Creativity and commerce: Michael Klinger and new film history

The crisis in film studies and history concerning their legitimacy and objectives has provoked a reinvigoration of scholarly energy in historical enquiry. 'New film history' attempts to address the concerns of historians and film scholars by working self-reflexively with an expanded range of sources and a wider conception of 'film' as a dynamic set of processes rather than a series of texts. The practice of new film history is here exemplified through a detailed case study of the independent British producer Michael Klinger (active 1961-87) with a specific focus on his unsuccessful attempt to produce a war film, Green Beach, based on a memoir of the Dieppe raid (August 1942). This case study demonstrates the importance of analysing the producer's role in understanding the complexities of film-making, the continual struggle to balance the competing demands of creativity and commerce. In addition, its subject matter - an undercover raid and a Jewish hero - disturbed the dominant myths concerning the Second World War, creating what turned out to be intractable ideological as well as financial problems. The paper concludes that the concerns of film historians need to engage with broader cultural and social histories. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Stanley Kubrick and the Internationalisation of Postwar Hollywood

This essay examines the early career, up to 1960, of the Jewish-American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, covering his first five features as well as his short films, his unrealised projects and also, very briefly, his initial work as a photojournalist. With detailed references to Fear and Desire (1953), Paths of Glory (1957) and The German Lieutenant (a script that came close to production in 1959), it discusses Kubrick’s strong interest in twentieth-century German and Austrian culture and history, his ‘procedural’ approach to stories about World Wars I and II, and the increasing internationalisation of the content and production circumstances of his work. These developments are discussed in relation to box office trends and public opinion in the United States as well as to changes in Hollywood’s mode of production and key markets in the post-war era