The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies

James Donald, Michael Renov, James Donald, Michael Renov

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781473971806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Written by a team of veteran scholars and exciting emerging talents, The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies maps the field internationally, drawing out regional differences in the way that systematic intellectual reflection on cinema and film has been translated into an academic discipline. It examines the conversations between Film Studies and its contributory disciplines that not only defined a new field of discourse but also modified existing scholarly traditions. It reflects on the field?s dominant paradigms and debates and evaluates their continuing salience. Finally, it looks forward optimistically to the future of the medium of film, the institution of cinema and the discipline of Film Studies at a time when the very existence of film and cinema are being called into question by new technological, industrial and aesthetic developments.

SECTION III

Paradigms in Perspective

Having mapped the field in terms of geographical traditions and disciplinary boundaries, this final section projects a third way of surveying the discipline of Film Studies. By charting some of the dominant conceptual features of its landscape, this approach not only provides a record of how that landscape has evolved and taken on its familiar contours, but also offers some pointers to possible future developments.

Although the landmarks may be familiar, looking at them again in the context of a sustained self-reflection on Film Studies as an academic discipline and an intellectual field may offer new angles of vision and so shed new light on them. The question of Hollywood, for example, cannot and should not be avoided. Now, however, it becomes possible to ask what role the historical and social fact of Hollywood has played in shaping Film Studies as a discipline. In part, looking closely and seriously at Hollywood films has challenged old aesthetic hierarchies. In part, the concern to explain and understand spectatorship, stardom and celebrity has taught us a great deal about the social education of fantasies and desires. In part, the international reach and worldwide embrace of Hollywood movies has been key to understanding the shifting alignments of global and local in twentieth-century culture. And, again in part, the history of the Hollywood industry has offered a paradigmatic and prophetic case of capital-ism’s adaptability to changing circumstances as well as one of the century’s great melodramas.

Hollywood, or mainstream cinema, has not been the only pole in the magnetic field of Film Studies. Equally important have been the defining ambivalence of academic Film Studies towards Hollywood – the desire to bury as well as praise – and also an enthusiasm to champion alternatives, whether national cinemas, exotic cinemas or various kinds of avant-garde or experimental filmmaking and film cultures. These other impulses are a reminder that an education in watching films both sympathetically and critically might itself best be understood as part of the attempt to create the space for alternatives to Hollywood. Film Studies courses have been important not least because they have continued to expose students to films from a wider variety of different places and a wider variety of different eras than they would normally experience, and, in doing so, they have helped, or at least attempted to foster, more generous modes of consumption and more aesthetically open minds. In other words, Film Studies has not just offered a commentary on the game. It has itself been a player, and sometimes a more effective one than it has realized.

The foci of the critical and academic debates about film have varied from time to time – sometimes in response to what has been happening in the cinema industry, often in response to developments in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. In revisiting such once-hot topics as authorship, genre, realism and audiences, some of the contributions to this section take the opportunity not only to reflect on their past importance and current salience, but also to demonstrate their resilience and their continuing relevance not only to the study of film and cinema, but also to an understanding of emerging new audio-visual media.

Overall, then, the lesson seems to be this. Film Studies represents a restless and inquisitive search to find effective ways of thinking about cinema as one of the most important symbolic forms and global industries of modern times. In pursuing that objective, the discipline has come up with concepts, perspectives and methods that transcend its founding object of study, and have had a rejuvenating effect on many disciplines across the Humanities. To put that another way, and to adapt a phrase from Claude Lévi-Strauss, film and cinema have turned out to be things unexpectedly good to think with.

19

The Hollywood Industry Paradigm

Ruth Vasey

While there are countless ways of interrogating Hollywood, the industry’s intrinsically commercial nature is necessarily at the heart of most of them, if only as something to elide or evade. The traditional critical approaches to Hollywood – studies of authorship, genre or ideology – have all provided systems of ordering, categorizing and analyzing movies as textual artefacts in ways that avoid or ignore the blunt commercial purpose of their production, distribution and exhibition. Constructing their critical practice from the methods and rationale of literary criticism, these approaches have tended to render Hollywood aesthetically respectable by ignoring or consciously discounting its commercial intent. Yet it is precisely Hollywood’s enduring status as the world’s most popular and financially successful cinema that requires analysis and explication.

Hollywood’s dichotomous nature as ‘show business’ has long presented a methodological quandary to scholars seeking to articulate the creative and financial relationship between movie and audience. Where should one begin – with the hard-nosed financial imperatives of the ‘business’ or with the intangible attractions of the ‘show’? While many studies have opted to concentrate on one of these factors to the exclusion of the other, the fact is that in relation to Hollywood the two have always been so thoroughly interdependent that it is impossible satisfactorily to account for the business of the movies without taking into account their aesthetic characteristics, and vice versa. To understand Hollywood is to understand the many interrelated strategies – some industrial and some aesthetic – that it has used to find acceptance amongst its diverse audiences. The extraordinary international success of the industry is testimony to the fact that many of these strategies have been sophisticated, inventive and responsive to historical change, despite the fact that the industry’s products themselves have regularly been characterized by its critics as crude and repetitive. Hollywood’s ‘formula’ for commercial success, far from being transparent, is sufficiently complex to ensure that, although the industry has been with us for the best part of a century, scholars are still searching for adequate ways to account for both its popularity and its influence.

In seeking to identify a ‘Hollywood paradigm’ of Film Studies, perhaps the first issue to confront is whether the object of study has been sufficiently coherent over time to be understood in relation to any single industrial or aesthetic model. There has been considerable debate as to whether the ‘Classical Hollywood’ that evolved until roughly World War Two can be meaningfully bracketed with the ‘Post-Classical’ cinema that followed the War, or indeed with the ‘Contemporary Hollywood’ that reoriented itself in the 1980s to pay TV, video and ultimately DVD and other digital formats.

At its height, ‘Classical Hollywood’ was dominated by a small, stable group of vertically integrated companies managing each stage of production, distribution and exhibition. The major companies excluded competition by cooperating closely with each other with respect to matters in which they had a mutual and non-competitive interest. Moviemaking within each company was characterized by highly efficient and concentrated production, with a permanent staff of specialized workers based in Los Angeles bringing out approximately a movie per major studio per week when the system was at its height in the late 1930s. The movies themselves were differentiated by budget and by their generic elements, but they were also subject to a high degree of centralized regulation, and were designed primarily to be consumed by general audiences in conventional cinemas.

Fifty years later, Hollywood’s industrial landscape and the cultural status of its products had undergone a radical overhaul. The direct connection between production and exhibition constituted by vertical integration had been disrupted: in 1948, at the culmination of a legal case known as the ‘Paramount Suit’, the Supreme Court required production/distribution companies to divest themselves of their exhibition chains. As a result of the industrial instability that followed, by the end of the 1960s all the major companies had been acquired by larger diversified conglomerates; and by the 1980s they had been positioned, to greater or lesser degrees, at the heart of gigantic media corporations. In this new era, movie production was largely outsourced to external creative teams, many of which came together for a single production and subsequently disbanded. Filming and post-production increasingly moved away from its Los Angeles base, and the old studio facilities were largely sold off or given over to television production or theme parks. Since then, movies have been designed to be classified for viewing by targeted groups of consumers in cinemas or at home instead of by general audiences; now the majority of a movie’s profits are realized in its video and television release and in many cases in merchandising. The ‘aftermarket’ of sales beyond the original cinematic release increasingly determines the nature of cinematic product rather than the other way around.

This bald overview may seem to suggest that Hollywood’s history has been characterized by clear points of rupture that have transformed it from one industrial state to the next. On closer inspection, however, it appears that this type of periodization is unnecessarily reductive, and that the changes that have been wrought upon Hollywood have been more incremental than catastrophic. Technological changes, so often trumpeted as ‘revolutionizing’ the industry, have typically disturbed the fundamentals of the movie business very little (see Enticknap, 2005).

When Douglas Gomery asks in The Coming of Sound, ‘How did the industry change as a new technology was innovated?’ (2004: xv), he is shaping his argument around essentially the same question that John Belton (1992) asks of widescreen technology and Gianluca Sergi asks of the second ‘sound revolution’ in The Dolby Era (2004). Gomery’s response – that a change driven by rational business decisions ultimately produced not chaos or revolution, but long-term growth and greater control for Hollywood over its global markets – demonstrates the rationality and coherence of the major companies’ transition from the provision of silent cinema to ‘talkies’. Gomery’s industrial and economic analysis provides a significant corrective to other accounts of the introduction of sound, which have been more concerned with the history and aesthetic consequences of technological change (Lastra, 2000; O’Brien, 2005), and have most commonly presented sound as causing a complete break with Hollywood’s past. Gomery’s own account is itself informed and nuanced by Donald Crafton’s emphasis, in The Talkies (1997), on the audience’s enthusiastic acceptance of sound and on the overriding economic impact of the Depression on the industry’s activities. Crafton’s conclusion that, ‘sound definitely changed cinema, but not across the board, and not as a radical overthrow of film convention … [whereby] in the long run, the social experience of going to the movies was remarkably unaffected’ (1997: 543–4), might stand as a plausible summary for the effects that the major changes in production technology (sound, colour, widescreen) have had on the industry as a whole. The history of technology itself demonstrates film history’s preoccupation with production and its techniques, rather than commerce. As Gomery also argues, ‘the greatest technological change in the movie industry in the United States during the 1930s came with the installation of air conditioning into theatres’ (2004: 148).

It is arguable that other pivotal moments of change were connected with the expansion of the foreign market in 1918; with the formulation of the Production Code in 1930, or perhaps its affirmation in 1934; with the filing of the Paramount Suit in 1938 or its resolution in 1948; with the reorientation of the foreign market during World War Two or changes in audience demographics following the war; with the widespread take-up of television in the 1950s or the abandonment of the Production Code and the adoption of movie ratings in 1968; with the experimentation with new profit-making strategies, including both new cinematic styles and new release patterns, in the 1970s; with the diffusion of cable and satellite delivery systems and video-cassette recorders in the 1980s; with the horizontal integration of the industry within multinational media companies or the rise of digital convergence; or with innumerable other factors that have impinged on the industry over time. There is no clear academic consensus about which of these ‘moments’ signals a clear point of departure for Hollywood. More fundamentally, there is as yet no clear academic consensus as to the basis for any periodization of the American cinema industry’s history – whether, that is, its periodization should be determined by technological change, by changes in the structure or viewing practices of the audience, by changes in corporate management or on the basis of legal or legislative change.

Even during periods of supposed stability, the Hollywood industry has been obliged to evolve continuously in response to its changing business environment. Remarkably, of the eight companies that dominated the industry by the end of the 1920s, only one, RKO, has been officially wound up. The others – Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros Fox, United Artists, Columbia and Universal – have all survived to the present day, despite bouts of asset-stripping, merger, acquisition, divestment and the occasional near-death experience. Mostly they have thrived, with many of these companies now amongst the most powerful corporations in the world, along with the Walt Disney Company, that also had its roots in the late 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the industry’s melodramatic history, audiences have not, on the whole, experienced Hollywood as a discontinuous phenomenon. Indeed, although the industry has constantly reshaped itself in order to profit from changing demographics, political climates and technologies, the nature of Hollywood’s attraction to audiences has remained remarkably stable throughout its history. It has remained an essentially erotic, star-centred, generic cinema; it has kept a close association with wider consumerist trends, especially fashion; and it has maintained its global prestige with high production values, typically expressed through action and spectacle. Most importantly, it has continued to engage audiences on an emotional level, with promotional campaigns consistently built around the promise of tears, laughter, thrills, suspense and horror.

The tension between industrial change and aesthetic persistence in Hollywood has been reflected in commentaries on the industry, which have commonly tended to emphasize either the fluctuating and contingent mechanics of the industry’s operations, or the more persistent ways in which movies have sought to engage and seduce audiences. The former perspective encompasses industrial, economic, institutional and cultural histories, including censorship practices and political economies. The second approach emphasizes factors such as stardom, film style, narrative construction and genre. There is clearly a good deal of overlap between these perspectives, and situated between the two is research, which seeks to integrate these two areas, by conceiving of Hollywood’s output as an intrinsically commercially-based set of aesthetic practices. Indeed, in relation to contemporary Hollywood, advances in digital convergence make it increasingly difficult to identify a ‘text’ that is independent of the multiple circumstances under which it is consumed, whether as movie, DVD, electronic game or content for a mobile phone.

This chapter will consider some of the ways in which scholars working in these disparate traditions have sought to illuminate the Hollywood phenomenon.

INDUSTRIAL HISTORIES

Since Hollywood’s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• INTRODUCTION
• SECTION I MAPPING TRADITIONS
• SECTION II DISCIPLINARY DIALOGUES
• SECTION III PARADIGMS IN PERSPECTIVE
• Index