In silent expressionist films like The Last Laugh (Murnau, 1924), costumes play a key role. Costumes designate and assign new identities to characters, further engrain a society’s hierarchical structure, and function as psychological influences on a character’s persona. As the French novelist Marguerite Duras once said: “A uniform is an...

John Ford's “My Darling Clementine” is one of the most famous Hollywood films of the 1950s and is considered to be a classic of the Western genre. The film tells the heavily fictionalized story of Wyattt Earp, a real historical figure whom Ford met and who, for him, represented the...

One movie that, to me, reflects how mistakes in communication can occur between cultures is the movie “Coming to America.” It is a film about a rich prince from the fictional African country of Zamunda, named Akeem who has his every need met by servants, and who has had a...

In the film "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" Fassbinder tells the story of Emmi and Ali, a couple that is mismatched from all appearances and on the basis of gender, race, and age. Emmi is a 60-year-old white woman, and Ali is a 40-year-old brown skinned Moroccan man. This match...

This film be take an emic perspective that seeks to shed light on how the culture of the Traveler Gypsies of Great Britain (also referred to inappropriately as Rom and far more accurately as Romnichal) who have settled in America for at least three generations impacts their celebration of Thanksgiving....