Split Screen Nation - Courtney

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Résumé :
Split Screen Nation traces an oppositional dynamic between the screen West and the screen South that was unstable and dramatically shifting in the decades after WWII, and has marked popular ways of imagining the U.S. ever since. If this dynamic became vivid in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), itself arguably a belated response to Easy Rider (1969), this book helps us understand those films, and much more, through an eclectic history of U.S. screen media from the postwar era. It deftly analyzes not only Hollywood films and television, but also educational and corporate films, amateur films (aka home movies), and military and civil defense films featuring ?tests of the atomic bomb in the desert. Attentive to sometimes profoundly different contexts of production and consumption shaping its varied examples, Split Screen Nation argues that in the face of the Cold War and the civil rights struggle an implicit, sometimes explicit, opposition between the screen West and the screen South nonetheless mediated the nation's most paradoxical narratives-namely, land of the free/land of slavery, conquest, and segregation. Whereas confronting such contradictions head-on could capsize cohesive conceptions of the U.S., by now familiar screen forms of the West and the South split them apart...

Biographie:

• List of Illustrations


• Preface


• Acknowledgements


• Part I: Projecting Region, Imagining Nation


• Teaser (Hollywood) : Easy Rider Begs a Genealogy


• Introduction: Split Screen Nation


• Part II: Remapping the Nation on Multiple Screens


• Teaser (16mm and archive.org)


• Camera Road Trip: Family Camping through Forty-Eight States


• Chapter 1: Midcentury Screen Maps for Model Citizen-Spectators


• Chapter 2: Frontier Vistas and Plantation Sutures: Hollywood Forms of the American Paradox


• Interstitial Teaser (multimedia)


• John Wayne vs. Tennessee Williams


• Part III: The Leaky South


• Teaser (TV): Enjoying the Southern Decadence Blues with Hugh Hefner


• Chapter 3: How the South Became Sexually Perverse in the Civil Rights Era


• Part IV: The Empty West


• Teaser (media saturation)


• Robert Frank's Postcards from the Edge


• Chapter 4 : Expanding Views of a Filmic Proving Ground


• Epilogue: Walking/Looking into the Toxic Cloud


• Index