Projecting Politics (2^nd Ed.)
Political Messages in American Films

The new edition of this influential work updates and expands the scope of the original, including more sustained analyses of individual films, from The Birth of a Nation to The Wolf of Wall Street. An interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between American politics and popular films of all kinds?including comedy, science fiction, melodrama, and action-adventure?Projecting Politics offers original approaches to determining the political contours of films, and to connecting cinematic language to political messaging. A new chapter covering 2000 to 2013 updates the decade-by-decade look at the Washington-Hollywood nexus, with special areas of focus including the post-9/11 increase in political films, the rise of political war films, and films about the 2008 economic recession. The new edition also considers recent developments such as the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the controversy sparked by the film Zero Dark Thirty, newer generation actor-activists, and the effects of shifting industrial financing structures on political content. A new chapter addresses the resurgence of the disaster-apocalyptic film genre with particular attention paid to its themes of political nostalgia and the turn to global settings and audiences. Updated and expanded chapters on nonfiction film and advocacy documentaries, the politics of race and African-American film, and women and gender in political films round out this expansive, timely new work.

A companion website offers two additional appendices and further materials for those using the book in class.

I. Studying Political Films

1. Setting the Scene: A Theory of Film and Politics
2. The Making of a Message: Film Production and Techniques and Political Messages
3. Causes and Special Effects: The Political Environment of Film

II. Political Films by Decade

4. Politics in the Silent Movies
5. The 1930s: Political Movies and the Great Depression
6. The 1940s: Hollywood Goes to War
7. The 1950s: Anti-Communism and Conformity
8. The 1960s: From Mainstream to Counterculture
9. The 1970s: Cynicism, Paranoia, War and Anticapitalism
10. The 1980s: New Patriotism, Old Reds, and a Return to Vietnam in the Age of Reagan
11. The 1990s: FX Politics
12. The 2000s: 9/11 and Beyond

III. Political Films by Topic

13. True Lies? The Rise of Political Documentaries
14. Film and the Politics of Race: The Minority Report
15. Women, Politics, and Film: All About Eve?
16. White House Down? Politics in Disaster

Appendix

Closing Credits: A Political Filmography

A recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in the Humanities, Elizabeth Haas has published in numerous journals and teaches film studies at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.

The author of many books including Local Politics: Governing at the Grassroots, Terry Christensen is professor emeritus in the political science department at San Jose State University in California.

Peter J. Haas,recipient of a Fulbright Foundation Senior Specialist grant, is education director for the Mineta Transportation Institute and teaches political science at San Jose State University.