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Read Archive director Jan-Christopher Horak's blog.
Kenneth Turan features the series in the Los Angeles Times.
Susan King talks with blacklisted writer Norma Barzman in the Los Angeles Times.
In the late 1940s in the wake of political persecution and the Hollywood blacklist, a group of progressive American directors, screenwriters and actors became voluntary exiles, hoping to rebuild their lives and careers abroad. While some left for Mexico, others, including Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, Ben and Norma Barzman, and Donald Ogden Stewart, found tenuous refuge in the capitals of Europe—London, Paris and Rome—where they formed a loose-knit community of support. Still hounded by the U.S. government and exploited by European producers looking for Hollywood talent on the cheap, they nevertheless carved out new career opportunities in the explosion of international co-productions in the 1950s and 1960s. While ultimately pursuing their own paths—with Dassin and Losey, in particular, achieving unprecedented levels of international success—they each drew on old and new aesthetic influences, including American film noir, neo-realism and modernist art cinema, to grapple with their experiences of loss, betrayal and exile. In her new book Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture, Rebecca Prime recounts the stories of these artists in exile for the first time, with rich personal detail, archival research and sharp analysis. This series presents a selection of titles by this “lost generation” of American filmmakers, which, as Prime argues, helped lay the foundation for the emergence of a new post-war transnational cinema.
This series was co-curated by Rebecca Prime.
