tailieunhanh - TAKING HOLLYWOOD SERIOUSLY

As the entertainment industry has become an increasingly global enterprise in recent years, Hollywood continues to occupy the central role in the production and commercialization of culture. Just as classi- cal Hollywood’s domination of the movie industry a half-century ago induced critic Gilbert Seldes (1978) to say that “the movies come from America,” so might one argue today that “entertainment comes from America”—and, more specifically, from Hollywood. And when one considers the widespread appeal of Hollywood movies and thus the col- onization of cultural consciousness on a global scale, it is worth noting that the term Hollywood becomes increasingly conflated with the notion of “Americanization” (Seldes, 1978) | Introduction Taking Hollywood Seriously he purpose of this study is to connect the historical development of Hollywood s cinematic style with the social and political history of the Hollywood community. Substantial elements of Hollywood classical cinema are the result of a political and esthetic negotiation engaging European anti-fascist refugees radical urban American intellectuals and studio executives from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. This negotiation was an integral part of the intellectual and political debates of the New Deal era and it left a profound mark on some of the films Hollywood made in this period. An effort to contextualize Hollywood and its films plays a crucial role in this work. In the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood was not a Baghdad by the sea 1 separated from the rest of the United States. Nor were its films a simple reflection of the commercial nature of the studio system. Rather the Hollywood community was animated by many of the same debates that were the center of the political and intellectual discourse in New York. Like their colleagues back East in fact intellectuals in Hollywood were part of the leftist political culture of the 1930s and they discussed the democratization of modernism its politicization and the formulation of a mass-marketed progressive culture capable of dealing with the political issues of the day. This study identifies chronicles and interprets the social intellectual and esthetic history of what I call Hollywood 1 2 Introduction democratic modernism. It examines its emergence the transformations brought about by World War II and its demise in the aftermath of the conflict. Hollywood democratic modernism often though not always took the form of social realism and much of the present work deals with the articulation of social and political realism in the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. I want to give the term a broad connotation both esthetic and political. In some sense Hollywood films always had to .