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C35 :  HOLLYWOOD  -  Lecture Programme           Term 1.

Though frequently derided as crass and shallow, the Hollywood text has always been multi-layered. We have chosen to begin this course with a screening of Billy Wilder’s 1950 film because it is replete with themes and ideas we will be exploring through the year: the power of cinema’s collective memory, the star system, the role of the director and/or author. At the same time as exploring the brutality of Hollywood - its material profligacy and spiritual bankruptcy - it presents the necessary but uneasy marriage of commerce and art. Furthermore, its narrative of the silent star and the scriptwriter of sound films (Sight + Sound) allows this text to articulate elements of the cinematic apparatus itself.

Screening: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

Key Reading:  Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, "Hollywood Cinema" (Blackwell, 1995) Introduction: ‘Taking Hollywood Seriously’ pp 1 -17, Ch. 1 ‘Entertainment’ pp 18 - 58

Indicative Reading: Christopher Ames, "Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected", (University of Kentucky Press, 1997) Ch. 7 ‘Offing the Writer’

The history of Hollywood, and of Hollywood product, has been in large part ‘written’ by the 8 major studios which formed through the late teens and 20s. In a high-risk, inherently volatile industry, their longevity has been remarkable. In this lecture, we will look at the studio system in its glory days, at the economic mechanisms which kept it in place - and, in particular, at the strategies and relationships which made Loews-MGM the most successful, the most buoyant major studio in the early 30s, post sound, when, from 1932, the other majors were shaken by the effects of the Depression.

Screening: Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

Key Reading:  Richard Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema", Ch. 2 ‘Industry’ pp. 59 - 87

Indicative Reading:  [Fortune] ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’ in Tino Balio (ed.) "The American Film Industry" (revised edition, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).  Mae D Huettig, ‘Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry’, in Balio (ed.) "The American Film Industry" (ibid.). Thomas Schatz, "The Genius of the System", (Simon and Schuster, 1989) Ch. 7 pp 98 - 124.

Stars are not intrinsic to cinema, but they are certainly integral to Hollywood cinema. In this lecture, we will explore the fascinating ontological riddle of the star, that super-being who scrambles the boundaries between art and life, who is capable of investing an on-screen character with an off-screen life (and vice-versa). We will look at the studio mechanisms which, in the case of Bette Davis and so many others, created and sustained a complex, charismatic persona through the 30s and 40s; we will look at the psychic mechanisms, on the part of spectators, which may equally be said to create, shape and sustain the star.

Screening: The Letter (William Wyler, 1940)

Key Reading:  Richard Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema" pp. 88 - 101, 252 - 276

Indicative Reading:  Cathy Klaprat, ‘The Star as Market Strategy: Bette Davis in Another Light’, in Balio (ed.) "The American Film Industry". Richard Dyer, "Stars" (BFI, 1986) pp 38 – 72.   John Ellis, ‘Stars as Cinematic Phenomenon’, in "Visible Fictions" (Routledge, 2nd edition, 1992), pp 91 - 108.  Jackie Stacey, ‘Feminine Fascinations: Forms of identification in star-audience relations’ in Christine Gledhill (ed.), "Stardom - Industry of Desire" (Routledge, 1991).

Genre film-making is an inevitable by-product of bulk production, delimiting choice, functioning as a kind of contract, a set of guarantees, between industry and audience. As a genre, the Musical was created by the sound revolution and, in its most successful early form, the Warners' Show Musical of the 30s, was shaped by the Depression, which in turn it ritualises and seeks to 'manage'. In this lecture, we will look at the modalities of the Show (or Backstage) Musical, at the particular contribution of the choreographer, Busby Berkeley, at the gender politics which underpin the genre, and at the genre's (not uncharacteristic) movement, through subsequent decades, into self-interrogation and auto-critique.

Screening: Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, Busby Berkeley, 1933)

Key Reading:  Richard Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema", Ch. 3 'Genre', pp 107 - 114

Indicative Reading:  Rick Altman, "The American Film Musical" , (BFI, 1987) pp 200 – 234. Bruce Babbington and Peter William Evans, "Blue Skies and Silver Linings" (Manchester University Press, 1985) pp 46 - 72.  Richard Dyer, ‘Entertainment and Utopia’ in Bill Nichols (ed.), "Movies and Methods Vol 2" (University of California Press, 1985).

Griffiths' place in film history was assured by his ground-breaking feature-length films, such as Birth of a Nation, Intolerance and Broken Blossoms. Although his contribution to the development of formal paradigms has been questioned in recent years, he clearly understood the importance of manipulating time and space and how the medium might be used to do that. Far from being the innovator of formal devices such as the close-up or the point-of-view shot, his talent seems to have been in exploiting these to his own ends. This lecture looks at the formal and stylistic developments associated with Griffiths' break-through films - developments which underpin his reputation and provide the foundation for mainstream cinema practice.

Screening: The Birth of a Nation (D W Griffith,1915) [Extracts]

Key Reading:  Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema", Ch. 7 ‘Time’ (pp. 286 - 322)

Indicative Reading:  Elaine Bowser, History of America Cinema Vol. 2: The Transformation of Cinema 1907 - 1915 (University of California Press, 1990), Ch. 4 ‘The Films: Alternate Scenes’.

The 1920s saw film come into its own and American film in particular rise to the pinnacle of international success. This was due in no small part to silent comics of the 1910s. By 1915, Charlie Chaplinıs was the most recognised face on the planet and was soon being depicted in high art forms by painters and sculptors. In fact, it was the balletic art of film comedy that seemed to characterise the new medium.This lecture will offer textual analyses of extracts to illustrate auteurist and self-reflexive elements within that art.

Screening: Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924) + Chaplin extracts

Key Reading:  Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema", pp. 263 - 276

Indicative Reading:  Kahleen Rowe Karlyn, ‘The Detective and the Fool, or the Mystery of Manhood in Sherlock Jr.’, in Andrew Horton (ed.), Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

It had been European films which, in the early 1910s, had forced American films into experimenting with the feature-length movie. By visiting European theatres American exhibitors learned that treating all patrons like a middle-class clientele would, in the words of Paramountıs Adolph Zukor, ‘kill the slum tradition.’ This lecture will discuss how Hollywood responded in the 1920s to the continuing prestige of European product - by importing Eurpean directors - and how this effected a shift in the dominant Hollywood paradigm.

Screening: Sunrise (F W Murnau, 1927)

Key Reading: Richard Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema", pp. 189 - 217

Indicative Reading:  David Bordwell, 'The Introduction of Sound', in Bordwell, Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson, "The Classical Hollywood Cinema" (Routledge, 1988) Ch. 23  pp 298 - 308.   Robert C Allen, Douglas Gomery, "Film History: Theory and Practice" (McGraw-Hill, 1985), pp 91 - 108.

The Frankfurt School had criticised Hollywood product as no more than a vehicle for capitalist propaganda. But if it could carry - had, in 1942, to carry - propagandist messages, its formal devices could also be an effective conveyor of heart-felt and curious - even unconscious - complexities.  Arguably, Casablanca is the ultimate studio film; "not one movie," Umberto Eco has said. "It is movies." In exploring the elements which make for that perfect paradigmatic status, it is also worth asking what strengths and what limits might be implicit in that designation.

Screening:  Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

Key Reading:  Richard Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema", pp 344 - 351.

Indicative Reading:  Robert B Ray, "A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930 - 1980" (Princeton UP, 1985) pp 89 - 112.

It is a commonplace in much criticism surrounding Film Noir to regard this retrospectively formulated category as a pessimistic cinematic response to the social and economic conditions in America during the decade following World War ll. But such an approach barely takes account of why the internal logic of these texts provides an enduring formula to which Hollywood returns again and again. Rather than referencing external sources, this lecture will address the internal logic of key texts of what is increasingly seen as a purely American genre, in order to account for its revival in neo-noir texts like 'Body Heat', 'The Last Seduction', 'L A Confidential'.

Screening:  Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

Indicative Reading: J A Place and L S Peterson, 'Some Visual Motifs in Film Noir', in Bill Nichols (ed.) "Movies and Methods Vol. 1" (University of California Press, 1976).  Paul Kerr, 'Out of What Past? Notes on the B Film Noir', in Kerr (ed.) "The Hollywood Film Industry" (RKP 1986).  Janey Place 'Women in Film Noir' in E Ann Kaplan (ed.) "Women in Film Noir" (BFI 1980)

From 1934, when it was instituted, to the mid-50s when structural changes within Hollywood eroded its authority and the authority of the major studios which sustained it, the Production Code Administraton ensured, in John Izod's words, that "for more than two decades, sexuality was replaced by coyness and controversy by blandness."  As interesting as the PCA and the regimes of self- and pre-censorship which it exercised, was the explosive ideological charge of various narrative forms - the gangster film, the 'fallen woman' cycle, the musical (again) - which enter the mainstream in the early 30s and to which the PCA was, in large part, a response. In this lecture, we will look at the Donıts, the Be Carefuls, the Must Avoids of the Code - and at the material which challenges or resists it.

Screening: Baby Face (Alfred E Green, 1933)

Key Reading: Richard Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema", pp 339 - 344 + 369 - 372

Indicative Reading: Richard Maltby, 'Baby Face: or How Joe Breen Made Barbara Stanwyck Atone for Causing the Wall Street Crash', in Janet Staiger (ed.) "The Studio System"  (Rutgers University Press, 1995).  Ruth A Inglis, 'Self-Regulation in Operation', in Balio (ed.) "The American Film Industry" (revised edition, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

Week 11. December 10th. No Lecture. Surgery for essays, as requested.

Week 12. December 17th.  No Lecture