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17 We have seen that a comparatively small but important group of postwar American films have been interpreted as Hollywood’s response to the Red Scare. But what produced this consensus view of postwar American cinema ? Along with the appearance of the earliest histories of the blacklist and the memoirs of blacklisted writers, as well as the industry’s belated recognition of those writers’ contributions, a third aspect of American film culture of this period fostered the impression that Cold War–era cinema was fertile territory for the exploration of political subtexts: the introduction of film criticism into the academy.Although this aspect was not specific to blacklist film scholarship, it was nonetheless a crucial element in establishing a framework within which this reading formation could develop and flourish. As Dana Polan and others have pointed out, there is a long history of academic interest in film as a particular type of cultural artifact.1 But it was not until the 1970s that universities began awarding doctorates in film studies as a distinct and autonomous discipline. As the field developed professional organizations dedicated to film studies, academic journals turned away from evaluation and increasingly turned to the study of film theory and criticism. As David Bordwell notes, film criticism was an outgrowth of film reviewing by professional journalists, but the meaning of a work supplanted its aesthetic worth as the chief object of inquiry. “Now the author of a film book,” writes Bordwell, “was apt to be an academic, whose professional career required publications bearing a scholarly imprimatur. In sum, the academicization of film publishing created an expanding institutional base for interpretive criticism.”2 Not surprisingly, blacklist interpretations became more common as a result of this change. As film scholars combed through films of the 1950s for their implicit and symptomatic meanings, the field came to accept the premise that certain films, and even entire 1 A Bifocal View of Hollywood during the Blacklist Period Film as Propaganda and Allegory 9780520280670_PRINT.indd 17 9780520280670_PRINT.indd 17 04/02/14 3:38 PM 04/02/14 3:38 PM 18 / A BIFOCAL VIEW OF HOLLYWOOD genres, allegorized the political tensions around the HUAC investigations and U.S. foreign policy. Rather than trying to answer the question of what these Cold War–era films mean, this book asks how they came to mean. In this chapter I more closely examine the two particular strategies film critics employed in identifying specific examples of American cinema as commentary on the era’s anti-Communist politics. On one hand, some critics, either explicitly or implicitly, describe the cycle of anti-Communist films produced between 1948 and 1958 as a type of propaganda. Although most critics acknowledge that Hollywood made these films to curry favor with investigative bodies like HUAC, the cycle contains an overt, polemical address to viewers that illustrates the potential threat Communist infiltration posed to the American way of life. This cycle of anti-Communist films contained its own ideological contradictions, however, partly because of Hollywood’s reliance on established storytelling formulas. On the other hand, many critics also point out that films produced outside this cycle of anti-Communist propaganda sometimes found indirect ways to comment on the politics of the period. Most of these critics implicitly identify allegory as the means by which this commentary is offered. In its simplest dictionary definition, an allegory is “a story in which the characters and events are symbols that stand for ideas about human life or for a political or historical situation.”3 By this logic, blacklist allegories thematize the evils of political repression and the abrogation of civil liberties. Rather than simply taking these two interpretive strategies at face value, I argue that they should be contextualized within a much broader understanding of propaganda and allegory as specific communicative acts. How, for example, is propaganda defined and how does this definition differentiate it from a more general sense that cinema functions within a structure of social, cultural, and political ideologies? Likewise, how does cinema “code” its representations in such a way that they can be interpreted as blacklist allegory? How do these blacklist allegories fit within a larger conception of allegory as a genre of literary or cinematic texts? This chapter’s aim, then, is to situate blacklist criticism within an understanding of propaganda and allegory as rhetorical modes. A METACRITICAL APPROACH TO FRAMING BLACKLIST FILM INTERPRETATIONS One of the chief inspirations for this book is David Bordwell’s Making Meaning: Inference and...

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