Hollywood Highbrow

by Baumann, Shyon

• ISBN13: 9780691125275
• ISBN10: 0691125279
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-24
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. InHollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
List of Tables	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: Drawing the Boundaries of Art	p. 1
The Central Argument	p. 3
How Do We Know What Art Is?	p. 4
American Film History	p. 7
The Social Construction of Art	p. 12
The Creation of Artistic Status: Opportunity, Institutions, and Ideology	p. 14
Outline of the Chapters	p. 18
The Changing Opportunity Space
Developments in the Wider Social Context	p. 21
The First World War and Urban-American Life
Two Disparate Influences on Film Attendance in Europe and the United States	p. 23
Post-World War II Changes in the Size and Composition of American Film Audiences	p. 32
Summary	p. 51
Change from Within
New Production and Consumption Practices	p. 53
Film Festivals	p. 54
Self-Promotion of Directors	p. 59
Ties to Academia	p. 66
United States, England, Germany, Italy, and France: Changes in the Industrial and Social History of Film	p. 76
Purification through Venue: From Nickelodeons to Art Houses	p. 88
Prestige Productions	p. 92
The Ebb of Censorship and the Coming of Art	p. 97
The Crisis of the 1960s Forced Hollywood down New Paths	p. 105
Summary	p. 108
The Intellectualization of Film	p. 111
Early U.S. Film Discourse	p. 113
The Intellectualization of Film Reviews: 1925-1985	p. 117
Film Reviews Approach Book Reviews: A Comparison with Literature	p. 133
1960s Advertisements Incorporate Film Review	p. 137
Foreign Film: A Pathway to High Art for Hollywood	p. 148
Cultural Hierarchy, the Relevance of Critics, and the Status of Film as Art	p. 155
Summary	p. 159
Mechanisms for Cultural Valuation	p. 161
Why a Middlebrow Art?	p. 163
Film Consumption as Cultural Capital	p. 169
An Emphasis on Intellectualizing Discourse	p. 171
Integration of Factors	p. 173
The Study of Cultural Hierarchy	p. 174
Notes	p. 179
References	p. 203
Index	p. 217
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