ABSTRACT
While Hollywood’s success – its persistence – has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser’s research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director’s themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood’s economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism.
The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser’s key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |10 pages
General Introduction
part I|62 pages
Flashback: Of Objects of Love and Objects of Study
chapter 1|16 pages
Film Studies in Britain: Cinephilia, Screen Theory and Cultural Studies
chapter 2|11 pages
The Name for a Pleasure that has No Substitute: Vincente Minnelli
chapter 3|12 pages
All the Lonely Places: The Heroes of Nicholas Ray
chapter 4|10 pages
Sam Fuller's Productive Pathologies: The Hero as (His Own Best) Enemy
chapter 5|10 pages
Cinephilia: Or the Uses of Disenchantment
part II|69 pages
Genius of the System
chapter 6|8 pages
The Persistence of Hollywood, Part I: The Continuity Principle
chapter 7|12 pages
Why Hollywood?
chapter 9|22 pages
Film as System: Or How to Step Through an Open Door
chapter 10|15 pages
Gangsters and Grapefruits: Masculinity and Marginality in The Public Enemy
part III|80 pages
Studio and Genre: Auteurs Maudits, Mavericks and Eminent Europeans
chapter 11|13 pages
Transatlantic Triangulations: William Dieterle and the Warner Bros. Biopics
chapter 12|15 pages
Welles and Virtuosity: Citizen Kane as Character-Mask
chapter 13|8 pages
The Dandy in Hitchcock
chapter 14|18 pages
Too Big and Too Close: Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang
chapter 15|11 pages
Robert Altman's Nashville: Putting on the Show
chapter 16|10 pages
Stanley Kubrick's Prototypes: The Author as World-Maker
part IV|82 pages
Genie out of the Bottle: The Return of the System as Auteur?
chapter 17|11 pages
The Pathos of Failure: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero
chapter 18|19 pages
Auteur Cinema and the New Economy Hollywood
chapter 19|13 pages
The Love that Never Dies: Francis Ford Coppola and Bram Stoker's Dracula
chapter 20|10 pages
The Blockbuster as Time Machine
part V|36 pages
The Persistence of Hollywood