Hollywood's Indies offers an in depth examination of the phenomenon of the classics divisions by tracing its history since the establishment of the first specialty label in 1980.
To continue doing business in Germany, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films attacking Nazis or condemning persecution of Jews. Ben Urwand reveals this collaboration and the cast of characters ...it drew in, ranging from Goebbels to Louis B. Mayer. At the center was Hitler himself--obsessed with movies and their power to shape public opinion.
InNot According to Plan, Maria Belodubrovskaya reveals the limits on the power of even the most repressive totalitarian regimes to create and control propaganda. Belodubrovskaya's revisionist account ...of Soviet filmmaking between 1930 and 1953 highlights the extent to which the Soviet film industry remained stubbornly artisanal in its methods, especially in contrast to the more industrial approach of the Hollywood studio system. Not According to Plan shows that even though Josef Stalin recognized cinema as a "mighty instrument of mass agitation and propaganda" and strove to harness the Soviet film industry to serve the state, directors such as Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Pudovkin had far more creative control than did party-appointed executives and censors.
The Stalinist party-state, despite explicit intent and grandiose plans to build a "Soviet Hollywood" that would release a thousand features per year, failed to construct even a modest mass propaganda cinema. Belodubrovskaya's wealth of evidence shows that the regime's desire to disseminate propaganda on a vast scale was consistently at odds with its compulsion to control quality and with Stalin's intolerance of imperfection.Not According to Planis a landmark in Soviet cultural history and the global history of cinema.
Traditional interpretations of the 1950s have emphasized how American anti-communists deployed censorship and the blacklist to silence dissent, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Yet those ...efforts at
repression did not always succeed. Throughout the early years of the Cold War, a significant number of writers and performers continued to express controversial views about international relations in Hollywood films, through the new medium of televi-sion,
on the Broadway stage, and from behind the scenes.
By promoting superpower cooperation, decolonization, nuclear disarmament, and other taboo causes, dissident artists such as Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Rod Serling, Dalton Trumbo, Reginald Rose, and Paddy Chayefsky managed both to stretch the boundaries of Cold War ideology and to undermine some of its basic assumptions. Working at times under assumed names and in some cases outside the United States, they took on the role of informal diplomats who competed with Washington in repre-senting America to the world.
Ironically, the dissidents’ international appeal eventually persuaded the U.S. foreign policy establishment that their unconventional views could be an asset in the Cold War contest for “hearts and minds,” and their artistic work an effective means to sell Ameri-can values and culture abroad. By the end of the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration not only appropriated the work of these talented artists but enlisted some of them to serve as official voices of Cold War cultural diplomacy.
This ground-breaking collection, the first sustained examination of the work of female practitioners within American independent cinema, reclaims the difference of female indie filmmaking.
Reynold Humphries provide a history of the political and cultural factors underpinning the why and the how of the various investigations of alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood.
