| This dissertation examines early Hollywood's promotion of itself and its products with emphasis on depictions of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Situating the texts of film promotion in relation to their social and industrial contexts, this dissertation is unprecedented in its scale of categories, evidence, and corpus drawing mainly from the leading trade paper Moving Picture World and the popular fan magazine Motion Picture Magazine during the period 1912--25. Following an introductory chapter describing the rationale and methods of this project, four chapters provide the findings of content analyses of randomly sampled materials obtained from these publications including advertisements, publicity articles, photos, and editorial cartoons. Drawing from a sample of 321 items, Chapter Two identifies and examines over a dozen rhetorical techniques that spanned the promotion of various product types. Chapter Three examines a comparable number of categories involving the promotion of the film industry and specific companies. Chapter Four identifies and examines nineteen categories for the promotion of specific films, ranging from storylines to behind-the-scenes information. In order to sufficiently account for marginalized communities, Chapter Five draws from a much larger sampling of over 1,700 items, identifying and describing how a dozen racial, ethnic, and national groups are depicted, ranging from dominant white Americans to Asians and indigenous people.;Two chapters then provide case studies via close textual analyses of several intentionally selected advertising images researched specifically for their depictions of two peoples. Chapter Six examines depictions of Germans with emphasis on the World War I era; Chapter Seven studies depictions of black people in regard to themes of Eurocentrism. The random samplings thus provide findings on broad patterns of promotional technique, while the case studies examine specificities of these qualities as they relate to depictions of racial, ethnic, and national identity and broader industrial and social discourses. Altogether, this project provides original, rich, and voluminous findings vis-a-vis numerous objects and a synthetic methodological approach, thus contributing new scholarship potentially vital to Cinema Studies and with implications for American Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and the history of advertising and the early twentieth century. |
