Students enrolled in CAMS 211: Film History II last term (fall 2012) researched developments in the postwar Hollywood film industry. The results of this work have been collected in a self-published volume, Postwar Film History, 1945-1954, Original Research by Carleton Film History Students.
Robert Yeagle and Giancarlo Danno set the stage by detailing the experience of moviegoing and struggles within the industry during the war years. From there, Katharine Walton, Ben Walsh, Dan McAlister, Felicity Flesher and Adrian Carpenter map a variety of understudied postwar developments, including an anti-trust suit against an independent theater chain, Hollywood’s ongoing humanitarian efforts, the machinations of the Theater Owners of America, the negotiation of race ideologies in the social problem film, and the advent of the first widescreen technology, Cinerama. In an era infused with Cold War anxieties about communist infiltration, Simon Lansberg, Alexandra Guy and Jack Davis trace a story arc from the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee to the film industry’s own Waldorf Statement, which instituted the Hollywood blacklist. Patrick Nalepka, Tanwaporn Ohl, Hannah White, Linnea Bullion, and Max Felderman investigate the deals that went down between Hollywood and other global industries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Britain, while Kyle Markwalter, Britney Fryer, Isaac Burns and Emily Boghossian survey the checkered history of film censorship in the mid-1950s. In a concluding section, Jacob McNaughton, Rebecca Brown, Chrissie Deutsch, Chris Baur, Woody Kaine and Braeden Ducharme scrutinized the dynamics of competition and cooperation between the Hollywood film industry and the emerging television industry.
Carleton's Laurence McKinley Gould Library provides a suite of resources for research in film history typically only found in libraries at major research universities with graduate programs in cinema studies: collections of primary documents and film industry trade publications in microfilm and online archives, specialized film journal and magazine databases, and a large collection of DVDs rich in silent, classic Hollywood, experiemental and foreign cinema.
