Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood

Noir

FILM NOIR, AMERICAM WORKERS AND POSTWAR HOLLYWOOD

 

New Noir Book:

“Busts This Town Wide Open”: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood

Dennis Broe, University of Florida Press

Order now for a 40% Discount with Code Listed Below

Ever since French critics began using the term film noir in the mid-1940s, a clear definition of the genre has remained elusive. Broe’s interdisciplinary examination is a cogent argument for the centrality of class in the creation of film noir, demonstrating how the form itself came to fruition during one of the most active periods of working-class agitation and middle-class antagonism in American history.

In the 1940s, both radicalized union members and protagonists of noir films were hunted and pursued by the law. The book details how, after World War II, members of the labor movement who waged a series of strikes that paralyzed American industry, including Hollywood, were forced to use extralegal means because of pressure applied by new legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act. In the same way the film noir protagonist moves further and further outside the law in this period until the films become a lament for a change hoped for but not achieved. The book then marks the sharp distinction between noir and the police procedural where the working class cop, now shorn of his or her radical sympathies, becomes the subject of the film.

A coda describes noir under Reagan and Bush (“A Thousand Points of Dark”) and post-9/11 noir which alternately resists and validates the replaying of the Cold War as the War on Terror.

What the Critics are saying:

‘[This is] an intriguing study of U.S. film noir as a left-wing cultural formation. Broe makes an informative and convincing case for the repressed, often overlooked working class determinants of early noir, and his discussion of individual films is consistently insightful. This is an important addition to the literature on the subject.’ James Naremore, author of More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

‘With keen insight and a deep appreciation of the politics of film noir, Broe has broken new ground in the interpretation of cinema itself. With this book film noir has found its most astute and informed critic.’ Gerald Horne, author of Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-50

‘Broe puts the red back in the black. His book contours amidst the shadows of film noir those battles and tussles of the laboring classes that have too often been written out of film history, as out of the authorized narrative of U.S. history. Through wonderfully synthetic overviews and deft extended readings, a panoply of films is shown to chart in devious and overt ways the ups and down of union power and working class perspectives.’ Esther Leslie, author of Walter Benjamin and Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde

‘[The book is] a bracing alternative history of how noir represented the roiling state of American culture in the 1940s … His categorization scheme will carry great weight in all future discussion of noir’s thematic landscape.’ Donald Malcolm, Noir City Sentinel

For a special 40% discount, until October 1, 2009, call toll free 800-226-3822, or order online at: http://upf.com/book.asp?id=BROEXS07 with discount code NOIR9.

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Manufacturing Happiness

Manufacturing Happiness

 

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Manufacturing Happiness: Investigating Subjectivity, Transformation, and Cultural Capital

The Graduate Students of George Mason University invite paper proposals for our 4th Annual Cultural Studies Conference. The Conference will take place on Saturday, September 19, 2009 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia

This conference considers practices, institutions, and products that promise happiness, in a sense of inducing “the good life,” typically expressed as self-realization or finding one’s purpose-borrowing Agamben’s term, subjective technologies that have a specific relationship to social and political forces. How do practices designed or claimed for such diverse purposes as personal stress management, recovering from colonization, parenting, global conglomeration, and corporate development work? What kinds of transformations do they bring, in terms of personality, power, and communitas? And what becomes of the living cultural traditions from which these practices are abstracted, as in the care of the psychotherapeutic practice of “western Buddhism,” which Zizek claims is the “hegemonic ideology par excellance of late capitalism?” From the transmission of packaged idealisms and practices with a putative relationship to traditional sources to the commodified transactions for services and goods, the conference organizers seeks papers that investigate the growing cultural industries, both global and local, devoted to manufacturing happiness.

The wide-ranging contexts for our investigation include, but are not limited to: the social positions within the family, home, workplace, community, or nation-state; geographical and global considerations of institutional development and affiliation; the political economy of corporate training models; cultural capital and legitimation; media and mediation (print, television, DVD, Internet, radio, etc.); religious connections and origins; the confirmation and construction of identities (gender, physical, class, spiritual, national, sexual, and race) in social or political realms; and the rise and intensity of ecological subjectivities.

Examples:
* Integral Institute, Integral Naked, and Ken Wilber
* Est Training
* Shambhala Training
* Eckhardt Tolle and Oprah’s Book Club
* Weight loss and Constructing Beauty
* The “Human Potential” Movement
* The Zen Alarm Clock
* The Secret
* Hollywood Kabballah Centre
* Transpersonal Psychology
* The “Self-Help” Industry
* Magazines such as What Is Enlightenment?

Please e-mail a 500-word abstract of your presentation along with a short CV to Michael Lecker (mlecker@gmu.edu) no later than June 15, 2009.

 

Additional information:

http://www.allconferences.com/conferences/2009/20090427183905/

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=168118

http://culturalstudies.gmu.edu/happiness/

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

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