"Hollywood Quarterly was so far ahead of its time it seems eclectic even today. Contributors to the journal routinely ranged from those who actually made movies...to those in academia who were at the time only beginning to comprehend the significance of cinema to 20th Century culture.... This anthology offers invaluable insight into the early history of film scholarship, education and perhaps most importantly, industry relations at a most crucial time in motion picture history."-Jon Lewis, author of Hollywood vs. Hard Core

The first issue of Hollywood Quarterly, in October 1945, marked the appearance of the most significant, successful, and regularly published journal of its kind in the United States. For its entire life, the Quarterly held to the leftist utopianism of its founders, several of whom would later be blacklisted.

The journal attracted a collection of writers unmatched in North American film studies for the heterogeneity of their intellectual and practical concerns: from film, radio, and television industry workers to academics; from Sam Goldwyn, Edith Head, and Chuck Jones to Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer.

 For this volume, Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin have selected essays that reflect the astonishing eclecticism of the journal, with sections on animation, the avant-garde, and documentary to go along with a representative sampling of articles about feature-length narrative films.

They have also included articles on radio and television, reflecting the contents of just about every issue of the journal and exemplifying the extraordinary moment in film and media studies that Hollywood Quarterly captured and helped to create.

In 1951, Hollywood Quarterly was renamed the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, and in 1958 it was replaced by Film Quarterly, which is still published by the University of California Press. During those first twelve years, the Quarterly maintained an intelligent, sophisticated, and critical interest in all the major entertainment media, not just film, and in issue after issue insisted on the importance of both aesthetic and sociological methodologies for studying popular culture, and on the political significance of the mass media.

Eric Smoodin is Film, Media, and Philosophy Acquisitions Editor at the University of California Press. He is author of Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era (1993) and editor of Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom (1994). Ann Martin is Editor of Film Quarterly and Coeditor, with Brian Henderson, of Film Quarterly: Forty Years--A Selection (California, 1998).

Read Full Book Online: Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945-1957

Paperback: 417 pages
Editors: Eric Smoodin, Ann Martin
Publisher: University of California Press (May 17, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520232747
ISBN-13: 978-0520232747

Introduction:
The Hollywood Quarterly, 1945–1957
Eric Smoodin

Writing Just After the end of World War II, the editors of the Hollywood Quarterly posed the following question: "What part will the motion picture and the radio play in the consolidation of the victory, in the creation of new patterns of world culture and understanding?" Asked at the beginning of volume I, number I, this question, and the "Editorial Statement" of which it was a part, made particular sense in 1945.

Today, more than half a century later, we might ask what made this question plausible, and why did the editors' concerns about peace, education, and aesthetics coalesce around the movies? We need to know, then, why a journal dedicated to the serious study of film, radio, and, later, television might have made such good sense at the time, and how it attracted a collection of writers unmatched in North American film studies, before or since, for the heterogeneity of their intellectual and practical concerns.

The first issue of the Hollywood Quarterly appeared in October 1945. Number I cost $1.25, although a reader could buy a four-issue annual subscription for only $4.00. The University of California Press published the journal, the daily activities of which were overseen by the members of a five-person editorial board, who were themselves guided by a number of advisers in motion pictures, music, radio, and technology. ...

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