Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place
In the early days of filmmaking, before many of Hollywood’s elaborate sets and soundstages had been built, it was common for movies to be shot on location. Decades later, Hollywood filmmakers rediscovered the practice of using real locations and documentary footage in their narrative features. Why did this happen? What caused this sudden change?
 
Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer answers this question in Shot on Location by exploring the historical, ideological, economic, and technological developments that led Hollywood to head back outside in order to capture footage of real places. His groundbreaking research reveals that wartime newsreels had a massive influence on postwar Hollywood film, although there are key distinctions to be made between these movies and their closest contemporaries, Italian neorealist films. Considering how these practices were used in everything from war movies like Twelve O’Clock High to westerns like The Searchers, Palmer explores how the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a “reality effect” to otherwise implausible stories.
 
Shot on Location describes how the period’s greatest directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Billy Wilder, increasingly moved beyond the confines of the studio. At the same time, the book acknowledges the collaborative nature of moviemaking, identifying key roles that screenwriters, art designers, location scouts, and editors played in incorporating actual geographical locales and social milieus within a fictional framework. Palmer thus offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how Hollywood transformed the way we view real spaces. 
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Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place
In the early days of filmmaking, before many of Hollywood’s elaborate sets and soundstages had been built, it was common for movies to be shot on location. Decades later, Hollywood filmmakers rediscovered the practice of using real locations and documentary footage in their narrative features. Why did this happen? What caused this sudden change?
 
Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer answers this question in Shot on Location by exploring the historical, ideological, economic, and technological developments that led Hollywood to head back outside in order to capture footage of real places. His groundbreaking research reveals that wartime newsreels had a massive influence on postwar Hollywood film, although there are key distinctions to be made between these movies and their closest contemporaries, Italian neorealist films. Considering how these practices were used in everything from war movies like Twelve O’Clock High to westerns like The Searchers, Palmer explores how the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a “reality effect” to otherwise implausible stories.
 
Shot on Location describes how the period’s greatest directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Billy Wilder, increasingly moved beyond the confines of the studio. At the same time, the book acknowledges the collaborative nature of moviemaking, identifying key roles that screenwriters, art designers, location scouts, and editors played in incorporating actual geographical locales and social milieus within a fictional framework. Palmer thus offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how Hollywood transformed the way we view real spaces. 
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Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place

Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place

by R. Barton Palmer
Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place

Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place

by R. Barton Palmer

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$40.95 
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Overview

In the early days of filmmaking, before many of Hollywood’s elaborate sets and soundstages had been built, it was common for movies to be shot on location. Decades later, Hollywood filmmakers rediscovered the practice of using real locations and documentary footage in their narrative features. Why did this happen? What caused this sudden change?
 
Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer answers this question in Shot on Location by exploring the historical, ideological, economic, and technological developments that led Hollywood to head back outside in order to capture footage of real places. His groundbreaking research reveals that wartime newsreels had a massive influence on postwar Hollywood film, although there are key distinctions to be made between these movies and their closest contemporaries, Italian neorealist films. Considering how these practices were used in everything from war movies like Twelve O’Clock High to westerns like The Searchers, Palmer explores how the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a “reality effect” to otherwise implausible stories.
 
Shot on Location describes how the period’s greatest directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Billy Wilder, increasingly moved beyond the confines of the studio. At the same time, the book acknowledges the collaborative nature of moviemaking, identifying key roles that screenwriters, art designers, location scouts, and editors played in incorporating actual geographical locales and social milieus within a fictional framework. Palmer thus offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how Hollywood transformed the way we view real spaces. 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813564081
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 02/18/2016
Series: Techniques of the Moving Image
Pages: 290
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

R. BARTON PALMER is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and the director of film studies at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. He is the author or editor of more than thirty-five books, including Larger than Life: Movie Stars of the 1950s (with Murray Pomerance), “A Little Solitaire”: John Frankenheimer and American Film (with Murray Pomerance), and Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice with Murray Pomerance (all by Rutgers University Press).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Real History, Real Cinema
1. Filming the Transitory World We Live In
2. The Postwar Turn toward the Real
3. Of Backdrops and Place: The Searchers and Sunset Blvd.
4. An American Neorealism?
5. Noir on Location
6. Ramparts We Watch: Legacies
Conclusion: Authentic Banality
Notes
Index
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