The Routledge Companion to American Film History

Introduction: American Film History as a Multiplicity Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood  Part I: Alternate Archives  1. Cinema’s Playful Objects: On Toys and the Movies Meredith A. Bak  2. Finding Its Voice?: Sound and the (Re)-Writing of Film History Dimitrios Latsis  3. Doing Disney History Despite Disney Peter C. Kunze  4. Doing Bad Film History: Lessons on Archive and Method from John Waters Hollis Griffin  Part II: Hidden Labor  5. Heroes, Villains, or Collaborators: The Place of Hollywood Unions in American Film Industry History Kate Fortmueller  6. ‘Students Will Be Participants’: Designing Working-Class Film Education at the Harry Alan Potamkin Film School McKayla Sluga  7. The Reticent Close-Up: Editing and Understatement in the Films of Barbara McLean Patrick Keating  Part III: Historicizing Style  8. How Hollywood Learned to Speak: Voice Culture and the Transition to Sound Kristen Hatch  9. Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Method Acting: Between Art and Commerce Amanda Konkle  10. A New Pathway Toward the New Hollywood: Love with the Proper Stranger Cynthia Lucia  Part IV: Racialized Technologies  11. Written Refusals: Oscar Micheaux’s Confrontations with the New York State Motion Picture Commission Alyssa Lopez  12. Hollywood Color: Race, Aesthetics, Technology Kirsty Sinclair Dootson and Xin Peng  13. ‘Basic Dark Face’: Writing the History of Makeup in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood Desirée J. Garcia  Part V: Histories of Fans and Spectators  14. Movie Stars Make News: Fan Magazines, Print Culture, and American Film History of the Studio Era Mary R. Desjardins  15. ‘I Want Big Things’: Beauty Merchandising and Noir’s "Femme Fans" Shelley Stamp  16. Any Given Sunday at La Cadena Metropolitana: Spanish-Language Theaters in Los Angeles and the Influence of Film Exhibitors, 1963-2001 Ross Melnick  Part VI: Cinema’s Material Cultures  17. Early Motion Pictures’ Cultures of Print Sarah Gleeson-White  18. Histories of Exhibition and Spectatorship: Loss and Imagination Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece  19. The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of: Re-Materializing Spectatorship Studies Caetlin Benson-Allott  Part VII: Transnational Production  20. Speculating a Speculative History of Early Chinese American Film Culture Yiman Wang  21. Neither Invasion nor Americanization: A Short History of the French Film Industry in Fort Lee Clara Auclair  22. When Hollywood Came to Greece: 20^th Century-Fox and the Challenges of Turning a Small Country into a Runaway Film Production Destination in the 1950s Yannis Tzioumakis  23. The Quintessential Seventies Picture Show: Voyage of the Damned (1976) as Heritage Film between Art Cinema and Disaster Flick Roy Grundmann  Part VIII: Intermedial Histories  24. Parabola: Transhistorical Connections Between Experimental Film and Music Videos Amy Skjerseth  25. From Home Movie Makers to Content Creators: Forging a Genealogy of Self-Made Media Lauren S. Berliner  26. Webs of Stories: 21^st Century Native American Film and Television Amy Corbin  27. ‘Drawn to Life’: Intermedial Promotion and the Monetization of Film History in Disney and Cirque du Soleil Kirsten Moana Thompson  Part IX: Movies as/in History  28. ‘Once Upon a Time…’: Movies about Hollywood as Film History Steven Cohan  29. A Netflix Original: History, Hollywood and Commemoration in the Streaming Era Jonathan Stubbs  30. Acts of Recovery: Excavating Youth through the Detritus of Film History Pamela Robertson Wojcik  Part X: Historical Afterlives of Cinema  31. In the Wake of Archival Rediscovery: The Afterlives of Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898) Allyson Nadia Field  32. Rediscovered Again: The Nonlinear Path of Alice Guy Blaché into US Film History Aurore Spiers  33. Casablanca: Rethinking Film History Through the Old Classics Barbara Klinger  34. ‘There’s No More to Say?’: The Lives and Afterlives of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason Paula J. Massood

Biography

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is the Andrew V. Tackes Professor in Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, USA; a Guggenheim Fellow; and former President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author most recently of Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (2024). 

Paula J. Massood is Professor of Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (2003) and Making a Promised Land: Harlem in 20th-Century Photography and Film (2013), editor of The Spike Lee Reader (2007), and co-editor of Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (2021).

“Wow. Two of our finest film scholars, Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood, have produced a volume that makes us reconsider most of what we thought we knew about American cinema. The introduction alone is worth the price of admission, but the cast of multi-disciplinary historians provides the nuance, depth, and surprise that will keep you coming back for more.” - Eric Smoodin, Professor of American Studies, University of California, Davis, USA and co-editor, The American Film History Reader

"Get ready to embark on a historical odyssey where toys, music videos, and campy directors comprise the methods; where color technologies, make-up design, and vocal codes reveal cultural frictions; where new media resurrects the old, bad challenges good, and perspectives attuned to the complexities of brown, Black, indigenous, queer, youthful, and female-identified lives come together in a verifiable page turner. I haven’t been this excited in a very long while!" - Jennifer M. Bean, Editor-in-Chief, Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal