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This book provides a detailed and engaging account of how Hollywood cinema has represented and 'remembered' the Sixties. From late 1970s hippie musicals such as Hair and The Rose through to recent civil rights portrayals The Help and Lee Daniels' The Butler , Oliver Gruner explores the ways in which films have engaged with broad debates on America's recent past. Drawing on extensive archival research, he traces production history and script development, showing how a group of politically engaged filmmakers sought to offer resonant contributions to public memory. Situating Hollywood within a wider series of debates taking place in the US public sphere, Screening the Sixties offers a rigorous and innovative study of cinema's engagement with this most contested of epochs.
List of contents
List of Illustrations.- Acknowledgments.- Introduction: Welcome to the Sixties.- Chapter 1: Mourning the Age of Aquarius.- Chapter 2: Bringing Them All Back Home.- Chapter 3: Go Away and Find Yourself.- Chapter 4: Something's Happening Here.- Chapter 5: Come Together.- Chapter 6: A Change Has Come.- Conclusion: More Funk in the Trunk.- Notes.- Bibliography
About the author
Oliver Gruner is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He has written on subjects including the historical film, the Sixties and cultural memory. His work has been published in the journals
Rethinking History and the
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television as well as various edited collections.
Summary
This book provides a detailed and engaging account of how Hollywood cinema has represented and ‘remembered’ the Sixties. From late 1970s hippie musicals such as Hair and The Rose through to recent civil rights portrayals The Help and Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Oliver Gruner explores the ways in which films have engaged with broad debates on America’s recent past. Drawing on extensive archival research, he traces production history and script development, showing how a group of politically engaged filmmakers sought to offer resonant contributions to public memory. Situating Hollywood within a wider series of debates taking place in the US public sphere, Screening the Sixties offers a rigorous and innovative study of cinema’s engagement with this most contested of epochs.
Additional text
“The book volume can definitely serve as a useful example for those who work around representation, public memory, and politics, whether on the Sixties in particular or not. … Screening the Sixties is an impressively elaborate exploration of ‘the Sixties as a commemorative palimpsest upon which divergent narratives have been written and rewritten throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s’ … .” (J. Van Belle, Communications, Vol. 43 (01), 2018)
Report
"The book volume can definitely serve as a useful example for those who work around representation, public memory, and politics, whether on the Sixties in particular or not. ... Screening the Sixties is an impressively elaborate exploration of 'the Sixties as a commemorative palimpsest upon which divergent narratives have been written and rewritten throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s' ... ." (J. Van Belle, Communications, Vol. 43 (01), 2018)
