2026-09-23T23:32:58Zhttps://ubir.buffalo.edu/oai/request

oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/840302025-07-16T19:35:36Zcom_10477_77914col_10477_81567

King of America: An Exploration of Americana Through the Movies of Henry King Francisco Cursini, Bruno Jackson, Bruce English film studies American studies literature M.A. This thesis engages the work of American filmmaker Henry King (1886-1982) with the understudied concept of Americana. I contend for the constitution of Americana as a cinematic genre, and focus on King's portraits of small-town America, using five films as case studies: Stella Dallas (1925), Remember the Day (1941), Wilson (1944), Margie (1946), and Wait Til the Sun Shines, Nellie (1952). A director whose career as a filmmaker started in the same year that The Birth of a Nation (1915) was released and ended by the time Francis Ford Coppola was presenting his first feature, I argue that King's oeuvre represents the epitome and apex of the studio filmmaker. Working in a wide variety of genres, his depictions of America's heartland and small towns, its iconographies and festivities, are rivaled only by D.W. Griffith's pastorals and John Ford's community's mediations. To sustain my arguments, I highlight the imageries of the idealized American small-town and compare the concept of Americana with two others: nostalgia, and the German Heimat. Present since the rise of motion pictures, films in the Americana genre raise and reflect historical questions and shifts in both the United States' hegemonic ideologies and the Hollywood studio system itself, and no other filmmaker exceeded in this genre quite as much as King. 2022-06-21T15:47:12Z 2022-06-21T15:47:12Z 2020 Text Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/10477/84030 eng Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions. Copyright retained by author. application/pdf State University of New York at Buffalo