British Universities Film & Video Council

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Media Screen Roundup – February 2015

The monthly roundup of film and television publications compiled by Simon Baker, Institute of Historical Research, & published here at the BUFVC by Linda Kaye.

Highlights in this month’s Roundup include a special forum in the Journal of Sport history entitled The Sports Documentary in/as Sport history covering contemporary sporting documentaries as well as sports in Cuba and an Arab-American football team featured in the film Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football (2011).

Interpretation of history in film is covered in David Dean’s Staging the Settlement: Shekhar Kapur and the Parliament of 1559 which offers an assessment of the depiction of the parliamentary making of the Elizabethan religious settlement in the film Elizabeth (1998). He subjects the film’s settlement sequence to analysis not only reading it as cinema but history as well.

Television and history are covered in Max Jones’ article The Truth about Captain Scott: The Last Place on Earth, Debunking, Sexuality and Decline in the 1980s which analyses the 1985 television drama arguing that the debunking of imperial heroes collided with debates about decline in 1980s Britain.

With the impending British general election readers may be interested in Moving Pictures? Experimental Evidence of Cinematic Influence on Political Attitudes in which the possibility that popular films can affect political attitudes is subjected to a control test in a laboratory. Subjects were randomly assigned to watch a control movie with no political messages, a movie with subtle political messages, or a movie with strong and explicit political messages and their responses measured.

Media Screen Roundup (Feb 2015) IHR-BUFVC (PDF, 136KB)

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