'Film Europe' and 'Film America'

Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920-1939

Edited by Prof. Andrew Higson, Prof. Richard Maltby

Publication date:

01 July 1999

Publisher

University of Exeter Press

Dimensions:

233x154mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780859895453

A volume of specially-commissioned essays dealing with the attempts to create a pan-European film production movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reactions of the American film industry to these plans to rival its hegemony. The book has an impressive array of top scholars from both America and Europe, including Thomas Elsaesser, Kristin Thompson and Ginette Vincendeau, as well as essays by some younger scholars who have recently completed new archival research. It also includes a number of primary documents selected by the contributors to illuminate their arguments and provide a stimulus to further research.

This book is a volume in the series Exeter Studies in Film History, and represents a major contribution to cinema scholarship as well as reflecting a strong interest in an area of study currently being developed in university departments and at the British Film Institute.

Winner Prix Jean Mitry 2000

Introduction

1. "Temporary American citizens" - cultural anxieties and industrial strategies in the Americanization of European cinema, Richard Maltby and Ruth Vasey

2. The rise and fall of film Europe, Kristin Thompson

3. The cinema and the League of Nations, Richard Maltby

4. Film Europe - cultural policy and industrial practice, Andrew Higson

5. Options for American foreign distribution - United Artists in Europe, 1919-1930, Mike Walsh

6. Germany and film Europe, Thomas J. Saunders

7. Hollywood's "foreign war" - the effect of national commercial policy on the emergence of the American film hegemony in France 1920-1929, Jean Ulff-Moller

8. Hollywood Babel -the coming of sound and the multiple language version, Ginette Vincendeau

9. Hollywood's hegemonic strategies - overcoming French nationalism with the advent of sound, Martine Danan

10. Made in Germany - multi-lingual versions and the early German sound cinema, Joseph Garncarz

11. Polyglot films for an international market - E.A. Dupont, the British film industry and the idea of a European cinema, 1926-1930, Andrew Higson

12. Negotiating exoticism -Hollywood, film Europe and the cultural reception of Anna May Wong, Tim Bergfelder

"Higson and Maltby's work provides a much needed contribution to the limited scholarly work on film distribution history . . . 'Film Europe' and 'Film America' presents a major addition to film scholarship and, hopefully, will instigate further research in this area of cinema studies." (Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, 2001)

"An interesting and useful anthology which focuses on various discourses surrounding the possibility of coordinated European efforts to offset the dominance of the American film industry in the 1920s … relevant not only for film historians, but also for those whose work centres on considerations of globalisation and cultural exchange more broadly." (Screening the Past, May 2000)

"Usefully situates national developments, movements and cinematic expressions of local cultures in a broader international context, analysing the process of reciprocity, collaboration, exchange and resistance that animated the era on both sides of the Atlantic." (English Historical Review)