This thesis is the first sustained analysis of historical films made in the New Hollywood era (1967-80). It explores the mediation of the era’s social, cultural and ideological concerns in feature films that represent key periods in American history. The terms New Hollywood and the historical film are utilised with revisionist aims. As well as considering the new wave of ‘auteur’ cinema synonymous with the New Hollywood, the thesis demonstrates the diverse range of films produced in this era. Similarly, it rejects the boundary drawing practiced by many studies of history and film, and submits that any film set in the past can be used to explore the values, assumptions and ideological conflicts of the present. Furthermore, the thesis contends that analysis of historical films allows us to understand how audiences of a given period engage with the past in emotional, moral and aesthetic terms. The method and approach of this research is robust and wide reaching, providing evidence based analysis of each film’s production and reception, as well as close readings of individual texts. The primary sources utilised include production files, draft screenplays, film reviews, press interviews and other forms of publicity. The vast majority of new Hollywood historical films are set in the recent past, and the six case studies undertaken in this thesis include a broad section of the era’s significant historical films: The Day of the Locust (1975), a drama centred on 1930s Hollywood; Sounder (1972), a story of Depression-era African American sharecroppers in the deep South; The Dirty Dozen (1967), a Second World War combat drama; The Way We Were (1973), a romantic film bridging the radical 1930s and the McCarthy ‘witchhunts’ of the 1950s; and American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978), which look back on the early rock and roll era of the late 1950s and early 1960s with nostalgia.

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This thesis re-imagines cultural-historical texts from contemporary perspectives to argue for the visibility of the femme fatalist figure in classic Hollywood cinema. The project contends that the femme fatalist, as an identity, more substantively accounts for women's multidimensionality as filmic characters, beginning with an assessment of this figure in two films noir and arriving at an assessment of her presence in a psychological thriller. To demonstrate the necessity of re-envisioning female multiplicity in the cinema, this study investigates how the motion pictures The Killers (1946), Gilda (1946), and The Spiral Staircase (1946) contribute to an understanding of the femme fatalist phenomenon. Through an extended analysis of critical scenes and the ableist, masculine-hegemonic rhetoric that perpetuates the sociobiological hierarchies of power depicted in the films, this project determines the extent to which the women portrayed in these motion pictures may unfetter themselves from patriarchal values of femaleness without compromising their ability to belong to this gendered iconography. The femme fatalist derives from the femme fatale while remaining distinct from this entity. In other words, a woman does not need to signify as a fatale to project fatalist-ness. However, the woman who chooses to embrace fatale-ness or whom society Others because of her non-traditional identity cannot re-integrate into conventional culture once alienated. Only by performing a role—that of the femme fatale or the femme fatalist or possibly both—can she ensure that she still belongs in society. Women possess more complicated identities in classic cinema than history and existing scholarly conversations might suggest. Assessing the figure of the femme fatalist demonstrates that however much we understand about the human condition, we can re-define how we perceive ourselves in relation to a cultural past that continues to shape our contemporary identities.

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Studies of Latin American culture have returned time and again to the issue of how to capture the many conflicts and tensions inherent in national, group, and individual identities of the region. This dissertation examines an overlooked component of identity debates: the experience of being anonymous or unrecognized. In particular, I focus on late twentieth and early twenty-first century representations of anonymity in Argentina and Brazil. These countries share various key characteristics: emergence from recent military dictatorships; accelerating urbanization and globalization; rapid transformation of public spaces and media technologies that shape the possibilities of expressing an identity and having it recognized. Within these contexts, my dissertation considers a corpus of novels and films centered on attempts to either escape anonymity or become anonymous. Chapter 1 analyzes the decay of family and community bonds as a source of recognition and social value in Fernando Bonassiâ"u20ac™s Subúrbio and Guillermo Saccomannoâ"u20ac™s El oficinista. Chapter 2 examines media technology and the relationship between audiences and celebrities. I read Alejandro Lópezâ"u20ac™s La asesina de Lady Di and Ignácio de Loyola Brandãoâ"u20ac™s O anônimo célebre as depictions of individuals seeking mass-media fame as a form of large-scale, public recognition. Chapter 3 looks at two cinematic representations of the bus 174 hijacking in Rio de Janeiro. José Padilhaâ"u20ac™s Ã"u201dnibus 174 and Bruno Barretoâ"u20ac™s Última parada 174 show the challenge of preserving the disruptive potency of the hijackerâ"u20ac™s demand for recognition, and the danger of neutralizing it through conventional narrative tropes. Chapter 4 analyzes representations of â"u20acœdesired anonymityâ"u20ac"u009d in Sergio Chejfecâ"u20ac™s novel Mis dos mundos and Albertina Carriâ"u20ac™s film Los rubios. The first explores the freedom of anonymous wandering in cosmopolitan and digital spaces. The latter imagines the creation of a community in which the burden of post-dictatorship memory and identity can be de-individualized and shared. Taken together, these works illustrate the continued demand to identify oneself and be(come) recognized as a basis for everyday social-civil interactions. They also question the value and viability of expressing a clear identity or cohesive self-narrative in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian society. / Adam Demaray

American film parody can be characterized as a distorted, comical and yet affectionate imitation of a given genre or specific work. Film noir as a genre with its distinct visual styles has been an easy target for such "creative criticism." Mel Brooks, famous for his series of successful parody films, has exhorted that the situation alone must be absurd while the actors must be serious, not funny to make a comedy funnier. He also said that funny is in the writing and not in the performance itself. Film noir through its unconventional visual styles and convoluted story lines engenders feelings of anxiety and paranoia in the audience, providing rich fodder for parody. The animated theatrical series Looney Tunes with its trademark slapstick style is well suited for making serious situations look absurd, affording "creative criticism". In this thesis I first analyze canonical examples to distill the distinct visual characteristics of these two different genres. I then employ the use of parody to bring together a few salient visual elements from each of these genres, thus enabling computer-generated visual parody. Finally, still image examples of such parody are produced by systematically combining visual elements from the two distinct genres, film noir for its expressionistic lighting and elliptical compositional elements, and Looney Tunes for its mischievous mise-en-scene and ingenuous characters.

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Thèse doct.--Philosophie--Department of Speech and dramatic art, graduate college, University of Iowa, 1972. / Filmogr. p. 217-249.

The American movie industry did not have to develop into the Hollywood dream factory. There were educative, religious, explicitly political, and other non-commercial alternative arrangements to America’s film industry. These alternatives, along with principles such as film free speech and movie propaganda, had to be cast aside by the emerging moguls of Hollywood. Conflicts with the vanquished liquor industries, moral and economic regulatory concerns, Republican Party politics, and the resurgent Klan all shaped the classic Hollywood system from 1906 to 1927, a 20-year period in which the American film industry depoliticized the Hollywood movie screen, shedding its democratic and propagandistic definitions for the politics of publicity and entertainment as a service to Americans. Developments in this infant industry also shaped the broader trajectory of American consumer capitalism toward big producer control and the self-regulation of the industry’s social effects.

Raúl, the protagonist of Pablo Larraín’s 2008 film Tony Manero, is a serial killer obsessed with “Saturday Night Fever.” Living in 1970s Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, Raúl symbolizes the abuse of Chilean culture committed by dual hegemonic forces: the political oppression of the Pinochet regime, and the ideological force of the North American culture industry. His efforts to participate in Chilean cultural production by staging a dance performance based on Saturday Night Fever becomes a ridiculous parody of Bhabhain mimicry: almost, but not quite. In this paper, I read against the postcolonial narrative of the mimicking subject in Tony Manero. Using fan theory from Michel de Certeau and Henry Jenkins, I seek voices of resistance or reappropriation within the film. I argue that because Raúl’s final dance performance is unplugged from the culture industry, it becomes a site for the performance of deviant identities and for the construction of a local community. I find that the film, however, denies the implications of this resistance, reasserting the omnipotence of the government and of mass media in constructing cultural identity. / text