John Dos Passos and Cinema

After faculty positions at University of North Carolina affiliates and Georgetown University School of Foreign Service-Qatar, Lisa Nanney co-edited and co-authored the 2017 study of John Dos Passos’s visual works, The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos: A Collection and Study (Clemson University Press). Her current book, John Dos Passos and Cinema (2019), further explores the intersection of his narrative methods and the visual arts by investigating his writing directly for the cinema, his translation of modernist fictional techniques to the screen, and the ways these forays into film writing were shaped by his re-evaluation of the Left at a pivotal point in his career. Nanney is also the author of John Dos Passos Revisited (Macmillan Press, 1998), a critical biography.

'A rich and engrossing book... John Dos Passos and Cinema will be the authoritative work on this aspect of Dos Passos's career and aesthetics for some time. But it also provides fresh insights into the perennial topic of his political biography and his shift to the right, as well as providing superb detail on the specifics of the networks and aesthetics of transnational, intermedial experiment on the left that galvanized modernist culture in the 1920s and 1930s.'Mark Whalan, Modernism/modernity

• IntroductionPart I (1917-1928)    From the Screen to the Page: “Goin’ to themovies…” in the Great WarChapter1DosPassos and Soviet Filmmakers: Meyerhold, Vertov, Eisenstein, and theDevelopment of MontageChapter2DosPassos and U.S. Film: D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Heartsof the World (1918)Chapter3“Propagandafor peace”: Film and Narrative in One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and ThreeSoldiers (1921)Part II (1934-37)      From Paramount Studios to the SpanishFront: Writing Hollywood, Filming HistoryChapter 4“[T]heworld’s greatest center of…propaganda”: Hollywood and The Devil Is a WomanChapter 5DosPassos and Joris Ivens: “Dreamfactory” and Meta-filmChapter 6DosPassos, Ivens, and Hemingway: The Spanish Earth and the Death of JoseRoblesChapter 7“Gohome and try to tell the truth”: Revision and Reception of The Spanish Earth                                                                                                    Part III (1947-70)      U.S.A. From Page to Stage toScreens: Political and Structural RevisionsChapter 8FilmicNarrative Into Narrative Film: Dos Passos Drafting U.S.A. for the Screen(1947-56)Chapter 9Negotiationand Adaptation: U.S.A. Under Option, Adapted for Television, andProduced for the Stage (1959-60)Chapter 10EarlyAesthetics Through the Lens of Late Politics (1960-70)