"The Studio System" Directed and produced by Chris Rodley, and: "Film Noir" Directed by Jeffrey Schon and Produced by Sasha Alpert, and: American Cinema (review)

direction ofTony Kushner's^wg^fÄ inAmericaand his leadership oftheJoseph Papp Public Theater, Wolfe is a fast-talking, dynamic, screen filling presence. His language and ear for the rhythm oflanguage becomes apparent in his readings ofhis work, and his interests and investments in history, identity, and the African American experience reveal themselves in the footage of performances, his actions at work, and his own comments on the influence ofAfrican Americans and the state oftheater in the United States today. Using words found in The ColoredMuseum, Wolfe tells us that his "power is in [his] madness and [his] colored contradictions," a statement aptly and carefully explained by the video itself. The quality of content in both videos translates effectively to the classroom. Accessible and informative for both high school and college-level students, the editors ofthe Signature series have created resources that deal with politics, race, class, and gender, as well as the role ofinfluences and experiences for writers, in a non-threatening manner that encourages viewers to listen and give serious attention to the values and beliefs of the individual writer on screen. The Kingsolver and Wolfe videos compliment each writer's work and, in fact, I was impressed enough by the Kingsolver video to work it into my own composition class to expand our discussion of Kingsolver's essay "The Memory of Place" as we investigate what it means to come from a particular locale. For those ofyou interested in bringing a well-rounded exploration ofa writer's career into your classes, check out the Annenberg/CPB Projects web page for ordering information about their various resources (http://www.learner.org/collections /multimedia/literature/siseries). The Signature: Contemporary Southern Writers series comes in a set curriculum package, which includes all six tapes, a guide, and the right to duplicate one set of the videos for your department or campus. All in all, this is an inspiring and educational resource to access for our students and our own learning about these writers with roots in the South. %? "The Studio System. "Directed and produced by Chris Rodley. "Film Noir. "Directed by Jeffrey Schon. Produced by Sasha Alpert. American Cinema. BBC / Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1994. Walter Metz Montana State University The episodes "The Studio System" and "Film Noir" in the American Cinema series , currently being distributed on vidéocassette, are both useful introductions to these topics for an introductory undergraduate and general public audience. The topics covered and the questions raised by these episodes are the ones an academic 132 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW H- SPRING 1999 Reviews film historian would expect to find addressed. Thus, the value of these episodes lies in their usefulness as teaching tools, and certainly not in theirgroundbreaking or innovative approach to film history. "The Studio System" episode begins with an introduction by John Lithgow which emphasizes the economic historical approach that the show will take, led by the two prominent industrial film historians in contemporary media studies: Thomas Schatz and Douglas Gomery. This strategy both gives the episode a needed coherence, but also produces its most problematic facet, the adoption ofa much too uncritical perspective on the Hollywood studio system. In his introduction, Lithgow argues that it was "the genius ofthe system" that led the classical Hollywood studio system "to produce some of the best pictures ever made." The episode builds its coherence around this purported "genius of the system," a concept borrowed from Schatz's book of the same title, which in turn was borrowed from Andre Bazin. In two separate places, Gomery emphasizes the terms of this genius: in his refutation of the Fordist factory model for understanding the Hollywood production system, and in his explanation ofhow Hollywood came to thrive even after temporarily crippling economic effects of the Paramount Decree. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with many of the conclusions drawn out ofthis formulation ofthe genius ofthe Hollywood system. The studio system did enable a number offilms that could simply not have been made under any other economic and cultural conditions. However, the existence of other models for understanding the Hollywood studio system are overwhelmed by this genius approach, which is clearly complicit with the funding and informational sources of the...