Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons : American Identity and the Cinema of International Relations (Cinema and Society)

Rawitsch, Elizabeth

I.B. Tauris（2014/10発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 264 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781780768694
• DDC分類 791.430233092

Full Description

Frank Capra has long had a reputation as being the quintessential American director - the man who perfectly captured the identity and core values of the United States with a string of classic films in the 1930s and '40s, including It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life. However, as Elizabeth Rawitsch argues, Capra's construction of national identity did not occur within an exclusively national context. She points out that many of his films are actually set in, or include sequences set in, China, Latin America, the Philippines and the South Seas. Featuring in-depth textual analysis supported by original archival research, Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons explains that Capra's view of what constituted 'America' changed over time, extending its boundaries to embrace countries often far from the United States.
Complicating Edward Said's theory of Orientalism as a strict binary in which the West constructs the East as an inferior 'other', it demonstrates that East and West often intermingle in films such as The Bitter Tea of General Yen and in Capra's orientation documentaries for World War II American servicemen; Capra imagined a kind of global community, albeit one with heavy undertones of British and American imperialism. Investigating shifts in what Capra's America has meant over time, both to Capra and to those who have watched and studied his films, this innovative book offers a startlingly fresh perspective on one of the most iconic figures in American film history.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Mr. Capra Goes to China? The Far East, Authorship, and National Ideology

1. "Give Her Americanism": Frank Capra, National Ideology, and the Global Community

2. "Can You Be Both?" Race, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Capra's America, 1922-1961

3. "Where the Fruit Trees Look Like Women and the Women Look Like Fruit Trees": The Bitter Tea of General Yen and the Blurring of the East/West Binary

4. "Sometimes He Calls It Utopia": Lost Horizon and the Politics of Imperialism

5. "A Free World and a Slave World": The Fractured Far East in The Battle of China and Know Your Enemy: Japan

6. "Tahiti? Inside Me?" Frank Capra, South Sea Exoticism, and American Domesticity

Conclusion. Mapping a "United States of the World": Authorship and the Cinema of International Relations

Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index