Reelpolitik

Rating:
Summary: Politics and old movies! What could be more fun?!
Review: My old History of Film prof used to say "You can't understand a film unless you understand the environment that produced it." Beverly Kelley and her co-authors (the redoubtable Jack Pitney, Craig Smith, and Herbert Gooch) have taken the pivotal years of the 20th Century -- from the start of the Great Depression to the end of WWII -- and examined how the ideological turmoil fomented in those churning times was rendered in celluloid, providing an iconography in black and white that still illuminates our thoughts today.

Eight films arrayed in a dialectical pairing of opposites provide the framework for the exploration of the ideologies that not only infused the sensibility of the times, but ripped at the very fabric of American life. Communism, Fascism, elitism, isolationism, and their opposites are all given voice through the medium of the Hollywood film. Some of the selections are obvious -- "Citizen Kane", "Casablanca" -- some obscure -- "Gabriel Over the White House", "Our Daily Bread" -- but all express a notion of what it was to be an American in a country at the crossroads of history.

From a people in the depths of the Depression still struggling with the aftermath of WWI, to a world power facing a new -- if still uncertain -- future, this American experience -- illuminated by film -- is the real subject of "Reelpolitik". Like a surveyor with a transit, Beverly Kelley uses these eight films to define the foundation of the culture which was to follow. It is a foundation on which we still stand today.

"Reelpolitik" is a welcome addition to the library not only of the history or film buff, but of anyone who loves the popular culture that made us who we are. In the end it should not be surprising that we can find some notion of what it means to partake of American culture by examining the messages found in film. As we approach the end of the first century to have its entire history preserved in this most living medium, what is of lasting interest is not the flickering curio of old haircuts and out-of-date fashions in the "old time movies", but a view of how we once saw ourselves and the times that produced those visions. And if we look honestly and clearly into that antique lens, the visage we see is startlingly, brightly, like our own.