David A. Gerstner,
Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 8 223377 54 (hb) £58.00
ISBN: 0 8 223376 30 (pb) £14.99
332pp
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)

Most studies of masculinity and cinema tend to concentrate on the textual representation of male characters in the films themselves with a concomitant attenuated sense of their social, historical and cultural contexts. By contrast, David Gerstner’s ambitious, subtle and erudite study, which deals with relatively few films, has a striking breadth of contextual material, the product of formidable research that brings together a range of diverse and scattered sources. Gerstner’s study encompasses movements in painting, theatre, literature, the plastic arts, photography, dance and aesthetic ideas as well as film, in order to explore the ways in which a rather precarious and specifically American concept of art and the role of the artist was created, one that had at its centre a white, male, Anglo-Saxon masculine norm, but which was challenged and modified by rival definitions, notably African American masculinities and queer subjectivities. Manly Arts is an ambitious attempt to understand the significance of cinema to ideologies of American masculinity and demonstrate the ways in which this new art established itself as the pre-eminent cultural form.

Gerstner begins his study with a typical wide-ranging historical reach, in 1849 with the cultural contest between the manly acting of Edwin Forrest – the ‘American Adam’ who had an emphatic physicality in all his roles, expressive of an egalitarian, working-class and virile masculinity – and the effete, over-refined theatricality of his arch opponent and rival, the Englishman William Macready, embodying Old World class-bound snobberies. In this struggle, Gerstner detects the inception of a specifically American democratic art, incarnated in a particular kind of male body that was tough, strong and unambiguously ‘manly’. It was also a struggle over the definition of the artist, a tricky problem for an evolving American culture that was suspicious of art as a ‘feminine’ activity, one that was steeped in disabling notions of the superiority of European culture based on the privileges of birth. In a dense but cogent analysis, Gerstner demonstrates how this democratic manliness had to incorporate the figure of the Noble Savage, the physical perfection and manly grace of the American Indian that Forrest admired, who embodies a pure ideal of manhood, untainted by the corruptions of civilisation. It was a complex construction, one that had to reinvent the figure of the artist as a paradoxical figure at once commonsensical and ordinary in whom realism and idealism could be united.

It was the stress on realism that made cinema potentially so significant, the art of the ‘machine age’ that was free from the burden of European tradition and provenance. In discussing the importance of film to American culture, Gerstner moves away from the familiar territory of D. W. Griffith to a careful consideration of The Battle Cry of Peace (1915), directed by J. Stuart Blackton for the American Vitagraph company. The Battle Cry of Peace – only 400 feet of this relatively little known film remain – depicts the destruction of New York after a fictional enemy invasion. This intensely patriotic film was championed by Theodore Roosevelt, who contributed to its pre-production, because it contained an urgent political message warning Americans about their ‘unpreparedness’, and also an aesthetic one, espousing Roosevelt’s notion of art as an industrious and virile activity whose vivid realism could communicate directly to a broad American public.

In moving to the work of Oscar Micheaux , the ‘black father’ of American cinema, Gerstner shows how Micheaux drew upon African American culture and experience in order to challenge the WASP norm. However, this was not a simple opposition. Micheaux’s work was highly influenced by Roosevelt’s contention that art should provide moral ‘uplift’, and also by a broad range of intellectual and aesthetic ideas. Through his analysis of, in particular Within our Gates (USA 1920), Gerstner shows the complexities of Micheaux’s films, which draw upon traditions of the trickster, minstrelsy and ‘passing’, to create an uneven, mobile and ironic relationship to black experience and to the discourse of realism, a multilayered representation of black masculinity that represented a further stage in the cultural and political evolution of the ‘hetero-masculinist’ American artist.

Gerstner traces this evolution in avant-garde circles, focusing on Manhatta (USA 1921), the work of painter-photographers Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, considered to be the first American avant-garde film, one depicting the dialectic of man and machine. Here too, the concern is with the development of a specifically American avant-garde aesthetic that continued the debate about the role and function of the artist. In Manhatta the artist is embodied as the camera-machine that united the aesthetic and the scientific, trying to render the ‘divinity’ of New York City meaningful and inspiring. Manhatta’s depiction of the artist-machine reconfirmed the masculinist bias of American art and, in his concluding chapter, Gerstner examines the early work of Vincente Minnelli, whose white homosexual modernism challenged this construction. Minnelli’s aesthetic was forged in the ‘diverse and frenetic’ milieux of queer American art as it developed in the theatrical world of 1930s New York. His feminised Otherness was initially realised through the dressing and décor of his theatrical productions, but broadened into a complex aesthetic of simultaneity as exemplified in his first Hollywood feature film, Cabin in the Sky (USA 1943) with its “modernist fusion of queer and African American international folklorism” (203).

Manly Arts is a demanding read, but its difficulties, and its rewards, stem from the breadth and depth of its cultural framework, the ways in which Gerstner situates his chosen artists and specific films within a complex evolution of ideas, politics and aesthetics. In doing so, he moves the history of early American cinema away from its conventional focus on the formation of Hollywood as an institutionalised mode of production with a particular system of narrative. Manly Arts is a distinctive and important contribution to the cultural history of the arts in America and to gender studies.

Andrew Spicer,
University of the West of England, UK.

Created on: Saturday, 9 June 2007