“Fighting Words: Sam Fuller’s Behind-the-Scenes Battles with the Military-Entertainment Industrial Complex”
Professor Marsha Gordon, North Carolina State University
Lecture, March 28, 4pm, Wells B342
Making war films, especially about a contemporary war, can be a risky and challenging enterprise. Studying previously neglected accounts of how war films were actually made in the 1950s allows film historians to have a better sense of just how risky and challenging this endeavor was. This presentation will focus on archival research and discoveries to suggest what can be learned about film history by casting a wide net beyond the usual sources of knowledge that film scholars pursue. Illustrated with primary documents as well as film clips from Sam Fuller’s 1950s films, Dr. Gordon will demonstrate the way that the various stakeholders in American filmmaking influenced the making of war films, including the Production Code Administration, the mainstream media, the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, the FBI, and the Studios themselves.
Dr. Marsha Gordon is Associate Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age, co-editor of Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film, and the former editor of The Moving Image journal. She has written the book about director Sam Fuller’s war films, which has just been published by Oxford University Press, and is completing a collection of essays about non-theatrical film and race, co-edited with Dr. Allyson Nadia Field, which is under contract to Duke University Press. Marsha is a co-founder of Home Movie Day Raleigh and of the infamous Bastard Film Encounter. She has a monthly radio show, “Movies on the Radio,” on WUNC/NPR’s “The State of Things.”