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The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children's fantasy novel by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. The book remains popular and is recognized as a classic in children's literature.
Smaug is a dragon and the main antagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit, his treasure and the mountain he lives in being the goal of the quest. Powerful and fearsome, he invaded the Dwarf kingdom of Erebor 150 years prior to the events described in the novel. A group of thirteen dwarves mounted a quest to take the kingdom back, aided by the wizard Gandalf and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. In The Hobbit, Thorin describes Smaug as "a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm".
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Video nasty is a colloquial term in the United Kingdom to refer to a number of films, typically low-budget horror and exploitation films, distributed on video cassette that were criticised for their violent content by the press, social commentators and various religious organisations. The term was popularised by the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (NVALA) in the UK in the early 1980s.
The Video Recordings Act 1984 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that was passed in 1984. It states that commercial video recordings offered for sale or for hire within the UK must carry a classification that has been agreed upon by an authority designated by the Home Office. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which had been instrumental in the certification of motion pictures since 1912, was designated as the classifying authority in 1985. Works are classified by the BBFC under an age-rated system ; it is an offence under the Act to supply video works to individuals who are under the age of the classification designated. Works that are refused classification cannot, under the Act, be legally sold or supplied to anyone of any age unless it is educational, or to do with a sport, religion or music and does not depict violence, sex or incite a criminal offence. The BBFC may also require cuts to be made, either to receive a certain age rating, or to be allowed a classification at all.
The cultivation theory suggests that people who are exposed regularly to media over long periods of time perceive the world’s social realities as presented on media and it affects the audiences’ attitudes and behaviors. Cultivation theory was founded by George Gerbner in the 1960s. At first, cultivation theory began as a way to test the impact that all this television viewing had on viewers, particularly with regard to violence. "The primary proposition of cultivation theory states that the more time people spend 'living' in the television world, the more likely they are to believe social reality aligns with reality portrayed on television." The images and ideological messages transmitted through popular television media heavily influence perceptions of the real world. The more media is consumed, the more the perceptions of people is thought to change. This leads to the idea of the "Mean World Syndrome", which refers to the idea that long-term exposure of violent media will lead to a distorted view that the world seems more violent than it actually is. These images and messages, especially when repeated, create the culture that is around is. Cultivation aims at understanding how long-term exposure to TVs, with their reoccurring patterns of messages and images, can contribute to our shared assumptions about the world around us.
James Alan Ferman was an American television and theatre director. He was the Secretary of the British Board of Film Classification from 1975 to 1999.
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Extreme cinema is a genre of film distinguished by its use of excessive violence, torture, and sex of extreme nature. The rising popularity of Asian films in the 21st century has contributed to the growth of extreme cinema, although extreme cinema is still considered to be a cult-based genre. Being a relatively new genre, extreme cinema is controversial and widely unaccepted by the mainstream media. Extreme cinema films target a specific and small audience group.
"Pornoviolence" is an essay by American author Tom Wolfe. It first appeared under a longer title in the July 1967 issue of Esquire magazine, and was later published in the collection Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. The essay introduced the term "pornoviolence" in reference to graphic written or audiovisual depictions of violence, which Wolfe argued were used in newspapers, magazines, and film to stimulate prurient audience interest.
The British Board of Film Classification is a non-governmental organisation founded by the film industry in 1912 and responsible for the national classification and censorship of films exhibited at cinemas and video works released on physical media within the United Kingdom. It has a statutory requirement to classify all video works released on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and, to a lesser extent, some video games under the Video Recordings Act 1984. The BBFC was also the designated regulator for the UK age-verification scheme which was abandoned before being implemented.
Janet Staiger is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus of Communication in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
J. R. R. Tolkien's novels The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), set in Middle-earth, have been the subject of various film adaptations. There were many early failed attempts to bring the fictional universe to life in screen, some even rejected by the author himself, who was skeptical of the prospects of an adaptation. While animated and live-action shorts were made off of Tolkien in 1967 and 1971, the first commercial depiction of the book onscreen was in an animated TV special in 1977. In 1978 the first big screen adaptation of the fictional setting was introduced in the animated The Lord of the Rings.
The horror film genre is a movie genre containing multiple subgenres. A goal of this genre includes invoking responses of trepidation and panic from the audience. Critics and researchers claim that these films depict graphically detailed violence, contain erotically or sexually charged situations which verge on becoming pornographic, and focus more on injuring or killing female as opposed to non-female characters.
Ernest Mathijs is a professor at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches film. He has published several books on cult films.
Kirsten Moana Thompson is an interdisciplinary scholar of American and New Zealand/Pacific cinema and visual culture. Thompson's work in American film has focused on classical American cel animation and the introduction of three strip Technicolor, on contemporary crime films and blockbuster and special effects cinema. Her work on Pacific cinema situates film production by American and Pacific filmmakers in broader cultural and visual contexts. She has also published on American horror film and German cinema.
Karen Elizabeth Boyle, is Professor of Feminist Media Studies at the University of Strathclyde, previously she was professor of Feminist Studies at the University of Stirling, and before that was a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Glasgow. She has published a number of articles on feminism, violence and pornography.
Martin Barker is a British scholar of media studies and cultural studies. He is now an Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth University, having previously taught at the University of the West of England and the University of Sussex. Over the course of his career he has written or co-edited fifteen books. He is known for being one of the pioneers behind the concept of cultural racism, which he termed "new racism".
Commentators have compared Peter Jackson's 2001–2003 The Lord of the Rings film trilogy with J. R. R. Tolkien's 1954–1955 written work of the same name, remarking that while both have been extremely successful commercially, they differ in many respects.
References
- ↑ Napoli, Philip; Voorhees, Steve (2017). "Oxford Bibliographies: Audience Studies".
- ↑ BBFC (2012). "BBFC is to adjust sexual and sadistic violence policy to take into account key areas of public concern".
- ↑ Barker, Martin; Petley, Julian (2003). Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
- ↑ Cumberbatch, Guy (2011). The effects of sexual, sexualised and sadistic violence in the media: A review of the research literature – A report for the BBFC (Report).
- ↑ Staiger, Janet (2005). Media Reception Studies. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 0814781357.
- ↑ Barker, Martin; Mathijs, Ernest (2007). Watching The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien's World Audiences . New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0820463964.
- ↑ Barker, Martin (2016). "Introduction: The World Hobbit Project". Participations. 13 (2): 158–174.
- ↑ Kuhn, Annette (2002). An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. ISBN 9781860648670.
- ↑ Smith, Martin Ian (2019). "Researching memories of The Exorcist: An introduction to grounded audience studies" (PDF). Participations. 16 (1): 844–864.
- ↑ Barker, Martin; Egan, Kate; Ralph, Sarah; Phillips, Tom (2016). Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137532053.
- ↑ Staiger, Janet (2019). "The Audience of Perry Mason, or, the Case of What People Write to Famous Authors" (PDF). Participations. 16 (2): 511–524.
- ↑ Harper, Sue; Porter, Vincent (2003). British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference. Oxford University Press. ISBN 019815934X.
- ↑ Egan, Kate; Smith, Martin Ian; Terrill, Jamie (2019). "Introduction to Themed Section: Researching past cinema audiences" (PDF). Participations. 16 (1): 680–686.