Читать книгу America on Film - Sean Griffin - Страница 20

This chapter examines what Hollywood film is and how it developed. Hollywood film can be identified by a specific set of formal and stylistic structures as well as by a set of historical, industrial, and economic determinants. These underlying structures affect how Hollywood films represent America, and how they conceive of issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Because Hollywood film is so prevalent in American culture (and world culture), many people think that the way Hollywood makes movies is the only way to do so – that there are no other possible methods for making films. However, there are many types of movies and many different ways to make them. As we shall see throughout this book, these other, non‐Hollywood movies often present different representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability than do Hollywood films, partly due to the (comparatively) greater opportunities for women, people of color, homosexuals, and differently abled individuals that exist outside the Hollywood system. Both Hollywood and non‐Hollywood films have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century, in conjunction with the broader social, political, and cultural events of American history. This chapter broadly addresses those concerns, and will lay the basis for future chapters’ more detailed analyses of how these issues relate to specific cinematic representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.