Lea Jacobs, The Decline Of Sentiment: American Film In The 1920s. Berkeley, Los Angeles And London: University Of California Press, 2008. ￡16.95.358 Pp

摘要

Sentimentality would seem to be an integral feature of interwar American films. It is true that Hollywood continued making films in which sentimentality and emotional appeal were central, but at the same time sentimentality became an object of criticism. Popular taste began to view sentimentality in a negative light. In this excellent cultural history of the 1920s, Lea Jacobs seeks to track these changes. She provides an analytical treatment of taste in this period by investigating shifts in the criteria by which aesthetic judgements about film were being made. Some filmmakers responded to these shifts and in turn added to the momentum of alterations in taste. Such alterations need also to be understood in relation to literary modernism and its radical break with the past. Jacobs charts the transformations in film preferences and aesthetic values in the 1920s by taking a long trawl through the industry trade press and the popular press of the time. As a result, she is able to focus in detail on those films considered to be up-to-date and innovative, and those considered stale and old-fashioned. She examines four popular narrative genres: the sophisticated comedy, the male adventure story, the seduction plot and the romantic drama.