Date of Award

6-21-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

First Advisor

James Ross

Abstract

This research explores the connection between film and culture by examining how major historical events impacted what types of movies were made. While previous cinema research uses a micro approach to analyze a few key films and draw conclusions about genre trends, this project takes a macro approach to examine thousands of movies in order to assess wider trends in consumer behavior. By creating a database of movie information using records from the Arkansas Amusement Corporation in Little Rock, I tracked trends in the popularity of war, film noir, horror, and family movies from 1933 to 1963. All four genres displayed statistically significant trends that mirrored national trends and correlated with major historical events such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

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