Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
In Hollywood Time, one of the most influential figures in the study of classical Hollywood cinema examines various paradigms for reading Hollywood and its cinema. In chapters on the great age of melodrama, the era of 'New Hollywood', post-classical Hollywood, and the current culture of digital Hollywood, Thomas Elsaesser considers the applicability of classical film theory and alternatives to it. Bringing together some of Eslaesser's classic texts along with many of his never-before-published essays, this volume explores a broad range of topics from cinephilia and auteurs--Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, among others--to melodrama, digital cinema, and even time- travel films.