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A new kind of public : community, solidarity, and political economy in New Deal cinema,1935-1948 / by Graham Cassano.
Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.N47 C37 2014
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Cassano, Graham.
- Series:
- Studies in critical social sciences ; 69.
- Studies in critical social sciences
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- New Deal, 1933-1939, in motion pictures.
- Motion pictures--Political aspects--United States.
- Motion pictures.
- Motion pictures--Political aspects.
- United States.
- Motion pictures--Social aspects--United States.
- Motion pictures--Social aspects.
- Physical Description:
- ix, 215 pages ; 25 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2014]
- Summary:
- In 1936, director John Ford claimed to be making movies for "a new kind of public" that wanted more honest pictures. Graham Cassano's book argues that this new kind of public was forged in the fires of class struggle and economic calamity. Those struggles appeared in Hollywood productions, as the movies themselves tried to explain the causes and consequence of the Great Depression. Using the tools of critical Marxism and cultural theory, Cassano surveys Hollywood's political economic explanations and finds a field of symbolic struggle in which radical visions of solidarity and conflict competed with the dominant class ideology for the loyalty of this new audience.
- Contents:
- 1 Black Fury (1935) and RiffRaff (1936) 30
- Radical Paternalism and Labor's Solidarity 32
- Black Fury and the Construction of Whiteness 34
- Black Fury's Paternalism 38
- RiffRaff 40
- Women's Exploitation in the Household 41
- Women's Exploitation in the Cannery 44
- Anti-Marx 47
- Race, Wealth, and Desire 49
- Responsible Unionism 51
- Cinematic Contradictions 55
- 2 My Man Godfrey (1936) 60
- Cinematic Corporatism 62
- Forgotten Men 66
- Two Communities 69
- Responsibility and Recognition 70
- Mastery and Servitude 75
- Captain of Finance 79
- Mask as Mark 82
- 3 Swing Time (1936) 84
- Recognition and "Schemes of Life" 86
- The Power of Fashion 88
- The Political Economy of Desire 90
- Swing Time's Realism 92
- Immigrants and The Shadows of Blackness 96
- Culture and Barbarism 102
- 4 The Hurricane (1937) 105
- Popular Front and Labor Affiliations 105
- Colonial Order and Pacific Passions 108
- "I'm Just the same as a White Man" 110
- Two Communities 113
- "Look at them Dance. There's the Island's Answer to your Law" 115
- De-Colonized Independence and Enslaved Servility 117
- "You're all Guilty" 118
- Contradictions and Paradoxes 120
- 5 Ginger Rogers and the (Hollywood) Proletarian Imaginary, 1939-1941 123
- 5th Avenue Girl (1939) 124
- Bachelor Mother (1939) 134
- Kitty Foyle (1940) 135
- Tom, Dick, and Harry (1941) 144
- 6 John Ford, From Radical Critique to the White Garrison State, 1940-1948 152
- Radical Traditionalism in The Grapes of Wrath 152
- Symbolic Domination as Traditional Compensation 154
- The Language of Patriarchy 156
- Allegories of Race 157
- Narrating Trauma as Radical Critique 160
- Capital, Class and the Charmed Circle of the State 164
- Workers' Control 167
- The Paradoxes of Radical Representation 168
- Two Voices 169
- From Class Conflict (Back) to Corporate Community 171
- All 1 can See is the Flags 173
- We'll have no more Grapes of Wrath 176.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 9789004275195
- 9004275193
- OCLC:
- 879567609
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