Destination Hollywood: The Influence of Europeans on American Filmmaking (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature monolithic, race relations history. Why wouldn't he? Once before , in The Birth ofWhiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, he tackled this controversial subject with equal candor. This second volume—a natural continuum to his earlier research —offers numerous arguments that Hollywood motion pictures fostered in-house racism. Once again, Dr. Bernardi has shed new light on a contentious topic that cannot be ignored. Robert Fyne Kean University RJFyne@aol.com Michael Paris, editor The First World War and Popular Cinema, 1914 to the Present. Rutgers University Press, 2000. 240 pages. $22.00 paper. Less Attention Twenty years ago, when the late Michael Isenberg published his classic War on Film: The American Cinema and World War I, 1914-1941, he asserted that film was "the mirror of democracy" and regretted that it remained, for most historians, "the unused evidence." World War I, he asserted, as democracy's first crisis of the twentieth century, was an ideal subject for the exercise of film history. Unfortunately, scholars have only gradually responded to Isenberg's call, as an earlier review essay in thisjournal has noted (see vol. 28.3-4 [1998], pp. 102ff). The First World War, despite its drama and its important relationship to the young medium of film, has drawn less attention than other subjects. This welcome addition to the literature embodies not merely the scholarship but also something of the verve Isenberg hoped to see devoted to the study of World War I and film. Its eleven contributors examine the impact of the war on the evolution of filmmaking in ten belligerent nations as well as—and perhaps more importantly—the continuing role of film in shaping the historical vision of the war. Pierre Sorlin's chapter on French film, creatively titled with a double-entendre, "The Silent Memory," illustrates these mutually instructive points of view. Virtually all of these authors will be familiar to readers of Film & History, having published in or received attention in the Journal. In some cases, though not all, the nations they discuss are their own. But in every instance, they have made the subjects their own by virtue of extensive research: Sorlin on France, Michael Paris and Nicholas Reeves on Britain, Ina Bertrand on Australia, Tim Travers on Canada, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche on the United States, Giovanni Nobili Vitelleschi on Italy, Denise Youngblood on Russia, Ewa Mazierska on Poland, Rainer Rother on Germany, and Franz Marksteiner on Austria. Thus, one of the principal virtues of this book is its utility as a reliable guide to the larger body of literature on World War I and film. Students could well begin with this book, but there is sufficient originality and depth throughout to please the most seasoned readers. Pierre Sorlin contributes the theoretical discussion that opens the book and is, in fact, too modestly entitled "Cinema and the Memory of the Great War." For Sorlin deftly connects that specific subject to larger matters ofthe moving visual images as a historical resource and, thereby, enhances the thematic cohesion and value of the following chapters. American readers mustbe impressed again with the great contrast between the corporate film industry that developed here and was present in virtually all of its classical aspects by the end of the war, and the more artistically oriented national cinemas of European and Commonwealth countries. This project is the result of a long and determined effort by editor Michael Paris, Senior Lecturer in Historical and Critical Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, who shepherded it through all of its developmental phases, authored one of the two chapters on Britain and located the illustrations which, in themselves, constitute an impressive photographic essay that interacts throughout with the conventional scholarship. The book is not only well-conceived and well-balanced as a written work, but handsome. Its elegant typeface and layout, together with the large number ofappropriate photographs, make it another small victory of scholarship and aesthetics over that bane of our times—mere information. It should find a place in the collections of subscribers of this Journal and the libraries of their respective institutions. Robert W. Maison University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown Rmatson@pitt.edu...