4 - Film
from Part One - 1945–1960
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
Of all the films in the fifties, it was perhaps the delinquency films that were most thoroughly shot through with omens of things to come: the generation gap and the children's crusade of the sixties.
Peter Biskind, Seeing is BelievingPatriarchal culture relies upon the maintenance of a gender-structured disequilibrium. This involves not merely a power-based, and power-serving, cultural hierarchy of male and female, but also the establishment of normative ‘gender’ values which are internalised by both sexes.
Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely StreetThere are, of course, differences in the respective relationships between novelists, painters, musicians and film-makers and their audiences. It was possible for Jack Kerouac to write the majority of his oeuvre in the long gap between the publication of his first book, The Town and the City (1950), and his second, On the Road (1957). He could do so because the production costs inherent in fiction-writing are insignificant and he was able to support himself via the periods of unskilled labour that counterbalanced his travels in and beyond America. Although the search for publishers was a constant source of frustration for Kerouac until On the Road was accepted, he managed to complete and store a sizeable literary output in anticipation of eventual acceptance. Book publishing expenses are also relatively low – particularly when texts do not include high-quality illustrations – so it was possible for an independent company like San Francisco's City Lights to produce and market texts that could be distributed nationally and internationally by mail, as well as through book shops.
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- Information
- The American Counterculture , pp. 97 - 116Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007