Looking Past the Screen

Focusing on Hollywood cinema from the teens to the 1970s, these case studies show the value of this extraordinary range of historical materials in developing interdisciplinary approaches to film stardom, regulation, reception, and production. The contributors examine State Department negotiations over the content of American films shown abroad; analyze the star image of Clara Smith Hamon, who was notorious for having murdered her lover; and consider film journalists’ understanding of the arrival of auteurist cinema in Hollywood as it was happening during the early 1970s. One contributor chronicles the development of film studies as a scholarly discipline; another offers a sociopolitical interpretation of the origins of film noir. Still another brings to light Depression-era film reviews and Production Code memos so sophisticated in their readings of representations of sexuality that they undermine the perception that queer interpretations of film are a recent development. Looking Past the Screen suggests methods of historical research, and it encourages further thought about the modes of inquiry that structure the discipline of film studies.

Contributors. Mark Lynn Anderson, Janet Bergstrom, Richard deCordova, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Sumiko Higashi, Jon Lewis, David M. Lugowski, Dana Polan, Eric Schaefer, Andrea Slane, Eric Smoodin, Shelley Stamp

Jon Lewis is a professor in the English department at Oregon State University. His books include Hollywood v. Hard-Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry as well as Whom God Wishes to Destroy: Francis Ford Coppola and the New Hollywood and The New American Cinema, both also published by Duke University Press.

Eric Smoodin is a professor of American studies and director of film studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930–1960, also published by Duke University Press, and Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era.