Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture

Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture PDF

Author: Sumiko Higashi

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994-12-02

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780520914810

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Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture demonstrates that the director, best remembered for his overblown biblical epics, was one of the most remarkable film pioneers of the Progressive Era. In this innovative work, which integrates cultural history and cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi shows how DeMille artfully inserted cinema into genteel middle-class culture by replicating in his films such spectacles as elaborate parlor games, stage melodramas, department store displays, Orientalist world's fairs, and civic pageantry. The director not only established his signature as a film author by articulating middle-class ideology across class and ethnic lines, but by the 1920's had become a trendsetter, with set and costume designs that influenced the advertising industry to create a consumer culture based on female desire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped material from the DeMille Archives and other collections, Higashi provides imaginative readings of DeMille's early feature films, viewing them in relation to the dynamics of social change, and she documents the extent to which the emergence of popular culture was linked to the genteel tradition.

Cecil B. DeMille, Classical Hollywood, and Modern American Mass Culture

Cecil B. DeMille, Classical Hollywood, and Modern American Mass Culture PDF

Author: David Blanke

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-26

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 3319769863

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This book uses the long and profitable career of Cecil B. DeMille to track the evolution of Classical Hollywood and its influence on emerging mass commercial culture in the US. DeMille’s success rested on how well his films presumed a broad consensus in the American public—expressed through consumer hedonism, faith, and an “exceptional” national history—which merged seamlessly with the efficient production methods developed by the largest integrated studios. DeMille’s sudden mid-career shift away from spectator perversity to corporate propagandist permanently tarnished the director’s historical standing among scholars, yet should not overshadow the profound links between his success and the rise and fall of mid-century mass culture.

Cecil B. DeMille

Cecil B. DeMille PDF

Author: Simon Louvish

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-03-04

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 9780312377335

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Examines the life and work of the motion picture director best known for his biblical sagas, including "Samson and Delilah" and "The Ten Commandments," discussing his complex personal life and the paradoxes existing within his films.

Containment Culture

Containment Culture PDF

Author: Alan Nadel

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780822316992

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Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history. Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.

An Army of Phantoms

An Army of Phantoms PDF

Author: J. Hoberman

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2013-01-29

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1595587276

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The film critic’s sweeping analysis of American cinema in the Cold War era is both “utterly compulsive reading [and] majestic” in its “breadth and rigor” (Film Comment). An Army of Phantoms is a major work of film history and cultural criticism by leading film critic J. Hoberman. Tracing the dynamic interplay between politics and popular culture, Hoberman offers “the most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published, one that takes film analysis beyond the screen and sets it in its larger political context” (Los Angeles Review of Books). By “tell[ing] the story not just of what’s on the screen but of what played out behind it,” Hoberman demonstrates how the nation’s deep-seated fears and wishes were projected onto the big screen. In this far-reaching work of historical synthesis, Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe (The American Scholar). From cavalry Westerns to apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars; from movies to media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, An Army of Phantoms “remind[s] you what criticism is supposed to be: revelatory, reflective and as rapturous as the artwork itself” (Time Out New York). “An epic . . . alternately fevered and measured account of what might be called the primal scene of American cinema.” —Cineaste “There’s something majestic about the reach of Hoberman’s ambitions, the breadth and rigor of his research, and especially the curatorial vision brought to historical data.” —Film Comment

Religion and American Cultures

Religion and American Cultures PDF

Author: Gary Laderman

Publisher: Abc-clio

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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The only multicultural survey of established and "new" American religions, this exhaustive three-volume encyclopedia explores the fascinating interactions between religion and ethnicity, gender, regionalism, and popular culture. Religion and American Cultures offers a unique and engrossing journey across our country's religious landscape, past and present. A new spirit of religious diversity and multiculturalism stands alongside traditional institutions in this exhaustive three-volume set. The first volume explores America's multicultural communities and their religious practices--not only Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Spirituality in Latino, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities is covered as well. The second volume focuses on cultural aspects of religions, with topics including film, Generation X, public sacred spaces, sexuality, new religious expressions, and much more. Organized alphabetically, longer general interest anchor essays in the first two volumes are followed by several shorter, more specialized supplementary essays. The third volume is devoted to complementary primary source documents. Written by more than 120 of America's most prestigious religious scholars, these insightful and intriguing entries address contemporary spiritual practice and culture with a historical perspective. - More than 120 essays covering virtually every religion in America - An expert panel of editorial board members and contributors on every major religion in the United States - Richly illustrated images depicting a wide range of religious figures and activities, as well as significant religious sites in the United States - An entire volume of primary source documents illustrating the religious diversity in American culture, including Cecil B. DeMille's essay "The Screen as Religious Teacher" as well as more conventional materials on Christian Science, the New Age, and Buddhism

Selling God

Selling God PDF

Author: Robert Laurence Moore

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0195098382

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In a sweeping colourful history that spans over two centuries of American culture, Moore examines the role of religion in America as it appropriated (and was appropriated by) commercial culture. He reveals the centrality of religion, and the marketplace, in American popular culture.

Cecil B. DeMille

Cecil B. DeMille PDF

Author: Cecilia de Mille Presley

Publisher: Running Press Adult

Published: 2014-12-16

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0762455373

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Colossal. Stupendous. Epic. These adjectives, used by movie companies to hawk their wares, became clichélong ago. When used to describe the films of one director, they are accurate. More than any filmmaker in the history of the medium, Cecil B. DeMille mastered the art of the spectacle. In the process, he became a filmland founder. One hundred years ago, he made the first feature film ever shot in Hollywood and went on to become the most commercially successful producer-director in history. DeMille told his cinematic tales with painterly, extravagant images. The parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments was only one of these. There were train wrecks (The Greatest Show on Earth); orgies (Manslaughter); battles (The Buccaneer); Ancient Rome (The Sign of the Cross); Ancient Egypt (Cleopatra); and the Holy Land (The Crusades). The best of these images are showcased here, in Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic. This lavish volume opens the King Tut's tomb of cinematic treasures that is the Cecil B. DeMille Archives, presenting storyboard art, concept paintings, and an array of photographic imagery. Historian Mark A. Vieira writes an illuminating text to accompany these scenes. Cecilia de Mille Presley relates her grandfather's thoughts on his various films, and recalls her visits to his sets, including the Egyptian expedition to film The Ten Commandments. Like the director's works, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic is a panorama of magnificence-celebrating a legendary filmmaker and the remarkable history of Hollywood.

Written in Stone

Written in Stone PDF

Author: Katherine Orrison

Publisher: Vestal Press

Published: 1999-03-30

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1461734819

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From concept stage through production in Egypt to release of the film: Katherine Orrison carefully recreates the behind-the-scenes story of Cecil B. DeMille's beloved epic.

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