ABSTRACT
Notwithstanding the often supra-historical quality about demonstrations of Hollywood films’ role (as agents of this apparatus) in the ideological formation of their spectators, histories of popular American cinema which most vividly bear out the metaphor of the cinematic apparatus were organized around various notions of a ‘classical’ or realist Hollywood film form. Some of these genealogies emphasized the structural and ideological conservatism of a classical cinema or the continuity of both the form and the system across various historical stages, while others preferred to explain how those stages gradually contributed to its demise.
