Peter Decherney,
Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 231 13377 4
US$19 (pb)
269pp
(Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press)

Peter Decherney’s book is a very fine institutional history of Hollywood and the culture elite. It details the history of their relationship as the tragic movement from the utopianism of its earliest models in the first decades of the century (the early theorist Vachel Lindsay is the starting point), when cultural institutions were imagined to be capable of transforming film into a perfected didactic media, through to the 1960s (the New Hollywood generation is definitively the endpoint) and the final complicity of those very institutions in supporting Hollywood’s hegemony over American cinema. Characteristic of Decherney’s work here is that neither ‘Hollywood’ nor ‘culture elite’ is intended to convey much beyond its most obvious meaning: Hollywood is hegemonic and run by studio-heads, the culture elite is those institutions that create and disseminate widely sanctioned notions of (mainly but not exclusively) high-brow culture, and the implied subject in both cases is an abstract American cultural consumer. (It should be noted here that Decherney does not use the term hegemony or any other to highlight the cultural transformation he is describing.) If the work is unreflective in its terminology, it remains a remarkable historiographic achievement: Decherney unearths genuinely surprising connections among an astonishingly broad network of cultural players, each of whom is given a refreshing and extremely thorough re-reading. Decherney effectively avoids reductive analyses of his large cast of institutions and individuals, and instead excels at revealing the complexities and intellectual sophistication that any analysis less thorough and sympathetic would miss. Few writers would have the confidence or patience to grant equal intellectual standing to Joseph Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Harry Alan Potamkin and Siegfried Kracauer and let their thought speak for itself. That Decherney is not only capable of marshalling such an enormous and varied cast but is also committed to presenting each figure in as thoroughly researched and objective a light as possible is itself testament to the importance of this work.

Those institutions that fall under Decherney’s umbrella term ‘the culture elite’ are varied indeed, extending from the imagined universal film library proposed by Vachel Lindsay in the first decades of the century, to the landmark but short-lived film collecting and teaching programmes launched at Harvard and Columbia, to more familiar institutions: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology and Jerome Hill’s various philanthropic organizations. Again, thorough primary research and objectivity are Decherney’s guiding principles.

However, while Decherney’s scholarship is extremely detailed and his readings very convincing, I feel the work is (perhaps inevitably) restricted by his refusal to engage fully with, on one hand, the key theoretical concepts he introduces and, on the other hand, the texts of those few films he addresses directly. This is very much institutional historiography on a broad and ambitious scale and Decherney is quite justified in avoiding dense theory and close textual analysis. Furthermore, he makes his intentions quite clear from the outset. Specifically, he aims to focus on the measures of Hollywood’s politics and influence other than film narrative and style (3): his concern is to enrich the scholarly field by revealing how cultural institutions helped shape the story of Hollywood’s rise to near-complete hegemony.

My hesitation is still valid, however, if it is agreed that Decherney fails to justify this history as necessarily a tragedy, or in other words, to convince the reader of his deeply pessimistic take on his subject. For those readers more convinced than I am that the history of Hollywood is tragic (or indeed tragedy) as such, Decherney’s work will count as a much-needed, thoroughly researched and exhaustive history of ‘how the movies became American’ (Decherney’s subtitle). For readers who, like me, remain somewhat troubled by its Althusserian implications for contemporary Hollywood-based scholarship, it remains an extremely useful and compelling work, rich in detail and penetrating in its individual arguments, detailing the socio-economic conditions of how American cinema moved to a position of near-total national-cultural hegemony by the 1960s. In either case, Decherney convincingly demonstrates the ways Hollywood made sure it would become a metonym of American culture (but, again, he leaves aside questioning whether Hollywood was internally divided on this issue and only contingently controlled by the studio heads). And considering this hegemonic position is occupied despite the content of many individual films (and indeed genres), despite the ideological goals of many of its foremost practitioners and despite the intentions of many of the key players in its institutional history (none of which is given much weight here), Decherney’s methodological argument is indeed convincing:

“[u]nderstanding the institutional filters that guide the reception of film … is essential to any understanding of the politics of the film text or the many ways viewers understand them” (3). The question I would have liked answered, or at least broached, is whether this is sufficient.

What then are the institutional filters and are they essentially Althusserian in their implications for contemporary scholarship? First, it is necessary to consider Decherney’s concept of Hollywood. Hollywood here is understood as an industry led by top-down decision-making which is in turn focused on three things. First, managing revenue by protecting against unionisation, by rejecting the social stigma attached to film since the rowdy nickelodeon (which, as Decherney notes in a brief but very satisfying detour, was ambivalently associated with both unsupervised drinking and with nitrate fires), and hence finding ways to maintain and expand its audience. Second, with nationalism and patriotism narrowly understood, that is, with doing the right thing for the audience as American citizens (which Decherney touches on in his provocative and, again, very detailed discussion of propaganda and the interventions of Nelson Rockefeller and the Office of Inter-American Affairs). Third, and here Decherney’s historiographical interests are particularly explicit, with identifying Hollywood as a patriotic symbol in its own right, and hence marking its movies and all movies as ‘American’.

Thus, according to Decherney, the economics of early Hollywood meant that, virtually from the outset, its best and perhaps only direction was always towards hegemony, because without a stranglehold on its market, its employees and its interpreters, it might not have survived. The complicity of cultural institutions in encouraging the elision of American culture and Hollywood (done, as Decherney astutely notes, to extend their own markets) and their correlated refusal to make significant concessions for dissenting national film traditions, defines Decherney’s trajectory and earns the greatest approbation (although he retains an objective tone even when drawing these conclusions). Accordingly, the most pronounced and repeated narrative arc here is the tragic failure of a properly utopian conception of film proposed in the early 1910s by Vachel Lindsay. Decherney is also very astute in pursuing this point since it leads to the very insightful and disillusioning observation that the culture elite’s concessions to alternative film traditions were repeatedly implicated in restricted artistic freedom and access to audiences, essentially ensuring non-Hollywood cinema remained within the institution’s own control. Thus, rather than celebrating Buñuel’s place in MoMA’s history or condemning Anthology Film Archives’ relationship to the avant-garde, Decherney makes the convincing case that both were equally contingent on a model of film production that protected avant-gardism even as it posited it within the hegemonic Hollywood model.

Crucially for Decherney’s argument, the process of moving toward complete correlation between American film and Hollywood changed gears in the mid-60s when the New Hollywood revenues started pouring in and nationalism as such suddenly appeared both less marketable and bad business internationally. This moment marks the logical conclusion of Decherney’s history and, appropriately, it is only briefly mentioned here (in the introduction and conclusion). Thus his story becomes a tragedy as a function of its historical scope and by being restricted to an institutional focus: top-down decision-making leading beyond mere national hegemony toward one of global or transnational proportions is indeed both pessimistic and largely convincing, so long as the perspective itself remains top-down. Indeed, few would argue that there is presently at least the possibility that film as such will shortly become fundamentally identified with the Hollywood model (though this is perhaps less alarming for those outside the United States). And if we follow the trajectory of its incubation as a national hegemony, any utopianism or wishful thinking on the part of scholars that safeguards to protect non-Hollywood film will be found in the institutions of the culture elite is itself irresponsible: cultural institutions have since the 1910s and 1920s known the benefit of accepting Hollywood on its own terms.

But the aporias here are fairly obvious. First, since the content of individual movies and the semi-autonomous nature of spectatorship are not being discussed at all, the identification of the movies as American is shadowy indeed: this is particularly egregious since any bottom-up transformations and fashions are implicitly and too-rigidly interpreted as already determined by their propagation as part of a studio system, which is itself interpreted ahead of the fact by cultural institutions. The circularity here is alarming but would benefit from even cursory international comparisons. Second, and perhaps more significant, the tragic victory of young Hollywood’s hubris (the need to achieve hegemony) and the limitations of Decherney’s text end in the same resigned acceptance of hegemony and the nostalgic placement of non-Hollywood movies in the no-place of utopia. In this sense, I feel Decherney falls into Althusser’s trap of viewing ideology as inescapable. This then is the substance of my critique of Decherney’s argument, which I feel shares with Althusser’s work an insistence on ideology’s ubiquity and does not focus on counter-hegemonies, which perhaps unnecessarily weakens an extremely convincing argument. Whatever the significance of his conclusions, however, Decherney is neither rigid nor deterministic in his writing. His history is so startlingly sober and intricate that the tragedy he ascribes to the Americanisation of Hollywood and the Hollywoodisation of American cinema is hard to refute. I will consider briefly two characteristic examples that suggest Decherney’s real virtues as a historian and which might also advance the paradox I have been suggesting as an inevitable limitation of his methodology and focus.

Decherney consistently connects the two poles of his research through key individuals and the organizations they create, lead or influence (there are long sections on Lindsay and the universal film museum, Iris Barry and MoMA, Nelson Rockefeller and the CIAA, Jerome Hill and his patronage system, and Stan Brakhage and Anthology). This strategy of approaching the organization through the individual is cleverly established in the first chapter’s discussion of Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) and his proposal for a universal film museum. Lindsay becomes a sort of showcase for Decherney’s methodology and the range of his interests: sympathetic and insightful, his representation of Lindsay rescues this extremely idiosyncratic thinker from his own romantic idealism and penchant for neologisms and grand statements. Decherney wisely avoids caricaturing Lindsay and instead finds something remarkably novel in the latter’s major work, the two editions of The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, 1922), specifically that “Lindsay saw an opportunity to take hold of cinema as a technology of national identity” (34). Thus it is in Lindsay’s elucidation not merely of the practical but rather the meeting of practical with historical/utopian and ideological aspects of film collection and presentation that Decherney finds his model and the first articulation of this key set of concerns. So, although the two versions of Lindsay’s book do not initiate the discussion of film collection (D.W. Griffith is credited with a similar set of interests, as are others), they do shift the discussion from the purely practical to a fusion of practical with ideological-aesthetic concerns that is clearly Decherney’s main interest in this work and one of several threads connecting Lindsay to such ideologically disparate figures as Harry Alan Potamkin, Iris Barry and Jerome Hill. For Vachel Lindsay, film collection means bracketing film as a unique art form capable of communicating the values of a cultural elite directly to a mass public in a previously unimaginable way – and in this sense he anticipated much of the theorising around media and popular culture elsewhere initiated by Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, something Decherney indicates obliquely through several cogent but underexplored chapter epigraphs.

Although Decherney is committed to exploring how Lindsay’s relationship to film collection became the model for a variety of cross-pollinations between Hollywood and the culture elite, he quite emphatically identifies the inherent problems in replacing the market place with a subjective funding process built around the concept of collection. The idea for an institution that acts as a universal film museum was a conceptual device Lindsay developed with the aim of transforming the nascent film industry from consumer driven to expert-guided: Decherney notes, “[a]lmost a copy of Hollywood’s industrial structure, Lindsay’s expert-run cinema would have been held to an equally institutionally sanctioned criteria” (35). More emphatically, “films could be made and used as instruments of public education in which academic knowledge, translated to visual form, would serve a useful social function” (35), a function controlled by the guiding values developed within the community of experts. In fact, this is an unexplored paradox that runs throughout the various discussions: can the judge of the expert be another expert? Cornelius Castoriadis would state otherwise: the judge must in the final regard be the user, the consumer. Neither Lindsay nor Decherney tackle the question of ultimate authority in matters of cultural activity, and hence neither discovers an exit from the tyranny of cultural bureaucracy.

Throughout this work, Decherney’s methodology privileges historical over textual analysis, and he makes a point of addressing his subjects on their own terms. The result is extensive referencing of personal letters and close attention to source documents, which at times is quite remarkable and thoroughly revelatory (Decherney’s reading of Stan Brakhage’s letters are particularly insightful, as I mention below; his reading of Harry Alan Potamkin’s “taxonomy for a Marxist film library” (92) is outstanding). On the other hand, Decherney does not allow himself the time to really probe the intellectual traditions to which many of these figures belonged or consider whether their thought transcended their institutional imperatives (I suspect Decherney considers most of these figures as profoundly circumscribed by their institutional affiliation). Lindsay’s understanding of the expert might well be absurdly utopian and universalist (31), but yet it offers a chance to reflect on the nature of film scholarship and elitism that is left unexplored throughout the work. In defence of Lindsay, his idea that educated spectators should ideally speak to another throughout a film, discussing freely its intellectual and artistic merits, is notably restricted by the courtesy that it should never be so loud as to annoy the young women who might simply be enjoying the film. In its way, this could be taken as a strong statement against elitism and the hegemony of elitist interpretation that might be used to counter the ways his thought was appropriated by or reflected in more conventional institutions, those which favoured exclusionary and proprietary conceptions of the expert. The unreflective spectator is granted quite a degree of dignity and authority in Lindsay’s articulation that resituates this elitism as something quite democratic (of course this remained profoundly underdeveloped).

The troubled fusion of practical (financial) concerns with ideological-aesthetic mandates becomes Decherney’s subject on a broad scale. When he arrives at his discussion of Jerome Hill and the marginalisation of the avant-garde or art film (in the sixth and final chapter), the tragic arc of Decherney’s argument becomes apparent. In a characteristically telling snapshot, Decherney describes the correspondence between the patron Hill and the artist Stan Brakhage, and draws from this a compelling thesis. Hill’s patronage comes between the men’s friendship and their mutual respect as artists, and Decherney goes so far as to summarize their relationship as an obsessive fear on Brakhage’s part that money would come between them and Hill’s fear that Brakhage might one day start taking advantage of his wealth. To this end, Decherney unearths a remarkable series of letters from Brakhage detailing the final breakdown of both relationships (patronage and friendship) as the fall-out of an awkward encounter: Brakhage, accompanied by Hill, realises he does not have the money to pay for some petrol he has just put in his car. Brakhage asks Hill to pay: Hill’s subsequent series of reactions (shock that Brakhage is taking advantage, horror at thinking such a thought, and embarrassment that he might also not have cash at hand) are described with quite astounding insight by Brakhage. Decherney’s own insights here are equally revealing: he calls it a “confessional… worthy of Augustine or Rousseau” (193). Indeed, Brakhage ends the relationship in typically Augustianian soul-searching: according to Decherney “Brakhage feared that patronage ultimately destroyed the possibility for the full-time, professional avant-garde artist” (197). Decherney takes this as the definitive symbol of a historical failure to develop a model of film collection/patronage, production and dissemination that exists outside Hollywood and maintain its integrity, and indeed for Decherney, this moment reflects the passing of the foundation film and “the triumph of the institutions and the defeat of the struggle to create a New American Cinema outside Hollywood” (203).

Running to 269 pages, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American covers enormous amounts of material that could easily have been expanded into a much longer work. It is bursting with miniaturist details and original and striking insights. Decherney links his six chronologically organised chapters with a number of threads, many of which would make a fascinating study on their own. His history of the changing concepts of the museum and library, for example, is extraordinarily rich and well researched and spans the entire period in question, but equally detailed are his discussions of MoMA, the utopian nature of film collection, and the paradoxes of film patronage. On a more practical level, this is also a well designed and effectively organised work with concise chapter and subsection titles and a very detailed index. Although Decherney’s endnotes are outstanding, he does not include a bibliography, which would have been particularly useful to readers interested in his extensive archival research. In short, Decherney’s book is a work of provocative, imaginative and I suspect enduring scholarship. All historiography is informed and circumscribed by narrative conventions and I do not quibble with Decherney’s tragic, pessimistic conception of Hollywood hegemony for either political or aesthetic reasons. Rather, given Decherney effectively illuminates one of the twentieth century’s most culturally resonate processes, I feel his work must be engaged with fully and all opportunities to look beyond hegemony taken. This is a very significant work that demands attentive and critical engagement.

Tom Crosbie
La Trobe University, Australia.

Created on: Saturday, 2 June 2007