Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film

(Paperback)

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From the silent era until the advent of the Cinemascopethe skyscraper as movie star. Whether tall office buildings, high-rise apartments, or lofty hotels, skyscrapers have been stars in American cinema since the silent era. Cinema's tall buildings have been variously represented as unbridled aspiration, dens of iniquity and eroticism, beacons of democracy, and well-oiled corporate machines. Considering their intriguing diversity, Merrill Schleier establishes and explains the impact of actual skyscrapers on America's ideologies about work, leisure, romance, sexual identity, and politics as seen in Hollywood movies.

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"In-depth and rigorous, Schleiers historical framework is more than simply a convenient temporal grid. Furnishing the reader with diegetic as well as external reference points, Schleier makes a strong case for these films as producers of culture at the same time as they can be seen to emerge from within a certain cultural context. Her research extends well beyond the screen." Scope

Author Bio

Merrill Schleier is professor of art, architectural history, and film studies at the University of the Pacific. She is author of The Skyscraper in American Art.