Description
Book SynopsisThe book features previously unpublished manuscripts and correspondence illustrating case studies of John Dos Passos' screen writing for Paramount Pictures (1934); his role in writing and filming The Spanish Earth (1937), a Spanish Civil War relief project whose circumstances culminated in his public break from the Left; the 1936 screen treatment he wrote just before The Spanish Earth in consultation with its director, Joris Ivens; and his later-career attempts, beginning in the 1940s, to adapt his radically innovative trilogy U.S.A. directly for the screen and to realign its leftist politics toward the anti-Communist conservatism reflected in his work and activism after the 1930s and the disillusionments of the Spanish Civil War. It thus provides a new context for and reading of his political reorientation in the 1930s that not only ended his long friendship with Ernest Hemingway but also evoked the opprobrium of his former champions on the Left and redefined his literary career.
Trade Review'A rich and engrossing book... J
ohn Dos Passos and Cinema will be the authoritative work on this aspect of Dos Passos's career and aesthetics for some time. But it also provides fresh insights into the perennial topic of his political biography and his shift to the right, as well as providing superb detail on the specifics of the networks and aesthetics of transnational, intermedial experiment on the left that galvanized modernist culture in the 1920s and 1930s.'
Mark Whalan,
Modernism/modernityTable of ContentsIntroduction
Part I (1917-1928) From the Screen to the Page: “Goin’ to the movies…” in the Great War
Chapter 1
Dos Passos and Soviet Filmmakers: Meyerhold, Vertov, Eisenstein, and the Development of Montage
Chapter 2
Dos Passos and U.S. Film: D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Hearts of the World (1918)
Chapter 3
“Propaganda for peace”: Film and Narrative in One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921)
Part II (1934-37) From Paramount Studios to the Spanish Front: Writing Hollywood, Filming History
Chapter 4
“[T]he world’s greatest center of…propaganda”: Hollywood and The Devil Is a Woman
Chapter 5
Dos Passos and Joris Ivens: “Dreamfactory” and Meta-film
Chapter 6
Dos Passos, Ivens, and Hemingway: The Spanish Earth and the Death of Jose Robles
Chapter 7
“Go home and try to tell the truth”: Revision and Reception of The Spanish Earth
Part III (1947-70) U.S.A. From Page to Stage to Screens: Political and Structural Revisions
Chapter 8
Filmic Narrative Into Narrative Film: Dos Passos Drafting U.S.A. for the Screen (1947-56)
Chapter 9
Negotiation and Adaptation: U.S.A. Under Option, Adapted for Television, and Produced for the Stage (1959-60)
Chapter 10
Early Aesthetics Through the Lens of Late Politics (1960-70)
