FS 444N - Postwar U.S. Cinema

Prerequisites, FTV 140, and FS 244, or FS 245. Dodge College film studies majors and minors will have enrollment priority. This course provides a survey of American cinema focused on the decade of the 1950s, which witnessed tremendous economic and social changes that in turn impacted the style of Hollywood films. In doing so, we will historically contextualize this decade in terms of its aesthetic, cultural, industrial, social, and technological attributes, including the rise of television in Hollywood and in response, the emergence of new film technologies like 3-D, Cinemascope, and stereoscopic sound in film; the major stars and genres of the decade that reflected dominant gender ideologies of the period (the “office company man,” “blonde bombshell,” domestic homemaker, the teen rebel, etc); the rise of “teenagers” as a social (and marketable!) demographic; the Cold war political climate (McCarthyism and the ensuing Blacklist in Hollywood; and the end of the “studio system” that caused changes in production (Hollywood productions abroad, freelancing). We will also consider historical revisionism of the decade through select contemporary Hollywood films and television and consider how the present frames the past. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits