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Crowd Scenes - Movies and Mass Politics (Paperback)
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Crowd Scenes - Movies and Mass Politics (Paperback)
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The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a
few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of
persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had
never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie
palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of
how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued
politicians and filmmakers alike. Movies seemed to speak directly
to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed
individual personality. Many political commentators believed that
movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist
mass politics-indeed, government control of the movie industry
became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new
political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social
order. Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses-the
crowd scenes-in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through
such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of
Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes
in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate
being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd
is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood
films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while
collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass
movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for
stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the
theater. The book concludes with an examination of the films of
Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood,
created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways
of using the crowd.
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