Abstract
This chapter establishes the goals of the text—to review the long and profitable career of Cecil B. DeMille within the historical context of his times—and seeks to place the methodology of the study within the long history of Film and Cultural Studies.
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Notes
- 1.
The extended DeMille family uses both the upper- and lower-case “De” spelling. Cecil wrote “DeMille” for most professional correspondence and this is used as the conventional spelling. His brother, William , and niece, Agnes , adopted the lower-case spelling, which is used in reference to them. All other forms are reproduced as they appear in the original source material. See James V. D’Arc, ed., The Register of the Cecil B. DeMille Archives (Provo: Brigham Young University, 1991), 21.
- 2.
For a discussion of DeMille’s use of flashback as a disruptive narrative device, see David Blanke, “Experiments in Time: The Silent Films of Cecil B. DeMille,” 92–105, in Matthew Jones and Joan Omrod, eds. Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays of Film, Television, Literature and Video Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015). Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By…(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 180, 183. For “complacent laughter,” see Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968), 91.
- 3.
For rankings, see Sarris , The American Cinema, 91.
- 4.
Dudley Andrew, “The Core and the Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Summer 2009), 913. David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Third Edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 182.
- 5.
For “big-budget camp,” see Allen Barra, “The Incredible Shrinking Epic” American Film 14, No. 5 (March 1989): 42. For “spectatorial invitation,” see Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” Representations, No. 29 (Winter 1990): 24–25.
- 6.
The general modifier “modern” denotes comprehensive political, social, and cultural shifts that first appeared in the late-nineteenth century. More specifically, “modernization ” refers to the material processes that define the economic and technological adaptations brought about by urban industrialization. Economic modernization , beginning in the late-nineteenth century, transformed labor and capital to produce a new political equilibrium that privileged the emerging corporate order, obliged the state to enact minimal reforms to protect workers, and magnified America’s economic interests abroad. Establishing radically new networks of power, undermining traditional assumptions about work and leisure, and, as a result, fostering a widespread crisis in group identity, the material realities of modernization made a new society possible. The concept of “modernity ” touches on the social aspects of this transformation, highlighting sources that describe the personal, often sensory experiences of a world now increasingly segmented by space and time. Modernity’s focus on the individual liberties of all citizens—including women, people of color, and ethnic minorities—spurred activists to demand the enforcement of their Constitutional rights that, following the tumult of two global wars, dovetailed with the consensus ideology of a “Good War.” Finally, “modernism” emerged as a cultural aesthetic about the meaning of modernization . First identified as an artistic and literary trend, by the end of the nineteenth century sources of modernism revealed a wider “coming to terms” with the political and social changes encompassed within modernization and modernity . Modernism offered radically new cultural opportunities for self-expression and pleasure, particularly through the consumer marketplace, that linked these broader economic, social, and political changes to the tangible satisfaction of new products, experiences, and services. Joel Dinerstein summarizes four themes distinctive to American modernism, including a perceived tension between rural and urban culture, a similar tension between cultural nationalism, individualism and social consciousness, the rise of popular cultural expressions that specifically mediated modernity (including film), and “the dialogic relationship of technological ‘speed-up’ and American culture.” For his well-reasoned overview and inclusive reference list on early cultural modernization , see Joel Dinerstein, “Modernism,” in Karen Halttunen, ed. A Companion to American Cultural History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 198–213; and Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton University Press, 1999).
- 7.
Ben Singer, “Introduction: Modernism, Modernity, and the Senses,” Monatschefte, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), 176.
- 8.
For “real spectators,” see Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 7.
- 9.
Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), vii, 2.
- 10.
Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 257–259. Wendy L. Wall , Inventing the “American Way:” The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5, 6–9, 279. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 408.
- 11.
Sarris , The American Cinema, 91. Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 182.
- 12.
For a detailed listing of these holdings, see D’Arc, ed. Register of the Cecil B. DeMille Archives (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1991) or on online overview at http://files.lib.byu.edu/ead/XML/MSS1400.xml (last accessed 6/17/2017). For brevity, the collection is referred in the notes as simply “BYU,” with the appropriate box and folder listed to provide specificity.
- 13.
BYU, Box 315, Folder 4.
- 14.
Simon Louvish, Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2007), 323–324.
- 15.
Jesse L. Lasky, Don Weldon, I Blow My Own Horn (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1957), 170. Scott Eyman, Louvish , Sumiko Higashi, and especially Robert Birchard form the core of the recent secondary literature on DeMille. While approaching DeMille from wildly different perspectives and for equally diverse reasons, the following books informed my approach to the director: Birchard , Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); William C. de Mille, Hollywood Saga (New York: Dutton, 1939); Anne Edwards, The DeMilles: An American Family (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988); Eyman , Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); Donald Hayne, ed. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1959); Higashi , Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Charles Higham, Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), Phil A. Koury , Yes, Mr. DeMille (New York: Putnam, 1959); Jesse L. Lasky , Jr., Whatever Happened to Hollywood? (New York: Funk & Wagnals, 1973); Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn; Louvish , A Life in Art; May , Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); May , The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Henry S. Noerdlinger, Moses and Egypt: The Documentation to the Motion Picture The Ten Commandments (Los Angeles, University of Southern California Press, 1956); Katherine Orrison, Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic, The Ten Commandments (New York: Vestal Press, 1999); Orrison, Lionheart in Hollywood: The Autobiography of Henry Wilcoxon (New York: Scarecrow, 1991); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994); Adolph Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong: The Autobiography of Adolph Zukor (New York: Putnam, 1953).
- 16.
In an attempt to account for this, the remainder of this chapter will use quotation marks to identify key terms and concepts widely assumed to be linked to a specific scholarly methodology. Once quoted, all subsequent uses of the term will occur without such quote marks.
- 17.
In this same spirit, and to avoid unnecessary duplication of more nuanced texts on the subject, here the notes avoid citing multiple examples of the various methodological schools (better contextualized and ranked by surveys reviewing film theory) and limit citations to passages directly quoted in this text.
- 18.
The work of both Mitchell, Children and Movies (1929), and the Lynds , Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), reached a wide audience. Thirteen PFS were published from 1933 to 1935, also with varying public interest. Blumer quoted in Garth S. Jowett , Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller, Children at the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 82.
- 19.
Jowett , Jarvie, and Fuller note that “Mass communications research was then, and is to this day, more closely tied to the public agenda that to social science research in general.” Jowett , Jarvie, Fuller, Children at the Movies, 4.
- 20.
Jowett , Jarvie, Fuller, Children at the Movies, 118–120. Melvyn Stokes, “Female Audiences of the 1920s and early 1930s,” in Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds. Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 42–60. See also Staiger , Media Reception Studies, (New York: New York University Press, 2005); CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Christopher J. Olson, eds. Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies Into Film Spectators and Spectatorship (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
- 21.
Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 52.
- 22.
While not a recognized member of the Frankfurt school, Jose Ortega y Gasset and The Revolt of the Masses (1930) surely follows this same tradition.
- 23.
Lukac quoted in Stam, Film Theory, 64–72. See also Staiger , Media Reception Studies, 29–31; Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (New York: Verso, 2016). In more recent years, with the rise of quasi-Fascist populists throughout many liberal democracies, the pessimism of the Frankfurt School is earning a new hearing, particularly Adorno’s The Authority Personality (1950) and the “F-scale” he developed to measure fascist potential. See Samuel Freeman, “The Headquarters of Neo-Marxism,” The New York Review of Books Vol. LXIV, No. 5 (March 23, 2017), 65.
- 24.
For “stature and dignity,” see BYU, Box 452, Folder 9. For London Critics Circle, see BYU, Box 486, Folder 3. Francois Truffaut later denounced this “tradition of quality” as the “cinéma de papa” which merely filmed celebrated works of literature. See Stam, Film Theory, 83–84.
- 25.
Agee quoted in James Agee, Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments by James Agee. Volume One (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969), 96–97.
- 26.
André Bazin , What is Cinema? Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 12. In America, the writing of Jonas Mekas in The Village Voice (1959–1971) served the same purpose, which was, in 1972, then transferred to Movie Journal.
- 27.
For an analysis of the insular logic that produces “cultural consecration” in auteurs, see Michael Patrick Allen and Anne E. Lincoln, “Critical Discourse and the Cultural Consecration of American Films,” Social Forces, Vol. 82, No. 3 (March 2004): 871–893. For “small industry,” see David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 155.
- 28.
For “politicized with a vengeance,” see Carl Plantinga, “Theory and Aesthetics: Notes on a Schism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 448. For “subject position,” see Chuck Kleinhans, “Marxism and Film,” in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., Film Studies: Critical Approaches (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110.
- 29.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,” Screen, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18.
- 30.
For “frame of reference,” see Bordwell , “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in R. Barton Palmer, ed. The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 396n44. For “SLAB,” see Ibid., 385. See also Stam, Film Theory, 169, 189. For his seminal work on pleasure and affectation in film theory, see Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 58–80, 91–97. See also Ben Highmore, A Passion for Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–6.
- 31.
For self-reinforcing definitions, see Charles Altman, “Classical Narrative Revisited: Grand Illusions,” in Ben Lawton and Staiger , eds., 1976 Film Studies Annual (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, 1976), 87. Plantinga , “Theory and Aesthetics,” 450. For two sharp critiques of the weaknesses in this new formalism, written before major corrections were applied, see Maltby , Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1983); Jerry L. Salvaggio, “The Emergence of a New School of Criticism: Neo-Formalism,” Journal of the University Film Association Vol. 33, No. 4 (Fall 1981): 45–52. Maltby’s anticipation of reception theory is noteworthy, writing how “It is not a matter so much of the camera/projector’s imposing a point of view on the audience as a question of their adopting the camera’s perspective. The distinction is between a diktat and a voluntary agreement, but the distinction is essential.” Maltby , Harmless Entertainment, 19.
- 32.
For “ascription,” see Bordwell , “Historical Poetics,” 370. For empirical questions, see Bordwell , Poetics of Cinema, 17, 20.
- 33.
Bordwell , Staiger , and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xiv.
- 34.
Bordwell , Staiger , Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 13.
- 35.
Emphasis added. Maltby , Harmless Entertainment, 183–184, 211–215.
- 36.
Bordwell , “Historical Poetics,” 372, 380–381. Bordwell , Poetics of Cinema, 17–20. Similarly, as Noel Burch argues, Hollywood’s institutional mode of representation affected the scope and significance of this cognitive reception.
- 37.
For “patriarchal cinema” and a summary of these early works and their place within the revision of film theory, see Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8–12. For Mulvey’s own reconceptualization of her classic essay, see “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)” in Mulvey , Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 29–38.
- 38.
Higashi , “In Focus: Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn,” Cinema Journal, 44, Number 1 (Fall 2004): 94–97.
- 39.
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Films, Its Spectator and the Avante-Garde,” Wide Angle, 8, nos. 3, 4 (1986): 63–70. Gunning , D. W. Griffith & the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 6–7, 17–28, 41–42. See also, Gunning , “Early American Film,” in Hill and Gibson, Film Studies, 255–271. Early German film scholars, like Walter Benjamin, were rediscovered in the mid-1980s and served a critical role in the reassessment of formalist and psychoanalytic theory. See Andrew, “The Core and Flow of Film Studies,” 907–908.
- 40.
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in Silent American Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 2, 4, 7, 11. Noting the contextual variance at work, she concludes, “Thus the reciprocity between the film on the screen and the spectator’s stream of associations becomes the measure of a particular film’s use value for an alternative public sphere: a film either exploits the viewer’s needs, perceptions, and wishes or it encourages their autonomous movement, fine-tuning, and self-reliance.” Ibid., 13.
- 41.
For “foregrounding,” see Higashi , “Film History,” 95–97.
- 42.
For “prevailing,” see Singer , “Modernism, Modernity, and the Senses,” 175, 178; for “subjectivity,” see Stam, Film Theory, 225; for “processes,” see Graeme Turner, “Cultural Studies and Film,” Hill and Gibson, Film Studies, 199; for “relationship,” see Nan Enstad, “Popular Culture,” in Halttunen, ed. A Companion to American Cultural History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 363.
- 43.
For a leading example of the role played by intertextuality and film receptions, see Tony Bennett, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (New York: Routledge, 1982).
- 44.
Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds. Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 2, 5–6. See also Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 14–15. Stacey , Star Gazing, 43. For more on fandom and Adorno , see Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27–35.
- 45.
Sandvoss, Fans, 156. Emphasis added.
- 46.
Gunning , “Early American Film,” in Hill and Gibson, Film Studies, 268.
- 47.
Michael Denning, “The End of Mass Culture,” International Labor and Working-Class History 37 (Spring 1990):17. See also Richard Keller Simon, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” American Literary History Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer 2001): 343–353; Denning, “The Ends of Ending Mass Culture,” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 38, The Working Class in World War II (Fall, 1990): 64.
- 48.
For “puritanical left,” see Stam, Film Theory, 314. Stam is making this point about critics, not representing them.
- 49.
For the role of these institutions in the “cultural consecration” of specific films and film-makers, see Allen and Lincoln, “Critical Discourse and the Cultural Consecration of American Films,” 871–893.
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Blanke, D. (2018). Locating DeMille. In: Cecil B. DeMille, Classical Hollywood, and Modern American Mass Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76986-8_1
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