Politics and Film

Films have been a part of U.S. society for a century--a source of great enjoyment for the audience and of great profit to filmmakers. How does a mass entertainment medium deal with some of the great sources of dramatic real-life political and economic conflict--the Great Depression, the Cold War--in a way that attracts an audience without making it angry? How does an industry, which has from its beginnings been the subject of attacks from social, political and religious groups deal with political issues and conflicts? This book is an attempt to examine these questions; it is also an examination of some of the greatest and most interesting American films ever made--westerns, gangster films, comedies, war films, satires, and film biographies--to see what American films say about politics and politicians, and what these films, in turn, say about the audience for which they were produced.

This volume explores film's function as a medium of political communication, recognizing not just the propaganda film, but the various ways that conventional narrative films embody, question, or critique established social values underlying American attitudes toward historical, social, and political events. Prince discusses Hollywood film productions of the 1980s in terms of salient political issues of the period, including anxieties about declining U.S. military power, the wars in Central America and the prospects for U.S. intervention, the legacy of the Vietnam War, and urban decay.

Hollywood's America is a balanced discussion of unique breadth and depth on a subject of national importance.

The American Left has produced a rich and varied cultural tradition that was largely suppressed during the Cold War but whose influence on the larger society has always been significant. Much of this tradition found its expression in film and, despite the suppression of overtly leftist content in most Hollywood films, there is still a substantial amount of leftist material in American movies. Booker's study gives the attention to the films of the American Left that they have long deserved. His book provides extensive entries for more than 260 films that are connected with the culture of the American Left, ranging from Citizen Kane to Apocalypse Now. The chronological arrangement of the entries allows the reader to trace the cinematic representation of the American Left across time, while an appendix and index provide alphabetical and thematic access to the material.

Ideas of national identity, nationalism and transnationalism are now a central feature of contemporary film studies, as well as primary concerns for film-makers themselves. Embracing a range of national cinemas including Scotland, Poland, France, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Germany and America, Cinema and Nation considers the ways in which film production and reception are shaped by ideas of national belonging and examines the implications of globalisation for the concept of national cinema.In the first three Parts, contributors explore sociological approaches to nationalism, challenge the established definitions of 'national cinema', and consider the ways in which states - from the old Soviet Union to contemporary Scotland - aim to create a national culture through cinema. The final two Parts address the diverse strategies involved in the production of national cinema and consider how images of the nation are used and understood by audiences both at home and abroad.

What does it mean to talk about a "national" cinema? To what extent can British cinema, dominated for so many years by Hollywood, be considered a national cinema? Andrew Higson investigates these questions from a historical point of view. Challenging the received wisdoms of British cinema history, and combining detailed analyses of film texts from the early 1920s to the 1940s with studies of industrial and cultural contexts, Waving the Flag is an impressive and wide-ranging survey of the concept of national cinema.

Hollywood in Crisis provides a detailed study of the workings of the American film industry during the 1930s. Colin Shindler looks at Hollywood as an agent of Roosevelt's New Deal & at the attempts filmmakers made to withstand the turmoil of the era.

This easy-to-use guide explores the relationships between film images and the experience of war, showing how films influence war-time behavior and how wars influence films. This unique reference combines essays on the aesthetic and historical aspects of war films with classifications and discussions of films about different wars, a filmography arranged alphabetically with annotations, a bibliography of books and articles dealing with war films, a general guide for film study, along with separate indices to film titles, filmmakers, and subjects.

The Nazis saw film as a major vehicle for both indoctrination and escapist pacification of the "masses"; in fact, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels tried to create a German counter-Hollywood. This highly acclaimed study, by one of Germany's leading commentators and authors on cultural policy, analyses the pictorial and spoken language of the various film genres in the Third Reich, including news reels, documentaries, feature and "cultural" films. It shows how a powerful and sinister propaganda machine emerged which, by deploying a wide range of psychological techniques, exerted a strong fascination on the masses. These methods were so successful that they continue to serve as models for totalitarian regimes to this day.

Film and television have been accepted as having a pervasive influence on how people understand the world. An important aspect of this is the relationship of history and film. The different views of the past created by film, television, and video are only now attracting closer attention from historians, cultural critics, and filmmakers. This volume seeks to advance the critical exploration scholars have recently begun.

This volume brings together the work of leading film scholars from the UK, France and the US who assess a dominant art form's engagement with expressions of national identity at key moments in French cinematic history, from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century, through the inter-war period, the Occupation, the post-Liberation era, and the New Wave, up to the current state of the industry. The essays go against the grain in their attempts to construct an alternative history of French cinema, whether by bringing to light overlooked films or by examining well-known, indeed even 'over-exposed' films or filmmakers in a new light. In re-evaluating the work of Georges MÈliËs, Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Diane Kurys, FranÁois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Jacques Beineix, the contributors to this volume focus on the paradoxical centrality of the marginal in constructions of national identity. In doing so, they reveal the structure of 'l'exception franÁaise', in which French culture makes an exception for itself by suppressing alterity within it.This multi-faceted assessment of French visual culture and identity will be of interest to students and scholars in French studies, media and film studies, cultural studies and French history.

What does it mean to be 'Chinese'? This controversial question has sparked off a never-ending process of image-making in Chinese-speaking communities throughout the twentieth century. This introduction to Chinese national cinema covers three 'Chinas': mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Historical and comparative perspectives bring out the parallel developments in these three Chinas, while critical analysis explores thematic and stylistic changes over time.As well as exploring artistic achievements and ideological debates, Yingjin Zhang examines how - despite the pressures placed on the industry from state control and rigid censorship - Chinese national cinema remains incapable of projecting a single unified picture, but rather portrays many different Chinas.