American Cinema/American Culture: 2025 Release ISE

PART 1 THE MODE OF PRODUCTION
1 The Emergence of the Cinema as an Institution
2 Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narration
3 Classical Hollywood Cinema: Style
4 The Studio System
5 The Star System

PART 2 GENRE AND THE GENRE SYSTEM
6 Silent Film Melodrama
7 The Musical
8 American Comedy
9 War and Cinema
10 Film Noir: Somewhere in the Night
11 The Making of the West
12 Horror and Science Fiction

PART 3 A POSTWAR HISTORY
13 Hollywood and the Cold War
14 Hollywood in the Age of Television
15 The 1960s: The Counterculture Strikes Back
16 The Film School Generation
17 Into the Twenty-First Century
18 Digital Cinema

American Cinema/American Culture introduces the reader to basic issues related to the phenomenon of American cinema. It looks at American film history from the 1890s through today, but it does not always explore this history in a purely chronological way. In fact, it is not (strictly speaking) a history. Rather, it is a cultural history, which focuses more on topics and issues than on what happened when. American Cinema/American Culture reflects the crucial role movies play in the process of identity-formation. Films not only serve as texts that document who we think we are or were, they also reflect changes in the nation’s self-image, tracing the transformation from one kind of America to another.