Paula Kehoe's fascinating and clarifying look at the debate surrounding global warming explores the striking disconnect between the relatively clear-cut concerns of the world's most prominent scientists and the maze of speculation, rhetorical posturing, and outright misinformation that attaches to this issue whenever it's taken up by politicians, PR specialists, and political pundits. Mixing a localized focus on Ireland with insights from scientists and leaders from around the world, the film serves as both a primer on climate science and a penetrating analysis of media framing and the science of perception management.
Presents a compelling and accessible argument about consumerism and its impact on the earth's future. Extensively illustrated with graphics and examples from commercial imagery.
Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world. Consuming Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids.
Delivers a fascinating rap on the 20th century movement called Culture Jamming. Pranksters and subversive artists are causing a bit of brand damage to corporate mindshare.
Despite the achievements of the women's movement over the past four decades, misogyny remains a persistent force in American culture. Thomas Keith looks specifically at misogyny and sexism in mainstream American media, exploring how negative definitions of femininity and hateful attitudes toward women get constructed and perpetuated at the very heart of our popular culture. The film tracks the destructive dynamics of misogyny across a broad and disturbing range of media phenomena: including the hyper-sexualization of commercial products aimed at girls, the explosion of violence in video games aimed at boys, the near-hysterical sexist rants of hip-hop artists and talk radio shock jocks, and the harsh, patronizing caricatures of femininity and feminism that reverberate throughout the mainstream of American popular culture. Along the way, Generation M forces us to confront the dangerous real-life consequences of misogyny in all of its forms--making a compelling case that when we devalue more than half the population based on gender, we harm boys and men as well as women and girls.
In this new, highly anticipated update of her pioneering Killing us softly series, the first in more than a decade, Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics in distorted and destructive ideals of femininity. The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes--images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality. By bringing Kilbourne's groundbreaking analysis up to date, Killing us softly 4 stands to challenge a new generation of students to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence.
This documentary contends that the foreign policy interests of American political elites, working in combination with Israeli public relations strategies, exercise a powerful influence over news reporting about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Combines U.S. and British television news footage with observations from analysts, journalists, and political activists. Examines the factors that have distorted the United States' media coverage and, in turn, American public opinion.
A documentary looking at depictions of Native Americans in Hollywood films from the silent cinema, through the Golden Age and to the present day. Travelling through the heartland of America, Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond examines how the myth of the movie "Injun" has influenced the world's understanding - and misunderstanding - of Native peoples. With clips from hundreds of classic and recent films, and candid interviews with celebrated Native and non-Native directors, writers, actors and activists, including Clint Eastwood, Robbie Robertson, Sacheen Littlefeather, John Trudell, Charlie Hill and Russell Means, Reel Injun traces the evolution of cinema's depiction of Native people from the silent film era to the present day.
The powder keg that is porn culture has exploded in the lives of North American children. From thongs and padded bras for 9-year-old girls to "sexting," 24-7 internet porn, and unfiltered social media, kids today are bombarded with commercial sexual appeals like never before. In this astonishing new documentary, award-winning documentary filmmaker Maureen Palmer explores what this radical transformation of the culture means for young people, parents, and our very notions of childhood. Palmer interviews researchers who have been tracking how the accelerating pressure to be sexy -- and sexual -- is changing kids' behavior and undermining their health. She sits down with parents and educators struggling to help kids navigate puberty in a hypermediated cultural environment that no longer seems to recognize or respect the developmental needs of children. And she talks to teens and pre-teens who share eerily casual insights into the routine role sex plays in their lives. The result is a stunning exploration of the sexualization of childhood and a startling wake-up call for parents who still think their own children are immune to the excesses and influences of today's sexed-up youth culture.
Filmmaker Thomas Keith takes aim at the forces in male culture that condition boys and men to dehumanize and disrespect women. Keith breaks down a range of contemporary media forms, zeroing in on movies and music videos that glamorize womanizing, pornography that trades in the brutalization of women, comedians who make fun of sexual assault, and a groundswell of men's magazines and cable TV shows that revel in old-school myths of American manhood. Even as epidemic levels of men's violence against women persist in the real world, the message Keith uncovers in virtually every corner of our entertainment culture is clear: It's not only normal -- but cool -- for boys and men to control and humiliate women. Arguing that there's nothing normal, natural, or inevitable about this mentality, The Bro Code challenges young people, young men and women alike, to step up and fight back against the idea that being a real man means being sexist.
Communication scholar Sut Jhally applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman's groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape in this provocative new film about gender as a ritualized commercial performance. Uncovering a remarkable pattern of gender-specific poses, Jhally explores Goffman's central claim that the way the body is displayed in advertising communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity. The film looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of surface objectification and beauty, taking us into the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations.
For years, debates have raged among scholars, politicians, and concerned parents about the effects of media violence on viewers. Too often these debates have descended into simplistic battles between those who claim that media messages directly cause violence and those who argue that activists exaggerate the impact of media exposure altogether. The Mean World Syndrome, based on the groundbreaking work of media scholar George Gerbner, urges us to think about media effects in more nuanced ways. Ranging from Hollywood movies and prime-time dramas to reality programming and the local news, the film examines how media violence forms a pervasive cultural environment that cultivates in heavy viewers, especially, a heightened state of insecurity, exaggerated perceptions of risk and danger, and a fear-driven propensity for hard-line political solutions to social problems. A provocative and accessible introduction to cultivation analysis, media effects research, and the subject of media influence and media violence more generally.
The United States is obsessed with virginity from the media to schools to government agencies. The Purity Myth is an important and timely critique of about why this is so, and why it's problematic for girls and women. Analyzing cultural stereotypes and media messages, Jessica Valenti reveals the overt and hidden ways our society links a woman's worth to her sexuality rather than to values like honesty, kindness, and altruism. With intelligence and wit, this film exposes the legal and social punishments that women who dare to have sex endure, while presenting a powerful argument that valuing girls and women for their sexuality needs to stop.