John Dos Passos and Cinema

After faculty positions at University of North Carolina affiliates and Georgetown University School of Foreign Service-Qatar, Lisa Nanney co-edited and co-authored the 2017 study of John Dos Passos’s visual works, The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos: A Collection and Study (Clemson University Press). Her current book, John Dos Passos and Cinema (2019), further explores the intersection of his narrative methods and the visual arts by investigating his writing directly for the cinema, his translation of modernist fictional techniques to the screen, and the ways these forays into film writing were shaped by his re-evaluation of the Left at a pivotal point in his career. Nanney is also the author of John Dos Passos Revisited (Macmillan Press, 1998), a critical biography.

• IntroductionPart I (1917-1928) From the Screen to the Page: “Goin’ to the movies…” in the Great WarChapter 1Dos Passos and Soviet Filmmakers: Meyerhold, Vertov, Eisenstein, and the Development of MontageChapter 2Dos Passos and U.S. Film: D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Hearts of the World (1918)Chapter 3“Propaganda for peace”: Film and Narrative in One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921)Part II (1934-37) From Paramount Studios to the Spanish Front: Writing Hollywood, Filming HistoryChapter 4“[T]he world’s greatest center of…propaganda”: Hollywood and The Devil Is a Woman Chapter 5Dos Passos and Joris Ivens: “Dreamfactory” and Meta-filmChapter 6Dos Passos, Ivens, and Hemingway: The Spanish Earth and the Death of Jose RoblesChapter 7“Go home and try to tell the truth”: Revision and Reception of The Spanish EarthPart III (1947-70) U.S.A. From Page to Stage to Screens: Political and Structural RevisionsChapter 8Filmic Narrative Into Narrative Film: Dos Passos Drafting U.S.A. for the Screen (1947-56)Chapter 9Negotiation and Adaptation: U.S.A. Under Option, Adapted for Television, and Produced for the Stage (1959-60)Chapter 10Early Aesthetics Through the Lens of Late Politics (1960-70)

'A rich and engrossing book... John Dos Passos and Cinema will be the authoritative work on this aspect of Dos Passos's career and aesthetics for some time. But it also provides fresh insights into the perennial topic of his political biography and his shift to the right, as well as providing superb detail on the specifics of the networks and aesthetics of transnational, intermedial experiment on the left that galvanized modernist culture in the 1920s and 1930s.'Mark Whalan, Modernism/modernity