Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945-1957 (review)

As any cursory survey of college and university film programs will reveal, film departments in the United States are generally composed of a mixture of filmmakers, film theorists, and historians. One finds further disciplinary differences among filmmakers who work in narrative or nonnarrative modes and who make commercial or experimental films. Meanwhile, film scholars are subdivided according to training and research methods into humanists and social scientists. Each area of film study has its own professional organizations and academic journals, and there is no single forum within which film faculty can debate collectively the political condition, aims, and goals of film culture in the United States. Consequently, journalists and Hollywood executives often take over the task of defining the public terms of political discussions about the media. But filmmakers and film scholars did not always lack a public sphere, as shown in a recent collection of essays from one of the most important journals in the history of U.S. film studies. Edited by Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin, Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945-1957 includes essays by sociologists, aestheticians, artists, and industry workers who attempted to speak publicly to one another about political questions of media production and reception. The political discussion within Hollywood Quarterly was almost always stifled and hesitant, but this limitation had more to do with the oppressive political climate of postwar America than it did with the problem of cross-disciplinary communication.

Established in 1945, Hollywood Quarterlyarticulated a consistently clear institutional mission: to promote all types of U.S. film culture. This mission is revealed in articles on the importance of film preservation, new venues for nonfiction film exhibition, and film education systems in France and the Soviet Union that might provide models for the establishment of similar programs in the United States. The collection supports Smoodin's claim that the journal "attracted a collection of writers unmatched in North American film studies, before or since, for the heterogeneity of their intellectual and practical concerns" (xi). Important academic scholars, intellectuals, filmmakers, and studio professionals are represented in pieces on narrative film, animation, the avant-garde, and documentary, as well as television and radio. Essays often explain the theory behind industrial practice, for example, Rudy Bratz's article on early television production, Edith Head's piece on costume design, and Harry Horner's essay on the design rationale for the sets of William Wyler's The Heiress. Other essays offer insightful examples of formal film analysis by important scholars and artists such as Lewis Jacobs, Siegfried Kracauer, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. From a different disciplinary perspective, some essays utilize a psychological approach to understanding media reception, such as articles that analyze the psychological appeal of Mr. Magoo and the way that audiences use their preestablished beliefs to interpret films. Some articles present the findings of sociological analyses, such as one study on the relationship between the socioeconomic background and television viewing patterns of children.

The most valuable contribution made by the collection does not lie, however, in the historical curiosity of outdated sociological studies or in the prescience of writers like Sam Goldwyn, who predicted the emergence of pay-per-view television. Rather, the relevance of this collection resides in the insight it provides into Hollywood Quarterly itself, a historically important film journal that helps us to understand the political tensions that shaped media practice and intellectual thought in postwar America. As Smoodin explains in his introduction, Hollywood Quarterly was the result of a collaboration between the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization and the University of California; the journal was first proposed at the Writer's Congress at UCLA in 1943, a meeting of film writers, scholars, and practitioners that spanned the political spectrum from John Howard Lawson to Walt Disney. Hollywood Quarterly was founded with the stated aim of considering the social function of film and radio in the aftermath of...