C.W. Post Professor Records Commentary Track for “El Cid” DVD

Brookville, N.Y. – Neal Rosendorf, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, has recorded the voice-over commentary track for the deluxe DVD edition of the 1961 epic film “El Cid,” recently released by The Weinstein Company. An expert on the film’s producer, Samuel Bronston, Dr. Rosendorf is also extensively featured as an interview subject in a documentary on Bronston that is included as a DVD bonus feature.

“Being involved in this process is a dream come true,” Dr. Rosendorf said.

Bronston was a pioneer of large-scale U.S. movie-making in Spain, where he forged and maintained a uniquely intimate relationship with dictator Francisco Franco from 1959 to 1973.

“Dictators throughout the twentieth century recognized the potential power of cinema to propagandize ideologies and agendas,” Dr. Rosendorf said. “Franco aspired to having a ‘Hollywood in Madrid,’ and Bronston was by far the most important figure in developing that.” He states that “the Bronston-Franco regime partnership was the closest ongoing political relationship that has ever existed between a Hollywood enterprise and a foreign government.”

Over the past thirteen years Dr. Rosendorf has conducted exhaustive research in the US and Europe and written extensively about Bronston and the Franco regime’s strategic use of American popular culture, including his doctoral dissertation and several articles and book chapters. He is currently writing Bronston’s biography, to be published by the University of Texas Press, with co-author Paul G. Nagle, a senior entertainment industry executive who has been a vice-president at Fox Television and a senior agent at the William Morris Agency.

“El Cid” is an epic adventure about the life of the medieval Spanish knight Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, his country’s greatest hero, who began the centuries-long effort to drive the Moors from Spain and became a legend in the process.

A fellow at the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, Dr. Rosendorf also is a researcher and oral historian with the Columbia Oral History Research Office’s project on the Council on Foreign Relations. He has taught at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, SUNY-Plattsburgh College, and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is an historian of U.S. foreign relations, modern international relations, and American cinema and popular culture. For the past decade he has been writing, lecturing and consulting around the world on subjects related to public diplomacy and the cultural dimensions of international relations. He earned a B.A. at Rutgers University, an M.A. at Ohio University, and an A.M. and Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Posted: March 7, 2008