tailieunhanh - Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People

Like trailers for individual films, these “trailers” for film history (made by a former trailer-maker) use a montage structure which both elides and reconfigures the narrative they promote. When that “narrative” is the entire history of Hollywood cinema—indeed world cinema mapped onto Hollywood cinema under the rubric of “the movies”—as summed up within a brief montage of very short clips, the ideology of cinematic representation as a magic act is overdetermined and foregrounded, bringing it in line at once with other advertising rhetoric (Williamson 140-145) and with that of the. | Reel Bad Arabs How Hollywood Vilifies a People By JACK G. SHAHEEN Live images on big screen and television go beyond a thousand words in perpetuating stereotypes and clichés. This article surveys more than a century of Hollywood s projection of negative images of the Arabs and Muslims. Based on the study of more than 900 films it shows how moviegoers are led to believe that all Arabs are Muslims and all Muslims are Arabs. The moviemakers distorted lenses have shown Arabs as heartless brutal uncivilized religious fanatics through common depictions of Arabs kidnapping or raping a fair maiden expressing hatred against the Jews and Christians and demonstrating a love for wealth and power. The article compares the stereotype of the hook-nosed Arab with a similar depiction of Jews in Nazi propaganda materials. Only five percent of Arab film roles depict normal human characters. Keywords Arabs Hollywood film industry stereotypes xenophobia movie reviews Introduction Al tikrar biallem il hmar By repetition even the donkey learns . This Arab proverb encapsulates how effective repetition can be when it comes to education how we learn by repeating an exercise over and over again until we can respond almost Jack G. Shaheen is a professor emeritus of mass communications at Southern Illinois University. Dr. Shaheen is the world s foremost authority on media images of Arabs and Muslims. He regularly appears on national programs such as Nightline Good Morning America 48 Hours and The Today Show. He is the author of Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture Nuclear War Films and the award-winning TV Arab. Los Angeles Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg calls Reel Bad Arabs How Hollywood Vilifies a People a groundbreaking book that dissects a slanderous history datingfrom cinema s earliest days to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters that feature machine-gun wielding and bomb-blowing evil Arabs. NOTE Reel Bad Arabs by Jack G. Shaheen was first published in Reel Bad Arabs