Smoke Signals film

What Smoke Signals Means 20 Years Later

This groundbreaking film was the first movie to be written, directed, co-produced, and acted by Native Americans.
Anna May Wong

Hollywood’s Asian American Heroes

Asian American detectives played by actors Anna May Wong and Keye Luke had a minor but notable place in 1930s and 40s Hollywood.
Baby Peggy

The Last Silent Film Star

The silent film star once known as Baby Peggy reminisces about how, decades before #TimesUp, children and women were exploited by Hollywood.
Adults reading comics

Why Adults Love Comic Books

There's more to comic books than bright colors, gratiutious violence, and whimsy. Comics tells stories that are deeply significant to their readers.
Hollywood's disappearing lesbians

American Film’s Disappearing Lesbians

In the 1990s, lesbian characters were repeatedly transformed into "close friends" in film adaptions of LGBTQ-themed books.
Phantasmagoria

The Magic Lantern Shows that Influenced Modern Horror

Eighteenth and early nineteenth century audiences were delighted and horrified by these spectral apparitions conjured in dark rooms.
Little Women movie

My Summer of Watching Little Women

What the author learned from her mother, a feminist academic doing a research project on film adaptations of Little Women.
Rotten Tomatoes film industry

How Rotten Tomatoes Changed the Film Industry

In 2008, a panel of film critics gathered to talk about the future of film reviewing as a profession in the age of the internet.
Black Panther Double Consciousness

Black Panther and Double-Consciousness

Double identity, present in both Marvel's Black Panther and in the critical race theory of double-consciousness, enables black American viewers to see their two identities played out on screen.
Mae West Belle of the Nineties

The End of American Film Censorship

The Hays Code kept Hollywood on a short leash until the Supreme Court decided in 1952 that films were protected by the First Amendment.