This text examines the two-way process of action and reaction by which films shape the identity of a society, its culture and its sense of nationhood; and, in turn, how films are themselves shaped by these forces and matrices. The nation here is America, in which films both effect and reflect changes in the national self-image, the transformation from one kind of nation to another: from an agrarian to an industrial economy; from a nation of producers to one of consumers; from a community of individuals to a mass society.
Mass culture, the individual and the mass; apocalytic cinema - D.W. Griffith and the aesthetics of reform; the crowd, the collective and the chorus - Busby Berkeley and the New Deal; the regulation of desire - from mass consumption to mass morality; the Carole Lombard in Macy's window; the economy of desire - the commodity form in/of the cinema/ the production code; the dark side of mass culture - film noir; notes on film noir/woman's place - the absent family of film noir; mass production, the failure of the new, and Reaganite cinema; postmodernism and consumer society / preparing the cracks - fantasy and ideology in the Reagan era; against the grain; new US Black cinema/ the oppositional gaze - Black female spectators.
