1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910495884203321

Autore

Higashi Sumiko

Titolo

Cecil B. DeMille and American culture : the silent era / / Sumiko Higashi

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c1994

ISBN

0-520-91481-3

0-585-07884-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 264 p. ) : ill. ;

Disciplina

791.43/0232/092

Soggetti

Music, Dance, Drama & Film

Film

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Introduction -- 1. The Lasky Company and Highbrow Culture: Authorship versus Intertextuality -- 2. SelLTheatricalization in Victorian Pictorial Dramaturgy: What's His Name -- 3. The Lower East Side as Spectacle: Class and Ethnicity in the Urban Landscape -- 4. The Screen as Display Window: Constructing the "New Woman" / 87 The "New Woman" as a Consumer -- 5. The Historical Epic and Progressive Era Civic Pageantry: Joan the. Woman -- 6. Set. and Costume Design as Spectacle in a Consume r Culture: The Early Jazz Age Films -- 7. DeMille's Exodus from Famous Players-Lasky: The Ten Commandments (1923) -- FILMOGRAPHY -- NOTES -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture demonstrates that the director, best remembered for his overblown biblical epics, was one of the most remarkable film pioneers of the Progressive Era. In this innovative work, which integrates cultural history and cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi shows how DeMille artfully inserted cinema into genteel middle-class culture by replicating in his films such spectacles as elaborate parlor games, stage melodramas, department store displays, Orientalist world's fairs, and civic pageantry. The director not only established his signature as a film author by articulating middle-class ideology across class and ethnic lines, but by the 1920's had become a trendsetter, with set and costume designs that influenced the advertising industry



to create a consumer culture based on female desire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped material from the DeMille Archives and other collections, Higashi provides imaginative readings of DeMille's early feature films, viewing them in relation to the dynamics of social change, and she documents the extent to which the emergence of popular culture was linked to the genteel tradition.