| One can argue that as a subject of serious academic inquiry, the sports film genre fails to exist. To remedy this shortcoming this dissertation constructs, establishes and defines the American sports film genre and explores its relationship with American culture. Built upon a historicized examination of over 200 sports films and a modest selection of related advertisements and reviews, this work examines representations of race, class, masculinity, and nation that are fundamental to the genre's constitution. My dissertation lays down the rules of the sports film genre as it explores the generic conventions that bind together sports, cinema and American culture.;This dissertation is divided into two parts. In Part I, " Defining the American Sports Film," I explore the relationship between the film genre and the cultural history of sports, examine the industry's production and marketing and the critical reception of individual films, and analyze the structure of specific early cinema texts (from roughly 1896 to 1919) in order to establish the semantic, syntactic, and spectacular generic codes of the genre. In Part II, "Chronicling the Cultural History of the American Sports Film to 1960," I begin by exploring the period from 1920 to 1940 in which I focus upon the many sports films set on college campuses engaging with issues of class during both the roaring twenties and the depression-era thirties, and I conclude by examining post-war masculinity and the physically and psychologically wounded sports hero from 1941--1960.;The work of this dissertation provides another cultural prism through which to view historically shifting notions of class, masculinity, nation and race as they are constructed on film. The American sports film genre offers its own unique Hollywood-influenced image of a society in which spectacular uniformed and bare-skinned bodies are on display even as they are connected to the idealism of a sporting culture that never completely severs its ties to its origins in youth culture. This dissertation interrogates representations of an American utopia founded upon an athletically inflected American Dream powered by a philosophy of self-determination and an ideology of a level playing field. |
