Download or read book American Politics in Hollywood Film written by Ian Scott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this second edition of American Politics in Hollywood Film, Ian Scott takes up his analysis of political content and ideology through movies and contends that American culture and the institutional process continues to be portrayed, debated and influen

Download or read book American Politics in Hollywood Film written by Ian Scott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is the American political landscape represented in cinema? What is the relationship between Hollywood and Washington? From Arnold Schwarzenegger's rise to the Governorship of California through to the drama of the celebrity-fuelled 2008 Presidential election, Hollywood and politics have never been more intimate.This thoroughly updated and revised new edition continues to analyse the theoretical and conceptual relationship of Hollywood to national politics and the way film content and criticism has aligned itself to political culture and debate.Chronicling the evolution of American political cinema from the 1930s, this book explores the genre's symbiotic relationship with the American political culture and history. Through textual analysis of a range of films and television series, Scott provides a critique of current and past developments across several sub-genres, including the bio-pic, the election film and documentary.New for this edition* Analysis of the post-9/11 and Bush era's effect on the American politics and cinema* In-depth discussion of political documentaries, such as Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Fog of War, as well as films from the 2000s, such as Man of the Year and State of Play* Expanded coverage of television series from The West Wing, through to 24 and John Adams

Download or read book Hollywood Left and Right written by Steven J. Ross and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ever since the film industry relocated to Hollywood early in the twentieth century, it has had an outsized influence on American politics. Almost immediately, the savviest stars and moguls learned that their ability to attract millions of fans also meant that they could sway public opinion. Through compelling larger-than-life figures in American cinema - Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Edward G. Robinson, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, Warren Beatty, and Arnold Schwarzenegger - Hollywood Left and Right reveals how Hollywood's engagement in politics has been longer, deeper, and more varied than most people would imagine. Alternating between stars from the right and the left, Steven J. Ross shows how each gained ascendancy in Tinseltown in different periods. From Chaplin, whose movies almost always displayed his leftist convictions, to Schwarzenegger's nearly seamless transition from action blockbusters to the California governor's mansion, Ross shows how both left and right activism in Hollywood reinforced the defining trends in American politics from the early 1900s to the present. Most significantly, Hollywood Left and Right challenges the commonly held belief that Hollywood has always been a bastion of liberalism. The real story, as Ross demonstrates in this passionate and entertaining work, is far more complicated. Most surprisingly, while the Hollywood left was usually more vocal and visible, the right had a greater impact on American political life, capturing a Senate seat (Murphy), a governorship (Schwarzenegger), and the ultimate achievement, the Presidency (Reagan)."--Jacket.

Download or read book Hollywood Goes to Washington written by Michael Coyne and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fantasy and politics are familiar dancing partners that rarely separate, even in the face of post–Election Day realities. But Hollywood has a tradition of punching holes in the fairy tales of electoral promises with films that meditate on what could have been and should have been. With Hollywood Goes to Washington,Michael Coyne investigates how the American political film unravels the labyrinthine entanglements of politics and the psyche of the American electorate in order to reveal brutal truths about the state of our democracy. From conspiracy dramas such as The Manchurian Candidate to satires like Wag the Dog, Hollywood Goes to Washington argues that political films in American cinema have long reflected the issues and tensions roiling within American society. Coyne elucidates the mythology, iconography, and ideology embedded in both classic and lesser-known films—including Gabriel Over the White House, Silver City, Advise and Consent, and The Siege—and examines the cinematic portrayals of presidents in the White House, the everyman American citizen, and the nebulous enemies who threaten American democracy. The author provocatively contends that whether addressing the threat of domestic fascism in Citizen Kane or the disillusionment of Vietnam and paranoia of the post-Watergate era in Executive Action, the American political film stands as an important cultural bellwether and democratic force—one that is more vital than ever in the face of decreasing civil liberties in the present-day United States. Compelling and wholly original, Hollywood Goes to Washington exposes the political power of the silver screen and its ramifications for contemporary American culture.

Download or read book Cinema Wars written by Douglas M. Kellner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema Wars explores the intersection of film, politics, and US culture and society through a bold critical analysis of the films, TV shows, and documentaries produced in the early 2000s Offers a thought-provoking depiction of Hollywood film as a contested terrain between conservative and liberal forces Films and documentaries discussed include: Black Hawk Down, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, Syriana, WALL-E, Fahrenheit 9/11 and other Michael Moore documentaries, amongst others Explores how some films in this era supported the Bush-Cheney regime, while others criticized the administration, openly or otherwise Investigates Hollywood’s treatment of a range of hot topics, from terrorism and environmental crisis to the Iraq war and the culture wars of the 2000s Shows how Hollywood film in the 2000s brought to life a vibrant array of social protest and helped create cultural conditions to elect Barack Obama

Download or read book Projecting Politics written by Elizabeth Haas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new edition of this influential work updates and expands the scope of the original, including more sustained analyses of individual films, from The Birth of a Nation to The Wolf of Wall Street. An interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between American politics and popular films of all kinds—including comedy, science fiction, melodrama, and action-adventure—Projecting Politics offers original approaches to determining the political contours of films, and to connecting cinematic language to political messaging. A new chapter covering 2000 to 2013 updates the decade-by-decade look at the Washington-Hollywood nexus, with special areas of focus including the post-9/11 increase in political films, the rise of political war films, and films about the 2008 economic recession. The new edition also considers recent developments such as the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the controversy sparked by the film Zero Dark Thirty, newer generation actor-activists, and the effects of shifting industrial financing structures on political content. A new chapter addresses the resurgence of the disaster-apocalyptic film genre with particular attention paid to its themes of political nostalgia and the turn to global settings and audiences. Updated and expanded chapters on nonfiction film and advocacy documentaries, the politics of race and African-American film, and women and gender in political films round out this expansive, timely new work. A companion website offers two additional appendices and further materials for those using the book in class.

Download or read book Hollywood and the Great Depression written by Iwan Morgan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how Hollywood responded to and reflected the political and social changes that America experienced during the 1930sIn the popular imagination, 1930s Hollywood was a dream factory producing escapist movies to distract the American people from the greatest economic crisis in their nations history. But while many films of the period conform to this stereotype, there were a significant number that promoted a message, either explicitly or implicitly, in support of the political, social and economic change broadly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal programme. At the same time, Hollywood was in the forefront of challenging traditional gender roles, both in terms of movie representations of women and the role of women within the studio system. With case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great Depression impacted on Hollywood and how it responded to them.Topics covered include:How Hollywood offered positive representations of working womenCongressional investigations of big-studio monopolization over movie distributionHow three different types of musical genres related in different ways to the Great Depression the Warner Bros Great Depression Musicals of 1933, the Astaire/Rogers movies, and the MGM akids musicals of the late 1930sThe problems of independent production exemplified in King Vidors Our Daily BreadCary Grants success in developing a debonair screen persona amid Depression conditionsContributors Harvey G. Cohen, King's College LondonPhilip John Davies, British LibraryDavid Eldridge, University of HullPeter William Evans, Queen Mary, University of LondonMark Glancy, Queen Mary University of LondonIna Rae Hark, University of South CarolinaIwan Morgan, University College LondonBrian Neve, University of BathIan Scott, University of ManchesterAnna Siomopoulos, Bentley UniversityJ. E. Smyth, University of WarwickMelvyn Stokes, University College LondonMark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University

Download or read book Hollywood Goes to War written by Clayton R. Koppes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-08-16 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The little-explored story of how politics, propaganda, and profits were combined to create the drama, imagery and fantasy that was American film during World War II. 32 black-and-white photographs.

Download or read book Hollywood s Last Golden Age written by Jonathan Kirshner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period—including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves—were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These "seventies films" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood’s embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters’ interior lives.

Download or read book Film Propaganda and American Politics written by James Combs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1994, this important book traces the rise of film propaganda in the 20th Century, discussing specifically how film can be used to manipulate public perception and opinions. Two distinct areas are covered: war propaganda, including feature and documentary films regarding warfare; and civilian propaganda, including films that address a variety of political subjects. Although the focus is American film and American politics, this book offers insights for all those interested in the affect of film on the minds of citizens of any country or state.

Download or read book The Politics of Hollywood Cinema written by R. Rushton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Hollywood Cinema radically transforms our understanding of cinema's potential to be politically engaging and challenging. Examining several films from Hollywood's classical era, including Marked Woman, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Born Yesterday, On the Waterfront and It Should Happen to You, alongside contemporary theories of democracy advanced by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Claude Lefort, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, Richard Rushton argues that popular films can offer complex subtle, relevant and controversial approaches to democracy and politics.

Download or read book Showbiz Politics written by Kathryn Cramer Brownell and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-11-24 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional wisdom holds that John F. Kennedy was the first celebrity president, in no small part because of his innate television savvy. But, as Kathryn Cramer Brownell shows, Kennedy capitalized on a tradition and style rooted in California politics and the Hollywood studio system. Since the 1920s, politicians and professional showmen have developed relationships and built organizations, institutionalizing Hollywood styles, structures, and personalities in the American political process. Brownell explores how similarities developed between the operation of a studio, planning a successful electoral campaign, and ultimately running an administration. Using their business and public relations know-how, figures such as Louis B. Mayer, Bette Davis, Jack Warner, Harry Belafonte, Ronald Reagan, and members of the Rat Pack made Hollywood connections an asset in a political world being quickly transformed by the media. Brownell takes readers behind the camera to explore the negotiations and relationships that developed between key Hollywood insiders and presidential candidates from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton, analyzing how entertainment replaced party spectacle as a strategy to raise money, win votes, and secure success for all those involved. She demonstrates how Hollywood contributed to the rise of mass-mediated politics, making the twentieth century not just the age of the political consultant but also the age of showbiz politics.

Download or read book Camera Politica written by Michael Ryan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1988-06-22 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " a modern mythography, a study of contemporary Hollywood films based on the tools offered by feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxist cultural theory, and deconstruction." --Village Voice "Solidly thought-out observation of the films of the 70's and 80's that comment on the system." --Audience "... intelligent, open advocacy. Its responsible arrangement of carefully described cultural materials will challenge students and instructors alike." --Teaching Philosophy Camera Politica is a comprehensive study of Hollywood film during a period of tremendous change in American history, a period that witnessed the end of the American empire, crises in the economy, a failure of political leadership, loss at war, and the rise of the Right.

Download or read book Un American Hollywood written by Peter Stanfield and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-27 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of “un-Americanism,” so vital to the HUAC crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, was resoundingly revived in the emotional rhetoric that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today’s political and cultural climate makes it more crucial than ever to come to terms with the consequences of this earlier period of repression and with the contested claims of Americanism that it generated. “Un-American” Hollywood reopens the intense critical debate on the blacklist era and on the aesthetic and political work of the Hollywood Left. In a series of fresh case studies focusing on contexts of production and reception, the contributors offer exciting and original perspectives on the role of progressive politics within a capitalist media industry. Original essays scrutinize the work of individual practitioners, such as Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Edward Dmytryk, and examine key films, including The Robe, Christ in Concrete, The House I Live In, The Lawless, The Naked City, The Prowler, Body and Soul, and FTA.

Download or read book Ronald Reagan in Hollywood written by Stephen Vaughn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-28 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the relationship between the motion picture industry and American politics.

Download or read book Hollywood As Historian written by Peter C. Rollins and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A commendably comprehensive analysis of the issue of Hollywood’s ability to shape our minds . . . invigorating reading.” ?Booklist Film has exerted a pervasive influence on the American mind, and in eras of economic instability and international conflict, the industry has not hesitated to use motion pictures for propaganda purposes. During less troubled times, citizens’ ability to deal with political and social issues may be enhanced or thwarted by images absorbed in theaters. Tracking the interaction of Americans with important movie productions, this book considers such topics as racial and sexual stereotyping; censorship of films; comedy as a tool for social criticism; the influence of “great men” and their screen images; and the use of film to interpret history. Hollywood As Historian benefits from a variety of approaches. Literary and historical influences are carefully related to The Birth of a Nation and Apocalypse Now, two highly tendentious epics of war and cultural change. How political beliefs of filmmakers affected cinematic styles is illuminated in a short survey of documentary films made during the Great Depression. Historical distance has helped analysts decode messages unintended by filmmakers in the study of The Snake Pit and Dr. Strangelove. Hollywood As Historian offers a versatile, thought-provoking text for students of popular culture, American studies, film history, or film as history. Films considered include: The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1937), March of Time (1935-1953), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Native Land (1942), Wilson (1944), The Negro Soldier (1944), The Snake Pit (1948), On the Waterfront (1954), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Apocalypse Now (1979). “Recommended reading for anyone concerned with the influence of popular culture on the public perception of history.” ?American Journalism

Download or read book Working Class Hollywood written by Steven J. Ross and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America. Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers. Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.