Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System

Description

Cinema and the Wealth of Nations explores how media principally in the form of cinema was used during the interwar years by elite institutions to establish and sustain forms of liberal political economy beneficial to their interests. It examines the media produced and circulated by institutions such as states, corporations, and investment banks, as well as the emergence of a corporate media industry and system supported by state policy and integral to the establishment of a new consumer system. Lee Grieveson sketches a genealogy of the use of media to encode liberal political and economic power across the period that saw the United States eclipse Britain as the globally hegemonic power and the related inauguration of new forms of liberal economic globalization. But this is not a distant history. Cinema and the Wealth of Nations examines a foundational conjuncture in the establishment of media forms and a media system instrumental in, and structural to, the emergence and expansion of a world system that has been--and continues to be--brutally violent, unequal, and destructive. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 10 List of Illustrations......Page 12 Acknowledgments......Page 14 1. The Silver Screen and the Gold Standard......Page 20 2. The Panama Caper......Page 40 3. Empire of Liberty......Page 56 4. Liberty Bonds......Page 87 5. The State of Extension......Page 102 6. The Work of Film in the Age of Fordist Mechanization......Page 136 7. The Pan-American Road to Happiness and Friendship......Page 161 8. Highways of Empire......Page 177 9. League of Corporations......Page 214 10. The Silver Chains of Mimesis......Page 233 11. The Golden Harvest of the Silver Screen......Page 266 12. Welfare Media......Page 306 13. The World of Tomorrow—Today!......Page 332 Notes......Page 356 Sources and Bibliography......Page 434 A......Page 474 C......Page 475 E......Page 476 F......Page 477 I......Page 478 M......Page 479 N......Page 480 R......Page 481 T......Page 482 U......Page 483 Z......Page 484