Book Description

The Cultures of American Film integrates a number of approaches to the study of movies. Its chronological organization provides a historical overview, a survey of films across the decades from cinema's invention to the present. Its analytical approach addresses form and content: how films workand how we respond to them. By putting films in their cultural contexts, it examines how films fit into our lives and their own: that is, the life of film itself; the technologies that made them possible; the studios in which they were made; the filmmakers' struggles with politics and censorship.The Cultures of American Film covers movements, directions and directors, genres, the structures of films and their audiences.American film and its audience engage in a process of ongoing negotiation: will a film gain an audience? What kind of audience? A broad one, consisting of ages 18-46, the demographic most desired? Will the film have "legs," bringing in more viewers by word of mouth and repeat viewers? Will a film bemade for a smaller audience, made with a small budget and perhaps attempting to experiment somewhat with form and content? What do you as a viewer expect from a film? Do you want simple entertainment, an escape from the everyday? Do you want a film to engage in complex emotions or even ideas? Whatsatisfies you most when you see a film? Do you respond most to acting and the presence of stars? Do you like digital spectacle with superheroes? Do you prefer more intimate dramas or films with sex and violence?All of this and more make up the cultures of American film. Production and reception (that's you, the viewer, responding to a film), the history of events surrounding and sometimes absorbed by a film, the ways in which film speaks to us and we to it constitute a constellation of events andinteractions that we will examine in the course of this book. In chronological order, we will analyze the ways in which films work as part of the cultures of their own making as well as the larger structures of their society. We will make general observations and close analyses of particular films,talk about how and why films are made, and investigate the kinds of responses that they require and desire. Included at the end of each chapter are suggestions for further reading and suggestions for further critical analysis of the issues presented in the chapter. The aim, finally, is not to beinclusive but rather an attempt to discover connections, interactions, even surprises when film, its makers, its audience, and the culture they are part of interact.