History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item The Surface of Things: Reading a Cinema of Decline(2018) Leininger, Derek Michael; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A declensionist imagination dominated intellectual and cultural discourse in American society through the late twentieth century. The 1970s and 1980s were punctuated by real declines of multiple sorts, but the alarmed debates about juvenile delinquency, rural blight, urban decay, and violent crime often obscured coterminous trends and the more meaningful critiques of the historical forces prompting the changes felt as decline. By looking at American films from the 1970s and 1980s focused on thematic decline of varied sorts, this project explores the postmodern social experience of the late-twentieth century and the cultural roots of overcriminalization in the United States. Reading between the filmic lines (or what film theorist Siegfried Kracauer called the surface expressions of cinema) provides clues into unpacking the often contradictory political, social, and cultural configurations taking shape at the end of the twentieth century.Item MODERNIZATION AND VISUAL ECONOMY: FILM, PHOTOJOURNALISM, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA, 1955-1980(2010) Halperin, Paula; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationship among visual culture, nationalism, and modernization in Argentina and Brazil in a period of extreme political instability, marked by an alternation of weak civilian governments and dictatorships. I argue that motion pictures and photojournalism were constitutive elements of a modern public sphere that did not conform to the classic formulation advanced by Jürgen Habermas. Rather than treating the public sphere as progressively degraded by the mass media and cultural industries, I trace how, in postwar Argentina and Brazil, the increased production and circulation of mass media images contributed to active public debate and civic participation. With the progressive internationalization of entertainment markets that began in the 1950s in the modern cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires there was a dramatic growth in the number of film spectators and production, movie theaters and critics, popular magazines and academic journals that focused on film. Through close analysis of images distributed widely in international media circuits I reconstruct and analyze Brazilian and Argentine postwar visual economies from a transnational perspective to understand the constitution of the public sphere and how modernization, Latin American identity, nationhood, and socio-cultural change and conflict were represented and debated in those media. Cinema and the visual after World War II became a worldwide locus of production and circulation of discourses about history, national identity, and social mores, and a space of contention and discussion of modernization. Developments such as the Bandung Conference in 1955, the decolonization of Africa, the Cuban Revolution, together with the uneven impact of modernization, created a "Third Worldism" and "Latin Americanism" that transformed public debate and the cultural field. By researching "peripheral" nations, I add to our understanding of the process of the transnationalization of the cultural field and the emergence of a global mass culture in the 1960s and 1970s.Item "An Unpleasant Wartime Function": Race, Film Censorship, and the Office of War Information, 1942-1945(2007-04-30) Wagner, Jessica Lauren; Gilbert, James B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper will try to untangle how the U.S. Office of War Information's Bureau of Motion Pictures tried to enact change in the world, using Hollywood films, during World War II. It will also show how inconsistencies within the agency and lack of support from the President, Congress, and Hollywood often sabotaged the Bureau's project. I argue that a structural component and a thematic component helped cripple the OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures. First, the extremely decentralized, bureaucratic and conflict-laden nature of the government information network, and the limited enforcement power of the OWI and in particular the Bureau of Motion Pictures, limited its success. Second, the BMP's passionately liberal and racially progressive interpretation of U.S. war aims helped contribute to its downfall. The BMP operated during a watershed moment in race relations, in which hierarchies of racial and ethnic groups were shifting dramatically.