Hollywood Style Research Articles

Monothematicism and Fate in Dust Be My Destiny (1939)

In the classic Hollywood style, monothematic film scores are rare. Perhaps the most well known of these is David Raksin’s score for Laura (1944). Max Steiner’s score for the 1939 Warner Bros. film Dust Be My Destiny similarly uses a single focal theme. However, in this case, it is not obsession that drives this compositional choice but fate. Steiner portrays this fight against fate through the recurrence and ongoing transformation of the material from the main theme, which he transforms throughout to portray various and dramatic situations. In all, Steiner presents seventy-one different variants of the theme in the film. As Joe begins to realize that he can shape his own destiny, the theme develops alongside him, up to the final transformation in the closing credits.

Lumumba in the Arts

Lumumba in the Arts

Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction

Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction

THE BATTLE FOR RE-IMAGINING CATALONIA: CINEMATIC POPULISM, MYTH-MAKING, AND CATHEDRAL OF THE SEA (JORDI FRADES, 2018)

In this article, we argue that the TV series event with the highest audience in recent Catalan history, La catedral del mar /Cathedral of the Sea (Jordi Frades, 2018), is an example of commercial cinematic populism. Cathedral of the Sea is built on formal elements of the classic Hollywood style (for example, continuous editing, linear narrative, lack of moral ambiguity), and a series of substantive dichotomies (people/ elite, the popular hero/ the villain, the good/ the bad) and myths (the savior, the unity of the people). In analyzing their significance, we distinguish three hermeneutic layers, the populist, the general-mythical, and the Catalan historical context, which, in combination, constitute the cinematic narrative. Therein the central hero of Cathedral of the Sea, Arnau Estanyol, personifies the myth of the commoner who, by accumulating a whole range of virtues and social roles, synecdochically stands for the triumphant emergence of the modern Catalan people. This narrative is, we maintain, traversed by a tension between the populist call for emancipation, incarnated by Arnau, and the phantasmal self-gratification based on the depiction of a world devoid of complexity.

Nilo Couret, Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960.

With its striking cover image of famed Argentine comic Luis Sandrini, Nilo Couret’s Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy 1930–1960 may appear simply to be a new addition, albeit it a theoretically sophisticated one, to the existing literature on Latin American stardom. But such surface impressions belie Couret’s more substantive project of mobilizing the star discourses surrounding Sandrini, his fellow Argentine comic Niní Marshall, and Mexico’s legendary Cantinflas in order to question the problematic conceptualization of Latin American film history, especially its marginalization of popular film comedy within the limiting discourse of national cinema. Couret proposes an alternative approach that reframes the comedy genre around affect studies, in which the nature of spectator engagement becomes central. Discarding the conventional organization of film histories, a point reflected in the volume’s title as it relegates historical, geographical and genre concerns to a subtitle, Couret highlights instead what he calls ‘mock classicism’. ‘Mock’ here is used as both an adjective to depict the result of comedic assaults on the Hollywood style, but also as a verb to describe the visual and aural weakening of the self-contained illusion of Hollywood’s narrative mode through the comic actor’s disruption of the onscreen illusion. Couret’s goal is to demonstrate how, through specific comedic practices associated with these three star discourses, Latin American film comedies produce a classical mode of spectatorship different from the classicism figured by Hollywood.

Helga Crane’s camera obscura: Nella Larsen, Garbo’s face, and the modernist longing for plot

ABSTRACT Through an examination of Nella Larsen’s repeated viewings of George Cukor’s 1936 film Camille, this paper argues that we must understand modernism’s troubling of realist Bildung within the context of the classical Hollywood cinema and its invocations of nineteenth-century literature. Starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor, Camille is based on the stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s The Lady of the Camellias (1848), a novel critical of the Balzacian Bildungsroman, predicating the self-possessing, bourgeois individualism of its protagonist Armand Duval on the expulsion of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier. Cukor’s Camille, to the contrary, integrates Marguerite, through the legerdemain of classical Hollywood style, into a bourgeois liberal plot of social arrival and self-becoming. Larsen’s fascination with Cukor’s Camille offers a new way to read her first novel Quicksand (1928), not as a rejection of novelistic plot and its racialized promises of social belonging, but as a deeply vexed and ambivalent longing for it. Building on the speculative turn in the historiography of Black literature, film, and cinematic spectatorship–as well as recent work in asynchronic literary historiography–this essay suggests that it may have been a complicated form of desire and longing that brought Larsen again and again to Camille, since she would have been primed to detect the remarkable ease with which the film stylises out of existence the skepticism about Bildung that animated Dumas fils’s novel, and the resolute impossibility of Bildung that her own Quicksand so systematically laments.

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Latin American Cinemas Beyond Borders: A Dialogue Between Different Cultures

Latin American Cinemas Beyond Borders: A Dialogue Between Different Cultures Toloo Riazi Tierney, Dolores. New Transnationalism in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. 224 pp. ISBN 978-0-748645-732. In New Transnationalism in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas, Dolores Tierney puts her analysis of transnationality as a crucial axis into practice studying six Latin American directors: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles, and Juan José Campanella. Some critics consider the transnational films of these directors to be highly influenced by Hollywood style. Key to Tierney’s approach is her view of transnationality as the means by which the aforementioned directors are able to benefit from resources and influences outside the geopolitical and aesthetic borders of their own national cinemas (1–5). As she observes, transnationality corresponds to both non-local and local trends. With a similar idea in mind, she tries to show both the influence from within on those Latin American directors and the particularization of each one in maintaining his own ideological traits. The text posits several approaches to tackling the intersection of national cultures and that of geographically dispersed Hollywood (9). An increase in the number of transnational productions in Latin America, Tierney argues, was a response to various factors such as withdrawing of national financial support and protectionist measures from certain directors by the state (2). It is the author’s intention to go beyond the dichotomy between the ways in which scholars see Latin American directors as advocates of Hollywood cinema versus the rest of the world. She identifies the deterritorialized directors as “interstitial authors” negotiating between different cultures. By deterritorialized films, she means movies that are produced or co-produced outside the boundaries of a director’s national cinema and usually, but not always, filmed in English. In her analysis of Latin American cinemas, the author looks for alternative boundaries that challenge mainstream assumptions based on which the six studied directors produce necessarily effaced and consequently Hollywood-influenced movies. By drawing on Naficy, Tierney argues that transnational directors produce an accented cinema that shows traces of displacement (10). Tierney includes a detailed history of Latin American cinemas by integrating relevant statistics regarding the top box office, genres, and cinematic productions in each region. As she indicates, transnationalism has [End Page 167] exercised a decisive influence on the process of filmmaking of the six mentioned directors. Such influences include popular Hollywood genres, funding sources, global marketing, and film distribution. Structurally, Tierney’s book is divided into three major parts with an introduction. The first part, which contains three chapters, focuses on Mexico. The second and third parts contain two chapters on Brazil and one chapter on Argentina, respectively. In the beginning, the author highlights the historical veins of contemporary Mexican, Brazilian, and Argentinian cinema. She rounds out her argument for transnationalism in Latin American cinemas with a brief epilogue focusing on Gravity, Birdman, The Reverent, and Crimson Peak. Each country is analyzed from a fourfold perspective: “descriptive chronologies of [national industries]; the industry and/or legislative shifts which facilitated these directors’ initial domestic successes, the industry and legislative shifts that have taken place alongside their deterritorialized successes, as well as accounts of the directors’ ongoing relationship(s) to filmmaking in their own countries” (26). The first section begins with background information on contemporary Mexican cinema, then scrutinizes four transnational films by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel, and Biutiful) in the first chapter. While the chapter touches upon some broader issues, the focus is upon Iñárritu as a director without borders (47). The author traces a line of continuity between Iñárritu’s films and shows that “rather than purely imitate Hollywood or US traditions (as some scholarship has suggested) his films embody a perspective aligned with Mexico, Latin America and more broadly the people of the Global South” (27). In the second chapter, Tierney weds a critical understanding of transnationalism to Alfonso Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja, Y tu mamá también, and Children of Men. First, the author examines the commercial genres of Cuarón’s films, such as romantic comedies and road movies...

Kingdom of Heaven and its ideological message

As a Crusades epic, the film Kingdom of Heaven revives the 12th century history in the critical city of Jerusalem. The story surrounds a French blacksmith Balian who defends Jerusalem and contends with the Islamic leader Saladin who attempts to seize back the holy city from the Christians. Through the special themes in region, religion and war, Kingdom of Heaven seems to indicate the conflicts between the East and the West. Furthermore, the outbreaks of 9/11 and the Iraq War definitely make this film’s release more controversial. Kingdom of Heaven, being a film, an essential medium of mass communication, the style in which it expresses its story and ideology is worth considering in depth. By exploring this Hollywood film which lacks of the typical Hollywood style, this paper discusses the significance in making Kingdom of Heaven in the wake of 9/11 and how the critical debate surrounding the film is a reflection of contemporary ideologies.

Eyeblink rate watching classical Hollywood and post-classical MTV editing styles, in media and non-media professionals

While movie edition creates a discontinuity in audio-visual works for narrative and economy-of-storytelling reasons, eyeblink creates a discontinuity in visual perception for protective and cognitive reasons. We were interested in analyzing eyeblink rate linked to cinematographic edition styles. We created three video stimuli with different editing styles and analyzed spontaneous blink rate in participants (N = 40). We were also interested in looking for different perceptive patterns in blink rate related to media professionalization. For that, of our participants, half (n = 20) were media professionals, and the other half were not. According to our results, MTV editing style inhibits eyeblinks more than Hollywood style and one-shot style. More interestingly, we obtained differences in visual perception related to media professionalization: we found that media professionals inhibit eyeblink rate substantially compared with non-media professionals, in any style of audio-visual edition.

Late 1920s film theory and criticism as a test-case for Benjamin’s generalizations on the experiential effects of editing

This article investigates Walter Benjamin’s influential generalization that the effects of cinema are akin to the hyper-stimulating experience of modernity. More specifically, I focus on his oft-cited 1935/36 claim that all editing elicits shock-like disruption. First, I propose a more detailed articulation of the experience of modernity understood as hyper-stimulation and call for distinguishing between at least two of its subsets: the experience of speed and dynamism, on the one hand, and the experience of shock/disruption, on the other. Then I turn to classical film theory of the late 1920s to demonstrate the existence of contemporary views on editing alternative to Benjamin’s. For instance, whereas classical Soviet and Weimar theorists relate the experience of speed and dynamism to both Soviet and classical Hollywood style editing, they reserve the experience of shock/disruption for Soviet montage. In order to resolve the conceptual disagreement between these theorists, on the one hand, and Benjamin, on the other, I turn to late 1920s Weimar film criticism. I demonstrate that, contrary to Benjamin’s generalizations about the disruptive and shock-like nature of all editing, and in line with other theorists’ accounts, different editing practices were regularly distinguished by comparison to at least two distinct hyper-stimulation subsets: speed and dynamism, and shock-like disruption. In other words, contemporaries regularly distinguished between Soviet montage and classical Hollywood editing patterns on the basis of experiential effects alone. On the basis of contemporary reviews of city symphonies, I conclude with a proposal for distinguishing a third subset – confusion.

Women on the verge. The carnivalization, the grotesque and the construction of the female characters in Almodóvar’s movies.

This study focuses on the work of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar in the context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical analysis. The objective is to discuss the presence of this analysis in the construction of Almodovarian characters who transgressively break with manichaeism, characteristic of Hollywood style, thus creating a more complex character.

Kingdom of Heaven and Its Ideological Message

As a Crusades epic, the film Kingdom of Heaven revives the 12th century history in the critical city of Jerusalem. The story surrounds a French blacksmith Balian who defends Jerusalem and contends with the Islamic leader Saladin who attempts to seize back the holy city from the Christians. Through the special themes in region, religion and war, Kingdom of Heaven seems to indicate the conflicts between the East and the West. Furthermore, the outbreaks of 9/11 and the Iraq War definitely make this film’s release more controversial. Kingdom of Heaven, being a film, an essential medium of mass communication, the style in which it expresses its story and ideology is worth considering in depth. By exploring this Hollywood film which lacks of the typical Hollywood style, this paper discusses the significance in making Kingdom of Heaven in the wake of 9/11 and how the critical debate surrounding the film is a reflection of contemporary ideologies.

The Perfect Human: An avant-garde rebellion against Classical Hollywood style

Abstract This article seeks to position Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human as an avant-garde challenge to Classical Hollywood film style as well as mine the film’s abstract appeal in its invention of new methodologies to generate meaning.

EmoNets: Multimodal deep learning approaches for emotion recognition in video

The task of the Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) Challenge is to assign one of seven emotions to short video clips extracted from Hollywood style movies. The videos depict acted-out emotions under realistic conditions with a large degree of variation in attributes such as pose and illumination, making it worthwhile to explore approaches which consider combinations of features from multiple modalities for label assignment. In this paper we present our approach to learning several specialist models using deep learning techniques, each focusing on one modality. Among these are a convolutional neural network, focusing on capturing visual information in detected faces, a deep belief net focusing on the representation of the audio stream, a K-Means based “bag-of-mouths” model, which extracts visual features around the mouth region and a relational autoencoder, which addresses spatio-temporal aspects of videos. We explore multiple methods for the combination of cues from these modalities into one common classifier. This achieves a considerably greater accuracy than predictions from our strongest single-modality classifier. Our method was the winning submission in the 2013 EmotiW challenge and achieved a test set accuracy of 47.67 % on the 2014 dataset.

Dreams in Films and Films as Dreams: Surrealism and Popular American Cinema

Les films ayant recours à des séquences de rêves étaient particulièrement nombreux au cours de la période transitoire. Dès 1915, ces films connurent une baisse de régime considérable avant de redevenir plus nombreux à partir de la fin des années 1930, et ce, grâce à la popularisation de la psychanalyse. Dans le cinéma classique hollywoodien, les composantes du langage cinématographique furent mises en avant dans le but de rendre compte de l’étrangeté des rêves et leurs écarts par rapport à la « réalité » de la diégèse des films. Les surréalistes subvertissaient le style réaliste classique en faisant des rêves le modèle de leur « réalité », et cette subversion fut mise en pratique dans les quelques films qu’ils avaient réalisés. Surréalistes et classiques hollywoodiens s’approprièrent la psychanalyse freudienne dans leurs approches des rêves ; cependant ces appropriations divergeaient radicalement. Un examen des séquences oniriques dans des comédies musicales permettra d’éclairer le débat sur la distinction entre les rêves dans les films et les films oniriques.

1920년대 초반 조선영화의 형식적 특징

1920년대 초반 조선영화의 제작은 식민지지배기구에서 시작되어 민간으로 확대되었다. 이들 영화는 풍경과 풍속을 기록한 실사영화와 극적 사건이 일어나는 장소를 촬영하여 보여주는 연쇄극의 자장 안에서 형성되어, 장소를 강조하는 형식으로 발전했다. 이 당시 할리우드 연속영화의 영향으로 조선의 주요한 경승지를 위험과 모험이 일어나는 장소로 사용했다. 하지만 스타일적인 면에 있어서는 롱테이크와 롱쇼트로 촬영되었고, 단조로운 화면은 변사의 설명으로 리듬감을 주었고, 필름에 색을 넣어 시각적인 자극을 강조하는 등 일본영화와 같았다. 일본영화와 비슷했던 1920년대 초반 조선영화는 나운규의 <아리랑>의 등장으로 보다 할리우드 영화와 같은 모습으로 변화하게 되었다. Early 1920s, Joseon film production began with Japanese colonial rule organization and expanded into civilian. These films were influenced by the documentary film what recorded the scenery and the custom also influenced by kino drama that displayed the place of a dramatic incident. So these films developed into the form emphasize on place. At that time, hollywood serial films were popular. So the first Joseon films shooted a picturesque place and a landmark of the city in the background where heros took a risk. In the style stakes, Joseon films looked very similar to Japanese films. shooted long-take and long-shot, it had rhythm with narration of benshi and emphasized on visual excitation by using color. Early 1920s Joseon films which were similar to Japanese films changed from Japanese style to Hollywood style caused by Na woon-kyu's <Ariang>.

Cine-Mimetic Syntax: The Big Lebowski and the Hollywood Neo-Classical Style

This article examines the use of language in general and miscommunication in particular in The Big Lebowski. Through close analysis of the dialogue, we find that the film's endless examples of linguistic complexity and semantic confusion function in a manner similar to what literary theorists refer to as “mimetic syntax,” wherein the form of a text imitates, mimics, or complements its content in meaningful ways. Cinematic techniques that were a standard part of the classical Hollywood style of narration are strategically and rhetorically abused in The Big Lebowski. As a result, the film challenges prevailing assumptions about film language, and this challenge to the viewer is reflected for the viewer in the film's use of mimetic syntax. This complex and heretofore unexamined structure transforms an absurd comedy into a multilayered mimetic text.

Sound and Domestic Screens

Sound and Domestic Screens Steve J. Wurtzler (bio) My starting point is several old phonograph recordings, discarded by someone and then acquired by me at a now-forgotten secondhand store, before eBay dragged everyone's attic contents out into the light of a collective, virtual yard sale. The records are a series, four LPs released by the magazine Popular Photography from 1965 to 1969, called Sound for a Picture Evening. What can these artifacts teach us about cinema? My claim, necessarily suggestive rather than fully developed, is that these recordings, designed to accompany projections on domestic film screens, point to ways in which cinema always has been an intermedial phenomenon. Far from being a specific and discrete "apparatus," cinema intersects other media forms both materially and experientially. Some of my earlier research argued that cinema's conversion to sound was simply one component of a broader, interwar instance of technological change across multiple media forms.1 Technologically, economically, and experientially, cinema's successful adoption of recorded sound must be understood in light of developments in multiple acoustic media. This short essay essentially expands that argument, stretching it both forward in time and outward to include more marginal practices, using domestic cinema screens and sound practices as a case study. Admittedly marginal to academic Film Studies (albeit decreasingly so), home movies represent a century-long cluster of texts, technologies, and practices through which the very possibilities of cinema have been exploited and explored. Variously denigrated as "substandard" or "amateur," like other so-called ephemeral films, home movies nonetheless quietly insist on a broadened definition of cinema as a representational technology. This broader notion of cinema threatens to undermine historical and theoretical perspectives that are solely based on the economically and ideologically valorized commercial deployment of the medium. Historically, home movies have intersected with documentary film practice, the avant-garde, and the tinkering hobbyist, as well as with commercial cinema. And like commercial cinema, home movies have often themselves resided at the intersection of what we might normally think of as discrete media forms. In the late 1960s, Popular Photography released at least four phonograph records designed to accompany home movies and slide shows. The Sound for a Picture Evening series provided an expansive variety of background music and sound effects, essentially a library of recorded sounds for home [End Page 153] moviemakers. The cuts on the records are categorized as different types of sounds: Themes, Sound Effects, National Portraits, Special Purpose Music, and Openings and Closings. Within those categories the recordings exhibit tremendous acoustic variety. Sound effects include thunder and rain, a cocktail party, oars in water, a dog barking, a baby crying, crickets chirping, fireplace sounds, and traffic noises. Most of the sound effects logically evoke images common to home movies. The practice of providing nations with acoustic signatures echoes a convention of silent-film cue sheets (in which a few bars of music claimed to signify a region: Russia, Africa, Greece, Japan, etc.), adapting that convention for midcentury family travelogues. Openings available for home movies could be "grandiose," "sweet and gentle," or "dramatic." Closings could be "epic," "Hollywood style," or (again) "gentle." The most interesting sounds don't seem at first to evoke a specific image or, in their naming, call to mind an anticipated sound. For example, Volume II includes the two-minute cut "Experimental." "No melodies here," the record jacket explains, "just moody, strange instrumental sounds." Further, the domestic listener (or acoustic performer) is instructed to try "Experimental" at different speeds, especially 16 or 78 rpm, indicating the creation of structural space within which projectionist-performers might engage in a kind of idiosyncratic sound design. Volume IV includes "Music to Zoom By," which answers the question "What does a zoom sound like?" When played today, uninterrupted from start to finish, the LPs provide a maddening cacophony. When taken on their own and with sensitivity to period terms, they provide an astoundingly diverse resource for amateur sound design. Sound for a Picture Evening might best be understood in terms of at least two trajectories: a history of acoustic accompaniment for the domestic screen, and a tradition within home-movie culture that sought to shape home-movie practices around...

Residents treated to some Hollywood style

Residents treated to some Hollywood style