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The Persistence of Hollywood
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Book Presentation:
While Hollywood’s success – its persistence – has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser’s research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director’s themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood’s economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism.
The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser’s key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.
About the Author:
Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam and, since 2006, Visiting Professor at Yale University. Among his recent books as author are: Weimar Cinema and After (Routledge, 2000); Metropolis (BFI, 2000); Studying Contemporary American Film (Hodder, 2002, with Warren Buckland); European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005); Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (Routledge, 2010, with Malte Hagener).
Press Reviews:
"For over forty years, Thomas Elsaesser has been an indispensable guide to Hollywood's role in the history of popular art, and his gifts are on full display in this rich collection. The essays—imaginative, bold, and crisply written—are admirably sensitive to the ambivalent place of American filmmaking in global culture, from Hollywood's golden age to today's corporate moviemaking." —David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Emeritus Professor of Film Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison
"Thomas Elsaesser demonstrates the power of movies by drawing on auteur studies (from Welles, Hitchcock, and Kubrick to Avatar), genres, industrial aesthetics, narrative analyses, social-symptoms, and the imperatives of corporate, global Hollywood. Throughout, Elsaesser makes the reader feel the tangled, affective energies of cinephilia. Beautifully intelligent—an essential book." —Edward Branigan, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
See the publisher website: Routledge
> From the same author:
The Mind-Game Film (2021)
Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology
European Cinema and Continental Philosophy (2018)
Film As Thought Experiment
Film Theory (2015)
An Introduction through the Senses
by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener
Subject: Theory
German Cinema - Terror and Trauma (2013)
Cultural Memory Since 1945
The Last Great American Picture Show (2004)
New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s
Dir. Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King and Alexander Horwath
Subject: Countries > United States
Weimar Cinema and After (2000)
Germany's Historical Imaginary
> On a related topic:
Minding Movies (2011)
Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking
by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
Subject: General
Hollywood Boozers, Brawlers and Hard-Luck Cases (2025)
Fifteen Ill-Fated Actors of the Golden Age
by Laura Wagner
The Golden Hour (2025)
A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood
Performing Chinatown (2024)
Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community
by William Gow
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