The Hollywood Blacklist

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The blacklisting of left-wing filmmakers in Hollywood during the late 1940s and early 1950s was an politically and emotionally divisive event. As a result, accounts of this dark period in American cinema have been particularly prone to subjective narratives. This history of bias make the Hollywood Blacklist an ideal subject for film historiography: the history of film history. A number of recent books have applied revisionist approaches to the study of the Blacklist, which is revealed as not only a domestic but transnational phenomenon and one with broad implications for our understanding of Cold War cinema. These texts share a methodological framework that emphasizes archival research using a variety of primary sources: oral histories, memoirs, film criticism, and newspapers and periodicals. Through readings in historiography and film history, along with tours of archival collections at Georgetown and other institutions in the Washington D.C. area, students in this seminar will evaluate different types of historical sources while gaining an understanding of important trends in postwar American cinema. Our investigation of blacklist narratives extends to questions of film style and genre through screenings ranging from Emile de Antonio’s Point of Order (1964) to documentaries about the blacklist to George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck (2005). The second part of this seminar will allow students to apply their theoretical and practical understanding of archival methods and historiography to other major topics such as early cinema, censorship, and the relationship between film, government, and the military. The course will culminate in individual research papers based on original primary research in which students reconsider some aspect of American film history. Required Texts: • Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (McGraw Hill, 1985) • Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. • Rebecca Prime, Hollywood Exiles in Europe: the Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture (Rutgers UP, 2014) • Jeff Smith, Film Criticism, The Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds (University of California Press, 2014) Partial Filmography: • Crossfire (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1947) • He Ran All the Way (dir. John Berry, 1950) • The Sound of Fury (dir. Cy Endfield, 1952) • Pickup on South Street (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1953) • On the Waterfront (dir. Elia Kazan, 1954) • Salt of the Earth (dir. Herbert Biberman, 1954) • Kiss Me Deadly (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1955) • The Intimate Stranger (dir. Joseph Losey, 1956) • Storm Center (dir. Daniel Taradash, 1956) • Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Siegel, 1956) • Point of Order (Emile de Antonio, 1964) • The Front (dir. Martin Ritt, 1976) • Legacy of the Blacklist (dir. Judy Chaiken) • Fellow Traveller (dir. Philip Saville, 1990) • Good Night and Good Luck (dir. George Clooney, 2005) • Trumbo (dir. Jay Roach, 2015)