Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art

Description

Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments CHAPTER I Introduction: Drawing the Boundaries of Art The Central Argument How Do We Know What Art Is? American Film History The Social Construction of Art The Creation of Artistic Status: Opportunity, Institutions, and Ideology Outline of the Chapters CHAPTER 2 The Changing Opportunity Space: Developments i nthe Wider Social Context The First World War and Urban-American Life: Two Disparate Influences on Film Attendance in Europe and the United States Post-World War I I Changes in the Size and Composition of American Film Audiences Summary CHAPTER 3 Change from Within: New Production and Consumption Practices Film Festivals Self-Promotion of Directors Ties to Academia United States, England, Germany, Italy, and France: Changes in the Industrial and Social History of Film Purification through Venue: From Nickelodeons to Art Houses Prestige Productions The Ebb of Censorship and the Coming of Art The Crisis of the 1960s Forced Hollywood down New Paths Summary CHAPTER 4 The Intellectualization of Film Early U.S. Film Discourse The Intellectualization of Film Reviews: 1925-1985 Film Reviews Approach Book Reviews: A Comparison with Literature 1960s Advertisements Incorporate Film Review Foreign Film: A Pathway to High Art for Hollywood Cultural Hierarchy, the Relevance of Critics, and the Status of Film as Art Summary CHAPTER 5 Mechanisms for Cultural Valuation Why a Middlebrow Art? Film Consumption as Cultural Capital An Emphasis on Intellectualizing Discourse Integration of Factors The Study of Cultural Hierarchy Notes References Index