Hollywood and the Culture Elite - How the Movies Became American (Hardcover)

An intellectualized examination of the film industry's early attempts to untie the Gordian knot of authority, domination and legitimacy connecting Hollywood filmmakers, the U.S. government and key cultural institutions such as museums and universities. Film has two unique histories. One concerns glamorous stars, ruthless moguls and the radical whence of talkies and digital dinosaurs-a territory continually mined in Hollywood creative nonfiction laced with clever fact and speculative ballyhoo. The second is more important for academic Decherney (Cinema Studies & English/Univ. of Pennsylvania), who delves into the flipside of eminent pop culture and investigates how civic and elite powers drove the emergence of American film into propaganda, high art, and documentary vis-a-vis simple escapism. Early 20th-century film's supremacy as a means of communication was clear, and filmmakers hustled to push the medium's accessibility to truth. Some were bent on eliminating written historical documentation, allowing visual images alone to portray events. Teetotalers saw film as a way to invoke temperance, yet film, even so, was criticized as an inebriant to the eyes, a tool for foreigners to manipulate America, and an impractical explosive device, due to its chemistry. The most intriguing elements here, however, are Decherney's depictions of Hollywood as outsider to legitimacy. Studios helped Columbia University's early film program grow by seeing it as a Jewish immigrant's vocational school from which to hire, while Harvard's Film Library's criteria for acquisition anticipated the Academy Awards-at the same time hampering a filmmakers' labor union. Decherney is happily objective in his account of Hollywood's Golden Age and thoroughly dissects the vicissitudes of players like film critic and MoMA curator Iris Barry as she rallies against American cinema one moment and heralds its global import the next. Discourses on modernism, phenomenology and library sciences stride confidently into hermeneutical territory, and Decherney regularly forgoes anecdotes in favor of historical and academic exactitude. If you're up for the challenge, here's a previously unplumbed course in cultural studies and American film history. (Kirkus Reviews)

As Americans flocked to the movies during the first part of the twentieth century, the guardians of culture grew worried about their diminishing influence on American art, education, and American identity itself. Meanwhile, Hollywood studio heads were eager to stabilize their industry, solidify their place in mainstream society, and expand their new but tenuous hold on American popular culture.

Peter Decherney explores how these needs coalesced and led to the development of a symbiotic relationship between the film industry and America's stewards of high culture. Formed during Hollywood's Golden Age (1915-1960), this unlikely partnership ultimately insured prominent places in American culture for both the movie industry and elite cultural institutions. It redefined Hollywood as an ideal American industry; it made movies an art form instead of simply entertainment for the masses; and it made moviegoing a vital civic institution. For their part, museums and universities used films to maintain their position as quintessential American institutions.

As the book delves into the ties between Hollywood bigwigs and various cultural leaders, an intriguing cast of characters emerges, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, film producers Adolph Zukor and Joseph Kennedy, Hollywood flak and censor extraordinaire Will Hays, and philanthropist turned politician Nelson Rockefeller. Decherney considers how Columbia University's film studies program helped integrate Jewish students into American culture while also professionalizing screenwriting. He examines MoMA's career-savvy film curator Iris Barry, a British feminist once dedicated to stemming the tide of U.S. cultural imperialism, who ultimately worked with Hollywood and the U.S. government to fight fascism and communism and promote American values abroad. Other chapters explore Vachel Lindsay's progressive vision of movies as reinvigorating the public sphere through film libraries and museums; the promotion of movie connoisseurship at Harvard and other universities; and how the heir of a railroad magnate bankrolled the American avant-garde film movement.

Amid ethnic diversity, the rise of mass entertainment, world war, and the global spread of American culture, Hollywood and cultural institutions worked together to insure their own survival and profitability and to provide a coherent, though shifting, American identity.

General

Imprint:	Columbia University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Film and Culture Series
Release date:	April 2005
First published:	April 2005
Authors:	Peter Decherney (Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and English)
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 22mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Trade binding
Pages:	272
ISBN-13:	978-0-231-13376-0
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > General
LSN:	0-231-13376-6
Barcode:	9780231133760

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