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- Title
The Normals, the Questionables, and the Delinquents.
- Authors
Rabin, Lisa M.
- Abstract
This essay is a reception history of adolescents' encounters with cinema in the working-class and predominantly Italian and Puerto Rican neighborhood of 1930s East Harlem. From 1929 to 1934, sociologists at the Payne Foundation conducted a "Motion Picture Study" on the allegedly deleterious effects of Hollywood cinema on the area's male youths, with two similar studies of girls also undertaken at this time. I examine the institutional forces shaping these young people's testimonies and the ways in which these testimonies show immigrant teenagers' using films and movie-going as a means of negotiating both their roles and independence in this urban environment. I also analyze the gangster movies and romances they discuss in order to understand the aesthetic and gendered influences these films exerted on the formation of new youth identities in East Harlem.
- Subjects
EAST Harlem (New York, N.Y.); MOTION pictures &; children; TEENAGE immigrants; JUVENILE offenders; GANGSTERS in motion pictures; ROMANCE films
- Publication
Iluminace, 2015, Vol 27, Issue 1, p9
- ISSN
0862-397X
- Publication type
Essay