The Oxford Handbook of American Film History offers a series of newly-commissioned chapters on the current intellectual and topical diversity of the study of American film history. It provides a thorough look at the complex history of American cinema, and showcases a variety of historiographic practices and methods. Within each of the five chronological sections, readers will find discourse on technology, reception, exemplary films and filmmakers, the culture of celebrity, and industry policy, procedure, and regulation -- on political economy, textual representation (form, style, diversity), scientific/technological innovation, and the cultural (and subcultural) resonance of movies with their time and place.
The Oxford Handbook of American Film explores the delicate and imperfect balance between art and commerce, between entertainment and commercial enterprise. Approaching the history of American film from a dialectical perspective that allows for a close look at not only the important films and filmmakers, but also the complex and fascinating business conducted behind the scenes. Movies are complicated products of a complicated industry. Consequently, the history of film defies a simple formula, a unilateral methodology. It is a history shaped by multiple theses and voices and interests.
In a series of newly commissioned chapters, The Oxford Handbook of American Film History offers a new and fully compelling discussion of American film as marked by significant moments of industrial and artistic change. Many of the chapters are built upon primary sourced research, while others detail aspects of form and style. Together, the chapters in this book show a history shaped by multiple theses and voices and interests.
Introduction
Part
1. Early and Silent Cinema-1895-1927
Chapter 1: "All Things Go: Travel Imaginaries, Letter Sheets, and the
Emergence of Cinema"
Chapter 2: Transition's Longue Duréeand the Historiographical Vagaries of
Silent American Cinema
Chapter 3: 16mm Hollywood
Chapter 4: "The Conquest of Paris": Making French Cinema American, 1910-1925
Chapter 5: Slapstick as Media History, or, the Joke in the Machine
Chapter 6: "Rethinking Uplift and Class in Early Black American Cinema"
Chapter 7: When "Orientals" Become "Indians": Gender, Race, Masquerade in
Frontier Silent Films
Part
2. Classical Hollywood-1928-1946
Chapter 8: The Classical Hollywood Studio Era: A Case Study of Warner
Brothers
Chapter 9: The Sound of Movement
Chapter 10: The MGM Woman's Film 1928-1947
Chapter 11: Managing the Classical Hollywood Musical's Dancing Bodies:
"Morality" and Glamour
Chapter 12: Hollywood Gangsters: Crime, Punishment, and Movieland Celebrity
Chapter 13: License Revoked? Orson Welles's Studio Films of the Mid-Forties
Part
3. The Postwar Transition-1947-1967
Chapter 14: "Image Management and the Fall of Hollywood's Golden Age"
Chapter 15: Selling Noir's "Red Meat" to the Female Market
Chapter 16: Efficient Alfred: Hitchcock's Technical Images, 1946-1964
Chapter 17: Becoming Queen: Barbara Stanwyck's Postwar Westerns
Chapter 18: The Square Screen: A Look at the Unhip Cinema of the 1960s
Chapter 19: "'Who Do I Have to Fuck to Get off This Picture?' Roger Corman as
Progressive Exploitation Auteur"
Part
4. The New Hollywood(s)-1968-1999
Chapter 20: "Industrial Signposts to New Hollywood's Demise: First Artists,
the Directors Company and United Artists"
Chapter 21: The End of the World (As It Is Collectively Known at the Time):
Hit Patterns in US and Global Box-Office Charts
Chapter 22: "Men Produce, Women Develop": Feminized Story Labor, Executive
Power and the "D-Girl" In New Hollywood
Chapter 23: Foxtrot Tango Alpha: Jane Fonda's New Hollywood
Chapter 24: Changing the Conversation: Black Film Discourse in 1970s New
York
Chapter 25: Male Fusion: Cronenberg's Masculinities, The Fly, and the First
AIDS Era
Chapter 26: "A short little Hebrew man" with "a scintilla of homosexuality":
Mel Brooks's Queer Comedy and Vulgar Humanism, from The Producers (1967) to
The Producers (2005)
Chapter 27: Genderqueer Approaches to Blaxploitation
Part
5. Converging Media-2000-2023
Chapter 28: "Fin-dies," Filmanthropy, and the Financialization of Indie Film
Chapter 29: From Tentpoles to Universes: Hollywood's Evolving Franchise
Strategy
Chapter 30: The Disintegration Effect
Chapter 31: "Dark Money Documentaries"
Chapter 32: Forward-looking Statements, or, The Content of the Content
Jon Lewis is the University Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at Oregon State University. He is the author of Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry, Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles, and Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture.
