Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the politics of intimacy in the New American Cinema (NAC), an independent film culture that emerged in the U.S. at the end of the 1950s. It situates the NAC’s investment in creating a more “personal” cinema as an outgrowth of late-modern anxieties about the “death of privacy,” arguing that this film culture took shape around an interest in mobilizing cinema’s intimacy toward the redemption of human interiority. Over the course of three chapters, I analyze how this redemptive project motivated the formal practices, thematic concerns, and more general modes of living pursued by artists of the NAC, discussing the centrality of intimacy to this film culture’s promotion of a “spontaneous” film practice, its recurrent representations of figures of homelessness, and its efforts to elaborate an alternative world more conducive to inner experience. I do so by way of close readings of the NAC’s critical, artistic, and personal writings, most notably those of Jonas Mekas, and through detailed examinations of films such as On the Bowery (1956), Pull My Daisy (1959), The Flower Thief (1960), and Guns of the Trees (1961). My analysis contextualizes such works by placing them in dialogue with a range of recent cultural histories of the postwar period and the cold war to demonstrate how the NAC’s filmic rebellion intersects with political debates about privacy and totalitarianism that emerged in the U.S. contemporaneous with this film culture. I also draw on theories of intimacy, public and private sphere theory, and theoretical writings on late modernity put forward by figures such as Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Georges Bataille, Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner to explore the conceptual contours of the NAC’s redemptive project, examining its cultural and historical innovations as well as its practical and political limitations.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
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Citation
Guilford, Joshua M.,
"Homeless Movies: The Redemptive Project of the New American Cinema"
(2015).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0H41PS2
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....