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- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- BU Libraries Search (BULS) This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of academic material provided by the library. The material covered by the search includes books, journals, scores, video and audio recordings, and other physical items held by the library. The search also covers ebooks and ejournals owned by the library, as well as online material provided by the library from a variety of sources.
Browse Films
- What a girl wants (streaming, Kanopy) In girls' own voices, What a girl wants presents a glimpse into the powerful - and often destructive - influence commercial culture has on the formation of young girls' identities. A diverse group of eleven girls speaks honestly and openly about the sexual and body-image pressures they encounter as they come of age in a culture that idolized Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and other pop stars.
- The Slanted Screen (streaming, Academic Video Online) This fascinating documentary includes interviews with award-winning veteran actor Mako, actors Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, James Shigeta, Dustin Nguyen, Phillip Rhee, Tzi Ma, Jason Scott Lee, comedian Bobby Lee, producer Terence Chang and casting director Heidi Levitt. The film contains more than 50 film clips depicting Asian American male characters from Hollywood films spanning almost a century.
- Slaying the Dragon/Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded (streaming, Kanopy) SLAYING THE DRAGON is a comprehensive look at media stereotypes of Asian and Asian American women since the silent era. SLAYING THE DRAGON. RELOADED looks at the past 25 years of representation of Asian and Asian American women in U.S. visual media — from blockbuster films and network television to Asian American cinema and YouTube — to explore what’s changed, what’s been recycled, and what we can hope for in the future.
- Killing Us Softly 4 - Advertising's Image of Women (streaming, Kanopy) 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.
- Miss Representation (streaming, Kanopy) Miss Representation uncovers a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see. The film exposes how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to feel powerful herself.
- Guyland: Where Boys Become Men (streaming, Kanopy) In this powerful new film based on his bestselling book, sociologist Michael Kimmel maps the troubling social world where boys become men -- a new stage of development he calls "Guyland." Arguing that the traditional adult signposts and cultural signals that once helped boys navigate their way to manhood are no longer clear, Kimmel provides an astonishing glimpse into a world where more and more young men are trying desperately to prove their masculinity to other young men -- with frequently disastrous consequences for young women and other young men
- Color Adjustment (streaming, Kanopy) In Color Adjustment, Marlon Riggs - Emmy winning producer of Ethnic Notions - carries his landmark studies of prejudice into the Television Age. Color Adjustment traces 40 years of race relations through the lens of prime time entertainment, scrutinizing television's racial myths and stereotypes.
- I am a Man: Black Masculinity in America (streaming, Academic Video Online) This award-winning documentary links everyday black men from various socioeconomic backgrounds with some of Black America's most progressive academics, social critics and authors to provide an engaging, candid dialogue on black masculine identity in American culture. Featuring interviews with bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, John Henrick Clarke, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, MC Hammer, and others.
- Generation M: Misogyny in Media and Culture (streaming, Kanopy) This film tracks the destructive dynamics of misogyny across a broad and disturbing range of media phenomena: from the hyper-sexualization of commercial products aimed at girls, to the explosion of gender violence in video games aimed at boys; from the near-hysterical sexist rants of hip-hop artists and talk radio shock jocks, to the continually harsh, patronizing caricature of feminism found in virtually every area of American pop culture.
- The Bro Code: How Contemporary Culture Creates Sexist Men (streaming, Kanopy) 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 that are saturated with sexism -- movies and music videos that glamorize misogyny; pornography that trades in the brutalization of women; comedy routines that make fun of sexual assault; and a slate of men's magazines and cable TV shows whose sole purpose is to revel in reactionary myths of American manhood. The message he 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. By showing how there's nothing natural or inevitable about this mentality, and by setting it against the terrible reality of men's violence against women in the real world, The Bro Code challenges young people to step up and fight back against the idea that being a real man means disrespecting women.
- The Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture (streaming, Kanopy) 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 cultural 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.
- Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity (streaming, Kanopy) While the social construction of femininity has been widely examined, the dominant role of masculinity has until recently remained largely invisible. Tough Guise is the first educational video to systematically examine the relationship between pop-cultural imagery and the social construction of masculine identities in the U.S. at the dawn of the 21st century.
- Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood, and American Culture (streaming, Kanopy) In this highly anticipated update of the influential and widely acclaimed Tough Guise, pioneering anti-violence educator and cultural theorist Jackson Katz argues that the ongoing epidemic of men's violence in America is rooted in our inability as a society to move beyond outmoded ideals of manhood. In a sweeping analysis that cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines, Katz examines mass shootings, day-to-day gun violence, violence against women, bullying, gay-bashing, and American militarism against the backdrop of a culture that has normalized violent and regressive forms of masculinity in the face of challenges to traditional male power and authority.
- Date Rape Backlash: Media & the Denial of Rape (streaming, Kanopy) How did date rape shift from a "shockingly frequent... outrage," as Newsweek once called it, to a controversy over "crying rape," as New York magazine later labelled it? Susan Faludi, bell hooks, Mary Koss, Katha Pollitt, Neil Malamuth, and others, analyse a classical case study in media "backlash."
- Boys to Men? - The Meaning of Manhood in America (streaming, Kanopy) Boys to Men?- Are You Listening' is part of a series of films from Media Education Foundation. In this moving follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Hoop Dreams, award-winning filmmaker Frederick Marx continues his exploration of the lives of ordinary young men and the extraordinary challenges they face.
- White Scripts And Black Supermen: Black Masculinities In Comic Books (streaming, Academic Video Online) A valuable and colorful examination of 40 years of changing representations of Black masculinity in a significant area of popular culture - comic books. This genre's reach and impact extended into other forms of cultural production such as movies and animated TV series.
- Afraid of dark : exploring black masculinity (streaming, Academic Video Online) Afraid of Dark, is a wonderfully insightful and entertaining, yet remarkably serious, documentary about Black men. This documentary, aims to destroy the misconceptions and stereotypes about black men that have often cost black men their lives by offering a genuine look at them from my eyes to the outside world, revealing the beauty in diversified strength, leadership and challenges; A reality that has often been distorted by others. Why is the world so afraid of dark?
- Representation & the media (streaming, Kanopy) In this illustrated lecture, Stuart Hall examines gender and racial stereotyping in the media. He focuses on the concept of "representation" to show how reality is never experienced directly, but is instead filtered through symbolic cultural categories
- The souls of Black girls the image of women of color in the media (streaming, Academic Video Online) Filmmaker Daphne Valerius's award-winning documentary The Souls of Black Girls explores how media images of beauty undercut the self-esteem of African-American women. Valerius surveys the dominant white, light-skinned, and thin ideals of beauty that circulate in the culture, from fashion magazines to film and music video, and talks with African-American girls and women about how these images affect the way they see themselves. The film also features powerful commentary from rapper and activist Chuck D, actresses Regina King and Jada Pinkett Smith, PBS news anchor Gwen Ifill, cultural critic Michaela Angela Davis, and others.
- Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex & Power in Music Video (streaming, Kanopy) Dreamworlds 3 examines the stories contemporary music videos tell about girls and women, and encourages viewers to consider how these narratives shape individual and cultural attitudes about sexuality. Illustrated with hundreds of up-to-date images, Dreamworlds 3 offers a unique and powerful tool for understanding both the continuing influence of music videos and how pop culture more generally filters the identities of young men and women through a dangerously narrow set of myths about sexuality and gender. In doing so, it inspires viewers to reflect critically on images that they might otherwise take for granted.
- The Pornography of Everyday Life (streaming, Academic Video Online) This trenchant and provocative documentary essay will generate thought, analysis, and discussion in a wide variety of courses in women's and gender studies, psychology, sociology, and popular culture. It incorporates more than 200 powerful images from advertising, ancient myth, contemporary art, and popular culture to demonstrate how pornography (defined as the sexualized domination, degradation, and objectification of women and girls and social groups who are put in the demeaned feminine role) is in reality a prevalent mainstream worldview.
Mass Media / Corporate Control
- Money for Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music (streaming, Kanopy) Of all mass cultural forms, popular music has historically been characterized by the greatest independence for artists and allowing access to a broader diversity of voices. However, in the contemporary period, this independence is being threatened by a shrinking number of record companies, the centralization of radio ownership and playlists, and the increasing integration of popular music into the broader advertising and commercial aspects of the market.
- Rich Media, Poor Democracy: How Journalism is Compromised by Corporations (streaming, Kanopy) If a key indicator of the health of a democracy is the state of its journalism, the United States is in deep trouble. In Rich Media, Poor Democracy, Robert McChesney lays the blame for this state of affairs squarely at the doors of the corporate boardrooms of big media, which far from delivering on their promises of more choice and more diversity, have organized a system characterized by a lack of competition, homogenization of opinion and formulaic programming.
- Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse (streaming, Kanopy) Media scholar Sut Jhally explores the devastating personal and environmental fallout from advertising, commercial culture, and rampant American consumerism. Ranging from the emergence of the modern advertising industry in the early 20th century to the full-scale commercialization of the culture today, Jhally identifies one consistent message running throughout all of advertising: the idea that corporate brands and consumer goods are the keys to human happiness. He then shows how this powerful narrative, backed by billions of dollars a year and propagated by the best creative minds, has blinded us to the catastrophic costs of ever-accelerating rates of consumption.
- The Crisis of the Cultural Environment: Media & Democracy in the 21st Century (streaming, Kanopy) Turning to issues of media policy, George Gerbner delivers a stinging indictment of the way the so called "information superhighway" is being constructed. By examining the logic of globalization he shows the ineffectual nature of our present responses - such as the V-Chip - to deal with the urgent crisis of the media. Showing the real uses to which the "information superhighway" will be put by its corporate masters, he urges the citizens of the world to struggle for democratic principles in the cultural environment.
- Digital Disconnect - Fake News, Privacy and Democracy (streaming, Kanopy) Based on the acclaimed book by media scholar Robert McChesney, DIGITAL DISCONNECT examines the ongoing attack on net neutrality and the concept of an open internet by telecom monopolies like Comcast and Verizon; explores how internet giants like Facebook and Google have amassed huge profits by surreptitiously collecting our personal data and selling it to advertisers; and shows how these tech and telecom monopolies have routinely colluded with the national security state to advance covert mass surveillance programs.
- Shadows of Liberty (dvd) Shadows of Liberty reveals the extraordinary truth behind the news media: censorship, cover-ups, and corporate control. Filmmaker Jean-Philippe Tremblay takes a journey through the darker corridors of the US media, where global conglomerates call the shots. For decades, their overwhelming influence has distorted news journalism and compromised its values...Tracing the story of media manipulation through the years, Shadows of Liberty poses a crucial question: why have we let a handful of powerful corporations write the news? We're left in no doubt--media reform is urgent and freedom of the press is fundamental.
For more films on the Media, browse the Media Education Foundation collection in Kanopy
- Media Education Foundation Collection The films in the Media Education Foundation (MEF) Collection encourage critical thinking about the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media. With a special focus on representations of gender and race, and the effect these representations have on identity and culture, MEF films are especially well-suited for use in Women's Studies, Sociology, Race Studies,Communication, Anthropology, Education, and Psychology courses.
See the following resources on Disability in Motion Pictures
- Films: Portrayals of People with Disabilities "The ways in which individuals and groups are portrayed in popular media can have a profound effect on how they are viewed by society at large. This tool represents an attempt to catalogue the representation of people with disabilities in motion pictures. Many of those representations are accurate, many are inaccurate, and some are even offensive. Their inclusion in this tool is intended to stimulate discussion and should by no means be considered an endorsement of their accuracy or appropriateness."
