Communism in Hollywood

Communism in Hollywood PDF Author: Alan Casty
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810869489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much has been written about the history of Communism in America, including the Party's appeal to many in the Hollywood community of the 1930s and 40s. While several books have offered standard accounts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings and the blacklist in the entertainment industry, Alan Casty provides a fresh and provocative perspective. In Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal, Casty challenges the absolute dualisms of the period: cowardly informers and heroic martyrs. Drawing on newly available material, Casty illustrates the control by the international Communist movement and the role of the Hollywood Communists themselves in fomenting the intense hostilities of the period. Casty juxtaposes the actions and statements of those who testified and 'named names' before HUAC with Communists who refused to testify and remained silent about the atrocities of the Soviet Union. By providing a scrupulous account of the full scope of the Communist Party in Hollywood, this book presents a more accurate picture of the moral quandaries faced during this dark period in American history.

Communism in Hollywood

Communism in Hollywood PDF Author: Alan Casty
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810869489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much has been written about the history of Communism in America, including the Party's appeal to many in the Hollywood community of the 1930s and 40s. While several books have offered standard accounts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings and the blacklist in the entertainment industry, Alan Casty provides a fresh and provocative perspective. In Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal, Casty challenges the absolute dualisms of the period: cowardly informers and heroic martyrs. Drawing on newly available material, Casty illustrates the control by the international Communist movement and the role of the Hollywood Communists themselves in fomenting the intense hostilities of the period. Casty juxtaposes the actions and statements of those who testified and 'named names' before HUAC with Communists who refused to testify and remained silent about the atrocities of the Soviet Union. By providing a scrupulous account of the full scope of the Communist Party in Hollywood, this book presents a more accurate picture of the moral quandaries faced during this dark period in American history.

Life Itself

Life Itself PDF Author: Robert Rosen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231075640
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why are living things alive? As a theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen saw this as the most fundamental of all questions-and yet it had never been answered satisfactorily by science. The answers to this question would allow humanity to make an enormous leap forward in our understanding of the principles at work in our world. For centuries, it was believed that the only scientific approach to the question "What is life?" must proceed from the Cartesian metaphor (organism as machine). Classical approaches in science, which also borrow heavily from Newtonian mechanics, are based on a process called "reductionism." The thinking was that we can better learn about an intricate, complicated system (like an organism) if we take it apart, study the components, and then reconstruct the system-thereby gaining an understanding of the whole. However, Rosen argues that reductionism does not work in biology and ignores the complexity of organisms. Life Itself, a landmark work, represents the scientific and intellectual journey that led Rosen to question reductionism and develop new scientific approaches to understanding the nature of life. Ultimately, Rosen proposes an answer to the original question about the causal basis of life in organisms. He asserts that renouncing the mechanistic and reductionistic paradigm does not mean abandoning science. Instead, Rosen offers an alternate paradigm for science that takes into account the relational impacts of organization in natural systems and is based on organized matter rather than on particulate matter alone. Central to Rosen's work is the idea of a "complex system," defined as any system that cannot be fully understood by reducing it to its parts. In this sense, complexity refers to the causal impact of organization on the system as a whole. Since both the atom and the organism can be seen to fit that description, Rosen asserts that complex organization is a general feature not just of the biosphere on Earth-but of the universe itself.

Post-War Italian Cinema

Post-War Italian Cinema PDF Author: Daniela Treveri Gennari
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135894965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through a comparative approach of current theories developed on ideology and an analysis of official documents from the Vatican and the United States Department of State, the book investigates the decisive role that American production companies played in the development of the Italian film industry and their links to the Vatican. This analysis evaluates how the Italian production and distribution industries satisfied the American political and economic interests. American political and cultural ideology of the post-1945 era, is compared with the Roman Catholic ideology in order to assess their cultural propaganda. This is followed by studies of the roles played by key individuals, such as Giulio Andreotti, and institutions such as ANICA and A.G.I.S. involved in formulating the policies and regulations that affected the production and distribution of American and Italian films in the post-1945 era, as well as the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in this process.

Coming Back to a Theater Near You

Coming Back to a Theater Near You PDF Author: Brian Hannan
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786498137
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the Silent Era, film reissues were a battle between rival studios--every Mary Pickford new release in 1914 was met with a Pickford re-release. For 50 years after the Silent Era, reissues were a battle between the studios, who considered old movies "found money," and cinema owners, who often saw audiences reject former box office hits. In the mid-1960s, the return of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)--the second biggest reissue of all time--altered industry perceptions, and James Bond double features pushed the revival market to new heights. In the digital age, reissues have continued to confound the critics. This is the untold hundred-year story of how old movies saved new Hollywood. Covering the booms and busts of a recycling business that became its own industry, the author describes how the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart and Alfred Hitchcock won over new generations of audiences, and explores the lasting appeal of films like Napoleon (1927), Gone with the Wind (1939), The Rocky Horror Show (1975) and Blade Runner (1982).

Brill's Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Warfare on Film

Brill's Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Warfare on Film PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004686827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 612

Get Book Here

Book Description
Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Warfare on Film is the first volume exclusively dedicated to the study of a theme that informs virtually every reimagining of the classical world on the big screen: armed conflict. Through a vast array of case studies, from the silent era to recent years, the collection traces cinema’s enduring fascination with battles and violence in antiquity and explores the reasons, both synchronic and diachronic, for the central place that war occupies in celluloid Greece and Rome. Situating films in their artistic, economic, and sociopolitical context, the essays cast light on the industrial mechanisms through which the ancient battlefield is refashioned in cinema and investigate why the medium adopts a revisionist approach to textual and visual sources.

Screening a Lynching

Screening a Lynching PDF Author: Matthew Bernstein
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820327522
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 708

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Leo Frank case of 1913 was one of the most sensational trials of the early twentieth century, capturing international attention. Frank, a northern Jewish factory supervisor in Atlanta, was convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan, a young laborer native to the South, largely on the perjured testimony of an African American janitor. The trial was both a murder mystery and a courtroom drama marked by lurid sexual speculation and overt racism. The subsequent lynching of Frank in 1915 by an angry mob only made the story more irresistible to historians, playwrights, novelists, musicians, and filmmakers for decades to come. Matthew H. Bernstein is the first scholar to examine the feature films and television programs produced in response to the trial and lynching of Leo Frank. He considers the four major surviving American texts: Oscar Micheaux's film Murder in Harlem (1936), Mervyn LeRoy's film They Won't Forget (1937), the Profiles in Courage television episode "John M. Slaton" (1964), and the two-part NBC miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988). Bernstein explains that complex issues like racism, anti-Semitism, class resentment, and sectionalism were at once irresistibly compelling and painfully difficult to portray in the mass media. Exploring the cultural and industrial contexts in which the works were produced, Bernstein considers how they succeeded or failed in representing the case's many facets. Film and television shows can provide worthy interpretations of history, Bernstein argues, even when they depart from the historical record. Screening a Lynching is an engrossing meditation on how film and television represented a traumatic and tragic episode in American history-one that continues to fascinate people to this day.

A Companion to Film Noir

A Companion to Film Noir PDF Author: Andre Spicer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118523717
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 662

Get Book Here

Book Description
An authoritative companion that offers a wide-ranging thematic survey of this enduringly popular cultural form and includes scholarship from both established and emerging scholars as well as analysis of film noir's influence on other media including television and graphic novels. Covers a wealth of new approaches to film noir and neo-noir that explore issues ranging from conceptualization to cross-media influences Features chapters exploring the wider ‘noir mediascape’ of television, graphic novels and radio Reflects the historical and geographical reach of film noir, from the 1920s to the present and in a variety of national cinemas Includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars

Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series

Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series PDF Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Publisher: Copyright Office, Library of Congress
ISBN:
Category : Copyright
Languages : en
Pages : 1786

Get Book Here

Book Description


Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion-picture Industry

Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion-picture Industry PDF Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 944

Get Book Here

Book Description


Film and Politics in America

Film and Politics in America PDF Author: Brian Neve
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134973314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
In A Social Cinema: Film-making and Politics in America, Brian Neve presents a study of the social and political nature of American film by concentrating on a generation of writers from the thirties who directed films in Hollywood in the 1940's. He discusses how they negotiated their roles in relation to the studio system, itself undergoing change, and to what extent their experience in the political and theatre movements of thirties New York was to be reflected in their later films. Focusing in particular on Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Jules Dassin, Abraham Polonsky, Nicholas Ray, Robert Rossen and Joseph Losey, Neve relates the work of these writers and directors to the broader industrial, bureaucratic, social and political developments of the period 1935-1970. With special emphasis on the post-war decade, bringing together archive and secondary sources, Neve explores a lost tradition of social fimmaking in America.