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As the person responsible for both the creative and technical form of a film, the director occupies a pivotal position in a collaborative art form involving people, talents and money In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century American directors have become integral to the packaging of movies, whether Hollywood or independents. Yet, this vision of director as the film’s primary author belies his or her status under the studio system.
The earliest directors had wide-open opportunities: D.W. Griffith became a founding father of Hollywood. His own studio legacy however, converted subsequent directors to workers within the system. While some became identified with distinctive styles and genres—e.g. Howard Hawks or John Ford with the western—others held control only through constant battle. Alfred Hitchcock manipulated the system; Orson Welles went into exile. Still others, though they produced masterpieces with materials and stars given them, rarely achieved “ownership” and faced arbitrary assignments. The well-established George Cukor (1899–1973), for example, was replaced after only ten days work on Gone With the Wind (1939).
Re-evaluation of the director’s role came with the studios’ collapse and the development of a film theory of “auteurship” based on European theory and practice of more autonomous control. In the 1960s and 1970s, older figures were re-evaluated, while new idiosyncratic visionaries arose, ranging from Sam Peckinpah to Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Sylvester Stallone. Directorial ranks opened to film school graduates and the less prestigious realm of television directing.
In the new Hollywood, the director is a key player to be negotiated (along with stars) in a producer’s creation of a picture. Directors command power and prestige because of their vision (Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese) or their box office (James Cameron, Jonathan Demme). Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have become uniquely powerful through their own economic success. Others build directing on their acting (John Cassavetes, Barbra Streisand). Directorial centrality also pervades the formation and aspirations of independent cinema, despite anti-Hollywood trappings.
The budgets and operations of Hollywood, since the 1920s, also have attracted skilled directors from abroad. Ernst Lubitsh, Josef von Sternberg and Billy Wilder came from Central Europe; Czech Milos Forman made his US debut in 1971. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood has drawn the Taiwanese Ang Lee and Hong Kong’s John Woo.
Yet, even so, directing has remained a predominantly white male role for most of Hollywood’s history. Despite pioneering work by Dorothy Aznar and Ida Lupino, women rarely have directed bigger-budget American movies; not one woman has been nominated for Best Director. Some early skilled African American directors like Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) were able to produce and direct forty feature-length films within a segregated Black cinema, but integration was slow. Photographer-essayist Gordon Parks, for example, despite his sensitive Learning Tree (1969), found his career confined to blaxploitation films. Since the 1980s, Spike Lee, John Singleton and a few other black males have directed features; only Lee, however, has developed a substantive career. Recognition for black women remains minimal. Women, African Americans and other minorities—Asian, Latino, publicly gay people (after many closeted Hollywood directors)—have also directed independent and documentary cinema.
Industry:Culture
As the second wave of feminism awakened a generation of American women in the late 1960s, so too did it galvanize a community of women artists. Where such artistically matriarchal figures as Georgia O’Keefe, Helen Frankenthaler and Eva Hesse had ambivalently occupied their identities as women artists, producing work that while critically construed as “feminine” was never resolutely feminist, the post-1968 generation of female artists was proud and defiant in its assertion and celebration of female identity.
Motivated by the very real conditions of discrimination and inequality this first generation of feminist artists sought to redress the historical condition into which they were born.
Producing their most influential work during the 1970s, such artists as Eleanor Antin, Judy Chicago, Adrian Piper, Faith Ringgold, Carolee Schnee-mann and Miriam Schapiro returned to the historically objectified female body and reclaimed it as a subject. In such collaborative art projects as Womanhouse (1972) and The Dinner Party (1979), Chicago, Schapiro and their artistic sisters elevated women’s experience and an iconography of the female body to the realm of high art.
While the activism of that first generation of feminist artists saw its continuation in the work and demonstrations of such political organizations as the Guerilla Girls and the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), by the 1980s a second generation of feminist artists had emerged, displaying markedly different aesthetic and political strategies. Renouncing the celebratory language and bodily imagery of their predecessors as deeply essentialist, such women as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler and Cindy Sherman sought to deconstruct, rather than reconstruct, culturally normalized conceptions of gender and identity. Working primarily with photography and written text, these artists avoided the representational practices and corporeal iconography that so marked the work of their antecedents and sought instead to expose, explore and dismantle the rigid binary logic of sexual difference. At the same time, such deconstructive strategies opened up a space for a more expansive investigation of issues of race, as is exemplified in the work of Sandra Bernhard, Anna Deavere Smith, Lorraine O’Grady Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker and Carrie Mae Weems.
From the vantage of the late 1990s, it is possible to celebrate the extraordinary gains achieved by women artists in little more than twenty-five years. Yet it is also worth considering whether the founding politics and ideals of feminism, rooted in the experiential difference of women, have been eroded, if not lost, to the theoretical forces of deconstruction and anti-essentialism that continue to shape and inform the production and reception of contemporary art.
Industry:Culture
As with all of the arts, one cannot summarize classical music in America since the Second World War with one word or phrase. Technology new and old, musical ideologies, and quests for audience all have affected the production and presentation of music. The heritage of the classical canon as well as innovation have also created tensions for orchestras, audiences and “consumption” of music.
Postwar development of audio-tape recorders and long-playing records not only made performances accessible to a wider public, but also changed the ways in which music was created. The tape recorder gave composers greater control over the creation and manipulation of sound. Rather than being dependent on notation or the quality and interpretation of performers, composers recorded and arranged sound from materials of their own choosing. The next critical phase in technol-ogy was the arrival of the computer in the mid-1950s. Although originally too expensive for most composers, computers were used by academics to create calculated musical sequences.
Another major impact of technology in the twentieth century was the development of electronic music and the use of synthesized instruments. Electronic music involved recording environmental noises and electronically generated pitches and sounds, replayed in the music. The use of technology has redefined what music is for many composers.
Hence, Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) called for “the liberation of sound…the right to make music with any and all sounds” (Kamien 1992:531). This included electronic sounds, untraditional noises created from amplification, tapping, scraping, plucking and rubbing of traditional instruments, as well as the use of noninstruments, such as jackhammers, to create sound.
In style, the first postwar trend in American classical music was the abandonment of tonality for the twelve-tone system, first advocated by Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) and then by his disciple Anton Webern (1883–1945). This method stimulated unconventional approaches to melody harmony and form. In America, use of the twelvetone composition, in its variations and transformations, became a means of re-affirming rather than repudiating the values of traditional tonal music. Even tonal composers such as Roger Sessions (1896–1985), with many of his works, starting with his violin sonata (1953), and Aaron Copland (1900–90) had either experimented with or been affected by the twelve-tone system, “I began to hear chords that I wouldn’t have heard otherwise.
Heretofore I had been thinking tonally but this was a new way of moving tones about. It freshened up one’s technique and one’s approach” (Kamien 1992:525).
A younger generation of composers adopted a revised version of the twelve-tone system, called serialism, in which groups of rhythmic values, dynamic levels or tone colors were organized into series, or an ordered group of musical elements. Composers like Milton Babbitt (b. 1916) used this method to compose mathematically. While this was a highly organized, controlled approach to music, in most cases the sound produced might seem random and chaotic.
A completely opposite contemporary movement was chance music, in which composers chose pitches, tone colors and rhythms by random methods, including coin tosses. The most famous American composer of this school was John Cage (1912–92).
Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4” (1951) for twelve radios gives directions for six performers to manipulate the wavelength and volume of the radios chosen by throwing dice.
In the mid-1960s, minimalism started to develop in reaction against the complexity of serialism and the randomness of chance music. Also influenced by non-Western music and philosophy, a new generation of composers, including Philip Glass (b. 1937), John Adams (b. 1947), Terry Riley (b. 1935) and Steve Reich (b. 1936), wrote seemingly hypnotic, repetitive music with a steady pulse and dynamic, clear tonality and insistent repetition of short melodic phrases. The minimalist movement was accepted by the public during the 1970s and 1980s with Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” (1976) and Glass and Adams’ operas Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Nixon in China (1987).
Contemporary classical music is heavily influenced by postmodern theories of reusing the familiar, with the re-discovery of tonality Many composers are returning to the roots of classical music, quoting music from the great masters. For example, in Ellen Taaffe’s (b. 1939) “Zwilich’s Concerto Grosso 1985,” the composer quotes passages from a Handel sonata. The revisiting of preceding styles started in the 1960s with the works of Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), William Albright (1944–98) and William Bolcom (b.
1938) reviving earlier popular music, most notably ragtime. To the current composers, such as David Del Tredici (b. 1937), educated in the atonal, twelve-tone system, tonality is the “new” form.
The tercentenaries of J.S. Bach (1685–1750) and G.F. Handel (1685–1759) in the mid-1980s also contributed to a search for roots in classical music. More performing arts groups started to explore historically accurate performance practices, using reconstructed “period” instruments of the Baroque and Classical periods.
Classical music today must also relate to the changing American audiences.
Traditionally classical music had been supported by patrons, whether wealthy individuals or institutions. Fundamentally this support structure has not changed— composers and performing arts groups are funded mostly by their audiences, benefactors and institutions, such as foundations and government agencies. However, classical music activities have been shifting from the traditional centers like New York, Boston, MA, Chicago, IL, Philadelphia, PA and Los Angeles, CA, where there has been a great tradition of classical music for nearly over a century. Regional performing arts groups have sprung up with great success in the postwar era in cities like Phoenix, Raleigh, Omaha (Nebraska) and Dallas.
On the whole, classical music organizations have found that their income is consistently increasing more than their expenses. The total income of American orchestras was nearly $1,087 million in 1997–8, an increase of 8.2 percent ($82 million) from the previous year. Total expenses for the same year were $1,077 million, an increase of 6.5 percent ($66 million) over 1996–7. This was due mostly to increased ticket sales (up 7 percent between 1996–7 and 1997–8), individual giving (up 17 percent) and corporate and foundation grants (up 17 percent).
Recording technology has not only changed the way music is created, but also the way in which it is presented and appreciated. Long-playing records, radio and television allowed for the recording and broadcasts of historical performances. Audiences no longer had to travel to live performances. Video, cable, CD and DVD have added new dimensions to home enjoyment and potential support. Currently, performing arts organizations are embracing the Internet, with many in the process of setting up live “web-casts” of performances, as well as putting up audio files to promote new music and composers, and posting of educational materials for outreach projects. In these ways, American classical music has renewed its audience in the early twenty-first century.
Industry:Culture
Asian Americans represent the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States. The 1990 census listed the population of Asians or Pacific Islanders as 7.2 million (2.9 percent of the American population). This figure nearly doubles the 1980 census figure of 3.7 million. A projected population for 2000 is 10.67 million. Immigration from Asia, by 1990, also represented nearly half (48 percent) of all legal entries to the US, compared with 5 percent in the years 1931–65. Since this group includes many recent immigrants, its relations with the many homelands are strong forces in forging Pacific Rim relationships.
Yet the category “Asian American” jumbles disparate peoples, languages, histories and experiences to fit “American” categories—even if Asian Americans themselves have found it useful in terms of political and cultural empowerment. “Asian American” generally includes people whose families originate in Asia and the Pacific Islands, but people from the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia may be perceived as heirs of distinct cultural traditions, whatever their census or employment categorization.
Culturally, the dominant image of an Asian American for most other Americans is a (recent) immigrant from East Asia who “looks Chinese”; heterogeneity is not widely acknowledged.
The first Asian Americans were Chinese and Japanese who came in the mid-nineteenth century under multiple restrictions. Filipinos and South Asians followed in the twentieth century. Koreans arrived primarily after the Korean War, just as Southeast Asians were linked to Vietnam. Overall, Asians had little American presence until the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished racial and nationality quotas. In the ensuing twentyfive years, the Asian American population increased sevenfold.
In the twentieth century most Asians entered the US either as family members of naturalized citizens or as professionals. However, in the black/white racial polarization of America, Asian Americans have been even more invisible than Hispanics. In part, this reflects an “ease” of assimilation. The media have labeled Asian Americans as the “model minority” because of their socio-economic success, including their remarkable student representation in elite universities like Harvard, University of California-Berkeley and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nicknamed Made In Taiwan). In fact, the labor of generations of Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos struggling to gain a stake has been eclipsed by an image of immigrant entrepreneurs and highly driven students. While some “Asian values” contribute to this, including strong family ties (often with Confucian overtones) and widespread cultural values of education and discipline, new immigration policies also favor family cohesion, education and capital. Meanwhile, an image of rapidly acquired wealth has antagonized local relations and hidden problems of the elderly, the culturally dislocated and those whose immigration experience is one of virtual servitude in sweatshops.
Moreover, Asian Americans are not seen as threatening: men have often been portrayed as smart but nerdy, preoccupied with math and science, while women are seen as the sexy Suzy Wong or subservient mail-order bride. This image of a successful, docile minority overshadows the diversity and the “Americanness” of Asians ranging from street gangs to Olympic skaters.
The most contentious issue facing Asian Americans is the difficulty defining Asian American. Often, Asian Americans come from countries that have fought each other for centuries. While their languages, foods, religions and clothes appear similar from a Euro-American perspective, differences in national and regional traditions are strongly marked among immigrants and their descendants—Vietnamese Chinese are not the same as Hmong or Viet, nor do early Cantonese immigrants share the language and experience of Taiwanese or Chinese from the mainland or the Chinese global diaspora. Asian Americans who have resided in the US for generations, suffering laws that divided families or interned them, have assimilated in different ways from those who have just arrived in the last few years or decades. However, this diversity is also a strength, which allows the group to act cohesively, with different voices against shared discrimination.
The notion of an Asian American identity, in fact, has been shaped by the success of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Grassroots organizations, like the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, serve all Asian Americans. In universities across the country, ethnic studies programs have incorporated sizeable Asian American sections, featuring Asian and Pacific American heritage week (or month) held every May.
The label “Asian American” is more readily used by American-born generations than by immigrants, since the former have a shared experience of growing up in America as neither black nor white. Hence, “Asian American” can be both a self-selected term for political empowerment and an imposed category for the ethnic accounting.
While there are Asian Americans all over the United States, large communities are especially situated in metropolitan centers like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Atlanta. More Asian Americans are concentrated on the West Coast because of its relative geographic proximity to Asia and its diverse historical roots. While the original Chinatowns were ethnic enclaves, middle-class Asian American suburbs took shape in the 1980s. Yet many Asian Americans, especially those of the second or third generation, live in diverse communities all over the country. Friendships and intermarriage with whites (often class-based ties that eclipse marriage with African Americans and Hispanics, and with other Asian nationalities) are also producing new biracial and bi-cultural generations.
Older Asian Americans have been making headway in the political mainstream, including Senator Daniel Inouye and Representative Patsy Mink from Hawai’i, and Governor Gary Locke in Washington. However, in the 1990s fundraising scandals linked to overseas Chinese and a suspected Chinese espionage scandal have shown how Asian Americans are marked as different within the United States. Orientalist stereotypes of a shifty, unscrupulous Fu Manchu are alive and well, complicated by a widespread assumption that all Asians are born and have allegiances “somewhere else.” Yet, the recent growth of the Asian American population as a result of the continual influx of immigrants has indeed made Asian Americans deeply transnational citizens, united by media, communication, travel and family ties to a global consciousness unusual within traditions of American isolation and assimilation. In fact, such transnational ties raise interesting questions about American identity itself. Is Shanghai-born I.M. Pei, whose career flourished in the US but who is also lionized in China, different from the Vietnamese American Maya Lin, or the European refugee Walter Gropius? Hong Kong film-makers Jackie Chan, John Woo and Ringo Lam work and live in the US; tennis star Michael Chang has fans across China. While the same issues of divided loyalties are raised with regard to Irish American supporters of the IRA or Cuban American exiles in Miami, Asian Americans as a whole seem to have been defined within a new global citizenship, wrapped in both suspicion and promise.
These issues also imbue media representation of Asian Americans as “others.” In literature and film, however, many have countered this in a florescence of artistic creativity especially since the 1960s. The seminal literary anthology The Big Aiiieeeee! (1974) reflects the frustrations many have felt as people marked as non-Americans despite their heritage, service and commitment (see Asian Americans in cinema and television).
Industry:Culture
Assassins (literally “eaters of hashish”) were an order of Muslim fanatics who specialized in killing Christian crusaders during the Middle Ages. In recent decades, “assassination” has come to refer almost exclusively to the murder of politically prominent persons. For example, whereas Mark David Chapman is the “murderer” of John Lennon, Lee Harvey Oswald was the “assassin” of John F. Kennedy.
The most shocking and controversial assassinations were the trio of killings in the 1960s, taking the lives of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy became one of those moments locked in Americans’ memories; people who remember the assassination can recall exactly what they were doing and how they felt when they heard the news. All three deaths evoked massive outpourings of public grief. Following Dr King’s death, riots broke out in several US cities because the assassination of the Civil Rights movement’s moral leader seemed to undermine any hope African Americans held for racial justice.
The official media and government response to the assassinations was to reassure the public that the assassins’ bullets could not damage the operation of the nation’s democratic institutions. The reassurance occasionally included positive actions, such as when President Johnson linked John Kennedy’s martyrdom with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Typically, many citizens have not been so easily reassured, and their doubts have led them to believe that, had President Kennedy lived, he would not have become deeply involved in the Vietnam War, or that Robert Kennedy would have won the 1968 presidential election and prevented much of the ensuing divisiveness in the nation’s political culture.
In all three assassinations, a prime suspect was quickly identified, convicted in the court of public opinion, and marginalized as a lone fanatic, unconnected with any powerful groups that might have profited from the assassination. Moreover, in all three cases, the assassination investigations were hastily completed, leaving many alternative hypotheses untested. Furthermore, the importance of the FBI in conducting these investigations calls their findings into question because Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover hated the Kennedys and King. In fact, the House Select Committee on Assassinations repudiated the key finding of the Warren Commission by asserting that Oswald did not act alone in killing President Kennedy, and was most likely carrying out the plans of organized crime leaders.
The controversy over these assassinations persists. Supporters of the official explanations find a platform in the media, whereas critics are given little access and are demeaningly called “conspiracy buffs.” Controversies were fueled by Oliver Stone’s proconspiracy movie JFK (1991), and by the flurry of media stories arising from the King family’s support of James Earl Ray’s request for a trial in the year before his 1998 death.
Industry:Culture
Assemblies viewed with nostalgia and trepidation, as continuous media presentations underscore. Many reunions are generational, marking rites of passage in education or military service. The 25th reunion establishes a milestone for adult change with regard to high school and college, and provides a retrospective framing for many films and television shows. Other reunions deal with localities, assembling former residents of changing areas to recall “the old neighborhood.” Family reunions unite space and time, whether small-scale events associated with holidays, more emotional coming together at marriage and funerals or massive assemblies that may cross race and class lines in search of history and unity. These may be associated with famous figures (descendants of Thomas Jefferson), but more often mark tradition and separation in black and white families.
Industry:Culture
At the intersection of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers, Pittsburgh set production records in the Second World War as a grimy steel town. With later shifts in its heavy manufacturing economy, Pittsburgh planned the first urbanredevelopment authority in the US; the Pittsburgh Renaissance became the most extensive peacetime reconstruction of an American historical urban center. The revitalized city has changed both civic identity and its economic foundations, stressing medicine and biotechnology research and development, education, banking and computer services, sports (baseball’s Pirates and football’s Steelers) and the arts, gaining renown as a highly habitable city of just over 300,000.
Industry:Culture
Atari, an American company formed in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell, a University of California engineering graduate, became the first major company to dominate the computer and video-game market. Building on popular games like Pong, Asteroids and Breakout, Atari became the leading name in consoles for televisions, video-arcade games and personal computers. This lasted until 1984 when Atari unsuccessfully began to stress computer over console production at a time when the personal computer market was undergoing great change with considerable competition between the Apple Macintosh and IBM clones, partly because the console market itself had reached saturation point from over-production.
Into the vacuum moved Japanese companies like Nintendo, Sega and Sony who now dominate the American computer-game and arcade market. Nintendo markets popular games for its consoles and “game boys,” while Sega’s Genesis machine and Sony’s PlayStation have grabbed a large share of the American market. Depicting street combat, wrestling or Kung Fu, the level of violence associated with these games has intensified, while the graphics have improved, sparking widespread fears that children are being desensitized to killing. The increased sophistication of personal computers, with the added possibility of downloading popular games like a new Pokémon craze, makes this a volatile marketplace, economically and culturally.
Industry:Culture
Atlanta has been a center for a “new” South in the post-Civil War era and the twentieth century. In both eras, this promise conveys civic hope and overlooks ongoing problems, especially those of race.
Incorporated as a city in 1847, Atlanta developed around the intersection of railroads linking the Atlantic and Gulf coasts with the Ohio Valley and the Midwest. Since the 1960s, a complex system of expressways and one of the world’s busiest airports has made Atlanta one of the most dynamic regions in the country. By the late 1990s, the population of the twenty-county Atlanta metropolitan region soared to nearly 4 million (city population 425,000).
Nevertheless, Atlanta’s growth has been very uneven, with most recent increases in employment and population taking place in a broad swath of suburban counties. Between 1970 and 1995, the central city experienced a steady decline in jobs and residents (modest growth reappeared in the late 1990s). As in many other US metropolitan areas, the urban/rural distinction partially corresponds to a racial divide. In 1960 two-thirds of the city’s inhabitants were white; in 1980 an equivalent portion of the urban population was African American. In the 1990s, two-thirds of the suburban population was white, although African Americans, especially middle-class households, had increased markedly during the previous decade. Hence, African Americans dominate city government, while whites control the suburban political establishment, despite Atlanta’s image as the “capital of the Civil Rights movement” and the presence of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center.
For most of Atlanta’s history its social dynamics have largely been a matter of relations between native-born blacks and whites. Since the 1980s, however, the inmigration of transplants from other parts of the United States, as well as the arrival of several hundred thousand immigrants and refugees from Latin America, Eastern Europe, subSaharan Africa, the Middle East and South, East and Southeast Asia have changed the city. In the early 1990s, it was estimated that more than 60 percent of the metro area population was born outside of Georgia.
Atlanta’s economy now includes telecommunications, finance, conventions and a wide range of business services. Its alluring business climate attracts billions of dollars each year in foreign, as well as domestic, investment. The presence of foreign capital, the expanded global reach of Atlanta-based companies, a global television network (CNN) and the 1996 Olympics reinforced boosters’ claims that Atlanta is indeed “The World’s Next Great International City” Atlanta is also a regional center for higher education, especially for African Americans. It is home to five traditionally black colleges (More-house, Spellman, Clark, Atlanta, Morris Brown), as well as Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University. Professional sports teams also form an important component of Atlanta’s identity as a major-league city including the Braves (baseball), the Falcons (football), the Hawks (basketball) and the Thrashers (hockey).
Industry:Culture
Attempt to locate and map more than 100,000 human genes and their 3,000,000 nucleotide bases by 2005. The global project began formally in 1990, supported in the US by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy—the latter showing earlier antecedents in studies of radiation and genetic impact. The project has increased genetic knowledge and also has identified specific contributors to hereditary diseases like cystic fibrosis and colon cancer. Five percent of the budget has been set aside to consider ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) that will arise. Many are concerned with the alteration of genes as well as the meaning of the identification of defective genes in a given population that would make them susceptible to discrimination. Annual US costs rose from $27.9 million (1988) to $303.2 million (1998) as the project accelerated completion to June 2000
Industry:Culture
