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Lecture 3:Lecture 3:Post War HollywoodPost War Hollywood

Professor Michael Green

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

This LessonThis Lesson

• America and Hollywood after World War II

• The Changing Audience and Hollywood’s Response

• Entertainment and Utopia

• Singin’ in the Rain

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America and Hollywood after America and Hollywood after World War IIWorld War II

Lesson 2: Part I

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) Directed by William Wyler

America after the WarAmerica after the War

• America was the most powerful and influential country in the world at the end of World War II.

• It had escaped fighting on its home ground. • It was in sole possession of the atomic

bomb.• Some people were calling the twentieth

century, “The American century.”

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Hollywood on TopHollywood on Top• During this time, no other segment of the

entertainment industry could come close to the movies.

• 1946 was the most profitable year on record for Hollywood.

• Weekly attendance at the movies was about 90 million people.

• Roughly ninety cents of every entertainment dollar were spent at the movies.

A Unifying Social ForceA Unifying Social Force• More than any economic indicator, movies

as a unifying social force provided the best measure of their strength.

• Writes Ray, “WWII had been a glorious occasion for demonstrating the industry’s collective myth-making power.”– Films strengthened familial ties– Reminded people of the values they shared– Provided the country with a common lore

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Classic HollywoodClassic Hollywood• The films that achieved all of this were

Classic (or Classical) Hollywood films.• Writes Ray,”Hollywood’s enormous Classic

Period success established its formal and thematic paradigms as the exclusive possibilities for commercial filmmaking. Indeed Hollywood’s dominance made its movies seem mere applications of some given definition of the cinema itself.”

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Defining the Classic PeriodDefining the Classic Period• Hollywood’s Classic Period (sometimes

called the Golden Age) ran from about 1930 to 1945 and produced thousands of features.

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Casablanca (1942) Directed by Michael Curtiz

Tropes of Classic HollywoodTropes of Classic Hollywood• Narrative economy/continuity, linear

storytelling and goal-oriented stories.• Continuity editing/seamless visual style that

privileged verisimilitude.• The star system• Reliance on genres with studios specializing.• Studio run - emphasis on craft over art.• Patriarchal, white, straight• Censorship (until 1967)

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The Development of Hollywood The Development of Hollywood • The apparently inevitable nature of

commercial American films had, in reality, developed primarily over time from the interaction of three factors:– Hollywood - with its own internal determinants– The audience - with its expectations and

perceptions shaped to a significant degree by the movies.

– The objective situation in America.

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No more than a ModelNo more than a Model• Post-war was the first time that filmmakers

and audiences alike began to recognize that Classic Hollywood was no more than a model, capable of being replaced, by alternate forms, here or abroad.

11 Rome, Open City (1945)Directed by Roberto Rossellini

A Change is Gonna’ ComeA Change is Gonna’ Come• Ray: “The movies of the late ‘40s and ‘50s

can be understood as a series of tentative, awkward compromises between the self-perpetuating nature of the Classic Hollywood on one hand, and the pressure for change caused by a new set of facts on the other.

• For the three principle components that had produced the Hollywood movie - the industry, the audience, and the situation of America - none escaped severe alterations.”

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The Changing Audience and The Changing Audience and Hollywood’s ResponseHollywood’s Response

Lesson 2: Part II

On the Waterfront (1954) Directed by Elia Kazan

Shocks to HollywoodShocks to Hollywood• Congressional witch hunts in 1947.

– The Hollywood Ten/Blacklisting

• Paramount anti-trust ruling in 1948, which stripped studios of their guaranteed markets.

• Deprived of overseas markets by European import tariffs and freezes on the removal of revenues (1947 - 1950).

• Television

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The Hollywood TenThe Hollywood Ten

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The “Presold” PictureThe “Presold” Picture• In response to these “shocks,” Hollywood

turned more and more to the presold picture, a movie based on an already successful novel, story, Broadway play, fairy tale or Biblical legend. These included:– The Three Musketeers– Gentlemen’s Agreement– Moby Dick– The King and I– The Robe– Peter Pan 16

““A Gap had Opened”A Gap had Opened”• Writes Ray, “As a result of the tacit

agreement with its audience to ignore reality during wartime for the sake of national morale, the industry had allowed a gap to open up between the movie’s concerns and those of many Americans.”

• Ray: “Caught between events that argued for conservative evolution and those that called for departures from tradition, Hollywood in the 1950s mirrored the state of America itself.” 17

The World had ChangedThe World had Changed• Nuclear weapons• America could no longer be isolationist as

it’s reach was now worldwide.• America’s new place in the world caused

widespread anxiety and disillusionment.• “America had won the war but in doing so

lost some essential part of its self-definition: the enduring appeal of America’s great myth - the reluctant outlaw hero.”

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A Mix of New and OldA Mix of New and Old• The resulting American condition, therefore,

manifested a mixture of the new and old: a new sense of necessity for permanent world involvement contradicted by a continued sense of unlimited opportunity at home.

• Domestic optimism lived side by side with unconscious awareness of vanishing possibilities represented by reluctant heroes.

• Hollywood was forced to begin to try and represent this new situation.

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Audience ReactionAudience Reaction• Hollywood’s persistent use of its old

formulas was greeted by a sharp and steady fall in attendance, an indication that the traditional patterns no longer neatly coincided with the audience’s intuitive understanding of reality.

• By 1953, almost 45 million people had stopped going regularly to the movies.

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The Fragmented AudienceThe Fragmented Audience• Audiences were becoming fragmented,

sharply divided between “the art-house crowd” and old-fashioned, entertainment seeking moviegoers.

• There were more foreign films being shown in the United States and more theaters to show them in.

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European ImportsEuropean Imports• “With their harsh frankness about postwar

realities, movies like Open City, Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief had no possibility of widespread acceptance.

• But the discovery that there was an audience sizable enough to make even these bleak movies profitable unsettled the American film industry.

• Open City and the other imports began to show filmmakers and filmgoers alike, what movies could show of real life.

The Cult Film and Cult StarThe Cult Film and Cult Star• In the postwar period cults began to grow up

around stars who Hollywood hadn’t manufactured, such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift.

• Similarly, many of the films being hailed as masterpieces were not box office successes or even Hollywood products.

• There was a huge discrepancy between what was successful and what was being seen as “significant.”

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Hollywood’s ResponseHollywood’s Response• Ray: “Hollywood’s task was somehow to

satisfy the new art-house, cult audience (with its tolerance for franker portrayals of the American situation) without losing the majority of filmgoers who clearly wanted more of what the industry had always produced - entertainment films predicated on the assumption that hard choices could be avoided.”

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The Problem FilmThe Problem Film• Hollywood’s first attempt at the solution was

to blend the serious social consciousness of the foreign movies with old-fashioned story-telling. The result was the problem film.

• Such films ernestly portrayed veteran’s struggles to adopt to homecoming, cruelties caused by racial predudice, the sufferings of maltreated mental patients, etc.

• These films were enormously popular until the late 1960s.

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Stylistic and Thematic InflationStylistic and Thematic Inflation• A second attempt at mixing seriousness and

entertainment, that seemed at the time to be a major departure from the tradition of the Classic movie, was in fact nearly as superficial as the epic.

• These attempts involved the inflation of standard genres by means of either style or theme.

• The “adult western” and the “integrated musical” were examples of these.

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CinemascopeCinemascope

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The Robe (1953) Directed by Henry Koster

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Entertainment and UtopiaEntertainment and Utopia

Lesson 2: Part III

Funny Face (1991) Directed by Stanley Donen

Hollywood as EntertainmentHollywood as Entertainment• Hollywood films obviously intended to

provide audiences with entertainment.• But according to Richard Dyer, what is meant

by this is rarely defined or discussed. • Dyer refers to entertainment in a historically

specific way - as “a type of performance produced for profit, performed before a generalized audience (the ‘public’), by a trained, paid group.”

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Contradictions Contradictions • Dyer argues that because entertainment is

produced by professional entertainers, it is also largely defined by them.

• More than in other industries, the workers (artists) have control over the output.

• Therefore, although professional entertainment in the 20th century has been largely conservative (white, straight, male), we should not be blind to the implicit race, gender and class struggles within it.

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Entertainment as UtopiaEntertainment as Utopia• Dyer writes, “Two of the taken-for-granted

descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wish-fulfillment, point to its central thrust, namely utopianism.

• Entertainment offers images of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day to day lives don’t provide.

• Alternatives, hopes, wishes - these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized. 31

The Feeling of UtopiaThe Feeling of Utopia• Entertainment does not present models of

utopian worlds.• Rather, the utopianism is contained in the

feelings it embodies. It presents what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.

• The code uses representational and nonrepresentational signs.

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SignsSigns• Representational signs stand in for

concrete things in the real world - stars and characters for real people, sets for cities or homes, dramatic issues for real issues.

• But we also recognize and respond to qualities in non-representational signs, such as color, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, and camera work.

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CategoriesCategories• Dyer writes that his categories of utopian

sensibility are temporary answers to the inadequacies of society, which is being escaped through entertainment. They are:

• Energy• Abundance• Intensity• Transparency• Community

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SummationSummation• Dyer argues that pure entertainment is more

than just a distraction; rather, it serves a social and psychological function by meeting needs that go unmet in society.

• However, it is limited in meeting those needs by its conservative scope.

• Musicals, through their form, especially present utopia.

• Read Entertainment and Utopia

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Singin’ in the RainSingin’ in the Rain

Lesson 2: Part IV

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

The MovieThe Movie• Released in 1952• Directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly.• Starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and

Donald O’ Connor.• Not a huge box office success when it was

first released, but has long been considered one of Hollywood’s high points.

• Routinely shows up on lists of the greatest films ever made.

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Movie as MetaphorMovie as Metaphor• Singin’ in the Rain is a self-reflexive film

because it is about Hollywood, specifically the transition from the silent to the sound era.

• However, we always have to consider films in terms of the time in which they are made.

• Singin’ in the Rain was made in 1952. Consider the anxiety and disillusionment that Americans were feeling at the time, as well as the identity crisis they were having, and then apply that to the movie.

Fear of TechnologyFear of Technology• One way to understand the movie’s anxiety

over change (represented as a fear of new movie-making processes) is to see it in terms of the anxieties about technology that Ray discusses.

• You can also see the movie as having anxiety over the transition America and Hollywood were going through. All this is allegorized by the movie’s story.

• Pause the lecture and watch clips 1 and 3.

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Musical as UtopiaMusical as Utopia• Much of what Dyer discusses can be

applied to the movie as well.

• Utopian sensibilities are on display. The movie is designed to be a temporary answer to the inadequacies of society: escape through entertainment.

• The movie is also conservative in the way it represents race, class, gender and sexuality.

• Pause the lecture and watch clip #2.

End of Lecture 2End of Lecture 2

Next Lecture: Hollywood’s Bad and Beautiful