A Duet for Sailors and Pansies: Queer Archival Work and Male Same-Sex Dancing in Follow the Fleet (1936) and Other Depression-Era Films

This chapter explores a queer all-male dance lesson for partnered sailors in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936), using archival research (scripts, Production Code Administration records) and comparative textual and contextual analysis. It raises the queerness of Rogers and Astaire before exploring two intersecting axes. The association of sailors with queer behavior and effeminate “pansies” occurs in military scandals, paintings, and Depression-era Hollywood films, including Sailor’s Luck and Son of a Sailor (both 1933). The queerness of male same-sex dancing arises in ballet and in film, including Suicide Fleet (1931). Various institutions criticized or attempted to censor such representations, but they also found acceptance. The US Navy, for example, wanted the comical dance lesson removed from Fleet; instead, it was only rewritten, suggesting the inability to remove queerness from culture and its essential role in mass entertainment.

Fashioning an Imperial Metropolis at the 1896 Berliner Gewerbeausstellung

The 1896 Berliner Gewerbeausstellung was a transformative moment for city and nation alike. The exhibition announced Berlin's pre-eminence as a scientific and industrial city and bolstered an emergent German national identity. Including displays of Egypt and Germany's formal colonies also revealed Germany's competence as a colonial power. By illustrating its skill in both aggressive conquest and subtle intervention, city and nation thought themselves capable of competing with European rivals at home and abroad. However, the two visions of colonialism, cloaked in the guise of mass entertainment, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. This article seeks to discuss this colonial–Oriental dichotomy by focusing on tensions between education and entertainment in display techniques, particularities of racial difference in ethnographic display, the use of advertising, and the insertion of new technologies. Contributing to a deeper understanding of race, empire, and modernity in the German context, the Gewerbeausstellung offers a jumping off point for further comparison to other local, regional, and international exhibitions and an avenue to explore how notions of modernity factored into formal and informal imperial arrangements. Ultimately, it sheds light on how an exhibition helped to fashion a global, imperial city at the turn of the twentieth century.

Richang: An Affect-Inflected Ethnography of Chinese Livestreams

I tracked one Chinese livestreaming platform Douyu from its emergence as experimental subsidiary of a Video on Demand platform in 2013 to its status as an ordinary medium of mass entertainment in 2018. This affect-inflected ethnography is written based on participant observation of three channels on Douyu as I exhibit the microcontexts of each channel in chronicles of affective events, long pauses of silence, repetitive and incoherent dialogues, asymmetrical debates, and sporadic moments of emotional meltdown. This ethnographic writing is a contact zone, a provocation, and, by proxy, a dialogue between academic theories (especially from television studies), user practices, and my informants’ own attempts at theorising how and what livestream feels and means for them.

Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory

As a form of popular mass entertainment and an apparatus for the automatic reproduction of material reality, cinema’s artistic aspirations seemed futile. Some early commentators nonetheless asserted that the new medium could be a legitimate object of aesthetic scrutiny. In an attempt to fathom cinema’s immaterial values, early film theorists including Herbert Tannenbaum and Georg Lukács explored cinema’s kinship with folk art, mental processes and the fantastic. They argued that film technology, specifically special effects, could articulate ideas in a sensual form and thus provide a pathway to a spiritual dimension. As this chapter shows, their techno-romantic lines of argument conceptualized the medium within established aesthetics and set the stage for the recognition of cinema as the first technological art.

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera (What the Listener Sees…)

The internalized visualization of symphonic music was validated by “New German School” programmaticism. Wagner’s mature music-dramas, with their symphonic “underscores,” were even theorized by him as “deeds of music made visible.” By locating dramatic agency in his concealed orchestra, Wagner problematized in advance his later disparagement by critics for whom the cinema downgraded music to the role of redundant accompaniment. Recent work on music in popular melodrama further complicates our understanding of critical battles fought over music and meaning in mass-entertainment theatre, where its melodramatic use seems initially to have served to repress socially disruptive “meaning.” Implications for film music-study of discoveries about melodramatic music are traced here with reference to a 1989 film realization of Delius’s opera A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901), whose last orchestral interlude (“The Walk to the Paradise Garden”) is turned there into a fully realized, “silent” cinematic narrative.

The sharing economy and livestreaming of terror: Co-production of terrorism on social media

In the xenophobic attack on a mosque in New Zealand, the perpetrator filmed the mass murder through a GoPro recording device attached to his head. The attack was streamed live on social networking sites, including a notorious extremist alt-right forum. This livestreaming of the terrorist attack on social media platforms received global condemnation, but it brought renewed scrutiny to the ‘sharing economy’ online and how terrorist attacks can be made for sharing, reposting, and editing of content by users, circumnavigating the removal of such content. This phenomenon widens the co-production of terror through mass audiences’ interaction in real time, positioning terror as mass entertainment. This chapter examines the architecture of the ‘sharing economy’ online and its significance in the production of terror, as well as the moral and ethical considerations it poses for humanity.

Selling Orchestral Music in the Vaudeville Age: The Duncan-Damrosch Tours, 1908–1911

Between 1908 and 1911, New York Symphony Orchestra conductor Walter Damrosch engaged the modern dancer Isadora Duncan to perform with his orchestra in New York and on three tours of the Midwest. Posing considerable risk to his reputation as an elite conductor, this unusual alliance grew in part from his concert manager's wish to compete with the Salomé dance craze raging in vaudeville halls across the country. Damrosch's “pioneering spirit” allowed him a genuine appreciation of Duncan's expressive, transcendent dancing. Yet for his critics, the shockingly under-dressed dancer, just back from her conquest of Europe, represented yet another sensational Salomé eager to capitalize on the popular profanities of market-driven entertainment. Music critics and Protestant clergymen from St. Louis to Boston berated Damrosch for what they saw as an immoral capitulation to mass consumerism and a desecrating abuse of the sacred repertoire he guarded—a repertoire defined in part by its distance from dancing. This article draws on critiques in the daily press, Damrosch's personal papers, and scholarship in dance and religious studies to situate Damrosch's marketing experiment with Duncan in the wider context of Progressive-era devotional life, where similar concessions to mass entertainment arose in the urban revival movement of the Third Great Awakening. Damrosch's recourse to Duncan's “barefoot dancing”—oddly akin to the tactics of big tent revivalists espousing Muscular Christianity and epitomized by Billy Sunday's pulpit pantomimes—illuminates the collision of spiritual and economic concerns that shaped both musical and ecclesiastical arenas of the American “sacred.”

Reflections of International Relations theories in selected TV series distributed by Netflix

This article demonstrates how Netflix, the current leading SVOD provider, can be a plat­form of global cultural exchange, which not only provides entertainment, but also offers a critical reflection on international affairs to its subscribers. Despite the fact that most Netflix content is fic­tional, its distributed and produced films and TV series still portray various theoretical approaches of international relations. This claim is based on the premises of critical discourse, which see our reality in terms of the social context.The aim of the article is to reveal what principles of main international relations theories (name­ly realism, liberalism, feminism, constructivism, or other critical theories) can Netflix subscribers find in the selected TV series. Using a visual qualitative analysis as a research method, the authors study five TV series, specifically Traitors (UK), 1983 (PL), Nobel (NOR), Pine Gap (AU) and Homeland (US). These TV series were selected with regard to their diverse origins of production, the topic’s central focus being politics, security or international relations, and their high ratings and numbers of viewers.The analysis of each TV series is based on answering three questions, which are used in defining basic premises of the portrayed theories. The following questions are: What role does the state play as an actor in the international system? What is the dominant cultural identity of the society? What is the status of an individual in a country? Processes of forming opinions and building images of social reality are influenced by the context in which the individual acts. As such, cultural exchange can influence the evolution of contemporary media society and thus affect viewers who are indirectly led to critical reflection. The results indicate that the global cultural exchange through the medium of mass entertainment is still driven mainly by traditional theoretical premises.