American studies and film, blindness and insight

American Quarterly

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 31-50

  Auerbach, Jonathan ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950339860     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2006.0018     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. For a discussion that is more prescriptive than retrospective, see Vivian C. Sobchack, "Beyond Visual Aids: American Film as American Culture," American Quarterly 32.3 (1980): 280-300
2. For another discussion focusing on disciplinary boundaries, but again without a long historical perspective, see Marcia Landy, "Film and English/American Studies: What Are We Doing in an English Department?" Critical Quarterly 39.1 (1997): 42-50
3. A witty albeit brief conjecture explaining the absence of film in American studies during the 1950s is offered by Thomas Doherty in "Film," Encyclopedia of American Studies, vol. 2 (New York: Grollier, 2001), 153: "Only lately granted status as learned professionals at the major universities, American studies scholars seemed too insecure in their own disciplinary bailiwick, too desperate for respect from the older, established departments of history and English, to squander intellectual capital on Hollywood cinema, whose brow was thought to be low, at best middle, and never high."
4. Everett Carter, "Cultural History Written with Lightening: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation," American Quarterly 12.3 (1960): 347-57
5. Peter C. Rollins, ed. Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983)
6. based on a special issue of American Quarterly 31.4 (1979)
7. Information about AQ subject matter confirmed by Thomas F. Marshall and Nancy A. Walker, eds., American Quarterly: An Analyzed Index to Volumes 1 to 25 (Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1976), 76
8. In my count I have excluded two brief film reviews from 1960 and 1970. I have excluded from my analysis British American studies practitioners, who started a bit later (mid-1950s), were subsequently influenced by the brand of cultural studies developed in the late 1950s by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, and generally were more receptive to the study of mass media than their American counterparts, although many British intellectuals midcentury negatively associated commercial film with an encroaching "Americanization." See Dick Hebdige, "Towards a Cartography of Taste, 1935-1962," in Popular Culture: Past and Present, ed. Bernard Waites, Tony Bennett, and Graham Martin (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 194-218
9. David R. Shumway and Ellen Messer-Davidow, "Disciplinarity: An Introduction," Poetics Today 12.2 (Summer 1991): 208
10. The term field imaginary has been popularized by Donald Pease, "New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon," Boundary 2 17.1 (1990): 1-37
11. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989)
12. See also the more comprehensive study by Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
13. Alexander Bakshy "The Talkies," Nation 127 (1928): 362
14. Quoted in Myron Lounsbury, The Origins of American Film Criticism, 1909-1939 (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 219. Much of the material in this paragraph is gleaned from Lounsbury's encyclopedic 1966 study, still unsurpassed today; for reasons that should become apparent by the end of my essay, its is highly ironic that Lounsbury produced this superb film dissertation while a graduate student in the American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania, where Robert Spiller long held sway
15. See Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)
16. and Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). Serious academic interest in film between the wars seems to be a tale of two cities, with production and production-oriented courses centered in Los Angeles, while more avant-garde, experimental work and viewing was located mainly in New York
17. Michael Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
18. Gilbert Seldes, The Great Audience (New York: Viking, 1950), 3
19. Seldes, The Great Audience, 102
20. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1976), 120-67
21. Dwight Macdonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture," in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), 63-64
22. On Macdonald, see Ross, No Respect, 58-64
23. Gorman, Left Intellectuals, 158-85
24. and Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 16-30
25. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, abridged ed. (1950; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961)
26. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1962). Warshow died suddenly in 1955 at the age of thirty-seven, perhaps too early to have a lasting impact on redeeming popular culture for serious analysis
27. For the debate between Seldes and Macdonald, see Kämmen, The Lively Arts, 326-28
28. Carl Hovland, Arthur Lumsdaine, and Fred Sheffield, Experiments on Mass Communication (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949), 3
29. For an audience study of Hollywood in general using a similar kind of empirical methodology, see Leo A. Handel, Hollywood Looks at Its Audience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950)
30. For the CIA in Hollywood, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999), 284-301
31. On HUACs role, see Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (1980; New York: Hill and Wang, 2003)
32. and Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1980)
33. For a superb, far-reaching analysis of the postwar disillusionment of liberal intellectuals in relation to Hollywood, HUAC, and film noir, see Richard Maltby "The Politics of the Maladjusted Text," Journal of American Studies 18.1 (1984): 49-71
34. See, for example, Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002)
35. especially Jan Radway "What's in a Name?" 46-48
36. Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin, eds., Hollywood Quarterly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1
37. Smoodin and Martin, eds., The Hollywood Quarterly, 222-40. It is interesting to note that for all of Adorno's theoretical and historical sophistication, when it comes to closely reading television programs themselves, he basically confines himself to an analysis of their plots and does not consider the TV medium as a distinct signifying practice, unlike mass media scholars such as Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan
38. Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (New York: Free Press, 1950)
39. and Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1950; New York: Arno Press, 1979), 56
40. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947)
41. On Kracauer's "troubled friendship" with Adorno, see Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 217-34
42. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., "The Films of a Nation," The Nation 165.4 (July 26, 1947): 105
43. During the war both Schlesinger and Kracauer were recruited to work in the research and analysis branch of the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA). See Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 10
44. For the "critical storm" triggered by Kracauer's book, see Jay, Permanent Exiles, 70
45. Henry Nash Smith, Preface to The Virgin Land (1950; New York: Vintage Books, 1957)
46. Smith, The Virgin Land, 100-101
47. Henry Nash Smith, "Can 'American Studies' Develop a Method?" American Quarterly 9.2 (1957): 205
48. F. O. Matthiessen, "The Responsibilities of the Critic," The Responsibilities of the Critic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 9. Claiming that "standardization is more suitable for soup than for art" [shades of Andy Warhol!], Matthiessen goes on to praise "the great new Italian films" at the expense of Hollywood
49. Matthiessen, The Responsibilities of the Critic, 6
50. Tremaine McDowell, American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), 60
51. In chronological order, Parker Tyler, "Documentary Technique in Film Fiction," American Quarterly 1.2 (1949): 99-115
52. Leon Reisman, "Cinema Technique and Mass Culture," American Quarterly 1.4 (1949): 314-25
53. Parker Tyler, Hollywood as a Universal Church," American Quarterly 2.2 (1950)
54. Margaret Thorp, "The Motion Picture and the Novel," American Quarterly 3.3 (1951): 195-203
55. and David Riesman and Evelyn Riesman, "Movies and Audiences," American Quarterly 4.3 (1952): 195-202
56. See also Margaret Thorp, America at the Movies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1939), 273-302. Margaret Thorp was the wife of the prominent Princeton professor Willard Thorp, one of the founding fathers of the American Studies movement in the 1940s. In 1963 Parker Tyler published a third essay in QA psychodrama that discussed method actors such as Brando
57. By 1954, American Quarterly began proclaiming itself "endorsed as the official journal of the American Studies Association," as it announced on its inside covers
58. For an anecdotal history of the PCA, see the memoir by Ray B. Browne, Against Academia (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989)
59. Allen F. Davis, "The Politics of American Studies," American Quarterly 42.3 (1990): 356
60. Philip Rahv, Image and Idea (New York: New Directions, 1957)
61. and Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday 1950)
62. I should point out that the journal American Literature, founded in the late 1920s, had a twenty-year head start on American Quarterly in terms of establishing its academic legitimacy. For an important discussion of the Partisan Review writers in relation to the professional institutionalizing of American literature, as well as an analysis of the role played by the journal American Literature in shaping the field, see David Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Shumway also discusses graduate programs in American civilization that emerged before WWII, and additionally notes in passing (315-18), as I do, that at its inception in 1949-50, AQ opposed specialization as it sought to attract nonacademic intellectuals more broadly. Yet to do so meant that AQ would have to compete for writers and readers against established journals such as Partisan Review. Therefore, a more charitable assessment of AQ's subsequent traditionalism would downplay the question of elitism and instead see its transformation into an interdisciplinary journal devoted to American subjects (understood primarily as combining literary and historical study) written strictly by academics for academics as a shrewd market move, enabling it to become the only game in town, so to speak, for more than a decade. Not until the 1960s do we find other American studies academic journals emerging, such as American Studies (published by University of Kansas), which would print its first essay on film in 1965
63. For Tyler as camp, see Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 49-72
64. The "dissident highbrow modernist" phrase is on 58. Unfortunately, no critical biography of Tyler is available currently, nor is there much discussion of his work aside from the chapter in Taylor's book. The latest edition of the standard anthology edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
65. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 225, 240-49
66. Parker Tyler, "Documentary Technique in Film Fiction," 106
67. Parker Tyler, "Hollywood as a Universal Church," 165
68. In keeping with the overall thesis of his book, Greg Taylor labels one such contemporaneous critic Manny Farber, reviewer for The Nation, a cultist dissenter, thereby slighting (as in the case of Tyler) the specific substance of Farber's political aversion to these social message pictures and others. See Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience, 30-48
69. Kracauer also noted these problem films, one of a number of interesting if uneven essays he wrote attempting to analyze American cinema along the lines of his Caligari book. See Siegfried Kracauer, "Hollywood's Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?" Commentary 2.2 (1946): 132-36
70. and "Those Movies with a Message," Harper's Magazine, June 1948 (vol. 196), 567-72
71. Whereas Kracauer tended to assume that American movies clearly "reflected" social anxieties, Tyler from the start of his career as film critic steered clear of such a potentially reductive reflection model by emphasizing Hollywood's mechanisms of displacement. See especially Tyler, "Hollywood's Surrealist Eye," in The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age Press, 1944), 22-36
72. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 209-68. In all fairness to Rogin, Tyler only rarely wrote on race
73. George Lipsitz, "Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies," American Quarterly 42.4 (1990): 625