Peter Decherney,
Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 231 13377 4
US$19.00 (pb)
272pp
(Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press)
The predominant tone of discussion about the US film industry – not only that industry, but also the totality of the US economy – is that it is based on the theory and practice of free market and free trade, and that government interference in the manufacture, buying and selling of products is, and always has been, anathema. (Of course, if such a theory and practice is harmful to a favoured sector of the US workforce, such as farmers, then protection transmogrifies into acceptability.) It follows that the US position is now that all other countries will become great and compete on an equal footing only if they embrace a similar philosophy. Nations that then embrace the ideology sign free trade agreements with the US through which their industries, arguably, end up at a disadvantage. None of this is rocket science; since the early years of the film industry in Australia, it was clear to those accountants concerned with the profits of domestic theatre chains that films from the US, which had already made a profit in the US domestic market, were cheaper than Australian product. For the US filmmakers, overseas sales were money for jam; sale prices could be as low as necessary to ensure a lower price than locally made films to the disadvantage of that local industry.
Peter Decherny argues for a different take on this process. Rather than a Hollywood that has always competed without government or other institutional support, he argues, through a proliferation of evidence and argument, that Hollywood became dominant domestically – and later, internationally – through the support of government and government-funded institutions and through a deliberate process of universalising cinema as entertainment. Only after it achieved dominance domestically was such support no longer required and Hollywood, through its various organisations and characters, became a proselytising voice for international free trade in films, positioning itself to become the major and dominant player in that market. The story of this development and change has most often focused on the rise of the studios, the practices they put in place during the first decades of the 20th century and the vertical integration that blockaded the industry against the incursions of foreign and independent competition by locking foreign films out of the distribution and exhibition sectors. It was only in the late 1940s – by which time the Hollywood industry dominated the world – that the Paramount decree forced the dissolution of the vertical integration that had enabled Hollywood corporations to establish and maintain hegemony.[1] Before becoming an industry that was concomitantly the unrivalled art form of the working and middle classes, certain changes had to occur, most of which were the products of human design.
Possibly the initial step in this process was the publication in 1915 of the first book of film criticism and analysis, Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915). The book was significant because it heralded the upgrading, or recognition, of film as an art form. In addition, film was imagined as a “singular national institution on an unprecedented scale” (33), and cinemas would become forums for negotiating universal consensus whilst museums and public libraries, through archiving and display, would participate at the forefront of developing a new national identity for the US. Further, cinemas were to inherit the raison d’être of the 19th century museums and libraries; that is, they would become sites for reclaiming Enlightenment ideals as well as the major players in the domestic civilising mission, a similar mission to that observed by Walter Benjamin in German museums.[2]
Such a project, argues Decherney, required a homogenous audience comprising the ideal bourgeois citizen, whose qualities included an active searching for spiritual and civic enlightenment. Decherney traces the change in audiences from those who populated the nickelodeons in the early years of the 20th century through to the later images of respectable audiences attending respectable places of entertainment that reflected middle-class values. Initially, nickelodeons were viewed as unsafe places and newspapers were quick to point out the risk of fire (both from the inflammable nature of the film itself and the unsafe cinema), the likely crushing of women, theft, and the damage caused to the eyes through focussing on flickering images. The general view was that cinema audiences were working class and that attending the cinema was not a respectable nor safe pastime. For cinema to become popular for a wider audience, this perception needed to change. Decherney traces the development of this audience before tying this with the institutional support that necessarily followed because of the positive reception of Lindsay’s vision. At the same time, the universalising film language underpinned the consolidation of the classical Hollywood style in the middle of the second decade of the 1900s and established film as the pervasive middle-class art form.
The change in perception came about through a combination of factors. Combined with these projects, and co-dependent with them, was Columbia University’s creation of the first university level standards of filmmaking and film viewing. This program was designed initially for Jewish students within the university’s extension school, who were excluded from mainstream programs because of selective admission policies. The vocational orientation of the university program, based on the film script as the pivot in a professionalised division of labour, mirrored the specialised division of labour in the fast-coalescing studio system. Hollywood producers Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor financially supported Columbia’s program, as well as producing the films based on screenplays (or photoplays) written in the schools.
In the following decade, these Hollywood producers reworked this model of film education for a film program at Harvard and, in the 1930s, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) worked with Columbia to design a model of film education that was used both in film courses in other universities across the US and abroad.
The acceptance of film by the middle and working class as a legitimate and attractive pastime was significant in itself. Yet film played another role throughout the century. It became one of the major tools in the “definition and dissemination” of US culture throughout the world as part of a wider strategy to defend democracy against the threats of communism and fascism (124). (Some might argue that the deployment of such tools would have been preferable to those actually deployed in recent attempts by the US to defend democracy.) Beginning with World War II, Hollywood corporations cooperated with the US military – and vice versa – to produce films designed to win the battle for hearts and minds. This cooperation has been well documented. Yet Decherney argues for a third player, MoMA, whose close links with the Central Intelligence Agency continued after World War II and which were central to the propaganda war waged during the cultural cold war. Decherney maps the links between MoMA, Nelson Rockefeller and the Rockefeller Foundation, offices of the US government, the CIA, and others, and factors in staff movements across these organisations as well. Partly, MoMA’s project was to establish a national film library that would be a cornerstone of US culture, to be displayed to the world. These projects were funded by government grants until well into the cold war, and Decherney’s original research traces the cooperation of MoMA with the CIA during these years; for example, “Most of MoMA’s board of directors in the 1950s…had worked for intelligence organizations during and after the war” (165).
Since then, the worm has turned. Once Hollywood gained ascendancy as the dominant institution in the global cinema industry, changes in the nature of the military-film industry binary have occurred. For example, when George W. Bush attempted to win the support of Hollywood studios in the war on terror after 11 September, Hollywood refused to make government propaganda, claiming that its task was “to make $60 million movies and make a profit”.[3] No longer does Hollywood require assistance from government, universities or cultural institutions. It has dedicated audiences throughout the USA and internationally. Decherney shows that this dominance was not accidental and was not a consequence of laissez-faire market policies.
Errol Vieth,
Central Queensland University, Australia.
Endnotes
[1] See, for example, Gomery, Douglas 1986 The Hollywood Studio System. London: Macmillan.
[2] Benjamin, Walter, quoted in Douglas Crisp, On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1995, 203–204.
[3] Freeman, Rob, (CEO Paramount), 208.