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Hollywood has created the foreign film in the US. While European nations may bemoan the fact that 70 percent or more of films that dominate their marquees have American origins and Hollywood blockbusters top the charts from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, roughly 98 percent of the films shown in the US are domestic. The remainder, then, are marked as different and specialized—in terms of content, audience and even venue. Yet audiences have developed clear expectations of classical Hollywood formulae, recognizable characters—if not stars—and movies in English that continually constrain the market; art films, by contrast, are subtitled rather than dubbed for mass distribution.
Moreover, Hollywood has appropriated international stars and settings within its own production—whether borrowing (as in Chow Yun Fat in 1999–2000’s Anna and the Kïng) or remaking (Three Men and a Baby, 1987, remaking a 1985 French hit).
Certainly some non-American films achieve mass distribution. British films in particular share language and stars with Hollywood, have been popular for decades and are even marked with a certain epic cachet. Canadian films have been hard pressed to compete with American resources; hence, directors like Atom Egoyan often occupy a liminal status. In the 1980s, Hong Kong films also gained wider markets through the international stardom of Jackie Chan, although directors like John Woo and Ringo Lam have also succumbed to the budgets of Hollywood in producing American versions of style and stories—a path followed in earlier generations by directors like Josef von Sternberg, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.
There are important exceptions too. Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1998) also received a wide distribution (as well as Oscar accolades) in both dubbed and subtitled versions. The Oscar for best foreign film (inaugurated in 1947) has recognized many major directors. Despite repeated recognition of Japanese films in the 1950s, and a few coproductions thereafter, it has also tended to reaffirm European films as art. Only one Latin American film has won the accolade.
The audience for “foreign films,” then, is presumed to approach film with critical expertise, dedication and a seriousness that tends to preclude importation of popular romances and comedies (although pornography has been an importable category). For decades, this also entailed specialized publicity and venues. In fact, the art cinema has been marked by cramped quarters, alternative high culture accoutrements (expresso bars, bookshops) and an erudite dedication to film that might mix current releases with retrospectives on directors like Bergman, Kiorastami, Fellini or Kurosawa. Other films have been screened in cinema clubs, especially on college campuses or in major metropolitan centers. Smaller cities might have one cinema that survives on a mixture of artistic and semipopular films. Film festivals also have screened works that no national distributor would risk—films that are not necessarily anti-American but are, at least, unfamiliar to the American spectator.
Some foreign films are also linked to ethnic populations in the United States.
International politics—as in films from China or the former Soviet Union—may also support distribution. In the early twentieth century certain populations were able to support independent theaters—like those of major Chinatowns or Hispanic neighborhoods; others rented halls for special showings. In an era of mass video and satellite television, this taste has been satisfied by videos available in specialty shops, grocers and other sites, as well as direct retransmission of external broadcasts. While these tend to offer more popular foreign-language films (rather than “art” films), their audiences are circumscribed. Nonetheless, Chinese theaters profited from the boom in Hong Kong films.
Meanwhile, cinema classes and critics have created an international canon of “serious” films that constitute high film culture even without boxoffice clout. Here, the impact of auteurs has been important in both availability and acceptance—people will watch a film by Truffaut, Saura, Wenders or Ray rather than identifying the product with a particular national origin. Overall, the equation of “foreign” and “art” excludes many popular films outside the US as it shapes the stylistic and intellectual demands imposed on American independent/artistic productions.
Industry:Culture
Hollywood has long lavished attention on female stars and sex goddesses. Marketing strategies have simultaneously targeted the female consumer by narrative, genre or other intertextual appeals. This entry explores instead the women behind the camera. Here, women achieved some early success in fields such as editing and also took on stereotypically “feminine” tasks (interior design, costume, etc.) as well as clerical roles.
Women in various guises have also been deeply involved in writing scripts, although often in subordinate roles. A 1980 survey by the Directors Guild of America, however, listed only fourteen features directed by women out of 7,332. The picture has changed somewhat in subsequent years with directors like Barbra Streisand, Penny Marshall, Susan Seidelman, Jodie Foster, Julie Dash, Kathryn Bigelow, Martha Coolidge, Nora Ephron, Amy Heckerling and Sondra Locke. Besides women directors for feature films, women have been independent directors, producers and animators. Yet, this remains a male-dominated world where even the enrollment in film schools has stood at a 2:1 ratio for a long time. Hence, since 1972, the American Film Institute has set up Directing Workshop for Women, whose alumni include Maya Angelou and Randa Haines, a token gesture to increase the representation of women in directing.
While women’s films through the history of Hollywood have sometimes presented women with their own agencies and contradictions, the history of women directors suggests common threads and diverse contributions—and how this relates to images on screens and beyond them.
In the formative year of movies, when movies were smaller businesses, women were actually important players. Alice Guy Blache (1875–1968) ran Solax Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey Lois Weber (1882–1939), a top-salaried director of the silent era, made social-realist films, with subjects ranging from prostitution to capital punishment. With the transition to sound, Dorothy Arzner (1900–79) was the only woman working in the male-dominated Hollywood mainstream. She made seventeen films between 1927 and 1943. Her heroines were strong working women, and female relationships and bonding were recurring themes in her movies. Ida Lupino, first an actor in noir films in the 1940s, formed her own company and directed six films for it between 1949 and 1954. The route from actor to director has proven a common path.
Breaking into the all-male Hollywood proved even harder for women of color trying to break into feature film-making. In 1989 Martinican Euzhan Palcy became the first black woman to direct a Hollywood film—A Dry White Season. Christine Choy, an Asian American film-maker, is known for her political documentaries. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust was a critical success, but it had taken her years to complete—and fund—this period piece about a Gullah family in South Carolina.
While Hollywood poses a great barrier to women directors, women directors have accomplished a great deal as independent and avantgarde film-makers. Maya Deren (1917–61) was the first to receive a Guggenheim grant to engage in motion picture. She saw her films as poetry not prose. Yvonne Rainer has made films that challenge the notion of the female gaze in Hollywood films. Toni Cade Bambara combined literature with film and community activism. Lesbian film-makers have also combined activist explorations with a growing screen presence.
Yet the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list released and voted on in 1998 does not include a single feature movie directed by a woman. These movies were chosen from a list of 400, including only five films directed by women, all produced between 1986 and 1993. While Prince of Tides was nominated for Best Picture at the 1991 Oscars, the Best Director nomination eluded even Barbra Streisand. Hence, the struggle and recognition accorded to women behind the camera comments on the gains and limits of gender and equality in the late twentieth century.
Industry:Culture
Horn and Hardart began operating self-service restaurants in the 1910s, with food behind small glass doors which were opened by inserting a coin (initially a nickel) into a slot. By the 1930s, such automats (restaurants without waiters) served a full range of lunch and dinner entrées; in the 1940s, more than fifty serviced New York City, NY alone. In their heyday through the 1960s, automats provided inexpensive food in vast simple rooms that allowed customers to linger at tables—and fascinated tourists and children. Outpaced by fastfood restaurants, however, the last New York automat closed in 1991.
Industry:Culture
Hunting has been widely supported as both a pastime and a way of life in the United States. A requirement in some of the frontier regions of the country and tied to the policy of extinguishing the basis for American Indians’ livelihoods, hunting remained a common practice throughout the nineteenth century With the threat to a number of species as a result of uncontrolled hunting, protections were put in place to limit the carnage. Under President Theodore Roosevelt, national parks were established to protect large tracts of government land, particularly in the western sections of the country, and the scientific management of the resources in these areas included the control of hunting. Such approaches were reinforced by the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which provided mechanisms for the conservation of ecosystems on which endangered species depend.
Hunting has remained entrenched in American culture and society even while the population has become increasingly urban, and those seeking wild game to hunt sometimes need to travel great distances. Part of this continued support for hunting lies in the attachment of many to gun culture, promoted by the NRA, making hunting a middleclass pastime as opposed to one of the landed gentry as in many other countries. An upper-class fox hunting tradition was never visible enough to become a lightning rod for a vocal opposition to hunting in general. The movie The Deerhunter (1978) highlighted the pervasiveness of gun and hunting culture in rural areas of the US, contrasting the life of a Pennsylvania resident who hunted deer for sport with his experiences in Vietnam to accentuate the insanity of the latter.
Paradoxically, given the image of the hunter as the rugged individualist, hunting has become central to the scientific management of the environment. Since the 1930s, the Malthusian notion that habitats are able to support only a certain number of a species has been applied to the management of different species. But, instead of assigning professionals to crop the herds, federal and state authorities have assigned this task to private sportsmen and women. In each state, therefore, hunting seasons have been established (sometimes of varied duration for different species), federal and state regulations dictating the methods of killing, the number that can be killed in one day and therefore also the amount of game that may be in the hunter’s possession. While such state control has helped to entrench hunting as part of game management, the system has faced growing opposition recently In the 1990s, animal rights activists, who claimed that animals suffer under the system, carried out protests of various kinds and lobbied Congress to bring about a complete ban on hunting.
Hunters most often use rifles and shotguns to kill their game. Frequently, hunters use semi-automatic weapons, leaving carcasses riddled with lead. Reacting to this situation and claiming that less sophisticated weapons make the hunt more challenging anyway, many hunters are now returning to the use of bows and arrows or muzzleloading rifles.
Such developments towards clearer distinctions between weapons used for hunting and those used for “self-protection” may become more evident as the gun culture itself faces growing scrutiny in the wake of a slew of shootings at schools across the country.
Industry:Culture
Icons of “major-league cities.” Historical ball-fields for baseball and football—Fenway Park in Boston, MA, Comiskey Park in Chicago, IL, Candlestick Park in San Francisco, CA—provided centers and landmarks for metropoles imitated by later monumental public constructions like Houston’s enclosed Astrodome (Texas). As neighborhoods and audiences changed and owners sought to cash in on lucrative boxes, these stadiums have also become battlegrounds for urban planning. While Cleveland, OH and Baltimore, MD have used them to stimulate revitalization of waterfront areas, others question the public expenditures and corporate perks, including naming, that hold cities hostage to franchise-owners against the promise of sometimes ambivalent returns in jobs, revenues and image.
Industry:Culture
If capitalism necessarily operates on a cultural logic of difference (i.e. masculine competition), the homosexual/heterosexual binaries serve as capitalism’s de jure oppositional categories of sexual difference. The late nineteenth century’s rapid and urgent framing of the normative from the non-normative required a rhetoric (medical, juridical, popular) that imbued the latter as an object of fear and disdain. Along with any number of cultural “non-normatives” of this period, the homosexual was marked as a disgusting anathema to the bourgeois sanctity of the heterosexual family. Moreover, because the homosexual body was scientifically and popularly presented as an “invert” (a woman trapped in a man’s body or vice-versa), the feminized male body (in particular) threatened the foundation of American masculinity. Thus, one might consider homophobia not so much a fear of the homosexual as such. More precisely homophobia may be more fruitfully considered as a response to the particular nineteenth-century concept of what a homosexual was, i.e. the “effeminized” male.
Historians as diverse as George Chauncey in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994) and Edmund Morris in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) have demonstrated the castrating effect that the effeminized male body had on American notions of hetero-masculinity. If the body of the homosexual was generated as a site of perversity the body of the normative masculine heterosexual American male was manufactured with similar gusto. Theodore Roosevelt’s radical shift from dilettantish statesmen to rugged cowboys is one of America’s more brilliant accounts of masculine heterosexual “invert” anxiety.
Even with the contemporary rethinking of the political, scientific and popular place of the homosexual in the twentieth century, the masculinized hatred towards homosexuals (often played out in crippling and deadly acts of violence) continued to occur. In the late 1990s, in so-called “post-gay” culture and complacent assimilation of/ by the “homosexual lifestyle” in “mainstream” society, homosexuals have signed a Faustian pact. In order to dispel homophobia, sexual difference has been veiled. Homosexuals, in other words, must necessarily present themselves as “normal” so as to avoid the violence that accompanies homophobia. In contemporary parlance, he or she is insisted upon to act “straight.” One can be “out” as long as one does not act too gay With difference effectively erased and the masculine/feminine order of things perforce in place, homophobia curiously repeats its nineteenth-century beginnings. It is clear that the louder and more egregiously one speaks the love that dare not speak its name, the stronger the challenge to hetero-normative culture’s purported acceptance of homosexuality.
Industry:Culture
If neo-Expressionism is the term most often used to characterize the re-emergence of figuration in postwar German and Italian painting, in the American context, the term refers more broadly to a generation of artists who returned to the easel in the 1970s and 1980s. Unburdened by the legacy of fascism which haunted the canvases of their European counterparts, the American neoExpressionists plumbed their artistic pasts and image-driven presents for the subjects and styles of their pictures.
Quite varied in their pictorial strategies and thematic preoccupations, the American neoExpressionists’ work ranges from Julian Schnabel’s self-aggrandizing velvet and tarpaulin-based homages to art historical traditions, to David Salle’s coolly ironic painterly pastiches of a mediasaturated world, to Eric Fischl’s psychoanalytic representations of the dark side of suburban life.
In their refusal to acknowledge the presumptive death of modernist painting, signaled not only by the demise of Greenbergian high modernist criticism but by the strategies and assumptions of pop art, performance, minimalism, conceptual-ism and video, the neo-Expressionists assumed the position of cultural melancholics, repeating and resurrecting the figurative impulse of historical expressionism when its power was long since extinguished. For all the anachronisms of their painterly predilections, American neo-Expressionism was ultimately far closer to the appropriative strategies and nostalgic impulses evinced in the photographically based practices of its deconstructive compatriots than to the European traditions invoked in its naming and stylistic affinities.
Industry:Culture
If television is “eye candy” a situation comedy (sitcom) is its tastiest morsel. Sitcoms allow viewers to develop long-term relationships with a stable cast of characters, whose conflicts, flaws and problems are depicted as endearing, amusing and almost always resolvable in twenty-two minutes or less. The program’s “situation” remains virtually unchanged throughout the run of the show and typically revolves around the characters’ home or work or a combination of the two.
Arising from the venerable traditions of farce, vaudeville and radio serials, sitcoms meet television’s need for new and inexpensive material. Primary sets are built once and used for years. Actors are signed to long-term contracts so that a “hit” show is not threatened by a key player’s departure. Four to ten writers, who become familiar with the situations, character and tone of the show, craft the season’s scripts. By the 1970s, networks and producers learned that sitcoms with a hundred or more shows “in the can” could be sold for re-broadcast to distributors for lucrative syndication fees.
Sitcoms generally portray the white middle class. In the 1950s and 1960s, popular sitcoms featured silly adults (I Love Lucy, CBS, 1951–61; Gilligan’s Island, CBS, 1964– 7), family life (Leave it to Beaver, CBS, ABC, 1957–63; Ozzie and Harriet, ABC, 1952– 66; Donna Reed, ABC, 1958–66), supernatural powers in suburbia (I Dream of Jeannie, NBC, 1965–70; Bewitched, ABC, 1964–72; My Favorite Martian, CBS, 1963–6) and a sanitized Second World War (McHale’s Navy, ABC, 1962–6; Hogan’s Heroes, CBS, 1965–71). Sitcom plots often had broadly physical humor, or played out the small triumphs and misunderstandings of everyday life for their humor. Through comedy, people’s foibles are humanized; sitcoms reassure audiences because no problem or person upsets the show’s status quo. The best early sitcom, The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961–6), successfully combined work and home situations and offered an appealing portrayal of marriage.
In the early 1970s sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–7), All in the Family (CBS, 1971–92) and M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–83) addressed more serious subjects.
Thus, M*A*S*H’s creator Larry Gelbart changed sitcom’s conventions by incorporating both a major and minor plot in many shows. M*A*S*H plunged viewers, long weary of Vietnam on television, into existential musings over life and death in the Korean War.
In its prosaic setting of working-class Queens, New York, All in the Family explored previously taboo subjects, including homosexuality sexism and racism. A program that introduced the workplace as a surrogate family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, inaugurated television’s first successful professional woman. Starting in the late 1980s, three of the longest running sitcoms presented dichotomous class issues—The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–92) offered an engaging portrait of an upper-middle-class African American family whereas Married…With Children (FOX, 1987–97) and Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97) portrayed the trials and tribulations of crass working-class white families. Successful sitcoms, such as Seinfeld (NBC, 1990–8), Frasier (NBC, 1992–) and Friends (NBC, 1994–)—evidence Americans’ teleliteracy by including large casts and intricate plots. Liberated from the constraints of the soundstage, cartoons like The Simpsons (FOX, 1989–) and South Park (Comedy Central, 1996–) twist and expand upon sitcom conventions. Sitcom has emerged as an acronym for Single Income Two Children Oppressive Mortgage, connecting once again family and representation.
Industry:Culture
If the middle class represents “the American dream,” the situation, goals and meanings of working-class life and identity are immediately thrown into question in the United States. Since the Second World War, one notes a continual decline in the presence, organization and impact of the working class as a result of both intergenerational changes in working-class families and external pressures from government and business. Indeed, the American working class at the end of the century tended to be represented in negative or nostalgic terms. Moreover, difference in work itself in the postwar period complicated any definitions that might convey an identification of working-class and factory life. Are service workers working class, whether flipping burgers at McDonald’s or typing in an office? Truckers? Farmers? Artists and intellectuals who speak for a class? Hence, it is impossible to talk about American working-class culture or organization in a sense comparable to traditions of Europe or Latin America. In fact, even while the situation of workers has become endangered by deindustrialization, lack of welfare safety nets, offshore production and imports, their response has tended to be conservative and patriotic. Nonetheless, the Left has seen this class as a potential locus for organization whose success might be epitomized in activities protesting trade agreements like the WTO in Seattle (1999).
Since the emergence of American industrialization, certain features have worked against the cohesion of working-class consciousness and action. One of these was the ideology of individual worth and mobility that the United States has held dear. Even if workers were trapped in a routine, they were taught that their children might find more security and gain, through education, homeownership, connections and hard work—the working class was a point of origin, not an end. Here, class and gender also coincided as the mother became especially charged with guiding children upward (or, in the case of the 1930s tearjerker Stella Dallas, not holding them back).
This was also tied to the politics of immigration and ethnicity. As immigrants found work in factories, they began to assimilate and identified mobility with citizenship. This meant that in the postwar period, Americanism could be identified with moving to the suburbs out of the old neighborhood (a battleground with new races or ethnicities trying to enter the workplace), replacing the blue-collar work shirt with a white shirt and tie, and getting a college education. Again, a generational perspective was important, as the GI Bill, 1950s prosperity and limits on new immigration promoted a generalized sense of mobility. Moreover, race clearly divided this class.
Some were left behind—especially where class intersected with race. African Americans moved into the Northeastern and Midwestern industrial workforce with the Great Migration, but found their opportunities for advancement constrained. Even in the Second World War and civil-rights era, they were often “last hired, first fired.” For many blacks, a solid upper-working-class job—post office or steady employment—has been read instead as a marker of middle-class identity. Single mothers, white and black, also constitute a large proportion of the “working poor.” Yet the dynamics of the disappearance of the working class do not rest with the working class. Business and government have long been uneasy about working-class organizations, especially if they betray any leftist or revolutionary consciousness (often imputed to “foreignness” or “anti-American sentiments”). Businesses have fought unions for a century often with government assistance. Meanwhile, both elites have often coopted workers into a sense of an American mission—to fight the Depression, win wars (where the working classes, black and white, are more likely to be soldiers), or rally against communism. Perhaps the most successful manipulation of this was the Reagan Revolution of 1980, where a conservative, elite Republican establishment rallied workers against the perceived threats of welfare moms, illegal immigrants and the Evil Empire rather than around issues of security safer and more just societies or healthcare and environmental stewardship.
The imagery of the working class in the US problematizes consciousness and culture.
Working-class culture is often defined, even in academic tomes, in terms of deficits or substitutes for institutions that reaffirm the middle class—neighborhoods, bars and churches for clubs and civic associations, etc. Clothes, accent, behavior and even body type tend to be treated as inferior versions of a middle-class norm (uneasily aping upper-class representations). Hence Paul Fussell writes sarcastically in Class that “If you can gauge people’s proximity to prole status by the color and polyester content of their garments, legibility of their dress is another sign…. When proles assemble to enjoy leisure, they seldom appear in clothing without words on it” (1992:56).
Mass media representations also affirm this generally negative overview, sometimes interlaced with nostalgia for a simple life now lost. Many actors use working class roles—smudged and unglamorous—in a manner analogous to portrayals of the disabled—to show their skills in being what they actively are not. Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas (1937) Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro in Stanley and Iris (1989) and Sharon Stone in The Mighty (1999) all demarcate a tradition of the working class as other for Hollywood. Works like John Sayle’s Matewan (1987) or some works of Barry Levinson and John Waters, among others, present more independent exceptions.
Television has done little more, although there were appeals to ethnic working-class neighborhoods in the golden age and a clear exaltation of working-class domesticity in The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955–71). The Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97) show, starring female comedian Roseanne Barr, also confronted issues of job insecurity and family budget, domestic tension, teenage behavior and other issues with humor and integrity Documentaries, including Salt of the Earth, Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA (1976) and American Dream (1990) and grassroots/activist videos have confronted these issues more politically While this may seem to present a bleak portrait of the working class and its future, one should not overlook possibilities of organization and action in coalition that continue to crop up in cities, environmental causes and even international politics. These are especially important where divisions of race, ethnicity and gender are overcome. Even intergenerational differences may pose compelling questions about the dream and its costs for children and grandchildren of working-class families.
Industry:Culture
Immediately following the Second World War, the federal government fought what it considered to be a growing communist menace within the United States. In part as a reaction to President Harry Truman’s strong anti-communist rhetoric, Congress developed its own program to fight internal subversion, stepping up the hearings and investigations of the existing House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC). The hearings gave Richard Nixon his first taste of national recognition, when Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss, a long-time Democrat and close aide to Roosevelt during the New Deal and the War, of passing classified documents to the Soviets in the late 1930s.
Industry:Culture
