American Film History: Origins To 1960

This authoritative collection of introductory and specialized readings takes its readers through the rich and creative history of this period in American cinema. Spanning a fascinating range of subjects from the early 1900s Nickelodeon to the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, it combines broader historical context with careful readings of individual films.

• Charts the rise of film in early twentieth-century America from its origins to 1960, exploring mainstream trends and developments alongside topics often relegated to the margins of standard film histories
• Covers diverse issues ranging from silent film and iconic figures such as Charlie Chaplin, the coming of sound, to the rise of film genres, studio moguls, and, later, the Cold War blacklist
• Designed with both students and scholars in mind: each section opens with an historical overview, and provides close, careful readings of individual films clustered around specific topics
• Accessibly structured by historical period, offering valuable cultural, social, and political context
• Contains careful, close analysis of key films from the era including early D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, and Buster Keaton films, films of Erich von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille,Don Juan and The Jazz Singer, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,films of the early avant-garde, Scarface, Red Dust, Glorifying the American Girl, Meet Me in St. Louis, Citizen Kane, Bambi,Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Rebel Without a Cause, Force of Evil,selected American underground films, among many others.
• Additional online resources such as sample syllabi, which include suggested readings and filmographies for specialized topics, will be available on publication atwww.wiley.com/go/lucia
• May be used alongside The History of American Film: Selected Readings, 1960 to the Present, to provide an authoritative study of American cinema through the new millennium

Cynthia Lucia is Professor of English and Director of Film and Media Studies at Rider University. She is author ofFraming Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film (2005) and writes for Cineaste film magazine, where she has served on the editorial board for more than two decades. Her most recent research includes essays that appear inA Companion to Woody Allen (Wiley, 2013), Modern British Drama on Screen (2014), andLaw, Culture and Visual Studies (2014).

Roy Grundmann is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Boston University. He is the author ofAndy Warhol’s ‘Blow Job’ (2003) and the editor of A Companion to Michael Haneke (Wiley 2010). He is Contributing Editor ofCineaste and has published essays in a range of prestigious anthologies and journals, includingGLQ, Cineaste, Continuum, The Velvet Light Trap, and Millennium Film Journal. He has curated retrospectives on Michael Haneke, Andy Warhol, and Matthias Muller.

Art Simon is Professor of Film Studies at Montclair State University. He is the author ofDangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film (2^nd edition, 2013). He has curated two film exhibitions for the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City and his work has been published in the edited collection“Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2007) and in the journalAmerican Jewish History.

Together they are the editors of the four volume reference work The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film (2012),The History of American Film: Selected Readings, Origins to 1960 and The History of American Film: Selected Readings, 1960 to the present (both 2015), all published by Wiley-Blackwell.