CURRENT ISSUES
IN NORTH AMERICAN AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Black Film, White Faces: Hollywood's Take on the Death Penalty, 1951-1968.

Tuesday,
14 June 2022,
6:00 c.t.-8:00 pm

Room A, IAAK
Regina-Pacis-Weg 5
53113 Bonn

This talk focuses on a cluster of over 30 crime films from the 1950 s and early 1960 s that revolve around the death penalty. It has often been argued - particularly with reference to Robert Wise’s film I Want to Live! (1958) - that Hollywood took a progressive, abolitionist stance toward the death penalty. An analysis of Hollywood’s entire death penalty-related output during the period as well as an attention to films’ formal strategies of representing executions suggests, however, that Hollywood’s take on the death penalty was much more of "mixed verdict".

PD Dr. Birte Christ teaches American Literature, Culture, and Media at Justus Liebig University Gießen. She is the author of Modern Domestic Fiction: Popular Feminism, Mass Market Magazines, and Middle-Class Culture, 1905-1925 (2012) and is currently preparing a book entitled Imagining the American Death Penalty: Race and Representation in the Long Twentieth Century.