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Record W2284628050 · doi:10.14288/1.0099552

Arabs in Hollywood : Orientalism in film

2009· article· en· W2284628050 on OpenAlexaff
Najat Z. J. Dajani

Bibliographic record

VenuecIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicJewish and Middle Eastern Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHollywoodOrientalismArtArt historyLiterature

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Early representations of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood productions were largely drawn from the literary works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They, in turn, were inspired by depictions found in Elizabethan manuscripts, which took their cue from the Middle Ages. Films like The Sheik (George Melford, 1921) and The Son of the Sheik (George Fitzmaurice, 1926) present the Arab as a barbaric savage, not yet cultured by civilization. These 'desert romances' started a filmic tradition, which lasted for a number of decades. Portrayals of the desert Arabs in The Sheik also left their mark on 'historically based' films, like Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) and Khartoum (Basil Dearden, 1966). By the late sixties, however, representations of Arabs and Muslims had changed in a drastic manner. No longer seen as romantic and erotic, Arab/Muslim portrayals in Hollywood films were influenced by the politics of the day. Islam not only posed an ideological threat to Christianity, but was also staking territorial and nationalistic claims, in the form of the Palestinians fighting for self-determination. Depictions from Hollywood followed suit, with films like Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977), opting to take Israel's side, in its fight against the Arabs. Today's world, which calls for a peaceful resolution to conflict has once again, brought upon a change in Arab/Muslim representations found in Hollywood productions. A nostalgic search for the exotic foreigner can once again be seen in films like The 13th Warrior (John McTiernan, 1999). Just as they did after the Vietnam War, American filmmakers are now reflecting upon past actions in the Gulf, through such films as Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999). Much as Professor Edward W. Said and other post-colonialists have done, I will concentrate on singling out the negative aspects of Orientalism, with regard to the chosen films. I will trace the origins of Arab/Muslim images in Hollywood since the early days of film to the present day. Films are also analyzed and viewed through historical, political and cultural contexts to show why these images prevail, and what changes, if any, have been presented on the screen.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.724
Threshold uncertainty score0.666

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.206
Teacher spread0.195 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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