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Forced to contend with unprecedented levels of psychological trauma during World War II, the United States military began sponsoring a series of nontheatrical films designed to educate and even rehabilitate soldiers and civilians alike. Traumatic Imprints examines wartime and postwar debates about, aspirations for, and uses of cinema as a vehicle for studying, publicizing, and even “working through” war trauma.

The first screening of films in Brazil took place on July 8, 1896. Journalists immediately praised the movies’ modernity and their progressive dimensions. Their commentaries support the commonly held premise that cinema was related to the onset of modernity. In Brazil, relationship had a very specific impetus. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, followed a year later by the ousting of the imperial monarchy, a new Republican regime (1889–1930) set out to redefine Brazil’s identity. Its peripheral status was to be a thing of the past, and incorporating European discourses of civilization and progress, the country was recast as a modern nation of order and progress. The cinema’s development was inextricably related to this modernizing project, with the medium helping to visualize Brazil’s civilized identity. Foundational Films explores the cinema’s particular invention of modernity in Brazil. Examining an array of early movies, including urban films, ethnographic documentaries, Hollywood-inspired movies, and avant-garde cinematic experimentations, and exploring their connections to other cultural forms, like maps, magazines, photography, science, and literature, the book looks at how cinema helped to project modern foundations for the Brazilian nation. The first sustained historical study of the cinema’s emergence in Brazil, Foundational Films is a fascinating account that illustrates the significance of the movies and their ability to project a national identity. It is an innovative and in-depth look at the cultural history of modernity in Brazil through the lens of a foundational moment in the country’s cinema.

This book reconceptualizes both the geopolitical boundaries and the periodization of Latin American film histories in order to reveal a predominant comic mode in the cultural practices of Latin America in the twentieth century. Comedies have been either relegated to the margins of regional film histories in the shadow of the New Latin American Cinema or articulated to the broader socializing and nationalistic function of earlier commercial traditions. Rather than map Latin American cinema according to radical politics, film directors, or film movements—as do conventional film histories—this comparative project examines the formal and narrative operations of Argentine, Brazilian, and Mexican commercially successful comedies released between the 1920s and the 1950s in order to demonstrate how they functioned as peripheral responses to modernization and prefigured the more explicitly political New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s. Each chapter braids empirical research, close reading, film theory, and Latin American studies to argue that Latin American cinema from the studio period became classical in ways that were phenomenally distinct from but structurally akin to those of Hollywood. To that end, each chapter presents one way that classical Hollywood was constructed within film studies and demonstrates how the ways cinema became classical in Hollywood do not occur identically in Latin America. Using an approach that encompasses both textual analysis as well as a range of practices from the film experience, such as stardom, trade and popular publications, and broadcast media, this book proposes thinking classicism as a discourse that mediates and renders the world, looking at the construction of the aesthetic world as diegetic totality and the circulation of the texts and objects in global circuits of economic exchange.

Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex examines how the American military has used cinema and related visual, sonic, and mobile technologies to further its varied aims. The essays in this book address the way cinema was put to work for purposes of training, orientation, record keeping, internal and external communication, propaganda, research and development, tactical analysis, surveillance, physical and mental health, recreation, and morale. The contributors examine the technologies and types of films that were produced and used in collaboration among the military, film industry, and technology manufacturers. The essays also explore the goals of the American state, which deployed the military and its unique modes of filmmaking, film exhibition, and film viewing to various ends. Together, the essays reveal the military’s deep investment in cinema, which began around World War I, expanded during World War II, continued during the Cold War (including wars in Korea and Vietnam), and still continues in the ongoing War on Terror.

Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 explores how documentarians working between the election of John F. Kennedy and the bicentennial created conflicting visions of the recent and more distant American past. Drawing on a wide range of primary documents, this book examines the films of Hollywood documentarians such as David Wolper and Mel Stuart, along with lesser known independents and activists such as Kent Mackenzie, Lynne Littman, and Jesús Salvador Treviño. While the former group reinvigorated a Cold War cultural liberalism, the latter group advocated for social justice in a city plagued by severe class stratification and racial segregation. Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History analyzes how mainstream and alternative filmmakers turned to the archives, civic institutions, and production facilities of Los Angeles in order to both change popular understandings of the city and shape the social consciousness of the nation.

In this, the first book devoted to one of the world’s most admired independent filmmakers, James Naremore offers a close critical study of all of Charles Burnett’s important works for movies and television—among them Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding, To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield, Nightjohn, The Wedding, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, and Warming by the Devil’s Fire. Naremore shows that Burnett’s important career has developed against the odds and that his artistry, social criticism, humor, and commitment to “symbolic knowledge” have given his films enduring value.

The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era’s last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence during which the company town’s many competing subcultures -- celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients – came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War.

Hymns for the Fallen listens closely to forty years of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to place the audience in the midst of battle and to stimulate reflection on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies—such as Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper—as well as lesser known films, Todd Decker shows how the domain of sound, an experientially rich, culturally resonant aspect of the cinema, not only invokes the realities of war, but also shapes the American audience’s engagement with soldiers and veterans as flesh-and-blood representatives of the nation. Hymns for the Fallen explores all three elements of film sound—dialogue, sound effects, music—and considers how expressive and formal choices on the soundtrack have turned the serious war film into a patriotic ritual enacted in the commercial space of the cinema.

Smutty Little Movies traces the adult film industry’s transition from celluloid to home video beginning in the late 1970s alongside an examination of the cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate pornography. Drawing on a wide variety of materials, Smutty Little Movies de-centers the film text in favor of industrial histories and contexts. In doing so, the book argues that the struggles to contain and regulate pleasure represent a primary entry point for situating adult video’s place in a larger history, not just of pornography, but media history as a whole.