Cecil B. DeMille and American culture : the silent era /
Sumiko Higashi.
- Berkeley : University of California Press, �1994.
- 1 online resource (xii, 264 pages) : illustrations
- ACLS Humanities E-Book (Series) .
Filmography: pages 205-208. Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-252) and index.
The Lasky Company and Highbrow Culture: Authorship Versus Intertextuality -- Self-Theatricalization in Victorian Pictorial Dramaturgy: What's His Name -- The Lower East Side as Spectacle: Class and Ethnicity in the Urban Landscape -- The Screen As Display Window: Constructing the "New Woman" -- The Historical Epic and Progressive Era Civic Pageantry: Joan the Woman -- Set and Costume Design as Spectacle in a Consumer Culture: The Early Jazz Age Films -- Demille's Exodus from Famous Players-Lasky: the Ten Commandments (1923).
Annotation Cecil B. DeMille and American Culturedemonstrates that the director, best remembered for his overblown biblical epics, was one of the most remarkable film pioneers of the Progressive Era. In this innovative work, which integrates cultural history and cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi shows how DeMille artfully inserted cinema into genteel middle-class culture by replicating in his films such spectacles as elaborate parlor games, stage melodramas, department store displays, Orientalist world's fairs, and civic pageantry. The director not only established his signature as a film author by articulating middle-class ideology across class and ethnic lines, but by the 1920's had become a trendsetter, with set and costume designs that influenced the advertising industry to create a consumer culture based on female desire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped material from the DeMille Archives and other collections, Higashi provides imaginative readings of DeMille's early feature films, viewing them in relation to the dynamics of social change, and she documents the extent to which the emergence of popular culture was linked to the genteel tradition.