Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America
- ISBN-10
- 0691214646
- ISBN-13
- 9780691214641
- Category
- Performing Arts
- Pages
- 392
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-06-30
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Author
- Steven J. Ross
Description
This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America. Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers. Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2000-01-03
- 367 pages
- Paperback
- Princeton University Press
Similar books
-
Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics
By Steven J. RossMost significantly, Hollywood Left and Right challenges the commonly held belief that Hollywood has always been a bastion of liberalism. The real story, as Ross demonstrates in this passionate and entertaining work, is far more complicated.
-
Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity into Labor
By Ronny RegevA history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace.
-
Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society
By Peter SteadTaking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of ...
-
Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film
By John BodnarIn a sense, we might add that there was hope in these features that liberalism and democracy could remain allied.44 Raymond Carney saw Capra differently. Instead of an effort at harmonizing ideals of personal striving and communalism, ...
-
The Working Class in American Film: The Creation of Image and Culture by Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s
By Robert A. MarcinkAs the first study to establish a direct connection between popular films of the 1970s and right-wing populist movements of today, this book helps to provide context for the more extreme rhetoric and activities of the Tea Party and other ...
-
White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America
By Joan C. WilliamsIn White Working Class, Joan C. Williams, described as having "something approaching rock star status" by the New York Times, explains why so much of the elite's analysis of the white working class is misguided, rooted in class cluelessness ...
-
Cinema of Mediocrity - The Representation of 1920s Mass Culture in King Vidor's The Crowd
By Peter BrüstleThe alternative view it offers, is that of a decade characterized by rising corporate power, the pressure to adjust and the powerlessness of the individual against an increasing standardization in the work and leisure sphere.
-
Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise
By Scott EymanShaw, George Bernard, 29, 66 Shaw, Irwin, 174 She Done Him Wrong, 2, 74–75 Sheffield, Reginald, 134 Sheldon, Sidney, 261, 262, 418 Shepherd, Cybill, 458, 470 Shepherd, Richard, 370 Sheridan, Ann, 243–44 Sherman, Lowell, 78 Sherwood, ...
-
Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema
By Derek NystromHard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men argues that the persistent appearance of working-class characters in these and other films of the 1970s reveals the powerful role class played in the key social and political developments of the decade, ...
-
Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s
By Iwan MorganWith case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great ...