American Cinema/American Culture

Book Description

Developed to accompany the Annenberg-funded telecourse American Cinema, and written under the aegis of The New York Center for Visual History, this text offers a fascinating look at the interplay between the movie industry and mass culture in America.

Ideal for film appreciation and film and culture courses found in Cinema Studies, English, History, American Studies, or other departments, American Cinema/American Culture first examines the industry, its narrative conventions, and its cinematographic style.

Following this introduction, students are exposed to the sweep of film history in the U.S. using five genres as the bases for discussion and focusing on the point at which each had the greatest affect on the industry, film aesthetics, and American culture.

Finally, the book concludes with a look at Hollywood post World War II, giving separate chapter coverage to the effects of the Cold War, television, the counterculture of the Sixties, directors from the film school generation, and the trends of the Eighties and Nineties.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent as a Historical Text Book.......2007-03-24

So, I expected this book to be a bit more fun. Unfortunately, the fun element is missing. However, in fairness, the book serves as a thorough textbook for the history of American Cinema and its techniques and various genres. I did enjoy reading about the early studio system and the vast amount of control this oligopoly held. There were some very good critiques and studies of specific films, and a bit about specific actors and actresses. Even a bit about directors. Though packed with information, the book just lacks an entertainment value that it could and should have pulled off based on the subject matter.

The different genres studied include:

Westerns
War Movies
Silent Films
Film Noire
Screwball Comedies

As well as an overall dissertation on Classical Hollywood Style and its various techniques.

Not very good..........2005-03-05

I got this book for a class on the history of cinema. Unfortunately, as the title implies, it only deals with American Cinema. If this is a book for school, check out the class to see if foreign films and film history will be discussed. This book is, again, as the title implies--one-sided. Most of the movies it discusses, gives away crucial plot-points and endings. Some movies that I've been dying to see were ruined in just one or two sentences. This book is also very puffed-up and biased (I don't know any other way of explaining it). Many times throughout the book, Belton seems like James Lipton of "Inside the Actor's Studio", and goes on and on about the greatness of Hollywood, actors, director's, and films with nothing negative to say. It's not at all critical of anything and the author frequently inserts his own interpretation of films into the general text, which I found a little pompous. The book does offer up some interesting facts about the early history and the birth of cinema, but there's something about the way this book was written that makes it hard to stay interested. I think the chapters about film genres exaggerate the importance of some of them, and neglects other genres completely, ie. Horror, Thriller, Mystery, Sci-fi, Animation, Epics, etc. Again, question the instructor and/or look at the class syllabus before siging up if this is the only book for this class. I don't believe this is a comprehensive and unbiased view of cinema and it's history.

A very useful beginners guide to American film........2003-01-08

Years ago I took an intro-level film class at a community college. This was the text for the class. It was accompanied (at least in my class) by a PBS video series that combined film clips with interviews and historical information. Going into the class I had little more than a passing interest in film and film history. But after taking that class, my passion for film has grown exponentially with each year. But back to the book, I really liked this book and highlighted my way from the front cover to the back cover. There are of course limitations to this book. Firstly, it deals only with American films. Secondly, this book barely breaks the 300-page mark - hardly a comprehensive volume. You aren't going to get any information on John Cassavetes here or anything. Now if you have a chance to use this book in conjunction with the PBS films, I think you'll do much better (in fact I think the vids even give a nod to Cassavetes), but even then please note that this material is for an INTRO-level film class, and won't be much good for someone who already knows a fair amount about American film. But with that in mind, the book still has a lot to offer someone looking to introduce themselves to film history.

The first third of the book starts with the birth of film, moves quickly on to the Hollywood studio system, and walks us through the basics of film style (camerawork, lighting, editing, etc.). The second third covers the basics of film genre; there is a chapter about film noir, one on comedies, one on war films, and one on westerns. This second section was particularly useful to me. I could read each chapter, jot down a list of promising titles, hit my local video store, and I was good to go. The third section covers American film after World War II. In this section things seem a little compressed. 110 pages for 50 years of film? A lot is lost on the cutting room floor. But there's lots to dig into all the same. There's a chapter on Hollywood during the McCarthy years (yikes!), one on film's evolution during the emergence of television, a chapter on 1960s counterculture films, one on the film school directors of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally a pretty weak chapter on film in the 1990s. Oh yeah, and at the end of the book there's a handy glossary (in case you're ever stuck on what point-of-view editing is) and a pretty thorough index.

Again, not a book for someone who already has a good feel for film history. But definitely a great resource for someone new to film studies, or for someone who has trouble finding a movie at Blockbuster on Fridays. It did a great job getting me excited about movies, and I imagine its done the same for others.... A good companion to this text (or possibly an all-out replacement of it) is Scorsese's VHS/DVD, "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies."

Movie spoiler.......2002-10-08

This would be a great book to read if you have no intention of watching the films discussed within, or if you've already seen them. On quite a few films, it tells the whole plot, in detail, from opening to end credits.

I also don't like the prose of the author, as he excessively uses sentences "in quotations". The writing structure is very formulaic and boring. The "5 paragraph essay" format is good for high school students learning to write, but imagine an entire book written that way. I can only read it for 15 minutes before losing interest.

The book does, however, provide plenty of examples from a variety of films.

Book Description

The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as "Hollywood's greatest year," saw the release of such memorable films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Stagecoach. It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series History of the American Cinema, Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.

Customer Reviews:

Great volume among all 10 of the Series now published........2003-09-24

Balio et al. assemble a fine addition to the Ten Volume Series of the History of American Cinema, conceived and edited by Charles Harpole, foremost film scholar and documentarian. No library, large or small, should be without all ten volumes in the Series because this is the definitive work on the subject.
The Series is published by Scribner-Thomson-Gale company and by the University of California Press. You may have to order direct because these are not discounted trade books.

Surprisingly Dull.......2003-03-27

I had high hopes for this book. The volumes in this series on the origins of cinema, the Twenties and the Forties are very good. This book, however, proved a chore to get through.

The big problem for me was that Balio seemed more interested in the movie companies as organizations and less interested in the films themselves. Compounding this was the fact that he sees the Thirties as a unit, and believes that the division of the decade's films into pre-Code and post-Code, with 1934 as the turning point, is a myth. Thus, to him, the "fallen women" films, Mae West comedies, classic gangster films, and horror films all died out because the public was tired, not because of censorship problems.

Balio sees filmmaking in the Thirties as dominated by the studios and with directors being hired guns. Hence there is no real discussion of any directors. Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra and Josef von Sternberg are barely mentioned, except when Balio complains that their films didn't make enough money.

Indeed, he seems to have no view of his own about the films. Instead, he views FILM DAILY and VARIETY as the voice of God. If they put the film on their 10 best list, it is good, and if they didn't, it isn't worth talking about. The idea that some films popular in the Thirties are no longer highly regarded or that some films despised at the time have become viewed as classics seems not to interest him at all.

Customer Reviews:

Vietnam on Film.......2004-06-11

These film essays look at documentary filmmaking and news reporting on the Vietnam War. I read this book as part of a film class at in college. This book is best for a person interested in the representation of war, especially this particularily divisive war will be moved by reading this book.

Sleepless in Heaven!.......2000-02-24

This book was amazing! It was very insightful and deep. I learned more about this era from this book than i ever did in high school!

Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I (Amsterdam University Press - Film Culture in Transition)

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Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I (Amsterdam University Press - Film Culture in Transition)
Kristin Thompson
Manufacturer: Amsterdam University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 9053567089

Book Description

Ernst Lubitsch, the German filmmaker who left Berlin for Hollywood in the 1920s, is best remembered today for the famous "Lubitsch touch" in such masterpieces as Ninotchka, which featured Greta Garbo's first-ever screen smile, and Heaven Can Wait. Kristin Thompson's study analyzes Lubitsch's earlier silent films of 1918 to 1927 in order to trace the mutual influences between the classical Hollywood film style as it had evolved in the 1910s and the German film industry of the same period, which had emerged from World War I second in strength only to Hollywood.

During World War I, American firms supplied theaters around the world as French and Italian films had become scarce. Ironically, the war strengthened German filmmaking due to a ban on imports that lasted until 1921. During that period of isolation, Lubitsch became the finest proponent of German filmmaking and once Hollywood films appeared in Germany again Lubitsch was quick to absorb their stylistic traits as well. He soon became the unique master of both styles as the golden ages of the American and German cinema were beginning. This innovative study utilizes Lubitsch's silent films as a means to compare two great national cinemas at a vital formative period in cinema history.

The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II

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Fascinating stuff for movie and history buffs
Excellent

The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II
Robert Fyne
Manufacturer: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0810833107

Book Description

An in-depth study that examines WWII movies, analyzing many motifs, stereotypes, ficiton-as-fact, distortions, and prevarications that permeate this genre.

Customer Reviews:

Fascinating stuff for movie and history buffs.......2000-08-24

I enjoyed this book immensely. Did you grow up watching such great classics as "Sergeant York", "A Yank in the RAF", "Sahara", "Flying Tigers", "Wake Island", "Gung Ho", and "Air Force". These are but a few of the great movies made during WWII to bolster American morale. There were also some real stinkers. I never cared much for "Mrs. Miniver", "Dragon Seed", "Days of Glory", and several others that were just plain bad of silly. This book explains the reason behind these films and some of the history of their making. The Office of War Information (OWI) was founded by the government to monitor the content of the war films fed to the American Public and set standards to follow and frameworks to work within. There is some very interesting stuff here. Why was Italy treated as a nonbelligerent? Why were Austria, Finland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania never mentioned? Why was there no distinction of Russian ethnic groups (they were all just simply Russians)? Why were Japanese depicted as barely more than monkeys and the Germans as stupid baffoons, but no racial slurs? This book gives great insight about Hollywood, the movies, and WWII.

Excellent.......1998-09-12

This book was extrodinary, and I recommend for everyone to read and purchase it.

Hollywood War Films, 1937-1945: An Exhaustive Filmography of American Feature-length Motion Pictures

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Hollywood War Films, 1937-1945: An Exhaustive Filmography of American Feature-length Motion Pictures
Michael S. Shull , and David E. Wilt
Manufacturer: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0786428546

Product Description

From 1937 through 1945, Hollywood produced over 1,000 films relating to the war. This enormous and exhaustive reference work first analyzes the war films as sociopolitical documents. Part one, entitled "The Crisis Abroad, 1937-1941," focuses on movies that reflected Americas increasing uneasiness. Part two, "Waging War, 1942-1945," reveals that many movies made from 1942 through 1945 included at least some allusion to World War II.

Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era

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Making Movies Black: The Holywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era

Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era
Thomas Cripps
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0195076699

Book Description

This is the second volume of Thomas Cripps's definitive history of African-Americans in Hollywood. It covers the period from World War II through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, examining this period through the prism of popular culture. Making Movies Black shows how movies anticipated and helped form America's changing ideas about race. Cripps contends that from the liberal rhetoric of the war years--marked as it was by the propaganda catchwords brotherhood and tolerance--came movies that defined a new African-American presence both in film and in American society at large. He argues that the war years, more than any previous era, gave African-American activists access to centers of cultural influence and power in both Washington and Hollywood. Among the results were an expanded black imagery on the screen during the war--in combat movies such as Bataan, Crash Dive, and Sahara; musicals such as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky; and government propaganda films such as The Negro Soldier and Wings for this Man (narrated by Ronald Reagan!). After the war, the ideologies of both black activism and integrationism persisted, resulting in the 'message movie' era of Pinky, Home of the Brave, and No Way Out, a form of racial politics that anticipated the goals of the Civil Rights Movement. Delving into previously inaccessible records of major Hollywood studios, among them Warner Bros., RKO, and 20th Century-Fox, as well as records of the Office of War Information in the National Archives, and records of the NAACP, and interviews with survivors of the era, Cripps reveals the struggle of both lesser known black filmmakers like Carlton Moss and major figures such as Sidney Poitier. More than a narrative history, Making Movies Black reaches beyond the screen itself with sixty photographs, many never before published, which illustrate the mood of the time. Revealing the social impact of the classical Hollywood film, Making Movies Black is the perfect book for those interested in the changing racial climate in post-World War II American life.

Customer Reviews:

Making Movies Black: The Holywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era.......2007-03-10

Everything arrived in perfect order

Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film

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Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film
John Bodnar
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 080188537X

Book Description

From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversion -- sometimes entertaining, sometimes provocative -- from the realities of their own lives.

In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genre -- among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood -- this book explores such topics as the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal democracy.

Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.

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Little Known Labour History
Walking the picket line in silent films

Working-Class Hollywood
Steven J. Ross
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0691024642

Book Description

This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America.

Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers.

Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.

Customer Reviews:

Little Known Labour History.......2001-02-24

Steven J. Ross shines a light on a little known and rarely examined period of cinema and labour history. In Working-Class Hollywood (Silent Film and the Shaping of class in America), he looks at the movies created by, for or against the labour movement and its emerging class identity. It is so interesting as it is a time of growth and struggle for both the cinema and the labour movements and the author shows how these two forces bumped and grinded with each other in a way movies never would again. Movies helped create a certain image of class and by the thirties this was pretty much set in stone so it is the period of the silent film where the struggle to shape that identity ensued. This book is amazingly well researched and accessible for the reader of either cinema, labour, or American history. Sometimes the author stretches his point and the reader will be frustrated that many of the films discussed are unavailable for viewing but these are small caveats to an impressive work.

Walking the picket line in silent films.......1999-01-22

Anyone interested in films dealing with social issues will love this book. In the 1910's the movie studios made many films that dealt with the relationship between management and workers. In the 1920's, a combination of lack of funds, censors and powerful movie studios combined to restrict stories of class conflict from the screen. This book explores one-reel melodramas by D.W. Griffith, comedies by Charlie Chaplin that ridicule people in authority, the "Red Scare" films from after World War I, and the films produced by labor activists themselves. It shows how many films used stereotypes of violent strikers that were not realistic. By necessity, this book is sympathetic to labor unions, but that does not interfere with the author's analysis of his subject.

The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in the American Cold War

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The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in the American Cold War
James J. Lorence
Manufacturer: University of New Mexico Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0826320287

Book Description

This impassioned history tells a story of censorship and politics during the early Cold War. The author recounts the 1950 Empire Zinc Strike in Bayard, New Mexico, the making of the extraordinary motion picture Salt of the Earth by Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, and the film's suppression by Hollywood, federal and state governments, and organized labor. This disturbing episode reflects the intense fear that gripped America during the Cold War and reveals the unsavory side of the rapprochement between organized labor and big business in the 1950s. In the face of intense political opposition, blackballed union activists, blacklisted Hollywood artists and writers, and Local 890 united to write a script, raise money, hire actors and crews, and make and distribute the film. Rediscovered in the 1970s, Salt of the Earth is a revealing celluloid document of socially conscious unionism that sought to break down racial barriers, bridge class divisions, and emphasize the role of women. Lorence has interviewed participants in the strike and film such as Clinton Jencks and Paul Jarrico and has consulted private and public archives to reconstruct the story of this extraordinary documentary and the coordinated efforts to suppress it.

Examines the conception, production, distribution, and suppression of the pioneering labor-feminist film made during the virulently anti-communist era of the Cold War.

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