106-068 Imagining Hollywood

Formerly available as 106-296/396. Students who have completed 106-296 or 106-396 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

Fifty points of first-year arts including at least 25 points from a specified list of subject areas, see Prerequisites.

This subject is designed to introduce students to ways of thinking critically, historically and analytically about studio-era Hollywood cinema. Tracing its constituion through the broad socio-historical frames of modernity, consumerism, and mass culture, the subject engages studio-era Hollywood as a paradigmatic institution of contemporary culture. It seeks to provide students with a detailed understanding of Hollywood cinema as a cultural industry, a formal style and a social mythology. By the end of semester students should be familiar with the discourses which circulate around ideas of 'Hollywood'; Hollywood as mass entertainment; Hollywood and commodity culture; Hollywood as textual system and aesthetic style; Hollywood and exhibition practices; the cult of the Hollywood star; and textual and spectatorial reworkings of Hollywood film.

Class participation and writen work totalling 4000 words.

A subject reader will be available.

• Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema. (2nd ed) Oxford: Blackwell.