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    Movies & Mass Culture

    John Belton (Author)

    9780813522289

    Paperback / softback, published 1 October 1995

    279 pages
    22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.399 kg

    Movies and Mass Culture looks at the ways in which American identity shapes and is shaped by motion pictures. Movies serve not only as texts that document who we think we are or were, but they also reflect changes in our self-image, tracing the transformation from one kind of America to another. They assist audiences in negotiating major changes in identity, carrying them across difficult periods of cultural transition so that a more or less coherent national identity again emerges. Films thus help their viewers to span the gaps and fissures that cultural changes cause, allowing passage over any disjointedness that in some way might disrupt our sense of what we believe in as a nation. This volume examines this process, illustrating the ways in which films aided America's transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy; from a nation of producers to one of consumers; and from a community of individuals to a mass society.

    Introduction
    Mass Culture, the Individual, and the Mass
    Apocalyptic Cinema: D. W. Griffith and the Aesthetics of Reform
    The Crowd, the Collective, and the Chorus: Busby Berkeley and the New Deal
    The Regulation of Desire: From Mass Consumption to Mass Morality
    The Carole Lombard in Macy's Window
    The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema
    The Production Code
    The Dark Side of Mass Culture: Film Noir
    Notes on Film Noir
    Woman's Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir
    Mass Production, the Failure of the New, and Reaganite Cinema
    Postmodernism and Consumer Society
    Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era
    Against the Grain
    New U.S. Black Cinema
    The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators
    Select Bibliography
    Contributors
    Index
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