Hollywood Filmmaking Research Articles

Transformation of gender roles in hollywood movies: 1946–1990

Abstract Over the past 25 years Hollywood filmmakers have gradually broken with tradition and now portray men and women in new ways. Female characters, no longer so exclusively focused on romance, have emerged as more complex, alienated, and violent. Through a systematic content analysis of the movies from the 1940s through 1989, the authors explore the shift in gender roles, showing how the images reflect the attitudes of a new Hollywood elite of filmmakers who have succeeded in replacing old myths with new.

Conventions of Sound in Documentary

This essay draws comparisons between various examples of sound practices and narration in the documentary tradition, focusing primarily on synchronous-sound observational films from the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the 1973 PBS series An American Family. While documentary sound tracks may include voice-over, dialogue, music, and effects, the hierarchy and distribution of these sounds differ in important ways from classical Hollywood conventions. In fact, Hollywood's increasing reliance on multi-track postproduction techniques contrasts significantly with documentaries that use only location-recorded sound. In a series of articles, Rick Altman has described the conventions of sound in classical Hollywood cinema as an interplay between intelligibility and fidelity, a system in which fidelity is sacrificed in favor of the more narratively central dimension of intelligibility.' Similarly, Noil Carroll has argued that the hallmark of Hollywood movie narration is clarity and comprehensibility. Popular movies offer experiences of places, events, characters, and drama more clearly delineated than our ordinary lives. In Carroll's words, The flow of action approaches an ideal of uncluttered clarity. This clarity contrasts vividly with the quality of fragments of actions and events we typically observe in everyday life.'2 Hollywood filmmakers use cinematic techniques of image and sound to focus the attention of the spectator on the salient elements that further the narrative action. Carroll suggests that it is not the purported realism of the cinematic apparatus that millions of viewers find compelling but rather the heightened intelligibility that is the hallmark of Hollywood cinema. If audiences were truly interested in greater fidelity to the real world, then presumably documentary films would form a larger part of the corpus that has made motion pictures a very popular art form in the twentieth century. While documentary films often use narrative forms, they rarely demonstrate the degree of clarity that these writers see as the standard of classical Hollywood cinema. Location sound work in documentary films occasionally makes discrimination among sounds difficult, if not impossible. Although works like Pare Lorentz's Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and Ken Burn's Civil War (1990) are perfectly comprehensible, the intelligibility of documentary only rarely approaches that of popular movies; characters lack clear motivations, speech may be inaudible in parts, lighting haphazard and variable, camera movements

Men, women, and chain saws: gender in the modern horror film

Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero, who suffers fright but rises to vanquish the forces of oppression. Clover, a medievalist, had written extensively on the literature and culture of early northern Europe, especially the Old Norse sagas. From her expertise in formulaic narrative grew her interest in contemporary cinema, which is, after all, yet another form of oral storytelling. Men, Women, and Chain Saws investigated the appeal of horror cinema, in particular the phenomenal popularity of those low genres that feature female heroes and play to male audiences: slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Such genres seem to offer sadistic pleasure to their viewers, and not much else. Clover, however, argued the reverse: that these films are designed to align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the female tormented--with the suffering, pain, and anguish that the girl, as Clover calls the victim-hero, endures before rising, finally, to vanquish her oppressor. The book has found an avid readership from students of film theory to major Hollywood filmmakers, and the figure of the final girl has been taken up by a wide range of artists, inspiring not just filmmakers but also musicians and poets.

Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry

The theoretical concept of role as resource is introduced and illustrated. The concept combines critical elements of the structural, interactionist, and network approaches to role. A role is a resource in two senses: it is a means to claim, barbain for, and gain membership and acceptance in a social community, and it grants access to social, cultura, and material capital that incumbents and claimants exploit in order to pursue their interests. This article examines the impact of a major transformation-the rise of the blockbuster-on roles and positions in Hollywood filmmaking and discerns two processes underlying the growth and decline of roles in culture production. Through adaptation, filmmakers adopt role combinations with intrinsic capabilities of solving technical and organizational problems. Through imitation, filmmakers copy the role combinations associated with early blockbusters and gain legitimacy in Hollywood's institutional environment. These responses resulted in two fundamental trends: the in...

Frank Capra'sWhy We Fightseries and the American audience

In 1942, successful Hollywood filmmaker, Frank Capra, was drafted by the Office of War Information to produce a series of documentaries explaining the American involvement in World War II to both military personnel and civilians. The result of his efforts was the seven‐part Why We Fight series seen by millions worldwide. This analysis investigates Capra's portrayal of fundamental American values through the visual contrast techniques of parallel editing and deep focus. Capra's failure to adapt the visual framework of arguments from preceding films to The Battle of China explains its temporary suppression by the United States government.

The genius of the system: Hollywood filmmaking in the studio era

Acknowlegements, Preface: Center of Gravity, Introduction: The Whole Equation of Pictures, Part I: 1920's: Beginnings, 1. Universal: System Takes Shape, 2. MGM: Dawn of the Thalberg Era, 3. Selznick at MGM: Climbing the Executive Ranks, 4. Warner Bros.: Talking Their Way to the Top, Part II: 1928-1932: Powers That B, 5. Selznick at Paramount: From Boo to Bust, 6. Universal: Renaissance and Retrenchment, 7. MGM and Thalberg: Alone at the Top, 8. Selznick at RKO: At the Helm of a Foundering Studio, 9. Warner Bros.: Zanuck Era, Part III: 1930s: Golden Age, 10. MGM in the Mid-Thirties:Charmed Interval, 11. Selznick International Pictures: Going Independent, 12. Warner Bros.: Power Plays and Prestige, 13. Universal: Playing Both Ends Against the Middle, 14. MGM: Life after Thalberg, 15. Selznick and Hitchcock: Balance of PowerPart IV: 1941-1946: War Boom, 16. Warner Bros.: Warfare at Home and Abroad, 17. David O. Selznick Productions: Packaging Prestige, 18. Universal: Best of Both Worlds, 19. MGM: High Cost of Quality, 20. Selznick and Hitchcock: Separate Ways, Part V: 1947-1960: Decline, 21. Warner Bros.: Top of the World, End of the Line, 22. MGM: Last Gasp of the Studio Era, 23. Universal: Blueprint for the Television Age, 24. Epilogue: Into the New Hollywood, Notes on Sources, Photograph Credits, Index

The DeMilles, an American family

This biography of three generations of the De Mille family, including the epic Hollywood film-maker Cecil B.De Mille, traces their rise to prominence from theatrical origins in the 19th century to their later dominance in stage productions, film and dance. Many previously unpublished family photographs complement the study. Anne Edwards has written several books on the film industry which include biographies of Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh and Shirley Temple.

Hollywood Filmmaking and Reputation Building: Hitchcock'sThe Birds

(1987). Hollywood Filmmaking and Reputation Building: Hitchcock's The Birds. Journal of Popular Film and Television: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 5-15.

Arthropods on the Screen

Recent rapid development of photographic and electronic technology plus growing environmental awareness have led to increased production of quality nature films. Very few now appear in theaters, but we can enjoy exceptional nature programming almost weekly on television through series such as Nature, Nova, Survival, and the National Geographic Specials. These efforts make a positive contribution to educating general viewers about nature, and some become available and useful for classroom purposes. But I wish to address the generally less constructive treatment afforded to arthropods on the screen in films made solely for commercial release. I present here a preliminary survey of the movies known to me whose production depicted or used arthropods in some way. Although primarily fictional creations of nonscientists, these works may serve to illustrate how one group of potential mass-audience “educators” (i.e., Hollywood filmmakers) views entomological subjects and how that view is transmitted by their medium.

Faulkner: A Biography (One-Volume Edition), and: Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, and Charles Ives (review)

Reviewed by: Faulkner: A Biography (One-Volume Edition), and: Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, and Charles Ives Arthur F. Kinney Joseph Blotner . Faulkner: A Biography (One-Volume Edition). New York: Random, 1984. 778 pp. $35.00. Joseph W. Reed . Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, and Charles Ives. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1984. 254 pp. $22.95. Joseph Blotner's new biography of Faulkner ("revised," "updated," "condensed," the dust jacket proclaims) is, in the author's own words, "not just different from its predecessor of a decade ago; it is to some extent a new book." It must necessarily go through some heavy revision if it is to take a judicious measure of what has been, by all odds, the busiest ten years so far in Faulkner criticism and scholarship. Four early works appeared between Blotner's two biographies—The Marionettes, Mayday, Sanctuary (the original text), and "Helen: A Courtship" and "Mississippi Poems" (to which Blotner himself contributed an introduction). Various memoirs have appeared by members of the family; documentaries have been made; the Rowan Oak papers were discovered, and so was a journal by Faulkner's father, Murry. New letters to and from Faulkner have been published, and his stepson, Malcolm A. Franklin, has left us Bitterweeds, a reminiscence revealing and moving by turns. And, most importantly of all, perhaps, Estelle Oldham Faulkner has died, freeing the biographer to go more deeply into Faulkner's relationships with his wife and, in subsequent years, with other, much younger women. This version, then, seems at once freer and franker. It is much more open, for instance, about Faulkner's marriage—about his wife's attempted suicide on their honeymoon, about her drinking, about her disappointment in waiting twelve years to marry him, and about the effects a drastic reduction in her material comforts had on their marriage. And there is now an important shift in focus. What emerged so poignantly in the 1974 biography was an artist who had to spend much of his energy, and untold amounts of his talent and time, worrying over making financial ends meet, fussing about his responsibilities with a much extended family, and complaining about the intrusions of popular magazines and Hollywood filmmakers on his work at the same time he used them, at some junctures shamelessly, to make room and time for his serious and more committed fiction. In this new edition, that Faulkner recedes as the man unhappy in love comes to the foreground. The treatment of Meta Carpenter Wilde, of Jean Stein, and even of Joan Williams that was missing in the earlier study is now given much of the attention it deserves, and so a fuller and clearer picture of Faulkner emerges. But this recent biography is not so different from its predecessor as the Foreword might lead us to believe. The heavily documented ancestry of Faulkner is condensed in the new life, but the clutter of fact is still present on every page. Blotner's biographical method is to provide a documentation of details that, in their slow accumulation, will provide the best and most reliable portrait. For many readers there will still be the problem of selection, of seeing in this account what emerge as the major figures in the Faulknerian carpet. And despite occasional disclaimers, the account is still largely tied to chronology: it remains the basic arrangement. As for his accounting of Faulkner's various affairs, Blotner is perhaps most disappointing in his presentation of Meta Carpenter (who went unacknowledged in the first biography); here he relies solely on her book, rather [End Page 411] than on fresh interviews, although she has recently said herself that this account is a faulty one. In 1974, Blotner ended his two-volume life with an extended and sometimes painful account of Faulkner's death and burial. He was himself a participant in part of the ritual as one of six pallbearers. The new biography ends similarly. It is a telling point. Blotner now, as then, is still (if more implicitly) in much of this book, and it has its effects on the tale and its telling. Joseph W. Reed's new book, of which Faulkner is one part...

Film and the Political

“It is extremely difficult to make a good political or social film because the issues are complex and, to some extent, abstract, and have to be embodied in human anatagonists to make them come alive… In effect, the film maker is caught between the Scylla of depersonalization and the Charybdis of oversimplification… It is much easier to make a film with political overtones or social implications, … and not confront the problems head-on.“In the winter 1982 issue of NEWS, Professor Sidney Wise ponders the treatment of the politician by Hollywood's film makers. Wise was prompted to write in response to a previous discussion of Robert Altman's Nashville by G. Alan Tarr, who argued that such a film is “above all a commentary on political life.”

Em cartaz: Hollyfruti. Um estudo da apropriação cultural como estratégia comunicacional da marca Hortifruti

A Rede Hortifruti, maior distribuidora de frutas e verduras do Brasil, com sede no Estado do Espírito Santo, utiliza, em suas campanhas publicitárias, a filmografia hollywoodiana, em consonância com seu discurso multimodal. O objetivo deste estudo é verificar como a utilização de elementos do imaginário coletivo e do cotidiano das pessoas se torna uma importante ferramenta nas estratégias comunicacionais, que geram uma espécie de conexão emocional, ao passar por todas as fases: chamar a atenção do público, instigá-lo pela criatividade e pelo bom humor, interagir com ele e causar a sua identificação com a marca. Para isso, utilizamos a metodologia Hermenêutica de Profundidade, ancorada nas técnicas de pesquisa bibliográfica, entrevista e estudo de caso. Como resultado, esperamos que a pesquisa possa contribuir para a reflexão da importância de consolidar a marca por meio de uma comunicação estratégica e criativa.