A new kind of public : : community, solidarity, and political economy in New Deal cinema,1935-1948 / / by Graham Cassano.

• Superior document: Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Volume 69
• VerfasserIn: Cassano, Graham,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands : : Brill,, 2014.; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in critical social sciences ; Volume 69.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (227 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

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.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: A Sociological Approach to New Deal Cinema -- Black Fury (1935) and RiffRaff (1936) -- My Man Godfrey (1936) -- Swing Time (1936) -- The Hurricane (1937) -- Ginger Rogers and the (Hollywood) Proletarian Imaginary, 1939–1941 -- John Ford, From Radical Critique to the White Garrison State, 1940–1948 -- Epilogue: Psycho (1960) and the New Domestic Gaze -- References -- Films Cited -- Index.