Agee, James (1909–1955)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Neighbors
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Literary Journalism ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Walker Evans ◽  
The Family ◽  
Film Reviews ◽  
Night Of The Hunter ◽  
Film Critic

James Agee was an American film critic, journalist, and novelist, who, like his modernist contemporaries, pushed against the constraints of his genres. Born in Knoxville in 1909, Agee attended Harvard University before working as a journalist for Fortune, TIME, and The Nation. In 1936 he and photographer Walker Evans spent time among Alabama sharecroppers with the intention of writing a journalistic story about their plight during the Depression. The essay and photographs that they produced were rejected by their editors but were later incorporated into their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Although the book sold poorly, it would become a modern classic and a groundbreaking work of literary journalism. During the 1940s Agee served as a film critic, and his intellectual film reviews elevated the medium from marketing device to literature. He lauded the work of Alfred Hitchcock, revived interest in silent film comedians, and hailed cinema as the preeminent art form of the 20th century. Eventually, he worked in film production himself, co-writing scripts for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), before dying of a heart attack at the age of 45 years. Two years later, his semi-autographical novel A Death in the Family was published and then won the Pulitzer Prize, securing his place in the canon of American writing.

Nicht nur Slapstick: Stummfilme als unterschätzte Zeugen der Medizingeschichte

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (25) ◽  
pp. 1818-1827
Author(s):  
Dennis Henkel ◽  
Eelco M. Wijdicks ◽  
Axel Karenberg
Keyword(s):  
Medical Profession ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Illegal Abortion ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Short Films

AbstractMedicine in silent film has a long history. Although the silent era in cinema was dominated by burlesques (using escaped “lunatics”) a number of themes emerged after systematic review. The cinematic representation of medicine coincided with the discovery of X-rays. During this “roentgenomania”, short films were produced showing groundbreaking X-ray images, which fitted perfectly into needs of dramatic cinema. But soon the “cinema of narration” evolved: Starting just after the turn of the century, the short film “The Country Doctor” was able to address complex interplay between duties and limitations of the medical profession. This was followed by numerous feature films on infectious diseases, which often used tuberculosis as a centerpiece of its story. Directors often took advantage of the well-known stereotype of the omnipotent physician. But in certain medical fields, such as psychiatry or surgery, a more ambivalent figure of the doctor was portrayed, f. e. in “Hands of Orlac” (1924). Silent cinema also offered interesting ideas on the healing powers of the medium itself: in “The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs” (1912) a film screening could cure the patient of fears after reenactment. Finally, a closer look at the early era of film echoes how social conflicts where dramatized, especially in the case of nationwide birth control. How illegal abortion kept the society on its edge, was most clearly shown in the adaption of the scandalous play “Cyankali” (1930).In addition to discussing various topics in the cinematic representation of medicine, this brief overview shows that silent movies were a new and true art form, representing an exceptional resource for historians of film and medicine.

Protesting the Privilege of Perception

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-227
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Walker Evans

This chapter explores how Hale County, Alabama became an iconic site of documentary representation during the twentieth century and why some its poor black and white residents resisted the attempts of documentarians to turn their private lives into public symbols. The chapter begins by examining the collaboration between two local white documentarians, amateur folklorist and poet, Martha Young and photographer J.W. Otts, who recorded the lives and customs of Hale County’s rural black people in the early 1900s. It focuses on Young’s dialect poems that speak from the perspective of black women who refused to be photographed by whites and who saw photography as an exploitative medium. Next, the chapter demonstrates how this narrative and tradition of resistance to documentary continued during the 1930s. It explores the resistance writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans faced in the 1930s from some of the white tenant families they documented for their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it shows how their descendants often found new ways to resist documentarians and journalists in succeeding decades. These acts of resistance transformed poor black and white residents into actors rather than just icons in the documentary process.

Documenting SNCC and the Rural South

2018 ◽  
pp. 156-193
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rural South ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
Walker Evans

This chapter examines the cultural politics of civil rights movement photography by analysing the work of Danny Lyon who worked as a photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee between 1962 and 1964. It explores how documentarians such as Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and James Agee inspired Lyon’s documentary work and how the political culture of the New Left influenced his work’s reception. The chapter first focuses on Lyon’s photographs of black SNCC activists in the South, particularly Robert Moses. Lyon’s photographs of Moses helped spread a romantic mythology around Moses and SNCC that was useful in recruiting white liberal support up North. Lyon also photographed the rural South’s landscapes and people extensively. Many in the New Left romanticized rural black southerners as true outsiders, the authentic opposites of their industrialized and commercialized societies back home. Consequently, Lyon’s photographs had the capacity to aestheticize the same conditions that SNCC recognized as the source of black subjugation. The chapter also highlights how these images and themes appeared and circulated in a civil rights movement photography book, The Movement, which Lyon contributed to and helped produce.

Boring from Within: James Agee and Walker Evans at Time Inc.

Criticism ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Allred
Keyword(s):  
James Agee ◽  
Walker Evans

“Ethnographies”: American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology

Prospects ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guenter H. Lenz
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Walker Evans

When henry nash smith defined American Studies in 1957 as “the study of American culture past and present, as a whole,” he summarized more than two decades of a wide-ranging and self-conscious critical analysis of culture in the United States and, at the same time, initiated the search for the unified or holistic “method” through which American Studies would, finally, achieve maturity as an (interdisciplinary) discipline. The 1930s were the decade when, as Warren Susman pointed out years ago, the complexity of American culture as well as the culture concept were discovered and discussed in the wider public. We think of the work of cultural anthropology, of the studies in cultural relativism by Margaret Mead or of patterns of culture by Ruth Benedict that emphasized the unity of cultures and often were written with a self-critical look at American culture in mind. What was, however, even more important was the fact that during the 1930s American culture manifested itself as a multiculture, as a culture that was characterized even more by variety, heterogeneity, tensions, and alternative traditions than by the strong drive toward national identity and consensus. Cultural anthropologists, critics, and (“documentary”) writers such as “native anthropologist” Zora Neale Hurston, Constance Rourke, or James Agee (with photographer Walker Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) worked out radical new methods and strategies of cultural critique and ethnographic writing in the study of American cultures, in the plural. Thus, historian Caroline F. Ware, writing for the American Historical Association in The Cultural Approach to History, could argue in 1940 that the “total cultural approach” does by no means imply that American culture is something like an organic unity, but that “American culture” is exactly the multiplicity of regional, ethnic, and class cultures and the interactions of these cultures in terms of rhetoric as well as of power, not some “common patterns” or the Anglo-Saxon tradition the “other” groups have to “contribute” to.

French Impressionist Cinema

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
Psychological States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Jean Renoir ◽  
Film Critic

French Impressionist Cinema describes an avant-garde film movement lasting approximately from 1918 to 1929. It was characterised by camera and editing techniques which both augmented the beauty of the image and evoked characters’ psychological states. Impressionist filmmakers regarded film as an art form in itself rather than simply a means for recording plays and novels. They believed art should not attempt to express truths directly, but rather create an experience which gives rise to emotions that would lead audiences to underlying truths. Mood and suggestion took precedence over plot. The ideas underlying French Impressionist Cinema found articulation in the writings of film critic and ciné-club founder Louis Delluc, who went on to write screenplays and direct films in the movement. Other notable Impressionist directors include Abel Gance (1889–1981), Marcel L’Herbier (1890–1979), Germaine Dulac (1882–1942), Jean Epstein (1897–1953), Jacques Feyder (1885–1948), Jean Renoir (1894–1979), and Russian émigré Dimitri Kirsanoff (1899–1957).

The Machine Aesthetic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Emison
Keyword(s):  
Technological Progress ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Social ◽  
Location Shooting

Film was allied with live performance because of its movement and also because many actors started in vaudeville. Hollywood often reproduced Broadway plays, prompting critics to try to define what might be specifically cinematographic, such as a facility for shifting from one layer of consciousness to another. Film allowed for a new kind of experience of dramatic art, more remote than theater in some ways but also endowed with new resources such as the close-up, location shooting, and a broad public sometimes apt for unaccustomed themes and treatments. Urban anonymity and the social effects of an increasingly mechanized environment were recurrent themes. The displacement of silent film by talkies was widely lamented, often on the grounds that silent film was just coming into its own as an art form, an early instance of questioning the reliability of technological progress.

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