The reflexive turn: mediating and remediating Hollywood: introduction

Abstract

Reflexivity has emerged anew as a device central to contemporary Hollywood cinema’s tactics for ensuring continued dominance and self-renewal. The kind of reflexivity at stake here is not limited to the much debated forms of ‘allusionism’ and self-referentiality that have long been acknowledged as core features of contemporary Hollywood’s narrative and visual codes.1 Instead, as the title of this dossier suggests, it is now manifest across a series of double turns or – as one of this dossier’s authors, Catherine Bernard, argues – in the manner of a double helix that entwines, with digital proficiency, the critical and creative together with the commercial and industrial. The contemporary reflexive methods explored in this dossier thus incorporate Hollywood’s self-celebratory recycling: a capacity for plundering its own past, from which it has been decoupled by the advent of the digital and which forms the basis of the exploitation of its back catalogue as well as its current revenant blockbusters. Here Hollywood returns to its own histories, including its formation as an industrial machinery, its operations implicit in its use of jokes, repeats, rehashes and replays.