[Air-L] {air-L] A Sunday morning curiosity: Marlon Brando and Medium Theory in 1953? (by Charles Ess)

[noam feinholtz]

Charles,

First of all thank you for this wonderful quote from the movie "The Wild
One". Although I'm writing my doctoral research on 'media films', films
that take television and the Internet as their central topics, I wasn't
familiar with this movie. As to your question about the "Media Panic"
phenomenon I would like to recommend some great books and papers dealing
with this subject. Unfortunately very little has been written about this
subject.**

*Books:*

Starker, S. (1989). *Evil influences: Crusades against the mass media*. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Stokes, J. C. (1999). *On screen rivals: Cinema and television in the
United States and Britain*. New-York: St. Martin's Press.

Young, P. (2006). *The cinema dreams its rivals: Media fantasy films from
radio to the internet*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press.

*Papers:*

Drotner, K. (1992). "Modernity and media panics". In M. Skovmand & К. С
Schroder (Eds.) *Media cultures: Reappraising transnational media*. London:
Routledge.

Drotner, K. (1999). Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of
Modernity. *Paedagogica Historica*, *35*(3), 593-619.

Springhall, J. (1998). *Youth, popular culture and moral panics: Penny
gaffs to gangsta-rap, 1830-1996**. *New York: St. Martin's Press.* *

Drotner writes:

"From the advent of mass-circulation fiction and magazines to film and
television, comics and cartoons, the introduction of a new mass medium
causes strong public reactions whose repetitiveness is as predictable as
the fervor with which they are brought forward. Adult experts [...] define
the new mass medium as a social, psychological, or moral threat to the
young and appoint themselves as public trouble shooters. Legal and
educational measures are then imposed, and the interest lessens- until the
advent of a new mass medium reopens public discussion. That spiraling
motion characterizes a *media panic* [...] In media panics, the mass media
are both the source and the medium of public reaction" (Drotner, 1992,
pp.43-44).

My analysis focuses on 115 films from the last 20 years but since you are
writing about the fifties I would recommend some early films that were made
in the fifties and even earlier that show this rivalry between cinema and
TV:

*Murder by Television*- Clifford Sanforth, 1935

*Meet Mr. Lucifer*- Anthony Pelissier, 1953

*A King in New-York* -  Charles Chaplin, 1957

*A Face in the Crowd*- Elia Kazan, 1957

All the best,

Noam Feinholtz



Noam Feinholtz . Ph.D. candidate - The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

(sites.google.com/site/smarthuji/noam-fainholtz-1)