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Classic Hollywood
Lifestyles and Film Styles of American Cinema, 1930-1960
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Book Presentation:
An ambitious reinterpretation of the most storied era in movie history
Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the Fifties movie musicals and family melodramas that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films.
Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, Pravadelli views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style, and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency. The result is an ambitious, much-needed synthesis of theoretical approaches to a legendary cinematic era.
About the Author:
Veronica Pravadelli is a professor of film studies and director of the Center for American Studies at Roma Tre University and a former visiting professor at Brown University. She is the author of several books including Performance, Rewriting, Identity: Chantal Akerman's Postmodern Cinema; Alfred Hitchcock: Notorious; and Le donne del cinema: dive, registe, spettatrici. The Italian edition of Classic Hollywood won two prizes for Best Book in Film Studies.
Press Reviews:
“Panoramic overviews alternate with convincing close readings of dozens of well-known films. . . . In confronting and developing these classic film texts, Pravadelli has produced her own outstanding reading of Hollywood classical style. Highly Recommended.”--Choice
"Pravadelli's examination and contextualization of on-screen gender dynamics of the 1930s-1960s makes a valuable contribution to film studies."--Journalism History
"Exceptionally well-argued and absorbing." --Screen
"[An] exceptionally well-argued and absorbing book." --Screen
See the publisher website: University of Illinois Press
> From the same author:
Contemporary Women's Cinema (2018)
Global Scenarios And Transnational Contexts
Dir. Veronica Pravadelli
Subject: Sociology
> On a related topic:
That Was Entertainment (2018)
The Golden Age of the MGM Musical
Classical Hollywood Comedy (2016)
Dir. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins
Subject: Genre > Comedy/Humor
Settling the Score (1992)
Music and the Classical Hollywood Film
Resetting the Scene (2021)
Classical Hollywood Revisited
Dir. Philippa Gates and Katherine Spring
Subject: Countries > United States
Foreign Devils (2013)
Exile and Host Nation in Hollywood's Golden Age
Subject: Countries > United States
Hollywood Goes Oriental (2010)
Caucasian Performance in American Film
Subject: Countries > United States
Classical Film Violence (2003)
Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968
Subject: Countries > United States
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