New Hollywood Cinema

Il paper discute, dopo una contestualizzazione della Nuova Hollywood, la questione del gender all'interno del testo filmico Bonnie and Clyde (1967) di Arthur Penn, mettendo in luce come suddetta questione sia centrale nella decostruzione del genere del gangster movie.

"Pictures at a Revolution" by Mark Harris details the years leading up to the Oscar ceremony of 1968, a year that changed everything for the American motion picture.

The 40th Academy Awards marked the last gasp of the old studio system as New Hollywood succeeded in kicking the door in and wresting control from the moribund studio heads.

Five films are examined in detail: "Bonnie & Clyde", "Look Who's Coming to Dinner", "The Graduate", "In the Heat of the Night" and "Dr. Doolittle." Each is emblematic of the enormous social changes impacting the culture and, in the case of "Dr. Doolittle", traditional Hollywood's dire need of a reality check.

Le “star” sono un a componente essenziale del “prodotto cinematografico”, e i “film sul cinema” le hanno spesso presentate come immagini fantastiche di glamour, ricchezza, bellezza, successo e popolarità, ma, nel contempo, ne hanno svelato anche il lato più oscuro e problematico. In effetti, l’ascesa e il declino delle stelle hanno costituito, come dimostra il ciclo di film “E’ nata una stella” una componente costante dell’immagine composita di una “star“. Ma come sono cambiate le rappresentazioni delle stelle al cinema dagli anni ’60 ad oggi, quale ne è il loro stato attuale, e quali prospettive aprono le nuove tecnologie digitali in un futuro che fa già parte del nostro presente? Questo Dossier fa parte del progetto "I film sul cinema: uno sguardo "dall'interno" sul mondo del cinema".The other Dossiers in the project, which are all available at ResearchGate.net or at www.cinemafocus.eu, are: * The star system: the rise and fall of stars * On the set: watching films being made * The "Hollywood system": behind the scenes of the "dream factory" * "Films within films": viewers watching viewers * Directors on and off the set * Producers and screenwriters: the "hidden figures" of filmmaking * "Meta-cinema": when movies reflect on themselves

A partire dalla fine degli anni Sessanta il linguaggio cinematografico è contrassegnato dall’affioramento periodico di una duplice pulsione: a disgregare la struttura narrativa mediante la sostituzione del tempo cronologico, omogeneo, irreversibile, quantitativo e calcolabile, con un tempo esistenziale, inesteso, non divisibile, qualitativo, eterogeneo, non misurabile e reversibile; a dissolvere le voci esterne o interne alla diegesi mediante un sistematico disoriginamento, che è prima di tutto un divorzio tra l’immagine e il sonoro, in direzione, direbbe Michel Chion, di un cinema «acusmatico». In direzione di un cinema che mette in questione l’ontologia e l’innocenza della sua tecnica audio-visiva, smascherando l’ideologia e il dogmatismo che hanno trasformato in religione l’unione di suono e immagine: le voci sono dissociate dai corpi di appartenenza e anche dalle individualità che essi incarnano.

2020 COMMENTARY: I wrote this item as a blog-post thirteen years ago as an undergraduate student, so there are a lot of flaws, errors, and naivety. Simultaneously I can see also some decent remarks in this text. What is important, it had been written two years before Warren Buckland's PUZZLE FILMS were published, and without a deeper awareness of THE WAY HOLLYWOOD TELLS IT written by David Bordwell. So I had found it worth to attempt a framework for my better understanding of these films which I have been considered remarkable. Moreover, although Christopher Nolan became one of the most commented film directors, the other three films I am analysing were somewhat forgotten. So this little piece can shed some light on them, I hope.

Despite the fact it had a lot to do with my youthful analytical enthusiasm when I wanted to see new ways of telling stories everywhere around, I still consider the 2005-2008 period of Hollywood filmmaking extraordinary. So many reasonably unusual films were shot. Not just the ones roughly analysed in the item (THE PRESTIGE, LADY IN THE WATER, DOMINO, STRANGER THAN FICTION), but also films like ZODIAC, SPEED RACER, THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III, SYRIANA, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK and many others - all of them told their stories in more or less unusual ways. We can say that they "teased" boundaries of classical narrative trajectories. Their classical aspects were provocatively combined with quite a new narrative or stylistic challenges. These challenges did not unequivocally serve to classical ones but became the dominant ones (in the formalistic sense).

It certainly was not an unified trend, not at all. However, it is possible to consider it as a kind of temporary creative milieu in the searching for fresh approaches to (classical) storytelling.

The transition from the 1960s to the 1970s saw the birth of two significant countercultural products: Charles Reich’s bestseller The Greening of America (1970) and Dennis Hopper’s surprising box office success Easy Rider (1969) . This article argues that Reich’s analysis of a “loss of self” in US society constructed white identity as being in crisis, thus setting the stage for affective solutions to this crisis by emergent cultural forms. The article understands both of these cultural artefacts as complicit in the emergence of a countercultural reconfiguration of white subjectivity, examining its racial politics and its translation into an aesthetic regime that came to be known as the cinema of the New Hollywood.

This article provides a stylistic examination of Sidney Lumet's thriller Deathtrap (1982), analyzing how its strategies of staging and performance generate narrational effects of suspense and surprise. It argues that Lumet anchors these performative strategies to a broad authorial program grounded in expressive subtlety; as such, Lumet's film reminds us of a waning tradition of US filmmaking in which stylistic ingenuity resides at the denotative and expressive (rather than the decorative or parametric) levels of stylistic discourse. The article treats Lumet's stylistic choices as creative solutions to a distinctive set of aesthetic problems. It canvasses-and identifies the functions of-the motivic staging schemas patterned throughout Deathtrap; and it illuminates how these schemas, actuated by star players, shape the viewer's cognitive uptake in substantive ways.

A film is a complex organism that exists within a network of cultural, commercial, and technological forces. The Hollywood Blockbuster is a particular kind of film that is designed for big budgets, mass merchandising, and large-scale audience response. What designates a film a blockbuster is the size of its production budget and marketing effort rather than either critical success or popularity. The blockbuster, therefore, has become something of a dirty designation—equated with ostentatious budgets rather than good storytelling—because many blame it for the decline of narrative films. Some even say that the Blockbuster has destroyed Hollywood storytelling. This course will explore the tension between storytelling and action films, with a particular focus on audience response, personal media, the rise of transmedia storytelling, and participatory culture.

A particularly fertile period for satanic presence can be found in mainstream Hollywood during the early to mid 1970s. Encouraged by the success of Rosemary’s Baby, major studios produced The Exorcist and The Omen series, not to mention a flurry of independent productions across the decade. Neither before nor since this decade has satanic content in cinema achieved such widespread popularity, and so this particular moment ought to warrant deeper consideration. In general, these narratives appealed to countercultural notions of conspiracy, especially with respect to authority figures and/or the government. But at an even more subconscious level, these satanic films spoke to a pervading fear, at this particular time, of relinquishing a former sense of control over one’s destiny. This article explores and elucidates the cultural conditions attributable for the emergence and popular embrace of these films in this particularly modernist cultural moment.

A particularly fertile period for satanic presence can be found in mainstream Hollywood during the early to mid 1970s. Encouraged by the success of Rosemary’s Baby, major studios produced The Exorcist and The Omen series, not to mention a flurry of independent productions across the decade. Neither before nor since this decade has satanic content in cinema achieved such widespread popularity, and so this particular moment ought to warrant deeper consideration. In general, these narratives appealed to countercultural notions of conspiracy, especially with respect to authority figures and/or the government. But at an even more subconscious level, these satanic films spoke to a pervading fear, at this particular time, of relinquishing a former sense of control over one’s destiny. This article explores and elucidates the cultural conditions attributable for the emergence and popular embrace of these films in this particularly modernist cultural moment.

La réalisation de « Gloria », en 1980, marque le retour à Hollywood de John Cassavetes, fondateur du cinéma indépendant américain. Succès public à sa sortie, le film obtient le Lion d’Or à la Mostra de Venise, mais nombre de cinéphiles y voient une « dérive commerciale » du maître qui aurait trahi son esthétique anti-hollywoodienne. Il faut admettre que ce polar irréaliste, initialement écrit pour un enfant-star de la MGM, Rick Schröder, semble d’abord irréconciliable avec la veine expérimentale et autobiographique de « Faces », « Husbands » ou « Opening Nights ». Pourtant, une figure centrale les unit, celle de Gena Rowlands, qui est à la fois la femme et l’actrice fétiche de Cassavetes. Car qui voyons-nous vraiment sur l’écran, l’actrice ou son personnage ? En la chargeant d’un passé équivoque, celui des autres figures féminines qu’elle a incarnées, Gena donne corps au mystère de Gloria. A travers l’analyse détaillée d’une séquence [1:08:50 - 1:13:58], cet essai voudrait dégager les enjeux génésiques, narratifs et symboliques du film.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the re-emergence of visible feminist debate is a characteristic of the genre today that was notably absent in those of the late 1980s and 1990s. As such, this chapter explores the nature of the re-engagement with notions of feminism, sexual politics, women’s sexual agency and heterosexual romantic culture in the postfeminist context using four examples, Crazy Stupid Love (Glenn Ficarra and John Riqua, 2011), Friends with Benefits (Will Gluck, 2011), What’s Your Number? (Mark Mylod, 2011) and No Strings Attached (Ivan Reitman, 2011). The chapter suggests that postfeminist culture harbours a maturation of backlash feminist politics which contemporary romantic comedy contributes to through its construction of the contemporary woman as ‘feminist apologist’ and its creation of a re-invigorated sexual conservatism for the twenty-first century.

La nueva versión de WSS hace un excelente trabajo situando la historia en una más justa perspectiva. No se limita a la mera rivalidad entre pandillas sin causas, sino que elabora sus contornos económicos, culturales, raciales y de género. La nueva versión confronta la rigidez estructural centrada en la música de Bernstein y la letra de Sondheim. Aun así, Spielberg alteró los fundamentos de esta estructura insertando la versión revolucionaria de la Borinqueña, posiblemente el cambio más atrevido de la producción. A no ser porque la letra del himno borinqueño la compuso una mujer (Lola Rodríguez de Tió), el público puertorriqueño se habría inclinado justamente a ver esta cara de esa historia como una versión en la que los hombres invocan su nacionalidad para imponer respeto, dignidad y hombría a la vez que urge la dignidad entre las mujeres, aunque inclinadas a adaptarse a la sociedad norteamericana. Sin embargo, de principio a fin, la secuencia anímica de la historia comienza con la afirmación nacional, seguido de conformismo y sujeción a las normas culturales, luego la decepción ante el rechazo, concluyendo con un sentido de reafirmación. Es la otra cara de esa historia.

In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood’s own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period’s inventive narrative design represents one of the great artistic accomplishments of American cinema.

In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President’s Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood’s formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.

The United States (or the U.S. for short) and Vietnam have always been different in many aspects, including culture and history, which directly affect the film industry of each country. While Hollywood has been the pride of the U.S. as the heart of the global cinema industry, Vietnamese cinema is far behind since the country suffers consecutive wars. As a result, these features lead to different portrayal of romantic relationship in Hollywood and Vietnamese romance films.

However, it is impossible to compare Hollywood and Vietnamese on-screen romance without clarifying the contrasts between American and Vietnamese cultures that lead to on-screen contrasts. The word “culture” itself is already very complicated. Various researchers have defined it in different ways with numerous perspectives; therefore it is hardly able to point out exactly the distinctions between American and Vietnamese cultures.

Recognizing the problem, this thesis proposes a solution by narrowing down the sphere of the word “culture” with theories from Geert Hofstede (1996) and Edward Hall (1977), two of the most well-known social psychologists in the world. Based on these concepts, the paper aims to build a firm basis to support further studying Hollywood and Vietnamese romantic films, thus finding the key contrasts of their on-screen romance. The sphere of research is limited among movies of the romance genre, which means movies of other genres such as horror, sci-fi or action are not included, even if they contain a romantic relationship in their plot.
In short, the research aims to provide a creative approach to studying intercultural communication by analyzing films as a new form of mass media. Hopefully, the thesis will become an effective tool for those working in the fields of communication, culture, country or cinema, and an inspiration for those who are interested.

The Conjuring Universe Currently consisting of seven (eight if one counts The Curse of La Llorona) interconnected films with additional entries in the pipeline, The Conjuring universe (2013-present) serves as one of the touchstone horror franchises of the modern era. Despite rising to industry prominence as one of the most profitable horror franchises of all time and one of the few properties to effectively execute a shared universe story world, The Conjuring universe has only been the subject of a few studies where it is often assessed alongside analogous, but thematically different, films such as Paranormal Activity (2009) and Insidious (2011). To fill this gap, the proposed collection will offer the first in-depth academic analysis of The Conjuring universe, its constituent films, and its mythology.

Michael Ryan ve Douglas Kellner tarafından kaleme alınan "Politik Kamera: Çağdaş Hollywood Sinemasının İdeolojisi ve Politikası" adlı çalışmalaya yönelik bir değerlendirme.

A review of "Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film" by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner.

Après une première sortie annulée en 2013 pour des raisons obscures (a été mentionné un blocage de la part de la veuve Giraud en raison d'une possible violation des droits concernant les dessins de son mari, largement présents dans le film), le documentaire de Frank Pavich sur l'adaptation cinématographique avortée en 1975 du planet opera culte de Frank Herbert (Dune, publié en 1965) par le réalisateur d'origine chilienne Alejandro Jodorowsky, est finalement sorti dans les salles françaises en mars 2016 (après avoir été largement visible depuis 2014 et son édition en Blu-ray).

S'il permet effectivement d'entrevoir des esquisses inédites du fameux story-board de mille pages dessiné par Jean Giraud/Moebius (et d'imaginer à quoi celui-ci ressemblerait si on l'adaptait sous forme d'anime), le documentaire de Pavich ne fournit aucune révélation particulière à l'endroit du projet « donquichottesque » du réalisateur : son histoire ayant été moult fois relatée, à commencer par Jodorowsky lui-même (qui en publia un compte rendu dès 1985 dans le supplément au numéro 107 de Métal Hurlant : « Dune, le film que vous ne verrez jamais »). Malgré son aspect « bonus DVD d'un film qui n'existe pas », Jodorowsky's Dune permet tout de même d'apprécier la place que tient ce ratage légendaire au sein de l'histoire hollywoodienne, ou dans l'imaginaire cinéphile contemporain.

Enfin, étant entièrement acquis à la « cause » du réalisateur, il offre l'opportunité de se confronter à une nouvelle version des faits et de découvrir ainsi de nouvelles failles au sein de la « légende officielle » du projet ; de confirmer - au cas où cela serait encore nécessaire - que tout ce qui est dit à son sujet doit être pris avec prudence.

The following paper is a comparative study of the French Nouvelle Vague and its subsequent influences on the cinema of New Hollywood during the 1970's based around the artistic and cultural ideologies of Postmodernism as expressed in the works of Frederic Jameson's Postermodernism in Consumer Society and Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I will be exploring the cultural and socio-political parallels between the evolution of the two movements and their reflections of new cinematic conventions and ideologies such as auteur theory and visual experimentation looking in particular at the films and culture of French Cinema from 1954 to 1968 and American cinema from 1967 to 1983. In this respect I will be drawing on comparative textual examples from Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and Jean Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle (1960) and exploring the common reciprocations in each piece of work comparing them in a broader ideological framework as productions and representations of an artistic culture and post modernist trend. I will also place an emphasis on the philosophies and ideologies expressed by key French film writers Alexandre Astruc in 1948 with his essay on the birth of the new Avante Garde: La Camera Stylo , and later in Cahiers du Cinema by the philosophies of Francois Truffaut and Andre Bazin and how these ideas were reflected in the films of the French New Wave and subsequently later in the films of New Hollywood. The main argument of the dissertation as such will  examine this cultural exchange and enduring cinematic legacy of both film cultures by exploring the recurring narrative and character motifs in both to deem whether they can be defined as deriving from Post modernist ideologies.

The success of Marvel Studios’ Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films can be attributed to many factors; this thesis specifically posits and explores factors that comprise their formula for success, namely Marvel Studios’ access to a huge bank of Marvel characters unfamiliar to mainstream audiences and Marvel Studios’ ability to use those characters to create films that are organically novel and fresh, using various successful genres, tones and aspects of storytelling, whilst being carefully steered within an innovative mode of storytelling pertaining to a grand shared cinematic universe by the MCU’s master storyteller Kevin Feige. This thesis also explores threats to the MCU’s success, comparing the MCU to other blockbuster film franchises and television series to create a full picture of how the MCU has expanded and evolved to become successful, and considers what the future holds for Marvel Studios as the MCU nears the culmination of Phase Three before it enters a new era of MCU storytelling. Finally, this thesis proposes why there is longevity in the MCU and highlights its opportunities for even greater success. While Feige is strongly connected to the success of MCU films – and the prologue outlines that he is instrumental to their success – the MCU derives other distinct connections; this thesis therefore specifically explores the interconnectivity of the MCU. The main body of this thesis is divided into three parts; Part One explores how the MCU connects to us and its influence on popular culture, the Interlude considers how MCU films connect to its creators and Part Two examines the extent to which the two major MCU mediums (film and television) connect.

This undergraduate dissertation examines depictions of mostly electronic forms of surveillance— and in some examples, the presence and function of paranoia— in 1970s New Hollywood cinema in the context of Michel Foucault’s theory of the panopticon published in his seminal 1975 text Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Taking into account the social, political and material conditions of surveillance and counterculture, this paper registers how both Foucault’s groundbreaking book and a handful of 1970s films addressed the panoptic society’s creation of the subject. In its ability to reflect and mediate images that are of interest and relevance to the spectator, film is arguably the most useful exhibition of a “history of the present” that Foucault sought to find, even if his body of scholarship contains strangely few references to the cinema. Given the recent emphasis on surveillance in American media and politics, this project is foregrounded in the belief that to understand the present, one must revisit a familiar past. As a high period of surveillance cinema, analyzing film and critical culture in the seventies offers insight into how we live today.

After the original one was canceled in 2013 for obscure reasons (it was speculated that the widow Giraud objected due to alleged copyright infringement concerning her late husband's drawings, prominently featured in the film), Frank Pavich's documentary, centered on the failed 1975 cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert's cult classic planet opera (Dune, 1965) by Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, finally premiered in French theaters in March 2016 (although it has been widely available since 2014 through its Blu-ray edition). While it does offer new glimpses of the famous thousand-page storyboard drawn by Jean Giraud/Moebius (and allows us to envision what it might have looked like as an anime), Pavich's film doesn't unveil any significant revelations about the director's quixotic project, the story of the latter having already been recounted numerous times, primarily by Jodorowsky himself (who published his own account as early as 1985 in the supplement to issue #107 of the French magazine Métal Hurlant: “Dune, le film que vous ne verrez jamais”).

Beyond resembling a “DVD bonus about a movie that never came to fruition”, Jodorowsky's Dune allows us to appreciate the significance of this legendary failure within Hollywood history, lingering in the depths of cinephile memory. Moreover, by fully immersing us in the director's cause, it offers an additional perspective on the project's backstory, allowing us to uncover potential new flaws within its official legend. This reaffirms, if there was any doubt, the need to approach everything told about it with much caution.

Chapter 5 from Hollywood on Location: An Industry History, ed. Lawrence Webb and Joshua Gleich (Rutgers University Press, 2019): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hollywood-Location-Industry-Joshua-Gleich/dp/0813586259

This chapter argues that location shooting was central to New Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s in terms of economics, politics and aesthetics. Though location shooting is often mentioned in summaries of the New Hollywood’s stylistic break with the classical cinema, it is rarely elaborated on in any detail.This chapter unpacks the complex and overlapping factors that pushed filmmaking away from the studio and traces some of the key trends in location techniques and aesthetics. As this chapter demonstrates, location shooting had already been established as a viable practice during the postwar period, but it took on a new importance in the economic and cultural turmoil of Hollywood at the end of the sixties. The decade that followed became a testing ground for location-based filmmaking, a practice that became central to New Hollywood’s emerging political economy and visual style.

This chapter explores the ways Robert Altman’s 1970s cinema manipulates, utilizes, deconstructs and re-presents the materiality of celluloid. With special focus given to his idiosyncratic use of the zoom lens and widescreen, the discussion examines how the films' distinctive visual style both takes in and significantly transcends any given textual model, be it a Hollywood-based genre piece or European-influenced “art film.”

This chapter focuses on the Hitchcockian legacy and takes its cue from the historical coincidence of Hitchcock overseeing his final picture at Universal Studios (Family Plot, 1976) just as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) took the American box-office by storm and heralded a new era in the history of American cinema. This moment has often been viewed as a change of guard in the history of film, with some going so far as to claim that Hitchcock himself could easily have ended up in the director’s chair for Jaws. The chapter addresses some of these myths yet also delivers an assessment of Hitchcock’s actual influence on Jaws, revealing some surprising links between Spielberg’s groundbreaking monster movie and Hitchcock’s British oeuvre.

"This thesis is the first in-depth, historical study of Hollywood’s relationship with the ‘family audience’ and ‘family film’. Since the 1970s, Hollywood family films have been the most lucrative screen entertainments in the world, and despite their relativelyunexplored status in academic film criticism and history, I will argue that the format is centrally important in understanding mainstream Hollywood cinema.

How have ‘family films’ become so globally dominant? One answer is that Hollywood’s international power facilitates the global proliferation of its products, but this explanation, in isolation, is insufficient. I will argue that Hollywood family films are designed to transcend normative barriers of age, gender, race, culture and even taste; they target the widest possible audiences to maximise commercial returns, trying to please as many people, and offend as few, as possible. This they achieve through a combination of ideological populism, emotional stimulation, impressive spectacle, and the calculated minimisation of potentially objectionable elements, such as sex, violence, and excessive socio-cultural specificity.

Initially, the audience for family films was predominantly domestic, but with the increasing spending power of international audiences, family films are now formulated on the belief that no market is inaccessible. For this reason, they are inextricably linked with Hollywood – the only film industry in the world with the resources and distribution capacity to address a truly global mass audience. The ‘family film’ originated in early-1930s Hollywood as a mixture of propaganda and commercial idealism. Hollywood cinema was already an international cultural phenomenon, but was founded upon a claim to universality that was undermined by the predominance of adult-orientated films. The family film was the result both of external pressures to make films more morally-suitable for children, and the desire to engage a more middle-class mass audience.

Films targeting the so-called ‘family audience’ were excellent propaganda for Hollywood, suggesting superior production, inoffensiveness and broad appeal. Although such movies have not always commanded the mass (‘family’) audiences for which they are intended, they have flourished in the domestic and international media marketplace since the 1970s, and their commercial and cultural dominance appears likely to extend further in the years to come. Whilst the idea of a universally-appealing film remains an impossible dream, mainstream Hollywood has pursued it relentlessly. It is the Holy Grail for mainstream producers, and has attained considerable importance in U.S. – and increasingly international – culture, as audiences flock to see films which appear to transcend run-of-the-mill screen entertainment by providing universally-intelligible aesthetic and/or emotional satisfaction. This thesis maps the history of the Hollywood family film, documenting the motivations and strategies involved in its emergence and development, analysing the form creatively and ideologically, evaluating its place within global mass entertainment, and underlining its considerable importance."

Amanda Howell offers a new perspective on the contemporary pop score, as the means by which masculinities not seen—or heard—before became a part of American cinema after World War II. Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action considers an eclectic mix of film, from Elvis and Travolta star vehicles to Bruckheimer-produced blockbuster action, with a special focus on the work of musically innovative directors Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Gregg Araki. Of particular interest is the way these films and their representations of masculinity are shaped by generic exchanges among contemporary music, music cultures, and film, combining American cinema's longstanding investment in violence-as-spectacle with similarly body-focused pleasures of contemporary youth music. Drawing on the scholarship of popular music and the pop score, as well as feminist film and media studies, Howell addresses an often neglected area of gender representation by considering cinematic masculinity as an audiovisual construction. Through her analyses of music's role in action and other film genres that share its investment in violence, she reveals the mechanisms by which the pop score has helped to reinvent gender—and gendered fictions of male empowerment—in contemporary screen entertainment.

In the 1970s, cities across the United States and Western Europe faced a deep social and political crisis that challenged established principles of planning, economics and urban theory. At the same time, film industries experienced a parallel process of transition, the effects of which rippled through the aesthetic and narrative form of the decade's cinema. The Cinema of Urban Crisis traces a new path through the cinematic legacy of the 1970s by drawing together these intertwined histories of urban and cultural change. Bringing issues of space and place to the fore, the book unpacks the geographical and spatial dynamics of film movements from the New Hollywood to the New German Cinema, showing how the crisis of the seventies and the emerging 'postindustrial' economy brought film and the city together in new configurations.

Chapters cover a range of cities on both sides of the Atlantic, from New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco to London, Paris and Berlin. Integrating analysis of film industries and production practices with detailed considerations of individual texts, the book offers strikingly original close analyses of a wide range of films, from New Hollywood (The Conversation, The King of Marvin Gardens, Rocky) to European art cinema (Alice in the Cities, The Passenger, Tout va Bien) and popular international genres such as the political thriller and the crime film. Focusing on the aesthetic and representational strategies of these films, the book argues that the decade's cinema engaged with - and helped to shape - the passage from the 'urban crisis' of the late sixties to the neoliberal 'urban renaissance' of the early eighties. Splicing ideas from film studies with urban geography and architectural history, the book offers a fresh perspective on a rich period of film history and opens up new directions for critical engagement between film and urban studies.

Reviews:

Selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2016.

“The Cinema of Urban Crisis is instantly a classic study on the relationship between the city and the cinema. The breadth and scope of this magnificent work is remarkable; Webb . . . has a seemingly limitless knowledge of urban history, political movements and ideology, and film. . . . This is an outstanding and important work. . . . Essential.”  (Choice)

https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089646378/the-cinema-of-urban-crisis

The controversial, influential themes of often high-art, yet low-budget films such as Cat People (1942) and The Naked Kiss (1964) got their freedom from the long line of less quality, but just as controversial exploitation films like Maniac (1934), which got away with their work by being made with little funds and no studio control. Works like the exploitation movies of the thirties and forties were the pathway to controversial films that took themselves more seriously. These films, in turn, changed the Hollywood system for the better.

"The usefulness of this book lies above all in the judicious and felicitous choice of contrasting complementary case studies, each of which is given a highly original historical placement and subjected to a complex multi-layered historical hermeneutics," Professor Thomas Elsaesser writes.

What happens when we suddenly feel that a moving image is being slowed down or halted? Nowadays it happens all the time in the cinema and the art galleries. A basic question of life - is it still or is it moving? - here urgently addresses emotional and aesthetical issues as well as questions concerning media. The still/moving image compels a new sensibility. (from Saarbrucken: Lamber Academic Publishing, 2010)