Cecil B. DeMille and American culture : the silent era
Title:
Cecil B. DeMille and American culture : the silent era
JLCTITLE245:
Sumiko Higashi.
Personal Author:
Publication Information:
Berkeley, California : University of California Press, ©1994.
Physical Description:
xii, 264 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
ISBN:
9780520085565
9780520085572
Abstract:
Counter 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. -- Publisher description.
Bibliography Note:
Filmography: pages 205-208.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-252) and index.
Contents:
The Lasky Company and Highbrow Culture: Authorship versus Intertextuality -- The Consumption of Culture: Highbrow versus Lowbrow -- Texts and Intertexts: A Question of Authorship -- Geraldine Farrar: A Diva Comes to Hollywood -- Critical Discourses -- Film: The New Democratic Art -- Self-Theatricalization in Victorian Pictorial Dramaturgy: What's His Name -- Melodrama as a Middle-Class Sermon -- A Genteel Audience: Rewriting Domestic Melodrama -- Character versus Personality: What's His Name -- The Lower East Side as Spectacle: Class and Ethnicity in the Urban Landscape -- Representations of the City: Artificial or Romantic Realism -- Social Ills and Comic Relief: The Chimmie Fadden Series -- A Tour of the Lower East Side: Kindling -- Cinderella of the Slums: The Dream Girl -- The Screen as Display Window: Constructing the "New Woman" -- The "New Woman" as a Consumer -- Cinderella on the Lower East Side: The Golden Chance -- The "New Woman" versus the New Immigrant: The Cheat -- The Sentimental Heroine versus the "New Woman": The Heart of Nora Flynn -- The Historical Epic and Progressive Era Civic Pageantry: Joan the Woman -- A Usable Past: Civic Pageants as Historical Representation -- Representations and the Body Politic: Joan the Woman -- Discourse on Femininity: Joan of Are as a Symbol of Gender Conflict -- Critical Discourses: Gender and the Moral Lesson of History -- Set and Costume Design as Spectacle in a Consumer Culture: The Early Jazz Age Films -- DeMille's "Second Epoch."