Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete

Abstract

Focusing our understanding of Hollywood and HUAC on questions of presence and content is to apply paradigms of authorship and genre which were critical by-products of the cultural transformation to which HUAC contributed, and will as a result have limited critical purchase on its causes. What might break this critical impasse would be the discovery of something outside the circle; something not easily, or at least not yet, assimilated into its cycle of repetitions. Such a remainder can be found in a film which is arguably one of the most important productions of the period: Edward Dmytryk‘s ‘lost’ film of Italian/American author Pietro di Donatos novel Christ in Concrete (1949).