American Film History E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1708

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

From the American underground film to the blockbuster superhero, this authoritative collection of introductory and specialized readings explores the core issues and developments in American cinematic history during the second half of the twentieth-century through the present day.

• Considers essential subjects that have shaped the American film industry—from the impact of television and CGI to the rise of independent and underground film; from the impact of the civil rights, feminist and LGBT movements to that of 9/11.
• Features a student-friendly structure dividing coverage into the periods 1960-1975, 1976-1990, and 1991 to the present day, each of which opens with an historical overview
• Brings together a rich and varied selection of contributions by established film scholars, combining broad historical, social, and political contexts with detailed analysis of individual films, including Midnight Cowboy, Nashville, Cat Ballou, Chicago, Back to the Future, Killer of Sheep, Daughters of the Dust, Nothing But a Man, Ali, Easy Rider, The Conversation, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Longtime Companion, The Matrix, The War Tapes, the Batman films, and selected avant-garde and documentary films, among many others.
• Additional online resources, such as sample syllabi, which include suggested readings and filmographies, for both general and specialized courses, will be available online.
• May be used alongside American Film History: Selected Readings, Origins to 1960 to provide an authoritative study of American cinema from its earliest days through the new millennium

Leseprobe

The Editors

Cynthia Lucia is Professor of English and Director of Film and Media Studies at Rider University. She is author of Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film (2005) and writes for Cineaste film magazine, where she has served on the editorial board for more than two decades. Her most recent research includes essays that appear in A Companion to Woody Allen (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Modern British Drama on Screen (2014), and Law, Culture and Visual Studies (2014).

Roy Grundmann is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Boston University. He is the author of Andy Warhol's Blow Job (2003) and the editor of A Companion to Michael Haneke (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is Contributing Editor of Cineaste and has published essays in a range of prestigious anthologies and journals, including GLQ, Cineaste, Continuum, The Velvet Light Trap, and Millennium Film Journal. He has curated retrospectives on Michael Haneke, Andy Warhol, and Matthias Müller.

Art Simon is Professor of Film Studies at Montclair State University. He is the author of Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film (2nd edition, 2013). He has curated two film exhibitions for the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City and his work has been published in the edited collection “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2007) and in the journal American Jewish History.

Together they are the editors of the four-volume collection The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film (2012) and American Film History: Selected Readings, Origins to 1960 (2016), both published by Wiley-Blackwell.

American Film History

Selected Readings, 1960 to the Present

Edited by

Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon

This edition first published 2016

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

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Cover image: Top: Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, 1969 (dir. John Schlesinger), photo: United Artists/The Kobal Collection. Bottom: John Turturro and Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing, 1989 (dir. Spike Lee), photo: Universal/The Kobal Collection.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Notes

Part I 1960–1975

1 Setting the Stage: American Film History, 1960–1975

Film Industry Decline and Transformation

Cold War Anxiety

Gender Roles and Sexual Mores in Early 1960s Hollywood

“A Jumpin' Jackpot of Melody”: The Musical in the 1960s

Gender, Race, and the American Family

The Family According to Alfred Hitchcock

The Star System in Transition

A New Immorality

The Avant-garde

Independent Fiction and Nonfiction Film

The New Hollywood

Ethnic Heroes and Independent Women

Notes

References

2 Adults Only: Low-Budget Exploitation

AIP and Teenpic Exploitation

Adults-Only Exploitation Films

Note

References

3 Black Representation in Independent Cinema: From Civil Rights to Black Power

Integrationism

Community

Violence

Freedom

Conclusion

Notes

References

4 Cinema Direct and Indirect: American Documentary, 1960–1975

Drew Associates

Maysles, Pennebaker, and Leacock

Wiseman and Other Developments

Notes

References

5 Comedy and the Dismantling of the Hollywood Western

How the West Was Won

and Westerns on TV

Cat Ballou

and the Drunken Hero

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys

and the Aging Hero

Sex and Masculinity in

Paint Your Wagon

Conclusion

Note

References

6 The New Hollywood

Changes in the Film Industry

A New Audience and a New Relationship to Cinema

A Directors’ Cinema

Easy Rider

, New Hollywood Style, and the Unmotivated Hero

The New Hollywood's Class Performance

Genre Revision and

The Conversation

The End of the (First) New Hollywood

Notes

References

7 “One Big Lousy X”: The Cinema of Urban Crisis

Hollywood Renaissance

The City in Decline

Midnight Cowboy

Immigrant City

The Cowboy in New York

The Crisis and Black New York

The Urban Road Film

Conclusion

References

8

Nashville

: Putting on the Show: Or, Paradoxes of the “Instant” and the “Moment”

The Loser as Winner

Putting on the Show

Nashville as the Stage for a Family Melodrama

Altman's Mise-en-Scène

A History of the Present: One-Dimensionality, Flatness, and the Spaces in Between

Nashville

and Vanitas: Country Music's Funereal Baroque

Notes

References

9 Cinema and the Age of Television, 1946–1975

Transitions

A Maturing Relationship

Struggles for Control

Conclusion

Notes

References

Part II 1976–1990

10 Setting the Stage: American Film History, 1976–1990

Industry and Economics

The Return of Vertical Integration

Genre Cinema and Its Audiences – Trends and Cycles

A Cinema of Spectacle

Oedipus in a Time Machine

Stars

A Socially Engaged Cinema

Writer-Directors and Other Auteurs

Women in Hollywood

Gay and Lesbian Representation and Queer Cinema

Independent Film

Avant-garde Cinema

Documentary

Notes

References

11 Seismic Shifts in the American Film Industry

Recovery (1976–1988)

Resurgence (1989–1998)

Reintegration and Retrenchment (1999–)

Notes

References

12 Independent Film: 1980s to the Present

Breakthrough and Consolidation: The Development of the “Indie” Recipe

Crossing over (and Selling out?): Expansion, Incorporation, and the Blurring of Lines

Still Indie after All These Years: “Mumblecore” and Other Lower-Budget Productions

References

13 Reclaiming the Black Family: Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and the “L.A. Rebellion”

Killer of Sheep

: Redeeming the Everyday

Daughters of the Dust

: Imagining History

Notes

References

14 Feminism, Cinema, and Film Criticism

Second Wave Feminism: The Context

Feminist Film Criticism and History: Images of Women

Feminist Film Criticism and History: Female Film Practitioners

Feminist Film Criticism and History: Feminist Film Theory

The Film Scene

Feminist Documentaries

Feminist Experimental Cinema

Women's Independent and Commercial Cinema

Women's Cinema: Trickle-Down Feminism

References

15 American Avant-Garde Cinema from 1970 to the Present

New Feminisms

Ethnic Cinemas

New Engagements with the Personal

Recycled Cinema

Home-Made Cinema and the Microcinema Movement

Perceptual Retraining

Note

References

16 A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film

“An Introduction to the American Horror Film”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

and

The Omen

The Slasher Film

Halloween

and Spectacle Horror

Conclusion

Note

References

17 Back to the Future: Hollywood and Reagan's America

Reagan Era Hollywood and the Battle of Good versus Evil

Star Wars

: Securing the Son's Future through the Past

Back to the Future

: Restoring the Father's “Rightful” Place in the Present

Know Thy Father, Find Thyself, and Save the World

Time and the Triumph over Evil

References

18 “Stayin' Alive”: The Post-Studio Hollywood Musical

Overture: The Studio System Fades

From Stage to Screen: The Show Musical

Cabaret

and

Chicago

: Fosse redefining and redefined

Musicals in the Age of Postmodernism

One from the Heart

: It's Only a Paper Moon

Gotta Dance: The Dance Film (or: You Should be Dancing, Yeah)

Conclusion

Notes

References

Part III 1991 to the Present

19 Setting the Stage: American Film History, 1991 to the Present

Independents in a Changing Industry

A New Auteur Cinema

Female Directors in Hollywood

Black Filmmakers in Hollywood

Hollywood in the New Millennium

The Meaning of Movies: Universalizing Content for the Global Market

Competing Screens and (not so) New Ways of Seeing

Independent Film

Non-fiction and the Avant-garde

American Film in the Twenty-first Century

Notes

References

20 The Queer 1990s: The Challenge and Failure of Radical Change

Resistance

Reaffirmation

Regulation

Notes

References

21 24/7: Cable Television, Hollywood, and the Narrative Feature Film

Cable Television as Aftermarket

Production/Distribution

Conclusion

Notes

References

22 Plasmatics and Prisons: The Morph and the Spectacular Emergence of CGI

Prison Worlds and Liquid Metal

“They're guarding all the doors and holding all the keys”

Mutation and Morphological Becoming

Conclusion

References

23 Mainstream Documentary since 1999

Interrogating Reality

Moral Investigations

References

24 Truthiness Is Stranger than Fictition: The “New Biopic”

The “New Biopic” as Cultural Symptom

The Biopic as Prestige Object, and Other Alternatives

The “Old” Biopic in the US: A Brief History

The “Old” Biopic as a Critical Form: International Influences

The “New Biopic” as Recuperative Form: 1999–2008

Shards of History:

Ali

Shards of Identity:

I'm Not There

Against the “Fictition” of “Truthiness”

Notes

25 “Asia” as Global Hollywood Commodity

Introduction

“Asia” as Ethnicity

“Asia” as Cinematic Smorgasbord

Slumdog Millionaire

: Bollywood Bombast Meets Political Paternalism

The Karate Kid

: Cross-Cultural Transmission

Conclusion

Notes

References

26 The Blockbuster Superhero

The Evolution of Batman from the 1940s to the 2000s

Narrative, Seriality, and Superhero Auteurism

The Fallen Superhero

Conclusion: From Market Synergies to Aesthetic Synergies

Notes

References

27 Limited Engagement: The Iraq War on Film

The Soldier as Cinematographer

The Soldier as Perpetrator – and Victim

Operation Homecoming: The Veteran as Cipher

An Audience of One

Notes

References

28 The Biggest Independent Pictures Ever Made: Industrial Reflexivity Today

Last of the Independents

Realms of Reflexivity

Bibliotechnologies

From Library to Reboot

Indy and the Indie

Notes

References

29 Writing American Film History

Early Film Histories, 1926–1939

From Kracauer to the 1960s

The 1970s: Formative Years of Academic Film History

Major Film History Projects

New Technologies, Awaiting New Paradigms

References

Index

EULA

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1

The enraged Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) and the heavy-drinking George (Richard Burton), in Mike Nichols's

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(1966, producer Warner Bros. Entertainment), are not quite the perfect Production Code couple.

Figure 1.2

In Herbert Ross's

Play It Again, Sam

(1972, producer Arthur P. Jacobs and writer Woody Allen) film critic Allan (Woody Allen) falls in love with Linda (Diane Keaton), his best friend's wife, and uses Humphrey Bogart's cinematic persona as a role model for romance and self-sacrifice.

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1

Dolores (Annette Funicello) introduces Professor Sutwell (Robert Cummings) to teen sex habits on the beaches of southern California in William Asher's

Beach Party

(1963, producers James H. Nicholson and Lou Rusoff).

Figure 2.2

“Why, Barbara, why?” implores Barton Thomas (Sam Taylor) when he discovers his wife (Pat Barrington) is a prostitute at the climax of Fatin Abdel Wahab's

The Agony of Love

(1966, producer William Rotsler).

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1

White surveillance of the black community is revealed through abrupt pans or cuts in Michael Roemer's

Nothing But a Man

(1964, producers Michael Roemer, Robert Rubin, and Robert M. Young).

Figure 3.2

Abrupt pans or cuts also reveal white surveillance of the black community in Ivan Dixon's

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

(1973, producers Ivan Dixon and Sam Greenlee).

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1

Paul Brennan thinks about himself in Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin's

Salesman

(1968, producers and writers Albert Maysles and David Maysles).

Figure 4.2

Bob Dylan performs for the camera, with poet Allen Ginsberg gesturing to the side in D. A. Pennebaker's

Don't Look Back

(1967, producers John Court and Albert Grossman).

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1

Inebriated abjection: Lee Marvin as Kid Shelleen in Elliot Silverstein's

Cat Ballou

(1965, producer Harold Hecht).

Figure 5.2

The comedic potential of the aging hero: Robert Mitchum and George Kennedy in Burt Kennedy's

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys

(1969, producers Ronald M. Cohen and Dennis Shryack).

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1

The camera pans across the faces of commune members in the prayer scene from Dennis Hopper's

Easy Rider

(1969, producer Peter Fonda).

Figure 6.2

Harry (Gene Hackman) listens intently to his recording in

The Conversation

(1974, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola).

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1

Joe and Rico at the grave of Dominic Rizzo in John Schlesinger's

Midnight Cowboy

(1969, producer Jerome Hellman).

Figure 7.2

Cops and the criminal underworld collide in Barry Shear's racially charged

Across 110th Street

(1972, producers Fouad Said and Ralph Serpe).

Chapter 8

Figure 8.1

Barbara Jean and Haven Hamilton: Nashville gods in front of their own Parthenon, in

Nashville

(1975, director and producer Robert Altman).

Figure 8.2

Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) and Tom Frank (Keith Carradine) in

Nashville

(1975, director and producer Robert Altman).

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1

Joan Davis in trouble again in

I Married Joan

(1952–1955, NBC, producers Joan Davis, James Bank, P.J. Wolfson, and Richard Mack). (Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research).

Figure 9.2

Ed Wynn, Jack Palance, and Keenan Wynn in Rod Serling's

Requiem for a Heavyweight

(1956, producers CBS and Playhouse 90). (Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.)

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1

Young soldier Chris (Charlie Sheen) witnesses the brutal and senseless murder of innocent Vietnam villagers in Oliver Stone's

Platoon

(1986, producer Arnold Kopelson).

Figure 10.2

On his first “date” with his future wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) in Martin Scorsese's

Raging Bull

(1980, producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler), the already married boxer, Jake La Motta (Robert DeNiro), takes her to his mother's apartment, where they admire a photo of Jake and his brother (Joe Pesci) adorned with rosary beads.

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1

James Spader and Andie MacDowell in

sex, lies, and videotape

(1989, director, writer, and editor Steven Soderbergh and producers Robert F. Newmyer and John Hardy), which sparked the indie film movement of the 1990s.

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1

Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) in Kevin Smith's

Clerks

(1994, producers Scott Mosier and Kevin Smith, who was also the writer), distracted by a debate about the finer points of

Return of the Jedi.

Figure 12.2

A matter of taste distinction, on and off screen, as Miles (Paul Giamatti), the wine connoisseur in Alexander Payne's

Sideways

(2004, producers Michael London and George Parra), is observed by the skeptical Jack (Thomas Haden Church).

Chapter 13

Figure 13.1

Stan and his wife dance to “This Bitter Earth” in Charles Burnett's

Killer of Sheep

(1977, producer Charles Burnett).

Figure 13.2

Trula and Yellow Mary on a boat in Julie Dash's

Daughters of the Dust

(1991, producers Julie Dash, Arthur Jafa, and Steven Jones). (Courtesy of Julie Dash.)

Chapter 14

Figure 14.1

In

The Ties That Bind

(1984) Su Friedrich creates a portrait of her mother. (Courtesy of MoMA film stills archive.)

Figure 14.2

Susan (Melanie Mayron) and Rabbi Gold (Eli Wallach) in

Girlfriends

(1978, director and producer Claudia Weill).

Chapter 15

Figure 15.1

Director and producer William Greaves in

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

(1972). (Courtesy William Greaves.)

Figure 15.2

Moosehead Lake, Maine, in

13 Lakes

(2004, director and producer James Benning). (Courtesy James Benning.)

Chapter 16

Figure 16.1

The opening “work of art” in Tobe Hooper's

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

(1974, producers Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel).

Chapter 17

Figure 17.1

Obi-Wan Kenobi fights Darth Vader in the spectacular battle of good against evil in George Lucas's

Star Wars

(1977, producer Gary Kurtz).

Figure 17.2

Marty McFly plays matchmaker to reunite his parents and change his own future in Robert Zemeckis's

Back to the Future

(1985, producer Steven Spielberg).

Chapter 18

Figure 18.1

Shot on location, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's

West Side Story

(1961, producers Walter Mirisch, Robert Wise and Saul Chaplin) places formalist balletic dance moves on gritty New York City streets.

Figure 18.2

John Travolta as Tony Manero dominates the film frame in John Badham's

Saturday Night Fever

(1977, producer Robert Stigwood).

Chapter 19

Figure 19.1

Danny Ocean (George Clooney), as heist “director” in Steven Soderbergh's

Ocean's Eleven

(2001, producer Jerry Weintraub), supervises a costume fitting for one of his “players,” Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner), as “producer” Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) looks on.

Figure 19.2

Bowling partners – the Dude (Jeff Bridges), Walter (John Goodman), and Donnie (Steve Buscemi) in

The Big Lebowski

(1998, directors, producers, and writers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen) – are sympathetic slackers who serve as antidotes to capitalist, achievement-driven values.

Chapter 20

Figure 20.1

Robert Taylor (Armand) and Greta Garbo (Marguerite) in the death scene from George Cukor's

Camille

(1936, producers Bernard H. Hyman and Irving Thalberg).

Figure 20.2

Mark Lamos (Sean) and Bruce Davison (David) in the death scene from Norman René's

Longtime Companion

(1989, producer Stan Wlodkowski).

Chapter 21

Figure 21.1

Linda Fiorentino as the irresistible Bridget Gregory with Peter Berg (Mike) in John Dahl's

The Last Seduction

(1994, producer Jonathan Shestak).

Chapter 22

Figure 22.1

T-1000 morphs from checkerboard floor to security guard in

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

(1991, director and producer James Cameron).

Chapter 23

Figure 23.1

Kartemquin films, one of the documentary production houses that flourished in the documentary boom, had theatrical success with Steve James's

Stevie

(2003, producers Steve James, Adam D. Singer, and Gordon Quinn); here, Stevie (left) with Steve James.

Figure 23.2

Still images presented as objects of study, problems to solve in Errol Morris's

Standard Operating Procedure

(2008, producers Julie Ahlberg and Errol Morris).

Chapter 24

Figure 24.1

The hand of Sam Cooke anoints the faithful in Michael Mann's

Ali

(2001, producers Michael Mann and A. Kitman Ho).

Figure 24.2

Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) is a Dylanesque figure defined by isolation and negative space in Todd Haynes's

I'm Not There

(2007, producer Christine Vachon).

Chapter 25

Figure 25.1

The Bollywood-style dance finale of Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan's

Slumdog Millionaire

(2008, producer Christian Colson).

Figure 25.2

A training sequence atop the Great Wall of China in Harald Zwart's

The Karate Kid

(2010, producers Ken Stovitz, James Lassiter, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jerry Weintraub, and Will Smith).

Chapter 26

Figure 26.1

Heath Ledger's Academy Award-winning performance as the Joker in

The Dark Knight

(2008, director and producer Christopher Nolan).

Figure 26.2

Will Smith's Hancock rescues an injured police officer in Peter Berg's

Hancock

(2008, producers Michael Mann, Akiva Goldsman, James Lassiter, and Will Smith).

Chapter 27

Figure 27.1

Sgt Steve Pink films his fellow National Guardsmen as their convoy comes to a halt in Iraq in Deborah Scranton's

The War Tapes

(2006, producers Steve James and Robert May).

Figure 27.2

Dr Riyadh visits Abu Ghraib prison in Laura Poitras's

My Country, My Country

(2006, producers Laura Poitras and Jocelyn Glatzer). (Photo Paul Cobaugh.)

Chapter 28

Figure 28.1

Director Ang Lee dons the motion capture suit in order to generate the data that will become The Hulk in

Hulk

(2003, producer James Schamus). The roll of carpet stands in for Jennifer Connelly.

Figure 28.2

“This is all you”: Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) discovers the library made from his blood in the reboot, Louis Leterrier's

The Incredible Hulk

(2008, producer Kevin Feige, Gale Anne Hurd, and Avi Arad).

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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Acknowledgments

These volumes would not have been possible without the outstanding research and scholarship of our respected cinema and media colleagues whose essays appear on these pages. We thank them, along with other scholars whose advice has been invaluable along the way. We are deeply grateful to Wiley-Blackwell editor Jayne Fargnoli, who was instrumental in helping initiate this project and whose continued support and advice have been crucial. We also thank the highly professional and supportive Wiley-Blackwell editorial team, including Julia Kirk, Mary Hall, Mark Graney, Annie Jackson, Brigitte Lee Messenger, and so many others who have devoted their time and effort to designing these volumes. We also are grateful to Colin Root, Robert Ribera, Virginia Myhaver, and Nicholas Forster of Boston University who assisted in completing the four-volume hardcover edition from which this two-volume paperback edition is drawn. And there are so many others – both colleagues and students – at Rider University, Boston University, and Montclair State University to whom we owe our thanks. We also acknowledge the support of Rider University summer fellowships and research leaves that were instrumental in helping us complete both the hardcover and paperback editions.

We deeply appreciate the support of our families and friends through the years we've spent on this project, without whom we could not have sustained our efforts. We remain forever grateful to Barbara Berger, Isaac Simon and Tillie Simon; Mark Hennessey; and Ray Lucia for their love, patience, and support.

We especially want to acknowledge Robert Sklar. Bob's contribution to these volumes goes well beyond the two essays that appear here. His mentorship, scholarship, and friendship meant so much to us over the years. It is with great respect and gratitude that we dedicate these volumes to his memory.

The Editors

Preface

In many ways, this project began in the classroom. When organizing American film history courses, often taught over two semesters, we encountered the recurring problem of how best to select readings for our students. A strong narrative history seemed essential and several of these are available. But because of their scope and synthesis, these texts do not have space for lengthy discussions of important events, film cycles, or artists. We wanted to create a collection of essays that would provide such in-depth discussions. We also wanted original treatments of “bread-and-butter topics” – the rise of the star system, the place of specific genres like the musical and gangster film, the operations of classical-era studios and their executives – as well as less frequently discussed topics. As a means of introducing new areas of inquiry into our courses and the larger field of film scholarship, we especially wanted essays that would cover film production on the margins, such as the avant-garde and documentary, and films made by and on topics associated with underrepresented groups – whether women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, or gays and lesbians. Although we gladly reprinted several important essays, we mostly asked scholars to contribute new work, extending arguments they had made elsewhere or tackling entirely new areas. The result was The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, published in 2012, in four-volume hardback and online editions.

The book in front of you is part of a two-volume paperback collection of essays selected from the four-volume hardback/online edition. New material has been added, including expanded introductions and brief overviews of individual essays, designed to guide students by highlighting key concepts and separately listing “additional terms, names, and concepts” of importance. Overviews also reference related essays in the paperback and hardback/online editions,1 encouraging readers to expand their understanding and further their research. Professors adopting this paperback volume(s) also will have access to pedagogically oriented materials online, including sample syllabi for survey courses in American film history and syllabi using these volumes to create more focused “special topics” courses.

With the classroom in mind, new and expanded introductions address historical time periods marked by each section division. These introductions, it must be noted however, do not pretend to be all-inclusive treatments of their particular periods nor do they systematically survey every essay within each volume – that task is performed by the overviews accompanying individual essays. Rather, the introductions function as a type of establishing long shot, a perspective on some of the more significant events, individuals, films, and developments in a given era, with collected essays providing closer, more detailed views. We also acknowledge that lines of demarcation from section to section, period to period, should always be understood as permeable, never rigid. As such, we do discuss films in the introductory essays that, from time to time, cross these flexible boundary lines.

As with every such collection, and with narrative accounts of film history, we were forced to make difficult decisions about those topics and essays from the 2012 edition that we would include or omit. Undoubtedly, readers will wonder about the inclusion of some subjects and the absence of others. This is perhaps particularly the case when it comes to individual artists. There are essays here devoted to Griffith, Capra, and Wilder but not to Ford, Hawks, and Hitchcock. All historians are painfully aware of who and what gets left out. Moreover, the essays focusing on individuals certainly favor directors over screenwriters or cinematographers. On the other hand, the critical importance of the star is addressed in several essays, many of which simultaneously take up the issue of genre. Our choices grew from the desire to create volumes that could most usefully be integrated into American film history courses as they typically are taught. Although our expanded introductions aim to fill in gaps, we acknowledge that more than a few gaps do, inevitably, remain.

Two approaches to American film history have guided the best work in the field over the past 30 years. The first is a cultural history approach offering an account that combines attention to the industry and its development with a focus on the political and cultural events central to US history in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. A second approach undertakes a far more intensive study of the film industry's production, distribution, and exhibition strategies, tracing the emergence of a “classical” language and recording the shifting authorial forces within the industry. This has been accompanied by important work inside studio archives and with the professional/personal papers of key artists. In writing a history of American film, both approaches are indispensable.

With the 2012 Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film and this two-volume edition, we have sought to add a third, vital component – one that pays closer attention to the films themselves. Because the best narrative American film histories have limited space for elaborate, close readings of the films they reference,2 we believe there is room in historical studies for attention to the relationship between representational or formal strategies of specific films and their narrative or thematic concerns. At the same time, we recognize that a call to include close reading in historical analysis is not without its problems. The wider historical picture can sometimes get lost in studies too focused on one film or a narrow selection of films. Furthermore, interpretive claims about a film do not lend themselves to the type of verification offered by work that draws significantly on archival sources. Still, we believe that close reading is an essential activity and makes a significant contribution. Although the essays published here adopt a “selected topics” approach, we believe they strike a rewarding balance between close readings that contribute to and those that complement the cultural history and history of industry approaches to American film history.

It is commonplace by now to understand cinema not as simple reflection but rather as a form of mediation that produces a perspective on, but by no means a transparent window onto, the world – a world it also simultaneously helps to construct. The relationship between the cinema and the world it represents travels a nuanced route that first passes through the conventions and pressures of the film industry itself. As Robert Sklar has argued in his seminal text Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies,

We need to be wary of postulating a direct correspondence between society and cinema or condemning its absence. Film subjects and forms are as likely – more likely – to be determined by the institutional and cultural dynamics of motion picture production than by the most frenetic of social upheavals.3

With this in mind, we have found it useful to think in terms of groups or clusters of films, closely examining patterns or cycles that form a cinematic landscape. Such clusters or groupings, whether folk musicals of the 1930s and 1940s or comic Westerns of the 1960s, form a coherent field that past audiences had encountered over a relatively concentrated period of time. Essays built along such lines can serve the needs of scholars, students, and teachers who may have time to see or show only one film in class. The significance of that single film hopefully will be illuminated when placed in dialogue with other films with which it is grouped in any one of our essays.

Not all of the essays published here, however, cover clusters of films. Industry practices, significant moments of experimentation, and various modes of documentary and independent filmmaking also are considered, some as parts of larger cycles and some not. Indeed, the scope of these volumes and the larger 2012 collection permits us to place, side by side, a variety of approaches to American film history. We are pleased to showcase the varied methods employed and the range of material now being examined by film historians. We also are gratified to publish the work of so many people in our field, from senior, well-established scholars to those whose important work has garnered attention over the past several years.

Our hope is that, in moving through each volume in a relatively methodical fashion, students and scholars will discover a rich collage that will open new lines of inquiry and contribute to an ever-expanding knowledge of American film history.

The Editors

Notes

1.

University libraries and individuals can get information about accessing the online edition at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9780470671153

2.

We do not mean so much the type of formal analysis of systems offered in a work like David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson's

The Classical Hollywood Cinema

(1985) with its analysis that theorizes an entire mode of production, but, rather, historical writing that includes interpretive claims about the function of specific techniques – mise-en-scène, camerawork, lighting, editing, etc. – as deployed in a film or set of films.

3.

Robert Sklar,

Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies.

Revised and updated. New York: Vintage Books (1994), p. 322.

Part I1960–1975

1Setting the StageAmerican Film History, 1960–1975

Profound changes rocked American cinema in the second half of the twentieth century, many of which reflected new directions in the history of the nation. A number of these developments occurred or, at least, got under way in the 1960s. By mid-decade, the anxiety that American society had initially kept at bay through a spirit of hope and renewal fully came to the fore, and forces of social and moral cohesion rapidly gave way to tendencies of questioning and confusion. From social rebellion and economic inequality there emerged an impulse toward cultural experimentation that also affected American films, but that, in the late 1970s and 1980s, would give way again to more conservative tendencies, as American politics shifted to the right and the US film industry reconsolidated and eventually reorganized itself on a global scale.

Film Industry Decline and Transformation

The old studio system of five majors (MGM, RKO, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Twentieth Century-Fox), vertically integrated with their own theaters guaranteeing certain exhibition of their films, and three minor studios that did not own theaters (Columbia, Universal, United Artists) had been in place for over 30 years. By the early 1960s this system was largely defunct, its remnants subject to a series of mergers, acquisitions, and restructurings that would install a new generation of leaders at the top of the industry. Their predecessors, the legendary moguls, had run Hollywood as the nation's main purveyor of mass entertainment by defining movie-going as first and foremost a family affair. The new crop faced a dramatically shrinking audience base resulting from demographic shifts brought on by suburbanization and a widening generation gap. During the 1960s, when the nuclear family grew less stable, the industry survived, in part, by targeting the youth market, while not losing sight, for a time at least, of its general audience. And while the relative stability of the classical era had yielded long tenures for studio bosses, enabling them to impart their artistic imprimatur, from the 1960s forward, heads of production became cogs within sprawling corporate structures. In this climate, the rare producers able to flourish long enough to develop a creative oeuvre were semi-independent makers of B-movies, like Roger Corman, and, more recently, writer-director-producers epitomized by Steven Spielberg, whose tycoon status signals a different order of independence.

Hollywood in the 1960s not only found itself in search of a product and an audience, but the industry was also saddled with growing doubt as to how American it indeed was. By 1966, 30 percent of American films were independently produced and 50 percent were so-called runaway productions – films made in Italy, Spain, and other European countries that beckoned with cheap, non-unionized labor. By that time, also, the effects of the 1948 Paramount Decree, which forced the studios to divest their ownership of theaters, loosened Hollywood's stranglehold on the domestic market. Beginning in the 1950s, exhibitors' burgeoning independence had opened the door to foreign imports. Between 1958 and 1968, the number of foreign films in US distribution would gradually exceed the number of domestic productions (Cook 2004, 427). While in 1955 television was Hollywood's only serious competitor on the media market, ten years later American viewers had an unprecedented array of choices. They could buy a movie ticket to The Sound of Music or stay home and watch the Ed Sullivan Show; they could (fairly easily) see François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1963) or seek out numerous other examples of what would become known as the golden age of European art cinema – or, starting in the mid-1960s, they could catch the rising tide of third world films. If they were not keen on reading subtitles, their options included artistically ambitious independent films by such directors as John Cassavetes or quirky, independently made horror and exploitation flicks by the likes of George A. Romero and Russ Meyer. Or they could seek out innovative documentaries made in direct cinema style, or avant-garde films like Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls (1966), which had made the leap from urban underground venues and college film societies into commercial exhibition.

In order to minimize risk, studios began to strike international financing deals that shifted their role to co-producer or distributor of internationally made films, exposing the industry to a wave of foreign talent and new artistic influences. Filmmakers like John Schlesinger and Roman Polanski would parlay their new wave cachet into international careers and relocate to the US. Others, like Michelangelo Antonioni and UK-based American expatriate Stanley Kubrick, directed projects that, while financed by Hollywood, were shot overseas. A new generation of American directors, including Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, and John Frankenheimer, who had come from television and also were attuned to foreign film, would also help broaden the aesthetics of American films to a significant degree. The so-called “movie brats” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first generation of directors trained in film school, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma, would extend this trend.

By the early 1970s, Hollywood had assimilated stylistic elements from numerous outside sources. The pre-credit sequence it took from television. The long take – while already present in 1940s prestige productions and 1950s widescreen cinema – was extended further through emerging auteurs influenced by European art cinema, independent documentaries, and the avant-garde. These cinemas also helped trigger the opposite trend in Hollywood – the acceleration of cutting and the fragmentation of the image into split screens, multiple slivers (showcased in the credit sequence of The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968), or collage-type arrays (as featured in the famous “Pusher Man” sequence from the 1972 blaxploitation film Superfly). Finally, the prominence of new wave cinemas inspired a loosening of Hollywood continuity editing conventions. Individualists like Sam Peckinpah, who pioneered slow motion, and Hal Ashby, who popularized the use of telephoto lenses, further broadened the formal palette of studio releases.

When Hollywood staged a return to classical topics and treatments during the Reagan era, some of these devices would be toned down. What ultimately characterizes the era from the late 1960s to the present, however, is the studios' openness to using most any formal and narrative technique, provided it can be placed in the service of contemporary Hollywood storytelling. Since the 1990s, especially, the increased accessibility of filmmaking equipment (brought about by the digital revolution), the diversification of exhibition outlets (generated by the internet and convergence culture), and the emergence of new generations of auteurs (like Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant, Baz Luhrmann, Todd Haynes, Joss Whedon, and Guillermo del Toro, who work on a global scale and cross over between big studio and indie productions, as well as between film and television) have generated a more elastic, globalized film aesthetic for a youth audience weaned on graphic novels, YouTube, and cellphone movies.

Cold War Anxiety

Even before the emergence of the late 1960s counterculture and its wide-ranging critique of American institutions, filmmakers challenged the long-standing political consensus that had underwritten the Cold War.1 After over half a century in which the movies had lent their support to American military campaigns, celebrating the GIs and the officers who led them, a cluster of films released between 1962 and 1964 no longer marched in step with the Pentagon. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and Fail-Safe (1964) told essentially the same story, the former through black humor and the latter through straight drama. Both questioned the hydrogen bomb as a peacekeeping device and argued that the technology of destruction threatened humanity's power to control it. Although Fail-Safe ended with a powerfully frightening montage of freeze frames showing people on the streets just before nuclear detonation – vividly illustrating a population at the mercy of the nuclear age – it was Dr. Strangelove's absurdist satire and its eerily incongruent ending – as bombs explode to the song “We'll Meet Again” – that would resonate for decades after its release. Here, citizens are totally absent as the buffoons in charge of their safety channel their own sexual fears and fantasies into a race toward the apocalypse. Seven Days in May (1964) imagined a coup d'état planned within the Joint Chiefs to stop the President on the verge of signing a treaty with the Soviets. Even more shocking, if ideologically less coherent, as R. Barton Palmer argues in Volume I of this series, was The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a returning veteran story at its cruelest, in which Raymond Shaw, falsely decorated a Korean War hero, is brainwashed to become a communist assassin. Caught in the crossfire between Red China and the US, sacrificed by his power hungry mother, and forced to kill his wife, Shaw embodies the myriad suicidal and twisted psycho-sexual impulses woven into Cold War thinking.

Gender Roles and Sexual Mores in Early 1960s Hollywood

During the 1960s, the movies' representation of gender and sexuality underwent dramatic changes, particularly in regard to Hollywood's portrayal of women. Initially, however, change seemed slow to come, as Hollywood's star machinery reflected 1950s ideals of beauty and morality. The reigning box office star from 1959 to 1963 was Doris Day, whose persona in a string of popular, old-fashioned comedies combined Cold War ideals of feminine virtue and propriety with increasingly progressive attitudes towards female independence. In contrast to the best screwball comedies of the 1930s, in which a man and a woman meet, fall in love, separate, and then “remarry” as true equals, in Day's films marriage was not merely the default mode of heterosexual partnership. It became the idealized goal of her protagonists who, in their mid- to late thirties, were afraid of missing the boat that would carry them into the connubial haven of motherhood and domesticity. Glossy Madison Avenue settings in Pillow Talk (1959) and That Touch of Mink (1961) function as a backdrop for Day's smartly coutured female professionals, as she conveys her characters' conflicted feelings about acting on or reining in her carnal desires with comic verve – all indicative of pressure on Hollywood to acknowledge, however timidly, American women's increasing sexual agency.

Fear of female sexual independence also played itself out in a number of early 1960s dramas about prostitutes: the Hollywood prestige film Butterfield 8 (1960) starring Elizabeth Taylor, the quirky overseas production Never on Sunday (1960) shot by grey-listed Hollywood director Jules Dassin, and two of Billy Wilder's satirical comedies, Irma La Douce (1962) and Kiss Me, Stupid (1964). Sex for sale served as a displaced arena for exploring various facets of America's uneasy relation to female sexual agency, while ultimately conforming to the logic of a deeply puritanical and patriarchal culture. In best Academy Awards tradition, Butterfield 8 depicts the prostitute as a tragic, doomed figure whose choice of profession is rooted in an unhappy childhood. Never on Sunday and Irma La Douce draw on the stereotype of the hooker with a heart of gold, though both are social satires, with left-winger Dassin exploring what happens when prostitutes organize and Wilder lampooning the role of the state in upholding bourgeois mores. Kiss Me, Stupid is more abrasive in its indictment of male greed and hypocrisy, as Robert Sklar argues in his essay on Wilder in Volume I of this edition. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film's zany plot – revolving around a small-town composer's scheme of trafficking women to trick a Las Vegas crooner into buying one of his songs – was widely panned as offensively tawdry. As these films indicate, Hollywood was willing to entertain the notion of female sexual agency only if the woman ultimately was punished or the story was moved off-shore to exotic locations and couched within comedy's more outlandishly carnival- esque conventions.

“A Jumpin' Jackpot of Melody”: The Musical in the 1960s

In their efforts to domesticate the sexual revolution, the studios were eager to manipulate genre conventions, and none more so than those of the musical. A case in point is MGM's cannibalization of Elvis Presley, whose anarchic musical talent and erotic charge were wasted in dozens of mediocre musical comedies during the 1960s. Even the mildly self-reflexive Viva Las Vegas! (1963), one of Presley's better films, heeds mainstream mores by turning his Rusty, a daring race car driver with a musical streak, into an old-fashioned romantic suitor of his sweetheart (Ann-Margret). The film reflects the contradictions of its time by straddling various musical subgenres. Backstage conventions serve to exploit the couple's sexual magnetism in steamy yet safely contained stage rehearsals and show numbers, while off stage the romance plot unfolds with the help of fluidly integrated serenades. Added to the formula are elements of the folk musical and action-packed car racing and crash sequences. Touted by its trailer as “A Jumpin' Jackpot of Melody,” Viva Las Vegas! is exemplary of how Hollywood, by 1963, extended its time-honored strategy of blending various genres into the musical (Altman 1999), having become so uncertain of its target audience that it tried to be all things to all people.

The trajectory of the musical during this period poignantly illustrates that, despite babies of the earlier boom having grown up to be among the nation's most sophisticated and regular of moviegoers, and the youth market having become an increasingly important demographic, Hollywood still often aimed at a general audience. Family fare remained popular through such vehicles as Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965). Industry attempts to recreate that film's overwhelming success failed, however, in such hopelessly old-fashioned yet high-budget extravaganzas as Dr. Dolittle (1967), Camelot (1967), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Star! (1968), Paint Your Wagon (1969), Darling Lili (1970), and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) (Cook 2000, 496). The reasons for such failures in the post-studio era are multiple, as Karen Backstein argues in this volume.

As America's musical tastes greatly expanded in the post-war period, especially under the influence of rock 'n roll and rhythm and blues, the repertoire of Hollywood music adapted as well. While a growing number of films incorporated songs by new and emerging artists – Simon and Garfunkel for The Graduate (1967), Leonard Cohen for McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Isaac Hayes for Shaft (1971), and, of course, a small catalog of rock hits for Easy Rider (1969) – there remained an important place for traditional scores, especially given the later box office success of futuristic or spectacle cinema. Among those whose music crossed over into popular listenership, but were best known for the movies, was Henry Mancini. After a year at Juilliard and World War II service, Mancini went to work at Universal where he created the stunning music for Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958). Best known, perhaps, for the soundtrack to Blake Edwards's comedy The Pink Panther (1963), the Mancini sound became attached to the early 1960s, with sophisticated scores tinged with sadness, as those written for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962).

Gender, Race, and the American Family

Hollywood had been furnishing sober, at times ominous, assessments of the state of the American family even before the inception of suburbia. In the 1960s, however, when the family was far less stable, surprisingly few films dealt with this subject. One reason was the decline of the melodrama – a genre traditionally focused on the family. Peaking in popularity with such films as Written on the Wind (1957), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Home from the Hill (1960), 1950s-style depictions of family strife would appear overwrought just a few years later. Stories involving sex and social mores, as featured in such films as Peyton Place (1957) that, upon release, were considered daring and controversial, by the mid-1960s found themselves serialized for television. The family dramas that did get made in the early and mid-1960s were just as claustrophobic as their precursors, but they were filmed in a more realistic style that no longer relied quite so heavily on melodramatic excess and overly ornate mise-en-scène. Adult themes, however, continued to function as a signifier for realism in these films, even as directors like Otto Preminger and Elia Kazan raised the bar on what “adult” would come to mean. As had been the case in the previous decade (and, to a certain extent, before World War II), the industry continued to look to the Broadway stage for adult source material, reaffirming the link between American film and American theater throughout the 1960s.

Kazan had been one of Hollywood's top directors in the 1950s with such adult dramas as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), and A Face in the Crowd (1957) – several of which had led to clashes with censors. His 1961 Splendor in the Grass, set in late 1920s rural Kansas, is a story about two teenage lovers whose relationship is stifled by a poisonous climate of materialism, sexual repression, and family hypocrisy. Written by William Inge, whose 1950s plays on small town sexual mores, Picnic (1955) and Bus Stop (1956), became Hollywood box office hits, the film dealt with such issues as premarital sex, rape, abortion, and society's double standards concerning male and female promiscuity. As Cynthia Lucia points out in Volume I of this edition, such issues were just as prevalent in early 1960s America of John F. Kennedy as they were in 1929 – both moments in history on the cusp of sweeping change. Splendor in the Grass, like many 1960s family dramas, reflects Hollywood's own anxieties about changing perspectives on gender and sexuality.

Although Hollywood made fewer family dramas during this period, it expanded the scope of the genre by incorporating the issue of race in films like A Raisin in the Sun (1961), which depicts a black working-class family's internal and external struggles as they aspire to leave their inner city apartment and move to a white suburb. Made independently by Broadway and TV producers David Susskind and Philip Rose for Columbia Pictures, A Raisin in the Sun was, of course, a white production. The studio, however, did allow black playwright Lorraine Hansberry to write the script (under tight supervision), adapting her own 1959 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award-winning Broadway play, which skillfully combined an indictment of racism with so called “cross-over issues” concerning education, entrepreneurship, and home ownership. The film got made, in large part, because of Hollywood's interest in filmed literature and in the rising African-American star Sidney Poitier (Reid 1993, 58).

For black-themed treatments in Hollywood, Poitier's popularity proved a blessing and a curse. He became the first black superstar in American film, but the success of his vehicles hinged on stripping his characters of any political dimension. The formula was at its peak in the biggest – and, as it would turn out, the final – hit of Poitier's career, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), a mixed-race family film in which a white family's liberal ideals are put to the test when their daughter announces that she intends to marry a black man. While hugely popular, the film deeply divided the black community given Hollywood's knee-jerk attempt to ennoble and whitewash Poitier's character – an overachiever and paragon of moral virtue embodying a stereotype Poitier often was forced to play. Although the Civil Rights Movement was at the forefront of national attention in the early 1960s, the studios limited their treatment of race to fewer than a handful of dramas, many of which featured mostly white casts, as true of many Poitier films.

It fell to independent cinema to furnish overtly political stories of black families and black struggle, although these films still were made by white filmmakers. Paul Young and Michael Roehmer's nuanced and gripping drama, Nothing But a Man (1963), tells the story of Duff, a railroad worker in the deeply racist South, who struggles to overcome racism and economic adversity in order to found his own family. While the film was poorly distributed, it launched the career of its male lead, Ivan Dixon, who ten years later directed The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), a film both serious and satirical about the history of the civil rights struggle. These films, as Alex Lykidis discusses in this volume, provide enlightening bookends to the civil rights era.

If Hollywood's adaptation of Hansberry's drama indicated that the industry was becoming interested in black-themed plays, the playwright most popular with studios up until the early 1960s was Tennessee Williams, whose dramas about dysfunctional and taboo aspects of white southern family life had generated solid box office. In 1962, however, a new play signaled a changing of the guard. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by the then unknown Edward Albee upped the ante with its unsympathetic, at times absurdist, portrait of the combative marriage of a middle-aged couple, George and Martha. With a nod to Williams's legacy, Albee's play references the older playwright's 1947 drama A Streetcar Named Desire. Although Streetcar concludes with the birth of a child, however, Virginia Woolf ends with the death of a child – a child that was never more than a fantasy functioning as both tonic and glue for a marriage founded on lies, denial, and false hopes. This same toxic combination dramatically alters the marriage of Streetcar's young couple, the Kowalskis (with Stella Kowalski choosing to stay with her husband even after learning that he raped her sister). As bookends to the baby boom years, both plays represent American families devolving from dysfunction into horror story. Warner Bros. adapted both into highly acclaimed and commercially successful films. The 1951 Williams adaptation, produced under the watchful eye of the still intact Production Code, changed the play's ending, forcing Stella to leave her brutish, rapacious husband. The film thus suppresses the true meaning of Stella's acquiescence in the play, which penetrates the sheen of morality and emotional commitment to reveal the family as an institution driven by practicality and accommodation aimed at securing material comfort and economic stability. With the Production Code all but buried, the costly, high-profile 1966 adaptation of Virginia Woolf, by contrast, placed such hypocrisy front and center. The horror of middle-class family morality heavily informed Elizabeth Taylor's Oscar-winning performance as Martha, a character who, like Poitier's Walter Young in A Raisin in the Sun and Ivan Dixon's Duff Anderson in Nothing But a Man