Film and American Studies: Introduction

Abstract

buffs who seem to be obsessed with directorial styles or the minutiae of film language. Of course, a myopic concern for texts is familiar to students of American literature. New Critics of the late 1940s and early 1950s were guilty of such shortsightedness, and many who now identify themselves with American Studies recoiled. At the other extreme of film studies today are traditional historians who seem to respond exclusively to fashionable thematic concerns such as racism and sexism. Their insensitivity to cinematic details echoes the error of those who, like V. L. Parrington, ignored the literary qualities of American writing because of ideological objections. In American Studies, the past forty years have seen an attempt to balance textual and contextual studies. Film studies have yet to reach such an equilibrium. essays in this special issue of the American Quarterly are all concerned with the relationship of text to context. Vivian C. Sobchack refines cinematic approaches to a film usually discussed in political or literary terms in The Grapes of Wrath (1940): Thematic Emphasis Through Visual Style. The Negro Soldier (1944): Film Propaganda in Black and White by Thomas Cripps and David Culbert reveals the importance of exhaustive research to film scholarship while explaining how content is communicated by a visual medium bent on persuasion. Kenneth Hey, in Ambivalence as a Theme in On the Waterfront (1954): An Interdisciplinary Approach to Film Study, decodes the ideology behind a classic film, while carefully relating background assumptions to specific elements of mise en scene, the use of the camera, and acting. Leslie Fishbein, in The Snake Pit (1948): Sexist Nature of Sanity, and Charles Maland, in Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus, explain their films in terms of intellectual and political background often lacking in the writings of film enthusiasts. John E. O'Connor, in Teaching Film and American Culture: A Survey of Texts, describes film-oriented texts suitable for use in American Studies courses. In my bibliographical essay, I point out sources for those who want to integrate motion picture research with work in political science, history, or literature. Taken as a whole, this special issue demonstrates that film studies are compatible with the concept of interdisciplinary analysis. These essays reveal collectively the importance of both fiction and nonfiction films to research and teaching in American Studies.