Boonin-Vail, Eli
(2024)
American Cinema’s Prison Industrial Complex: Carceral and Anti-Carceral Moving Image Media in the 20th Century.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
This dissertation examines the carceral and anti-carceral uses of cinema and moving image media in the American 20th century. The carceral managerial class, comprised of various bureaucrats and officiants within the prison industries, asserted influence over the American film industry’s depiction of prisons. Their arrangements with Hollywood, though fractured and multifaceted, allowed enterprising individuals within the studio system to extract great exploitation value from carceral images, architecture, and labor. Moreover, these penal managers sought out opportunities to imagine, produce, and exhibit their own cinematic visions in the form of industrial, training, educational, and publicity films. Yet moving images also proved to be powerful tools for independent and often radical filmmakers who objected to the encroachment of the prison into public life, particularly Black and of color life. Fictional narrative, experimental, and documentary modes of independent moving image production by those whom the carceral state threatened reveal that cinema can be a weapon for or against the carceral state. Prison officials and anti-prison filmmakers both intuited this simultaneous carceral and anti-carceral potential of the moving image. It motivated their discourses, projects, and aesthetic approaches.
To make this argument, I first draw on archives and trade journals from the cinema and prison industries by branching outward from their points of imbrication: movie reviews in the American Journal of Correction, prison newspapers tucked away in studio files, letters from corrections officials to studio executives, film promotional materials in the scrapbooks of wardens, and other points of contact between a spectacularly visible industry and a practically invisible one.
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I then turn to the more diffuse and lived archives of independent film practice, drawing on close readings, oral histories, abolitionist theory, and digital humanistic mapping practices to connect carceral conditions to cinema production. Intervening in scholarship on media and governance, Black media, and the carceral state, “American’ Cinema’s Prison Industrial Complex” not only reveals the connective tissues between prison and screen, it develops a historical and theoretical heuristic for understanding the power of moving images to both produce and reimagine our carceral world.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
17 July 2024 |
| Approval Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
22 July 2024 |
| Access Restriction: |
2 year -- Restrict access to University of Pittsburgh for a period of 2 years. |
| Number of Pages: |
589 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Film Studies |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Prison, Hollywood, Black Studies, Carceral Studies, |
| Related URLs: |
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| Date Deposited: |
27 Aug 2024 13:36 |
| Last Modified: |
11 Jun 2025 15:54 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/46711 |
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