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Hollywood Aesthetic
Pleasure in American Cinema
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Book Presentation:
• comprehensive appraisal of Hollywood's capacity to deliver aesthetic pleasure
• enlists empirical research in psychology
• offers a new theory of Hollywood storytelling aesthetics
• sees fans of Hollywood cinema not as victims of mass media culture but as active participants in their own entertainment
• Features companion website with clips from dozens of films, illustrating key arguments
• Features full color illustrations throughout
Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among huge populations, translate into box office success. With that goal in mind, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a massive scale.
In Hollywood Aesthetic, Todd Berliner accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. Analyzing Hollywood in the areas of narrative, style, ideology, and genre, Hollywood Aesthetic offers a comprehensive appraisal of the aesthetic design of American commercial cinema. Grounded in film history and in the psychological and philosophical literature on aesthetics, the book situates aesthetic analyses within the context of film reception, the film industry, and the current understanding of human psychology.
Illustrated with numerous examples, Hollywood Aesthetic analyzes the design of a range of films that span Hollywood history. The book examines films, such as City Lights and Goodfellas, that have earned aesthetic appreciation from both fans and critics. But it also studies curious outliers and celebrated Hollywood experiments, such as The Killing and Starship Troopers, films popular with cinephiles and cult audiences. And it demonstrates the ways in which even ordinary popular films, from Tarzan and His Mate to Rocky III, as well as New Hollywood action blockbusters, like Die Hard and The Dark Knight, offer aesthetic pleasure to mass audiences. Hollywood Aesthetic explains how these and dozens of other Hollywood movies engage viewers by satisfying their aesthetic desires. Many film scholars dismiss Hollywood cinema as mere commercial entertainment and leave it at that. Hollywood Aesthetic explains how Hollywood creates, for huge numbers of people, some of their most exhilarating experiences of art.
About the Author:
Todd Berliner, Professor of Film Studies, University of North Carolina - Wilmington Todd Berliner, Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, teaches film aesthetics, narration, and style and American film history. Author of Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (2010), Professor Berliner has received two Fulbright Scholar awards, including the Laszlo Orszagh Distinguished Chair in American Studies. Professor Berliner was the founding chairman of UNCW's Film Studies Department. He holds a master's degree and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.
Press Reviews:
"Has there ever been a work reflecting on the characteristic aesthetic features, value, and experience afforded by Hollywood filmmaking with anything approaching the self-consciousness, rigor, and flair exhibited in Todd Berliner's Hollywood Aesthetic? ... Berliner's book offers us a theory of the aesthetic and of the Hollywood aesthetic, in which critical analysis plays a key supporting role." - Murray Smith, Professor of Film, University of Kent
"In his book Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (2017), Todd Berliner lays out a theory of how and why popular cinema succeeds in entertaining millions of viewers. His book is provocative and convincing, full of detailed examples from particular movies and fascinating general insights." - James Cutting, Professor of Psychology, Cornell University
"Todd Berliner's Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (2017) offers useful broad theoretical arguments about how to underst and our pleasures in viewing cinema. The value of the project is combining standard film-critical knowledge with the cognitive strand of psychological theory. In this effort, Berliner provides an enhancement of a major trajectory in film and media studies." - Janet Staiger, Professor Emeritus of Communication, University of Texas at Austin
"Todd Berliner's Hollywood Aesthetic is a major contribution to the study of Hollywood movies. While many previous critics — notably, auteur critics — have defended the artistry of selected subsets of Hollywood films, Berliner makes a compelling case for the aesthetic value of Hollywood cinema as a whole — as a rich and varied tradition that includes both ordinary films and time-tested classics. He supports his argument with detailed examples from dozens of movies." - Patrick Keating, Professor of Communication, Trinity University
"Berliner's engaging and fresh cognitive approach to familiar topics within film studies makes it appropriate for both undergraduates, who might be encountering these topics for the first time, as well as for graduate students and film scholars looking for new understanding and insight based on scientific and cognitive theories. The book is cogently argued and comprehensively examines entertainment cinema and the aesthetic pleasures associated with it that have been too long ignored." - Laura L. Beadling, Journal of American Culture
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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