Artists In The Audience: Cults, Camp, And American Film Criticism; Author: Taylor, Greg; Paperback

Author: Taylor, Greg
Paperback; 11 Halftones
208 pages
Published: September 2001
University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton
ISBN: 0691089558

Gone with the Wind an inspiration for the American avant-garde? Mickey Mouse a crucial source for the development of cutting-edge intellectual and aesthetic ideas? As Greg Taylor showsin this witty and provocative book, the idea is not so far-fetched. One of the first-ever studies of American film criticism, Artists in the Audience shows that film critics, beginning in the 1940s, turned to the movies as raw material to be molded into a more radical modernism than that offered by any other contemporary artists or thinkers. In doing so, they offered readers a vanguard alternative that reshaped postwar American culture: nonaesthetic mass culture reconceived and refashioned into rich, personally relevant art by the attuned, creative spectator.Shows that film critics, beginning in the 1940s turned to the movies as raw material to be molded into a more radical modernism that offered by other contemporary artists or thinkers. Shows that film critics, beginning in the 1940s turned to the movies as raw material to be molded into a more radical modernism that offered by other contemporary artists or thinkers.How have popular American films influenced film criticism and intellectual thinking? This book shows that critics, beginning in the 1940s, turned to the movies as raw material to be moulded into a more radical modernism.