Columbia University Press

The following blog post is by Andrew deWaard and R. Colin Tait, authors of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape. You can also read an interview with the authors.

In our book, The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies and Digital Videotape, one of the issues that we argue distinguishes Soderbergh’s filmmaking career is his work as an “actor’s director.” This is certainly evident in Soderbergh’s supposed last feature film, Behind the Candelabra, with A-List stars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon’s unorthodox portrayals of Liberace and his lover Scott Thorson.

As we explain in our book, Soderbergh’s films are marked by extremes between the poles of realism, modernist and (sometimes) postmodern excess. This rule of thumb applies to Behind the Candelabra, which is marked by its precise attention to historical detail in the form of the film’s re-creation of Liberace’s tastes in decorating (which he describes as “palatial kitsch”) but at the same time, relies on the audience’s foreknowledge of its stars, their heterosexuality and, thus, their playing against type.

This is certainly the case in Michael Douglas’ performance as the famously flamboyant pianist. The role is not only one of the most complex of his career, but one of the most complex characters within Soderbergh’s oeuvre. In terms of realism, Douglas concentrates on getting the most important details right to play Liberace—the voice and his mannerisms—in order for the audience to accept Douglas as the Vegas showman. Similar to other biographical portraits in Soderbergh’s body of work (Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich, Benecio del Toro as Che Guevara) this involved a great deal of research on the part of actors in order that they convincingly play the real-life figures.

On the other hand, there is a modernist streak in these performances which is similar to Bertolt Brecht’s concept of theatrical “distanciation.” In Candelabra, it is impossible to separate Michael Douglas and Matt Damon from the characters they play, adding intertextual weight to the film. Douglas’ performance is particularly striking in this regard, as the film relies on the spectator’s foreknowledge of Douglas’ star persona—seen in his most famous roles as uber-capitalist Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, put-upon adulterer in Fatal Attraction and disgruntled everyman in Falling Down—to present a radically different image to the audience. His portrayal as a gay man in this film, then, directly opposes his career-long trend of playing hyper-heterosexual and volatile characters in Basic Instinct and other movies.

That he is playing a gay man is perhaps secondary to the shock of seeing Douglas’s frail, bald, and saggy body. In our book, we label the willingness of actors to transform themselves within Soderberghian films as “dirtied stardom,” such as Matt Damon’s unflattering role in The Informant!, where he is mustachioed, obese and bald, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s character’s gruesome autopsy in Contagion. “Dirtied Stars” actively go to extremes in order to destabilize or shock the viewer by playing against their star image. In Candelabra, the most striking scenes involve Douglas and Damon displaying their bodies in very different ways than audiences are expecting—not only by way of their nudity but via graphic scenes of plastic surgery, which are far more visceral in their peeling back the veneer of stardom than the experience of seeing Douglas and Damon perform homosexual acts.

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The following is a post by Rob Stone, author of The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run. You can also read an interview with Rob Stone discussing the book and Linklater’s films:

When the British-Canadian film scholar Robin Wood wrote about Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) in his book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 1998), he felt compelled to preface his analysis with the admission that “here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration but love” (1998: 318). His subscription to the kind of affective or appreciative criticism advocated by André Bazin sets a challenge for academics who commonly assume that the intellect must explain away intuition and that objectivity is our prime objective. Like many academics I was a closeted film fan allowed out to play with movies like Before Sunrise following the example of Wood, who not only shared his passion but made it an essential component of his craft.

Truth be told, I wasn’t expecting much. I was living in Madrid at the time and used to frequent the art house cinemas off the Plaza de España and just see whatever was on. Yet, as the film started, the feeling crept up on me that the world was changing. I’d done a lot of inter-railing around Europe so I knew the sensation of timelessness in travel and the everyday fantasies of actually connecting with someone who was going the same way as you; but Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) somehow ignored the fear of rejection and amazingly invited me to travel with them too. At first, I admit, I observed them, sometimes cringing at the conversation but mostly admiring the eloquent dialogue that culminates in some convoluted argument about time travel that Jesse uses to convince Céline to get off the train with him in Vienna. There they walk, talk, drift into a record store and try out a listening booth. And then this happens:

It’s been eighteen years since I first shared that song, that booth, that moment with Jesse and Céline and the feeling has never gone away. Indeed, the sensation has only intensified by reconnecting with them in the Paris-set sequel of Before Sunset (2004) and their (our) present-day reunion on a Greek island in ‘Before Midnight’ (2013). Lacking Wood’s courage, I’ve often tried to understand (and perhaps disguise) my love for this scene in analysis, bolstered by the fact that it even lends itself to academic enquiry by combining two of the most evocative themes in film studies: time and the gaze.

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“I think that [Soderbergh's] ‘final films’ from 2009-2013 after he announced his retirement reflect one of the most prolific and creative bursts of filmmaking in recent American cinema.”—R. Colin Tait, coauthor of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh

The following is an interview with Andrew deWaard and R. Colin Tait, authors of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies and Digital Videotape

Question: What made you interested in writing about the topic of Steven Soderbergh?

Andrew deWaard: Like many, if not most students in film studies, we were interested in the concept of film auteurs and the personal visions of film directors. Soderbergh presented a dramatic alternative to this school of thought; he seemed to radically change his style and subject matter with every new film.

R. Colin Tait: There was also the strange coincidence that we both arrived to graduate school with a similar idea—to work on Soderbergh—and that collaborating on a project would allow us to push each other in ways that I think a single-authored piece couldn’t. There was also the matter of why Soderbergh’s contributions had largely been overshadowed within an era that he was hugely responsible for defining, which became one of our central questions when approaching the subject.

Q: How about your subtitle: what do you mean by “indie sex, corporate lies and digital videotape”?

RCT: Well, it’s a play on and an update of the title of Soderbergh’s breakout film, sex, lies and videotape. In the book, we wonder aloud how Soderbergh might define the running themes throughout his work from today’s vantage point. By indie sex we intend to evoke the “romantic” account of the indie era of American filmmaking in the early 1990s, and how Soderbergh, often thought of as a cold, aloof filmmaker, has filmed some of the most cinematic, non-traditional love scenes (Out of Sight, Solaris) in recent years. For “corporate lies” we evoke the anti-corporate stance of many of Soderbergh’s movies, where the “little guys” face off against big business (as in the case of Ocean’s 11). And finally, for digital videotape, we wanted to highlight Soderbergh’s essential role as an early adopter of digital technologies and his role in changing the aesthetic of contemporary films.

AD: “Corporate lies” can be seen to be a significant concern throughout Soderbergh’s body of work, including those he directed — environmental pollution and corporate malfeasance in Erin Brockovich, the lobbying industry in Washington in K-Street, global price-fixing in The Informant!, environmental destruction that leads to a pandemic in Contagion — as well as those he helped produce — the geopolitical ramifications of the oil industry in Syriana (Stephen Gaghan), the psychotropic dystopia of A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater), and the corporate and legal corruption featured in Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy), among others

Q: What did you intend to accomplish with this book?

AD: Primarily we wanted to shed light on a then-underrated yet prolific filmmaker. When we began writing, there wasn’t a single book dedicated to Soderbergh; there are now five, attesting to his recently realized significance. Once we started writing, it became apparent that Soderbergh wouldn’t fit into traditional auteur formulations, so we sought to expand our analysis to include some of the other important factors in contemporary filmmaking, such as economics, publicity, and technology. Similar to Soderbergh’s own filmmaking practice, we attempt to introduce a new idea or concept with each chapter, rather than adhere to any single paradigm.

RCT: I think that it was important to build a contemporary model for considering how authorship has become much more complicated within the Hollywood industry. I’m certain that the model we constructed can be used to consider other directors as well. There has also been a tendency on the part of critics to dismiss figures that don’t broadcast their own significance or possess an obvious signature. We wanted to explain that Soderbergh was not only significant, but his career was emblematic of the shifts within the industry within the past 20 years or so.

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The following is an interview with Rob Stone, author of The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run.

Question: What makes the cinema of Richard Linklater a good subject for study?

Rob Stone: Linklater is an incredibly versatile filmmaker, not only in the range of genres that he’s tried, which includes romantic comedy, western, science-fiction, animation, documentary and much else besides, but in the way he operates between the independent and studio systems of production and distribution. At the same time his films are literate and thoughtful to the point of being philosophical, even spiritual, and they always have this amazing dialogue going on, not just between the characters who do their fair share of walking and talking, but between American and European ideas of time, cinema, politics and understandings of life. He’s made over twenty films, shorts and documentaries and has influenced filmmakers all over the world.

Q: What are the aims of the book?

Chapters in the book aim to contextualize his cinema in the location of Austin, discuss and describe his working methods including his use of rotoscoping, consider his most dominant themes and recurring aesthetics and analyze the full range of his work. This includes his little-known documentaries on baseball and New York post-9/11 and even an unseen pilot for a situation comedy. But one of the richest seams of inquiry is often that of his cinema in relation to the history of independent American cinema and indeed the recent blurring of the term and idea of an “indie” film or filmmaker in relation to the bigger studios, changing modes and platforms of distribution and even transnational and world cinema. I was fortunate in that Linklater is also approachable, immensely affable and even collaborative so the chance to interview him at length was a major incentive too.

Q: How did the interviews go?

RS: I went to Austin, Texas, where he lives and where he helped established the Austin Film Studios and his own Detour film production company. It was July and baking hot and I took a taxi out of Austin to the converted aircraft hangars that now house the studios and the wooden bungalows beside them where his production offices are. His offices are like a gallery of original film posters, many of them rare and all carefully framed. It was his birthday but he showed up at noon and was friendly, welcoming and funny. Our interviews just drifted in the best possible way and we covered the entirety of his career. A vegan chocolate birthday cake arrived and we enjoyed that and met the next day at his apartment in downtown Austin, which had even more classic film posters adorning the walls. He was always the most forthright and generous interviewee to the point where I had one of those out-of-body moments of perception like you see in Linklater’s films such as Waking Life when you look down on yourself and think ‘wow, I’m talking about my favorite film of all time with the guy who directed it!’

Q: And which is your favorite film?

RS: Before Sunrise I think, although I find it impossible to separate it from its sequel nine years later, Before Sunset, so can I have both? In fact I’ll be seeing the third installment, Before Midnight in Vienna in a couple of weeks so I’d better make room for that too.

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Remember the ’90s? I do but if you don’t, there are two new books on two of the decade’s directorial stars who helped to shape and define American independent film. However, these directors are more than just remnants of the past. For the past two decades they’ve created some of the most compelling films of recent years. Moreover, they’ve both very much been in the news lately with one capping off a remarkable trilogy and the other announcing his retiremnet but not before directing a critically acclaimed film about a certain Vegas pianist.

We are of course talking about Richard Linklater and Steven Soderbergh and the two books are the aptly titled: The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run, by Rob Stone and The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape, by Andrew deWaard and R. Colin Tait

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the books on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of both books to a lucky winner.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on June 7 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

A recent post from the New Yorker‘s blog, Culture Desk tells the remarkable story of the rediscovery of the first American Anti-Nazi film. The long-lost film’s location was tracked down by Thomas Doherty, author of the recently published Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, while he was researching the book.

The New Yorker post tells the remarkable story of how Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.trip to Germany in 1933 shortly after Hitler became Chancellor led to the film’s creation. The film, Hitler’s Reign on Terror, includes footage of Nazi rallies, book burnings, street scenes in Vienna and Berlin, and anti-Nazi protests in Madison Square Garden. The film premièred at the independent Mayfair theatre on Broadway on April 30, 1934, and garnered the biggest single opening day in the house’s history.

However, as the article writes, “George Canty, the Berlin-based trade commissioner for the U.S. Department of Commerce, got wind of protests against the film by the German Ambassador in Washington, and concluded that ‘the film serves no good purpose. Across the country, censors took Canty’s view, and the film was denied a license, banned, and cut by New York City and State censor boards.”

The film then seemingly disappeared only to be recovered by Thomas Doherty. Here’s the description from the New Yorker article:

This April, Thomas Doherty, a Brandeis University professor, published “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939,” a lively study of Hollywood’s relationship to Nazism. Researching the book, Doherty hunted down a number of American films from the period to provide a “Nazi-centric view of the American motion picture industry,” but had proved unable to find “Hitler’s Reign of Terror.” “Given the profile of the film in 1934,” Doherty wrote, “its total absence really stumped me. Curiouser still was its seeming disappearance from places it really should have been at least mentioned—such as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. papers at Vanderbilt University, where it was not referenced at all. It appeared to be an authentically ‘lost’ film.” Then, a few years into his research on the book, Doherty received an email from Roel Vande Winkel at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Vande Winkel had been contacted by Nicola Mazzanti, of the Royal Belgium Film Archive in Brussels, to report that the archive had come across a copy of the film in a back shelf in cold storage; he assumed it had been there since around 1945.

A Belgian film distributor, Doherty explained, must have ordered a print of the film from abroad—likely London—after the war broke out but before the Nazis invaded Belgium. Due to its foreign origins, it had to clear customs, but once the Nazis took control, the postulated distributor probably didn’t want to be holding an anti-Nazi film (or couldn’t afford the tax), and so never picked it up from customs. Somehow, some years later, it wound up with other unclaimed film-related customs inventory at the Royal Belgium Film Archive.

We are reposting an interview with Alison Griffiths, author of Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinemas, Museums, and the Immersive View (now available in paper!). Griffiths is associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York, and on the doctoral faculty of the Graduate Center. She is also the author of Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn of the Century Visual Culture:

Q: The word “immersion” generates a lot of buzz in contemporary culture. But what exactly is an “immersive view” and why do we need a book about it?

Alison Griffiths: An immersive view is provided by an image or space such as a painting, photograph, film, or museum exhibit that gives the spectator a heightened sense of being transported to another time or place. Certain architectural forms can immerse visitors, including the Gothic cathedral, which creates a sense of the infinite and divine through the vaulted ceiling and other features. Immersive views take you out of the here and now, giving you the experience of having suddenly entered a new world, similar to virtual reality, but without the headgear. Cinema does this exceedingly well, especially large format films such as IMAX, which brands itself on the idea of virtual movement through space, that sense of being there that drives the marketing. But there is nothing new about the experience of immersion, as I explain in Shivers Down Your Spine: panoramas (huge circular paintings extremely popular in the nineteenth century), planetariums, and museums of science and natural history have long exploited the phenomenon. What this book provides is some much-needed context and theorization of the idea of immersion by drawing extensively from the historical archive.

Q: Why do immersive views give us “shivers down our spine?” Isn’t this a term associated more with horror films?

AG: We get “shivers down our spine” because there’s a disjunct between what we see and feel and what we know is happening to us. Giant panoramic paintings that I discuss in chapter two can take your breath way not only because you feel as if you’ve suddenly walked into the world of the paintings (you are enveloped by it), but because it’s an embodied experience which can give you shivers, tears, and sometimes vertigo or nausea. It’s that jaw-dropping sense of awe, reverence, and perhaps a little fear that makes the comparison to the horror film fitting, although the line “shivers down your spine” was used by a panorama reviewer in 1799 to describe the effect of seeing panorama inventor Robert Barker’s spectacular painting The Battle of the Nile which represents the decisive battle between Napoleon’s French fleet and Admiral Nelson’s Royal Navy.

Q: What are some of the most easily accessible immersive views in today’s culture? Where can we go to experience this sensation?

AG: Museums of natural history deliver “shivers down your spine” and immersion on two fronts: not only do the galleries feature exhibits that re-create natural environments such as the rainforest in the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History, but they also frequently feature IMAX screens which are exemplary at delivering immersion. Movie theaters showing IMAX films, especially the purpose built theaters with fifteen-story screens as opposed to retrofitted IMAX theaters, are the most convenient places to go to experience the “immersive view.” The classic “phantom ride” shot when the audience feels they are flying through the air or hurtling on a rollercoaster is synonymous with the immersive view, and exploited most fully in theme park type thrill rides. Immersive views can be long or short, loud or quiet, familiar or unsettling. They are, however, almost always marked by a sense of the uncanny.

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Interested in Stephen Soderbergh? If so, Andrew deWaard and R. Colin Tait, the authors of The Cinema of Stephen Soderbergh, have created a web site devoted to news about the director.

Recently they’ve posted on:

* Soderbergh’s twitter novella (written under the twitter handle @bitchuation
* A recent interview with The Financial Times
* Soderbergh’s much talked-about and controversial State of the Cinema Address (which we’ve also posted below:)

The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes, by András Bálint Kovács offers a critical assessment of one of Europe’s most important contemporary directors. As Kovács argues, for both his aesthetic achievements but also his remarkable depiction and understanding of the present and historical situation for Eastern Europe, Tarr represents an important voice.

In a widely cited essay, The World According to Béla Tarr, Kovács discusses each of Tarr’s films and his development as a director. In the following passage, Kovács describes how Tarr’s films capture the mood and zeitgeist of Eastern Europe in the 1990s:

The significance of Béla Tarr’s films in the 1990s—beyond their stylistic and aesthetic values—is that they offer the most powerful and complex vision of the historical situation in the Eastern European region over the last decade. His films reach but few viewers; still, it would be hard to deny that he speaks for hundreds of millions of ordinary European people in his universal and ruthless language, people who feel cheated and disappointed for wasting all the values of their previous lives in a matter of seconds, who fall prey to petty intrigues, who are led by petty, mean promise-mongers that talk of high ideals but follow their selfish power and financial interests. This feeling is born not only from the past, but also from the present experience; although the setting and certain characters may have changed, the same petty fights and intrigue still rule our lives; other ideologies are quoted, while the misery remains or even deteriorates in the former Soviet Union, Romania, or Yugoslavia. We cannot trust anyone; we cannot believe in anything, for all high ideals are but tools to abuse the helpless. We, Eastern-Europeans, are the tenants of the blocks of flats in Satantango and we desperately cling to all the promises of the promise-mongers who only take our money. We are the hopeless drunkards; our leaders are the alcoholic policeman, the clever smuggler, and the mafia-man inn-keeper…. All of this, of course, is an exaggeration—the exaggeration of great art.

Here too is a clip from his 2000 film Werckmeister Harmonies:

Throughout the week Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, has been discussing a variety of books associated with the politics of the time.

Here are some clips and trailers from the films. All the quotes are taken from Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939:

Blockade(1938)
Starring Henry Fonda and directed by Walter Wanger, the film depicted the Spanish Civil War. “Blockade was received by friend and foe alike as a brief in defense of the Soviet-backed loyalists. On that Catholics and the communists agreed.”

Olympia (1938)
“Riefensthahl was Nazism’s second most photogenic face. More than that though, she was a brilliant motion picture artist in thrall to a ruthless dictator, a match that inspired a special measure of loathing from the artists in the Popular Front….Being the one Nazi filmmaker who was not a second-rater, who was as good, or better, than the Jews purged from Ufa, she intrigued, tantalized, and unnerved. ‘The gal has charm to burn,’ gushed gossip monger Hedda Hopper, who was smitten with the lady. ‘As pretty as a swastika, snarled syndicated columnist Walter Winchell, who was not.”

Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939)
“For the typical moviegoer in 1939, more eye-and-ear opening than the plot or the politics of Confessions of a Nazi Spy was the visual drapery and sonic atmosphere. The insignia, salutes, and catchphrases of Nazism—huge swastikas, giant portraits of Hitler, and throngs of rabid Americans in Nazi garb shouting ‘Sieg heil!’…the free-wheeling operation of Nazi military men and espionage agents in New York conjured an elaborate fifth column crisscrossing America, a cancer eating away at the body politic.”

The Mortal Storm (1940)
“The Mortal Storm reviewed the history of the period between 1933 and 1939 that had been overlooked by the Hollywood cinema produced between 1933 and 1939….The word that is still unspoken in The Mortal Storm is ‘Jew,’ but by 1940 only the dimmest moviegoer would have failed to read the signs….Professor Roth identifies himself as ‘non-Arayan’ and what kind of non-Aryan is made clear when his wife visits him in a concentration camp and a ‘J’ adorns his sleeve.”

Inglourious Basterds (2009)
“Set in a counterfactual fantasy world removed from history but not from the fascination with cinematic legacy of Nazism, it is a Nazi-obsessed movie about other Nazi-obsessed movies, an affectionate homage to the many hours of cinematic pleasures the Nazis have given moviegoers. The intoxication with the iconography of the the Third Reich is unblushing and obsessive.”

In the following essay, Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, examines how the ant-fascist movement in 1930s Hollywood shaped the blacklist in 1950s Hollywood:

Last November, the Hollywood Reporter deviated from its normal beat and published and in-depth investigation of itself. Part historical reclamation, part act of contrition, the lengthy article by Gary Naum and Daniel Miller dredged up the paper’s complicity in facilitating the Hollywood blacklist, specifically the animating role of its founding editor, W. R. “Billy” Wilkerson.

Citing chapter and verse from Wilkerson’s front-page column, a must-read fixture of the trade press from 1930 to 1960, the piece traced an ideological vendetta by a mean SOB who, if he did not singlehandedly launch the blacklist era, worked tirelessly to sustain it. Along with the anguished self examination, a sidebar article by Willie Wilkerson, editor Wilkerson’s son, apologized for the sins of his father.

Like a lot of commentators on-line, I was put off by Wilkerson Jr.’s posthumous hit on his father—a gesture that struck me as an odd sort of oedipal payback— but Naum and Miller’s article was a solid job of history, backed up by exhaustive research in the paper’s back pages and sobering reflections from the dwindling number of alumnae of the blacklist era. It was also more temperate in tone than most inquiry into what jas become the bitterest slice of Hollywood history. I am always amazed at how raw and close to the bone the subject of the blacklist is, how ferocious the passions remain even after half a century, despite the fact that the battles are mostly vicarious now, fought by descendents, literal and spiritual, a generation or two removed from the main action.

The last major venting of authentic bile from actual participants was during the controversy that arose over the honorary Oscar awarded to director Elia Kazan in 1999. In 1952, in a closed session before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Kazan “named names”—informed on his former comrades in arms—and, worse, refused to apologize for doing so. Worse yet, he used his free pass to make indisputably great movies. Like the old joke about Irish Alzheimer’s disease, where the afflicted forget everything except the grudges, the surviving octo-and-nanogenarians went at each other once again, but mainly it was an ex post facto donnybrook. During the tense ceremony, younger members of the Academy audience showed their colors by (variously) sitting on their hands, standing up to cheer, or tepidly applauding.

Like Baum and Miller, I’ve spend a good deal of time scrolling through back issues of the Hollywood Reporter over the years, lately for a study how the motion picture industry responded to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. (The short answer: pretty well, on average, especially compared to the rest of America.) My own sense was that the sackcloth and ashes routine was a bit overdone: the piece didn’t unjustly malign editor Wilkerson but it left a lot unsaid and brushed over some of the historical complexities. As befits its masthead, the Hollywood Reporter‘s role during the blacklist was mainly reportorial not prosecutorial. In general, it reflected mainstream industry attitudes when it insisted that the Hollywood Ten be called the Unfriendly Ten, so as not to sully the industry as a whole with the antics of the witnesses called before the original HUAC hearings in October 1947. (These are the iconic hearings that are invariably unspooled in archival documentaries of the era: the testimony from HUAC’s other Hollywood-centric hearings was denied newsreel coverage).

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“The pictures of Nazism first projected by Hollywood between 1933 and 1939 will always be before our eyes.”—Thomas Doherty

In the second half of our interview, Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, discusses the role of newsreels in depicting Nazism to American audiences, Mussolini’s son’s trip to Hollywood, and films of the era. (For part one of the interview and to read an excerpt from the book):

Question: Another component of American awareness of Nazi Germany came through film newsreels. What balances or compromises did newsreel producers make? Did they provide a forthcoming, honest picture of Hitler?

Thomas Doherty: The newsreels are actually one of the most interesting and untold stories of the era. Our focus on Hollywood feature films sometimes makes us forget that the most powerful images of the Nazis came from the motion picture journalism of the day. The problem for the newsreels was that it was virtually impossible to obtain uncensored film of the Nazis in action. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels controlled all outgoing motion picture imagery, which meant that when the newsreels showed the Nazis on screen, it was in Nazi—shot and—approved footage. As a result—and because unruly moviegoers would sometimes hiss and jeer at the Nazis on screen—the commercial newsreel companies often refrained from featuring the Nazis in the newsreels. Even when the newsreel editors did include pictures of Hitler and the Nazis in the newsreel issues, local exhibitors were known to cut out the clips so as not to disturb patrons out for an enjoyable night at the movies. The full motion picture record of the rise of Nazism—so vivid to us today—was not before the eyes of Americans in the 1930s.

Q: Your book also includes the odd but telling stories of Mussolini’s son and Leni Riefensthal’s sojourns to Hollywood. What do their stories tell us about Hollywood’s evolving attitudes toward fascism and its growing political awareness.

TD: Yes—the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League used the visits of Vittorio Mussolini in 1937 (in town to work out a a co-production deal with producer Hal Roach) and Leni Riefensthal in 1938 (she hoped to arrange a stateside distribution deal for Olympia [1938], her epic documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics) to discourage Hollywood from doing any business with the Nazis. The efforts of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League made Mussolini and Riefenstahl social pariahs around town—and intimidating anyone else in the film industry from associating with them. The animus towards Riefenstahl— “Hitler’s honey,” they called her—was especially intense because she was perceived as a genius of the cinema who had turned her talents to a demonic cause.

Q: Which anti-Nazi movies do you find most compelling? Do they feel dated or do they still have resonance today?

I find MGM’s The Mortal Storm (1940) oddly affecting—ironically enough, because MGM was the Hollywood studio that had no qualms about doing business with the Nazis throughout the 1930s. Director Frank Borzage shows how the Nazis destroy a culture through the disintegration of a once-happy family, with the warm conviviality of the opening scenes turning to emptiness and death in the end reel. Ernest Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) is go-for-the-jugular satire at its best, though I can see why American audiences in 1942 were not amused. Of course, Casablanca (1942) still packs an anti-Nazi punch, especially during the scene where everybody in Rick’s Cafe sings “La Marseilles” and drowns out the Germans.

Q: What is the continuing legacy of Nazism and Hitler on Hollywood either thematically or visually?

TD: Check out Quentin Tarantino’s Inglouriuos Basterds. Hitler, Goebbels, the SS, the Nuremberg rallies, swastikas, and all the other images of the twelve year Reich remain the most visually striking manifestations of political evil in motion picture history. The pictures of Nazism first projected by Hollywood between 1933 and 1939 will always be before our eyes.

“Up until 1938-1939, there were really no anti-Nazi films from the major Hollywood studios….For most of the 1930s, the major studios were missing in action.”—Thomas Doherty

Our featured book this week is Hollywood in Hitler, 1933-1939, by Thomas Doherty. In the following interview (we will post the second half tomorrow), Doherty discusses Hollywood’s reaction to Nazism:

Question: Hollywood celebrities today are associated with a variety of different social and political causes. How was the situation different then and how did it curtail film stars’ anti-Nazi activism?

Thomas Doherty: In the 1930s, motion picture stars were typically very timorous about expressing their political opinions in public, especially if the sentiments were in any way controversial or left of mainstream opinion. Why alienate a potential customer at the ticket window? For their part, the studio heads considered the stars their own personal property, not unlike the costumes and props in the studio warehouses. They didn’t want anything to deplete the value of their investments. At first, only the most stalwart and secure actors and actresses defied convention and broke ranks.

Q: What effect if any did their activism have on shaping American attitudes towards Hitler?

TD: It’s hard to say, but the anti-Nazi activism of popular stars like James Cagney, Melvyn Douglas, John Garfield, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford not only brought publicity to the cause but served to normalize the sentiments. The mere fact that movie stars—who more typically sold their faces for commercial endorsements—were now speaking out against Nazism, for free, made at least some people think about the reasons for the transition.

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This week our featured book is Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, by Thomas Doherty.

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the book and its author on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on April 5 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

And, for more on the book, read the chapter Hollywood-Berlin-Hollywood.

We close out our week-long feature on Satyajit Ray on Cinema by putting up a special Pinterest board on Ray and his films.

The above image is a poster for one of his films, designed by Ray himself. Here are a couple of other images and we will be adding more in the days to come!

Continuing our feature on Satyajit Ray on Cinema, we present a fascinating 4-part interview with Ray from 1983.

In the interview, Ray discusses his his childhood, the influence of the Bengal renaissance, his interest in design and typography, his approach to political films and violence in cinema, his interest in period films and children’s films, and his response to Western films and critics.

Part 1

Part 2

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We continue our week-long feature on Satyajit Ray on Cinema with another excerpt from one of the essays in the book.

In “National Styles in Cinema,” Ray explores the characteristics of various national cinemas and how it reflects the particular ethos of a nation. Here he writes on American cinema:

For is there a truer reflection of a nation’s inner life than the American cinema? The average American film is a slick, shallow, diverting and completely inconsequential thing. Its rhythm is that of jazz, its tempo that of the automobile and the rollercoaster, and its streaks of nostalgia and sentimentality have their ancestry in the Blues and ‘Way down upon the Swanee river’. Yet it must be reckoned with, as jazz is real and the machine is real. And because cinema has the unique property of absorbing and alchemizing the influence of inferior arts, some American films are good, and some more than good. The reason why some notable European directors have failed in Hollywood is their inability to effect a synthesis between jazz and their native European idioms.

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“‘I DON’T LIKE Godard’ is a statement one frequently hears at Film festivals”, writes Satyajit Ray in his essay “A Word About Godard,” an essay from our featured book Satyajit Ray on Cinema.

The book includes a wide range of Ray’s writing on film, including sketches of and essays on fellow filmmakers. Below is an excerpt from his essay on Godard in which he questions some of the assessments of JLG’s critics. You can read the full essay as well as Ray’s view of Michelangelo Antonioni here.

Now, I don’t like Godard too. But then, ‘like’ is a word I seldom use to describe my feeling about truly modern artists. Do we really like Pablo Picasso, or Claude-Michel Schönberg, or Eugène Ionesco, or Alain Robbe-Grillet? We are variously provoked and stimulated by them, and our appreciation of them is wholly on an intellectual level. Liking suggests an easy involvement of the senses, a spontaneous ‘taking to’, which I doubt if the modern artist even claims from his public.

Godard has been both dismissed summarily, and praised to the skies, and the same films have provoked opposite reactions. This is inevitable when a director consistently demolishes sacred conventions, while at the same time packing his films with obviously striking things.

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Our featured book this week is Satyajit Ray on Cinema by Satyajit Ray and Edited by Sandip Ray. (For more on the book here’s Ray on Godard and Antonioni.

Throughout this week we will highlight aspects of the book and Ray’s thoughts on films, directors, and his own work, as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Hollywood, Smollywood, we say Bollywood! While many film fans will be turning their attention to the Oscars, we asked Kush Varia author of Bollywood: Gods, Glamour, and Gossip to recommend five Bollywood films ideal for someone new to the genre (along with some clips):

Veer Zaara

Mughal-E-Azam

Sholay

Pakeezah

Mother India