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Hollywood's Hawaii
Whether presented as exotic fantasy, a strategic location during World War II, or a site combining postwar leisure with military culture, Hawaii and the South Pacific figure prominently in the U.S. national imagination.Hollywood's Hawaiiis the first full-length study of the film industry's intense engagement with the Pacific region from 1898 to the present.Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett highlights films that mirror the cultural and political climate of the country over more than a century-from the era of U.S. imperialism on through Jim Crow racial segregation, the attack on Pearl Harbor and WWII, the civil rights movement, the contemporary articulation of consumer and leisure culture, as well as the buildup of the modern military industrial complex. Focusing on important cultural questions pertaining to race, nationhood, and war, Konzett offers a unique view of Hollywood film history produced about the national periphery for mainland U.S. audiences.Hollywood's Hawaiipresents a history of cinema that examines Hawaii and the Pacific and its representations in film in the context of colonialism, war, Orientalism, occupation, military buildup, and entertainment.
eBook
'Jewish' Genocidal Villains for Children? Emergent Holocaust Consciousness and Postwar Antisemitism in One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
This article studies how two popular 1960s Anglophone children's films projected antisemitic ideas onto genocidal villains. Focusing on Cruella de Vil of Walt Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and the Child Catcher of Ken Hughes's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), it analyzes the appearance of ethnically stereotyped, Jewish-suggestive figures presented as enactors of genocidal violence, rather than as victims or survivors of it. Subliminally reversing the resonance of the Holocaust's Jewish victimization by non-Jewish Europeans, these films both touch upon themes of genocidal atrocity that were belatedly emerging in broader Western popular culture of the 1960s, as well as maintain an antisemitic ethnic hierarchy in which implicitly \"Jewish,\" non-white, and queer bodies appear unworthy or dangerous. In these films, villains marked by Jewish, racialized, and queer stereotypes, as well as by antisemitic paradigms, categorically oppose the existence of an entire demographic or seek to confine and/or annihilate that demographic for their own perceived wellbeing. Contextualizing and analyzing this phenomenon, I consider its potential meanings for 1960s American audiences in relation to their shifting social and political realities, including the waning of public antisemitism, as well as the emergence of Second-Wave Feminism and the Gay Liberation movement.
Journal Article
Reconstructing the Self and the City: Wolfgang Koeppen's Rubble Film Bei Betty (1946–1948)
This article discusses Wolfgang Koeppen's to date unpublished screenplay Bei Betty (ca. 1948) and makes a case for its importance both within Koeppen's oeuvre and as an artifact of postwar German culture that helps us understand the category of the Trümmerfilm as well as the complexity of the “zero hour.” In contrast to other rubble films, Bei Betty portrays postwar reconstruction (Wiederaufbau) as an ambivalent process, allowing some individuals to “remake” themselves while others remain damaged by the war. This visual narrative thus links physical reconstruction with acts of self‐refashioning in the aftermath of the war, highlighting the political and social stakes of performing a “new” self in response to the Allied occupation. In contrast to Koeppen's novels, full of interior monologue, the screenplay emphasizes the impenetrability of surfaces and performed social selves, the acts of concealment and masquerade that proliferated after the war's end.
Journal Article
Ghosts and Miracles: The Volkswagen as Imperial Debris in Postwar West Germany
Starting with the author's own experience of ghostliness in the archive, the article explores the political meaning of the postwar Volkswagen in West Germany as embodiment of the country's “economic miracle.” The investigation follows the uncanny in texts and images about the Volkswagen between 1945 and 1960 and argues that the car carried with it a “public secret” as a “debris” from the Nazi empire that silently transcended the 1945 divide. This reading of the Volkswagen as well as the methodological path toward it highlight a phenomenon that postcolonial scholars have described as “haunting”: a confusion about the relationship between past and present that also bears on those who study the past. Taking this analysis as an encouragement to revisit the powerful myths and “miracles” of postwar consumer cultures in the West from a new angle, the article calls for historical genealogies of these myths that conceive of the postwar West as a—not yet—postcolonial space and that cross the 1945 threshold.
Journal Article
The Race to Primitivism: Ralph Ellison's Transatlantic Musings and the Italian Reception of Invisible Man
This article traces the ways in which the discourse of primitivism runs through Ralph Ellison's view of 1950s Europe and the Italian reception of his novel Invisible Man , published in Italian in 1953. The overlaps in the understanding of the term primitive, widely used in the 1950s transatlantic world, give way to fundamental distinctions. Italian critics use primitivism to maintain African American literature at the margin of the Euro-American canon. By discounting its aesthetic features to focus on its sociological analysis, Italian reviewers foreclosed conversations of analogous experiences in Italian history, such as racial relations and colonialism. Ellison reverses the gaze to locate primitivism in postwar Europe itself, where the engagement with the recent horrors of its history and the worldviews that made them possible had yet to emerge.
Journal Article
The Postwar Restoration in East and West
This article examines continuities between East German literary and filmic cultures in the late 1940s and 1950s and the Weimar Republic. The postwar account of Weimar history and the collapse of German democracy featured a heroic Communist Party and the concept of a genetic relationship between the struggles of Weimar culture and the effort to construct German socialism amid the ruins of the Nazi state. The article also demonstrates that there are more structural similarities between postwar East and West German culture than is commonly believed, as both cultures appealed to largely conservative aesthetic and cultural presuppositions.
Journal Article
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR ON SCREEN
According to Khrushchev, late Stalin-era war films were sickening. Dedicated to “praising Stalin as a military genius,” they “surround[ed] Stalin with glory, contrary to the facts and contrary to historical truth.”¹ This is an accurate description—but only of three out of the thirty-eight war films released in this period. The remaining thirty-five films tell a somewhat different story, as this chapter will reveal.²
War films were the most popular type of Soviet-made feature to screen during 1945–50, after which point their production ceased until after Stalin’s death. They account for over a third of all feature film releases
Book Chapter
Atomic Dwelling
In the years of reconstruction and economic boom that followed the Second World War, the domestic sphere encountered new expectations regarding social behaviour, modes of living, and forms of dwelling. This book brings together an international group of scholars from architecture, design, urban planning, and interior design to reappraise mid-twentieth century modern life, offering a timely reassessment of culture and the economic and political effects on civilian life.
This collection contains essays that examine the material of art, objects, and spaces in the context of practices of dwelling over the long span of the postwar period. It asks what role material objects, interior spaces, and architecture played in quelling or fanning the anxieties of modernism's ordinary denizens, and how this role informs their legacy today.
eBook