Abstract
This is a study of cross-cultural language use in Clint Eastwood's movie scripts. Eastwood, the renowned film director, starred and produced numerous movies in a variety of genres. The study focuses on the language of the movie scripts used in Eastwood’s War films and Western. Scripts were downloaded from a website "The Web’s Largest Resource for Movie Scripts" and were examined with KH Coder, a free software program, to analyze word frequency. Before looking at the words used in the movie scripts, cross-cultural language had to be defined. Edward Said coined the term "Orientalism", studying 19th and 20th-century post-colonial European literature. Typical cross-cultural language use, in other words, words frequently used to describe "Orientalism", was investigated from the original text downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Those words were compared to the word frequency of the British National Corpus (BNC). Frequently used words were listed on a cross-cultural word list. The same process was used to add typical words used in Hollywood movie scripts that depicted foreign culture. More words were added from the Internet dictionary sysurus.com to enrich the vocabulary. Comparing the Clint Eastwood’s movie scripts of War movies and Western to the original word list to analyze his works in terms of language is the goal of the study. Certain words in the script showed statistically significant differences with the enriched BNC, indicating that Eastwood’s work employs cross-cultural language, in other words, "Orientalism". This reveals his films can be researched from not only scenes but language.
Author Information
Yujin Fukatsu, Gakushuin Women's University, Japan
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