Movies and Mass Culture

John Belton, Rutgers University

• Mass culture, the individual and the mass; apocalytic cinema - D.W. Griffith and the aesthetics of reform; the crowd, the collective and the chorus - Busby Berkeley and the New Deal; the regulation of desire - from mass consumption to mass morality; the Carole Lombard in Macy's window; the economy of desire - the commodity form in/of the cinema/ the production code; the dark side of mass culture - film noir; notes on film noir/woman's place - the absent family of film noir; mass production, the failure of the new, and Reaganite cinema; postmodernism and consumer society / preparing the cracks - fantasy and ideology in the Reagan era; against the grain; new US Black cinema/ the oppositional gaze - Black female spectators.