Routledge Companion to American Film History

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is the Andrew V. Tackes Professor in Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, USA; a Guggenheim Fellow; and former President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author most recently of Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (2024). Paula J. Massood is Professor of Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (2003) and Making a Promised Land: Harlem in 20th-Century Photography and Film (2013), editor of The Spike Lee Reader (2007), and co-editor of Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (2021).

“Wow. Two of our finest film scholars, Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood, have produced a volume that makes us reconsider most of what we thought we knew about American cinema. The introduction alone is worth the price of admission, but the cast of multi-disciplinary historians provides the nuance, depth, and surprise that will keep you coming back for more.” - Eric Smoodin, Professor of American Studies, University of California, Davis, USA and co-editor, The American Film History Reader"Get ready to embark on a historical odyssey where toys, music videos, and campy directors comprise the methods; where color technologies, make-up design, and vocal codes reveal cultural frictions; where new media resurrects the old, bad challenges good, and perspectives attuned to the complexities of brown, Black, indigenous, queer, youthful, and female-identified lives come together in a verifiable page turner. I haven’t been this excited in a very long while!" - Jennifer M. Bean, Editor-in-Chief, Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal

• Introduction: American Film History as a Multiplicity Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood Part I: Alternate Archives 1. Cinema’s Playful Objects: On Toys and the Movies Meredith Bak 2. Finding Its Voice? Sound and the (Re)-writing of Film History Dimitrios Latsis 3. Doing Disney History Despite Disney Peter C. Kunze 4. Doing Bad Film History: Lessons on Archive and Method from John Waters Hollis Griffin Part II: Hidden Labor 5. Heroes, Villains, or Collaborators: The Place of Hollywood Unions in American Film Industry History Kate Fortmueller 6. ‘Students Will Be Participants’: Designing Working-Class Film Education at The Harry Alan Potamkin Film School McKayla Sluga 7. The Reticent Close-Up: Editing and Understatement in the Films of Barbara McLean Patrick Keating Part III: Historicizing Style 8. Teaching Hollywood to Speak: Voice Culture and the Transition to Sound Kristen Hatch 9. Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Method Acting: Between Art and Commerce Amanda Konkle 10. New Pathways Toward a New Hollywood: Love with the Proper Stranger Cynthia Lucia Part IV: Racialized Technologies 11. Written Refusals: Oscar Micheaux’s Confrontations with the New York State Motion Picture Commission Alyssa Lopez 12. Hollywood Color: Race, Aesthetics, Technology Kirsty Sinclair Dootson and Xin Peng 13. ‘Basic Dark Face’: Writing the History of Makeup in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood Desirée J. Garcia Part V: Histories of Fans and Spectators 14. Movie Stars Make News: Fan Magazines, Print Culture, and American Film History of the Studio Era Mary R. Desjardins 15. ‘I Want Big Things:’ Beauty Merchandising and Noir’s ‘Femme Fans’ Shelley Stamp 16. Any Given Sunday at La Cadena Metropolitana: Spanish-Language Theaters in Los Angeles and the Influence of Film Exhibitors, 1963-2001 Ross Melnick Part VI: Cinema’s Material Cultures 17. Early Motion Pictures’ Cultures of Print Sarah Gleeson-White 18. Histories of Exhibition and Spectatorship: Loss and Imagination Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece 19. The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of: Re-Materializing Spectatorship Studies Caetlin Benson-Allott Part VII: Transnational Production 20. Speculating a Speculative History of Early Chinese American Film Culture Yiman Wang 21. Neither Invasion nor Americanization: A Short History of the French Film Industry in Fort Lee Clara Auclair 22. When Hollywood Came to Greece: 20th Century-Fox and the Challenges of Turning a Small Country into a Runaway Film Production Destination in the 1950s Yannis Tzioumakis 23. The Quintessential Seventies Picture Show: Voyage of the Damned (1976) as Heritage Film between Art Cinema and Disaster Flick Roy Grundmann Part VIII: Intermedial Histories 24. Parabola: Transhistorical Connections Between Experimental Film and Music Videos Amy Skjerseth 25. From Home Movie Makers to Content Creators: Forging a Genealogy of Self-Made Media Lauren Berliner 26. Webs of Stories: 21st Century Native American Film and Television Amy Corbin 27. ‘Drawn to Life’: Intermedial Promotion and the Monetization of Film History in Disney and Cirque du Soleil Kirsten Moana Thompson Part IX: Movies as/in History 28. ‘Once Upon a Time…’: Movies about Hollywood as Film History Steven Cohan 29. A Netflix Original: History, Hollywood and Commemoration in the Streaming Era Jonathan Stubbs 30. Acts of Recovery: Excavating Youth through the Detritus of Film History Pamela Robertson Wojcik Part X: Historical Afterlives of Cinema 31. In the Wake of Archival Rediscovery: The Afterlives of Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898) Allyson Nadia Field 32. Rediscovered Again: The Nonlinear Path of Alice Guy Blaché into US Film History Aurore Spiers 33. Casablanca: Rethinking Film History Through the Old Classics Barbara Klinger 34. ‘There’s No More to Say?’: The Lives and Afterlives of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason Paula J. Massood