Recent Books in Film History

Reflecting the broad range of new scholarship in the history of cinema, the books included in this section have been selected by the editorial staff of Film History. The summaries have been provided by the authors.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).

Cinema, the Regime’s Other Weapon.

Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema is the first in-depth study of the feature and documentary films made during Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship about Italy’s African and Balkan occupations. The fruit of research in military and film archives, it focuses on the dramatic years between the invasion of Ethiopia (1935–36) and the loss of the colonies (1941–43) during World War II. Promoted and created at the highest levels of the regime, empire films were Italy’s entry into an international marketplace of colonial and exotic offerings and engaged many of Italy’s emerging filmmaking talents (Roberto Rossellini) as well as its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini). Shot partly or wholly in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies: their sets were sites of violence and of interracial intimacies. Like the imperial histories they recount, they were largely forgotten for most of the postwar period. Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema restores them to Italian and international film history and offers a case study of the intertwining of war and cinema and the unfolding of imperial policy in the context of dictatorship.

Chris Cagle, Sociology On Film: Hollywood’s Prestige Commodity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017).

Frame grab, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947).

Sociology on Film revisits the often ignored or maligned social-problem film of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood, arguing that the genre’s popular sociology helped transform Hollywood’s prestige film. The account synthesizes archival research in studio records, reception study, discursive reading of the trade press, textual analysis of individual films, and an intellectual history of twentieth-century sociology. Whereas many film histories examine the genre through the lens of the blacklist and Hollywood’s left, a broader, middlebrow, liberal culture characterized the films and their reception. Many of the films were adapted from best-selling realist novels, and many of the cinematographers were praised in the trade press for their realism. Sociology on Film argues that the soft genres of melodrama and adaptation were actually in dialogue with the more explicitly political ones of the film noir, social-problem film, and semidocumentary film more canonically associated with postwar Hollywood cinema.

Stephen Charbonneau, Projecting Race: Postwar America, Civil Rights, and Documentary Film (New York: Wallflower Press, 2016).

Mary Coley as the featured midwife in All My Babies (1952), one of the films discussed in Projecting Race. (Publicity still from George C. Stoney Papers, 1940–2009, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Drawing on extensive archival research, oral history, and textual analysis, Projecting Race tracks the evolution of race-based, nontheatrical cinema from the forties to the late sixties...