Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (review)

Culture and Commerce

It is widely understood that the movies are a business. Behind all of the studio publicity and hype for a new cinematic release, the bottom line is not just how much money the picture will earn, but how much will it make during the opening weekend. Even in independent, artistic enclaves such as the Sundance Festival, the big buzz comes down to which title was sold for the most amount of money. The post-Academy Awards talk is about how salaries will increase for the winners or how high (or low) the television ratings were for the broadcast.

In Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American, Peter Decherney traces the history of this often contentious, but usually profitable, relationship between artists and financiers, filmmakers and scholars. In this well-written and thoroughly researched study, Decherney begins his exploration at cinema's birth, rebuking the idea that "film as art" came about naturally, but instead he shows how Hollywood executives and American cultural institutions created this concept when it was financially and politically advantageous for both. Motion pictures have always been a business, an art form, and a political maneuvering tool, often at the same time.

The book begins with an exploration of the early ideas of how film would be exhibited and stored. Many imagined motion picture libraries or museums, accessible to all, where films would be shown by popular vote. Decherney particularly focuses on the contradictory plans put forth by D.W. Griffith, who believed in a collection controlled by trained experts, and by Vachel Lindsay, with his democratic vision of local film museums, laid out in The Art of the Moving Picture (published in 1915, revised in 1922). Decherney notes that Lindsay's text was adopted at Columbia University in the first college-level film course, helping start the tradition of film appreciation as an academic study.

The most interesting chapters of this study look at the development of the film studies programs at Columbia and Harvard Universities. Columbia's curriculum, Decherney shows, was closely linked with the growth of Hollywood in 1914-1915. Among other things, Columbia's program focused on the importance of the script or screenplay and through its extension school taught screenwriting classes to Jewish immigrants. These classes also served to teach immigrants core "American values" through films. Harvard University's program began in the business school, with Joseph P. Kennedy and an assortment of Hollywood speakers teaching the business side of cinema.

Soon, however, Harvard's Fogg Art Museum became active in both attempting to build a film library and training its students to teach film courses or curate new film museums. Decherney charts the progress of several of these Harvard graduates, from their championship of avant-garde and leftist pictures, to their roles in developing film museums. The relationship between the universities and Hollywood executives is explored in depth here, and these relationships are fascinating, and often overlooked in many early histories of Hollywood.

The next few chapters focus not just on the development of a film library at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, but the political culture surrounding the development. Decherney spends a chapter detailing the life of British critic Iris Barry, who became a seminal force in the MoMA and American film spectatorship. Barry's journey from outspoken critic of the homogenization effect of American film to one of the biggest advocates for the diversity in the global market is well documented here, and Decherney captures this transition of thought eloquently.

Barry, as head of MoMA's film library, worked with Hollywood and U.S. government institutions to sell film as a distinctly American art form, and develop the World War II propaganda machine. Decherney also details Barry's role in creating the postwar avant-garde. The last chapter follows this movement and the changing relationships of cinematic institutions, Hollywood, and the government.

Hollywood and the Cultural Elite: How the Movies Became American...