Full Description
In 1936, director John Ford claimed to be making movies for "a new kind of public" that wanted more honest pictures. Graham Cassano's A New Kind of Public: Community, solidarity, and political economy in New Deal cinema, 1935-1948 argues that this new kind of public was forged in the fires of class struggle and economic calamity. Those struggles appeared in Hollywood productions, as the movies themselves tried to explain the causes and consequence of the Great Depression. Using the tools of critical Marxism and cultural theory, Cassano surveys Hollywood's political economic explanations and finds a field of symbolic struggle in which radical visions of solidarity and conflict competed with the dominant class ideology for the loyalty of this new audience.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Sociological Approach to New Deal Cinema
The Problem
Symbols, Experience, and Overdetermination
Interpellative Intention
Context
The Force of Imagined Things
"a new kind of public"
Working Class Community
The Hollywood Cultural Apparatus
Plan of the Work
1. 1935-1936 Black Fury and RiffRaff
Radical Paternalism and Labor's Solidarity
Black Fury and the Construction of Whiteness
Black Fury's Paternalism
RiffRaff
Women's Exploitation in the Household
Women's Exploitation in the Cannery
Anti-Marx
Race, Wealth, and Desire
Responsible Unionism
Cinematic Contradictions
2. 1936 My Man Godfrey
Cinematic Corporatism
Forgotten Men
Two Communities
Responsibility and Recognition
Mastery and Servitude
"The only butler we ever had who understood women"
Captain of Finance
Mask as Mark
3. 1936 Swing Time
Recognition and "Schemes of Life"
The Power of Fashion
The Political Economy of Desire
Swing Time's Realism
Immigrants and The Shadows of Blackness
Culture and Barbarism
4. 1937 The Hurricane
Popular Front and Labor Affiliations
Colonial Order and Pacific Passions
"I'm just the same as a white man"
Two Communities
"Look at them Dance. There's the island's answer to your law"
De-Colonized Independence and Enslaved Servility
"You're all guilty"
Contradictions and Paradoxes
5. Ginger Rogers and the (Hollywood) Proletarian Imaginary, 1939-1941
5TH Avenue Girl (1939)
Bachelor Mother (1939)
Kitty Foyle (1940)
Tom, Dick, and Harry (1941)
6. John Ford, From Radical Critique to the White Garrison State, 1940-1948
Radical Traditionalism in The Grapes of Wrath
Symbolic Domination as Traditional Compensation
The Language of Patriarchy
Allegories of Race
Narrating Trauma as Radical Critique
Capital, Class and the Charmed Circle of the State
Workers' Control
The Paradoxes of Radical Representation
Two Voices
From Class Conflict (Back) to Corporate Community
"all I can see is the flags"
"We'll have no more Grapes of Wrath..."
Epilogue: Psycho (1960) and the New Domestic Gaze
The Gaze
Interpellating Community
The Loss of the Collective Spectacle
References
Films Cited
Index
