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"The Hollywood Quarterly was so far ahead of its time it seems eclectic even today. Contributors to the journal routinely ranged from those who actually made movies (producer Samuel Goldwyn, animator Chuck Jones, and legendary costume designer Edith Head) to those in academia who were at the time only beginning to comprehend the significance of cinema to 20th-century culture (theorist Theodor Adorno and a who's who of early film studies: Siegfried Kracauer, Lewis Jacobs, and Georges Sadoul). This anthology offers invaluable insight into the early history of film scholarship, education, and perhaps most importantly, industry relations at a most crucial time in motion picture history."—Jon Lewis, author of Hollywood v Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry
"The Hollywood Quarterly has a legendary status among film and media historians. It was an important journal in postwar America for its trenchant analysis of forms of communication and new media (radio, television, as well as cinema). An illustrious array of writers contributed and gave it a visibility and importance beyond typical scholarly journals. The anthology includes major figures in the history of film study and also well-known practitioners of the art of cinema."—Dana Polan, author of Pulp Fiction (BFI Modern Classics)
"The Hollywood Quarterly occupies a crucially important place in the history of American film criticism. It stands at the juncture between, on the one hand, an artisanal and (in the best sense) amateur scholarship, and on the other hand, a fully emergent academicism. More than any other journal in this country, it initiates the formal, scholarly study of the cinema as both an industrial institution and an art form."—James Naremore, author of More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Hollywood Quarterly, 1945–1957
Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin
Editorial Statement (1945)
1. The Avant-Garde
2. Animation
3. Documentary
4. Radio
5. Practice
6. Television
7. The Hollywood Picture
8. Scenes from Abroad
9. Notes and Communications
Index of Names
Index of Films
About the author
Eric Smoodin is Film, Media, and Philosophy Acquisitions Editor at the University of California Press. He is author of Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era (1993) and editor of Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom (1994). Ann Martin is Editor of Film Quarterly and Coeditor, with Brian Henderson, of Film Quarterly: Forty Years--A Selection (California, 1998).
Summary
This selection of essays taken from "Hollywood Quarterly" reflect the astonishing eclecticism of the journal, with sections on animation, the avant-garde, and documentary to go along with a representative sampling of articles about feature-length narrative films.
