[ecrea] New Book - Screening the Sixties: Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory

My book /Screening the Sixties: Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of 
Memory / has recently been published by Palgrave Macmillan. In case of 
interest, I include details below.


This book provides a detailed account of how Hollywood cinema has 
represented and ‘remembered’ the Sixties. From late 1970s hippie 
musicals such as /Hair/and /The Rose/ through to recent civil rights 
portrayals /The Help/and /The Butler/, Oliver Gruner explores the ways 
in which films have engaged with debates on America’s recent past. 
Drawing on extensive archival research, he traces production history and 
script development, showing how a group of politically engaged 
filmmakers sought to offer resonant contributions to public memory. 
Situating Hollywood within a wider series of debates taking place in the 
US public sphere, Screening the Sixties offers a rigorous and innovative 
study of cinema’s engagement with this most contested of epochs.

//


“Screening the Sixties: Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory, by 
Oliver Gruner, is a superb work on the intersection of film, history, 
and memory. It is not just the best book that I have read on Sixties 
film, it is one of the best studies of its kind on any period. What is 
amazing to me is the author’s ability to deal with so many shifting 
different discourses over time – film, history, politics, gender, and 
race – and yet produce an incisive study. Gruner is not only remarkably 
fluent in multiple theories of social and political development, he also 
well understands the mutable landscapes of films in development.” 
(Robert A. Rosenstone, Professor Emeritus of History, California 
Institute of Technology, USA)


“This is a thoroughly researched and engagingly written study of 
Hollywood films about the Sixties. Screening the Sixties contains 
wonderfully perceptive film analyses and is always sensitive to the 
changing contours of political culture in the United States. Yet the 
book’s most important contribution to the scholarly debates about public 
memory, American politics and Hollywood’s historical imagination is the 
attention and understanding it brings to the craft and art of script 
writing. Oliver Gruner gives the reader unique access to the creative 
process through which the stories that Hollywood tells take shape. By 
detailing the different ways the Sixties have been reconstructed by, and 
have come to matter to, script writers and directors as well as to 
Americans more generally, he demonstrates the ongoing importance of this 
period of profound cultural, social and political transformation.” 
(Peter Krämer, University of East Anglia, UK, author of “The New 
Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars”)


Oliver Gruner is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University 
of Portsmouth, UK. He has written on subjects including the historical 
film, the Sixties and cultural memory. His work has been published in 
the journals Rethinking History and the Historical Journal of Film, 
Radio and Television as well as various edited collections.


Publisher link http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137496324



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