Classic Hollywood : lifestyles and film styles of American cinema, 1930-1960 / Veronica Pravadelli ; translated by Michael Theodore Meadows.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pravadelli, Veronica, 1964-

Contributor:

Meadows, Michael Theodore.

Standardized Title:

Grande Hollywood. English

Language:

English

Italian

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--United States--History--20th century.

Motion pictures.

History.

Motion pictures--Production and direction.

United States.

Motion pictures--Production and direction--United States--History--20th century.

Motion pictures--California--Los Angeles--History--20th century.

California--Los Angeles.

Physical Description:

viii, 226 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Summary:

Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called Classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the 1950s movie musicals and family melodramas that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, Pravadelli views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style, and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency. The result is an ambitious, much-needed synthesis of theoretical approaches to a legendary cinematic era. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: classical Hollywood cinema and film studies

The early thirties: modernity, new women, and the aesthetic of attractions

Normative desires and visual sobriety: apogee of the classical model

The male subject of noir and the modern gaze

(Dis)adventures of female desire in the 1940s woman's film

Excess, spectacle, sensation: family melodrama in the 1950s

Performative bodies and non-referential images: excesses of the musical.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780252038778

0252038770

9780252080340

0252080343

OCLC:

877367723