Hollywood and the American Historical Film

by Smyth, J.E.

• ISBN13: 9780230230934
• ISBN10: 0230230938
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-02-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This definitive interdisciplinary collection by leading scholars probes the theoretical and historical contexts of films made about the American past from silent film to the present. The book offers a fresh assessment of studio era historical filmmaking and its legacy across a range of genres.

Author Biography

J. E. Smyth is Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from Cimarron to Citizen Kane and Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History.

Table of Contents

Introduction; J.E.Smyth
Film and History: Artefact and Experience; W.Susman
Film History, Reconstruction and Southern Legendary History in The Birth of a Nation (1915); D.Culbert
The Hollywood Western, the Movement-Image and Making History; M.Landy
Ripping the Portieres at the Seams: Lessons from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) on Gone with the Wind (1939); S.Courtney
Hollywood About Hollywood: Genre as Historiography; R.Sklar
Some Like it Hot (1959) and The Virtues of Not Taking History Too Seriously; D.Eldridge
Vico's Age of Heroes and the Age of Men in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); M.Roche and V.Hösle
Anatomy of a Shipwreck: Warner Bros., The White House and the Celluloid Sinking of PT 109 (1963); N.J.Cull
The Long Road of Women’s Memory: Fred Zinnemann’s Julia (1977); J.E.Smyth
Inventing Historical Truth on the Silver Screen; R.Rosenstone
'This is not America; this is Los Angeles': Crime, Space and History in the City of Angels; I.Scott
Between Nostalgia and Regret: Strategies of Historical Disruption from Douglas Sirk to Mad Men; V.Dika
Further Reading