Description
Drawing on cinema and media studies, art history, American studies, and postcolonial studies, this innovative book offers a fresh way of thinking about Hollywood film aesthetics. It explores how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western colonial formations of vision influenced classical Hollywood film style, and thus provides a new and unique perspective on the origins of the cinematic gaze. Classical Hollywood cinema constructs global spaces as an imaginative dreamworld,
subsuming geographical and cultural differences into utopian fantasy. Yet, this characteristically Hollywoodian aesthetic has rarely been explored in detail. How are such representations constructed within film texts? Is this utopian aesthetic really as uniform and transparent as it appears? What is its relationship to the United States' status as an imperial power?
In The American Abroad, Anna Cooper explores how postwar Hollywood cinema adopted elements of British and French imperial visual culture, transforming them to suit a new United Statesian context. Cooper argues that four visual discourses in particular-the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour-became building blocks in the development of a new American visual language.
Author: Anna Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 10/19/2023
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.46d
ISBN13: 9781501391729
ISBN10: 1501391720
BISAC Categories:
- Performing Arts | Film | History & Criticism
- Art | Film & Video
subsuming geographical and cultural differences into utopian fantasy. Yet, this characteristically Hollywoodian aesthetic has rarely been explored in detail. How are such representations constructed within film texts? Is this utopian aesthetic really as uniform and transparent as it appears? What is its relationship to the United States' status as an imperial power?
In The American Abroad, Anna Cooper explores how postwar Hollywood cinema adopted elements of British and French imperial visual culture, transforming them to suit a new United Statesian context. Cooper argues that four visual discourses in particular-the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour-became building blocks in the development of a new American visual language.
Author: Anna Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 10/19/2023
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.46d
ISBN13: 9781501391729
ISBN10: 1501391720
BISAC Categories:
- Performing Arts | Film | History & Criticism
- Art | Film & Video
About the Author
Anna Cooper is Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television, University of Arizona, USA. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick and has worked at the universities of Hertfordshire, Sussex, and California (Santa Cruz). She co-edited Projecting the World: Representing the "Foreign" in Classical Hollywood (2017).