UCLA Film & Television Archive's Research and Study Center (ARSC) is pleased to announce the recipients of the ARSC Student Research Award for the 2009-2010 academic year. This award was made possible by a grant from the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation.
My Living Doll: Androids and the Social Construction of Femininity"
By Gillian Horvat. View a PDF of the essay.
Abstract
During the early 1960s men who had discounted the justifiability and efficacy of the feminist movement were now faced with legal exigencies to recognize the new role of women, precipitating an unusual alteration in the collective male psyche of network television executives and their corporate advertisers. This movement of women into the work force liberated them from their limiting role as housewife, but it also jeopardized their enshrinement by American corporations as the household's primary consumer. In the throes of Freudian wish-fulfillment complexes, the men of America yearned for a magical solution, some way to return women to their erstwhile roles of obedience and sexual co-operation. Between 1964-1965 the television shows Bewitched, My Living Doll, and I Dream of Jeannie all premiered during primetime on various networks. The appearance within a two-year period of three shows featuring gorgeous, acquiescent female leads who can manifest enormous power, but choose to direct their abilities toward the pleasure of the men in their life, reveals the tension of the representations of women in network television in the 1960s, both acknowledging their increased abilities, but also reasserting their positions as consumers first, fulfilled women second. In My Living Doll, the stunning Julie Newmar plays "Rhoda," a goofy, gorgeous robot. Female androids are a unique construct for examining society's conception of "the ideal woman." Because they are completely artificial, every aspect of them correlates to a social need or fantasy. Analyzing the construction of Rhoda's femininity reveals the tactics utilized by television networks and advertisers to influence empowered woman to eschew their newfound power and focus on a debilitating search for a male partner and the preservation of their beauty.
About the Author
Gillian Horvat is a 1st year M.A. student in the Cinema Media Studies Program at UCLA. She received a B.F.A. in Film and Television Production from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University; her short film Gunplay was a Wasserman Semi-Finalist and played at the Haig-Manoogian Screenings at the Director's Guild in Los Angeles in 2007. She has programmed films at The Fowler Museum at UCLA and also for The Crank, a graduate student-run film society that screens prints from UCLA's Film and Television Archive on a regular basis. Her current research interests include Japanese film, moving beyond three-act story structure, and the influence of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy on genre films of the 1980s.
"Radically Reimagining Rebellion: Historicity and Black Agency in The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)"
By Samantha N. Sheppard. View a PDF of the essay.
Abstract
This essay explores the historical contingencies, conflicts, tensions, and meanings in Ivan Dixon's The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1973). Using a theoretical historicist approach, the essay engages with the "situated knowledges" of the film's history, including its production, exhibition, and reception. By recognizing the text's many interfaces as a part of its historical becoming or meaning-production—inflecting the past in its present, speaking the unspeakable of its contemporaneous moment, and being read against the bearing of its future (re)consideration and placement—The Spook Who Sat By the Door presents alternative and transitive social realities of Black agency. As a result, this essay constructively historicizes the film within its own controversial production history, the blaxploitation genre, Black's documentary-televisual image in the late 1960s, and the narrative origin of the Crips gang.
About the Author
Samantha Noelle Sheppard is a doctoral student in the Cinema and Media Studies Program at UCLA. Her research interests include: race and embodiment in sports and dance films, African American filmmakers and representation, feminism and film, theories of performance, drag, and popular culture. She is currently working on an essay for publication on labor, affect, and embodiment in films by the "L.A. School of Black Filmmakers."
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