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1. What was not allowed in films during this time? 

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1. What was not allowed in films during this time? 

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The was a code between 1934 and 1968 called the Hays Code. The Hays Code was a set of guidelines that prohibited profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic and/or realistic violence, sexual persuasions, and 🤬.

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1. What is the atmosphere in the French quarter?
2. What is the importance? significance of the streetcar in New Orleans

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Post WWII

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2. Why was A Streetcar Named Desire (the film) considered so controversial? 

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2. Why was A Streetcar Named Desire (the film) considered so controversial? 

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What issues arose with the return of the troops?

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What issues arose with the return of the troops?

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-Troops returning home were faced with homelessness, unemployment, PTSD, and overall struggled financially in supporting themselves. They also were stuck with psychological problems from their experiences in the war making it difficult for their families to live with them again.

-There were bills such as the GI Bill that allowed troops to pursue an education or more easily purchase property such as a farm or house.

-With men returning home after the war, you also saw them going back into the general workforce which forced many women to return to their pre-war lives where they fulfilled a more stay-at-home role in their family.

-There were worries that the American economy could not support their burgeoning industrial sector as it transitioned to civilian production after the war, but this worry was negated by the booming economy that gave most Americans a substantial disposable income.

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What is Elia Kazan’s film style? (patterns in his broader work?)

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What is Elia Kazan’s film style? (patterns in his broader work?)

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How did gender roles and expectations change during and after WWII?

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How did gender roles and expectations change during and after WWII?

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How did the American economy change after WWII? 

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How did the American economy change after WWII? 

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How did industry and technology push out agriculture after WWII? 

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How did industry and technology push out agriculture after WWII? 

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How were advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s targeted towards men and women? 

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How were advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s targeted towards men and women? 

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1)  How did Tennessee Williams' life affect his writing of A Streetcar named Desire?

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1)  How did Tennessee Williams' life affect his writing of A Streetcar named Desire?

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What is the difference between the New South and the Old South?

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What is the difference between the New South and the Old South?

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What is the atmosphere in the French quarter?

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What is the atmosphere in the French quarter?

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What is the importance/significance of the streetcar in New Orleans?

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What is the importance/significance of the streetcar in New Orleans?

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A picture of the French Quarter

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Decline of the Hollywood studios

During the U.S. involvement in World War II, the Hollywood film industry cooperated closely with the government to support its war-aims information campaign. Following the declaration of war on Japan, the government created a Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs to coordinate the production of entertainment features with patriotic, morale-boosting themes and messages about the "American way of life," the nature of the enemy and the allies, civilian responsibility on the home front, and the fighting forces themselves. Initially unsophisticated vehicles for xenophobia and jingoism with titles such as The Devil with Hitler and Blondie for Victory (both 1942), Hollywood's wartime films became increasingly serious as the war dragged on (Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die, Jean Renoir's This Land Is Mine, Tay Garnett's Bataan, all 1943; Delmer Daves's Destination Tokyo, Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, Lewis Milestone's The Purple Heart, all 1944; Milestone's A Walk in the Sun, 1946). In addition to commercial features, several Hollywood directors produced documentaries for government and military agencies. Among the best-known of these films, which were designed to explain the war to both servicemen and civilians, are Frank Capra's seven-part series Why We Fight (1942-44), John Ford's The Battle of Midway (1942), William Wyler's The Memphis Belle (1944), and John Huston's The Battle of San Pietro (1944). The last three were shot on location and were made especially effective by their immediacy.

When World War II ended, the American film industry seemed to be in an ideal position. Full-scale mobilization had ended the Depression domestically, and victory had opened vast, unchallenged markets in the war-torn economies of western Europe and Japan. Furthermore, from 1942 through 1945, Hollywood had experienced the most stable and lucrative three years in its history, and in 1946, when two-thirds of the American population went to the movies at least once a week, the studios earned record-breaking profits. The euphoria ended quickly, however, as inflation and labour unrest boosted domestic production costs and as important foreign markets, including Britain and Italy, were temporarily lost to protectionist quotas. The industry was more severely weakened in 1948, when a federal antitrust suit against the five major and three minor studios ended in the "Paramount decrees," which forced the studios to divest themselves of their theatre chains and mandated competition in the exhibition sector for the first time in 30 years. Finally, the advent of network television broadcasting in the 1940s provided Hollywood with its first real competition for American leisure time by offering consumers "movies in the home."

The American film industry's various problems and the nation's general postwar disillusionment generated several new film types in the late 1940s. Although the studios continued to produce traditional genre films, such as westerns and musicals, their financial difficulties encouraged them to make realistic small-scale dramas rather than fantastic lavish epics. Instead of depending on spectacle and special effects to create excitement, the new lower-budget films tried to develop thought-provoking or perverse stories reflecting the psychological and social problems besetting returning war veterans and others adapting to postwar life. Some of the American cinema's grimmest and most naturalistic films were produced during this period, including those of the so-called social consciousness cycle, which attempted to deal realistically with such endemic problems as racism ( Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement, 1947; Alfred Werker's Lost Boundaries, 1949), alcoholism (Stuart Heisler's Smash-Up, 1947), and mental illness (Anatole Litvak's The Snake Pit, 1948); the semidocumentary melodrama, which reconstructed true criminal cases and was often shot on location (Kazan's Boomerang, 1947; Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death, 1947); and the film noir, whose dark, fatalistic interpretations of contemporary American reality are unique in the industry's history (Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946; Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai, 1947; Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, 1947; Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, 1948).

The Kobal Collection/RKO

The fear of communism

Film content was next influenced strongly by the fear of communism that pervaded the United States during the late 1940s and early '50s. Anticommunist "witch-hunts" began in Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) decided to investigate communist influence in motion pictures. More than 100 witnesses, including many of Hollywood's most talented and popular artists, were called before the committee to answer questions about their own and their associates' alleged communist affiliations. On November 24, 1947, a group of eight screenwriters and two directors, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were sentenced to serve up to a year in prison for refusing to testify. That evening the members of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, which included the leading studio heads, published what became known as the Waldorf Declaration, in which they fired the members of the Hollywood Ten and expressed their support of HUAC. The studios, afraid to antagonize already shrinking audiences, then initiated an unofficial policy of blacklisting, refusing to employ any person even suspected of having communist associations. Hundreds of people were fired from the industry, and many creative artists were never able to work in Hollywood again. Throughout the blacklisting era, filmmakers refrained from making any but the most conservative motion pictures; controversial topics or new ideas were carefully avoided. The resulting creative stagnation, combined with financial difficulties, contributed significantly to the demise of the studio system, although, paradoxically, the actions that the studios took between 1952 and 1965, including the practice of blacklisting, can be viewed as an attempt to halt the industry's decline.

The film industry believed that the greatest threat to its continued success was posed by television, especially in light of the Paramount decrees. The studios seemed to be losing their control of the nation's theatres at the same time that exhibitors were losing their audiences to television. The studios therefore attempted to diminish television's appeal by exploiting the two obvious advantages that film enjoyed over the new medium-the size of its images and, at a time when all television broadcasting was in black and white, the ability to produce photographic colour. (In the 1952-53 season, the ability to produce multiple-track stereophonic sound joined this list.) In the late 1940s, fewer than 12 percent of Hollywood features were produced in colour, primarily because of the expense of three-strip Technicolor filming. In 1950, however, a federal consent decree dissolved the Technicolor Corporation's de facto monopoly on the process, and Kodak simultaneously introduced a new multilayered film stock in which emulsions sensitive to the red, green, and blue parts of the spectrum were bonded together on a single roll. Patented as Eastmancolor, this "integral tri-pack" process offered excellent colour resolution at a low cost because it could be used with conventional cameras. Its availability hastened the industry's conversion to full colour production. By 1954 more than 50 percent of American features were made in colour, and the figure reached 94 percent by 1970.

The aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height) of the projected motion-picture image had been standardized at 1.33 to 1 since 1932, but, as television eroded the film industry's domestic audience, the studios increased screen size as a way of attracting audiences back into theatres. For both optical and architectural reasons this change in size usually meant increased width, not increased height. Early experiments with multiple-camera wide-screen ( Cinerama, 1952) and stereoscopic 3-D ( Natural Vision, 1952) provoked audience interest, but it was an anamorphic process called CinemaScope that prompted the wide-screen revolution. Introduced by Twentieth Century-Fox in the biblical epic The Robe (1953), CinemaScope used an anamorphic lens to squeeze a wide-angle image onto conventional 35-mm film stock and a similar lens to restore the image's original width in projection. CinemaScope's aspect ratio was 2.55 to 1, and the system had the great advantage of requiring no special cameras, film stock, or projectors. By the end of 1954, every Hollywood studio but Paramount had leased a version of the process from Fox (Paramount adopted a nonanamorphic process called VistaVision that exposed double-frame images by running film through special cameras and projectors horizontally rather than vertically), and many studios were experimenting with wide-gauge film systems (e.g., Todd-AO, 1955; Panavision-70, 1960) that required special equipment but eliminated the distortion inherent in the anamorphic process.

Like the coming of sound, the conversion to wide-screen formats produced an initial regression as filmmakers learned how to compose and edit their images for the new elongated frame. Sound had promoted the rise of aurally intensive genres such as the musical and the gangster film, and the wide-screen format similarly created a bias in favour of visually spectacular subjects and epic scale. The emergence of the three- to four-hour wide-screen "blockbuster" in such films as War and Peace, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Ten Commandments in 1956 coincided with the era's affinity for safe and sanitized material. Given the political paranoia of the times, few subjects could be treated seriously, and the studios concentrated on presenting traditional genre fare-westerns, musicals, comedies, and blockbusters-suitable for wide-screen treatment. Only a director like Hitchcock, whose style was oblique and imagist, could prosper in such a climate. He produced his greatest work during the period, much of it in VistaVision ( Rear Window, 1954; The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956; Vertigo, 1958; North by Northwest, 1959; Psycho, 1960; The Birds, 1963).

© 1954 Paramount Pictures Corporation

In spite of the major film companies' elaborate strategies of defense, they continued to decline throughout the 1950s and '60s. Because they could no longer dominate the exhibition sector, they faced serious competition for the first time from independent and foreign filmmakers. "Runaway" productions (films made away from the studios, frequently abroad, to take advantage of lower costs) became common, and the Production Code was dissolved as a series of federal court decisions between 1952 and 1958 extended First Amendment protection to motion pictures. As their incomes shrank, the major companies' vast studios and backlots became liabilities that ultimately crippled them. The minor companies, however, owned modest studio facilities and had lost nothing by the Paramount decrees because they controlled no theatres. They were thus able to prosper during this era, eventually becoming major companies themselves in the 1970s.

Cinema around the world

World War II physically and economically devastated the film industries of the Soviet Union, Japan, and most European nations. Italy's early surrender, however, left its facilities relatively intact, enabling the Italian cinema to lead the post-World War II film renaissance with its development of the Neorealist movement. Although it had roots in both Soviet expressive realism and French poetic realism, Neorealism was decidedly national in focus, taking as its subject the day-to-day reality of a country traumatized by political upheaval and war.

Most of the major figures in the Neorealist movement had studied at Mussolini's Centro Sperimentale, but they vigorously rejected the stagy, artificial style associated with the telefono bianco films in favour of a Marxist aesthetic of everyday life. The first identifiable Neorealist film was Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1942; Obsession), a bleak contemporary melodrama shot on location in the countryside around Ferrara. It was suppressed by the fascist censors, however, so international audiences were first introduced to the movement through Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (1945; Open City), which was shot on location in the streets of Rome only two months after Italy's surrender. The film featured both professional and nonprofessional actors and focused on ordinary people caught up in contemporary events. Its documentary texture, postrecorded sound track, and improvisational quality became the hallmark of the Neorealist movement. Rossellini followed it with Paisà (1946; Paisan) and Germania, anno zero (1947; Germany, Year Zero) to complete his "war trilogy." Visconti's second contribution to Neorealism was La terra trema (1948; The Earth Trembles), an epic of peasant life that was shot on location in a Sicilian fishing village. In many respects it is more exemplary of the movement than Ossessione, and it is widely regarded as a masterpiece. Neorealism's third major director was Vittorio De Sica, who worked in close collaboration with scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, the movement's major theorist and spokesman. De Sica's films sometimes tend toward sentimentality, but in Sciuscià (1946; Shoeshine), Ladri di biciclette (1948; The Bicycle Thief), and Umberto D. (1952), he produced works central to the movement.

Neorealism was the first postwar cinema to reject Hollywood's narrative conventions and studio production techniques, and, as such, it had enormous influence on future movements such as British Social Realism, Brazilian Cinema Nôvo, and French and Czech New Wave. It also heralded the practices of shooting on location using natural lighting and postsynchronizing sound that later became standard in the film industry. Despite its influence, in the 1950s Neorealism disappeared as a distinct national movement, together with the socioeconomic context that had produced it, as the Marshall Plan began to work its "economic miracle" in Europe. Italian cinema nevertheless remained prominent through the films of several gifted directors who began their careers as Neorealists and went on to produce their major work during the 1960s and '70s.

Federico Fellini had worked as a scriptwriter for Rossellini before directing in the 1950s an impressive series of films whose form was Neorealist but whose content was allegorical ( I vitelloni [ The Loafers], 1953; La strada [ The Road], 1954; Le notti di Cabiria [ Nights of Cabiria], 1956). During the 1960s Fellini's work became increasingly surrealistic ( La dolce vita [ The Sweet Life], 1960; Otto e mezzo [ 8¹/₂ ], 1963; Giulietta degli spiriti [ Juliet of the Spirits], 1965; Fellini Satyricon, 1969), and by the 1970s he was perceived to be a flamboyant ironic fantasist-a reputation that sustained him through such serious and successful films as Fellini Roma (1972), Amarcord (1974), and E la nave va (1983; And the Ship Sails On).

Cineriz/Interopa Film/Paris Film; photograph from a private collection

While Fellini and Antonioni were putting Italy in the vanguard of modernist cinema, the country's second post-World War II generation of directors emerged. Ermanno Olmi ( Il posto [ The Job], 1961; Un certo giorno [ One Fine Day], 1968; L'albero degli zoccoli [ The Tree of Wooden Clogs], 1979) continued the Neorealist tradition in his tales of ordinary people caught up in systems beyond their comprehension. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had worked as a scriptwriter for Fellini, achieved international recognition for Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964; The Gospel According to St. Matthew), a brilliant semidocumentary reconstruction of the life of Christ with Marxist overtones. Pasolini went on to direct a series of astonishing, often outrageous films that set forth a Marxist interpretation of history and myth- Edipo re (1967; Oedipus Rex), Teorema (1968; Theorem), Porcile (1969; Pigsty), Medea (1969), Salò (1975)-before his murder in 1975. Like Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci was a Marxist intellectual whose films attempt to correlate sexuality, ideology, and history; his most successful films were Il conformista (1970; The Conformist), a striking dissection of the psychopathology of fascism, Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972; Last Tango in Paris), a meditation on sex and death, and Novecento (1976; 1900), a six-hour epic covering 50 years of Italian class conflict. Other important Italian filmmakers include Francesco Rosi ( Salvatore Giuliano, 1962), Marco Bellocchio ( La Cina è vicina [ China Is Near], 1967), Marco Ferreri ( La Grande Bouffe [ Blow-Out], 1973), Ettore Scola ( Una giornata speciale [ A Special Day], 1977), Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani ( Padre padrone [ Father and Master], 1977), Franco Brusati ( Dimenticare Venezia [ To Forget Venice], 1979), and Lina Wertmüller ( Pasqualino settebellezze [ Seven Beauties], 1976).

Beginning in the 1970s, the declining European economy compelled many Italian directors to make coproductions with American, French, German, and Swedish companies. In order to maximize profits, several such films featured international stars in leading roles. This dependence on world markets-as well as the increased popularity of television throughout Italy-often led to the loss of national identity in Italian films, although such filmmakers as Roberto Benigni, Carlo Verdone, and Maurizio Nichetti were able to use the new situation to good advantage. Perhaps the most individual voice in Italian cinema during the 1990s was Nanni Moretti, whose humourous, satiric works, such as Caro diario (1994; Dear Diary), critique the social values of the late 20th century. Moretti's family drama La stanza del figlio ( The Son's Room) won the top award at the 2001 Cannes film festival.

French cinema of the occupation and postwar era produced many fine films ( Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis [ The Children of Paradise], 1945; Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la bête [ Beauty and the Beast], 1946; René Clément's Jeux interdits [ Forbidden Games], 1952; Jacques Becker's Casque d'or [ Golden Helmet], 1952; Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Salaire de la peur [ The Wages of Fear], 1953), but their mode of presentation relied heavily on script and was predominantly literary. There were exceptions in the austere classicism of Robert Bresson ( Le Journal d'un curé de campagne [ The Diary of a Country Priest], 1950; Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé [ A Man Escaped], 1956), the absurdist comedy of Jacques Tati ( Les Vacances de M. Hulot [ Mr. Hulot's Holiday], 1953; Mon oncle [ My Uncle], 1958), and the lush, magnificently stylized masterworks of the German émigré Max Ophüls, whose La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de... (1953), and Lola Montès (1955) represent significant contributions to world cinema. An independent documentary movement, which produced such landmark nonfiction films as Georges Rouquier's Farrebique (1948), Georges Franju's Le Sang des bêtes (1949; The Blood of the Beasts), and Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard (1956; Night and Fog), also emerged at this time. It provided a training ground for young directors outside the traditional industry system and influenced the independent production style of the movement that culminated in the French postwar period of renewal-the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave.

The most important source of the New Wave lay in the theoretical writings of Alexandre Astruc and, more prominently, of André Bazin, whose thought molded an entire generation of filmmakers, critics, and scholars. In 1948 Astruc formulated the concept of the caméra-stylo ("camera-pen"), in which film was regarded as a form of audiovisual language and the filmmaker, therefore, as a kind of writer in light. Bazin's influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951, elaborated this notion and became the headquarters of a group of young cinéphiles ("film lovers")-the critics François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer -who were to become the major directors of the New Wave. Bazin's basic principle was a rejection of montage aesthetics-both radical Eisensteinian cutting and Hollywood-style continuity, or invisible, editing-in favour of the long take and composition in depth, or what he called mise-en-scène. Borrowed from the theatre, this term literally means "the placing in the scene," but Bazin used it to designate such elements of filmic structure as camera placement and movement, the lighting of shots, and blocking of action-that is, everything that precedes the editing process.

The Cahiers critics embraced mise-en-scène aesthetics and borrowed the idea of authorship from Astruc. In proposing la politique des auteurs ("the policy of authors"), christened the auteur theory by the American critic Andrew Sarris, they maintained that film should be a medium of personal artistic expression and that the best films are those imprinted with their makers' individual signature. As a logical consequence of this premise, the Cahiers critics rejected mainstream French cinema and its "tradition of quality" in favour of the classic mise-en-scène tradition (exemplified in the films of Louis Feuillade, F.W. Murnau, Erich von Stroheim, Renoir, Welles, and Ophüls), the films of Hollywood studio directors who had transcended the constraints of the system to make personal films (Howard Hawks, Josef von Sternberg, Hitchcock, and Ford), and the low-budget American B movie in which the director usually had total control over production.

The first films of the New Wave were independently produced dramatic shorts shot in 16-mm by the Cahiers critics in 1956-57, but 1959 was the year that brought the movement to international prominence, when each of its three major figures made their first features. Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups ( The 400 Blows), Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour, and Godard's À bout de souffle ( Breathless) were all in their different ways paradigms of a fresh new style based on elliptical editing and location shooting with handheld cameras. This style was both radically destructive of classic Hollywood continuity and pragmatically suited to the New Wave's need to make its films quickly and cheaply. Its ultimate effect was to deconstruct the narrative language that had evolved over the previous 60 years and to create a reflexive cinema, or meta-cinema, whose techniques provided a continuous comment on its own making.

The critical and commercial success of the first New Wave features produced an unprecedented creative explosion within the French industry. Between 1960 and 1964, literally hundreds of low-budget, stylistically experimental films were made by cinéphiles with little or no experience. Many of these ended in failure, and the New Wave as a collective phenomenon was over by 1965. But the three figures who had initiated the movement, and a small group of sophisticated and talented filmmakers-Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Louis Malle, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy -dominated French cinema until well into the 1970s, and several continued to make significant contributions into the next century.

Leacock Pennebaker, Inc.; photograph from a private collection

Alain Resnais was slightly older than the Cahiers group, but he identified with the New Wave through style and theme. His most famous film is the postmodern mystery L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last Year at Marienbad), which questions the processes of thought and memory-central concerns in Resnais's work. Muriel (1963), La Guerre est finie (1966; The War Is Over), Stavisky (1974), Providence (1977), and Mon oncle d'Amérique (1978; My American Uncle) are all in various ways concerned with the effects of time on human memory from both a historical and a personal perspective.

Cinema 5; photograph from a private collection

Other important New Wave figures with lasting influence are Claude Chabrol, whose entire career can be seen as an extended homage to Hitchcock; Louis Malle, a master of film types who relocated to the United States; Eric Rohmer, whose "moral tales," including Ma nuit chez Maud (1968; My Night at Maud's) and Le Genou de Claire (1970; Claire's Knee), established the ironic perspective on human passion that he maintained in later films; Agnès Varda, famed for her improvisational style; Jacques Demy, whose best films are homages to the Hollywood musical; and Jacques Rivette, the most austerely abstract and experimental of the Cahiers group.

Few national movements have influenced international cinema as strongly as the French New Wave. By promoting the concept of personal authorship, its directors demonstrated that film is an audiovisual language that can be crafted into "novels" and "essays"; and, by deconstructing classic Hollywood conventions, they added dimensions to this language that made it capable of expressing a new range of internal and external states. In the process, the New Wave helped to reinvigorate the stylistically moribund cinemas then found in Britain, West Germany, and the United States; it created a current of "second waves" and "third waves" in the already flourishing Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Japanese cinemas.

The New Wave made France the leading centre of Modernist and postmodern film and film theory, a position it continued to hold for many years. By the 1990s France had followed the lead of other European countries in assimilating into the world market. The influence of the New Wave was still evident, but increased demands for commercial fare resulted in several crime thrillers and period costume dramas, genres that were often specialties of young directors.

Unique among European filmmakers, however, many French directors remained unfettered by commercial demands. At the turn of the 21st century, Chabrol was still a dominant force, with films such as La Cérémonie (1995; Judgment in Stone) demonstrating his continued mastery of the psychological thriller. Prominent young directors included Manuel Poirier, who specialized in affectionate, offbeat romances and "buddy pictures," such as Western (1997); Claire Simon, who, after several years of directing documentaries, adapted her characteristic ironic humour to such fiction films as Sinon, oui (1997; A Foreign Body) and Ça c'est vraiment toi (2000; That's Just like You); and Robert Guédiguian, a writer-producer-director known for works such as Marius et Jeannette (1997) and Á la place du coeur (1998), which effectively blend affectionate character studies with biting social satire.

In Great Britain the post-World War II cinema was even more literary than in France, relying heavily on the adaptation of classics in the work of such directors as Laurence Olivier ( Henry V, 1944; Hamlet, 1948; Richard III, 1955), David Lean ( Great Expectations, 1946; Oliver Twist, 1948), and Anthony Asquith ( The Importance of Being Earnest, 1952). Even less-conventional films had literary sources ( Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands, 1951; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger's The Red Shoes, 1948, and The Tales of Hoffman, 1951). There were exceptions to this trend in a series of witty, irreverent comedies made for Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios ( Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949; The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951; The Man in the White Suit, 1951), most of them starring Alec Guinness, but, on the whole, British postwar cinema was elitist and culturally conservative.

In reaction, a younger generation of filmmakers led by Lindsay Anderson, Czechoslovak-born Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson organized the Free Cinema movement in the mid-1950s. Its purpose was to produce short low-budget documentaries illuminating problems of contemporary life ( Anderson's O Dreamland, 1953; Richardson's Momma Don't Allow, 1955). Grounded in the ideology and practice of Neorealism, Free Cinema emerged simultaneously with a larger social movement assailing the British class structure and calling for the replacement of bourgeois elitism with liberal working-class values. In the cinema this antiestablishment agitation resulted in the New Cinema, or Social Realist, movement signaled by Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), the first British postwar feature with a working-class protagonist and proletarian themes. Stylistically influenced by the New Wave, with which it was concurrent, the Social Realist film was generally shot in black and white on location in the industrial Midlands and cast with unknown young actors and actresses. Like the New Wave films, Social Realist films were independently produced on low budgets (many of them for Woodfall Film Productions, the company founded in 1958 by Richardson and playwright John Osborne, one of the principal Angry Young Men, to adapt the latter's Look Back in Anger), but their freshness of both content and form attracted an international audience. Some of the most famous were Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), John Schlesinger's A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), and Reisz's Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966).

These films and others like them brought such prestige to the British film industry that London briefly became the production capital of the Western world, delivering such homegrown international hits as Richardson's Tom Jones (1963), Schlesinger's Darling (1965), Richard Lester's two Beatles films, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and Anderson's If... (1968), as well as such foreign importations as Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), and American Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). This activity inspired a new, more visually oriented generation of British filmmakers-Peter Yates, John Boorman, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and Ridley Scott -who would make their mark in the 1970s; but, as England's economy began its precipitous decline during that decade, so too did its film industry. Many British directors and performers defected to Hollywood, while the English-language film market simultaneously experienced a vigorous and unprecedented challenge from Australia. In the 1980s, amid widespread speculation about the collapse of the film industry, British annual production reached an all-time low.

Great Britain's film industry, however, has a long history of rebounding from periods of crisis. A major factor in the revival of British cinema during the late 20th century was the founding in 1982 of Channel 4, a television network devoted to commissioning-rather than merely producing-original films. Its success led to the establishment of a subsidiary, FilmFour Ltd., in 1998. Internationally acclaimed films produced or coproduced under either the Channel 4 or the FilmFour banner include A Room with a View (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Trainspotting (1996), Secrets and Lies (1996), The Full Monty (1997), and Welcome to Sarajevo (1997). Also contributing to the resurgence of British film was the National Lottery, which, after its establishment in 1994, annually contributed millions of pounds to the film industry.

Germany's catastrophic defeat in World War II and the subsequent partitioning of the country virtually destroyed its film industry, which had already been corrupted by the Nazis. Rebuilt during the 1950s, the West German industry became the fifth largest producer in the world, but the majority of its output consisted of low-quality Heimatfilme ("homeland films") for the domestic market. When this market collapsed in the 1960s because of changing demographic patterns and the diffusion of television, the industry was forced to turn to the federal government for subsidies. In recognition of the crisis, 26 writers and filmmakers at the Oberhausen film festival in 1962 drafted a manifesto proclaiming the death of German cinema and demanding the establishment of a junger deutscher Film, a "young German cinema." The members of this Oberhausen group became the founders of Das Neue Kino, or the New German Cinema, which was brought into being over the next decade through the establishment of the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (1965; Young German Film Board, a grant agency with funding drawn from the cultural budgets of the federal states), the Filmförderungsanstalt, or FFA (Film Subsidies Board, which generated production funds by levying a federal tax in part on theatre tickets), and the independent distributing company Filmverlag der Autoren (1971; Authors' Film-Publishing Group), with additional funding from the two West German television networks.

These institutions made it possible for a new generation of German filmmakers to produce their first features and established a vital new cinema for West Germany that attempted to examine the nation's unbewältige Vergangenheit, or "unassimilated past." The first such films, which were deeply influenced by the New Wave, especially by the work of Godard, included Volker Schlöndorff's Der junge Törless (1966; Young Torless) and Alexander Kluge's Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (1968; The Artists Under the Big Top: Disoriented). In the 1970s, however, three major figures emerged as leaders of the movement- Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders.

Fassbinder was the most prolific, having made more than 40 features before he died in 1982. His films are also the most flamboyant. Nearly all of them take the form of extreme melodrama, ending in murder or suicide- Warum läuft Herr R. amok? (1969; Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?), Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972; The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and Angst essen Seele auf (1973; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)-and several are consciously focused on German wartime and postwar society ( Die Ehe der Maria Braun [ The Marriage of Maria Braun], 1979; Lola, 1981; Veronika Voss, 1982).

Herzog's films tended more toward the mystical and the spiritual than the social, although there is nearly always some contemporary referent in his work-the image of idealism turned to barbarism in Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972; Aguirre, the Wrath of God); the hopeless inability of science to address the human condition in Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974; Every Man for Himself and God Against All, or The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser); the inherently destructive nature of technology in Herz aus Glas (1977; Heart of Glass); the incomprehensible nature of pestilence in his remake of Murnau's Nosferatu (1979).

Wenders, on the other hand, was profoundly postmodern in his contemplation of alienation through spatial metaphor. In such works of existential questing as Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1971; The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) and Im Lauf der Zeit (1976; "In the Course of Time"; Kings of the Road), he addressed the universal phenomena of dislocation and rootlessness that afflict modern society.

The state subsidy system enabled hundreds of filmmakers, including many women (e.g., Margarethe von Trotta) and minorities, to participate in the New German Cinema. With the exception of the work of Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, however, the New German Cinema did not find a large audience outside West Germany. Yet in terms of exploring and extending the audio-language system of film, it was to the 1970s and '80s very much what the New Wave was to the '60s, and its influence was widely felt.

By the reunification of Germany in 1990, a national identity had still not been forged in any of the various arts. Several outstanding German directors and production artists did emerge, but most of them achieved their greatest success in Hollywood. Roland Emerich ( Independence Day, 1996; The Patriot, 2000) proved to be a skillful practitioner of the action-adventure genre, and Wolfgang Petersen, who received international acclaim for Das Boot (1982), earned a reputation for tense thrillers ( In the Line of Fire, 1993) and unrelenting visual spectacles ( The Perfect Storm, 2000). German cinematographers (Michael Ballhaus, Karl Walter Lindenlaub) and composers (Hans Zimmer, Christopher Franke) were also among the more notable artisans working in Hollywood films at the turn of the 21st century.

The development of an indigenous film culture in Africa occurred at different moments in the history of the continent. The various timelines are related to the political, social, and economic situations in each country and to the varying effects of colonialism on the continent. Only Egypt had a truly active film industry for the first half of the 20th century; the development of cinema elsewhere on the continent was largely the result of individual efforts. One such example is Paul Soumanou Vieyra, the first African graduate of the French film school Institut des Hautes Études Ciné, who joined with friends to produce the short film Afrique sur Seine (1955), considered the first fiction film by black Africans.

Some countries, such as Morocco, did not develop a strong national cinema; others, such as Algeria and Tunisia, nationalized all or parts of their film industries. Several African nations joined the Fédération Pan-Africaine des Cinéastes (FEPACI; "Federation of Pan-African Filmmakers"), formed in 1969 to oversee the political and financial problems of the film industries throughout the continent.

As the 20th century drew to a close, many filmmakers and scholars began to examine the questions of, first, what constitutes an "African film" and, second, how film can best deal with the diaspora of the African people. On one hand, African filmmakers had to acknowledge and learn from the conventions of Western film. On the other, they wanted to highlight and preserve aspects of African culture that had been threatened by Western colonialism. As part of this search to define the goals of African cinema, African filmmakers often used the medium to explore the social issues plaguing postcolonial Africa. Directors such as Adama Drabo ( Ta Dona [ Fire], 1991) and Moufida Tlatli ( Les Silences du palais [ The Silences of the Palace], 1994) explored such matters as education, the environment, and women's rights and suggested that traditional approaches to such issues had to be adapted to the realities of contemporary Africa. Aspects of these realities were examined by such directors as Tsitsi Dangarembga ( Everyone's Child, 1996) and Salem Mekuria ( Ye Wonz Maibel [ Deluge], 1995), who dealt with the AIDS crisis and political violence, respectively. Colonization itself was examined by such directors as Bassek ba Kobhio, whose satiric study of Albert Schweitzer, Le Grand Blanc de Lambaréné (1995; The Great White Man of Lambaréné), shows how colonialism damaged both the colonizer and the colonized.

Although more than half of Japan's theatres were destroyed by U.S. bombing during World War II, most of its studio facilities were left intact. Japan, therefore, continued to produce films in quantity during the Allied occupation (1945-52). Many traditional Japanese subjects were forbidden by the Allied Command as promoting feudalism, however, including all films classified as jidai-geki (period dramas). Nevertheless, the film that first brought Japanese cinema to international attention belonged to that category: Kurosawa Akira's Rashomon (1950), which won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice film festival. The film, a meditation on the nature of truth set in the medieval past, marked the beginning of the Japanese cinema's unprecedented renaissance . During this period, new export markets opened in the West, and Japanese filmmakers produced some of their finest work, winning festival awards throughout the world. Kurosawa, who was already well known in his homeland for a number of wartime and postwar genre films, became the most famous Japanese director in the West on the strength of his masterful samurai epics- Shichinin no samurai (1954; Seven Samurai), Kumonosu-jo (1957; Throne of Blood), Kakushi toride no san akunin (1958; The Hidden Fortress), Yojimbo (1961), and Sanjuro (1962)-which raised the chambara, or "sword-fight," film to the status of art. He made films in other genres, including literary adaptations, gendai-geki (modern dramas), gangster films, and period films that cannot be categorized at all ( Akahige [ Red Beard], 1965; Dersu Uzala, 1975); but Kurosawa always returned to the samurai form for his most profound statements about life and art ( Kagemusha [ The Shadow Warrior], 1980; Ran, 1985).

Two other established directors who produced their greatest films in the postwar period were Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujirō. Both had begun their careers in the silent era and were more traditionally Japanese in style and content than Kurosawa. Mizoguchi's films, whether period ( Sansho dayu [ Sansho the Bailiff], 1954) or contemporary ( Yoru no onnatachi [ Women of the Night], 1948), were frequently critiques of feudalism that focused on the condition of women within the social order. His greatest postwar films were Saikaku ichidai onna (1952; The Life of Oharu), the biography of a 17th-century courtesan, and Ugetsu (1953), the story of two men who abandon their wives for fame and glory during the 16th-century civil wars. Both were masterworks that clearly demonstrated Mizoguchi's expressive use of luminous decor, extended long takes, and deep-focus composition. As one of the great mise-en-scène directors, Mizoguchi can be compared to Murnau, Ophüls, and Welles, but his transcendental visual style makes him unique in the history of cinema.

Ozu Yasujirō too was a stylist, but the majority of his 54 films were shomin-geki, a variety of gendai film dealing with the lives of lower-middle-class families ( Tokyo monogatari [ Tokyo Story], 1953; Higanbana [ Equinox Flower], 1958; Ukigusa [ Floating Weeds], 1959). They were all very much alike and, in a sense, were all part of a single large film whose subject was the ordinary lives of ordinary people and the sacred beauty therein. Ozu's minimalist style-originating in both Zen Buddhist aesthetics and the fact that most of his films were shot within the confines of a typical Japanese house-was based on his use of low-angle long takes in which the camera is positioned about three feet (one metre) off the floor at the eye level of a person seated on a tatami mat. This practice led Ozu to an especially imaginative use of offscreen space and "empty scenes."

The second postwar generation of Japanese filmmakers was mainly composed of Kobayashi Masaki, Ichikawa Kon, and Shindo Kaneto. Kobayashi is best known for Ningen no joken (1959-61; The Human Condition), his three-part antiwar epic set during Japan's brutal occupation of Manchuria, and the beautiful ghost film Kwaidan (1964). Ichikawa's major works were the pacifist films Biruma no tategoto (1956; The Burmese Harp) and Nobi (1959; Fires on the Plain). Shindo is best known for his poetic semidocumentary Hadaka no shima (1960; The Island) and the bizarre, folkloristic Onibaba (1964).

The third generation of postwar directors was most active during the 1960s and '70s. The group was deeply influenced by the French New Wave and included Teshigahara Hiroshi ( Suna no onna [ Woman in the Dunes], 1964), Masumura Yasuzo ( Akai Tenshi [ The Red Angel], 1965), Imamura Shohei ( Jinruigako nyumon [ The Pornographers], 1966), and Oshima Nagisa ( Ai no corrida [ In the Realm of the Senses], 1976). In the mid-1960s, however, competition from multiple-channel colour television and from American distributors forced the Japanese film industry into economic decline. A decade later, two major studios were bankrupt, and film production was increasingly dominated by two domestic exploitation genres: the yakuza-eiga, or contemporary urban gangster film, and the semipornographic eroducti on film, which mixed sex and sadism. During the 1980s and '90s, Japan continued to produce the highest annual volume of films of any country in the world, but the studios remained in decline, and most serious productions, such as Kurosawa's Kagemusha, were funded by foreign interests. At the turn of the 21st century, funding for films remained low, although the market for films was the greatest ever. This situation led to the mass production of low-budget films, as well as to the increased popularity of amateur and experimental films.

China, Taiwan, and Korea

Other Asian nations have had spotty cinematic histories, although most developed strong traditions during the late 20th century. The film industries of China, Taiwan, and Korea were marked by government restrictions for most of the 20th century, and the majority of their output consisted of propaganda films. The loosening of many restrictions in the 1980s and '90s resulted in a new wave of Asian directors who attained worldwide prominence. At the turn of the 21st century, China's "Fifth Generation Cinema" was known for such outstanding young directors as Zhang Yimou, who specialized in tales of political oppression and sexual repression. Korea's cinematic history is difficult to assess, because virtually no films made prior to World War II exist, but works produced during the 1950s and '60s-the "golden age" of Korean cinema-gained a strong international reputation. The most successful Taiwanese directors of the late 20th century were Ang Lee, who directed films ranging from American morality tales such as The Ice Storm (1997) to the lavish martial-arts fantasy Wo hu zang long (2000; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon); and Hou Hsiao-hsien, who was best known for his sensitive family dramas ( Hao nan hao nu [ Good Men, Good Women], 1995).

In 1961 the Indian government established the Film Institute of India to train aspiring directors. It also formed the Film Finance Commission (FFC) to help fund independent production (and, later, experimental films). The National Film Archive was founded in 1964. These organizations encouraged the production of such important first features as Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969; Mr. Shome), Basu Chatterji's Sara akaash (1979; The Whole Sky), Mani Kaul's Uski roti (1969; Daily Bread), Kumar Shahani's Maya darpan (1972; Mirror of Illusion), Avtar Kaul's 27 Down (1973), and M.S. Sathyu's Garam hawa (1973; Scorching Wind) and promoted the development of a nonstar "parallel cinema" centred in Bombay (Mumbai). A more traditional path was followed by Shyam Benegal, whose films ( Ankur [ The Seedling], 1974; Nishant [ Night's End], 1975; Manthan [ The Churning], 1976) are relatively realistic in form and deeply committed in sociopolitical terms. During the 1970s the regional industries of the southwestern states-especially those of Kerala and Karnataka-began to subsidize independent production, resulting in a "southern new wave" in the films of such diverse figures as G. Aravindan ( Kanchana sita [ Golden Sita], 1977), Adoor Gopalakrishnan ( Elipathayam [ Rat-Trap], 1981), and Girish Karnad ( Kaadu [ The Forest], 1973). Despite the international recognition of these films, the Indian government's efforts to raise the artistic level of the nation's cinema were largely unsuccessful. During the 1970s, India was a land of more than one billion people, many of them illiterate and poor, whose exclusive access to audiovisual entertainment was film; television was the medium of the rich and powerful middle class. The Indian film industry was for much of the later 20th century the world's largest producer of low-quality films for domestic consumption, releasing on average 700 features per year in 16 languages.

Australia was a country virtually without a film industry until the late 1960s and early '70s, when the federal government established the Australian Film Development Corporation (after 1975, the Australian Film Commission) to subsidize the growth of an authentic national cinema, founded a national film school (the Australian Film and Television School, later the Australian Film Television and Radio School, or AFTRS) to train directors and other creative personnel, and initiated a system of lucrative tax incentives to attract foreign investment capital to the new industry. The result was a creative explosion unprecedented in the English-language cinema. Australia produced nearly 400 films between 1970 and 1985-more than had been made in all of its prior history.

With financing from the Film Commission and such semiofficial bodies as the New South Wales Film Corporation (by the end of the decade each of the federal states had its own funding agency), the first films began to appear in the early 1970s, and within the next few years several talented directors began to receive recognition, including Peter Weir ( Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975), Bruce Beresford ( The Getting of Wisdom, 1977), Fred Schepisi ( The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, 1978), George Miller ( Mad Max, 1979), and the first AFTRS graduates, Phillip Noyce ( Newsfront, 1978) and Gillian Armstrong ( My Brilliant Career, 1979). Unlike the productions financed with foreign capital by the Canadian Film Development Corporation during the same period, these new Australian films had indigenous casts and crews and treated distinctly national themes. By the end of the 1970s, Australian motion pictures were being prominently featured at the Cannes international film festival and competing strongly at the box office in Europe. In 1981 Australia penetrated the American market with two critical hits, Beresford's Breaker Morant (1980) and Weir's Gallipoli (1981), and the following year it achieved a smashing commercial success with Miller's Mad Max II (1981; retitled The Road Warrior, 1982). In the 1980s, many Australian directors worked for the American film industry, with varying degrees of success (Schepisi: Barbarossa, 1982; Beresford: Tender Mercies, 1983; Armstrong: Mrs. Soffel, 1984; Weir: Witness, 1985; Miller: The Witches of Eastwick, 1987). Despite this temporary talent drain and a decline in government tax concessions, the Australian cinema remained one of the most influential and creatively vital in the world. Prominent younger directors helped to maintain Australia's world status, including Baz Luhrmann, noted for his flamboyant visual style in such films as William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge (2001), and P.J. Hogan, known for biting social comedies such as Muriel's Wedding (1994) and My Best Friend's Wedding (1997).

Russia, eastern Europe, and Central Asia

After World War II the Soviet Union's film industry experienced greater stagnation than that of any other nation except Germany. The Socialist Realism doctrine imposed during Stalin's dictatorship caused film production to fall from 19 features in 1945 to 5 in 1952. Although Stalin died the following year, the situation did not improve until the late 1950s, when such films as Mikhail Kalatozov's Letyat zhuravli (1957; The Cranes Are Flying) and Grigory Chukhrai's Ballada o soldate (1959; Ballad of a Soldier) emerged to take prizes at international film festivals. Some impressive literary adaptations were produced during the 1960s (Grigory Kozintsev's Hamlet, 1964; Sergey Bondarchuk's Voyna i mir [ War and Peace], 1965-67), but the most important phenomenon of the decade was the graduation of a whole new generation of Soviet directors from the Vsesoyuzny Gosudarstvenny Institut Kinematografii (VGIK; "All-Union State Institute of Cinematography"), many of them from the non-Russian republics-the Ukraine (Yury Ilyenko, Larissa Shepitko), Georgia (Tengiz Abuladze, Georgy Danelia, Georgy Shengelaya and Eldar Shengelaya, Otar Yoseliani), Moldavia (Emil Lotyanu), Armenia (Sergey Paradzhanov), Lithuania (Vitautas Zhalekevichius), Kyrgyzstan (Bolotbek Shamshiev, Tolomush Okeyev), Uzbekistan (Elyor Ishmukhamedov, Ali Khamraev), Turkmenistan (Bulat Mansurov), and Kazakhstan (Abdulla Karsakbayev). By far the most brilliant of the new directors were Sergey Paradzhanov and Andrey Tarkovsky, who both were later persecuted for the unconventionality of their work. Paradzhanov's greatest film was Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors), a hallucinatory retelling of a Ukrainian folk legend of ravishing formal beauty. Tarkovsky created a body of work whose seriousness and symbolic resonance had a major impact on world cinema ( Andrey Rublev, 1966; Solaris, 1971; Zerkalo [ Mirror], 1974; Stalker, 1979; Nostalghia [ Nostalgia], 1983), even though it was frequently tampered with by Soviet censors.

During the 1970s the policy of Socialist Realism (euphemized as "pedagogic realism") was again put into practice, so only two types of films could safely be made-literary adaptations and bytovye, or films of everyday life, such as Vladimir Menshov's Moskva slezam ne verit (1980; Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears). The Soviet cinema then experienced a far-reaching liberalization under the regime of Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policy of glasnost ("openness") took control of the industry away from bureaucratic censors and placed it in the hands of the filmmakers themselves. The Soviet cinema began to be revitalized as formerly suppressed films, such as Elem Klimov's Agoniya (1975), were distributed for the first time, and films that dealt confrontationally with Stalinism, such as Abuladze's Pokayaniye (1987; Repentance), were made without government interference.

Of the eastern European nations that fell under Soviet control after World War II, all except East Germany and Albania produced distinguished cinemas. Following the pattern set by the Soviets, these countries nationalized their film industries and established state film schools. They experienced a similar period of repressive government-imposed restrictions between 1945 and 1953, with a "thaw" during the late 1950s under Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. In Poland the loosening of ideological criteria gave rise to the so-called Polish school led by Jerzy Kawalerowicz ( Matka Joanna od aniołŅw [ Mother Joan of the Angels], 1961), Andrzej Munk ( Eroica, 1957), and, preeminently, Andrzej Wajda ( Pokolenie [ A Generation], 1954; Kanał [ Canal], 1956; Popiół i diament [ Ashes and Diamonds], 1958). Wajda's reputation grew throughout the 1960s and '70s, when he was joined by a second generation of Polish filmmakers that included Roman Polanski ( Nóż w wodzie [ Knife in the Water], 1962), Jerzy Skolimowski ( Bariera [ Barrier], 1966), and Krzysztof Zanussi ( Iluminacja [ Illumination], 1972). The Polish cinema expressed its support of the Solidarity trade union in the late 1970s through films by Wajda and such younger directors as Krysztof Kieślowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Feliks Falk.

The example of the Polish school encouraged the development of the Czech New Wave (1962-68), which became similarly entangled in politics. The Czechoslovak films that reached international audiences during this period were widely acclaimed for their freshness and formal experimentation, but they faced official disapproval at home, and many were suppressed for being politically subversive. Among the directors who were most critical of Pres. Antonín Novotný's hard-line regime were Věra Chytilová ( Sedmikrasky [ Daisies], 1966), Jaromil Jireš ( Zert [ The Joke], 1968), Ján Kadár ( Obchod na Korze [ The Shop on Main Street], 1965), Miloš Forman ( Hoří, má panenko [ The Firemen's Ball], 1967), Jirí Menzel ( Ostře sledované vlaky [ Closely Watched Trains], 1966), and Jan Němec ( O Slavnosti a hostech [ The Party and the Guests], 1966). When Alexander Dubček became president in January 1968, the Czechoslovak cinema eagerly participated in his brief attempt to give socialism "a human face." After the Soviet invasion of August 1968, many New Wave films were banned, the Czechoslovak film industry was reorganized, and several prominent figures, including Forman and Němec, were forced into exile.

In Hungary the abortive revolution of 1956 forestalled a postwar revival in film until the late 1960s, when the complex work of Miklós Jancsó ( Szegénylegények [ The Round-Up], 1965; Csillagosok, katonák [ The Red and the White], 1967; Még kér a nép [ Red Psalm], 1972) began to be internationally recognized. The rigorous training given students at the Budapest Film Academy ensured that the younger generation of Hungarian filmmakers would rise to prominence, as happened in the case of István Szabó (1981; Mephisto), István Gaál ( Magasiskola [ Falcons], 1970), Márta Mészáros ( Örökbefogadás [ Adoption], 1975), and Pál Gábor (1978; Angi Vera), many of whose films-as do Jancsó's-involve ideological interpretations of the national past.

Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria, unlike their more sophisticated Warsaw Pact allies, did not begin to develop film industries until after World War II. Yugoslavia was the most immediately successful and produced the countries' first internationally known director: the political avant-gardist Dušan Makavejev ( Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T. [ The Tragedy of the Switchboard Operator], 1967). Makavejev belonged to the late 1960s movement known as Novi Film (New Film), which also included such directors as Puriša Djordjević, Aleksandar Petrović, and Živojin Pavlović, all of whom were temporarily purged from the film industry during a reactionary period in the early 1970s. This dark period came to an end in 1976 when the filmmakers of the Prague school made their debuts. Goran Marković, Rajko Grlić, Srdjan Karanović, Lordan Zafranović, and Emir Kusturica were all graduates of the FAMU film school in Prague who had begun their careers working for Yugoslav television. Their offbeat, visually flamboyant social comedies brought a new breath of life into Yugoslav cinema and won a number of international prizes. Like Czechoslovakia, whose Jiří Trnka perfected puppet animation in the 1950s, Yugoslavia also became world famous for its animation, especially that of the "Zagreb school" founded by Vatroslav Mimica and Dušan Vukotić.

The Romanian and Bulgarian film industries did not begin to progress until the mid-1960s. Both countries subsequently developed authentic national cinemas and boasted directors well known on the festival circuit (e.g., the Romanians Dan Piţa, Mircea Veroiu, and Mircea Daneliuc and the Bulgarians Hristo Hristov, Eduard Zakhariev, Georgi Dyulgerov, and award-winning animator Todor Dinov).

For decades, state money was readily available for filmmaking throughout the Soviet bloc countries, provided that the films were ideologically acceptable. This changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union in January 1992, whereupon funding became the chief obstacle to filmmaking in the region. By the late 1990s, fewer than two dozen films per year were produced in Russia. Adding to the decline were such factors as theatres that were closed or converted into businesses such as car dealerships, a home-video industry that was barely in its inceptive stages, and the popularity of American and Asian films. Although such directors as Sergey Bodrov and Vladimir Khotinenko received a degree of international acclaim, the financial situation of the film industries throughout Russia and eastern Europe during the 1990s suggested that it would be many years before these nations established a degree of prominence in world cinema.

Buñuel's presence in Mexico between 1946 and 1965 had little effect on the general mediocrity of that nation's film industry, however. The commercialism of the Mexican cinema was briefly mitigated by a group of idealistic young filmmakers in the late 1960s (Arturo Ripstein, Felipe Cazals, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo) but reappeared even more relentlessly in the following decade. The Mexican cinema enjoyed a resurgence at the turn of the 21st century, and directors such as Alfonso Cuarón ( Y tu mamá también, 2001) and Alejandro González Iñárritu ( Amores perros, 2000) gained international acclaim.

In the United States, as elsewhere, the last half of the 1960s was a time of intense conflict between generations and of rapid social change. Deeply involved with its own financial crisis, Hollywood was slow to respond to this new environment, and the studios made increasingly desperate attempts to attract a demographically homogeneous audience that no longer existed. The stupendous failure of Twentieth Century-Fox's blockbuster Cleopatra (1963) was briefly offset by the unexpected success of its The Sound of Music (1965), but over the next few years one box-office disaster after another threatened the studios' independence until most were absorbed by conglomerates. RKO had been sold to the General Tire and Rubber Corporation in 1955, and Universal had been acquired by MCA (the Music Corporation of America) in 1962. Paramount was then taken over by Gulf + Western Inc. in 1966, United Artists by Transamerica Corporation in 1967, Warner Bros. by Kinney National Services, Inc. (later renamed Warner Communications), in 1969, and MGM by the Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian in 1970. Continuing this trend, in 1981 Twentieth Century-Fox was acquired by Denver oil tycoon Marvin Davis (who later shared ownership with publisher Rupert Murdoch), and Columbia was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 1982. United Artists merged with MGM in 1981 to form MGM/UA, which was subsequently acquired by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., in 1986. The impact of such mergers was pronounced because they reduced filmmaking in the United States to a subordinate role; in the profit-making machinery of these multinational corporations, film production was often less important than the production of such items as refined sugar, ball bearings, field ammunition, rubber tires, and soft drinks.

Before conglomeration had completely restructured the industry, however, there was an exciting period of experimentation as Hollywood made various attempts to attract a new audience among the nation's youth. In an effort to lure members of the first "television generation" into movie theatres, the studios even recruited directors from the rival medium, such as Irvin Kershner ( A Fine Madness, 1966), John Frankenheimer ( Seconds, 1966), Sidney Lumet ( The Pawnbroker, 1965), Robert Altman ( Countdown, 1968), Arthur Penn ( Mickey One, 1965), and Sam Peckinpah ( Major Dundee, 1965). These directors collaborated with film-school-trained cinematographers (including Conrad Hall, Haskell Wexler, and William Fraker), as well as with the Hungarian-born cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, to bring the heightened cinematic consciousness of the French New Wave to the American screen. Their films frequently exhibited unprecedented political and social consciousness as well.

Star Wars© 1980 Lucasfilm Ltd./Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Abraham, F. Murray; Amadeus Courtesy of Orion Pictures Corporation

Linda R. Chen/© 1994 Miramax Films; photograph from a private collection

David A. Cook Robert Sklar The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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History of the motion picture - The war years and post-World War II trends

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American economic boom after World War II

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By Kelli Frost

"If I did not write, I'd go mad."
-Tennessee Williams

Born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Missouri, Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams is considered one of the foremost American playwrights of the twentieth century. He is best known for The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He was the son of pioneer Tennesseeans, mostly military men and politicians. Most of the biographical information available on Tennessee Williams came from Williams himself. He wrote his own history in the form of essays and introductions to his plays, and helped others write it through numerous interviews which he gave. Some sources list Williams's birth date as 1914, but Williams purposely confused the year--not out of vanity, but out of necessity: early in his life he entered a play-writing contest in which he had to knock three years off his age to qualify. He won the contest, but never corrected the erroneous date of birth.

Williams wrote about loneliness, frustration, and the desperate need for communication by people who are society's misfits. At least parts of this had to reflect his own life. Sometimes a misfit himself, Williams left home for good at an early age. His mother was overprotective, and he did not like his father. During his childhood, his sister, Rose, was his only friend. Later she was confined to an institution after an emotional breakdown from which she never recovered. His father was a traveling salesman who spent very little time with his family and made no permanent home for them as they moved among various Mississippi towns. When his father took a job managing sales for a shoe company, the family moved to St. Louis in 1918. A year later a younger brother, Dakin, was born. The family struggled to survive life with a father who was stingy, crude, and often drunk. The family was marked with anger, tensions, and separateness.

Williams recalled being teased by gangs of boys when he began to go to school. Nevertheless, he graduated from high school in January 1929, and went on to the University of Missouri that fall. In 1932, during the Great Depression, he dropped out of college in order to take a full-time job in a shoe company. His three years there were, he said, "a living death." After suffering a physical breakdown, Williams went to live with grandparents in Memphis, where he enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis. There his interest in writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Herman Melville intensified. In 1938, he graduated from the University of Iowa and began writing and wandering, both of which continued throughout his life, in spite of his later affluence.

Williams's career as a playwright began in earnest in 1935, when his first play was produced. (This play has never been printed.) The next year, he became associated with the Mummers, a lively St. Louis theatre group. By 1939, he had dropped the Thomas Lanier and ceased to be simply a local playwright. This was the year he lied about his age and submitted a series of plays to the Group Theater. The most important result of the Group Theatre prize was that Williams got himself an agent, Audrey Wood, who had faith in him and worked hard for him. She immediately procured Williams a Rockefeller Fellowship, which gave him money enough to work comfortably. His first published plays appeared in The Best Plays in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1944, and 1945.

He achieved his greatest acclaim as a playwright during the 1940s and '50s. Though he spent six months writing screenplays in Hollywood, The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago on December 26, 1944, and in New York on March 31, 1945. The play ran for more than a year, and Williams had arrived. From that time on, his career is a matter of public record. For the rest of his life, he averaged more than a play every two years.

If we take 100 performances as a respectable run for a play in New York, Williams had only two failures before 1963. His greatest commercial and critical successes were The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Night of the Iguana. These plays not only had the longest runs, but all received the Drama Critics Circle Award, and both A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were given the Pulitzer Prize. Williams took comfort in the knowledge that he had gained a reputation as one of the handful of American playwrights who could be considered serious dramatists.

During the 1970s, Williams became depressed and went into a decline. He spent two months in a psychiatric hospital in St. Louis, dealing with personal and professional pressures. He later told interviewers that he would stick with off-Broadway, where tensions were less stressful for him. He published three collections of short plays, and Hollywood has made over fourteen films from his plays and short stories.

Williams's plays contain themes aplenty, though he said of them: "I have never been able to say what was the theme of my play, and I don't think I have ever been conscious of writing with a theme in mind. . . . Usually when asked about a theme, I look vague and say, 'It's a play about life'" (American Writers [St. Paul: University of Minnesota, 1974], 384).

Williams wrote about both victims and victimizers, such as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, but some of his best-written characters are his versions of society's misfits: artists, madmen, cripples, foreigners, and perverts. Williams invariably explores the relationships his characters have with God and the universe, yet his themes imply that there is no God and that most of society fits into one or more of the above categories of misfits. His characters try to escape this godless universe by running away from it (like Tom in The Glass Menagerie) or by retreating into themselves (like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire).

From the beginning of his career, Williams tried to tell the real truth about human beings, but he never wanted to do that as a realist. He made constant use of both literary and theatrical devices of nonrealistic sort, ranging from the subtle to the shockingly obvious, from organic machine to pure gimmick, from the mythic to the popular. Mythic and significant names were Williams's way of stressing the nonrealistic elements in characters. As though pushing his characters toward caricature and his plots toward myth and decorating both with symbols were not enough, Williams made use of every possible tool of the theatre-sets, props, lights, sound-to emphasize that his plays were not realistic. Clearly Williams was a playwright with a sharp eye for nuances of speech and gesture which have always been of great importance to the realistic dramatist; yet, he consistently chose to work in the nonrealistic tradition.

Williams died in 1983, at the age of 72. He will always be revered as a troubled soul who was able to describe that torment better than any American dramatist before or since.

(The introductory quotation is from Harold Clurman, Tennessee Williams: Eight Plays [New York: Doubleday, 1979], ix.)

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About the Playwright: A Streetcar Named Desire - Utah Shakespeare Festival

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By Kelli Frost "If I did not write, I'd go mad." -Tennessee Williams Born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Missouri, Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams is considered one of the foremost American playwrights of the twentieth century. He is best known for The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desi

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Hollywood's golden age had reached a peak by 1940. The eight largest studios (Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [MGM], RKO Radio, Twentieth Century Fox, United Artists, Paramount, Universal, and Columbia) controlled more than 90 percent of film production and distribution. The big studios were churning out at least one film per week. The Production Code Association (PCA) kept a tight leash on the topic matter that could be presented in films. The association made sure the good guys always won, sexuality was suggested rather than mentioned openly, and social issues were not debated. The strict censorship in Hollywood was meant to protect the nearly eighty million Americans who went to the movies each week. When regular Americans and those in Hollywood began to wonder what role the United States would play in the war, attitudes about censorship changed. Studios wanted to explore political issues in films, but many feared that ticket sales might be hurt. By 1941, Hollywood had decided to support the war, making training films for the army and releasing Sergeant York, the first of many films supporting U.S. engagement in the war.

Although the films that did comment on the war supported U.S. involvement, 95 percent of the films made during the period had nothing to do with war. The majority of films made in the 1940s were playful romps, such as The Philadelphia Story (1940), starring Cary Grant (1904-1986), James Stewart (1908-1997), and Katharine Hepburn (1907-); or the comedies of Bud Abbott (1895-1974) and Lou Costello (1906-1959). Walt Disney (1901-1966) also released his animated symphony performance called Fantasia. More serious films included The Grapes of Wrath (1940), the film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Depression (1929-41) by John Steinbeck (1902-1968), and Citizen Kane (1941), the first film of Orson Welles (1915-1985). Many consider Citizen Kane the greatest film of all time.

After the war, film noir ("dark cinema") became a popular style for movies. The dark, serious films, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946), gave new life to the popular detective stories so popular with readers during the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the most popular detective writers, including Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), and James M. Cain (1892-1977), adapted their novels and stories into screenplays. Americans were intrigued with these films, especially as fear and apprehension grew with the onset of the Cold War (1945-91). Even with the popularity of a new film style, movie attendance sank after the war, mostly because more Americans stayed home to watch their newly affordable television sets.

Elaborate musicals were enormously popular during the 1940s. Nearly eleven million people attended Broadway extravaganzas in 1943. Most of the shows had upbeat, patriotic themes with casts of singing soldiers or high-kicking women. Popular shows included This Is the Army (1942), Something for the Boys (1943), and Winged Victory (1945). All proceeds from This Is the Army and Winged Victory (millions of dollars) were contributed to the Army Emergency Relief Fund.

Although Broadway enjoyed great success, dramatic theater suffered during the 1940s. Dramatic theatrical productions had difficulty finding paying audiences. The Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s was discontinued, and dwindling attendance pushed Project-funded plays off Broadway and into smaller theaters. Despite the smaller profits, two of the greatest American playwrights wrote during the 1940s: Tennessee Williams (1914-1983) and Arthur Miller (1915-) wrote dramatic masterpieces. Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1945) and Miller's All My Sons (1947) introduced audiences to themes of disillusionment and the difficulties of attaining the "American dream" of success and happiness.

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Hollywood's golden age had reached a peak by 1940. The eight largest studios (Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [MGM], RKO Radio, Twentieth Century Fox, United Artists, Paramount, Universal, and Columbia) controlled more than 90 percent of film production and distribution. The big studios were churning out at least one film per week.

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Blanche DuBois (one of the characters) was long considered to be inspired by Willaims' sister Rose, who suffered from mental health problems and eventually underwent a lobotomy.

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A streetcar Named Desire was named after a real streetcar line. Named for its endpoint on Desire Street in the Ninth Ward, the Desire line ran down Canal Street onto Bourbon and beyond.

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They were not allowed to have mixed race couples unless to condemn them. They used mostly white characters, even to portray the black characters (blackface).

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, the first likely contender in next year's Oscars race, depicts the quiet resilience of Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple in 1950s Virginia facing enormous legal and social opposition to their interracial union. But before the Lovings' lives came to be celebrated in art, Hollywood had to contend with its own conflicted history of depicting interracial relationships.

The silent film era occasionally featured mixed-race relationships - sometimes to condemn them, as in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and nearly always using white actors to portray both parties ( Birth of a Nation included extensive use of blackface, while Richard Barthelmess donned yellowface to play the Chinese man in love with Lillian Gish in Griffith's sympathetic romance Broken Blossoms).

But in 1930 the Motion Picture Production Code (colloquially known as the Hays Code, after then-Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association president Will H. Hays) explicitly forbade the depiction of miscegenation, which it defined as "sex relationships between the white and black races." The code was meant to curb immorality in the film industry - profanity, "excessive and lustful kissing" and disrespectful uses of the flag also were prohibited - and because interracial marriage was still banned in 30 states, its depiction in film would imply the condoning of an illegal act.

The code was actively enforced from 1934 through the late '40s, with violating films failing to secure release. This happened to Josephine Baker's 1935 classic Princess Tam Tam, which stars the entertainer known as Black Venus as an exotic Tunisian woman who becomes the muse of a French novelist. The pic, produced in France, was denied a Production Code Administration certificate of approval and therefore could not be screened in most mainstream theaters in the U.S., although it gained a cult following in independent cinemas that catered to black audiences.

There were exceptions: Universal's 1936 adaptation of the wildly popular Broadway musical Show Boat, which features the revelation that the wife of one of the white leads is part-black, was granted an exemption because its source material was already so familiar. It likely also helped that the biracial character was played by Helen Morgan, a white actress. And MGM's 1951 version of Show Boat cast the white Ava Gardner in that role - Lena Horne, who campaigned for the part, claimed that the Hays Code prevented her from getting it.

Another film, Twentieth Century Fox's 1949 drama Pinky, got around the Hays Code through the same casting loophole. The story directly dealt with passing - the title character is a light-skinned black woman who travels north and falls in love with a white doctor, who assumes she is white as well. Although black screen sirens like Horne and Dorothy Dandridge vied for the starring role, producer Darryl Zanuck opted for the white Jeanne Crain, who received an Academy Award nomination for best actress for the part.

Even when the story did not depict an interracial relationship, the Hays Code was used to prevent two actors of different races from performing opposite each other in a romantic or marital context. In MGM's 1937 adaptation of The Good Earth, about a family of farmers in China, nearly the entire ensemble appears in yellowface, even though Anna May Wong, one of the first (and only) Chinese-American movie stars, was available to play O-Lan, the female lead. But because the Hays Code made it illegal for her to appear onscreen as the wife of Jewish-American actor Paul Muni (playing the lead, Wang Lung), the role went to German-American actress Luise Rainer, who won the best actress Oscar for playing the Chinese farmer's wife.

The anti-miscegenation clause was removed in the Code's 1956 revision. The next year, Warner Bros.' Sayonara, about two U.S. Air Force pilots who fall in love with a pair of Japanese women, won four Oscars, including for supporting couple Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki (who remains the only actress of Asian descent ever to win an Academy Award).

Perhaps the most iconic cinematic example of interracial romance is Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which won two Oscars and was a box-office hit. The Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn dramedy was released in 1967, six months after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.

Hollywood continues to be skittish at times when it comes to depicting interracial love. Will Smith said in 2005 that Eva Mendes was cast in Hitch to avoid pairing him with either a black or a white actress: "There's an accepted myth that if you have two black actors in a romantic comedy, people around the world don't want to see it. ... So the idea of a black actor and a white actress comes up - that'll work around the world, but it's a problem in the U.S." But the legacy of films such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Loving indicate that, as is so often the case, critical and commercial success may be the most compelling motivators of progress.

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From the Hays Code to 'Loving': Hollywood's History With Interracial Romance

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the first likely contender in next year's Oscars race, depicts the quiet resilience of Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple in 1950s Virginia facing enormous legal and social opposition to their interracial union. But before the Lovings' lives came to be celebrated in art, Hollywood had to contend with its own conflicted history of depicting interracial relationships.

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A picture of the Lively French Quarter

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- main way of transportation
- because the minorities didn't have cars they were the main ones that used them
-If the streetcars were ever shut down they had no way transportation

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Tennesee Williams was a writer during the 1940s who was most prominate for writing playwrites and writing plays like The Glass Menageniere,The rose tattoo and one of his most affective works a street car named desire.

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-In the heart of the French Quarter
-Lots of Partying and Jazz
-Lit up with neon lights
-Has celebrations such as Mardi Gras
Important places:
The Royal Sonesta Hotel (opened 1969)
Galatoire's Restaurant (Opened 1905)
Jean Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop (constructed sometime before 1772)
Old Absinthe House (Built 1806)
Fritzel's European Jazz Club

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Bourbon Street | New Orleans Streets to Visit

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On the most famous street in New Orleans, you can find live music, beads, balconies, restaurants, bars, shops, alcohol & more. Click here to learn more about the famous Bourbon Street!

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Alabama, like the rest of the South, experienced drastic economic and social change in the post- Reconstruction, or New South, era. The term "New South" refers to the economic shift from an exclusively agrarian society to one that embraced industrial development. Influential southerners such as Atlanta Constitution managing editor Henry W. Grady employed the term in an effort to promote economic investment and industrial growth in the decimated and depressed South, as well as to tap the region's abundant and largely untouched natural resources.

During this time, Alabama saw profound changes in its economic and political landscape, the emergence of new manufacturing and mining industries, the growth of urban centers, and advancements in education. The period is also characterized by civil and social upheaval; farming hardships and exploitative labor practices led to the emergence of labor unions, and Jim Crow laws allowed racism to flourish under the guise of a policy known as "separate but equal." Alabama's geographic location in the Deep South, along with its lack of skilled labor, capital, and education, caused the state to lag-economically and technologically-far behind the nation and even some parts of the former Confederacy. Alabama's natural resources, however, gave the state an advantage over some of its neighboring states in attracting investment and industry.

Prior to the Civil War, most free people in Alabama made their living by farming cotton. Although little industry existed, Alabama contained large, unexploited deposits of coal, iron ore, and limestone. Jefferson County is the only place in North America where these three essential ingredients for steel production are found in such close proximity. These natural resources drew investors to Alabama, and from 1880 to 1890, the manufacture of iron products came to dominate industry in Alabama. By 1889, Alabama ranked second in the nation in iron ore production. Unlike antebellum farmers all over the South, who grew cotton and shipped the raw material up north or to Europe for manufacture into a product, Alabama manufacturers produced iron ore within the state. Alabama's first blast furnace, built by the Pratt Coal and Coke Company, began operations in 1880. By 1891, 53 furnaces operated in Alabama.

Cotton manufacturing also increased in the New South era. The number of cotton mills in the state increased, with the number of people employed at these mills increasing from 1,300 in 1860 to 9,000 by 1900. Once considered waste, cottonseeds became a valuable raw material. By 1900, more than a dozen Alabama mills produced oil, soap, fertilizer, and stock food from cottonseeds.

In addition to steel and cotton manufacture, grist mills, flour mills, and wool mills continued to operate and many expanded. The growth of manufacturing in Alabama was rapid and extensive during the New South era. From 1880 to 1900, the number of operating factories in the state rose from 2,000 to more than 5,500, with the number of factory employees increasing from approximately 10,000 people to more than 33,000. Birmingham became the center of commerce in the state, and its more than 200 industrial plants included cotton gins, brickyards, bottling works, broom factories, gristmills, furniture factories, a jug factory, an overalls factory, and a cottonseed-oil mill.

Notable factory and mine owners included Daniel Pratt, Henry F. DeBardeleben, James Sloss, Enoch Ensley, and Braxton Bragg Comer. Pratt, Alabama's preeminent antebellum industrialist, and son-in-law DeBardeleben founded the Experimental Coke and Iron Company. DeBardeleben partnered with James Sloss and established the Sloss Furnace Company. Ensley created the Pratt Coal and Iron Company from the Alice Furnace Company and the Linn Iron Works in 1884 and also founded the Ensley Land Company, which became a major land holder in Birmingham. Comer started what would become one of the largest grist mills in the state in Barbour County before moving to Birmingham and developing successful textile operations at Avondale Mills.

Despite the wave of industrialization sweeping through the state, most Alabamians-nearly 90 percent-still lived on and worked farms. Cotton production rebounded by the 1880s to pre-Civil War yields, but market prices dropped continuously through the 1880s and 1890s. As a result, conditions for Alabamians engaged in agricultural production did not improve after Reconstruction. Many described the tenant farming and sharecropping systems, which emerged as a result of an overabundance of unskilled workers and the persistent lack of credit opportunities, as little better than the slave system that preceded it.

Both freed slaves and poor white small farmers were affected. Freedpeople were generally unable to find credit to purchase land of their own. Landowners, who no longer had an enslaved labor source, had little money to pay salaries. As a solution, owners either rented their land to farmers (tenant farming) or allowed farm laborers to live on and work their land in exchange for a share of the profits from cash crops (sharecropping). Such relationships developed not only between farmers and landowners, but also between farmers and creditors, who advanced groceries, seed, fertilizer, and other necessities for a share of future profits. These advances were known as "crop liens." Both tenant farming and sharecropping exploited laborers and doomed them to perpetual debt. Few tenant farmers or sharecroppers could hope for better than breaking even each year.

Tenant farmers and sharecroppers established advocacy organizations, such as the Grange, the Agricultural Wheel, the Farmers Alliance, and the Sharecroppers' Union, to combat exploitative business practices and advocate for reforms. The Farmers' Alliance achieved modest successes in reducing railroad shipping costs and establishing the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industry to help educate and fight for their rights. Agricultural curricula at Auburn University and Tuskegee Institute sought to educate farmers in both the business and science of farming.

Birmingham became the most representative symbol of the New South in Alabama. The city was founded in 1871 by a group of enterprising capitalists who successfully convinced railroad interests to build lines through the area to provide shipping for the iron, coal, and limestone products. Located at the intersection of north-south and east-west railroad lines, Birmingham became a center of commerce. Lots in Birmingham worth $100 in 1871 were worth $50,000 by 1900. People said the city grew "like magic," hence its nickname, the "Magic City." By 1900, the population of the city rose to nearly 40,000 as industry expanded. Soon after the rise of Birmingham, entrepreneurs attempted to recreate its success by founding other towns where iron and coal deposits were suspected to be abundant. DeBardeleben founded Bessemer, Ensley named a town after himself, and Samuel Noble and Daniel Tyler founded the planned community of Anniston, which became the fourth largest city in Alabama by 1900. Some towns that lured investors, such as Fort Payne, did not fulfill their promise and bankrupted their hopeful developers.

Sizeable cities not related to industrial areas expanded during this time as well. Mobile struggled throughout the early New South era because of the decrease in cotton exporting, but it rebounded as textile shipping increased and the state dredged a deeper shipping channel. Huntsville, Montgomery, and Gadsden grew larger and more prosperous because of the influx of successful textile mills.

Transportation improvements played a major role in the development of Alabama during the New South era. Railway construction connecting Mobile with Nashville, through Montgomery and Birmingham, was completed in 1872. In addition, a line linking Meridian, Mississippi, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, also ran through Birmingham. By 1900, the Southern Railway system, the Atlantic Coastal Line, and the Seaboard Line all reached into Alabama, which by then had more than 4,000 miles of working track.

Waterways also played an important role in shipping. Improvements to steamboats and Mobile Harbor made water transportation more viable. The invention of sternwheeler steamboats, which were more powerful than sidewheelers, improved efficiency on Alabama's riverways. Dredging efforts in Mobile Harbor in 1876 and 1888 were crucial in maintaining Mobile's status as a major ocean port.

After almost a decade of Reconstruction efforts by Republicans, southern conservative Democrats, or " Bourbons," regained political power in the period known as Redemption, which began in the mid-1870s. The Republican Party (the party of Lincoln) held a majority in the House in 1872, when the black vote carried Republican candidates to victory. But the party failed to stay unified because of the emergence of Republican figures like Lewis E. Parsons, who was no supporter of rights for African American Alabamians. This discord among Republicans sympathetic to and those opposed to civil rights opened the door for Democrats to reassert themselves in the state political arena. After winning back control of the state in 1874, Democrats drafted a new Constitution in 1875 that re-imposed white supremacy and enshrined states' rights, limited government, and low property taxes. The party split into conservative and reform factions. Reform Democrats supporting Rueben F. Kolb split from the party to form the Jeffersonian Democratic Party.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the Populist Party emerged as a viable competitor in the traditional two-party system. Democrats in Alabama viewed Populists as a threat to their support from small farmers and discontented factory workers and bristled at their calls for government regulation of business and industry, which were viewed by many people as corrupt and exploitive. Kolb, who courted the Populist vote and spoke out for Populist ideas, narrowly lost two controversial gubernatorial races marred by charges of voter fraud, apparently well founded.

In 1901, Alabama's legislators drafted a new Constitution in which conservative Democrats sought to disfranchise black and poor white voters through severe limitations on suffrage. Clearer voting requirements set the voting age at 21 and established an annual poll tax. Vague qualifications included a requirement to be "of good character" and hold a "steady job." Under the new constitution, the number of black male voters fell from well over 100,000 to fewer than 4,000. The poll tax also deterred poor whites from voting and secured power in the hands of the conservative Democrats well into the twentieth century. Nationally, reform became the sentiment that carried the day, and many reform-minded politicians were able to enact progressive improvements in areas like education and worker rights. The conservative Democrats had to embrace some tenets of progressivism to ensure their continued dominance of Alabama politics.

Antebellum society did not place a premium on public education. A significant portion of available jobs required unskilled labor and social stratification discouraged widespread educational opportunities. In 1880, more than half of Alabama's population was illiterate. Even more significant, more than 80 percent of Alabama's African Americans could not read or write. A major part of the New South optimism hinged on improving education and thereby enhancing opportunities. Several important colleges and universities in Alabama were founded in the New South era. The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama (now Auburn University) was founded in 1872; Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo) was chartered in 1892; And the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (present-day Tuskegee University) was founded in 1881 to train black educators.

Several existing colleges relocated or were forced to rebuild following the Civil War. The University of Alabama, which suffered significant damage during the conflict, began rebuilding in 1867 and reopened in 1869. Southern University moved from Greensboro to Birmingham and became Birmingham-Southern College. Howard College moved to Birmingham in 1887 and became Samford University.

"Normal" schools, established to train teachers, opened in several cities during this time. In 1872, the state of Alabama took over Florence Wesleyan University in Florence and renamed it Florence State Normal School (now the University of North Alabama). Additional institutions were founded in Jacksonville and Livingston in 1882 and Troy in 1887. Social reformer Julia S. Tutwiler served as the president of the normal college in Livingston (now the University of West Alabama)and became a major force in education reform in the state.

Elementary and high school education also made great strides during the New South era. Many of the normal schools also offered preparatory (elementary and high school) programs. More than 100 private elementary and high schools were chartered in Alabama between 1880 and 1900, and a state school system headed by a state superintendent was established. In addition, many of Alabama's larger towns set up their own independent school systems.

Education among blacks in Alabama, however, never progressed as well as that of whites, and lost ground after the gains made during Reconstruction. Beginning in 1891, local jurisdictions were authorized to apportion spending, and they unevenly divided funding among the segregated schools in favor of white institutions.

New industrial labor brought with it strikes and controversy over working conditions, as well as renewed calls for reform of convict and child labor. In antebellum times, plantation owners held legal jurisdiction over slaves and whites often settled disputes outside the courts. Reconstruction Alabama had a severe shortage of jails and penitentiaries to house convicted criminals. As a result, the state leased out convicts to companies as a source of revenue. Convicts provided cheap labor for new industrialists, who needed mine and mill workers. Working conditions for convicts were deplorable; they were overworked, poorly fed and clothed, and harshly treated. Because the majority of the convicts were black, the use and abuse of conflict labor drew comparisons to slavery. Activists and reformers, such as Julia S. Tutwiler, called on the state to abolish convict labor. Free workers also argued against the convict worker program, charging that it reduced available jobs and depressed wages. Labor unions and worker organizations such as the Greenback Labor Party, the Knights of Labor, and United Mineworkers of America tried unsuccessfully to organize Alabama's industrial workers beginning in the 1880s, but convict leasing continued until 1928, when Alabama became the last state in the nation to end the practice.

Child labor became a major social concern during this time. Many new industrialists built villages around their mills and factories to house laborers. These self-contained communities usually included a school, a market, and a church, and provided housing allowed companies to keep wages low. Workers had no choice but to accept such arrangements, given the alternatives of tenant farming or not working at all. Low wages also meant that the family needed as many paychecks as possible, and so mothers, fathers, and children all joined the workforce. Protestors, most prominently Montgomery minister Edgar Gardner Murphy, lobbied unsuccessfully to establish a law limiting a child's workday to eight hours. In 1909, Alabama passed a law setting the minimum age of a child worker at 12 and limiting the maximum hours a child could work per week to 60. Alabama raised the minimum age law to 14 in 1915, and child labor would continue in Alabama until the 1930s.

Race relations in Alabama were always contentious, but in the New South era, disfranchisement, dire working conditions, and convict leasing worsened them significantly. Optimism among blacks during Reconstruction quickly dissipated when conservative Democrats regained power. The Constitution of 1901 dealt a devastating blow to dreams of racial equality in Alabama.

Some blacks protested the new voter restrictions, including Montgomery's Jackson W. Giles, who led the Colored Men's Suffrage Association and filed a class-action suit against the state on behalf of blacks who lost their voting rights, but the suit failed in the U.S. Supreme Court. Others, including Tuskegee Institute's Booker T. Washington, and Alabama A&M University's William H. Councill thought that protesting was futile and had the dangerous potential to incite the anger of whites and thereby hinder efforts to empower African Americans in the state. The numbers are staggering: in 1900, more than 180,000 black men had the right to vote; by 1903, this number had been reduced to less than 3,000. While the Alabama Constitution of 1901 severely inhibited the suffrage rights of Alabama's poor whites, the legislation was intended to reduce the political power of blacks in the state and to concentrate power among wealthy whites.

The re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century also exacerbated racial tension in Alabama. By the 1920s, the Klan had nearly 100,000 members and held tremendous political power. Yet Klan violence alienated many of its members, and membership dropped significantly toward the end of the decade.

Approaching the Great Depression

New South industry changed the face of Alabama. It brought prosperity for some and new concerns for others. Reform movements in the early decades of the twentieth century sought new railroad regulations, prison reform, improved working conditions for both industrial and farm workers, and prohibitions on alcohol. Both industrial and farm production reached an all-time high in the 1920s. Ironically, it was this production, which exceeded the country's capacity for consumption, that contributed to the economic collapse of 1929 and essentially signaled the demise of the New South era all over the region. In Alabama, the effects of the Great Depression were so devastating that Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt called Birmingham "the worst hit town in the country."

Fuller, Chet. I Hear Them Calling My Name: A Journey through the New South. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Gaither, Gerald H. Blacks and the Populist Revolt: Ballots and Bigotry in the "New South." Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1977.

Hesseltine, William Best. Confederate Leaders in the New South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950.

Lewis, W. David. "The Emergence of Birmingham as a Case Study of Continuity between the Antebellum Planter Class and Industrialization in the 'New South.'" Agricultural History 68 (Spring, 1994): 62-79.

Rogers, William Warren, and Robert David Ward. August Reckoning: Jack Turner and Racism in Post Civil War Alabama. Baton Rouge, La.: LSU Press, 1973.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South. Baton Rouge, La.: LSU Press, 1951.

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Alabama, like the rest of the South, experienced drastic economic and social change in the post-Reconstruction, or New South, era. The term "New South" refers to the economic shift from an exclusively agrarian society to one that embraced industrial development. Influential southerners such as Atlanta Constitution managing editor Henry W.

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What were any fears of standing out….conformity, cold war, etc. red scare

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What were any fears of standing out….conformity, cold war, etc. red scare

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Post World War II brought much precaution to people, significantly, was the fear of foreign powers and the return of communism.   Most notably, was the Red scare, where many feared foreign communist infiltration of the US’ government. It was named the Red Scare as it was associated with the communist symbol. In combat of this, was McCarthyism, where Senator Joseph McCarthy's campaign falsely accused many of being part of the communist party, often being blacklisted and losing their jobs

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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The atmosphere was very lively and bright. Jazz filled the streets with partying till dawn. You could say that the lively atmosphere is the complete opposite of what happens in the movie. It shows the contrast between ideas of life, whether you are living a lie or not. The significance of the street car was that it connected the whole city and was the main way of transportation for everyone especially minorities. Although if the streetcars where ever shut down there would be no way for them to get anywhere because they didn't have cars.

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The gender roles changed during WWII when women began entering the work force to make up for the men who were off at war. After WWII many of these women were fired for their jobs due to the return of the men. Advertisements in the 40's and 50's were targeted towards women to send and return the genders into the work force. During the war in the early 40's the ads encouraged women to enter the work force and after the war when the men returned the ads pushed women into the same place they were before. These ads told them their place was in the kitchen and to serve a working man.

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In the period after world war two, there were some potential issues with the return of the troops, but those were mitigated by the booming economy, the main issue that eventually rose was McCarthyism. With the return of the troops there were questions about if they were going to be able to return to normal life. There were some mental health issues, but bills such as the GI bill helped troops transition back into normal life. The economy was booming, as it had shown that it was able to adapt to civilian production, with both the supply and demand being high. There was also further development in the military sector fueled by the Cold War. Fears around the Cold War, however, caused everyone to be worried about the rise of communism. This sparked McCarthyism and baseless attacks about political beliefs, especially communism, which turned into a a fear of standing out in any way and a period of increase conformity.

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Industrial Age and New South Vs. Old South

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Industrial Age and New South Vs. Old South

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After WWII, there was a dramatic change in the South. Industrialization shifted the Old South into what we now know as the new South. The New South includes an expansion on technology, and decreased jobs in farming, while the Old South contained slave labor, and unacceptable gender stereotypes between men and women.

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- Birmingham, Alabama prospered from iron and steel manufacturing, and mining and furniture production benefited other parts of the South
- Although new industries did emerge in this era, the benefits of the New South did not accrue to African Americans or poor whites.
- Although AAs were freed there was still white supremacy and they were still thought of as lesser than.

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Could the American South be remade as an industrial economy like the North?

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In the Mid 1930s Kazan joined New York's experimental Group Theatre. There, he practiced the "Method" style of acting, which encourages actors to draw on their personal experiences and to express themselves with raw emotion on stage. Some actors can get involved with a character using method acting and have to change their daily routine to insane lengths like; gaining or losing a substantial amount of weight or having terrible sleeping habits. One of the films Kazan directed was a film adaptation of the play written by Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar named Desire. A Streetcar named Desire had a lot of reflection on Tennessee William's own life. In the play, Williams wrote about loneliness, frustration, and the desperate need for communication by people who are society's misfits, which are some things Williams encountered in his past life. For example he left home for good at an early age which most likely affected his mental health and influenced him to write about his feeling of loneliness and frustration in the play. 

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In the Mid 1930s Kazan joined New York's experimental Group Theatre. There, he practiced the "Method" style of acting, which encourages actors to draw on their personal experiences and to express themselves with raw emotion on stage. Some actors can get involved with a character using method acting and have to change their daily routine to insane lengths like; gaining or losing a substantial amount of weight or having terrible sleeping habits. One of the films Kazan directed was a film adaptation of the play written by Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar named Desire. A Streetcar named Desire had a lot of reflection on Tennessee William's own life. In the play, Williams wrote about loneliness, frustration, and the desperate need for communication by people who are society's misfits, which are some things Williams encountered in his past life. For example he left home for good at an early age which most likely affected his mental health and influenced him to write about his feeling of loneliness and frustration in the play. 