Studies of “Classic Hollywood” typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. This book complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, the book breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases. The book's analysis follows Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the “Transition Era” and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. The book's analysis is set apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. The book views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency. The result is a synthesis of theoretical approaches to a legendary cinematic era.
Author(s): Veronica Pravadelli
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Year: 2014
Language: English
Tags: Hollywood films, classic films, Transition Era, conservative 1930s, Fifties musicals, film noir, women's films
Cover
Title
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Film Studies
1. The Early Thirties: Modernity, New Women, and the Aesthetic of Attractions
2. Normative Desires and Visual Sobriety: Apogee of the Classical Model
3. The Male Subject of Noir and the Modern Gaze
4. (Dis)Adventures of Female Desire in the 1940s Woman's Film
5. Excess, Spectacle, Sensation: Family Melodrama in the 1950s
6. Performative Bodies and Non-referential Images: Excesses of the Musical
Notes
Works Cited
Index
