Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw is the first concentrated study of Ukrainian cinema in English. In particular, historian Joshua First explores the politics and aesthetics of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema during the Soviet 1960s-70s. He argues that film-makers working at the Alexander Dovzhenko Feature Film Studio in Kiev were obsessed with questions of identity and demanded that the Soviet film industry and audiences alike recognize Ukrainian cultural difference. The first two chapters provide the background on how Soviet cinema since Stalin cultivated an exoticised and domesticated image of Ukrainians, along with how the film studio in Kiev attempted to rebuild its reputation during the early Sixties as a centre of the cultural thaw in the USSR. The next two chapters examine Sergei Paradjanov's highly influential Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and its role in reorienting the Dovzhenko studio toward the auteurist (some would say elitist) agenda of Poetic Cinema. In the final three chapters, Ukrainian Cinema looks at the major works of film-makers Yurii Illienko, Leonid Osyka, and Leonid Bykov, among others, who attempted (and were compelled) to bridge the growing gap between a cinema of auteurs and concerns to generate profit for the Soviet film industry.

Filmmaking is a business-someone has to pay the bills. For much of the industry's history, that role was shouldered by the studios. The rise of independent filmmakers then led to the rise of independent financiers. But what happens if bad weather closes down a production or a director's vision pays no heed to the limitations of time and money? Enter Film Finances. The company was founded in London in 1950 to insure against the risk that a film would exceed its original budget or not be completed on time. Its pioneering development of the "completion guarantee"-the financial instrument that provides the essential security for investors to support independent filmmaking-ultimately led to the creation of many thousands of films, including some of the most celebrated ever made: Moulin Rouge (1953), Dr. No (1962), The Outsiders (1982), Pulp Fiction (1994), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), La La Land (2016), and more. Film Finances's role in filmmaking was little known outside the industry until 2012, when it opened its historical archive to scholars. Drawing on these previously private documents as well as interviews with its executives, Making Hollywood Happen tells the company's story through seven decades of postwar cinema history and chronicles the growth of the international independent film industry. Focusing on a business that has operated at the meeting point between money and art for more than seventy years, this lavishly illustrated book goes to the heart of how the movie business works.

Directing actors is the hardest thing faced by both beginning and experienced directors. Filmmaking hardware like cameras, lenses, and editing machines do what they are told. Actors have minds of their own, often making directors lives miserable. Here is an inspired and insightful must-read for directors at all levels of their craft, which is based on the extensive experiences of veteran Director John Badham, as well as no-holds-barred, out-of-school tales from such celebrated directors and actors as Sydney Pollock, Michael Mann, John Frankenheimer, Mel Gibson, James Woods, Jenna Elfman, and many more. Beneath the entertaining and instructive war stories lies the truth: how directors elicit the best performances from difficult and terrified actors. You'll learn how to use proven techniques to help actors give their best performances, including the ten best and ten worst things to say and what you can do when an actor wont or cant do what the director wants. Its all here, put into print by a renowned director with stories to tell and lessons to impart.

Examines how Hollywood responded to and reflected the political and social changes that America experienced during the 1930sIn the popular imagination, 1930s Hollywood was a dream factory producing escapist movies to distract the American people from the greatest economic crisis in their nation's history. But while many films of the period conform to this stereotype, there were a significant number that promoted a message, either explicitly or implicitly, in support of the political, social and economic change broadly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programme. At the same time, Hollywood was in the forefront of challenging traditional gender roles, both in terms of movie representations of women and the role of women within the studio system. With case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great Depression impacted on Hollywood and how it responded to them.Topics covered include:How Hollywood offered positive representations of working womenCongressional investigations of big-studio monopolization over movie distributionHow three different types of musical genres related in different ways to the Great Depression the Warner Bros Great Depression Musicals of 1933, the Astaire/Rogers movies, and the MGM 'kids' musicals of the late 1930sThe problems of independent production exemplified in King Vidor's 'Our Daily Bread'Cary Grant's success in developing a debonair screen persona amid Depression conditionsContributors Harvey G. Cohen, King s College LondonPhilip John Davies, British LibraryDavid Eldridge, University of HullPeter William Evans, Queen Mary, University of LondonMark Glancy, Queen Mary University of LondonIna Rae Hark, University of South CarolinaIwan Morgan, University College LondonBrian Neve, University of BathIan Scott, University of ManchesterAnna Siomopoulos, Bentley UniversityJ. E. Smyth, University of WarwickMelvyn Stokes, University College LondonMark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University

Mex-Cine offers an accessibly written, multidisciplinary investigation of contemporary Mexican cinema that combines industrial, technical, and sociopolitical analysis with analyses of modes of reception through cognitive theory. Mex-Cine aims to make visible the 21st-century Mexican film industry, its blueprints, and the cognitive and emotive faculties involved in making and consuming its corpus. A sustained, free-flowing book-length conversation between two leading scholars, Mex-Cine enriches our understanding of the way contemporary Mexican directors use specific technical devices, structures, and characterisations in making films in ways that guide the perceptual, emotive, and cognitive faculties of their ideal audiences, while providing the historical contexts in which these films are made and consumed.

How big data is transforming the creative industries, and how those industries can use lessons from Netflix, Amazon, and Apple to fight back. "[The authors explain] gently yet firmly exactly how the internet threatens established ways and what can and cannot be done about it. Their book should be required for anyone who wishes to believe that nothing much has changed." -The Wall Street Journal "Packed with examples, from the nimble-footed who reacted quickly to adapt their businesses, to laggards who lost empires." -Financial Times Traditional network television programming has always followed the same script: executives approve a pilot, order a trial number of episodes, and broadcast them, expecting viewers to watch a given show on their television sets at the same time every week. But then came Netflix's House of Cards. Netflix gauged the show's potential from data it had gathered about subscribers' preferences, ordered two seasons without seeing a pilot, and uploaded the first thirteen episodes all at once for viewers to watch whenever they wanted on the devices of their choice. In this book, Michael Smith and Rahul Telang, experts on entertainment analytics, show how the success of House of Cards upended the film and TV industries-and how companies like Amazon and Apple are changing the rules in other entertainment industries, notably publishing and music. We're living through a period of unprecedented technological disruption in the entertainment industries. Just about everything is affected: pricing, production, distribution, piracy. Smith and Telang discuss niche products and the long tail, product differentiation, price discrimination, and incentives for users not to steal content. To survive and succeed, businesses have to adapt rapidly and creatively. Smith and Telang explain how. How can companies discover who their customers are, what they want, and how much they are willing to pay for it? Data. The entertainment industries, must learn to play a little "moneyball." The bottom line: follow the data.

In 1947, the Cold War came to Hollywood. Over nine tumultuous days in October, the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings into alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. The blowback was profound: the major studios pledged to never again employ a known Communist or unrepentant fellow traveler. The declaration marked the onset of the blacklist era, a time when political allegiances, real or suspected, determined employment opportunities in the entertainment industry. Hundreds of artists were shown the door-or had it shut in their faces. In Show Trial, Thomas Doherty takes us behind the scenes at the first full-on media-political spectacle of the postwar era. He details the theatrical elements of a proceeding that bridged the realms of entertainment and politics, a courtroom drama starring glamorous actors, colorful moguls, on-the-make congressmen, high-priced lawyers, single-minded investigators, and recalcitrant screenwriters, all recorded by newsreel cameras and broadcast over radio. Doherty tells the story of the Hollywood Ten and the other witnesses, friendly and unfriendly, who testified, and chronicles the implementation of the postwar blacklist. Show Trial is a rich, character-driven inquiry into how the HUAC hearings ignited the anti-Communist crackdown in Hollywood, providing a gripping cultural history of one of the most transformative events of the postwar era.

Film production in Latin America is as old as cinema itself, but local film industries have always been in a triangulated relationship with Hollywood and European cinema. This book situates Latin American film industries within the global circulation of film production, exhibition and distribution, charting the changes that the industries have undergone from the sound era to the present day. Focusing in particular on Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, Tamara Falicov examines commonalities among Latin American film industries, such as the challenges of procuring funding, competition from Hollywood, state funding battles, and the fickle nature of audiences, as well as censorship issues, competition from television, and the transnational nature of Latin American film. She addresses production, exhibition, and distribution contexts and financing and co-production with Europe and the United States, as well as the role of film festivals in funding and circulating films both within and outside of Latin America. Newer trends such as the revival of protectionist measures like the screen quota are framed in contrast to the U.S.'s push for trade policy liberalization and issues of universal concern such as film piracy, and new technologies and the role of television in helping and hindering Latin American cinema.

In recent years, the images shot by the Cologne-based architectural photographers Hugo (1879-1938) and Karl Hugo Schmölz (1917-1986) have been winning wide acclaim and are receiving more and more attention. After completing his photography training and working in various positions, Hugo Schmölz set himself up as an architectural photographer in Cologne in 1911. Later, his son Karl Hugo took over the company. While the work of the two photographers fell into oblivion over the years, it is being rediscovered today and reveals its breathtaking aesthetic originality and technical perfection. Due to the development of a special, additional exposure technique, Schmölz was able to capture dark interiors in astounding detail even at the beginning of the century and to create dazzlingly elegant pictures which have lost none of their expressive power. For the first time ever, the book presents a series of photos, taken mostly in the Rhineland and the Ruhr district between 1935 and 1957, together with pictures showing movie theatres which were brand new at the time. Most of these cinema auditoriums have since been destroyed, but the light in the photos gives them a three-dimensionality that evokes a striking sculptural effect. They are certainly not imbued with nostalgia, on the contrary, they appear to be strangely lost in time and, owing to their extremely delicate gray nuances, seem almost hyperreal. Text in English and German.

Between 1931 and 2000, India's popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country's prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema's complicated history. She begins with the industry's surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film's discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.

Histories of women in Hollywood usually recount the contributions of female directors, screenwriters, designers, actresses, and other creative personnel whose names loom large in the credits. Yet, from its inception, the American film industry relied on the labor of thousands more women, workers whose vital contributions often went unrecognized. Never Done introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry - from the employees' wives who hand-colored the Edison Company's films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM's backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. Sketching a history of how Hollywood came to define certain occupations as lower-paid ""women's work"" or ""feminized labor,"" Hill also reveals how enterprising women eventually gained a foothold in more prestigious divisions like casting and publicity. Poring through rare archives and integrating the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, the book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible. As it traces this long history of women in Hollywood, Never Done reveals the persistence of sexist assumptions that, even today, leave women in the media industry underpraised and underpaid.

The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term "art film" and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak-the leading figures of Indian art cinema-became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film's relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.

"The Sounds of Commerce" is the first book to present a detailed historical analysis of popular music in American film, from the era of sheet music sales, to that of orchestrated pop records by Henry Mancini and Ennio Morricone in the 1960- to the MTV-ready pop songs that occupy soundtrack CDs of today. Jeff Smith's landmark exploration of film and music cross-promotion investigates the combination of historical, economic, and aesthetic factors that brought about the rise of popular music in the movies.Smith employs a sophisticated yet accessible fusion of musicology, film theory, and social history. In one chapter, a musicological unpacking of the theme song from Goldfinger is used to show how the repeated refrain developed massive cultural appeal, leading to huge singles sales and a ubiquitous tune that most Americans can recognize several decades after the film's release. Other chapters look at how the film and music industries became so heavily intertwined, how soundtrack music progressed from orchestral score to pop song, and how certain soundtracks today become chart successes while their accompanying films generate scant box-office interest.Throughout the text, Smith persuasively argues that the popular film score has been as successful as its classical predecessor at enhancing emotions and moods, cueing characters and settings, and signifying psychological states and points of view. With "The Sounds of Commerce, " he challenges film music scholarship to recognize the significance of popular music in modern film.

Audiences love the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but beyond the red carpet and behind the velvet curtain exists a legion of individuals who make showbiz work: agents. Whether literary, talent, or indie film, agents are behind the scenes brokering power, handling mediation, and doing the deal-making that keeps Hollywood spinning. In Representing Talent, Violaine Roussel explores the little-known but decisive work of agents, turning the spotlight on how they help produce popular culture. The book takes readers behind the scenes to observe the day-to-day activities of agents, revealing their influence on artistic careers and the prospects of Hollywood's forthcoming projects. Agents are crucial to understanding how creative and economic power are intertwined in Hollywood today. They play a key role in the process by which artistic worth and economic value are evaluated and attributed to people and projects. Roussel's fieldwork examines what "having relationships" really means for agents, and how they perform the relationship work that's at the heart of their professional existence and success. Representing Talent helps us to understand the players behind the definition of entertainment itself, as well as behind its current transformations.

After World War II, as cultural and industry changes were reshaping Hollywood, movie studios shifted some production activities overseas, capitalizing on frozen foreign earnings, cheap labor, and appealing locations. Hollywood unions called the phenomenon "runaway" production to underscore the outsourcing of employment opportunities. Examining this period of transition from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Runaway Hollywood shows how film companies exported production around the world and the effect this conversion had on industry practices and visual style. In this fascinating account, Daniel Steinhart uses an array of historical materials to trace the industry's creation of a more international production operation that merged filmmaking practices from Hollywood and abroad to produce movies with a greater global scope.

What do Canadian films say about crime and justice in Canada? What purpose do Canadian crime films serve politically and culturally? Screening Justice is a scholarly exploration of films that focus on crime and justice in Canada. Contributors to this edited collection argue that crime films are pivotal for understanding and shaping Canadian sensibilities about justice by setting out widely available templates for thinking about crime, justice and society. They argue that films offer accessible cultural spaces to contest mainstream assumptions about the ways race, class, gender, place and culture produce and reproduce crime. Spanning disciplines and examining films from across Canada, Screening Justice is the first comprehensive Canadian volume on crime films that takes up cultural criminology s call for more critical scholarly analyses of the interplay between crime, culture and society.Defining Canadian crime films as movies that focus significantly on crime and its consequences in Canadian society, the book is as much about the ways crime films provide vehicles for understanding what it means to be Canadian as it is about the depiction and representation of crime and justice in Canadian cinema and television. The films examined in this book span all regions of Canada and include case studies of films set in Atlantic Canada, Nunavut, British Columbia s Lower Mainland, the Prairies, Ontario and Quebec. Moreover, Canadian crime films produced from the 1930s to the present are included in these analyses. Contributors to this multi- and interdisciplinary volume are drawn from criminology, criminal justice studies, English literature, art history, film studies and communications, cultural anthropology, sociology, and women s and gender studies. Adopting American criminologist Nicole Rafter s concept popular criminology, the essays in this volume all take crime films seriously as popular efforts to understand the causes, consequences and meanings of crime in Canadian society."

In "Hollywood 1938," Catherine Jurca brings to light a tumultuous year of crisis that has been neglected in histories of the studio era. With attendance in decline, negative publicity about stars that were poison at the box office, and a spate of bad films, industry executives decided that the public was fed up with the movies. Jurca describes their desperate attempt to win back audiences by launching Motion PicturesOCO Greatest Year, a massive, and unsuccessful, public relations campaign conducted in theaters and newspapers across North America. Drawing on the records of studio personnel, independent exhibitors, moviegoers, and the motion pictures themselves, she analyzes what was wrongOCoand rightOCowith Hollywood at the end of a heralded decade, and how the industryOCOs troubles changed the making and marketing of films in 1938 and beyond.

Netflix and its competitors like Disney , Amazon Prime and Hulu have brought unprecedented levels of entertainment to consumers everywhere, providing the richest, most abundant aggregate of motion pictures and cinematic television the world has ever seen. Behind the facade, however, things are not as pleasant. A very costly paradigm shift is underway, altering not only conventional business and finance models, but also threatening long-established avenues of entertainment such as movie theaters, traditional television, and home video, and wreaking havoc on independent filmmakers and veteran producers alike. This book attempts to make sense of ongoing economic and creative shifts of infrastructure and intellectual property, to understand where the industry is headed, and to distinguish which business models should be maintained and which ones should be left behind. Featuring exclusive interviews with some of the industry's most prolific filmmakers and executives, it dives into the trenches of Hollywood to provide readers with the knowledge necessary to rethink the business, see past the turmoil, recognize the new opportunities, and take advantage of exciting new possibilities. Change sparks innovation, and innovation brings about great opportunity--but only for the well-informed and prepared.

Here it is: the first-time look at the remarkable American multinational mass media empire and its century of entertainment-the story of Twentieth Century Fox (1915-2015). Or, to borrow the title of a classic 1959 Fox film, The Best of Everything. This is the complete revelatory story-bookended by empire builders William Fox and Rupert Murdoch-aimed as both a grand, entertaining, nostalgic and picture-filled interactive read and the ultimate guide to all things Twentieth Century Fox. The controversies and scandals are here, as are the extraordinary achievements. Among other firsts, the book offers fun tours of its historic production and ranch facilities including never-before-told stories about its stars and creative personalities (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Shirley Temple got started there). Finally, it is the first such work approved by the company and utilizing its own unique resources. The authors primarily tell a celebratory tale, but most importantly, an accurate one.

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.

In this engaging and readable book, Peter Decherney tells the story of Hollywood, from its nineteenth-century origins to the emergence of internet media empires. He recounts how the studio system rose out of the ashes of Thomas Edison's trust to create the handful of companies that have dominated global screens and imaginations for more than 100 years. Throughout, he reveals that the elements we take to be a natural part of the Hollywood experience-stars, genre-driven storytelling, blockbuster franchises, etc.-are really the product of cultural, political, and commercial forces. In many ways, Hollywood has remained the same for over a century. It has always been a global industry based in the U.S., and its storytelling has always unfolded across media, adapting plays, book, and comics and spinning off product tie-ins, television series, and social media campaigns. But major events have also continually remade Hollywood. The studios have weathered wars, disruptive new technologies, and competition by adopting a strategy of risk management and assimilation. This book explores the challenges of new technologies, including sound, home video, and computer graphics. And it examines Hollywood's responses to World War II, independent film movements, and regulations imposed by Washington. Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction is filled with discussions of well-known movies, stars, and directors, encapsulating the past century of research on Hollywood while adding many original insights and stories. It is the perfect introduction for readers who want to better understand the history and functioning of our screen-saturated world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Film is often used to represent the natural landscape and, increasingly, to communicate environmentalist messages. Yet behind even today's ""green" movies are ecologically unsustainable production, distribution, and consumption processes. Noting how seemingly immaterial moving images are supported by highly durable resource-dependent infrastructures, The Cinematic Footprint traces the history of how the ""hydrocarbon imagination" has been central to the development of film as a medium.Nadia Bozak's innovative fusion of film studies and environmental studies makes provocative connections between the disappearance of material resources and the emergence of digital media-with examples ranging from early cinema to Dziga Vertov's prescient eye, from Chris Marker's analog experiments to the digital work of Agnes Varda, James Benning, and Zacharias Kunuk. Combining an analysis of cinema technology with a sensitive consideration of film aesthetics, The Cinematic Footprint offers a new perspective on moving images and the natural resources that sustain them.

A Companion to Russian Cinema provides an exhaustive and carefully organised guide to the cinema of pre-Revolutionary Russia, of the Soviet era, as well as post-Soviet Russian cinema, edited by one of the most established and knowledgeable scholars in Russian cinema studies. * The most up-to-date and thorough coverage of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, which also effectively fills gaps in the existing scholarship in the field * This is the first volume on Russian cinema to explore specifically the history of movie theatres, studios, and educational institutions * The editor is one of the most established and knowledgeable scholars in Russian cinema studies, and contributions come from leading experts in the field of Russian Studies, Film Studies and Visual Culture * Chapters consider the arts of scriptwriting, sound, production design, costumes and cinematography * Provides five portraits of key figures in Soviet and Russia film history, whose works have been somewhat neglected

The works of Shakespeare and Dante or the figures of George Washington and Moses do not often enter into popular conceptions of the silent cinema, yet, between 1907 and 1910, the Vitagraph Company frequently used such material in producing "quality" films that promulgated "respectable" culture. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson situate these films in an era of immigration, labor unrest, and mainstream American xenophobia, in order to explore the cultural views promoted by the films and the ways the audiences--the middle classes as well as workers and immigrants--related to what they saw. The authors associate the production of quality films with a top-down forging of cultural consensus on issues such as patriotism and morality, and reveal the surprising bottom-up negotiations of these films' "meanings.". Devoting chapters to the literary, historical, and biblical subjects used by Vitagraph, this book draws upon plays, pageants, school textbooks, and even product advertisements to illuminate the conditions of cinematic production and reception. It provides a detailed look at one aspect of the film industry's transformation from "despised cheap amusement" to the nation's dominant mass medium, while showing how cultural elites engaged in a struggle similar to that of today's American academy over the literary canon and national value systems. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

As movies took the country by storm in the early twentieth century, Americans argued fiercely about whether municipal or state authorities should step in to control what people could watch when they went to movie theaters, which seemed to be springing up on every corner. Many who opposed the governmental regulation of film conceded that some entity-boards populated by trusted civic leaders, for example-needed to safeguard the public good. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NB), a civic group founded in New York City in 1909, emerged as a national cultural chaperon well suited to protect this emerging form of expression from state incursions. Using the National Board's extensive files, Monitoring the Movies offers the first full-length study of the NB and its campaign against motion-picture censorship. Jennifer Fronc traces the NB's Progressive-era founding in New York; its evolving set of "standards" for directors, producers, municipal officers, and citizens; its "city plan," which called on citizens to report screenings of condemned movies to local officials; and the spread of the NB's influence into the urban South. Ultimately, Monitoring the Movies shows how Americans grappled with the issues that arose alongside the powerful new medium of film: the extent of the right to produce and consume images and the proper scope of government control over what citizens can see and show.