David Scott Diffrient
Biographic Data
| ID | 318005 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Scott Diffrient |
| GIVEN NAMES | David Scott |
| FAMILY NAME | Diffrient |
| SIGNATURE | DIFFRIENT D S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Colorado State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1889-0585 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 21 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Haunted Laughter
Jonathan C. Friedman’s latest book is a welcome addition to the growing body of academic literature concerning the Holocaust and humor. Along with a handful of other recently published works, including Liat Steir-Livny’s Is It OK to Laugh About It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israeli Culture (2017), Valerie Weinstein’s Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany (2019), and David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt’s edited vol…
A knowledge of horror or the horror of knowledge? Frightfully insightful directors’ commentaries on Blu-rays and DVDs
Body Genre
Dating back to Carol Clover’s and Linda Williams’s pioneering work on horror cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, film scholars have long conceptualized this once-disreputable category of cultural production as a “body genre.” However, despite the growing recognition that horror serves important biological and social functions in our lives, we have only scratched the surface of this genre regarding its affective, corporeal, and sensorial appeals. In th…
East Asian Film Remakes
‘Half the world away’
Comedy has long been thought of as a genre that does not ‘travel’ well, owing to the fact that humour is often tied to culturally specific (or ‘local’) references that might be lost on audiences outside a text’s originating context. In recent years, however, a few globally recognized comedians, such as Simon Pegg, have suggested that the jokes that pepper British comedies can be easily understood by non-British audiences. This article critically …
(Arm) Wrestling with Masculinity
For decades, dating back to the medium's origins as a commercially viable form of mass communication in the postwar years, US television programs have contributed to the many paradoxes of masculinity, revealing but also obscuring the normativizing function of cultural representations through the use of generic encoding and the compositional 'logic' of male (visual) dominance. One visual motif in particular-the shot of two men sitting at a table, …
Hands, Fingers and Fists
The cultural imaginary of kung-fu cinema has been codified as a physically balletic and graceful, if also violently bloody and brutal, genre defined in part by the persistent presence of deadly, thrusting hands. Of course, hands are also central to another type of cultural production, one that has often incorporated kung-fu action and iconography. This chapter assesses a broad range of motion pictures that showcase hands in thematically complex a…
Elevator to the shallows
Set in the world of Madison Avenue advertising during the 1960s, a century after the earliest construction of vertical lifts in New York City, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men illustrates how central the elevator has become to the urban spatial imaginary, perpetuated in part through such cultural productions as Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment (a source of inspiration for Weiner). Like Wilder’s classic comedy, Mad Men stages several interpersonal e…
Always , Blind , and Silenced
The article examines three feature-length films produced in South Korea—director Hwang Dong-hyeok’s Silenced (2011), Song Il-gon’s Always (2011), and An Sang-hun’s Blind (2011)—that highlight a problem in contemporary disability rights cinema. While privileging individuals and groups that challenge normative understandings of character-based drama or documentary filmmaking, these motion pictures reflect an infantilizing tendency in popular cultur…
Backup Singers, Celebrity Culture, and Civil Rights
This essay explores Morgan Neville's 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, which, despite the filmmaker's honorable intentions, reproduces the asymmetrical power relations that it sets out to challenge. The film spotlights previously marginalized members of rock music ensembles; namely, backup singers such as Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, and Darlene Love, whose overlapping careers span a roughly sixty-year period (1950s–2010s). But in attempting…
The omnibus film as message picture
This essay uncovers the production and reception history of It’s a Big Country (1951), a multi-director M-G-M film that explores the interwoven issues of nationhood, citizenship and cultural diversity during the cold war era. Produced by the liberal studio chief Dore Schary, who referred to the film as a ‘propaganda picture’ and a ‘message picture,’ It’s a Big Country is a contradictory text that explicitly upholds the cold war mandate of inclusi…
The good earth and the still waters’
This article seeks to demonstrate the underlying ideological similarities between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era political rhetoric and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Captains Courageous (1937), an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 novel of the same title. Rather than claim a simple causal relationship between FDR’s oratorical calls for socio-economic reform and M-G-M’s cinematic tale of cooperative teamwork in the face of adversity, …
Triangulating Terabithia
As a big-budget adaptation of Katherine Paterson's 1977 Newbery Award-winning novel of the same title, the 2007 Walden Media/Walt Disney family film Bridge to Terabithia departs from its source material in telling ways, subtly shifting the motives, manners, and yearnings of the main adolescent characters while compounding the complexities of gender roles and class relations. In this essay, I triangulate three texts—the novel, the recent motion pi…
Beyond Tokenism and Tricksterism
Beyond Tokenism and Tricksterism:Bobby Lee, MADtv, and the De(con)structive Impulse of Korean American Comedy David Scott Diffrient Asian Americans have not been completely invisible in the history of American popular culture, but what visibility they possess has taken delimiting and disempowered forms. ... Asian Americans must harness their technological skill, economic power, and political focus to influence the television industry so that [the…
Screwball Television
Bringing together seventeen original essays by scholars from around the world, Screwball Television offers a variety of international perspectives on Gilmore Girls (WB/CW, 2000-2007). Adored by fans and celebrated by critics for its sophisticated wordplay and compelling portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship, this contemporary American TV program finally gets its due as a cultural production unlike any other - one that is beholden to Hollywo…
The Cult Imaginary
Filming a Life in Fragments
Using the works of Gaston Bachelard and Susan Stewart as a philosophical foundation upon which to build a theory of the "biorhythmic-pic," this article explores how director Fran ̧ois Girard's postmodern biopic Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) both adheres to and departs from conventional genre patterns of cinematic life-writing
Spectator sports and terrorist reports
Drawing upon the writings of Benedict Anderson, Hayden White and Robert Rosenstone, this essay compares and contrasts three feature-length films dealing with a historically significant event and its aftermath: the ‘Munich Massacre’, which took place during the 1972 Summer Olympics and led to violent reprisals in the months and years that followed. While stylistically different from one another, these political thrillers – 21 Hours at Munich (1976…
Cabinets of cinematic curiosities
For the Love of Film
"Military Enlightenment" for the Masses
Although officially categorized as "military enlightenment" and "anticommunist" by the Park Chung Hee regime, the war films directed by Yi Man-hŭi (Lee Man-hee)—one of the most important auteurs in South Korea's cinematic Golden Age of the 1960s—transcend formulaic genre constraints and deserve special attention for their humanistic approach to the Korean War
Seoul as Cinematic Cityscape
In his recent book, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Ackbar Abbas charts the complex spatial coordinates of a port city that, leading up to its 1997 "handover" to China, endured colonial "dislocations and discontinuities." Though Abbas focuses on the cultural forms unique to Hong Kong that melt away either "local," "marginal," or "cosmopolitan" identities and, in the space of that evaporation, reveal the dynamic symbiosis bet…
Spectator sports and terrorist reports
Drawing upon the writings of Benedict Anderson, Hayden White and Robert Rosenstone, this essay compares and contrasts three feature-length films dealing with a historically significant event and its aftermath: the ‘Munich Massacre’, which took place during the 1972 Summer Olympics and led to violent reprisals in the months and years that followed. While stylistically different from one another, these political thrillers – 21 Hours at Munich (1976…
Seoul as Cinematic Cityscape
In his recent book, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Ackbar Abbas charts the complex spatial coordinates of a port city that, leading up to its 1997 "handover" to China, endured colonial "dislocations and discontinuities." Though Abbas focuses on the cultural forms unique to Hong Kong that melt away either "local," "marginal," or "cosmopolitan" identities and, in the space of that evaporation, reveal the dynamic symbiosis bet…
"Military Enlightenment" for the Masses
Although officially categorized as "military enlightenment" and "anticommunist" by the Park Chung Hee regime, the war films directed by Yi Man-hŭi (Lee Man-hee)—one of the most important auteurs in South Korea's cinematic Golden Age of the 1960s—transcend formulaic genre constraints and deserve special attention for their humanistic approach to the Korean War
Cabinets of cinematic curiosities
For the Love of Film
Filming a Life in Fragments
Using the works of Gaston Bachelard and Susan Stewart as a philosophical foundation upon which to build a theory of the "biorhythmic-pic," this article explores how director Fran ̧ois Girard's postmodern biopic Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) both adheres to and departs from conventional genre patterns of cinematic life-writing
Spectator sports and terrorist reports
Drawing upon the writings of Benedict Anderson, Hayden White and Robert Rosenstone, this essay compares and contrasts three feature-length films dealing with a historically significant event and its aftermath: the ‘Munich Massacre’, which took place during the 1972 Summer Olympics and led to violent reprisals in the months and years that followed. While stylistically different from one another, these political thrillers – 21 Hours at Munich (1976…
Screwball Television
Bringing together seventeen original essays by scholars from around the world, Screwball Television offers a variety of international perspectives on Gilmore Girls (WB/CW, 2000-2007). Adored by fans and celebrated by critics for its sophisticated wordplay and compelling portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship, this contemporary American TV program finally gets its due as a cultural production unlike any other - one that is beholden to Hollywo…
The Cult Imaginary
Triangulating Terabithia
As a big-budget adaptation of Katherine Paterson's 1977 Newbery Award-winning novel of the same title, the 2007 Walden Media/Walt Disney family film Bridge to Terabithia departs from its source material in telling ways, subtly shifting the motives, manners, and yearnings of the main adolescent characters while compounding the complexities of gender roles and class relations. In this essay, I triangulate three texts—the novel, the recent motion pi…
Beyond Tokenism and Tricksterism
Beyond Tokenism and Tricksterism:Bobby Lee, MADtv, and the De(con)structive Impulse of Korean American Comedy David Scott Diffrient Asian Americans have not been completely invisible in the history of American popular culture, but what visibility they possess has taken delimiting and disempowered forms. ... Asian Americans must harness their technological skill, economic power, and political focus to influence the television industry so that [the…
The good earth and the still waters’
This article seeks to demonstrate the underlying ideological similarities between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era political rhetoric and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Captains Courageous (1937), an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 novel of the same title. Rather than claim a simple causal relationship between FDR’s oratorical calls for socio-economic reform and M-G-M’s cinematic tale of cooperative teamwork in the face of adversity, …
Always , Blind , and Silenced
The article examines three feature-length films produced in South Korea—director Hwang Dong-hyeok’s Silenced (2011), Song Il-gon’s Always (2011), and An Sang-hun’s Blind (2011)—that highlight a problem in contemporary disability rights cinema. While privileging individuals and groups that challenge normative understandings of character-based drama or documentary filmmaking, these motion pictures reflect an infantilizing tendency in popular cultur…
Backup Singers, Celebrity Culture, and Civil Rights
This essay explores Morgan Neville's 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, which, despite the filmmaker's honorable intentions, reproduces the asymmetrical power relations that it sets out to challenge. The film spotlights previously marginalized members of rock music ensembles; namely, backup singers such as Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, and Darlene Love, whose overlapping careers span a roughly sixty-year period (1950s–2010s). But in attempting…
The omnibus film as message picture
This essay uncovers the production and reception history of It’s a Big Country (1951), a multi-director M-G-M film that explores the interwoven issues of nationhood, citizenship and cultural diversity during the cold war era. Produced by the liberal studio chief Dore Schary, who referred to the film as a ‘propaganda picture’ and a ‘message picture,’ It’s a Big Country is a contradictory text that explicitly upholds the cold war mandate of inclusi…
Hands, Fingers and Fists
The cultural imaginary of kung-fu cinema has been codified as a physically balletic and graceful, if also violently bloody and brutal, genre defined in part by the persistent presence of deadly, thrusting hands. Of course, hands are also central to another type of cultural production, one that has often incorporated kung-fu action and iconography. This chapter assesses a broad range of motion pictures that showcase hands in thematically complex a…
Elevator to the shallows
Set in the world of Madison Avenue advertising during the 1960s, a century after the earliest construction of vertical lifts in New York City, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men illustrates how central the elevator has become to the urban spatial imaginary, perpetuated in part through such cultural productions as Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment (a source of inspiration for Weiner). Like Wilder’s classic comedy, Mad Men stages several interpersonal e…
(Arm) Wrestling with Masculinity
For decades, dating back to the medium's origins as a commercially viable form of mass communication in the postwar years, US television programs have contributed to the many paradoxes of masculinity, revealing but also obscuring the normativizing function of cultural representations through the use of generic encoding and the compositional 'logic' of male (visual) dominance. One visual motif in particular-the shot of two men sitting at a table, …
‘Half the world away’
Comedy has long been thought of as a genre that does not ‘travel’ well, owing to the fact that humour is often tied to culturally specific (or ‘local’) references that might be lost on audiences outside a text’s originating context. In recent years, however, a few globally recognized comedians, such as Simon Pegg, have suggested that the jokes that pepper British comedies can be easily understood by non-British audiences. This article critically …
Body Genre
Dating back to Carol Clover’s and Linda Williams’s pioneering work on horror cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, film scholars have long conceptualized this once-disreputable category of cultural production as a “body genre.” However, despite the growing recognition that horror serves important biological and social functions in our lives, we have only scratched the surface of this genre regarding its affective, corporeal, and sensorial appeals. In th…
East Asian Film Remakes
Haunted Laughter
Jonathan C. Friedman’s latest book is a welcome addition to the growing body of academic literature concerning the Holocaust and humor. Along with a handful of other recently published works, including Liat Steir-Livny’s Is It OK to Laugh About It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israeli Culture (2017), Valerie Weinstein’s Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany (2019), and David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt’s edited vol…
A knowledge of horror or the horror of knowledge? Frightfully insightful directors’ commentaries on Blu-rays and DVDs
Art (20 works) · Sociology (13 works) · History (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (10 works) · Literature (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Media studies (8 works)