Contemporary Hollywood Cinema Research Articles

The Values in the Hollywood Cinema Market

Some have misled Hollywood cinema with impressions due to some conception that it is limited to big budgets, stars, special effects, and extensive publicity campaigns. However, it encompasses more than investment diversification, production, and commercial propaganda feature. In other words, beyond the illustrative classic Hollywood pre-sold mechanism, monopoly, and overseas market, it supports values and serves as multicultural, sexual and race equality. This paper lists the phenomenon that contemporary Hollywood cinema is revenue-driven, resulting in many low-quality and quantity reproduction cinemas such as hybrid genre is typical of formulaic filmmaking, and they arranged all the cinematic elements narrative to meet the audience's expectations. Significantly, formulaic movies have become popular and widespread in the international market and may have an unpredictable impact on the future film industry. The author believes that films are the medium for representing historical periods and are for the generation's legacy, which should craft narratives that intricately blend values and ideology. In a nutshell, it is crucial to discover a solution for cinema's unpredictable future.

영화 속 재즈 음악의 활용 양상에 관한 연구

This study aims to compare movies with distinct characteristics that utilize jazz to grasp the usage patterns of jazz in film music and to investigate the cinematic approach to the jazz genre in contemporary Hollywood films. For this research, Terence Blanchard's Malcolm X(1992), John Williams' Catch Me If You Can(2002), and Justin Hurwitz's La La Land(2016) were selected and researched; the conclusion was as follows. First, trumpeter Terence Blanchard faithfully served the cinematic function by utilizing jazz, a pillar of Black music. Second, Traditional Hollywood film composer John Williams fused symphonic sound with the jazz genre. Third, Justin Hurwitz crafted music by embracing the characteristics of the musical film. The music had a close relationship with the film's narrative structure and played a significant role throughout the film. As comparative analysis based on the research findings, the diverse cinematic approaches to the jazz genre were influenced by the film's structure and the composer's musical inclinations. According to this, distinctions appeared in the underscore, source music, and cinematic function of music depending on the film. However, they also coexisted with common elements, such as classical music's foundations and leitmotif techniques.

Barbara Plotz, "Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema" (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 282 pp.

Barbara Plotz, "Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema" (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 282 pp.

Analysis of Mulan’s Poor Reception in China from the Perspective of Orientalism

Abstract The undesirable reception of Disney’s Mulan (2020) is attributable to complicated factors. This paper combs Hua Mulan’s images in Chinese literary and visual discourses, and confirms her as a virtuous epitome and a national heroine in Chinese mainstream culture, whereas in Mulan, she is portrayed as a warrior with magic “qi” and homosexual orientation, representing modern feminists’ pursuits for gender recognition and equality. Besides, the assertive collage of Chinese cultural elements severely impairs the authenticity of her story. Superficially, the arbitrary appropriation of Chinese culture causes the poor reception of the movie, which, however, if situated within the framework of Orientalism with a lineal examination of the Chinese-culture-related Hollywood movies, more underlying causes, ideological, political and commercial, can be uncovered. The film’s failure bespeaks the predicament confronted by contemporary Hollywood film industry. If Hollywood film producers want to reap lucrative gains from the booming Chinese film market, they should rectify their outdated condescending attitudes and do more in updating their production concepts, innovation, empathy and cooperation. This paper may be of significance as a reference to the practice and study of film adaptation, production and marketing across cultures.

Wonder Woman: The Female Body and Popular Culture, by Joan Ormrod; Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, by Barbara Plotz

The idea of the female body as a site onto which sociocultural fears and anxieties are projected is well established in feminist theory. Theorists like Laura Mulvey, Kathleen Rowe, bell hooks and Hortense Spillers have created seminal works from their examination of how the body operates, conforms and resists under a patriarchal, heteronormative, white gaze. Discourse around the body—and in particular, the female-coded body—is what aligns the work of Joan Ormrod and Barbara Plotz reviewed here. Although their analyses focus on the body in different contexts (Ormrod charts the cultural icon Wonder Woman, while Plotz examines fatness in contemporary Hollywood cinema), both conduct in-depth examinations of the ways in which ideology can be projected onto the body.

On the realist aesthetics of digital de‐aging in contemporary Hollywood cinema

This essay examines digital de‐aging—a process of making actors appear younger on‐screen than they actually are that has taken a firm hold in contemporary Hollywood cinema—as a controversial filmmaking tool that raises fundamental questions about cinematic realism in the digital age. Since Hollywood’s visual effects are similar to the image manipulation that can be achieved with deepfake software, digital de‐aging is framed as a complex creative process that supports the actors’ craft in order to distinguish it from the image manipulation and misinformation that has come to characterize the post‐truth era. I will discuss the affordances and limitations of Hollywood’s “youthification” technology in terms of the shifting ontologies that characterize the transition from the photographic to the digital image, situate digital de‐aging within larger debates about synthespians and the realistic portrayal of digitally created human beings, and argue that de‐aging in films such as Gemini Man (Ang Lee, 2019) and The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) reconfigures linear temporalities and ultimately reshapes the concepts of time and memory by which we structure our life trajectories.

Kennedy Miller Mitchell and the relationality of Australian cinema – global film practice in Australia

ABSTRACT Recent work in Australian screen scholarship has been focused on expanding the limitations of our national cinema discourse. Terms like Deb Verhoeven’s ‘Industry 3’ or Ben Goldsmith’s ‘outward-looking Australian cinema’, and the discourse of ‘transnationality’ more generally, exemplify a contemporary tendency that seeks out new conceptual foundations from which to analyse Australian film as interrelated with international industrial contexts. US film historian Janet Staiger has proposed one potentially fruitful alternative conceptual schema. Staiger argues that the concept of ‘film practices’ offers a way to carry out the historiographical grouping of film texts without recourse to categories of nationality or transnationality. In this article, I examine the analytical possibilities of the film practice schema in the Australian context. I focus on the Australian production firm Kennedy Miller Mitchell, which I identify as operating within the contemporary classical Hollywood cinema practice. Scholars have previously encountered conceptual deficiencies in grouping the work of this firm under prevailing terms of national cinema discourse. I show how the application of the film practice schema can make better sense of Kennedy Miller Mitchell’s place in the Australian and international screen industries, and I assess some of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach for future scholarship.

Retroframing the Future: Digital De-aging Technologies in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

ABSTRACT: An emergent current of contemporary Hollywood cinema’s virtual population is the digitally age-regressed body, whereby computer animation “de-ages” star performers in feats of astonishing technological expressivity. This article examines the critical implications of virtual de-aging processes as both an institutional shift and a set of regularized formal practices. While the computerization of stardom by visual effects studios permits the aged star to transcend the limitations of their flesh-and-blood bodies, de-aging technologies intervene into critical discussions surrounding computer-mediated acting and digital performance; Hollywood’s increasingly “puzzling” narrative structures; gendered representations of aging in popular cinema; and the historical relationship between cinema, physiognomy, and memory.

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Questions of Space in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

AbstractSpatial fixing was an integral part of maintaining imperial power structures throughout the colonial period, and like other discourses, it later found itself reproduced in cinema. As such, the physical and mental use of space has become key to the dissemination of ideological messages in many films. Confronting this tendency, this study applies theories of postcolonialism to selected examples of contemporary Hollywood film to examine how far it reconstructs traditional binaries of space. This investigation finds that despite attempts to disseminate more culturally sensitive and globally-minded portrayals of the Other, space remains particularly problematic. It also remains vital to storytelling narratives of race, gender, class and society in consideration of the film cases analysed in this study. While Fanonian notions of space continue to permeate cinema—with Total Recall and Avatar in particular drawing upon stereotypical motifs, it is possible to observe developments upon these discourses. Elysium and District 9 exemplify this, with each feature employing space to address increased questioning of US cultural superiority since the failed Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and the 2008 global economic crash.

Yearning to Belong, Drawn to Be Mexican

This essay analyzes two contemporary Hollywood films—Fools Rush In (1997) and McFarland, USA (2015)—to highlight the mainstream imaginary of the relationship between Mexicanness and whiteness. We argue that these fi lms reveal how the existence and persistence of an emotionally impoverished whiteness becomes visible beside, against, and through Mexican affective fullness. We develop the term “white lack” to represent how whiteness, in all its modernity and focus on individual autonomy, is exposed as incomplete and even insufficient once it knows and “feels” the warmth and abundance of Mexicanness. We show that the political logics of white lack reveal a yearning not just for human connection but also for a different social order and relationship to place. Yet even as these fi lms gesture toward moments of interracial harmony and anticapitalist possibilities, they both retain the centrality of the white hegemonic gaze; indeed, Mexican affective fullness must be contained and reabsorbed into the body of whiteness by the end of each film.

Revolutionary Exceptions: Reception of The Godfather Films in Cuba

ABSTRACT This article revisits the conditions under which Cuba illicitly acquired, exhibited, and responded to Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films in the 1970s. After a brief ban on new American media imports—considered anti-intellectual in nature and incompatible with revolutionary ideals—following the Revolution, the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry saw fit to exhibit a Hollywood picture under the constraints of the blockade and at the height of the Cold War. To justify this break from the self-imposed boycott of contemporary Hollywood films, Cuban critics endeavored to construct a unified hermeneutics that understood the mafia as a singularly American phenomenon and the Godfather films as a form of immanent critique of capitalism. The purpose of this study is to identify Hollywood film as a persistent site of exchange or discourse between two competing ideologies. Faced with an ongoing blockade and a faltering national film industry, Cuban film criticism resisted the threat of cultural imperialism, nationalizing the limited presence of the American culture industry in the island much as it had other U.S. property a decade prior.

Louisiana Disguised: Film Tax Incentives and Location Representation in Contemporary Hollywood Films

Louisiana Disguised: Film Tax Incentives and Location Representation in Contemporary Hollywood Films

Dystopia, Science Fiction, Postapocalypse: Classics, New Tendencies, Model InterpretationsEckartVoigts and AlessandraBoller. Trier: WVT Wissenwchaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015 Quality Hollywood: Markers of Distinction in Contemporary Studio Film GeoffKing. I. B. Tauris, 2016. Spoiler Alert!: Mind‐Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film CorneliaKlecker. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015.

The Journal of American CultureVolume 40, Issue 2 p. 186-189 Book Review Dystopia, Science Fiction, Postapocalypse: Classics, New Tendencies, Model Interpretations , Eckart Voigts and Alessandra Boller. Trier: WVT Wissenwchaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015 Quality Hollywood: Markers of Distinction in Contemporary Studio Film Geoff King. I. B. Tauris, 2016. Spoiler Alert!: Mind-Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film Cornelia Klecker. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015. Laurence Raw, Laurence Raw Baskent UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Laurence Raw, Laurence Raw Baskent UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 June 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12720Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume40, Issue2June 2017Pages 186-189 RelatedInformation

The reflexive turn: mediating and remediating Hollywood: introduction

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.

Do African Americans Direct Science Fiction or Blockbuster Franchise Movies? Race, Genre, and Contemporary Hollywood

While scholars have long considered the relationship between genre and Black film production, less is known about African American directors’ participation in contemporary Hollywood film genres, especially the spaces where they are least included. An examination of post-2000 Hollywood films reveals that Black directors are routinely underrepresented in the most financially lucrative film genre, science fiction, and are therefore denied the success that comes with it. The underrepresentation of Black directors in the science fiction genre operates in dialogue with racialized ideological discourses about the place of African Americans in U.S. society—stereotyping them out of intellectual cultures. Race-bound practices of marginalization in science fiction films, and thereby top franchises, also impedes Black directors’ ability to attain the highest levels of economic success in the Hollywood film industry. Both outcomes present material and symbolic barriers for the complete inclusion of African Americans in contemporary media institutions and in U.S. society.

Ambiguous Bodies, Biopower and the Ideologies of Science Fiction

Contemporary Hollywood film narrates the fear of monstrous science; attending to the modulations of medicine, capital and the body. The filmic body is employed to illustrate the power of the new biotechnologies to create and sustain life and the new sets of social relations which are a consequence of the marriage of capital and medicine. In the Hollywood film, persons who do not fit the ideal healthy persona have a moral duty to pursue repair and transformation. Constructed as inherently lacking, the unhealthy body becomes a repository for social anxieties about control and vulnerability, vis-à-vis the enormous and exponentially expanding science and technology fields. Hierarchies of embodiment are played out on the Big Screen as imperfect bodies are excluded from public life, power and status and urged to strive for “optimization”. Late modern societies present the possibility of new technologies which have the potential to radicalize bodies. However, these potential modulations are ultimately derived from a set of ideologies around the body and the power of the individual to enact an individualized solution. Contemporary narratives circulate around ownership of capital and the price of “repair.” This marriage of science and capital in popular narratives may be indicative of concerns for our future, as the power to make and repair life seems to rest increasingly in the hands of an elite.

From Shame to Drive

This article juxtaposes two 2011 Hollywood films—Shame, directed by Steve McQueen, and Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn—that in their mutations of narrative time and cinematic montage demonstrate the ongoing salience of Fredric Jameson’s Marxist analysis of postmodern culture for the aesthetic and social form of contemporary Hollywood cinema. What Jameson in Postmodernism called the atemporal “waning of affect” is hyperbolically exposed in both films, which are linked by their formal emphasis on accumulation, repetition, and looping. This late capitalist regime of accumulation and excess takes the form of a cinematic drive that no longer hews to a narrative temporality but, rather, appears as exactly the hallucinatory intensity of an overwhelming present that Jameson described. For this reason, the films dispense with beginnings and endings; through modulations of filmic time, they return to the stasis of an eternal “posthistorical” present. Drive and Shame both end with montage sequences in which flashbacks and flash-forwards are rendered indistinguishable. Exploring this emphasis on sameness and repetition, the article takes up the psychoanalytic notion of the drive in relation to Jameson’s argument about the waning of affect.

Home Movies, The American Family in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Home Movies, The American Family in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Kirk Combe and Brenda Boyle, Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Film

Kirk Combe and Brenda Boyle’s recent book Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Film is part of the Palgrave series of books “Global Masculinities.” The book presents a socio-political analysis of monstrosity in contemporary blockbuster filmmaking, especially in relation to masculinity and gender performance. From the onset of the book two ideas frame their discussion. First, who is the hero and who the monster in these narratives is often surprisingly complex. Their natures i...