Cecil B. Demille and American Culture

by Higashi, Sumiko

• ISBN13: 9780520085572
• ISBN10: 0520085574
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr on Demand

Summary

Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture demonstrates that the director, best remembered for his overblown biblical epics, was one of the most remarkable film pioneers of the Progressive Era. In this innovative work, which integrates cultural history and cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi shows how DeMille artfully inserted cinema into genteel middle-class culture by replicating in his films such spectacles as elaborate parlor games, stage melodramas, department store displays, Orientalist world's fairs, and civic pageantry. The director not only established his signature as a film author by articulating middle-class ideology across class and ethnic lines, but by the 1920's had become a trendsetter, with set and costume designs that influenced the advertising industry to create a consumer culture based on female desire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped material from the DeMille Archives and other collections, Higashi provides imaginative readings of DeMille's early feature films, viewing them in relation to the dynamics of social change, and she documents the extent to which the emergence of popular culture was linked to the genteel tradition.

Author Biography

Sumiko Higashi is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York, Brockport

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Lasky Company and Highbrow Culture: Authorship versus Intertextuality	p. 7
The Consumption of Culture: Highbrow versus Lowbrow	p. 7
Texts and Intertexts: A Question of Authorship	p. 10
Geraldine Farrar: A Diva Comes to Hollywood	p. 20
Critical Discourses	p. 25
Film: The New Democratic Art	p. 29
Self-Theatricalization in Victorian Pictorial Dramaturgy: What's His Name	p. 34
Melodrama as a Middle-Class Sermon	p. 34
A Genteel Audience: Rewriting Domestic Melodrama	p. 41
Character versus Personality: What's His Name	p. 49
The Lower East Side as Spectacle: Class and Ethnicity in the Urban Landscape	p. 59
Representations of the City: Artificial or Romantic Realism	p. 59
Social Ills and Comic Relief: The Chimmie Fadden Series	p. 63
A Tour of the Lower East Side: Kindling	p. 71
Cinderella of the Slums: The Dream Girl	p. 84
The Screen as Display Window: Constructing the "New Woman"	p. 87
The "New Woman" as a Consumer	p. 87
Cinderella on the Lower East Side: The Golden Chance	p. 92
The "New Woman" versus the New Immigrant: The Cheat	p. 100
The Sentimental Heroine versus the "New Woman": The Heart of Nora Flynn	p. 112
The Historical Epic and Progressive Era Civic Pageantry: Joan the Woman	p. 117
A Usable Past: Civic Pageants as Historical Representation	p. 117
Representations and the Body Politic: Joan the Woman	p. 123
Discourse on Femininity: Joan of Are as a Symbol of Gender Conflict	p. 125
Critical Discourses: Gender and the Moral Lesson of History	p. 132
Set and Costume Design as Spectacle in a Consumer Culture: The Early Jazz Age Films	p. 142
DeMille's "Second Epoch"	p. 142
The Commodification of Marriage: Old Wives for New, Don't Change Your Husband, Why Change Your Wife?	p. 146
Discourse on the Old versus the New Morality: The Demographics of Film Audiences	p. 159
Ambivalence as a Sign of Modernity: The Affairs of Anatol	p. 166
Advertising for Affluent Consumers: DeMille's Texts as Intertexts	p. 175
DeMille's Exodus from Famous Players-Lasky: The Ten Commandments (1923)	p. 179
Antimodernism as Historical Representation: The King James Version of the Bible as Spectacle	p. 179
The Cost of Spectacle: Film Production as Commodity Fetishism	p. 194
DeMille's Legacy in a Postmodern Age: The Ten Commandments (1956) as a Televisual Supertext	p. 201
Filmography	p. 205
Notes	p. 209
Index	p. 253
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