Kanopy Videos
On-demand streaming video for over 16,000 films including content from the BBC, PBS, and Critereon Collection. Public performance rights for educational use are included.
These videos are searchable via the Cerritos College Catalog or directly through Cerritos.kanopystreaming.com
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. The film looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of surface objectification and beauty, taking us into the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations. With its sustained focus on the fundamental importance of gender, power, and how our perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman get reproduced and reinforced on the level of culture in our everyday lives, The Codes of Gender is certain to inspire discussion and debate across a range of disciplines.
Like drawing back a curtain to let bright light stream in, Miss Representation uncovers a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see. Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, 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. In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message that our young women and men overwhelmingly receive is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader. While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades, the United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors. Stories from teenage girls and provocative interviews with politicians, journalists, entertainers, activists and academics, like Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Margaret Cho, Rosario Dawson and Gloria Steinem build momentum as Miss Representation accumulates startling facts and statistics that will leave the audience shaken and armed with a new perspective.
Dreamworlds 3, the highly anticipated update of Dreamworlds 2 (1995), examines the stories contemporary music videos tell about girls and women, and by extension boys and men, providing a meticulous analysis of how these narratives reflect and shape individual and cultural attitudes toward femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and race. Systematically dismantling music video's most persistent and disturbing stock representations, and setting them against cases of real-world violence, sexism and discrimination, the film inspires viewers to critically examine how the distorted images of the "Dreamworld" connect with the lives of real girls and women, and real boys and men.
Anything You Want To Be was one of the earliest and most popular films of the Women's Movement. Made in 1970, this groundbreaking film about a teenager's humorous collision with sex-role stereotypes was one of the first to explore the external pressures and the more subtle, internal pressures a girl faces in finding her identity. In a series of comical vignettes, a bright high school girl finds that, despite her parents' assurance that she can be anything she wants to be, she is repeatedly foiled by social expectations and media stereotypes. Anything You Want To Be is one of New Day's founding films. The film was restored with a grant from the Women's Film Preservation Fund and was recently honored with screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, NY and at the Tribeca Film Festival.