Celluloid Saviours: Angels and Reform Politics in Hollywood Film, by Emily Caston

The emergence of the term film blanc as a category for Hollywood films is a relatively new development. Peter L. Valenti was one of the first film scholars to use this term in 1978 to describe those Hollywood films that “show contemporary Americans successfully negotiating a return to the real mortal world after a trip to the twilight region between life in the physical world and either death or an altered state of existence in another, spiritual world” (295). Almost a decade later, Lyn and Tom Davis Genelli broadened the scope of this term by including psychological perspectives: “Just as the ‘film noir’ shows the dark, cynical underside of human motivation, oriented toward death, ‘film blanc’ portrays the ‘override’ or human nature, our profound attraction to the Transcendent” (10)