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Although films rarely act as mirror reflections of everyday reality, they are, nevertheless, powerful cultural expressions of the dreams and desires of the American public. This work provides a complete post-World War II survey of American cinema and its often complex and contradictory values.
At the end of World War II, Hollywood basked in unprecedented prosperity. Since then, numerous challenges and crises have changed the American film industry in ways beyond imagination in 1945. Nonetheless, at the start of a new century Hollywood's worldwide dominance is intact - indeed, in today's global economy the products of the American entertainment industry (of which movies are now only one part) are more ubiquitous than ever. How does today's "e;Hollywood"e; - absorbed into transnational media conglomerates like NewsCorp., Sony, and Viacom - differ from the legendary studios of Hollywood's Golden Age? What are the dominant frameworks and conventions, the historical contexts and the governing attitudes through which films are made, marketed and consumed today? How have these changed across the last seven decades? And how have these evolving contexts helped shape the form, the style and the content of Hollywood movies, from Singin' in the Rain to Pirates of the Caribbean? Barry Langford explains and interrogates the concept of "e;post-classical"e; Hollywood cinema - its coherence, its historical justification and how it can help or hinder our understanding of Hollywood from the forties to the present. Integrating film history, discussion of movies' social and political dimensions, and analysis of Hollywood's distinctive methods of storytelling, Post-Classical Hollywood charts key critical debates alongside the histories they interpret, while offering its own account of the "e;post-classical."e; Wide-ranging yet concise, challenging and insightful, Post-Classical Hollywood offers a new perspective on the most enduringly fascinating artform of our age.
Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period—including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves—were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These "seventies films" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood’s embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters’ interior lives.
The national cinemas of Czechoslovakia and East Germany were two of the most vital sites of filmmaking in the Eastern Bloc, and over the course of two decades, they contributed to and were shaped by such significant developments as Sovietization, de-Stalinization, and the conservative retrenchment of the late 1950s. This volume comprehensively explores the postwar film cultures of both nations, using a “stereoscopic” approach that traces their similarities and divergences to form a richly contextualized portrait. Ranging from features to children’s cinema to film festivals, the studies gathered here provide new insights into the ideological, political, and economic dimensions of Cold War cultural production.
This is an introduction to the study of America since 1945--the period in which the US became a world power. Alternate chapters provide the historical background and illuminate themes through culture and the arts, grounding students in the facts before exploring more interpretive approaches. In this way, awareness of central currents in art, film, theater, intellectual history and media is developed alongside an understanding of political and social change.
This selection of essays taken from Hollywood Quarterly reflect the eclecticism of the journal, with sections on animation, the avant-garde, and documentary to go along with a representative sampling of articles about feature-length narrative films.
This text introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essys on important topics in U.S. history. The book asks students to evaluate primary surces, test the interpretations and draw their own conclusions.
This is the most comprehensive analysis to date of Nazi film propaganda in its political, social, and economic contexts, from the pre-war cinema as it fell under the control of the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, through to the end of the Second World War. David Welch studies more than one hundred films of all types, identifying those aspects of Nazi ideology that were concealed in the framework of popular entertainment.