ARCHIVE RESEARCH AND STUDY CENTER (ARSC) STUDENT RESEARCH AWARDS

The UCLA Film and Television Archive's Research and Study Center (ARSC) is pleased to announce the recipients of the ARSC Student Research Award for the 2007-2008 academic year:

PhD: Daniel Steinhart

Hollywood Promotional Featurettes in the 1960s: History, Form and Visual Evidence (download .pdf of paper)

Abstract: This essay examines Hollywood’s promotional featurettes of the 1960s through an analysis of their producers, exhibition venues, formal and rhetorical strategies, and attempts to capture the production process. It argues that the form matured in the 1960s, solidifying conventions that persist to this day. The essay also makes the case that these promos serve as an important site for understanding how feature films were promoted and how the industry was cultivating its self-image during a time of industrial transition.

Biography: Daniel Steinhart is a 2nd year PhD student in the Cinema & Media Studies Program at UCLA. He programs for The Crank, a graduate student-run film society, which screens films from the UCLA Film & TV Archive on a weekly basis. He is currently researching Hollywood’s postwar foreign productions, location shooting, and issues of film form and style

MA: Maya Smukler

Race, Suburbia and the Televised American Dream (download .pdf of paper)

Abstract: In the 1950s and early 1960s, popular television sit-coms such as Father Knows Best (1954-1963), Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963) and The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) served a double purpose: to entertain with depictions of suburban living, while at the same time using their narratives to act as a kind of advertising for the suburbanite way of life. Absent in the real life communities of early suburbia, as well as their on-screen counterparts, was any indication that people of color could be part of this new idealized mode of living. Made fifty years apart, the television programs Beulah (1950-1953) and Weeds (2005-Present) each structure home, family, and work within their narratives as a way to examine the on-screen relationship between race, suburbia and the televised pursuit of the American Dream

Biography: Maya Montañez Smukler has taught film studies at the New School University since 2002. Her interests, in both film and television, include: the impact of the sexual and feminist revolutions on Hollywood in the 1970s; and American comedy as an expression of cultural stress (Great Depression, Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, 9/11). Maya is currently completing her M.A. in Cinema Studies in UCLA’s Department of Film, Television and Digital Media.

About the Award

Submissions to the ARSC Student Research Award were open to enrolled Masters of Arts and PhD candidates in UCLA's Department of Film, Television and Digital Media or Moving Image Archive Studies programs.
The award was created to:

• To recognize excellence in graduate student critical and theoretical writings based on extensive primary research viewing and analysis of moving image materials held in the collections of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
• To promote and encourage extensive research access to collections held by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Submissions were evaluated upon how well they demonstrated:

• Sophistication and depth of research methodology and organization in the textural analysis of moving image collection materials held by the Archive.
• Originality of scholarship, quality, clarity, and strength of argumentation in the critical and theoretical analysis of complex cultural or historical issues related to specific films or television programs held by the Archive.

Past award recipients

2006-2007 recipients