Persistence of Hollywood

<p>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.</p><p><em>The Persistence of Hollywood</em> 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.</p>