A New Kind of Class Situation
Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Graham Cassano calls on Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation to understand the relationship between audiences and the socially conscious films of the New Deal period. These films called forth a new kind of working-class audience while that audience was itself developing out of the trauma of the Great Depression, which made the films possible. Working-class filmgoers were able to recognize themselves in these films as part of a “class situation” even when those films deployed retrograde images of race or gender. Cassano’s investigation of the work of John Ford is especially telling and evokes the arc of the New Deal from its early radical period through the period of national unity during wartime and the cold war and red scare that followed.
Source: Rethinking Marxism
Author: Richard McIntyre
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2761265335