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Cinematic Identity Anatomy of a Problem Film Cindy Patton Table of Contents		$20.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-3412-5 ISBN-10: 0-8166-3412-2 $58.50 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-3411-8 ISBN-10: 0-8166-3411-4
Social identity at the intersection of Method acting and Hollywood’s “problem films”. Though largely forgotten today, the 1949 film Pinky had a significant impact on the world of cinema. Directed by Elia Kazan, the film was a box office success despite dealing with the era’s most taboo subjects—miscegenation and racial passing—and garnered an Academy Award nomination for its African American star, Ethel Waters. It was also historically important: when a Texas movie theater owner showing the film was arrested for violating local censorship laws, his case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the censorship ordinance unconstitutional. In Cinematic Identity, Cindy Patton takes Pinky as a starting point to meditate on the critical reception of this and other “problem films” of the period and to explore the larger issues they raise about race, gender, and sexuality. Films like Pinky, Patton contends, helped lay the groundwork for a shift in popular understanding of social identity that was essential to white America’s ability to accept the legitimacy of the civil rights movement. The production of these films, beginning with Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947, coincided with the arrival of the Method school of acting in Hollywood, which demanded that performers inhabit their characters’ lives. Patton historicizes these twin developments, demonstrating how they paralleled, reflected, and helped popularize the emerging concept of the liberal citizen in postwar America, and in doing so illustrates how the reception of projected identities offers new perspectives on contemporary identity politics, from feminism to the gay rights movement. “Historians mining the studio archives would be wise to consider the astute insights provided by Patton and critical theory.” —Film & History Cindy Patton is professor of women’s studies and sociology at Simon Fraser University. Her books include Inventing AIDS, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong, and Globalizing AIDS. 232 pages | 24 b&w photos, 2 tables | 5 3/8 x 8 1/2 | 2007 Theory Out of Bounds Series, volume 29 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1. American Celluloid: New Medium, New Citizen             Back to the Movies             Race and Sexuality: Some Analytic Caveats             Acting the Citizen 2. In the Hearts of Men             To Die For             Popularizing “the Problem”: Politics as Melodrama             Into the Closet             Alienating Queer 3.  Censorship and the Problem Films             Censoring Race             Cinematic Prohibition             Race Mixing             From Image to Story             When a Kiss Is Not a Kiss             Censoring Pinky             “Prejudice” and Epithet             The Dominoes Fall             Sacrilege and Race versus Sexuality 4. Acting Up: The Performing American             Signs of Apartheid             Acting History/The Historicity of Acting             Sound, Class, and Narrative             Narrative Sublation: Recalling-Forgetting History             The Question of Acting 5. Two Conversations: Black and White Americans on Film             Reading (in) “White Time”: Black Performance and the Demand for Literacy             The Victim-Witness Story             Distinguishing Wrongs             An Ear for the Master’s Tropes             “White Time”/Black Place             A Final Word, a Feeling, a Hope Appendix. Pinky: A Synopsis Notes References Filmography Index

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