Split Screen Nation

Moving Images of the American West and South

Susan Courtney (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

328 Seiten

2017
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-045996-3 (ISBN)

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Analyzing an eclectic history of film and related media, Split Screen Nation argues that popular visions of the American West and the American South must be thought in relation to one another if we are to fully understand the marks both have left on popular ways of imagining the U.S.

Split Screen Nation traces an oppositional dynamic between the screen West and the screen South that was unstable and dramatically shifting in the decades after WWII, and has marked popular ways of imagining the U.S. ever since. If this dynamic became vivid in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), itself arguably a belated response to Easy Rider (1969), this book helps us understand those films, and much more, through an eclectic history of U.S. screen media from the postwar era. It deftly analyzes not only Hollywood films and television, but also educational and corporate films, amateur films (aka "home movies"), and military and civil defense films featuring ¨tests" of the atomic bomb in the desert. Attentive to sometimes profoundly different contexts of production and consumption shaping its varied examples, Split Screen Nation argues that in the face of the Cold War and the civil rights struggle an implicit, sometimes explicit, opposition between the screen West and the screen South nonetheless mediated the nation's most paradoxical narratives-namely, "land of the free"/land of slavery, conquest, and segregation. Whereas confronting such contradictions head-on could capsize cohesive conceptions of the U.S., by now familiar screen forms of the West and the South split them apart; offering convenient, discrete, and consequential imaginary places upon which to collectively project avowed aspirations and dump troubling forms of national waste. Pinpointing some of the most severe yet understudied postwar trends fueling this dynamic-including non-theatrical film road trips, feature films adapted from Tennessee Williams, and atomic test films-and mining their potential for more complex ways of thinking and feeling the nation, Split Screen Nation considers how the vernacular screen forms at issue have helped shape how we imagine not only America's past, but also the limits and possibilities of its present and future.

Susan Courtney is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies and English at the University of South Carolina. There she also co-founded the Orphan Film Symposium and has directed the program in Film and Media Studies. She is the author of Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (2005).

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
About the Companion Website

Part 1: Projecting Region, Imagining Nation
Teaser (Hollywood): Easy Rider Calls For a Genealogy
Introduction: Split Screen Nation

Part 2: Remapping the Nation on Multiple Screens
Teaser (16mm & Archive.org): Camera Road Trip
Chapter 1: Screen Maps for Model Citizen- Spectators
Chapter 2: Frontier Vistas and Plantation Sutures: Hollywood Forms of the American Paradox

INTERSTITIAL TEASER (Multimedia): "John Wayne" versus "Tennessee Williams"

Part 3: The Leaky South
Teaser (TV): Enjoying the "Southern Decadence Blues" with Hugh Hefner
Chapter 3: How the South Became Sexually Perverse in the Civil Rights Era

Part 4: The Empty West
Teaser (Media Saturation): Robert Frank's Postcards from the Edge
Chapter 4: Expanding Views of a Filmic Proving Ground

Epilogue: Walking/Looking into the Toxic Cloud

Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	12.03.2017
Zusatzinfo	over 400 screen stills
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	257 x 183 mm
Gewicht	774 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	0-19-045996-4 / 0190459964
ISBN-13	978-0-19-045996-3 / 9780190459963
Zustand	Neuware