into a sexually conflicted character in Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller of the same year, Marnie, but is especially true in the mid-1960s war narrative. For example, the low-angle, atmospheric framing in Back Door to Hell (directed by Monte Hellman, shot by Nonong Rasca) and the compelling two shot in The Thin Red Line (directed by Andrew Marton, shot by Manuel Berenguer) memorably illustrate filmmaker Robert Bresson's comment that: “Cinematography is a writing with images in movement and with sounds.”
These cinematographers, frequently working with proscriptive budgets and other creative restraints, focalize the perspective of the audience, to establish how one sees the film narrative.
List of Figures
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- 15 October 2020
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Introduction
- Gary D. Rhodes, University of Central Florida, Singer Robert, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Consuming Images
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 15 October 2020
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Summary
“The best TV commercials create a
tremendously vivid sense of mood, of a
complex presentation of something.”
—Stanley Kubrick in 1987In 1897, while employed at the Edison Studios, William Heise created one of the earliest filmed commercials, Admiral Cigarette (Fig. I.1). Heise, a director and (mostly) cinematographer of such Edison moving pictures as The Kiss (1896), Serpentine Dance, Annabelle (1897), and McKinley Taking the Oath (1897), shot the thirty-second moving picture, Admiral Cigarette, in one static, wide shot characteristic of the early cinema, but for the contemporary audience, this advertisement proved to be of historical significance: Admiral Cigarette helped inaugurate the ongoing and dynamic relationship between film culture and the advertisement–commercial, to be further exploited by the television medium.
Four men, dressed in costumes humorously suggesting various social and ethnic strata, posed in front of a billboard prominently featuring the name of the tobacco company; they sit and converse. Then, a large box to the left of the frame opens and exposes a woman, who promptly distributes cigarettes and casually tosses them all over the set. Near the end of this commercial, the men unfurl a large banner stating the inclusive ad copy “we all smoke,” even Native Americans and women. All can watch, and all can purchase. The relationship between film and advertising, from an aesthetic and technical perspective, with consumerism and commerce as practiced in commercial advertisements, remains an intact industrial standard.
Appearing at an event held at Queen's University of Belfast in 2007, David Lynch fielded numerous questions from attendees. One of them asked why he had decided to direct television commercials, which he has occasionally done since first making a series of four commercials for Calvin Klein's Obsession in 1988. Smiling, Lynch quickly responded that he accepted the job offer for the large salary it provided, an answer that pleased the audience due to his honesty and good-natured demeanor.
Implicit in the question was a disdain for the TV commercial, not surprising given the fact that many critics view certain kinds of filmmaking as inferior to others, particularly those that are—in the larger sense of the word—“commercial.”
Pedagogical Value of Polling-Place Observation by Students
- Christopher B. Mann, Gayle A. Alberda, Nathaniel A. Birkhead, Yu Ouyang, Chloe Singer, Charles Stewart III, Michael C. Herron, Emily Beaulieu, Frederick Boehmke, Joshua Boston, Francisco Cantu, Rachael Cobb, David Darmofal, Thomas C. Ellington, Charles J. Finocchiaro, Michael Gilbert, Victor Haynes, Brian Janssen, David Kimball, Charles Kromkowski, Elena Llaudet, Matthew R. Miles, David Miller, Lindsay Nielson, Costas Panagopoulos, Andrew Reeves, Min Hee Seo, Haley Simmons, Corwin Smidt, Robert Stein, Rachel VanSickle-Ward, Abby K. Wood, Julie Wronski
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- Journal:
- PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 51 / Issue 4 / October 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 16 May 2018, pp. 831-837
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- October 2018
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Good education requires student experiences that deliver lessons about practice as well as theory and that encourage students to work for the public good—especially in the operation of democratic institutions (Dewey 1923; Dewy 1938). We report on an evaluation of the pedagogical value of a research project involving 23 colleges and universities across the country. Faculty trained and supervised students who observed polling places in the 2016 General Election. Our findings indicate that this was a valuable learning experience in both the short and long terms. Students found their experiences to be valuable and reported learning generally and specifically related to course material. Postelection, they also felt more knowledgeable about election science topics, voting behavior, and research methods. Students reported interest in participating in similar research in the future, would recommend other students to do so, and expressed interest in more learning and research about the topics central to their experience. Our results suggest that participants appreciated the importance of elections and their study. Collectively, the participating students are engaged and efficacious—essential qualities of citizens in a democracy.
ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher
- Gary D. Rhodes, Robert Singer
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- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 22 December 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 February 2017
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One of the most important yet overlooked of Hollywood auteurs, Budd Boetticher was responsible for a number of classic films, including his famous ‘Ranown’ series of westerns starring Randolph Scott. With influential figures like Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood acknowledging Boetticher’s influence, and with growing academic interest in his work, Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer present a vital collection of essays on the director’s long career, from a range of international scholars. Looking at celebrated films like 'Buchanan Rides Alone' (1958) and 'Comanche Station' (1960), as well as at lesser-known works like 'Escape in the Fog' (1945) and 'Behind Locked Doors' (1948), this book also addresses Boetticher’s influential television work on the James Garner series 'Maverick', and Boetticher’s continuing aesthetic influence on contemporary TV classics like 'Breaking Bad'.
Introduction
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- By Robert Singer, California State University—Long Beach, Gary D. Rhodes, Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland
- Gary D. Rhodes, Queen’s University in Belfast, Robert Singer, CUNY Graduate Center
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- Book:
- ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 22 December 2017
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- 03 February 2017, pp 1-10
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Summary
“What happened up there?” — Ben Stride (Randolph Scott)
“Payte Bodeen. I killed him.” — Bill Masters (Lee Marvin)
“Why?” — Stride
“Why not?” — Masters
Seven Men From Now (1956)Few filmmakers have lived lives that have been as cinematic as Budd Boetticher's. He was himself aware of the fact, so much so that, during his later years, he wrote an autobiographical script.
Born in Chicago in 1916, Boetticher was an adopted child, one raised in a very unhappy household in Indiana. While in Mexico as a young man, Boetticher became entranced with bullfighting. His knowledge of the subject landed him his first break in Hollywood: technical advisor on Rouben Mamoulian's Blood and Sand in 1941. A directorial career followed, though it was largely undistinguished until 1951. Thanks to the efforts of John Wayne, Boetticher returned to the subject of bullfighting in his breakthrough film, Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) with Robert Stack. It was also the first film in which he was credited as “Budd Boetticher,” rather than his real name, Oscar Boetticher, Jr.
From there, Boetticher directed an array of films and television programs, most notably the “Ranown” series of Westerns starring Randolph Scott, the moniker resulting from the name of a production company Scott owned with producer Harry Joe Brown. Bucking the Hollywood system, he spent much of the 1960s in Mexico making a documentary film about bullfighter Carlos Arruza. The nomadic director spent years obsessively pursuing his subject, declining offers from Hollywood even though the project was fraught with problems. As a result, Boetticher suffered illness, divorce, bankruptcy, and even incarceration in jail and in an asylum. He gave no indication, however, that he would have changed his life even if had he been able. As Dr Storrow (John Archer) asks Sam (Noah Beery, Jr.) in Boetticher's Decision at Sundown (1957), “What man knows how a life should really be lived?”
Despite the many personal troubles he faced, Boetticher's films—particularly the Ranown Westerns—have been extremely influential, his adherents ranging from Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah to Martin Scorsese and Anthony Sarris. Such acclaim has resulted in numerous retrospectives and restorations, as in the Bruce Ricker documentary Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That (2005) and Sony's DVD boxed set The Films of Budd Boetticher (2008).