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Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power

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Cultural production has been an intrinsic part of the Los Angeles region's internal formation and rise to global influence.  These essays map the arts and mass culture of Los Angeles as the tendrils of a growing regional and global power. Los Angeles arts and mass culture were forged in a furnace of imperialism and revolutionary movements, racial apartheid, middle-class reformers, and autocratic police departments, a period running from around 1900 through the 1950s.  By mid-century, the crisis generated by the Cold War National Security State and the Civil Rights movement brought about anew wave of transformations in the cultural field.

“The Problem of the Twentieth Century,” W.E.B. DuBois famously declared in 1901, “is the problem of the Color Line.”  Feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman added that the other problem of the 20th century was the rule of patriarchy. Fusing these two ideologies was the specter of fascism, the authoritarian, intolerant and genocidal rebuke to western humanist values.  These essays map Hollywood's accountability for all three of these core problems of the 20th century: racism, sexism, and fascism, and how Hollywood generated new, carnographic forms of power in the bloodbaths of the 20th century.  Because production of mass culture took place in the segregated spaces of Los Angeles and in territories around the globe, the production of these films took place within the reigning structures of inequality.  Movies were of and about the real world, despite their fictional entertainment intent, they emplotted the leading ideologies of the day.

The motion picture industry generated a new mode of communication, and expanded the scope and scale of moviegoer's lives. Consuming movies in public, large groups shared a single screen, in journeys familiar and exotic, personal and social. Circulated to millions worldwide, movies opened up new landscapes in every direction, containing the maximum range of subject matter, selling it daily to merge with the everyday by consuming masses who now experienced far more widely than ever before in all of human history. These landscapes were deeply interrelated. The movies were entertainment, to be sure, but they were much more to the millions who spent their leisure time and money to see them. The stars were role models, the sets were utopias, dystopias. The culture industry created worlds that extended the vast geography of society itself.

This page has paths:

  1. Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
  2. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Phil Ethington
  3. Networks Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. Manufacturing Mass Culture and the Rise of Racial Propaganda in Los Angeles, 1890s-1950s
  2. The Mating Dance of LA Arts and Architecture: 1900s-1950s
  3. Love with Strangers: LA Countercultures, Rise of an Art Capital, and the Ends of Art, 1950s-1990s
  4. American Pulp Fascism: Tarzan, Birth of a Nation, and the Ku Klux Klan, 1912-1930s
  5. Hollywood’s White Hunters: Colonizing Africa and Amercan Mass Media, 1929-1939
  6. Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood
  7. Bloodbath: New Hollywood, New Right, and the Carnography of Power, 1940s to 1980s
  8. Moby-Dick: On the White Maleness of Hollywood
  9. Bibliography for White Shadows

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