He remarked that while in higher education courses there was an “obvious student interest in film” (245), the elitist approach of that period prevailing in the ivied domain of American universities ignored the cinematic art considered, in the given context, “a mere diversion and at best a journalistic tool” (245). Rollins saw the most visible points of convergence between cinema and American studies particularly in the realm of teaching. Rollins’s 1974 article on “Film and American Studies” published in American Quarterly―the official publication of the American Studies Association―was among the first focus studies regarding the connection between the two fields. Obviously, Hollywood’s, New Hollywood’s, and the independent filmmaking’s imaginaries of America―perceptions and misperceptions alike―are, in today’s globalized world, as important as they were earlier, if not more. Girgus recapitulated Kolbenschlag’s ideas by claiming that film promulgates diverse “conceptions and representations of American identity” (12) in a global culture where American popular culture and moving images lie at the heart of America’s image.
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experience and ambience” (2004) both on the domestic scene and on the international arena. In 1975, Marie Claire Kolbenschlag drew the attention to the power of moving images when she remarked that film is a real “microcosm” reflecting the “imaginative articulation of U.S. Even though there have been a burgeoning number of publications on the American cinema and film, it took decades after the establishment of American studies as discipline for a handful of critics to question the lack of engagement of movies within the field of American studies. The two fields have a myriad of common subjects, methods, aims, and interests which still need to be addressed through a collaborative enterprise. Besides, it would be inadequate to talk about contemporary American studies without considering the intricate implications of the American cinema, a ubiquitous cultural product that has long been the global export success of the United States.Īlthough film has long inhabited a marginal field in the context of American studies, contemporary approaches to New American studies can find prolific terrains of research in connection with film studies, which has started to find its way into the field of the Americanist discipline. Despite a massive outpouring of publications on American studies and on film, separately, there are still few texts and even less in-depth research about the relationship between the two fields.
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Film and American Studies: A Blind Spot Connectionīoth American studies and film studies are fields encompassing multitudes of meanings with complex connections albeit this association has, paradoxically, long been neglected by film theorists and American studies practitioners alike. “American cinema is international like the fairy tales were international.” The break between the two does not exist: life is cinema.” “In America cinema is true because it is the whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic Tremaine McDowell American Studies (1948) Within the framework of American studies.”
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“The motion picture is sometimes noticed but it has not yet been critically evaluatedĪs a factor in our civilization―an understanding which might very profitably be conducted Essays on Literature, Film, and American Studies (2012), co-author of Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories (2008) and founding editor of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary and its AMERICANA eBooks division. She is the author of Cultural Vistas and Sites of Identity.
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Cristian is Associate Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged. "American Studies and Film: From Blind Spot to Symbiosis" by Réka M. Cristian