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Author: Ruth Vasey
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299151942
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
The most visible cultural institution on earth between the World Wars, the Hollywood movie industry tried to satisfy worldwide audiences of vastly different cultural, religious, and political persuasions. The World According to Hollywood shows how the industry's self-regulation shaped the content of films to make them salable in as many markets as possible. In the process, Hollywood created an idiosyncratic vision of the world that was glamorous and exotic, but also oddly narrow. Ruth Vasey shows how the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), by implementing such strategies as the industry's Production Code, ensured that domestic and foreign distribution took place with a minimum of censorship or consumer resistance. Drawing upon MPPDA archives, studio records, trade papers, and the records of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Vasey reveals the ways the MPPDA influenced the representation of sex, violence, religion, foreign and domestic politics, corporate capitalism, ethnic minorities, and the conduct of professional classes. Vasey is the first scholar to document fully how the demands of the global market frequently dictated film content and created the movies' homogenized picture of social and racial characteristics, in both urban America and the world beyond. She uncovers telling evidence of scripts and treatments that were abandoned before or during the course of production because of content that might offend foreign markets. Among the fascinating points she discusses is Hollywood's frequent use of imaginary countries as story locales, resulting from a deliberate business policy of avoiding realistic depictions of actual countries. She argues that foreign governments perceived movies not just as articles of trade, but as potential commercial and political emissaries of the United States. Just as Hollywood had to persuade its domestic audiences that its products were morally sound, its domination of world markets depended on its ability to create a culturally and politically acceptable product.
Author: Ruth Vasey
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299151942
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Get Book Here
Book Description
The most visible cultural institution on earth between the World Wars, the Hollywood movie industry tried to satisfy worldwide audiences of vastly different cultural, religious, and political persuasions. The World According to Hollywood shows how the industry's self-regulation shaped the content of films to make them salable in as many markets as possible. In the process, Hollywood created an idiosyncratic vision of the world that was glamorous and exotic, but also oddly narrow. Ruth Vasey shows how the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), by implementing such strategies as the industry's Production Code, ensured that domestic and foreign distribution took place with a minimum of censorship or consumer resistance. Drawing upon MPPDA archives, studio records, trade papers, and the records of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Vasey reveals the ways the MPPDA influenced the representation of sex, violence, religion, foreign and domestic politics, corporate capitalism, ethnic minorities, and the conduct of professional classes. Vasey is the first scholar to document fully how the demands of the global market frequently dictated film content and created the movies' homogenized picture of social and racial characteristics, in both urban America and the world beyond. She uncovers telling evidence of scripts and treatments that were abandoned before or during the course of production because of content that might offend foreign markets. Among the fascinating points she discusses is Hollywood's frequent use of imaginary countries as story locales, resulting from a deliberate business policy of avoiding realistic depictions of actual countries. She argues that foreign governments perceived movies not just as articles of trade, but as potential commercial and political emissaries of the United States. Just as Hollywood had to persuade its domestic audiences that its products were morally sound, its domination of world markets depended on its ability to create a culturally and politically acceptable product.
Author: Mandy Merck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136007105
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
At a time when the expanded projection of US political, military, economic and cultural power draws intensified global concern, understanding how that country understands itself seems more important than ever. This collection of new critical essays tackles this old problem in a new way, by examining some of the hundreds of US films that announce themselves as titularly 'American'. From early travelogues to contemporary comedies, national nomination has been an abiding characteristic of American motion pictures, heading the work of Porter, Guy-Blaché, DeMille, Capra, Sternberg, Vidor, Minnelli and Mankiewicz. More recently, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, John Landis and Edward James Olmos have made their own contributions to Hollywood’s Americana. What does this national branding signify? Which versions of Americanism are valorized, and which marginalized or excluded? Out of which social and historical contexts do they emerge, and for and by whom are they constructed? Edited by Mandy Merck, the collection contains detailed analyses of such films as The Vanishing American, American Madness, An American in Paris, American Graffiti, American Gigolo, American Pie and many more.
Author: Michael Wedel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110612372
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
German film in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods is regarded as marked by a strong sense of cultural conservatism and the aspiration to be recognized as an art form. This book takes an alternative approach to the history of German cinema from the emergence of the early feature film to the transition to sound by focusing on the poetics of popular genres such as the disaster film, melodrama, the musical and the war film, exploring their cultural reverberations and modes of audience address. Based on the assumption that popular cinema contributed immensely to the breakthrough of a modern audiovisual "culture of the senses" in Germany between 1910 and 1930, Pictorial Affects, Senses of Rupture offers close readings of a number of rarely analyzed films, including one of the first cinematic adaptations of the Titanic disaster from 1912 and the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front from 1930. Restoring the films' horizons of historicity by locating them at crucial points of intersection between social, cultural, technological and aesthetic discourses, this book argues for the prominent role popular German cinema’s own forms of discursivity have played within the historical formation of modernity.
Author: Giorgio Bertellini
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520972171
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority. This is the first volume in the new Cinema Cultures in Contact series, coedited by Giorgio Bertellini, Richard Abel, and Matthew Solomon. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org.
Author: Cynthia Baron
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814338054
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Employs the foodways paradigm to analyze the ideological dimensions of food imagery and food behavior in fiction and documentary films. Cinema is a mosaic of memorable food scenes. Detectives drink alone. Gangsters talk with their mouths full. Families around the world argue at dinner. Food documentaries challenge popular consumption-centered visions. In Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation,authors Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson, and Mark Bernard use a foodways paradigm, drawn from the fields of folklore and cultural anthropology, to illuminate film's cultural and material politics. In looking at how films do and do not represent food procurement, preparation, presentation, consumption, clean-up, and disposal, the authors bring the pleasures, dangers, and implications of consumption to center stage. In nine chapters, Baron, Carson, and Bernard consider food in fiction films and documentaries-from both American and international cinema. The first chapter examines film practice from the foodways perspective, supplying a foundation for the collection of case studies that follow. Chapter 2 takes a political economy approach as it examines the food industry and the film industry's policies that determine representations of food in film. In chapter 3, the authors explore food and food interactions as a means for creating community in Bagdad Café, while in chapter 4 they take a close look at 301/302,in which food is used to mount social critique. Chapter 5 focuses on cannibal films, showing how the foodways paradigm unlocks the implications of films that dramatize one of society's greatest food taboos. In chapter 6, the authors demonstrate ways that insights generated by the foodways lens can enrich genre and auteur studies. Chapter 7 considers documentaries about food and water resources, while chapter 8 examines food documentaries that slip through the cracks of film censorship by going into exhibition without an MPAA rating. Finally, in chapter 9, the authors study films from several national cinemas to explore the intersection of food, gender, and ethnicity. Four appendices provide insights from a food stylist, a selected filmography of fiction films and a filmography of documentaries that feature foodways components, and a list of selected works in food and cultural studies. Scholars of film studies and food studies will enjoy the thought-provoking analysis of Appetites and Anxieties.
Author: David McGowan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477317449
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Felix the Cat, and other beloved cartoon characters have entertained media audiences for almost a century, outliving the human stars who were once their contemporaries in studio-era Hollywood. In Animated Personalities, David McGowan asserts that iconic American theatrical short cartoon characters should be legitimately regarded as stars, equal to their live-action counterparts, not only because they have enjoyed long careers, but also because their star personas have been created and marketed in ways also used for cinematic celebrities. Drawing on detailed archival research, McGowan analyzes how Hollywood studios constructed and manipulated the star personas of the animated characters they owned. He shows how cartoon actors frequently kept pace with their human counterparts, granting “interviews,” allowing “candid” photographs, endorsing products, and generally behaving as actual actors did—for example, Donald Duck served his country during World War II, and Mickey Mouse was even embroiled in scandal. Challenging the notion that studios needed actors with physical bodies and real off-screen lives to create stars, McGowan demonstrates that media texts have successfully articulated an off-screen existence for animated characters. Following cartoon stars from silent movies to contemporary film and television, this groundbreaking book broadens the scope of star studies to include animation, concluding with provocative questions about the nature of stardom in an age of digitally enhanced filmmaking technologies.
Author: Ben Urwand
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674728351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
To continue doing business in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films that attacked the Nazis or condemned Germany's persecution of Jews. Ben Urwand reveals this bargain for the first time—a "collaboration" (Zusammenarbeit) that drew in a cast of characters ranging from notorious German political leaders such as Goebbels to Hollywood icons such as Louis B. Mayer. At the center of Urwand's story is Hitler himself, who was obsessed with movies and recognized their power to shape public opinion. In December 1930, his Party rioted against the Berlin screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, which led to a chain of unfortunate events and decisions. Fearful of losing access to the German market, all of the Hollywood studios started making concessions to the German government, and when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the studios—many of which were headed by Jews—began dealing with his representatives directly. Urwand shows that the arrangement remained in place through the 1930s, as Hollywood studios met regularly with the German consul in Los Angeles and changed or canceled movies according to his wishes. Paramount and Fox invested profits made from the German market in German newsreels, while MGM financed the production of German armaments. Painstakingly marshaling previously unexamined archival evidence, The Collaboration raises the curtain on a hidden episode in Hollywood—and American—history.
Author: David A. Redfern
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147664263X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Oscar-winning actor, translator of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, and director of the iconoclastic The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton's name alone commanded box office and theatre acclaim. This book is the first to offer an intimate examination of his 54 films produced in Britain and Hollywood from 1928 to 1962. Each has technical credits and cast lists, as well as publicity taglines, a plot synopsis, selected dialogue, Oscars won or nominated, and production commentaries. Also provided are listings of Laughton's miscellaneous shorts and feature films, abandoned film projects, amateur and professional stage appearances, select radio broadcasts, television broadcasts, and audio recordings. Appendices detail the studios, performers and cinematographers of the Laughton films.
Author: Thomas Leitch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628923725
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
From William Dickson's Rip Van Winkle films (1896) to Baz Luhrmann's big-budget production of The Great Gatsby (2013) and beyond, cinematic adaptations of American literature participate in a rich and fascinating history. Unlike previous studies of American literature and film, which emphasize particular authors like Edith Wharton and Nathaniel Hawthorne, particular texts like Moby-Dick, particular literary periods like the American Renaissance, or particular genres like the novel, this volume considers the multiple functions of filmed American literature as a cinematic genre in its own right-one that reflects the specific political and aesthetic priorities of different national and historical cinemas even as it plays a decisive role in defining American literature for a global audience.
Author: Daniel P. Franklin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442262338
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Politics and Film examines popular movies and television shows as indicators of social and political trends to explore the political culture of the United States. Updated to include the popular and controversial movies and shows American Sniper, House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and Twelve Years a Slave, the second edition investigates popular conceptions of government, the military, intelligence and terrorism, punishment and policing, and recognizes mistakes or dark times in our shared history.
