J. Hoberman

Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn.’

From 1910 to the end of the Fifties, Westerns accounted for a quarter of all Hollywood productions. As late as 1972, the high point of genre revisionism, they still represented 12 per cent of all American movies. But if the year that brought Richard Nixon’s triumphant re-election was the last in which the number of Western releases would reach double figures, the residual significance of the West as the bedrock of American identity was eloquently reiterated, just before the collapse of Soviet Communism, by the panic which attended a Japanese firm’s bid to administer the services at Yellowstone National Park.

The Ephemera of 20th-century popular music have never been more monumental. CDs transform collectors into completists and completists into archivists. Why be content with the Beach Boys’ greatest hits when you can invest in a boxed set, complete with alternate takes, unreleased masters, demo tapes, and radio air checks? Long defunct record labels are catalogued and repackaged as the CD ‘revolution’ churns up all manner of forgotten material. Issued in time for Christmas a few years back, The Beatles: Live at the BBC proved to be their fastest-selling release ever; the Rolling Stones’ BBC tapes are set to follow. Nor is radio the only source. The six-disc Smithsonian Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, which first appeared in 1952 as a repackaged collection of rare 78s in the new LP format, and is now reissued on CD, received twice the number of votes of its nearest rival as best release in the Village Voice annual poll of pop music critics.‘

The 20th century is over but the aesthetic returns are far from counted. Take the case of the novelist and film-maker Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951). The most prolific director of so-called race movies and the forebear of American independent cinema, Micheaux is one of the most significant American film-makers – as well as one of the most obscure. Hardly known outside the world of film...

‘To be anti-Hollywood was, in a sense, to be anti-semitic.’ So said Budd Schulberg, the son of a pioneer film producer, a successful screenwriter and author of the quintessential Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (a book that was itself accused of a self-directed anti-semitism). To be anti-Hollywood has also, at various times, been a way to enlist the rhetoric of...