School of Theatre, Film and Television

One of the country’s most picturesque cities and conveniently located just a few hours’ drive from Hollywood, San Francisco became the most frequently and extensively filmed American city beyond the production hubs of Los Angeles and New York in the three decades after World War II. During those years, the cinematic image of the city morphed from the dreamy beauty of Vertigo to the nightmarish wasteland of Dirty Harry, although San Francisco itself experienced no such decline. This intriguing disconnect gives impetus to Hollywood in San Francisco, the most comprehensive study to date of Hollywood’s move from studio to location production in the postwar era.

In this thirty-year history of feature filmmaking in San Francisco, Joshua Gleich tracks a sea change in Hollywood production practices, as location shooting overtook studio-based filming as the dominant production method by the early 1970s. He shows how this transformation intersected with a precipitous decline in public perceptions of the American city, to which filmmakers responded by developing a stark, realist aesthetic that suited America’s growing urban pessimism and superseded a fidelity to local realities. Analyzing major films set in San Francisco, ranging from Dark Passage and Vertigo to The Conversation, The Towering Inferno, and Bullitt, as well as the TV show The Streets of San Francisco, Gleich demonstrates that the city is a physical environment used to stage urban fantasies that reveal far more about Hollywood filmmaking and American culture than they do about San Francisco.

In a series of seminal articles, Swadesh (1951, 1955) and Lees (1953) developed the theories of lexicostatistics and glottochronology, and detailed the methods for their application. There followed a spate of enthusiastic studies to test and refine those methods, discussed by Hymes (1960) in his lengthy evaluation of the progress of lexicostatistical theory. At that time, Hymes deemed the glottochronological method a potentially useful tool for the dating of language splits, and called for its further refinement. Yet, since Bergsland and Vogt's (1962) scathing and cogent critique of the method, glottochronology has been neglected. Neither defended nor disproven definitively, glottochronology seems to have died a silent death. Our purpose in this paper is to resurrect it once again, to test the method with data from nine modern dialects of Arabic, to examine the problems involved in its application, and to scrutinize the assumptions which underlie the theory.

A study examined the nature of functional literacy among 671 Moroccan children, aged 11-14, and the relationship of functional and classroom literacy to background factors and school experience. Students were assessed on a seric, of household literacy tasks sampling knowledge of spatial and monetary print conventions, specialized vocabulary, and ability to relate the written word to real-world contexts. The most difficult tasks involved spatial, monetary, and telegraphic text conventions. Correct responses were associated with grade level achieved and with remaining in school. Among younger children, cognitive level, reported home literacy activity, and urban environment were significant predictors of both household and school-type literacy. By contrast, predictors of household literacy differed considerably from those of school literacy among older children. Cognitive level, factual knowledge, and grade level attainment predicted both types of literacy, but urban residence, male gender, and home literacy activities appeared to play a greater role in fostering household literacy, while school dropout and age predicted school-type literacy only. The pattern of results indicates that knowledge of literacy conventions required for successful performance of common household literacy tasks may be acquired only partially, even after five years of formal schooling, and different pedagogical approaches may be required to promote development of each literacy type. (Author/MSE)