著者

笹川 慶子

出版者

日本映像学会

雑誌

映像学 (ISSN:02860279)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.63, pp.38-54, 1999-11-25

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This paper focuses on how the wartime conditions in Hollywood influenced the development of Hollywood musicals and other films during 1939-1945. The goal is to foreground a historical process in which the musicals had been incorporating the different ideologies of the times,by tracting the relationships between the studios and the political and the economical situations. Under the strong influence of the F.D.Roosevelt's Administration, the Office of War Information attempted to imbue the movies with its political ideas by distributing the Govenment Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry to the studios. Since the OWI had no power over censorship,the studios ignored the manual. However after mid-1943 when the OWI established a coalition with the Office of Censorship, the studios suddenly became compliant, and more films were molded into what the OWI required: the propaganda of Americanism. In such a circumstance,the musicals had been considered as a mere-trivial-escapist-entertainment among the OWI and the studios. Nonetheless, it is impossible to disregard the changes of the wartime musicals. The musicals also interwove the politically different ideologies with their conventional formars, and could be functioning as the powerful propaganda during the war by reproducting the utopian images of Americanism.