Pop Culture Explosion Innocence Lost in Film Literature

Pop Culture Explosion Innocence Lost in Film, Literature and Music in 1950 s America

Pop Culture Explosion

Loss of Innocence

The Bikini

Booming Consumerism

Booming Market

Booming Anti-Americanism

Happy Days

Silver Screen Temptation

The Girl Can’t Help It - 1956

Silver Screen Rebellion

Rebel Without a Cause -1955

The Wild One - 1953

Hells Angels

Rock around the Clock

American Pie – Don Mc. Clean

Leave it to Television

Pleasantville - 1998

Civil Rights

One Man’s Dream

Brown v. Board of Education

Billie Holiday Strange Fruit Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves, and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Pastoral scene of the gallant south The bulging eyes and twisted mouth Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh Then the sudden smell of burning flesh Here is fruit for the crows to pluck For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop Here is a strange and bitter crop

…all that jazz and soul and blues and funk

…and bebop

The Bird

Melodious Spunk

… out of this world

the beat

the beat generation

Howl I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of coldwater flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammaden angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake- light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull…

Kerouac and Cassady

On the Road

The Source

Abstract Expressionism “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. ” Harold Rosenburg

Jackson Pollock

Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental – Richard Poussette-Dart

Black Untitled – William de Kooning

Untitled – Jackson Pollock

Night Creatures – Lee Krasner

51 – Jackson Pollock