Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jon Lewis is a professor in the English department at Oregon State University. His books include Hollywood v. Hard-Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry as well as Whom God Wishes to Destroy: Francis Ford Coppola and the New Hollywood and The New American Cinema, both also published by Duke University Press.

Eric Smoodin is a professor of American studies and director of film studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960, also published by Duke University Press, and Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era.

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"From university classrooms in 1915 and adult films in the 1930s to secretary-producers and dish night at the movies, this compelling collection reminds us that the power, importance, and complexity of films and film studies reside in the vibrant details of the medium's extraordinary cultural history."--Timothy Corrigan, author of "New German Film" and "A Cinema without Walls"

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Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION the History of Film History Eric Smoodin........................................................................................1I INSTITUTIONAL HISTORIES......................................................................................................................35THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN FILM STUDY Dana Polan..............................................................................................37THE PERFECT MONEY MACHINE(S) George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Auteurism in the New Hollywood Jon Lewis....................................61II STAR STUDIES................................................................................................................................87LOIS WEBER AND THE CELEBRITY OF MATRONLY RESPECTABILITY Shelley Stamp.........................................................................89TEMPTING FATE Clara Smith Hamon, or, the Secretary as Producer Mark Lynn Anderson............................................................117THE CRAFTING OF A POLITICAL ICON Lola Lola on Paper Andrea Slane.............................................................................151III REGULATION.................................................................................................................................167GOING HOLLYWOOD SOONER OR LATER Chinese Censorship and The Bitter Tea of General Yen Eric Smoodin............................................169PLAIN BROWN WRAPPER Adult Films for the Home Market, 1930-1969 Eric Schaefer.................................................................201IV RECEPTION...................................................................................................................................227ETHNOGRAPHY AND EXHIBITION the Child Audience, the Hays office, and Saturday Matinees Richard deCordova......................................229DISH NIGHT AT THE MOVIES Exhibitor Promotions and Female Audiences during the great Depression Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley......................246"A TREATISE ON DECAY" Liberal and leftist Critics and their Queer readings of Depression-era U.S. Film David M. Lugowski.....................276V PRODUCTION...................................................................................................................................301MURNAU IN AMERICA Chronicle of lost Films (4 Devils, City Girl) Janet Bergstrom..............................................................303THE AMERICAN ORIGINS OF FILM NOIR Realism in urban Art and The Naked City Sumiko Higashi.....................................................353Bibliography...................................................................................................................................381Contributors...................................................................................................................................397index..........................................................................................................................................401

Chapter One

THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN FILM STUDY Dana Polan

In a version of this study that I was preparing to present at Stanford University (one of the historical sites of importance for the story I propose to tell), I had originally intended to use the word "origins" instead of "beginnings" in my title. But then it struck me that the idea of "origins" might be misleading, for it could suggest lineages, developments, traditions, and legacies-that is, successful continuities across time. In fact, the story of the earliest days of American film study is instead one of breaks and gaps-of projects begun but not followed through, of initiatives that concretized into nothing enduring. For all the effort of a new historiography to break away from singular events and deal with gradual movement (as in the Annales school's emphasis on longue dure, or the long duration of history), the history of early film study in particular reveals itself to be highly punctual and highly fragmentary.

To be sure, as the following pages will bear out, in the early days there were precise institutional linkages between the various attempts at bringing film into the academy. Indeed, much of the early history has to do with the ways in which, with the support of established institutions, various initiatives could seem to gain solidity. But to the extent that any initiative depended on larger institutional support and promotion, its existence and endurance could be fragile when the support dried up. To anticipate just one example, it is clear that soon after its founding the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter, AMPAS or "the Academy") became a central player in the push to introduce film education into universities. The Academy sponsored several such educational projects and was key to their start-up. But it seems that when the Academy came to feel it no longer needed special university instruction and could rely on the studios to train their own personnel, it lowered its support to academic ventures, and the diverse university initiatives under its aegis had to fight on their own or flounder.

In fact, if the early history of cinema study is one of punctual events that do not add up to an enduring lineage, we can in particular pinpoint an ultimate punctuation to these beginning moments, one that cuts early film study off from later developments that more clearly form part of a legacy for the current state of the discipline. This terminal event, which takes place in the mid-1930s, is the founding of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film and its creation of a circulating library of film titles. As disconnected as are the beginnings of film study, the formation and dissemination of the MOMA canon brings together the fragments and gives a sense of direction to a new field of film study in the university. Almost as if overnight, we see the creation of courses all mentioning the MOMA collection and all resembling each other in terms of their sense of just what the history of film has been canonically. To take just one example, in the late 1920s Stanford University hesitantly tried to introduce a film course (under the aegis of AMPAS). But this hesitancy disappeared in the second half of the 1930s when the university began a new, more enduring course based on the MOMA collection. Significantly, where the earlier course had been housed in the Department of Psychology (a sign in this case of an uncertainty of just how film should be imagined as an object of study), the new course was in the Department of Fine Arts and reflected a newfound respectability for film as an aesthetic object.

In the following study my goals are both modest and complex. On the one hand, I want simply to tell the story of early film study as I see it. The primary goal here is to present things as I think they were, as captured in all their concrete facticity. But here even the modesty becomes complex. I have already used language-"the story ... as I see it," for example-that implies that this history is very much one filtered through a narrative consciousness (in this case, mine). Perhaps this is inevitable in all historiography but it is especially necessary in the case at hand, for there is much...